Spring’s Children (Naruto)
Spring is the season of change; of new beginnings and new leaves, and that was what they had.
Time travel is not a simple thing, and it only becomes that much more confusing when dimension travel is involved.
Cast adrift in a strange world where Naruto’s family is alive and well, Sasuke’s once-nemesis is living happily with his clan, and a place where Sakura has numerous older brothers, Team Seven struggle to figure out how to fit in within a world which doesn’t seem to need to be fixed. Yet every world has its own struggles, and its up to them to figure it all out once more upon an unpaved, unknown road.
chapter one • reverse the hourglass
The room belonged to a familiar stranger – pale pink walls, sakura motifs lingering on the bedsheets, cushions, and curtains. It belonged to a girl of eight-years-old whose name was Haruno Sakura. Her name was also Haruno Sakura, and yet she wasn’t truly eight-years-old, no matter how very young she looked.
Her eyes fell to her hands, small and pudgier than she remembered. Had she truly always looked so fragile? Sakura could only ponder on that much. If she had always inevitably represented her namesake—beautiful, fragile, and much too swift to die. Not that she had truly died as such, rather she had acquiesced to some hare-brained scheme thought up by Naruto and had been swept up on the raging whirlpool which was Uzumaki Naruto.
A soft sigh escaped her, and she flopped back on her bed, peering up at that familiar-strange ceiling. It was before Pein had demolished the village – her ceiling had been different after that. She had spent enough days staring up at the ceiling to be sure of that.
Dimly, she wondered how different everything else would be through eyes which had seen the worst the world had to offer and had come back. “I wonder if they’re back too,” she murmured, thinking then on whiskered cheeks and red eyes which had spun. She sat up at the thought, long hair falling well beyond her shoulders. It was impractically long, thinking about it, but she knew better than to try and cut it herself.
Besides, there was a small part of her which liked it – the almost foreign sensation of hair reaching her lower back. Had she always had hair that length at the tender age of eight? Sakura frowned at the thought, almost certain for a split second that she had short hair at that age, but obviously she was wrong. Her memory was good, not perfect.
Her stomach chose that moment to growl loudly, and Sakura hopped off her bed at that, almost warily approaching the door, fingers lingering against the wooden surface. It had been cut from a Hashirama Tree, remnants of his chakra remaining in that wood even to that very day. Not that she had ever really sensed it before in her bedroom door, given how she had only developed the wood release much later in life. Like everything else, it had come through time, blood, sweat, and her own effort. Nothing ever seemed to just click into place for her as it had done for Naruto and Sasuke.
Well, at least until it came to seals. They were something she just seemed to understand in an instant, compared to how Naruto had struggled over them upon learning about his birthright and something which might bring him closer to the memory of his mother. That was how she had been roped into helping him in the first place, and how she had even started on the path to sealing – but while Naruto had struggled and given up, never having liked the idea of writing and memorising, she had thrived.
It was how she was there beneath that ceiling in the first place, since she was the budding seals master.
Her hand closed on the door handle, just as her door slammed open, wood crashing into her face and her toes and sending her onto her backside a little ways behind the door. “Oww,” she muttered, feeling the tears building in her eyes both at the pain and the sheer embarrassment of what had just happened. Part of her almost wished she had a more traditional house then, with screen doors which slid open. Then she, jounin of Konoha, pint-sized she might be, wouldn’t have been taken down by a bloody door of all things. She had a dignity to maintain, dammit.
“Oh, Sa-chan, sorry ‘bout that,” an unfamiliar voice sounded, and Sakura would long deny the squeak she let out as she was hefted up into someone’s arms. “But you’re running late. Ren-nii sent me up to get you.”
“Ren-nii?” she echoed, frowning at the unfamiliar name and that suffix. Was someone else’s family over for breakfast?
“Ichiro-nii is here too for once,” her captor babbled, ignorant to just how very confused she was as she was carried down the stairs and into the dining room. “Itsuki-nii is away on a mission though, so it’s just the four of us for now.”
Then she was set down, toes still aching, nose still throbbing, eyes still watery, and she was left to look upon a too big dining room table and two unfamiliar figures who sat on the chairs around it. The Haruno Family had never been big on tradition, especially when it came to living spaces. That was left to the more noble and older clans who had histories and traditions stretching years back.
The closest thing the Haruno Family had to a tradition was their yearly visit to the less popular shrine of Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto. It was a quieter place, compared to the shrine of Amaterasu-ōmikami which the Uchiha flocked to in droves. Though that could hardly be helped, what with the branding of their moon god as an evil kami. Not to mention the fact that the moon felt so very eerie to some – but that was neither here nor there, and the Haruno Family she knew and loved were hardly fussed about such matters.
Yet that wasn’t the Haruno Family she was familiar with – consisting of herself and her two parents. Rather, there were two strangers, three if she counted the boy who had swiftly seated himself in one of the two remaining places at the table, sitting there instead.
Two of them had bright pink hair the same as her own, whilst the boy who had carried her down had her mother’s dark blonde. Which made no sense at all, given how she had once been an only child, the same as her mother and father had been. The Haruno Family had always been small, with very little extended family – most of which lived in the Land of Iron a long ways away.
“Sa-chan,” a voice purred, dark pink pouty lips curving up into a smile, and Sakura could only blink and stare at the male before her. Pink hair fell down his back, tied up high at the back of his head with a familiar red ribbon. Green eyes looked at her curiously, his body language mostly hidden by the kimono he wore which fell in a style more reminiscent of what a more traditional kunoichi would wear. His smile widened. “You’re late, little blossom. Now come and give your beloved Ren-nii a kiss and eat your breakfast. You’ve got a long day ahead of you, sweetie.”
