Archive of Our Own ^beta

Sakura’s never actually been to Uzushio, but everything she’s ever heard or read about it has always described it as beautiful. 

Everything she’s ever heard about it must have been wrong, however, because no part of the old Uzushio bunker she currently finds herself in remotely approaches anything she’d call beautiful. “Claustrophobic,” “confusing,” and “dirty” are all words that come to mind. Although, to be fair, she figures that might just be how bunkers are designed. She doubts most Konoha bunkers are any better.

It’s been a year since the… unorthodox dissolution of Team 7, and she just recently made Chunin during the last exams. With said promotion came increased responsibilities, and for her first B-rank mission, Tsunade had chosen something relatively tame: investigate an abandoned Uzushio bunker that was recently discovered in outer Fire Country. Another team had recently and accidentally discovered the site on an unrelated mission, but didn’t have the time to do a thorough investigation then, which meant that Konoha had to send out another two-man team to handle it.

Hence, Sakura and Kakashi. Certainly not her first choice of partner, but then, Tsunade hadn’t given her a choice at all.

It’s not that she dislikes her former mentor—far from it. She respects his skills, his knowledge, and his legendary status within the village. She knows she was lucky, on paper at least, to be placed under his tutelage as a genin. They’ve barely seen each other since the Konoha Crush, though, other than a few polite but distant interactions, and much like everything else connected to her old team, seeing him again just brings up an anxious knot in her stomach and a mass of contradictory feelings she’s not sure how to sort through.

Kakashi was always kind to her. He sometimes treated her like an afterthought in training. He protected her on missions. She’s not sure he ever actually cared about her outside of his assignment. He made sure she was taken care of after the invasion. He left her after the invasion.

He wouldn’t have been her first choice, is her point.

Still, the mission hasn’t been as bad as she’d worried. A relatively tame trip from Konoha to the bunker’s reported location had been punctuated by friendly, if shallow, conversation, and their exploration of the bunker itself has been fairly uneventful thus far. The only lighting in the underground complex comes from the dimly glowing seals every couple of yards, and there are large swaths of nearly entirely black areas where the lighting seals have either degraded or were never properly installed. She imagines that, when this place was properly maintained, the lighting was probably much better, but now, it just gives the whole place an eerie feel.

That feeling is only compounded by the confusing layout of the bunker itself. Twisting tunnels branch out over and over and back into themselves like a maze, occasionally dotted with a variety of small rooms. They pass olld sleeping quarters, work offices, dozens of abandoned supply rooms, and more, along with a couple of dilapidated areas she can’t figure out the purpose of.

“Ah, Kakashi-sensei?” she asks as they find what appears to be yet another such room. He glances over at her, raising an eyebrow. “What do you think this place was supposed to be?”

He hums. “What do you think?”

Answering questions with questions—she certainly hasn’t missed that since Team 7. “Umm… something permanent, probably. Maybe some kind of safehouse?”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, there’s a lot of sleeping quarters, so they probably planned for a lot of people to be here at once. But it’s not really close to anything important, either, so it doesn’t make sense as a regular station. It doesn’t really seem fitted for a military base either, though. There’s no training spots or anything.”

Kakashi smiles approvingly, and part of her hates how good it makes her feel. “Good observations.”

She starts to smile back, but falters when she realizes his wording. “But wrong conclusion?”

Kakashi shrugs. “Not necessarily, but if I had to guess, I’d say this was used as some sort of testing or research site. Like you said, it looks like this place was designed to house a decent number of personnel at once, and most safehouses aren’t staffed long-term.” It sounds like he’s going to end it there, but Kakashi must either change his mind or notice something in her body language, because a moment later he throws her a bone. “That being said, I happen to know that Uzushio actually kept research stations in Fire Country, so I’m kind of cheating here.”

Sakura nods, trying not to feel embarrassed. “Do you know what they might have been testing here, then?”

“Probably something dangerous. Seals have a nasty tendency to fail spectacularly, which is one of the main reasons why a lot of fuinjutsu research is done out-of-village in the first place. Better to blow up a random patch of forest than the heart of your research division.”

Sakura blinks. “...what are the odds we run into something that blows us up, then?”

Kakashi shrugs again. “Hard to say. It’s unlikely that anything too large was tested here, given how far away from Uzushio the site is, but even common seals can become dangerous as the ink degrades and the seal destabilizes. As long as we're careful with where we throw chakra, though, we should be fine.”

“The same way that the Wave mission should have been fine?” she asks dryly.

There's a smile in Kakashi’s voice as he responds. “Exactly.”

--

“What’s that you said about it being unlikely they were testing anything crazy?” she asks shortly after, stopping just a few feet into the bleached out sealing chamber she finds herself in. Kakashi stops just a half-step behind her, at the very edge of the carvings on the ground.

“Everyone’s wrong sometimes.”

Considering that, up until this point, they’d come across nothing in the bunker but right angles and strictly utilitarian architecture, the intricately detailed archway they’d found at the end of their final uncharted hallway had stood out like an emotionally well-adjusted individual in Anbu.

The interior stands out just as much.

The circular chamber isn’t massive, but it’s still easily twice as large as any of the others they’ve encountered. Repeating stone arches are chiseled into the bone-white walls, with densely carved, unfamiliar runes covering every surface. Looping bands of some dark-stained metal set into the stone floor and ceiling circle spiral out from the middle of the chamber. At the very center of the room, the starting point of all the spirals, stands a short column made out of the same material, curling upwards to a jagged point. It looks almost as though it had once connected to the ceiling, but had since been broken.

“I guess we found what they were testing,” Kakashi says drily. She nods idly, trying to place the small bits of fuinjutsu she actually recognizes. Most of it is completely alien. “We’ll record whatever they were working on here as best we can and take our findings back to Konoha for analysis. Be careful, don’t try to modify or activate the seal, and let me know if anything starts glowing, you know the drill. With any luck, this shouldn’t take any more than an hour or two, and then we can get out of here.”

“Only two hours of staring at scribbles. Fun.”

--

Nearly two hours later, Sakura is pretty sure she never wants to see another spiral in her life. Her notebook, as well as her brain, is a mess of radii, periods, orientations, and diameters, and Konoha might need to redesign their flak jackets, or else she might need to go missing-nin, because she’s pretty sure that if she looks at one more swirl then her brain is just going to melt out of her ears.

Kakashi technically has it harder, in that with his sealing proficiency he's actually analyzing and trying to decipher some of the more complex bits of the whole seal, but at least that's intellectually stimulating. Sakura’s been stuck measuring lines for two hours.

She leans back against the cold stone wall, stretching her cramped muscles. "It’s amazing how much bigger the room seems when you have to record every square inch of it."

Kakashi glances up from where he’s analyzing the center of the seal, his single visible eye crinkling in amusement. "We’re almost there. Just a bit longer."

"Easy for you to say," she mutters. "This all actually means something to you. I'm just a glorified tape measure."

He chuckles softly. "Consider it a lesson in patience and attention to detail. Besides, your job is just as important. Precision is critical in seal design."

Sakura sighs but nods, pushing herself off the wall. "Yeah, yeah. Precision. Got it." She’s just about done, anyway. The stone bands formed by the spiraling metal are mostly identical, so recording the few deviations isn’t as much of a challenge as it could have been. “What do you think this is, anyway?”

“I wish I could tell you,” Kakashi says frankly. “If I had to guess, maybe some kind of transport seal? There’s a lot of redundancy and chakra stabilization and processing built-in, and it looks a little like one of my sensei’s old jutsu. But there’s too much in here I’m not familiar with for me to give you any kind of real answer.” He sounds annoyed by that fact.

“What’s our goal here, then?” she asks, making a small note of where a swirl is flipped between two bands. “I mean, the obvious goal is to figure out what the seal actually does, but if that’s not on the table, what’s the next best thing?”

Kakashi makes a displeased noise. “Honestly? I think we’ve just about reached the next best thing already. I’m reaching the limit of what I can infer from the seal with any degree of certainty, and there’s only so much data we can collect here as non-specialists before someone else will need to come in anyway.” He straightens, looking over the whole seal appraisingly.

Sakura carefully keeps the hope out of her voice. “Does that mean…?”

Kakashi sighs, obviously unhappy with their relative lack of progress, but concedes. “Finish up what you’re working on, and then we can head out.”

Sakura internally fistpumps.

--

It’s not much longer before they’re ready to head out, and Sakura doesn’t want to jinx it, but she’s pretty happy with how the mission has turned out. Objective mission success, no issues along the way, and even her interactions with her mission partner have been perfectly normal. It’s everything she can hope for from her first B-rank.

She mentions as much to Kakashi as they finally leave the sealing chamber, and he knocks on the stone wall. “We don’t have any wood, but it’s better than nothing,” he explains at her raised eyebrow.

“You’re hilarious.”

Up ahead, the single tunnel connecting the sealing chamber to the rest of the base finally begins branching out into the bunker proper. She’s barely paying attention to her surroundings as she steps into the first intersection, busy trying to plot the quickest route out of the bunker from the winding route they took on the way in.

She barely registers the sound of a sandal scuffing against stone before Kakashi’s hand is suddenly a vice grip around her arm, yanking her back hard enough that pain spikes in her shoulder. She barely has enough time to process that before a massive fireball shoots out of the side corridor and crashes explosively into the side wall, exactly where she’d been stepping a moment before.

“ Doton! ” Kakashi shouts, slamming his hands to the ground to raise a reinforced mud wall to block off the hallway as she draws a kunai, heart racing. Immediately, the improvised cover is shaking from unseen impacts on the other side.

“At least a dozen chakra signatures, dropping cloaks,” Kakashi says, forehead protector already raised as he races through hand seals. “Stay back, support if you think you can, but stay safe.” And then he raises a curled hand to his mouth, and a high pressure jet of water shoots forward to stab right through the crumbling dirt wall. A startled cry rises and immediately falls silent from the other side.

It’s at about that time that Sakura manages to screw her head back on straight from a frozen spiral of almost died fireball inches away should have died and manages a nod. Fighting, they’re fighting, they’ve been ambushed and somehow neither of them sensed that an enemy had entered the bunker after them, but that’s something to figure out later but right now they’re fighting.

She can do fighting.

One of the enemies finally manages to bring down the wall with some earth-style jutsu of their own, and Sakura finally catches her first glimpse of their opponents. She can already make out six or seven shinobi in the narrow corridor, with who knows how many others are waiting in random corners of the base, and can spot a familiar music note on some of their headbands as Kakashi shoots forward, lightning in hand. 

She throws a handful of shuriken down the hall, telegraphed and aiming wide to avoid Kakashi. The closest enemy manages to deflect the first star but is forced to take the second to the shoulder when it becomes a choice of getting shredded by a shuriken or taking a chidori to the gut, and Sakura’s easily deflected second throw is just cover for her senbon that sneaks its way into a second enemy while Kakashi lunges for a third. In a matter of seconds, two of their opponents are down, and a third injured, but three more have already appeared to take their place, and Sakura spares a moment to wonder what they’ve gotten themselves into as she weaves a light genjutsu over Kakashi’s figure.

A kunoichi he jabs in the throat chokes, interrupted from where she’d clearly been inhaling for what Sakura assumes was going to be a fireball or water jet of some kind. Instead, she coughs up a noxious yellow bile that bubbles and fumes as it melts through her own skin and the stone beneath her. Abruptly, she’s reminded of why she hates fighting against Oto-nin. it’s like fighting a brand new and uniquely fucked kekkei genkai every time. 

Another enemy goes down hard to one of Kakashi’s knives, but then a massive compression wave rips through the tunnel and Sakura is suddenly more concerned with her own position in the fight. It’s only instinctual chakra reinforcement that protects her ears from being blown out as she’s violently thrown back down the corridor. She manages to convert it into a roll to a ready stance, which in turn gives her just enough to leap back to avoid the downward swing of a katana from the enemy suddenly in front of her.

The narrow tunnel gives her a slight advantage in theory against the longer, less wieldy weapon, but in practice she’d much rather have the extra room to maneuver around any nasty surprises her opponent might have. It also means that the enemy can rather effectively cut her off from reuniting with Kakashi, which makes things significantly harder.

She manages to parry or block a few of the enemy’s thrusts and slices with her kunai, but for the most part she’s content to simply dodge and cede ground until she finds the sealing chamber opening wide around her. 

