a deep breath

by spideywhiteys

Summary:

Haruno Sakura hasn't always known what or who she would be. She built a life out of broken bones and scorched what-ifs, lingering daydreams and sharp antiseptic. At the most pivotal moment of their battle against Kaguya she stood shoulder to shoulder with two boys she always fell just short of, and she flew.

Then she fell. Three inches to the right and ten years back.

Notes:

HELLO! I had a blast writing this for the Naruto Reverse Big Bang! I was so glad to get this prompt, it was my absolute favorite -- i adore time travel AUs so much!! EGG DREW THIS AMAZING PIECE, WHICH I CENTERED THE FIC AROUND !!

Chakra is hungry.

Shinobi actively cultivate their internal energy until it swells beyond the natural state of merely being alive and leaps into something more. Something that is capable of being molded, twisted, shaped. Turned to stone, to fire, to lightning, to wind, to water. To manifestations of scalpels and soothing balms and miraculous cures. Chakra within a shinobi is an ocean, constantly battering the shoreline. 

So very alive, and so very wanting.

Sakura knows this more than most, micro-managing the meager pool she was unfortunately gifted with. She turned it into a veritable galaxy under careful tutelage and willpower. It will leap into the air, wasted and desperate, if you don’t keep a leash on it.

It will jump from your very skin at the slightest notion of being used, of being consumed. 

Sakura can’t match the sheer skill of Naruto and Sasuke’s literal god-given fighting prowess and jutsu techniques. She can fight, she can heal, and she can perhaps outlast almost everyone. She knows what she’s good at, and absolutely no one can take that from her. You don’t have to wield sage-level jutsu to be a good shinobi. She knows more about medicine and healing than the two—three, because she can’t leave out Sai—knuckle-heads she calls teammates put together. They wouldn’t even come close.

She is skilled at what she does. She is good at what she does. 

It doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating to see them move so fast her eyes almost can’t keep up. They keep getting tossed around by Kaguya like toys, and it sucks to be the one who flies the farthest, the one who usually gets hit first. But not everyone needs to be as fast as lightning. Not when Naruto and Sasuke bruise after a hit and Sakura is the one to get her feet under her first, skin unmarked aside from a terrible acid burn on her shoulder. 

“This isn’t working!” She calls out, frustrated. Her fists are starting to ache. Her chakra is hungry and dipping into her once near-bottomless stores is finally taking its toll. “We need to do something!”

Naruto skitters to her side, swatted like a stone skipping over a river. He pops up to his feet after a few seconds, right as rain. “We just have to keep hitting her!” 

“Because that’s been working,” Sasuke mutters. “Sakura’s right, we’re not getting anywhere.”

Even bruised and bloody he’s unfairly pretty. It’s almost insulting.

Sakura feels like a wet pig with how much she’s sweating and coated in dust. Their fight has torn the landscape apart, left craters in the earth and changed the topography of this region. How someone can come out of that still looking weirdly attractive is incomprehensible. If they weren’t in the middle of a fight to the death right now, she might just rub dirt in his hair.

“Okay, fine,” Naruto says. “Then it’s final move time.”

“Final move time?” Sakura repeats.

Sasuke sneers.

Naruto charges up a rasenshuriken, his chakra a brilliant orange and yellow, like a sun in the palm of his hand. It starts growing larger and larger. “Yeah, final move time.”

Sakura and Sasuke exchange a glance. For a terrifying moment it feels like they’re twelve again, witnessing Naruto do something ridiculous. Small moments when they were just kids and a little more than a girl with a crush and a boy with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Sasuke’s hand illuminates, his chakra screaming with lightning. It seems to come to him more naturally than fire. He’s right on Naruto’s tail, never able to let a challenge go. They’re more alike than they think.

Sakura closes her eyes. What more can they really do? They’ve been hammering away at the goddess for hours—days, even. Kaguya must be feeling it. Even as powerful as she is, there’s no way the strain isn’t starting to get to her. 

Sighing, Sakura gives her two idiots a long, final look, and her byakugou seal flares across her body once more in ribbons of black. “Fine. One last ridiculous mission for Team 7.”

“Don’t be a pessimist!” Naruto exclaims. “We got this!”

“Like we’ve had it the past two days?” Sasuke drawls.

Sakura takes the first step forward and the ground shatters under her heel. It silences the two boys before their squabble can take root. The surge of chakra collecting around them is huge, devouring, final.

And Kaguya seems to sense this.

She still lingers in the sky, hovering above like she can’t bear the thought of her feet touching the ground. The white of her traditional clothing is at least partially stained with dirt and blood from their fists, and scorched in places from the viciousness of their chakra. 

Her mouth moves slightly, muttering something they can’t hear. Her own poisonous cloud of chakra begins to swell. She doesn’t even need hand signs.

In that moment, Team 7 moves.

The outward projection of their chakra is a physical weight in the air, twining together like a braid as they finally match each other step for step. For every breath Sakura takes, Sasuke exhales. For every moment her heel lifts, Naruto places his down. In tandem, like a machine with perfectly moving parts, they ascend. The boys split off to the sides, Naruto from the left and Sasuke from the right. But Sakura…

Sakura goes for the front. 

Head first, staring into the eyes of a ‘goddess’ older than dirt. Her fist charged and ready to meet paper white flesh.

The boys shear away the chakra swelling from the side, but Sakura feels whatever jutsu Kaguya is forming fill the rapidly decreasing space between them. It feels like something very physical attempting to press past the barrier of her flesh—aiming to infect her soul where it lingers in the pathways of her chakra network. 

Sakura gnashes her teeth and screams. “SHANNARO!”

Her fist carves a swath through the poison, and her fist hammers into Kaguya’s head, shattering the horns on her head. The fragments burst like paper-bombs right back into Sakura’s face. They press into her skin. Dust and debris coating it like paint. They sink.

Sakura screams. 

She screams because she feels that yawning, gaping wealth of chakra wrap around her, in her, filling her depleted stores with something foreign and incomprehensible. 

“Sakura!” Naruto calls, his voice distant.

A hand curls around her wrist. Red eyes stare into her own, belonging to a pale face. Sasuke’s mouth is taut. Pressed into a line. He doesn’t say her name, but he still tries to catch her—like he always seemed to catch her, back when they were kids.

Sakura doesn’t know why she worded it like that, actually. Catch her?

She feels like she’s falling, but she’s not. Is she?

Sasuke’s sharingan eyes spin. Sakura’s head is spinning too. There is chakra everywhere, so thick it takes shape. Explosive, erupting in the shape of a supernova, scattering glittering particles in the air. 

When Sakura inhales, she tastes bone. 

Kaguya screams—or keeps screaming. Sakura realizes the storm of sound is the goddess, and Naruto is battered away by the wind and chakra, his azure gaze wide and clear and worried. Sasuke’s hand is bruising her wrist. In the past she might have fainted over such a thing.

Now she’s really hoping he doesn’t let go because it kind of feels like she might die if he does. In a totally non-romantic and actually life-threatening sense.

Her chakra is surging, devouring the fresh reserves, turning it from foreign to hers. The sudden expansion of chakra held within her own body—not within the seal—burns. Aches like nothing ever has before. There is a distant worry, beyond the pain, that it’s ravaging her chakra network and will simply destroy it. Leaving her to never wield chakra or be a medic-nin.

It feels like ages have passed, but it’s been three seconds.

Then Sasuke winces. Her chakra is swallowing the bone dust and Kaguya’s jutsu, all the lingering energy left in their collision. It can’t distinguish what belongs to who. So it starts to eat Sasuke. Because he’s stupid and won’t let go of her, even after all the bullshit he put everyone through.

And Sakura can’t let this happen.

She twists her wrist and uses the other hand to smash the tender pressure points by his elbow, causing him to release her abruptly. He yells her name then, and she’s never heard him say it like that.

Like a scream.

What a day, she thinks, before the chakra folds in and in and in and in. The world becomes light, becomes dark, and when she inhales she is breathing no air, just condensed chakra. There is no direction, no sensation, no vision, no existence. 

And then she ceases to be.

 

---

 

The first moment of awareness is cool liquid. She burns with a fever-bright heat, whatever she’s submerged in offering relief. There’s a buzz all around. Echoing throughout her body. She bursts with chakra, but also throbs with the ache of a cavernous emptiness. It’s as though something has been scooped out and replaced, but whatever it is just doesn’t quite fit right. Not yet.

Sakura opens her mouth and water seeps in. Mostly clean. She bobs slightly with movement. A moving river then? An ocean? No salt. Probably a river. Awareness has still not fully returned.

She thinks she’s somewhere between dreaming and not.

There’s no concept of time to her drifting. It could be hours, days, weeks, or months. It doesn’t even feel like existence.

Then—a spark.

Heat, reminiscent of coal burning, of campfires, of storm clouds heavy with soot. Warm hands curve around her, tugging and lifting like she weighs little at all.

The change from the cool water to air is a shock. Her skin prickles with gooseflesh and the world slides two inches to the right—back into place. Suddenly she can hear, can breathe, can feel the entire world around her. Including the uncomfortable press of a flak jacket’s pocket digging into her cheek. 

And the water in her throat.

Sakura heaves, coughing out the liquid. The hands holding her up twist her to the side, letting her expel whatever’s in her lungs onto the ground. 

“Easy,” a voice says. Masculine, but not incredibly deep. 

Sakura cracks her eyes open. The world is dim. It takes a moment for her to realize that it’s night, the glare of the moon spilling across the river. She’s pulled back into a more upright position once her breathing settles and gets a look at the man.

She nearly gasps. The features he possesses are familiar but not. Pieces of an image once torn to shreds and then improperly put back together. 

