Chapter 1: Wildfire
Chapter Text
There was a small beep and a little red light started blinking as the recording device was activated.
“Time is twenty two hundred hours and thirty minutes on August 14th, 12 years post NTA, 15 days and 8 hours post the invasion of Sunagakure and Otogakure. I, Kakashi Hatake, rank jonin, SRN 009720, have been granted special privilege by T&I commander Ibiki Morino to conduct this initial interview.”
Kakashi-sensei seemed cold and foreign in the oppressively blank interrogation room, his sharingan exposed and glowing ominously. His aloof and carefree persona was completely flipped into one that was duty-bound and serious.
His eyes bore into her very soul as he continued the report.
“The interviewee is Sakura Haruno, rank genin, SRN 012601. Relationship disclosure, I am her jonin teacher and commanding officer. At approximately twenty hundred hours, Haruno is under suspicion of colluding with Sunagakure and Otogakure to be convinced of treason.”
Kakashi-sensei dropped the serious act so quickly it gave her whiplash. He leaned forward slightly, closed his eyes in a disarming smile, and his voice raised into something recognizably light and airy.
It felt nothing like it usually did. What once put her at ease or simply annoyed her, now felt like a funeral toll.
“So, Sakura-chan, want to tell me what happened?”
— — — —
Sakura has always known that she was different.
But it was never the kind of different one could be proud of.
Before she could talk, she was always more interested in knives and other objects of violence than the dolls and stuffed animals her family offered. Apparently the Haruno’s lived in the outskirts of the Land of Fire, closer to the financial district near the daimyo where her parents were very successful merchants. Sakura never knew that life, however, because they moved to Konoha for fear of judgement from their daughter’s odd tendencies. That kind of personality was more tolerated among the military and mercenaries.
Strike one. Too different for her parents’ lives.
When she was 5 and enrolled into civilian school, once again, she never could quite fit the picture. Sure, she was an excellent student with a wicked intelligence, but the other students were almost afraid of her. The other girls bullied her, which wasn’t unusual, but it wasn’t because she was too pretty, too ugly, or too much of anything in particular. She was just too much in general. While other girls were fawning over boys or playing house, she was tousling with the boys with a certain vicious killing edge that made even her teachers nervous.
She didn’t really remember that year of schooling. She was quickly recommended to join the ninja academy after countless attempts of therapy didn’t work.
Strike two. Too hard for a civilian.
But even once she enrolled in the ninja academy, she still couldn’t find her place.
Sure, everyone was more like minded with the same sense of brutality as her, but this was a different kind of ostracization. It was one of circumstance. It had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the fact that she was born outside of Konoha, wasn’t directly impacted by the Kyuubi’s attack, and the worst crime of all, had loving, alive parents that would do anything for her.
Strike three. Too soft for a ninja.
Despite this, she was one of the only civilian-born and non-orphaned students to graduate. It didn’t earn her any respect. Her fake crush on Sasuke, something meant to make her more relatable to her peers, made her lose her best friend. Her timid introduction to team seven destroyed what little respect she might have still had. Her stalling inability to help during the Land of Waves mission solidified her weakness to the rest of the team. That weakness let her team down and almost killed them in the Forest of Death.
Everything she did, or didn’t do, always seemed to be the worst possible choice.
Ino hated her.
Sasuke was revolted by her.
Kakashi-sensei ignored her.
She pushed Naruto away.
And, worst of all, the most unforgiving thing was…
Her parents still loved her. They were still proud of her. They were still alive .
Every morning, she had breakfast waiting for her where her dad would make some joke and her mom would roll her eyes before she rushed off to training. They never complained about how often she’s gone. They never mentioned how all that time was wasted.
Every evening, dinner was on the table and her parents waited for her to join them. Or she’d stomp off to her room and sulk, only for her mom to gently console her as she confessed what a failure she knew she was. She cried to them about how she was falling behind, cried about Haku, cried about failing the Chunin Exams, cried about how everything was falling apart around her.
Ninja weren’t supposed to cry. Civilians were expected to. She was always going to be in between both worlds.
All the same, they picked her up each time and assured her there was always tomorrow to make things right.
But how many tomorrows did she really have left?
The final day of the Chunin Exams started like any other. She made her peace with failing out and supporting the rest of her team. She had breakfast with her parents, was kissed goodbye by her dad, and headed out.
Then Konoha was infiltrated by Orochimaru, crushed, and the rest of the day blurred until Sakura found herself in a sorry state the following day, sifting through concrete and rubble to rescue any survivors and retrieve bodies.
Since yesterday, she’s personally recovered three civilians. None of them alive.
It was very rare that anyone found a survivor- especially after the first day.
Her shorn pink hair, that was mutilated in the Forest of Death, was rescued by her mom into a cute short cut that just barely reached past her chin. It was now matted closer to ear level and plastered to her skin with blood, sweat, and runny concealer. She and her mom had just gotten their nails done- her mom’s a modest shade of pink and Sakura a simple clear coat. But now they were chipped, some were ripped down the middle, and what little nail remained was caked with debris.
Concrete and rebar made for a very harsh nail file, it seemed.
All of that said nothing for her bright red dress. It was meant to be worn for celebration. She wanted to look her best to congratulate Naruto and Sasuke when they won. It wasn’t meant to be worn for combat, but now it was ripped and utterly destroyed.
Her skin was flushed red from exertion with the late summer sun beating down on her. The heat made the scent of rot and decay that much more potent. There was talk of building a pyre since the makeshift morgues were starting to overflow in capacity. The truth is most of the deceased wouldn’t be able to be positively ID’d anyways.
Sakura’s strength and determination had long since waned, so she found herself slacking in her retrieving efforts, lamely moving rocks and rebar aside by hand, not bothering with the shovel or pick. It was almost midday, so a shift change should be coming at any minute. Then she had 6 hours to rest before launching into 6 hours of civilian guarding, 6 hours of rebuilding, then another 6 hours of rescue and retrieval.
Skikaku Nara- Shikmaru’s dad- was the acting commander since the Sandiame was KIA. He tried to keep genin teams stationed together, so she, Naruto, and Sasuke all claimed a tree closer to the sectioned off civilian district. Since Kakashi-sensei was an elite jonin, he was off doing other tasks that were higher than her current security level. So, instead, a middle-aged chunin named Junko was their fourth person. She was nice, but didn’t talk too much. Apparently she had been pulled from the reserves and had been about to retire to care for her elderly parents, but all shinobi had been called to action.
She also mentioned in a dull, exhausted tone that she didn’t even know if they were still alive. All messenger hawks had been grounded except for those carrying vital information, so the cordoned off civilian evacuation zone might as well have been in a whole other world.
Sakura figured she should also be worried about her parents, but couldn’t quite muster up any concern.
She had a sense of permanence and security within her that told her she would still have a family after all of this. Not to mention that her house was within the evacuation zone, which was the most intact part of the village.
Once again, Sakura found herself escaping tragedy and since she is a very selfish person, she couldn’t even feel relieved.
Her thoughts were interrupted when her callused hands brushed against something that didn’t make them hurt or bleed.
Instead, it was soft.
Brown.
“I’ve got someone here!”
She shouted out before she even registered what she saw.
It was hair.
Her heart sank and her hands immediately started shaking, her body kicking into overdrive as she started throwing debris out of the way.
They were likely dead and everyone knew it, but that didn’t stop her from hoping. Two male chunin that were nearby– one with tied long black hair and another with a cane– rushed over and helped her move chunks of concrete, shards of glass, and twisted rebar out of the way to reveal a small head.
Oh god, it was a kid . A little girl.
She hadn’t found a child before. The bodies she’s recovered were adults- one female, one male, and one they’ll have to check dental records for.
At the discovery, they worked in a blur until Black Hair could pull the kid out. She was small, barely academy age and so, so limp with her smooth, baby fattened skin littered with cuts and scrapes. She had barely avoided being crushed by a lucky net of rebar that created an air bubble. That fortune was not shared with the smattering of blood found all around her, crushed between the concrete.
Cane signaled down a jonin to come and help scrape away the body they found, though she hesitated to even consider it a body. The sight and smell was enough to make her gag, so she looked away and focused on the little girl that Black Hair had gently set down.
He had to return to his own site, but he instructed her to take care of the kid.
Whatever that may mean.
Holding her breath, Sakura pressed two fingers against the little girl’s soft neck.
It was slow and dangerously weak, but it was there .
Sakura was about to race to the nearest medical outpost when she heard a shriek that would haunt her for the rest of her life.
“KAORI!”
She whipped around to find a civilian woman with the same long brown hair struggling desperately against the hold of two jonin commanders. Her face was tear streaked and desperate as she kept sobbing, “ My baby! That’s my baby! Let me go!”
Sakura was stunned and paralyzed at the strength and raw determination that woman possessed. She heard stories of mothers lifting giant trees to save their children, but to see it in person was something else entirely.
She had to have escaped the guards of the civilian section barrier and raced across miles of landscape that even the most experienced of ninja struggled with all while outpacing two elite ninja. That’s when she noticed the woman’s twisted ankle, the blood on her face, and who knows how many injuries. But the mother only had one singular thing on her mind, drowning out everything else.
And that was her child– Kaori-- who was laying limp, but alive in Sakura’s arms.
Her ears started to ring, but Cane put a hand on her shoulder, bringing her back to reality. She had a job to do. She had to take Kaori to the medical outpost where she could be documented, triaged, and properly taken care of.
Despite the ear-splitting screams of her mother, Sakura turned and dashed away to the nearest nurse.
“Female, approximately 6, unresponsive, level 4!” the male nurse barked out as soon as he took her from her arms.
“Kaori!” Sakura called out as she was taken away. “Her name is Kaori!”
If the nurse heard, he didn’t show it as he laid her out in a cot and got to work.
Sakura couldn’t bring herself to sleep after Naruto relieved her. He asked her something that she waved off before returning to their tree. No one else was there. Everyone was working.
The next two weeks passed in an exhausting haze.
She didn’t find any other survivors.
She never heard about Kaori again.
But her mother would forever haunt her.
Strike four. Not hard enough, even for a civilian.
— — — —
Sakura could feel the world becoming fuzzy and her thoughts slipped away like water through her fingertips. Her tongue grew heavy as her eyes began to flutter closed, breaking the involuntary eye contact her sensei locked her into.
Kakashi-sensei clapped loudly, his expression not changing one bit as he broke her out of her trance.
“Focus, Sakura-chan.”
— — — —
“I feel like I could sleep for weeks , y’know?” Naruto commented, somehow as enthusiastic as ever, even as he was dragging his feet.
“I could sleep for months,” Sasuke responded, too tired to hold his usual guarded demeanor.
“I could sleep for years, ” is what she was expected to say.
Instead, Sakura said nothing.
“Ne, Sakura-chan, how about you?” Naruto prompted, bumping her side with an elbow as all three of them walked to where they’ll be staying for the night.
Naruto’s apartment complex was flattened, so he was assigned a shelter close to the Uchiha Compound, which was where Sasuke was reluctantly returning to. Sakura, meanwhile, was going home. With dinner on the table and her parents joyfully welcoming her home.
Tears will almost certainly be shed, but Sakura felt too tired to care about anything except her bed, a shower, and finally getting out of her stupid dress.
Shikaku lifted the state of emergency after two grueling weeks. The village was nowhere near recovered, but at least most of the debris had been cleared and there had temporary shelters in place while the rebuilding effort continued.
The funeral for the Sandaime was scheduled for two days from now, giving the elite jonin enough time to return from their missions and pay their respects.
Communications were slowly opening back up across the village, but it was chaotic as family members frantically tried to find one another and the morgues were scoured systematically for missing person identification.
“Sakura-chan?” Naruto prompted again, a bit softer this time.
Sakura came back to herself a bit as she laughed a bit and bashfully rubbed the back of her neck.
“I guess I’m pretty tired myself.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’ll be happy to go back home,” Sasuke sourly noted.
An innocent enough comment, but she could feel the barbed accusation. Naruto said nothing, either not catching the undertone or not caring. But it opened up that guilty pit in her chest again.
The biggest sin in the ninja world was not being marred by grief.
She knew the drill, so she didn’t acknowledge the comment.
Eventually, they reached the fork in the road where Sakura would go left to her loving family and intact home while Naruto and Sasuke would go right to their empty shelters.
Naruto gleefully skipped backwards, waving his whole arm in a hearty goodbye while shouting, “See you later, Sakura-chan!”
Sasuke didn’t even look back. He just gave a short wave with his back turned to her, Naruto chatting incessantly as they disappeared down the street. Sakura could hear a sharp, “I thought you said you were tired!” , as she too walked away.
A small smile broke across her face. Despite herself, she was fond of her two teammates despite how annoying Naruto and how distant Sasuke was. Though they didn’t see each other much over the past two weeks, they became a pillar for each other to lean on in little things. Naruto would leave little notes for them to read on their breaks. Sasuke would keep their supplies organized and tidy- while vehemently denying doing so. And Sakura would… not do much, admittedly.
Maybe she relied on them more than they relied on her.
She felt a little guilty about that.
The invasion aftermath was harder on her than it seemed to be on either of them. They were tired, sure, but her world was rocked. This was the first time she had really experienced such destruction while they were born into it with the Kyuubi’s attack. She moved on autopilot in a haze, just like she had after the Land of Waves.