Immediately, she leaps back, drawing senbon and shuriken in the same movement. In the tunnel, it was too dangerous to give the enemy space, because she gave them the time and space for ninjutsu then she’d have nowhere to dodge. Now, though, she can shift the battle a bit.

Predictably, the moment she gives her opponent the room, he’s racing through hand signs, and she throws her kunai straight for his head as she dives out of the way of the fireball he shoots at her. The fireball itself hits the innocuous-looking column at the center of the seal, and Sakura falters when it, as well as the whole sealing matrix they’re standing on, start glowing a faint blue.

Kakashi’s warnings about unstable seals and explosions fly through her head, and her heart rate spikes. It’s just enough of a distraction for her opponent to close the distance once again, and while she barely manages to block the swing with her kunai, she isn’t quite able to redirect it before her opponent puts his weight into it and starts pressing down on their locked blades. She can’t extract herself or her blade without her opponent’s katana slipping around her kunai and straight into her, so she pushes back with all she’s got.

It’d be a poor strategy for most kunoichi her size—the Oto-nin is bigger than her, with both the weight and strength advantage, which her opponent is undoubtedly counting on. Most shinobi in her position would flag first, their block would falter, and they would die.

Sakura is not most kunoichi. She’s been trained by the Godaime Hokage, and she doesn’t need to outlast her opponent. All she needs is a moment. She gathers chakra to her fist, even as she’s slowly pressed back, ready to blow the shinobi in front of her to bits with a single punch—

She stumbles forward as the weight in front of her suddenly disappears, the enemy shinobi flickering away just in time for one a clone to come through with a flying kick that she doesn’t react fast enough to block. She grunts in pain as she’s sent flying back towards the glowing pillar in the middle of the room, and she just barely has enough time to hope the whole thing doesn’t just explode on impact before she makes contact.

Pain shoots up her back as she collides with the column, and the world goes white.

“I guess we found what they were testing,” Kakashi says drily. 

Sakura blinks. What?

She whips her head around, heart still beating fast as she tries to get her bearings. Stone arches, carved runes, ominous carved pillar in the center—this is the sealing room. It's the sealing room where Kakashi had been bleeding out thirty seconds ago, because they were under attack from enemy shinobi!

Kakashi either doesn’t notice, or chooses to ignore her confusion for the moment, because he’s still talking. “…With any luck though, it shouldn’t take any more than an hour or two. Any ideas on where to start, then? Ah, Sakura?”

What the fuck .

--

So that’s what the seal does.

White fades from her vision, and Sakura blinks. What?

She looks around. Stone arches, carved runes, ominous carved pillar in the center—this is the sealing room. It's the sealing room where Kakashi had been bleeding out thirty seconds ago, because they were under attack from enemy shinobi!

“Sakura?” Kakashi gets her attention, sounding uncertain.

She turns to face him, but her question nearly dies on her tongue at his expression. Even when fighting for their lives, her sensei has only ever seemed grimly determined. But now? If he were anyone else, she might even call his expression shaken.

“Sensei… did we…?”

“Time travel,” he confirms her guess, and Sakura swallows hard. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Um, we were fighting the Oto-nin. And then, you got hit. Badly. You were bleeding out, but somehow the seal in the middle of the room started glowing. I accidentally touched it, and… now we’re here.”

Kakashi looks troubled. “And that’s the only time you remember coming back?”

“Yes…? Wait, do you remember more?”

“This is the first time I remember coming back, but I remember it differently than you do. As I remember it, we walked into this room together, and you immediately started telling me about time travel. You described what you just told me, but we weren’t sure if it was actual time travel or some kind of genjutsu or something else. We were still ambushed, and I ended up activating the seal. Now we’re here.”

Sakura tries to wrap her head around that. “So… assuming both of our memories are accurate, we’re either from different timelines… or we’ve time traveled twice?”

“More accurately, I think we’ve each traveled once. Your memory of the last loop was probably the real first time we arrived here, and then you traveled back to this point, when we entered the chamber. Then, we went through it a second time, which ended in me getting sent back to just now.”

Sakura takes a deep breath, trying to steady her racing thoughts. “So, every time one of us activates the seal, we travel back to this moment?”

Kakashi glances at the main seal thoughtfully. “That would make sense, based on what we’ve experienced.” He looks back to her, curious. “How did the seal activate for you, by the way? Did you notice anything strange about it?”

Sakura thinks back, but comes up blank. “Nothing especially suspicious, I don’t think? The middle platform was hit by a fireball in the ambush and started glowing, which I assumed was just because the chakra activated it or something. The actual time travel only happened when I made contact with the platform a minute afterwards, though.”

Kakashi frowns. “That’s another difference, then. No part of the seal was struck with any chakra when it activated—it just started glowing by itself, suddenly.”

Sakura blinks. That is weird. “Nothing else happened immediately beforehand? Was it hit by chakra earlier in the fight or something you may not have noticed?”

“The fighting mostly took place outside of the room prior to the seal’s activation, so it’s unlikely. And I didn’t notice anything else that might have caused an activation.”

Now Sakura frowns as she tries to think of a possible explanation. After a moment, a thought hits her. “Is it possible it never deactivated after the first loop? Or that it activated itself, somehow? We already know it can send us through time. Maybe it can send itself chakra, as well, or something.”

“That’s… possible,” Kakashi allows slowly. She can almost see the gears turning in his head as he considers the possibility, probably trying to work out how that might work on a technical level. “I’m not sure that it’s sending chakra back in time, exactly, but the idea that it might be activating itself in future loops is a good one.”

Once again, that simple compliment is enough to make her nearly glow with pride. It feels good to have Kakashi acknowledge her, after all the times she was treated as secondary compared to her teammates in the past.

“…activated the seal?” Suddenly she realizes that Kakashi hasn’t stopped talking, and is looking at her expectantly.

She feels herself flush a little. Focus! she tells herself as she asks him to repeat the question.

“I asked if you remember how much time passed between the moment we just traveled back to and when the seal was activated in the original loop.”

She thinks back. “Two hours? Maybe a little more?”

Kakashi nods thoughtfully. “That’s about how much time passed between you ‘waking up’ and the seal spontaneously activating in the loop I remember.”

“We could test if that’s the case again this loop,” Sakura suggests, her curiosity getting the best of her. She might see if she can arrange for some kind of sealing lessons once they get back to Konoha, because this is honestly pretty fascinating. Or maybe it’s just time travel that’s fascinating. Suddenly though, she realizes what she’s saying, and shakes her head. “Wait, this doesn’t even matter. Shouldn’t we be getting out of here? Before the Oto-nin arrive and we get attacked again?”

She’s surprised when Kakashi grimaces. “On that note… I did a little bit of scouting last loop after you started talking about time travel and ambushes, and I’m fairly certain the enemy is already in the area, if not in the upper levels of the bunker itself already.”

That’s… bad. “What are our odds of getting past them?”

“Shaky, but not altogether terrible. The bigger issue is that I don’t think we should be trying to escape them in the first place.”

She looks up, startled. Because, what? She almost asks, but sees Kakashi’s amused smile and pauses. Tries to think it through, like she had earlier.

Why shouldn’t they try to escape? Or, maybe a better starting point, what other option is better than escape? Failing to escape and dying obviously isn’t the answer Kakashi has in mind. Trying to avoid detection until the enemy leaves, maybe? Except, they didn’t just run into Oto-nin in the first loop, they were ambushed . The enemy obviously knows they’re here, so trying to avoid detection isn’t likely to succeed.

Fighting the enemy head on is another option, but an obviously unappealing one when faced with such a large numerical advantage. Never bother with a fight you can avoid . It had been drilled into them all over and over again in the Academy. At best, you’ll probably survive a fight; you’ll always survive avoiding a fight. There’s no shame in fleeing. Never stand your ground unless the ground is worth standing for.

Except… there is something worth standing their ground for.

She feels her stomach sink. “We’re not just trying to survive an ambush. We’re trying to stop Oto from getting their hands on the most dangerous seal I’ve ever heard of.”

Kakashi's smile grows a little wider. “Congratulations on surpassing your first C-rank becoming an A-Rank—your first B-rank has now officially turned into an S-rank.”

Sakura sits down, places her head in her hands, and stares at the wall. 

--

Sakura ends up spending most of the next hour or so playing at inspecting the seal, mostly for the benefit of any potential sensors among the enemy, while Kakashi spends that time actually examining the seal in order to try to figure out what they’re dealing with, now that he has the starting point of knowing what the seal does. She considers redoing and rewriting all of her measurements from their first go around, but ends up deciding against. Partially on the basis of her being too distracted by thoughts of time travel and Oto-nin to properly focus, and partially on the basis of her really not wanting to measure any more seals today.

Mainly the second reason.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t try to fight them earlier? Catch them off guard, before they can set up the ambush properly?” Sakura asks at one point. Even removing surprise as a factor, walking into an ambush can still be deadly just based on positional advantages. If they could avoid getting caught out in the hallway like last time, it’d go a long way towards helping their odds.

The plan they’d settled on is almost disappointingly straightforward—intentionally spring the Oto-nin’s trap, and try to ambush the ambushers with their foreknowledge. Honestly, it could hardly be called a plan at all. More of a goal, really.

Kakashi hums distractedly from where he’s inspecting some symbol or other on the other side of the room. “We could try, but we’d be trading one advantage for another. Even if we deny the enemy the opportunity to set up, we’re unlikely to catch them off-guard, either. So it becomes a question of whether or not our knowledge of the trap outweighs the danger of the trap itself.” He stops to jot something in his notes before continuing. “To be perfectly honest, though, I doubt our timing would significantly change our odds one way or the other. Given that, I’d rather wait and test our hypothesis about the seal’s before we do anything. Worst case scenario, nothing changes, and best case scenario, it’ll give us a chance to reset if things go wrong in the fight.”

Sakura tries to shake out some jitters as she nods. She’s not quite bored, but standing around for an hour with nothing to do but think about walking into an ambush is making her a little restless. Kakashi turns to look at her, clearly amused.

“If you’re that eager to do something, you can start redoing some of the measurements from earlier—”

“I’m not bored!” she quickly interrupts, sweating at the thought of another hour of analyzing spirals.

Kakashi laughs.

--

“Well, the bad news is that I’m pretty sure we’re locked out from activating this again by ourselves,” Kakashi finally says, straightening up from where he’d been trying to feed chakra into a particular cluster of carvings near the center of the room. “On the bright side, though, I’m pretty sure we’re not going to destroy the fabric of reality or kill ourselves instantly by using this again if it does activate. But that’s just about all I can tell you.”

Sakura exhales, as the knot in her stomach loosens just a tiny bit. “That’s a relief, at least.”

Kakashi makes a noise of agreement. “If our theory is correct, and the seal does activate by itself, I want you to stay behind while I fight. Be ready to use the seal and go back, in case anything goes wrong.”

“You don’t want backup?” Sakura asks, surprised. “We’re pretty heavily outnumbered here.”

“I have a lot of experience fighting while outnumbered,” Kakashi replies easily, making his way over to the entrance to the room where she’s been keeping watch. “Plus, we’re fighting in a relatively narrow corridor. That helps limit the advantage of numbers.”

Sakura is still skeptical. “Even so, it’s not like having someone at your back could hurt.”

“True,” Kakashi acknowledges. “But that brings me to my second point: I want you to guard the seal. If one of the enemy manages to get past us, and they manage to time travel, then our job instantly becomes much, much harder.”

Sakura concedes the point, but has another thought. “What about your ninken? Can’t they help guard the seal?”

Rather than immediately responding, Kakashi runs through a set of seals, bites his thumb, and slams his head against the ceiling, presumably to avoid running over any of the carvings on the ground with the summoning seals. A puff of smoke appears, but nothing else. “Summoning blocks,” Kakashi elaborates at Sakura’s stunned look, tucking his hands back in his pockets. “Fuinjutsu capable of blocking the local connection between our realm and the Summoning realms. It’s impractical for most battlefield applications, but nearly ubiquitous in high-security locations. I felt it on the way in.”

Sakura thinks that she should just stop being surprised at what fuinjutsu can do at this point. “Alright then. I’ll just update you the best I can if I go back.”