His hair is so dark it nearly melds into the night sky behind him. Thick curls brush his ears and the Konoha headband tied around his forehead. Eyes like wells of ink, black voids with hidden depth. His lashes are thick, far thicker than hers, fitting a pretty face. There’s signs of poor sleep and stress under his eyes. A faint line there, a bruise of exhaustion here. 

She sees Sasuke in his face. Not quite, but still. 

This man—teen? He must be her age or at least close enough. He’s got a strong nose, broader than Sasuke’s petite, sharp one. But their eyes are nearly the same. And the curves of their jaws and cheeks are too similar to not speak of relation. 

Sakura isn’t stupid.

She knows not every person with dark hair and eyes is an Uchiha. Just look at Sai—he’s got the coloring and the pretty face but he’s not one of them. Probably. Actually, do they know that for certain? 

…Sakura doesn’t want to think about that right now.

She knows the entire Uchiha Clan was massacred. But she also knows that she had been so enamored with Sasuke to the point where she thought she knew him inside and out. She’s seen Itachi, too, and Obito, and Madara.

It’s ridiculous and silly and fanciful but she looks at this guy and thinks—

Oh, an Uchiha.

Impossible.

Sakura was just at war. This guy is wearing a flak jacket, a Konoha headband—not one with the kanji for Shinobi on it. The sky is dark, perhaps even edging towards dawn. There’s something in the air, in the very earth under her legs, in the faint thump of the heart she rests against, that tells her that everything is wrong.

Her head tilts back a bit, meeting his gaze more firmly. There’s an odd expression on his face. Perhaps he’s not an Uchiha. Too open. Sasuke would never look at her like that. As if she were something strange and interesting.

Oh. Sasuke. Naruto. The explosion?

“Where’s the fight?” She croaks. Her fingers twitch. It might take a moment for her to remember how to move. “I can still fight.”

Those dark eyes skitter down her body, assessing. There’s no perversion in his gaze, just clinical intent. She recognizes it, being in her field. Being a shinobi strips away a lot of the normal hangups people have about bodies once fighting and injuries are involved.

She glances down at herself, wondering if the weird buzzing across her skin is really just numbness, or if she’s actually grievously injured. Fortunately, that’s not the case. Her clothes are nearly burned away. Seared by the intensity of the chakra. Fabric clings unevenly across her frame, and the canvas of skin revealed is blotchy with first or second degree burns. Easy enough to fix. 

Maybe after a nap.

Sage, she doesn’t know why she’s so tired. Or why everything feels slightly fresh and new and replaced. Or why she feels more than just the presence and warmth of this man, but an imprint of his very being. His chakra is fire, smoke, feathers.

“There’s no fight here,” he says, the words making her head spin. “And I don’t think you’re really in any state to move.”

“I can move,” she replies crossly. Her fingers twitch again.

One of his dark brows rises. He’s amused despite the caution she sees in his face. “Yeah, I’m sure you can drag yourself out of here with your pinkies.”

“I could.”

“I’m sure.”

She insists, “Don’t underestimate me.”

“I won’t,” he promises, and his eyes twinkle as though they belong in the starry expanse he’s backlit by. “Can you tell me your name? Or what happened to you?”

It immediately raises a red flag in her head. Not his concern, specifically, but rather the need to ask what happened at all. There’s literally the war to end all wars happening right now.

Right?

“War,” she mutters, and she might not be in the river anymore but it still feels like she’s being pulled down. She’s drowning. Tugged to the bottom of the muddy riverbed. Her bones feel so heavy. “We’re at war. Where is…where…”

“The war? It ended a few years ago. We’re in Konoha.”

“Back in Konoha? How?” Even confused, the fact that she’s home makes her relax.

He smiles a little. It makes his face look wonderful. “I was hoping you could tell me…?”

“…Sakura,” she replies softly, blackness creeping across her vision. She’s probably dehydrated. Starving. Hunger howls at her, bolstered by all the chakra. It demands to be maintained.

The man shakes her a little, gently. “Sakura, that’s a pretty name for a pretty lady! Stay awake, okay? I think you need help.”

Cold sweat breaks across her forehead. She feels awful. “Who…?” 

He deliberates for a moment. “Uchiha Shisui. I just pulled you out of the Naka River.”

That’s impossible. 

A chunk of the Naka River cuts through Uchiha territory. Of course she knows that much, being a citizen of Konoha. Combined with the fact that this man claims to be an Uchiha, she’s coming to a very strange conclusion. She glances at his sleeve. There’s an Uchiwa on his shoulder. The symbol of the Uchiha Clan. They don’t make those clothes anymore.

She’s no Shikamaru, but she can’t doubt her own intelligence. “How did I get into the Uchiha Compound?”

Shisui’s shoulders shift a little, like he’s trying to prop her better. A bit of the suspicion wanes, and she hadn’t even realized there’d been some there to begin with. Oh, he’s good. Jonin-level, easy.

“We seem to have very similar questions.”

Her voice grows softer. Words slurring. “But I’m in Konoha? It’s safe?”

She’s really trying to ask if they’ve won. Even if she’s not certain what’s happening with Shisui here. Has she jumped into an alternate dimension? That’s one of Kaguya’s powers. It’s not like Sakura knew what jutsu the old bag had been cooking up.

Shisui makes a show of glancing around. “Yep. Definitely Konoha. Pretty far behind the walls, so that’s safe. I suppose. I mean, you were in the river, which is dangerous. Safety is a little relative considering your current state. We really should get you to a hospital—“

“You’re an Uchiha,” she interrupts, realizing he might be a bit of a babbler. Not like Sasuke at all. Maybe more like Obito? Madara? They sure liked to talk. “So I’m safe?”

Shisui’s fingers dig a bit into her skin. She barely feels it. He stares down at her for a moment, then smiles. “Yeah, Sakura. You’re safe.”

“That’s good.” She tilts her head, a dizzying spell coming over her. Something stops her. For a delirious moment she thinks her forehead is big enough to actually catch on the sturdy surface of his shoulder pad. Then she realizes that she’s being ridiculous. She can still turn her head fine, there’s just something…extra. Taking up space.

“What’s on my head?”

“Um, horns. I think.”

She blinks up at him, his pretty face blurring by the second. “Why do I have horns?”

He looks appropriately confused, just as she does. “You mean that’s new?”

Sakura would like to say that the panic gave her enough adrenaline to sit up and yell. Or grab these new appendages. Or…just. Anything. Stay awake.

It doesn’t. She passes out.

 

---

 

Sakura wakes slowly, the world coming back sense by sense before she’s able to twitch her fingers against soft sheets. Touch, smell, sound. 

She hears a low murmur that cuts out as soon as her awareness returns. That only heightens her own, because she hasn’t given any inclination that she’s woken at all.

Sakura opens her eyes.

The room is dim, but it’s clearly day out. The curtains are drawn, bright light spilling around the edges of fabric. She hears the sounds of nature—birds, wind chimes, trees. It feels like home. Like Konoha. She feels a lot better now, easily sitting up without much strain.

“Sakura?”

She turns her head. Two men watch her. Both she recognizes. One is Shisui, her savior. The other sends a bolt of terror and confusion lancing down her spine.

She tenses up quickly under the dark, cautious gaze of Uchiha Itachi. She’s never seen him with anything other than blood red pinwheels, and he looks so much younger here. 

Like, incredibly.

Small and round-faced, perhaps the same age as a freshly graduated genin. He looks like Sasuke did, back when Team 7 first formed. His hair is tied back and silky, his face too pretty for words. Lines of stress are carved under his eyes like cracks in marble. It’s a pitiful sight for a child.

She doesn’t know how to feel, because suddenly everything makes a little more sense—and absolutely none at all. Sakura is younger than Itachi. That’s a simple fact of life. But now Sakura is 17 and this Itachi is—

“Oh, fuck,” she says. Then, to Shisui—an Uchiha who is mostly-likely-absolutely dead in her time— “Where to you bring me?”

“My house!” He replies cheerfully. 

She stares at him. (Maybe if she ignores Itachi she can pretend everything is fine and absolutely not falling apart.) “Instead of a hospital?”

“Well, I didn’t think it would be the best idea to bring in an unknown shinobi with horns. Spontaneous horns, according to you.”

“Unknown shinobi?” She murmurs. Well, that’s strike three. A live Uchiha, a young Itachi, and neither of them have any idea who she— Haruno Sakura, student of the Godaime Hokage —is. Great.

Sakura tosses the blanket off herself. She’s still dressed in her tattered shinobi blues and coated in dust. The sheets are dirty now, but that’s Shisui’s own fault for not cleaning her off. Didn’t take her to a hospital, didn’t clean her—what kind of medical education did he receive?

Probably the same as I did in the Academy, she thinks to herself. Which is to say, not very much at all beyond first aid.

Itachi politely averts his eyes and Sakura is hit with another wave of wrongness at the situation. Since when did an S-Rank missing nin capable of slaughtering his family have manners?  

Honestly, there’s a lot of things she could say right now. There’s a lot of emotions she needs to sort through. A monumental amount of planning to be done. But first. “I need a mirror.”

“For the spontaneous horns?”

“Yes,” she dryly echoes. “For the spontaneous horns.”

Itachi observes them both, his mouth in a tight line. He looks like he wants to say something, but doesn’t. Shisui’s hand falls over his head before he can, ruffling his hair and mussing the ponytail. 

Shisui grins widely, ignoring whatever tension is present. He has nice teeth. Is that weird to say? “Sure thing! My bathroom’s right over here. You can shower, if you want. I’ll bring you some fresh clothes.”

