Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or Inuyasha.

Author's Notes: Wow, after lots of reviews stating how much they hated the drabble format, I have listened. I compressed all of the first few chapters into one.

"If you feel you're sinking

I will jump right over

Into cold, cold water

For you."

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This wasn't how it was supposed to go.

When Sakura had been thrust into war at the tender age of sixteen, she thought that it would be over quickly—that the combined strength from the Shinobi Alliance would be enough to lay waste to their enemy. She knew it would not be easy, but she had naively hoped with all of her young, wishful heart that they would have been enough to stop Uchiha Madara.

She was wrong.

The Fourth Shinobi Great War persisted for four years and had taken the souls of so many. Young and old, friends, lovers, fathers and mothers—none had been spared; and as a medic, she felt the loss keenly. Many had died under the exhausted glow of her hands—hands that were trained to save and yet could not—and each was a blow to her already wounded heart.

Kakashi had once told her that war never changes.

Over the hush of a rare peaceful night and by the glow of a melancholy fire, his weary voice echoed in her frightened skull: War never changes. The agony, the bloodshed, and the unraveling of the warrior's mind would remain long after they had gone. Human greed would forever be the precursor to conflict and misery; and blood would be spilled in the name of everything.

Mankind could destroy the world, and still war would not change.

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When she was thirteen, Sakura killed a man.

He wasn't a very good man, she remembers. He had been a part of a group of bandits that were terrorizing a small civilian town north of the battlefield. She knew that she had been right to kill him, that such scum could not be allowed to walk amongst them, and it had been a matter of life or death. But to her dismay, she found that no amount of justification for his death could keep her from weeping over her kunai buried in the neck of a corpse.

She was almost sick under the weight of her shame, and had turned her head away from the unveiled look of disgust and pity her teammates had sent her way. The boys on her team had made their first kills over a year prior, but because she had been so weak she had been the last of all of her friends to purposely kill someone.

The thought made sobs shudder through her body, and she was unsure of what she had been ashamed of most: murdering a man or her aversion to it.

.

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Kakashi had been the one to gently pull her away from the growing puddle of blood under her knees, and she winced at the squelch her kunai made as he retrieved it for her. She followed his figure through her tears until they came across a clearing and sat down with her back against a tree. The boys ignored her as they went about setting up for camp, and the wide berth they gave her made quiet, pitiful sobs rack her small frame.

It wasn't until a gentle hand was placed on the crown of her head that she forcefully stemmed the flow of her grief, and the kind empathy she found in Kakashi's sole eye made her dissolve into tears once more.

It was enough for her that he understood her pain, because Sakura knew she would never come to understand all of the sorrow her sensei held in his own soul; but the calm reassurance he offered her eased some of the weight.

"Does it get easier?"

And though her words were almost whispered, years would pass and Sakura would still see the heartbreaking defeat in the eye of the strongest man she knew as he replied similarly,

"Yes."

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When Sakura was fourteen, she killed a woman whose eyes were the color of the sea.

She didn't know anything about her. She didn't know her name or age, but she knew her eyes were blue and her hair was silk between her fingers when she tilted her head to slit her throat.

The nausea and tears still come when she washes off the blood in a nearby stream, but they are soon swept downstream along with the blood of the second life ended by her hands.

Sometimes, when she visits Wave Country on different missions, she thinks of silk and blood and drowns.

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As she aged, death became routine and it surprised her to know that it had started to mean more to her than life.

Death meant she was getting better; death meant she must work harder; and it was through death that she came to know her place in the world.

Becoming a medic under Tsunade's tutelage cemented its role in her life, and it was through her that Sakura learned to hold it in her hands and control it.

But when she saves the life of a child in one village and then takes the life of a man in another, Sakura thinks she can finally understand the loss in Kakashi's eyes that night so long ago.

There is honor in her intentions when she takes a life, and that makes it easier.

But she no longer thinks of the color of their eyes, whether or not they preferred the sunrise over the sunset, or if they had a family they would never return to.

And that, she thinks, is the greatest death of all.

.

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War never changes, and Sakura finally understands that.

But this was not how it was supposed to go.