Sakura blinked, dumbfounded at the order. Why did she have a brother – brothers she should say? The seal she had designed had been for time-travel, not… whatever the hell the bizarre world in front of her was. It wasn’t her past.
She swallowed, the room around her almost seeming to swim the longer she stared at it. “Huh?” she mumbled, staring wide-eyed between the table, her brothers, and the array of breakfast foods on the table. Rare was it that she had a traditional breakfast, what with her father’s travels and the many different cuisines he had come across: the same cuisines he had often experimented with whenever he had been home.
Haruno Kizashi – the Haruno Kizashi she had known in her past – had been fascinated by the world around him and the many differences between different people in different places. It was part of the reason he had become a merchant and travelled all across the world, wherever permitted, seeing as how he was a civilian member, but a member nonetheless of Konohagakure, the Village Hidden in the Leaves.
“Sa-chan?” the aforementioned Ren-nii spoke, pink hair shifting as he stood up. “What’s wrong? You don’t look too well…” he trailed off, stepping towards her then, and Sakura could only blink. Dimly it felt as though something had gone kaput in the back of her mind, because really where in Yomi was she?
“Brother?” she mumbled, almost tasting the word on her tongue.
“Yes, that’s me,” her brother Ren said, a hand cupping her cheek then, painted green nails flashing in the light which seemed so awfully bright all of a sudden. A frown crossed his pretty face, the back of his hand meeting her head. “You’re awfully warm,” he murmured. “Sa-chan, are you feeling alright?”
Sakura pondered on that for a few moments, noting the fact that the world was spinning and that she felt so very uncomfortably warm all of a sudden. There was a boiling hot sensation behind her navel, and it was quickly growing so very uncomfortable. “Hot,” she said, her voice so much more high-pitched and squeaky than she remembered.
“Ichi-nii,” Ren called pointedly, sharing a glance with the other pink-haired member of the family – the one who was so very clearly the eldest of them, if his name was anything to go off of.
“I’ll let the academy know,” Ichiro said softly, blue eyes meeting her green ones, even as Ren hovered nearby. “Are you well enough to eat, Sakura?”
She paused, the thought occurring to her then. If one ate the food of Yomi, they could never return. Sakura could only wonder whether that was the case there. She had the distinct impression that she wasn’t dead, heartbeat and all. Rather something had gone terribly wrong with her so-called time-travel seal.
It wasn’t like she’d had a chance to test it before its use, and evidently she had forgotten something in her calculations. Now she was simply paying for the consequences of that.
“Sa-chan?” Ren murmured, pausing in her peripheral for a moment longer before he scooped her up in his arms. Sakura had the distinct impression that was something she would have to get used to, before she vomited down herself and her brother, the taste of bile thick in her throat as she whimpered.
“Sorry,” she blurted out, breath hot, her throat feeling raw even as the sticky liquid seeped into her sleeping clothes. They were a garish shade of pink, she noted, a far cry from the soft pastels which had covered her room.
“Don’t apologise,” her brother said, stroking at her brow then, his hand feeling terribly cool and soothing all of a sudden. “You could hardly help it,” he murmured, and Sakura grunted, shifting as best she could in his grip. “C’mon,” he said softly, green eyes glancing down at her as she lay there in his arms, cheek pressed up against his kimono as she looked up at him, still verily confused as to what exactly was going on there. “I think a bath, a change of clothes, and some more rest will do you some good.”
Sakura blinked, startling fully awake then. “Can bathe myself,” she blurted out, uncomfortable at the thought of the practical stranger bathing her. Yet her brother didn’t know that much, and he moved with the thoughtless grace of a shinobi. Behaving strangely wasn’t in her best interests, and yet she didn’t have a clue what the Sakura before her had acted like. Fear bubbled in her belly, a pout curving at her lips as she lay there in unfamiliar arms who belonged to a boy who thought he knew her.
“Aw,” her brother cooed, and Sakura had the vaguest of feelings that her brother thought of her as a cute, small, helpless animal. Perhaps that would have been true in another life. “Sa-chan, when did you start growing up? Can’t you trust your big brother to help you? It’s not like mother’s around to help and you’re far too small…” he mumbled, which was how Sakura found herself divested of her clothes and submerged to her neck in warm, bubbly waters with her brother in the room.
She held her knees to her chest, the bubbles all but swamping her tiny form. Part of her marvelled at how very small she was, while the other part of her lamented to loss of the old her. Her old body. The scars of war hadn’t left their mark on her yet, and they probably never would – at least not in the same way, given the fact that she was in that child’s body, and this was seemingly a different dimension. She had brothers, numerous older brothers.
Yet hers, Naruto’s and Sasuke’s plan hadn’t changed, no matter the different place they had ended up in. They were going to protect Konoha, their Village Hidden in the Leaves, that time around.
It wasn’t going to be left in smouldering ruins.
Not again.
Never again.
Sakura: 0
Wooden Door: 1
PREMISE: A Naruto Time/Dimension Travel Fic featuring the main trio from a more apocalyptic world. Not Quite Crack. Greater Exploration of Character's reactions and interactions about being back in a different universe where nothing seems to have gone wrong as of yet. No Kyuubi Attack. Minato and Kushina Live. No Uchiha Massacre.