Chapter 1: The End is Where We Begin
Chapter Text
She could taste the blood on her tongue, sharp and coppery as it was, even as she heaved for breath there atop the plinth she had been chained to.
Chakra pulsed in her forehead, a dull throb she had never been able to rid herself of since the day she had decided to investigate what nature chakra would do when combined with her seal. She had just been hoping to earn some form of sage mode to better her healing abilities and combat options. She hadn’t striven to accidentally make herself something of an immortal, forever to regenerate from the wounds inflicted upon her without wearing out her skin cells and making her age. Rather, the influx of nature energy had kept her body somehow repairing itself without wearing it out – keeping her in the state which she had been in when she had acquired her botched seal.
It wasn’t perfect immortality though, and Sakura was so very glad for that – so very glad there was a way out of that prison she had found herself within. A den of sadists and a woman who very much enjoyed torturing her, saying it was all to discover just how she had made herself that which she had. Sakura didn’t understand why anyone would want to sign themselves up to the same hell she was trapped in, but each to their own, or so she thought to herself bitterly. Naruto and Sasuke were long dead. There was no rescue coming for her, and Sakura was quite frankly tired. It was funny how ending up in such a situation had led to her figuring out a way to die as she had so wished to for so very long. What was that saying? In every cloud… She shook her head then, focusing back on the task at hand then – and what an important task it was.
Her so-called immortality was still dependent on her chakra – with nature chakra influencing her own network, she couldn’t really run out of chakra or so she had found after many attempts. Her seal ensured that much, boosting her own chakra recovery rate. Injuries to her body didn’t work. But injuries to her chakra system itself might. It was entirely possible to do such damage, despite it going against everything she had been taught and her natural instincts themselves, but she only had one chance to do it, and do it correctly. Otherwise they would notice she had figured out a way to slip chakra through the binds they had placed on her. Something which had taken a good ten years to figure out, or there abouts, with how little she knew of sealing. Those only sealed her ordinary chakra though, not the seal on her forehead, unlike normal restraints. Normal restraints had crumbled to stone thanks to the sheer potency of the nature chakra which had been introduced to her body. Though she had already known her chakra couldn’t be sealed through normal methods – she had tried to have someone seal it, and the end result had been them turned to stone. Her chakra still flowed naturally around her body, subsequently healing her. The seals just impaired her ability to access her chakra, hence why it had taken her so long to figure a way around them.
They were seals designed especially for her. Sakura hadn’t thought that possible, but that was why they had managed to capture her in the first place. She had gotten used to the status quo, become complacent in believing she couldn’t be killed and that she might as well be unmatched. There were things worse than death. Sakura knew that by then. Torture was one of them. More so when the body repaired itself meaning even the more brutal forms of the barbaric art wouldn’t kill her. She couldn’t count the number of times she had been used as a training dummy by the people who worked in that facility where she was being kept. The experiences had blurred into one.
Enough was enough though, and she gathered the chakra she had managed to slip through the seals, even as the door to her cell was opened and her most frequent visitor greeted her with that smile she despised with every inch of her being. She really wanted to watch her expression turn as she realised her favourite toy was dying for real. Escaping once and for all. Her heart leapt at the thought, and despite many years of misery and denial, she felt the roaring flame of hope crackle to life within her chest. She would see Naruto and Sasuke soon, once she reached the Pure Lands, and she wouldn’t feel that pain which had tormented her for so very long. Even if her captors knew the Reanimation Technique, she would feel no pain. She rather doubted they would bother, given as how they were only interested in her thanks to the terrible, accidental modification of the Yin Seal she had made. So she was going to be free so very soon. She wouldn’t have to spend any more years trapped in that place. Her heart raced at the thought, and she allowed hope to feel her with an odd sort of happiness. That had hardly been something she would have expected to feel at the prospect of her own death. Well, all those years ago when Team Seven had been alive and well and she had been normal and mortal.
Her chakra built in her chest, and she had it rotating in her chakra core, forming little drill-headed tendrils even as she pushed past the instincts of no-wrong-don’t-do-this-death-danger.
“Ah, Sakura!” her main tormenter greeted, picking up a sharp scalpel then, freshly cleaned and ready for use once more. “I’ve been waiting all day to come and visit you!” she declared, skipping forwards then, implement in hand.
“So have I,” Sakura hissed, lifting her head then, a smile on her face as her chakra readied itself to go against every instinct in her body. “Fuck you, bitch,” she spat, feeling a vicious sense of satisfaction as pain ripped through every inch of her, her own chakra spearing through the thick walls of her chakra core. Her tormentor’s eyes widened, and Sakura felt her own chakra run rampant in her body, freed then from its coils and core, tearing through bone and tissue as it drained away. Tiredness hit her soon after the agony, though she was somewhat used to the latter by then – and that was going to be the last time she felt such pain. Because she was going to die. She could tell it even as blood welled up in her throat and she spat it out. Already her body tried to heal itself, draining her core of the little chakra it had left, and Sakura could only smile weakly, blood on her tongue as her vision darkened as the last few drops of chakra were taken from her ruined chakra system.
Chakra exhaustion wasn’t quite the method she thought she would die by, so long ago, but Sakura supposed she would take what she got. The howl of rage on behalf of her tormentor was music to her ears. She was so glad she had waited until that moment, despite the risk of being saved from the clutches of death she so longed for. And they were just about embracing her right then and there. Her eyes closed, the cold grip of death closing around her then for a single instant and then—
Nothing.
Darkness surrounded her, bleak and unfathomable, pain wracking through her – which Sakura thought odd because she was dead, and she hadn’t thought there would be the slightest bit of pain awaiting her after she had died. It was why she had longed for that end, despite it being out of her feasible reach for such a long time.
Her body was so very heavy, eyelids feeling like they were stuck in molasses as they blinked open so very slowly. She felt drained and tired as she lay there, staring at the ceiling. Staring at a ceiling. She was dead. She was supposed to be dead. Chakra exhaustion had come for her and blissfully freed her from that place of nightmares and eternal suffering and she was free and dead. She was dead too, and that was the crux of the matter.
She was supposed to be dead. Her heart was beating still – she could feel it in her chest, and fear hit her like a sucker punch to the gut. Fingers clenched in sheets—bedsheets, she figured after a brief look around and the feeling of a pillow behind her head. She hadn’t slept on a bed in years. She couldn’t really remember how long she had been a captive for. Long enough for that baby to grow into her worst tormenter. Just as her mother had been before her, and her mother before that…
But she wasn’t looming over her then, gloating about how they had somehow brought Sakura back from what was almost certainly a fatal injury. Her heart pounded in her chest, because gloating about her failed suicide attempt would be something she would do.
Slowly, ever so slowly, she gained her bearings, eyes narrowing at the light which seeped in through the window and the drawn red curtains. The room was dark though, covered in heavy furnishings like thick rug and the tall dark wood dresser close by her bedside, set in the corner of that room. Sakura thought she might have been able to live with that, had everything not been that shade of red. Red like spilled blood. Red like the colouring of her blood and innards mixed together.
She lurched out of bed, heart pounding then as she looked around the room wildly, taking a step towards the door and promptly falling flat on her face as the sheets tangled in her legs. Red sheets. Bloodied sheets. Her breath caught in her throat, and then she was back on her feet and stumbling out of that red-red-red room. The door slammed behind her with a definitive click and thunk, and Sakura rested her back against it then, breathing heavily as she tried to find balance in a body which felt wrong and out of shape. Though she had been tortured and chained up in the same place for years, so it probably wasn’t too surprising she was out of shape in some ways—but her seal had kept returning her to the state she had been, meaning she should have had some form of muscle…
Sakura lifted her arm in front of her, nausea stirring in her gut as she stared at the wrong shade of skin colour. She had been pale before, but her skin had an olive undertone to it. Not the ruddy red undertones and the pale porcelain which she had more associated with the Uchiha and the high-class nobles who stayed inside more often than not to avoid tanning. So why did she have those tones right then and there? Her breath caught in her throat again, and Sakura was vaguely aware she was on the verge of having a panic attack. She slid down the door then, clutching her knees to her chest as she tried to gather her wits about her. Because she was supposed to be dead, supposed to be in the Pure Lands, but her heart was beating and nothing looked vaguely familiar.
“Deep breaths,” she whispered, her voice piercing the thick silence around her – one which had only been broken by her ragged gasps, not that she could hear them over the ringing in her ears. “Deep breaths…” she murmured again, comforting herself in the fact she was no longer in that facility and she was no longer chained to that plinth. Her arms wrapped around herself, fingernails digging in until the pain hit her and she felt the familiar warm, sticky liquid rush over her skin then.
Startled, she drew back, staring as the blood trickled from those deep crescent gouges in her skin then, panic returning full force as the skin healed shut in seconds. Like it had when she had still been under the influence of her tragically modified Yin Seal. Her heart fluttered in her chest, fear rising in a crescendo as she stood up.
“No,” she muttered, because if the Yin Seal worked still, then she was still alive. “No,” she muttered again, because she had died of chakra exhaustion and she was supposed to be in the Pure Lands doing whatever dead things did. “No,” she muttered once more, because nothing was making sense anymore. Her feet moved then, moving her away from the red-red-red-like-blood room, and she walked across the hallway overlooking some sort of hallway below. She needed to figure out where she was, if she was in danger, and what exactly was going on. There was movement in the corner of her eye, and her head snapped around, heart in her throat as she caught sight of green eyes staring back at her.
Their hair was brown, unlike the white her own had turned after so many years of torment – the only thing the seal had allowed to change for some reason, the face undeniably female with that soft, heart-shaped face, delicate bow-shaped lips, thin, elegantly styled brows, and thick brown eyelashes which framed those big green eyes. She didn’t look like a threat, what with her small profile, and she looked as surprised as Sakura as they locked eyes. Taking a deep breath, she straightened up and took a step forwards before she stopped sharp. Because the brunette did the same, and that was a mirror opposite her which should have reflected herself in that frame, given how she was standing, but she could only see that strange brown-haired lady. Her breathing picked up again, a whimper and whine escaping her as she backpedalled sharply, eyes widening as she tumbled into and over the railing. Hair flew up around her as she fell, too stunned to even attempt to flip herself over. It was brown. Her hair was brown, just like that stranger in the reflection where she should have been. She didn’t quite understand how that could be.
Her back slammed into the ground, the snap of bone somewhere audible, pain throbbed through her then, giving her a single snippet of clarity amidst the madness clawing at the eaves of her mind, but her forehead was already pulsing in such a familiar manner, and then that pain was fading and ebbing as her body healed. Sakura lay there, staring at the ceiling in shock, numbness not from injury making her simply lie there and stare blankly at a chandelier which didn’t resemble any she had seen before. Nothing was familiar, not the patterns of the designs on the walls, nor any of the decoration there. Sakura didn’t understand. “No, no, no, no, no,” she muttered, because she was supposed to be dead and free. But those walls around her were closing in, and she couldn’t breathe, even as she vomited over herself, the taste hot and thick and making her gag as her stomach expelled whatever had been inside it. Her breath came in sharp pants, even after her stomach had finished expelling everything within it, and she curled up into a ball then, ignoring the horrid scent of her own sick permeating through the air. She had lived in and smelt worse.
She stayed like that, shaking and sobbing, curled up in a ball until the light from the window faded. Tiredness pulled at her limbs then, and she pulled herself to her feet, ignoring the mess on the floor and all over her then as an owl hooted someplace off in the distance. She needed to move to a more defensible and comfortable location if she wished to rest. Shivers crawled down her spine as her bare feet stepped over the cool tile, hairs rising on end as she realised just how long she had lain there on the ground for. And the fact no one had come across her lying like that, clearly having some sort of panic attack. That and nobody had come after she had fallen – something that might have killed a normal person. She was anything but ordinary by that point. After all, she was supposed to be something dead, yet there she was, seemingly alive, not in any form of Pure Lands, and in a body which wasn’t hers. Sakura was reasonably sure she was alone in that place, but it never hurt to be careful. She didn’t want to get captured and tortured again, and if anything or anyone found her to be a dead thing in a living body then they would probably want to know how she had achieved such a feat. Sakura didn’t want to be an experiment or a victim of curiosity, or a victim of torture yet again.
Before, she had only been caught because she had grown complacent and had let her guard down. She wouldn’t let her guard down ever again. She had to be cautious, in this new, strange place, even if she was seemingly alone. Her feet were near silent as she edged her way into the entranceway. The sight of the door which ultimately had to lead outside, or so the cloudy window on either side suggested made something in her shrivel up in fear, and Sakura hurried up the stairs, eager to get out of what she was tentatively classing as ‘the danger zone’.
The stairs were made from wood, heavy and dark, carpet runners set upon them, though Sakura was grateful they were a deep dark blue. Like the ocean. She hadn’t seen it in so long. Her feet made no noise atop the wonderful carpet, and so she padded up it carefully, ears straining to catch any sound of movement or breathing aside from her own. But chakra wasn’t threading through her ears, enhancing her hearing capabilities as it should have been. Sakura frowned at that, but she was managing just fine without her chakra right then and there. She could investigate the problem at a later late because something had definitely healed her after she had fallen before—before she had started panicking. But she was done panicking for now. She needed to find a safe place to hole up for the night, and it could hardly do that while she was panicking. Panicking could come second, and then could come research and monitoring of her strange new situation. Because that hadn’t been her body in the mirror, nor had that been her brown hair attached to her head. Something had changed, something had interfered, and now she wasn’t dead like she was supposed to be.
Sakura wasn’t quite sure what to feel about that much – she wanted to see Naruto and Sasuke again. They wouldn’t hurt her, nor would Ino or another of her friends. They had all died before her, leaving her alone, afflicted with that dodgy seal of hers which had only brought misfortune after misfortune upon her. She wanted to see them all again.
Yet her cursed seal was probably still in place, if the incident earlier was anything to go by. Sakura swallowed, throat feeling dry then, but she didn’t particularly care too much as she stumbled forwards, finding the first door which didn’t lead to a lounge area or a study. She hadn’t found a single trap as of yet, proving it likely wasn’t the house of a shinobi, but Sakura wasn’t about to let her guard down. The last time she had done that she had been captured and tortured. Sakura didn’t want that again, and so she hesitantly peered around the room there, heart leaping as she spied the not-red bedding on the large bed in the room and the overly large wardrobe. Safe, her instincts whispered, and Sakura wasted no time in carefully checking the area for possible traps or enemies hiding in the shadows before she hauled the blankets and pillows from the bed, and threw open the wardrobe. There were only a few clothes within, and she moved them to one side swiftly as she set up her bed there.
It was cosy in there, more so when she closed the wardrobe doors, and most importantly nothing was red. Rather than cloistering, the wardrobe walls felt protecting and comforting. They weren’t about to close in, and even if they did she could escape them easily enough. It wasn’t like there was a lock on the wardrobe, not even from the inside. Though that meant anyone could get to her – she would have some warning, because the wardrobe didn’t quite have solid doors for the most part – there were gaps where patterns of trees had been carved. She would be able to see a flash of movement before any sort of attack. Or so she hoped, as she curled up and pulled a forest green blanket to cover up her shaking body. She didn’t understand why or how she was there. But one thing Sakura knew for certain was that she would never be captured again. She refused to be tormented again, and she knew she was the only one she could rely upon to stop that.
Chapter 2: The Aftermath is Never Pretty
Chapter Text
The world hadn’t changed by the time she woke up, and Sakura was infinitely grateful for that. There was still a cupboard surrounding her, thick wood blocking out the outside world as best it could, hiding her from any possible threats. There was still a green blanket over her, and when Sakura breathed in she could smell the scent which reminded her of the outdoors lingering upon it. She hadn’t smelt that in a long time so she couldn’t be entirely sure of the scent – but it didn’t smell of blood and rust and her prison, so Sakura was as happy as she could be.
Part of her dreaded she was somehow still dreaming – that she would wake up to that smiling face and that voice which purred out her name as knives and other implements came out to play. Her toes clenched, and she remembered the crunch of bone, the pain, and the tugging as her toes were crushed between pliers and pried from her foot one by one. They were still there and whole. Sakura shivered at the memory, hands grasping at her toes then as she sucked in a shaky breath. ‘This is all in the name of science,’ the all too familiar voice purred, and Sakura felt herself shake. The skin wasn’t pink and sensitive, she assured herself, grounding her thoughts within the facts presented before her. They hadn’t only recently regrown. They hadn’t been pried off once more, as they had so many times before. She supposed the nightmare she had just woken up from was something to blame those vivid thoughts and memories on. Nothing good ever happened once she woke from a nightmare, no matter if she was suddenly free from that place of hell and torment. That fact still stood.
A soft whimper escaped her, even as she buried her head in her knees and prayed this was no dream which she would suddenly wake up from. Even if it wasn’t death and the Pure Lands, it wasn’t her prison, which meant it was better. She had escaped from their clutches, and she was free. That had to be all which mattered.
‘You’ll never be free of us, Sa-ku-ra,’ the voice purred, and she sat up suddenly, skin feeling as though there were ants crawling all over it, and she hurried out of her wardrobe then, crouching down as she surveyed the room around her with cautious eyes. There were no threats. Her breathing was the only sound she could hear amidst the eerie stillness which was broken as the sound of a bird’s trill pierced the air. It came from outside, beyond where the light seeped in through the light curtains, and she held her breath for a moment as she listened and watched that light. The same light she had seen yesterday, but hadn’t paid much attention to in her frantic panic.
She hadn’t seen light in so long. It almost looked foreign and far too bright to her tired eyes as she stared at that window, heart beating in her chest rapidly as she edged towards the light. Part of her wondered if it would burn her, or if she wouldn’t feel the heat because it was nothing but an illusion. But she did feel the warmth on her skin, squinting at the brightness of the world outside, breath catching in her throat at the sight of the sea on the horizon.
Waves sparkled in the light, and Sakura could almost taste the salt on the imaginary breeze as she stared at the roiling waves of the sea. Her hand landed against the glass, part of her longing to run down to the sea, but she didn’t know what sort of danger lurked outside. She flinched back then, staring at the faint brown-haired reflection she could see in that glass, turning away from the window then, stomach twisting at the sight of the face which wasn’t hers.
There was no illusion set upon her right then and there. Sakura wasn’t entirely certain if she remembered how to do such a thing. It had been a long while since she had used one, confident in her own strength and skills as she once had been. There had been no need to hide or infiltrate anywhere or anything. Her arms wrapped around herself, and she glared at her brown locks then. Body snatcher, something whispered in the depths of her mind, and so she decided the first order of business was tying her hair back. There was only one problem – she knew where nothing in that house was, and she had the terrible feeling, as she opened draw after empty draw of the dresser, that any sort of hair ties or other beautifying equipment would be in that room she had first awoken in.
That red room – the same room which probably belonged to the body she was in. The same room which would belong to her technically, given how she was there and seemingly breathing in that body. Her hands shook, growing steadily more shaky as the search of another room yielded nothing else, and silently she weighed up her discomfort. There was no knife available to cut her hair, and even if there was, bits would only end up in her vision, too short to be out of the way, and she didn’t particularly want to shave her hair off. It would be terribly itchy growing back and Sakura didn’t think she was comfortable being bald or near enough. She was still female at heart, and she was rather attached to having hair. A lot of the people in the paintings had long hair too – and Sakura supposed that was another mark for keeping her hair there long, yet tied back and out of the way. She wanted to blend in should she meet anyone else.
So the momentary terror and discomfort didn’t outweigh the need for a hair tie of some description, which was how she found herself standing before the door to that room, sucking in deep breaths as she tried to gather any vestiges of courage she had. Shaking fingers curled around the door handle, and Sakura opened the door, stomach twisting as she spied that red colour. She didn’t like red anymore. Never again, not after all the blood and pain. That colouring brought up too many painful memories, and Sakura slammed the door shut, falling to her knees then, burying her face in her hands and whimpering. Pathetic, part of her which sounded eerily like her tormentor whispered amidst the roiling terror in her mind. Defeated by a room, another part whispered, stressing the final word. Sakura stared at her feet, ashamed and miserable at the revelation. Look at what’s become of the great and mighty Haruno Sakura… Her hands curled into fists, nails cutting into skin, drawing blood and another whimper of pain as the red sticky liquid leaked down her arm, skin sealing shut only moments later, taking away the slight pain soon after – the blood on her skin and nails the only evidence of what had happened.
“It is only a room,” she whispered. Her voice sounded strange in ways she couldn’t quite understand. Sakura didn’t think it mattered much in that instant, what with the more pressing issue of trying to get those wrong brown locks out of sight and out of mind. She would be able to deal with everything else once she had managed to get that done. “It is only a room,” she decided then, rising slowly to her feet, ignoring the mocking whispers on the eaves of her mind as her legs trembled somewhat. “And it is not that room,” she reminded, steeling her nerves as she put her hand on that door handle once more. “And I do not need to stay in it…” she trailed off, the spoken words reassuring her once more, jerking the door open, setting eyes on the dresser surrounded by that horrible red colour which made her stomach churn and painful memories claw up from the depths of her mind she had tried to sink them to. She moved quickly, in spite of her shaking hands, pulling open what she thought to be the likeliest of drawers, relief seeping through her as she spied the leather thong. Her fingers closed around it, and, prize in hand, she fled from the room, slamming the door shut behind her, breathing heavy as the heavy wooden door closed with a click.
There was no more red, only the wooden panelling which decorated the corridor in all its glossed glory. It reminded her somewhat of the wardrobe she had slept in, and the wardrobe was a designated safe spot in that large house. Sakura wondered whether she ought to call it a mansion, what with how large it was seeming to be. She had yet to explore all the rooms, determine its safety and defensibility in case of an attack, or even lay some basic traps. Not that she had any material with which to lay traps with. But she hoped to find something. And ideally never have to go in that red room ever again. She didn’t like the red, no matter how she had once worn that colour. ‘And you wore it so very well,’ her tormenter purred in her ear, and Sakura ran then, retracing her steps from earlier, leather thong in hand and ready for use as she made her way back to her designated safe spot.
The walls of that room were a forest green, vibrant and not red which made them soothing to her eyes, and she snuggled back up inside the comforting wooden walls, only fiddling about with her hair then. Her hands moved, nimble fingers twisting that strange hair of hers into a simple braid. One of the few she could just about remember still after everything. Her hands shook at the memories, but the tie was already in her hair, securing those unfamiliar brown locks as out of sight of her immediate vision as they could be. She curled up in her blankets then, letting herself snuggle in the warmth of the odd nest bed she had made in that safe wardrobe. She liked being warm. She had been cold for too long. Exposed for too long. Sakura shuddered at the memory, grateful she was clothed – even if it was a long, flowy, impractical dress she was wearing. She resolved to change clothes at the earliest opportunity, or at the very least wash them, what with how they were somewhat splattered with dried vomit.
Her nose wrinkled, a reminder that scent would give her away ringing in her brain then, and she decided to scout the rest of her new apparent accommodations. She wasn’t probably as hungry as she should have been, per say, but she could feel the beginnings of that gnawing hunger just about scraping in her stomach. The kitchen, food, and the bathroom. Those were what she needed to find. Perhaps the boiler, or the boiler room too, given how she would want hot water for her bath. After that would come everything else. Like traps and defences and then she would begin figuring things out. Sakura nodded to herself, wondering how long she had been snuggled in those warm, comforting blankets. Probably too long. She bit her lip, reluctantly sliding out from the warmth and the blanketing sensation of safety she felt from that wardrobe and that room she had already spent a night in.
She slipped from the safe room then, bare feet padding against the mostly wooden floor. The first floor was mainly wood, or so she was discovering as she explored. There were six bedrooms, including the red room, and three bathrooms with plumbing which thankfully worked. A decent level of technology and plumbing and general hygiene or so it seemed. The water was cold, even from the hot tap, meaning there was likely a boiler room somewhere, but it evidently wasn’t automated or electronic. Sakura supposed in some ways that made things simpler – she couldn’t really remember how to operate a normal one – but a wood fire burner type or whatever it was technically called… That, she would be able to use, even if it meant she would have to remember to set a fire every time she wanted a hot bath.