But now, for the first time in her life, her home was foreign. Her village was in shambles. She used to be able to give the exact number of cracks in the pavement from her house to Ino’s flower shop, but now, there was barely any pavement at all.
She took solace in the fact that at least her house survived.
Her home’s happy yellow paneling remained, if a bit blackened from soot, and the large windows were either cracked or smashed, but the structure itself remained as stable as it had been throughout her life. She took out her key to unlock the front door, but found it already unlocked. She brushed it off as her parents anticipating her arrival and leaving it unlocked for her.
The entry level was dark and covered in glass and dust, but Sakura took her shoes off anyways and ambled up the stairs past the kitchen and living room to her bed, where she promptly fell into her bed and passed out.
She didn’t pay any attention to the foreign quiet of her home.
Her parents were probably already asleep.
She didn’t register the fact that it was barely past noon.
— — — —
Kakashi-sensei didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need to as he simply raised an eyebrow and looked at her through half-lidded, bored eyes. That sharingan was still just as paralyzing as before.
Stop stalling .
— — — —
Waking up was a slow, laborious process that just left her feeling groggy. Sakura slept longer than she had at any point in her life.
Over 24 hours without a doubt. It was now almost the evening of the next day .
She started coughing from the sheer amount of dust that was suspended in the air, making the room look hazy through the sun’s early evening rays.
It was odd to see her room in such disarray- a fine film was accumulated on every surface, but then again, she was lucky to still have a room at all. Nothing could surprise her at the moment.
That being said, it was odd that her mom let her sleep that late.
Lots of things were odd.
She groaned and ran a hand through her greasy hair, wincing at the ache of her whole body. Gods, she needed a shower.
Sakura peeled herself off her bed and went to her bathroom across the hall. She tried the lights, but there was nothing. Power likely wouldn’t be restored for a while.
So, instead, she resolved to shower in the dark.
The water sputtered and ran a murky brown for several minutes before running clearer. Two weeks ago, Sakura would have avoided that water like the plague, but current Sakura hadn’t showered with more than a bucket of water and the river for entirely too long. The water was ice cold, but it felt like it was sent by the heavens as it washed away all the muck and dried blood that had matted in her hair and on her skin.
Sakura’s skin was wrinkled and pruned when she finally left.
Her torn dress was thrown into the trash along with all others that looked even remotely like it. She didn’t think she could ever wear a dress again after being stuck in one for two whole weeks.
Instead, she wore practical and breathable athletic wear that was much more accommodating for the situation. The emergency state may have been lifted, but there was still much of the same work that needed to be done.
Sakura forced herself to go down the hall and down the stairs, where she could have the first non-emergency ration in weeks before standing at attention once more.
“Good morning, o-” Sakura paused to cough before taking in the empty kitchen and living room. “Okasan?”
The same dusty film in her room filled the rest of the house, but down here, it was so thick, she had to draw the fabric of her shirt to breathe properly. The air was also filled with the musty scent of spoiled food that might’ve made her gag once upon a time, but the smell of melting rot would forever trump any other stench.
The scene just felt wrong .
There were signs of life, but more so that it just disappeared. There one minute, blipped out of existence the next.
A half-eaten sandwich was sitting on their dining table, accumulating a thick sheet of mold, along with all other food left out on the counter. It looked like her mother was in the middle of preparing lunch. There was a knife still stuck in a tomato that has since liquified with rot. Flies buzzed around from maggots that had replaced her parents.
A glance at the living room showed a similar odd scene.
A half-completed crossword rested on the coffee table with ink from an exploded pen dried through the pages. Her dad’s reading glasses waiting next to them along with an unfinished, molded cup of tea.
“Okasan?” Sakura called out over her shoulder before racing back upstairs. “Otousan?”
She rushed into their room to find the bed made like no one had slept there in days, the same dusty film was seen on their usually pristine sheets. Their dresser was left untouched, her mother’s safe was still secure, and her brush was still neatly laying on her vanity. No signs of anyone packing up luggage.
It was like they tore out of their house without thought of anything else which was so unlike her parents.
Her dad, maybe, but her mom? She was meticulous , neat, and purposeful. She instilled those same traits into Sakura, so to see their home so dead and decayed felt wrong. Unnatural.
A foreign twinge of worry swelled in her throat, slipping down to her stomach where it threatened to make her empty stomach turn. She swallowed it back.
No, it was most likely fine.
Some jonin or chunin, hell maybe even a team of genin, probably barged in through all the houses and gathered the civilians to a shelter. There was no blood or any signs of a struggle- just a hasty escape. Business as usual was only just recently resumed, so it’s entirely possible and likely that they were just stuck trying to get ID’s accounted for before they could be released.
It was unfortunate that their house was in such disarray, but at least it was still standing! Her whole street was still standing, even if the foundation was a bit rocked. Things could be cleaned and everything could still return to normal.
Despite everything, Sakura forced herself to calm down.
She had never been given a reason to worry about her family’s safety and she was certain that the village emergency services took good care and had a swift response to the crisis. Her parents were rational and smart people. Smart enough to stay safe.
A faceless woman with a twisted ankle gave a banshee’s cry as two strong men tried to restrain her.
KAORI-
She shook her head.
Everything would be fine .
She probably should meet with her teammates and see if Kakashi-sensei has returned to give them orders, but she thinks it’s understandable she’d want to see her family. Plus, with her status as a shinobi– even if she was just a genin, she might have enough authority to pull her parents to the front of the line and they could be home as soon as tonight!
— — — —
Sakura’s stomach formed knots as more acidic bile rose up her throat.
She didn’t want to continue.
She couldn’t .
Tears involuntarily began to prick in her eyes, her lungs constricted, and she broke eye contact for the second time. She didn’t realize her hands were shaking until she balled them up in a fist, her fingernails digging into her callused skin.
“Sakura, I need you to look at me,” Kakashi-sensei ordered in a sharp tone.
Out of sheer terrified instinct, Sakura gasped and complied.
Kakashi-sensei’s eyes softened so slightly that she almost missed it. Through that subtle change, it became clear that he was being strict on order, not by choice. Sakura tightened her jaw and stared back at him like she was proving a point. Her face was still heated from unshed tears.
“Stop stalling,” he finally verbalized. “You’re going to have to get to the point eventually. It’ll either be with me or I can escalate this to T&I.”
It had all the right inflections of a threat.
His eyes subtly softened again before hardening like ice back into that emotionless edge.
Not a threat.
A warning.
— — — —
Early night had fallen over the village with the chirping of crickets and a deep dark blue in the sky above by the time Sakura had finished casing the civilian shelters.
It was a logistical mess, just like she figured it would be, with people laying out the bare floor while the elderly and pregnant women took the limited cots. Everyone was packed in tight like sardines and they were all trying to get information on when they could get home. But like she expected, only a couple family units could be processed at a time. Families with young children had priority while single individuals likely wouldn’t be processed for another week.
They couldn’t just open the gates and let everyone go home all at once.
The exhausted chunins working at the checkpoints barely had time for her as they all responded, “I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you one way or the other just yet. Please have patience.”
The thought of waiting any longer sickened her and made that knot of worry return with a vengeance, but she swallowed it back once again.
They probably have delivered that line thousands of times that day to concerned loved ones just like her trying to reunite with their families. They didn’t need to know that she snuck in through the rafters to scan the place herself. So far, she couldn’t recognize the unique shock of pink hair her father shared, but that didn’t have to mean anything.
They could still be anywhere.
She wasn’t exactly in top shape, so missing her parents after weeks of sleep deprivation wouldn’t be surprising. Maybe she should just go home, clean everything up, and wait. Her parents would be home in no time, she was sure of it.
She just needed to have patience.
“Excuse me, miss?”
Sakura whirled around, hand itching towards her shuriken holster.
She locked eyes with a nurse that was steadily approaching her with a clipboard in hand. The nurse had an intense and stern look on her face, not at all bothered by the clear defensive position Sakura had taken up on reflex. Her sharp blue eyes were framed by blonde hair that was so light, it was almost silver. For a second, Sakura wondered if this woman was in any way related to the Yamanaka clan.
The maybe-Yamanaka glanced up at her hitai-ate and swiftly demanded, “Can I have your SRN?”
Sakura was a little taken aback. She had to write her Shinobi Registration Number at the top of all her mission reports, but she had never verbally been asked.
“012601,” Sakura responded after a beat.
The nurse muttered something under her breath as she sifted through the stack of papers she was carrying. She eventually landed on page, pointing to something as she read, before an unreadable expression swept the stern look off her face. She suddenly looked much older and it drew attention to the dark bags under her eyes.
Sakura could recognize the exhaustion as an echo of her own. It seemed nurses have been just as strained as shinobi since the invasion.
A series of clinically detached identification questions followed.
“You’re a civilian-born, correct?”
“Yes.”
“State your full name.”
“Sakura Haruno.”
“Verify your rank.”
“Genin.”
“Name of your jonin teacher?”
“Kakashi Hatake.”
The nurse nodded and sucked in a quick breath, biting the inside of her cheek for just a second.
“Well, Miss Haruno, can you please report to Tent 9?”
Before Sakura could respond, the nurse avoided eye contact and walked past her like she was invisible. Odd interaction aside, it seemed that Sakura wouldn’t be tidying the house back up tonight. She felt a small bit of relief. She wasn’t even all that daunted by the mess, she’s seen and personally dealt with way worse over the past two weeks. It’s just that the house felt eerie and too quiet without her parents there.
Sakura vaguely remembered where Tent 9 was, so she let herself wander without much hurry back towards the epicenter of the disaster. She wasn’t all that thrilled to be going back there either.
The loud buzzing of generators and massive air conditioning units could be heard a block away from Tent 9. The sound intensified to the point that it almost hurt as Sakura got closer- it seemed to beat in tandem with the pounding of her heart.
Something wasn’t right.
There had to be a mistake.
That nauseous worry came back with a vengeance to the point that Sakura had to brace one hand against a nearby concrete wall and fight desperately to avoid losing her stomach’s empty contents. It was a losing battle.
She heaved and hacked until she felt hollowed out, but nothing was more hollow than her heart as she realized where that nurse had sent her. Deep within her soul, she knew this wasn’t for an impromptu mission.
Tent 9 was a temporary morgue.
The loud AC units were there not for comfort, but to keep the bodies from decaying before family had the chance to identify them. They were donated and installed when the stench of rot got too thick to handle.
She almost lost her balance and toppled over, but righted herself just in time to slowly drag herself to the tent.
She checked in at the entrance.
They said they’ve been trying to find her.
She really wished they hadn’t.
A minute passed of being guided through the forest of corpses- civilians, shinobi, children, and even foreigners were being kept here. There was no discrimination.
Row 39, column B and C.
The only way she could identify her father was the unique pink hair they both shared. That must be why they were trying to find her. There were only so many pink haired individuals in Konoha. Luckily, her mother was right next to him, only distinguished by the rings on her hand. They must’ve been found together.
She remembers something about ‘ two weeks ’.
She remembers positively identifying them.
She remembers somehow ending up at her house.
She remembers being deaf to her own screaming.
— — — —
Sakura doesn’t remember anything after that.
Chapter 2: Fire Lookout
Summary:
Kakashi just wanted to go to sleep and crash for the next eternity. He did not want to deal with this... whatever this was.
Notes:
I wrote this whole thing in a single stream of consciousness because I was possessed. I decided to make a couple executive decisions, 1. I'm going the 'Hatake have wolf traits' route because why not, it sounded fun to write and it was, and 2. I wasn't planning on there being any Kakagai undertones (not established relationship, more- everyone knows but him), but what can I say? Again- possessed. Neither points will be big parts of the story, more just something in the background.
Tw: Heavy dissociation and panic attack from Sakura, but as an observer, not from the POV of. Mentions of interrogation tactics, but nothing explicit.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
If someone were to ask Kakashi what his assessment of Sakura Haruno was when he first met her, or, hell, even three hours ago, it would be just one word.
Filler .
A warm body to make up the required third person in a genin squad and nothing more. She was intelligent and had a rare control of her chakra, especially as a civilian-born, but she was completely uninterested in any of the ninja arts. She had no talent for taijutsu, never even tried genjutsu, and only did as much ninjutsu as strictly required.
She had no drive and Kakashi wasn’t about to try and inspire it.
Becoming a ninja had to be a personal decision and it should never be forced. Despite what Gai preached to his own genin, the life of a ninja was brutal, bloody, and wrought with tragic loss.
If Sakura didn’t want any part in that and her only goal was a misguided attempt at love with a boy who had a noose strung around his neck since he was 7? Then the only thing for Kakashi to do was to keep her alive long enough for the other two boys to be promoted.
At least she was obedient and level-headed. That would keep her alive.
In another world, maybe she could’ve been a good bridge between Naruto and Sasuke- like how Rin brought him and Obito together, if only for a single night. But that wasn’t this world and maybe that’s for the better. Rin wasn’t much older than Sakura currently was when she died.
His other two students were handfuls enough and every day, he wondered if passing the boys was signing their death warrant.
It wasn’t that they didn’t have potential.
It was that they were so tunnel-visioned, they likely wouldn’t live to see their goals through.
Naruto was a walking bomb unless he could get the Kyuubi’s chakra under control- something he was wholly unprepared to teach. That paired with his complete lack of inhibition made for a deadly combination, maybe not for Naruto himself, but for everyone around him. He had to offload the kid onto Jiraya for a fighting chance.