Kakashi hums. “It is a little bothersome that only one of us gets direct knowledge back when we travel. Especially considering we can’t take any written notes with us.”

Even with two hours to wrap her head around the idea of time travel, it still feels strange to discuss a coming battle in terms of redos and improving future events.

“Well, are we sure that only one of us can travel back? What if we touch the seal together, or are both holding it when it activates?”

Kakashi frowns. “That might work, but I’m not too keen on giving a soul-transference technique multiple targets, especially when we don’t know if it’s designed for it. It’s already a miracle that it’s working as well as it is.”

She briefly wonders what a targeting error might look like with time travel, and is struck by a terrible vision of her stuck in her old sensei’s body while her own body walks around Konoha reading porn. Or worse, the two of them somehow getting stuck in one body. She shudders. “Good point.”

“If we—”

Kakashi is interrupted by a soft blue light suddenly filling the chamber. They turn to where the column in the middle of the room is now glowing faintly. Dim pulses of light sporadically flash through the neighboring carvings sporadically, flaring and dimming at random.

“I guess we were right,” she says quietly. It’s not that she expected them to be wrong, or anything, but the seal actually activating makes the whole situation feel more real, somehow.

Kakashi stares down the dark hallway, towards where they know, somewhere, over a dozen enemy shinobi lie in wait.

“If something goes wrong…” he says suddenly, voice utterly serious, “If enemies get past me, and the seal doesn’t send you back, survival is your number one priority.” There’s something intense in his eye, and Sakura almost wonders if he’s had a mission like this in the past, because something in his voice makes it seem like more than a standard pre-fight warning. “Fight dirty, and fight smart. If I go down, and you get a chance to flee, take it. Do you understand?”

“What about the mission?” she can’t help but ask, carefully ignoring the part where Kakashi casually plans for his own death.

“Forget the mission at that point. At least if you make it back to Konoha, they’ll know the seal exists. You won’t help anyone by dying here.”

Sakura nods cautiously. “Alright. But don’t you go killing yourself either, okay? We still don’t know for sure that this will work the way we want.”

It’s not something a shinobi can promise, and she knows intellectually that, if there was ever a battle to die in, this would be the one. Still she takes some measure of comfort from Kakashi’s familiar eye smile as he responds. “Of course.”

She nods. “Good luck.”

Kakashi’s smile softens, reassuring. “See you soon.”

And with a flicker, he’s gone.

The sudden silence is oppressive. Every quiet footstep feels like a thunderclap as she walks to stand beside the glowing seal in the middle of the room.

The seconds pass like minutes pass like hours as she waits.

A massive explosion suddenly rocks the bunker, casting dust from the walls and ceiling as the rock shakes at the impact, and she tenses despite herself. The violent sounds of steel on steel and crashing ninjutsu echo through the hall and into the chamber. Distant voices rise in shouts, only to trail off into gurgles or suddenly be cut off entirely, and Sakura forces herself to remain calm.

Sensei is a legend for a reason , she reminds herself. It’s something she never quite realized as a genin on his team—the Kakashi-sensei she knew was habitually tardy, consummately unprofessional, a shameless fan of smutty romance novels, and generally unimpressive outside of his jonin status. Ironically, it wasn’t until she left his tutelage that she learned about her Sensei’s other, more impressive reputation.

He’d been on countless missions. More dangerous missions, surely. He must have survived worse odds than these, before. He’d survive this, too.

She focuses on the continuing sounds of combat. Fighting is good. Fighting means that the Oto-nin still have someone to fight. It means they haven’t won.

Unfortunately, it also means they haven’t lost yet, either. A second explosion sounds in the tunnel, and two Oto-nin slip into the sealing chamber shortly afterwards—the acid-spitting one from earlier, and a sunken-looking one Sakura doesn’t recognize. She can still hear the sounds of battle echoing after them, so Kakashi is clearly still alive—they must have simply gotten past him. Something to keep in mind for future loops.

The unfamiliar enemy steps towards her as he spots her, a sadistic grin spreading across his face. He flexes an arm, and something on him ripples unnaturally, but she doesn’t give him a chance to show off whatever body-horror show modification he might be hiding: she sends up a prayer, touches the seal, and has just enough time to feel relieved as the world fades away.

White fades from her vision. Arches, runes, ominous pillar—still in the sealing chamber.

“Sakura?” Kakashi asks from beside her, sounding uncertain. Just like last time.

Relief bubbles up inside her. It worked. She turns to face him, smiling despite herself. “I’ve got a couple things to catch you up on, Sensei.”

White fades away.

“This would be loop five?” Kakashi asks as Sakura tries to reorient herself.

She nods, smiling as relief bubbles inside her. The seal worked. “I’m at four, so it must be. Anything important to note?”

“Other than the fact that Oto-nin are miserable to fight against?” Kakashi deadpans, and Sakura rolls her eyes. “Actually, yes. Apparently shadow clones can activate the seal.”

That’s… actually really interesting. “And you came back with your main body’s memories, too?”

“My memories are the same as if the clone dispelled,” Kakashi confirms. “And there’s one other thing. You did a check up on us last time, to see if looping was affecting us at all, and you thought you might have felt something. Would you like to check again now?”

Sakura blinks, surprised. “Sure,” she says, already beginning to circulate medical chakra through her body. Running a diagnostic on yourself is a little harder than on someone else, but Tsunade made sure that she knew how—

Wait a minute.

“Can I double check something on you?” she asks, a little disturbed, and Kakashi nods. Her hands glow blue as she holds them up to his temples.

Sakura frowns, brow furrowing as she tries to decipher the strange feeling her diagnostic is returning. "It’s—I’m not sure how to describe it, actually. It feels like some kind of pressure is building up in your brain. I haven’t felt anything like this before. There’s definitely stress on the organ, I can say for certain."

Kakashi glances at her, his expression calm but visible eye sharp. "Is it getting any worse?"

She shakes her head slowly. "Not at the moment, but it must have worsened at some point if I wasn’t even sure if it existed last time. Right now, I’m worried about subsequent loops. If it gets too bad, there’s a chance it could turn into an aneurysm, and given that it only seems to get worse with each loop, rather than reset..."

Kakashi's eye narrows. "If it becomes fatal, then resetting won’t help. We’d travel back in time, only to immediately have an aneurysm and die again."

Sakura nods grimly, finally releasing the jutsu as she lowers her hand. "Exactly. We’re on a time limit, essentially."

Kakashi doesn’t look pleased either. “How bad is it right now?”

“Not very,” she says. “It feels a little like a very mild headache. If this is how bad it is after four loops, then we should be safe for a while.” She scowls. “Assuming the rate of damage doesn’t suddenly get worse, at least. Which, considering I know nothing about how time travel-induced brain stress works, is technically possible.”

“Are we sure it’s four loops?” Kakashi points out. “As far as we can tell, only one of us is traveling back each time. If the stress comes from looping back, then it might only affect the person who actually uses the seal on each loop, rather than both of us.”

Sakura considers that. It would make sense, even if it doesn’t necessarily change the math all that much. “We can test that easily enough on the next loop. I’ll run a diagnostic on both of us again, and see if one, both, or neither of us worsened.”

Kakashi nods. “For now, we’ll alternate who resets as best we can. Hopefully that will help mitigate some of the effects of looping on either of us individually. And even if it doesn’t, it will at least make sure we’re both relatively up to date at all times.”

“Sounds good,” Sakura agrees. “What’s the plan for this loop, then? Same strategy, something else, or…?”

“I think our broad strategy should remain the same, but I want to try something else during the battle. If we need to go back again, then I’d like you to tell me which enemies got past me and when, and then we can work from there the next loop.”

“And in the meantime?”

“… Would you hate me if I said I wanted to study the seal some more?”

Sakura groans.

“How are you already writing?” Sakura asks incredulously as her vision finally comes into focus after yet another trip back. Time traveling always leaves her disoriented and fighting vertigo, but Kakashi is already messing with what appears to be some kind of high-level fuinjutsu nonsense in his notebook. “Every time we reset, I need a few moments to even figure out where I am, but here you are already decoding the secrets of time travel or something.”

Kakashi smiles as he scribbles a few numbers in the margin. “Experience with feeling like crap, mostly. I’ve run missions concussed, hypovolemic, chakra exhausted, and just about everything in between. At this point, I’m pretty used to working through disorientation.”

The chunin in Sakura is impressed. The med-nin in her is not. “Why do I get the feeling not all of those experiences were strictly necessary?” she asks dryly.

“You know, ‘necessary’ can be so ill-defined…”

“Seriously, how are you even alive?”

“Death doesn’t want me?”

“I’m telling Tsunade when we get back.”

Kakashi rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. “To be fair, they do train you to fight through most of that in Anbu. In my case specifically, I had an old teammate who mixed a lot of vestibular genjutsu in with her taijutsu. It was obnoxious as anything to fight against, but my experience sparring with her probably saved my life the first time I had to fight with a concussion in the field.”

Genjutsu mixed with taijutsu, huh? Neat. “Do you think you can teach me that?”

Kakashi looks up. “I didn’t know you had an interest in genjutsu,” he says, sounding curious.

“I don’t, really,” she admits. She doesn’t look down on the skill at all, and knows how important it can be. It just can’t compare to the satisfaction of a solidly connected punch. “But if it can supplement my taijutsu, I’d like to learn it.”

“Smart,” Kakashi complements. He slides his notebook into a pocket on his vest. “In that case, we’ll start with the hand signs."

Sakura grins.

White fades away.

“Nine?” Kakashi asks, looking down the hallway in something approaching a glare.

“Nine,” Sakura agrees, giving him a wary look. “Last loop didn’t go well?”

Kakashi sighs. “No worse than any of the others,” he says. “I’m just realizing that this is going to be harder than I thought.

That’s not a comforting statement. “Harder as in ‘difficult but doable’? Or as in, ‘maybe impossible’?”

“The former,” Kakashi quickly reassures, pulling himself out of whatever thought had him glaring down the dark as he turns back to face her. “There’s just a lot more enemies than I initially guessed. Worst case scenario, if the battle is truly unwinnable, we can always just slam down a bunch of explosive tags, destroy the seal, and escape in the chaos.”

Sakura blinks. “Is there a reason we’re not doing that in the first place?”

“We should try to preserve the seal for Konoha if possible. With a seal this complicated, there’s a pretty good chance that the fuinjutsu underpinnings could reach into the stone or metal itself—even if we used the sharingan to recreate the seal perfectly back in Konoha, there’s a very good chance it wouldn’t be functional at all. What we really need is to get a proper sealing team or seals master out here.”

“So… destroying the seal and escaping is the backup plan if preserving the seal while also defending it from the enemy is impossible?”

“Exactly.”

Sakura glances down the tunnel where Kakashi had been staring. To an outside observer, she’d just passed through it a couple of minutes ago, but by her own memory, it’s been nearly a full day, and with every loop the bunker’s shadows seem more sinister and more impenetrable. “You were saying this is more difficult than you expected?”

Kakashi shugs, seemingly over whatever annoyance had momentarily gripped him. “They’re just more competent than I’d expected. They either know you’re here, or know what they’re after, because they keep making efforts to get past me, rather than just fight me, which is troublesome.”

“Probably the former,” Sakura replies, thinking back to how the enemy nin always seem to lock onto her, rather than the seal, whenever they appear in the chamber. “I don’t see how they could know about the seal. Konoha didn’t even know this place existed until recently, let alone what’s in it. Even if we have an information leak, the information wasn’t there to leak in the first place.”

Kakashi frowns, probably at the mention of a leak. She doesn’t blame him, even though she’s sure he had already considered the possibility. As distasteful as it is to think about, the odds of an Oto-nin squad this size stumbling upon the previously unknown location at the exact same time that Konoha sent a relatively high-profile, yet lightly armed team are… slim.

“If they really are just aiming for me, then we can adjust our strategy to take advantage of it,” she suddenly says. Kakashi gives her an interested look, and she hurriedly continues. “You make it sound like the issue isn’t that you can’t beat them, but that you can’t stop all of them from getting past you. Is that right?” Kakashi nods. “Well, what if you didn’t have to worry about them getting past you?”

Kakashi seems skeptical. “Are you talking about sealing off the chamber somehow? Because we don’t really have the time or materials to do that effectively."

