Archive of Our Own ^beta

It starts when she dies. Or maybe it ends.

Either way, Sakura runs out of chakra, bleeds out in the water, and drowns.

*One*

Then she’s back across the river, desperately dodging the giant overcompensating sword of doom that’s trying to steal all her chakra. The sun is higher in the sky, her chakra isn’t completely gone, and she’s even more or less in one piece.

Sakura falls back into the rhythm of the fight before she even realizes what’s happened, finally getting close enough to punch the missing nin straight across the jaw. Some of the force was killed by the way she had to twist to land it, but Sakura hears his jaw bone snap and the startled sound of pain.

She grins, punches Kisame’s knee so hard it folds nearly in half, and tries to follow it up with a kunai to his throat.

That’s when the sharks attack.

*Two*

Sakura’s back and so is he, both of them whole.

She darts back, tries kai because this has to be a genjutsu, and Kisame’s clone snaps her neck behind her.

It’s less instantaneous than the sharks had been. Sakura has time to try to heal the break, time to wonder what the fuck is going on, and time to see him crouch down and steal every drop of her chakra.

“Oh fuck you,” Sakura says as she sinks beneath the river, sharks eagerly nosing at her limp body. The damn sword is so unfair.

She drowns again.

*Three*

Sakura dodges, and tries her damnedest to kick straight through Kisame’s ribs. She feels them break as he flies back, blood spilling out of his mouth and his weird little eyes totally shocked.

The sunlight sparkles on the churning water as Kisame plows into the cliff face. He doesn’t get back up.

Sakura slips away from the sharks, skirts the sword caught in the rocks by the shore, and punches his clone so hard the water spray makes a rainbow.

She slits his throat and laughs, because what the fuck just happened??

Birds sing, Kisame dies, the sharks disappear.

Some instinct (not a good one, Sakura regrets this instinct) makes her look back across the river. A flash of red turns into a flood of it, and the colours of the world twist. The sky is black, the trees are red, the water is an unsettling white.

Kisame’s blood is all over her hands. It’s perfectly pitch black

“This genjutsu will not end until you do,” Itachi Uchiha says.

*Thirteen*

Kisame shreds her over and over until Sakura realizes that the sky is blue, the water is clear and she can’t see Itachi.

She retreats, the sharks under her feet, Kisame’s clone killing her twice before she makes it to shore. Itachi is close, she knows he’s close, she has to run--

They don’t chase her.

Sakura stops when she can’t run anymore. She doesn’t know where she is. There’s trees. She might be home. There's trees at home.

She sleeps in a bush, curled up as small as she can make herself, and wakes when the forest starts to brighten. Sakura crawls towards the sound of water, the jagged rubble inside her somehow even worse than it'd been the day before.

The water is small and runs clear, soft green growing around it. Sakura dips her face into it because her mouth is dry and the water is cold and wet. Her body still remembers how to swallow, a small mercy.

She spends the day there, dipping her face in the water to drink and twitching occasionally. There’s no trace of Itachi's chakra, but the intersection of her body, her chakra, and herselves is a raw and bleeding wound. Some furious part of her is trying to heal her, but Sakura can barely remember how to breathe, much less how to help.

The first step is always to clean the wound, and tears stream out of Sakura's body's eyes as the shreds are cut away and the wreckage scoured for anything that isn't herself.

It loosens the already tenuous connection to her body. She can't feel her skin, can't touch her chakra. There's only pain with no source or end.

Another day passes, she thinks. A deer wanders through the clearing, so absolutely apathetic to her presence that she wonders if it’s not a shadow-ponytail-friend-with-mesh Nara deer.

It sniffs her, nudges her with one dainty hoof, and her chakra clicks back into place like a dislocated joint popping back into its socket. Sakura writhes at the shock of it, finally scaring the deer off.

Her chakra gives her clarity, lets her manipulate the muscles that she can’t quite move. It’s like trying to puppeteer a corpse, and she wastes far too much chakra manipulating her limp body through a very abbreviated wash.

She props her torso up against a nearby tree, and nudges her eyes to point forward. Then she realises her eyes aren't blinking, and they won't stay closed when she tries to push her eyelids down.

Sakura experiments for a few minutes until she manages to glue her upper eyelid to her lower eyelid with dried mucus. At least they won't dry out.

It’s progress. Sakura breathes in, breathes out, and goes to work.

Someone has already begun healing her and Sakura doesn’t question that. Her mind has always been the type to run away without her.

It’s night, and she’s still trying to glue the fragile pieces of her mind back together when Kakashi finds her, Naruto with him.

“Sakura, where were you?!” Naruto’s words strobe through her nerves, shaking loose pieces of her mind that had felt steady before. “Gaara is dead!”

Sakura can’t remember how to talk, so the conversation is short.

After a while, Kakashi reaches out and gently closes her eyelids. “Fix yourself, if you can. I’ll take you home.”

Tsunade fixes it. Her.

Sakura watches, studying what Tsunade does until she thinks she could replicate it. She'll likely need to do it again.

Itachi's genjutsu was good. It gave her time to think.

She's restarting every time she dies, like one of the arcade games Naruto used to like so much. In retrospect, that's obvious.

It would be stupid to test, of course, but it should also be simple to avoid--Sakura made it fifteen years without dying, so doing the same for the rest of her life should be easy.

She’s not sure how many days have passed when Tsunade sits down next to her bed, bathed in early morning sunlight. "That was the nastiest genjutsu aftermath I've seen in decades. Who was it?"

Sakura stares at Tsunade like an idiot. Tsunade’s words are like honey in her mind, moving a thousand times slower than they’d ought to.

The hospital room is white. Streaks of gold sunlight and pools of cool blue shadows paint over that canvas as Sakura considers her words. It's harder than it should be to open her mouth and form his name. "Itachi."

Tsunade shows no hint of it, but Sakura has the strangest feeling that she's surprised. Surely Kakashi reported...? But no, she'd stayed behind to fight...a weak enemy. Kisame had found her after, hadn't he?

"I...killed his partner." Sakura drags the drifting parts of her mind back into place, forcing them to line up through willpower alone. "He was mad."

Tsunade hums.

Birds sing outside. Itachi's hell had no birds. Sakura drinks the water Tsunade hands her. "I don't know what is real," Sakura admits. Since that’s actually a genjutsu side effect, she continues, “I keep dying and waking up in battle.”

“Genjutsu.” Tsunade pokes at Sakura’s head, her chakra bright and brisk inside it. “We’ll keep you here for a few more days. Do you want puzzles or tea parties?”

“The genjutsu was red, though,” Sakura protests mildly. “This isn’t.”

“And you aren’t dead. Pick one or I’ll assign you to art therapy.”

Sakura grimaces. “Don’t like that.”

Tsunade looks fond, rumpled and tired in the early morning light. “Puzzles or tea parties?”

“Puzzles,” Sakura decides, still too slow. Her mind feels like it's trying to slide over gravel, scraping her raw with each thought. Genjutsu recovery is the worst.

Two days later, she’s crawling across a rope bridge to get the lever she thought would open the third gate she needed to finish the puzzle.

Sakura smells the distinctive scent of the hospital’s signature lunch special (congee, it was congee).

*Fourteen*

The blade hits her full-on as Sakura yelps in absolute shock, her skin shredding as Kisame changes the angle and drives the rasps of his blade deep under her skin, draining her of every drop of her chakra.

“What the fuck!” Sakura half-shrieks before the sharks get her.

*Fifteen*

This time she remembers to dodge him, sidestep his sharks, but the water clone gets her with a fucking kunai to the neck.

Sakura bleeds out in the water and spends the time plotting vindictively, absolutely furious. She made it home! She was supposed to be safe, seriously, fuck this--

*Sixteen*

She screams in rage and punches the water so hard that it erupts under them, at least one of the sharks poofing into smoke as it strategically retreats. It angles the water’s surface, sliding Kisame close enough that he’s inside her reach for once.

He’s laughing at her when Sakura takes advantage, hitting him as hard as she can. As hard as she can is extremely hard and it leaves Kisame more red than blue.

Then she sprints as fast as she can away from the riverbank where she’d seen Itachi that one time.

She’s not fast enough. A splinter of red and black sweeps over her vision. Sakura panics and stops her own heart.

*Seventeen*

The river sparkles under her again and Sakura runs away.

It takes her three tries to get it right.

She heads west, toward nothing at all, running until she can’t anymore.

Deep inside the forest she finds a clear pond with a dead tree grown up through the center of it. Dozens of sparrows rest on the dead branches, stirring when she stumbles into the clearing, but not flying away.

Sakura sits, grimly determined, and starts trying to break the genjutsu.

Several hours later, slightly less determined, she takes a break to eat.

