Chapter Text
It begins, as so many things do, small and unnoticed.
It starts on a mist-shrouded bridge in Wave Country. Sakura is tense with fear, clutching a kunai in front of her, trying not to tremble as she stands in front of the old man who had in his desperation, lied to the most powerful military organisation in Fire Country about the parameters of his mission.
Sakura doesn’t know it yet, but when Naruto howls in fury at the sight of Sasuke lying on the ground, cold and unbreathing—and smashes the strange boy’s ice prison into smithereens, the roil of demonic chakra he unleashes reaches her senses. And it stirs something within, waiting for the perfect moment to fully awaken.
Someone is screaming her name, but all Sakura sees are flashes of light as her head and entire body cracks hard against the bark of the tree. Then, shooting pain everywhere. She gasps for air.
Only to be suffocated with the crushing, choking sensation of an overwhelmingly malicious chakra. She feels it, searing and terrible, a burning sensation running through the sand claw now wrapped around her body.
The conscious part of her mind told her that there was in reality no heat, just the awful pressure of a closing vice ready to crush her. But somehow, she feels as though she were being burned alive.
This was it. She was going to die.
In the grip of a monster that had once been that crimson-haired Suna shinobi, crushing her with waves of this terrible, terrible energy that choked her very being on a primal level. She tries to expand her lungs to take a breath but she only feels the space closing in. Her vision is graying out—the intellectual part of her mind that had always been so good at memorising facts unhelpfully points out that the eyes were some of the most oxygen-hungry organs.
She can’t breathe, she’s going to die, the bark of the tree she is crushed against rough and unforgivingly hard against her back.
I don’t want to die, I’m so scared, please I don’t want to die, no no no I’m scared—
Time slows to a crawl. It was true, what they said about your life flashing before your eyes.
She thinks of her parents. They hadn’t expected her to want to be a shinobi, but had gone along when she asked to attend the Academy. Indulging their only daughter, smiling and nodding whenever she ran home, excitedly telling them the new things she had learned that day, even when they didn’t understand it.
She thinks of her team.
She thinks of never seeing them all again. Her team, whom she had only just started to get to know.
Sasuke, whom she had wasted so much time fawning over, without getting to really know him as a human being, until he had faced death in Wave Country and then in the Forest of Death. Who’d been fighting Gaara before they arrived, who was now on the ground in pain, the dark shadows of the terrible Curse Seal crawling over his body as he struggled to force it back. Sasuke, who she had tried and failed to protect.
Naruto, the foolish boy she had wasted so much time dismissing and lecturing as though she were better than him, who was so determined and brave, who never gave up—who must now be standing alone against that horrible, terrifying incarnation of sand, trying to save them both.
Sensei, always reading his stupid books and driving her up the wall with his chronic tardiness—but tall, strong and reassuring, who so easily cut down the men who had almost killed her back in the arena when the battle erupted—who would now have to live with the death of at least one of his students on his conscience—
—all because she remained stupid and weak. Hadn’t she vowed that things would be different from then on in the Forest of Death and yet—
Useless, she screams and rages at herself. Not with resignation and despair, but roiling, sharp and bright anger.
It was like a barrier had been breached. Hot, fiery anger that expanded through her entire body, pure energy. The feeling of lifeforce everywhere, even in the tree against her back, no longer hard and rough but thrumming with life. The surreal sensation of not seeing, but feeling every leaf unfurling and growing, every microscopic cell dividing—
I don’t want to die, I can’t die now, I haven’t done enough, I won’t die—
The chakra rushes through her being in a torrent—and she sees nothing but light as the sand coffin around her disintegrates.
Temari will later curse herself for freezing when the sand crushing the unconscious pink-haired girl she had mentally written off exploded, pierced by monstrous, rapidly growing wooden vines. She stumbles backwards, trips and lands awkwardly on her ankle. Fuck.
It took her a while to realise what she was seeing.
Unlike Temari, Sasuke immediately understood. Without consciously realising it, he’d instinctively dredged and wringed out whatever remained of his chakra and channelled it to his eyes.
He watches in shock, Sharingan memorising every detail of Sakura’s dirt-streaked face, the anger in her green eyes and the sharp, curving lines of the enormous wooden vines that swarmed and strangled the sand claw attached to the deranged Suna shinobi.
