Chapter Text
They sit until the anger thins.
Until the killing intent eases off their skin and the room stops feeling like the inside of a held breath. Until Naruto’s hands stop bleeding and Sasuke’s hands go from trembling to merely cold in Sakura’s grip. Until the chakra in the room feels less like it’s trying to wrap around her and sear the feelings of righteous indignation and protective fury into her very own coils.
When they finally loosen their grips on one another's hands, it’s not because anything is fixed. It’s because visiting hours end and a nurse with tired eyes clears her throat at the door. Naruto mutters something about bringing breakfast in the morning. Sasuke, still pale, tells them they’ll eat in his room tomorrow before he’s discharged. They go.
Sakura is left alone with the quiet.
It is a different quiet than before. There is no soft brush against her skull, no sarcastic comment or quiet, leaking hiss of tightly coiled anger chained tightly behind her ribcage that would often leak into Inner’s commentary.
It's quiet with edges. It’s echoey. If she speaks inside it, she hears herself.
That’s the part that startles her—how loud her own thinking is without the second voice to braid through it. Without the quick, dry correction. Without the sharp nudge when she’s pretending not to notice something she should.
She turns onto her side and stares at the thin line of shadow beneath the door until the hall light winks out. If she reaches for Inner, there’s no catch. No hand meets hers from the other side. She breathes in. Out.
Fine , she tells the ceiling, as if it had asked. Then teach me.
✿✿✿
Her mind doesn’t fall all the way into dream; it skims the edges, sliding over seams that don’t want to be opened.
Tree-shadows. Late light through leaves. The ache in her body is heavy, heat pooled in some places, cold in others, her breath catching in her chest as she drags herself along the dirt path toward the civilian district. Her knees feel wet. She doesn’t look down.
She knows this section of forest—too well. Hidden beneath the canopy, past old-forgotten graves that must have meant something to someone once, lies Training Ground Forty-Six.
(Hiroshi had practically christened it with her blood.)
A shape between the trees. Too still. Then another, behind it. They shouldn’t be there—she knows this in the same way she knows when she’s being watched during training.
Masks. White, blank.
For a moment they are sharp enough to touch.
One taller, still as stone—chakra sharp, humming like steel drawn across ice. (Steel-ice-sharp, she called them, because they’d never given her a name.) The other shorter, but heavier somehow, his watching weight settling deeper than the first—ink-cool chakra, steady as a drawn line. (Ink-cool-steady, nameless, too.)
Then—blink—the edges smear. She’s not sure if the masks had faces at all.
Her mouth is dry, but the question comes anyway: “Who are you?”
Steel-ice-sharp tilts their head, a fractional movement that says they’ve heard. Their voice is low, even—like stating the weather. “You shouldn’t be walking alone like this.”
The words shiver apart.
White between the leaves, half-seen, half-remembered: her crawl home after every session between her tenth and eleventh birthday. The two presences always bleeding into one another—ink into ice, ice into ink. One meant the other was close.
And then she’s somewhere else—maybe a clearing, maybe only the memory of one. It’s half-familiar, but it won’t hold still long enough to name.
Ink-cool-steady stands there without his partner. Shadows cling tighter to the edges of a mask she can’t see. His eyes are unreadable. His voice comes out like something that hurts to speak.
“ He’s gone .”
She doesn’t ask who. She already knows—like knowing the instant before you lose your footing.
The air tastes like ink.
(There is no ice.)
And then she’s alone.
Morning is a pale square on the floor and the grit in her throat. Her neck is a ring of dull heat that flares if she swallows too fast. Someone has left a paper cup on the tray; the water tastes like pipe and chlorine. She drinks anyway.
The quiet in her head has learned to breathe with her.
The hall carries low arguments and slippered footsteps. Somewhere, someone laughs too loudly and cuts the sound off with a hiss, as if it hurts to do so. Sakura swings her legs over the side of the bed and waits a second for the room to stop tilting sideways. Then she stands.
Her feet remember the route before she does. Three doors left, two right, the second window with the view of the cracked stucco and a stubborn fern in a clay pot that a nurse keeps forgetting to take home. Kakashi’s room is just beyond the fern. Sakura pauses at the plant’s rim to touch a brittle frond—brown halfway down. She turns the pot a quarter turn to the light.
