new story alert!
i blame all the incredible authors whose works i read for getting suckered into timetravel!Sakura (sprx77, Katlou303, writer168, jaylene, aoutrance and blackkat, I'm looking at you)
Mokuton!Sakura was born after a lot of tumbling, mainly inspired by postscratch, tiredgaykakashi and professorsparklepants, as well as sandorclegane's art (v cool btw, check it out) and, cause, honestly? fuck canon with a cactus. SasuNaru can be reincarnations of a goddesses' sons but Sakura can't have Wood Release cause she'd be ~overpowered~? oh boo-fuckin-hoo. #blocked
also, experimenting with present-tense narration for the first time ever, so apologies for any tense-slipups. they will happen. #oopsinadvance
Sakura jerks awake with a gasp.
She's drenched in cold sweat and shivering, the memory of a haze of suffocating orange chakra and a searing pain in her lower back and left breast making her swallow back bile.
Then, she freezes.
Her chakra is gone.
Well, not gone, the not-yet-panicking part of her mind corrects – while the rest is firmly committed to hyperventilating – but tiny. Dormant. Untouched.
She opens her eyes and raises her arm and –
Small.
No callouses, no bloodied, ripped off nails, no torn-up cuticles or silvery scars. Just a small hand, with pale, unblemished skin, and short, untrained, clumsy fingers.
Sakura's breath catches in her throat. The pastel yellow walls of her bedroom begin to spin.
She'd been eighteen, fresh out of the Fourth Shinobi War. She'd been on the frontlines for over a year, had surpassed Tsunade, had mastered both of the blonde's legendary jutsus, had stood with Naruto and Sasuke as their equal while they faced a goddess.
And yes, they'd won the war, but they'd lost so many. Yet, after Kaguya had been dealt with, everyone just… went back to 'normal'. Hardly any time was spent grieving, mourning those they'd lost. But Sakura couldn't just let go. She'd lost too many faces she'd known and held dear, lost Ino, Sai, Genma, Shikaku, Kiba, Yamato, Neji, Inoichi, Tenten, Shizune – and nobody seemed to care. Kakashi, grief-leaden and traumatised beyond belief had been tasked with Hokageship, a job Sakura knew he'd fulfil to the best of his ability, but one that nobody who'd really loved him should've asked of him. Tsunade had retired, dropped her age-concealing illusion and focused on rebuilding the hospital and rehoming civilians, and while Sakura didn't begrudge either of them their decisions, it meant nobody saw her composure slowly shattering. So when Naruto and Sasuke decided to fight, because the fact that they'd just fought in a war didn't seem to matter to their egos, Sakura had been tired. So she'd followed. And when they'd pulled out their respective end-all moves – ones she'd known would total the landscape around them and, if they were lucky, severely injure both of them – she saw an out. She saw an end to the play-pretend they'd all been living in.
(So she stepped between them.)
She shakes off the memory, but clings to the facts: eighteen, a young woman, a shinobi, a medic, a student, a legend, and now–!
A child.
She rolls out of bed, her breathing coming in ragged gasps, falls on the floor and staggers to the window, and tries to wrench it open. It moves slowly, and it hurts as her palms dig into the sharp wooden frame, splinters coming off and lodging themselves into her delicate skin, but eventually – when she's panting from exertion and her arms are shaking – it gives.
In her panic, her practiced leap out of the window turns into a stumble, and she trips over the frame, her legs too short to reach over the window sill and she falls through and has two terrifying seconds where she's freefalling, but gravity does its work and the ground comes up all too soon. Sakura hits the grass in a graceless tangle of limbs, feels the impact of jar her fragile bones and wonders how barely five metres can feel like tumbling from the Valley of the End.
She feels tears spring to her eyes when she pulls herself up and her left arm is burning, the normally straight forearm forming an obtuse angle.
Broken, the sober part of her mind catalogues, even as the rest of her is still busy having a panic attack, compound fracture.
