AN: Normally I'd have it in a spoiler, or in the message after, but it's very important that you take what I'm about to say seriously. This story is not a comedy, this story is funny.
This chapter is not funny. This chapter is very serious. This chapter contains a very bad no good time for Sakura and I don't skip over it. It has artistic merit, but if you're a very squeamish person or you feel a little overwhelmed, take a moment. Stop reading, go get some water, do some jumping jacks.
Or skip to the next linebreak, you'll get the gist pretty damn quick.
"This is stupid." Sakura thought the fact that they had to sneak into the village under a fog while being silent on a ship was kind of weird, but then being stealthy is good for bodyguarding someone so she hadn't said anything against it. The mist had felt nice in her hair, and she'd managed to sit around and go over basic tactics with Naruto and Sasuke while Kakashi kept an eye out. Tactics have become a passtime for them. It's given her time to correct certain problems, like Naruto thinking Chakra is pronounced Chatora. Chatora.
She repeats. Cha-tora. He graduated from the Academy. Being the best student in the Academy suddenly became meaningless because he passed while others failed.
A boy who didn't know how Chakra was defined passed the same test she aced. It's like finding out you're king of the idiots when you think you're a genius!
It makes sense though, ninja can't have a crazy high bar or there wouldn't be enough ninja. It just hurt to find out. Without her stats to prove she's smart she might have gone into a crisis over it. When Sasuke played along and pretended he didn't know how to pronounce it either, she almost drew her blade.
Back to the really stupid, that's not it, this is even dumber she's just easily distracted while panicking.
The fact that the hair that had burned off is back and the burns covering her skin from jumping through one of Sasuke's fireballs is fixed did seem to bother, well, everyone, but it wasn't the first time and no one had questioned it then either. A ninja is allowed to have secrets.
This is bullshit.
Naruto had almost killed a bunny, jealously trying to show off to her after she took charge during her previous fight. She hadn't even had time to really yell at him, before Kakashi's words clicked in her ears. "Get down!" He'd shouted, and for some reason, all she could think about were her boys behind her. She could hit the ground, but could they without Genin Agility?
Her heart pumping and her adrenaline coursing; she drew her sword and gave her all to block the force against them. It came from the sky, a masterwork blade sent to behead her and everyone with her. It was so huge, just its spin had her weapon grinding against it hard enough for sparks to fly. She knew she was losing though, even with the reflexive blood loss from the Chaos blade's activation, she was barely holding herself up against it. So she did something Kakashi told her not to do without good reason. She channeled more. She bled into the blade, begged for its power and let out a scream as agony racked her body from head to toe. Sipping her life force, it came to life in the split second between calling it and finding her target. This lesser, giant, needless sword crashing against hers.
Only half a second had passed but she'd let out a battlecry and she wasn't going to hold back when she had no way of knowing if Naruto and Sasuke had fallen to the ground behind her. No, it was up to her, and her vision saw red.
For all of that second. Before the titan of a weapon still forcing itself against her glowed. She barely had time to see what was going on, before the blood sucked right from her weapon into it. "Wha-"
She didn't even get a half a second to figure out what just happened, before she was gone.
Mission failed, and she didn't even have time to realize it and check on the boys before she couldn't see them anymore.
She felt bushes tear through her on the way back, the momentum kept her going through them like they were simply paper in the way. She felt grassy ground smacking against her feet, her attempts to stop herself by slamming her feet down meaningless against the insane momentum of the powerful attack. The world had kicked up, and just her feet trying to bleed off momentum destroyed her shoes within seconds and knocked enough dirt into the air to blind her.
Back to the present. The stupid bullshit.
"Fuaaa!" She doesn't get to grasp anything else.
Pure hatred flows through her, hatred and pain so great she can't comprehend it. Her vision goes white, red, black, and blue all at once. Her sense of color is destroyed in the moment it takes her to realize she's not blocking anymore and is instead slammed against a tree by her back.
It's not a flash of pain, that'd be exaggerating in the wrong way. Her barely lucid moments are so painful her vast vocabulary lacks a word for it. She doesn't know where it hurts, she can't tell, the system that tells her that information has left the building and dropped the keys in the trash on the way out.
