Chapter Text
Sakura’s awareness returned in increments. First came sound- a gentle, rhythmic beeping that kept time for the slow rise and fall of her chest.
Inhale. Exhale.
Then, smell. The tang of disinfectant and the sweet sharpness of laundry detergent that tickled her nose. And finally, touch. Rough linens at her twitching fingertips, tape clinging to her arms, and the brush of a hand at her temple.
She found herself straining toward that hand, leaning into the warmth of its touch. Her eyes flew open.
The light burned. She grunted and shied away from it only to find a shadow looming over her. It fled without a word, the sliding door hissing as it retreated from the room. A chorus of shrill beeping erupted from a set of nearby monitors as her heart hammered against the cage of her ribs.
She floundered in a cocoon of gauze and IV tubes. Her breath fogged the oxygen mask cupped to her face as an onslaught of questions raced through her mind. Where-? When-? What-? All impossible for her to answer through the sudden buzz of panic.
The IV tubes tugged dangerously at her skin as she fought to escape as the nest of blankets and wires sucked her down like quicksand. Two new shadowy figures entered the room. She sputtered beneath her mask, struggling to warn them to stay back through her chattering teeth.
One of the shadows lunged for her and she yelped. A calloused palm brushed her forehead. “That’s enough, Sakura.”
She stilled at the sound of a voice she recognized. After a few rapid blinks, Tsunade and Shizune’s worried faces came into focus. Shizune removed her oxygen mask and she flinched at the rush of cold air against her clammy skin.
“I don’t understand,” Sakura blurted. And what an understatement that was.
Tsunade ignored her, turning to check the monitors instead.
“Vitals are looking good,” Shizune said, “though I don’t think any of us are surprised there.” She leaned over the railing of the bed, clipboard in hand. “Now, I just have a few questions for you.”
“Can I sit up?” she asked. Beneath the tangle of blankets, her whole body trembled with the need to move. To run.
Tsunade turned and gently lifted her until she was propped up against several pillows.
Her wristband snagged the collar of her hospital gown as she ran a shaking hand through her hair. “Why do you need to ask me questions? Why can’t you just tell me what’s going on first?”
“There was an incident,” Tsunade said. “It involved extensive head trauma. We need to gauge your cognitive functions.”
“Can you tell me your name?” Shizune asked.
She curled her fists into the blankets and took a deep breath. “Sakura Haruno.”
Shizune nodded, the tip of her pen twitching as she took notes. “Your birthday?”
“March 28th.” The answer came so easily. That had to be a good sign, right?
“What village are you from?”
“Konohagakure.”
“Your rank?”
“Jounin,” she answered with a small twinge of pride.
“Who is the hokage?”
“Lady Fifth, Tsunade Senju.” She offered Tsunade a hesitant smile, though it wasn’t returned.
“And what’s the last thing you remember?”
She parted her lips. Her smile fell. What did she remember? Blank, black nothingness. Murky, dreamless sleep until the beeping coaxed her into the waking world. But no, that wasn’t right, there had to be more. There was more. She cradled her head in her hands and began to sift through the muddled haze of it all.
Images flashed in her mind’s eye. Rolling dunes of sand under a blazing sun. The comforting weight of a kunai in her sweat-slick palm. A pack of rations split over a fire while deep gray eyes watching her over the tips of the flames.
“Start talking, kid,” Tsunade commanded.
So she did. “I was on a mission. We were en-route to Suna. Orders were… to track down a band of rogue shinobi. Capture preferred, but lethal force authorized.” She stole a glance at Shizune and allowed herself to feel a shred of relief as she continued taking notes and nodded along.
“And are you able to specify who ‘we’ might be?”
She bit her lip and thought for a moment, doing her best to ignore Tsunade’s grim stare. “It was a limited roster. After debriefing at the hokage’s office, we were dispatched immediately. It was only me and Kakashi-sensei.”
Shizune paused, then exchanged a look with Tsunade.
Her heart leapt into her throat. One of the monitors began to beep with a more frantic pitch. “What’s wrong? He made it back okay, right? He’s not…?”
“The brat’s fine,” Tsunade sighed. “He was the one who carried you all the way back after-”
A commotion erupted outside. Hospital staff began shouting and Sakura swore she heard the phrases “sterile environment” and “no dogs allowed” but they were quickly drowned out by excited barking. The door slid open and a little brown blur was the first one through. It barrelled into Sakura with enough force to knock the breath from her lungs.