Sakura shakes her head. “That’s not what I mean. The reason why we need to guard the chamber is because we don’t want them to use the time travel seal, right? But that’s only an issue once the seal activates itself. If we bring the fight to them earlier, then it doesn’t matter if they get to the chamber. As long as we can end the fight before the seal activates, we’ll be fine.”

Kakashi still doesn’t seem convinced. “It would also mean giving up our safety net if something goes wrong. More importantly, it would mean you would have to fight, too, since you can’t use the seal if the enemy reaches you.”

“I can fight,” she says seriously, fighting off a scowl. She tries not to let his doubt get under her skin.

“I know you can,” Kakashi assures, barely managing to avoid sounding patronizing. “But against multiple chunin and jonin-level enemies? Maybe simultaneously? That’s a dangerous fight for most jonin , let alone a chunin.”

“I know,” she says, because she does. “But danger’s part of the job. You taught us that.”

“That doesn’t mean I like it,” Kakashi mutters under his breath, before speaking up. “We can try that strategy later if we need to. For now, let’s stick with what we’ve been doing. That way, we can at least gather as much information on our opponents as possible, before we commit to the fight.”

Sakura nods, and decides to let it go for now. Kakashi’s plan makes sense, anyway, and it’s not like they won’t get the chance to switch things up later if necessary. “Alright. But I expect an apology for that chunin remark when we kick Oto’s ass.”

Kakashi barks out a laugh, and like that the tension is gone. 

Kakashi walks slowly towards her, each foot placed exactly in front of the previous.

Sakura forms a hand sign, and feels a dip in her chakra. Kakashi’s gait remains unchanged, and his eye curves up in a taunting smile.

She narrows her eyes, adjusts her hands just slightly and digs a little deeper into her chakra pool.

Kakashi’s next step falls slightly to the left as he stumbles, and he freezes. Sakura pumps her fist in victory.

“Congratulations,” Kakashi says, smile turning warmer as he effortlessly breaks her genjutsu. “You got it working in only a couple of hours; that’s really impressive. Are you sure you don’t want me to talk to Kurenai?”

Sakura grins back. “Chakra control has to be good for something. And we’ll see. I really appreciate the offer, but I think I’d rather focus on my medical ninjutsu and taijutsu right now.”

“It’s smart to focus on your specialties,” Kakashi concedes. “Still, no skill is ever wasted. If you ever change your mind, let me know.”

“Maybe when I get a little closer to jonin,” she replies, and she’s surprised when his expression sobers.

“You know, I don’t think I ever formally congratulated you on your chunin promotion.” He hadn’t, as a matter of fact. Tsunade later told her he was out on a mission during the exams, and they hadn’t seen each other afterwards. His voice now is sincere. “That’s really great. You’ve become a fine shinobi.”

The delivery is a little awkward, in a way that suggests that Kakashi's a little out of practice in giving compliments. Although, she’s pretty sure that has more to do with him being out of practice with emotions and sincerity in general than anything else. It’s rare that she’s ever seen him anything other than aloof and detached emotionally, and on those rare occasions he’s always seemed a little uncomfortable.

Even despite all of that, Sakura can’t help the warmth she feels at his words. After so long being overlooked and placed second to the rest of Team 7, it was always a rare treat when Kakashi had singled her out for praise.

The past year has been transformative for her, between her own rapid improvement as a shinobi, her learning to live with newly deceased parents in the aftermath of the invasion, and the rapid and ugly disintegration of Team 7. She’s not a genin anymore, she’s the Hokage’s Apprentice, and most days, she tends to think of the naive little girl from Team 7 as a completely different person than she is now.

All that is to say, Kakashi’s approval shouldn’t mean so much to her. He’s not even officially her teacher anymore, and she likes to think she’s grown beyond the child that was always wishing he’d look at her the same way he looked at her teammates. She should be beyond this.

“You should be proud,” Kakashi finishes, smiling.

It’s all she can do not to beam.

“Loop fourteen?” Sakura asks, blinking away the disorientation that comes with time traveling.

“I’ve got it at fifteen,” Kakashi replies, and Sakura nods.

“Still sticking with the same strategy?” she asks cautiously, because she’d think that ten attempts in a row is enough to warrant at least some kind of reevaluation of their current methods, but apparently Kakashi disagrees.

“Same strategy,” he confirms. “The fight is going better every time—we’re making progress.”

True enough. Still, she tries not to wonder if they could be progressing faster. “Learn anything new about the enemy?”

“I’ve already told you about poison senbon?” Kakashi asks, continuing a thread from a previous loop. Sakura nods. “I’m pretty sure every one of their weapons larger than a kunai has that same poison on it. Which means we don’t just need to win, we need to avoid getting hit in the first place.”

She adds it to the ever growing list of information he’s been gathering about their opponents. “You know, I could probably put all this intel to better use if I was actually fighting, rather than staying behind every time,” she says, only half-joking.

Kakashi’s visible eye gives the impression of a smile, but his reply is serious. “These are high level enemies, Sakura. I don’t want you fighting if you don’t need to.”

It’s a dismissal and she knows it.

“You know, we’ve each experienced something like fifty consecutive hours of consciousness at this point, and yet I don’t even feel tired,” Sakura observes one loop, more to make conversation than anything else. “I’m assuming the seal is returning us to our previous mental states in that regard, in addition to our physical states, but it makes me wonder what exactly is going on at the physical level. Like, how are our brains updating to keep our memories, but not updating with our fatigue or anything?”

“You’re ignoring the obvious solution,” Kakashi calls back from where he’s shadowboxing some imaginary foe. Apparently, one of the enemy nin has a particularly annoying taijutsu style, and he's trying to find a way to break through it faster. “Maybe the seal really is just updating our entire mental state, no finesse to it.”

“And your explanation for why we’re not both about to pass out on the spot is…?”

Kakashi gives her a confused look. “We haven’t been up for that long. We might start feeling it soon, but it’s still a little early to tell.”

Sakura stares at him, incredulous. “Sensei. Including the time we were awake before activating the seal in the first place, we’ve both been up for nearly three days at this point. What exactly do you consider to be a long time to stay awake?”

Kakashi’s expression quickly shifts to that of someone who realizes they have said aloud something that they were unaware was supposed to be a secret, before he tries to hide it. Sakura, who is unfortunately long familiar with her former sensei’s terrible self-care habits, still catches it.

“Sensei!”

“Sensei, I can help! We don’t have infinite attempts at this, and I really think my idea—

“It was a good suggestion,” Kakashi interrupts, voice hard, and Sakura shuts her mouth in surprise. “But it’s too dangerous. We’re not risking it.”

His tone leaves no room for argument.

She tries not to take it to heart, but the total rejection still stings.

Eventually, even Kakashi runs out of productive things to practice while they wait for the seal to activate before he goes to fight. Still, his chosen pastime is one that she’s never quite understood.

“You really do like those books, don’t you?” she asks, bemused.

Kakashi gives her an amused look from behind the cover of Icha Icha Paradise . “I certainly read them a lot for someone who doesn’t.”

Sakura shakes her head. “Honestly, I always thought maybe you were just reading it to troll people. Or at least, to discourage them from talking to you.”

Kakashi shrugs, turning his attention back to his book. “The side benefits are nice, too.”

“What’s even the point of reading them at this point? Haven’t you memorized them with your sharingan?”

“As a matter of fact, I make a point of keeping the sharingan covered when I read them, so that I can always experience the story anew when I return to it.”

Sakura can’t tell if he’s joking or not. She’s not going to ask, either. “Still, there must be other books you find worth reading, at least occasionally. But I only ever see you with Icha Icha .”

“Hey, don’t knock it before you try it.”

“You honestly think I’ll enjoy it if I give it a try?”

“Not even a little.”

She barely has time to register that she’s back in time before Kakashi sinks to his knees beside her, clutching his temples and hissing in pain.

“Sensei!” She runs over and quickly lifts a glowing hand to his head, running a diagnostic as quickly as she can.

Kakashi's breathing is labored, and he seems to be struggling to focus. After a few tense moments, Sakura's diagnostic shows no immediate physical damage, but she can sense the intense strain on his brain.

“Are you alright, Sensei?” she asks, concern lacing her voice.

“Migraine,” he grits out. “Just—I need a minute.”

She keeps her hand steady, focusing her chakra to ease the pain. Slowly, she manages to bring down some of the stress on the organ. Definitely still way above baseline, but enough that it should help with most of Kakashi's immediate symptoms.

"Just breathe, Sensei," she murmurs, trying to adopt the soothing tone she’s seen Shizune so easily fall into. “You’re fine."

Kakashi's breathing begins to steady, and the tension leaves his shoulders in increments as the pain slowly subsides.

“Thank you, Sakura,” he finally says, eyelids relaxing from where they’d been clenched shut. Sakura takes that as her cue and lowers her hand.

“There was way more pressure on your brain then there should have been,” she says, worried. If something is changing now, then they have way less time then they’d thought. “Did something happen in the last loop?”

“Accident,” Kakashi mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose as he tries to work out the last bit of his headache. “I traveled back twice in a row. Bad idea, apparently.”

She frowns. “Why’d you travel back twice in a row? What happened?”

“One of the enemies was faster than you thought and made a break for the seal, and I was closer.”

Something is wrong in his tone, but it might just be residual pain. She decides to move on regardless. “How did the loop go otherwise? No major breakthroughs?”

“No such luck.”

“Any progress, then?”

“Some,” he says, in a tone that she takes to mean barely any. She tries not to grimace.

"That’s something, at least. My mother liked to say that, once you run out of ways to fail, you’re guaranteed to succeed."

Kakashi huffs what might have been a laugh, the sound echoing softly in the dimly lit room. “My sensei used to say something similar when he was experimenting with a new seal design. Usually a couple of minutes before blowing himself up.” Kakashi's one visible eye crinkles in what could be a smile. “He was an optimist, that way.”

Sakura giggles, the tension in the room easing slightly. "You think he was wrong?"

He shrugs. “Sometimes things are just impossible.”

She shifts, trying to word her next sentence in a way that won’t immediately get shut down like it has been the last half dozen times. “Maybe that’s because we’re looking at it from the wrong angle.”

“I’m not letting you fight, Sakura,” Kakashi's tone goes hard, and the levity in the room disappears.

Sakura’s fists clench at her sides. So much for subtlety. “Sensei, what we’re doing clearly isn’t working, and we’re running out of chances! I can help! I’ll hang back if you want, but let me do something!”

Kakashi shakes his head, the silver strands of his hair catching the faint light. “This fight is beyond what you can handle right now.”

“I know I was never good enough for you, but I’ve been training! I’ve improved, I can help now, Sensei. I’m not useless!” Her voice trembles with barely contained frustration. She doesn’t understand why he’s being so stubborn about this.

“I know you’re not useless, Sakura. But I know your skill level, and—”

“You don’t!” she shouts, her voice echoing off the stone walls. Kakashi seems genuinely taken aback by her outburst.

“Sakura—”

“You’re not my sensei anymore! You keep saying I can’t handle this, but you haven’t seen me fight in nearly two years! Your info is literally years out of date, how can you not realize that?”

The words are spoken in anger, but the moment they leave her mouth, she realizes the truth of them. Kakashi is too practical not to realize that he doesn’t know her abilities. Unless… unless he has seen her fight, and she just doesn’t remember.

Her stomach sinks. “Sensei, what have we been doing on your loops?”

Kakashi’s expression instantly shutters, and suddenly Sakura is nauseous.

“Sensei…”

“We’ve attempted your strategy multiple times, now,” he says, voice even. “It hasn’t worked. Every time, you’ve been either grievously injured, or killed.”

Her brain refuses to process what she’s hearing. The ground feels shaky under her feet. “What?”

“Your idea was good. We tried it. It didn’t work.”

The words wash over her, but they still barely make any sense. “Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

“Because you didn’t need to know.”

“So you just made the decision for me? Decided I didn’t need to know that I’d died ?” she nearly shouts, confusion giving way to betrayal and righteous anger. She barely maintains the presence of mind to keep her voice low enough not to alert the enemy. “Because you know best? Because my input doesn’t matter? Because I’m too weak to know the truth?!”

“Because no one needs to hear about their own death ,” he responds sharply, wheeling to face her, before visibly reeling himself in. She doesn’t bother reining in her own glare. “At best, the information is irrelevant, and at worst, it’s a traumatic revelation I didn’t think you needed dumped on you when we’re already in an incredibly stressful situation.”