She stumbles through her garden and crawls out through the gap in the hedge, and then she's running, keeping to the shadows and gasping in desperate breaths through her mouth even as her throat feels clogged with the promise of tears and black spots are dancing across her vision.
Eventually, she reaches the communal park, deserted and decidedly haunted-looking so late in the night, and makes a bee-line for the treehouse, dazedly climbing up the ladder until she's surrounded by four wooden walls and comforted by the fake feeling of security the cover provides.
Then, she breaks down.
She cries, ugly and loud and desperate because she's somehow back in time. She's small, probably pre-Academy judging by the fact that her chakra hadn't even responded when she called for it, much less rose up automatically to cushion her fall when she jumped out of the window.
She cries and cries and cries, and eventually, she runs out of tears.
All she feels is numb and tired, and the ache of her broken arm is there, but the mess in her head manages to reduce it to background noise.
She's maybe… four? Five? Probably pre-Academy, and definitely pre-Ino, since her red ribbon was nowhere in sight. She looks at her body and feels a pinprick of fear crest at the bottom of her skull and slide down her spine in a shiver; she's so small. (vulnerable, useless, defenceless, civilian-!)
Eventually her panic abates, and the throb of her arm becomes louder. Sakura takes a deep breath and rises to her feet, shivering once again, this time from the cold. She absently notices that she's barefoot, and her sheep-patterned pyjamas are most definitely not adequate protection from Konoha's late autumn nights.
She looks down at her arm and sighs. Hospital it is, she decides grimly. She makes her way to the ladder, then pauses and eyes the slide. How long has it been…? She wonders absently, and when her brain catches up, she's already moving, sitting down and pushing off. The whoosh of air as she slides down eases the pain in her heart and she feels the beginnings of a smile pull at her mouth, and when she stands up, she feels slightly lighter.
The trek to the hospital is uneventful; Sakura keeps to the shadows and skirts past the mouths of dark alleys and drunk singing, and eventually, she finds herself in the reception of the A&E department, and the quiet reminds her of the few graveyard shifts she'd pulled back –
Back then.
She swallows.
There's only two other people in the waiting room, a dozing shinobi attached to an IV drip, and an elderly civilian holding an icepack to his head. Sakura walks up to the receptionist's desk and has to stand a bit away so she can actually see and be seen once the woman looks up.
"Excuse me, miss?" she says and immediately hates how high and quiet her voice is, but it serves its purpose; the woman startles and looks up, then immediately down. Her eyes widen.
"Oh my gosh!" she exclaims, and Sakura winces at the volume. "I'm so sorry sweet-pea, were you waiting long? Where's your mama? What happened?" she bombards Sakura with questions, and inwardly, Sakura's medic-self berates the woman for her unprofessionalism.
"N-no, ma'am." She denies. "I fell out of bed and hurt my arm." The white lie slips out with nary a thought, and she shows off her broken arm for good measure and then adds, "And I didn't want to wake my mom. I came here myself."
She sees the receptionist's eyes widen at that, and she stands up and hops over the desk, crouching beside Sakura's small form. "Oh, sugar, let me take you to the X-Ray department, okay? The doctors are going to quickly scan your arm and set it, and then you'll have to wear a cast for a few weeks while your arm heals, but we could make it colourful! How about pink to match that pretty hair of yours, hm?" the nurse rambles, and Sakura knows she should be soothed by the explanation because she's, for all intents and purposes, a child, but all it does is raise her hackles because she always hated being talked down to, damn it. She could recite the procedure for dealing with broken bones in her sleep!
But she bites back the anger and the bitterness and lets the receptionist lead her away, smiles and waves goodbye when she leaves and suffers through the x-rays and the wait for the results. The doctors seem alarmed when she says she's alone, but they're easily bought by her teary explanation of not wanting to wake her mom.
Brave girl, they tell her, such a considerate daughter, and it stings and burns, rancid in her throat but all she does is smile and duck her head. And when she's led away to have her arm set and put in a cast, she doesn't register that she'll be put under anaesthetic until they're wheeling over the tray with the mask.
