[Red Sands: In Search of the Scarlet Dawn]

A groan escaped her, low and long, and reverently, she prayed that the world would stop spinning sometime soon enough. Her stomach rolled, barely able to keep down the rations the coach driver had procured for her, each time looking more and more nervous the closer they drew to her home estate. She had an ‘estate’, or rather, the Haruno Family did. It was almost boggling to part of her mind, whilst the other part of it simply went I know.

It had taken days to even come within viewing distance of her family’s ancestral home, and what a sight it would have been if she had been in any state to admire it. As it was: she wasn’t. She was horribly sweaty, very uncomfortable, and she was fairly certain she felt the onset of a fever. The pettier part of her wanted to blame it on Uchiha Sasuke, the familiar stranger. Logic told her that her apparent transmigration was probably more likely to blame.

The carriage came to a slow stop, a neigh almost announcing their presence there within the gates of her home. “Ugh,” she muttered, silently wondering how long it would take for someone to gather that she wasn’t about to be making it out of the carriage on her own. Her stomach roiled, another groan escaping her as she fought against the bile rising up in the back of her throat. She liked that carriage, and she didn’t particularly want to ruin it with her vomit.

“That’s sister’s carriage,” a voice made it through the carriage walls and over the pounding thud in the back of her head. It felt like someone was using her brain as a punching bag, and she wished it would stop already. “I didn’t think the school term had finished just yet…”

“Why is she not coming out to greet us?” another voice came, and Sakura distinctly recognised it as her eldest brother’s.

“Brother Ichiro,” she mumbled, just about remembering his name amidst the haze which was rather swiftly descending on her now that she had reached somewhere she instinctively knew was safe. She didn’t need to hold onto her sanity and the mask of the Duke’s Daughter by the tips of her fingernails for much longer. “Ngh…”

“Oh, sister!” the first voice sing-songed, a part of her brain labelling that voice as belonging to Ren, her second oldest brother, and probably, by far, the most annoying of her relatives. “Why did you come home so early?” His voice grew closer and closer, though her depth perception both visually and audibly were undoubtedly malfunctioning. “Don’t tell me you went and got yourself sent back home early due to—”

The carriage door burst open, golden rays of light filling her vision, and Sakura could only groan at the sudden influx of light.

A warm hand cupped at her cheek, eyes cracking open to meet the matching green ones of her second brother. “Sister?” The playful, cheery tone was gone from his voice, leaving only concern and fear. “Sakura?” His hand patted at her cheek, as if that could rouse her from the darkness slowly beginning to fill her vision. “Ichiro!” he screamed, and Sakura could only burp as she found her body shifted suddenly, vomit escaping her as the world spun, saliva and bile dripping from her lips as a rancid smell filled the air. “Call for the doctor! Now!”

She was being carried, she realised dumbly, like a damned princess, the logical part of her brain added. “Brother…” she mumbled feebly, despising her own situation right then and there. “Ren…”

“Shh,” her brother murmured. “Save your strength, sister…”

“Too… noisy,” she slurred, slumping fully into the arms holding her – carrying her somewhere she couldn’t quite remember. Though she should have been able to. That place was her home. The Duke’s Daughter’s home. That was her, wasn’t it?

Ren chuckled. “Clearly you haven’t lost all of your senses—”

The world faded to black.

“SAKURA!”

Two cries of two different people overlapped, and Sakura felt her eyes slide shut, head falling to rest against something firm yet comfortable. Her brother. The Duke’s Son. She wondered how two different titles for the same person could sound both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

Then the darkness swallowed her whole and she couldn’t think on such a thing any longer.

There was something soft at her head and back, and a weight holding her hand, a thumb tracing over the back of her hand absentmindedly. Her eyes fluttered open, stomach rumbling audibly as a high ceiling and the top of a four-poster bed met her gaze. “Nh—” She coughed, abruptly aware that her throat felt like a scorpion had decided to nest inside it for a few days.

“Drink.” A glass was pressed to her lips, and she drank greedily. “You have been asleep for three days. It is no surprise you are thirsty when you’ve only just opened your eyes the first time since,” her eldest brother said, letting her drink her fill before he set the glass back down on her bedside table.

“Three?” she echoed, coughing then, scowling when her brother helped her up to a seated position.

“Yes – four nights and three days if you wish to be specific, and that is not counting the time you spent ill in your carriage,” he said, fingers brushing against her cheek, forcing her to turn to face him. “Why did you travel in such a state, sister? You should have summoned one of us to take care of you – or at least secure your journey back safely…”

Her eyes slid away from his gaze, unable to hold that blue-eyed stare which seemed to bore into her very soul. Could he tell she wasn’t quite the same sister who’d left to go to the academy in the Royal City? “Not safe…” Thoughts of not-Sasuke stirred in her memories. “Strange…” she mumbled, thinking of a Sasuke who had listened to her silently, and whose lips moved only minutely to display what he was feeling. It was a far cry away from the Sasuke she had fallen so desperately in love in there—and yet…

