Collide

Asuma hadn’t known what to expect after implying the existence of alternate lives, but it certainly wasn't for Sakura to take off running. She stumbles into the streets, darting between pedestrians and through stalls and once, nimbly, underneath a disgruntled shopkeeper’s legs. She’s fast for a five year old, Asuma notes, fast, and agile in a way that indicates practice.

Asuma is faster. He’s a full grown man and a ninja with access to the rooftops. Unfortunately he has to pretend to be a full grown ninja who is not chasing down a five year old girl. He’s thankful she hasn’t alerted any adults, and then he wonders why she hasn’t alerted any adults. The more he watches her movements the more he notices that she seems to be trying to avoid attention. She’s staying away from busy streets when she can, but, more notably, she is staying away from shinobi. She switches sides of the street if they’re in her way, or ducks out of view when she spots a group of them. She never stops though, she never even slows down.

A woman shrieks as her scarf is thrown up into Asuma’s face. As he disentagles himself, he almost misses a flash of pink hair darting into the patch of forest north of the main gate. He leaps into the trees, following from above. It’s a mistake on her part to move to an isolated place; he wonders if she knows it. Sakura speeds up, and maybe it isn’t a mistake after all. He lands in front of her before she can reach the tree, which hides a discrete ANBU entrance.

“Let me go” she whispers tearfully. “I don’t know anything I promise. I’ll just leave, I won’t cause problems, please just let me go.”

She’s lying. Her choice of location, if nothing else, proves that much. The fear is real though, and it dawns on Asuma that she doesn’t know why he’s suddenly taken an interest in her.

“I’m not trying to grill you for information. I haven’t told anybody what I know about you.” He murmurs, in an attempt to reassure her.

“Then why-” she starts, before they’re interrupted by a scuffling sound beneath them. He drags her out of the clearing just as a man in a wolf-mask stumbles up from between the roots of the massive oak Sakura had been reaching for moments earlier. Fortunately she has the sense to stay quiet. The pair listen to his hideous gasping fade into the distance, and Asuma hopes his comrade is heading towards a hospital.

“I really think this is a conversation best held in private. Perhaps a secluded training field, with wards to protect against wandering eyes and perceptive ears.” He deadpans, as Sakura squeezes out from between him and the tree they were hiding behind.

“Oh forgive me for trying to avoid ending up in Torture and Interrogation.” snarls Sakura “I’m sorry I didn’t trust a random jounin not to rat me out to the world’s most perfect Hokage”

He splutters at the accusation “I’m not… I wouldn’t tattle on you to my dad”

Sakura scrunches her face and then says nothing. “We shouldn’t be having this conversation so close to an Anbu exit.” She spreads out her arms, and her face goes pink. “Getting back will be faster if you carry me.”

Asuma has the sense to suppress the chuckle building up in him.

She scrambles up onto his back, and he takes off. His chakra is made of wind, and the way he moves, like an agile whirlwind, proves that. Academy students always get a kick out of it when he shows off and carries them, they whoop and shout like he’s a human rollercoaster. Sakura is silent.

When he lands back at the training field, she leaps off of him and tries to hold a dignified stance. The effect is lessened because Sakura’s hair is tangled and wild, and because she is a little girl.

“So,” grouches Sakura “I’m guessing you aren’t from this world either”

Her bluntness startles him for a moment. It demands honesty from him.

“No,” Asuma admits, out loud, for the very first time. “No I’m not.”

“How long have you been here?”

“It’s been 21 years.”

Sakura’s face crumples, and all the air rushes out of her lungs at once. She sways a little, like a marionette with cut strings. A second later and her posture is pristine once more.

“You still have to teach me that kata you mentioned.” She looks at him with the same toothy grin from the morning they met. They both know it’s fake. It's a miracle she's still standing or talking at all.

“Maybe another day, Sakura-chan. I think you should go home.” he murmurs. The summer sun beats down on his face. “It’s too cold outside. You’re shivering.”

She knows her sleep will be fitful before her head even touches the pillow.

