Chapter 1
In Team 7’s—the last Team 7’s, the best Team 7’s, her Team 7’s—generation, they figure it out.
Well, they always know—
Deep in their bones—
(Past their bones, technically)—
Beneath everything—
But not consciously.
As Sakura, Sasuke and Naruto, they figure it out.
It changes things.
As souls, more emotion than thought and sentience, they’re aware of it. They enjoy the company and the knowledge and they remember and remember lifetimes similar and different before the Lethe comes and the knowledge is buried, yes, but not forgotten.
They know in the cycle between lives.
Figuring it out during one of the lifetimes is the sudden, unexpected breakthrough that changes things. That changes everything. They didn’t even know they were waiting for it until it happened.
Each new life isn’t like the old one, except for how it is. The names don’t stay the same, obviously. The family, the chakra, the techniques—these things change each time. The personalities, even, the attitudes and wants and beliefs and friends and everything else that makes one life distinct from another.
Some things—the bare bones of a soul—do not.
The life time where they are Team 7 changes that. They achieved the knowledge in a mortal life, and they have always had the knowledge in the un-life/ever-life/lull in the life cycle; they had never done that before.
So, more than the skeleton traces of the same soul that shines through in different bodies, elements of a lifetime manifest in the subsequent one.
Sakura knew. The knowledge followed. Or Sakura knew to follow the knowledge, when her mortal shell fell away.
Where once a soul lingered in the afterlife, cleansed and nameless, now a name accompanied. Traces of a lifetime refused to wash off. This life wasn’t any more special than the other lives.
But it was. It so completely was because Team 7 figured it out.
Of course, Virginia is no more Sakura than Sakura was Mito.
She’s new and different, as Sakura was new and different than her past life.
It’s just. Virginia—Pepper, damnit—remembers being Sakura from the start.
It’s like picking up a song where the last line left off.
You know. Instead of starting completely over.
Pepper made the mistake of thinking—when she thought about it, in halting rhythms as she figured out more and more from muddled memories, learning the words to a song she half-remembered before she could play it clearly herself—that it would be as simple for her boys.
When did they ever make things easy for her, Jesus Christ, those morons.
(Her boys can never, ever do things simply.)
Virginia “Pepper” Potts grew up taking no shit from anyone.
She ran before she walked and when she inevitably fell she shoved herself off the ground and kept on going.
She loves her mom and dad fiercely and, though she couldn’t remember everything she learned as an adult—as Sakura—she was leaps and bounds ahead of the other children.
Naruto, she thought as a child; not so much with specific memories of his face or what he meant to her or what they went through. Just the knowledge that he was hers and the warm recollection of a warmer laugh and every room filled with love and cheerful happiness.
She could feel it on her skin. It was like the sun.
Sasuke, she thought as a child; not so much with specific memories of his face or what he meant to her or what they went through. Just that knowledge that he was hers and a rush of affection, the knowledge of the pseudo-reluctant return of it, of sharp, shocking amusement (but small smiles) and sharper, shockier-ness filling every room, adrenaline and excitement (but gentle touches, innocent and careful).
She knows this of them with the childlike certainty that it’s true--without wondering why or thinking about it too often, if at all. It never needs be considered because there is no doubt.
The sky is blue (sometimes) and she shouldn’t talk to strangers (unless Mom or Dad is introducing her to them) and there exist feelings to go with these names she doesn’t consciously know but will remember (always).
Pepper remembers—such a nebulous term—being Sakura Haruno. But she is not Sakura any more. She is Pepper and she doesn’t have the option of being a shinobi.
She, point of fact, has not dug into those memories too closely, content to let the names of everyone she has ever loved who has died and doesn’t exist anymore stay forgotten, dulled by the mostly thorough cleansing of the reincarnation cycle. It happened, but not to her.
Pepper goes to school and does excellently and winds up—after a lot of years with equally as interesting and meaningful things happening, thank you very much—as Tony Stark’s personal assistant.
He reminds her so much of—someone—that it hurts in her chest at first, as tears jump to her eyes, until she refuses to be overwhelmed by ghosts of a past life, covers up that vulnerability by pulling self-confidence and tartness to her voice.
“Excuse me?”
Tony is like a whirlwind. She isn’t an engineer and doesn’t try to understand the jargon. She is not walked upon. She can manage him and manage the company and everyone in it.
She does.
She makes a great CEO.