Pain throbbed at her temples, a groan of her own puncturing the air, even as the rumbles of her stomach reached fever pitch. “Calm yourself, sister,” her oldest brother said, touch at her hand grounding her there in that strange-familiar place. “You are home. You are safe,” he murmured, and tentatively, Sakura clutched at his hands like the lifeline they felt like. “Mark my words there will be an investigation into exactly what happened… To think you would be forced to travel in such a condition.” He frowned then. “You were very ill, sister… I am not to sure whether your body could’ve handled more…”

A soft snort escaped her. “Is that your way of trying to tell me that I almost died or something?” she mumbled, tongue fumbling over her words. “I’m fine… brother,” she said, the word still feeling so eerily uncomfortable to her. She remembered being a shinobi who hadn’t had brothers, and that part of her had probably become more dominant. After all, that was her after all the trials and tribulations she’d had to go through to claw some happiness from amidst the wreckage of the world in the aftermath of war. Her gaze darted down to her hands, teeth sinking into her lip as she remembered dirt and blood staining them in another life. Dirt and blood had rarely stained the Duke’s Daughter’s hands…

“You are sitting in bed after being ill,” Ichiro told her, blue eyes boring into her flatly. “You are far from fine, though I will accept the answer that you are feeling better than before,” he said. “Now, would you like to stretch your legs and head to breakfast, or would you rather dine in bed? I can have the maids assist you, unless you’d be willing for my own assistance…”

Sakura blinked, remembering then that she had maids. Her memories as war veteran Haruno Sakura were definitely more vivid, or so she was finding. It was what made the world around her feel so familiar and strange at the same time – and what an unsettling feeling that was. “I can get changed myself,” she blurted out, remembering how she’d lived by herself – her own independence from others. Not that she had that much as a duke’s daughter those days…

Her brother frowned, hand going to her forehead. “You don’t have a fever,” he murmured. “How odd…”

“Breakfast,” she grumbled, feeling her stomach rumble again. She needed breakfast – then she could scramble to come up with a plan. What did one do when they found themselves incarnated into a character in a terrible game? Sakura didn’t know. Instead there was only one certainty before her: that she needed to live as Haruno Sakura, Duke’s Daughter. Somehow.

“Will you need—”

Groaning, she swung her legs out of bed, idly noting that her clothes had definitely been changed. People had handled her unconscious body, and the thought perturbed her. “I can manage,” she said, blinking as her brother presented a robe to her.

“I know you would usually prefer to go down in full dress, as is proper, but I think comfort and breakfast are more of a concern for now,” Ichiro said, and Sakura was hardly going to argue with such logic. She wanted food, preferably five minutes ago.

“Uh, okay?” she mumbled, taking the dressing gown from him and slipping herself inside it, scowling at the odd weak feeling she could feel in her legs. “Where’s breakfast?”

Her brother looked at her oddly once more. “Where it always is, sister…” he said, and Sakura could only smile and desperately try to wrack her brains for answers. “Come, let us go to the dining room…”

“Sure thing,” she mumbled, earning another sidelong, confused look as she stumbled out of her room. Her brother was fully dressed, and yet there she was beside him, looking like something dragged in off the street. She probably smelt terrible too, she mused, sniffing at her armpit as discreetly as possible – though evidently not discreetly enough, given by the odd look her brother sent her way. She smelt of soap and lavender. She swallowed thickly, realising then that her outfit hadn’t just been changed, rather, she had been bathed by practical strangers and the thought almost made her break out in hives.

“Sister…?” Ichiro looked at her, pausing in the junction in the corridor. “Are you sure you are well enough to be out of bed…? You are behaving… strangely… and you appear to have forgotten where our dining room is,” he said, gesturing to the left corridor when she had been beginning to walk over to the right corridor.

“I’m fine,” Sakura said, stomach growling yet again. “I’m just hungry, brother… and a bit tired…” she added hastily as if that would explain how very shoddy her memory of that world had become. As if that could explain why a ‘Hinata-fan’ had run her over with a truck and sent her into a strange world which appeared to be the virtual one she had despised. Well… the one she had despised ever since it had all but caused her death as such.

“You look sad. Is there something troubling you?” Blue eyes bore into her green ones, and Sakura choked down her spit and desperately tried to adjust to having a brother. Someone who looked after her, and had done since she was younger. Pain pulsed in her temples, and she winced, not giving her brother any time to ask her if she was well enough, even as she barged into the dining room with all the grace of an elephant and sat in the nearest available seat.

“Daughter.”

Sakura choked on the glass of water she had just began sipping from, even as her eldest brother slid into the seat next to her and Ren along with her third and youngest brother looked at her oddly alongside the man who held barely a passing resemblance to Haruno Kizashi. But it wasn’t ‘Haruno Kizashi’ as such, not the one she knew, rather the man at the head of the table was Duke Haruno, a stern yet doting father. “Uh… yeah? I mean—what is it, father?”

“A letter has arrived from the academy,” he said, and Sakura felt her stomach flip whilst the larger part of her regretted not asking for breakfast in bed. “It requests for your immediate expulsion, and I would verily like to know why.”

She blinked at that, heart in her throat as she swallowed her nerves, looking at the empty plates in front of them then. “Uh, could that, like, wait until after breakfast?” Her stomach rumbled louder than ever. “I’m hungry.”