i.

Haruno Sakura is twenty-five- and a half- when Naruto does a goof and creates a hole in space-time.

As days history is made go, she reflects that this one is really rather unremarkable. It's a typical June day in Konoha: the sun is beating down on them, the grass beneath them and the trees around them stink of botany, and the sounds of other shinobi working in nearby training ground are a comfortable constant. Especially the screams of that one recently-promoted chuunin who's been trying to learn fire jutsu for the better half of the past year. Sakura smiles to herself in the middle of a crunch, proud of the girl. She's young and shy, sure, but she's already distinguishing herself as an exceptionally efficient learner in the hospital...

"Guys, I think I broke the world!"

Sasuke raises his head from the scroll he's been scribbling all over for a year, trying to rehash the entire clan law from the minuscule bits and pieces that Itachi hadn't burned out of spite when he jumped ship. Sakura puts hers in her hands. Kakashi (who wandered into the training ground while following the road of life) looks devilishly amused, probably because he's still mad about Sakura getting him into the position of Hokage and takes abject joy in all her suffering.

"Dammit, Naruto," Sasuke says dully. "Not again." He returns to the scroll.

Naruto thinks about that for a moment. They can all hear the gears turning in his brain, until finally: "But this one is twice the size!"

"That's not a good thing," comes his teammate's apathetic voice.

"No, it is," Naruto corrects smugly. "Because this means that all of space and time is now in my reach."

Team Seven takes a moment to consider the ramifications of that.

"We're doomed," Sakura sighs.

Suddenly, Kakashi stills. They're all on the alert within a second, eyes fixed on him in worry. Sakura strains her senses to feel around their location and comes up with nothing, so what—?

"MY ULTIMATE RIVAL..." a great and terrible voice booms from a thunderstorm suspiciously centralized in Konoha's market district, far off and yet horribly close at the same time. "...CHALLENGE... FLAMES OF MY YOUTH!"

Everyone looks at Kakashi. Kakashi stares accusingly at Sasuke. Comprehension dawns on Sakura's face, who also turns to stare at the taciturn Uchiha.

"Sasuke, you didn't..." she starts.

Seemingly absorbed in his scroll, he does not respond.

"...UCHIHA! I WILL DEFEAT YOU THIS TIME! I SHALL NEVER LET MY YOUTH BE QUENCHED, NOT EVEN BY YOUR INSIDIOUSLY UNYOUTHFUL SCHEMES!"

"What did you even do to Lee?" Naruto asks in bewilderment.

"Squirrels," Kakashi mutters darkly. "Can't believe anybody taught him genjutsu..."

"Uh, Kakashi, you taught him genjutsu," Sakura points out.

Immediately, Kakashi is blank-faced. "I have no memory of that."

Liar, all three think, eyeing him.

An exceedingly youthful earthquake shakes the ground as Lee's chakra signal approaches the team at an alarmingly quick rate. Naruto gulps to himself when he remembers something else that Lee must've discovered this morning when he put that horrible spandex suit on...

"Let's get out of here," he says hastily and grabs Sasuke and Sakura's wrists, thinking only of the burnt ashes of every single one of Bushy Brows' suits. That was the disadvantage to seal work, really. Things just tended to blow up indiscriminately at the first hint of a network that was incompatible with the laws of the universe. "We've gotta go, 'ttebayo!" he stresses when his teammates remain immovable, eyes wide and alarmed. He feels Kurama wince inwardly and realizes he's let his verbal tic slip by- but that doesn't matter right now, they've got to get out of here yesterday!

"You did something. What was it?" Sakura demands, grasping his arm in turn.

"All of Lee's suits are gone," Naruto wails, flailing as the pink-haired woman's grip tightens. Sasuke glares and steps approximately two feet to the left when a particularly violent wave of his arms nearly hits the Uchiha square on the nose. A shame, really; Naruto had been aiming in that general direction.

"YOSH!"

The Dynamic Entry that Lee executes tosses Sasuke right into the wormhole, which the seal has been powering the whole time. The remaining members of Team 7 look at each other.

"I've gotta save Sasuke!" Naruto dives into the shimmering weave of volatile space-time energy before anyone can stop him.

"Excuses!" the pink-haired woman hollers after him.

Lee stops, blinking now that the targets of his youthful energy have disappeared. "What is...?"

Kakashi and Sakura share a truly woebegone sigh, mutually deciding to never acknowledge that Lee looks half-decent when he isn't wearing that hideous suit. "Why are we the only intelligent members of this team?" Sakura laments.

"Never leave a teammate behind," Kakashi points out.

"Yeah, yeah, power of friendship, trust in the blond, ramen-loving reincarnation of Kami-sama," the pink-haired woman mutters under her breath.

"Come on. Lee, tell Tsunade-sama that she's interim Hokage, effective immediately," the masked man tells the Jonin gleefully as he prods Sakura along. "We have no idea where this tear in reality leads to and I've got some teammates to save."