It’s much worse when she actually steps into the bathroom. She’d been expecting—well, she wasn’t sure what she was expecting. The horns made little sense to her, but she could deal. Eventually.

But when she looks into the mirror, Shisui a step behind her, she can’t help but recoil. It’s instinctive. Every muscle in her body clenches tight as if preparing for battle, and she has to tamper down the immediate reaction of punching out the mirror. Picking glass out of her knuckles is not what she needs right now.

The first obvious change is the horns. They’re completely the same as the ones that had sprouted from Kaguya’s head—the same ones Sakura had cracked and broken. The constructs curl up from her hairline like short rabbit ears, a grayish-purple with rivets like a seashell.

At the center of her forehead, the byakugou diamond seal has grown larger, as if mimicking Kaguya’s third eye. She can only assume that it expanded to house the enormous quantity of chakra Sakura can now feel thrumming through both her and the seal. Two accompanying diamonds flank the centerpiece, smaller in size. 

Her eyes house no pupils. There’s just sheer, bright green staring back at her. It’s perhaps the most striking change aside from the horns. She can’t even wrap her head around what she should be feeling about it. The way her eyes look isn’t quite the same as a byakugan, because the eyes of a Hyuuga are large, pooling irises with very little visible sclera. Sakura’s irises haven’t expanded in size, they instead remain average—like the Yamanaka. 

Sakura stares at herself in the mirror. Her hair is the same. Her skin, face shape, even the curve of her mouth—all the same. When she opens her mouth she finds teeth with a little more bite to them. White and strong, with pronounced canines.

“Sakura?”

“Sorry,” she says reflexively. “I just…wasn’t expecting this.”

He gives her a boyish grin. “We seem to have a lot in common, then. Why don’t you clean up and we can talk about it. Sound good?”

She nods. A moment alone is all she needs.

A moment to—

A moment to think.

Shisui gives her a change of clothes. It’s a bundle of black fabric, and she doesn’t really bother looking beyond that. Ugh, the Uchiha really aren’t ones for color, are they? They’ve got such gorgeous faces and pretty eyes, yet they all dress like they’re going to a funeral.

Mechanically, Sakura strips from her scraps of cloth and gets in the shower. 

If she’s panicking a bit, that’s her business. How exactly does one react to going from fighting a goddess—one you hadn’t known existed two days ago—to staring Uchiha fucking Itachi in the eye. He didn’t even have his sharingan activated! And he’s like twelve!

There couldn’t be more than a year or two before he killed everyone.

Oh Sage, she abruptly thinks. There’s a tiny Sasuke running around right now.

Because Haruno Sakura, without any doubt in her mind—okay, a little doubt that she’s 1) dead, or 2) in a really weird genjutsu—is pretty sure she just time traveled.

Not completely outside the realm of possibility. She isn’t as familiar with fuuinjutsu as a Master or someone like Tenten, who used it more frequently in their arsenal. But she knows enough about the theory of it, as well as the current advancements.

For one, space-time fuuinjutsu already exists. Hiraishin is an example. If gods could descend from the sky and travel through the fabric of reality into alternative dimensions, then who’s to say that time travel isn’t a thing?

A thing Sakura has to deal with.

She stands in the hot water for a long time.

If this really is time travel, she sees two paths ahead. Either this is her own reality and she needs to avoid any and all contact from anyone that could destroy or affect the future she comes from—or this is an alternate timeline. It’s not wrong to assume that she couldn’t exist in tandem with another version of herself. The concept of alternate timelines is largely spurred on by the idea of ‘what if’s’. 

What if I turned right instead of left?

What if a future version of Sakura appeared?

Her presence alone could have already made ripples. She certainly didn’t recall Uchiha Itachi ever knowing who she was. Then again, maybe he didn’t care, or didn’t recognize her without the horns. She’d been…

Well, she’d been a lot different before she realized she had two hands of her own to use. Hands she could fight with, heal with, push herself to her feet with. 

She turns the water off.

The mirror is steamed up when she exits and she stares at the blur of her misty shape. Her greatest fear is not death. It’s being weak. Because she’s been there before and to slide back and find herself amounting to nothing—

It’s unthinkable. 

Sakura raises a hand to smudge the condensation, the bright green of her new-different eyes appearing clearly. They’re rimmed with red, but no tears slip down her cheeks. Crying is for later, when she’s happy.

She’s so sick of crying over shit she can’t do.

 

---

 

There’s not a single person in this life and beyond who could have told her that one day she’d be sitting cross-legged on the floor in a circle with two Uchiha. 

Let’s rephrase that. She’d had dreams of it: Sasuke and a kid. Their kid. (So, technically two Uchiha. Or more, who knows.) 

But two Uchiha that had been, in her mind and to her knowledge, completely dead? It’s the kind of joke that would have gotten someone a swift fist to the jaw.

Yet here she is, staring into matching dark eyes. One smiling, the other impassive. Shisui sits with a loose kind of posture, long-limbs and weirdly graceful. Itachi, meanwhile, is a stone statue in perfect seiza, a few inches closer to Shisui than Sakura, as if he’s scared at the mere thought of their knees brushing.

He’s weirdly cute. 

She firmly locks that thought away. Chubby cheeks aside, this is still the (future) man that destroys Sasuke’s life, heart, and past.

“What I’m about to tell you is absolutely secret and can not be shared with anyone. My presence here is a mistake, the less people that know the better.” She makes sure to hold both of their eyes for a few seconds before continuing, just to show how serious she is. Shisui still looks terribly amused. “I’m from the future.”

A beat.

“Huh,” Shisui says. “You know, I was actually thinking you were a runaway from Orochimaru, but this is definitely better.”

Itachi’s side eye is devastating. 

Sakura hates that she relates so fully to his reaction. “Your definition of better is certainly interesting. I tell you I’m from the future and that’s all you can say?”

He looks at her with wide eyes. “Oh, sorry. Should I redo my reaction? Do you want a look of horror? A scoff? I can pretend I don’t believe you for a few days. You know, for the drama.”

Sakura clenches her fists hard enough that the muscles creak ominously. “Are you making fun of me? Does it seem like I’m joking?”

He puts his hands up quickly. “Okay, not in a joking mood. Got it.”

“Why should we believe you?” Itachi, the voice of reason, ignores his cousin and stares at her with as much intensity as his baby face can conjure.

Great Sage, just looking at him makes her brain hurt. “Listen, I don’t want to be here chatting away any more than you do. If I could leave right now, I would. There’s nothing for me here. Nothing. But I’m stuck because I don’t know how to get back. I don’t have the skill in fuuinjutsu to break time. I’m not sure there’s much I can say to convince you without giving away details of the future—which I won’t do.”

Shisui hums. “Well, you kind of already have. Remember? When I plucked you up out of the river? You were muttering about fighting in a war.” The older Uchiha leans forward a tad, the smile on his mouth a touch too wide. It shows too many teeth. His gaze is narrow with interest, sheer black without reflection. 

They all look the same, Sakura thinks. Those damn Uchiha. When they see something that interests them, they put everything into it. It’s a clan of extremists. Throwing all their want, all their drive, all their heart, all their focus—whatever it may be—into one thing and one thing only. Until they are sated. 

She remembers the mania that consumed Sasuke. He lit a fire under his feet and let the flames lick up his skin until he boiled over and poured steam from every orifice. Ambition, the fuel. 

Uchiha Shisui wants to know everything. He wears the same expression of peaked interest that Obito had when Naruto slapped the brainwashing out of his head.

“What war?” He asks. “The third has just ended.”

Itachi narrows his eyes. “It doesn’t have to be Konoha’s war.”

Shisui waves a hand dismissively. “No, she’s from Konoha.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“She passed out dramatically in my arms after devotedly stating her trust in the Uchiha Clan!”

“I did not!” Sakura snaps. A rush of embarrassment comes over her at Shisui’s knowing, cat-like grin and Itachi’s suspicious glower. “It wasn’t like that! Are you going to help me or not?”

Shisui makes a show of deliberating. “Well, what year are you from?”

“Stop trying to get me to spill information.”

“Fine, I’ll just break into the records and search for anyone named Sakura. You look about seventeen. I can do math.”

She stares at him. For all he knows, she doesn’t even look like she used to. The horns speak for themselves. She didn’t even tell him her last name. Her old self has to be about six or seven right now, just starting the Academy. Civilian-born, so her records will be basically non-existent. He can’t know that she even exists in this time period. For all he’s aware, she hasn’t even been born yet!

But the smiling expression she gets in return for her deadpan staring tells her that if it’s possible, he will find her old self.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re annoying?” She mutters. Is she starting to feel sympathy for Sasuke?

“Every once in a while!”

Then Sakura, incredibly, shares a commiserating glance with preteen Uchiha Itachi, because her life can’t get any stranger.

She pinches the bridge of her nose. All the healing ability in the world does nothing for a headache born of annoyance. “I’d rather you not try to completely destroy the timeline by gathering information you’re not supposed to have.” 

“Don’t worry Sakura-chan,” Shisui says, cheerfully ominous. “You’ve already changed the future just by being here, so this is an alternate timeline. Feel free to spoil everything, I’m all ears!”

She crosses her arms. “Are you some expert in time travel or something? How would you even know that?”

Most space-time seals currently lean heavily into the space part. Or using time as a form of preservation. Putting things or people into stasis. Nothing public had anything to do with utilizing time on a large enough scale to splinter the timeline. For good reason, obviously, because they definitely didn’t need that kind of god-like fuuinjutsu being used without care. 

She only knows the gist of what can happen when you mess with the timeline because she’s the Hokage’s apprentice. And Naruto’s teammate. Which usually warrants a lot more hazard knowledge than most, strictly to prevent cataclysmic events brought about by Naruto’s simple existence. 