She starts to struggle, because the last thing she wants is to be out and in her head for an undisclosed amount of time, but the doctors soothe her and gently try to pin her flailing limbs, and someone expertly secures the elastic around her head and pulls the mask over her mouth and nose.
"Count to ten." They tell her.
I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want-!
She passes out.
..
When she wakes, her arm is immobile and in a garishly pink cast, and she's lying in a bed far softer than she remembers from her hospital. The clock on the wall reads 6am and Sakura desperately tries to remember what time her parents left for work. It would be difficult to explain how she ended up in the hospital if the front door was still locked, and she didn't exactly want her first interaction with her parents – alivealivealive! – to be full of lies.
She slips out of bed and pads down the corridor of the paediatric ward, and then down to main reception. It's busier now, more nurses bustling around and more people in the waiting room, but the receptionist is still the same.
"Good morning." She greets quietly and waves when the woman glances at her. "Thank you for your help, nurse-san. Can I go home now? I don't want my parents to worry."
"Sakura-chan!" the woman greets, and Sakura absently wonders how long she spent looking for her medical records with only her appearance and approximate age to go on. "Are you sure? We could send someone to notify your parents of where you are!"
"No, thank you." Sakura demurs, toeing the line between insistent and rude and fighting with her rising irritation. "I feel better and I'd like to see my parents before they go to work."
The receptionist caves at last, even though Sakura sees she's still reluctant, and at last she's free to go, still in her pyjamas and now bearing a ridiculous cast in a shade of pink so obnoxious it makes her hair look tame in comparison.
She makes her way home, crawling in through the same gap in the hedge she left by, and stands under her window, staring at the wall with a frown.
The front door is locked, and while breaking in through the window was child's play to adult-Sakura, Sakura as she is now lacks both the tools and the dexterity to make it work.
She frowns at her wall, aware what she needs to do but somewhat hesitant, then she sighs and concentrates.
Her chakra is there, sure as anything, and while the pool is depressingly shallow, her control seems to have translated and as she puts her foot against the wall, she knows she's got the exact amount of chakra she needs in it. It's jarring, seeing her foot against the wall, because it's so small, and in her original timeline, she didn't even attempt the exercise until she was twelve, in Wave and living each day in fear of Zabuza, her first bogeyman. Still, she makes her way up the wall, slowly, because for all that she's confident in her control, arrogance and rushing ahead had always been her teammates' trademarks, not hers.
She crawls in through the still open window, her small stature for once helping her instead of inhibiting as she manoeuvres and squeezes through despite her broken arm. She grabs a random book from her shelf and makes her way downstairs, creeping down the stairs and curling up on the sofa, content to wait till her parents get up to start the day and spin her little sob story then.
She opens her book and pretends to read, while inwardly, she plans.
The ache of losing half of her precious people is still too fresh in her mind. She doesn't think she can bear seeing everyone again, not as they were in the Academy, innocent and boisterous and with faces lined with baby-fat.
But she needs to make a start on her shinobi career. Perhaps not officially, because 'child genius' isn't a title she particularly wants, but enough to be prepared for what will come after. Better prepared, at least, than she was originally. Prepared for Orochimaru and Pein and Danzo and-
She freezes, mental cogs grounding to a halt at the thought.
Danzo.
Who did she know who was after talented, nameless children, who would help her get strong – even if it was only for his gain – and who was instrumental to the shitstorm that went on in her teens? And if she manages to get close, to find evidence, she could bring damning evidence to the Sandaime, evidence that could, hopefully, get rid of Danzo all that much sooner.
And save Sai.
Her breath catches in her throat once more, and she absently notes that she's clutching her book in a white-knuckled grip. She knows what she must do. And she knows she cannot fail, cannot falter.
A lance of pain shoots through her when she thinks of what she's about to do to her parents, but she knows her success is infinitely more important than the happiness of two civilians.
It is time, she thinks grimly, mercilessly quashing any guilt that tries to rise up, to get noticed by ROOT.
an arguably slightly different take on timetraveller!Sakura but hey ;) as always, tell me what you think!