Chapter Text
Mebuki Haruno was as pretty and sweet as Sakura remembered. True enough, she was younger than she had ever had any recollection of. Sakura couldn't have been born for more than a month, now; that would make her mother in her mid twenties, at most.
(Sakura was too tired and worried and amazed to will her brain to do some basic math.)
Since re-gaining her consciousness, Sakura didn't make a peep. The first day, when she realized what kind of mess she had gotten into, had been the hardest. She cried until her throat hurt and her lungs burned, thrashing and tugging at everything she could.
Sakura had always liked the fantastical idea of doing it all over again, this time right. Her regrets were many and not at all sparse, but her youthful wishing hadn't been anything more than that. If she knew that it could happen, that she would be rendered as a dependent baby almost twenty years before her mental age, she would've kept her mouth shut.
Her main problem now was how to go back, if she could. She remembered very little of the last instants of the war. Her ears hurt at the thought, almost as if she was still standing on the field, ragged breathing and deafening whistles filling the sky… and then? Then it's a blackout, no way for her to remember anything.
… She should be dead.
Sakura wasn't fearless. She was (had been?) scared of many things over her life. Scared of failure, of rejection, of never being enough; scared of bees, of large bodies of water. She had been scared of dying too. And she had regrets, so many of them.
She had never been enough, or maybe she had been and that was the problem. That she was enough, just there, unimportant. Useful, but not too much. Mediocre.
Wasn't that why she couldn't stop Sasuke? Why it took her almost three years of costant bruises and bleeding to become enough? Why she always relentlessly relied on Naruto? He was more than enough. Everyone was in Team 7. They were amazing, all of them strong in their own unique way and with immovable beliefs… and she, she was just Sakura. Nothing more, nothing less.
She sighed as her mother (her heart clenched at the thought, the knowledge that she was alive enough for her to feel a little bit better and a lot more selfish) cradled her, a soft humming escaping her lips. Sakura wasn't sure if assuming she was dead was the right path, though. She was supposed to keep all the possibilities in mind, but it sounded more impossible as time passed by.
Time-travel wasn't as insane as reincarnation — but still, the both of them were way more reasonable than her being in her infant body sometime down the timeline while another her waited in a war.
Yeah, she was dead.
She hoped the ones standing wouldn't be too sad, that they could keep fighting on and defeat their enemies… but a part of her would always think that they would be thankful that she was gone.
She willed it silent and instead let her mother lull her to sleep, the melodic sound of her voice acting as a lullaby.
Repression, Sakura knew, was one defence mechanism that Inoichi-san had never approved of. But Sakura didn't want to think of him, because he was dead, and much less did she want to think of anything else — so she did just that. Sakura repressed any and all thoughts of the past. She thought it was for the better, because seeing her mother's worried eyes every time she trashed and cried broke her heart. So she pushed them away, Naruto and Kakashi and Sasuke and the deaths, the bombs and the blood.
She focused on the present. The present was good, it was attainable.
Now six months old, Sakura sighed under her breath (it sounded more like a huff, really) as she crawled over the balcony of her room. The air in the house was stuffy, her mother picking up a germophobe streak after her birth. It was too much for her, it made her feel constricted. Feeling like a prisoner in her own home, the apartment where she had grown up previously, was shit.
She inhaled the fresh air of Konoha from her spot on the balcony floor, glad her mother had left her in the care of her father. Her dad had always been laid-back. That was probably why she had latched onto Kakashi so much, after her mother's death. Her dad had thrown himself into work, barely spending any time at home and Kakashi… he was just there.
She giggled when she caught sight of shinobis running over rooftops, her eyes following their movements somewhat skillfully. It was reassuring. She had been dragged away from all she knew, her friends and remaining family, but some of her abilities were still there. Her eyes were as trained as they had been in the past and her chakra control was still perfect. She didn't have much chakra to begin with, but it was still more than a normal toddler would have.
She wished she had her strength, though. Crawling was becoming more annoying as days passed and her legs muscles still weren't strong enough to let her keep her balance.