It’s very difficult to make someone feel hunger in a genjutsu. The kind that does is more of an intellectual exercise than anything actually useful, because--why would you? What purpose could it serve?

Make it feel more real, sure, but you could just as easily capture someone under such a complete genjutsu, interrogate them, and then blur their memories or kill them.

The point is, massive, elaborate genjutsu is rare. It’s rare because it’s hard to do, and it’s rare because it’s a lot more effort than it’s worth.

Sakura rips all of the grass out of the ground in front of her and watches it while she eats, every blade of grass staying exactly where it should be.

Two days later, Sakura’s head is blindingly painful, her chakra worn down to dregs. She hadn’t even realized kai took chakra to use, but the evidence is pretty irrefutable.

Every part of this felt real, from her aching head to the unwavering realism of the grass and sky.

A genjutsu that let you think it was a genjutsu, yet strong enough to be unbreakable...Itachi’s had been like that. Had it ever truly ended?

If it isn’t a genjutsu, Sakura abandoned her mission and her team.

If it is a genjutsu, she can’t break it, and she still abandoned her mission and her team.

She hates both answers.

Morning of the fourth day, and Sakura throws in the towel. She’d made the wrong choice. This is real.

The genjutsu must have broken when she’d run away. Itachi must have made her think that time was resetting, though hell if she knew why. It seemed so pointless.

“Okay,” Sakura tells the starlings in the dead tree, tying her headband a little tighter. “I was wrong.”

One shits into the pond, which Sakura feels is a particularly scathing response.

“And...I guess I have to go home and tell them,” Sakura says, uncertainly. She hopes, perhaps stupidly, that another course of action will fall into her lap, but she’s not so lucky.

The clearing stays behind her, torn apart by her fists and irrefutably real.

Sakura heads toward home, each step like another shovel of dirt on top of her grave.

“Sakura, where have you been?” Naruto says when he finds her on the evening of the ninth day, only a few miles from home. “Sakura--”

He looks wrecked, his eyes still red from crying. “Sakura, we thought--I thought you died, too.”

Sakura’s heart stops in her chest. “Who--?”

“Gaara and--” Naruto chokes on a sob, like he can’t even get the next name out, and Sakura knows. “He--I couldn’t help him, I didn’t--”

Sakura staggers back a step, then another and another until her shoulders are pressed against the solid bark of a tree. She’s crying, tears carving rivers through the road dust coating her face. “No. No, he’s--not--” Sakura has no idea what she’s trying to say.

She should have been there. She should have been there.

Naruto crashes into her, and they both end up on their knees, Naruto sobbing into her shoulder like his heart is breaking all over again. “I’m so glad you’re okay--”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

The guards at the gate let her head home. Kakashi’s funeral is in the morning.

Her shower’s floor runs black with dirt, not even a hint of blood in it because she’s fine, not so much as a scrape on her coward’s skin.

Sakura doesn’t sleep. She lies awake, wondering if it’ll restart if she dies, or if she’ll just be dead. Or both, dead here and alive there.

Should she leave a note, just in case something happens?

That thought gets her out of bed, sets Sakura on a restless path through her apartment.

She makes it as far as the kitchen table, a notebook open to a blank page. She can’t find a pen. Sakura searches her apartment, ransacks her drawers, and comes up empty.

Their team picture feels like it’s staring at her, and Sakura hears him like it was only yesterday, “Those who abandon the rules are trash, but those who abandon their teammates are worse than trash.”

She did both. Like a fucking idiot, thinking she was in some genjutsu. She let Itachi and Kisame chase after her team because it wasn’t real, because she was too scared of Itachi to fight them.

When dawn comes, she’s still sitting there, her face resting in her palms, tears dripping down her wrists on a one-way quest for her elbows.

The sun creeps upward through the sky and Sakura finally carves a note into her kitchen counter for lack of anything better. She puts their team photo facedown on top, an air of ritual to it.

It’s just in case something happens to her. She wants Naruto to know that...that she’s doing it for their team. She’s just trying again.

That she’s sorry.

*Eighteen*

Dying is terrifying, but waking--

Sakura shouts as her memory jars into her bones, surging under the familiar swinging blade, getting suicidally close to Hoshigaki Kisame.

Joy bursts in her soul like the first rays of the morning sun and Sakura kisses him impulsively, her arms wrapped around Kisame’s shoulders to get her close enough--he’s so fucking tall--

He freezes, his teeth cutting her lips.

Someone sinks a blade through her spine and Sakura laughs, her life spinning away like a dandelion seed in the wind.

*Nineteen*

There’s something freeing about the fight being consequence free. It gives her time to perfect it.

Kisame is dangerous, but he’s the same every single time, just like Itachi.

She goes from dying nine times out of ten to beating Kisame often as not, and there’s a fair amount of enjoyment in that.

Itachi stays in the willows, a death trap that goes off if she looks like she’s going to kill his partner, but never involving himself otherwise.

Sakura’s never hated anything more than she hates Itachi’s genjutsu.

*Forty-Two*

Sakura skates backward on the river, swooping around Kisame’s sharks and clones until she’s directly under Itachi’s hiding place. Then she earthwalks straight into the river bank, and blindly grabs for his feet to try to drag him into the dirt with her.

Itachi cuts off her hands.

*Forty-Three*

She hadn’t really expected that to work.

Itachi is terrifying. Way scarier than Kisame. She tries to explain that to Kisame, in between dodging his stupid sword and his stupider sharks and his extremely stupid clones.

“You’re fighting me, girl!” he says, like she’s somehow offended his pride.

Sakura skates backward, dipping a hand in the water to grab one of his sharks by the tail. “I’m just saying! Genjutsu? That shit is terrifying!” She hauls the shark out of water, ignoring how it frantically snaps at her. The shark can’t reach its own tail and both her and the shark know it.

“You, though, all you have is the sword and the sharks, and it’s kind of kitschy, right? Very Mist-themed, obviously, but so Mist-y that it’s basically a cliche.” Sakura says, hanging onto the shark’s tail with both hands as she swings it through the air, obliterating Kisame’s water clone with it.

The shark squawks at her in a surprisingly shrill voice as she lets go, sending it flying into Itachi’s hiding spot. He won’t do anything about it, but it cheers Sakura up to inconvenience the bastard. “In comparison, Kisame, you have to admit that Itachi has that subtle veneer of fear, that classic je nais sais quoi of terror, you know? He’s downright spooky.”

“Hey!” Kisame protests, trying and failing to skewer her on a water spear. “Itachi’s a nice guy--” he trails off, like he’s suddenly realized what he’s saying.

Sakura stares at him skeptically as Kisame fumbles for words, then curses and tries to stab her with the exact same attack as before. “Okay, like--you know that’s not going to work, and also, Itachi is a psycho.”

“He’s not that bad,” Kisame says, weakly. “Look, just--fucking hold still so I can stab you--”

“Nyah,” Sakura sings, sticking her tongue out at him. “You killed me way too many times, buddy. I learned allll your dirty tricks.”

“You’re looking really lively for a dead girl!” he grunts, trying to block her punch and then cursing when she dents his arm guards and fractures his forearm. “Fucking hell--”

“Thanks!” she chirps, hoping that it’ll annoy him, and she’s delighted when it does. “Anyway, back to your horrible psycho partner, who has also murdered me at least ten times--” It’s actually only seven, but she prefers round numbers and drama.

“I can’t believe you’re saying Itachi’s psycho, psycho!” Kisame retorts. It’s dumb and he knows it, and Sakura relishes his awkwardness. This isn’t the first time she’s tried this conversation, but it’s by far the funniest. “You aren’t even dead!”

“I know, it’s weird, right? I think it’s weird too, but I keep waking up here.” Sakura rambles cheerfully, trying to decide when she’s going to make a break for it. It will have to be soon, she’s getting low on chakra and Itachi will come crawling out of the forest soon. “You know the little girl in that movie? The one with the hair? She comes crawling out of the television?”

“That was a terrible movie,” Kisame says, though he doesn’t deny knowing what she’s talking about. His eyebrows twitch as he tries to kick her and she blocks. She adds enough chakra that he might as well have kicked an iron beam, and he very nearly stumbles back. “It didn’t make any fucking sense, there’s no jutsu that’ll let you crawl through glass, it’s too brittle.”

“True, but way more important, don’t you think Itachi looks like her?”

He laughs before he can stop himself, and Sakura takes that as her cue to bail.

She stabs him in the shoulder with the tanto she stole from his belt, just deep enough to make sure he’ll live while hopefully distracting Itachi from chasing her. “Seeya soon, Kisame!” she calls over her shoulder as she drops an explosive tag in the water and runs up the side of the cliff, leaving more tags on her trail to keep Itachi from trailing her.

Explosive tags are a last resort because they cost an arm and a leg, but Sakura will get these back as soon as she dies, so what does she care?