The lights in that place, aside from the ones in the bedroom, were always seemingly on, and they grew brighter as evening came – or so she was discovering, having not paid much attention the evening before. She couldn’t really remember the evening prior all that well. She made her way downstairs, hairs on end as she walked through the entrance hall – the danger zone where the door which led to the outside was. She all but sprinted further into the house, nervousness rising at the eerie silence which engulfed her. Sakura supposed she would have to get used to that much, what with her seeming to be the only one living there for the time being. She didn’t think she wanted that to change – if there were indeed others out there. Sakura was presuming that much, what with all the portraits which had been in the house, depicting other people whom she didn’t recognise in the slightest.
She still didn’t understand how or why she was there. The only thing which mattered was ensuring she was safe and secure. Then, and only then could she worry about how far away she had managed to get from her tormentors. Though she was fairly sure she was pretty far away, what with how she vaguely remembered dying. Sakura shook her head, padding across the tile which seemed to be the predominant flooring type on the ground floor. And likely the floor beneath it, if the stairs leading downwards were anything indicative. She didn’t think the kitchens would be down there, so she ignored them for the time being, making a mental note of where they were in that house. The kitchens, or so she discovered, were more towards the back of the house, with a view out into the garden on the other end of her new residence. Ground seemed to give way to the sea much too suddenly, and Sakura could only presume there was some kind of cliff edge there, fenced off as it seemingly was.
Food was thankfully in stock in the kitchen painted with creams, the tiles around the kitchen area made black for a nice contrast, and Sakura grabbed a hold of some dried meats, bread, and some cheese by the looks of it, seating herself on one of the granite countertops and making short work of the meal she had grabbed, eyes darting around all the while as she ate. Part of her was terrified of anyone suddenly appearing, especially when she was unarmed and hadn’t used her chakra in years. Well aside from the whole attempted suicide in which she had thought she had managed to damage her chakra system beyond repair. But her Yin Seal still worked, she was alive, and she didn’t understand anything anymore, not even her own body. But Sakura didn’t want to think on that. Water from the taps was cool, clean, and fresh, washing down her meal, and Sakura got straight back to business with that, hunger sated and dealt with meaning it was time for the next item on her self-made agenda.
She needed to find whatever heated water. There was a hot tap, meaning there had to be a way of heating up water, and Sakura was going to find it, she knew. She didn’t want to bathe in cold water. She didn’t want a bucket of cold water to occasionally be thrown over her. The water had to be hot, and so Sakura made her way through all the rooms on that particular floor, disappointment filling her when all she found were parlour rooms, dining rooms, offices, and other spaces for what she assumed to be general living. The house was far larger than she had originally thought. Her stomach stirred at that, nausea gripping at her for some reason. Because she knew nothing about the body she was inhabiting. The body which was apparently hers now. The body which might protect her from her tormentors, different as it was from her last. The body which didn’t feel like her own thanks to that very same reason.
“Downstairs,” she muttered, the word cutting off that train of thoughts before it could roll into another station in her mind. Survival was more important than the matter of that body. Sakura thought she needed warm water for survival. She hardly wanted to catch anything or impair herself with illness from constantly bathing in cold water. She didn’t know the local area, nor the types of illness which would be commonplace there, or if she had immunity to some of them already thanks to that body.
The stairs which led downstairs, to a set of corridors which were still above ground – the house seemingly built on different terrain levels. The lights in that place seemed to be of a warmer glow than the colder lighting of the main part of the house there, a few windows outside letting in the glow from the sun low on the horizon. There were no shadows, lights carefully positioned to ensure there were no blind spots in that corridor which made her wonder if the place belonged to shinobi. Though that didn’t mean she wasn’t careful when opening the doors, always so very careful of where enemies could lurk or traps could be laid.
She found the correct room on her first try in that odd section of the house – the room closest to the stairs on the right hand side, opposite to the side the windows were all situated on. It was a large room, with a fair number of pipes, but the lights were still very bright and there were still no enemies in sight. She was starting to get fully accustomed to the idea that she was blissfully alone in that place, and she was so very grateful for that fact. She didn’t know what she would’ve done, had she suddenly met anyone who she was supposed to know, or one of the people whose portraits had been painted and hung throughout that house.
Shaking her head, Sakura put that horrible imaginary situation to one side and gathered the wood logs and other things she knew she would need, sweeping away the ash which had been left there from the last use of that place into the metal bucket placed by the side of where she presumed the wood was meant to go. The dead ash and the way there were no flammable materials situated there was a bit of a giveaway. Matches had kindly been left there, and there were a few boxes of them, meaning she would have many attempts to get a fire going before she had to worry about how to get more. Something she was thankful for. She didn’t want to go near the front door for a while yet.
Sakura wasn’t sure if she would ever want to venture there or beyond for a long while.
Chapter 3: Baths, Bubbles, and Blues
Chapter Text
The fire crackled behind the grate, and Sakura fed it more wood, even as she sat there in the sweltering room. Her mind was a mess, and the repetition to the motions was oddly soothing to her, even in the horrendously warm room as she was. It was better than the freezing cold. She hadn’t been tormented with heat and burns for a long while, and it wasn’t like she was stuck in that room. Her chains were gone. She could leave, and that was a marvel in itself. Though her legs didn’t look or feel the same. They could move and work, and that was all she wanted to focus on right then and there.
She wasn’t entirely sure how much time passed with the familiar motions before she climbed to her feet, the fire crackling merrily behind her, water bubbling through clanking heated pipes and whatever mechanism had been used. She left that place of relative safety in search of the nearest bathroom, but she didn’t think time really mattered much, after what had happened.
There was always too much time for her, and apparently even dying and body snatching didn’t change that very fact.
One step at a time, she reminded herself. All she needed to do was find her feet again, secure herself a safe space, and then she could try and figure out how to unknot the tangles of the situation she had found herself in. Sakura nodded. That was something she could do – something she would do. A breath escaped her, low and long, and she moved onwards. That was a good place to move to, she decided. Nodding to herself she retraced her earlier steps as best she could, using the many paintings and tapestries draped upon the walls to guide her, finding a bathroom closest to the room she was temporarily designating to be her safe space.
Traps would have to be set as soon as she scrounged up some materials, and then she would truly be able to relax just a smidgeon more. Nodding again at the idea which had come to her, she entered a room decorated in pastels. It was in contrast to everything else which was covered in vibrant colours and thick furs and rich woods and finery in some display of lavish wealth, the cooler temperatures near the sea seeming to demand for it in the winters, and Sakura found it rather soothing. She had the oddest of feelings that was how the room was meant to be – soothing and calming to someone or another.
Sakura could only be grateful it was that to her as well.
After all, it wasn’t like that room had been made for her. She was a body snatcher. An imposter wearing another’s skin. It was almost odd how much that affected her, given how many times she had cast illusions over herself to make her look different. But this was no illusion. There was no chakra to disrupt in order to bring back pink hair and green eyes. Although she did actually have green eyes, and her hair had been white by the very end of it all.
Though she couldn’t afford to get caught up with those thoughts and worries right then and there. She needed to set up a base for herself there, and then she could go around and try to figure out what exactly had happened. And why she wasn’t dead and in the Pure Lands like she was supposed to be. Swallowing at the thought of the implications of that, she pushed those thoughts aside.
Survival first, she told herself, skin crawling like ants at the thought of being captured again. Or perhaps revealed for the body snatcher that she was. Undoubtedly they would be curious of how she came to be, and curiosity rarely meant anything good when directed towards her. Curiosity meant scalpels and knives. Curiosity meant pain and a want to find out how she ticked. Curiosity meant something bad, and that in itself meant that she should avoid such a thing at all cost. She had lived through enough curiosity as it was.
She padded through the pastel room, noting the opulent bed and hangings, reminding herself that the family of the body she’s stolen were undoubtedly considered well off. And seemingly liked to show it off – but above that they weren’t hers. Though her family had long since passed on. Like she should have.
The dark wooded door on the other side of the pastel room was her goal: the closest bathroom which was situated by that room as opposed to the other bathrooms which were more easily accessible without going through someone’s private room. Entering the unfamiliar room cautiously, as was in her very nature by that point, she peered around, scanning about the shadows as if they were hiding things.
The room was empty, the air still and silent, and Sakura let out a soft breath. She was alone. That in itself was familiar, and she was used to the quiet and the sound of her own thoughts. Usually company meant pain and suffering in the name of science. Sakura didn’t like that sort of pain – the ripping and tearing of flesh beneath blade, pale, bloodless skin peeled back to reveal everything underneath.
But that was in the past, and that was how that had to stay. Forwards was the only direction she could move; the only way she should move.
The bathtub was sunken into the floor, taps shining beneath the pale light of the moon as if calling for her to use them. Marble flooring gleamed even in the scarce light from the little crystal lamps which shone as silver as the moon. Carved patterns marred the edge of the frankly rather large bathtub, her fingers tracing them as she knelt down and turned both the two taps on.
Sounds of water gushing out into the bathtub shattered the silence which had once been eerily comforting. Sakura turned, focusing her attention on the rest of the room which reeked of wealth and decadence, her eye caught by the shelves of little glass pots and vials. Shimmery substances glimmered in the light, and gently, she padded over to the far wall where the stone shelves lay. Her fingers brushed against the cork stoppering one of the bottles, whispering warnings, lingering paranoia making her wonder whether the substance would harm her. Yet she was in a bathroom, and logic dictated that they were bath products. Logic turned out to be correct, and she grabbed a bottle from the shelves, placing it within easy reach of the bathtub as she went and ran her fingers over the many different surfaces of the room as the bathtub slowly filled itself up.
Part of her wondered about her new fascination with touching everything. The other part of her reminded her of how very strange everything was to her, and how she hadn’t really felt much sensation beneath her fingertips for quite a while.
“Maybe that’s an explanation,” she murmured, her words soft and far too lyrical. Something she would undoubtedly have to get used to. Everything about that place was something she had to get used to. What other choice was there?
She turned the taps off, bathtub filled with steamy water, stripped off her vomit-splattered dress, and sunk into the warm waters. A soft sigh escaped her, a bubble of laughter escaping her as she lay her head back against the uncomfortable stone. It was a world steeped in luxury and quiet, and now it was hers, baffling as the concept was.
There was no more pain, no more chains, no more tormentors, and no more Haruno Sakura, or so it seemed every time she caught a glimpse of her reflection in windows and mirrors. She was a stranger in a strange body, in a strange large house surrounded by strange lands. She hadn’t been anywhere near the sea before she had supposedly died, and yet every time she looked out of the west side of the house, there the blue-grey waters loomed, unfathomably deep and wide.
She didn’t understand. She didn’t think she would ever understand.
Though survival took precedence over understanding something or another, and that was all she needed to focus on.
There was a set of vastly oversized clothes in one of the rooms, and it was that which Sakura helped herself to after her bath, despite the fact that they clearly didn’t belong to her as such.
They swamped her in their entirety, both the shirt and the trousers, the waist and ankles having to be tied with some silvery rope she had filched from the curtain ties, and the sleeves needing to be rolled back many times just to reveal her wrists. Sakura didn’t need a mirror to know that she looked completely awful in them – like a half-starved stray wearing their father’s clothes – and yet there was no one besides herself around. There was no one to care about how she looked, because she certainly didn’t mind too much.
She was wearing clothes which was all that mattered, foreign as they sometimes felt, given how she had been strung up naked long enough to no longer be embarrassed by her own nudity at times. Though that hardly meant she liked being naked. Admittedly, she would have preferred to wear clothing in her correct size, but with the room painted red out of comfortable access to her, she was left with oversized but practical clothing. Things which were easier to move about in compared to the dress she had woken up in.
That same dress she had since cleaned and somewhat ruined. It turned out dresses were delicate things, and that scrubbing them too hard could damage them beyond repair – or at least beyond repair for her. It wasn’t as though she had any tailoring abilities, nor did she have the slightest idea of where potential sewing supplies were.
The house – mansion, more like – was far too large for a single person’s use, many parts of it unexplored by her eyes and touch. Which was how Sakura found herself passing time. Exploration was hardly a pastime of hers, and yet it kept her occupied in that place of solitude and quiet. She hadn’t had the freedom to do whatever she pleased in a long time, and she was seemingly making as much use of the oodles of time she now had.
My, the things one could do when no longer strung up and waiting to be tortured…
A burst of laughter escaped her, cold and miserable as her sense of humour has undoubtedly become. She only prayed she didn’t somehow go back, unbidden fears of her situation being the product of a fever dream coming to gnaw at her heels even as she walked soundlessly down the hallway.
There had been a washroom tucked away in one corner of the ground floor – down in the wing of the house which was seemingly situated away from the more lavishly decorated parts of the building. It was that same place down the stairs – where the heating room, as she was calling it, lay. Though the washroom wasn’t the only thing which interested her there.
Rather, the well-maintained, and yet clearly unused forge caught her eye.
Haruno Kizashi had been a blade smith, after all, and the rest of her uncles had helped, whether by crafting the hilt and the sheath of a blade of her father’s creation. Even to that very day she still remembered the raging heat of the forge and the sound of her father striking while the iron was hot.
Yet the forge was cold, her father and her uncles were long dead, and the stars she wandered beneath were unfamiliar. Teeth sunk into her lip, arms coming to wrap around herself as she tore herself away from the sights which taunted her of memories long passed.
There were other places to explore. Though perhaps after a spot of lunch. Her stomach was starting to grumble, and she was getting more used to working the strange kitchen decked in stone and varnished woods. Yet another showing of wealth. Wood was a perfectly acceptable kitchen surface, but clearly the family that owned that place hadn’t known that.
It wasn’t like there was anyone around to show off that wealth to.
Scowling, Sakura headed upstairs, making her way towards the library she had discovered only a matter of hours before. Reading was a perfect way to kill time and hopefully help her relax as much as she was capable. The scent of books, ink, and parchment wasn’t something she’d managed to smell before her arrival there, and she could hardly mistake it for anything else.
It was one of the few things which hadn’t been marred with memories of blood and torture.
There was a twitchy restlessness she couldn’t get rid of, an insidious, unsettling feeling which made her fingers or feet move whenever she stayed in one place for too lone. Even reading books and uncovering more information about that place didn’t exactly help much. Despite the fear of it all, the strangeness of her translocation, and the uncertainty of her future, she was bored and ultimately feeling rather cooped up. Though she didn’t dare take one step outside either the front door or the back door.
Her feelings of twitchiness and unsettlement only grew whenever she edged too close to either of those locations, the sheer amounts of glass making her feel as though their were eyes watching her every movement.
Still, she needed something to do – something to take her mind off her worries and fears which hadn’t alleviated as much as she had hoped with the laying of traps and bells to alert her should their be movement in the house. Her mind raced, part of her playing with the idea of cracking out the sewing kit she had discovered a matter of days ago, another part of her acknowledging that she would soon need to venture out in search of food sooner or later.
Her supplies were running out.
Not that her nervousness about going outside in that strange world was lessening anytime soon, or so she mused to herself as she wandered about the place, stepping over her carefully positioned strings and ropes where necessary. Her feet led her to the same place they had been taking her far too often.
The forge loomed before her, beckoning and calling to her as it ever was, and part of her wanting nothing than to start the fires and forge something. Only she didn’t quite know how to do just that. It wasn’t as though she had taken up her father’s craft. Instead, she had opted for the shinobi path, and as such, knew precious little about the intricacies of her father’s craft.
Yet she had nothing but time before her, didn’t she?
Her fingers ran over the hard metal, and she lifted one of the larger hammers, weighing it in her hands and wondering if the exercise she was doing was truly enough. That body – her body was still awfully weak compared to the one she was used to. Her fingers were fine and soft, a far cry away from the calloused digits she had once had before everything had turned on its head.
The sounds of metal striking metal rang in her ears, and Sakura found herself moving on autopilot as she set the place up. Tears bit at the corners of her eye at the nostalgia she felt. She remembered setting the forge up with her father, before ensuring all the tools were placed away carefully at the end of the working day. Though as she had grown older, she had spent less and less time in the forge. Shinobi life had taken its toll.
Sucking in a soft breath, she gathered the necessary materials she would need to make something – or that which she thought she could use to make a blade, just as her father had, all the while trying to wrack her brains for any snippets of information her father had once told her.
Laughter rang out as she stared at the abomination of a blade she had made.
It was in pieces after a single test swing, made too brittle to withstand a single impact, and she had no idea why. Sakura could only wonder on where she had gone wrong as she picked up the shards with thick leather gloves and a dustpan and brush, placing them on one of the workbenches along the side of the room. “I really should frame such a thing,” she mumbled, staring at her failure.
She wondered why she was so amused, thinking then on how her father would probably have laughed at such a failed creation. That was one of the few things she remembered him showing her – the framed memento of his first blade, a failed creation which he had taken nothing but pride in showing off to friend and family.
“The best thing is,” he had said, “is that from here you know you can only go upwards! Can’t get much worse than this!”
“It’s worse than yours,” she mumbled, heart aching as she reminisced before sighing ever so softly. Her father was dead and buried, and nothing she did would change that. All she needed to do was remember his teachings, ideally without breaking down at every unthinking thought of the man with pink hair she no longer had and warm blue eyes she would never see again.
After all, it wasn’t like she had made it to the Pure Lands, and she had the strangest of feelings she might never make it there at the rate she was going.
Sakura sighed, blinking at the sight of the morning sun creeping over the horizon. Sleepiness ate away at her body, a yawn escaping her as she hurriedly made her way towards her preferred cupboard to sleep in. She thought she had made it quite cosy, a couple of weeks into her stay in that strange mansion. It was the same cupboard she had originally chosen to sleep safely within, carved designs of branches and trees making for gaps in the stained woodwork with which to peer through.
Blankets of blues and greens had been stolen from various rooms around the place, a pillow going missing here and there, along with a fluffy quilt or two which seemed to be stuffed with actual feathers rather than synthetic fabric. They were almost sinfully comfy to ensconce herself within, and she wasted no time in doing just that, closing the wardrobe doors behind her and settling down to sleep.
Her eyes remained open in that strange way they could, most of her mind coming to rest as she lay there, drifting between faint awareness and true sleep. The thoughts of blacksmithing and her failures in that department only serving to amuse her as she tossed and turned silently within the bounds of the bed she had made for herself.
Sakura could only wonder what the coming days would bring, nervousness and worry gnawing at her, even as she felt the faintest surge of excitement at the thought of visiting the forge, and perhaps the library once more.
For all that smithing was usually a craft taught orally from master to apprentice, it couldn’t hurt to check whether the library had any tomes which might help her improve on the little hobby she might as well have found for herself beneath stranger stars.
Chapter 4: Books, Blackouts, and Blacksmithing
Chapter Text
The moonlight cast an eerie shadow on the entranceway, the hairs on the back of her neck up on end as she stared down at the front door. Her skin was crawling, her heart beating frantically in her chest because there was a box in the entrance hall – or the deep blue runner which ran from the door to the two rugs which ran up the two sets of stairs if she wanted to be specific. Everything was so very extra in that place, though that was something she was quickly coming to terms with. What she couldn’t quite come to terms with was that someone had left that box there.
Which meant that someone had been in that house while she had been busy.
And she hadn’t noticed.
Her fingers twitched, digging into the wood of the banister upon which she was perched on. She was overlooking the hallway, clad in the shadows of the hallway, and yet probably still horribly visible to anyone who might be peering through the windows beside the doors. As if on cue the hairs on the back of her neck stood up on end, part of her twisting her head around viciously, as if there was someone standing right behind her.
There wasn’t anyone behind or around her – or even on the ceiling. She’d checked. Instead there was only a lonely little box perched in the entranceway, and Sakura didn’t have the first idea about what to do with it. She tilted her head, moving slowly and silently then, slinking down the railing of the stairs like a cat on all fours. Eyes darted around the entrance hall, searching for any human or animal-shaped shadow, coming up empty on all counts except for her own shadow.
Part of her almost wanted to turn the lights up individually how she’d learnt to the night before – with the little dial in the middle of the two glowing crystal-like rods powered by something Sakura had yet to figure out for the life of her. Yet turning the lights to a brighter setting than the already dim glow they were on would only alert outside eyes to where exactly in the house she was.
Toes dug into the soft blue carpet lining the entrance hall, her breathing ever so soft as she hesitantly crept towards the innocuous box sitting there. Her heart pounded in her chest, fear giving rise to panic as her eyes jumped between the windows, ascertaining there was no one there before she continued on her way to her destination.
Sharp eyes picked out the rectangle of an envelope set atop the box, and cautiously, Sakura picked it up as though it were a live exploding tag. There, written on the front of the envelope – the letter – was a neat script proclaiming:
Aerloth
Sea Flower, her mind translated almost instantly, fingers brushing over the smooth brushstrokes which had made up the name. The name which could only belong to the body she was stuck in for one reason or another. “Aerloth,” she whispered almost reverently. It was one of the few pieces of information she had about the body she was inhabiting; a clue about who she was supposed to be acting like.
She wondered about the real Aerloth sometimes, the real owner of that body who clearly could no longer be with them, given how she was inhabiting that very body. Her arms wrapped around herself fear making her breath catch in her throat, the reedy whine she let out all too telling of how close she was to having another episode. Fingers shook, tucking the letter away in the pocket, part of her wondering about whether or not to read it. After all, it wasn’t like she was actually Aerloth. Rather, she was just stuck in her body without a clue of how to get out.
Her fingers smoothed over the surface of the box, which was, in actual fact, a wooden crate now that she was close enough to see it properly. Cautious, ever wary of traps, she pried it open, blinking at the sight she was met with. On one hand, she no longer needed to worry about procuring supplies, but on the other hand why? Why had someone gone to the trouble to deliver her cooking ingredients?
Mind racing to figure out an answer, she hunkered down behind the box, heart beating furiously at the flash of movement in the corner of her eye. As if someone had just chanced a glance through the far too big windows lying on either side of the intricately carved front door.
There was someone outside.
Gingerly, she peeked out from around the side of the crate, ears straining to pick up any hint of a noise. They did – catching the sounds of the faint murmur of voices and the trudging of footsteps atop gravel as whoever had evidently delivered her supplies retreated from her house. Her apparent home, given how she didn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.
Panic thrummed in her chest, arms straining as she lifted the crate and carried it off towards where the kitchen was – further inside. Perhaps if she hadn’t have done any exercise in the last few weeks of her residency, she would have found carrying it to be a bit more difficult. As it was, she made it to the kitchen with little fuss, her nerves shaken ever so slightly from the sudden appearance of food and, more worryingly, people.
Shivers ran down her spine, an insidious fear creeping and lingering around in her gut even long after those strangers had left the vicinity. Or so she assumed. She didn’t know whether they were lurking about just out of sight and hearing range. Her hands twitched, fears rising once more because she didn’t want to become a curiosity yet again. She just wanted to be plain, boring Aerloth.
“I’m Aerloth,” Sakura whispered, wondering if one day uttering those words would feel like less of the lie it currently was. Fingers traced the envelope as she sat on the kitchen counter, the crate placed next to her, ready to be unloaded. “Should I open it?” she mumbled, staring at those unfamiliar and yet familiar letters she could read as well as she could speak the strange language of that place. Though ever time she spoke or read, it was just another reminder that she was far, far away from the ones who had tormented her, and Sakura took comfort in that.
Comfort was a rarity which was oddly becoming more common the longer she spent in that place.
Shaking her head, Sakura put the envelope back into the voluminous pocket of the oversized trousers she wore. It could wait. The shaking in her hands, and the fear she felt couldn’t – which meant it was time to busy herself with putting her supplies away, reading books in the library, cooking dinner, and perhaps some time spent in the forge she was quite quickly becoming fond of. It didn’t matter that nothing she had made there had turned out quite alright. All that mattered was that she was doing something and losing herself in the rhythm and routine she had found in that place by the sea.
“Again,” she muttered to herself, her words barely audible above the crackling of the fire and the sound of the metal hammer descending on her half-formed blade. “And again,” she whispered, her hands feeling stiff and dry from the constant heat she was surrounded by. Sparks flew up through the air, a smile curving at her lips as she stared at how far she had come from the shrivelled mess of metal which hadn’t even deserved to be called a knife. The same shrivelled, broken mess of metal which sat pride of place on the dresser in the room she had long since laid claim to.