Shisui finally leans back. “I’m something of a genius.”

Ugh. Like she hasn’t heard that before. There are so many people falling into the genius category lately that it’s not even special anymore. 

“Well, unless you’re the reincarnation of the Nidaime or Yondaime Hokage, you’re not the kind of genius I need.”

“Ow?”

Itachi interrupts, “Time within fuuinjutsu is not written as a linear construct. It cannot be rewound. Alterations to an existence that created your circumstances are impossible, they only create new paths that do not affect your present.”

Of course it would be him. Sakura is shocked that this kind of language came out of someone still missing a baby tooth.“I thought you didn’t believe me?”

She can’t quite tell if the way he eyes her up and down is judgemental or not. 

“It’s not that I believe you entirely, but the possibility of time travel is not zero. Your abrupt appearance this far behind Konoha’s walls and this deep into the Uchiha Compound is cause for concern. Especially considering the state you were previously in. Signs of a seal weren’t located on your body, aside from the one on your forehead.”

Okay, wait, what? How did he know that? “Excuse me?”

Itachi tilts his head. “My apologies.”

Sakura makes a face at Shisui. “You let the baby frisk me?”

“Huh?” Shisui blinks. “No, I walked in on him doing it.”

“You what!?”

Hastily, Itachi says, “You’re a foreign presence and I had to be sure you weren’t in possession of any weaponry.”

Shisui wiggles his fingers. “Did you want me to frisk you instead?”

“Keep doing that and you’ll be figuring out how to do jutsu with no hand seals.”

Shisui puts his hands down.

Sakura exhales heavily. It’s not like she had any expectations about this whole thing anyway, seeing as she knows neither of them. (For the most part.) But really. This isn’t going as expected. “Moving on from that, I doubt you’d find evidence of a seal. I’m almost positive it was a jutsu that landed me here.”

“A jutsu?” Shisui sounds intrigued. “Someone able to use space-time jutsu?”  

More like a goddess, not just someone.

“Yes, a jutsu. Because I was in the middle of a fight, in the middle of a war, and I need to get back as soon as possible.” Preferably at the exact moment that she disappeared, so no time will have passed in her ‘present’. Missing that fight could literally mean the world ends. 

“Okay, sorry I asked.” Shisui leans forward, cradling his pretty face in his palms, blinking at her with salaciously long eyelashes and devious intent. “What about that war again?”

“I’m gonna beat you up.”

“Has anyone ever told you how pretty you are when you threaten bodily harm?”

“Pretty!?”

Itachi clears his throat loudly. “Sakura-san, what’s your current goal and plan?”

She moves her glare away from the older Uchiha and sighs. “Well, assuming  you’re correct, I need to figure out how to return to my original timeline. Considering that the theory of alternate dimensions and timelines is true, it’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack, unless I myself can act as a magnet. Presumably, my presence here isn’t natural. My existence should match my own universe. Maybe there’s something to be observed in my chakra?”

“Like a universal tagging system?” Shisui asks, incredulous. Then, “Wait, back up, did you just say that the theory of alternate dimensions is true? Timelines I can believe, but seriously? Like, seriously?”

“Uh, yeah.” Should she not have said that? “What, is that too hard to believe?”

“No. I mean, a little. But I’m mostly like—“ Shisui gestures randomly with his hands, miming explosions. “—what the hell? How did you get proof of that? How is it real?”

Sakura purses her lips. “It’s hard to explain. You’d probably know more about it, being Uchiha.”

“What?” Itachi says.

“What?” Sakura replies.

“What?” Shisui echoes.

“What do you mean what!?” Sakura snaps.

“Why would we know?!” Shisui exclaims.

“Because of your sharingan? The mangekyou? The rinnegan? Don’t you have documents about this stuff?”

Itachi’s eyes narrow. “How do you know about those? That information is classified.” He looks her over more carefully. “You don’t look like an Uchiha to me.”

That’s a little rude. Not untrue, but still. She could be an Uchiha one day, if she ever—well. If her silly childhood daydreams ever came true. Right now she doesn’t have time for that. She’ll see where her headspace is after she kills a god.

“I have two teammates with sharingan, I think I know more about it than I really want to. Especially with my reckless sensei.” Kakashi just couldn’t stay out of the hospital, honestly. It’s like he loved it there. She decides to refrain from mentioning that most of her mangekyou and rinnegan knowledge comes from the fact that people have been trying to kill her (and a lot of others) with fancy eyes for the last few months, never mind the current war.

Itachi still doesn’t look convinced. 

Shisui looks intrigued. “Still, to think you’d even know the name. You don’t happen to be marrying one of those teammates, do you?”

Sakura flushes bright red. “You—! That kind of thing isn’t on my radar right now!”

“Ah, so you do like one of them. Are they cuter than me?”

“Shut up!” She exclaims, lashing out with a hand and swiping him on the shoulder the way she would Naruto. He goes with the movement easily, laughing all the while.

“What is the Uchiha clan like in the future?” Itachi’s somber voice cuts the mood in two. 

Sakura suddenly feels like she’s slammed back into her body. The floor is too real under her knees, the air too heavy with the scent of Shisui—ash, incense, some kind of sandalwood body wash. Wood polish and fire, like Sasuke.

She smiles at him, the fake kind that Sai always makes fun of. She realizes she doesn’t know what to say. Where is Itachi’s head at? What kind of thoughts go through his mind? Last she heard of him, Sasuke had killed him. 

There hadn’t been a moment for idle catch-up, and Naruto hadn’t even been there for half of it. Shipped across the ocean for his own unknowing protection. They didn’t have time to talk and Kakashi never brought anything up—but it had felt as if (because she knew her boys well enough by now) they were hiding something from her. 

It could be written off as tension and nerves before a battle to end all battles, but she didn’t think that had been the case. Then the fighting started and those kinds of thoughts were left in the dust. Tossed in the closet for another day.

But she keeps wondering to herself—especially now that she has time to sit and think about the events of the last few days—why is Sasuke back?

Why did he show up on the battlefield? Why did he want to be Hokage? Why did he bring the reanimated versions of the previous ones? 

Why, why, why?

Everyone always says that Sakura is the more emotional one.

That’s not true.

Team Seven is a wreck of emotional cases. Sasuke with his rage and focus, his inability to do anything normally and not full-tilt extreme. Naruto with his screaming, leaking emotional distress and pick-me attitude, his outstretched hand and heart on his sleeve. Kakashi with his soul stuck in the form of a child, skin ballooned out with the emotions he keeps trying to trap inside. Sai, who went through the worst experience a shinobi could, who was stripped of his sense of self—who still couldn’t be turned into a blank slate because he loved too much and too deeply, just didn’t know how to put it into words.

And Sakura, who is all flash-fire and reaction. She yells whatever she feels and by Sage does she feel deeply, always.

They’re a bunch of basket-cases and she loves them all dearly, deeply, infinitely.

But they don’t tell her everything.

Because they still see her as the one that’s too soft, too kind, too emotional. It’d been true at the start, now they just need to open their eyes and see that she’s not that little girl anymore.

She wonders exactly what they’re hiding from her when she looks into Uchiha Itachi’s eyes and for all that he’s a strong, S-class ninja even at this age, she can’t understand why he does it.

What is the Uchiha clan like in the future?

What a question to be had, spoken from the mouth of the child who kills them all.

Sakura wonders if he’s thinking of it now, or if he really doesn’t know what he’ll turn into.

She crosses her arms. “Not telling.”

“Hah?” Shisui frowns, his eyes growing big and round. “Just a little spoiler, Sakura-chan!”

Itachi merely watches her as she watches him, his tiny face placid. Pretty and small, with wrists like bird bones and fat in his cheeks. He’s only eleven or twelve, she could probably kill him. Maybe.

Or at least surprise him.

“You talk a lot for an Uchiha,” she finally says, turning back to Shisui. “Do you need to be checked out for that?”

“Rude. But you can check me out all you want, Sakura!”

She raises her hands as a threat. “That can be arranged.”

“Shisui, control yourself,” Itachi says.

“Yeah Shisui, control yourself.”

The twelve year old gives her the driest stare she’s ever witnessed.

“Sorry,” she mutters. Now look at her, apologizing to a future serial killer just because he has mochi cheeks! “Can you help me?”

Itachi and Shisui glance at each other, doing some weird Uchiha telepathic communication through their matching dark eyes. It goes on for a moment, then two, before they both turn back to her in unison.

“Sure thing!” Shisui exclaims. “It sounds like a lot of fun!”

 

---

 

Sakura has been locked in Uchiha Shisui’s house for a week and she’s going crazy. She can’t even strut around town because of her horns, and using a genjutsu to hide them won’t work for long when she’s smack dab in the middle of a hidden village. There’s too many Uchiha alive right now. Which isn’t something she’s necessarily sad about, because it’s a good thing. A bittersweet thing.

She kind of doesn’t want to go out specifically for that reason. The idea of walking among the dead is unsettling. Shisui is already enough. After sleeping on it a few days, she’s elected to ignore the fact that the pretty, snarky, smirking Uchiha is six feet under in her time. Not to mention like a decade older than her if she looks at this whole mess chronologically. So she’s subtly trying to remove all adjectives pertaining to his looks from her mental vocabulary.

It’s not going well.

He’s hot. He definitely knows it.

And she’s going absolutely stir-crazy in his house, even if the outside does scare her. She wants to train! To stretch her muscles beyond the yoga and kata she can do on the tatami mats! 

She’s basically in shark territory. Surrounded by Uchiha on all sides because Shisui lives in the Uchiha compound and not even like, in the outskirts or in a scenic area. No. Right between two other houses on a busy street that’s a block over from the Uchiha Compound’s main road. 