"Kakashi, I can walk perfectly fine on my own. Stop pushing me! And stop shirking your responsibilities just because you miss fieldwork, you lazy, porn-reading, Mr. Ukki neglecter-"

Lee watches as they jump into the violently sparkling purple rip in the fabric of the universe, mouth opening and closing. When the seal makes an odd sound three minutes later and the wormhole closes up again as if it had never been there, he shuts it with a click and recalls the directive their bizarre Hokage has just given him. "That is most Unyouthful," he murmurs, shocked into regular decibel levels.

Tsunade will not be happy.

ii.

Kakashi wakes silently to a spotless green ceiling. He eyes it.

Well, he thinks. That's new. And not grey. Not to mention that stain from the pissing contest the dogs had while I was out is gone... Did someone tell Sai that the best way to engender affection from others is to do them favors? Then he realizes: Wait, this apartment had the most hideous shade of tea green until I painted it between ANBU missions!

He closes his eyes again after taking a moment to absorb this information and its implications. "Dammit, Naruto," he says aloud, pinching the bridge of his nose. Then he sits up and performs a familiar sequence of seals, slamming his hand down on the plain blue sheets without a care as to their cleanliness. "Summoning!"

Pakkun sniffs once in Kakashi's direction after arriving and gives him what Kakashi has come to understand as the dog equivalent of a raised eyebrow. "Alright, kid. Something's got you bothered. Spill."

"We've got a Code Orange. I need you to look around."

"That's two in the past month…" Kakashi gives him a Look. Pakkun heaves a great big unimpressed humph. "Look around, sure. I'll do you one better: you've got one heck of a visitor in the other room. Try not to throw a kunai at him." With that happy warning Pakkun leaps out of the open window.

What? Kakashi blinks, bewildered. When he tests the air he finds that Pakkun is right... though he can't quite place the scent of the male. It's familiar, sure, but exactly who is it…? "I've got a bad feeling about this," he mumbles to himself, slipping his kunai holster on anyways and latching the window shut.

"Good morning, Kakashi-san," says a very familiar voice. "I came to see how you were feeling…"

Kakashi valiantly resists the urge to have a heart attack as a half-grown Uchiha Itachi dodges the instinctive kunai to the jugular with a cool tilt of the head.

"…Good morning," Kakashi returns, forcing his body to relax.

Itachi smiles. There's no trace of shock, resentment, or cruelty in it. In fact… that looks like warmth from Itachi. Kakashi nearly does have that heart attack. "I suppose I should tell Hokage-sama that you are still on the mend. Kushina-san has been preventing him from making noodles for you. She says 'you're welcome', by the way."

…What. Putting aside the fact that he's nearly sure that's the most Itachi's ever said in one go, what? How… what… when… what? What exactly has Naruto gotten them into this time?

Kakashi moves, very carefully, to sit on the edge of the other couch.

"Explain," he says delicately.

"Aa." Itachi nods and writes something down on a little notebook. Memory loss, Kakashi reads. Blunt trauma may have caused lasting internal damage. "You see, even delirious you refused to stay in the hospital…"

iii.

Sakura Haruno is eight- and a half- years old when she wakes up in a shockingly pink bed with the immense urge to find Naruto and beat the crap out of him. With a slowness that would invoke fear in anyone around to see it, she raises her hand and sees a small, untried, uncalloused little-girl palm.

"Na-ru-toooooo," she hisses lowly, clenching that hand into a fist. "I am going to kill you."

For Sakura, being knocked unconscious only means retreating to the mindscape that she and her Inner once shared. In the years since she had survived to adulthood, the mindscape had been comforting in its silence; it was a place of security to regroup and think before she charged out again, because time passed less quickly than it did in the real world.

She's been unconscious for what feels like three days. And what did she find when she looked around after being pushed into that rip in space-time by Kakashi?

Who's Naruto? asks Inner curiously.

"Slowly. Painfully. I can cause internal injuries," Sakura mutters to herself as she gets ready for the day and eyes the frilly lavender curtains opposite her dresser mutinously. "You won't escape. When I catch you, you'll do whatever it was that you did the first time and get us back before I'm forced to disembowel you for… For… Violating space-time protocols!"

It's one of the first things anyone learns when starting fuuinjutsu theory! Messing with a timeline via seals is dangerous on several orders of magnitude— like destroy the world if you do it wrong magnitudes! A Beginner's Guide to Inverse Quadratic Seal Matrices by Takuya Tanaka says so, and it's a beginner-level text that she knows he checked out from Konoha's library, so how does Naruto not know that?

Or (the far more likely option, she reflects), how could he completely disregard that warning?! He's not allowed to even potentially die when it's not for a mission and she's not around to put him back together!

Sheer pique leads her to tie her hair up with her old ribbon in sharp, violent movements. Sakura glares at herself in the mirror on the wall next to her little bed. Books and books and books gleam enticingly at her from behind, inviting her to lose herself in the world of knowledge.

"No," she tells the books with a truly fearsome glower. She's got a dumb future Hokage to hunt down.

Sa-kuuuuu-raaaaa, Inner whines. Who is Naruto? Tell me!

"He's an idiot!" is the vehement reply as Sakura stomps out of her room and right past her startled aunt.