Not that she had ever slept in the bed.
The wardrobe was far more comfortable for her, and Sakura thought it always would be. Lying on a bed made her feel too exposed for her liking. She had already tried it once or twice, and always wound up returning to the wardrobe for her rest periods. The same rest periods which felt as though they were getting shorter and shorter, despite her not being affected by a clear lack of sleep, and that in itself was curious.
Sakura had her suspicions, mostly to do with the periods where her attention seemed miles and miles away as she completed a task which she knew so well she thought she could do it in her sleep. It was almost alarming to think that might be what was happening. Aerloth’s body was strange and odd in ways she couldn’t quite describe, and those ways were ultimately affecting her in the end.
The few tasks she had never fallen into that strange waking-slumber were few and far between – the most prominent of them being reading, given how it required a large portion of concentration. She also made an effort to never slumber while forging, though sometimes repetitive actions made her concentration wane and that odd dulled state surface.
Her eyes narrowed on the glowing metal, a soft sigh escaping her as she continued in her task, silently making a mental note to go over the lists and methods of quenching she had discovered in the library on one of her daily ventures. That was one of many things she had read up on – whoever the one who had used that forge before her evidently deciding to keep a written note of what had worked and what had not.
Which had turned out to be incredibly useful for her, though she had yet to achieve the perfect shape or strength or sharpness which she wanted from a blade. The little she remembered from her father differed from the methods written out there – the blades the one before her had made meant for toughness and impact, a sharp comparison to the blades her father had forged. The blades her father had made were sharp and yet that sharpness lent itself to brittleness, meaning such a blade was not as good for parrying, lest the owner wish for it to break that much sooner.
The sound of metal meeting metal rang in her ears, almost seeming to form a strange song of sorts. It was a melody unlike any she had heard before. Not that Sakura really thought it mattered all that much, humming to herself as she continued in her work, wondering if her latest blade would be less of a failure than they usually all were.
She doubted it.
It was nice to dream though – even if it was a dream which would take a while for her to reach. Sakura was no stranger to hard work, after all.
She started small, knowing she would have to overcome her aversion for all things outdoors and the terror that other people seemed to inspire within her. That in itself was an obvious fact, even if it had taken a few days for common sense to override that crippling fear and silent assurance that she didn’t need to do anything about it. She did, and that was the crux of the matter.
It began with her opening a window by a centimetre, and then slowly opening it that much further and further until a person could easily vault into the house. Not that they could without springing any of the traps laid out around such openings, but the unease was still there. She didn’t think she’d be perfectly at ease until she had a weapon on her person as well. Not that it would be happening any time soon – although she was perfectly capable of creating a makeshift weapon in a pinch, there was something so very alluring about the call of the steel and iron she was always attempting to forge into weaponry.
The terror that other people inspired was a lot harder to overcome, and it began with her keeping vigil over the front door whenever her supplies began to dwindle after twelve days – that which counted for two weeks there, given how a week was only six days.
There was something almost amusing about the fact that people so rarely ever looked up, and Sakura was content to watch the intruders – potential threats – from the banister, the top of the curtain rails, and occasionally from atop the large light fixture in the entranceway. All that mattered was the fact that she was watching them and learning of their weaknesses. After all the time spent in that large, empty mansion, she knew its layout so very well. It was home territory, and she would have the home field advantage. That in itself was something she knew how to take full advantage of.
The moon was high in the sky by the time she decided to make her move, the night cold and unforgiving, telling of the winter about to come howling at their door. Her supplies within the forge were dwindling, and she needed them restocked – and that meant engaging with the silver-haired and the brunette intruders who came to the front door like clockwork every two weeks.
There were curtains beside the doorway, thick and all too easy to hide within, and so that was what Sakura did as she waited ever so patiently for the intruders to arrive. Her heart pounded in her chest, fear gnawing at her belly until she felt as though she might throw up.
Then there was a familiar click of the door being opened, and she finally received her first closeup glimpse of the ones who brought her supplies and intruded upon her house. They were almost androgynous, their skin seeming to glow ever so slightly beneath the moonlight, and it was only when they spoke that Sakura realised the brunette was female and the long haired silver locked one was male.
“Well, I’ll assume she’s managing just fine by herself here, given how these crates always seem to vanish,” Silver-hair said, hefting the next crate in to rest on the blue rug it was always placed on.
“Faelon,” the brunette hissed, staring at him pointedly. “Her brothers are growing concerned, especially since she hasn’t returned their letters, and they asked us to check. In case you’re forgetting whose employment we’re currently considered under…”
Sakura felt her brow furrow. Brothers? She shook her head, making a mental note to freak out about certain things later. Her only priority there was making contact and asking them to restock the forge with all the required materials she needed whether it be oils or metals or other things she still didn’t know the names of. She reached out, materialising from the shadows then to clamp a hand down on Faelon’s shoulder.
Faelon screamed like a little girl, and the brunette’s hand clamped around the sword at her waist. Her heart pounded in her throat, dimly aware that they were armed and she was not – nor could she use her chakra properly if they wanted to harm her. Fear made her breathe out that much more harshly, concealing the shakiness she felt as she tightened her grip on Faelon.
“Lady Aerloth,” the – not a woman, an elleth part of her murmured – lady greeted, and Sakura felt herself go as tense as a bowstring. “What brings—”
“Forge,” she bit out, unable to stop herself any longer. She needed to say her piece, and then she needed to go and hyperventilate in her wardrobe-bed until she calmed down from the undue stress that confrontation was causing her. “The forge needs to be restocked.”
The brunette blinked, smiling placidly in a way which didn’t reach her eyes. Too late, Sakura realised she had spoken over her, and she opened her mouth to apologise for that—
“Honestly,” Faelon grumbled, seemingly trying to shake out of her iron grip to no avail. “Did you destroy your father’s old work area in one of your temper tantrums?” he muttered, shaking his head, oblivious to the way Sakura felt her brow furrow. “You should be glad your brother won’t be needing to—”
“Faelon,” the brunette hissed, elbowing him almost covertly in the side before she turned her attention back to her. “You are aware that your expenses here will be made a note of – your eldest brother will see them, and given how you are both exiled and under house arrest, you are meant to be on your best behaviour if you want even a chance of returning to Mithlond.”
Sakura blinked again, nodding stiffly. “Restock the forge,” she said stiffly, watching cautiously as the elleth nodded at her demand. “Thank you,” she added hastily, vanishing into the shadows of the corners of the room, silently praying that those would keep the eyes she could see staring in her general direction from following her as she sucked in a ragged gasp. Tension fled her body as she leant against the wall, watching as the pair of them left with only a curious and a confused stare directed at the shadows of the entrance room in which she hid within.
“Is it me,” Faelon mumbled, still just within her earshot, “or did she say thank you?”
She breathed out at that, legs shaking even as she sprinted back to where her wardrobe-bed was, burying herself in her covers, wrapping her arms around her as her body shook like a leaf. There had been just a bit too much information unloaded on her in such a short space of time – the main concern being that Lady Aerloth had older siblings. Older brothers – plural – if she had understood everything correctly.
Tears filled her eyes, panic clawing a space in her chest as she gasped for breath, because how exactly was she supposed to behave like the Aerloth they undoubtedly knew? She couldn’t. She didn’t even know what the original Aerloth had behaved like, nor whether she could imitate it as such.
That in itself would incite curiosity.
And curiosity was that which she feared, especially when it involved herself.
Chapter 5: The Song of Metal and Shadows
Chapter Text
Her feet found themselves treading down increasingly familiar corridors, a maelstrom of thoughts swirling behind her eyes as she made her way to the smithy. What was she supposed to do about the fact that she – who was now Aerloth, and thus had to deal with whatever she had – had brothers? She had been an only child once before. She was hardly experienced when it came to the matter of dealing with brothers. She could barely remember Sasuke and what had happened with his brother after the length of time which had passed – and how she didn’t like thinking of the pair, and what she no longer had.
Immortality was a funny thing. One which had come to twist her personality little by little as the years went by. Then those people had happened, and her last embers of faith and comfort around other human beings had went up in smoke.
She was jaded, she knew by that point. She wasn’t quite the outspoken, hair-trigger tempered woman she had once been. Part of her still didn’t know what to think on that. All she knew was that she had to move forwards on her own two feet. It was the only option she had left. The only thing which hadn’t been ripped from her in depravity or her own ongoing loneliness. The latter was something she had long since come to terms with.
Which was why the revelation that Lady Aerloth had brothers was ever so nerve-wracking to her shot nerves, if only because they knew the old ‘her’ and the fact that they were people.
Sakura didn’t particularly enjoy interacting with people those days.
She prayed then silently to whatever deities might be out there, that none of her brothers would ever deign to visit her in that strange, far too large house. She prayed that they would stay away, far away and out of sight, until she thought she could manage to see them. And somehow pretend to be an elleth she had never been before… A frown creased at her brow. What was an elleth? She wondered then, wondering why that term had been used to replace woman when referring to herself and the lady who had been half of the group who had brought her supplies.
“They should be getting the forge restocked soon,” she mumbled, reminding herself that she still had enough metal to hopefully last her until new supplies came. “Until then,” she murmured, going about setting out her little station she had carved out for herself in the forge which had undoubtedly belonged to another before she had started venturing there.
Her father, she thought she could recall them saying that smithy belonged to. Idly, she wondered where Aerloth’s father was, shaking her head as she tried to remember that she was Aerloth now. She wondered why there was no discomfort to that very thought, heart beating frantically in her chest before she cast those thoughts aside. Thinking too much wasn’t all that great for her mental state, she was discovering, even as a familiar heat washed over her and almost seemed to carry her worries away to the cold corners of the room.
She could feel the thin, fragile hairs on her hands and arms being singed by the constant heat she was exposing them to, a melodic laughter escaping her even as she took one of the varying ingots of metal she still had no idea of the name of. It was the best as the base material, she had come to learn after many a failure of blades.
Though she had yet to figure out the best composition, even as she selected the other ingots she was to use for another attempt at making a blade her once-father – in another life, part of her whispered – would have been proud of.
She wondered then if Aerloth’s father – her father – would be proud of what she was doing right then and there. Or whether he would shake his head and tell her that she simply ought to have sought out a proper bladesmith to learn from… Then again, there were no guarantees that he had been a bladesmith. There were other things to be crafted with metal, and the box of small jewels of numerous vivid colourations implied that he might have had a hand in crafting jewellery.
The kind that the Sakura before immortality and before that place of torture would have loved to admire. She didn’t know whether she would still be able to admire them as she was right then and there, what with how her priorities and interests had shifted when it came to beauty and all things beautiful.
A faint melody rang in her ears, soothing and what could only be a remnant of happier times before a scalpel had been put to skin – before flesh had been peeled back as if that could discover the secrets of her folly. She hummed along to that melody, the song coming to her, yet she couldn’t for the life of her remember where she had heard it before.
It was a strange tune, part of her whispered to herself, utterly unlike the ones common to Konoha. Yet that was the only place she could have heard it – and knowing that strange song was the only explanation as to why she was humming along so happily to it, even as the hammer she had selected rose and fell with that clashing sound of metal on metal. Thoughts drifted away as she worked the metal, eyes watching as the length of metal glowed that familiar, comforting amber-red.
She was home – there, in the forge. Maybe that was why she always felt so infinitely safe within those walls lit with those strange sconces she had yet to figure out the lighting mechanism behind.
Safety was a fickle thing, Sakura was coming to learn, even as she watched strangers – people she had never met before – carry new ingots of varying sheens and colourations into her forge. Barrels full to the brim with liquid were carried in, for quenching, her mind supplied, knowledge of bladesmithing coming to her then. Proof her weeks of practice had amounted to something rather than nothing, and proof that she remembered more about smithing than she had once thought.
Her heart beat almost frantically in her chest, hands twitching with the urge to rip those pointy-eared people out of her forge and throw them onto the doorstep of the too-large house she occupied right then and there. The same house she had apparently been exiled to, with brothers who wrote to her even in her apparent exile.
Idly, she wondered exactly what she had done to merit being exiled, her heart a similarly fickle thing which was beating far too loudly and quickly in her chest as she watched the odd procession of intruders.
“What exactly has she been doing with all that metal?” Faelon asked, turning to his brown-haired companion, as if she might somehow know.
Yet she had ensured she couldn’t be spied upon, so it would be all the more concerning if that strange unnamed elleth knew what she had been doing. More so when she had carefully cleared up all evidence of her failures and successes – rare as the latter were those days – in the forge at least.
“Why are you asking me as if I will have an answer for that much?” she responded, one eyebrow arching up, her expression unimpressed and unamused. “The Valar only know what is up with that elleth these years…”
“Do you not think her strange?” Faelon asked, and Sakura felt her heart skip a beat. “She said thank you, after all, the last we were here.”
“Then perhaps she is attempting to play the part of a regretful elleth,” the lady said, and Sakura bristled at that – at the idea that she was only holding on to a façade. Please and thank you were simple common courtesies, and she didn’t think she could rid herself of them, no matter if it was becoming apparent that the Aerloth of before hadn’t used them.
They hadn’t used common courtesies with her when she had been their prisoner, and sometimes she liked to think herself better than them.
She was fundamentally different to that Aerloth, and it almost alarmed her to think that. She didn’t want to be different and strange, after all. Swallowing thickly at that, she resumed her watching from the embrace of the shadows which hid her ever so well.
“Where do you suppose she is right now?” Faelon asked, and she only smiled in relief at that, even as her heart went thud-thud behind her chest. If they were to explore the shadows of the nearby curtains they would undoubtedly find her, no matter how she wished to remain unseen and undiscovered. “I have seen neither hide nor hair of her since we came inside… and it unnerves me.”
“Does her location truly matter all that much?” the brunette continued, heedless of the way they were being watched by curious, wary green eyes. Around her, the shadows seemed to hum, part of her feeling so infinitely safe in the shadows which leant her their aid. Their cover, she should say. “We are restocking the forge here, should the second eldest master wish to come here and smith for a while. This has little to do with Lady Aerloth or her pursuits, no matter if she is being petty and destroying things,” she said, and Sakura felt herself hunch up at that – at how casually they seemed to write Lady Aerloth off as nothing more than a passing nuisance.
She wondered then, if that was what she was, closing her eyes and letting the shadows engulf her wholly as she sat there on the windowsill and waited for those intruders to be gone.
Her fingers trailed over the spines of the books on the shelves, acutely aware then of how those once gentle, soft hands had slowly turned into something much rougher and harsher – an echo of the hands she had once had when others had called her Haruno Sakura, though different nonetheless. The hands of a blacksmith, she mused, rubbing her fingers against her palms then, almost able to imagine grabbing at her once-father’s hands as a small child.
She missed those carefree days, even as the hairs on the back of her neck stood up on end and she glanced around frantically. Her heart pounded in her chest, eyes locking on the window, silence reigning supreme even as the thud-thud of her heart echoed in her ears.
A bird burst out from the canopy of trees, shoulders sinking minutely, and she laughed bitterly then. “Scared by a bird…” she muttered, smoothing her hair back and digging her fingers into her scalp as she hid her face from the world.
It was jarring to think sometimes; how far she had fallen from the metaphorical podium she had once stood on. Then she had played about with nature chakra and done something worse than turning herself into stone. She couldn’t deny the fact that everything would have been easier if she had turned to stone and died rather than becoming what she had. Her hands shook, pale pinkish skin free from the marks which should have marred her flesh – should have proven that she had lived through that hell and had mystifyingly come out the other side.
Sometimes she wondered what she had gained and what she had lost when she had become something far too enduring. At least her body had become something enduring. Her mind wasn’t quite of the same rigidity. Sometimes, if she thought on it for long enough, she could almost feel the fractures of her psyche, razor thin lines carved into her very soul itself.
She stood, climbing to her feet, voluminous trousers shifting even as she tugged at her makeshift belt. Her hands itched, mind whispering at her to go back to the forge and strike the iron until she could lose herself and her worries and fears in that rhythmic pounding of metal-on-metal. Yet part of her wanted to linger there a little longer, amongst the scent of parchment and ink, and all the memories of happier days they brought back.
The same memories which made her heart throb painfully.
Sunlight glinted off the mirror to her side, and she braved a look at herself right then and there. Brown hair fell bone straight to her waist, bright green eyes staring back at her as she edged closer and closer to the reflective surface. Her eyes narrowed, catching sight of a single strand of hair which looked odd. Frowning, she picked it up, holding it in front of her and peering at that single lock which had made her pause.
Looking at that strand in the light, she could only frown. It was white, she knew, lips pursing as she wondered what exactly it meant for her to have a white hair. Scars of the mind aren’t so easily healed, wise words whispered in her ear, an echo of a friend long dead.
Her hands went to her head, part of her almost thinking then, for a brief moment, that she could heal the miniscule, branching cracks buried in her mind. Then she remembered it was impossible and let her arms fall back to her sides, sighing as she did.
Working in the forge had put lean muscle on her arms and constantly walking from one end of her home to another had put some muscle on her legs – not that anyone would be able to tell of that much, hidden beneath baggy clothing as her limbs usually were in that place. Yet, somehow, she still looked gaunt, her face sharper than she remembered first catching a glimpse of in the mirror when she had first arrived there.
She tore her eyes away, shuddering at the sight of the familiar stranger in the mirror who was becoming more and more familiar to her as the days slipped past her without much note. “It’s not important,” she murmured to herself, ignoring the way her heart beat ever so frantically in her chest even as she walked away – heading towards the kitchen then to procure herself some lunch. “It’s not important at all.”
Chapter 6: What Makes a Home
Chapter Text
Distantly, she could hear the crash of the waves on the shores not too far from the place she lived. Her home in exile. She swallowed at that, the moonlight haloing her paling hair, even as the fire of the living room crackled and popped. It was one of many living rooms she had long since discovered, and it was the one she usually felt the most comfortable sequestering herself away in.
On the low table in front of her sat several letters, each with a looping script declaring them for Aerloth. Her breath came out in a soft, long sigh. Part of her craved to be back in the smithy, far away from those still sealed envelopes which made her stomach twist and turn upon itself. Yet she was trying to be better – trying to be braver, as she once remembered herself able to be. Before she had truly understood what fates were worse than death.
Her fingers twitched, reaching for the envelope and prying the red wax seal free. Her heart thudded in her chest, a steady, loud rhythm which echoed in her ears as she pried the first, and oldest letter free from its confines.
Dearest sister, the words read, penned in a cursive script which seemed to drip finery and grace in ever stroke of whatever brush or pen was used to write those words.
I hope this letter finds you well, it continued, and Sakura could only snort softly at that. She was anything but fine, and she was self-aware enough to know it. I have not heard from you in a while, and the reports your guards send back are beginning to concern me. She swallowed thickly at that, forcing herself to keep reading those smooth words before she could lose her nerve and run off to hide. Nevertheless, I am obliged to inform you that the order for your exile has yet to be rescinded, though it is early days yet, and I hope to have you home sooner rather than later. Lady Melliel’s wounds have yet to begin scarring over, and the memories of what you did to her are still yet fresh in everyone’s mind. Sakura blinked, reading frantically over that last sentence, a sinking feeling of dread building in her stomach as little pieces of the puzzle began to slowly fall in place.
The way her guards seemed to tread cautiously around her.
The absolutely terrible assumptions everyone seemed to have of her.
I hope to hear from you soon, the rest of the letter went, and she could only blink at the fact that it was signed by her eldest brother. She swallowed thickly then, wondering then just how many brothers she had there. Going from the number of properly furnished rooms, she was betting three or four. Her stomach twisted at the thought, and she could only glance at the small pile of unopened letters which had gathered for too long.
How long had it been since she had first woken up in that place and started ignoring those letters?
Sakura couldn’t quite remember, blurred as the days had become amidst her slivers of solace and the wariness which was ever present within her. Sometimes she still thought she was trapped within a dream, yet everything felt altogether far too real. Her shoulders sunk, fingers traitorously reaching for another letter with the thought that she might as well hurry up and get it all over and done with. Another wax seal was pried loose, her eyes almost greedily drinking in the words written there.
Dear sister, that letter began, the handwriting ever so slightly different to her discerning eyes. At least respond to brother so that we know you’re alive. He’s beginning to grow rather concerned, and I’m sure you’re quite aware of what he’s like when he grows worried enough. Unless you would rather be smothered by our overly watchful brother once our beloved high king rescinds the order for your exile, I highly suggest you send your reply to brother’s letter with utmost haste. Best wishes. Her brow furrowed at that, part of her wondering just what the creatures called brothers were right then and there.
That letter though was signed with a name; Díneloth. Silent Flower, part of her translated, and she pondered then on that particular facet of her abilities there – the ability to translate and understand a language she had no real memory of learning. She wondered what exactly it meant. Was she partly truly Aerloth in some way, shape, or form? She tilted her head, chewing on her lip even as she stared at the five other letters stacked up, waiting to be read.
She could probably put off opening them for a few more hours, if she really wanted to. Yet her curiosity was peaked ever so slightly when it came to the fact of her brothers. Part of her was ever so terrified that the feeling would be mutual when she inevitably did something odd and strange in their eyes. Her hands shook at the thought, even as she gritted her teeth and reached for the next letter.
Dearest sister, it began, and a quick glance at the end of the thick parchment told her it was from her eldest brother once again. She swallowed, noting that the overall length of the letter was that much longer than the first she had read. I hope you are faring well in Harlond. The seas tend to get rougher towards the beginning of Firith, so please refrain from going boating until the seas calm. The scholars like to say that Gaerys’ anger grows frosty and fierce when the colder seasons come a calling, so do be careful of the sea and its many moods. I find myself increasingly concerned as I haven’t heard from you just yet, though I do hope it is merely one of your passing moods. If I could visit, then I certainly would, but alas I find myself swamped with work, and I doubt our king will let me leave Lindon anytime soon. She swallowed thickly, reading those words, and feeling the growing sense of unease and worry radiating from the words written on the parchment. Our brothers are similarly busy, so you won’t need to worry about a surprise visit from them either. Please write back. I do so long to hear from you, sister.
Sakura closed her eyes, letting out a harsh breath as she tried to arrange the few pieces of the puzzle which was Aerloth that she had found out in the past several minutes of reading through her letters. The same letters which were a good few weeks old – or perhaps months by that point. It wasn’t like there had been a new letter every week – sometimes weeks elapsing between the envelopes with her name appearing.
Aerloth – she – had hurt someone, enough to leave scars, it seemed, and had then been exiled for that display of violence by what could only be the highest power in that land. A burst of laughter escaped her at that, something like hopelessness coming to settle in her chest as she wondered just what she had done to earn such a fate.
She should have died when she played about with nature chakra. She should have died when she had destroyed her chakra system – been able to move on to whatever was supposed to actually happen after one died.
Her shoulders sunk, even as she stared at the rest of the letters, wondering then about the contents of them all And what else she would come to learn of what the Aerloth of the past had been like… She swallowed thickly at that, almost dreading to learn more about what others would think to be her past, and perhaps, in some odd way, it was.
Fingers twitched, part of her longing to venture to the forge and spend hours working away those insidious feelings on swords which were still far too brittle and easily broken. That was her one solace there – well, that and perhaps the library. The only two places where she felt uncannily at ease; the way which had come so naturally to her before… everything…
“Finish the letters first,” she scolded herself, knowing that if she put off reading them, then who knew what might happen. Information was what she needed, so as not to alert anyone of her strangeness. She didn’t want anyone else to grow curious, didn’t want to be picked apart to see how she worked if she seemed far too out of place in that strange environment. Her heart beat frantically in her chest at the thought, and she swallowed thickly, tearing the wax seal loose to distract herself with the next letter from her elusive brothers.
