It's the next day when Sakura makes a request that has Sasuke feeling more excited than he thinks should be possible.

"Wanna play hooky and go spar?" she asks playfully when they wake up. She's half naked and laying on him, an obvious second offer on the table.

But he can feel himself getting weaker by the day and this is the first time she's wanted to do anything so he sits up and pushes off her warm embrace. "We'll have to be careful not to be seen."

Sakura squeals and jumps out of their single width bed. The house they had been given had only two rooms, one to live and cook in and one to sleep. Karui had been right in saying the small western house wasn't much. They were content in the small space though, especially since it had huge picture windows in the living space. Sasuke had learned something new about his wife since they'd moved here: even just getting to see the sun when she woke up made the woman elated.

Sakura walks over to Sarada's crib in the corner of their bedroom. "I'll feed her real quick then we can drop her at Saruu-chan's?" It only takes a moment for Sarada to latch onto his wife once she picks her up.

He takes a moment to give Sakura a rare smile, putting energy in it to make sure it reaches his eyes. "I'll go make us breakfast," he decides, leaving Sakura to feed their daughter in peace.

In the kitchen, he decides to make oyakodon (chicken & eggs over rice), as it only takes one pan and they only have one burner in their kitchenette. He smiles to himself as he picks out the chicken from the fridge. To make it easier for him to cook, Sakura always cuts and repackages it when they buy it.

Sakura emerges fully dressed in mission gear, baby in one hand and two large cloaks in the other. She takes an exaggerated inhale through her nose and hands Sarada off to him.

"Smells good!" She praises him, going over to check the rice cooker.

"Oyakodon."

Sakura hums happily to herself. "I'll get it served up if you two wanna go get dressed!"

He doesn't respond, just takes a moment to let his eyes linger on the darker patch of fabric on her back, where the uchiwa had once been. The rest of the fabric on her back was lightly sun bleached, no one but him would notice, he was sure.

He places Sarada on their bed, and she kicks happily in the air. She just started doing that, and he can already tell how powerful she'll one day be. She also just started babbling every chance she gets, another clear sign she'll take after her mother. Today she seems content with exclaiming "Cu Cu Cu Cu" everytime she sees her parents doing anything.

It doesn't take him long to dress himself, but Sarada's kicking must make her outfitting take too long because Sakura appears behind him giggling before he can get the second leg of her little pants on. With Sakura's distraction, he finally gets the infant dressed and the three of them go sit on the couch Sakura had purchased two weeks before to eat.

An hour later, Saruu is ecstatic as always when they drop off Sarada, and makes inappropriate jokes about why they're playing hooky that make Sakura blush and Sasuke laugh in spite of himself. She tells them that there's a private plot of land that her family owns about 8 miles out of town.

It's an overcast day so Sasuke decides it's safe to fly there with his summoning, Garuda. While they're in the air, Sasuke can't help but look at his wife's serene face the entire time. She lays back as soon as they take off and spends the entire 20 minute trip with her eyes closed and a smile on her face. Her hair is half way down her back now and she hasn't tied it up yet, so it flows around her like water, or maybe like chakra. He can't decide.

When they reach the plot of land, he's almost surprised to not see grass matching Sakura's hair. Instead, for as far as the eye can see there's only dirt and rock. They appear to be on a plateau of some kind, but they were too far in the clouds on the way here for Sasuke to know how far the edge is from them.

He releases the summons, and immediately feels the wind shift on his back. He turns, ready, but all he finds is Sakura's cloak still falling behind him. For the warm up, he leaves his Sharingan off and closes his Rinnegan eye, so he can only use the vision she has to scan the area around them. It's only when he feels his bangs shift on his forehead that he thinks to look up.

Sure enough, he sees a heeled boot coming right for his face, attached to it is a beaming pinkette. He dodges, thankfully because when she hits the ground, there's a little crater left even without chakra. He smirks back at her, giving himself a good distance, and removes his cloak with one move. Taijutsu it is then.

He charges first this time, aiming his open palm for her left rib cage, which she dodge at the last moment and grabs his wrist. He can feel her trying to use his weight against him, but he recognizes the pattern of her moves and chalks his arm up to a loss. He balances on his left foot, and brings his right one up his wife's knee, he kicks hard enough to throw her off balance and that's all. She waivers for a moment, releasing his wrist and steadying herself. Wrist free, he goes in again, this time with a kunai summoned from his shirt sleeve.

Sakura must have noticed because she jumps up again, launching herself over his head, and lands behind him with a kunai of her own drawn.

They continue this way for hours, no chakra, no jutsu, just kunai and muscles and open laughs. Neither of them win, they just get close enough and start again. It's the lightest sparring Sasuke thinks he's ever done but his muscles are singing from being used finally and by the time sweat makes his hair stick to his skin, he might as well be a child again playing a game on the school yard. Not that he ever played games back then, but if it had been this fun he thinks he might have.

Sakura keeps up with him just as well as she did before Sarada, though it doesn't take long to notice that she still protects her abdomen subconsciously more than any other part of her. When it causes him to get a really good hit into her back, he finally mentions it to her and sees an alarming glaze move over her eyes before she agrees that was the cause. She completely drops the behavior after that.

All he brought for lunch was tomatoes and he's pleased that it makes Sakura laugh the entire time that they sit and eat. Mixed with the loud wind of this elevation, her laughter has to be his favorite song.

"How about we meditate for a while; practice a little chakra control?" she asks while she buries the seeds from her tomatoes. He doesn't bother to tell her that they probably won't grow up here.

He agrees, and lets her guide him through meditation for the better part of half an hour. Sasuke gets frustrated when he comes to the conclusion that in childhood he had been so much better at this than he is now.

It doesn't take any words or much time for Sakura to notice. "You can't concentrate, can you?" She asks, her hand on his cheek giving him permission to stop trying.

"I can't get my brain to shut up." He says because it's true, and because the questions from the night before were swirling around up there, taunting him.

Sakura seems thoughtful for a moment. "You're more of a doer anyway," she decides. "Let's try chakra control then."

"I don't see any trees to walk up," he jokes.

Sakura lightly slaps his arm. "I had other things planned, obviously." She gets up with an eye roll.

"Like?" he asks, following her a few meters away from where they had meditated.

"Watch," she instructs. "You can use your Sharingan too."

He does as instructed and activates his Sharingan, the entire world gets darker but his wife glows the familiar teal green he's used to.

She gives a wide berth between them, and when she stops he can already see the chakra she's building in her pointer and middle finger. It flows from her thin limb and creates a kind of knife's edge around the digits. Sakura takes a deep breath and slowly, with purpose, bends down and barely touches the two chakra covered fingers to the ground. He sees with his Sharingan that the shape she had created wasn't meant to be a knife, but more like a needle. Below her fingers, he sees her chakra flowing into the ground.