It doesn't end. Ninja are trained to take pain and to block it out. Every Academy student knows how to ignore a punch, and by genin you can handle a pretty deep stab or cut with a kunai without locking up. She once blocked out the pain of Kakashi breaking her nose and took a nap in Naruto's arms. She invited Naruto into her home, she saw him get a mother, she saw him learn from a father. She saw that mother learn his nuances, and comfort him time and time again when he wasn't sure if he belonged in any given moment.
It's a faint smile at the fond memory that allows her eyes to close-
And then shoot the fuck back open as she realizes what that is, her recent life flashing through her eyes while she gives up at her core. "I refuse." She manages to get out, or at least she thinks she does between all the screaming. Her head pounds and she manages to blink through the tears to get a moment of her surroundings.
She hears the clashing of kunai, screams - those are hers -, Naruto's shouting something and Kakashi's barking commands. Naruto's alive, that's good, and since he's not catatonic she can assume Sasuke's still alive too.
She locks them out of her brain, they're her idiots but they're also her greatest distraction and her focus is fading really fast.
It's not in her shoulders, that'd be reasonable from the jar of trying to block that and failing, but it's not there. It's not from her back, that'd make sense having smashed into a tree full force, but it's not there either. It's when her hands land on a pool of her blood and the sparky power of the Chaos blade that she realizes exactly what it is.
Her sword is in her stomach, flaring to life and using her life force as power against her. A cool idea she'll need to try sometime against a superior enemy, but also a death sentence. She needs that out, and she needs it out now. Fuck conventional medical wisdom, she will die.
She bites her lip hard enough to draw blood just to try and distract herself, unable to do anything but whimper. That is until she hears another scream - this one not hers - and her desire to get back up and fight wins out over her overwhelming inner desire to give up and fade from this.
She'd thought the demon twins had made a lot of blood, and to be fair she had cut them both in half so they certainly did, but seeing a weak idiot taken down mostly by Naruto - she'd really only done the stabbing a held down person part - dead on the ground and seeing her own blood trail off far enough in the distance it disappears into the bushes… Well, they're different experiences.
She reaches around her to get her bandages and a chakra pill. It might not help much later, but the energy would be really helpful right now. That's what she tries to do anyway, before she realizes it's impossible. A quick look shows her why.
Her sword isn't 'inside her stomach,' her blade is speared through her and halfway into the damn tree behind her. Her pack is speared with it, making it impossible to slip it off or move and she's too crammed against it to cut it off using the stuck weapon. "If I get through this, haah, I'm getting a front pocket, and I'm putting medical supplies there!"
Her only saving grace is that the Chaos Blade is her weapon, which means it's only been one fourth the damage because of Kenjutsu Moderate. That's not a comforting thought, but it is helpful information. This'd suck four times more for anyone else. She quickly vows to force this on whoever did this to her.
She feels like she's on death's doorstep. If it had been anything else, well, she doesn't wanna think about it. Pulling up her stat sheet, she's happy to report she has about twenty health. Which is - nevermind, nineteen, it's lowering - more than enough for her to try and figure this out. She has a max of ninety six right now, which means she took almost eighty damage there. Just a month ago, she'd be dead right now.
"The only health point that matters is the last one." She grunts, while wondering about something very important. How does this HP thing work? She hasn't had a lot of chances to test it, or, more like she hasn't been insane enough to test it. Jumping through fire to freak out Sasuke, training new techniques, cutting herself on accident with Kenjutsu, none of that's given her a definitive answer.
If she pulls the sword out of her, will she bleed to death?
Eighteen life. She doesn't really have much of a choice. "Ghaa! Bullshit!" She shouts as the weapon inside her charges meaninglessly. She's really hopeful it doesn't do some kind of giant laser attack if it sucks enough of her blood. Leaning forward and lodging the piece into her a little strongly, so she can get at the hilt. "Fuck…" She pushes it away, and she does have some success, but that brings about another issue.
Now she has to lean more forward to push it.
And more. Every single inch another cause of agony, and another moment that might be killing her. She remembers basic first aid, there's a reason every ninja has to have bandages on them.
This is the dumbest idea ever, but while her hyperactive sword is inside her, she is going to die. Her team is too distracted by whatever the hell that was, and it's that thought that pushes her forward.