Dearest sister, the letter began, proving it was from her eldest brother once more. He was seemingly the one who wrote to her the most. Díneloth had only sent one so far – yet there were still three more letters to go, she mused, chewing on her lip as she got back to her reading. How do you fare? I hope the cold seasons are treating you well. I do not wish to pressure you, yet I have not heard from you for far too long a period – though I suppose you have never been sent away for this long before. I am thinking of sending your childhood friend out, since none of our beloved brothers can be sent away from their duties here in Lindon just yet. If you do not wish for him to come, I would so love it if you could let me know. Awaiting your response.
Sakura closed her eyes, mentally trying to calculate the amount of time which had lapsed between that letter arriving and the present moment. “No. Nononono,” she mumbled, teeth sinking into her lower lip as she tried to process the fact that she was supposed to have a childhood friend. Who undoubtedly knew her ever so well and thus would see her for the faker she was—She breathed in deeply, feeling the panic clawing at her lungs as she sucked in a couple of lungfuls of air in quick succession.
She stood up then, three letters left on the table unopened, her feet already treading the familiar path to the forge, hands ready to work away the bout of anxiety which had surfaced with relish thanks to the implications of that letter.
She stared at the silver of the blade, sighing softly as she held the blade aloft, that strange melody ringing in her ears, jarred and ever so slightly distorted. The balance felt off, a far cry away from the blades her once father had made, and Sakura only closed her eyes as she brought the blade down on the nearest surface, hearing the shatter of metal as her latest failure broke into innumerable pieces.
Far too alike to her life right then and there… She sighed, a familiar feeling nibbling at her gut as she looked in the direction of the front door to her home there, and wondered when, if ever, a supposed family friend would come around to call.
It was a waiting game, and she had played far too many of them before – so she was well accustomed to the sinking sense of dread and the nervousness of when everything would begin to unfold. She didn’t like not knowing things, she was coming to understand, and there in that place she barely understood a thing. Well, besides her growing knowledge of all things smithy. She closed her eyes, letting out a soft breath as she went and set about making her own midday meal. Keeping herself occupied with something or another was something of a habit by that point in time.
She just had to keep moving somehow, and everything would be fine.
Liar, something inside of her whispered, and she closed her eyes and let out a deep breath, bottling that thought up and discarding it in the recesses of her mind as best she could.
Her mind chose to stray to the three unopened letters she had left, shaking her head then, even as she climbed to her feet once more and strode out of her forge. There was an aching weariness to her bones, a sleepiness starting to consume her from the inside out, something whispering at her to just give up. Part of her was unduly tempted to. Yet she was still, if nothing else, persistently stubborn. She was finding something of her feet there, and somehow she knew that to give into that tiredness would mean to lose that much.
Yet exhaustion still ate at her – quickly coming to a point where she couldn’t simply rest in that strange trance-like state she often seemed to enter. She had to lie down and close her eyes, and there was something which felt eerily wrong about needing to do that much. Yet that was something she was no closer to figuring out, and there was that terrible, sinking feeling that the lack of that knowledge would mark her for the strange being that she was.
“I need to go rest,” she murmured, trying to make herself more eager to go and hole herself up in that wardrobe she used in place of those soft beds in each room. The beds that normal people would probably use, and undoubtedly the kind of bed people would expect her also to sleep in. Her shoulders sunk at that thought, feet finding their way to the main entrance foyer where the main staircases were on either side of the room.
A soft tap at the door made her stop dead still.
Her heart pounded frantically in her chest, her head cranking around ever so slowly to stare at the glass panel where she could see a faint shadow cast by the moonlight outside. It was late – dark – far past the reasonable hour for a guest to call. Part of her prayed then that she was simply hallucinating and hearing strange things. Her guards – as she had come to learn who they were to her – didn’t bother to knock when bringing her the supplies which weren’t due for six more days, a whole week there. Her hand went to her chest, the loud thud-thud of her heart ever so distinct. She almost felt as though it would burst out of her chest, her vision tunnelling as she stared at the shadow.
The knock came again.
Her legs shook, mind whispering to her of undoubtedly who her guest was. Hands moved on autopilot, grabbing a hold of the nearest cloak and throwing it over herself, as if it could hide her within its voluminous depths. “Go away,” she mouthed, praying frantically then that the stranger who probably wasn’t supposed to be a stranger would leave.
Yet there came the distinct sound of a latch turning, and Sakura could only watch as the door creaked open, revealing an ellon with long silver hair and piercing blue eyes. Those same blue eyes locked on her form, her hands digging into the banister as if that could save her from the scrutiny of that gaze.
“Aerloth,” the ellon greeted, and Sakura felt her heart sink as she realised that the one before her was undoubtedly the ellon who her eldest brother’s letter had mentioned. A childhood friend. Those blue eyes narrowed, fingers curling around the key he had undoubtedly used to gain access to her home there, even as the door shut behind him with an eerily final click. “What exactly are you wearing?”
Sakura relinquished her death grip on the stair railing, biting her lip to supress the soft whimper she wanted to let out. “Clothes,” she said flatly, folding her arms against her chest, hiding them under that cloak as if that would conceal everything she wanted to hide.
A snort escaped him. “Obviously, Aerloth dearest,” he said, the endearment making her shudder at how cold it seemed. Yet the one before her had been undoubtedly violent – enough to physically maim someone for reasons she had yet to figure out. “What happened to those pretty dresses you loved to flaunt? If you’ve ruined them all, then there is a local tailor here, but remember all your expenses here—”
“Are being monitored by brother dearest,” she said, fighting the urge to roll her eyes. She had been told that much already – that very fact had been all but drilled into her skull by that point. Every time she had dared to ask for the forge to be restocked, it had been told to her over and over again. “I know.”
“And that’s why you’ve ruined the forge twice already?” he asked, one silvery brow rising in question.
“I wasn’t aware that you were involved with my expenses,” she remarked, internally wondering exactly who the person in front of her was and how close they were to both her and the rest of her family.
“I have to be,” he said flatly. “Or have you conveniently forgotten about that precious little Oath I swore when we were children?” he demanded, and Sakura mentally denoted that as something of a sore topic for the ellon in front of her. “No matter, I am still your friend at the very least… so are you going to stop wearing that ridiculous cloak indoors and greet me properly?”
How was one supposed to greet someone properly there? Sakura didn’t have the faintest clue. “Well,” she said, trying to act out her part as best she could when she didn’t have the foggiest clue as to what her part was supposed to be. “Welcome to my humble abode, friend,” she continued, praying she didn’t seem as plastic and fake as she felt. “I take it you’re familiar with the house, so you can use your usual room… if you’re staying for longer.”
“Aerloth,” the ellon said frankly. “It was a three-day trip to come out here, thanks to the worsening weather. I will likely stay until spring comes and the waters become safer to traverse – unless I fancy an even longer trip by horseback to Lindon.”
Sakura felt the smile on her face freeze, a choked bit of laughter escaping her. “That’s… great…” she mumbled, wincing then at the narrowed blue-eyed gaze sent her way right then and there.
“I can keep you company for a short while this time,” he said matter-of-factly. “However I doubt I will be able to come out here too often for however much longer your exile lasts for.” He chewed on his lip. “You were only sent away for fifteen coranari last time.”
She blinked at that, the knowledge that she – Aerloth – had been exiled once before somehow not surprising her all that much. For fifteen years. A frown curled at her lips then as she wondered just how old she was right then and there. Not that it was a pressing concern right then and there. The friendly-foe in front of her was greater than that.
“Given how you actually physically injured someone this time, it might even be a whole yén this time,” he said, and something in the back of her head equated that to one-hundred and forty-four normal years. She shoved that morsal of knowledge into a little box in the back of her head to be dealt with later. “Though it would be cruel to make you endure that much in constant solitude, hence why Faelion sent me out here.” He stepped towards her then, and it took everything in her power not to try and back away.
Never mind the fact that she wanted to run away screaming – yet she didn’t think that was what the Aerloth the ellon in front of her knew would do. Thus staying there and interacting with a real live person it was.
“Now,” he said, and Sakura realised what he was about to do moments before his fingers curled in the fabric of her cloak. “I think it time you took off that cloak which is meant to be worn outside and showed me where the kitchen and our supplies might be.” Mentally, she cursed her earlier self for not running away, even as those hands pried her protection away from her.
“Um,” she mumbled, trying not to let her nerves get the best of her. “Well, let’s go to the kitchen, then,” she said, feeling eerily like a wooden puppet as she tried to take a step towards the aforementioned kitchen.
A hand closed around her arm, and there was a war within her to get rid of that unfamiliar sensation of someone grabbing her. “Aerloth,” he spoke, voice barely above a whisper. “Do you want to explain to me exactly what’s going on? Or should I go and find the nearest healer?”
The mention of a healer brought her up short. She smiled blandly, feeling as though she were pulling her own teeth out as her lips curled up. “I’m not injured?” she offered, tugging on her arm then, a familiar anxiety building in the pit of her stomach the longer she was held there.
Silvery brows knotted together, blue eyes staring at her in abject confusion. “If you’re fading out of sheer spite – then that would be an incredibly apt Aerloth thing of you to do, yet I know for a fact that is not quite possible. Are your brothers aware of this?” He tilted his head, and fear gripped her heart and squeezed.
Her free arm whirled around, fingers sinking into the collar of his shirt with a greater strength than she thought she currently possessed. “No one can know,” she hissed, heart beating frantically in her chest. She had no clue what this fading was, even though it was likely treatable, but if it were strange or odd, or would otherwise draw unwanted attention to her, then no one could know. “No one.”
“You know I’m compelled to keep your secrets,” he muttered, sounding almost bitter about that very fact. “No matter how foolish it is to keep them that way…” Those blue eyes gazed into her green ones almost pleadingly before bitterness came to their forefront, and part of her almost felt guilty. Almost. “On your head be it.”
Her fingers unclenched, her grip on him slackening. “So be it,” she mumbled, stepping back from him then. Her hands fell back to her sides, a soft sigh escaping her as she turned on her heel and made her way towards the kitchen – her childhood friend, whose name she still hadn’t figured out, following behind her like a silent shadow.
Chapter 7: Late Nights and Apple Pies
Chapter Text
Her hand was steady as she sliced the tomato, her knifework careful and precise after enough weeks of practice there. The silent shadow at her back, though, was exceedingly unfamiliar, and silently she wondered what she could make him do to get him off her back both literally and figuratively. She swallowed thickly, the silence thick and heavy as it lay between them, awkward and uninterrupted. Mentally, she begged him to start whatever awkward conversation they could have.
“Aerloth,” her unnamed friend spoke, and silently, she praised whatever deity might have answered her call.
She turned with a smile. “Yes?” she asked, the smile on her face feeling strange – and her friend undoubtedly thought the same, if the way he startled was any indication.
“Have you penned a reply to your brothers yet?” he questioned, and Sakura felt her blood run cold at that, and the unwitty reminder that she still had three letters she had yet to open and read. And the fact that she would probably have to read them in the presence of her supposed childhood friend. The same childhood friend she had no idea how to interact with, or even what their name was. Her shoulders sunk at the thought, part of her wondering what would happen when he realised she had no memory of him.
Curiosity, undoubtedly. She shivered at the thought. “Uh, no,” she answered, cheek twitching as she tried to smile and act nonchalantly about the matter. How long could she keep the charade up? Part of her couldn’t help but ponder on that much. How long could she keep someone who supposedly knew her well from figuring out that she honestly had no memory of him? She swallowed thickly at the thought, nerves coming to bite and twist in her stomach.
“You might be angry at them for whatever reason you’ve come up with in that head of yours, but they grow worried, Aerloth, and they are not ellyn who can leave their posts in Lindon easily.” Those piercing blue eyes stared at her flatly. “I would rather they not bring trouble upon themselves… they’ve been incredibly kind to me”—Sakura could hear the implied, unlike you—“and I must insist that you reply to their letters. Faelion sent me out here because he was worried about you.”
“Fine,” she muttered curtly.
“Even if you don’t—oh,” he said, blinking and staring at her, and Sakura busied herself with lighting the fire so she could cook atop the hob. The prep work for their late night snack was almost finished, and she was only growing that much more exhausted by the minute. It was surprising how draining being around other people was, and part of her was infinitely grateful then that she only seemed to have one childhood friend. “You… agreed with me?” her friend murmured, frowning at her, and Sakura felt her shoulders sink at that. “No argument…” he was muttering to himself, and she tuned him out as best she could. “You’re even voluntarily making dinner for the both of us…”
“I already had dinner before you arrived,” she said. “It is quite late, and I was intending to go to sleep before you appeared and disturbed my plans.”
“Your brother told you I was coming. I’d expect you would be able to calculate the rough timing of my arrival. You’re familiar with the route the ship takes by this point,” he stated, and Sakura could only think on how very incorrect that statement was. Perhaps the original Aerloth knew, and yet as she was right then and there – she didn’t know. She didn’t even know the geography of that land beyond the limited views from the windows around the literal mansion she resided in there.
“I opened the letter which said you were coming some seven hours ago,” she said, feeling herself bristle ever so slightly at his tone. “Forgive me if I was surprised by your sudden appearance.” Though it could have been worse, she mused, a wry, grim smile curling at her lips. She could have not read the letter and asked him who the hell he was upon his arrival. And that would have undoubtedly set the alarm bells ringing. Yet that hadn’t happened, and her childhood friend was there and undoubtedly unnerved by her and the way she was acting.
“Aerloth,” he spoke, a scolding tone to his voice. “So you have been ignoring your brothers…”
She put the saucepan down on the hob with more force than strictly necessary. “And?” she demanded, not knowing what to say, nor if she could even defend herself against the unspoken accusation. It wasn’t like she could tell him she had no memories of him or her ever mysterious brothers who couldn’t leave the place called Lindon. It wasn’t like she was about to spill her guts about her terrified she was about her brothers and the way they would undoubtedly learn something was off the minute they laid eyes on her. It wasn’t like she could tell him why the idea of people being curious about her terrified her so.
She really needed to get her hands on a map of that place, she thought to herself. Or, a sly voice which sounded far too much like her own, you could just stay in the forge? Part of her almost craved to shut herself away in there and constantly lose herself to the rhythm of metal on metal. She missed the boiling heat of that room – though she supposed with the hob on, a fire crackling away within, was as decent of a substitute for the heat which was eerily comfortable to her by that point in time.
“They are worried about you. Faelion was… most frantic when he realised that you were ignoring them,” he explained, and she cursed the sliver of guilt she felt at that. If only because it wouldn’t be the Aerloth they knew they would eventually be getting back. “He has asked the High King many times now – pleaded on your behalf, if only to alter your punishment to house arrest rather than exile here,” he said, and Sakura wondered then just what Aerloth meant to her brothers. She had scarred another – to what degree, she was still uncertain. She had never had brothers before, and she could only wonder exactly what it meant to have them. “Even if you are… prideful and far too willing to resort to physical violence, you are still their only, beloved sister. They helped your parents raise you before your mother and father sailed… and you were still rather young when they felt the sea longing.”
Sakura frowned. “Mother and father went… sailing?” she murmured to herself, wondering if that was some sort of euphemism for something. Or whether they had suddenly taken to the seas for the rest of their lives? Her brow furrowed that much further, brain trying to make sense of the little snippets of information she was learning. A yén was one-hundred and forty-four years, according to some vestige of information buried deep within her mind. What sort of timescale were they living on? Sakura could only gulp and wonder at that, a familiar pit of misery stirring as she thought about the death which was supposed to have killed her. Death had been her escape. Death by old age had once been something she had been so jealous of. Death was supposed to be the end of the confusion and suffering. And yet…
Her friend stared at her in confusion. “Yes – to Valinor, the Undying Lands… You know… our homeland where we will all likely return to before the end,” he said, those piercing blue eyes feeling as though they were peering right through her and all her plastic fakeness.
“Oh. Yes, of course,” she answered, trying to laugh at the obvious error she had made. Clearly everybody knew of their homeland there… besides her, of course. Her laughter fell flat, the sounds and smells of her cooking doing her best to distract herself as she felt the weight of his stare fall upon her once more. “Are you almost done with the rest of the vegetables?” she asked, desperate to try and divert the conversation onto something she would be less likely to stumble and fumble around.
“Yes,” he said, holding up his chopping board of neatly cut carrots and onions. “What even is the recipe for?” he asked, peering curiously at the contents of the saucepan. “I saw you putting the pastry in the oven earlier. Is it some sort of pie?”
“I think so,” she said. “I got the recipe from the book in the corners… and I’ve made a few adjustments to suit my tastes.”
“You? Adjusting the recipes?” A soft snort escaped him, a glimpse of humour without any distaste finally making its way onto his face. “I never thought I would see the day. But since dinner is underway, would you be up for making dessert?”
“Dessert?” she echoed.
“You know – your favourite meal of the day which satisfies that raging sweet tooth of yours?” he said, and Sakura blinked at him.
“I don’t know any recipes?” she offered, mouth salivating at the thought and promise of sugar. That was seemingly something she had both as Sakura and Aerloth. She licked her lips, thinking of anmitsu, not that she could make it there. She didn’t even know how to go about making it in that place.
“Honestly, have you forgotten where your mother always kept the dessert recipes?” he asked, looking for once as though he were actually enjoying himself there as he delved into the cupboard beneath the shelf where the other recipe books were. They were all handwritten books as well, and Sakura had the distinct impression that her mother might very well have been the one who had written them. The handwriting was all the same, after all, and it bore an uncanny resemblance to her eldest brother’s fine looping script. “Here,” her friend said, holding out a recipe book with one hand, even while his nose remained buried in the cupboards. “Looks like you should have all the ingredients. You still have some eggs left, don’t you?”
“They’re in the cold room,” she said, pointing to the door she knew led to the pantry and then the coldest part of the house. “It’s where all the more perishable foods are kept.”
“I know, silly, unless you want them to spoil,” he answered, and Sakura blinked, nodded, and then turned her attention to the book in her hands. She watched out of the corner of her eye as his silvery hair vanished into the pantry, part of her relaxing as he went out of sight. It was almost funny how stressful having friends could be. Sighing at that thought, she flicked through the pages, reading each of the recipes and what they made and wondering what she wanted to try first. She had plenty of time to try them all as it stood. Though admittedly baking and cooking didn’t calm her as much as the art of forging did. Even if her cooking skills were already leagues better than her ability to create a useable blade. “Have you decided what you want to make yet?”
Sakura startled at that, glancing at her friend as he lingered behind her like her shadow – only he wasn’t nearly as silent as he’d been on the way to the kitchen. “Uh. I’m still looking,” she said, flicking through the recipes for cakes, tarts, and other interesting deserts she had never seen much of before. There was no shaved ice instructions, no recipes involving red bean paste, and no little illustrations depicting anything like dango.
“You don’t want to make your favourite?” her friend asked, one silvery brow raised in question, and Sakura could only smile with the shaky knowledge that she had no idea which of those recipes the original elleth had preferred.
“Uh, well, my tastes might have changed,” she said hurriedly, hoping that was enough of an excuse if she inadvertently chose to make something the original Aerloth had scorned. “The pie recipe here looks good, but do we have apples, and the cinnamon it recommends?” she asked, chewing on her lip as she tried to figure out if she had seen any containers with the label for the spice. “Then again… maybe this cake might be simpler and quicker to make?”
“We have the apples and the cinnamon,” he said, puling a glass container from the cupboard and setting it on the counter side. “I’ll go get the apples – you can get started on the pastry, though you might need to sort out the other pie you’re making for our late night snack. The filling looks like it might be nearly ready.”
“Oh, thanks,” she mumbled, earning herself a perturbed look before her silvery-haired friend vanished into the pantry once more.
“You’re a more accomplished chef than I thought,” her still as of yet unnamed friend said, cutting through the crisp pastry of the savoury meat pie she had made, glancing at her curiously as he ate another bite. She winced at the memory of the first time she had tried cooking it. The pastry had cracked, and the filling had been overcooked and underflavored. It was one of the few recipes which tended to turn out alright when she cooked it. “I still remember the days when you adamantly refused to cook. In fact, I’m surprised you haven’t wrangled your guards into cooking for you. You did that the last time you were exiled…”
Sakura heard herself laugh weakly at that, keeping an eye on the other pie she could still smell cooking.
“Honestly, I don’t understand what’s the matter with you,” he said, and just like that Sakura felt the tension flood her body once more. “You’re acting strangely, you know. You aren’t harassing your usual guards – you’re even cooking for yourself. You don’t greet me like usual… It’s almost like you’ve grown up, only the Aerloth I know isn’t capable of that much.”
“That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?” she tried, feeling her heart beat frantically in her chest and ignoring it as best she could.
“Certainly, change is childhood… or change after, well, experiencing things out of the ordinary for someone… that kind of change is to be expected. Yet exile is hardly unexpected for you, nor the fistfights which often proceed your little spates of exile,” he said, and Sakura could only muse grimly on how apparent it was that Aerloth had been exiled multiple times before. And the spate of exile she was currently living in would likely be the longest yet… A grim smile curled at her lips at that, bitterness surfacing at the reminder of just how little she knew of that place. “Our kindred are slow to change. We weather it – endure it… sail away from it or… fade,” he said, looking at her mournfully. “Will you not tell me what it is that is affecting you so?”
Sakura pushed her chair back. “I think the apple pie is ready,” she said in lieu of an answer to that. The same answer she knew she would never truly speak of – because just how was she supposed to explain that she wasn’t Aerloth even though she was inhabiting the elleth’s body? How was she supposed to willingly reveal herself for the oddity she was? She swallowed thickly at the thought of what would happen should she be revealed as something unordinary.
“Great,” her friend said, the smile on his face looking incredibly forced all of a sudden. “I love apple pie.”
“I know,” she remarked, pulling on the oven gloves and delving into the oven to pull out the tray she’d baked the pie on. “You said that while we were making it.”
Coward, part of her whispered in her head, and she set the hot tray down on the cooling rack with a soft sigh. Yet she supposed, perhaps she didn’t mind being a coward, so long as it kept her from being tortured for the rest of her probably far too long life.
“How much do you want?” she asked, carefully prying it from the case she had cooked the steaming hot apple pie in.
“As much as you’ll let me have,” he answered, fussing then with the remains of the pie which might as well have been her second dinner. Though, surprisingly enough, eating with another person after so long of being in solitude hadn’t been nearly as bad as she’d thought – at least until the questions had started, she mused.
“That tells me so much,” she grumbled, wondering then whether an eighth or a sixteenth would be better to give him. Yet it would spoil eventually – it wasn’t like she had a working freezer in that place. “An eighth for each of us it is,” she muttered, cutting them both a slice and bolting back to the table in the hopes of finishing her dessert that much quicker. If only so she could excuse herself and go to bed that much sooner.
A yawn escaped her.
“Tired?” her friend asked, tilting his head in question, those silvery locks shifting with the movement as he sat down at his place opposite her.
“Well, considering I was about to go to bed when you arrived…” she said, trailing off pointedly. “You arrived very late.” Her gaze darted to the moon she could see, hanging in the sky, from where she sat at the small dining room table in the kitchen. She had the strangest of suspicions that there was probably a bigger dining room somewhere in that place. They had multiple living and what could only be reception rooms for greeting guests.
“Yet you still cooked for me,” he murmured softly, and there was something in that piercing gaze of his that she couldn’t quite decipher.
“So I did,” she whispered, rubbing at her tired eyes. “Do you hate it that much?”
“No,” he answered. “I certainly do not. You’ve been eerily kind, Aerloth.”
Yet the original Aerloth hadn’t been nearly as kind, she mused grimly, eating the last of the apple pie which had turned out to be quite nice with someone there to help with her cooking. She closed her eyes, pushing herself to her feet and desperately trying to forget how odd she was in comparison to the one who had been there before her. “So it would seem,” she said, feeling those blue eyes boring into her back, a myriad of questions she couldn’t dare answer in their gaze. “Goodnight.”
Chapter 8: That Which Remains
Chapter Text
Awareness came back to her slowly, the railroad of memories of the night before slamming into her with enough force to make her groan softly and wish for those days of loneliness and quiet. The days after she had woken in that red room, with its walls which reminded her of the colour of her own blood as she had bled out over an over again. Skin had split and healed, as according to her cursed regeneration, and her skin still did that even to that day.