Nothing happens for a long moment, until he can no longer see his wife at all for the brightness of the chakra in the ground, fanning out, growing under Sakura's experienced coaxing. He switches off his Sharingan and sees Sakura standing serenely in front of him, seemingly just standing there with her fingers on the ground.

He hears what happens next before he sees it. The ground cracks and the sound is more like bones breaking than earth. It only takes a moment for him to send chakra back to his eye to see what's happening, but by the time he sees the pool of teal chakra below their feet, it's already exploding upwards. He jumps to avoid the debris and lands next to his smug wife.

"Show off," he teases.

She scoffs and watches the dust settle over her crater. "You try."

"None of my jutsu require a technique like that." He says because it had taken him 10 times as long to figure out how to walk up a tree anyways, so he knows he won't be able to do anything near what she just did.

"The first step to circulating chakra in a person is to practice on fish," she says, and he's silent because he has no idea what that has to do with anything. She looks at him, taking her queue to continue. "But I don't see any fish around here! And I might need your help when we go next week."

Sasuke's throat is dry at the thought of the years his wife was giving up for the child of their childhood friend. "I'm not a medic," is all he can get out.

She nods in agreement. "You're not, but after Sarada…" she trails off and stares at where their child had grown. "My seal has never been that empty before, even when Obito and I were looking for you back then. I know I can do this, but the loss of chakra so soon after childbirth and chakra depletion might make my recovery time take longer."

Sasuke sighs, and looks off into the distance. So Sakura hadn't been honest with the Akamichi's about the risks for her after all. Typical.

"How much longer?"

The look from earlier in the day glazes over her eyes again for a moment, but she quickly hides it from him. "When Pain attacked the village, Shishou used so much chakra that she was unconscious for weeks. That's the only reason Danzo was 'hokage' when you killed him."

Sasuke recoils from the memory, he knows they both know that right after that it was her he had wanted dead.

"She was also using the jutsu to keep herself looking younger though, so I'm not sure if it'll be quite that extreme. I do know that I was only conscious in the hideout before Sarada was born because of Karin's chakra though." She's rambling faster and faster as the words escape, she's obviously nervous. She might even be expecting anger.

Sasuke just sighs, and steps forward so she can't see the scowl on his face. "What do I need to do?"

It takes an hour and a half before he's able to push enough chakra into the ground for so much as a pebble to move from the ground. It takes him about 15 times the amount of chakra he's injecting into the ground to get it to penetrate at all. When he saw Sakura do it, she was so efficient the amount of chakra she used to move the chakra into the ground was less than it took to stand on water.

His problem, as he just now decided, is that this technique is much too delicate for him. It may look flashy and like a show of power, but in reality it's more like performing surgery on the ground with nothing but your chakra. Sakura may be known for her brute strength but it appears he relies on bruteness more so.

He's out of breath just as a little "puff" comes from the ground, the sound is just as pathetic as the disturbed dirt. He scowls at the tiny hole he's made. The ground has betrayed him, his chakra has betrayed him. He has failed.

In a fit of what one might call childish rage he summons chakra to his palm and almost too easily compared to the last hour and a half of struggling changes it to electricity. He grunts as the chidori makes contact with the ground, tearing it apart in a much more satisfying way.

From far behind him he can hear Sakura absolutely losing it. When he turns she's falling to the dirt, holding her stomach and snorting.

"That's...heh...one….way…" She can't get the rest out for the laughter, and Sasuke thinks he should be offended.

Instead, he finds himself laughing too, looking at the giant crater that had erased his shameful divots.

Sakura takes her time to make her way over to him, he's sitting now and she's still giggling when she joins him.

"You were doing really good!" she says and he just raises his eyebrows at her. "Really! Really! You were doing better than Ino was on her first day. Don't tell her I told you this but she killed three fish her first day, one of them even exploded!"

"Stop laughing at me or I will," he threatens. He said it too quickly, and has to stop himself from physically recoiling. If he attempted to speak to her best friend at this point, there'd only be accusations and punches thrown, not funny childhood memories.

She slaps his only arm. "Oh quit it, you will not. Anyway, I think you're using too much chakra to move yours, and it's backfiring on you."

"Hn."

Sakura leans her head on his sweaty shoulder, his shirt long forgotten. "It's okay though, it was a long shot."

"What do we do now?" he asks, trying to mask the defeat in his voice.

"If I'm out of it after we harvest the flower, you'll need to bring me to the clinic here, they can give me chakra, the delay will just mean I'll be out of it longer though. I'll have to find someone to make the medicine for me."

"We won't be able to wait for you to wake up?"

The look on her face now is one he can immediately identify: she's worried. "Chocho-chan won't be able to wait at all if I'm going to save her chakra network."

"Hn."

They sit and watch the setting sun for a while, until Sakura has another idea for training. It comes from almost nowhere, but most of her ideas do.

"Did you lose your powers after the war too?" She asks, light behind her eyes. She reads in his face that he's confused by her question. "Naruto lost all of the gifts the Sage of Six Paths gave him, did you too? Other than the portal thing?"

"Oh? No, as far as I know my Rinnegan can still function the same. I only used a few of the paths during the war though." He leaves out that he used them on his allies, because she already knows this.

Her face turns into a smirk. "Your turn to show off, show me." Sakura commands in a playful way.

Sighing, but with a little inkling of excitement he stands and walks away from her. "What do you want to see first?" he calls from over his shoulders.

He can almost feel her tapping her finger to her chin behind him. "Planetary Devastation!" she yells with a booming voice. He lets his questions go about why she wants to see this, as it's a jutsu that destroyed their village and that he almost used to destroy the world.

With a steadying breath, he summons the necessary chakra to his eye. He remembers the intent behind it last time he had performed this jutsu, so he imagines the black hole-like structure hard enough that it forms in his hand. He wills it, with nothing but his gaze to climb it through the air. He can feel the weight of the little dot on his soul, connected to him through his Rinnegan.

It only takes it a moment to proverbially get with the program, and start attracting the ground. First it comes in small pebbles, then the telltale huge chunks of earth dance around them. Sakura gracefully jumps out of the way, he expects her to give him a wide berth so he's surprised when she lands directly to his side.

"Now make it stop," she yells over the sound of cracking and crumbling around them.

"What? It's not complete."

"The more powerful the jutsu the harder it is to completely control," she says in a strange singsong voice. He vaguely remembers Kakashi saying those words to him in what seems like another life. In hindsight he realizes Kakashi was trying to teach him to stop the chidori before he killed someone with it, a skill Kakashi himself had lacked when he had killed Rin.