Meanwhile, if Naruto was an inevitable explosion, Sasuke was an inevitable implosion . The kid died five years ago along with his clan, even if his heart was still beating. His only need for life was to kill his older brother, which was as good as putting an exploding kunai in your mouth and waiting. That kind of destruction, he was familiar with.
Sakura was the easy one. At least she wasn’t in a hurry to die or to get others killed.
But Kakashi really should’ve known better.
After all, this is Team 7 and historically, a bit of insanity was a prerequisite.
Just two hours ago, Kakashi returned to Konoha after a brutal unpaid two weeks of combing every square inch of Fire Country for Suna or Oto nin, expecting to crash at his bare apartment and claim that his mission report got lost on the path of life. The Sandaime would let that slide and grant him an extension, but he knew that Shikaku would not. Kakashi did not care either way.
Or at least that was his plan until a telltale golden hue and the billowing of smoke over the village walls told Kakashi that there was no rest awaiting him beyond the village gates.
He wonders if every jonin-sensei’s first thoughts would be: ‘ Which one of my boys?’ , ‘How many dead?’ , and most importantly, ‘ How much paperwork?’ . Or was this a Team 7 exclusive experience?
Before he could even check in, he was intercepted by a high ranking T&I kunoichi (always a good sign and pleasant experience) and summoned to his second favorite place just below the Kannabi Bridge. The T&I headquarters. ‘ Only good things happen there’ , he thought without an ounce of joy.
Good thing he always wears a mask or someone might be able to guess that he wasn’t too happy at the moment.
What awaited him at T&I was something he never in a million years would have guessed.
Ibiki Morino presented him with a huge file with pictures, written testimonies, and victim conditions from a whole city block explosion that took place not even an hour ago. It was in the designated safe zone, ironically enough, and when Ibiki said there was an explosion, he failed to mention that it wasn’t just an explosion. No, there was nothing left. Someone took a mortar and pestle to it and started grinding it all down to a fine dust.
This level of completionist destruction would be impressive even for the Kyuubi, just on a much smaller scale.
Written testimonies detail a manic sort of laughter and a thunderclap of violence so quick and sudden that it had people fearing for their lives. No fatalities because the homes on that block were still vacant, but there were serious injuries dealt to three chunin during attempts to restrain the convict. Ultimately, the convict was only able to be stopped via sedation through a poisoned senbon.
The individual was under suspicion of involvement with the Suna-Oto invasion with charges including, but not limited to, high treason and domestic terrorism. Both of which include the death penalty.
Their name was redacted along with any personal descriptions.
Kakashi wondered why the hell he was being flagged down for this. None of this matched the MO of any of his genin.
If it was Naruto, he would’ve felt the carnage from miles away. It wasn’t bad enough and it was too precise for a leaky seal of the Kyuubi. The precision might be expected from Sasuke, but there was no reason for him to do anything like this unless Itachi was spotted. But if that was the case, there would’ve been fatalities- one of them likely being Sasuke himself.
Sakura, meanwhile, simply didn’t have it in her to do anything like this. She probably could’ve had the power if she really wanted to, but she was undertrained and missing one very important thing. Anger. Grief. Frustration. Any kind of strong emotion that could drive such an act.
What Kakashi didn’t account for was how much things could change in two short weeks.
“She-” Kakashi’s suspicion grew, his eyes narrowed. “-won’t talk to anyone and I’m this close to sending in a Yamanaka,” Ibiki explained with a hard expression. “This is her last chance. Any further resistance, regardless of involvement with the invasion, and she will be tried and convicted of willfully withholding information.”
Kakashi said nothing as he followed Ibiki through those terribly oppressive steel walls.
There’s really only one person he could be referring to, but it still didn’t make any sense. Sakura Haruno was not capable of such destruction.
Ibiki huffed a bit and said, “I’d almost be impressed with her resistance if not for the circumstances. Kid might’ve had a future in T&I.”
He didn’t like that past-tense, but once again, said nothing. You never willfully say anything within the walls of T&I.
Ibiki stopped him in front of a locked, windowless interrogation room and handed Kakashi a small recording device as well as the file. “You will be conducting this interview with your sharingan. I’ll excuse the conflict of interest just this once. We’re short-staffed and I think you’re the only person who has a chance of getting through to her.”
Kakashi just nodded, grabbed what he was offered, and entered the room. He exposed his sharingan despite his already exhausted chakra.
As soon as he opened the door, he was immediately assaulted with the thick scent of gasoline, fire, and grief . It was so strong, it threatened to make him gag, but thanks to decades of suppressing any kind of reaction, he held firm. Instead, he set the device and folder down on the table, but didn’t start anything just yet.
Sakura looked like a complete stranger. Even with his sharingan, he struggled to recognize the girl he’d been supervising for the past six months.
For starters, her completely-against-regulation signature red dress was missing and replaced with something that was leagues closer to what he’d expect from a shinobi. But the positivity ended there. She was covered in ash and soot, her pink hair was almost gray from the amount of foundation and wall dust that covered her. All the grime didn’t hide the obvious swell of her knuckles, cuts on her hands, and torn muscles that were visibly distorted beneath her skin.
But that wasn’t what unnerved Kakashi so much.
No, it was her eyes.
They were dull, lifeless, and if not for her breathing, Kakashi might’ve thought she was already dead, just being propped up like a sick imitation of a puppet. There was only one way someone could achieve this level of catatonia in such a short amount of time and that was through intense, world-altering trauma. The kind that you don’t come back from. The kind he’s seen ninja be forced to retire because of.
The very same kind that he experienced at a young age after finding his father. After Obito’s death. After Rin’s. Minato’s. Kushina’s-
Just what happened to her?
‘Willful withholding of information’ was quite the disturbing stretch of the imagination. Sakura barely had a will at all at this point. Maybe he should drag that sick bastard in here and-
He was shocked at the protective surge that seized his chest, stopping the air in his lungs for just a moment. Keeping Team 7 alive has always been his priority, but he hadn’t felt this overwhelmed by the need to protect since Rin. He thought that particular instinct had been killed off, but seeing Sakura like this…
It shook something loose within him.
It was just wrong and he felt the need to correct it. Maybe it’s been building for a while since the Land of Waves or maybe even from the first time he met them. Or maybe he was just going crazy from the seemingly endless 2 weeks spent in the backcountry.
Either way, it didn’t matter. How he felt was irrelevant.
He had a job to do and doing it well was the only way he could protect Sakura.
Kakashi gave himself a brief, imperceptible shake before wiping all traces of emotion from his face. Carefully, he reached across the table and put a hand on her shoulder, speaking in a voice so soft that it was foreign to his own ears, “ Sakura-chan -”
As if shocked with electricity, she came back to herself with a sharp intake of air and a flutter of her eyelids. She looked around for a brief moment, confusion and distress present but muted on her face.
She didn’t even seem to be aware of the tears rolling down her face when she locked eyes with him like a lifeline. There was only a slight trace of recognition in her expression.
The sharp scent of fear and confusion radiated through the wildfire-like ambiance of the room’s scent profile. It wormed its way into his gut, trying its best to knot and break down his careful control, but he couldn’t be swayed.
Kakashi put up a cold and professional front like a shield, like this was just another ANBU assignment. All emotions put on hold and everything that wasn’t strictly necessary could wait until after the interrogation. For Sakura’s sake, he needed to be the bad guy for a bit. He reached over and pressed the button on the voice recorder.
There was a small beep and a little red light started blinking as the recording device was activated.
“Time is twenty two hundred hours and thirty minutes on August 14th-”
– – – –
Kakashi carefully revealed nothing as the words stopped waterfalling from Sakura’s mouth. Ultimately, he didn’t gain anything vital to the investigation from her report except for proof of a fragile mental state. Trauma from the invasion compounded with the shock of losing her parents would be enough to put anyone in a paralyzed state of being.
But none of that explained what happened next.
Trauma was exceedingly common among shinobi and is an occupational hazard. You take some leave, fill out a psyche report, and you either come back or you retire.
Shinobi don’t just decide to raze an entire city block.
Especially not one as smart as Sakura. There just had to be something else. Some external interference that she was excluding either purposefully or subconsciously blocking it. He had the strong impression it was the latter. Sakura wasn’t in control of herself at the moment, if the frequent flaring of her usually carefully controlled chakra was any indication.
She didn’t seem to remember anything past seeing her parents. Fragments, maybe. But even the events leading up to it were growing fuzzy. Her speech slowed down and slurred as she got closer to the gap. Her frequent loss of thought increased as the recount progressed, as though she were fighting through a thickening fog.
Sakura seemed on the verge of losing herself entirely once again as that terrible dullness began to glaze over her eyes.
No amount of snapping, clapping, or other variants of sharp noises could reground her like it had before.
Kakashi gave an exhausted sigh, bordering on a low whine, and glanced at the clock positioned behind and directly above the interviewee. It was already past midnight. They were both spent mentally, emotionally, and physically.
He himself hadn’t had a proper night’s rest or eaten anything more than soldier pills in weeks, and while his body was used to that kind of abuse, he still had his limits. It’s gotten harder to keep himself in check as the day wore on. If he was still an active ANBU operative, he would be able to stretch this out for about a month before he crashed, but he’d gotten soft after so long off the S-rank roster.
Sakura wasn’t used to this kind of life, however. She got a taste of it during the Land of Waves mission, but even then, she still got to sleep through the night while in the village and never had to resort to rations. Combine this physical strain with losing her parents, losing her mind, then the retraumatization of having to recount the whole thing.
There was an art to interrogation and he needed to know when to push and when to stop. For obvious reasons, he couldn’t be too soft, but if he pushed too hard, he’d risk a full mental shutdown.
He told himself this was strategic and not just an excuse.
Sakura was relatively cooperative when she wasn’t dissociating, so he at least had a good preliminary report for Ibiki which should stave off the Yamanaka threat. Mind walking was an effective, but extreme method of information extraction. When someone was as mentally fragile as Sakura currently was, mind walking could leave her permanently disabled or potentially brain dead.
Even if Sakura was colluding with the enemy, Kakashi would need more information before he’d willinging allow her to endure that kind of jutsu. But looking at her and hearing her story, he sincerely doubted she was a risk for national security.
A risk to herself? Almost certainly.
A risk to others? Maybe.
But a risk to Konoha itself? Absolutely not.
Ibiki was likely going to throw a fit, but Kakashi made the executive decision to end the interview early. They could pick it back up once Sakura has gotten over her shock and Kakashi has gotten more than two hours of sleep at a time.
“Alright, we’re done for today,” he said under his breath with another heavy sigh, pulling his hitai-ate over his sharingan and nearly collapsing from the relief. “This was part one of Haruno’s pre-trial interview for her suspected role in domestic terrorism post the invasion of Konoha by Sunagakure and Otogakure. Concluding at zero hours and fifty-two minutes on August 15th, 12 years post-NTA, 15 days and 11 hours post the invasion of Sunagakure and Otogakure.”
Without any flourish, Kakashi pressed the button to stop the recording.
He stood up and grabbed both the device and the file. The harder part of this interview was yet to come and neither of them were prepared for it just yet.
Kakashi leaned against the desk and just regarded his student for a minute.
Her breathing had evened out since they first started, but seeing her so out of it has never felt right. Of all of them, she was supposed to keep her civilian softness. That wasn’t something to be ashamed about and he thought she was fine with that too. That’s why he never pushed her. If someday she realized she actually wanted to be a proper kunoichi, he’d meet her there, but not a second before.
This was not the awakening he wanted for her.
Anything else he had to say, sentiments he wanted to share, or emotions that were clawing up to the surface had to wait until after they were outside T&I HQ. He knocked “OK” in morse code upon the door, even though encryption was hardly necessary. Sakura wasn’t capable of even listening, let alone decode.
Three knocks high on the door. One knock high, one knock low, and final knock high. Each bang of his fist against the steel door felt like an unforgiving gavel, sealing Sakura’s fate in her own poor timing and Konoha’s hasty assumptions.
The guard responded with three high knocks of his own.
A moment later, Ibiki opened the door and ushered Kakashi outside. He was stone-faced as Kakashi returned the device and the file.
“So?” he prompted after a moment of Kakashi’s prolonged silence. “Is the history of Team 7 repeating itself?”
Kakashi bit back a growl that rumbled deep in his throat, choking him as he stifled it. What a tasteless joke. He was just tired enough that he almost laid into him, but he had no authority here and showing any weakness here was like painting a target on his back. His face was kept carefully blank, his posture relaxed, his entire demeanor slightly bored.
“Conclusions cannot be drawn yet.”
Ibiki raised an eyebrow.
“Is that it? You spend almost three hours with the suspect and you come back inconclusive?” he challenged, his voice purposefully taunting. “What have they done to you, Kakashi? You’ve gone soft. I used to respect you and that unyielding hard edge of yours.”
It wasn’t a glowing character assessment for anyone if they earned the respect of Ibiki Morino, the eternal sadist who was born without empathy. A compliment from him was more like an insult to anyone else. The man that Ibiki respected was killed by Team 7 and the world was better for it.
But, Kakashi ignored all of that, though he had a scathing response just on the tip of his tongue.
Instead, he said, “Release Sakura into my custody as her probationary officer for the remainder of this investigation.”
That request shocked both Ibiki and Kakashi himself. That wasn’t a conscious thought- he hadn’t even considered it before for a number of reasons, but from the moment he said it, he felt firm and unyielding. That protective fire he’d been suppressing was scathing him from the inside out.
