Chapter Text
Mud sloshed beneath their feet, soaked and slippery from the ongoing flood from the skies. It was like the heavens themselves were mourning which, admittedly, was hardly surprising. The world as they’d known it was gone, corpses littering the ground around the three of them as they just stood there. Everything they knew was gone – friends, teachers, allies… The shinobi alliance had succeeded, but that didn’t really matter. Not when they were all dead.
Dirt covered their once vibrant clothes, all the world awash in muted colours, alliance headbands scattered on the ground – slightly scratched and very much forgotten. It was over. Everything was over, and that was a bit of a big problem.
Sakura chuckled mirthlessly to herself, staring up at the sky. “Well, that didn’t go as planned,” she remarked, a scowl twitching at her face in the next second as Sasuke snorted derisively. Well, at least that hadn’t changed, she mused, curling her hand into a fist. Though it certainly didn’t make her want to punch him any less for all the heartache and headaches he’d caused her over the years.
“No kidding,” Sasuke drawled.
“Sasuke!” Naruto yelled, leaping over so he was standing in front of them rather than at their cold, dead sensei’s side. “I see those years under Orochimaru didn’t do much for your socialisation skills…”
“It’s no wonder Orochimaru didn’t let him out all that often,” Sakura grumbled, glaring down at a pale blonde, blue-eyed body like it offended her.
It did, but that was hardly the point.
“You aren’t seriously talking about me like I’m a dog, are you?” he ground out, glaring menacingly between the pair of them. “Besides… what do socialisation skills matter when we’re the last people living on this entire planet, dobe. A lot of fucking good that did us.”
Sighing, Sakura raised her hands, coming between the pair before things could go any further downhill. “Chill with the swearwords. They aren’t gonna get us anywhere – except even more riled up, and that’s the last thing we need right now.”
“Hn.”
Sakura felt her face twitch. “Speak in actual words we can understand, please, Sasuke. Shockingly enough, not all of us speak Uchiha.” Her fingers twitched at the answering Hn. She really wanted to do something… express her rage and sadness, but she didn’t want to punch anything. In fact, she rather wanted to set things on fire, but she wasn’t a fire element and she didn’t want to waste chakra. “I said, speak in words we can understand, dumbass,” she muttered, uncaring of her once-upon-a-time crush on the boy.
Sasuke scowled at her, glaring at her menacingly.
Sakura didn’t back down. “You wanna die, shithead?” she hissed, ignoring the small part of her which screeched at the insult she’d thrown his way. He was always staring, sneering, and she wanted nothing more than to wipe the look from his face. Ino was dead. Her crush didn’t matter.
He answered her stance and words with his own, each just as filthy as the last. “You really want to test me, hypocritical bitch?”
Naruto stepped in between them then. And wasn’t that surprising… usually it was her stepping between the two idiots… but they weren’t those same children anymore. “Come on, you two…” he said, and Sakura felt a flush of shame run through her. “There’s no need to fight.”
“We’re literally the last living people on this entire planet,” she said, staring at him blankly. “We can do whatever the hell we want.” Her eyes narrowed on Sasuke. “Punch whoever we want.” She wasn’t the weak little girl he had left behind.
“What about Team Seven Unity?” Naruto offered, a trembling smile testing his lips. “Konoha Solidarity – that’s a thing, right?”
Sasuke snorted. “Fuck no, I defected in case you forgot,” he muttered snidely.
“But Kakashi-sensei didn’t care about that… we don’t care about that…” Naruto said, glancing over towards where the body of the last member of their team lay. Sakura didn’t want to look. Didn’t want to see yet another corpse of one of the people who she’d come to care about so much. “You’re one of us, now and forever, until death do us part,” he remarked, throwing his arms around their shoulders and pulling them into a hug.
Sakura returned it with slightly more force than necessary.
“When did the three of us get married?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
Naruto grinned. “When we graduated from the academy, of course… when… Kakashi-sensei found us.”
Sasuke looked contemplative. “I suppose he wasn’t a bad sensei,” he mumbled, looking at the silvery mop of hair, spattered with mud and blood.
“And now he’s dead because of Kaguya and her little bitch,” she hissed, glaring intently at the ground – as if expecting Zetsu to phase through it and pop up like the annoying whack-a-mole he was. He wasn’t going to though. They had all but ensured it, though the method they had went about it had been less than satisfactory.