A loud crash resounded from behind her and Sakura didn't bother turning around, her mother's chakra flaring in worry. However, nothing could stop her from whining when the woman picked her up and closed the window violently.
Sakura really hoped she would stop coddling her.
But the hope was lost that same night.
Sakura blamed herself for her own stupidity, but even with her chakra system already developed and working she couldn't do anything. So she tried to make herself disappear in her mother's arms, her heartbeat slowing almost to the point of not being there, as evil and raging chakra seeped through the walls. She didn't cry. She wouldn't cry.
She kept stoically silent as the Kyuubi raged, demolishing houses and killing ninjas and civilians alike. She didn't sleep that night, her mind and heart trying to reach out to Naruto. Sakura couldn't protect him from this, but she would be damned if she let him unprotected for much longer.
When her mother woke up again, Sakura had a soft smile on her face, her green eyes focused on a far away building barely noticeable from her room's window.
The period of time leading to her second birthday was boring. Her mother was always too worried, too inexperienced to let some dirt color her chubby hands and Sakura soon found the situation to be too much for her.
She was happy to see both her parents again, truly. They were alive, still in their prime and as energetic as a Naruto in a good mood. Except that they were always behind her, looking and staring with wide eyes whenever she did anything that could be considered abnormal for a child her age.
Out of all the activities, the ones that had been a pressing matter to Sakura were walking and potty training. At night she laid in her cradle, bending her legs and stretching them back to train her muscles. The sooner she walked, the sooner she could stop using diapers, in her opinion.
At nine months old, Sakura attempted her first steps. She toppled over and bumped her head on the floor, scoring a bloody nose, accompanied by a bump on her already bigger-than-average forehead and scared yells from her mother. Her father had sighed loudly, brown eyes set on his wife with fond exasperation.
Sakura had tried again, much to her mother's chagrin, and this time she didn't fall.
Potty training came soon after that and Sakura was thankful. She cringed at the idea of spending another year pissing herself and having to cry for help. Sakura hated asking for help.
In less than a month, Sakura was officially potty trained and an experienced walker. All the sharp corners of the house had been baby proofed, but Sakura didn't expect anything different from her pantywaist of a mom.
The next step, however, had been the more complicated one. Training her legs' muscles to walk had been pretty easy, and the potty training already came natural with her… talking wasn't as easy.
Her tongue was uncooperative and the pinkette couldn't bear it anymore.
She liked to talk. It was relaxing, always had been, to sit somewhere with one of her friends and pour her heart out. She wanted to do it again, even if her worries couldn't be spoken of and her friends list started with her mother and ended with her father.
Sakura frowned as much as a toddler could, remembering how Tsunade had wanted her to be an expert in all fields. Sakura had dismissed the idea, because she was a front liner before she was a medic and what's the point of speech therapy when I'm the reason they usually can't talk anymore?
So help her, if chance ever came again Sakura would read the shit out of those speech therapy manuals Tsunade tried to shove at her.
She gurgled and babbled in the amazingly absurd language of nonsensical toddler, before her first proper word escaped her lips.
It wasn't in Sakura's plans, really. She wanted her first words to be Mama and Dada, like any other children. She didn't think her thought would translate into a proper three syllables word, but it did.
"Shinobi!" she had cried out, chubby finger pointing at a chunin flying by her window. They used her balcony to jump more often than not, so it wasn't hard to come onto them.
The look of despair in her mother's green eyes was hard, like the setting of her father's jaw. They bit it back, whatever it was that they were feeling, and smiled proudly at her.
Sakura knew that even in this life, they wouldn't approve.
However, that little word acted as a catalyst. From that day on, Sakura always tried a bit harder to formulate her words and at age two she could already formulate proper sentences. Not that she did, anyway.
She always kept them shorter than five words, because she didn't think reciting her medical textbooks somewhere outside her bedroom and in a time different than the middle of the night would do her any good.
Finally her mother calmed down, starting to take her out more and more. Sakura admired it. She wasn't shy to the indoctrination that Konoha and other Hidden Villages performed on their youngest, but seeing her mother retaliating with as much force and conviction to make her prone to the civilian life was funny.
Then Sakura saw him and realization hit.