She can hear people talking and bustling around from the open windows. Can feel them, too. Their chakra. Beyond the scope of what she could ever do before, seeing as she hadn’t been much of a sensory nin. Her ability has skyrocketed. The buzz of fire and lightning, smoke and static. Every single one of them connected to show that they are of the same clan, some more than others, and each with a uniqueness to them. She can sense Itachi the moment he enters the compound. 

Feathers, sugar, campfire smoke and salt.

Shisui is like globs of slow-moving magma, thunderclouds over a volcano spilling ash and lightning.

Further still, beyond the walls of the Uchiha compound, is a village alive with chakra and life. From the youngest civilian infant with the weak flickers of untrained chakra, to the buoyant mountain of steel and oak that very likely belongs to the Hokage. 

She can practically taste the chakra in the air. Spending enough time with the slugs has taught her the dangers of nature chakra, yet here she is, able to see it in the dust motes floating through the sunlit windows.

That aside, there’s another issue.

She is still here.

A whole week of nothing! Zip! Three decently intelligent (Shisui’s on thin ice) brains put together and they’re no closer to figuring out how to send her back to her timeline. 

They don’t actually have a lot of fuuinjutsu knowledge between them. Both Shisui and Itachi have rudimentary skills, while Sakura’s lies solely in medical seals. Neither of her Uchiha partners in crime can spend all of their time on this issue either, seeing as they’re both on-duty jonin. So progress is a lot slower than she likes.

Four days in, Itachi had merely stated: “I’ve decided to master fuuinjutsu.” Then he left, and three days later Sakura hasn’t seen him since. She got a note from a crow yesterday about his progress, though. Which was cute, except the crow woke her at 3AM and it turns out she now floats in her sleep.

Falling four feet onto the mattress was a wake-up call and a half, and her shriek had sent Shisui blasting through the door to her borrowed bedroom in his boxer shorts with a single chopstick as a weapon.

Not one to leave all the heavy lifting to someone else (or at least not anymore), Sakura has, on top of fuuinjutsu training, also been trying to get a hang of her new…powers? Abilities? There’s no guidebook, so it’s not like she actually knows what she should try or do. She mostly tries to fine-tune the excessive chakra sensing, because everything all at once is incredibly loud and draining.

She’s also been trying to cook, but Shisui put a stop to that on night two after she nearly set the house on fire. Turns out he can cook well enough for the both of them, having lived alone for most of his life. A lot like Naruto and Sasuke, in that sense.

She tries not to think about it too much.

They’re in the unburned kitchen now, devouring the last of their dinner. Scrolls and notes about time travel or anything related to such topics are scattered over the table.

Shisui props his head up on his hand, slouched over the kitchen counter. His cheek puffs out. He’s annoyingly cute. “We could always inform the Hokage of the situation. I’m sure he’ll be amiable after…a time.” 

“No way,” Sakura denies immediately. Sure, she trusts the Hokage well enough, but he doesn’t know her. She was also Tsunade’s apprentice for nearly four years, she knows how the Hokage position works. Hiruzen would practically be obligated to squeeze every bit of knowledge of the future out of her. Plus, he had that irritating shadow… “Not when that Danzo creep is literally biting his ankles.”

Shisui’s lashes flutter, dark smudges over his cheekbones. He doesn’t say anything for a moment, then smiles. “Right. Danzo is a creep, isn’t he?”

She narrows her eyes. Why does she get the feeling she’s said something she shouldn’t have?

Oh well.

It’s not like it’ll matter for much longer. 

And Danzo is a creep. She can’t forgive him for what he did to Sai. Or to Lady Tsunade. That power-hungry fool really thought he could just take the Hokage seat after Pain’s attack? That easily? While she doesn’t know the exact circumstances that led to Sasuke killing the man, she can’t say that she’s torn up about his death. The only disappointment to be had is over the fact that he can’t be tried for his crimes.

Still. Shisui’s been a bit unsettling. “You know him?”

He hums and half shrugs. “Everyone in ANBU knows him.”

“Oh,” she says. Then does a double-take at his words. “ANBU? You?”

“Why did that feel like an insult?”

“No, really? You?”

“Okay, so definitely an insult.”

She splutters, “Are you even allowed to tell me that?”

“It’s not like the information matters to you. You’re from the future.”

That’s—fair. He’s also dead, so it doubly doesn’t matter. Even though the idea of him actually being dead is kind of sucky. He’s a good guy, if a bit weird. She’s getting too attached to him and she knows it, because she knows herself. Her heart is too big and too foolhardy.

But at least she knows she can take a hit better than anyone else.

“Just—be careful,” she says.

 

---

 

They fall into a simple routine. Sakura’s never cohabited with anyone but her parents for long stretches of time and Shisui’s clearly used to living alone, but they make it work. Life is made up of a bunch of much smaller scenarios. Like how there’s only one shower, so they have to learn to take turns. She catches him walking around in a towel twice before threatening bodily harm.

All that bare skin isn’t good for her health, dammit!

“You could do it too,” he says, only to scream when her fist splinters his door.

They spend an afternoon fitting a new one into the frame. Luckily, rather than be mad at her explosive temper, he seems to find it hilarious. He doesn’t even mind fixing dents when she accidentally puts a little too much force into her movements. It’s not that she’s bad at control—it’s her greatest strength—but there’s just…so much more now.

Power seeps from her every breath.

He cooks, she cleans, they both study fuuinjutsu. He goes out on missions and waves her goodbye with a wink and a blown kiss, and she flips him the bird and pretends her face isn’t steaming red. 

For an Uchiha, he’s far too comfortable and adept at getting under her skin. Sasuke never did anything subtle like that. He was a tank, a bull, more likely to run right through her than try to worm his way close.

For an Uchiha— he’s not the one she imagined that she’d end up living with.

“Ugh, Shisui!” She calls, tossing the shower curtain to the side. “Pull your fucking hair out of the drain!”

He calls something unintelligible from downstairs and she rolls her eyes. Maybe it’s weird that he’s so easy to live with. Even if he does occasionally put the toilet paper roll in the wrong way and leaves his five million leave-in conditioners all over the counters after using them instead of putting them away.

Even when he does something particularly stupid, like tear a book in half when trying to teasingly pull it from her hands, or wash all her newly bought underwear with his shirts and stain them all black and pink. 

He’ll hand her a fruit cup a few hours later and grin like he already knows he’s forgiven.

She sniffs. “Peaches?”

“Peaches, just as sweet as you.”

She swipes it from his hand and shovels a spoonful of the diced fruit into her mouth. He’s a ridiculous, eerie, annoying, awkward man. But he’s rather endearing, all the same.

 

---

 

“Sakura! My beloved!” Shisui calls, throwing the door to her bedroom—his bedroom?—open. He’s been gracious enough to let her use it, setting himself up in the study with a spare futon, but it seems his goodwill doesn’t extend much further. He has no concept of privacy whatsoever.

She blames it on his early graduation. No one taught him manners before he started killing people. Now look at him. A full clown.

“Don’t call me that!”

Shisui gets in her space and flicks at one of the horns on her head. He’s doing that weird, toothy grin that doesn’t entirely feel like it should be classified as a grin. She refrains from throwing him into the wall because they still haven’t fixed the dent from last time.

Four weeks in and nothing. She’s going crazy. Her eyes have started twitching. 

“I found you,” he croons. 

“Astute observation.”

“No,” he says. “I found you. Haruno Sakura, civilian born, age seven, year one at the Academy.”

She gapes. A strange flush crawls up her throat. “You—you idiot! Have you been wasting your time looking for that stupid information instead of—“

“Wait, Sakura, no, put your fist down—are you more stunning than usual? Have you done something with your hair? ACK—WAIT!”

 

---

 

“You’re so small,” he says later, when the moonlight cuts through the shuttered blinds and the summer air has cooled. “Different. I couldn’t believe it was you until I saw that hair. Even sharing the same name, it’s—“

His words trail off.

Steaming tea sits between them, the low table heavy with seal work they only half understand. His living room is bereft of personal items, but messy with shinobi tools. She thinks of her apartment with its cozy blankets and dying plants, romance novels and knick-knacks from childhood. Lived in. Unlike the hardwood and dark shadows of his military home.

She almost feels ashamed. The younger her is shy, meek, and needle-thin.

“A lot changed.”

He hums at that. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen. It’s also October where I came from.” Not summer, which sets her back a few months, a few years. 

“October, huh.” His long, pale fingers trace the rim of his cup, indifferent to the searing heat. The ceramic does nothing at all to soothe the scald of the hot water it holds. “Funny.”

She hates that she knows he likes his tea boiling.

“How old are you?”

“Oh, finally felt like asking? I’m seventeen, too. I’ll be eighteen in the very month you came from!” He grins then, a sly, smarmy thing. The kind she can’t quite parse because Sasuke never made an expression like that—but she thinks maybe Obito did, briefly, when he was making fun of Kakashi-sensei. “Means we’re about ten years apart. I’m too old for you, pretty lady.”

She laughs.

It’s not really funny.

“You wouldn’t be my type anyway.”

He squints at her, like he knows she’s lying. His features are more roguish. Square jaw, broad nose. Still pretty, with the longest lashes known to man, and a head of riotous, gorgeous ink-blank curls. He’s not sharp and ethereal the way Sasuke is.

She still flushes pink when he smirks and says nothing.

“Where’s Itachi?”

“Busy,” he says, graciously letting her change the subject. “As always. That’ll never change.”

“He’s twelve, right?”

Shisui takes a sip of his tea. He doesn’t look at her. “Something like that. You know him?”