"I'm not sure if this works like that," he screams. But honestly, he does try to make the gravitational-like pull stop- to no avail.

"How do you stop the Amaterasu?"

That was an interesting question, because for the longest time he didn't think one could, until instinct took over with team Taka back then. A secondary to breathing kind of skill now, he tries to remember, all while dodging boulders are flying at them, how he did it that first time. He remembers thinking of the Amaterasu as a sort of contract with the flames, a bond of honor if you will. He was angry at them, in a childish way, for they weren't listening to him. It was the anger that had caused him to send a burst of chakra to his other Sharingan with the intent to end.

I don't have another Rinnegan though, he reasons in his head. At that moment Sakura fails to dodge a piece of rock in her escape of a bed-sized boulder and it causes a crimson line to appear on her upper arm. She's a doctor, she's a doctor, she's a doctor, he tries to tell himself. It only takes a moment for another even larger boulder uproots itself and barrels towards the pinkette. By instinct, as easy as breathing, he switches place with the accursed object only to find himself crashing into his wife mid air.

"What the hell!?" she screeches as he does his best to scoop her up with his only arm. The attractor above them is now as big to them as the moon usually is from the ground and he has to end it now. "I totally had that, shannaro!"

"Shut up," he commands, eyes locked on the sphere. Here goes nothing. He can't end it without another Rinnegan so that leaves him with one option. "You might need to lend me some chakra after this," he whispers into his wife's hair. Just like the Final Valley. Sasuke sends a rush of chakra and his very will into his Rinnegan. The pressure in his eye builds until he's sure he's going to lose it, but he pushes further. Sweet relief comes in the form of a massive pressure wave, whose force is so great the compressing air can be seen with the naked eye. It moves outward from the Uchiha couple until it makes contact with everything in the air.

Sasuke appears to have given this Almighty Push enough power to only break the cloud layer, but it's enough for the attraction to be weakened and for the two of them to land on the ground.

"That's the most inefficient way to do that," Sakura scoffs, looking at him how she had always looked at Naruto.

"This was your stupid idea, what do you expect me to do?"

"Make it disappear. If you don't learn how to use the six paths at least a little in tandem and on demand your Rinnegan will be more like a handicap compared to the Sharingan." Sakura's face is back to the thoughtful expression he's familiar with. She's right.

"I don't have 6 bodies to do my bidding for me," he says half out loud. His lungs burn from the effort, he can't seem to catch his breath. Chakra depletion is one of the worst feelings.

"So stick with the ones that won't exhaust you, or cause collateral damage." Sakura taps her finger to her chin and looks up the now very tiny looking sphere in the sky. "Maybe instead of thinking of the paths as separate jutsu you should think of them as different forms of the same one."

"One path brings back the dead and another makes cannons pop out of one's body, Tsuma."

To this, Sakura clicks her tongue at her husband in a scold. "One chidori controls the lightning of an entire thunder storm and another is basically just a fancy sword. You're using Karin in a Light Spear situation, is all I'm saying."

The main difference between the two jutsu that his wife is using for examples is one could destroy an entire area, and the other could be aimed as delicately as he likes.

Aim.

"I've never opened a portal that big before." He replies, finally understanding.

Sakura nods, "Right now you can only fit a person or two through at once."

"You could have just told me this is what you wanted to see," Sasuke scoffs. "You're worse than Kakashi!"

Sasuke focuses at a point just above the sphere he created. It occurs to him as he begins forming a portal to the high gravity dimension (hopefully the attraction of that dimension can assist him), that he overlooked another difference between Kirin and Light Spear. Density.

An object, or an enemy for that matter, doesn't need to be carefully enveloped in the portal to be pulled through, at least according to his most recent hypothesis. Sakura's next to him but that doesn't stop a much younger voice of hers from ringing through his head. She was the first one to understand the scientific method in the academy, a feat she had unwittingly rubbed in his face that whole year. Next was a recreateable experiment.

He imagines the portal as a thundercloud, his chakra the heat that causes it to grow. He studied clouds extensively while developing Kirin for Itachi, and like Kirin this version of his jutsu didn't need to be clean either. It could be messy and wild and everything he strived not to be, if he lets it.

So he does, and the thin black veil spreads out to a size just bigger than the cumulus boulder, at least 6 times bigger than any time he'd practiced alone. There was a strange whining noise as the rock meets the translucent opening to the high-gravity space, but it only resists slightly on its way in. As it disappears, their surroundings calm and Sasuke can't help but marvel at the hole left in the cloud layer above.

With a hand on her hip, Sakura jests, "Show off."

A chuckle that starts deep in his stomach and is unsupressable on the way up escapes his lips. He felt invincible for the first time in a long time and by Sakura's posture and first true smile of the week he inferred she did too. The pain of overexertion turns into a numb humming caused by endorphins.

When he turns to her she isn't surprised, and when he puts his lips to hers in the first non-peck since they become parents she melts.

"Let's go home," he whispers into her hair because anywhere with her and their Sarada is home now.

Karui decides to stay behind when the group is ready to go find the medicinal flower Sasuke can't remember the name of to save his life. Sasuke is sure it's one part to stay out of their way and one part to have some peace without the Uchiha's for the first day since their arrival. Choji meets them at the edge of the nearby cliff side just ask 4:30 in the morning. His disheveled hair and heavy eyes mirror Sasuke's.

Sakura tiredly nods in the direction opposite the clearly worn path. The three set off, in silence other than Choji's quiet munching.

Sakura speaks about an hour later, the sun is rising now and the air is warmer and stickier for it.

"Do you guys see that?"

Sasuke stops shoulder to shoulder with choji on their path up the mountain, he ignores the rock chips that fall hundreds of feet down. Being afraid of heights is stupid. Ahead of Sakura, beyond the curve of the cliff-face about 50 yards all vegetation stops. It's obviously not from a fire, it's as if no life had ever taken root there even though it was right next to a lush forest.

"Maybe there's never light there?" Choji notes, as the area is also currently in the path of the mountain's shadow. They continue on to investigate.

"There's never been a lot of nature chakra left over here." Sakura chimes as Sasuke kneels to observe the soil. "The plant we're after uses an extraordinary amount of chakra to exist, so much that we're probably not even that close to one."

"Why does it need our chakra then?" Choji asks, thoughtfully and Sakura consults one the 12 maps she insisted on putting in Sasuke's pack.
"It needs this much chakra to exist," Sakura gestures around them. "It needs even more to thrive. It's like the chakra resistant species, the ones that derive 100% of their energy from the sun. An okay-ish plant can survive on a little light here and there, but to thrive and bloom, or produce fruit it needs a lot."

Choji does a sort of blinking thing that makes Sakura laugh, and it sounds like bells.

