Time is On My Side
She could not track down her teammates to ask for the whereabouts of the Toad Sage. They weren't in Iron like they were supposed to be. Their shared flat was left empty. It had been two days since she emerged from the forest.
There was a paper crane coming her direction. A fluttering thing, white and recognizable to anyone who know the Angel of Ame.
“Konan-san?” There were three days left for Sakura to be off duty. Nagato had just cleared her schedule. The girl quickly opened her palm to create a landing for the jutsu. It nestled in the coolness of her temperature and unfolded itself in precise motions.
Everything was written in a variation of the Amegakure coding system, which was included in the handbook that acted as her Bingo List.
[ Please report back to Ame immediately if you receive this letter. He is deceased. The organisation is falling. ]
Sakura did not reread. She ran.
“Sakura-san. I– we thought you won’t return.”
“Return? For what?” The black hair girl asked, rain droplets dripping from the hem of her cloak. Her lipstick smudged. Inner didn’t say a snarky remark. Inner wasn’t there.
The older kunoichi tilted her head and looked at the youngest member of Akatsuki. “For everything. For Nagato”
“He approved of my leave, did he not?” Sakura quickly added, “Who’s dead?”
There was a heavy silence.
A twitch.
A barrage of sharp paper blades was shooting for her vitals. Sakura dodged as much as possible, missed two, one nicking her neck, the other ripped off a good chunk of her sleeves.
A D-rank tsuchi jutsu would have to suffice.
The blades bent on their previous trajectory and the girl lunged forward, poisoned kunai in hand, “For Kami sake I have the ring!” her other hand retrieved the necklace inside her collar. Konan broke the jutsu, pausing. The rings are irreplaceable. They were house keys for the members. “Itachi likes dango, Kisame is insecure of his obviously weird colouring, you surprisingly loathe origami artists and Pain was once called Yahiko!”
Then, without withdrawing the extended hand readying for an attack, Konan asked, “At what age was Haruno Sakura recruited to Akatsuki?” It was a command for an answer.
“Fourteen years old, half a month before my fifteenth birthday.” Akatsuki was too confident that it never had to verify the identities of its members. This wasn’t normal. They were walking chakra radars, they sense it and evaluate it like fingerprints, another skill she needed to work on.
“What did Sakura take her leave for?”
“Research.” She would never say about the trees. “Senpai, this isn’t an interrogation is it? Who was dead?”
“Why did Haruno Sakura leave Konohagakure?” The people would assume the medic was throwing a tantrum, too tired, gone mad, manipulated, entering her angsty teenage phase in search of a lost puppy love. The Leaders understood otherwise.
The answers kept coming, “It was not a farmstead for horses. It was a slaughterhouse. They kill sheeps.” She rolled her eyes. “I am neither sheep nor horse.”
“...My apologies, chakra replication techniques from our enemies are extremely elusive. I have to send chakra-specific notes to you every once in a while in hope of reaching you.” The purple haired woman released her hold. “It was Uchiha Itachi.”
“Which enemy– What?”
“Uchiha Itachi was KIA after succumbing to his injuries in a fight between him, his brother and Danzo.”
Itachi was not an easy kill. None of them were. He was still healthy enough, not yet into the last stages of his clinical disease to simply just die in any fight.
Sakura was great at detecting genjutsu. Nothing was blaringly wrong, logically wrong or even instinctually wrong. A dead Itachi and a suspicious Konan was quite incorrect, actually. She yanked on her chakra. “Kai! Kai!”
Nothing happened.
“Shit.” The kunoichi screamed. “Kai. Kai. Kai!” Logically, if this was an S-ranked illusion, then her only hope of escaping was no better than trying to kill herself and hoping that her real body wouldn’t carry the same action.
“Stop!”
Sakura did not stop in the process of taking a good grip on the kunai she had earlier, drawing it to her heart with a chakra enhanced blade to make sure it reached the arteries.
The paper pieces caught her in a tight clasp. “Sakura. This is not a genjutsu.”
“No, no, stop talking to me.”
“Come this way, Nagato told me to wait for you if you do return.” Konan finished their exchange and led (clamped then towed) her down a spiral of stairs, narrow enough for two people at once. There was no point in struggling. Life whispered in her nape. Death caressed her sweaty temples. She ignored them in favour of calming down and finding out more about whatever the genjutsu was. There hasn't been any harm.
It was an underground vault. Inside was the red haired man on his deathbed.