It’s slightly fresher ground up here, chasing Naruto and Kakashi’s trail. The last few restarts Sakura’s been developing a theory that maybe the Kazekage needs to live for her to break out of this. A bijuu might be powerful enough to twist time, though why it’d pick her...Maybe it’d been an accident?

The ground rumbles under her feet as she sprints down the ragged path torn through the vegetation. A shockwave washes over her skin, the battle ahead clearly still going.

Sakura flips open her medical kit lid, blindly finding and biting down on a soldier pill, the bitterness flooding her mouth. She has sixty seconds before her body starts trying to turn her flesh into pure chakra. Sakura uses the time to chug half her canteen, washing the taste out of her mouth.

She eats a gel ball while she’s at it, grimly chewing and then swallowing the frankly goddawful mix of caffeine, glucose, and salt mixed into a thick gelatin base. The Nara clan kept pushing gels like they were the second coming of the soldier pill, but they were frankly worse. The texture’s like rubber, and they don’t exactly light you on fire for the rest of the fight.

That being said, they also didn’t melt your fat and muscle for chakra, so there were some pluses.

The treeline opens up into a crater that’s carved twenty feet deep into the ground. The blond Akatsuki member is dead, she thinks--half of his head and one of his arms is gone--but she can’t see the Kazekage. Chiyo and Kakashi are alive, though Kakashi is clearly near his limit. It’s fine, she’ll make sure she protects him.

Naruto’s clones are drilling into the deepest part of the pit with Rasengan, and it’s chewing into the bedrock fast but-- “Pull back, Naruto!” Sakura shouts, launching herself into the sky and gathering the soldier pill’s strobe-light chakra into her fist.

The clones scatter and cheer as she dives fist first into the pit, her punch shattering the ground beneath her.

The ground cracks under her sandals as she crashes inside a massive cavern. Naruto’s clones burst into smoke when they hit the ground around her, obscuring her vision. She smells blood. Lots of it. Fresh.

Instincts finely honed by the last half-hour push Sakura to dodge to her left, something sharp and huge narrowly missing her. Sakura goes low to the ground, numbing her nerves to pain in anticipation of failure. She’s only done this fight about ten times, and each time has been a disaster that ended in either her or Gaara dead.

This time, though, Sakura ignores the terrifying giant globe of chakra that’s draining out of Gaara and makes a beeline straight for the equally giant statue that seems like it’s trying to eat the chakra.

A cloud of smoke bursts in front of her, burning her skin and eyes as she charges recklessly through it. Sakura channels more chakra to her legs, launching herself into the giant statue and slugging it in the jaw as the insubstantial TV-static clones on the statue’s outstretched hands yell at her.

At first she thinks it didn’t work, the stone holding against her best punch. Then the cracks start spreading, each of them backlit with bright white light Sakura yells in triumph.

A shockwave of chakra pulverizes her.

*Forty-Four*

She dodges easily out of the way of Kisame’s swing, kicks his legs out from under him, then shifts to make sure the blue shark misses her, then plunges her arm into the water to grab the tail of the blue-grey shark.

She lifts it out, and Kisame is not where he’s supposed to be.

Sakura throws the shark at Itachi instead of Kisame, because she needs her hands free to catch herself as she drops to the water’s surface in a push up that has her almost kissing the blue shark’s back.

Kisame’s massive sword rips some of her hair out, it’s so close. Sakura channels chakra to her palms and toes, and flies forward across the river’s surface like a pond skater, twisting as she passes Kisame to hamstring him. Her kunai skips across the light wire mesh he wears under his pants, then finds the gap and digs brutally deep.

Water gushes out as Kisame’s edges dissolve, and Sakura curses, her heart jumping in sudden fear.

She feels impact more than pain, Kisame’s hidden tanto sinking perfectly between two of her vertebrae.

A sudden impact against the side of her neck, Kisame finishing her off.

It’s over.

...why did he move?

*Forty-Five*

Sakura restarts, and she tries to dodge.

Kisame kicks her across the river, straight into his water clone’s sword.

*Forty-Six*

Sakura dives under the water, punching the sharks out of existence, then activates the chakra scalpels that she hasn’t exactly mastered and throws herself into a furious, suicidal lunge at Kisame. His sword tries to steal her chakra, but Sakura figured out how to keep it for that crucial half-second ages ago.

Her scalpels half-decapitate him, and Sakura is genuinely surprised when he bleeds instead of bursting into water. Kisame stares at her, his weird, beady little eyes blank as he crumples and sinks into the water with her.

“Fuck!” Sakura shouts, because she just set off her least favourite countdown.

She never senses Itachi coming. It’s always--

The world stops, water frozen in mid-air, the breeze abruptly gone. Then Kisame disappears.

*Forty-Seven*

Sakura dodges, then launches herself as far away as she can get in a single jump. She ends up on the far cliffside, staring down at the river.

Kisame looks up at her, alive again. He looks...disquieted, Sakura decides.

Itachi body-flickers out of the trees to stand beside him and they both stare up at her as the waves from the fight slowly calm.

Something has changed.

“What genjutsu is this?” Kisame asks.

Itachi looks at him, and there’s some silent exchange between them that Sakura can’t even guess at. “Seriously?”

Itachi nods and he’s absolutely terrifying. Sakura hates him.

“Well shit.” Kisame seems to think something over, and then he’s grinning up at her, his teeth as sharp as his summons. “You killed me.”

Sakura inches closer. “Do you remember?” she asks, and it’s some kind of insanity that’s making her hope that they did. “Are you restarting, too?”

She doesn’t know how long it’s been. Some loops only lasted minutes, others took over a week before she snapped back to when she started. Sakura is hanging on to the Will of Fire by the skin of her actual teeth to just keep going, but if someone else is in this too--

“You know what this is,” Itachi states, and Sakura’s skin tries to crawl off her body.

“Fuck, why you?” Sakura mutters. Kisame would have been fine. She likes to think she knows him pretty well by now, and he’s not all bad. Kinda weird, but not as inclined to murder as he wants her to think. He always finishes her off promptly, and as a bit of a connoisseur of death, Sakura appreciates that.

Itachi likes to disable or debilitate, then leave her to die slowly. He doesn’t have a single merciful bone in his body.

Itachi cocks his head very slightly to the left, like an overgrown vulture, and says, equally flat: “You have done this many times. You knew precisely how to fight Kisame, but failed as soon as he began changing pattern.”

“You are so spectacularly creepy, how does Kisame even deal?” Sakura says, considering and discarding a half-dozen courses of action.

Itachi’s eyes narrow, and his mouth twitches down at the corners. “You are, of course, too weak to fight him without considerable advantages.”

“And you’re too evil. Kisame’s way less evil and mean and bitchy than you, so he’s way more fun to fight,” Sakura retorts, and it’s a dumb answer, but they’ll just forget--

Oh fuck.

“After all these years, do I finally have a fan club?” Kisame laughs and swings his sword over his shoulder. “Oi, Itachi, what’d you do to piss her off?”

Itachi’s eyes light up red and Sakura slams her eyes shut. He hmphs at her, but holds his place on the river. “Nothing I would be reluctant to do again, I’m sure.” He sounds almost offended, and as gleeful as that makes her feel--

“When I killed you, the world stopped, and then I snapped back to the save point,” Sakura says. “When I died, did it do the same for you?”

They don’t answer, and that’s an answer in itself.

“Then we’re in a state of mutually assured destruction,” Sakura says, and then she smiles. If they try to kill her team, she’ll just kill herself until they give up. It won’t be fun, but at least she won’t have to beat them in a fight to stop them.

Kisame exchanges a wary look with Itachi. "What's the save point?"

"About three minutes ago." Sakura stretches, enjoying the sun sparkling off the river, the breeze on her wet skin. She reminds herself to act cool. Calm. Like a normal person.

“Do you guys want to be friends? We should be friends,” Sakura asks brightly. “You could not try to kill me when it resets, and I won’t kill you?”

The sun darkened slowly, cold lethargy sinking through her bones, and for a second she sees the red sky whitewaterblacktrees--

*Forty-Eight* Sakura whips around under Kisame’s blade and slugs his kneecap into a pink spray of gore. He sheds her back with a glancing blow from his stupid fucking sword because she still couldn’t get away fast enough, but fuck it--

Sakura clings to her chakra with two bleeding hands and fury that felt like it was boiling her alive. “Fuck you, too,” she hisses through gritted teeth as Kisame drops the giant sword and staggers back, his grey skin turning pale pearl white.

Itachi’s there, because she hurt his precious partner, but she knows better than to look at him. Let him stab her, let him find out how fucking little that matters. Sakura will cut his fucking eyes out, see how he likes that.