"This way idiots."

Sasuke prides himself on being a tracker, of men, of prey, of babies learning to crawl. He can track with the best, and yet he has absolutely no idea where they are or how they got there. It's well past 5 in the afternoon and they're now 3 mountains into the range by the village. He's followed in near silence for the entire day, watching in amusement and at times awe, how well Choji and Sakura work together. They both know too much about the patterns of plant growth and geology for shinobi he thinks.

They're at the mouth of a huge cave that's not on Sakura's maps. Hopefully, within this gaping void their prize awaits, because this is the 3rd flower they had found evidence of and only the first with any kind of opening nearby. Excavation was out of the question for fear of damaging the plant before they could make it grow.

They're only 2 feet into the cave when Sakura stops and coughs in an obvious way. "Uh, Sasuke. I didn't bring flashlights because we need to see the whole area at once to search the fastest." The way she says it, while wiggling her toe in the dirt is such a contradiction to her current self. He can't help but smirk at his wife, the person she is now, asking him for something like she did when she was 13.

"Hn," is all he says as he activates Susanoo. The faint purple glow probably helps the other two the most, but now that he's sending chakra to his eyes, he can see what Sakura had been talking about when they were close to the first flower. Under the impossible black of the void, within the natural chakra-laden layer of the ground, were what looked like roots. The fact that he could see them, however meant they weren't roots exactly. This thing they were searching for used more chakra to stay alive than most jutsu he'd gone up against with his Sharingan by the looks of the amount of chakra pouring into the south side of the cave.

"This way," he orders, breaking Choji and Sakura out of their examination of a small patch of crystals behind him.

"You can see it?" Sakura asks as they shuffle up to meet him. He nods.

"That would have come in handy during the war!" Choji chimes in, opening a bag of chips, probably to congratulate himself.

"Yes!" Sakura chirps with a smile Sasuke doesn't need to see to know it's there.

Unable to resist the bait, Sasuke finds himself asking, "You two found this flower during the war?"

"No, we were both sent out a few times to gather herbs for medicine and food pills," Sakura explained. "But most of those plants do the same thing as this one, just on a much smaller scale"

As if in tune with her word, the flow under their feet gets brighter. In a few more paces there are no voids of chakra free space left on the path they walk.

"It's close." He says sternly.

Sakura and Choji nod and everyone quickens their pace.

"It's here!" Sakura squeals. Sasuke has to deactivate his Sharingan to see what she's walking towards. On the far end of the expansive cave room they're in now, there's what looks to Sasuke like a nail sticking out of the ground.

He and Choji follow Sakura, and soon both verify that the nail is in fact, a stem.

"What do we do now?" Choji asks. The hope in his voice echoes around the cave.

Sakura takes off her pack and pulls out a small raggedy scroll. She ties her hair with the band on her wrist and pulls open the scroll. Her eyebrows furrow in a way that Sasuke knows to interpret as concentration, though he finds it cute as well.

After reading the scroll for what has to be the 100th time, Sakura nods. "I'm going to begin now."

The men nod back at her, watching carefully from a few feet away as she does a simple hand sign. Sakura cups her hands around the small stalk, and Sasuke can see with his Sharingan how the chakra flows into it, pooling in a growing reservoir under the stalk.

After several minutes, everything looks unchanged to the naked eye, though the underground reservoir is so bright now that Sasuke has to turn off his Sharingan.

Sakura releases her seal around the time Choji decides to sit down, they've been in this cave for 2 hours, still no visible change.

Even with 4 hours of time for their eyes to adjust, Choji and Sasuke hear Sakura fall over before they see it. "Shit," she lets out under her breath as Sasuke rushes over to kneel beside her. "Not enough," she whispers to him, gesturing to the now budding plant.

A feeling of panic washes over his body when she sits back up, already feeding more chakra into the ground. He remembers what she had tried to teach him, how to share his chakra. He isn't good enough to envelope his own chakra to move it, but Sakura is.

"Use your chakra to move mine into it, instead of giving it your chakra. You need a break," he offers but she shrugs him off. He knows she's even more annoying when she's tired so he decides to wait until she falters again.

An hour later, he can hear her breathing as the loudest sound in the cave, and decides it's time. Taking a play from her book, he sits opposite her and starts ineffectively moving his own chakra into the reservoir.

"What are you doing? You're just wasting chakra!" she says loud enough for sleeping Choji to roll away from them. Sasuke only shrugs and continues his efforts. After about 5 minutes of this, she concedes. "Fine, just give me your hands, baka." She says it with a sigh but he knows she's relieved.

He feels her chakra surrounding his hands, that are cupping the plant. It doesn't take long for them to match speeds, with him only giving her as much chakra as she can move and her only moving it at a pace that won't exhaust him.

"Your chakra feels different," she mentions, breaking the silence some minutes later.

"Hn?"

"I'm not a sensory type but I can sense what they can about someone's chakra when I'm healing them. Even after your final battle your chakra wasn't like this." She says, her hair is covering her face in the shadow of the cave but he knows she's smiling.

"Like what?"

"Warm," she whispers. He lifts his head to offer her a warm smile in response.

The flower is almost bloomed when he can feel himself running out of juice. He doesn't think Sakura has noticed, as she's been constantly using her chakra for 12 hours now. He won't need long to recover even if he uses almost all of his supply, so he shuts it out of his mind and solely focuses on the task at hand.

His focus is too great, but the time Choji cheers that the flower looks ready, both Sasuke and Sakura only have the energy to open their eyes once. He feels his wife falls into him first, quickly followed by his own bones hitting a rocky floor. He can hear Choji yelling after them, but he seems so far away Sasuke ignores it. They deserve rest, he thinks.

The only problem is, when the dark and damp cave melts away, he is surrounded by white, not a peaceful sleep.

A bitter cold engulfs him, tiny painful pinpricks swirling on his face as the light works to blind him. As his eyes adjust to the white, all he can make out is snow, snow on the ground, snow falling in fat flakes around him, snow in his pink bangs.

Wait. Pink.

Sasuke frantically moves his eyes around, his body frozen in place by cold and fear. All he can see is snow and more snow, hiding the answers he's searching for. He forces his head down. The feat burns the muscles in his neck, a stark contrast to the numbing burn on his cheeks.

At first all he can make out is red, his eyes take a full minute before he can make out that the red is a big jacket. Further down his eyes make out the shape of legs- not his legs but he knows these legs- and heeled boots buried up to his (her) ankles.

Genjutsu. It has to be genjutsu.