“Lookin’ a little bit worse for wear these days, aren’t ya, Floral Green.”
“Pakkun?” she wheezed.
Before he could reply, Tsunade grabbed him by the scruff and whirled on the rest of the pack still piling in through the doorway. “What the hell is the matter with all of you? You can’t just barge into my hospital like you own the place. GET OUT!”
Every single one of the pack vanished in a puff of white smoke save for Pakkun. Tsunade held him at eye level while his tail quivered between his legs.
“Real sorry for making such a ruckus, Lady Tsunade. We didn’t mean for anything to get out of hand.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t injure my patient or else I would’ve flayed your hide.”
“What are you doing here, Pakkun?” Sakura asked.
Despite Tsunade’s death-grip on his scruff, he still managed a shrug. “Well, when the boss said his wife finally woke back up we thought we would come see-“
His mouth still moved, but Sakura didn’t hear the rest as the world immediately collapsed upon itself and left her as its sole spiraling focal point.
Boss.
He couldn’t mean…?
“I-I’m sorry, Pakkun, I think I misunderstood you. Could you-“
Wife.
She brought a trembling hand to the cold sweat beading on her forehead. In the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of the name printed neatly on her wristband:
Sakura Hatake.
No. No no no. That just… it couldn’t be. She recoiled, turning her head to the side only to come face to face with a tattered copy of Icha-Icha balanced carefully on the edge of her bedside table.
She sucked in a gasp. Tsunade swore as the monitors went haywire once more. Dizziness overtook her. A whoosh of rushing water filled her ears as she slumped back against her pillow and a tide of that blank, black nothingness swallowed her once more.
⋆.˚₊ ༺𖦹༻ .˚₊⋆
They said her head had been crushed to a pulp, the culprit an unidentified earth jutsu wielded by a rogue shinobi. Somewhere in the shredded mass of firing synapses, her byakugou unleashed its massive stores of chakra and knit her mangled flesh back together. A miracle that left her completely spent and on the edge of death where she’d lingered for four entire weeks.
After she awoke, Tsunade insisted on a forty-eight hour monitoring period during which they performed several scans that tracked her vitals and brain activity for any anomalies. It was enough to determine the damage sustained to her medial temporal lobe left her with retrograde amnesia and that- thank the Kami- her ability to form new long term memories remained intact.
For several hours she also endured endless rounds of questions from Tsunade and Shizune, testing her knowledge of medical jutsu and treatment protocols established both in the field and at Konoha General. They hadn’t bothered disclosing her final score, but she was almost certain she’d answered them all perfectly. The only problem was, when pressed to elaborate on her past experience she could only do so for one third of the scenarios. The rest was just… gone.
On the day of her discharge, Shizune gently informed her that she’d been placed on a required two month medical leave which could be extended based on the progress of her recovery. She’d also been given a folder of “remedial study materials” and a list of exams she’d have to pass- apparently a second time- before she’d be cleared for practice as a medic nin again.
She numbly thanked Shizune for all her help before making her way down to the ICU attendant’s desk. There she waited while one of the staff retrieved her one and only personal affect- a bent hitai-ate that clung to her bloodied bandana by a mere thread. It was delivered to her with a polite “Have a nice day, Mrs. Hatake” that nearly sent her reeling.
The rest of her gear, she’d been told, was beyond salvaging.
Someone-
Kakashi-
Her husband-
-had been kind enough to drop off some of her civilian attire. Though, he never bothered to show his masked face since she woke up. Not even to collect the copy of Icha-Icha he’d left at her bedside. It was now tucked tightly under her arm along with her headband as she stepped out of the sterile lobby and into the sunshine.
Finally free from the smothering watch of the hospital staff, she found herself floating down familiar streets as she made her way home, fighting a strange tightness in her throat. The crowd parted around her and she found herself searching the sea of faces for someone- anyone- that she knew. What she would do if she did run into someone, she couldn’t quite say. Would she pull them into a suffocating hug? Cry? Run the other way? Maybe all three in that order.