“What?”

“You know him.” This time it’s not a question. The cup clatters softly against the low table as Shisui sets it down. “You didn’t recognize me, but you knew him. Because you looked more surprised to see him than me.”

Sakura watches him and feels a terrible knot in her throat. It rises from her chest, weightier than a stone. She knows she’s always been a terrible actor. Her and Naruto have that in common—they wear their emotions too easily on their faces. Her, because she feels them so sharply and so brutally. Him, because he never learned how to hide them to begin with. 

“No, I don’t know him.” Her reply is honest enough that Shisui believes her.  And why wouldn’t he? She is telling the truth. She never knew Itachi personally. Doesn’t know his favorite food or what he liked to do in his spare time. Barely knows what his voice sounds like. Can count the sentences they’ve spoken to each other.

He stares at her for a long, quiet moment, the swell of cicadas drifting in from the windows. “Okay.”

She breathes evenly. The world falls off her shoulders once he looks away. “Shisui, why hasn’t anyone found me yet?”

The subject change is abrupt, but nothing like surprise flares between them. He doesn’t even look back to her, content with staring out the window like he wants to pull open the shoji doors and sit upon the engawa—as if this were any other summer night and she wasn’t a stranger in a different time stream.

She pushes on. “I can hide my chakra, but my presence isn’t impossible to perceive. Especially during that first day when I crashed here.”

“This is Uchiha land, Sakura.”

She furrows her brow.

The confusion on her face must be obvious, because when he glances at her he lets out a laugh. “You know, I’m not sure what to think of your naïveté sometimes. I can only assume it’s because you were too young to understand what’s happening now. It means something’s changed. Whether or not it’s a good thing, well…you said you have two teammates with sharingan, so I can only hope.”

Sakura parts her lips, a question on her tongue. But she stops, because she can’t even figure out what she wants to ask. She’s not stupid—and Shisui doesn’t think she is, Sakura knows that much. He’s never treated her like she was too weak or too dumb or however she used to feel about herself when she was young. 

But there are pieces to this puzzle that she doesn’t understand. It’s like someone’s swiped a few from the table in the middle of her putting it together. Now there are holes. 

“Hope…” she mutters.

Shisui finishes the last of his tea. “What was the war about, Sakura?”

The story is so long, so convoluted, and so, so painful—and she doesn’t even know all of it. If Naruto was here, he’d be better at this. If Sasuke was here, he’d fill in the gaps that she doesn’t understand about this clan. 

“Aliens,” she says. The truth.

Shisui, for once, looks so flabbergasted that his jaw drops. “Aliens?”

“Aliens.”

“Dare I ask?”

“Well, long story short—an alien came down and accidentally gave us chakra through a big-ass tree. Turns out the alien was actually the equivalent of a goddess. And she gave birth to the Sage of Six Paths. That very same alien goddess also wants all of her chakra back, so she’s trying to kill everyone. That’s the fight I was in the middle of when this whole thing happened. I punched her in the head, got turned into this, and was sent here for my troubles.”

He jabs a finger at her head—her horns—rudely. “Oh! OH! Great Sage, you’re an alien now!”

“Of all the things you could have taken from that! I can’t believe you!”

“You punched an alien!” He laughs brightly, white teeth flashing behind his curling lips. Bittersweet and handsome. His stare is a heavy thing. “That’s my girl.”

“Not your girl,” Sakura grumbles, hiding half her face behind her cup. 

 

---

 

Itachi comes in with a stern expression on his face that almost immediately washes away into something passive and incredulous when he lays eyes on them. “What.”

“Uh.” Sakura, currently floating on the ceiling, stares back at him with wide eyes. She’s holding Shisui under the arms, his feet dangling off the ground. His arms are out at his sides, mimicking bird wings.

“I’m flying!” Shisui exclaims.

“Is this typical?”

“Uh,” Sakura mutters again. “No, this is. This is kind of new.”

“Like the horns?”

“Yeah, like the horns.”

Itachi exhales. “Sakura-san, I have to ask, are these changes to your body a result of the jutsu or something else?”

Shisui kicks out his feet. “Okay, let me down. This doesn’t feel like a Shi-Bird conversation.”

She floats down until his heels brush the floor, then releases him. The newly discovered skill has taken a bit of time to get used to. The horns, the hovering, the eyes—yeah, she knows what it looks like.

Doesn’t change the fact that flying is super fucking fun.

Sakura drops down beside Shisui and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Well, I’m pretty sure it is…I did…inhale something before the jutsu went off.”

Itachi’s expression doesn’t change. “What?”

“I don’t—I don’t really know how to explain it.” It’ll sound crazy no matter what. So she taps the horns on her head with a wry grin. “Shattered the original owner of these and breathed in the bone dust. Then I got whammied.”

“Huh. You know, I did want to ask about these when I saw your baby self, but I do have some sense of tact. I can always rely on Itachi to have less tact.” Shisui reaches up and pokes the horns himself. “Parasitic? Aliens….alien parasites. Hot alien parasites. ”

She smacks his hand away. “I don’t think so. The changes are more like…mutations. My very chakra network has been altered. There’s nothing to suggest that there’s a foreign substance or parasitic entity feeding off my reserves—or anything else.”

It’s also quite literally alien. That means it could very well be a parasite, just under a broader definition. Still, she’s shelving that theory for now. 

“Instead, it’s more like the changes you see when a kekkei genkai involving body transformation is activated.” Or a curse mark, she doesn’t say. “Except it’s permanent.”

“It’s a good look,” Shisui says.

“I have horns.”

“You’d be pretty even with a few extra eyes.”

As weirdly cute as the sentiment is, it hits a little too close to home when she thinks of the third eye opening up on Kaguya’s forehead. She brushes her fingers over the skin almost self-consciously. There’s nothing there—she can’t even feel where she knows the extended byakugou seal is.

Sakura smacks Shisui’s shoulder. “Shut up.”

“Wha—hey!”

“I didn’t actually come here to talk about your new abilities or features. But congratulations on the unofficial kekkei genkai.” Itachi clears his throat. “Fuuinjutsu is delicate work. It’s not impossible to create a seal that can travel through time. What’s more difficult is finding the correct timeline that belongs to you in particular. Since you’re here, the typical time travel seal will bring you to our future. There’s no guarantee it’ll be yours, especially since your presence here has already created a splinter.”

“I know.” It’s something she’s already thought about. In the dark of the night, when even grimmer thoughts begin to creep in. It’s nothing at all like the clouds of weakness, shame, and heartbreak she once felt after Sasuke left—all during the years she’d had to build herself back up, brick by brick. 

Rather, the emotions that tunnel forward in these current nights are an icy, pitch black ocean. The kind she doesn’t want to look at yet.

Because if she does, she has to acknowledge that maybe there’s no turning back. Once you slip forward, or slip into the past, there is no home to return to.

Maybe time travel really is always a one way stream.

Shisui claps his hands. “I think I’ll make some tea. Guys?”

“Sure.” Itachi walks over to the low table. “I’ll show you what I have so far.”

Sakura clenches her jaw. Unbidden, her eyes grow misty. She watches Itachi bow his head as he pulls scrolls from his pack, dark hair tied low with a few errant strands clinging to his shirt. Purpled skin blooms below his eyes, his lips bitten raw. He is young, tired, and determined. He is helpful, quiet, and patient.

Her stomach flips and she feels ill.

Who is he?

She sits down beside him and peers down at his work. Careful penmanship, intricate fuuinjutsu, scratched notes in organized quadrants. She can’t make heads or tails of it, but recognizes that he’s using a lot of water-related particles. 

“I imagine time is very much like an ocean,” Itachi murmurs. His finger brushes over kanji that spell out void, grip, and flow. “You hear it often compared to streams, whether one or multiple. As if it travels steadily forward in one direction. Or loops, round and round, always feeding into itself. What I wonder is if perhaps it’s neither a circle or a line, but a pool.”

“Just thinking about it is a bit beyond me,” she admits.

“It’s fine. You’re very intelligent. You don’t need to be an expert in every area.”

She finds herself flushing at the abrupt, off-handed praise. “But it seems that you do.”

It’s not meant as an insult, and to her relief he doesn’t act like it is. “Despite what you might assume, this doesn’t come easily to me.”

Could have fooled her. He’s already learned so much about this in such a short amount of time. It’s incredible.

“You’re incredible.” Of course, she already knew that. Even if Uchiha Itachi was the scourge of Konoha, there was no denying his talent. But it’s something else to witness in person, especially like this—when it didn’t have anything at all to do with violence.

His small hands still. There’s ink stains under his fingernails. “Not always.”

“I don’t think anyone ever is.” She knocks their shoulders together. “Would be pretty exhausting, even for the great Uchiha Itachi.”

“Hn.”

The truth is, she does think he’s a great man—or he will be. But the thing about greatness is that it’s not synonymous with goodness. His skill, his power, his ability to be catastrophic. He is the greatest beast, the greatest threat.

He is eleven years old, and she’s taller than him when they’re sitting side by side.

“Hope you like mint!” Shisui calls from the kitchen. “Someone who won’t be named burned all the jasmine.”

 

---

 

Sakura is in the shower when she feels a worryingly familiar chakra signature approach Shisui’s house.

Fizzy like an electrical fire or a shaken soda, bright as a mid-day sun. Uchiha Sasuke prances right up to the front door of the house and starts banging on it to be let in, calling for his cousin.

Sakura has never jumped out of the shower so fast in her life.

“Shisui!” Sasuke’s squeaky little voice is muffled through the wood.

She doesn’t know what to do.

He’s so small. 