With a calming breath he forces chakra to his eyes, trying to cast his own genjutsu over the one he's trapped in. He can't move his arm yet and the sharingan has always been more effective than a release. The cold dissipates for a moment but it returns. He opens his eyes once more, baffled. Even as a genin he cannot remember a genjutsu besides Itachi's that he couldn't escape from. One of them surely would have noticed if a Shinobi even close to his brother's caliber had entered the cave with them. What is going on?

With seemingly no choices he lets the genjutsu (or whatever one would call a vision that even the Rinnegan couldn't escape from) take him fully.

As if it had been waiting for him to submit, the body he seems to be inhabiting moves. It takes a deep centering breath and in an instant it's gathering chakra in his right hand with an ease and knife sharp edge to it that is completely foreign to him. It raises his hand even further and forces the air out of his lungs so quickly the fog around his face doesn't allow him to see the hand- his hand (her hand)- hit the snow. The ground around him swells, moving him in the air at least 20 feet, all without his feet leaving the surface. When the mound comes back down, he jumps out of the way just in time to see a large volcano-like structure of ice and water shoot into the grey sky.

'I did it!' a voice in his head that he recognizes as a childish version of his wife exclaims. He can feel what she felt at that moment in time, whenever he is. His hands ball and pumping the air and his face curls into an overwhelming smile, hurting his weathered face in the process.

"I guess we should have started on the ground," he recognizes it's Tsunade that's behind him (her) but the Sakura in his head won't let his body move. She keeps her eyes (now his eyes) peeled on the 40 feet wide hole in the ice covering the lake ahead. "It took Shizune a full week to crack the ice, are you sure you didn't come out here to practice before today?" Tsunade asks as she stops beside her pupil.

Sakura shakes her head without moving her eyes from the hole. "It felt…" she pauses for a moment and even without hearing the thoughts going through her head, Sasuke knows what she's going to say. He felt it too. "So good." she breathes. "I didn't think I could do it, but I did and it felt so good."

"Hmph"

Tsunade leads them to a clearing in the trees about a 5 minute's walk from the river. There are boulders in the far side of the clearing, and mud walls with dog heads scattered closer to them. Sakura and Sasuke in her head recognize the walls as Kakashi's, and Sakura only needs to nod at them for her teacher to understand her question.

Sakura tightens her gloves and breathes into her hands to warm her face, fog clouding her vision as Tsunade explains. "Kakashi-kun wanted to help with your training, but the chakra control you're learning is over his head so we compromised."

Sakura tilted her head back and wrinkled her nose. "I know I've seen him destroy walls and stuff with chakra adding to strength before."

Tsunade saunters over to one of the walls, stopping about 10 feet back. Sakura watches at a distance as Shishou starts her latest lesson. "What you just did on the lake, Kakashi-kun could do, you're right. That's just adding a bit of a punch to your hits, but if you stopped there, Sakura, you wouldn't be worth my time."

Sakura laughs lightly at the pun and watches in awe as two blond pigtails dance gracefully between flakes of snow. Tsunade is making a motion to punch, slowly and exaggerated so Sakura can soak in her movements. She doesn't move closer so when she recoils her fist and releases, she makes contact with nothing. This does not mean safety for the wall she's aimed at however, and it takes all of Sakura's normal eyes' focus to see what's happening. It's faint and Sasuke is more grateful than ever for his sharingan, but Sakura can just barely make out the warping of the air as Tsunade builds chakra in her fist, then around it. Her chakra moves the air, a heat wave in the frozen tundra. Sakura only notices how massive and precisely kept in shape the chakra is outside of Tsunade's body seconds before the chakra rushes out in a tight line from her fist.

To the outward observer, Tsunade just moved her first from 10 feet away and caused the wall to explode as if it were hit by a spinning vortex of water. Sakura squeals and claps (Sasuke is certain this is the first time he has ever experienced clapping).

"What did I just do?" Tsunade asks with a smug look on her face.

Sasuke can see from Sakura's flash of memory that this is how the old woman had taught her everything she knew. She would show, and Sakura would deduce. Sakura, whenever they were, still thought this was nothing more than her teacher's eccentric style. Sasuke knows it was because Sakura was exceptional and overshadowed by Naruto and himself. Tsunade knew this, and probably even during this memory knew that Sakura would surpass her.

"Based on how the debris flew away, you built up chakra in your fist like normal." Sakura taps her chin to feign thinking, but Sasuke is in her head and knows she already has the answer. "But then you spin it really fast, and let it leach out. I just can't figure out if you have to keep controlling it- like the spin- while it hits or if you just let it go."

"How about you try it," Tsunade offers, stepping aside and gesturing to the next wall, about 20 feet from her.

Sakura positions herself at the same distance that her mentor had been from her now defunct wall. Sasuke could feel it with idle amusement as Sakura imagined a ball of water floating around her arm. She willed it to spin, picturing Naruto's rasengan. This didn't feel right though, so she changes her approach.

A crispy version of himself appears, into a thin view. He remembers this, Kakashi had been teaching him the Spiral Vortex Flame and he couldn't control it. Sakura had to be there to help extinguish Sasuke and their Sensei.

She pictures fire surrounding her forearm in a neat spiral, the chakra tears at her jacket and skin in a way that would make Sasuke put a halt to it, but she knows how to balance it out, more strength less spirit. She takes a deep, steadying breath and pulls back her fist, chakra still swirling around her now exposed arm. As she snaps her arm forward, she releases the chakra, a massive weight of it, and relinquishes control.

She's thrown back in the next moment as chakra and disturbed snow and ice tear into her flesh. Her arms are blocking her face as she flies back so she does not see her Shishou come towards her until she's already being steadied on her feet by the woman.

"Why would you let me try that!?" Sakura bursts out, her eyes are wide and watery as they focus on the uneven destruction before them.

Tsunade wraps Sakura's exposed arm in a thick bandage, mostly to protect it from the cold, and smirks. When she's done, she pushes Sakura back into the clearing.

"Try it another way!" She calls from behind.

Sasuke is grateful for only one moment that Orochimaru had at least not been this frustrating as a teacher.

Sakura is angry, but eager to experiment with chakra control outside of her body. She decides to approach it not like one would a jutsu like Chidori or the Rasengan (how Sasuke was reasoning out this memory would end) but rather how she controls chakra inside of the fish she's training on.

Her chakra the previous time had been too well controlled around her arm, and released so rapidly that it had spun out of control and hurt its owner. This time, she focuses the chakra on her fist like she had with the lake. In the fish she'd learned to heal, you decide what you want your chakra to do inside of the fish, and then you encase that chakra inside of healing chakra. (Sasuke is starting to figure out why so few people are medics even at the animal level)

A hypothesis forms behind her closed eyes and by the time she opens them and raises her arm to view, she's ready to test it. She can see the faint blue glow of a chakra infused limbs, it barely changes shape when she adds the same vortex of chakra as last time. Encase it, control it. The chakra she adds to control it is that of a sleeve, a thick and heavy and unbelievably draining sleeve.