Old habit. She eases the door open just enough to slip inside.
“Jerk-sensei.” Her voice is flat, almost bored, as she steps into the hospital room—pointedly ignoring the blonde woman across from him, whom she recognizes as the new Hokage, and caring just as little. “Back in bed, old man. I can smell the chakra exhaustion from here.”
It’s not wrong, exactly. Just bare. Inner used to lean over her shoulder at moments like this, shifting the weight of a word, tilting the sharpness of her tone— not too loud, not too soft. Keep your head down here. Lift your chin here. Be meek here. Do not show weakness here. Now there’s only the echo of that touch, a phantom adjustment that never lands.
The silver-haired man freezes mid-excuse, caught halfway through convincing the Godaime that, despite having one leg out the window, he cared very much for his health and was absolutely planning to stay until he’d recovered.
“Maa, Sakura-chan, is that any way to speak to your beloved sensei?”
She lifts one unimpressed eyebrow. “It is when he goes around picking fights with missing-nin every time I turn my back.” The phrasing feels like it should roll off cleaner than it does. The edge is still hers—always has been—but without that quiet nudge to smooth it, it lands harder, heavier.
Kakashi’s eyes curve in that way that means he’s hiding a smile. “I am a jounin, you know, my cute little genin. I can take care of myself.” The leg still settled on the floor inside the room stiffens, his chakra feeling more like static electricity than the sharp lightning she’s used too, and he’s forced to draw the other leg back in unless he wants to risk landing on something he wants to keep in tact.
“You.” She points at him, then at the bed. “In bed. Now.”
The command falls flat in the air between them, stripped down to its bones. It’s odd—how she has to think about her own inflection again, like relearning a movement her body used to make without thought. The instincts that shaped her are still there, but the second set of hands guiding them is gone.
His gaze flicks between his student and the Hokage. Whatever he sees in her face makes him think better of arguing. He sits.
She holds his eyes a moment longer, then turns and leaves without so much as a glance in Tsunade’s direction.
Sasuke’s room isn’t far from their sensei’s — back through the same hallway, second door on the right.
Naruto is already there when she arrives, perched on Sasuke’s hospital bed. The two of them sit shoulder to shoulder, a rolling table pulled close and loaded with the choice of breakfast.
The obvious culprits are easy to spot: a to-go container from Ichiraku’s, probably holding a miso, a tonkotsu, and a shoyu ramen in neat rows, and a paper bag from the dango stand they never seem to pass without stopping. Sakura has told them more than once that ramen and dango are not breakfast foods — but the spread isn’t all bad. There’s also bowls of white rice, a small plate of rakkyōzuke, and neatly divided portions of grilled fish.
She decides she can let it slide this time.
Not that she’d turn down the ramen and dango anyway. After a month of hospital cafeteria food, she’d eat just about anything.
Kami, she can’t wait for her chakra to behave again.
“Did you start without me?” she asks, closing the door behind her. Pulling one of the padded chairs from along the wall, she sits across from them. The rolling table is too high for their usual preference of sitting cross-legged on the floor when they eat together, so the chair will have to do.
Naruto flicks a piece of rakkyōzuke at her with a scrunched nose. “Of course not.”
Sakura catches it neatly between her now-separated chopsticks, tossing it into her mouth. The vinegary bite lingers on her tongue.
“How could we ever start to eat without the Hime herself present?”
Sasuke hums in agreement, his mouth too full of dango to speak, but he lifts his chopsticks and gestures them vaguely at her, like that somehow makes Naruto’s point.
Sakura scrunches her nose and knits her brows in response — just a small, unconscious twist of her expression. Every time she does it, though, Naruto and Sasuke look at her like she’s just parted the sky.
( They look at her like that a lot. )
“Sasuke-teme is being released today, after being unconscious for a month, and you’re still gonna be stuck here?” Naruto says, cutting straight to the point. It’s not really a question — more the opening move in the conversation breakfast was always going to circle toward. This is the first time they’ve all been together since the invasion, and the first time they’ve been able to talk about it without someone hovering.