“I don’t need you to protect me ,” she hisses, hoping her anger is enough to cover the yawning pit of hurt she feels growing within her. She’s not delusional enough to think that Kakashi had thought of her as an equal in the field, not with the massive disparity in experience and skill between them, but she at least thought he was starting to see her as a peer and fellow shinobi. “I’m not still a genin . I’m not weak.”

“I know you’re not weak—”

“You keep saying that! But you don’t act like it!” she shouts, and it echoes in the following silence.

“I’m sorry,” Kakashi finally says. She can’t gauge his sincerity through the mask.

Sakura holds a breath, before letting it out in a sigh. Shinobi aren’t emotional. She can move past this, for now. “How did those loops really go, then? Compared to the ones I’ve been telling you about.”

Kakashi opens his mouth behind his mask, before closing it, clearly deciding against whatever his initial response was going to be. “Still not well. With you helping to cover blind spots, none of the enemy is able to consistently get past us. But the battle itself goes poorly every time. You hold your own well, but consistently get overwhelmed when they start doubling or tripling up on you. I’m usually not fast enough to protect you.”

Sakura closes her eyes. She wants to ask if she died again in the last loop, and if that had something to do with Kakashi looping twice in a row, but she doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. She’s a chunin now. She’s grown. Shinobi don’t get emotional. She opens her eyes again. “Did you succeed in any of those loops? Or does the strategy fail regardless?”

“It’s not a success if you die, Sakura,” Kakashi immediately responds, so utterly missing the point and still not taking her seriously that suddenly the anger is right back at the surface.

“Were any of them successful otherwise , then? Was my death the only thing holding you back?” she demands, voice rising.

Kakashi’s expression closes off again, and he gives her a look she can’t decipher, maybe somewhere in the ballpark of considering. Suddenly, Sakura almost wishes she hadn’t asked. Almost.

“Yes,” he finally says, simple, and that single word sinks cold into her heart like a knife.

She sits down on cold stone, facing away from him, and says nothing.

--

Sakura stays behind when Kakashi leaves to fight. An Oto-nin makes it into the sealing chamber. Sakura touches the seal, and time resets.

“Thirty-four?” Kakashi asks cautiously as she finds her footing in the next loop, and Sakura nods shortly. He’s cautious of her , she realizes sourly.

Neither of them say anything else.

It’s not the first time that Sakura finds herself annoyed by the fact that she and Kakashi are operating on two entirely different sets of memories, but it feels worse now than it did before. It doesn’t really matter if she and Kakashi remember slightly different versions of their small talk, or occasionally make references to comments the other doesn’t remember making. As long as they were on the same general page, it was fine.

But now? Kakashi doesn’t remember telling her about how he’d lied, how she’d died . Not even the sharingan could remember the moment he’d revealed his breach of trust, what he’d said or how she’d reacted. None of her words had stuck with him, had even been said, and it left her feeling unsatisfied. She wants to yell at him again, make him acknowledge his mistake again, make him remember it this time.

But she won’t, because clearly she already had . Kakashi’s not talking, not smiling, not even looking in her direction: he’s clearly uncomfortable and unaware of how to deal with her. Which means she’d told him something last loop, except she can’t remember doing so.

She hates it.

--

Two hours later, she stays behind as Kakashi goes to fight the enemy alone. The same nin as last time finds his way to the chamber again—bleeding, crading a broken arm, and obviously furious. Sakura almost considers engaging, not resetting like Kakashi wants her to, but then the enemy’s arm shifts. Bones crack back into place, flesh ripples, and suddenly the arm is healed. His skin starts glowing black and red with the familiar spreading of a cursed seal, and Sakura touches the pillar.

Sakura blinks as she once again finds herself at the chamber entrance. “Thirty-five?” she asks tersely.

“Ah, thirty-six,” Kakashi corrects lightly. He hesitates for a moment, and then, “You died in loop thirty-five.”

Sakura freezes mid-way through pulling out her notebook, with which she’d intended on doing anything that doesn’t involve talking to Kakashi. “Oh,” she says uselessly, then flushes at her own response as she deliberately resuming her prior motion.

Neither of them say anything else for a while.

--

“How?” she finally brings herself to ask, breaking the silence around an hour later.

Kakashi glances at her, considering, but seemingly unsurprised at the question. “Unpleasantly.” He pauses for a moment. “Are you sure you want details?”

She hesitates for barely a moment, more to build up courage rather than because of any uncertainty, before nodding decisively.

Kakashi looks away. “One of the enemy nin spits acid, and he got you pretty good. You killed him, but your healing couldn’t keep up. It took a couple of minutes.”

She remembers watching that acid eat through stone like nothing. Imagines the pain of melting flesh, a horrible death by inches as she desperately tries to heal faster than the acid can tear her apart, the dread of realizing she can’t keep up, that she’s only delaying the inevitable, prolonging the pain—

She stops thinking about it. “Ah,” she says quietly.

They both go silent again.

--

She stays behind. The enemy makes it into the sealing chamber. She resets.

“I’m sorry,” Kakashi says into the silence of the sealing room, over an hour into their wait for the seal to activate. It’s the first time he’s said anything unrelated to the mission unprompted in three loops.

“I understand why you did it,” Sakura mumbles quietly, staring into her own lap from the opposite side of the room. She’s sitting against the wall of the chamber, mostly lost in her own thoughts. Other than her brief check ups at the beginning of each loop, it’s not like she has anything more productive to do, anyway.

Over the past couple of loops, anger faded first into melancholy, and then into the hollowness she feels in her chest now. What was she even mad at him for in the first place, anyway? Trying to protect her? Trying to protect the mission? Ever since she learned the truth, she’s been distracted, upset, and their communication has suffered as a result. Doesn’t that prove that Kakashi was right to withhold the information from her?

“You had a right to know,” Kakashi continues, shaking his head. “And I took that from you. It was wrong of me to make the decision of what you’re better off knowing or not for you. Ethically, I wronged you. Practically, I jeopardized the mission by causing both a breach of trust between us, and also withholding important information from my teammate. I made a selfish decision, and I apologize for it.”

He stops there. Sakura wonders how much of that he’d mentally scripted before he even started speaking. Wonders if he’d practiced on her last loop, when she wouldn’t be able to remember if he’d misstepped.

She opens her mouth before she can stop herself. “You said before that not telling me wasn’t a reflection on me.” Or, he implied it, at least. This is a stupid question , you shouldn’t even be—“Why didn’t you tell me, then?”

“I told you the truth before,” he says eventually. “Near-death experiences in the field can mess shinobi up badly. I can’t imagine it’s a much happier thing to know that, in another world, you did die. I wanted to spare you that.” He looks her in the eyes. “I never believed that you couldn’t handle knowing, or something similar, because I know you can. I just didn’t want you to have to.”

She thinks she believes him. She wants to believe him. But at the same time, she’d believed him before, as well. “You would have made the same decision for someone else then? Not just me.” Kakashi starts to respond, but Sakura cuts him off before he can get a word out. “Please be honest this time.”

Kakashi closes his mouth, mulling over his words for a few seconds, before answering. “Maybe not for everyone else. Most of my old Anbu teammates, and probably most jonin, I would have told. Hiding it from them wouldn’t be a kindness, because frankly it wouldn't matter to them either way. At a certain level of experience of shinobi, the thought of your own death stops bothering you. But for anyone else? Naruto, the rest of your class, anyone who hasn’t hit that point of apathy?” He sighs heavily. “If it was someone for whom I thought hiding it would be a kindness? I probably wouldn’t have told them, either.”

It’s not a perfect answer. But somehow, that’s what makes her believe it. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Kakashi echoes.

“Okay,” she repeats, letting out a breath. “I don’t like that you lied to me. I might still be upset for a while, and you definitely owe me a meal back in Konoha.” She hesitates. “But I don’t want to keep being angry at you.”

“...You’d be well within your rights if you did.”

“I know.”

Neither of them say anything for a minute, but something about that little bit of honesty makes her want to get the rest of it off her chest.

“I hate thinking that I’m the only reason why we haven’t finished this mission yet. I mean, here I was, thinking that I’m finally more than just the extra teammate holding everyone back like I was in Team 7, all to suddenly find out that, nope! The mission could have been done ages ago, except Sakura keeps on screwing it up and dying.”

“You’re not the reason for the mission’s failure now, and you were never that person on Team 7,” Kakashi says simply, like it’s an obvious truth. “On Team 7, you performed admirably. The only teammates you had to compare yourself against were both prodigies in their own ways, and you still kept up with and even surpassed them regularly. The only failure there is on me, for not always giving you the attention you deserved, and letting your confidence suffer.”

Some knot deep within her loosens a little bit. Not fully: Kakashi’s words weren’t the magic secret she needed to hear to instantly fix all the messy memories and emotions she has from the time. Still… it’s strangely validating, and a little relieving, to hear Kakashi himself admit that he had treated her poorly, sometimes. That she hadn’t just been imagining it, or had somehow done something to deserve to be treated as secondary.

“And now?” she asks.

“Now, the only times I’ve ever defeated all our opponents are with your help. Every time I’ve tried it alone, I’ve failed. You’re not the only thing holding the mission back from success—you’re the reason why success is on the table in the first place.”

It’s a kind response, even for all the things it leaves unsaid in the ensuing silence.

The knot loosens a bit more.

--

Sakura stays behind when the seal starts glowing. Enemies make it into the sealing room, and she resets.

Half an hour into trying and failing to practice her genjutsu, Sakura finally accepts that she’s not in the right state of mind to focus on the task and gives up. Instead, she looks up to where Kakashi is once again giving studying the seal another go.

“Why would you go back, and jeopardize the mission?” she asks, finally giving into curiosity. The question has been gnawing at her since Kakashi first told her the truth. “This seal is… it’s more important than me. It’s more important than either of us.”

Kakashi looks up, brow furrowed. “I’m not just going to leave you behind, Sakura.” He sounds almost regretful, like he’s upset that he even has to say it. “I know I’ve failed you in a lot of ways, but I hope you know that I would never just leave you to die.”

“Why?” she asks without thinking, and then backpedals at Kakashi’s startled expression. “I mean—not, why wouldn’t you let me die, but, why would you, not—”

 She stops, takes a breath, and restarts. “Strategically, objectively speaking, this seal can bring greater benefit to Konoha than either of us could as individuals. It doesn’t make sense to risk the seal for me. I’m glad that I’m alive, obviously, but…” She trails off, stumbling as she tries to figure out what she wants to ask. “I guess… I want to know why you chose to come back. I don’t think most other shinobi would have done that.”

Kakashi fully abandons the seal as he looks at her. “You know my nindo,” he says, like that explains everything.

After Team 7’s bell test, she doesn’t think she could ever forget. Still… “A nindo is just a statement of belief,” she argues, gesturing abstractly. “Not an origin. You don’t believe something because it’s your nindo. It’s your nindo because you believe it.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that it is a core belief of mine.”

“But why?” Sakura knows she’s being annoyingly insistent, but she wants to know. On top of her general curiosity, there’s the not insignificant point that Kakashi’s adherence to his nindo is quite possibly the only reason she’s still alive. It feels important to know why.

Kakashi doesn’t break eye contact during or after her question, but he doesn’t say anything immediately either. It looks like he’s trying to decide what he wants to say next.

Finally he sighs, and closes his eyes. “‘Those who break the rules are scum, but those who abandon their friends are worse than scum,’” he recites resignedly. “That’s something one of my genin teammates once told me, the same mission he gave me his eye. His name was Uchiha Obito.”

That’s… not what she was expecting. She’s wondered in the past where Kakashi had gotten his sharingan, of course, since he obviously wasn’t born with it, but she certainly wasn’t expecting it to come up now. “What happened?”

Kakashi’s voice is flat as he goes on. “It was during the Third War. Our third teammate, Rin, had been kidnapped by Iwa-nin, during a critically important mission. Obito wanted to go rescue her. I—I was a stickler for rules, when I was kid, and thought we should prioritize our mission. We got into an argument, and I told him that those who break the rules are scum. He set me straight.”