He expected a fight, but to his surprise, Ibiki just blinked and gave a very mild response.
“Why should I?”
“My apartment has sustained minimal damage and is well sealed, as you are aware. It will still effectively be a holding cell, but I can more easily build rapport and maintain trust in a controlled environment. This should make the whole process easier. We will continue this investigation over the next couple of days.”
He already made up his mind regarding Sakura’s guilt in the charges brought before her, but he still had several unanswered questions that he needed to uncover answers for. That, and the fact that he felt this overwhelming instinct screaming at him to keep her in his sight.
Officially, he’d be protecting everyone else.
But in reality, if push came to shove, he was going to protect her . He wasn’t about to let a member of Team 7 die on his watch, in his own village.
“You know what she did to that city block and you want me to release her?”
Kakashi did not respond.
Ibiki regarded him for a moment.
“And how do I know you’re not going to go rogue?”
Kakashi still did not respond, but he offered as deadpan an expression as he could manage with just one visible eye. This was all just prose and they both knew it. He can’t crack an ex-ANBU operative, even if he was seven years off the force and running dangerously low on any kind of endurance.
“Okay,” he acquiesced. Kakashi was careful to conceal any reaction, but he could feel a knot in his chest begin to dangerously unravel. “ But , she is to wear chakra seals, you will be heavily monitored, and you will be interviewed extensively after the fact. You know the consequences for failure to comply with any of these conditions.”
Memories of being forcibly taken from his dorm room in the middle of the night came to mind. ANBU conditioning- they wanted to catch you fully off guard to simulate a real interrogation scenario.
They never held back either.
The easiest ones were the physical punishments. Vice grips fastened around joints, pliers taken to fingernails, knives, hammers, and even just bare fists. Keeping your mouth shut while getting beaten within an inch of your life was easy. Eventually, you just grow numb to it because the brain can only take so much pain at a single time. It was easy to mentally detach from the situation.
Genjutsu was where the real torture was. There was no escaping it and no amount of compartmentalization could dull it. This kind of training was officially banned for all standard active duty shinobi because of the amount of people that were driven to madness or suicide- banned for all except for the ANBU.
Thankfully, this particular kind of training was exclusive to new operatives. A sort of hazing to make sure they could handle extreme pressure without cracking. Kakashi’s was a bit rougher than the other’s, however.
His sharingan made it easier to resist and even counter that particular tactic, so they had to be extra cautious. They’d weave it in so slowly and carefully that anyone else would mistake it for real life. Eventually, he became so paranoid that he didn’t sleep for a week and ended up in the hospital.
Even now, Kakashi would subconsciously flare his chakra at steady intervals to make sure he wasn’t being fed a false reality.
If it came to interrogation, both he and Ibiki knew that getting him to crack would be near impossible.
Even so, Kakashi agreed to these terms and by 1:30 AM, they had finished painting the semi-permanent seals on the palms of her hands and he was cleared to take her home. When he lightly grabbed her shoulder in an effort to rouse her, she was very clearly struggling to stay conscious. She could lift her head, but her eyes would switch in and out of focus like a cruel game of tug of war.
He still tried to help her to feet, however, hoping that the movement might ground her back into reality- at least long enough for them to get out of the building. But just as she got both feet on the ground, heavily leaning into Kakashi’s shoulder, she whispered in a groggy voice, “Where are we going?”
She met his eyes enough for him to give her a quick smile and say in his typical airy tone, “I’m taking you home.”
That was evidently the wrong choice of words.
Her breaths drew short in labored gasps, sounding more and more shallow with each inadequate draw of air. Her dead weight became rigid and her already torn muscles were shaking from the effort. Her previously distant and hazy expression sharpened into one of pure panic and terror.
“ Sakura! ” Kakashi repeated time and time again, hoping to catch her focus enough to calm her down. He was now kneeling on the floor with both of his hands firmly gripping her shoulders as he tried to bring her back, but she was too far gone.
He had to stop this now before things got much worse.
Reluctantly, Kakashi exposed his sharingan once more and forced eye contact.
In an instant, she seized and fell completely limp, falling against him in his arms as she fell into an artificial sleep. A sharp headache that made him grimace firmly reprimanded him for using any small amount of chakra, but this was a necessity. He hated having to use Obito’s eye like this- it felt cheap and completely robbed the person of any sense of autonomy, but he knew what was happening to her and he knew there was no bringing her back.
She would’ve panicked until she passed out in the worst possible place to do so.
Sakura was currently under intense scrutiny and any sign of weakness would be exploited. Especially if it was so easily triggered.
“Alright, Sakura-chan,” he said to deaf ears as he adjusted her into an easier carrying position with one arm under her knees and another around her back. Her weight was concerning. He always knew she was leaner than a kunoichi ideally should be, but young girls could be weird about their weight, so he never brought it up. But she was especially light now, barely weighing anything at all, and he could feel her ribs through her shirt.
Just add it to the pile of problems he was going to have to deal with.
Without any further distractions, Kakashi carried her out of T&I and wondered how the hell he got himself into this mess. He handled ANBU missions where the only information he had was a loose approximation of a location and very vague instructions with steadier nerves than he had now. Speaking of ANBU, he was also inviting a detail to follow him home, record every conversation, every interaction, and probably even keep count of how many breaths he was taking.
He knew because he’s been on that kind of assignment before.
Fortunately, that also meant he knew loopholes and how to bore the agents enough that they grant him even two seconds of privacy.
Gods, he needed sleep.
– – – –
“ Let her go , you asshole! ”
Kakashi wasn’t exactly expecting a fanfare once he left T&I, but he really wasn’t expecting Naruto to be spitting at him like a rabid animal while Sasuke just barely holds him back from committing a felony. He was too tired for this.
“ Dobe , stop!” Sasuke finally snapped, grunting with the effort it took to hold Naruto’s arms apart to prevent him from summoning any shadow clones. “Use your brain for once! That’s our stupid teacher!”
Usually Kakashi might feel the need to reprimand such blatant insubordination, but he really didn’t care right now.
Naruto finally opened his eyes and saw that it was indeed Kakashi carrying Sakura and not some rogue nin. He immediately stopped resisting, which caused Sasuke to almost fall backwards from the sudden lack of counter pressure. He cuffed Naruto in the back of the head, but he had little to no response.
He was now being stared at with those wide blue eyes, not unlike a puppy might when they’re distressed and confused.
Kakashi gave one of his signature smiles and said a quick, “Yo!”
Those blue eyes immediately filled with tears as Naruto rushed forward and clung to his legs with enough force to make him stumble while burying his head against his side. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say Naruto was trying to crawl inside his own skin.
That disturbing visual aside, Kakashi, the formerly feared and cold ANBU captain, now had a 12 year old boy clinging to him like his life depended on it and another 12 year old girl dead to the world in his arms. If not for the circumstances, he was certain Asuma would get a good laugh out of this. Gai would probably cry something about how Kakashi’s cold heart finally thawed or some other embarrassing declaration.
As it stood, his only audience was Sasuke, who he would expect to have some scornful thing to say, but instead just looked tired and like he was trying to hide any sense of concern. His overcompensation was almost cute.
“Kaka-sensei, we were so worried, y’know!” Naruto cried out while crushing the feeling out of his right leg. “I saw the explosion and Sakura went that way, so I ran over and Sasuke was already there and I could sense that Sakura was there, but then she was gone. Sasuke said he saw her be taken here and I didn’t know what this place was, but then he told me and I just-”
He whined again before crying even harder.
Sasuke stood off to the side, pointedly not looking at them with his eyes crossed, but his face was flushed as he sheepishly admitted, “We thought Sakura might’ve been…” He trailed off, muttering the last part of the sentence in an unintelligible mutter.
These kids actually waited outside all night and didn’t kill each other. The thought struck Kakashi with an odd, warm feeling in his chest.
He shuffled Sakura around so she was instead balancing on his hip and with his newly freed hand, he ruffled Naruto’s unkempt hair.
“Sakura will be okay,” he said with his voice light and airy. “She’s going to be staying with me and won’t be taking missions for a little while, but everything will go back to normal soon.”
Naruto extracted himself from Kakashi’s side and looked up at him with those same puppy eyes.
“You promise?” he said with a wobbly voice.
Kakashi looked away for just a moment, wondering who decided to make these children ninja. And why was it only now that he was reminded of their age? That fire-like surge of protective instinct climbed its way up into his throat again, making him feel like he was a second away from breathing out smoke.
It didn’t help that with Sakura pressed against him, that wildfire scent was still stuck in Kakashi’s nose and choked everything else out.
He gave Naruto an awkward one-handed hug, pressing him against his side as he affirmed, “I promise.”
Sasuke was still standing back, but looked increasingly uncomfortable.
“You too, Sasuke. Come here,” he commanded while waving him over.
Not unlike a cat, he scoffed a bit before slowly looking around to make sure no one was around. Once he verified it, he quickly flickered over to their side, giving him and Naruto the quickest and faintest impression of a hug before darting back once again. He coughed and said, “I’m, uh… glad.”
“Sasuke, you do care!” Naruto cheered, but it was unclear if he was teasing or genuine.
“Shut up, dobe!”
“I want another hug!”
Naruto pushed away from Kakashi and tried to force Sasuke into a death grip, but they both just ended up fighting in the street while shouting and playing their usual routine. Kakashi shuffled Sakura around again, so she was lying as she was before and called out, “Boys! Make sure you both turn in for the night soon. Just because I’ll be busy, that doesn’t mean you can slack on training. I’ll have Gai check on you to make sure you’re both behaving.”
“Yes, Kaka-sensei!”
“Whatever.”
Kakashi rolled his eyes and left them to their squabbling. Maybe Team 7 wasn’t all that bad, actually. A little bit of stupidity in all this gloom might be good for the soul. Yes, they’ll have to grow up eventually, but for now, Kakashi was struck with the need to protect them as they are now.
Something was seriously wrong with him today.
– – – –
His apartment was just as empty and bare as he left it.
Perfectly utilitarian with undecorated half-paneled walls, a cheap couch shoved behind an equally cheap coffee table, a small fold out table as a sad excuse for a dining table with similar foldable chairs, and he had a whole kitchen with some pots and pans around there somewhere. He even had a tea kettle on the stove! He was practically drowning in luxury.
Across from the kitchen was a tiny hallway with a bathroom to the side and his bedroom at the very end.
It was practically lifeless with little to no personality or indication of the person who lived there except for his Icha Icha collection scattered haphazardly across the kitchen counter. He knows he didn’t leave those there, but a quick investigation showed a note from Gai that read, “ It really is shameful to leave these out in the open. You’re lucky I found them. Put them away. ”
Kakashi huffed a small laugh.
Gai was the only person that could bypass the seals trapping his apartment and that privilege was granted only for strict emergencies after he lost a challenge. Apparently what he deemed to be an emergency was returning his book collection that was scattered across the various training fields.
Of course, he knew exactly where each of them were and he really only put them in random places to mess with the general public and to also make Gai ever so slightly annoyed.
That challenge was rigged anyways, so, of course Kakashi was going to make his life hell for it. What kind of challenge was ‘ see who can make the most people laugh in 5 minutes ’ anyways? People laughed at Gai all the time for his ridiculous attire and Kakashi was told he had a resting ‘ I’m going to kill you ’ face, so he was at a severe disadvantage.
Why did he take the challenge, one might ask?
Because refusing a challenge was an automatic forfeit and the point defected to the challenger immediately. Neither of them were willing to accept defeat that easy. It was shameful.
Moment of brevity over, Kakashi turned his attention back to the 12 year old girl he suddenly found himself in complete responsibility for. He felt this odd mix of pure dread and that odd protective feeling that’s been clinging to him all day.
She was still out of it. That mild genjutsu was only supposed to last 5 minutes at most, but it seemed that she fell asleep at some point on her own. That was most certainly for the better. He couldn’t imagine her willingly falling asleep any other way, so as harsh as the method was, it was her best option.
Now, where to put her.
Ideally, she’d get cleaned up a bit before properly being put to sleep, but she was in no state to do it herself and he didn’t want to risk waking her up. Historically, he wasn’t the gentlest person in the world and he knew from experience how hard it was to fall asleep after a day like this.
Putting her on the couch didn’t feel like the right move, but that really only left one other option. There goes Kakashi’s desperate little hope of finally sleeping in his own bed.
Still, it was the right thing to do, and if Kakashi was being honest, he doubted if he’d be able to sleep tonight. That was another reason he was reserved to the idea of having her stay with him initially. He’s always struggled to sleep with other people around. That’s why he always took the longest watches and it’s also why he landed himself in the hospital so often. Forget his sharingan’s drain on his chakra, he didn’t need the help in driving himself into the ground.
Very quietly, Kakashi entered his simple bedroom and laid Sakura down onto the mattress. She was so dead to the world that she didn’t even shift or make any kind of noise at the disturbance. Instead, she just sunk into the bed like she’s always been there. He habitually watched the rise and fall of her chest, making sure she was still breathing, before pulling his thin covers over her and leaving her be.
He did not close his bedroom door though.
Regardless of how much he may trust Sakura, she is still under his strict supervision and until this whole story is cleared up, he needs to stay on guard and assume she actually is a traitor- as absurd as that notion is.
Kakashi was going to take a shower to wash away the grime of the past two weeks and the unfortunate events of today, but instead he just collapsed against the wall, sliding to the floor so he was facing the door to his bathroom.