Sakura hums, nodding as she sandwiches a piece of rakkyōzuke between two bites of grilled fish.
Sasuke steals a grain of rice from Naruto’s bowl without looking, his other hand flicking out to block Naruto’s retaliation before the chopsticks even get close.
“It is a little weird,” he concedes. “I mean, for all intents and purposes, Kakashi-sensei and I have been tortured for the last month. His chakra’s still scraping the bottom, mine’s barely recovering.” His eyes cut toward her, sharp under the lashes. “You’ve been here the same month, recovering from chakra exhaustion. Normally that’s… what? A week at the longest?”
Sakura shrugs. “Trees.”
“…Trees,” Naruto repeats, hands pausing mid-air. The chopsticks in his grip dip. “Sakura, what does that mean?”
She glances at Sasuke for help, but finds him watching her with the same careful blankness Naruto’s wearing. The edges of their chakra tell a different story — concern curling under the surface, pressing against the curiosity. And she knows, by the absence of the teasing “ hime ” in Naruto’s voice, which of those is gaining ground.
“Sakura,” Sasuke says, and she doesn’t like the way it sounds in his mouth either — not these days. The hazy confusion has already tightened into something sharper, a clean line of focus she can feel like a blade across her skin. “Explain.”
“Okay, don’t be weird,” she warns, aiming for reassurance. It does the opposite — their chakra flares, quick and tight.
“So maybe the trees are hungry.”
“Sakura.” Naruto exhales like he’s bracing himself.
“And maybe they can communicate.”
Sasuke drags both hands over his face. “What.”
“I mean not in words, exactly,” she says, unbothered. “It’s more like… when feelings bleed through chakra, but sharper. Focused. Enough that you can read intent—sometimes even the impression of words.”
“I—” Naruto’s mouth opens, closes. “I don’t even know what to say to that. Sakura, what do you mean the trees talk to you?”
“Let it be clear,” she says, chopsticks rising to point at him for emphasis, “the words ‘the trees can talk to me’ never came out of my mouth.”
Sasuke groans into his hands.
“What are they intending now, then?” Naruto asks. “Is that why you haven’t left yet?”
Sapling. Sapling. Protect. Small.
Sakura hums. “I mean, they were hard-pressed the first week or so, but I was still recovering. All that’s really coming through now is things like protect .” She shrugs, snagging another piece of fish before it cools. “The only reason I haven’t been discharged yet is because I apparently had a seal in my head that broke.”
Sasuke’s head shot up, and Naruto dropped his chopsticks to focus completely on her. The air was full of concern now, curiosity choked out completely, fear leaking into the edges.
“Okay, Sakura.” Sasuke leans forward, “I’m going to need you to present the latter half of what you just told us as though you were giving a report, okay?”
Sakura furrows her eyebrows in confusion, but complies nonetheless and straightens in her chair, setting her chopsticks down like she’s about to brief a superior officer.
“Around three weeks after the invasion I was visited in my hospital room by Haruno Kizashi—my biological father. The conversation escalated to physical assault. At some point during the altercation, he attempted strangulation. While this was happening, I experienced a… significant psychic and physical event. Subjectively, it felt like something inside my head snapped. Objectively, my chakra network registered a surge well above normal operating levels—hospital monitors confirmed the spike before I lost consciousness.”
Her eyes flick between them, gauging their attention before continuing. “Upon regaining awareness, I found myself in a mental-space environment—later identified as my own unconscious mind—where I encountered Takeo, a summon from the Kagerou clan. He informed me that what broke during the assault was something called a ‘Shadow Seal.’ It’s a hereditary protection mechanism, appearing in roughly thirty percent of Kagerou children, with four known stages: Inactive, Semi-Dormant, Active, and Broken.”
She pauses, leaning back slightly. “The stages are triggered by extreme events. Semi-Dormant in moments of near-death. Active after the complete loss of trust and innocence—this was when I first manifested who I had referred to as Inner. Broken occurs under conditions that replicate the trauma which created the shadow self in the first place, but instead of fracturing further, the self and shadow merge back into one psyche. According to Takeo, the last known person to complete all four stages was Senju Azumi.”