Sakura doesn’t say anything. Something in Kakashi’s voice, and the way he holds himself, makes her think that this is something he’d much rather not be talking about at all, and he was clearly reluctant to start talking about it in the first place. She worries if she cuts him off at all, he’ll never finish the story.

“I ended up losing my eye during the rescue, and later on Obito lost his life saving mine,” Kakashi continues. “Mortally wounded during a cave-in. Before he died, he asked me to see the future for him, and now…” Kakashi gestures vaguely at his left eye. “His final request was that I watch over our last teammate, and keep her safe.”

The story is obviously painful for Kakashi, and Sakura almost feels bad for asking in the first place. She hadn’t meant to drag up the death of a teammate, and even if she’s never experienced it… even just thinking about Sasuke or Naruto dying on a mission in front of her sends shivers down her spine. “What happened to your teammate?” 

“I killed her,” he replies blandly, carefully even.

… What? It doesn’t compute for a minute. Not wanting to return for a teammate is already so unlike the Kakashi she knows, but she can at least understand the fact that people change, and that beliefs don’t come from nowhere. But killing a teammate… she can’t imagine any version of Kakashi ever doing that.

“It was at the end of the war, just a couple months after Obito,” he continues, and even as he keeps his voice steady she can hear the grief in his tone. “We were negotiating peace with Kiri at the time—hostilities were supposed to have been suspended. But Kiri kidnapped her anyway. I didn’t know it at the time, but they turned her into a jinchuriki. They stuck the Sanbi in her with a faulty seal, then let her go so that she’d return to Konoha and kill us all when it broke free.

"I tracked her down to rescue her, but was too late to stop the sealing. She wanted me to kill her, to stop her before she could destroy Konoha. They had a compulsion seal on her, and she couldn’t kill herself, or fight the urge to return. But she could ask me to do it for her.”

What the fuck, she thinks, trying not to gape. She’s still shocked that Kakashi would agree to it, but if it was one teammate against potentially the entire village…

“I told her I wouldn’t do it,” Kakashi continues, derailing her thoughts completely. “But I was fighting the Kiri Anbu that were after us, and she jumped in front of my chidori. I was too slow to save her.” The emotion is gone from his voice again. “I failed her. I failed both of them.”

What the fuck .

Their previous conversation is barely a thought in her mind at the moment. She wants to apologize for asking. She wants to know why he’d even answer her in the first place. She wants to thank him for trusting her enough to share something that personal. Mainly she wants to go back in time to before she’d ever asked in the first place. She was trying to move past the depressing part of their conversation, not…

“…I’m sorry,” she says eventually. Then, because she has to, “I didn’t mean…”

Kakashi nods, like he heard her say something else. “I know. But you deserve honesty. It was a fair question, anyway. It’s never a bad idea to examine where beliefs come from, either your own or others.”

And, apparently they’re just moving on. Alright then.

“The point of all that is, you asked why I would risk the mission, even an objectively more important one, to save a teammate.” Sakura nods distractedly. It’s a little difficult to go back to their previous conversation after that story, but she manages. “My nindo isn’t just a belief. It was a promise: to myself, to my past teammates, and to my current and future teammates, as well. It’s a part of who I am.”

Well, at least she got her answer. Even if it was… more than she expected. “What if you can’t complete the mission and save me, though? What if this is just… impossible?”

A pause. “Are you saying we shouldn’t try?”

“No! It’s not that, not at all.” Sakura shakes her head viciously. “It’s just… we’re running out of tries, sensei. Your head’s getting pretty bad, and I don’t want you to kill yourself chasing a goal that might not be attainable.” She hesitates, swallowing hard before finally getting to what she really wants to ask. “What if we just abandoned the mission now?”

Kakashi shakes his head. “We’re not abandoning the mission. This is too important.”

“But if it’s impossible—”

“It isn’t,” Kakashi interrupts, confident. “I can take them all out, and keep you alive at the same time. I guarantee it. I’ve been getting closer every time—a couple more attempts, and we’ll be out of here.”

She searches his face for any hint of doubt. “You’re sure? No offense, but that’s a lot of confidence for someone who’s been trying for three days straight.”

“Your confidence inspires me so,” Kakashi deadpans, before lightening up. Any trace of old grief is gone now, and Sakura finds herself wondering how he does that. “Have some faith in your old sensei. We can afford one or two more tries. We’ll get through this.”

She bites her lip, and raises her hand to run a diagnostic on him one more time. “I really don’t know. You have maybe one more loop, but I really don’t want to risk anything past that. You’re worse off than I am, probably because of your double loop before, but even still, realistically we only have two, maybe three more safe attempts between us.”

“Then we’ll make it work with two or three more attempts,” he replies. 

Even a year out of his tutelage, something about that calm certainty reassures her the way it did back with Team 7. She feels some of the tension leaving her as she nods. “Alright, Sensei.”

His eye curves up, and, for the first time since their fight, she lets herself tentatively grin back.

White fades away.

Sakura holds her hand to Kakashi’s head with a frown. He stays mostly still while she runs her diagnostic, but winces very slightly every time her chakra moves too fast. “I think you can maybe loop back one more time,” she finally judges, and the glow of her chakra changes shades as she ends the jutsu and begins to focus on relieving the stress in Kakashi’s brain. “But even then it's inadvisable. You’re definitely not looping again after this.”

Kakashi frowns, obviously displeased, but not particularly surprised. They’d both been fighting headaches for a while now, even with her healing them as best she can. “Inadvisable as in…?”

She grimaces. “Maybe twenty percent chance of death?”

“Inadvisable indeed,” Kakashi mutters, though some of the tension in his muscles finally soothes as Sakura finishes healing what she can. “I’m assuming your own odds are just as bad?”

“A little worse,” Sakura confirms grimly. It’s something they’d observed in previous loops: for whatever reason, her own condition seemed to be worsening slightly faster than Kakashi’s. Their best theory at the moment was that it was something related to yin-chakra tolerance, and that Kakashi’s much greater exposure to various yin-release techniques over the years might have given him a better resilience. Ultimately, though, they have no way to know the underlying reason for certain, and the result remains unchanged either way. “What’s the plan?”

Kakashi is silent for a long moment. “We have two more attempts, at the most,” he finally says. “I want to try fighting one more time this loop, and if it doesn’t work, then I’ll reset. If that happens, we’ll abandon the mission, destroy the seal, and escape.”

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to risk resetting again?” Sakura asks, doubtful. “You’re risking a lot for no guarantee of any return.”

“I’m risking a lot for the chance at a massive return,” Kakashi corrects, “and even if I fail, there’s better than four-to-one odds that I’ll be fine regardless.”

Sakura isn’t convinced. They’ve been trying this for dozens of loops, and never succeeded. The odds of succeeding this time, if nothing else changes, are miniscule. Kakashi’s risking his life for nothing. “In that case, at least let me help you in the fight."

“Sakura—” Kakashi begins a familiar objection, but Sakura cuts him off.

“At least hear me out, okay? I don’t know what we’ve talked about on the loops you remember, but earlier you told me that you’ve gotten closest to success when I’ve helped, right?”

Kakashi’s expression isn’t doubtful, exactly, but it’s clear he’s not sold what she’s suggesting. “If you recall, it’s also been incredibly dangerous for you, historically. If something goes wrong…”

“I know, but—it’s not like I like the idea of risking it, okay? But if you’re looping anyway, then I’ll be fine no matter what. The only one at any real, lasting risk here is you.” She doesn’t want to pause in her explanation, as if convincing Kakashi depends on her keeping up her momentum. “I mean, what are the possibilities? If you loop, I’ll be fine no matter what, but you might not survive the trip. If we succeed in this loop, though, then we never have to run that risk at all. Letting me help maximizes that chance of success. And if I help and we still fail, then you loop anyway, and we’re in the exact same place as if I hadn’t helped in the first place.”

“And if something goes wrong, and I can’t reset for whatever reason?”

“Then my odds are still better than yours.”

Kakashi looks at her for a long moment without answering. “You know, if you ever get tired of being a medic, you’d make a brilliant strategist.” Finally, he sighs, but there’s a smile in his voice, too. “If you’re going to fight too, then we’d better go over strategy.”

Sakura grins back.

--

The next two hours pass in a blur of planning and review. Kakashi reviews and expands on every bit of useful information he’s gleaned from their enemies over the previous loops. They go over everything and anything they can think of, from massive things like the total number of enemies (nineteen) and their specialties, to minutia like which of them are left handed (four).

“Remind me why your shadow clone isn’t in here fighting with us?” Sakura asks towards the end, as they discuss Kakashi leaving a clone behind to activate the seal.

“One of them has some kind of omnidirectional concussive wind-style attack,” Kakashi replies. “It’s not that strong, and won’t do more than unbalance you as long as you’re ready for it. Still, it’s enough to consistently disrupt my clones.”

“Really?” That doesn’t seem right. She’s seen shadow clones take full punches before, if they see it coming. Something so weak doesn’t seem like it should be able to break one.

Kakashi shrugs. “There might be a chakra-disruptive component infused into the jutsu, I’m not sure. I just know that, after the seventh time my shadow clone was destroyed almost immediately, I decided to stop wasting chakra.”

“Fair enough.”

Soon enough though, the seal starts glowing around them, the time having passed the fastest it has since the very first loops, and almost before Sakura knows it the two of them are making their way down the single tunnel out of the sealing room, leaving nothing behind but a single minimal-chakra clone.

It’s the first time Sakura remembers leaving the sealing chamber since they were truly caught off guard by the ambush during the very first loop. Time simultaneously crawls and passes in a rush as they approach the first intersection in the passage, and Sakura flexes her hands in anticipation as she feels her heartbeat speed up.

“Ready?” Kakashi whispers from beside her, not turning to face her.

“As I’ll ever be,” she confirms, equally quiet. At their current pace, they’re just seconds away from where they know the enemy will attack.

Without any further warning, Kakashi throws a precisely aimed barrage of kunai and exploding tags, which immediately detonate. Stone crumbles, enemies shout in alarm, and Sakura draws her weapons.

The battle begins.

--

The biggest hangup in previous loops, according to Kakashi, has been avoiding getting poisoned in the first minute of the fight. The relatively narrow corridors are a double edged sword, because while they make it harder for the enemy to surround them, it also means that they don’t have much room to maneuver, and thus are usually forced to engage with whichever enemy presses ahead.

“They have a couple of bukijutsu specialists that usually press hard immediately after the initial ambush,” Kakashi had revealed. “Their blades and senbon are all poisoned, too. My main issue in the past has been that I can’t get through that fight injury free, while also avoiding any distance attacks from their allies, without resorting to chakra intensive techniques.”

Which had led to issue number two: in loops where Kakashi did commit to a more chakra intensive beginning, he usually ran out of chakra before the end of it. The solution that had apparently worked in the previous loops where she had joined him was that she would provide support while he tried to dominate the narrow passage they were fighting in, bottlenecking their opponents to prevent them from getting at her. 

--

Kakashi’s initial explosion only incapacitates a few enemies, but the disorientation it causes is just as important as Kakashi immediately launches himself at the first Oto-nin to come stumbling out into the open.

For a short while, their plan works beautifully. Any opponent that gets too close to Kakashi is swiftly cut down or beaten back, the silver-haired shinobi precisely dodging poisoned blades and crushing blows by fractions of inches as his own steel deals out death in return. Any enemy that tries to get tricky with blindspots is intercepted by Sakura’s shuriken or senbon, and any enemy that diverts a fraction of their attention from fending off the copy-nin to dispel one of Sakura’s genjutsu are punished for it immediately when Kakashi takes brutal advantage of their distraction.

It’s almost exactly how they’d approached the ambush by instinct on their first loop, only now with better preparation and intel. It’s actually kind of neat to think that their first strategy was apparently also the best.

Nothing works forever, though, and soon comes the moment they’ve been watching out for.

Their opponents, who had largely focused on Kakashi as both the deadlier and nearer target, eventually realize they can't afford to ignore her as they deal with Kakashi, and so switch things up. With some kind of combination of earth-style and genjutsu, one of the enemies seems to melt through the walls of the passage to get around Kakashi, and immediately goes after her.

She’s startled, but not caught off guard as she intercepts his initial strike with a kunai. With a subtle application of her newly-learned vestibular technique, she disrupts the man’s balance enough that he stumbles into her fist rather than around it. She feels his ribs cave beneath her hand, and even though he’s not dead, he’s still out of the fight with nearly as much certainty unless he’s some kind of healer.