Fingernails dug into the soft skin of her wrists, and she breathed out sharply as she grounded herself in the present. It did her no good to look back and reminisce of days gone by. A life she would never be returning to, unless she was caught up in some bizarre fever dream.
Footsteps sounded, light and barely audible, and Sakura felt herself stiffen as she was reminded that she had company. She had company who knew the original Aerloth. She paused, intimately aware all of a sudden that she was sleeping inside a wardrobe in either a guest room or one of her brothers’ rooms. Startling out of her stupor, she hurried out of the small space which had been nothing but a balm to her uneasy mind, pushing the doors shut to conceal the bedding, blankets, and pillows she had used to pad the wardrobe out to something resembling a sleeping area.
The clack of those wooden doors evidently echoed somewhat, and Sakura looked up at the sound of a faint tapping at the door to that room.
She stared at those doors, holding her breath at the sound of the latch twisting, and she met that blue-eyed, curious gaze of the ellon she was supposedly childhood friends with. She was no closer to figuring out his name, and idly, she wished her brother had given her his name in one of their many letters. The fact that she had no memory of him was nothing more than a shallowly buried skeleton all but primed and readied to be excavated.
“Aerloth,” her friend greeted, and she threw on the best smile she could manage as he stared at her and the room in confusion. “I checked your room, but you weren’t there… Why are you in Tathrenor’s room?”
Sakura smiled, ignoring the question of who the bloody hell was Tathrenor? Her brow furrowed for the barest of instances. Probably the name of one of her who-knew-how-many brothers she seemed to have there, she figured. The very same brothers she didn’t particularly want to meet. The very same brothers she would eventually meet whether she liked it or not once her exile was over and done with. Oh how she dreaded that day. “How long is left on my… period of exile?” she asked, hoping then that her companion would say a couple of yén or more, if only so she could hide away from her problems for many a years to come. Maybe then she would be less of a nervous wreck when she eventually went to see her brothers for the first time.
“One-hundred sun years is what I’ve heard,” he answered. “But then again, it could change… depending on whether your brothers manage to convince the king – he’d the only one who could shorten or lengthen your time spent in exile. Until such a time as the order to bring you home is passed though, you will be stuck out here in Harlond,” he said as though that were a bad thing. “Undoubtedly, by the time you return to court, much will have changed – and that is if you gain permission to return to court at all. The king may well forbid your return, and I daresay I would not be able to blame him…”
She tilted her head at that, reminding herself of what a firecracker the original Aerloth had seemed to be – and her impression of the original being who had worn that skin only seemed to worsen the more she heard of the stranger who undoubtedly ought to have been there instead of her. Never mind the fact that she didn’t think anything of the original Aerloth would be returning to court, if she could return at all.
“I’m not familiar with the gossip of the high society you used to amuse yourself on endlessly, so I can be of no help there,” he informed her, and Sakura only shrugged, fingers itching to return to the forge and begin trying to learn the art of blacksmithing properly. Only she had a guest, and that undoubtedly severely limited her freedom. Even from the little she knew of who had come before her told her that Aerloth was not one to dirty herself in the forge. With her friend there, she could hardly allow herself to be stranger than she had already been the previous night. Otherwise that would bring up questions she couldn’t dare to answer.
“What do you want to do today?” she asked, having already mentally asked herself that same question and come up devoid of any reasonable answers. So asking around for reasonable suggestions it was, if only to prevent her from seeming any stranger than she already was.
He blinked at her, large blue eyes staring at her uncomprehendingly, and Sakura had the strangest of impressions that she’d just put her foot in her mouth for the thousandth time since his arrival at her home. “You…?” he trailed off, swallowing thickly. “You… want me to decide what we’re going to do today?”
She folded her arms, standing as firmly as she could against the scepticism creeping into his tone. Imperious, she reminded herself, trying to shoehorn herself into a personality she thought was more skin to the original’s. “Yes,” she declared. “That is just what I asked you to do, after all.”
Her friend stopped short for a moment. “I see,” he remarked, recovering from the surprise quickly enough. “Well, the weather is still too haphazard for us to go boating… a pity I did not come in Laer. The weather would have been nicer and less prone to sudden storms.” As if to emphasise his point, the windows rattled as another harsher gust of sea air slammed into the side of the house. “I don’t suppose you would wish to venture outside… I fear the weather would ruin whatever hairstyle—” his words cut off abruptly, blue eyes fixing on her and the messy plait she had thrown her hair into the night before.
It was still strange to her, even after all that time, to see brown hair instead of the pink – or white, as her hair had slowly turned through the years of pain in that place – colouration she was almost expecting to see.
“I wouldn’t be opposed to going outside,” she said, trying to sound braver than she felt. A familiar curl of anxiety wrapped around her stomach and squeezed. The thought of going beyond the walls of that house was terrifying to that part of her which had labelled them as safe. That was her home there, no matter if it had only truly belonged to the original Aerloth. Somehow she didn’t think that strange elleth would have ran out of a bedroom in terror due to the colour she had decided to paint the walls.
“Then shall we visit the market?” her friend asked, and it made part of her wish that she had never said she didn’t mind going outside when the opposite was far truer. “It’s Orbelain, which means the weekly market will be setting up about now,” he explained, and Sakura tried to figure out just what Orbelain was. Was it some sort of festival? Yet nothing rose up from the recesses of her brain to explain just what that word was, and she was left frowning at her friend.
“Orbelain…” she echoed, glancing outside, even as her stomach grumbled.
He laughed. “You really have lost track of time if you cannot remember what day of the week it is,” he said, and Sakura blinked at the knowledge that no, she didn’t know what the days of the week – a six-day week, that was – were called there in that place. Though she had long since remembered that there were only six days to it, thanks to whatever fragments of concepts were left over from Aerloth as she’d originally been. At least that was where she assumed that knowledge came from. “Come. Let us go and have breakfast. Then we can visit the market – your brothers sent me over with an additional allowance for you, so you do not need to worry about your spending limits.”
Sakura tilted her head. “I did not realise I had limits,” she muttered, realising how silly that sounded only after the words had left her mouth.
“Ah, yes,” he murmured, corners of his lips curving up in visible amusement. “Your family has never been one to struggle for finances, though I suppose neither have mine,” he said, sighing softly, even as they ventured down the stairs into the main lobby. “It is a luxury both of us share…”
She shivered at the sight of the doors and windows at the front of the house, part of her wondering just whereabouts her usual guards had gotten to. She didn’t quite understand where they watched her from on a day-to-day basis. Her stomach grumbled loudly once more, distracting her from her surging fears. “Come on,” she said, increasing the pace. “I think a leftover slice of apple pie will do nicely for breakfast.”
“Then I suppose I ought to make us something just a bit healthier to go with that,” he said dryly, side-eyeing her as they strode through the house and towards the kitchen she knew like the back of her hand. “Your sweet tooth never changes.”
“And it never will,” she finished, pushing open the door to the kitchen and wincing as the hinges creaked loudly. “I’ll have to oil those,” she muttered, earning herself another side-eye which was more confused and concerned than the last.
“Since when do you oil hinges?” he asked, one silvery brow rising in question.
“Since now,” she said, shoulders sinking at all the small little details she seemed to be tripping up on when it came to her as she was then and how she was supposed to be to everyone who seemed to know her on those strange shores. “What are you making for us?” she asked, abruptly changing the topic before either of them could elaborate on her strangeness.
“I’ll have to see what is in the cupboards, but I think some oatmeal might be good,” he said. “I’ll have to check the greenhouses to see if we have any fruit a bit later… perhaps after we come back from the market. Then I’ll have a better idea of what to make for tomorrow. Plain oatmeal can get rather boring after a while, and you have never been one for plainness.”
“Greenhouses?” she echoed, clamping her lips together then as she realised what a stupid thing to question that was. Could she be any more obvious about her missing memories? Part of her wondered about that hopelessly, even as her friend turned to her with an almost characteristic frown by that point.
“Yes. The ones your mother had build some several yén ago,” he said, pulling open the cupboards, retrieving the ingredients he needed without any further questions directed her way. Yet that strange glint in his eyes remained whenever he looked at her – even as she bustled about, grabbing yesterday’s apple pie from the cold storage and carving them out two more pieces for their breakfast.
At least her apparent sweet tooth matched Aerloth’s, she mused, tuning the sounds of her friend humming out as she readied the leftover portion of their breakfast.
There was an uncomfortable tightness in her stomach as she stared at the open doorway in front of her – the unseen line which divided outside from inside in the midst of the doorway her friend was standing in. He glanced back at her, concern shining in those bright blue eyes of his, and all Sakura could do was try to ignore the discomfort the idea of going outside brought.
She could almost picture the face of her nameless torturer – one of many who had indulged themselves in their own sense of sadism beneath the veneer of trying to unpick the method of her immortality. Part of her almost wanted to ask her friend of what sort of timescale they lived upon when they measured lengths of time in such great a period as a yén. Yet it wasn’t as if she would be an oddity, if the rest of her kin lived to such lengths… and yet she still had her ability to heal any sort of injury, and there was the dreaded feeling that it was a ability unique to her. It was a holdover, from a life she almost wished she could forget.
“Do you need a warmer cloak?” her friend asked, tilting his head as he looked at her plainly. “You’re shivering,” he stated, worry creeping that much further into his expression.
“I’m fine,” she said, part of her feeling just a bit safer with that cloak there to cover her head and cast her features in shade. Fear were irrational, funny things, she was coming to understand the longer she lingered there as Aerloth. “We won’t be late to the market, will we?” she asked, wondering whether or not she would be able to step out of the door in the first place.
She had shut herself away in that place for weeks by that point, never able to muster the courage to set foot properly outside of the walls of that house.
“We will if you keep dawdling,” he said matter-of-factly, but rather than simply waiting there he held out his hand instead. An offer. There hadn’t been a hand extended to her with the promise of help in quite some time, so she only marvelled at the sight.
Her fingers twitched, part of her urging herself to put her hand in his own and let that strange-friend who might or might not have been hers pull her from the safety of her home. “Right,” she mumbled. “I cannot dawdle…” she murmured, silently wishing that it was as simply as putting a brave face on and taking he proffered hand. Hesitantly, she reached forwards, wanting nothing more than to feel another’s warmth for the briefest of moments. Yet her hand stopped halfway, fingers shaking before she quickly curled them into a fist.
It was pathetic.
There was a lump in her throat which wouldn’t shift, even as she remembered the room she had been held prisoner in for years upon years. Decades upon decades. She had been there long enough to see several generations of a sadistic family who had delighted upon her screams and her pain. Yet she still remembered the times before that – the fateful time she had left her home, only to wind up kidnapped through a simple lapse of judgement.
Would she come back to the safety of her home if she left that place with her friend? Or would she be dragged into another endless abyss of pain and misery?
A thumb gently rubbed away at the tears she hadn’t even realised were falling, blue eyes suddenly far too close. “Why do you cry, Aerloth?” her friend asked, peering into her green eyes as if they might hold all the answers to the many questions he seemed to have.
Gently, she grasped at that hand, pulling it away from her face, fingers curling around his hand tightly and not prepared to let him go. She wanted that contact, she realised dumbly, even as she wiped away her tears with her free hand. “Let’s go to the market,” she declared, holding onto his hand as though her life depended on it and hoping that he thought nothing of her grip.
“Aerloth.”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” she warned, keeping her eyes fixed on the ground ahead of them. A shaky breath escaped her as she set foot outside, immediately feeling as though ants were crawling over her skin as she crossed the boundary she had never dared to when she’d been alone.
Did having a supposed friend there give her courage?
Memories came to her, remembering blonde hair and a sunny smile, dark hair and eyes which had spun red. She remembered greying hair, wrinkles, and ashes interned in graves when they had aged and died without her. They had left her through no fault of their own.
Had that empty, greedy part of her heart already latched onto that friend who looked nothing like the people in the friendships she had once had when her ears had been rounded?
Well, she supposed, a frown creeping onto her face as those blue eyes caught her own for the briefest of seconds. Blue like Naruto’s, though undoubtedly not the exact same shade. Yet those friends of hers had been dead for years upon years by that point – and, more to the point, buried in a completely different place to the one she was in right then and there.
“Very well,” he murmured, and Sakura felt at least half of the tension drain from her shoulders at the assurance he would not pry. “To the market let us venture,” he said, shifting the topic of their conversation away from dangerous territory and into something more mundane. Mundane was safer than questions prying into why she was acting so unlike what was supposed to be herself.
Gravel crunched underfoot, the pathway leading from her household to something of a main street – or at least a more well-travelled area – quite long and winding as it brought them down the hill upon which her house was situated. Breath came out in a cold mist, the stinging of the cold, salty air on her nose almost a relief to her. It meant she was free. There had been no air which had smelt like salt and pine back in that room she had been kept prisoner in. There had been no friend to walk beside her on the pathway which snaked between vast stretches of woodland that fenced the property off from the town she could just about hear bustling about its morning a ways away.
“What goods are sold at the market?” she asked, praying then that her ignorance of the matter could be put down to not having been to that particular market in the last yén.
Her friend looked at her, staring at her for just a few seconds too long. “Harlond is a harbour town – so you will have fresh fish, and if the pearl divers have managed to venture to the cliffside and the bay around there where the oyster beds are… then you might see some pearls, but those are less common, more so in the colder seasons,” he explained. “There are locally grown vegetables and fruits as well, but fish is more common of a produce here. What else is there…?” he mumbled, counting the items he’d already listed off on his fingers of his free hand. “With how often you destroy the forge, I doubt you’ll be interested in any of the metals mined from nearby, nor any of the jewels… There is quite a selection, since some of the blacksmiths also specialise in jewel-craft or otherwise work alongside skilled jewel-smiths in order to make jewellery. Though I suppose you are much like a magpie when it comes to jewellery.”
“I hope you’re not insinuating I steal things,” she said, watching the path ahead, even as it flattened out, trees becoming sparser the closer to the collection of grey-stone buildings they moved. A variety of coloured doors caught her gaze, the similarities and differences between all of those rather small buildings made apparent as they grew closer to where the market was.
“Of course not, Aerloth,” he said. “Do you not remember the many seasons of Laer we spent upon these shores?” he asked, and just like that every single drop of tension returned to stiffening up her shoulders. “We ventured to this market quite a few times when we still had yet to come of age properly…”
“Things change over time,” she answered, skirting around the question of her memories because she had none of those when it came to the matter of Aerloth and her existence. “Come on,” she said, cutting him off before he could demand another answer from her. “I quite fancy fish for dinner all of a sudden. Though I suppose we can have leftovers from yesterday for lunch.”
He looked at her, those blue eyes ever suspicious and searching for someone she didn’t think was there any longer. “I see you already have this all planned out…”
“Indeed,” she murmured, walking beneath the cheery blue and silver banners which seemed indicative of where the market began on the street. “Though I didn’t bring anything with which to carry our future dinner… and our other purchases in,” she mumbled, eyes catching on the crates which held numerous small gems that glittered in the light. Part of her almost wanted to empty those crates of jewels, her mind’s eye already picturing them set into the hilts of the many swords she wanted to craft if only to make them that much more pretty to her eyes. Was it vain of her to want to make weapons that were both beautiful and practical? She tore her eyes away from those jewels, focusing instead on her friend as he held out a canvas bag, waving it pointedly in front of her face.
“You’re lucky that out of the pair of us, I actually have some forethought,” he said matter-of-factly, and Sakura only snorted at that, pulling him forwards then towards the hustle and bustle of vendors selling their wares to eager customers.
Chapter 9: The More that Changes
Chapter Text
The sun was a low blot on the horizon by the time the bags they brought to the market with them were full for a second time. Vendors were packing their stalls away, the gazes lingering on her sly and curious, and Sakura could only muse on how Aerloth was evidently known to those people. Yet she was now Aerloth and she didn’t have the first clue who any of them were beyond the products and produce they each sold. Was Aerloth supposed to know more than that? Sakura didn’t know, and she had the distinct impression she might never know.
It terrified her, a familiar nest of snakes coming to squirm in her stomach before the presence of her friend made the sensation abate ever so slightly.
“So, my dear Magpie,” he said, an arm settling across her shoulders in a strangely comforting grip. It wasn’t tight enough to restrain her, yet it wasn’t weak and limp either. If she cast her mind back years upon years… it was something Naruto had a habit of doing, and yet those days were long gone, along with everything else she had once known beneath different skies. That had ended the day she had managed to shatter her own chakra pathways, and yet there she was, still living and breathing in spite of it. “What made you buy gemstones – of everything you could possibly have bought?” he asked, glancing down at the small number of the entire handful she had bought. “You chose green to match your eyes, yes?” He looked at her, and all she could do was incline her head at that. “Yet you, of all people, chose to go for a variety of jewels this time around… I remember when we were both on the cusp of adulthood. You did enjoy having your fixations… diamond and labradorite were your favourite gemstones for a time.”
Sakura only hummed under her breath at that, brain soaking up as much freely given information about Aerloth as she could. About her, since she was Aerloth and it did her no good to constantly think of them as separate entities. It only made her feel that much more like an interloper, and that wasn’t something she particularly wanted to continue feeling like. “Come on,” she settled for, not daring to even attempt to reminisce about the past with him. “Dinner won’t cook itself,” she reminded, feeling his arm withdraw from her shoulders, and silently a part of her mourned the loss of contact.
“I can handle dinner tonight,” he answered, eyes lingering on her as they trudged back towards the path leading toward her house. “Today seems to have been a stressful day for you,” he said matter-of-factly, and Sakura barely repressed the shudder that wanted to roll down her spine at the infinitely knowing look in those blue eyes.
“I’m not stressed,” she said, stomach twisting itself into knots at the singular raised eyebrow that earnt her.
He looked at her plainly. “It may have taken me an inordinately long time to figure out, but that is only because you seem to have been in a perpetual state of stress since I’ve arrived here, Aerloth. For all that you used to call me dull-witted, I am no fool when it comes to these matters,” he remarked, and Sakura couldn’t help but feel sick at that. “You should go and do whatever it is that relaxes you these days when we return home,” he said, and the image of the forge came to her mind then. “I will ensure there is enough hot water for you to bathe, or at least so you have that option,” he added, and all Sakura could do was swallow thickly at that, even as her heart beat frantically inside her chest.
“Thank you,” she murmured – the only thing she could think to say in response to that as they wandered back towards the place she called home then and there.
A soft laugh cut through the air, and all Sakura could do was stare at him. “It is rather funny, though I suppose you don’t understand… just how many times you have thanked me since my arrival here,” her friend said, and she stiffened at that, continuing to trudge back up the path to the lonely home she owned all the while. “Before I came here, I could count the number of times you ever thanked me on one hand.”
Her teeth ground together. “What of it?” she bit out, fighting against the tide of panic swelling up within her. What would he do if he figured out she wasn’t quite Aerloth? What would he do if he uncovered the way her skin split and healed seamlessly in a matter of seconds? Her brows drew together in a frown, fear and worry swirling beneath her skin.
“You’ve changed, Aerloth,” he stated simply. “Is it wrong of me to want to know the impetus behind it all?” His hand shot out, grabbing her own hand before she could even think about running for the hills. “We might have our differences, and a somewhat tenuous history riddled with an Oath you tricked me into taking – and that’s not even mentioning everything you had me do and swore me to secrecy using that very Oath, but I do consider you a friend in spite of it all…”
“Was I truly that cruel to you?” she asked, the question slipping out before she could stop it, her heart sinking, even as she pushed herself onwards. Home was a balm of safety to her, and she knew, deep down, she needed it for whatever conversation was on the cusp of happening.
“Aerloth,” her friend spoke, blue eyes staring into her own and they cut deep. She tore her eyes away, scowling ever so slightly when a hand grasped at her chin, making it so she couldn’t look away from him and his searching eyes as they came to a stop on the trail. “What has happened to your memories?”
They were far enough out of town, and far away enough from the guards waiting outside her home, that the small forest was near silent around them. Birdsong was the only thing which broke that thick, heavy quiet, even as the familiar bite of tears in her own eyes came.
It was like she was back there, chains wrapped tightly around her limbs, the heat of the furnace seeping through the walls of her grand cell that had kept her prisoner for years upon years. “Nature chakra truly is extraordinary, don’t you think?” She shuddered at the sound of the voice she could still remember to that very day. Even after that particular tormenter had passed, she still hadn’t been able to forget the sound of their voice. It haunted her, and somehow, Sakura didn’t think it would stop haunting her until the day she died.
“Aerloth.”
She remembered the bite of the scalpel, the thin, sharp knife sinking into skin and pulling apart her flesh to reveal sinew and bone. She remembered the colour of her blood, a vivid red in stark contrast with the pale white of bone. She remembered what her liver looked like, blood red and still warm as it laid on the metal slab of a table besides the one she had been strapped down to. Vivisection, that was what they had done to her on many occasions. That was what it had been called—
“Aerloth,” a familiar voice called, and Sakura could only blink as she returned to the present. She wasn’t there anymore – not that she truly had known where there was on the maps of the Elemental Nations – and she was safe from those gloved hands who had pried her apart and made her hurt. “Aerloth, are you with me now?” Sakura blinked again, brain taking a few moments to process the cream-coloured shirt that her face was pressed against.
“Huh?” she mumbled intelligently, feeling her heart rate soar again as she realised that she had seemingly spaced out.
An old memory surfaced, cutting her like a knife to the chest. “It’s called disassociation, Forehead.”
She breathed out harshly at that, fabric crumpling beneath her grip as she reached out with one hand and grabbed a hold of the soft and slightly scratchy fabric of her friend’s shirt. It was real, that sensation, and it helped to ground her as she stood there, feeling infinitely dazed and panicked.
“I will need to send word to your brothers,” her friend said, and any semblance of comfort she’d found was ripped away in the blink of an eye. “You cannot be left alone in Harlond as it is…” Blue eyes watched her, wariness and worry swirling in their depths. “You are acting like Faelion used to…”
“No.” The venom in her voice surprised even herself. “You can’t tell them. You can’t tell them anything!” She shook her head, ignoring the way his grip on her tightened. “I won’t let you – you can’t!” she demanded, remembering scalpel, blood, organ, and bone. She couldn’t let it happen again. She wouldn’t be able to live through it a second time. Those greedy hands delving deeper and deeper into her chest, even as her skin tried to knit itself back together…
She stopped that thought in its tracks, unwilling to tumble back down the rabbit hole of her past.
“Aerloth—Stop, you’ve made your point,” her friend said, even as something tugged in her chest, her free hand going to her heart then, as if prodding at her skin would help her understand that strange sensation. “It is foolish, I think, to deny the help your brothers would give, but if that is what milady commands, then so be it.” His lips pursed together, an expression of clear dissatisfaction on his face. “How are you going to function, should you have another episode when I am not here?”
She chewed on her lip, brain frantically ticking over for a solution—“What episode?” Denial, apparently, was her best friend there.
“The one you literally just had,” her friend said, taking one look at the mulish expression on her face and promptly pinching the bridge of his nose. “Aerloth. Aerloth, look at me – you cannot simply pretend nothing has happened. You are not well—”
“I’m fine,” she insisted, shoving gently at his chest until she had some room to herself.
“Then call me by my name, as you haven’t done for the entirety of my current stay here, and tell me what has made you so forgetful of Harlond’s markets in the summer of our youths,” he stated, blue eyes scorching as they met her green ones in a look which dared her to prove him wrong.
Yet she knew nothing of the summers previously spent in Harlond, and she didn’t have the first clue as to her supposed friend’s name. She tore her eyes away, scowling at the ground then and waiting for his judgement to come.
“Or can you not remember?” he asked, and all Sakura could do was grit her teeth and stare determinedly at the ground – as though enough menace behind her glare would make it swallow her up and no longer have to deal with the situation in front of her. Where had it all gone so wrong? She could only wonder. Why did he have to be so nosy? Yet something in her whispered that friends could be, unfortunately, quite nosy and irritating at times.
His hand closed around her own, gently nudging her back into motion as he led her further up the path and closer to the promise of safety. She could, perhaps, hide from him for a little while in her home there. He hardly knew her own habits as they were right then and there. Yet that was probably only a neon sign which proclaimed that there was something infinitely wrong with her.