“The plant guy.” Naruto folded his arms, deep in thought as his eyes turned to crimson slits, a manic grin stretching at his lips. “I want to pulverise him again… rip him to pieces… feed them to the pigs…”
“Naruto!” Sakura barked, elbowing him sharply in the ribs to remind him to keep his composure. Then she remembered there was no one really to keep it for. “You can’t do that to pigs. That would be animal cruelty!”
“Then what is slicing open a fish to heal it?” Naruto enquired, arching a blonde brow in question. “Or keeping it alive out of water?”
“All the fish survived in the end,” Sakura muttered, blinking at the unexpected inquiry. “When did you get smart enough to think of questions like that…?”
“I think the bigger question is when did you two become so bloodthirsty?” Sasuke mused quietly, mildly intrigued if not slightly worried.
“They took Kakashi-sensei form us… Obito too… You might not have liked him, but he was family, and he’d just turned himself around,” Naruto said, waving a finger in his face. “It’s all that plant guy’s fault. If he hadn’t been messing around behind the scenes all these years, then things never would’ve gotten to this point. Madara might not have even betrayed the village if it hadn’t been for him and tablet planting stupid ideas in his head.”
Sakura sighed longingly. “What does it matter?” she grumbled. “It’s not like we can go back and change things…” she trailed off, eyes widening at the sight of those crystal now-blue orbs. Her feet shuffled backwards, taking her away from the grinning blonde demon. That look always spelled trouble. She had seen it far too many times to think anything else. Nothing ended easily when Naruto had that smile on his face. A fox’s grin. “Naruto, whatever you’re planning, it’s a no.”
“She’s right, dobe.”
His smile widened inexplicably.
“Naruto, no,” Sakura said, folding her arms, glaring at the grinning maniac. He would actually be the death of them, or so she was convinced.
“Naruto yes,” he mumbled, pouting at them. “Come on, at least hear me out! Pretty please?”
“About what?” Sasuke asked, edging towards him, ever so slightly intrigued. It wasn’t like it mattered. They were the last ones alive, so it’d be pretty boring for things to stay the way they were. Naruto’s ideas, no matter how insane, would liven things up… or so Sasuke assumed.
Sakura wasn’t so sure on that front.
“Time travel!”
Sakura sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose, already knowing no amount of arguing could convince their blonde friend otherwise. “I’m saying this now… we’re all idiots.”
“And you love us for it, Sakura.” Naruto puffed his chest up, a vaguely Sasuke-like smirk appearing on his face. The sight sent shudders down her spine. “Now… who’s in?”
“Ugh, what the heck…” Sasuke muttered, raising his hand. “Let’s go and fuck Zetsu and Kaguya ten times over… no one gets to kill my sensei aside from me.”
“And you accuse us of being bloodthirsty,” Sakura said, snorting quietly before she reached her decision. “Dammit. What the heck… let’s just do it or die trying.”
“Dying sounds less painful, if I’m completely honest,” Sasuke grumbled, sounding so utterly done with the pair of them.
“Sasuke! You aren’t allowed to die!”
“Ugh. Whatever, dobe.”
“Kurama’s in too,” Naruto said after a few moments, pulling out a set of brushes and ink in the next blink of an eye. “Now, gimmi some blood. I need it if I want to programme the seal.”
Sakura felt her shoulders sink. “Let’s just get this over with already.”
::
Sakura regretted that decision immensely.
As did Sasuke.
“Naruto!” she hissed, pawing at her fluffy red locks of hair as she stared at her reflection in the tiny cracked mirror. It didn’t matter her lovely jade green eyes were gone – replaced by onyx black orbs. No. The real problem was her hair. She didn’t mind the colour all that much – pink was a variant of red, after all – but what got her was the style. Gone were her silky straight bangs, spiky untamed locks in place in all too familiar style. “Why the hell did you give me Madara hair?”
“My hair is red, Naruto!” Sasuke hissed. His hair had retained the same duck butt style, but the colour was horrifying. He looked like a damned tomato with those chubby cheeks of the childish body he and the rest had all been forced into. “This is not OK!”
Naruto chuckled, onyx orbs meeting their matching ones, his straight red hair falling around him like a curtain. His whisker marks were gone, his skin a matching shade of pale white – just like Sasuke’s had been.
“This is unfair,” Sakura grumbled, glaring between the Uzumaki hair and the Uchiha eyes and skin. “Why the hell do we have the traits of your two clans but none of my own?”
Sasuke snorted, staring at her down his nose in a way that made her fists clench. “Clan superiority, obviously.”
Sakura felt her eyebrow twitch. “I’ll show you clan superiority in a minute…”