Sakura
“Eyes!”
Sakura winces as her knees slam into the mud, the wet earth stinging the scrapes along her legs. Sasuke’s face is frozen in shock, red eyes wide open. She digs her fingers in, her heart beating so loudly she can barely hear the rain and yells of her teammates. Blood pools in the cavity left behind as Sakura removes her hands from his face. It drips down like tears, mixing with the rain beating down on them.
Sakura runs.
She hears a kunai sing and a new cut form near the back of her leg. Pulling her arms closer, she runs even faster. Fear rising like bile in her throat. The forest starts to blend together, closing in on her, blocking her from returning. What if she’d taken a wrong turn back to camp?
“Hey.” A hand lands on her shoulder.
Sakura screams, throwing herself to the ground hoping they don’t grab her. She scrambles in the mud for a moment, pushing herself back up using the back of her hands to prop herself up, careful to keep her hands in a claw shape to protect the eyes. She doesn’t get far, crashing into someone after a few steps. They grab her by the shoulders, shaking her, stopping her from running. It takes her a moment to register that they have a konoha headband. Longer yet to register what he was saying, something about a report.
She wishes he would stop shaking her. She opens her hands, showing him Sasuke’s eyes. The man finally lets go of her and instead starts yelling at someone else. She’s vaguely aware that she’s being led somewhere and eventually, out of the rain. The grey sky replaced by the yellow walls of a tent. There’s a hand shoved in front of her, snapping for her attention but it sounds far away, the roaring of her heart overpowering everything. She blinks.
The hand moves away then swifty returns in a loud ringing clap in front of her. She jolts up. The loudest thing she hears is no longer the roaring of her heartbeat but rather the pitter patter of the rain hitting the tent.
“Report.” The jounin says. She doesn’t know this shinobi but she recognises the jounin vest.
“Haruno Sakura, Squad ten.” She pauses, racking her brains. She’s never given reports before, the team captain had always done so. Sakura merely stood in the back waiting to get dismissed. What would captain say?
The jounin nods at her hands.
Sakura opens them and Sasuke stares back at her. Oh.
“Sasuke.” She’s not sure if she’s answering the jounin or talking to herself. She offers the eyes to the jounin, wondering what they did with the special eyes. All she remembers is her sensei repeating how important it was that they never fell into enemy hands. A jar appears in front of her and she drops Sasuke’s eyes into it. She winces a little when the second one drops onto the first. She can feel Sasuke staring at her even after the jar is taken away.
The jounin is still staring at her. Belatedly, she realises that she hasn’t actually explained anything. Worse, she hadn’t told them to send backup to the teammates she’d left in the rain.
“We were ambushed on the way back!” Her voice hitched. “Uh, captain told me to get Sasuke’s eyes and run back. They’re still there! You have to go back, please!” She reaches forward to beg the jounin as he takes a step back. Right, her hands were bloody.
“We already found them.” The jounin sighs, relaxing from his rigid stance when he sees her stop her approach. “Wash up and see the medic. You’re dismissed.”
—
Sakura washes the blood off her hands, scrubbing furiously. Gradually, the water runs clear between her hands. Silently cursing the day she learnt to use them as a weapon. Cursing that she could not find a better weapon during emergencies. She turns around to see her team wrapping a body, she curses the shinobi for falling asleep during their watch.
She starts flicking through the bounty book, hoping that their attackers were at least worth something for their trouble. She can feel the disgusted stares of her teammates as she squats beside their bodies. She ignores them, no sense leaving money on the ground. She’s delighted to find one of their faces in the book, worth a decent sum too. She decapitates it, storing the head in a scroll. They’re nowhere near a collection station now and she wouldn’t want her claim to end up unrecognisable. Then she goes through their belongings.
“Sakura!” The voice is pitched with annoyance.
Sakura turns around to face Ami, arms crossed and brows furrowed as she glared at her. She raises her hands in surrender. Best not to piss Ami off, few would tolerate Sakura going through the dead in times of peace. Going on missions with Ami wasn’t so bad. She stands up and grabs her pack, “Sorry.” she says.
Ami rolls her eyes, she knows Sakura isn’t one bit sorry and would do the same if this happened again. Satisfied Sakura would follow, Ami turns to continue their journey back to Konoha. Their other teammate, Toshi, is pale and keeps a distance away from Sakura. Toshi is younger, likely a fresh chunin and Sakura doubts he was in the war given how squeamish he looked at the sight of death. Or maybe it’s that the shinobi on night watch was his friend, they did look pretty close after all.
They reach Konoha as the sun sets, its rays splitting into pretty pinks and oranges. Ami takes care of the boring task of rattling off the code words and checking them in with the gate guards. She’s about to take off when Ami grabs hold of her arm, jerking her head towards Toshi, or rather, the body scroll in his hands.