“Meldir,” he stated then. “My name, that is – or at least what you and your brothers call me,” he explained, and Sakura blinked for what felt like the thousandth time, eyeing up the silvery hair which fluttered in the soft wind. Meldir was the name of her friend, she mused, letting herself be tugged back home.
Somehow, the name suited him well.
Arriving back home was both a comfort and something stressful, if only because the cat had poked its head out of the bag. There was no longer the occasional uncomfortable quiet between them both, instead there were only concerned, awkward glances on Meldir’s side, and a longing to vanish into the ether on her own side.
“Go,” Meldir said, shooing her deeper into the house. “Relax. You clearly need to,” he murmured, and Sakura could feel his eyes on her back even as she ventured through corridors which she had become intimately familiar with by that point in time. “I will come and find you when dinner is ready,” he declared, and she estimated that she had a couple of hours at most before she would be back in his company.
Two hours at most to come up with an idea of what she was supposed to do from then on. She breathed in, closing her eyes and exhaling soundlessly as she pondered on just how long the skeletons buried in her closet would stay hidden there.
She wondered just how long it would be until Meldir realised that she also quite literally slept in the wardrobe. Unless he had already clocked the cushions, blankets, and duvets the morning prior when he had found her in one of her brothers’ rooms. She sighed, feet tracing a familiar path before she even realised it. She wondered then, what Meldir would inevitably think when he found her in the forge that everyone was so adamant that she was destroying any time it was brought up in conversation.
Yet that was something, perhaps, that future Sakura – future Aerloth – could worry and concern herself over. It wasn’t like her probably newfound interest in smithing could add any other clues as to just what had become of her. Meldir had already figured that her memories were patchy at best. What did one do when they lost their memories? Was it normal to have new interests after that? Sakura didn’t know, if only because she had never worked closely with anyone who had ever lost any memories. In fact, it had been a long time since she’d worked with anyone at all.
Maybe that was why she preferred the solitude of the forge when things became too much? Sakura could only ponder on the matter, part of her almost vibrating in eagerness to bury herself in the hard work of attempting to create a useable product. Yet then again, there was also solitude in the library, and she still preferred the forge. She preferred the sweltering heat which probably ought to have reminded of the days in her cell when the incinerator had been lit. Those days had been more and more frequent, the longer she had stayed there.
She closed her eyes, sighing deeply again as she shoved the memories of that place as far down as she could manage. Those days were behind her, after all, and it wasn’t like Meldir was going and alerting the guards to raise their pitchforks and drag her off to be tormented. Was he? Her heart beat in her chest, mind conjuring pictures of him speaking with the guards her brothers had assigned to her for the duration of her house arrest there.
Her feet stopped dragging her towards the forge, and Sakura turned around sharply, hurrying back through the corridors to reach the kitchen door where they had parted ways only a matter of minutes before. If he wasn’t in there, making dinner, then that meant… She swallowed thickly, wincing as the hinges creaked.
Silvery hair turned, almost seeming to gleam in the light of the kitchen. “Aerloth?” her friend called out questioningly, and all she could do was peak around the door, confirming that he was in the kitchen, seemingly part-way through the meal prep. There were no hurried whispers between him and the guards – rather, those guards were nowhere to be seen, as per usual. She had only spotted them when they had been on their way back from the market.
Almost instantly, she felt silly for assuming otherwise. He was her friend there, and friends didn’t sell out other friends. That fact held true, no matter what stars she resided under.
“Are you okay?” Meldir called, blue eyes darting between her half-hidden figure and the fish he was in the middle of gutting on the chopping board in front of him.
“I’m fine,” she stated, shutting the kitchen door with another creak and a sharp click. There had been no need for her to backtrack, it seemed. Sakura could only click her tongue at the thought that had occurred to her earlier, shaking her head as she made her way back towards the forge. A familiar heat seeped into her bones as she fired everything back up in the room she had grown to love. Red fires lit the room, a fine sheen on sweat glistening on her forehead as she went about the motions of creating a blade – not that she had yet to make a useable one that lasted the test of both sharpness and time.
Her eyes darted over to the empty barrel which had become something of a disposal bin for the times she inevitably made another failure of a blade. It had probably once contained mineral oil or the like, and Sakura could only muse on just who could have used that room before her. Or she could probably ask Meldir, and he’d know…
“Would you be proud?” she murmured, thinking then about the father she had long since outlived, and the father who she had once shared her pink hair with. Fingers wound through the brown hair she had then, the sensation grounding her while the colour only served to remind her of how everything had changed. “That I’m finally following in your footsteps?” She tilted her head, glancing at the little nook she had stowed away the gems she had bought at the market. She wondered how long it would take before she could create a masterpiece worthy of being encrusted with a jewel or two. Humming under her breath, she cast that thought aside, reaching for her hammer and slowly losing herself to the sound of metal meeting metal as she started smithing.
There was a strange melody to the sound of metal on metal; a faint hum which made her occasionally pause as if the quiet would let her hear that strange noise. Yet it was seemingly caused by her smithing, and all she could do was occasionally hum along to it as she worked.
She was only disturbed by the time she was sinking the blade into the oil to quench it, the door creaking – which meant it was another to add to her need-to-oil-the-hinges-of list – and a familiar face peering inside the forge. Meldir blinked, confusion surging across his face, quickly to be replaced by shock as she placed her completed blade down on the anvil it had originally been made on.
It was a far cry away from her first twisted, warped blade she had made, and yet she knew it was a far cry away from being anything close to the perfection she wanted. The blade was too dull, and it would crack and shatter within the first few swings. A brittle blade. Her father’s blades had never been made for blade clashing against blade though – more made for slicing through things without opposition, as opposed to blades from blacksmiths in the Land of Earth which were made with more toughness and less sharpness in mind. She closed her eyes then, amusement surging at the strange, little details she remembered from the life before that one as Aerloth.
“Aerloth,” Meldir called, watching her, curious and watchful as she left her imperfect work behind in the middle of the room. “Dinner is ready.”
She blinked softly, wiping her hands down on the apron she wore before hanging it up beside the door. There was only one set of clothes available to her, what with the fact all of the clothes which actually fit her were shut within a room whose walls reminded her just a bit too much of the colour of her own blood. She was hardly going to ruin that one set of clothing she had and liked wearing. “What did you end up making?” she asked, ignoring the questioning stare with what was becoming a practised ease.
“I could ask you the same,” Meldir answered, casting a glance back at the forge they were leaving behind in promise of dinner. “I did not know you had an interest in smithing,” he said, telling her something she had already long since worked out, if only thanks to everyone assuming she was destroying that place rather than simply using the materials and occasionally requiring a restock of goods.
“You saw it. It was a sword, though not a very good one, mind you,” she said, and there was almost a bounce to her step, if she briefly forgot about the fact that her friend knew of her apparent amnesia and was all too eager to tell her brothers of the matter. “I’ve told you what I made, so do you not think you ought to return the favour? Tell me what awaits us for dinner.”
“Fish pie with an assortment of potato wedges, and a side of those vegetables we picked up from the market,” he said, and Sakura only frowned at that – the name of the dish unfamiliar to her, and she could only wonder if she’d missed it in one of the recipe books or whether it was something of his own make. “You have a lot of potatoes, Aerloth, and I don’t particularly want them rotting sooner rather than later.”
“And we both seem to have a habit of making pie after pie,” she remarked, wondering then, just why it was so easy to fall into conversation with him. Or maybe she’d simply been starved for interactions with other people… Then again, she hadn’t exactly missed anyone in those first few weeks of being alone in that home.
“This one doesn’t have any pastry in it,” Meldir informed her, and soon her nose caught the scent of fish and cooked potato.
“Pity – that’s my favourite part,” she murmured, hurrying into the kitchen then, even as her stomach growled noisily.
Meldir snorted then, looking infinitely fond and amused in that instant. “Of course it would be,” he said, clicking his tongue. “I had thought we could dine in the dining room for once. I think we could both do with a change of scenery.”
“Does the scenery really matter when you’re going to be insistent on having such an awkward conversation about things which don’t matter?” she demanded, grabbing the plate and the portion he’d already dished out for her, taking it out of the room and abruptly pausing. “Which way is the dining room, then?” she asked, barely resisting the urge to flinch at the look he sent her way; infinitely knowing and ever so worried. It was a familiar look by that point.
Would Naruto or Sasuke have looked at her like that if they had been alive to understand just what had happened to her?
Sakura shook her head, casting the thought away like it had burnt her. It didn’t do to dwell on things which would never be… she reminded herself, allowing Meldir to lead the way then.
“So you’ve even forgotten the layout of this home of yours,” Meldir murmured, sounding infinitely sad. “No wonder your spirit has dimmed,” he said softly, and Sakura could only frown at that. “But that alone wouldn’t explain why you were fading so severely when we first met…”
Sakura blinked, her frown only deepening as Meldir opened the door to a room she might have stuck her head into once since waking up in her home there. “You mentioned that when you first arrived.”
Her friend froze a couple of steps into the dining room. “Aerloth,” he said plainly. “Please tell me you remember what fading is…”
“I don’t,” she stated, placing her plate down on the table with a loud clack. “Is it important?”
“Aerloth,” Meldir said, his face solemn, and Sakura had the vaguest impression that his next words were about to shake the foundations of her world. “Fading is the elven equivalent of death, even if it is not permanent in the sense that human death is.”
Sakura stared at him. “Oh,” she mumbled.
Chapter 10: Fading and Feelings
Chapter Text
It was as though the world had come to a stop, time feeling as though it were moving through treacle as she sat there, desperately trying to understand the truth which had just been dropped upon her so suddenly.
“Am I, uh, dying then?” she asked, feeling as though a sudden weight had decided to take the place once occupied by her heart. Yet her voice didn’t waver, a familiar resignation filling her once more as she stared at her friend intently.
Memories flashed before her eyes, part of her musing on how she’d once hoped to die, if only to escape the pain. There was no longer any pain, and thus no longer a reason to seek out her own death. After all, that was all death had been to her by that point in her far-too long life: an escape, an end.
And in a sense, Haruno Sakura had died; Aerloth was the one who lived, or at least the visage of the person she had to be. The shell she wore, even if what was inside wasn’t quite the same anymore.
She hated the thought of it.
“Fading is a slow process, Aerloth,” Meldir explained, looking as though the words were physically paining him to say aloud. “Depending on how deep the hurt goes… well, some recover, and others do not. Their spirit returns to the Halls, and the ones left on this side of the ocean can only mourn their passing and hope for the day they might be reunited upon the shores of our homeland.”
Her eyes narrowed, part of her realising that he hadn’t quite answered the original question. “So I am dying, then?” she questioned, ignoring the anchor that felt like it had lodged itself in her gut. “Or am I recovering?” Sakura sat back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest as she stared at her friend intently, silently willing him to give her a straight answer. “It can only be one or the other, not both.”
“It may be surprising, but I am no healer, Aerloth,” he said, finally taking a seat opposite her with a heavy sigh. “I cannot determine exactly where you fall on the scale of dying and recovering… all I know is that your spirit has dimmed, and I am unfortunately old enough to have seen some of our kin who were rescued from Angband before most of them decided to venture across the sea to heal.”
“Angband?” the questioning note escaped her before she could help it, head tilting as she stared at Meldir.
He looked at her then, blue eyes sharp and piercing. “How much have you truly forgotten, Aerloth?” he asked, staring at her as though she might vanish if he looked away for even a moment. “You have no memory of the markets… you barely know your way around this home of yours… you could not even remember my name, and now you’ve even forgotten what happened to your brother…”
Her lips clicked together with a soft pop, words refusing to come as she sat there, all too aware of how oddly she was behaving in Meldir’s eyes. She wanted to vomit, even before the familiar bundle of nerves came to gnaw savagely at her stomach.
“If I were to ask you who Morgoth is, would you be able to answer?” Meldir questioned, and silently her mind raced – as though she might be able to figure out exactly who that person was by merely the expression on her friend’s face. She knew that his name meant friend, and her own name there meant Sea-Flower, and the name Morgoth meant Black Foe. He was an enemy, she could hazard a guess, and yet—“You don’t know, do you?”
Her silence said it all.
“We should eat,” she declared matter-of-factly, all but grabbing the rudder of the conversation and making a hard shift to starboard. “Before the food gets cold. You worked hard to make it. We should not let it go to waste,” she said, stabbing her fork into the largest piece of pie she could find and stuffing it into her mouth.
“This conversation is not over,” Meldir stated, and she forced herself to swallow her mouthful even as her stomach heaved. “Angband was the fortress of Morgoth back in the First Age of the Sun, and likely for some years before that,” he explained between bites of his own meal. “Yet I suppose the fact of the matter is that Faelion was held captive there for nearly a hundred sun-years.”
Sakura blinked, part of her wondering just how many years she had similarly been held captive in a different time and place. Reflexively, her grip on her cutlery tightened, and she silently willed those memories of a time she would have loved nothing more than to forget to vanish back into the depths of her mind.
‘It’s your fault for making yourself like this,’ one of the voices she wished she could scrub from her memories whispered, and she shook her head then.
“Aerloth, are you quite alright?” Meldir questioned, frowning at her intently as she sat there, feeling infinitely lost.
“I’m hungry,” she said, pointedly grabbing a hold of her fork and shovelling in the next mouthful of her dinner, staring pointedly at her friend all the while. She didn’t want to talk – not when every other sentence out of her mouth seemed to make it only more starkly apparent that she was so very different from the Aerloth he had known.
Meldir only sighed, still frowning at her ever so intently as she sat there, trying to distract herself with the admittedly rather tasty dinner that her friend had cooked up. “We do need to talk about this at some point,” he said, ignorant of how those words made her want to vomit. “I cannot stay for the rest of your exile, no matter how I feel the need to… and I would rather like to ensure that you are well-cared for during the remainder of your stay here.”
“I am fine as I am,” she declared, thinking then of the forge and that familiar warmth that made her feel ever so slightly more relaxed. “And I will be fine when you leave,” she said.
Everything had been ever so chaotic since his arrival there, and it was almost terrifying how quickly the time had gone by in contrast to the hours and days that had trickled by without his presence. Everything would return to normal once he left… Sakura swallowed thickly, ignoring the slightest bit of comfort she felt at Meldir’s presence there as she ate her dinner – all the while doing her best to ignore the strange mix of feelings racing through her.
She was used to being alone by that point in time. Company hadn’t meant good things for a fair amount of time for her. Yet Meldir brought back very distant memories she almost thought had been lost forever…
Sakura sighed.
“I worry, Aerloth,” he murmured. “I think anyone would…” he said, pursing his lips even as he ate his own dinner in a rather subdued manner. “I do not think it wrong to worry either. Faelion would be besides himself with worry if he were here… Enough, I would think, to bundle you aboard a ship and take you back to Lindon to be seen by the best healers, exile or not.”
Her stomach twisted at that, a familiar fear coming to gnaw at her guts at the thought of her strangeness being realised by more than just Meldir. “You will not tell him,” she reiterated, watching as his shoulders sunk in resignation.
“I know,” Meldir said, sighing deeply at that. “Have you even forgotten that every order you give I must obey?”
Her fingers tightened their grip on her other arm, part of her wavering then… It was part of an internal debate she was having: whether or not it was okay for Meldir to know the extent of the knowledge she was missing. And yet was there really much point in hiding it when he was seemingly so adept at figuring out just what knowledge she was missing? All he had to do was ask a direct question – a request for information she should have known – that she couldn’t deflect and wait for the telltale pause signifying her lack of knowledge.
“Will I ever be able to convince you to even let a healer examine you?” he asked, already seeming to know the answer she was about to give by the expression on his face.
“No,” she answered, skin crawling at the thought of someone touching her to examine what exactly was wrong with her – to figure out exactly what made her tick. “Never.”
Meldir smiled; a small, sad thing. “I see,” he murmured, shoulders sinking in what looked like defeat.
“Enough with this. We should finish eating,” she said, praying then that she had put a stopper in that conversation once and for all. Though given how stubborn she was starting to see Meldir was… part of her doubted she had heard the end of that argument. It was her own turn for her shoulders to sink, a sliver of relief coursing through her as she sat there, eating her dinner in the remarkably tense and awkward silence that had fallen.
All she could hear was the sound of her heartbeat and the faint clinking of cutlery as they both ate.
“I will come check on you later,” Meldir declared minutes later, having polished off the rest of his plate. He was a fast eater – either that or he was desperate to escape the almost choking atmosphere that seemed to linger in the room. “Please be safe, Aerloth.”
The familiar sweltering embrace of the forge was welcome to her after dinner; the lingering worries vanishing when she took hammer to iron. Or whatever alloy of metal was in front of her… It wasn’t as though they had been labelled. She tilted her head then, wondering if she was allowed to experiment with making varying alloys to find the desired strength of blade she wanted. She tilted her head, wondering whether the only father she remembered had ever done such a thing.
A soft hum escaped her, a faint tune lingering in the back of her mind as her mind ticked over her varying thoughts. She was in the forge to make a blade, first and foremost… and then whatever else tickled her fancy after she had an actual, useable sword with which to use… Sakura paused, the music vanishing like smoke as she wondered just why she wanted a blade.
Nostalgia, for the father of a life left behind in the dust? Sakura tilted her head, sweat trickling down from her forehead as she sat there contemplating on just why she was fixated on smithing a blade that could be used. Hadn’t she experienced enough violence for a lifetime? She chewed on her lip then, thoughts racing and veering off in different directions as she sat there, hammer set to one side from the vaguely blade-shaped piece of metal that she’d been working on.
“Aerloth,” a familiar, almost dreaded voice called, and she turned, meeting those blue eyes that seemed to pierce straight through her.
“Meldir,” she greeted in kind, feeling ever so disgruntled at his sudden appearance. “What brings you to this forge I tend to destroy?” she asked, a sliver of bitterness seeping into her voice then even as Meldir watched her ever so curiously.
“The restock of the forge then…” Meldir murmured, evidently taking in the sight of her sat there, hammer set down to one side, her half-finished creation laid out in front of her. “It wasn’t that you destroyed it,” he declared, stepping into the room and running his fingers along one of the ingots stacked on the shelves behind her. “You were using it. You are using it… quite regularly too, I would assume.”
“You saw me last time. Are you really only putting the pieces together now?” she asked, a sardonic smirk curling at her lips, part of her bitterly acknowledging that her safe space had been intruded upon.
“I think Gladil would be overjoyed to know that another of his siblings has an interest in following in their father’s footsteps,” he said, and part of her longed then, for memories of that world – if only so she could feel less like an outsider blindly stumbling into things. Maybe then she would know which one of her brothers Gladil was… There were too many strange names to remember, and she had a mind full of things she’d love more than anything to forget.
“I do not think that’s any of his business,” she declared, stomach twisting in on itself at the thought of anybody besides Meldir learning of just how different of a creature she was in comparison to before.
“How could it not be his business when it is his forge you’re using right this instant?” he questioned, silvery brow rising in query.
“I thought it belonged to our father?”
“It did,” Meldir said, and Sakura had a feeling he was about to grace her with knowledge that she should already have known. If she hadn’t been someone else wearing the shell of Aerloth… “Yet now that your father has ventured across the seas, right of ownership falls to the eldest child or the oldest child which picked up his craft, which is Gladil in this case.”
Her teeth ground together at that, and she wondered then, ever so briefly, if there was any point in trying to pretend that she was still the Aerloth that Meldir had once known. It didn’t seem like he would be able to tell others about just how strange she was without her expressed permission thanks to whatever oath he had sworn to her so long ago. Would it even hold up, what with how she was Sakura and not Aerloth? She chewed on her lip, a familiar undercurrent of nerves gnawing at her stomach at the thought of anyone else knowing.
“You were barely interested in rights of inheritance before… yet this isn’t mere disinterest,” Meldir said, evidently having figured out it was yet another thing she was now completely clueless about. “This is yet another fact that you have forgotten…” Those blue eyes stared at her, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up on end as he looked at her ever so intently. “You are acting like a completely different person, Aerloth, and it scares me…” he murmured, and Sakura felt her heart skip a beat at how he’d unironically hit the nail right on the head.
“And what do you want me to do about that?” she demanded, ignoring the shaking in her hands as she searched for something to occupy them. Meldir couldn’t know just how much his words bothered her – he was far too perceptive for that. Or rather, he knew the original Aerloth far too well, and their apparent personalities were far too different for her to do anything about… She swallowed thickly at that. “It’s not as if I can flick a switch and recall everything I wish,” she admitted, shoulders sinking in defeat. “No matter how much I wish I could.”
“Talk to me,” Meldir pleaded. “Tell me what has happened for you to end up in this state…”
“It’s not that simple,” she answered, ignoring the unpleasant squirming in her chest as fear and loathing came to a head there. “Besides, I do not want to talk about it. I barely know you,” she admitted then, heart beating ever so frantically in her chest.
Amnesia was understandable, wasn’t it? She could get away with admitting that much without ending up as the subject of someone’s insatiable curiosity, couldn’t she? The lump in her throat was thick to swallow, her mouth feeling inordinately dry all of a sudden, and she climbed to her feet abruptly.
“I need a drink,” she declared, walking around her so-called friend and leaving the sweltering safety of the forge. Which probably wasn’t all that safe… Meldir had intruded there, and ultimately discovered yet another thing which separated her from the true Aerloth. “You do not have to follow me around. You are not my shadow,” she said, trying to ignore the soft footsteps trailing behind her own.
“Yet that is what you used to call me,” Meldir murmured, keeping pace with her on her trek to the kitchen. “I always used to follow behind you when we were children… We were the closest in age in Harlond all those sun-years ago, so perhaps it was only natural.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you have forgotten,” he said simply, as though it were a plain fact and not life-changing information that ought to have altered the way he looked at her. “How else are you supposed to remember?”
Her breath caught in her throat, an emotion she didn’t quite understand welling up in her chest. A strange mix of longing, and loss that made absolutely no sense to her. “And if I never remember?” she questioned, tasting something bitter on her tongue. The house she might as well have called home – even if she had yet to fully explore every nook and cranny – was far too large. The corridors were pointlessly long, and there were a few too many stairs for her liking.
Yet Aerloth had probably been used to pointlessly long corridors, if that was where she’d grown up.
“We can cross that bridge if it comes to it,” Meldir reassured. “You need to focus on healing, I think,” he said, reminding her then of her seemingly fragile state.
Was she dying right then and there? Sakura could only wonder, and she sighed in relief when the kitchen door came into sight. She just needed to focus on the present, part of her was already deciding. She didn’t want to think of the past, and there was not much point on wondering on the future still to come.
What would happen, would happen…
She had left behind the life of a shinobi and the world of chakra, and the life in front of her was elven, not human, and was ever so strange to her ears and eyes. She was dying or had come close the death because of that. In fact, she barely knew anything about the strange life that was apparently hers from then on out. She didn’t fundamentally understand just how elven was different to human, and that was probably too strange of a question to ask.
The basic fundamentals of her logic were rooted in ways that were undoubtedly human, and if there was a point that had been hammered home; it was that she wasn’t human anymore.
Part of her didn’t know how to feel about that because in hindsight it had been obvious in some ways… and yet, when it all boiled down to it, had she really even been human by the end of it? Why was she even so fussed about it?
“Aerloth?” Meldir’s voice was soft, his touch at her shoulders ever so gentle.
“I’m tired, Meldir,” she murmured, feeling the wave of exhaustion creep up on her ever so suddenly – a rip current that had caught her in its flow and was dragging her out well beyond the sandbanks. She closed her eyes, sighing softly as she let her head rest against his chest for a moment. It was a strangely comforting thing to do.
“Then you should go and rest. Properly,” he answered, arms steering her then towards the stairs and she didn’t bother to fight that much. She wanted nothing more than to forget her situation and let her mind wander for a few hours, and not in the usual waking-sleep that had become slightly more common for her.
“Here,” she declared when Meldir tried to lead her towards her original room – the one she hadn’t dared to set foot in since she had woken up inside.