Her family, Emily’s family, is gathered around a campfire; she’s young, small enough to hang off of one of her father’s arms as he lifts her up towards the stars. Her mom is tending the fire. Her older sister is watching the smores, packaged like presents in their tinfoil, with sparks dancing in her eyes.

Sakura wakes up with bile in her throat. She barely makes it to the bathroom before she vomits. She stays there, retching in the dark, until her stomach cramps around the emptiness.

Asuma gets drunk and quiet for the second night in a row. Kurenai carries him home.

“Did someone die?” she asks, mostly joking but at a loss for what could be eating at him.

He chuckles darkly to himself. Kurenai is his best friend, and has been since his academy days. He wants to say “If only you knew”. He wants to tell her everything. Instead he holds her a little bit tighter as she piggybacks him home, and hides his face in her soft hair. He doesn’t dream, he almost never dreams. Instead, he remembers.

When he’d first arrived in this world, he was angry. Angry that he’d been ripped from his family, from his wife and his child. Angry that death had forced him to be an absent father. Angry that this life had given him an absent father, just like his last one had. Hiruzen loved him, but never enough to put his son before his village.

When he was younger, Asuma threw tantrums. The world had forced him into the body of a child so he’d petulantly decided to act like one. He was a very fussy baby. To his mother’s relief, he mellowed in toddlerhood. To her horror, he traded his tantrums for wanderlust. It seemed like Asuma started walking and never stopped. He went on walks frequently, never announcing his departure, and frequently giving his guard details heart attacks. No ninja wanted to be responsible for the death of the Hokage’s child because they couldn’t keep track of a toddler.

He hadn’t even been thinking about the adults in his life when he started. The wandering was originally a form of reconnaissance, and then he never stopped.

He encountered shopkeepers selling magic scrolls, and Inuzuka dogs that seemed like they could talk to their partners. He watched teenagers walk on water and breathe fire. Once, a giant toad talked to him. By the time he was old enough to enter the academy, he’d pretty much accepted that this world was totally alien, and decided to make the best of it.

He hadn’t had a friend until the Academy. Everyone who treated him like an equal was a child, and no children liked him because he treated them the way adults did. Or worse, they were overly nervous and formal because of his connection to the Konoha elite. Half a decade without a friend, and in a foreign world, filled him with a bone deep loneliness he couldn’t shake.

Then, on his first day, Yuuhi Kurenai punched him in the face for being condescending and gave him a vicious glare that dared him to treat her like a little kid. In his shock he asked if her eyes were red because of the bloodlust. They’ve been best friends ever since.

The morning after meeting Asuma is a Monday. This is something Sakura only realizes when Mebuki shouts her down for breakfast. She inhales a glass of water to soothe her aching throat, grabs a piece of toast to settle her stomach, and rushes out the door. Kizashi chucks her school bag after her, which she barely catches in time.

She gets to the schoolyard just as the other children start trailing into the building. She spots Kiba carrying little white Akamaru on his head, and races to sit next to him. She’d picked her spot next to him a week into class, and guarded it fiercely. He’s brash enough to take Iruka’s attention away from her, without actually being all that distracting. Also, he has a dog. Sakura loves dogs, and a little thing like death will never change that.

When she sits down, the young boy quietly places a napping Akamaru onto the desk space between them, and she rubs absentmindedly at its belly. Suddenly there’s a different little white dog beneath her fingers, a maltese creatively named Snowflake. It’s her birthday and she’s 12 years old, and Emily is holding this tiny tiny life in her hands, and she never wants to let go.

Then she snaps back to reality, and Sakura is quietly hoping nobody can notice the tears pricking at the corner of her eyes.

“Damn Asuma,” she thinks “I had the memories under control before he reminded me. Serves him right to die for being so bothersome.”

That thought catches her attention. The man she met was Asuma Sarutobi. Asuma Sarutobi dies.

“Does he know?” She wonders. “Do I warn him? Would I want to know?”

Kiba gives her a strange look, and she registers the pain of her fingernails pressing into the palms of her hands. She smiles weakly at him. The Inuzuka's head snaps forward as Iruka bursts through the door, dragging a complaining boy by the collar of his hideous orange jumpsuit. She has never been so thankful for Naruto’s ability to kick up a fuss.