One leg was extended, pressed against the door at a slight angle because he couldn’t quite fit, while the other was drawn up to his chest, being used as an armrest. It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but being able to just sit down for five minutes was intoxicating all on its own.
His exhaustion across the charts was catching up to him, but he knew he wasn’t going to be able to sleep.
He was just going to sit here, paralyzed, as his mind and body rebelled against the constant abuse it’d been facing. He wasn’t going to sleep, but he wasn’t going to be getting up either.
Hopefully, he’ll regain the ability to move before dawn, but for now, he is stuck here.
Kakashi leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, listening to Sakura’s even breathing in the next room over. This definitely was not how he imagined this evening going. He missed his life from however many hours ago when he wasn’t worried about his team and his only concern was figuring out the most effective way to delay his mission report.
Now, he was collapsed on the floor and the only thing on his mind was how best he could keep his genin safe.
He did not miss this feeling.
“What did I get myself into?” he whispered under his breath.
Notes:
I was planning on ending the whole interrogation here, but like with the wolf and Kakagai points, it just happened. I was writing and that's just how it came out. I'm not the one driving the ship and it's kinda fun! Again, I haven't *wanted* to write in so long. I'm having fun. Also, I accidentally wrote Ibiki as an absolute asshole, but I couldn't remember what he was like in canon.
Let me know how my characterization of Kakashi was. His voice is harder to write in because I get the feeling that his inner dialogue would be different from what he portrays to the rest of the world, so there will likely be some dissonance between what you read in his POV and what other characters (like Sakura) see.
Chapter 3: Hypoxia
Summary:
Sakura didn't know where she was or how long it's been. There are only two abstract things she is certain of. One, she is in trouble with the law. And two, she is guilty. But she has no idea what she did.
Notes:
Hello! This is quite late, but Sakura just wasn't cooperating with me. I didn't quite get done what I wanted to, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. This story is going slower than I anticipated, but that's just how it tends to go with me, it seems.
Trigger warnings for mentions of death and dissociation/panic.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The position Sakura found herself in was something straight out of a nightmare and cautionary tale.
Waking up was a slow and unforgiving process, not unlike trying to find a piece of driftwood while drowning at sea. She’d just barely grasp the edge of consciousness before losing it again, falling underneath the foamy waves of sleep. She had faint memories of barely opening her bleary eyes before they closed again and she drifted off once more.
It wasn’t a pleasant or willful kind of sleep either. It was forced upon her like she was under the influence of anesthesia.
Was she in the hospital?
That’d explain her fleeting consciousness, but it didn’t feel quite right either. Last she could remember, she was walking home with Naruto and Sasuke, but then nothing else.
Blank.
Did something happen to her on her way home? The danger should have passed by that point. She very clearly remembered the emergency state being called off and there were almost certainly chunin guards patrolling around her parents’ neighborhood.
She knew she wasn’t home either.
The sheets draped over her were thinner and rougher than the admittedly very expensive ones she had on her bed. Those ones would glide over her skin like silk while these clung to her skin with every slight movement. The mattress was also entirely too firm and didn’t feel much better than the tree she had been sleeping in for the past two weeks.
Then there was the scent. There was an overwhelming presence of smoke like Sakura had spent the past 12 hours bathing in a campfire, but there was the undertone of something more familiar and comforting. It wasn’t home- that much she knew for certain. Home smelt like her mother’s light floral perfumes and her father’s tea while this smelled heavier, more natural. Like the oaks and cedars that grew in the Konoha forests, but also almost musty like a dog.
It was almost soothing and felt familiar in a way she just couldn’t place.
She was in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar place with her mind slipping through her fingers like water. It was a textbook situation she was taught to avoid.
But all the same, she didn’t feel like she was in any danger.
Sakura slowly blinked the sleep from her eyes and yawned, which turned into a hacking cough once something hit the back of her already dry throat. With tedious effort, she spat out a… dog hair? It was small and brown. Once again, strangely familiar.
She fully opened her eyes and took in her surroundings.
Bare half-paneled walls surrounded her with the only other piece of furniture besides the bed she was currently laying on was a wooden dresser that looked older than she was. The bed was similarly bare of any personality with white sheets and a white pillow. None of this looked like a permanent residence, more like a regularly booked motel.
All the same, she could feel the thrumming of chakra buzzing with the walls- strong and familiar, promising only pain for any unwanted intruders.
With labored movements, Sakura managed to get herself out of the bed. She felt more sore than she had been in her entire life and it wasn’t the natural kind of sore that came from training or a night on a cheap bed.
No, it felt wrong.
Pain shot up her arms and legs and down her back with any slight movement.
She also didn’t have her full range motion. It was as if invisible anchors were tied to her joints, not just making it painful, but flat out impossible to make certain movements. Her muscles were impossibly tight, but she couldn’t stretch it out.
Sakura had enough basic medical knowledge that this couldn’t possibly be the result of her grueling work post-invasion. The brain usually stopped the body from pushing itself to this point.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, an earsplitting, ‘ KAORI’ , rang out and ricocheted against the walls. A mother with broken bones and impossible strength.
Sakura shook her head as much as she could manage.
She suddenly understood at least a portion of what Lee felt when he opened the gates. Temporarily overcoming all physical limitations but at a heavy cost.
But what could she have possibly done to feel like this?
It was then that she looked down and took stock of her appearance.
She just looked wrong.
Her skin was blackened with ash and soot that left a black stain on the sheets where she had been sleeping. Her clothes were something she hadn’t worn in at least a year- not since when she tried being serious as a ninja before ultimately getting discouraged by the skill gap and giving up. The once red top was now almost as black as her leggings.
But her appearance was hardly the biggest issue.
As she reached for her chakra, she realized she could feel it, but couldn’t control it- not even a twitch. The feeling was incredibly disorienting. This wasn’t chakra exhaustion- she knew that much from seeing Kakashi-sensei dip into it any time he used his sharingan.
That was when she noticed the small black seals painted on the palms of her hands.
She couldn’t read the sigils for an exact interpretation, but she understood the general message. She recognized it from reading about commonly used seals.
Chakra suppressors.
But why?
She’s lived too much of a blessed and easy life to ask any of the important questions- like who or why and how long did she have until she was disposed of. Instead, she immediately assumed guilt since she was within her village walls and they would never punish someone who didn’t deserve it.
But what did she do?
What could she have possibly done that warrants a reasonable use of suppression?
Never mind the unfamiliar surroundings, she just felt like everything was slightly to the left of where it should be. It felt similar to if she left her kunai in her shuriken bag instead of the appropriate holster on her thigh. If she moved to grab one for a life-saving maneuver, her hand would come up empty.
Even worse is that she has no memory of what happened or how long it’s even been.
Sakura found the strength within herself to limp over to the bedroom door, leaning heavily on anything nearby.
She clipped close to the door frame and steadied her breathing.
Stealth was ultimately a fruitless endeavor since her uncontrolled chakra would be screaming to any ninja worth their salt, ‘ I’m awake! ’. But she was conflicted. On one hand, a trained habit was blaring alarm bells, but on the other, her instincts were telling her it was okay. This felt more like a safe house than a holding cell.
All the same, Sakura peered out from behind the door, half expecting to see an empty hallway.
But instead she immediately locked eyes with a single red sharingan- spinning and glowing ominously in the dimly lit hallway.
Kakashi-sensei?
All guard immediately dropped as she could suddenly place where all that familiarity came from. The strong, thrumming chakra- not unlike the growl of a protective dog, dangerous to everyone but a select few. The dog fur is presumably from his ninken. She had never been in his apartment before, but she had to assume that was where she was.
Despite being the only truly familiar entity, however, the man himself was the only thing that felt foreign.
Kakashi was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall and his long legs crammed into the small hallway, looking like he hadn’t slept in years. A kunai was lightly brushing the fingertips of one hand. His whole body looked loose, but she knew there was a tightness of someone ready to strike at one wrong move.
His eyes revealed nothing, cold and solid in a way that had never been directed at her before. For just a moment, he was tracking her every move, sizing her up and scanning for any small sign of a threat.
There was a piercing chill that stole the air from her lungs and wracked her whole body with a violent shiver.
As foreign as his regard of her was, it too felt familiar.
It brought her back to a vacation she took at a young age. She was supposed to try skiing for the first time in the colder part of the country, but a sudden blizzard forced them to stay stuck in their cabin until it calmed down enough for them to leave. She always was a curious child, so she wandered outside while her parents weren’t looking.
It was freezing cold, but she was exhilarated by bounding through heaps of snow that she had never seen before. That was, until an instinctual fear gripped her and she realized she was being watched. She turned to look through the forest line and that’s when she found them.
Piercing amber eyes, the color of fire with all of the danger and none of the warmth.
A massive gray wolf was crouched low and waiting.
Likely stalking her as soon as she left the cabin, biding its time before she stupidly wandered too far from her parents. The fact that it made its presence known meant that her time was up. The only thing that kept the wolf away was her father, who had snuck up behind her with a shovel and a warning in hand.
Once again, she found herself hunted down.
Despite herself, she squeaked out a high, “Kakashi-sensei?” with hands in the air and her whole body leaning away from him.
After a quick and final scan, Kakashi-sensei let out a small, almost inaudible breath and snapped his hiati-ate back over his Sharingan. He released a small amount of that imperceptible tension as his hand dropped away from the kunai, like it had never been there in the first place.
He gave her a small smile with his eye, as though he hadn’t been sizing her up just moments ago.
“Why are you on the floor?” she blurted out, unable to ignore the absurd position of a tall man shoved into a small space, seemingly by choice. Yes, she should have asked the important questions first, but with a sense of normalcy returning, she had to diffuse the rest of the tension.
Kakashi-sensei deflected and said, “Well, you see, I found my bedroom already occupied.”
“But I can see a couch not ten feet from here.”
“Ah, has that always been there?” He spoke as though he was surprised, like he’d never seen that couch before, so of course it wasn’t an option before now. In a light and airy tone, he changed the subject. “How are you?”
It was a typical and bland question, given with the expected conversational tone, but Sakura could sense a landmine planted within it. A loaded trap of exploding kunai that was just itching to be set off. She didn’t know why she was here or why Kakashi-sensei was acting so strange, so she was at a very clear disadvantage. She was playing blind while her sensei already had a path to victory planned out.
This single question? A killing blow.
She was set up for a Fool’s Mate. A checkmate within just two moves.
So, she gave the only defense she could even think of employing. Her brain was still sluggish and slow. Any complex maneuvers would have to wait until she can think clearly.
Sakura gave a single shrug, suppressing the wince of pain that threatened to give her up.
A shrug was a powerful response.
It took advantage of the other person’s preconceived ideas about you and let them fill in the blanks. People loved being correct, so they usually wouldn’t push any further and don’t realize that you barely gave an answer at all.
Kakashi is smarter than that, however, and Sakura knew that.
After all, he was a master of deflection.
His eye narrowed slightly and that calculating look remained, but otherwise, he did not call her out. A small mercy.
“Glad to hear it,” he said instead. What he said next was another phrase that would just be a passing comment coming from anyone else, but from him, it was another dangerous weapon. “You were pretty out of it yesterday.”
“Yeah, I don’t really remember much, to be honest,” she said through a small laugh that sounded fake even to her. Subconsciously, she moved to rub the back of her neck, but the movement was aborted when a sharp pain ripped through her arm.
It was innocuous enough and as close to a truth as she felt she could give to Kakashi. As much as she trusted him, she couldn’t ignore the situation she found herself in. Covered in soot, body in tatters, chakra restricted, and a huge undetermined gap in her memory. Departing from Naruto and Sasuke could have happened last night, two days ago, or even a whole month for all she knew.
She had to follow Kakashi’s lead. If he was being evasive with half-truths, then so would she.
Kakashi offered another small smile with his eye closed, but she could see the gears turning in his head.
“Huh. I wonder why,” he said casually with an inquisitive tone.
Sakura called bullshit on that immediately, but was not surprised one bit. Kakashi adopted a blank look for a second- still smiling with his eyes closed, before turning his head away and taking a small breath. It was as though he was gathering the will to do something. What was it? She couldn’t see his only exposed eye, so it was harder to gauge what he was about to do. But his body was much more rigid than before, finally showing that tension that he was concealing.
She was preparing for anything.
Was this all a genjutsu? Was he about to release it? With her chakra sealed, she had no way to detect it or dispel it, but what would the point of that be? She wasn’t being interrogated, not really. More so observed. It wasn’t really what she said that mattered anyways, but what she looked like in response.
Instead of any earth shattering action, however, Kakashi simply got up off the floor. It would’ve looked fluid to anyone else, but she could tell that he couldn’t refrain from bracing against the wall. He was holding his breath the whole time. Even now, he was leaning against the wall in what looked like his usually casual nonchalance, but she knew better.
After that mission in the Land of Waves, she made it a point to carefully pick apart Kakashi’s behaviors. He seemed invincible, but she knew that he routinely pushed himself to the very edge of his capabilities- more often than not exceeding them and becoming incapacitated. Even worse, he was a master at hiding it. She knew Sasuke and Naruto were either too preoccupied or too thick-headed to keep tabs on everyone, so she volunteered herself for that role.
It was important to know her teammates’ limits. None of them were willing to run from a fight despite their physical or mental conditions, so Sakura was prepared to do whatever she had to in order to pull them away if needed.