The image would have made Sakura dizzy, but she only stared. Tubes were attached to him, transporting a sort of liquid like nutrition—very advanced, compared to what Konoha is capable of. Pain and other Paths were surrounding the large room, their black piercings like holes etched to their skin in the dimness of torches and oil lamps.
Nagato’s hair was matted and was turning an auburn muddy hue. His body was so thin she can estimate how long he had before his ribcage poke its way through himself. The sticks on the ends of his limbs were far more skinny than how much a living man’s fingers were allowed to be. His skin pallor was no better than the grey sky metres and metres above where he was.
“Sakura.” It was a breathy sound.
“Nagato-sama?” She moved forward, minding Konan pacing closely and protectively near, angling in a way that was convenient to slit the young predecessor’s throat.
“It’s been a while.”
“Had it?” Sakura asked, not knowing what else to say. It hasn't , though.
“It’s been seven months.” He reminded her. At her visible confusion, the Uzumaki kindly repeat the events in its order, sallow eyes not leaving her stature. “Itachi is dead. Kisame and Sasori had left. Kakuzu went missing a week ago. We failed at an attack on the Leaf. War was declared between us just before you came, in fact. Against the Five Great Nations. Uchiha Madara is alive, he declared a three-way war soon after. All Jinchuuriki had been captured, two Sennin are dead.”
The fifteen—was she still fifteen?—years old popped her mouth into an ‘O’ shape. It was soundless.
The dark eyes were searching her.
He found something. “You…were gone for much longer than you thought.” A question waiting for a confirmation.
There was some shuffling, her teeth clenched “I left. I reported to you four days ago.”
“Was it–”
“–the Iron mission? Yes. Yes, it was. Collecting data from the Konoha-Suna-Kiri Alliance’s Fumetsu-goroshi initiative.”
He didn't flinch. Perhaps he was far too weak to even lift a finger. A raucous cough escaped the dying man, “I see. Have you found anything?”
He wasn’t asking about her well crafted oral report, not her thoughts on the affair, not giving out warnings for snakes and trees. She knew exactly what he asked. “Kami. Yes. Yes I have.” She said fervently. “Yes, yes, yes. No, that doesn’t really matter. You told me of a war?!”
Konan dutifully sat on a nearby bench, poised and gracious like always. “It had been speculated since before you joined. They are coining it the Fourth Great Shinobi War.”
“I mean— Yes. But. I– It was the fucking forest! Oh for the love of Shinigami!”
The other shinobi in the room waited for her to continue.
The Senju Forest was never meant for her to leave. No contractors of that god ever got their freedom. Ultimately, all they were, everything they owned and lost, belonged to it. Time passed differently in that forest. That was why those who know send a clone to circumvent the issue. That was why bunshin were banned anywhere past the bone gate because the shrine trapped people. The seals were memory altering seals. That was why no one knew about the bone gate. Nothing made sense.
“Sakura-san? What forest? Do you have any recollection of the events?” She didn't know who was asking. “Have you lost your memories? Would you be able to tell us where you've gone to?”
Sakura gasped. She would have come to this conclusion a while ago if Inner was here. She knew what to do.
It was simple. Too simple. The problems were undecided, but a solution is frankly clear.
Looking at the Leader who formed an organisation she was marginally fond of and definitely proud of, she told him, hushed and careful. Her words were never to be heard again, “I could redo this.”
Sakura latched onto time. “I will.” She grinned.
Time was pulled.
Time felt different.
Feeling time is conceptual and prejudiced. The experience of time differs for every single thing that exists within it.
When Sakura looked, it was objective. Unbiased. Impartial.
She had been removed from time, detached, and instead of revolving in it, it revolved around her.
Things felt like a maelstrom of sensation. The forest was growing, dying, old, young.
The trees are rotting, will rot, have rotted.
Time is horizontal,
l e f t t o r i g h t.
It
is
ver-
ti-
cal,
up
then
down.
It
is
diagonal.
They are dots.
They are arrows, numbers, graphs.
(There is no expression for mathematics to encapsulate the complexity and simplicity of time.)
The sky fell.
No, it isn’t.
It will, though, in some years.
It had, a thousand years ago.
I t i s f a l l i n g n o w.
There is rarely one constant. Constancies are created as pillars time clung onto. Building blocks of the foundation that must not be different than it is.