In theory this should be just like forcing healing chakra into a body, but Sakura underestimated the difference between controlling healing chakra as it closes off delicate blood vessels and this spiralling and chaotic display of her strength. Her arm could weigh a thousand pounds now for the pressure, not in her muscles, but in her chakra network. The way the innermost places in her arm burns reminds of him of when he was 12 and trying that third chidori in a row. Her young chakra supply and pathways could not take this kind of strain, and most definitely should not be allowing her to continue.

A strangled "Shanaro!" escapes her cracked lips and Sasuke expects her to stop now, her tiny arm is being torn apart by her own chakra. She's too stubborn though and the pain in her arm only fuels her in a very Naruto way. Her other arm snaps up and she swathes the skin and muscles of her right arm with healing chakra with her left. The effort leaves her breathless but she can feel the chakra around her arm stabilizing.

If she was a battery to be charged he's sure she'd be very near 0% right now. She finally, though only half way there, releases the punch. Instead of letting it run rampant in front of her, she focuses, using the sleeve she crafted as a tether. She can feel almost like her chakra has become another part of her body when her chakra cuts through the wall in front like butter, and continue past it. One wall, two walls, three walls. At the forth, she starts to lose control. A human's chakra was not meant to still be connected to them at this distance, and she feels it equally trying to return to her and trying to steal the rest of her chakra with it.

It takes less than a second for her to decide to loosen her grip, to let her chakra fan out as fast as she's pushing it forward. It takes the rest of that second for the force to find equilibrium again. She reaches her limit as the "sleeve" of chakra whiplashes back into her, and Sasuke is sure it has to be the only chakra left in their body.

There's a still moment where Sakura can stand in awe at her work. All of the walls in a straight line are completely gone, their only trace a path of carved up clay. There's almost a perfectly symmetrical forking where she had to loosen her grip, and it fans out all the way to the trees on the other end of the clearing. Everything in the path of her one single punch was destroyed.

"Oh!" is all she can say as she falls backwards into the snow. Sasuke had been right, she was now very close to dangerously low on chakra. Still though, the only thing he could hear over her pulse was the breathless laughter she couldn't keep in.

"The more chakra you try to throw out, the more chakra it takes to control it." Tsunade explains from above her and Sakura isn't surprised she that didn't notice her approach. "If you try to go full power like that in a battle as you are now, you'll be useless after."

Sakura is panting and seems to welcome the old womans warm chakra as it pours into her abdomen. "So should I.. Should…" Sakura has to gulp, her lungs hurt maybe from the cold, maybe from the strain. Tsunade moves her hands over her chest and Sakura sighs with relief. "So should I control it and do more destruction or stick with easier hits to keep from this." She tries to gesture with her arms but they barely even twitch.

The old woman smiles and her eyes are sad for a moment. "One day you'll be able to do that whenever you want, Sakura. What did I tell you?"

He sees the pictures in his mind of his younger self, the way Sakura had seen him. She pictures him at all of his strongest physical points. Her mind stops at a memory of him breaking the sound-nins arms with a smile on his face. She thinks, as the cold fades away, that this must have been what he felt like back then.

The world swirls away again and for a moment he thinks he's back in the cave, but when his eyes adjust he sees he's in a field. His eyes and body take less time to respond this time. Within the first minute he can move his head down to confirm what he already knows.

He's still Sakura.

As if a grand director had screamed action the scene around him moves into fast forward. Sakura is alone in the field until she's not. A massive rogue ninja from the Stone is on the other end of the clearing, partially masked by the shadows the tree lines make in the moonlight.

"I'm only on a supply missive to a nearby clinic, it's not worth the trouble!" She shouts at him, but Sasuke can feel the burning in her throat as the words escape. He cannot feel the chakra of a teammate and the pounding of Sakura's pulse in his ears tells him no one will be showing up.

The rogue doesn't respond, only walks forward with a confidence and a swagger to him that left a knot in his stomach. He wasn't sure if the knot was his own or Sakura's but it didn't seem to matter. Sakura pushed the slightest amount of chakra around her body, willing it to stop shaking, as she placed her backpack on the ground behind her. Her mind was racing with victorious battles and visions of Sasuke's smile, building her confidence in a way Sasuke finds himself envying.

The rogue shinobi pounces, all brute strength and sloppy limbs barrel towards her small frame. She counters the first strike, and her counter misses by a hair's width. She jumps back to ready herself for another attack, pulling out a kunai and throwing it before he lands. The rogue hits it away with a distinct ting but she doesn't see it. He's thrown a smoke bomb around himself.

Sakura gives herself a solid distance between her small body and the billowing cloud of smoke. The rogue lunges forward, above her by a few feet. His leg barely misses her face in a powerful kick. With little control over his massive body, he slams past her and his leg intercepts with a tree. The blow meant for her face ledges itself into the bark. He snarls and frees himself as Sakura runs toward him, he decides to knock the tree over trying to hit her and rather than dodge she decides in a split second, anger controlling her, to show off her strength to him too.

The massive tree whips towards her, massive and foreboding enough to make her heartbeat betray her. She thrusts her chakra-ready fist into the air and the force of the chakra alone might as well be a wood chipper. The tree never even connects with her fist.

While she's distracted, the rogue shinobi moves to her left side. She dodges his first punch with ease, and it's only when a sharp pain hits the back of her left shoulder that she realizes her grave mistake.

'The backpack.' Sasuke hears Sakura's inner voice shriek, both realizing at once and all too late where she had set down the supplies she was to deliver.

It was a careless mistake, stupid really. Sasuke realizes only as Sakura's thoughts start racing that its one she's made on her very first mission alone.

The prick on her shoulder grows to a searing pain, then to nothingness. She skidds back, trying feebly to escape the the towering man. His expression changes as he drops the syringe, and her mind is a cacophony of panic and medical terms. Her body seems to be disconnecting itself from her control, muscles she means to flex only whimper and twitch. Her chakra seems to be unscathed however, and she uses it to run.

'Anesthetic.' Sakura decides and it's the first word Sasuke recognizes since she started running. Inner Sakura does math that Sasuke is sure must be in a foreign language and comes to the conclusion that she has 6 minutes until her chakra runs out, she's pumping enough through every muscle she can still feel to completely crush her bones under normal circumstances.

She's too slow however, and as she darts past a towering oak the rogue shinobi is already in front of her. She sees his hand raise and Sasuke can feel how much effort it takes to move her arms at all to soften the blow that would be to their shared chest.