“Fucking--” Kisame wheezes, his clone wavering, then dispelling as he lost his concentration.

“Kisame.” Itachi looks faintly paler than usual. “Your leg--”

“It’s fucked,” Sakura says brightly, biting down on the seething, bitter fury and hatred. She needs to make a good impression, after all. “If you try that again, I’ll rip your eyeballs out and feed them to you,” Sakura says, meeting Itachi’s eyes with reckless, incandescent fury. All she wants is--why can’t they just be reasonable?

The red and white and black snap into place around her.

“I will die a thousand times to kill you once,” Sakura promised, cutting off his inane, irrelevant prattling about time. “You think the time in this filthy genjutsu has any meaning to me? I’ll slaughter your boyfriend in front of you until you remember his destroyed corpse more than you remember him, and he’ll feel every second of it.

“I’ll rip him limb from limb, pull off his jaw and fucking hand it to you while he drowns in his own blood,” Sakura says, mildly surprised at how many ideas are springing into her head, fully formed in her fury. “Then I’ll rip out your eyes and feed them to you. Or to him. I don’t know, which is more fucked up?”

There was a pause, the ticking of an invisible clock stretching between them. “The first, I think,” Itachi said. “But it’s a difficult decision.”

“I could feed one to you and one to him, I guess.” Sakura sighs, tilting her head back to stare at the endless sky. “Both are awful.” She’s tired, really. She’ll make their life hell so they don’t do the same back to her, but-- “Why didn’t you want to be friends? We could have had so much fun.”

She hears him breathe in. The milk-white water laps at her feet, disorientation crawling inside her skin as the genjutsu slides through her skin. She hates this.

Tsukuyomi is not just a genjutsu, it’s a psychic attack on the connection between her soul, her chakra, and her body, and a violent dismemberment of her sense of self. It hurts.

But she’s been through this before, and she has the scars to prove it.

Sakura’s on his cross, and she’s in the trees, in the water, in the folds of his cloak. She’s cut apart, but the pieces are still there, and each piece is still her.

“What are you doing?” Itachi asks, his frown a stark blue-white on the black canvas of his face. “...where are you?”

“If I’m not here, then who is?” Sakura asks. Behind him, sketched in black and shocking white, her other self grins at her and holds a too-long finger to her lips. Don’t tell.

Sakura grins back, and reinforces her second self with every iota of spite and anger that she’d ever felt. And hatred, because she’s never hated anyone as much as she hates this man.

He finally looks over his shoulder, searching for the malevolence he can surely feel, but her shadow crawls into his, a dark blur at the edge of his sight. “This is my genjutsu. You cannot reverse it.”

“I’ve been here before,” Sakura says. She inches her voice toward perkier and happier, though in truth she wants to puke. Her head feels like he’s peeling it like a hardboiled egg. “I’ve done this before. And I’ve torn you apart in this petty little illusion, but you never remembered. That hurts, you know. All the awful things we’ve done, and I’m the only one who remembers.”

She’s lying, she’s lying so much. He’d released the genjutsu early once because she attacked him with her second self, but if he figures out what she’s doing, this will never work again. She’s got to--this has to work. It has to.

“I ate your eyes,” Sakura says, straining every bit of acting skill she has to sound wistful. Bone white tears drip down her face.

Itachi looks as alarmed as he ever does, which isn’t much. It’ll have to do.

Her shadow spills out from his feet like ink blooming in the water as Sakura desperately remembers every horrible death she’s lived through, pushing her despair and killing intent through the morass of Itachi’s chakra.

He reels back, looking down in what she prays is horror and Sakura sends her other self swarming up his legs. Her second self lunges straight for Itachi’s face, her jaw dislocating in a shrieking howl of fury.

Sakura laughs wildly and rips through the burning layers of Itachi’s chakra to reach her body of flesh and bone and blood. It’s frozen in time on the river, and Sakura crawls inside, alone.

Shredding her brain is a relief.

*Forty-Nine*

She slips under Kisame’s blade, and skates away from him toward the riverbank, where she sprawls on the smooth rocks and drinks from her canteen.

They approach and say something to her. Sakura ignores them because she can’t understand words just yet. Instead she stares into Itachi’s wheeling red eyes and grins, tilting her head inquisitively. Youanmeletsggogogoogogooggo. Bitch.

Sakura binds the new cracks in her mind back together while she waits, the puzzle the Tsukuyomi made of her as familiar as the riverbank by now.

They came to a decision, talking around her uncomprehending body like it’s just another rock. She feels their attention shift to her, and Sakura drags her molasses-like thoughts to order.

“Friends,” Itachi says, like it’s a foreign word. “We--accept your offer.”

“Oh good,” Sakura replies, bouncing to her feet as her brain wobbles ponderously inside her skull. She kept full, brazen eye contact with Itachi because if Tsunade has taught her anything it's that you don’t get jack shit by backing down. “Let’s go kill that blond asshole!”

“Wait, we didn’t agree to that--” Kisame protests.

“What, you chicken?” Sakura tosses over her shoulder as she races towards her next death.

It’s unclear if they follow her.

She doesn’t need the soldier pill or the gel this time, and she gets there fast enough to punch the angry blond Akatsuki member through the ground and into the cave underneath.

Sakura lands on top of him, the stone floor cratering from the impact. The blond wheezes as his eyes roll back in his head and blood pours out of his nose and mouth. Sakura slits his throat to be thorough, then starts running toward--

The statue is missing, nothing but a massive pile of rubble where it’d stood, and a bunch of static-y clones still staring at it from the tips of the hands surrounding it.

The poison cloud comes out of nowhere, and Sakura doesn’t exactly dodge. Sakura numbs her skin as the poison starts to burn.

The oppressively thick chakra that had been streaming out of the Kazekage is sort of oozing backward into him as he screams and writhes, which is probably a good sign.

Sakura winces in sympathy as her skin starts to blister and bleed. She can’t feel it, but it’s pretty ugly. Her lungs are also filling up with fluid, which, painless or not, is deeply uncomfortable.

Naruto catches Gaara before he can crash into the ground, and Chiyo’s absolutely dominating the weird puppet ninja that had poisoned Sakura.

Kakashi looks like he’s trying to help, but Chiyo is having none of it. If Sakura ever manages to grow old, she wants to grow old like Chiyo.

All of the weird rainbow-static-clones have disappeared, which leaves only the weird puppet guy--Sakura likes their chances.

Not so much her chances--Sakura is definitely dying, because on further reflection, the cloud hadn’t been poison, it’d been vapourized acid, and she doesn’t have anything on hand to neutralize it. Sakura rips a couple of puppets apart, as she watches Naruto and Gaara.

The demon chakra around Gaara churns violently in the air--almost anxiously. Weird. Gaara is screaming and trying to claw his own face off as the chakra pours into him through his eyes and mouth. Naruto is holding him down and--oh. Screaming for her help.

The cave is getting darker as her vision grows dim, but she wants to see what’s wrong with Gaara for the next time. Sakura ambles over.

She kneels beside them, and the bijuu chakra sears her in ways her numbing jutsu can’t prevent. It feels like being scoured from the inside, an iron rasp drawn along her bones. Sakura tries not to look at her hands as she makes the seals for a diagnostic jutsu.

“Oh, that’s not good,” she says.

Naruto looks up at her and stops, his eyes widening in shock. “Sakura--holy shit, Sakura! Your face--”

“He’s dying,” Sakura says, and the demonic chakra shrieks in fury. Gaara mirrors it, his back bowing off the rock as he arches in absolute agony, his internal organs desperately trying to heal even as the chakra boils him alive. “That’s not good,” she adds, biting her lip. She immediately regrets it when her skin tries to slough off under her teeth.

“Are you okay?” Naruto says, and she forgets why he’s asking--it doesn’t matter, does it? She’ll just restart back at the fight with Kisame. “Sakura!”

Ah yes, Naruto didn’t know that. “It’s fine,” she says, only it’s more of a gurgle.

She’s really starting to not feel very good. She doesn’t usually die this slow--Kisame always makes it so fast. He’s nice like that.

“Sakura!” Naruto reaches out like he wants to shake her, but freezes, his hands hovering over her shoulders. “No, no, no--you can heal yourself, can’t you heal yourself? You have to heal yourself!”

“Don’t worry so much,” Sakura says, and she feels like crying with him. She never wants to make him sad, she just needs data.

A puddle is forming under her, and somewhere in the back of her mind Sakura is screaming.

Death is normal, frequent, often redone. Death is dying, and Sakura doesn’t want to.

That’s when a giant venus fly trap eats her.

Yeah. Sakura has no idea either.

*Fifty*

Kisame breaks away, and the sharks disappear. “So how’d that go?” he asks. He grins at her as he swings his massive sword onto his back, hostering it for now. “Rescued the princess?”