It’s a short fight, only a couple of seconds, but even that short amount of time where she wasn’t covering Kakashi and the larger group of enemies is enough for another enemy to have gotten past Kakashi, who has been forced to shift his fighting style to focus more on just dealing with the enemies as they come rather than focusing on preventing them from getting past him.

She abandons her shuriken and draws a kunai instead. Time to fight.

--

“If that plan works so well, then where do things go wrong?” Sakura had asked back during their strategizing.

“Eventually, they regroup, and rethink their approach. As soon as they start to get past me, we’re forced to fight separately. I’ve tried to get back to you when that happens, but the enemy has been pretty good about keeping me away. Odds are, I won’t be able to get to you safely if it happens again.” Sakura had seen the intensity in his eye as he’d continued. “If they get past me, you need to be at your best. For a little while at least, you’ll be on your own.”

She could tell by his expression that she hadn’t survived it in the past.

--

Sakura blocks the shuriken coming at her with a kunai, but it’s just cover for the enemy’s approach, and she’s forced to flip backwards to avoid their approaching kunai swipe. She throws her own shuriken to keep him busy, but can’t take advantage of it when an enemy kunoichi appears beside her mid-attack.

Sakura replaces with a bit of rubble farther back in the passage before the enemy’s blade can reach her, but she’s once again immediately on the defensive as her first opponent is on top of her again.

The enemy’s taijutsu is fluid, almost serpentine, as they fight, and it seems like every movement is converted into another strike from an awkward angle for Sakura to block. She’s on the defensive even before the kunoichi rejoins the scrap. Sakura hastily redirects the second nin’s punch, but she’s too slow in turning back to her first opponent. She raises her leg a moment too late to properly check his roundhouse, and she cries out in pain as her knee buckles.

She slams her heel back into the ground, hard enough to crater stone, ignoring the way her knee screams in protest. Her opponents are momentarily unbalanced at the impact, and she takes advantage with a chakra reinforced punch aimed squarely at her first opponent’s head. He manages a block, but isn’t able to diffuse the force at all, and the bone shatters at the impact as he’s sent flying into the wall. He doesn’t get up.

Sakura doesn’t have time to reorient herself to face the enemy kunoichi before something slams into her back, thankfully not piercing her flak jacket but with enough force to throw her several feet. She hits the ground hard, and when she tries to scramble up her knee won’t hold her weight.

She rolls herself so she’s at least facing her opponent, already cycling medical chakra to her leg to try to at least get it to the point where she can stand. She raises a kunai to try to fend off whatever attack may be coming, but it doesn’t matter. The kunoichi keeps her distance as she finishes the hand seals for her attack.

"Suiton: Corrosive Jet!" she shouts, cupping her hands to her mouth. A sizzling stream of milky-colored water shoots out directly towards Sakura.

She raises her arms in a desperate attempt to shield herself from the worst of it, even as she knows it won’t be enough. Before the attack can reach her, though, it’s intercepted in a blur of green and silver.

Even before Sakura fully processes what happened, Kakashi is already ripping off his hissing flak jacket, trying to use the precious moments of protection it affords to get the acid away from him. While he’s busy, the kunoichi is already completing the hand signs for another attack, but suddenly a second Kakashi flickers in and grabs her wrist before she can finish. Sakura realizes it’s the clone they’d left in the sealing room when it bursts into electricity. The kunoichi goes down screaming.

Her brain finally catches up with her as Kakashi finally shucks the last bit of his hissing flak jacket, the material giving off fumes as it hits the ground. “What about the seal?” she hisses as he throws up a mud wall to block an incoming fireball. ”We should be guarding it!”

“It doesn’t matter as long as we win,” he bites out, sounding pained. He’s clutching his left side with one hand. “This is more important. It’s the closest we’ve come so far.”

She looks down the hallway to where Kakashi had been fighting. Bodies litter the ground, but a little less than half of their initial number of enemies are still standing. She turns back to Kakashi, intending to say something about how they shouldn’t risk it, but stops short when she sees the growing stain of red underneath his hand. “Sensei—!”

“We’ll worry about it later,” Kakashi cuts her off, already speeding through hand seals. From the speed at which the wound is bleeding, Sakura figures he must have been hit while rushing over to block the acid attack. “I can still fight. Heal your leg.”

Then the familiar sight and sound of chidori fills the bunker, and Sakura has no more time to protest before Kakashi is gone down the hall.

The lightning blade is just as fearsome as it’s always been, ripping through flesh and bone and guard and armor like paper. The crackling energy surrounds his hand, illuminating his fierce, determined expression. His sharingan whirls, taking in every movement around him, yet his reactions are slower, more labored. Sakura can see the pain etched into his features, the tightness around his eyes whenever he shifts his weight onto his injured leg.

Despite the injury, Kakashi is a whirlwind of lethal precision. His movements are a blur, an amalgamation of speed and raw power, yet there’s a wildness to them that she hasn’t seen before. He’s always been controlled, every action calculated, every strike purposeful. Now, there’s an edge of desperation.

He fights with a ferocity that leaves no room for hesitation, each enemy that falls under his assault is met with another who steps up to take their place. She sees him stagger slightly, his breath coming in harsh, ragged bursts. Blood drips steadily from a gash on his side, staining his undershirt a deeper red.

She’s seen Kakashi fight many times before, and she knows that the reckless tearing through enemies she’s seeing now is not at all up to his usual level. His leg must be holding him back, because she watches him take a dozen cuts and glancing blows that he would have avoided on any other day. Or maybe he just doesn’t care enough to dodge, willing to take on the injuries in order to end the fight before poison or chakra exhaustion can catch up to him. Either way, lucky hit after lucky hit piles up, and it’s all she can do to cast the occasional genjutsu on their opponents to try to spare him a few of them.

Only a fraction of the Oto-nin had still been standing by the time Kakashi began his reckless charge, and the stragglers don’t last much longer. One enemy goes down after another, until finally, Kakashi’s chirping hand pierces straight through the heart of his final opponent. The oto-nin's dying eyes widen in shock and pain, and then nothing at all.

Kakashi roughly shoves the dead shinobi off his arm as he releases the chidori, and the body hits the ground with a dull thud . The last echoes of birdsong fade away, and for a moment, the battlefield is eerily silent, save for the soft hum of Sakura’s healing jutsu and Kakashi’s own heavy breathing.

Kakashi stands amidst the fallen, his body trembling with exhaustion. He starts to turn towards her, but sways. He manages one step before he collapses.

“ Sensei! ” It’s only a couple of seconds more before she’s able to heal her leg to the point that it can support her weight, but it feels like hours. The moment she can, she’s tearing across the room to where he’s lying nearly motionless on the ground.

Blood is already pooling on the ground beside him, and his breathing is shallow and pained. Sakura hurriedly kneels beside him, fumbling open her medkit with trembling hands as she tries to assess the damage.

“You’re going to be fine, okay? You’ll be fine. We just need to stop the bleeding, and—and isolate the poison, just, hang on…”

She pulls out gauze with one hand and packs the largest wound on his side as best she can, but the length of the gash makes it near impossible to do so perfectly. Her other hand hovers over the wound, chakra glowing faintly as she tries to knit torn flesh back together. Blood continues to seep around the gauze, through her fingers as she tries to hold pressure.

“Sakura…” Kakashi groans.

“Don’t talk, just hang on,” she orders. She grabs his hand and presses it against the gash as hard as she can, ignoring his hiss of pain. “You need to hold this as tight as you can. I can heal the wound, but we need to make sure you don’t bleed out before I’m done.”

She moves from wound to wound, trying to triage. She heals the major slice along his side, at least enough to stop the majority of the bleeding, before moving onto a burn on his shoulder. If she ignores the blackness she feels seeping beneath his skin, then she can almost pretend that she’s back in Konoha’s hospital, well within her wheelhouse and confident in her ability to heal whatever injury is set before her.

But the moment she feels for the poison curling in his veins, cautiously optimistic, reality violently reasserts itself. The toxin is spreading too quickly, and it’s not like any formulation she’s seen before. Healing wounds is easy, but counteracting a poison like this, let alone one of this complexity, isn’t something she has experience with. Her chakra falters, her vision blurring with tears.

“I don’t know this one, I—I can’t—”

“Sakura.” His grip tightens around her wrist, grounding her in the midst of her panic.

She glances at his face, sees the pallor of his skin, the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. His heartbeat falters once, then twice, and she resets it with a spike of chakra.

“Stay with me, please,” she whispers, moving her hands to his abdomen, where another wound oozes dark, poisoned blood. She channels more chakra, but the poison resists her efforts, spreading tendrils of blackness through his veins.

“It’s okay.” Kakashi’s voice is barely a whisper.

It’s not okay. She pauses, staring down at the wounds she can't heal, at rapidly blackening blood she can’t fix. The realization hits her like a physical blow: she can't save him.

Kakashi must see it in her eyes, even before she says anything, because his jaw tightens in a way that has nothing to do with his pain.

“Don’t reset the loop,” he rasps.

“What?” She looks at him, confusion and desperation mingling in her gaze.

“Don’t reset,” he rasps again, his grip on her wrist still firm despite his weakening state. “You just looped, it’s too dangerous to try again. You could kill yourself if you try.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I could die? You’re going to die!” Her voice breaks, her tears flowing freely now. “Why wouldn’t you just wait and reset?”

“This is our best chance of mission success. You’re alive, and we have the seal. There’s no—” He cuts himself off, tilting his head just enough to cough up blood and phlegm without choking on it. “No guarantee… we can replicate that, if we loop.”

“This isn’t success!” She cries, heart shattering.

“It’s the closest… we’re going to get.” Kakashi starts gasping as his grip on her wrist finally falters.

She’s shaking her head even before he’s done talking, pushing even more chakra to her hands, as though she can keep Kakashi’s heart beating through sheer force of will. “No. No. I can’t let you die!”

She’s not sure if Kakashi even hears her. He’s long since closed the sharingan, but she can see the light flickering in one open eye as he fights out his next words. “…does no good… kill yourself too…”

He stops breathing.

“Sensei,” she calls, desperate. “Wake up. Sensei. Sensei!” There’s no response. His heart is still beating, and she tries to latch onto that fact. A beating heart means he’s not dead, means it's not too late to save him.

His heart is only beating because you’re beating it for him , the medic in her whispers. He’s already dead.

She pushes forward regardless—she doesn’t need to counteract the poison, if she can just physically burn it out of Kakashi’s system. It’s chakra intensive, it’s dangerous, and it might cripple or even kill him if she messes up, but it’s better than just letting him die.

She yanks down Kakashi’s mask without any hesitation, barely even registering the face that any other day she’d be beside herself to finally see as she performs mouth to mouth. One breath, two breaths, and then her hands are glowing again.

“Oxygen in, then circulation” she mumbles, determination flooding her. Kakashi’s heart had stopped beating when she took her hands off his chest—she’ll have to multitask. With one hand, she continues on beating his heart. With the other, she pours chakra into his system, trying to target, overwhelm, and burn out the poison in his veins. The poison is hard to pin down: it feels oily and slick and intangible simultaneously, and she’s sure she’s doing more damage to surrounding tissue than strictly necessary in her efforts to eliminate it, but inch by inch, she manages to beat it back. Kakashi’s heart keeps beating.

One breath, two breaths—medical chakra can substitute for most vital functions, but oxygen is needed to prevent brain death. Green chakra from one hand, blue from the other—keep the patient’s vitals steady while treating the poison simultaneously. One breath, two breaths. Green chakra, blue chakra. Kakashi’s heart keeps beating.

Time flows around her as she falls into a kind of rhythm, trying to keep her Sensei alive as she fights the poison that’s killing him. For a brief, incredible period of time, she manages to trick herself into thinking that she’s going to be able to save him.

It’s her chakra that gives out first. Medical ninjutsu is chakra intensive to begin with, and the technique she’s been using to try to burn out the toxin is essentially just blasting it with high-density, high-output medical chakra. Her blue hand flickers out first, and then a moment later her green.

Kakashi’s heart stops beating as the chakra sustaining it fails. She switches to chest compressions. The tears she’d chased away to focus on the hope in her chest and the work in front of her return. She stops chest compressions. She stares.