Asuma is waiting in the courtyard when the Academy lets out. Maintaining the delicate balance between staying relatively out of sight while not seeming like a creep is very difficult, and he has no good excuse for stalking a child. He groans inwardly as he realizes he’ll have to use that jutsu. He dutifully closes his eyes, feels his chakra, and reaches inwards.

His hands start to tingle, and his chest lights up in pain as he surrounds himself with his dark chakra. Back when he was a genin, his chakra paper had rotted and blackened, and although Asuma chose to focus on his wind nature, this still came in handy from time to time.

Even a skilled sensor ninja can’t sense a corpse, and when he’s shrouded in the suffocating chakra, they wouldn’t be able to find Asuma either. Experienced ninja have looked right through him, and animals always avoid him without knowing why.

Sakura stares right at him.

She doesn’t walk up to him right away. She watches Sasuke jump into his brother’s arms and Ina-Shika-Cho wander off shoulder to shoulder. She waits until the courtyard is almost empty, slouching lazily against the brick wall reading a book in a way that is eerily similar to Kakashi. Every once in a while her eyes dart over to the jonin. She watches the way nobody else looks at him, or even near him. She watches Akamaru whine and sneeze and Kiba shiver, and she watches as they give him a wide berth without even noticing he’s there.

Eventually she peels herself off of the academy wall and strolls hesitantly towards him. He nearly jumps out of his skin when she bumps into him, his mind always wanders when he uses this jutsu, as if he’s suddenly underwater. She walks slowly past him, occasionally checking to see if he’s following her. He’s grateful for her pace as he stumbles after her, he feels dizzy and puts all of his effort into not losing sight of the child.

Suddenly they’re at the training ground they’d met at yesterday, and it is, mercifully, empty.

Asuma drops the jutsu and drops to his knees, gasping for air. His heart thunders loudly in his chest and his lungs feel like they’re on fire. It takes a second for the world to stop spinning. When he looks up, he realizes that Sakura has already set up the wards again, although she hasn’t tried to activate them. For a moment, he thinks she looks worried for him.

“Hurry up before someone sees us.” she scowls, grabbing his cold sweaty hand to try and pull him to his feet.

His eyes dance around the empty training field, very grateful that his past self had chosen such a secluded spot to meet Sakura for the first time. He moves towards the activation trigger from yesterday and slams his hands against it, it’s strangely relaxing, feeling his very normal chakra get drained, his other jutsu never seems to run out of energy and sometimes he’s terrified he’ll never be able to stop it once he starts.

When his brain feels less like mush, he turns to his fellow ghost. “Are you ok?” he asks, in mangled English. He knows it’s a stupid question as soon as it leaves his lips.

“Am I ok? AM I OK? Of course I’m not ok. Who the fuck would be ok in this situation? Not only am I not dead. I am not-dead in this unbelievable world run by a bunch of military dictators, surrounded by these awful people who treat me like I’m a baby but still expect me to be ok with murder. No. No I am not OK.” she spits back at him.

There is a stretch of awkward silence. It feels as if the wind has stopped moving.

Asuma grins sheepishly at her murderous gaze “You’re right, it was a stupid question. I should have known better. After all, I remember growing up here. I remember realizing that I was alive in a world completely different from my own. I remember things nobody else in this world would possibly understand. Most of all, I remember being alone.”

She’s staring at him with big, weary eyes. No child should have those eyes, he thinks to himself, not even a false-child. He kneels and reaches towards her, his hand rests on Sakura’s shoulder, almost engulfing it.

“You don’t have to handle this alone anymore. You won’t be alone ever again.” he promises to her, and maybe, to himself as well.

Sakura’s lip trembles, but she steadies herself and her face becomes stone once more.
“Train me” she pleads, “This world is cruel and painful and filled with people who kill without a second thought, and people who die when they shouldn’t have to. Teach me to survive. Teach me to save them.”

“I will teach you.” Asuma swears, and then he makes, Sam makes, a promise no shinobi would: “I will keep you safe for as long as I live.”