"Guh-okay, just-"
It's with another push that the overly long sword is out of the tree, the scrape rending wood well. She's grateful the weapon is so sharp or she'd be kinda screwed. allowing her to weakly push herself to her feet. Standing up allows her to push the sword out in a very different way, using gravity. Unfortunately, her life force likes following gravity too, and she feels the warmth overtake her feet just as the sword hits the ground completely. She holds one hand to the wound, and turns a little to try to get at her pack now that it's not stuffed under both the weapon and tree.
It's too much. "Okay I just need-" That's all she gets before she finds herself on the floor of a forest, forgetting her own name. Blearily, she tries to make out reality, she tries to save herself.
She tries to get through this now that the hard part is over. She can't. The adrenaline that coursed through her to get this far left with what little blood she had left to lose when the sword clattered helplessly to the ground. At least she knows she's one with the sword, as she mimed it just a second later. "Just a little more…" She mumbles to herself, watching her HP hit eight without anything she can do. None of her words reach her brain, and none of her desires or fears hit her body.
She got the sword out, now she's going to die. Question answered; yes, she will bleed to death.
Tears fill her eyes all over again, and she feels something touch her. It's vague, frozen.
It's so cold…
From what little her eyes can see, there's a mask peering over her. A white mask, with a red tendril around the middle. "Don't take me." She begs the specter peering over her in her final moments. "Not like it matters what I say." Against her will, her eyes close, and all she can do is hope the demon that has come for her soul is merciful.
Her dreams are filled with bloodshed and agony. The moment is so real even now that she replays it over and over. She was stuck against that tree for maybe thirty seconds, and yet she's sure that even without the sharingan she'll never, ever, forget even a single detail of her death. She was an afterthought in someone else's battle. One bad call and her own power destroyed her. Why did the blood she'd given her sword get absorbed by the giant horse chopper?
She has no idea, but it doesn't matter.
She'd have to be alive for it to matter.
"It seems I've overused my Sharingan." She hears Kakashi's beautiful voice, as her eyes slowly open. She's in a strange place, with a wooden plank ceiling. She can hear birds outside, and the world is so warm right now. It's not worth paying attention to though, because Kakashi sounding exhausted is much more important. Specifically, Kakashi sounding anything except pissed she got herself killed is important. "It's too bad I can't regenerate, unlike a certain someone."
"I died." She finds herself softly mumbling. "This isn't regeneration, this is some kind of unholy, possession kinda thing. People are supposed to die when they are killed. Am I a shitty ghost now? Was I ever alive?" Her thoughts race as her heart does. She doesn't give herself even a moment to take in the fresh smells of being alive before the panic from the dreams hits her at full force.
"Stop complaining about living." Kakashi scolds her, and she nuzzles her pillow with her full face, holding back tears and a retort in the same way one resists an angry 'I hate you' at their father. "Some of us have to deal with consequences."
"... Yeah, sorry." Letting your fellow ninja keep their secrets is a common rule of thumb in a ninja village. Even your students. The first time Kakashi noticed her healing was after Sasuke knocked her tooth out. She'd genuinely thought he was going to pin her down and torture information out of her, he hadn't. He'd just said when she was ready to tell them what was up, he'd be happy to listen.
Now, she's pretty sure she owes him an explanation. But not right now, now, this pillow is so comfy, and this world is so warm and real and not super fucking dead! Who knew not dying when you die felt good! "Who saved me?" She asks. "From the ground I mean, someone had to collect me."
"It was a ninja tracking unit." Kakashi says, using a hand to sit up and stare at her with his one good eye. "They bandaged you up… You didn't die."
"That's good news," Sakura mumbles. She has a hard time letting her joy cut through it all and hit her voice, let alone feeling it internally, but she is happy. She has to be. "I'm not a zombie."
"I wouldn't be so sure, with wounds like that, you should have died." He says. "Being undead would be less of a surprise to me than whatever the actual reason for all this probably is. Who would have thought Sasuke would be the normal one on team seven." He actually shivers at the thought. "You're troublesome."
"Sorry." She apologizes yet again, while he stretches a little. Reaching towards the air, and wiggling his body ever so gently.
"I think it'll be hard to move here for the next week." He admits. "I don't know what's up with this mission, but Jonin aren't supposed to just appear out of thin air."