She knew she wasn’t very strong.
So she needed to make sure the strong people on her team were well enough to fight.
“Well, why don’t you clean yourself up and then we can talk. It’s not much, but you should find what you need in there,” he said while gesturing to the door directly across from them.
Sakura wasn’t about to pass up this opportunity and some alone time to process everything was sorely needed. She didn’t have a change in clothes, a toothbrush, or really anything, so a simple shower would have to suffice. She could probably rinse off the worst of the grime on her clothes in the sink.
“Thank you, sensei,” she said with a small bow of her head while opening the door and walking into the extremely basic bathroom.
As the door closed behind her, Kakashi ominously called out, “Also, we’ll be having some company, so be prepared for that.”
That could mean almost anything and very few of those options were anything good.
Best case scenario was the rest of Team 7. Worst case scenario was the judge, jury, and executioner that would be sanctioning whatever punishment was deemed fit for whatever act she had committed. There was technically another option- that being she was chakra sealed and under her sensei’s protection because she was being targeted by someone, but that didn’t account for the odd feeling in her chest that had been crushing her since that morning.
Getting lost in her head about it all was made easier by the lack of a mirror in the bathroom. She could faintly see the empty holes where one might have hung, but it was long gone.
Instead, she only really got a look at herself once she filled the sink with water and was about to wash her clothes as best as she could.
There, in the water’s reflection, she almost didn’t recognize herself.
It wasn’t even the ash and soot that seemed to cling to her like a second skin. Nor was it her attire or even her hair, which was flat and matted. No, it was her eyes. Her face. And it had little to nothing to do with her appearance.
Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy like she had been crying all night with no recollection of doing so. Tear tracks muddied some of the ash as it ran like weeping mascara down her cheeks. The bags under her eyes were deep chasms into skin that she once so carefully maintained.
Underneath all of the gloom, she looked even worse. There was a yawning emptiness in her eyes, like an endless chasm that had been ripped into the earth by the Nine Tails himself. A cruel and razor sharp claw seemingly hacked into her very soul with reckless abandon. Even when she tried to smile just to have some semblance of recognition, it reflected back at her with a plastic doll-like quality.
Even deeper, through the emptiness, she could see her parents.
Her dad in the pink of her hair and the cut of her jaw.
Her mom is in the green of her eyes and the shape of her nose.
None of these observations were new, but her hands started shaking.
She felt like throwing up.
Instead of even trying with her clothes, she impulsively cupped the water and threw it over her face, scrubbing again and again until her skin turned an irritated red. Any sense of progress was erased by the disappearing act her reflection played in the water’s now black and murky depths.
Now, as she breathed shakily over the sink, she decided she didn’t care about her clothes anymore.
She had a feeling it wouldn’t matter anyways.
Sakura drained the sink and didn’t bother with clearing the leftover grittiness from the debris. Any sense of guest etiquette was forgotten in the wake of this strange sense of grief.
Her mother would’ve give her a stern scolding about it–
No.
The feeling got worse with the thought of her parents. Tears absently sprung in her eyes and terrible questions began to manifest in her mind.
Why was she really here?
Where were her parents?
What was happening?
What did she do?
Sakura firmly put those thoughts out of her mind as she turned the shower to the hottest setting possible. It was still ice cold, but she didn’t care. The shock of it broke her out of those thoughts as she scrubbed her skin like she was trying to rub it off entirely.
She stayed in the shower long after the water stopped running black.
The fresh bar of soap that was kept on the sink’s edge was already almost half used. Her skin was red from the abuse, but the feeling kept her thoughts away from what was trying to break through a forming crack in her skull.
“Sakura? Are you alright in there?” a vaguely familiar and soothing feminine voice called out through the door. She thinks it was Team 8’s jonin, Kurenai-sensei, but she had only really seen her a few times, heard her speak even less.
Sakura broke out of her trance and finally turned off the water.
“Yeah–” her voice cracked in the middle, so she cleared her throat– “I’m fine. Sorry for taking so long.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Maybe-Kurenai-sensei said reassuringly. “We brought you some fresh clothes and other things you might need. Do you mind if I bring them in?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s fine,” Sakura responded, slightly in shock.
Wasn’t she supposed to be a prisoner? Or at least a suspect? Did Kurenai-sensei go to her house?
Did she see her parents?
Part of her was screaming to ask, but the other part vehemently rejected it, as though it would reveal some forbidden knowledge.
Quick as a flash and before Sakura even knew it, she heard the door open and close in rapid-fire.
Pulling back the curtain, she found a set of clothes that she definitely didn’t recognize. It was a simple light pink hoodie and black pants that vaguely resembled something Hinata might wear. There was also a new hairbrush, toothbrush, and other basic necessities like that. The thoughtfulness of the items wasn’t something she would have expected from Kakashi, though that’s probably why he called Kurenai for support.
She supposed that’s probably what he meant by ‘company’. Hopefully.
The thought of her sensei panicking over what kind of things a 12 year old girl might need was vaguely funny and almost made her heart warm.
But as sweet as all of this was, it also meant something that drove an even deeper hole in her stomach. These were items you’d give someone who was having an extended stay.
She wasn’t going to be going home for a while.
Sakura pushed the thought out of her mind. No need to jump to conclusions and she wasn’t going to entertain anything would bring back that empty spiral she found herself in earlier. The remnants were laid in dark streaks along the sink.
She got herself dressed in the new clothes, brushed through her hair, and brushed her teeth in what felt like the first time in days. The whole time, she avoided looking into the sink, as she was still afraid of what would look back up at her, but despite this, she felt a bit more like herself again.
She left her old clothes in the waste bin.
Whoever was out there wouldn’t be dangerous. Even if they were, at least Kurenai was there and even if she had only met the kunoichi a scant few times, she felt like she could trust her. Kakashi wouldn’t invite anyone to hurt her.
Even if she was chakra bound.
Even if she was guilty of some unknown and undisclosed crime.
Oh god, what if the clothes were meant to lull her into a false sense of security? What if that wasn’t even Kurenai and instead was the henge of someone pretending to be Kurenai?
That sinking feeling reopened in her gut.
What if Kakashi wasn’t really Kakashi either? What if she was already firmly in the grips of T&I or some other organization meant to torture her and extract a confession? She didn’t even know what to confess to!
No, all of that was ridiculous.
Kakashi wouldn’t let that happen without a fight. Even though a whisper of doubt tried to convince her that she didn’t really know her sensei at all– only the front that he wanted her to know.
She shook her head and tried to rationalize. There was no proof of any trickery anyways. All she knew for certain was she had chakra seals on her hands, she wasn’t going home anytime soon, and someone gave her a nice new set of clothes and other necessities. She just had to hold on that sense of security that she woke up with. Her instincts were saying she was safe, her mind was just playing tricks. She wasn’t in any kind of danger.
Yet .
Sakura slowly opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.
Sakura forced herself to relax as she peered into the living room from around the corner and found quite the ensemble of ninja. All 4 current jonin-sensei were gathered in Kakashi’s small apartment with 3 of them kneeling around the small coffee table.
Oddly enough, none of them were sitting on the couch and instead were seated on the floor. Kurenai sat at the end of the table where she had her back to Sakura and was staring at the window with such focus that her jaw was clenched tight. Asuma sat beside her on the long side of the table with Kakashi to his right. The two of them were locked in a serious discussion, seemingly about the third hokage.
With a tight pang in her chest, Sakura remembered that the third hokage was Asuma’s father.
They were discussing funeral arrangements and wondering about succession.
Sakura suddenly felt a burst of shame regarding her nonchalance about the sandiame’s death. She never really had a relationship with him and only really saw him at her registration and later at the mission assignment desk. But he mattered a great deal to a lot of people.
Especially Naruto.
She never knew the extent of their relationship, but she knew they were close and though Naruto never really showed it, she knew he was hurting about it as well.
The sound of water hitting cast iron broke her out of her thoughts and drew her attention to the kitchen.
Gai was in there, busying himself with making tea as he placed a kettle over the stove and brought out four tea cups. They were clearly from a set and definitely weren’t something Kakashi would ever buy for himself. They were the most expensive looking things in the apartment. Pristine white with a thin red circle around the rim and a unique kintsugi pattering on each of them.
Her mom probably could’ve told her where that exact set came from and who made it, while her dad would likely tell some stories about their adventures to that particular part of the country.
She realized with another pang that her parents never really met Kakashi-sensei.
She realized just how much she missed her parents.
Getting this whole mess sorted couldn’t happen fast enough. She hadn’t been home in two weeks! Her parents were probably worried sick, though she was sure that they were given an official cover story. That thought made her feel a little better.
It seemed that this jonin meeting wasn’t necessarily about her and that made her feel comfortable enough to walk out into the living room. She didn’t know where she was allowed to be, however, so she hovered awkwardly for a second until Kakashi caught her eye and subtly nodded over to the couch.
With a small nod, she took her place across from Kakashi. Her only thought at that moment was how is the ground more comfortable than this?
No wonder the other jonin weren’t sitting there and why Kakashi chose to sleep on the floor of all places. The very sad amount of cushioning was uneven and she could feel the springs digging against her skin.
Across from her, Kakashi caught her attention by a very small shift in his movement.
Without even looking at her, Kakashi started tapping out a small and inconspicuous pattern on his thigh, so slight that anyone else could’ve mistaken it for a fidget. Six taps with his index finger, three taps with his ring finger, over and over again.
Early on, Kakashi forced them to memorize a Team 7-exclusive code of signals along with the standard Konoha signals. At first they thought he was just being paranoid, afterall, what kind of missions would a team of genin be sent on when such heavily encrypted messages would be needed? The utility became obvious during the Land of Waves when they didn’t catch a couple of his cues and completely missed the two rogue nin, the Demon Brothers.
Kakashi had given them a firm reprimand.
They should never assume that the enemy didn’t know the standard signals they learned in the academy. Team 7 would only use their own code.
4 allies inside, 1 hostile outside.
Sakura tapped her thumb twice to indicate she understood.
Their positioning suddenly made a lot more sense. Kakashi and Sakura were at the sides of the window where they could keep watch, but the enemy wouldn’t be able to see them easily. Kurenai was front and center in the window. She didn’t have a doujutsu, but Sakura knew she was a powerful genjutsu user and that was a visual art that became more powerful with direct eye contact.
She let herself fall back into passive listening while waiting for another cue.
“We’ve all been caught up trying to think of a good successor,” Asuma said heavily. He sighed and leaned back onto his heels. “I haven’t really had the time to debrief with my team since this whole mess started. But, the clan kids are all busy with their clan-related obligations anyways.”
From the kitchen, Gai chimed in, “That’s true. I haven’t seen or heard from Neji in some time. But, the spirit of Team Gai is strong! He is undoubtedly just as diligent in his training as ever, even in our unfortunate absence!”
“Speaking of,” Kakashi added, turning to look at Kurenai, “how is your Hyuga and your other clan kids doing?”
Kurenai’s focus stayed carefully trained out the window as she replied, “I’ve met with my team once, but I let them go since they seemed pretty preoccupied with everything else happening. They’re all tied up in clan business for the foreseeable future.”
Kakashi got an odd glint in his eye.
“Even the Inuzuka, huh? I’ve seen most of them deployed in the field as search and rescue,” he casually noted. “Are you sure Kiba isn’t just pretending so he can get out of training?”
“Positive. He’s usually such an energetic kid, but at our last team meeting, he was practically dead on his feet. Even Akamaru was having trouble staying awake. Shino and Hinata were pulled away pretty quick after dismissal, but I actually gave Kiba a cover so he could rest for a few minutes. Apparently he wasn’t even getting his full 6 hour break.”
“How long did you let him stay?” Kakashi’s tone changed into something a little less casual and a little more demanding.
Sakura got the feeling they weren't actually talking about Kiba.
Kurenai hummed for a minute as she mulled the question over. Could be a simple recollection, but Sakura suspected this had to do with whoever she was casting a genjutsu over.
“Everything from the past two weeks has blended together, so it’s hard to say, but I’d guess maybe an hour? Two hours max.”
Kakashi nodded.
The energy in the room shifted immediately as a tension that she wasn’t even aware of shattered like glass. Kurenai immediately dropped like her strings were cut, just barely catching herself with a hand braced against the coffee table. Her eyes were closed like a vice grip as she pressed another hand against her temple.
Sakura instinctually moved to help, but aborted the movement when she realized there was nothing she could even do to help. Asuma had moved over so she could lean against his shoulder.
Gai approached them with a steaming cup of tea in his hands.
He set it on the table as an offering as he asked, “Are you okay?”
Kurenai flashed him a slightly pained smile as she responded, “Yeah, I’m okay. Thanks, Gai. I just think I may have overdone it a bit with the layering. He wasn’t exactly putting up a fight.”
She reached over and grabbed the cup of frothy matcha, taking a sip, and sighing as she slowly let herself relax.
Gai distributed the four other cups, including his own, before sitting down on the couch beside Sakura. The cheap cushioning heavily sunk over to his side, almost unbalancing Sakura in the process, but she paid it no mind. Instead, she was focusing on Kurenai, watching her slowly recover, as her own helpless feeling in her chest began to subside. Once again, she was unable to do anything, but watch.
“If I’m right about the identity of our little mask, then we can probably lean on the two hour max comfortably. He’s a specialist and that speciality is not genjutsu,” Kakashi said with sudden nonchalance. “There was only one of them, correct? The other two left?”
