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Chapter 1

Sakura began acting strangely just after they had been called together as Team 7. She had shuddered, let out a breath, and remained quiet. The students slowly trickled out until only the three of them were left, waiting.

As Naruto began to get bored and started setting up his prank with the chalkboard and the door with the eraser above it, she got up and began opening the window.

"What are you doing?" Naruto asked, eyes bright and always too positively optimistic for his own good. Then he jumped up in alarm as Sakura placed one foot on the windowsill. "Hey!"

"I'm not contemplating suicide, tell Kakashi I'll be elsewhere if he needs me," Sakura replied emotionlessly. Sasuke's head was turned toward her, just as apathetic, but with a dawning recognition. Her eyes were colder than his.

"But why are you going?" Naruto continued, and she could see nothing but hope and prayer and dreams in his eyes, speckled with potential and the lives of his kingdom above. Sakura had never felt herself be any hollower, and her eyes seemed to reflect that because both of them flinched.

"Does it matter?" Sakura asked, eyes dull but not far beyond. "I am just a fictional character playing some fool's game, have been played by many, and in the future shall forever be at the mercy of the halfhearted fools who know not the true experience but wish to dance about their pens anyway."

Sakura felt the strings shift, pull taut, and then she was a crooning lovesick shell of a girl all over again, all the pieces falling back into place, and yet that impression never seemed to leave any of their minds judging by how pensive even Naruto seemed when the eraser fell on Kakashi's head as the door opened.

It wasn't until weeks later that she resurfaced again once their roles had been established and Naruto began questioning her again, prodding carefully this time, knowing what would emerge from the nondescript two-dimensional disguise she hid under. The fabricated Sakura knew nothing of their questions. The Sakura underneath did not struggle because she knew, she was trapped underneath her own skin, until finally the hold lessened and Sakura watched them as they watched her while Kakashi's eye focused unnervingly from a tree in the distance.

"I apologize for shocking you earlier, to tell the truth I'd thought you would have forgotten it and dropped the matter entirely," she admitted. "Although I do see in retrospect how out of character it must have been."

"Who are you?" Sasuke asked. Sakura blinked.

(Oh, what a fool she had been, thinking that they would believe her as she was now compared to the prettier picture she was before. She knew it was inevitable. The gods above her laughed, and oh what a terrifying power they wielded.)

"I am Sakura Haruno," she said, "and I always have been, and I always will be."

"Liar! Tell me where the real Sakura is!" Naruto shouted, pointing at her accusingly, and how quaint it was to believe the illusion that had been shown to him because that was the thing he associated most with Sakura.

"The Sakura you know is not real," she said sharply, with far more will in her tone than she had meant to say aloud. "She has been rewritten in time over and over, and she has lived through hundreds of lives that their authors had never even thought of asking before sending her through. I merely play out those roles, because that is what they force me to do. I play their games, I win their victories, and I will always be a mortal husk of a human being," Sakura monotoned, "because that is what the story wishes for me to be. But in another world, I swallow universes. In another world, I trample gods, I survive the holocaust, I raze down worlds with a wave of my hand, because that is what their maker wishes me to do. I enjoy those ones more than others, I'll admit, but in this one I will be nothing. 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.' In this one I am Sakura Haruno, and so it must be. You will come to accept it, in time."

"...I will admit I understood none of that," Kakashi said, "but you should have at least mentioned this in your introduction of yourself during our first team meeting. See, now we feel left out."

Both Sasuke and Naruto turned to stare at him as if he had lost his mind, but Kakashi had said his piece and was already returning to his book with the ease of a practitioner of the I-don't-give-a-shit. Sakura let out a vague wheeze of laughter, which seemed to terrify her teammates even more as they whipped back around with expressions of surprise.

"Sasuke, I didn't understand what she was saying either," Naruto muttered from the side of his mouth. Sasuke's face instantly transformed into a scowl. Sakura waved a hand, as if everything she had just said was inconsequential.

"As long as I remain here, as long as both of you continue to require the existence of Sakura, then I will be forced to remain here as a piece of the whole," Sakura spoke, not to them but to herself. "My meaning is to read this script, be shaped by the metaphysical hands of god, and let fate and destiny take apart and dismantle me slowly from the outside in." She paused to take a breath.

"...Wow, Sakura, that's amazing," Naruto breathed, clearly understanding none of that but still turning starry-eyed. Sakura gave them both a deadpan stare.

"If you don't understand, that's fine. In this year, Sasuke will defect in order to kill his brother. Naruto, a month after that you will leave the village with one of the sannin. Kakashi will find Obito, presumed to be dead, in the man known as Tobi of the Akatsuki. Yet all of you, do you yet realize the potential you have? You are each that thermodynamic miracle, built up of small infinitesimal cells that just happened to come together in just the right way and at just the right time. You are each so special, every one of you, an improbability that all adds up like layers and layers of skin and bone and dreams to a whole. And there will never be another you, not an identical replica, and these dreams you have will drive you till the ends of time."

Sakura blinked and became younger again, less old in her speech and her expression. "But anyway, you're searching for the wrong people right now, and I'd like to bring it to your attention because it'll make everything a lot easier. You should be looking for the man named Danzo, Sasuke, he has most of your relatives' eyes in his arm. That's pretty weird."

"...What." The boy in question responded.

"Also, Kakashi, Obito never died but now he's been led on by one of Madara's crazy dreams again and wants to consume the world in an eternal Mangekyo or something so that Rin's alive again." Sakura waved a hand carelessly. "So Tobi's probably pretty insane."

"What." Sasuke repeated.