Sakura feels her limbs sting with numbness as she claws her way into Shisui’s clothes, still half damp. The man himself comes out of his room rubbing sleep from his eyes, lines from his pillow pressed into his pale cheek. He blinks blearily at her, growing more awake when he spots the obvious tension in her frame.

Here’s the thing.

It’s Sasuke.

In Sakura’s mind, it’s always been Sasuke.

Then that little shape she cut out just for him grew, transforming into a hole the perfect size to fit Naruto, Kakashi, Sai, and even Yamato. They’re her boys, for better or worse, and the last time she saw any of them was three months ago at this point in time.

Three months since Sasuke dug bruises into her arm because he didn’t know how to let go.

Three months later, she’s wondering if that chapter of her life is over. She’s wondering if she’s going to live within these four walls forever.

“I’ve got it,” Shisui says.

She watches him go down the stairs.

She recognizes the onset of a panic attack. The numbness, the tingling of her fingertips, the shortness of breath. Her chest feels tight. All she can make out beyond the fuzziness of her vision is the memory of an older Sasuke. It doesn’t match with the high pitched, excited voice streaming in from below. 

Sakura puts her hands over her mouth and crouches down. The little boy groans—then laughs, bright and loud. 

She’s never heard Sasuke sound like that before.

She wants to be anywhere but here.

The feeling builds within her, a pressure that seems to grow to the point of pain. Starbursts flare behind her eyelids, pinpricks of light and color. She grinds her teeth and the chakra within her screams.

I’m still here, it seems to say. Hungry. Vast.

Sasuke’s young voice echoes in her ears. Over and over. She sees his dark eyes. Her desire to leave grows. There’s a snap. A thrum. The space before her tears like fabric, frayed edges and all. A wave of heat washes over her, sprays fine grains of hot sand across her cheeks. Sakura gasps at the sight of a desert pressing into the space that belongs to a hallway.

The sight sends her sprawling back, and the portal snaps shut with another tearing sound. 

“What was that?” Sasuke asks.

“What was what?”

“You know what! That noise!”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Shisui replies loftily. 

Little footsteps approach the stairs.

“Ah, ah, ah!” Shisui calls, his voice growing closer as well, with no footsteps of his own to accompany it. “You aren’t allowed up there.”

“Why not?”

“Uh, because…because I have a special friend over.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Shisui clears his throat. “Well, you know all about special friends, right? I’m sure your mom talks about it from time to time. Like when she asks if any girls in your class have caught your eye.”

“Ugh,” Sasuke scoffs. “That’s boring. Who cares about stuff like that?”

“What do you know? You’re three.”

“I am not!”

“You sure?”

Sasuke huffs. There’s a muffled thud. Sakura pictures him stamping his feet. “Why can’t your special friend come out?”

“Because it’s a secret! Who knows what would happen if Auntie Mikoto found out I had a special friend!”

It’s quiet for a moment.

“Probably make you marry her,” Sasuke says.

“I’m too pretty to be tied down so soon. So you absolutely can’t tell anyone at all, deal?”

“What do I get out of it?’

Shisui sounds amused. “You’re bleeding me dry here. Fine, I’ll buy you whatever snacks you want for a week.”

“Two weeks.”

“Okay, fine. Two weeks.”

“I should have asked for three,” Sasuke whines.

“Don’t push it.”

Their babble rushes over Sakura, clearing the fog of her panic. She leans her weight against the wall, too shaky to move just yet and too weak-hearted to get any closer to the stairs. 

It seems like no time at all passes before Shisui is crouching in front of her, messy hair and mismatched socks. He grips her arms and pulls her to her feet, glancing over her with flickers of worry that barely take shape. 

“What, did you trip or something?”

Her throat is dry. It takes a moment for her to speak. “No, I—I think I—“

What does she say?

His hands are wide and warm, almost too hot. He’s nearly a head taller than her, chin tilted down just so they can meet each other’s eyes. “Is this about Sasuke?”

She doesn’t quite flinch, but that in itself is response enough. Shisui’s lashes flutter as he blinks, time moving like syrup. “Was he on your team?”

It’s weird that she can tell what he’s really asking.

“Let go of me.”

He releases her quickly, yet doesn’t move away. It’s her who turns, giving her back to his hawkish gaze. She knows her face is too expressive, too easy to read. 

“Sakura—“

“Can we not talk about this right now? There’s bigger things to worry about. I just conjured a time-space portal in your hallway.”

“…you what?”

 

---

 

Opening a portal is a lot like stretching an unused muscle. She’s not quite sure where the muscle is, unless you count the entirety of her chakra system, but the placement of the discomfort and strain is so foreign that it confuses her. This is her body now, though, so she just needs to get used to it. 

The changes to her body as well as her new abilities are all carefully documented by her own hand. She keeps constant vigilance of her chakra and its immense nature.

A week after her first accidental portal, Sakura has yet to open another.

“It’s too dangerous to try inside,” she says, and she’s adamant about that. “K—The alien goddess could open up worlds that contained lethal landscapes and atmospheres. I’m lucky I got a desert instead of a lava pit.”

“You have experience with that?” Shisui asks.

“Unfortunately.” Hanging over an active lava floor is not her idea of a good time. “Which brings me back to another question of mine…why has no one caught on to my presence, and is it possible for me to leave?”

“You want to leave?” He doesn’t look happy.

She wants to tell him that yes, she does. It’s not like she’ll be here forever—it’s not like she’s meant to be here at all. Instead, she says: “Well, I’d like to go outside at the very least.”

“Oh, right,” he says sheepishly. Like he’d forgotten she was a human being who’d very much like sunlight every once in a while.

“Don’t dodge my questions.”

“It’s not that I’m trying to dodge them,” he replies. “It’s that they’re difficult to answer.”

She knows it could be hypocritical of her to demand answers when she’s very reluctant to give her own. But surely that’s different? It’s the future after all! “What’s difficult about wondering how the hell the village’s security hasn’t picked up on a foreign presence?”

“Might be hard for them to realize that there’s a stray when you’re here.” He gestures around flippantly. “The Uchiha compound is on the farthest plot of land from the center of Konoha. You need to walk fifteen minutes just to see the next neighborhood.”

She frowns. “Why did you settle so far from town?” 

Even the Nara, who were backed by a massive forest, were closer to a district than that.

“We didn’t.”

She watches him and he watches back, his dark eyes cold where his smile isn’t. She’s never been scared of Shisui, and she isn’t now, but there’s something in the shadows of his face and the crooked flash of his teeth that feels more unsettling than usual. 

“You know,” she starts slowly, “You were right. Sasuke is one of my teammates. I always thought I knew more about him than anyone else, aside from Naruto. But maybe I was wrong.”

Shisui’s throat bobs slightly with a swallow. She can’t read the expression on his face. “What’s the Uchiha Clan like in the future, Sakura?”

What can she say?

“Tell me,” she pleads. “Tell me what I’m missing.”

For a long while Sakura doesn’t think he will. He starts pacing, fingers twitching at his sides. His eyes flash over the walls, as though expecting someone to leap from the wood and attack them. He reaches for her suddenly, but she’s so familiar with his chakra that she doesn’t even bother flinching away. His fingers curl around her own. 

Their hands hang between them.

He says, “I want you to answer this first, Sakura. Do you think you’re going home?”

She recoils like she’s been slapped. His fingers hold tight, however, and even if she could easily pull away she doesn’t. “Why would you say that?”

“It’s been a while, Sakura. You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

“Of course I’ve been thinking about it! I’ve been thinking about it every Sage-damned day! So much time passes here and I’m stuck, I’m stuck somewhere I don’t belong and I can’t even go outside!”

Shisui’s expression fluctuates between something grim and something sympathetic—teetering into a softness she can’t quite recognize. “Sakura, I think we’ve already cracked time travel.”

Her lip wobbles.

He continues, “Itachi explained everything in words even an idiot could understand. He has all the seal work done, knows it like the back of his hand. We could probably try, now, if we really wanted. Shoot you into the future. But it wouldn’t be your future, would it?”

She stares at him, her vision blurring. Her heart feels so heavy in her chest she’s amazed it hasn’t fallen through her body to the floor. She can only ask, again, “Why would you say that?”

“Where do you think you’d go if we used that seal, Sakura?”

“Stop it.”

“Where?”

“Stop it!” she screams, finally tearing her hand away from his. Sakura doesn’t know if the pain she’s feeling is born of rage or misery.

Shisui doesn’t try to reach out again, but his eyes are more real than any physical touch could be. “You’d go a little over a decade into the future of right now, right here, in a world where Haruno Sakura time traveled at age seventeen. Maybe nothing will have changed, or maybe it will. Maybe you go back and you’re not on a team with Sasuke because that didn’t happen here. We don’t know.”

“I haven’t changed anything. I haven’t even left this damn house! I’ve interacted with no one, I haven’t left an impact, I haven’t altered anything of my own personal timeline!” Sakura drags a hand through her hair and down her face. “What are you trying to accomplish here?”

“I think if you wanted to go back, you’d have already tried.”

Sakura can’t believe the words that just came out of his mouth. “How dare you—“

“You’re too scared to try.”

“Don’t you fucking dare say I’m scared, I’m not weak—“

“I don’t think you’re weak,” he says. “Fear isn’t the definition of weakness. You’re scared because you already know that going back in time is a one-way trip, but I need you to wake up now.”

Sakura is crying, even when she said she wouldn’t. The words come from her mouth like pulled thorns, leaving behind bleeding holes. “I know.”

She does. She’s been thinking about it since the start. Since she was able to really, seriously sit down and study how time travel works. She exists in a splinter from a previous timeline, and there is only forward in this same direction, or back in an entirely new one.