Kurenai affirmed with a simple nod.
Asuma looked faintly disturbed as he cut in, “Wait, how do you know who-”
“Don’t worry about that,” Kakashi said with a deliberately annoying smile, completely cutting off Asuma’s statement. Gai shot Asuma a look that spoke a thousand words, all of them rounding out to mean ‘you don’t want to know’ and ‘he’ll never tell you’ .
She took a sip of the tea that Gai set down in front of her and felt the warmth radiate through her like a ray of sunshine seeping into her skin. It was expertly brewed, another thing she wouldn’t have expected from Gai.
Sakura almost wanted to laugh and probably would’ve had the situation been a bit different. The jonin of the village all gave the impression of being strong, untouchable, and borderline inhuman in their dedication to the mission. But seeing them here like this brought out their humanity. Gai’s unexpected mastery of such a delicate task, Kakashi’s evasiveness, and Asuma’s annoyance. It lasted just a second, but it was nice.
Then a thunderstorm of tension suddenly rolled over them, weighing down the fleeting light-heartedness with the weight of an anchor, sinking deep into her stomach.
Everyone’s attention was suddenly on her, quicker than she could blink.
Now she understood. It confirmed the suspicion she’s held since she saw the ensemble.
This meeting actually was about her.
And it wasn’t necessarily friendly.
She set down her tea cup before the first roll of thunder could shake the ground.
“Now that we can speak frankly, let’s not waste any more time,” Kakashi said, all pretense of levity dropped as he spoke low and serious. The first rumble of thunder, a warning of what’s to come, rang out in his next statement. “Sakura, you mentioned earlier that you couldn’t remember much. We need you to be caught up, so tell me what your last memory is. I’ll fill in from there as best as I can.”
A part of Sakura didn’t want to say anything. She didn’t want to know.
The world she was currently living in was fine and she wasn’t ready to destroy the protective wall that had formed in her mind. It felt like some irreparable truth was waiting on the horizon, as persistent as a vulture and as hungry as a wolf. She knew her world had already changed, but she was blissfully unaware of it. Whatever it is, for now, she could pretend it didn’t exist.
But Kakashi’s voice, gentle as he tried to be, still left no room for argument. She was caught in a snare that didn’t quite dig into her skin, but held her all the same.
It came with an apology in the form of soul-warming matcha, but was just as immovable as the taijutsu specialist sitting beside her.
Sakura’s curiosity was just as dangerous and violent as her fear, however. That curiosity is what almost drove her into the jaws of that wolf. She wondered if the same thing was happening here, but if she had learned anything about herself, it’s that she needed to get burned before a lesson would stick.
Maybe in the future she’d let her fear overtake her curiosity, but that day was not today.
“I remember…” Sakura started out weak and quiet, her voice shaking, but she forced herself together as she grit her jaw and stared back into Kakashi’s waiting eye. Something about this felt familiar. “I remember reaching a fork in the road with Naruto and Sasuke. We were dismissed after the emergency state was lifted and we were going home. I turned left and they turned right.”
“Nothing else from later in the day?” Kakashi prompted. Sakura shook her head. “Do you know how much time has passed?”
Sakura shook her head again.
Apparently, it had been two days, but that information quickly became the least of her worries. That was nothing more than a dense gathering of clouds upon the horizon, a warning of what’s to come, but forgotten in the wake of everything it promised.
The first lightning strike came in the form of her neighborhood, untouched and pristine. An electricity sparking in the back of her mind, but it didn’t ground itself to anything. It just fizzled away in a quick flash of light.
The following thunder was her empty house. A low warning. Almost enough to shake her, but not enough to cause concern.
There were too many explanations for that.
The rest of the recollection followed that basic formula. A small strike and a low following thunder, but never enough to cause any real concern. It didn’t even feel like her own story. This was something that happened to someone else. It was slow and mundane, doing nothing to explain why it felt like her muscle fibers were snapped in half or why she was on lockdown with her chakra suppressed.
Going slow was supposed to reduce the shock of the grand reveal. Why she was here, what has happened in the past 48 hours, and what’s going to happen to her.
But it did nothing to help.
Not really.
She could watch a thunderstorm rage on for hours, but not once did she ever fear getting struck by lightning. That was something that happened to other people. She could enjoy the violent beauty with none of the brutality. Similarly, that’s how her life as a shinobi had been up to this point. All of the violence, but none of it really happened to her. None of it followed her home.
It was always something that happened to someone else.
Until it wasn’t.
Apparently, she got struck. She woke up with the lichenberg scars, but couldn’t even remember the storm. There was all of the pain with none of the context.
She knew she would regret this discovery.
She knew it was an inevitable truth.
“ -”
The sky was blue.
“ -ra. ”
The grass was green.
“ -kura .”
Her parents were dead.
And that’s all there was to it.
“ Sakura .”
A very large, warm hand gently touched her shoulder, causing her to violently snap back to herself. She could feel her lungs burn as they failed to fully inhale, instead, she was breathing in short and sharp gasps that made the edge of her vision speckle with black dots. Instinctively, she leaned against the hand for stability.
Some distant part of her mind recognized that hand as belonging to Gai.
Before she knew it, she was leaning her full weight against him in a solid hold, barely cognizant enough to realize that she was collapsing into the shoulder of a man that she only really knew in the periphery. He was saying something that she couldn’t quite hold onto long enough to process, but the deliberate pressure of his hand kept her grounded enough to try and claw her way back to the surface.
This persistent and calming presence reminded her of her father and his warm hugs. It didn’t matter what happened that day– a bad test, another fight with Ino, her persistent bullies, the Land of Waves– being wrapped in his arms would make everything okay again. They would right the world. Tilting everything on its axis as though he were assisting Atlas in holding up the sky.
For a second, she could transport to a time when she was little and everything was so much simpler. No matter how serious the issue was, his hugs remained a steady anchor.
That was a luxury she knew her teammates never had.
It was now a luxury she’d never have again either.
A harsh whine crawled up her throat as she began to cry through gritted teeth, fisting her hands in the fabric of Gai’s stupid jumpsuit like a child. She fought to get control of herself. She was in some prestigious company! Her mother would throw a fit if she saw her behaving in such a way…
Well, not anymore.
Dignity thrown out the window, Sakura cried and let herself be comforted by him regardless of how it might make her look. Who was going to judge her?
After what could’ve been 5 minutes or an hour, she ran out of tears and was instead leaning against him with still-shallow breaths and thoroughly exhausted. Despite this, she knew they weren’t done with her yet. Allowing her to cry it out was a luxury she was being afforded, but they wouldn’t all gather just to tell her that. Kakashi could have just come out and said it as soon as he saw her this morning if that was all it was.
“Are you back with us, Sakura-chan?” Kakashi asked in a deceivingly casual, almost joking tone. His eye was closed in what should be a smile, but she knew better.
He was tense.
They were all tense, with the exception of Gai, who was deliberately keeping calm for her sake. Kurenai looked at her with sympathy, her tired face twisted in a small frown. Asuma looked awkward and aloof, but she could see his fist was clenched and it was only Kurenai’s hand casually against his own that stopped him from going over to her. Kakashi was hard to read, but she knew he likely invited Gai to impart the comfort that he didn’t know how to provide.
Sakura slowly drew herself away from Gai’s steady support and leaned her weight against her knees with her arms.
These were the facts: her parents were dead, she was presumably under Kakashi’s strict supervision, her chakra was locked, and there was even an ANBU guard detailing them. With the village in such a state, those kinds of measures weren’t taken for no reason.
She met Kakashi’s eye with a haunting look and in a horribly blank voice, she asked what she had been afraid to touch since she woke up.
“What did I do, Kakashi-sensei?”
Notes:
Let me know what you thought! Initially, I wanted to get this whole confrontation done in this chapter and reveal what happened, but decided that this needed to go a little slower. Bare with me! Next chapter will have the revelation then we have some soft Team 7 moments coming up soon!
Chapter 4: Explosion
Summary:
Sakura remembers *everything*.
Notes:
Wow, this chapter gave me a lot of difficulty, actually. But I had so much fun writing it. This is my fifth draft, but I'm finally happy enough to post it! Some wildfire coincidentally broke out where I'm on vacation, so watching the smoke rise and helicopters drop water was a nice backdrop for this. These fires are rural by the way, so no one's been injured.
Shorter chapter this time, but it just felt right. Content warning for some descriptions of mania?
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Kakashi hesitated, something she had never seen him do before.
But it passed in a blink as he steeled himself, a cold and rehearsed look drowning the shine in his eye as he drew in a deep breath and began rattling off what he knew like a mission debrief. A crime scene that she was found in, but without any clear memory of.
Nothing but the sinking feeling that she did something terrible.
“At approximately twenty hundred hours on August 14th, there were reports of a sudden explosion at-”
– – – –
Seeing her parents dead was something of an instant rejection.
It was something so absurd that she rejected the fact that it happened at all. But, these past two weeks have been nothing if not absurd, so she was used to it. This was an alternate dimension and in a few months, she’d wake up like normal, say goodbye to her parents, and pass by a fully restored village on her way to train with her team.
She signed off on their IDs and just went home.
It didn’t mean anything.
The walk from was just as surreal as the walk to Tent 9. Closest to the epicenter, she could pretend she wasn’t in Konoha at all. She remembered seeing little black and white images of razed villages in the midst of the Third Great Ninja War in one of her textbooks. She could pretend that she somehow walked into the page and she was back in time. Present, but at a safe distance.
The closer she got to the tent, the further from reality she was.
But now, as she walked away from the tent, the opposite was happening. She was slowly crashing back down to reality.
As she went deeper into the village, there were more recognizable structures. She could see little vignettes play out in the shadows. In the corner of her eye, she could see herself and Ino walking around this part of the village, talking about things that six year olds really shouldn’t know anything about. Over to the right was the cafe that her and her mom would frequent when her dad was out on a solo business trip. Faintly, she could hear herself laughing as her mom gave some critique of a passerby’s fashion sense.
The windows were all smashed in and the roof had fully collapsed, but it remained whole in her mind’s eye. Within the next few months, it’d be fixed and brand new once again. Not that it was all that old to begin with. Buildings in Konoha had a funny way of never getting old.
Sakura didn’t realize that she had strayed from her usual path home.
The pavement used to be to the left of where she currently was wandering. Here, there once stood a little dango shop where she and Ino had their first big fight over Sasuke. Ino was fawning over him and mentioned how they were paired up for taijutsu practice that morning. It was practically destiny! The fates wanted them together! Sakura chimed in about how Sasuke was the partner of the guy who she sat next to in class, so he came over on occasion and once, he even looked at her.
She argued that it was more significant since it was a voluntary interaction, not a forced one. Ino didn’t like that very much. One thing led to another and they were asked to leave the shop because they were disturbing some of the kids.
It was the beginning of the end of their friendship.
And now, Sakura was walking through areas where walls once stood. Maybe with all this death and rebirth, she and Ino could be friends again? They had a moment during the chunin exams that gave her hope.
She adjusted her trajectory so she was walking where the pavement used to be. Now, it was indistinguishable from everything else, but it was nice to pretend. At least it got easier to follow as the bare pillars and total collapses gave way to empty broken shells of homes and establishments. Those would be easier to fix.
More and more memories played through her head as she slowly made her way home.
Something strange started to happen to her as the broken shells became whole buildings. The separation in her from then to now had been cracking all this time, but now it was slowly flaking away and she became aware of something strange in her chest. It was a brittle sort of feeling, something that shouldn’t be touched for fear of breaking it.
That brittleness slowly wrapped itself across her skin and spread like a cancer throughout her body, filling the space between her organs like scar tissue. It brought with it a numbness that pressed deep into her core.
By the time she reached the city block that she was raised in, she was more of a spectre than a corporeal being.
She passed the family owned bookstore where she used to have her dad check out textbooks for her. The owners were nice, but a little old fashioned and weren’t sure about giving such reading material to someone so young. A couple windows were smashed, but the rich mahogany exterior looked relatively untouched, if a little sooty.
The Yoshizawas lived next door and they were a nice elderly couple that used to babysit Sakura when she was little. The story was that they bought a family-sized home with the intention of their son living there with his family, but his wife was a ninja who was permanently disabled after the Kyuubi attack. They instead moved out into the country to be closer to her family.
Apparently, they recently rented the upstairs to a young couple whose twin son and daughter had dreams of becoming ninjas. They moved all the way from Southern Fire Country just for them.
Her mom had asked last week if she would be willing to tutor them and give them a real perspective on the life of a shinobi. They were barely 7 and just starting at the academy, but it was all they talked about.
She said she’d think about it.
Then her direct neighbor was a revolving door of tenants. For whatever reason, no one ever stuck around in that house despite it being in a good area. Especially now since their block was one of the few that remained relatively unscathed.
There were theories around the neighborhood about it, but her dad insisted it was haunted and made a whole folklore about it for the neighborhood kids. She suspected he kept it up only because it annoyed her mom. Her mom suspected the real reason was because the landlord was greedy and probably kept raising the rent exuberantly after a single lease term. Apparently she did some business with him back in the day and didn’t have too many good things to say.
It currently didn’t have any occupants. They left right before the invasion.
She wondered where they went and if they’re still alive.