Her voice drops just a fraction. “He also confirmed that, with the seal broken, Inner is… gone. Or, more accurately, re-integrated. Which means anything she would have thought, known, or felt is now mine to remember—if I can.”
She looks down at her hands for a moment, then back up. “This information has not been reported to the hospital staff, superior officers, or anyone else until this conversation.”
Sasuke takes a slow breath in, measured, and Naruto gives a single, sharp nod—then another, slower one.
“Okay,” Naruto says finally. “Okay. So… what do we do now?” He scratches at the back of his head, thinking aloud. “Surely this counts as a kekkei genkai or something, right?”
Sakura blinks. “I mean, it doesn’t have many battle applications. All it did was—allegedly—keep me from going insane when I was a kid.”
Sasuke shakes his head, letting his breath out in a quiet sigh. “No. Naruto’s right. To the council, this will count as a kekkei genkai. Normally it wouldn’t even be much of a blip on their radar—you’d just fill out some paperwork saying it shows up in one out of however many in the bloodline, and that would be the end of it.”
He looks between them, holding each gaze deliberately. “But combined with the fact that you are now known to possess natural Mokuton—and can use it—it’s different. Add the highly, highly likely chance that you share the sensing abilities of the Nidaime…” His tone hardens. “We cannot let anyone we do not trust with our bodies after death find out about this.”
Sakura blinks again. “I don’t have the Nidaime’s senses.”
“He was known to never be able to turn it off,” Sasuke says flatly. “And normal people do not feel emotions through chakra, Sakura.”
Naruto raises a hand. “I can.”
Without breaking eye contact with her, Sasuke points at him. “Which further proves my point that normal people cannot do it.”
Sakura nods—Naruto has always been able to do things no one else could, courtesy of being a Jinchuriki.
“Okay rude.” Naruto mutters without heat, “So, we keep it between us?”
Sasuke nods once. “We tell no one Sakura doesn’t tell herself.”
“Okay,” Sakura agrees, reaching for another piece of fish. “And I’m going to eat all the rakkyōzuke if you two keep staring at me instead of eating.”
The rest of breakfast passes as it always has—quiet bickering, shared food, the comfort of familiar company.
✿✿✿
Since breaking her seal, sleep came in bursts—blood-slick and jagged—or not at all.
Without Inner to stand guard, the tight box she’d built over years was left unattended, its seams leaking into her dreams. Nightmares bled into memories she couldn’t remember living. Sometimes she woke unsure which was which.
Faces swam up and vanished. Ichiro’s. Yuki’s. Her team dying because she hesitated. Her father’s hands on her throat. The lines blurred until the only thing that felt certain was the taste of fear when she opened her eyes.
It would drive anyone else mad. Maybe it would drive her mad too—if she hadn’t already learned, since childhood, the thousand small ways to keep herself steady. The tone pitched just right, the glance held or averted, the weight of a word placed where it would do the least harm. Those choices had always come as easily as breathing, guided by a voice just under her own. Now, the voice was gone, and every decision felt a fraction heavier in her hands.
But even the training cracked in those moments between dream and waking, when the thought sank in like a knife: someone might have died trying to fix a problem that was never theirs to fix.
Sakura is a shinobi. Shinobi do not break. Shinobi do not falter.
They do not do not do not .
Sakura is twelve .
✿✿✿
She’s moving before she knows where she is—bare ground underfoot, summer heat pressing heavy, the smell of iron sitting sharp in her nose.
Hiroshi’s voice threads through the air, calm and exact, telling her to lower her stance, breathe through her teeth.
And she knows, as she’s always known, that they are watching.
Not a hunch. Not paranoia. Fact—solid as the dirt under her sandals, the ache in her calves. She can feel them, though it's faint, only just a twinge of something hidden in the feelings of the wind and bark surrounding her, hidden further behind Hiroshi’s sharp-wind-edged and blood-tinged chakra.