"Yeah…" Her blood runs cold at the thought. Is that what happened? Did she summon a random encounter so strong it almost got them killed? Are Naruto and Sasuke okay?
"And once again, the attacker immediately focused on trying to take you out of the fight." He says. "This time, he succeeded. You definitely have a bounty on your head."
"I can't imagine why." She sighs, finally sitting up to give him real attention, only to dive back under the covers a moment later with red cheeks. Her clothes had been ruined, they changed her clothes, but her pack was stabbed through! So she's in someone else's nighty, and it's not exactly designed for dignity. "Don't look!"
"I hadn't intended to." She can feel the eye roll behind his mask and headband. "I'm not in the habit of peeking at my vulnerable students, regardless of what you might think of me."
"That's not what I, I'm sorry." She admits, flushily simmering back into her pillow.
"I'm going back to bed." She hears him thunk into his roll out bed. "Go get breakfast or whatever, your teammates are making a mess without you there to clean up."
Secretly, she's happy for the excuse to bug out of this conversation.
Realistically, she knows damn well Naruto's got the cleaning covered.
She'll just have to stop and find better clothes before she gets there.
"Howwwww." It's Sasuke's oddly elongated word that hits her ears first as she enters the kitchen. There's a stew of sorts that fills her nostrils, and the sight of a whole group of people at the table makes her smile a little. There's a small boy, unremarkable except for his big ol fisherman hat and a pouty attitude. There's a dark haired woman, also pretty unremarkable, except for the fact that she wears lots of pink just like she does. It's nice to see someone agree on the color.
Then there's the bridge builder himself, who's looking a little boozed out - what else is new - and her team, totally staring at her like she's a ghost. It doesn't help that she's raided someone's room to get those new clothes and the obviousness of that has the woman glaring at her too. "It was revealing." She explains herself.
"It's still rude." The woman scolds, and her tone is just no nonsense enough Sakura looks away from her to focus back on her team. There's no winning that one, but there was no way in hell she was walking out here in that to ask permission. Maybe in front of Naruto now that he's calmed the hell down, but she saw the way Sasuke was looking at her after she killed those Chunin. She doesn't want his pervy awakening to be about her. She spent way too long fakely trying to get his attention to accidentally get it now.
"How." Sasuke repeats himself, giving her the one two stare of death. "You were basically dead just a few hours ago." He actually points at her midsection. "Now you look like you just got up from a soothing nap."
"I did, actually." She says, finding herself a seat real quick, before scrambling over to find a bowl for some of that stew while she's at it. "It was a very nice nap, very pleasant. Much wow."
"That's not what I mean." Sasuke growls.
"I know." She says, filling her bowl quickly with a ladle. What, the woman's not gonna scold her for serving herself too? That's unfair, she realizes after a moment. Doesn't make her irritation bubble away, just tells her she's being moody. She gets to be moody, she just died. "But I don't have a good answer for you."
"Could you give us any answer?" It's Naruto's unsure tone that catches her off guard, and lowers it completely after a long second. "Sakura, you've been acting really weird lately… Some of it good, like you know, the whole, taking me into your home thing." The dumb blond speaks up awkwardly, hands intertwined with themselves, rolling over each-other a bit. Fear of rejection is a common expression for him, and she can recognize it instantly now that she's seen it in its native environment. Normally this'd be about the time where her mom would swoop in and make things better. She's not here to tell either of them that it'll be alright.
Naruto's a lot more used to this than she is.
She wishes that wasn't true. "But some of it's really scary." Naruto continues. "Like how you killed those guys who attacked us. You said you knew Kakashi wasn't dead, but you still went right for the kill."
"What's your point?" She asks a little coldly, sitting down and picking up a spoon, now that she has a nice steamy bowl to coax her grumbly stomach into its normal function..
"You didn't have to kill them, Sakura." Naruto says.
"And when Kakashi killed them, what would have changed?" She asks. She takes a nice bite, remembering her previous anger and deciding to do something right. "Thank you, this is very good." She immediately compliments the woman before the taste even really hits her.
"You wouldn't have bloodied your hands." Naruto says. "Why were you so eager to bloody your hands?"