The grotesque, half-transformed boy recoils, as though he had been burned at the touch of Sakura’s chakra. The eerie golden eye in the metamorphosed half of his face is wide with shock, as he regards his damaged arm, golden sand swirling furiously and attempting to reform but somehow failing.
Unlike Temari, Sasuke knew exactly what it was he was witnessing, and he knew he was seeing the impossible—
“Grab Sakura-chan, I’ll hold this bastard off!” Naruto is a loud, bright and reassuring presence. His hands are already fixed into the seal for his trademark jutsu, that ridiculous technique that no one but Naruto had the bottomless chakra reserves to use so effortlessly.
The demonic Suna shinobi—there was no other word that could adequately describe him—seemed to have regained control of his sand. A hideous chimaera, he shrieked and thrashed in fury, throwing a wave of sand in Sasuke’s direction.
With a yell, Naruto detonates several explosive tags. The sand wave recoils. Naruto’s eyes are bright, his teeth gritted. Several more Kage Bunshin materialise. “It’s fine, Sasuke! I’ve got him—get Sakura-chan! Pakkun, help them!”
“You don’t need to tell me that!” The small dog retorts, already leaping up the tree. "I'll never hear the end of it from Kakashi if I don't get you all out of here in one piece!"
Pushing aside the strain of chakra exhaustion, Sasuke darts forward to catch his now swaying teammate before she can plummet off the tree branch. What she had just done evidently took out almost all her existing chakra reserves, not to mention her injuries from being flung into that tree at such high speed.
He grabs her arm, winds it over his shoulder, trying to support her the best he can, checking quickly for broken bones. Innately, he sighs in relief when he sees that her neck is at a normal angle. Spinal injuries were some of the most nightmarish to deal with on a battlefield. He may have been the top graduate of their year but he readily admitted that he was completely useless when it came to treating debilitating injuries. He had to take her to safety.
Pakkun is sniffing Sakura. “Careful, boy— I smell blood from internal injuries. She broke something, probably a rib.” Makes a face. “Or somethings.”
As gently as possible, he helps her to the ground, trying not to jar her injuries.
He notes gratefully that Naruto is keeping the sand creature well-occupied. He had no more chakra to attempt another Chidori, and had frankly been incredibly lucky that he was still standing despite his botched attempt at a third one before his two teammates arrived. For shinobi who pushed far beyond the limits of chakra exhaustion could end up stopping their very own hearts.
Sakura coughs, blood mixed with spit. The sight alarms him; internal bleeding, as Pakkun diagnosed. But it is paired with the overwhelming sense of relief.
She’s alive.
For the moment, the sight of the rise and fall of her chest banishes away the sickening feeling that had consumed him when she had leapt in front of him, with nothing but a kunai against the sand demon, ready to meet her end. The cold feeling of his stomach twisting up when she was easily batted away by that boy’s sand claw and hurled against the tree, sand already crawling across her body. He didn’t fail this time, not like on that day—
Dimly, he’s aware of Naruto’s yells and the tumult of the battle around them as his teammate hurls his clones at the Suna shinobi. Sensei’s dog summon—Pakkun—is saying something, but he isn’t listening. He finds himself looking up, not at Naruto or the monstrous boy—but at the now-frozen tendrils of wood bursting out of the tree Sakura had been crushed up against minutes ago.
Sakura’s trying to say something, but all that comes out is another wet-sounding, hacking cough. Her eyelids flutter. She’s struggling to stay conscious.
“Don’t talk,” he says urgently, as his mind races furiously to piece together everything that had just happened.
Sasuke had never known Senju Hashirama in person, of course. But he had grown up hearing tales about the First Hokage of the Hidden Leaf at his mother’s knee. Uchiha Mikoto had always told her youngest bedtime stories, where history mixed with legend.
And one of the many stories she vividly brought to life had been the famous battle against Uchiha Madara at the Valley of the End. How Hashirama had struggled, held on and eventually defeated the man renowned as the most powerful of their clan.
At this very moment, leaning heavily against his shoulder, her face pale and drawn, pink hair streaked with dirt and blood, Sakura looks as far as possible from the pictures Sasuke had seen of the tall and dark-haired legend who had created the modern shinobi world.
Yet, somehow or another, his famous bloodline limit ran in her veins.