Her own sunny little three story was nestled comfortably between the empty house next door and an older family home to the right. She didn’t really know her other neighbors because for as long as she could remember, they’d been shut-ins and didn’t talk to anyone. Her parents said she used to play with their son when she was really little, but she didn’t remember that.
Apparently that little boy died of a rare illness that they didn’t catch until it was too late. They never really recovered from that loss, so that house was a home to three ghosts from then on. A little boy who was taken too young and two parents who went with him in every way except physically.
She thinks she remembers hearing about an older sister, but she had moved out not long after and she was never seen again.
Life could be cruel sometimes.
She’s always heard that tragedy could bring people together though, so maybe the family could reunite after all this chaos. That is, if they all survived.
How many empty houses will there be after the dust has settled?
Just as before, Sakura grabbed her house key to unlock the door, but forgot that she left it unlocked.
She left it unlocked in case her parents came home while she wasn’t there to let them back in. They would’ve left in a hurry, so forgetting their house keys wouldn’t be surprising.
She didn’t need to worry about that anymore.
There was no one other than her to leave the door unlocked for.
Sakura entered the empty house.
These walls and these floors wore memories of her childhood like an old sweater. Something that used to be comforting, but now was ill-fitting and felt more like a taunt.
This entry level room was small and didn’t have much in it. It was just a vessel for entering and exiting the house, which resided on the upper levels.
But it saw her parents on their first day in Konoha, her father balancing a young Sakura against his side as she slept and they wondered about their new life. It saw her come home in tears after civilian school and leave the house in nervous excitement for the ninja academy. It saw her every good and bad day before she could tailor a reaction for her parents.
It also saw her leave for the final battle of the Chunin Exams.
And it saw her parents rush off to their deaths on that very same day.
It was at that moment, standing in the entryway with her head hung low and glass littering the floor around her, that she realized something.
Her parents would never walk through that door ever again. The house would forever be barren of their presence. Filled with nothing but the ghosts of what once was and what now only lived in Sakura’s memory.
There would be no more hasty goodbyes after a rushed breakfast, her dad would no longer call out for answers to the daily crossword, her mom wouldn’t try and fail to teach her how to cook, there would be no more neighbor gossip, no one to brag about her lackluster achievements as a shinobi. There wouldn’t be dinner waiting for her anymore. No afternoon tea with her mom. No sobbing into her father’s arms until she forgot what the problem was in the first place.
As a selfish kid, she used to resent these things and take them for granted. All she could think was ‘ I don’t fit in the civilian world, but I can’t fit in the ninja world like this either ’. It was a separation between her and her peers who were either orphans, impoverished, or clan-born. Kids like her didn’t join the academy, and if they did, they certainly didn’t become shinobi.
She had the luxury of choice and was still willing to forsake something her peers would’ve traded everything for.
But now, at that very moment, Sakura grew up and realized that it wasn’t about her.
It never was.
Her parentage didn’t matter, it was her attitude that did. She always blamed her inability to fit in with circumstance, but in reality, she was the only one making it so. Because now, her parents were dead, and she didn’t feel any better as a shinobi for it.
All she got was this cruel reality:
She was the only Haruno left in Konoha.
The sharpness of her father’s jaw, the shape of her mother’s nose, the pink of her father’s hair, and the emerald of her mother’s eyes… all of it would die with her.
Sakura turned around and faced the pillar that supported the door with reverence. There were tiny marks scratched into the wood with dates and little phrases written in ink.
Height markings, measuring her growth.
Every birthday since she was old enough to stand, her dad would make her stand with her back straight against the column and etch a new mark in the wood. His face would scrunch up in exaggerated concentration with one eye closed and his tongue sticking out the side of this mouth.
Further up, well above her head, was a mark for her mother and father’s height, etched into the wood the same day they moved in.
They had an ongoing bet for if she’d be closer to her mom’s 172 cm or her dad’s 184 cm at full height.
Sakura realized that there would be no more marks on the pillar.
Her parents would never know.
She gently brushed her fingers against the mark her dad made 5 months ago with the words “0012/3/28 Our Little Kunoichi” scrawled in his messy writing. She shifted her grip to hold onto the pillar as she leaned her head against the wood.
Something odd stirred in her chest.
Our Little Kunoichi .
Her lungs began to ache and burn as those three little words lit an ember of self-loathing deep within her chest. It smouldered, releasing thick and heavy amounts of smoke that curled up and choked her out from within.
Each shuddering inhale only fanned the tiny root of a flame.
What a kunoichi she ended up being.
Every sacrifice her parents ever made for her was squandered by her own immaturity. They didn’t have to be in Konoha. They could have been safe in the financial district, far away from all the destruction that hidden villages seemed to attract. But, instead, they sacrificed it all so she could reach her full potential. And what a waste that sacrifice amounted to in the end.
She couldn’t protect her parents. Instead, she very well might be the reason they were dead.
She just couldn’t be normal enough to pass as a civilian.
Strike two.
Her featherlight touch tightened into a vice grip.
But she also couldn’t be strong enough to succeed as a ninja.
Strike three.
Her nails dug into the wood with as much force as she could muster. She didn’t even flinch as splinters dug into her nail beds and thin pinpricks of blood ran down her fingers.
What was she supposed to do? It was obvious that she couldn’t succeed in either world. There just wasn’t a place for someone like her, someone who would always fail to commit to either extreme. Sure, she’d give all the right answers, but that mattered very little when it came time to execute. The only people who truly cared and believed in her were dead.
Kakashi-sensei clearly didn’t think she was worth the effort.
Sasuke refused to acknowledge her existence.
Naruto didn’t believe in her strength.
Ino couldn’t care less if she lived or died.
And at the end of the day?
That’s all she really had now.
That burning feeling in her chest grew and caught onto the brittleness that had spread through her entire body with the hunger of a wildfire in overgrown brush. Every piece of resentment, every tiny failure, and every attempt to fit in served as the perfect kindling as she trudged it all up like she was looking for something buried. Looking for any reason to rationalize her existence and at the end of the day, only coming up with more emptiness that the fire greedily swallowed.
A normal person might have cried.
Sakura expected herself to cry.
After all, that’s all she was really good at in the past.
Instead of a sob, however, an uncontrollable laughter seized her entire body.
A smile wider than any she had made before stretched across her face with such violent force that it threatened to crack her skin, letting the smoke pour out of the fractures. Her lungs were burning from the inside out, turning to char right inside her chest, but she did not have the capacity to stop.
Even as it became physically painful, she could not stop laughing.
Her chakra was at a violently rolling boil just under her skin, leaking out of every pore without anywhere to be channeled. She coughed it up in every laugh, it saturated her sweat, and was threatening to rip out of her skin.
Pop!
A sharp firecracker rang out in her head, so loud she thought her ears might be bleeding.
Sakura was burning.
And before she knew what she was doing, she had decided to burn everything else down with her.
Something-
snapped.
She instinctively wrapped her chakra around her muscles and pulled them taut in a way that just felt right . Her fingers, which had barely dented the wood before, now plunged into the pillar with her chakra forming a protective aura to stop the worst of the splinters.
Before she could think otherwise, she pulled and-
Crash!
The pillar flew from her grip and smashed into the staircase behind her, leaving a trail of broken steps and splintered wood in its wake.
For barely a moment, she regarded her hands with a piercing tunnel vision. They twitched every so often like electric shocks were running through her body, but she was numb to it. All she felt was the thrumming of chakra through her network, pulsing just below the skin, alive and angry all on its own.
Power .
This was what people feared enough to throw her out of civilian school.
This is what made her a shinobi.
She had never felt this invigorated and she had never been aware of her own power and strength before. The uncontrolled laughter shifted to a high pitched voluntary cackle of pure manic glee.
With her teeth bared in a wide grin, Sakura poured everything into her arms and legs.
All the rage.
Indignation.
Fear.
Sadness.
Grief .
It concentrated from her waist, flowing through her thigh and to her calf as she sent a powerful kick through the front door. It broke clean off its hinges and scattered into the debris-riddled street in hundreds of pieces.
This was her house now, right?
She could do what she wanted.
The unceremonious transfer of ownership felt like a cheap insult to the memory of her parents. She couldn’t make new memories with her parents. She refused to make new memories in this house. But no one else was allowed to own the house her father designed. It would die with them.
The sharp sound of shattered glass filled the cotton-like dullness thrumming through her ears as she shattered the remaining windows.
Walls were torn like cardboard.
Wooden floorboards were ripped up like paper.
Stone was shattered as easily as fine china.
But it wasn’t enough .
It didn’t satisfy the raging flame in her chest that burned and begged for more . More destruction. More pain. More movement to distract her from what was creeping just in the back of her eyes.
Her father’s pink hair peeking out from under a sheet-
Her mother’s cold hand falling over the edge of the cot, her wedding ring glinting in the dying light of the sun-
Sakura was on the roof.
A hole was ripped through the ceiling of her parents bedroom where she burst through. Bits of wooden paneling, stone shingles, and cotton-like insulation fell in clumps onto her parents’ bed along with a thick cloud of dust.
Not that it mattered.
They wouldn’t be using it anyways.
She just needed all of it to be gone .
Sakura shoved all that pain coalescing in a ball in her throat down through her body to her legs as she crouched low before bursting upwards into the sky, stone shingles shattering from the force of her ascent.
And for just a second…
Sakura wasn’t burning.
She was floating.
Flying .
Her eyes closed as she took a deep breath and relished in the weightlessness of it and the foreign power in her body.
Before she tightened once more and righted herself in a dive as gravity reclaimed its hold of her, her fist was borderline on fire as she tore through the air, aiming right for the center of her house, meaning to plunge right through it like a well-placed kunai.
She braced for impact as the orange shingles rapidly approached.
For a moment, she realized this impact could kill her.
At that moment, she made her peace.
– – – –
Sakura woke up in a thick cloud of ash and dust, her mind immediately latching back to the finals arena, Orochimaru-
No.
She caught a brief glance at the blackened sign of a familiar bistro just ahead of her.
There was the Niwa’s house right next door.
More familiar buildings flanked it.
She was facing the street behind her own, but it was from a disorienting and impossible view. She was seeing it from the ground, when she had always looked down upon it from her bedroom window.
It was then that she realized she was looking at the world sideways, her head resting in a fine powered ash. She was sunken in the ground, lying in a crater where her home once was.
Sakura tried to stand, but collapsed immediately, her muscles seizing and turning into a liquid, immovable mass. Her arms and legs twitched as her heart raced at an impossible speed, her lungs heaving through the smoke.
Her chakra was a sluggish stream within her, not unlike a river in the middle of a drought.
She tried to get her bearings.
How did she get here?
Where was her house?
What happened?
But she didn’t get the chance to rationalize before a rough hand laid a harsh grip on her shoulder and-
Pop!
A sharp ring clattered around her skull as she gained sudden control of her body again. That lazy flow of chakra immediately rushed into a whitewater rapid as though a dam had broken.
She had reawakened.
Though her brain was still choked by the smoke and all she could think was ‘ I am under attack’ as the harsh grip yanked her upwards.
All exhaustion forgotten, Sakura immediately stood up, her head knocking back into the invader’s, stunning them before she could swing her elbow into their ribs.
She could feel them crack under her impact.
The person flew back several yards away and into the next street over.
Sakura then fell into a ready stance, her hand hovering over her thigh kunai holster, brushing against the metal as she watched with a hawk’s attention for any movement through the smoke.
Her chakra hummed within her, pulsing and familiar, ready to yield to her command.
She was still dazed, relying solely on the instinct to fight as she fought to gain mastery of her mind through the thick fog that had settled between her ears.
There were more people, shadows in the smoke as she bristled and jumped like a cornered animal.
A sudden flashing of lights.
A blaring alarm.
The ringing in her ears.
The smoke in her lungs.
The fire in her veins.
Sakura didn’t even see the enemy coming before she had him pinned to powder beneath her, her hand gripping his arm so tight that it shattered . She had a kunai pressed to his throat.
His screams of pain were a distant ring in her ears.
Something in her felt wrong , but before she could even think for a second, two arms wrapped around her shoulders and pulled her off of him.
She swung around on instinct and made perfect contact with his head before–
Nothing.
A pinprick of pain on her neck before a drowsy blackness overtook her.
– – – –
“-and there’s been evidence of a gas leak explosion, but we know that’s not the full story. The real question is your involvement. Do you remember anything, Sakura-chan?”
She didn’t realize her hands were trembling until that kintsugi tea cup was gently pushed into her hands, the warmth grounding her as she stared into the frothy green matcha inside.
“Maybe we should take a break?” a gentle voice– Kurenai– offered.
Before anyone could say anything else, she answered Kakashi’s gentle but firm prompt in barely a whisper, so light that Sakura wasn't sure if she actually said it at all.
Exhaled in nothing but a breath.
“ I remember everything .”
Notes:
I hope you enjoyed! I am going a very certain way with this that I wasn't at all expecting, but let's see if we can get any guesses for what glow up our queen Sakura is gonna get. I don't see enough of it written when I've read BAMF Sakura fics, which is surprising to me. "Home" from Undertale played while writing the first portion, which just felt too cruel not to share.
Team seven softness is coming soon! Thank you all so much for your support. I read every single comment and I appreciate you all. Much love!
Nazar89 on Chapter 1 Thu 29 May 2025 03:03AM UTC
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Suberu1407 on Chapter 2 Sun 08 Jun 2025 06:09PM UTC
Last Edited Sun 08 Jun 2025 06:09PM UTC
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