She flies backwards, legs waving unnaturally as she does so, unable to keep them in place curled in on herself. She doesn't hit the ground when she stops, and Sasuke is sure its both of their stomachs making this twisting feeling, both of their pulses deafening in his ears. She inches her head up, and makes eye contact with the man that's stopped her from hitting the grass.

Up close she can smell his foul breath and see the dark and veiny circles under his eyes. It takes too much chakra to hold her head in that way, her focus draining along with the whiplash she diagnosed herself with internally.

"Guess I got double lucky tonight," the rogue shinobi purrs in a most vulgar way in her ear. As the goosebumps of dread pepper their way across her (his) bare neck Sasuke finds himself, for the first time since this weird vision started, screaming.

He screams in the nothingness that exists inside of one's own mind, thrashes against nonexistent restraints, begs with someone who is not there to make this stop, he's seen enough.

Please just make it stop.

But it doesn't and Sasuke can't close his eyes because Sakura did not in this moment. He feels her small bones echo in his skull as her body hits the ground in an unceremonious way. He feels the warmth of the rogue ninja lowering himself on top of his teenage wife, invading the cool sweet Spring air around them. He sees, because she saw the man's hardness as he looked at her the way Choji looks at food.

Sakura seems frozen, not because of the drug- she still has 2 minutes until she won't have any control at all. Her mind is a blaze with Sasuke's voice.

'We all have our own path.' The rogue shinobi grabs a kunai.

'Annoying.' He cuts her mission top with one delicate cut and Sasuke damns himself for not being there when this really happened.

'I don't need you.' The nin palms at her small breast but Sakura does not move, does not even try. He recognizes in her the same numbness he had once been so intimately acquainted.

She has given up, resigned herself to just prepare. The thoughts in her head start to drift towards how to make it so the shinobi has to kill her. This is her fault, the thoughts say (Sasuke knows its his wife's voice in them but the voice is so hollow he doesn't recognize it) that she was stupid and this is what she deserves. Sasuke was right, she is weak and annoying and he was right to leave her all alone for this night. She is doomed to repeat the past, always staring at their backs, always several steps behind.

Sasuke is screaming for Sakura now, trying to bring her back. He can feel a hand creeping downwards. Sakura is lost though, off in a land of faults and self loathing.

'You are my prodigy, ya know?' a voice appears in the back of her mind and Sasuke soaks it in. It's the only thing happening that doesn't make them both want to die. It's a memory, a far away and barely tangible one.

Sakura turns away from the memory, self loathing kicking in again, but just like the drunk woman in the memory herself, it is unavoidable and overwhelmingly loud in her head.

"But Shizune-san is…" she hears her voice say off in the distance. Sasuke relishes in the familiar and warm tone in the memory-Sakura's voice.

The woman starts as just an aura, further from Sakura's vision than the voice is to her ears. Before long, she is clear as day when Sakura closes her eyes, all life and flushed cheeks and honey eyes. She's drunk and she's happy and Sakura remembers the taste of her first sake accompanying the memory.

"Lissen...Lisssssen. Do not ever let anyone tell you that you are anything less than amazing." Sakura remembers just thinking how weird it was that her Shishou had so seriously stated this in the middle of drunkenly babbling. Sasuke knows it's because it's true and his wife even in his present life doesn't seem to grasp it.

"The fact that I made you my prodigy is all you or anyone else needs-hiccup- to know."

Back in the present (past) Sakura shoots her eyes open, a vigor they both recognize as a Naruto-like second wind rushes over her soul.

The shinobi is at her legs now, kunai sliding against shorts and flesh. She has 45 seconds left.

She amasses all of her remaining chakra in the leg that he doesn't have a kunai on. She's on her back, digging her hands into the dirt beneath her. Slowly as to not be noticed, she prepares to flip over. It only takes the smaller part of a second for her leg to spring up, catching her would be assailant off guard. With the fumes she can spare she pushes with her arms at the same time, her leg swings in a circular way. By the time she makes contact with his chest it's over.

She's on her stomach, head turned so she can only stare at him. Her leg is in a sickly crater of ribs and blood and sweat. She only notices his dead eyes staring at her when the pool of blood coming from him reaches her fingers. She's out of time and chakra but she's safe and she's conscious so she chalks it up to a win in her head.

The anesthetic takes the rest of the night to wear off, and Sasuke is conscious for every moment of that night, because Sakura had been. For 7 hours she (they) had stared at the man who would have been the end of her. In that time, her thoughts go from panicked and traumatized, to how right Sasuke had been about her, to damn him she had just saved herself, to an understanding.

As she slowly gains the ability to move a finger, then her forehead, then a few toes she thinks of Sasuke again before that entire world finally melts away for him.

The next Sakura he must embody is in more pain than he has ever thought a person could endure. It hits his soul like a spiked brick wall, only it's not just coming from one side. Her (his) eyes are closed and it makes it impossible to focus on anything other than the tearing, acidic pain. It's as if every inch of his organs have been covered in the nerves from his skin, and every single one of those nerves is alive with fireworks of pain.

Sakura's lungs are struggling to inflate under the weight of the pain, but he can tell she's trying her hardest to take deep breaths. He ponders for a moment how he might be so conscious in a memory that Sakura was not but he's interrupted by a barely coherent string of thoughts. She's recounting more foreign medical knowledge, he recognizes fetus and that's about it.

Sakura finally opens her eyes and can only see the blinding purple glow of Sasuke's Susanoo. Every shift of the hand enclosing her body causes a unique and new flavor of tearing pain. A rush of fluids spill out of her, at first Sasuke thinks she's messed herself for all of the jostling.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit." Sakura chants, quiet enough that Sasuke knows he can't hear her as he carries her to Karin's hideout. He recognizes the feeling of overwhelming blood loss from the Valley of the End and his soul goes cold. Through her drunken state, Sakura still manages to send chakra to her uterus to stop the bleeding. She gets the job done, but she's sloppy and it feels like a fresh gate to hell is being opened inside of her.

Sasuke would take blowing off his arm any day to what is happening now.

"Gahhh! Holy shit! What happened to you guys?" Karin screams at them when she meets them in the dark several meters from the hideout entrance as always. Her voice is recognizable but coming from the end of a long tunnel Sakura can't get through.

"We were attacked, obviously," Sasuke replies in an impatient tone.

"Sakura-chan?" Sakura tries to lift her arm, but her chakra flow falters from her abdomen when she does.

"Exhausted, can you take her? Hey careful!" Sakura is placed in Karin's arms and a new wave of sensations grate at her nerves. Sasuke can feel her thoughts, and all of them in that moment were focused on the tone in his voice.

As they reach the rocky entrance, and quickly make their way down the winding labyrinth of hallways towards the lab and living areas, Karin finally speaks up again.