Sakura sticks her tongue out. “Went perfectly,” she lies. “Up until the venus fly trap. Do you work with a venus fly trap? Or was that some kind of coincidence?”

His eyebrows rise. “What’d you do to piss that guy off?”

Itachi is next to Kisame, like he’d been there from the beginning. “You ran into Zetsu?”

“Itachi, we can’t just tell her--”

“We agreed to be teammates,” Itachi says, his mouth twitching into an extremely faint frown. “We must hold to that.”

Sakura stares at him, then Kisame, who shrugs like he’s trying to say yeah, I don’t know what’s gotten into him either.

“Uh, yeah. Teammates.” It’s meant to be sarcastic, but Sakura's been drilled on teamwork for over a decade. Her traitorous instincts shift so fast that she nearly loses her balance.

Yes, these are teammates, yes, she must cooperate, yes, she needs to-- Sakura blinks rapidly, rubs her hand across her eyes, then sighs. Itachi’s not wrong. Dead idiots get to be picky about backup. Living ones make it work. “You’re right. I’m Tsunade’s apprentice. Do either of you need healing?”

Kisame steps back warily, but Itachi doesn’t. “Thank you for your offer,” Itachi says, and she thinks--there’s just something about him that’s so familiar. “I’m good to continue.”

They both stare expectantly at Kisame. “I thought you didn’t like him?” he asks weakly, pointing at Itachi. “Is this is--was there a secret code message there or something?”

“It’s better to be a team.”

“Teammates are very important,” Itachi adds.

“Fail alone, succeed together,” Sakura agrees.

“Those who abandon the mission are trash, but those who abandon their teammates are worse than trash.”

“I thought they were joking when they said it was some kind of cult,” Kisame says, but Sakura doesn’t listen, her attention drawn laser tight to Itachi.

He stares back, his eyes red as death.

“You’ve worked with Kakashi.”

“He was my squad captain.”

Her instincts shift again, part of her screeches in protest. “I see.” Sakura nods, because she does, now. Itachi and Kisame are her teammates for this mission. Kisame is Itachi’s teammate, that’s why he kept losing his shit when she killed him. “I have restarted over thirty times. Several times, Kakashi has died.”

“What the fuck, Itachi--?”

“Kisame,” Itachi doesn’t look at him, doesn’t vary the tone of his voice in the slightest. He reminds her of the some of the weirder ANBU she’s met, but maybe that’s normal. He’d been part of it before he went insane, hadn’t he? “Are you on this team or are you off?”

“Kisame is nice,” Sakura protests, the weird affection she’s gained for her favourite murderer rising up. “And we all get thrown back here if he dies, so--”

Her skin prickles, goosebumps rising along her arms as the water under their feet turns glass smooth. “Do you trade loyalties so easily, Itachi?” Kisame asks, and there’s something raw about the way he says it.

“One might say that I do not give them up so easily. And we do not need to kill Akatsuki members, Kisame.”

“They’re my enemies,” Sakura offers. “I can do it if you’re squeamish.” Kisame looks appalled, which isn’t really the reaction she was looking for. “Or we can...pacify them?” she tries.

Itachi turns his eyes on Kisame, and it feels like he’s drawing a blade. “We must investigate, Kisame. We can do nothing without more information.”

Sakura isn’t a good chakra sensor, but she doesn’t have to be. Kisame is a wild ocean dammed with toothpicks, his usual smile gone. “Information.”

Itachi looks away from Kisame and the tension simmers down. “We have--’restarted’--eight times. She is too weak to have caused this, but is indisputably related. We must find more information.”

Kisame nods slowly, his jaw tight, but it feels less like a teammate slotting into place than a bomb waiting to explode.

“My working theory is that a tailed beast might have enough power to make a--” Sakura makes a vague gesture, still not sure what the hell to call this. “--a circle in time? The Kazekage’s bijuu, in case that’s not clear.”

No one has a better idea, so that’s the direction they go.

*Fifty*

Kisame ends the fight between the blond Akatsuki (Deidara, apparently), Chiyo, Naruto, and Kakashi by trapping all of them in jelly-like balls of water, then Itachi drops them all into a genjutsu. It takes three seconds at the most.

“Okay, so were you not actually trying to kill me, or what?” Sakura asks them before she cracks open the cave’s ceiling with her fist just to feel like she’s contributing.

Kisame curses when the ground crumbles under his feet, twisting mid-air to grab Deidara and Kakashi, throwing them out of the sinkhole she’d made. “I thought you wanted him alive!”

She numbs her nerves as she falls, half-expecting to land in another acid cloud.

The ground cracks under their feet, and the cave is--

The bijuu chakra is gone. Gaara’s on the ground, and she doesn’t think he’s breathing. The statue is still broken into ten thousand pieces.

Sakura stares at it, then looks back up to the sun, trying to gauge how much time has passed. She’s almost certain this is earlier than she’s gotten here before.

Had her punch come back with her? ...cool.

“What the fuck happened to the statue?” Kisame asks. He looks up to the fingertips of the cupped hands where the clones had stood, then back to the ruin of the statue. “And where the fuck is the one-tailed bijuu?”

He sounds pissed, and Sakura’s trapped with him for the foreseeable future and past. “There was never a statue,” she lies, making her way through the rubble to the Kazekage. “But last time...” she crouches by his head, checking for life with a jutsu she’s barely ever needed. “The Bijuu was still in the cave last time I made it here. And the Kazekage was still dying, not dead.”

Itachi lands beside her, his cloak flaring behind him like a cape before it hits the ground with a wet slap.

Wait, when did he get wet?

She barely feels the needle enter her neck. The poison freezes her before she can shout and she slowly tips to the side, paralysis spreading through her as fast as her blood pumps.

Kisame crumples a second later, meeting the ground with a dull thud and a rustle of cloth.

Somehow, she hadn’t expected Itachi to use poison, Sakura thinks, wishing she could scratch the itchy spot that had suddenly appeared on the tip of her nose.

The chakra strings lift her upright, and Sakura realizes that she’s an idiot. Itachi’s skin melts into sand, and Chiyo clucks at her. “Now what would that Slug-Girl think to see you working with your targets?”

Sakura doesn’t reply on account of being paralysed.

“Foolish young thing,” Chiyo murmurs, sliding another needle into Sakura’s skin.

Chiyo leaves Sakura draped on top of Kisame’s body as she returns to the Kazekage, kneeling with a grunt of effort, the crackling of her joints echoing through the deserted cave.

Kisame shudders underneath her, every muscle tight as steel. If Sakura could feel her chakra, she’d give him the mercy of a swift death, same as he’s gifted her so many times.

She can’t, though. Sakura’s drifting into the sun, her numbing jutsu ensuring she doesn’t feel a thing as her muscles contract so hard they start snapping her bones. Kisame jolts, a dozen small popping sounds echoing as something inside him breaks.

The sound of someone collapsing to the ground filters through the wobbling world, and a man’s voice says something, but she’s not sure what.

It takes a long time for them to die.

*Fifty-One*

Kisame drops like a stone, every jutsu he had active shattering.

Sakura dives into the river after him, grabbing his wrist before the current could drag him into the rocks, then hauls him back up onto the water’s surface. His sword is a lost cause, but it’s too heavy to be pulled downstream; Kisame can get it from the river bottom later.

Sakura checks his pulse and finds it racing under the thin skin of his neck. He shudders, his strange white on black eyes rolling in his skull.

He heaves in a breath, then another, and starts trying to stand. He doesn’t remember to water walk, or forgets they’re on water and Sakura has to pull him up again. “It’s over,” she says, feeling more sympathy than she’d expected.

Itachi still hasn’t made it out of the woods, so Sakura hoists Kisame over her shoulder and carries him towards Itachi’s hiding spot.

Every step she takes makes her feet squelch in her sandalls, makes her remember Itachi’s cloak slapping wet against the rocks and her idiotic thought: when did he get wet?

She’d fallen for henge. “Man, I deserved that one,” she says. “We’re just lucky Kakashi-sensei didn’t break the genjutsu, too.”

“I can walk,” Kisame mutters into her back, so Sakura eases him down and steadies him while he catches his balance. “Fuck.” He staggers into her, barely holding himself upright. “Where’s Itachi?”

“Over here somewhere,” Sakura says, grabbing Kisame’s arm and pulling it over her shoulder, then wrapping her arm around his waist. He’s still slouching toward horizontal, so she grabs hold of his belt, too. “It’s all right, you can walk it off. You just need to wait out the aftershocks.”

“Damage doesn’t--?” he asks, then retches once before vomiting neatly between his sandals. “Fuck!”

“You aren’t injured, it’s just echoes.” Sakura sees a flash of red between green leaves, and leads them both toward it. “Itachi, you awake?”