Neither Tsunade nor Shizune had been keen to fill her in on the details of her own life. Such catastrophic trauma had left her mind and emotions in a delicate state, she’d been told. The healing chakra that surged from her byakugou reconstructed most of her neural pathways without the careful guidance of a medic. And now that she’d been reconstructed- more like rewired- Tsunade insisted she had to rebuild and regain all her faculties at her own pace. That it would be the most difficult, but the best for her in the long run.
She rounded the corner of her apartment building and fidgeted with her hitai-ate as she ascended the creaking stairs. Outside unit 414, she paused. Her front door was a more vibrant shade of red than she recalled. The landlord must have repainted it sometime between Then and Now.
Her hand drifted toward her pocket before she remembered she didn’t even have her key. She bent over and flipped aside the welcome mat to retrieve her hidden spare when the door swung open.
“Sorry, ma’am, can I help you?”
Sakura stood and found herself face to face with a woman she definitely didn’t know. She was young with round eyes and brown hair that drifted down to her waist.
“I- um-“ Sakura faltered and rubbed at her forehead as she glanced over the woman’s shoulder. The living room was decorated with a black couch and a striped rug- furniture she also didn't recognize. “I’m sorry, is this unit 414?”
The woman nodded and her eyes narrowed. “Wait a second, you look kind of familiar. Are you the tenant that lived here before?”
Before. Sakura flushed crimson and swallowed thickly. “That’s right. I guess I wandered into the wrong neighborhood by mistake. Um, do you happen to know if- if Kakashi Hatake lives nearby?”
The woman tapped her chin. “Hatake… Hatake… That sounds awfully familiar.”
A queasy feeling settled in her gut. She instinctively glanced toward the mountain overlooking the village. Next to Tsunade’s stony likeness, an intricate series of scaffolding climbed up the sheer cliff face.
Then the woman snapped her fingers. “Oh! That’s right! Hatake Clan manor. Wow, you are in the wrong neighborhood, huh? That’s all the way out by village outskirts. You’ll know you’re getting close when you reach the farm fields.”
“Ah. Great. Thank you so much.”
“Sure, no problem. Have a good one!”
She flinched as her own front door abruptly shut in her face.
⋆.˚₊ ༺𖦹༻ .˚₊⋆
Green fields of wheat swayed in the gentle breeze along either side of a well worn footpath. Sakura followed it toward a thick copse of trees where a dark sloping roof peaked above the canopy. By the time she reached the shade of the trees, her breath came in short, shallow gasps.
She squatted near a log bearing an intricately carved Hatake crest and fanned herself with Icha-Icha. A few seconds into her meltdown, the ridiculousness of the situation hit her full force. Here she was, a jounin of Konoha, celebrated war hero, a dealer of life and death hardened by many perilous missions, and the thing that finally brought her to her knees was setting foot on clan property in her own damn village.
Property that she inhabited with Kakashi of all people. Last she knew, he'd been renting a teeny tiny apartment not too far from her own, but, as she was figuring out in the most jarring way possible, those living arrangements were a thing of the past.
As she rose stiffly to her feet she tried the genjutsu release sign, hoping not for the first time that this was all some elaborate hallucination. No luck.
When she rounded the corner and beheld their house for the first (but not really the first) time, she doubled over again and almost retched up her lunch. It was… nice. Traditional, with a broad porch and a second floor balcony with spacious windows. All the elegance and stateliness of an ancestral clan home. Too nice for a little civilian-nobody like her.
She followed a well manicured path up a set of stairs and into an entryway where she promptly removed her shoes. Even with bare feet, the sounds of her footsteps echoed too loudly throughout the spacious living room. In the center sat a couch (not the one she remembered from her apartment) and a wide coffee table piled high with medical texts. A basket of dog toys had been tucked away in the corner. Shelves lined the far wall, crammed with a vast collection of medical texts, some novels she didn’t recognize, and of course special edition prints of every entry in the Icha-Icha series.
Sakura crossed the room, her head on a swivel, and placed the copy she’d brought from the hospital with the rest of its brethren. Then she sucked in a breath to soothe her painfully beating heart and began to explore the rest of the house.
Off of the living room was a kitchen in a traditional layout retrofitted with modern appliances. Her old apron hung from a peg on the wall near the doorway. She stopped and gave it a brief squeeze, thankful for at least one shred of familiarity in the midst of a strange dream.