"Why do you care?" Sakura asks, quirking her brow with no small amount of piercing, hot irritation. "They weren't people, forget about them." It's the moment she says it that she realizes what she said. The truth is they weren't.
As random encounters they were made entirely for her to fight. Their entire life a story told in a bingo book just for her to indulge in before destroying them. They were given pointlessly elaborate mission histories, and cartoonishly evil deeds on their record. They were bad guys spawned for her to crush, and that makes sense to her. Her power delivered exp bags to her, and she cut them in half and claimed the spoils.
But there's no way to explain that without sounding mental. "I mean, by leaf rules." She quickly tries to save it, even while Naruto gawks and Sasuke looks at her with genuine concern. "Don't you remember, from the Academy? It's a lot easier if you don't think of enemy ninja as people. They're clever enemies you need to exterminate at all costs."
"I don't remember that vocab." Sasuke snarks immediately. "I think I'd remember that."
"I'm paraphrasing." Sakura defends, crossing her arms over her chest. For a second, before she remembers she needs her hand for food and her stomach is gurgling like whispering madness. "They're dead, we got some cool loot, and we moved on."
"Yeah that's another thing." Sasuke winces at her sudden snappy glare. "You're the only one that looted their corpses. Even Kakashi didn't wanna do that."
"..." She opens her mouth.
"..." Then she closes it.
"Who does that?" Sasuke asks. "You cut two guys in half in five seconds and your immediate thought was to go through their pockets."
"I found a good amount of cash in there." She defends.
"We're just worried about you." Naruto manages to articulate. "And confused."
"I kinda figured 'I will jump through your fireball' was a technique we were training for emergencies." Sasuke says. "I didn't think you were going to pull it out on our first fight like it was meaningless if you got hurt."
"To be fair, it was meaningless." She says. "I was fine after a nap."
"That doesn't mean I like watching my friend burn while covered in blood and guts." Sasuke points out harshly, anger vibrating in his tone like a raging fire only kept under wraps by respect for what she's recently been through. She'll have to have a very real conversation with him soon, both of them. Just, not now. "Some of that burning blood was yours. Why are you so willing to give yourself to that stupid sword?" Sasuke has no idea how right he is, holy crap, it murdered her recently. "I watched my family die, Sakura, and you're making me watch you die too." Lucky for him, she'll die just out of sight, attached to a tree by her stomach.
"I just…" She finds there's nothing left in her bowl when her spoon scrapes nothingness. "I think I need to go think." She says, getting up, and walking towards the door with footsteps eerily reminiscent of a corpse walking. She can hear wet thwacks and bloody squirts with every step, her struggle to fight back the haunted memory of what was making her stop dead in her tracks. Her eyes close to try and block out the sights overlaying in her vision from her dreams.
She has to fight back her own reality trying to catch up to her. It turns out full healing doesn't cure her from mental status effects like pissed off or traumatized, really cool of it, maybe at a higher level. For them it's been hours, for her, it was minutes ago. It's the sigh from Naruto that snaps her out of herself for a moment. So pained, so drained, so disappointed.
She plays mom.
She turns on a dime and hugs him from behind. She wraps an arm right around him, holds him as close as she can with the chair in the way, plays with his hair with one hand and gives him a gentle kiss on the cheek. At the hitch of his breath, she takes his hands in both of hers, abandoning her objective to stop something she hates.
She splits his hands apart, intertwines their fingers, and whispers in his ear.
"You're wanted, okay? Nothing is going to change that." His warmth is all that keeps her from shaking, and her warmth is what soothes him.
A month ago she'd hesitate to give him any intimacy, but he knows what this is. It's a perfect copy of many nights in their kitchen, him making some mistake and falling apart. To think he was that torn apart inside, and no one at the Academy ever noticed. She can't help but feel like some of that was intentional, just another broken idiot to forget about and move on from.
Ninja villages are cruel.
There's no room for misinterpretation, and that makes it okay to comfort him with all the energy she has left. Sadly, she doesn't have much energy. As soon as her comforting touch gave in, it left. She doesn't even bother to elaborate to the very confused Sasuke. Naruto will explain it, or he'll think she suddenly has a crush on the blond; right now she couldn't possibly care less which.
She just leaves, and she's happy she does.
Because she has a lot to think about. Having just died changes things.