"She's covered in blood Sasuke-kun..," Karin whispers, finally able to see her better in more than the moonlight.

"Ah, it's not hers. I need to use that phone thing as soon as we get to the lab, is it operational?"

"Of course, I'll show-" but everything is black and white noise for Sakura now. Sasuke screams into the void, trapped in someone else's comatose is an unraveling experience for the mind.

They come to on a tile floor that Sasuke recognizes as the bathroom in the hideout his daughter was born in. If Sakura recognizes it, she doesn't care enough to think about it.

"Save her." Sakura says bleakly. She tries to pool healing chakra in her abdomen but it's no use. A feeble whine escapes her lips. She's bleeding again, her head falls to her chest and all she sees around her buckled legs is a growing vermillion sheet. "Pretty," is cut off from her lips by Karin's arm.

Sakura bites as hard as she can and is almost relieved by the feeling of healing chakra washing over her tired body. 'Almost' because she has to immediately redirect all of the chakra to her abdomen. Karin's hand begins to glow green, but Sakura slaps them away. "Save your chakra," she whispers. "I'm going to need it soon."

Sasuke doesn't wince anymore as he feels the needle pricks of chakra stitching his wife's insides back together. The level of absolute focus in her mind is awe inspiring as she bites her own arm to keep from screaming at the tortuous workings of her own chakra.

When the pain finally slips from mind-destroying to only about a 9.9/10, Sakura takes a slow breath. She inhales and counts in her head to 5, exhales while counting to 5 and repeats until she can no longer hear her heartbeat as the loudest thing in the room.

When she speaks, her voice is dry and crackling. "Karin, we've become some kind of friends, right?"

Karin seems taken aback by the pinkette's question, as her eyes widen but do not leave the puddle of blood Sakura sits in. She nods, unsure.

Sakura smiles and lets out a hum of approval. "What I'm about to tell you, falls under not just doctor-patient but also friend-friend confidentiality then?"

Karin nods again, settling on the floor opposite Sakura, probably taking her chattiness as a queue to stop hovering.

"Earlier today, my placenta completely detached itself, leaving if I were to wager, about a 2cm hole in my uterus." Sakura pauses as she witnesses disbelief then fear warp Karin's features. "I've managed to patch the hole with new tissue growth but I cannot reattach the placenta completely."

"Sakura, we need to perform an emergency surgery." Karin says frantically, lunging towards Sakura on the floor. She's stopped however, by Sakura's fist planted squarely on her jaw. The red haired woman sinks back to her side of the tile, and internally Sasuke is both satisfied and annoyed at his wife's actions.

Satisfied because Karin is annoying in all the wrong ways and annoyed because Sakura refused their friend's help and he had let her.

"She's too weak," Sakura says in a hiss. "Underweight, under developed, she won't survive."

"It won't survive disconnected from you either."

"That's why I need your chakra, Karin." Sakura is annoyed now, and far too tired for this conversation. "I've managed to cacoon the fetus in my chakra and a few blood vessels, it's not much but we're alive."

Karin inhales in a way that reminds Sasuke of when he'd impaled her. "The moment you stop that, you'll die."

"I won't stop." Sakura states matter-of-factly.

"No one can keep that up for as long as you'll need to."

"I have to, we both know what will happen-" Sakura is cut off by a feeling akin to her internal organs turning to glass and shattering.

"Sasuke will kill me if I let you die." Karin says. Her eyes are sure, if not a little sad.

"If Sasuke loses this baby, the entire world is at risk. I know you're not blind enough to him to see that." Sakura hears Sasuke's footsteps down the hall and changes to a whisper. "The same people who ordered his clans inhiliation ordered this." She gestures to the blood surrounding them. "If you lend me your chakra, I promise you I will protect us all from that."

Karin pushes up her glasses with a grimace. "I guess you're right. But don't think I'm doing this for the world."

With a successful sigh, Sakura allows herself to close her eyes. She hears Sasuke's voice in a distant tunnel, but she can't make out what he's saying anymore.

Karin offers Sakura her arm, and he can feel chakra rush into her body. The more chakra, the less he feels attached to this plane. By the time he hears himself in this memory opening the door, he's back in the darkness.

Sasuke could sing for the relief of no longer being in the pain his pregnant wife had been in. He's in the darkness still, but he doesn't mind the break this time. He wonders what the next memory will be.

"Sasuke!? Sakura!?" He can hear a voice frantically in the distance, but he can't recognize it.

The voice repeats, over and over for so long Sasuke convinces himself that their names are just the background noise of the universe. Maybe they were two stars floating in the void, destined to crash into each other.

The moment his mind makes the connection to Choji's voice, he's snapped awake. He's still in the darkness but this time it's solid. Where there was void, there's now dampness and thick earth aromas. He blinks, and is surprised when his body listens to his command to turn his head.

The first thing he recognizes is the pale brown his wife's hair turns in this lighting. He shifts his eyes up and smiles contedly when he sees his own midnight bangs.

"Sakura," he whispers. Though it's only Choji who hears him.

"Sasuke!" The burly man rushes over, and helps him to sit up.

"What happened?" Sasuke croaks out. His eyes adjust and he recognizes that they're still in the cave, with a few extra light sticks illuminating his surroundings.

"You both passed out, and the plant was still taking chakra from you." Choji point to Sasuke's wrist where he finds a stem roughly cut on one end, and directly attached to his chakra network inside of his only arm. "It took some doing, 'cause those stems are tough as hell, but I got you both free about 5 minutes ago."

"H-how long was I out?"

"About 20 minutes I think, why?" Choji asks, while he goes over to the most beautiful of flowers. Sasuke watches Choji infuse chakra into a kunai and slowly saw the flower free before he speaks.

"Weird dream," Sasuke says because all he can focus on are the memories.

Choji carries Sakura for him back the way they came. They expected her to be out of it afterwards but there's still a weighted tension around her unconsciousness.

His mind is still stewing over the memories of Sakura's he lived through but it takes a long time for him to come to what he thinks might be an awful conclusion. Obviously what he saw was caused by their chakra being depleted and connected by the plant, which means they both most certainly had the same experience.

He had been witness to every time his wife had come as close as safely possible to running out of chakra. Every time in his life that he had completely run out like that, he had been completely engulfed in hatred and darkness.

He remembers the therapist at the hospital after the war refer to him as an extreme case of trauma induced psychosis. Was Sakura really still unconscious because of chakra depletion or did he finally taint his wife to the point of breaking?

Sorry for the delay, I had a lot I wanted to put in this chapter! Also sorry I had to upload twice, it was unreadable the first time I posted (like it had an extra 15k words worth of coding added? Iunno guys!) Anyway, thank you for your patience! As always, have a wonderful day!