She was the strongest medic in the Shinobi Alliance after the heartbreaking passing of her mentor, and still with all of her prowess in her field, she can't seem to stem the blood flowing from the gaping hole in her friend's chest.

Neji's breaths are shallow as he coughs blood from his last remaining lung and TenTen is screaming at her to save him; and Sakura can't because the damage is too much and all she can think about is how much pride he took in his hair, how he loved sunrises because they reminded him of new beginnings, and how the woman struggling behind her will never know how much he loved her.

Her heart is tearing at the seams when TenTen breaks free of Lee's hold to sob into the palm of Neji's bloody hand as he takes his final breaths, and for a moment Sakura is angry that the war raging around them has ignored their anguish.

Her eyes find the back of her teammates—all three men of the original Team 7— fighting Madara and Kabuto in the distance and flinches at TenTen's tortured wail and Lee's sorrowful sniffles.

Neji is the first of them to die, but this was not how it was supposed to go.

.

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This was all she has ever dreamed of and everything she has hoped against.

The war is drawing to an end and the last telling battle looms over the horizon, but their allies are dropping around them like flies under the combined strength of Madara's Mangekyou Sharingan and Kabuto's undead shinobi.

They're losing, and she's too far from her teammates to help anyone—too far from Kakashi to catch him when he stumbles under Obito's glare.

The fate of the world rests in the hands of the two boys—two men—she has always placed her faith in, and for a moment she snarls at their backs with the type of hatred she usually reserves for Uchiha Madara.

Sakura would never be a part of their dynamic, and she knows that now. They were almost demigods; they were prodigies and powerhouses and she was not. They were in a league all of their own and she would never reach them. But she loves them both with all of her bleeding heart and it hurts her to see that they have easily forgotten her in the sea of faceless shinobi.

But then Kakashi turns desperate eyes in her direction when Naruto and Sasuke end up being barely enough to push back the enemy, and she realizes then—in the words they don't speak and the things they do—that they will always need her.

But the Allied Forces were losing.

They were losing.

They were tiring and the sole female of Team 7 is the missing piece of the puzzle, and the thought encourages her to pump her strong legs towards them to help.

She had been waiting and preparing for this moment for years; and if Sasuke is the Moon and Naruto is the Sun, then she is the Earth that grounds them.

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Sakura never reaches her team.

The air crackles and bows under the oppressive weight of chakra. Her lungs burn from the lack of cycling oxygen and she is so tired from healing and fighting, but her desperation to reach her boys manages to overshadow her fatigue.

It's not enough.

She trips over a disembodied arm and it gives an enemy ninja ample time to shatter her cheekbone with his fist and send her body flying. Kakashi's worried shouts barely reach her through the painful haze as she impacts the blood quenched ground, but her finely honed senses save her from certain impalement.

Sakura painfully pulls herself to her feet and Kakashi is shouting at her and it sounds like he's pleading, but she can't understand what he's saying. She's too focused on evading lethal blows and landing critical hits that should have killed but lack the necessary control, so she doesn't hear the desperate warnings coming from the lips of her Sun and her Moon.

Her enemy doesn't give her any room to breathe, and he is close enough for her to see the green of his eyes that remind her of a home that is no longer there. They are so close that their harsh pants entwine together in a mocking semblance of a lover's embrace and the blood running down their faces mingle with each strike.

And that is when she feels it—the sickening pull of a desperate jutsu combined with unknown power of an enemy's last resort.

Sea glass eyes widen in horror as she realizes that she and her enemy are caught in between Kakashi's Kamui and his traitorous best friend's similar technique. She tries to pull away from her enemy's painfully unrelenting grip, but his resigned grin tells her all she needs to know.

The jutsu hits her with a force that tears a tormented scream from her throat and she feels an awful pull from her navel that is unfamiliar and entirely painful. Her eyes find distressed and agonized blue eyes as every molecule in her body is displaced and sent elsewhere in a blinding flash of light that makes everyone avert their gaze.

Sakura never manages to reach her boys and the Earth disappears from beneath her feet.

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A/N: I understand that this seems a little all over the place, but this was once broken into separate drabbles and then put together. Please let me know what you think!