Sakura sighs. Right, someone died. Now they have to do another report and inform their family. Sakura never liked the hospital, she likes the morgue even less. Toshi hands the scroll over to the receptionist who unseals the body onto a table. All their names are recorded with Toshi volunteering to inform the family. Sakura’s thankful. All she wanted to do was to go home and sleep. She’d been out on the road for almost two weeks and would love nothing more than to sleep in an actual bed.
She shunshins away as soon as Ami stops watching her, running across the rooftops to get home. With little care, she drops her pack onto the floor of her one room flat, sprawling on the cool wooden floor. She’d rather not dirty her bed with the grime of two weeks of travel.
Eventually, she gets up, taking a nice long bath and scrubbing away the dirt under her nails. Her hair wrapped up in a towel, skin red from scrubbing, she collapses on her bed and falls into a deep sleep.
—
She wakes to red eyes amid darkness.
That was nothing special in of itself and she was almost content to ignore it for more sleep until she realised that these pair of eyes were attached to a face. She reaches for the kunai under her pillow too late as one is placed against her throat. Unable to avoid direct eye contact with the sharingan, she feels the lull of a genjutsu pulling her under.
She awakens to the sensation of cold metal around her limbs and finally sees the person behind the intrusion. In the dim red light, she can make out an Uchiha dressed in black. She has no idea who the intruder is. Worse still, she finds herself unable to disrupt the genjutsu she’s in.
“Where are my brother’s eyes?” His voice, while steady, had a hard edge to it.
She stares at him blankly, trying to figure out what an Uchiha would want with her. Sure, she wasn’t the nicest person to work with but she didn’t think she’d offended someone enough to warrant this. She can’t even recall the last time she worked with an Uchiha. After the war, the whole clan became really paranoid about sending out their members. They were rarely seen outside of Konoha in the first place.
“Who?” If she can’t get out then she might as well try to talk her way out of…whatever this was.
Clearly this was the wrong thing to say as she feels the metal binding her limbs pull her up onto a board, splaying her limbs out around her. He holds a short sword to her side, pressing the tip into her side just enough that she can feel it but doesn’t draw blood.
“Uchiha Sasuke. Where are my brother’s eyes?”
Sakura sucks in a breath. She’d never expected to hear that name again even as his eyes haunted her. Briefly, the sight of blood falling down Sasuke’s face flashes in her mind. She banishes the thought immediately, not wanting to deal with the memories and nightmares that would follow.
The sword digs into her side and she screams, jerking forward for all her bindings would allow her to move. Her hair falls in front of her face as she bites her lip and glares at Sasuke’s brother. She spits at his feet. Sasuke’s brother was an asshole.
“How the fuck would I know you dick.” She grits out.
Evidently, this answer was also wrong as he proceeded to stab her again. Then, he repeats his question. She looses track of how many times he does this. At the end of it, all she can repeat is that she doesn’t know. And truly, she doesn’t. She doesn’t know what became of Sasuke’s body. Neither does she know what became of the eyes she’d handed to the jounin in that tent. Just as she doesn’t know whether the rest of the team had survived after that.
She didn’t have the luxury to think about that during the war. And even after the war, she had more pressing matters to worry about than what happened to someone who died during the war. The stabbing stops and a hand grabs her hair, pulling up her head. Her vision is blurry from her crying and she can barely focus on what’s in front of her but they slowly settle on the pair of red eyes in front of her. She feels herself slip into another genjutsu.
This time, she’s in a forest. It’s raining and Sasuke is in front of her. She’s small again. Sasuke is crying blood, his eyes are in her hands again. And just like that, Sakura is twelve again. Lost and helpless to do anything but run.
A hand lands on her shoulder. “What did you do with Sasuke’s eyes?” The Uchiha, looking even taller and more imposing from her child perspective, looms over her shoulder. She bites back a scream.
“I- I ran.” She hiccups, hands shaking as Sasuke looks up at her.
“Where?”
She points behind Sasuke, beyond the stretch of trees that hid their camp.
The hand grips her shoulder tighter still and she can feel the wind cutting her face in a shunshin that brings her to the camp. Her legs feel like lead, how had she made it into camp back then? She’s pushed forward by Sasuke’s brother and as if kicked into action, stumbles forward towards the tent. She’s not sure why she expects the jounin to be there. The camp was deserted. There was no one there save the two of them and Sasuke’s eyes.
She can feel his eyes on her as they enter the tent, waiting.
“T-there was a jar. Sasuke. The jar.” She stutters out. “I don’t know - hic - I don’t know what happens after.” Sasuke’s eyes were still in her bloody hands. She wishes the jounin were here to take them away.
It’s not enough for Sasuke’s brother though. His hand moves to the back of her neck in a vice grip. “Who?”
“...I don’t know.” She chokes out and closes her eyes, bracing for the inevitable blade that would pierce her side.
It never comes. No stab, no red light and no chains.
Sakura slips into blissful darkness.