There was a bathroom stocked with pink fluffy towels and all of her hair and skin care products as well as a half used bottle of dog shampoo under the sink. Across from the mirror, she leaned in and peered at some of the faint creases forming at the corners of her eyes. She quickly turned away and fled the room.
One of the other rooms downstairs was filled with training equipment, another appeared to be a sauna, and yet another which was completely bare save for several stacks of unlabeled boxes. Upstairs opened up into a wide loft and in the center of that loft… their bed.
She sank onto the corner of the mattress and prodded at the comforter before taking her head in her hands. A tear rolled down her cheek and left a small wet circle on her leggings. All of her things were here. Not everything that she remembered in her apartment of course, but enough to prove beyond any doubt that she lived here.
But it didn’t feel like coming home. More tears joined the first as she brought her legs to her chest and folded in on herself. An unbearable weight pressed between her shoulder blades as she tried and failed to stifle a sob. Everything she’d been holding back in the hospital came tumbling out of her all at once with shuddering gasps.
What had happened to her life? How could she have been so determined, so full of hope for a future with Sasuke only to turn her back on him and marry another man? And why hadn’t that man come to see her in the hospital after she woke up?
As she explored the house and took a quick inventory of her things, there was something very obviously missing- something she’d taken for granted in every other home she’d ever visited. There were no photos. No mementos from their time together. Not even the picture of Team 7 in their genin days.
Was their marriage a loveless one? Just a matter of convenience? Or, at some point during a period she couldn’t even remember, had she somehow proved herself too much to handle as a wife?
Too…
Annoying?
Muffle footsteps came from the living room. Sakura leapt to her feet, her knees suddenly threatening to knock together even as she hastily swiped the tears from her eyes. She made her way to the stairs, palm gliding against the wall for support. There she lingered and held her breath a moment before silently easing down the first few steps and peering around the corner.
Kakashi stood between the coffee table and the couch with his back to her. Two takeout containers sat on the table. Her heart throbbed painfully in her chest at the burdened slope of his shoulders. The next stair creaked under her foot and he turned. With his hitai-ate missing, his long silver hair fell over his forehead.
Above the line of his mask, his eyes crinkled. “Ah, I wondered if you’d be home yet. Shizune sent word that you were discharged, so I snuck away as soon as I could. Sorry I’m late-” he gestured to the containers- “but I thought I’d grab us lunch.”
Unable to trust her voice to remain steady, she simply nodded.
If he noticed her red eyes, he didn’t say a word about it. He produced a couple pairs of chopsticks from the bag and motioned for her to join him. Arms still wrapped self consciously around herself, she opted to sit on the floor across from him. He slouched to the ground and slid one of the boxes her way.
Sakura nudged several pieces of karage around in her container, uncomfortably aware of his gaze roving over her face. Until he produced his copy of Icha-Icha (when had he grabbed it from the shelf?) and began to read.
After several minutes of them both picking silently at their food, she worked up the nerve to ask a question. “So, how long has it been?”
He turned a page. “Hm?”
“Since we’ve been… together.”
“Let’s see.” He took his chin in hand and glanced at the ceiling. She stole a glance at him, noting the dark circles under his eyes. “I think it’s been about three years?”
“Since- since we were married or-?”
“That happened somewhere in the middle.”
“Oh.” Three years of her memory gone, just like that.
“They told me the last thing you remember was a mission to Suna.”
She nodded. “That’s right. But not the one where I had my accident.”
“Right. Your accident.” His tone was light but his grip on Icha-Icha tightened ever so slightly. “Luckily I remember that same mission and pulled our reports from the archives. It was seven years after the Fourth Great Ninja War. One year before... Well, before those other three years.”
“I see. Did Lady Tsunade warn you not to tell me too much?”
He peered at her over the top of his book. This time the happy crinkle of his eyes was forced. She wasn’t sure how, but she just knew. “Something like that. She said we should try letting your memories return naturally instead of forcing them. That way they would be more… genuine.”
There it was. She bit back another round of tears as he delved back into his book. Those years were the missing link between the Sakura she was now and the one he’d married. And without them, how could anything they had ever be genuine? If it was ever genuine to begin with.
“Are you finished with that?” He gestured at her half eaten food.
She nodded, once again not trusting herself to speak.
“Then let me take care of it.”
Kakashi slipped his book into his vest pocket. As he packed up their food, she noticed his hands were trembling.