Kakashi’s envenomed corpse sits in front of her. There’s still so, so much poison in him, and there’s nothing she can do to treat it. Something cracks deep inside her.

Her sensei is dead. He’s been dead for nearly fifteen minutes.

She sits back stiltedly as the realization washes over her. She pulls her knees to her chest, tucks her head, and curls in on herself. She bites on her lip until she bleeds, squeezes her eyes shut, and feels her entire body begin to shake.

She forces herself not to cry.

--

The pale light of the seal bathes the chamber, washing out the colors of the blood and bodies scattered around the room. The column in the middle of the room sits tauntingly, just a few feet away from where Sakura sits on the cold floor, and just a few feet further away from the colder body of her team captain.

She’s a chunin now. She can do logic.

The mission is, on paper, a success. Sakura can leave now, and bring intel on the seal back to Konoha, and no one could fault that. In fact, it is probably the correct decision. Other than Kakashi’s death, the two of them have completed all mission objectives. No single life could possibly outweigh the benefits that time travel could bring Konoha. Even Kakashi had agreed with that assessment. All the enemies are dead. She should leave now.

All the enemies were dead loops ago. Kakashi should have left then.

Sakura stares at the glowing seal. She stares at Kakashi’s body.

Kakashi had made the selfish decision because he refused to leave a teammate behind. Could she do the same?

She shouldn’t. Konoha would say she shouldn’t. Kakashi would say she shouldn’t.

She reaches for the seal, and the world goes white.

White fades in. And it doesn’t fade away.

“Sakura!”

Everything hurts. Or, no, wait, it’s only her head that hurts, it’s just that nothing exists outside of that pain. It feels like her skull is being crushed, ground into dust, and then into nothing at all, and simultaneously she feels countless are being driven deep into her forehead and temples. She can’t focus, she can barely even think.

“What happened? Sakura!” Kakashi’s voice is distant, distorted by the agony searing through her mind.

Gritting her teeth, Sakura fights through the blinding pain, forcing herself to move. She channels chakra down to her hand, struggling for the control that had always come naturally to her, and raises her palm to press against her head. She struggles to perform the techniques she’s practiced countless times.

Come on, Sakura , she thinks to herself, or maybe says out loud. It doesn’t really matter. Keep it together.

The first wave of healing chakra hits her skull like a soothing balm, dulling the edges of the pain just enough for her to think a little more clearly. Focusing becomes a touch easier, and she pushes a bit more chakra into the technique as she works to repair the immediate physical damage caused by the trip back. It’s delicate work, and definitely not her specialty, but moment by moment she manages to bring herself back to something safer.

She feels Kakashi’s hand on her shoulder, his grip steady and grounding. “You’re doing great, Sakura. Keep going.”

Her eyes are still screwed shut, blocking out the outside word, but his words provide another anchor to the world outside her head while she tries to nudge her mind back into shape. With every passing moment, she finds it a little easier to focus, which in turn makes it a little easier to heal, until finally, the pain begins to recede.

Her labored breathing finally steadies, and she manages to open her eyes without wincing on her second attempt. Immediately, her vision is filled with Kakashi’s concerned face. He’s alive, he’s alive—

“How do you feel?” he asks, his voice filled with a mix of worry and relief. He leans back against the wall of the chamber next to where she’s sitting. He must have moved her while she was whiting out.

Sakura takes a deep breath, testing the clarity of her thoughts. The pain is still there, but it’s manageable now, a dull throb instead of an all-consuming agony. “Better,” she replies, her voice still a bit shaky. “I’m... I think I’m okay.”

Kakashi lets out a sigh of relief, dropping his hand from her shoulder as his head falls back. “What happened?”

As the immediate pain fades, she slowly regains the ability to actually think about what’s going on, and immediately tries to take off in a million directions at once. Kakashi died, Kakashi’s alive, I should be dead, I’m alive, we’re both alive but neither of us should be—

She forcefully shoves the maelstrom of emotions down, dragging her attention back to the present as she answers. “I had to loop twice in a row,” she says, before stopping. She doesn’t have to continue.

Kakashi's expression briefly morphs into confusion, before quickly being replaced by one of resigned understanding. "I died, didn't I?"

“You chose to die to complete the mission.” she says. And then, when he doesn't react, "You’re not surprised.” A familiar chasm reopens in her chest. Betrayed, secondary, didn’t need to know—

“It’s not like I’m planning on dying, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Kakashi clarifies.

“But you’ve considered it?”

“…It has occurred to me as a possibility,” he admits, but immediately continues. “Every mission, you have to think about what you’d be willing to die for, and what dying would actually help. That doesn’t mean you want to die. I promise, Sakura, I’m not looking for death or anything.”

“And dying for this is worth it?”

Kakashi sighs. “Life as a shinobi means watching your precious people die every day, until the day you die. It’s our job as shinobi to try to stop that from happening. This seal can do that.”

Sakura doesn’t have an immediate response to that.

They sit in silence for a moment as she tries to figure out how to phrase what she wants to ask next. “When you were dying, you said that that loop was probably our best chance,” she tentatively starts. “Was that…?”

Kakashi glances briefly at her, but looks away again. “Success is still possible. If I did it once, I can do it again. Especially now that I know I’ve succeeded once.” 

“In the loop where you first told me that I’d died, you said that it wasn’t a success if I didn’t come home. It’s not a success if you die, either,” she points out. She pauses. “Can we really succeed with this mission?”

Kakashi doesn’t respond for a long couple of seconds, and Sakura doesn’t interrupt whatever he’s thinking about. Finally, he looks heavenwards, and sighs. “I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll be able to complete the mission and both survive, no. I don’t have the chakra for it, and you don’t have the experience.”

Sakura closes her eyes, and lets out a deep exhale. It’s what she expected, but it still hurts to hear, to know that all of their work might have been for nothing.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean we should abandon the mission,” Kakashi says eventually.

Her eyes shoot open. “Sensei!” she cries, disbelieving.

“This mission is more important than either of us,” he continues evenly, unknowingly echoing her own words from a previous loop. “It’s not like I’m going to try to die: trust me when I say I would also like me to survive. But this seal could save countless lives, and we shouldn’t be willing to give it up.”

“So, what? I’m more important than the mission, but the mission is more important than you? How can you ask me to do something that you’re not even willing to do yourself?”

“I am the team captain. It’s my job to make sure you get home safe.”

She doesn’t understand. Kakashi jeopardized the mission over and over by refusing to let Sakura die, but all of a sudden he’s willing to sacrifice himself? What, his nindo only goes one way?

Wait a minute.

She’d been horrified when he’d told her about Rin. It had been easy to see how deeply the ordeal had affected Kakashi, as well. But… the way he talked about it…

I killed her. I couldn’t save her.

It hits her. He doesn’t blame Rin for what she put him through. No, more than that—he doesn’t realize that Rin had put him through it in the first place. Which means…

“Killing yourself doesn’t make it any better, you know,” she says, harsher than she intends.

Kakashi glances at her. “Excuse me?”

She calms herself down. “Sensei… you told me you think you failed Rin. Have you thought that maybe she failed you?”

He looks away, but doesn’t otherwise react physically. “Are you going to tell me Rin was wrong for dying?”

She ignores the obvious trap. “I think she was wrong for putting that on you.”

“She didn’t have a choice .”

“But you do .”

He doesn’t respond. His gaze is distant, but she hopes that he’s at least still listening to her words.

“You said you feel like your life is just losing your precious people. Have you ever thought that there are people who don’t want to lose you ? What about Gai-sensei? Or Naruto? Did you know Tsunade-shishou said she thinks of you like a nephew?” She knows her voice is wavering, but still pushes forwards. “What about me , sensei? This, you dying here—that’s not a fluke, or a mistake , it’s—this is suicide!”

Kakashi flinches, barely noticeable, and Sakura’s not sure if it’s at her accusation of suicide, or her at her own rising voice, but she can’t bring herself to sort it out. The words keep coming, and her voice keeps rising, and she’s not even really thinking about what she’s saying anymore because every time she blinks she sees his body and she can’t do anything—

“You always say that comrades come before the mission, but you don’t—you’re not including yourself in that! You’re asking me to let you die! How could you, after—I know it’s not the same, you’re not asking me to kill you, but you’re asking me not to save you, but— how can you put that on me? ”

Kakashi is staring at her now, eye wide, and some distant part of Sakura is aware that she’s shouting and tearing up at her superior officer in the field, but she can’t bring herself to care. Her vision is blurry with unshed tears. ”I know, sometimes people die, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, but this isn’t like that! You dying here, wouldn’t just be you precious people losing you—it would be you leaving us.”

She feels the tears, threatening to spill, but she every time she closes her eyes she sees him bleeding out, sees the light leave his eyes as his dying breath rattles out of his chest, she’s sees her own trembling hands desperately searching for a pulse that isn’t there, and now he’s looking at her like he’s considering doing it to her again and she just can’t —

“Please don’t leave me again,” she chokes out, voice breaking. His expression cracks.

“Oh, Sakura …” Kakashi reaches towards her, unsure but with open arms, and Sakura shamelessly throws herself into the hug. She barely registers Kakashi wrapping his arms around her as she sobs into his flak jacket.

“I keep—I keep seeing it, seeing you… It didn’t even happen! You—you’re here, you’re alive, but I still…”

“It’s real, Sakura. It happened,” he says quietly. “We’re lucky to have had as many chances as we have today. But it doesn’t make what you’ve experienced, or what you’re feeling, any less real.” He lets out a shaky breath. “Far be it from me to comment on healthy grieving, but… you watched a comrade die in front of you. It’s okay, to not be okay.”

“You kept it together,” she gets out, eyes still squeezed shut as she buries her face in his jacket. “When you saw me…” she trails off into sniffles, unable to bring herself to say die .

He huffs out what might have very generously been called a laugh. “Sakura, there is a massive difference between being okay, and being able to hold it together in spite of not being okay. The latter gets easier with experience.”

Sakura hugs him tighter as she cries.

--

The next couple of minutes pass in relative silence, outside of her own crying and Kakashi’s occasional mumbled reassurances.

Eventually though, she manages to bring herself together, and pushes herself off of him, back to her knees. She wipes away her remaining tears with the back of her hand and takes a steadying breath as Kakashi looks at her. She meets his gaze. Now what?

“You’re aware that abandoning the mission is, objectively, the wrong decision here, right?” Kakashi eventually asks.

She nods, because she’s thought this through dozens of times by now.

“There’s a chance this could end up as a permanent black mark on your record,” he adds.

“I’m not changing my mind, Sensei,” she says, resolute. “You’ve already made it obvious you’re not going to leave me behind, and I’m definitely not letting you kill yourself.”

Kakashi gives her a long, assessing look. Finally, he sighs. “Well, then I guess there’s not much of a choice,” he says, but with a familiar kind of performative exasperation that brings her back to Team 7. “Start setting explosive tags, and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Sakura grins.

--

After all the trouble they went through trying to preserve the seal, it kind of surprises her how easy it is to lay down the explosives. How eager she is to just get rid of the damn thing already. She wonders if Kakashi feels similar, but doesn’t ask.

In a similar vein, after all the injuries and even deaths the two of them have sustained fighting the Oto team, she’s almost offended at how easy it is to just run past them. After quickly activating the time release on the explosives, it only takes a handful of shunshins before the two of them are at the surface and fleeing. They run into exactly two enemies on their way out, but Kakashi deals with them almost before she can react. She imagines the rest are probably exploring other caverns in the bunker, still trying to locate the two of them, but it really doesn’t matter. The rest of the enemies are, officially, no longer their problem.

It’s a freeing thought, even beyond the context of the mission. Their mission, on paper, is a failure, because of the call she made. And yet, she doesn’t regret her decision at all.

There’s a certain relief that comes with making a decision that squares with herself. A confidence in who she is as a shinobi, that wasn’t necessarily there before this mission.

It feels nice.

As they break through to the surface, the fresh air is like a balm to Sakura’s senses. The oppressive weight of the bunker is gone, replaced by the vastness of the open sky. For the first time in what feels like an eternity, she feels a semblance of hope. They sprint through the forest, leaves crunching underfoot, and the sounds of the explosive detonation behind them echo through the trees.

She doesn't look back.