Sakura was dead and will stay dead. That is not a constant. She was alive in another world. Not this one; in this one, she never was. She has never been alive in a sense of more than surviving, she had never been alive. She was a baby crawling and grabbing fists of air, begging in the instinctual need of attention. She was a woman that touched the sun, collapsing like a puppet cut off strings. She was a teenager lacking a sparing thought for commodities and things other girls loved. Lacking love.
Perhaps love was what made someone alive. Or maybe, it was the agreed upon components of consciousness, perception, self awareness, growth and reaction. If so, then she is quite alive. But love kept people alive, Sakura had read it somewhere, and whichever was right?
Shishou had told her, “Love is something a sane person must be able to feel. Happiness alone isn’t love. Love is happiness, pain, confusion, anxiety, all of those that comes in shades and textures and tastes. Love, Sakura, is recognizing humanity in bloodshed, celebrating it, appreciating it and for us, protecting it. Shinobi knows love as much as we know death.”
And the green eyed girl thought that maybe shinobi don't know Death so well. Sakura has met Death at a young age. Confronted Death on a bridge in a country that wasn’t hers, bargain with it in a forest that bears its namesake. It had only told her it will take when least expected: on the day the suicidal wanted to live, on the morning someone was revived.
Sakura do not love love.
Sakura saw Death in everything. She knew Death the most intimate. She knew her blue eyed boy was born from it, her raven haired boy smeared with it.
She was watching.
The one who observes, sees things.
So if Sakura was ever alive, then she lived with Death. She was alive with Death. The Shinigami did not choose her, she just happened to be the one who hung around to greet it in the aftermath.
Time is malleable, changeable, erasable, constructable—it was never supposed to be. She wondered if it was linearly from the start. What start? When is the start of time? When is the end of it?
Time is fickle. It fizzles and thrash and scratch. It is quiet, serene. A timeline is solitary. No timeline is solitary.
Everything is connected.
Time is not life, it can not be , it only influences. That is a constant. It moves. Never the same, always similar.
Once something changes, there is no fixing. One variable altered equals a timeline undone. A ball of yarn unrolled can never be put back in the order or direction or speed it had been wrapped in the first time. Going back in time meaning a life unlived, a dimension erased, a branch diverged. Consequences are unaccountable and terribly world-endangering. Time-loops were a fictional exception. If a traveller of time could make sure a loop happens and avoid the paradoxes with themselves, their ‘past self’ can then exist until the point of time hopping. They can happen. They can’t.
When she slipped in time, she really didn’t slip in time, but rather, dimension. She completely eradicated her original timeline and attempted to enter previous points within that timeline, leading to diversion. She swapped her ‘home timeline’, which ceased to exist, for an identical version of it after diversion. It was a branch of a trunk.
Time travel has consequences. To the past is harder than to the future. When going to the past, one's mere presence will change the course of events that have already occurred. When going to the future, they only interfere with the future timeline which is yet to happen, making it safer, smoother.
The pink hair–black hair child knew every consequence possible, understood it like a second language she was proficient in. Inner would have approved of this decision. The sky was falling. There is no god at the end of the world, no death, just so, so, so much time.
This Sakura wondered if she was the first Sakura in the continuum of space and time that reached for the scorching sun and not twinkling stars or soft-lit moon. She tried to break the multiverse.
Time spat her into Amegakure, the same place she had seized it, in the first timeline.
“I am Haruno Sakura, approximately one month older than your Haruno Sakura.”
Nagato did not seem shocked, only faintly surprised.
It was the day before she defected, originally. The storm was heavy outside, shaking the windows and howling in pain. “You don't seem surprised.”
“The Great Toad Sage had foretold this after he saw me unfit to become a sage. ‘There will be a medic you shall seek, for she will return before she ever comes’. You are a time traveller.” He explained composedly, standing up from his chair to properly greet her.
The Leader was a smart man, but time was not on his side.
“I was expecting to spend hours here explaining everything, but I guess a time loop, well, something like that, is in effect. Yes, I am, and turns out I hate the world ending. Who would have thought?”
He mulled at her words. “Would you be able to elaborate on your experience?”
“Well. I should.” She leaned on the wall opposite to his desk, adjacent to the doorway. Sakura takes a gamble, larger than any of those that her once shishou played. This game will cost more than just pieces on a board or golden coins and bottles of sake. There was no going back (She had been taught this a long time ago). “Time is on my side.” Not Death, not Life, but time.
“Yes, it is.”