“This is Tathrenor’s room,” Meldir said, as if that might convince her to follow him back to the red room she hated with a fervent passion. “I do not think he would be pleased if he learnt you had stole his bed.”
“Then you will not tell him,” she retorted, pushing open the doors and making her way towards the wardrobe she had claimed for her bed. “Besides, it’s not as though I’m using his bed.”
“Aerloth… that is the wardrobe,” Meldir said, staring at her in confusion as she pulled the wardrobe doors open and clambered inside.
“It’s comfy.”
Those blue eyes stared at her, a practically characteristic confusion in them by that point in the day. “I can see that, but—never mind,” he mumbled, shaking his head then. “Do you want me to close the doors?” he asked, and Sakura could feel his stare boring into her back as she sat there in her next of blankets, duvets, and pillows.
“Please,” she requested, almost sighing in relief when she heard the magnet click into place, keeping those doors shut until someone opened them once more.
“Is there any reason you chose Tathrenor’s wardrobe?” Meldir asked, his gaze just about visible through the slats. “I know your own wardrobe has quite a few clothes—”
She sighed heavily then, mind conjuring up the colour red and everything it meant to her by that point. The colour of her own blood was practically ingrained into her head by that point; a sight she could never forget. “The colour red,” she murmured. “I don’t think I like it very much… anymore,” she added, because Aerloth had evidently once been fond of it. Just as little baby Haruno Sakura had once been fond of it, before her liking for it had been soured in memories of blood and endless amounts of pain.
“Ah,” Meldir hummed, the face she could see through the gaps in the door one of confusion and pity – and, curiously enough, understanding. “Faelion does not much like that colour either,” he said softly, and part of her could only wonder just how much she had in common with him right then and there. How much she shouldn’t have had in common with him, if she truly had been Aerloth… “I will leave you be now, Aerloth,” Meldir called, pausing in the doorway for a brief moment. “Rest well.”
Chapter 11: Friendship and Folly
Chapter Text
She awoke to the scent of breakfast.
The scent hung heavy around her, sugar and cinnamon lingering in the air, and Sakura licked her lips and contemplated – not for the first time – about how helpful Meldir was turning out to be. Before his arrival, had she woke with her stomach rumbling, she would have gone to the kitchen and made it herself while ignoring the sounds of her own hunger whilst it cooked.
It wasn’t like she’d had breakfast made for her before his arrival there. That was a luxury she had long since forgotten after everything. In fact, before Meldir, she couldn’t really remember who had last made breakfast for her… She closed her eyes, fingers ghosting over her temples as part of her mourned for the things she had inevitably lost over her years in captivity.
For all how she hated the memories of that place, ironically, those were her clearest memories of all. She shuddered at the thought, hands clenching around her arms as she shivered. Her eyes snapped back open, ears catching the sounds of movement downstairs.
Carefully, she pushed open the wardrobe doors feet padding silently against the soft fabric of the rug as she emerged from the safety of her makeshift bed. The floor creaked as she slunk forwards, ignoring the twinges of a familiar anxiety that liked to stir every now and then.
Near silently, she snuck down the stairs, heading towards the kitchen. It was a familiar route to her by that point; almost second nature. Which only went to prove just how used to that strange slow life as Aerloth she’d become. She swallowed thickly at the idea, pushing open the kitchen door tentatively.
Part of her had almost expected to find someone else there, a familiar fear making her worries all the more poignant. Yet fear rarely held firm roots in logic, and it was just Meldir stood by the hob, frying pan in one hand, spatula in another.
Blue eyes found her own instantly, Meldir seemingly having some sort of sixth sense for her whenever she materialised in the same room as him. “You have awoken,” he stated in lieu of a more standard greeting. “Good. I had begun to worry over your sleeping habits… especially after, well—I suppose that does not matter too much. I am glad to see you awake.”
Sakura blinked in confusion. “Ah. Uh, good morning?” she offered, feeling ever so slightly perplexed as she stared at her supposed friend. “Did you sleep well?”
“I slept just fine,” Meldir answered. “And you?” he questioned, silvery brow arching in question. “How was your rest?”
There were a few moments of silence that felt altogether far too stifling. “Peaceful enough,” she settled on answering. It was true enough that her rest had been peaceful enough, lined with bone-deep exhaustion that she suspected was simply another facet of the supposed fading she was experiencing. “What have you made us for breakfast?”
“Come and see for yourself,” he said, gesturing to the pan in his hand, and she pottered over to him, curiously looking over his shoulder at the circular golden-brown disc in the frying pan – a breakfast she hadn’t seen before, and undoubtedly something from the recipe book that she had yet to fully make her way through.
“What is it?” she asked, determinedly looking at the new foodstuff to prevent herself from seeing whatever face that Meldir was undoubtedly making beside her.
“It’s… pancakes, Aerloth,” he said ever so hesitantly. “Your mother’s recipe, which has a hint of cinnamon and vanilla, that is,” he explained, and Sakura felt her brows draw together as her brain sucked in that morsal of information.
Her mother’s pancakes specifically had cinnamon and vanilla in them, she noted, wondering then if she’d ever be able to meet any of her brothers without them immediately clocking that something was incredibly wrong with her. Her shoulders sunk at the thought, eyes remaining fixed on the pancake even as Meldir placed it on a plate and held it out to her.
“Here,” he said, offering it to her pointedly. “It’s for you.”
“Oh. Thank you,” she mumbled, grabbing her plate and taking it to the small table in the kitchen – the place she had always eaten her meals at until Meldir had dragged her to the large dining room. Sakura rather thought she didn’t want to go back to said dining room, what with how her only memory in it was of learning that she was apparently dying in some way, shape or form.
She didn’t particularly want another explosive kunai thrown at her head in that manner. Though, admittedly, she didn’t think there was much that could top the ‘hey Aerloth, you’re sort of dying but not really’ conversation they’d had prior to that. Though the only way to put a pin in that debate, and to put her mind at ease would be to go to a healer and have them tell her where she fell in the grand scheme of death and recovery, and where she sat on those precarious scales.
The very idea of going to a healer both rankled her and made her skin crawl. She licked her lips, turning her gaze onto her breakfast as if that could take her mind off of things – and yet it couldn’t. All she could do was muse about how everything had changed. Though, she mused almost bitterly, wasn’t that to be expected when one woke up in a stranger’s body in a strange world with a different raiment of stars above her head?
“Do you want another?” Meldir’s voice startled her, and she blinked furiously at him, heart racing in her chest as he set down a plate of multiple pancakes between them both. “Careful – the plate is hot,” he said, taking off the thick gloves he’d used to carry their breakfast over.
Sakura blinked again. “Thank you,” she murmured, keeping her eyes on him, as though he might startle her again if she dared to take her eyes off him. “You didn’t have to make breakfast.”
“I am but a guest in this house,” Meldir said, between mouthfuls of his own food. “Should I not help out my host every now and then? Especially when she is not at full health…”
“I am merely fading, Meldir. I’m not an invalid,” she said, ignoring the way her heart sank every time that fading was mentioned. An illness that she didn’t know how to recognise nor treat. Her gaze drifted to her hands, mind casting itself back to when she had last used those hands for healing. Well, not those hands that were only just starting to form calluses from her work in the forge… her old hands that had been a few shades darker, lined with small, faded scars from a few accidents before she had somehow made herself immortal in the loosest sense of the word… she had found a way to die, after all… just as she was apparently finding a new way to perish in Aerloth’s body… She closed her eyes, breathing out a soft sigh as she felt Meldir’s gaze on her.
“Fading is not something to take lightly,” Meldir reprimanded, his expression ever so serious. “You do not wish for it to run its full course—”
“Is death really something to be terrified by?” she found herself asking, the words slipping from her lips before she could think better of it.
She had longed for it at one point – wished for it, and made that wish a reality through her own plots and plans. Or at least she thought she had… Sakura bit her lip, wondering, not for the first time, just how she had ended up there. Why was she there instead of in the Pure Lands? Was everything Senju Tobirama had delved into about the forbidden art of recalling shinobi from death somehow grievously incorrect? Sakura chewed on her lip; the idea of the man renowned as a genius being wrong feeling incorrect. Maybe she was the odd one out—
“Aerloth.” Hands grabbed a hold of her shoulders, spinning her so she was facing him now that he had surged out of his seat. “Please tell me you do not long for death…”
She looked at him, green meeting blue as she noticed the sheer nervousness and fear there was in his eyes. “Meldir,” she murmured, using his name as he seemed to love to do with her own name. “I have more interesting things to be doing than simply longing for my own ending,” she said, thinking about the forge and the many snippets of information and knowledge that she had yet to uncover about working in said forge.
It didn’t matter if it belonged to her second eldest brother – that was just a technicality, and that forge there was hers in all but name.
“You aren’t quite vehemently denying it,” Meldir said, the as I expected you to left unsaid.
“It is the truth, what more would you have me say?” she stated, glancing at him for the barest of seconds before pulling her shoulders free and returning her focus to her breakfast. It was the most important meal of the day, after all, she mused, ignoring the way her heart panged at the thought. “You should stop presuming my actions,” she said, dearly longing then for him to stop acting so surprised whenever she did something unlike the elleth he had once known. The same elleth who was gone and had left a mess behind for her to apparently clear up… Her shoulders sunk at the thought, part of her playing with the idea of just barricading herself in that house once Meldir left and hissing at anyone else who came too close.
All she wanted was to sequester herself away in her home there and tend to the forge. Was that too much to ask for? Sakura tilted her head, chewing furiously as she sat there, eager to head off to said forge and let her worries fade to the back of her mind for awhile.
“I worry for you,” Meldir said, said worry contorting his face as he sat back down ever so slowly – staring at her as though she were an explosive tag about to go off.
“You’ve made that quite apparent,” she said, hating the way her thoughts went back years upon years to the last people who’d worried about her. They had both had blue eyes – though their hair had been on the blonde side of the spectrum rather than the silver locks that Meldir sported. Her shoulders sunk at the thought, a familiar pang of loss coming to stab at her heart.
Yet those two had passed on years before, and she was all that remained – and that was seemingly becoming a running theme in her life. Strangely enough, she didn’t think that Meldir would grow old and leave her behind; least of all because he talked about death as though it were something unnatural. Her throat felt dry at that, a familiar panic surging beneath her skin as her thoughts raced before she stopped that train in its tracks.
All she needed to do was focus on forging, her brain informed her, fingers twitching as she set down her cutlery and stood up. She had finished her breakfast and had done her socialising for the day. There were no issues with her retreating to one of her precious few safe spaces.
“Aerloth,” Meldir said plainly, stopping her in her tracks before she could even take a single footstep towards the door. “What do you think about death, then?” he asked, blue eyes boring into her side like daggers. “What exactly does it mean to you…?”
Not for the first time, she wondered just how Meldir had an uncanny way of knowing exactly what questions to ask to get to the heart of the matter.
Sakura pondered on what her answer to that question was supposed to be. Death was a curious and mildly terrifying subject to her those days. It had been something she had once longed for: an end to her endless suffering. It had been a means to an end. An escape. Yet that had been then. She wasn’t suffering anymore. There were no more knives dragged over her skin, trying to peel back the mysteries of just how she had attained her pseudo-immortality. It hadn’t been ‘true’ immortality, so to speak, otherwise she would still have been there, trapped in that place. Maybe if that fact had been properly understood, then she never would have become the subject of such cruel curiosity.
“Aerloth?” Meldir questioned, ever reminding her of the fact that she wasn’t supposed to be Haruno Sakura anymore. She had shed that skin with her supposed death – which she wasn’t sure she could call death, what with the fact that she was mysteriously alive.
A smile curled at her lips, sardonic in nature as she kept on wondering about what her answer was supposed to be. “Death…” she murmured, closing her eyes and breathing out ever so softly as she thought of everything she had somehow lost or otherwise been deprived of. “There are worse things than death, don’t you think?”
She had yet to figure out if her new life was one of them…
The silence was almost deafening in the wake of her answer, and Sakura took that as her cue to leave. To escape to the forge that was all but singing her name. She was doing a lot of that recently: escaping things. It was becoming a habit, or so she thought. She didn’t know if it was a habit she wanted to stick. Yet if running away helped her escape the pain, then she’d run as far as she needed. She had no desire to wind up trapped in another cell and tortured for the secrets she contained.
“I will see you later then, Aerloth,” Meldir called from behind her, breaking that tenuous silence that all too often fell between them with every discovery he made, and she felt her shoulders sink in acknowledgement of that.
“I know,” she mumbled, knowing deep in her heart that Meldir wasn’t about to vanish. He was there for her, despite Aerloth’s past faults that had long since been implied and bandied about beneath her nose like a bad smell. Sakura didn’t quite understand why the idea of him being there in that capacity unsettled her so. All she understood right then and there was her incessant desire to sequester herself away in the forge for more than a few hours.
There were an array of different metals for her perusal, but she had barely looked at the labels for each of them before grabbing a variety of them along with a sheaf of parchment to scribble some notes on.
Today was a day for creating various alloys, her brain had decided, and that meant precise measurements for percentages. What was the point in experimenting if she couldn’t recreate the process and replicate it for future success? She tilted her head, hair tucked back out of her face in a messy bun.
Her face was dry, the sheer heat feeling as though it were singing off the finer hairs on her face and arms as she shifted the pot of white hot molten metal, carefully pouring it into the mould she had dug out from the recesses of the forge. Yet she would only properly be using her newest alloys once her smithing skills had improved… It was just a change from the usual processes she went through… after all, it was nice to take a break from her steady stream of swords which she didn’t think counted as swords, unusable as most of them still were.
“Aerloth,” Meldir called, and she glanced away, molten metal safely ensconced in the mould and not about to burn her or anything else if she stepped away.
“Meldir,” she greeted, wiping her hands on the apron she wore. “What brings you here?”
“It’s evening,” he said matter-of-factly, nodding towards the sliver of a window that showed a fraction of the world outside. “It would seem we both missed lunch. I took the liberty of heading out into the town proper to gather some more supplies for dinner and breakfast tomorrow.”
As if on cue, her stomach rumbled ravenously, and Sakura felt her cheeks redden at that – if they hadn’t already turned a ruddy colour from her hours of work in the forge. How the time had flown by, she mused, letting Meldir tug her away from her preferred hiding spot in the house and back towards the kitchen. Though, she supposed, it wasn’t really much of a hiding spot anymore, what with how the only other occupant of the house knew that was where she preferred to sequester herself away in.
“I thought we could cook together tonight,” he offered, and Sakura tilted her head at that. Part of her could only wonder if it was going to turn into another grilling on just what she was forgetting and remembering.
“I see,” she mumbled, a familiar bundle of nerves coming to gnaw at her stomach at the prospect of another interrogation of sorts.
“You do not have to, if you do not wish to,” Meldir said levelly. “It is an offer, nothing more, nothing less. I quite enjoy cooking… and, from the pie, I thought that you might also enjoy it… I did take over the kitchen quite a few times in the past few days.”
“What did you have in mind?” she asked, wondering then if she would wind up learning a new recipe that very evening.
“I managed to get some fish from the fishmonger,” Meldir informed her, proving just how much he apparently had a taste for fish as his eyes lit up at the prospect of having fish for dinner. Sakura supposed she ought to have expected more fish-based dishes, what with the fact that Harlond was a harbour town. “We had fish pie not too long ago, so—in fact, since I chose the ingredients, perhaps you ought to chose the recipe? We can go through your mother’s recipe book quickly…”
“What do you want to have for dinner tonight?” she repeated her question, staring at him flatly until he caved.
“Sautéed fish? Perhaps with some potatoes? There do seem to be quite a few potatoes to still be used…” Meldir offered, and Sakura only nodded at that, her stomach rumbling at the thought of food all the while. “Are you sure you do not want to look at the recipes? There might be something more to your tastes—”
“I’m hungry,” she stated flatly. “We are having sautéed fish with potatoes and whatever other vegetables are in the pantry.”
An odd smile curled at Meldir’s lips. “So it would seem,” he said, an oddly fond look in his eyes as he looked at her.
“So… what did you do today?” she asked, not wanting a silence to fall and linger for too long. For the first time that evening she properly looked at him, glancing at the white gunk that was caught in a fingernail or two. There was a fleck of white on his cheek, spattered from doing who knew what, a distinct chemical smell lingering around him. Her eyes strayed to the bucket, left by the entrance to the kitchen, filled with water, a brush, and what looked like wet paper.
“That—well, I will show you when I’m done,” Meldir answered, a soft smile curling at his lips. “It’s a surprise. For another day.”
Sakura blinked. “I see,” she said, brain shifting its focus to food a matter of seconds later as her stomach grumbled. “We should wash our hands and get to it,” she added, glancing down at her own hands which weren’t the cleanest at that current moment.
“Ah, Aerloth,” Meldir spoke, looking up from where he had meandered over to the sink. “How would you feel about going into town, perhaps tomorrow?”
Her stomach dropped to her toes at the idea of leaving the safety of her home there. “We went into town recently,” she said, as if that very fact would make it obvious that they didn’t need to go again. Once was plenty enough for her, or so her sensibilities had decided.
“I had thought you might want to visit the tailor,” Meldir said, glancing at her outfit then, and she was abruptly reminded that she had been living between a couple of sets of trousers and a few shirts – all of which had been stolen from Aerloth—her brother’s rooms. “I do not think those shirts will last long, especially as you spend more time in the forge.”
Sakura bit her lip, part of her acknowledging then that he did have a point there. Yet she didn’t particularly want to have to leave the house that was slowly becoming home to her over time. It was a place of safety at the very least. She gazed out of the window, eyes drawn to the skies above her head. The stars were still a fairly unfamiliar sight to her; hallmarks of a completely different world outside her doorstep. How ironic it was that her mind would never seemingly let her fears from beneath a different set of stars fade… A soft sigh escaped her at that particular musing.
“It does not have to be tomorrow,” Meldir informed her kindly. “There is no rush. We can go when you are ready… I merely wanted to.. well…”
“Ensure I don’t stink the house out?” Sakura finished, her wits returning to her as she tore her eyes away from the stars.
He chuckled at that. “The stars are very pretty tonight,” he said, evidently noticing, in that uncanny way of his, where her attention had wandered to. “I suppose we can thank Elbereth Gilthoniel for that… though I can only wonder why they are particularly bright on this particular evening.” Meldir’s own gaze travelled to where she knew the sea was, his eyes becoming somewhat distant as he stared off into the distance. “Perhaps something joyous has occurred in Valinor…” he mumbled, and Sakura only frowned at the odd names. They were ones she hadn’t heard before.
“Valinor?” she found her voice, curiosity gnawing at her then. If Meldir had to obey her order to not reveal anything about her fading, then wasn’t it best to obtain as much information from him as possible? She chewed on her lip, a familiar worry thrumming beneath her skin as she revealed yet another piece of information that ‘Aerloth’ no longer understood.
“We should find some time to talk through the histories,” Meldir said, and idly Sakura wondered what Valinor and Elbereth Gilthoniel had to do with history. Yet she would find that out, wouldn’t she? When Meldir told her of them… “There are a few tomes scattered around the house. Celegon enjoys collating history – I almost think he should have become a scholar, rather than a tailor.”
Silently, Sakura filed the other name away, knowing it likely belonged to one of her brothers. Those were probably the most important names that she ought to learn. She chewed on her lip then, knowing that her meeting them was likely inevitable. A small smile pulled at her lips, part of her grateful then for the fact that the original Aerloth had gotten herself exiled. That had certainly given her enough breathing room, and idly, she wondered how long she could get away with staying in Harlond before one of her so-called brothers came to visit.
Her hand went to her hair then, sharp eyes finding the increasing number of white hairs from the strands that fell in front of her face.
“You have more white in your hair,” he murmured, a crease appearing in his brow as his fingers picked up the distinct white hairs growing from head. “Are you sure you do not wish to visit a healer?”
Sakura felt herself stiffen, her eyes focusing on the array of ingredients lining the counter. “I believe we were about to make dinner,” she said flatly, her rejection and deflection crystal clear.
“Aerloth, hair turning white is not something that fading alone causes,” Meldir said, even as he pored through the cupboards, searching for whatever it was he thought they needed for their latest dinner. “It is a sign of a deeper hurt… and I do not understand how that… well, how that could be the case for you…”
A familiar anger swirled inside her, part of her wanting nothing more than for him to stop talking. “Meldir, I do not want to visit a healer. That is my choice, and I have every right to make it,” she stated, breathing out a long sigh. “Do you think a healer will be able to snap their fingers and make me remember everything?” she demanded, hating the tears she could feel building in her eyes as the anger and frustration won out. “I am tired of being subjected to other’s curiosity about just how I came to be… in the situation I am in now, I suppose. So, just—stop. Please.”
“I did not mean to upset you, Aerloth… I merely worry for you,” he said, looking as though he wanted to reach out and pat her shoulder – or worse, hug her. “I cannot stop worrying for you either. Not when… the situation is like this.”
And she was ‘the situation’ in question. She sighed for what felt like the hundredth time that day, pain creeping behind her temples as she stood there, trying to make sense of the mess of her emotions.
“Shall we get to making dinner, then?” Meldir asked, a tentative, ever so fragile smile curling at his lips.
Sakura took it for the tentative little peace offering that it was. “Please.”
Chapter 12: Turning Seasons
Chapter Text
There was a letter on the table.
It wasn’t one she had received, rather, it had yet to be placed in an envelope and sent off just yet. It wasn’t even a letter she had written. Instead, the graceful looping style of Meldir’s penmanship stood out stark against the pale cream of the paper he was writing on.
She hadn’t so much as touched any of the stationary in the office since her awakening there, and she was far more used to receiving letters those days rather than sending any. She didn’t even know who she could send letters to in the first place, besides her supposed brothers, and that would just be asking for trouble that she was in no way, shape, or form ready to even remotely prod with a stick.
It was a sleeping bear, and Sakura was more than happy to refrain from waking it up by whacking it with a large stick.
She didn’t even know how many brothers Aerloth had in the first place, and that was a question she didn’t feel comfortable asking ever.
Meldir knew she was missing memories, but that felt like such a basic question about Aerloth that she was supposed to know, amnesia or not.
Dear Faelion, the letter went, its script neat and remarkably straight despite there being no page lines.
I am writing to convey my express wish for more leave from my duties. I had thought that a single coranar would perhaps be enough, but upon arrival I was struck by the realisation that I would need more time to spend with your dearest sister.
I know with your duties and your service to the Court of Lindon that finding time will not be the easiest. However, I would quite enjoy your company in Harlond, and I should believe Aerloth would as well—Sakura wrenched her eyes away, heart beating ever so frantically in her chest at the very idea of meeting one of what were supposed to be ‘her’ brothers.
Even the thought of it made her shrivel up inside. Because just how was she supposed to continue the charade? It wasn’t like she would suddenly start remembering things. There was a distinct divide between the person Meldir had been expecting and the person who she was: an undeniable bridge that couldn’t be crossed.
The very fact that it hadn’t taken her supposed childhood friend all that long to figure out that she was missing a whole lot of memories was a testament to that fact. How was she supposed to deal with a brother who would undoubtedly know Aerloth far, far better than a friend? In fact, Sakura mused, if it had been a brother who had come to visit her instead of Meldir, she would bet they would have figured out everything Meldir had, and more, within the first few minutes of being inside that house with her. The thought sent shudders down her spine, part of her only able to wonder when exactly the curiosity about her would fade. If it ever did…
Sakura breathed out, a low, long, steady breath that did barely anything to ease her fears and worries, numerous as they were.
Even if she was free now, she mused, that facility she had been trapped in for a countless number of years she’d long since lost track of had certainly left its marks.
Its scars…
Her eyes darted down, staring at the unmarked skin on her arms. Even the fine hairs on her arms that she knew had been singed off only hours prior in the forge had already grown back. It was something she absolutely hated. The inability to be injured. The inability to die properly – though according to Meldir, she was certainly making a valiant effort to do just that again.
Yet what problems did she have that death would solve?
The very thought of that question made her eyelids droop, a familiar wave of tiredness coming to claw at her skin as she stood there.