Itachi’s eyes are vivid red, blood dripping like tears down his ice-white face, his ink-black hair tangled in the bush he’d collapsed into.

Redandwhiteandblack slips into her mind like a knife.

Sakura closes her eyes, helps Kisame sit next to Itachi, propping him up against a tree. She shakes it off.

They look like failed clones, shuddering and trembling on a bed of crushed grass and flowers. She’s going to miss her chance to go to help Kakashi if she stays, but he’s usually fine if Kisame and Itachi don’t find him and there’s no chance of that this round.

She sits between them, ready to wait. Just to be certain, Sakura runs through a diagnostic jutsu on Kisame, finds him just as healthy as she’s expecting, then uses the same jutsu on Itachi.

Her eyebrows rise, and her fingers flick through the healseals again, slower this time. Itachi’s eyes keep sliding over her, trying to focus and failing. Makes sense, given that he has both cataracts as opaque as a Hyuuga’s and glaucoma.

The fact that he’s 80% blind might not matter, though, given that he’s going to die in a year if he doesn’t get his lungs regrown, either choking to death or from the anemia.

“Wow.” Sakura sits on her heels and asks Itachi, “Who gave you blood root?” She’s pretty sure the cataracts are normal, but the chances of a ninja having all the symptoms of blood root poisoning naturally at Itachi’s age are roughly the same as a ninja with a knife wound having fallen on a kitchen knife. Not impossible, just much less likely.

Itachi pulls himself together, his eyes dulling to black rings around opalescent pupils. He must have been using genjutsu to hide them. He takes a square of fabric from a hidden pocket and wets it from his canteen, then wipes the blood from his face, his hands trembling. “Is this--why you prefer Kisame?” Itachi asks.

She has no idea if he’s joking. “Swift deaths don’t do much,” she says anyway. “It’s the long ones that echo.”

“And yet you’re fine,” Itachi says, the tremors in his voice smoothing out, his blind eyes finding hers with eerie accuracy. “How is that?”

Sakura isn’t an idiot. She knows a threat when she hears one. “I have a jutsu I use when I think I’m going to die, it keeps me from feeling pain. Makes it a lot harder to fight, though. I exploded my own hand once, couldn’t feel that I was mis-timing the recoil on my punch.”

“Teach us?” Kisame asks. “As--teammates.”

“Of course.” Sakura stands and stretches, then yawns. “We might as well stay here. I need to rest and both of you should, too.” She wrings out her hair and sits to pull off her sandals, hanging them off a nearby branch to dry.

“What’s blood root?” Kisame asks her later, after Itachi’s fallen asleep. “You asked Itachi who gave it to him.”

The fire crackles in front of them. Itachi is as close to it as he can get without crawling into the flames. Sakura’s not surprised. He’s probably cold all the time at this point. The sun still isn’t fully set, but Sakura’d insisted on the fire to dry her clothes, and Itachi had gone along with her over Kisame’s protests.

“Poison,” she eventually says. “A slow one.”

As Tsunade’s apprentice, one of the first things Tsunade made her learn was how to read a room with no cues she’d ever be able to put her finger on. It’s a critical skill for med-nin.

She’s pretty sure that Kisame is extremely upset.

“It’s a pretty common poison in the Land of Waterfall, though not for combat use. It’s also a regional delicacy.”

“People eat it on purpose?”

“You have to eat it for a couple months straight for the damage to be irreversible, and even then it’s a really slow death. Concentrated, I think it’s something like a drop or two every two weeks for a minimum of three or four months,” Sakura adds. “It’s a great assassination poison. Makes it looks like they caught a fatal case of some mysterious disease, they waste away over a year or two, and you’ve gotten away with murder.”

Kisame hasn’t gotten less upset at any point in their conversation. “And they die within a year or two of being poisoned? No chance of a longer timeline?”

The sun sinks behind the horizon while Sakura thinks about it. “Could be three years, maybe. But if it was that long ago, he’d be borderline comatose.”

Tired of tiptoe-ing around it, she adds, “He would have been poisoned one or two years ago over a period of three to six months. Anyone who had access to his food or water on a semi-regular basis at the time could have done it.”

“I see.”

They are, all three of them, teammates right now. “It doesn’t have to be fatal, but you'd need the Hokage herself to fix his lungs." She presses her knuckles into her lip to keep from talking, because nothing she says here is going to be helpful.

Itachi rolls onto his back, staring blindly at them. She's not sure if he knows his genjutsu broke, but she's equally unsure how to bring it up. "How long do I have?"

"If you aren't dead by next year, you'll be wishing you were."

"They increased the bounty on you by ten million two years ago," Kisame says quietly. "Couple months later, Kazuku insisted we help him work that surveillance mission."

"That's true," Itachi says. He closes his eyes pensively. "Kisame, will you help?"

"Of course."

She'd have to be deaf to not hear the fondness in Kisame's voice, and Sakura's suddenly really glad she didn't kiss him when he could remember it.

"Statue is still fucked," Kisame says sadly, tossing a shard of it aside. "Think we have a backup one lying around somewhere?"

Sakura pokes around where the Kazekage's body had been. He's gone, of course, but she's pretending that she's looking for clues. They have no reason to suspect she broke the statue, and as long as she looks helpful and innocent, that's how it'll stay.

She should probably fish for information, though. Might be suspicious not to. "Is the statue important?"

Kisame glances over, and doesn't seem to notice her nerves. "Mostly an empty cocoon. I don't think it had the power to trap us like this."

The one-tailed bijuu had been flowing into the statue's mouth the first few times she saw it. "...It was a bijuu jar?" Were they fucking serious? They were killing jinchuuriki to put their bijuu in a box? "You know, when they said you guys were hunting jinchuuriki, I assumed you were going to use them, not start a bijuu butterfly collection."

"Ah, well. When you're a missing nin, hobbies are hard to come by." Kisame wanders towards her, apparently done with the statue she'd broken. "You found anything?"

Sakura shook her head. "I'm not much of a tracker, to be honest. Someone took him out of here, but I have no idea if he was alive or dead when it happened."

Itachi's footsteps echo as he makes his way back in from the shattered gates that had sealed the cave. "The Kazekage was unconscious when he entered the cave, correct?"

Sakura shrugs, then realizes he wasn't asking her.

"Yeah, Sasori said he was sleeping like a baby the whole time." Kisame confirms.

Itachi hums, his face like perfect porcelain and his eyes pure deep black. She can't tell that there's a genjutsu, even knowing that it's there. "I believe the Kazekage broke himself out."

"Impossible," Sakura protests. "He's super dead by the time they finish with Deidara, and we didn't interfere at all."

Itachi raises his eyebrow at her, holds out his fist and tilts it.

Sand pours out in a steady stream.

"...the timeline is changing," Sakura says. "But it never changed before." She's off balance, the foundation of what she’d thought she knew shaken. "Why would it now?"

"Maybe because you broke the statue?" Kisame guesses. "Because it definitely wasn't broken before we started restarting with you."

"What statue," Sakura says, her voice squeaking. She curses herself for being a terrible liar. "I never saw it?" Her voice lilts up into a question.

"We were two of the spirit clones in the summoning. We watched you destroy it," Itachi tells her, looking very faintly confused.

Well fuck.

"Nice punch," Kisame adds.

She laughs awkwardly, nearly crossing her eyes as she tries to keep them both in view at the same time. "You aren't mad?"

"Already killed you for it. No use crying over lost kunai." Kisame shrugs, then laughs at her. "Wait, you thought we didn't know?"

"Were you trying to hide information, Sakura?" Itachi asks solemnly. "We are teammates."

He's right. Sakura pouts. "I didn't want you to kill me again.”

“So what was the original timeline?” Kisame asks. “How much variation is there?”

Sakura shrugs."Near as I can tell, it started when Kisame killed me the first time. I was thrown back a couple of minutes, but I thought it was a genjutsu.

"I'm not a match for either of you, so I died seven or eight times before I managed to kill Kisame. Itachi appeared then and dropped me into Tsukuyomi."

She eyes Itachi warily, but--teammates must trust to get trust. "Tsukuyomi is brutal. I think you killed me a half dozen times before I could coordinate my body enough to run. Neither of you followed.

"Kakashi and Naruto found me a day or two after. I couldn't remember how to talk at that point, and it was very difficult to do pretty much anything, actually. They told me that the Kazekage was dead."

"Where was Chiyo?" Kisame interrupts. "Did they say anything about her?"

Sakura shook her head. "It wasn't immediately after today. I don't think she would have come to look for me with them, so... yeah, unknown status for her.

"Kakashi and Naruto took me back to Konoha, and Tsunade fixed me. I was just starting genjutsu recovery when the loop reset without me dying."

Itachi interrupts this time. "Are you certain you didn't die?"