Shisui reaches for her again and she lets him. His thumbs brush over her rounded cheekbones, tracing the path of tears. His fingers are warm, delicately placed like petals against her skin.

“I’m very fond of you, Sakura. I’m not saying this to be cruel or to keep you here against your will. If you end up wanting to try, I’d support you. I’d wait ten more years to see you again. I’m saying this because we’re running out of time and as fond of you as I am, I can’t put those feelings first.”

Sakura’s proud of the way her voice doesn’t break when she speaks. “Why are you running out of time?”

There are pieces of the puzzle she’s never been privy to, she knows this. But she’d be an idiot not to see that it’s autumn, and then it will be winter, then spring, and then summer, the last summer the Uchiha Clan will ever see. In less than a year they’ll be gone. Gone before August comes. It seems like a lot of time, but it isn’t. 

Shisui is worried. Itachi is always worn thin and stressed. The Clan exists at the very edge of the village. Isolated. She never feels anyone but those of Uchiha blood or the occasional non-clan spouse enter the compound. 

The puzzle had always been just pieces. 

She thinks she’s starting to see the fractured image it’s supposed to create.

“I need you to make a decision, Sakura. I need to know if you’re going to help us.” His voice has dropped to a breath, so quiet she can barely hear it.

“Help you with what?” She asks, lowering her voice to a whisper. 

Their eyes bore into each other. His ink-dark eyes are searching, peeling her back layer by layer. She thinks, somehow, that they’re leaning a little too close to each other and she isn’t sure how it happened. Their noses nearly bump.

It’s funny, this is the closest she’s ever really gotten to a man and yet the air isn’t charged with anything more than their own anxieties. 

“The future,” he murmurs. “I want to save the Uchiha.”

 

---

 

“So you told her,” Itachi says. His little arms are crossed. He doesn’t look happy or mad, but his face is remarkably stony at the best of times. Unless Sasuke is mentioned, then it blossoms into something soft and flowery and confuses Sakura even more.

Shisui shrugs, not at all repentant. “Yeah.”

Sakura is still reeling from the information that’s just been dumped on her. She doesn’t want to completely let go of the possibility of going home. But it’s a fool's errand and she knows it, even if true acknowledgement is still too much to consider. 

A civil war is absolutely not what she expected when first landing in the past. To think that the Uchiha were attempting to set up a coup right under everyone’s noses… Right on the heels of the third war, just a few years out from the Kyuubi attack. Yondaime, dead. The Sandaime, back in office but obviously growing older and far too lenient. 

His decision to not pull resources together and kill the psycho student that slaughtered hundreds of children definitely wasn’t looked upon well in the older shinobi circles. Even Sakura is a little hard pressed to forgive him for that. Then again, look at her and Naruto with Sasuke…

Well. Actually. Sasuke never murdered thousands just for his own cruel, disgusting experiments. Sasuke only had one goal and one man he wanted to kill.

Said man was now a child staring at Sakura with his unimpressed baby-face.

There are a lot of things slotting into place in Sakura’s head right now and she’s really, really not liking where it’s all going.

I’m going to be Hokage. Sasuke had said.

The kind of thing only someone who wanted the power to change things said.

Uchiha Itachi slaughtered his entire clan, hundreds of people, in a single night. Hundreds. A percentage of those people being trained shinobi, ranging from every rank—probably even ANBU, like Itachi himself. Shinobi who likely had sharingan of their own, or at least quite a number of them. 

How.

Seriously, how?

Silently? Even at the edge of the village, HOW?

She can’t look at Itachi anymore. To Shisui, she says, “Your plan to use your mangekyou. When are you thinking of doing it?”

“In a couple months time, if our other avenues of persuasion don’t work,” he replies. He offers a wry grin. “It’s a last resort, honestly. I’d prefer if we were able to find a peaceful solution naturally.”

“I get it. I know.” Naruto is much the same. Though not afraid to use his fists, he’s remarkably reliant on his words to shatter the last of his enemies’ will.

She’s getting the feeling that a peaceful resolution didn’t work in this case. 

Her eyes flicker briefly to Itachi. “Is it just you two working against this?”

“Technically,” Itachi replies stiffly. “From the Uchiha side. Myself and Shisui are operating as the Hokage’s eyes and ears.”

“Yeah, we’re working on a lot of fun things for that old man.”

Sakura hums. “Okay. Okay.”

“Okay?” Shisui repeats. 

“Here’s the thing. Maybe I can’t get back. Maybe I can. Either way, this isn’t my timeline and I know that. So what’s the harm in changing some things for the better here?” She’s certain she sounds a bit crazy. She feels a bit crazy. 

Itachi and Shisui share a look. 

The youngest leans forward. “Please elaborate on what you wish to change.”

Sakura could take her words back. She could decide, at any moment between now and opening her mouth, not to alter this reality. Except there’s Shisui, who looks at her like he knows her and still says he’s fond. Who knows how she likes tea and which snacks to buy from the store that will settle her moods. There’s hundreds of bright chakra points that she’s grown used to, boiling, sparkling, fiery beacons of life.

And she thinks of Sasuke. Broody, tortured, agonized Sasuke. Who turned into a husk of a boy and curled around his bleeding heart to protect himself. Who showed flashes of kindness because he had been kind. She sees it now, in the way she’s heard his child self laugh and joke and whine.

It’s funny how he’d always let her pick him up when they were younger. He’d leap to her rescue first, and maybe it had been because she was the weaker link but he’d still done it. Because he didn’t want her to hurt, because it was natural to want to help, because he broke someone’s arms for her and it’s the closest he came to expressing love. 

He could be happy, she thinks, if she saved him for once.

Sakura’s eyes are puffy and red from crying herself to sleep the night before. Her gaze is tired but focused, bloodshot and determined. Neither boy before her comments. Neither boy considers it a weakness.

“Next summer, about a week after Sasuke turns eight, the entire Uchiha Clan aside from him is massacred.”

To their credit, there are no screaming denials or demands. Itachi looks deep in thought while Shisui seems to sink into himself, disoriented by her words.

He blinks once, twice. Licks his lips like his throat is parched. “You said you had a teammate and a sensei…it’s Hatake Kakashi, then.”

She raises a brow. Impressive. Or obvious. “Yeah. Not much of an Uchiha, but Obito’s eye still counts.”

Or it did, before Madara tore it out of his skull and Naruto somehow regrew a fresh, non-sharingan eyeball right in Kakashi-sensei’s empty socket. 

“Huh,” Shisui utters weakly. His pale skin is even paler. He takes a long swig of steaming tea. “I feel like I need a large cup of sake right about now.”

Itachi exhales. “How does it happen?”

Sakura’s lips part, but she can’t bring herself to speak. She holds his gaze and wonders what he sees there, if he’s putting together pieces to a different picture. 

“I—I’m not sure I know the whole truth. There’s…well, I was very young and naive when it happened. I barely recalled what exactly the Uchiha Clan was by the time Sasuke and I were placed on the same team. As far as anyone knew, the whole clan was massacred in a single night by Uchiha Itachi, who then fled and became one of Konoha’s most notorious missing nin.” 

It’s harder now to reconcile the image of the older, menacing Itachi with the child in front of her, whose placid face is sheet-white and sweaty, who pretends to be unaffected when he definitely isn’t.

“I don’t—“ Shisui cuts himself off, eyes darting all over the room. “I don’t know if I’m really wrapping my head around this. Itachi would never.”

After a moment of deliberation, Itachi speaks. “Actually, the elders have already brought up the idea of murdering all the Uchiha.”

And if that doesn’t just slam the last nail in the coffin, Sakura isn’t sure what else will. Her heart can’t take it. This is it. This is proof.  

Proof that all her brief, flickering thoughts of how far Konoha would go to keep the peace were right, no matter how hard she stamped them out. She has always believed that her village was great, was just. Peace was their prerogative, despite the existence of shinobi. Now it’s—

It’s all crumbling around her, yet she can’t even say she’s surprised by this news. It makes sense. The last pieces slot into place perfectly. She knows why Sasuke killed Danzo. She knows why Sasuke wants to change the village. She knows why he came back as a new, quieter, broken man with no heart in him despite finally gaining his revenge against Itachi.

She wants to save Sasuke from that.

Across the table, the two Uchiha still reel in their shock and breathe . 

She wants to save them, too.

Shisui looks at her, and he’s always looking at her, she just isn’t sure what it means yet. His smile is brittle. She doesn’t want him to die.

“It’s not going to happen this time,” she says. It’s not even something she can promise, because of how convoluted and messed up the whole situation is, especially when they only have a window of time before the council gets too antsy and someone pulls the knife out, Itachi or not. But great fucking Sage if she can’t then she’s going to go out swinging.

The massacre, the Akatsuki, Obito, Kaguya, and Konoha’s own corruption. There’s a laundry list of things for her to do and she’s going to try her hardest to check each one off. Not just for Sasuke. For Naruto and Kakashi and Sai and Yamato and everyone else she loves. If she can stop a war, create peace, break the cycle with her own hands so they don’t have to stain theirs—

She will. Even if it means staying here forever, as Sakura-out-of-time, the once-human-probable-alien. Away from her family, friends, and team.

Somehow, watching these two boys across from her, she thinks she’ll survive. She’s always been the best at getting back up, after all.

“Then we need a plan,” Itachi says.

Shisui snorts, “Oh, we need plans for each plan.”

“Then let’s start broad,” Sakura says, clapping her hands together. “It’s time I told you about our main adversaries: Kaguya and her annoying brat. Listen carefully, ‘cause this is a long, long story.”

Because they have under a year, and centuries of plotting to unravel. 

Notes:

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