The white comes first, from the corner of her vision: the curve of something smooth where a face should be. A mask, maybe, though she has never seen one in full. When she turns her head, the shape smears, like chalk dissolving under water.
Steel-ice-sharp is there. So is ink-cool-steady. Always together. Always just far enough away that she can’t quite meet their eyes.
Hiroshi never mentions them. She never asks.
Back then, Inner had been the one to nudge her attention back to the placement of her feet, to tighten the warning in her spine when the watchers drifted closer.
( Hiroshi had always been harsher if she messed up when they were around, she recalls now. )
The ache in her calves sharpens—
No, not her calves. Hands. Her hands, clamped hard around the column of a man’s throat, the pulse hammering against her fingers until it stutters and stills.
The heat on her back thickens—
No, warmth. Blood soaking into the crease of her palm where a woman’s ankle is caught in wire, the skin opening in clean, straight lines.
The sound of Hiroshi’s voice—
No, someone else’s, breathing wrong. Wet. Rattling. Because she’s broken something inside them.
Hiroshi calls it necessary practice. Sometimes there’s a reason. Sometimes there isn’t.
She never calls them anything.
Inner had taken these things and locked them away, lids sealed tight, no edges sticking out. But here, in the dream, the lids shift. The contents leak. She sees more, not less.
Blood in her hair—
Blood in water—
Wave. Her hands move without hesitation, killing as neatly as peeling fruit.
The salt smell thickens—
No, not salt. Smoke. From the invasion, curling around her as she moves again and again, her body steady before the thought of killing even forms.
And then the silence—
The faint hum of hospital equipment.
She remembers the weight in her limbs, the bone-deep drain of chakra, the bodies already cooling by the time she thought to count them the first time she woke after the invasion. No guilt. No sorrow. Not even surprise. Just the fact of it: shinobi hurt, and are hurt in turn. That is the work.
Yuki’s apology had been strange. Naruto’s anger, Sasuke’s too.
What else did they think a kunoichi was for?
The killing had always been part of the shape of life.
She thinks—almost hears—that Inner would have said something here. Something about wrongness. About how the way she’d been raised wasn’t normal, wasn’t safe. But even in her own head, the words don’t land. They dissolve before they can take shape, like water sinking into sand.
If she pushes at the thought, it wavers.
If it was wrong… why did it happen?
Her neighbors had eyes. She remembers meeting them—starless nights on the back porch, rain threading through her hair and down her sleeves, the ache of an empty stomach curling under her ribs. They looked right at her. They didn’t say a word.
Hiroshi had told her she was being trained.
Can training be wrong? Can it be too harsh, when the thing you are training to be is a killer?
Hiroshi beat her—yes.
But shinobi are beaten, again and again, until they can’t be moved.
Hiroshi told her to kill, and she did. Told her to hurt, and she did. Sometimes because he scared her. Sometimes because she didn’t want to be hurt herself. But isn’t following orders just another skill? Another muscle to build?
Becoming a kunoichi is the only thing she has ever let herself want. The only thing she’s taken with both hands and held on to. She’s careful not to leave claw marks in it, because claw marks mean you think it can be taken away. And it will not be taken from her.
Sakura hates Hiroshi. Hates Kizashi and Mebuki.
This she knows, has known for a long, long time.
But she isn’t entirely sure why.
She would like to think that Inner would have a reason. But wasn’t Inner also her? Takeo had said they’d merged—remerged—so shouldn’t she know what Inner knew? Shouldn’t she be able to put the pieces together?
Shouldn’t she be able to tell what she’s feeling?
The hum of the equipment thickens in her ears. Becomes breathing.
Not hers.
Close.
She blinks—but the white curve of a mask slips away before she can turn her head, leaving only the weight of its gaze behind.
( Why doesn’t Sakura know anything about herself? )
✿✿✿
She wakes to the hum of hospital equipment, and she doesn’t have long to parse through the fading memory of her dream before her head is snapping to the side in fear, adrenaline locking her spine and filling her veins.
There is chakra smothered in the taste of rot, and slithering with the unmistakable taint of snake scales moving slowly toward Konoha’s walls.
And just under it, pushed back and choking underneath the rot and slime, is Sasuke.