There were no chains or shackles wrapped around her wrists. Rather, the only prison she was in was one of her own making, and in time she would be capable of breaking out of it. She just needed a working weapon she could use so that nobody would be able to capture her again. Her gaze fell to her hands, part of her wondering just how long smithing would take for her to master. That, she thought, was something she wanted to do more than anything. After all, she was likely to be stuck there for at least fifteen years, or hopefully longer.
Maybe she could hide there forever?
“Aerloth?”
Sakura blinked, turning around to find Meldir standing there, looking at her warily. “Meldir?” She tilted her head, her heart beating ever so loudly for a reason she couldn’t quite place.
“Is it such a surprise to see me?” he asked, a soft smile pulling at his lips.
She blinked again. “I suppose not,” she said, part of her wondering why she had been startled by him. He had, after all, made it clear that he was staying for a while. The very letter she had just read, penned by him, had stated his intent to stay with her for longer than originally intended. That meant he cared, didn’t it? She swallowed thickly at the idea, part of her wondering what it meant to have someone who cared about her again.
Yet the one he cared for was Aerloth… so what would happen if he realised that she wasn’t ‘Aerloth’ as such… She swallowed thickly at the thought. What would the consequences be of that realisation? It was probably better to never find out.
A truth that would have to never see the light of day… and that meant she had to live as Aerloth—and avoid her so-called brothers for as long as elvenly possible.
They were the ones who were most likely to figure it out. And if they did then, inevitably, they’d be curious… Her stomach turned at the thought. “Why are you asking Faelion to visit?” she questioned, knowing then that she couldn’t allow that to happen.
“Is there a specific reason he do not want your brother to visit?” Meldir asked, eyebrow raised. “Faelion is… the most likely to be able to help, since you do not want to visit a healer. Besides, would it not be nice to see your brother? You usually say he’s the most tolerable of all your brothers.”
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up on end. “I just don’t want to see him,” she said matter-of-factly. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“So I am not allowed to ask him to visit? Not even just to see his childhood home? Not even to see me?” Meldir asked, and Sakura could feel the tension in the room skyrocket as she stood there. Everything had been going well for a couple of days by that point, and she wondered if she was doomed to have at one least conflict with her childhood friend at least once a week – or, rather, the week that was six days there.
“No,” she said, hating the way her voice shook. “You can’t.”
Blue eyes met her own, Meldir staring at her. There was a hard edge to his gaze, an undercurrent of tension behind it. “Is that an order, Aerloth?” he questioned.
She swallowed thickly at that, part of her knowing that he wanted her to say that no, it wasn’t and yet—“Yes,” she stated, shoulders sinking as she tore her eyes away from that accusatory gaze. “It is. I don’t want to see Faelion. Or any of them,” she added, as though he would jump ship to pleading with another of her brothers to get on the next ship to Harlond once that letter reached them back in Lindon.
Undoubtedly, Aerloth had lived in Lindon, until whatever it was she’d done to get herself exiled.
Sakura wasn’t sure she actually wanted to find out what exactly that was. It had involved injuring someone, she knew. To what degree was still up for debate, but she would happily wager it to be severe.
All that mattered was that she was the one who would inevitably have to deal with the fallout of it all. That, she mused, was not something she was looking forwards to. Just as she wasn’t really looking forward to the rest of that conversation with Meldir.
“Very well, Aerloth,” Meldir said, his voice tight.
Part of her almost wanted to apologise; the part of her that had grown fond of him. Yet her safety came first, and part of that safety was ensuring that as few people knew about her situation as possible. Meldir knowing was enough, and even then he had taken a bit of time to figure out the extent of her ‘amnesia’.
Somehow she didn’t think it would take her brothers nearly as long to put their fingers on what was wrong.
Family was supposed to be close, weren’t they?
A faint memory stirred then, her mind taking her back years to the faint, few memories of her old parents. She was supposed to have ‘new’ ones as Aerloth, wasn’t she? Yet they’d sailed – and whatever that meant, but she had the distinct feeling she didn’t have to worry about them right then and there. Her brothers were the biggest issue to face.
“We should start on dinner,” she mumbled, desperate to change the topic of conversation away from the ever sensitive matter of her health.
“Is that an order?” Meldir asked, and she felt her teeth grind together at that.
It was easier when they could talk with each other; easier when there was casual conversation without any mention of her health, declining or otherwise; easier when there was no mention of asking someone else for help, brother or healer. Why did they even need to have that conversation in the first place? Hadn’t she made it obvious that she didn’t want to talk about it?
She swallowed. “No,” she said, shoulders tense, determinedly not looking at him then. “It’s not,” she answered. Her throat felt dry. “Do you… want to help me make dinner tonight?” she asked, wondering whether the answer would be yes or no. Which one did she even want the answer to be? “If you don’t want to… well, I can make it—that is fine…”
“I will help,” he said, but his voice lacked its usual enthusiasm.
“Meldir…”
He looked at her, and she met his gaze for the first time in a little while. The guilt she felt was still there, but fear won out as it always did. “Let’s go to the kitchen,” he said, turning his back on her. “Dinner won’t make itself.”
“No, it won’t,” she acknowledged, trying to dispel the awkward silence – which had well and truly turned into stilted, awkward conversation instead. “What do you want for dinner?” she asked, part of her hating how hesitant she sounded.
She hated the guilt she felt. She hated the lies. She hated the inescapable Oath that Meldir loathed, and yet was the only thing that helped keep her safe. She hated the fact that she could only be grateful for that very Oath when being bound to it seemed to hurt Meldir that much more.
“We should see what is in the pantry,” Meldir said carefully, not turning to look back at her as he led the way to the kitchen. “There are still things we need to use before the next delivery.”
“I see,” she mumbled, hating the silence that fell all the way to the kitchen and beyond.
“You are foolish,” were Meldir’s first words to her over their dinner of haphazardly battered fish with leftover potatoes and greenery from the greenhouse that Meldir had showed her quickly before they truly began their meal preparations.
Sakura only blinked, tilting her head as she stared blankly at him. She didn’t have the energy to get angry at that, she found, shoulders sinking as she looked back at him flatly, not bothering to come up with a retort. The silence was gone, and the annoyance that had been simmering along with the dinner had finally come to a full boil.
“I cannot, for the life of me, figure out exactly what you are trying to achieve here,” he said, shovelling the next mouthful of fish and chewing oddly aggressively as he stared at her with a mixture of frustration and concern. “You are ill – yes, I do not care if you like to call it ‘merely fading’ – you are not well, and your refusal to care by summoning a healer, or, Valar forbid, your brothers to aid you is, at this point, quite vexing.”
“Why do I have to be trying to achieve something?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at him curiously as they sat there in the dining room. The same dining room that was quickly becoming the go-to spot for awkward conversations.
“I do not want to have to watch you die, Aerloth,” Meldir said, a frown curling at his lips then. “What sort of person would that make me, if I merely let you fade when I do not think it has to end this way…?” His shoulders sunk – as if the thought of her dying was truly such a weighty thing. It wasn’t like he realised, after all, that the Aerloth he’d known and hated was already dead. “I thought you said you had better things to do than die.”
“I do,” she answered. “I also have better things to do than summon either a healer or my brothers.” The batter of the fish made a loud crunch sound as she shovelled it into her mouth, jaw set as a sliver of annoyance rose past the overwhelming tiredness she felt.
“Why are you so adverse to accepting help?” he pleaded. “All I want is to help you. Nothing more, nothing less… so why can you not accept that?”
“Why can you not accept that I do not require help at this point in time?” She shovelled another mouthful of dinner into her mouth, a scowl forming as she chewed angrily. “I just want to be left alone – is that too much to ask?”
“When you are suffering from memory loss, indeed, yes,” Meldir stated. “You did not even know what you could purchase at the market – in fact, I suspect you did not even know that there was a market until I took you to it,” he said, knife making an unholy screeching sound as he cut off another slice of his battered fish. “You clearly require some form of supervision.”
“I am not an errant child!” Sakura hissed, feeling well and truly riled as she tried to finish her dinner as quickly as possible, if only to run away from that conversation that much sooner. “I can survive perfectly well in this household by myself—what do you think I was doing before you arrived?”
“Certainly. Remind me again, which of your brothers’ rooms are you currently staying in, again?” Meldir questioned, silvery brow raised in question, and Sakura felt her heart skip a beat.
She knew the answer to that question – Meldir had mentioned it before, after all, and he had been her source of information for the most part. “Tathrenor’s room!” she declared, but it was too late. The real Aerloth would have been able to give her answer in mere seconds as opposed to the several she had taken to recall such ‘basic’ knowledge.
“Is that why you are so adverse to seeing them?” he asked, expression flickering between annoyance and concern – his two most common states, or so Sakura was coming to understand, especially when it involved her. “Because you don’t remember them?”
Her teeth ground together, part of her hating just how sharp Meldir was when it came to figuring her out – and just what information she was missing. “What do I have to do for you to never bring up this topic of conversation again?” she asked through gritted teeth, far beyond done with that conversation right then and there.
“You know how,” Meldir spat. “Just give the order and I will be forced to obey.”
Fingers twitched, a familiar guilt surfacing at the thought of giving another order. An order that he would be bound to obey, whether or not he wanted to. Her shoulders sunk at the very idea. “I don’t want to do that,” she said quietly, tears biting at the corners of her eyes. Why couldn’t she go back to the days before Meldir had arrived? Before the days of Oaths, orders, and the undeniable fondness she seemed to have for him…
“You were ever so happy to do that before,” Meldir muttered, cutlery scraping against his plate.
“Before I… lost my memories?” Sakura raised an eyebrow, finally finding the courage to meet those blue eyes that stared at her in frustration, fear, and worry all mingled in that gaze.
“Are you finally ready to fully acknowledge that fact?” he asked, tilting his head and meeting her gaze head-on as he finished his own dinner and focused the full force of his attention on her. “You have been all too happy to skirt around that issue… and that is the crux of the matter, is it not?”
Her eyes narrowed, fear bubbling up beneath her skin the more she thought of the consequences of just who and what she was being revealed. “I just want to live quietly, Meldir,” she mumbled, anger giving way to a familiar, bone-deep tiredness that had been dogging her footsteps ever since she had woken up there beneath those unfamiliar stars.
A tiredness that had lingered with her long before she had woken up there, and one which would not be shed within a matter of months.
“Perhaps that would be possible if you were another elleth,” Meldir said, the frustration on his expression slipping ever so slightly. “But you are Aerloth… the elleth who somehow always manages to be at the centre of every single drama within the Court of Lindon. The elleth who is most notable for being exiled several times due to poor behaviour.” He closed his eyes, breathing out a long sigh as he did. “I would wager that tongues are already wagging about you behind your back at home.”
“And yet I don’t remember a single one of those incidents,” she answered, shoulders sinking as she wondered if the real Aerloth knew just what a horrific mess she had left behind for her to answer to. “I do not remember doing anything to make those tongues wag,” she grumbled, part of her praying that the day that she was dragged back to Lindon would never come.
Yet the realist in her knew that it was only a matter of time until she was forced to confront the sins of Aerloth’s past.
“But you did,” Meldir said, his voice quiet, the anger lining their conversation having been yanked out like a rug from under their feet. “And I don’t think that the Court of Lindon will let you forget that much.”
Sakura snorted, folding her arms as she stared across the table. “This Court business sounds rather exhausting,” she stated matter-of-factly. “So why should I return to it when everything here is said and done?”
Meldir blinked. “What else do you have to do, Aerloth?” he asked, and Sakura felt her heart sink at that. “You have no craft—”
“I am figuring out how to smith,” she said, folding her arms across her chest and glaring at him, daring him to comment on her lack of luck and skill when it came to blacksmithing. Her blades were getting better – she had nearly figured out the brittleness issue, along with getting the basic shape of the blade in line with the few other styles of blade that had been left in that particular smithy.
“Indeed you are,” Meldir said, pinching the bridge of his nose then. “Yet how viable of a career do you think that will be for you? You have no reputation as a blacksmith, and the only reputation you do have across Lindon is as the realm's premier troublemaker… Do you truly think any smithy will take you on as an apprentice?”
She chewed on her lip at that, shoulders sinking as the realities of what awaited her in Lindon were made starkly apparent. “Is one of my brothers not a smith?” she questioned, remembering then that the forge she was using was technically belonging to someone else – a brother whose name she couldn’t quite remember.
Meldir glanced at her, as if weighing his words up. “I suppose you could ask,” he acknowledged, but the expression on his face gave her little to no hope that it would be a viable option. “But you would have to actually ask Gladil to his face.”
Her stomach dropped like a rock in a pond, vanishing into the murky depths below. “Are you going to pester me about speaking with my brothers again?” she demanded, every single bit of tension returning to her shoulders at that.
Meldir sighed; a low, long, bitter thing. “You have made your stance on that quite clear,” he said, lip curling ever so slightly—a clear sign of his disapproval.
“And yet you keep bringing the topic up…” Sakura muttered.
“I am your friend, Aerloth,” Meldir reminded. “As far as I am aware, friends are not meant to be mere puppets, meekly obeying the whims of another. Yet you certainly have tried over the years to make me your puppet… I’m glad that, at least, has not changed much.”
Tears bit at the corners of her eyes at that, part of her wanting nothing more than to protest that statement. She didn’t want Meldir to be her puppet, did she? Yet she might as well have been able to order him about as one – her fingers were on the strings, and all it took was pulling them to ensure he would do as she wished. It was an ugly thing to witness, and a cruel thing to acknowledge… She swallowed thickly. “I just… want to protect myself,” she said, wondering how weak of a defence that was to the accusations laid at her feet. “That’s all.”
“From what?” Meldir questioned, somehow managing, as always, to cut straight to the heart of the matter. “What exactly do you need to protect yourself from?”
Lips clamped shut, thoughts racing behind her eyes as she struggled to figure out how she was supposed to tell Meldir what she was terrified of: of chains and shackles, knives slicing skin apart in an attempt to piece together just how exactly she ticked, of twisted smiles and unending curiosity that fuelled torture. Yet Aerloth wasn’t the one who had been chained up inside that facility. Aerloth hadn’t been the one whose skin was peeled back time and time again.
That had been Haruno Sakura’s life – or, rather, the end of Haruno Sakura’s life.
Aerloth was an elleth who had just been exiled to her childhood home in Harlond. Nothing more, and nothing less. She was a prideful elleth who had lost her memories and was now fading – and that was what Meldir could see. He saw the surface of it all, and nothing beneath that much. How was she supposed to peel her own skin back and reveal the truth beneath it all? That was something she couldn’t do.
“What is it that has you so fearful?” he asked, prodding the beehive with yet another stick—and she was the beehive in question. “What has you so afraid of stepping outside this house?” Those blue eyes bore into her green ones, silently pleading with her for an answer to the confusing mystery that she was turning out to be. “What is it that’s causing you to fade?”
Her hand spasmed at that, fear making her heart beat that much faster. All those questions had one answer, and it was one she was unwilling to give. Because she wasn’t Aerloth at the end of the day, and Meldir’s friendship and trust were built upon the bridge of belief that she was Aerloth. That bridge wasn’t something that she could afford to collapse.
Not when she couldn’t be certain they wouldn’t try to figure out how to get Aerloth back with scalpels and agony on her part.
She couldn’t endure that sort of pain again.
She refused.
“I just want to understand, Aerloth,” Meldir pleaded. “That’s all.”
Sakura stared at him, a familiar guilt surfacing at the distraught expression flashing across his face. “I cannot tell you,” she relented, as the guilt weighed heavy in her stomach – because, like the last friend she’d had with bright blue eyes, she wanted to trust him. “Not until I’m certain it won’t happen again.”
She was in her wardrobe, ready to settle down for the night when she heard the door click. Her focus shifted in an instant, eyes peering through the slats to find Meldir stood there. He was dressed in his nightclothes, a perplexed expression on his face.
“Aerloth?” he called ever so softly, his gaze meeting her own through the slats.
Sakura sat back against the hardwood of the wardrobe she called her bedroom right then and there. “What is it, Meldir?” she asked, letting out a soft sigh as she thought on the conversation they’d had at dinner. Two steps forwards, and somehow three steps back all at once, she mused.
“Earlier at dinner,” he said, walking towards the wardrobe. “I did not mean to be as pushy as I did… it’s been a long day for me,” he added, but instead of opening the wardrobe door, as Sakura thought he might, Meldir simply sat outside, back leaning against one of those doors. “I visited the healers in Harlond proper,” he explained, and Sakura felt herself tense at the admission.
Yet wasn’t he under Oath to not reveal her ‘fading’? Sakura tilted her head, ignoring the way her heart pounded in her chest.
“I did not mention you at all, so do not concern yourself with that,” Meldir added, and that gave her a small amount of comfort. Nobody else knew she was fading. Yet. “To them it was mere academic curiosity. Yet I suppose what I learnt made me fear the worst for you… and the fact still stands that I do not want to watch you fade before my eyes…”
Her heart clenched at that, tongue moving before her mind could stop it. “You do not have to stay, you know,” she said, wincing at the way those words seemed to reverberate around the room. The brief silence that followed didn’t help.
Meldir let out a soft, almost broken huff of sound. “Has anyone told you that you are cruel, Aerloth?”
“You have. Many times,” she answered, remembering all the times he’d mentioned just how cruel she’d used to be, both in the past and in the present. There was some commonality between herself and Aerloth after all, it seemed. A smile curled at her lips, bitter and broken. Or maybe her once-captors had brushed off on her more than she’d have liked? They had spades of cruelty to spare—and she would be the one to know.
“I suppose that has been a bit cruel of me,” he murmured. “To keep reminding you of how… cruel you’ve been in the past when you can no longer remember it. I must confess, I did feel a little bitter at how your brothers demanded I come out here to babysit you as a result of your refusal to answer their letters…”
Sakura snorted, remembering the tinge of bitterness that had lined his first few words to her – before he’d pulled the cloak from her shoulders and found out that not all was as he’d thought. “You don’t say…”
Meldir chuckled softly. “It was that obvious, was it?” he mumbled, and Sakura didn’t need to look to know that he was smiling. “You can be inexplicably cruel at times… yet you can also be unbearably kind every now and then. Though, as of late, you have been more kind than cruel – that must be acknowledged.”
She sighed. “Why are you here, Meldir?” she asked, feeling awfully tired and wanting nothing more than to sleep, and then wake up, have breakfast and head straight to the forge to start the next day of smithing.
“I merely wished to apologise for earlier,” he said, making no motion to move from his spot by the wardrobe door. It was almost like he was guarding the door to her wardrobe. A smile pulled at her lips at the thought.
Because if her old friends had been alive and able to guard her, then she knew she would have never ended up in that horrible place to begin with.
Was that why his presence was such a comfort to her?
“I can be impatient at times, especially when someone’s life hangs in the balance,” Meldir explained, but she didn’t think she really needed the apology at that point in time. She hadn’t truly been angry at him in the first place.
Friends could be annoying at times, she remembered, distantly recalling all the times Naruto had ended up getting on her nerves. Like the time he had broken into her apartment, giving her a heart attack in the process—for what purpose, she couldn’t remember by that point. Her gaze darted over to Meldir, part of her wondering just what it was about him that seemed to bring back such fond memories of a time before everything had gone wrong.
“I am not angry,” she answered, shifting herself to lie down then, eyes fixing on the silvery wisps of hair that poked through the slats of the wardrobe door.
“Then I am glad,” Meldir murmured, their conversation fading away naturally as her exhaustion won out.
Sakura felt herself drift off, mind welcoming the relief of dreams – and dream she did; of a forge lit in amber, an ellon at the anvil, a hammer that made for a rhythmic beat as it worked the metal set beneath, a song hummed quietly that she thought she recognised from somewhere she couldn’t place, and eyes of molten gold that seemed to pierce her very soul as that strange ellon looked directly at her and said, “You should not be here, young one.”
Sakura woke with a gasp, the sound of birdsong greeting her from beyond the wardrobe and Tathrenor’s room telling her it was morning already.
The leaves were turning amber, crumpling up and falling to the ground silently. A slow death of nature, in preparation for winter and the spring which would then follow that. A never-ending cycle of death and rebirth, or so she mused as she sat in the nearest armchair closest to the window with the view of the trees surrounding the property.
She had woken up there in Spring – Ethuil, as Meldir had called it – and yet already the seasons had passed. Time was ticking onwards, as it always did for her, the only traces of it being the increasing number of white hairs she was sporting.
Summer had already come and gone, time seeming to slip through her fingers like treacle; sticky, leaving its residue, but ultimately passing on by. There was an odd permanence to the air around her – to the life she had, and it was one she thought she knew. The same feeling that had overtaken her life the minute her Yin Seal had botched up. The minute that nature chakra had entered her body and granted her an near-undying body.
Was that why she had ended up beneath those stars?
Sakura could only wonder as she meandered down to the forge, ready to start a new project – or, rather, restart a familiar task of attempting to make a blade.
She had new clothes, courtesy of Meldir going to the tailor and taking her measurements down on a day when he had inevitably gotten just a bit fed up with her refusal to leave the house. He seemed to swing between exasperation and pure, genuine concern like an erratic pendulum, and part of her could only wonder if she was about to make him prematurely grow a beard with all of her supposed antics. Because that was apparently the greatest indicator of age for an elf, or so she had learnt from the goldmine of information himself. His hair was already silver, so it wasn’t like he was about to ‘go grey’… like her old friends from another life had…
Her shoulders sunk at the thought; the memory of it all. It all seemed so distant when she was there beneath a different sky, silently watching as time trickled on by her without leaving its mark.
It was strange how the period of time she’d been living there for could feel so long and yet so short at the same time.
Routine was a familiar thing to her by that point, and maybe that was what made the time she spent in Harlond with Meldir feel both long and short. It barely took her much time to get the forge up and running, nor did it take her long to seat herself at her usual workbench, notebook and pencil set to one side for any observations she wanted to jot down. Minutes blended into hours, the familiar heat of her workplace surrounding her as she lost herself in her chosen craft. The rhythmic sound of metal being hammered music to her ears as she sat there, trying to grasp a faint tune that lingered in the air around her until—
“Aerloth. Dinner is ready,” Meldir called, his familiar figure stood in the doorway, the light haloing his hair and making it seem as white as an alarming portion of her hair had already turned.
Something that made Meldir tut and hover around her like a mother hen whenever he inevitably noticed another white strand replacing the chestnut brown that had been Aerloth’s original colouring.
It would, more than likely, all turn white eventually, or so Sakura suspected as she began automatically tidying her equipment away, leaving her latest supposed masterpiece in a spot she could easily pick her work back up from after she slept the night away.
That was her routine by that point; to wake up, make breakfast for herself and Meldir, head down to the forge, more often than not skip lunch unless Meldir decided not to head into town and bodily dragged her from the forge to eat, smith until dinnertime – at which point, if he hadn’t already interrupted her for lunch, Meldir would find her in the forge and pull her away from her latest craft to either eat dinner, or help him make dinner and then eat said dinner.
That was her routine, barring a few days when Meldir inevitably decided to usher her into town so she would at least see some sunlight, and experience the fresh salty air of the coastline—
“Do you fancy heading into town tomorrow?” Meldir asked, as if sensing the turn her thoughts had taken. “It will likely be one of the last few days that we might be able to head out on the boats before the weather takes a turn for the worse,” he explained, and Sakura only hummed in acknowledgement at that. “Excellent, I shall take that as your agreement.”
Sakura blinked, shoulders sinking as she thought of how often Meldir helped her across the inexplicable boundary of the property. A line she still couldn’t really cross on her own. “I see,” she murmured, knowing that it was probably a good thing that Meldir dragged her out of the mansion she called her home right then and there. Otherwise she would definitely have become a hermit by that point. Though part of her couldn’t deny the fact that there was a large part of herself that would be more than happy most of the time to spend the rest of her days hidden within the depths of her supposed childhood home there in Harlond.
That place was safe after all.
It just had to remain that way, no matter how the seasons turned.
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Lunartosolar on Chapter 1 Fri 26 Feb 2021 02:30AM UTC
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Last Edited Wed 07 Apr 2021 05:37PM UTC
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