"Pretty certain.” She thought about it, then shrugged. That was seven Tsukuyomi ago. Sakura’s memory is like moth-eaten cloth right now. “Maybe.

"I decided it had to be a genjutsu, so I escaped the fight and tried to break it. Nothing worked, and it was too realistic. The effort level for a genjutsu like this would be wildly out of proportion with me being the target of it." Sakura licks her lips, then grabs her canteen from her belt and drinks.

Sakura briefly considers mentioning that she's fairly good at seeing through and breaking genjutsu, but she's talking to Itachi Uchiha. It'd be like trying to boast about her medical skills to Tsunade.

"I went back to Konoha. This time, Kakashi and the Kazekage had died. I decided to try to trigger the reset, and succeeded."

"There's a way to reset the loop?"

"Death," Itachi answers for her. "You killed yourself."

Sakura tries to smile, but her face feels wrong. "Yep! I've used it a few times, when I had failed an objective or was about to die extra horribly. Chiyo's poison made it impossible for me to use chakra or I would have mercy killed us."

"So you fled and Kakashi lived, then you fled, and he did not. What did you do differently?" Itachi asks.

He’s right, damn him. Sakura's only a tiny bit bitter that she hadn't realized that herself. "I don't know. Went in a different direction, maybe?"

"Interesting."

"That was probably us," Kisame says thoughtfully. "We would have tracked her at least a little, so the timing of when we made it here could have changed."

"Did Kakashi die any other times?"

"A couple," Sakura says. "If I make it here before they finish fighting the blond guy with the hands--" Sakura holds her hands up, palms out, and wiggles her fingers to try to indicate the mouths on his palms. "--I think either Kakashi or I died every time. If I get there after they kill the blond, it's just me who dies down here. He's usually fine if I don't show up at all, as long as I make sure you’re both distracted."

Itachi hums. "Then you broke the ceiling, and decided to destroy the statue. The subsequent shockwave killed everyone."

"Did you get to see what happened after it exploded?”

Itachi shook his head. "No. I saw you dissolve before the spirit clone dispelled, and it was a few seconds after that when the shockwave killed us, too."

"Maybe it was the dying that made you join me? But if that's true--shit. Is everyone else restarting, too?"

"There's no way Sasori is. He does the exact same thing every time the loop restarts," Kisame says.

"You guys can see in here when we reset?"

"We get a few minutes, but the spirit clones rely on the statue. They run out of chakra pretty fast without it." Kisame looks over at the rubble again, frowning.

"Each loop, the time the spirit clones stay active has decreased, and the One-Tail's chakra has grown weaker,” Itachi says, his eyes locked on the sand cupped in his hand. Sakura doubts he can actually see it.

"The statue and the bijuu are dying echoes," he concludes. "At this rate, I expect the clones will be gone entirely within the next five loops."

"Fuck," Sakura mutters. As desperately as she's been trying to change things, having them change on their own is a terrifying proposition.

"On the upside, it looks like we're getting infinite second chances to figure it out." Kisame sighs, his mouth twisting into a frown as he looks at Sakura. He's probably disappointed that she isn't a more useful teammate--Sakura is also disappointed about that.

"On the downside, we don't know why it started, and have no idea what will trigger its end. If it ends with us having failed--" Sakura says, because she's been thinking of nothing else for at least a month. "Then we're going to be stuck with that."

"Then we will perfect the mission and complete it every time." Itachi takes a drink from his canteen, then continues, "We will split up here, and seek answers regarding what happened earlier in this loop. Aim to expand your knowledge of what has happened since the loop began, so that we may compare future loops. Do not die to restart, we will seek the true end."

Huh, Sakura thinks, he's pretty good at this. "Next loop. Will we help my team?"

Itachi neither looks at him, nor moves a muscle, but it's obvious he’s deferring to Kisame.

"We'll decide the mission scope next time. Not enough information yet," Kisame decides. "But yeah. We'll head towards their fight immediately to keep Hatake, the Nine-Tail’s host, and Deidara alive. Itachi, maybe don't try to genjutsu Chiyo."

"That works," Sakura says when they look at her expectantly. She has questions (a lot of them) and she's a little terrified that they're going to decide the mission is something that she can't live with, but--

It's such a relief to not be alone.

Sakura teaches them the pain numbing jutsu before they split up.

Her goal is Konoha. Kisame is headed back to the base where most of Akatsuki should be, apparently, and Itachi's sneaking into the nearest civilian village to observe the marketplace.

It's a four hour run back home.

Gives her a lot of time to consider the fact that she went missing for over a day on an S-Rank mission with grave diplomatic consequences.

She's probably going to end up in interrogation, Sakura decides unhappily.

Three hours in, she takes in a designated rest station to eat and fill her canteen. It's not a fancy one, just a tin roof to keep out the rain, a rain collector for refilling water bottles, a fire pit, and a couple hammocks that could be set up if you were going to wait for a while.

Stopping outside a rest station sent an SOS to passing patrols. Maybe she should try to draw attention, it'd seem more innocent, wouldn't it? But Sakura doesn't want to talk to anyone. And she's fine, more or less. She has absolutely nothing urgent to report, either.

It'd be more suspicious to draw attention.

She eats the terrible gel, her stomach churning as it processes food for the first time in...Sakura has to think to figure out how long it's been.

This stomach would have eaten on the run out of Konoha, two and a half days ago. But Sakura hasn't eaten in the last few loops. She hasn't been hungry.

She still isn't hungry.

Sakura sets up a hammock on the hooks inside the shelter, studying her hands as she does. Her hands are shaking. Motion is unaffected. She does feel strange, but it's a very nebulous type of strange.

Maybe she's just searching for reasons to not go back. The thought is unpleasant.

The canteen spills when she opens it and tries to drink, water soaking her face and chest. Her hands seem to be shaking a lot. She should get out of the hammock and keep going.

Sakura screws the cap on, and sets the canteen on her stomach. There's no jutsu she's done more often than the diagnostic one, and her hands flow through the seals with ease that had been entirely absent with the canteen.

That probably means she's fine. The diagnostic jutsu is just to be able to tell Tsunade she checked.

"What the fuck did you do to yourself?" Tsunade asks incredulously. "Your brain scan looks like you're in a coma and looking at your chakra is making the Hyuuga medics nauseous."

"Oh," Sakura says unenthusiastically, mostly because Tsunade seems to be waiting for a response.

"Was it Itachi?" Tsunade looks like she wants to hunt him down personally, which Sakura appreciates, even if it seems strange.

Glowing hands on her temples drag Sakura back to earth. "Concentrate," Tsunade orders her. "You can't drift like that."

"I fixed it," Sakura protests, her hands shifting aimlessly over the hospital sheets, fingertips brushing over the cotton. "I remembered how."

"You should be dead, so yes, you did something. 'Fixed it' is, however, a wild overestimation of your own abilities." Tsunade snaps at her, exhaustion carved into the lines of her face, and that’s Sakura’s fault too, isn’t it?

To her shame, Tsunade's scolding cracks something already broken inside her, and Sakura crumples. She fights free of Tsunade's hands and curls up as small as she can make herself in a pathetic attempt to hide.

Sakura can't control the thready, whiny gasps of air she keeps making, and the humiliation of knowing that Tsunade’s watching--she nearly stops her heart again to make it go away.

Tsunade sits on the edge of Sakura’s bed and hauls her bodily into an extremely good hug. Sakura would be thrilled by it if she weren’t a gross mess.

“You are my student,” Tsunade says, rough and low. Her hand cups the back of Sakura’s head like she’s holding something precious. “I will heal you and destroy anyone who means to harm you.”

Sakura hugs her back, unable to stop herself. “I’m sorry,” she apologises, still wracked with sobs that she can’t stop. “I don’t know why--”

“It’s a goddamn miracle that you’re alive.” Tsunade’s arms tighten around her. She could break Sakura better than anyone else in the world, and she never chooses to. One of many reasons Sakura adores her. “In light of that, you can get snot on my coat, kid.”

“Oh no,” Sakura laughs and cries, scrambling in Tsunade’s iron grip until she can reach the tissue box on the nightstand and pull one out. She wipes Tsunade’s shoulder clean and then dries her own face, rubbing the grit out of her eyes.

“Dumbass kid,” Tsunade mutters, and her chakra envelops Sakura in sweet relief. “Rest.”

She sags into Tsunade, breathing in the familiar scent of alcohol, ink, and soap that’s embedded in everything Tsunade owns. “I’ll do better,” Sakura promises.

“It’s not going to happen again, Sakura,” Tsunade says, tucking her back into bed as Sakura drifts into a painless sleep. “I’ll promise you that.”

*Fifty-Two*

The sunlit greenhouse disappears, and Sakura’s falling into the water, sharks swirling around her.