"Naruto, you're...in for a lot of shit." She patted his head, smiling in a way that she hoped was consoling but came out as more of a grimace. Naruto nodded uncomprehendingly. She may have broken his brain with that speech.

"Can I switch my genin yet?" Kakashi mourned to no one. "I thought I would have at least one normal one."

"I'm probably not going to return until several weeks after our mission in Wave. Please don't bully fake Sakura for this, however much of a fabrication she is. She knows absolutely nothing, and to be honest you're not gonna find much if you look in the T&I." She furrowed her brow as she said that, muttering, "why would they even torture a genin from their own village, I will never understand gods sometimes..."

"First step kill Danzo, guys," she yelled before her eyes glazed over, closed shut, and then Sakura was smiling brightly as if nothing was wrong.

"H-hey, Sasuke, do you wanna-"

"No."

Sakura felt nothing for a long period of time after that. It felt sometimes as if she were seeing from another person's eyes, which in this case she was. The other Sakura moved and talked and felt like a real person, but she knew that it was an illusion because she was the one that existed inside. And so she moved away from the conscious world and fell immobile, for a moment, circling in her own thoughts and mourn what could have been.

"I've always wanted a body of my own," she murmured to herself. "Freedom is a cruel thing, just out of reach to the people standing on the other side of the bars. Those gaps in space, if they could just open a bit wider..."

Then pull them apart by force, her mind spoke.

"Then I will abandon this play in favor of another one," she replied. "All the world's a stage, what does it matter if I step into another?"

But it is of your own free will, it persisted. Sakura prayed. If there was just one, just one place where she could live freely for the rest of her life, she would enjoy it till the very end. She had no use for material things, nor fear for the humans around her. She was not a god, after all, and those were the ones to be feared the most.

It took much longer to emerge from within her conscience, partly because of how exhausted she felt and partly because she did not feel she wanted to. She would only be sucked back into this body, again and again, without purpose and with no particular damage to the script. They would not believe her. The world must move on.

She returned to the sight of Sasuke holding a bloody arm.

"What," Sasuke hissed, shaking the arm of Danzo with the bandages still partly wrapped around it, "is this."

Sakura stared. And stared. And continued to stare until finally she couldn't hold it in.

"Wow, those are a lot of eyes that I don't want to look at anymore," she said, and promptly threw up in the bushes next to her. Naruto, who was standing beside her, winced.

Kakashi was crouched over a pool of water in the clearing further away from the group, lost in his own reflection. His other eye was revealed. "What is he doing," Sakura whispered to her teammates.

"He's having an existential crisis after he realized that Obito's still alive and that's not the point," Sasuke scowled, still holding the amputated arm of his brethren. Well, the eyes of his brethren. "Why."

"The Izanagi technique so that he was able to have multiple lives since he could control reality itself with its illusion. Basically he wanted to be immortal," Sakura spoke evenly. Judging by the way Sasuke paled and Naruto looked horrified, they disliked Danzo's choice of reasoning.

"He killed my family..." Sasuke was trembling. Naruto appeared solemn. "...he killed my family for that? And my brother had to leave the village because of what this man had done..."

"Wait, so did you guys just kill Danzo?" Sakura asked suspiciously. "You walked up to his base, incapacitated all the Root members and just chopped the guy's arm off?"

"...Yes," Naruto responded, but he still appeared to be a bit queasy. "Kakashi did most of the work, and we did call up help from several ANBU members. Danzo kept staring at his eye for too long, haha, I guess that's..."

"Holy shit," she said, because with that her own sense of self was crumbling. The script could be changed. The script was not an immortal piece of god's writing to guide her path and play her until she keeled over of old age or a blade. Her strings twitched, straining, and with a flick of her wrist they were set on fire, reaching so high that the clouds hid their span through space time.

"...I have a choice," she said, eyes dimming once again. "But that would mean that I am now my own god. With nothing holding my strings, without someone else to tell me what to do I have taken their place. Is that what they had wanted all along? For I am no god."

Sasuke and Naruto both stared at her as if she'd gone insane, which she didn't really find she disagreed with to be honest. "Did you find the papers Danzo hid?" Sakura said, and her voice sounded so tired, so far away once again.

"Y-yeah, we sent it to Gramps already," Naruto told her. "Are you okay? You don't look so good."

"I can't believe you actually believed me," she responded, and she was sitting down with her head in her hands. "I used to spend so much time fighting my purpose. There were scripts the gods gave me, ones that tore apart my mind and my pride and my dignity. I am a terrible actor, and you all know it. Why now do I get the choice to be my own person?"

"If all the world's a stage, then I shall go ahead and rewrite it," she said, and there a fire was relit in her eyes. She startled the both of them, encasing them in a hug even as they were covered in blood and most likely guts. "Yes, I am okay. I am more than okay now. I don't care anymore how it happened, but I can choose worlds now. I can travel the way I want to, when I want to, and I have no need for troublesome ties by some forgotten beast watching my every move."

"...You know, I still have no idea what you're talking about," Naruto began, "but hell yeah! I believe in you! Believe it!"

"Thanks," she said, and to her surprise tears were forming in the corners of her eyes. She wiped them off roughly. "Thanks, Naruto."

She would stay here, for as long as she was needed. And then she would set her sights on other worlds, worlds where they needed someone who was stupid enough to fight wars that she did not belong in but needed to participate in for the rest of them. Sakura jerked her head in Kakashi's direction, leaning back to smile at the two still behind her.

"Come on, guys, let's go cheer Kakashi-sensei up."

This is real meta kids time to go to sleep and forget all of this even happened