Fuck, she thinks bitterly, already missing that loop. She’d spent most of it asleep or drugged into a haze while Tsunade and a dozen Yamanaka elders poked at her mind, but it’d been a very restful time.

The sharks disappear before Sakura has to punch them, so at least Kisame came back, too. His hand plunges into the water next to her, and Sakura grabs it, letting him haul her to the surface.

“Let’s go,” Itachi says as soon as Sakura’s standing.

Sakura knocks Deidara out of the air with a well-aimed boulder, and Kisame catches Naruto and Kakashi in the same bubble prison he’d used before.

“Hey!” Deidara shouts, scrambling out of the crater his body left when he’d crashed into the ground. “What’s the big idea, Kisame? I almost had them!”

“Where the fuck is Chiyo?” Kisame shouts to Itachi as he adds another bubble for Deidara.

“She’s not here,” Itachi replies sharply, taking a defensive position next to Kisame. “The Kazekage is--”

Two things happen then.

First, Sakura finds Chiyo’s corpse about twenty meters away from the fight, collapsed in the grass without a single wound on her.

Second, the ground under them erupts into a volcano of sand and puppets, and the Kazekage rises like an avenging god, tear trails of blood painted across his gaunt face.

Kisame and Itachi move as one, launching themselves toward the forest with Deidara screaming furious protests from Kisame’s shoulder.

Technically, the Kazekage’s an ally.

Practically, he’s absolutely terrifying and the only reason Sakura doesn’t run is because Kakashi and Naruto are still trapped in Kisame’s bubble prison jutsu. She skirts the Kazekage’s seething curtain of sand and runs straight for her team.

The Kazekage screams, his voice inhuman in its ruin, and the sky turns black.

*Fifty-Three*

“Fuck,” Sakura says. Did he crush her? Or did his killing intent stop her heart?

“Fuck,” Kisame agrees, running his hand through his hair. “That was something else.”

“I’ll genjutsu all of them into running. Let’s go.” Itachi blurs as he runs up the cliff, and Sakura chases after him.

The Kazekage is half a kilometer behind them when he rips out of the ground, his chakra a pulsating beacon in the sky.

Naruto snaps through Itachi’s genjutsu as soon as the sky blackens and turns toward the malevolent power like a flower toward the sun. “Gaara!”

“Naruto, get back here!” Sakura yells, but it’s too late, Naruto’s already charging head first into hell.

Kakashi’s eye catches hers. He’s broken the genjutsu too, and Sakura’s starting to think a lot less of Itachi’s skill with them. He jerks his chin toward the terrifying pillar of death and sand, and Sakura wants to cry. Why is her team so obsessed with dying?

On three, Kakashi turns on his heel, and Sakura follows him, both of them sprinting back the way they came.

Kisame yells something uncomplimentary after her, but fuck it, what was one more death?

The forest streaks past her as she chases after Kakashi at a pace she absolutely can’t keep up for long. A stray branch draws blood as it whips over her cheek, and she spares a thought to heal it.

“Careful!” Kakashi yells, and Sakura changes the angle of her last jump at the last second so she’s not launching herself into branches that no longer exist.

The forest around the Kazekage is gone, a perfectly flat circle of shredded plants and sand stretching a hundred meters in every direction.

In the middle of it all, Naruto has the Kazekage in a fully reciprocated bear hug, and Gaara’s sobbing into his shoulder, the terrifying aura of death around him gone completely gone.

Sakura skids across the sand as she comes to a stop, Kakashi beside her. “I don’t know why I expected anything different,” Kakashi says eventually, once it becomes clear that nothing short of an exploding tag will distract the Kazekage or Naruto from their hug.

“Same,” Sakura agrees. Everyone really important is alive, excluding Chiyo and potentially whatever Akatsuki member had been caught in the cave with Gaara. Sakura’s fine with them dying.

Does this count as a perfect ending?

“So,” Kakashi says, and Sakura casts a guilty look in his direction. “Am I crazy, or were you working with Itachi Uchiha and his partner back there?”

“Uhh--” Well, it’s almost perfect. “I can explain!”

*Fifty-Four*

The loop freezes just as Kakashi substitutes with a nearby log, leaving her hugging an oversized stick.

Sakura lands on the river, shifting out of Kisame’s way. “What the hell happened?” she demands. “Everything was fine!”

“The Hokage killed Itachi.” Kisame stares at her like he’s reassessing his entire estimation of her based on having seen Tsunade. “You’re a jounin, right?”

“What?” Sakura asks, frowning at him. “Why the hell would you go to Konoha? And no, obviously not. I’m a chuunin.”

“Damn,” he mutters, hanging his sword in the massive harness on his back as he heads toward the far bank. “We didn’t head toward Konoha, she came out of fucking nowhere with a team of ANBU and just.” Kisame makes a vague gesture and Sakura nods in understanding.

“Rule one with Tsunade is to never let her land a hit,” she says sagely, sharing her own hard won wisdom.

“He exploded.” Kisame says. “Hey Itachi! You alive back there?”

“What was she doing that far from Konoha?” Itachi asks, his hand pressed against his eyes like he’s fighting a blinding headache. “She didn’t even look at Kisame.” It’s the most emotion she’s ever heard from him.

Sakura has an inkling of an idea why, but-- “Doesn’t matter. We need to grab Deidara and Kakashi. Leave Naruto there, he needs to hug the crazy out of the Kazekage.”

Tsunade shows up just in time to see the end of Naruto and Gaara’s hour and a half long hug.

She comes with Shizune, the ANBU team Kisame mentioned conspicuously absent.

Kisame steps in front of Itachi, Sakura and Kakashi wave hello, and Deidara frantically tries to drag himself into the dubious shelter of a bush. Naruto and Gaara go back to hugging it out.

“Alright, how many of you are caught in this time bullshit?” Tsunade asks, eyeing Itachi like she’s considering dissecting him. “Sakura, Itachi, and?”

Kisame raises his hand and after a second Kakashi does, too.

“Kakashi?” Sakura stares at him. “But you’ve definitely died without resetting it!”

“Just this last one,” Kakashi replies, giving a fairly apathetic shrug for having experienced time travel. “It was like you said it’d be.”

“Sakura, what’s the number under your bracer?” Tsunade turns toward her again, her glare softening considerably.

“The what?”

“The number of people trapped in the seal with you--” Tsunade stops, and her lip curls in amusement. “--are you telling me none of you have removed your bracers this entire time?”

“I was busy!” Sakura pops the clips on her arm bracer and pulls it off. Sure enough, the number 4 is tattooed on the inside of her forearm, wrapped in a very complicated-looking seal.

“It’s my first time,” Kakashi contributes.

Itachi squints down at his arm through the mesh, and then releases his genjutsu. “Oh.”

“They’re comfortable,” Kisame says with a shrug.

“Excellent. Sakura, don’t tell anyone else that you’re in the time wheel, except for Shizune. Tell her right now.” Tsunade says.

“Hey Shizune, I’m in a time loop.”

The four on her arm turns into a five, and Tsunade smiles. “Perfect.”

“Thank you, Sakura,” Shizune says, inspecting the seal that had just appeared on her own arm.

“That’s how you trap other people in it,” Tsunade tells her, in case it wasn’t clear.

“But how do I end it?” Sakura asks. “And how do you even know all of this?!”

“You trapped me in with you about fifty times back, and I got a matching one on my arm then. I had Jiraiya take a look at it in one of the times that lasted longer than an hour.” Tsunade grins, and Sakura’s skin prickles with fear. “We will not be ending it yet. I have a few more things I’d like to try.”

She tosses Sakura a bright red money scroll. “Take a vacation. Don’t die unexpectedly. Spend whatever, it’s not permanent.”

With that sage advice, Tsunade and Shizune’s clones burst into smoke, leaving Sakura holding a scroll with a hell of a lot of zeros marked on the end, and staring at her own forearm like an idiot.

“Well fuck,” Sakura says.

Kakashi looks up from his book, his eye bright as he looks at the scroll in her hand. “You know, there’s an extremely nice and obscenely expensive hot spring only three hours run from here.”

“We should go,” Kisame says, giving an awkward wave. Itachi’s already gone, but that won’t really do.

“Tsunade told us to take a vacation,” Sakura says brightly, catching Kisame by the wrist. He doesn’t stab her so it’s all good. “And you’re our teammates, now.”

Kakashi makes a noise, and tilts his head. “They’re teammates?”

“Yes, Itachi agreed,” Sakura says, shamelessly ratting him out. “Actually he suggested it.”

“And when one of us dies, all of us have to restart?” Kakashi’s clearly very rapidly doing math in his head. “Itachi, get back out here, we’re going on vacation!”

“It’s a cult,” Kisame mutters, but he doesn’t resist.