The Adjustment
She couldn’t figure out a way home.
Sakura closed her eyes, flopping back on her bed, slamming a pillow down over her face to muffle the frustrated scream she let out. She had learnt rather quickly if she yelled or screamed someone would drop by to check on her. Sakura was only thankful she didn’t seem to have any neighbours in the nearby rooms to complain about the noise.
She didn’t know fuinjutsu, and she couldn’t start learning it when there were no resources. No one to teach her, nor explain what sort of ink she needed. Chakra needed to be compatible with it, from the little she knew about medical seals, and she highly doubted anything chakra-compatible existed, given they didn’t seem to understand chakra.
Mana wasn’t the same as chakra, as she had learnt through hours and hours of doing what she did best – pouring through books and spying on people in the rare event of her emerging from her room. They hadn’t detected her chakra when they had been searching for this mana and they seemed to think her weak due to the lack of it.
Sakura had refrained from punching anyone and anything with her full strength thanks to that. Surprise was a shinobi’s best friend, especially in unknown and unpredictable situations. Rubbing at her chest, she frowned, throwing the pillow back up her bed so she could stare at the high white ceiling.
It was so different in style to the buildings back in the Elemental Nations. Closing her eyes once more, she groaned quietly. Maybe she’d died and been incarnated in some weird afterlife which wasn’t the Pure Lands… Her shoulders sunk. Or maybe this was the Infinite Tsukuyomi… Unlikely, given how this wasn’t a situation her brain or some genjutsu could have dreamed up. It was too weird. Too foreign. Too alien.
There was only one thing she could really do, no matter what the strange world was, given how she wasn’t going to making it back home anytime soon – and that was to wait for someone to rescue her, and in the meantime adjust to the strange new life there.
After all, if no one came…
Sakura swallowed, rubbing at the spot Sasuke had stabbed her through. They would come, wouldn’t they? A shaky smile formed on her face. Of course they would.
Her eyes narrowed. Well, they’d try. Sakura wasn’t too sure what to expect, given how an entire team of so-called mages hadn’t been able to figure out how to get her home. Dimension travel was complex, or so she’d learnt upon trying to read the scripts in the highly secretive room belonging to the summoners of extradimensional beings.
Sakura scowled at the thought that she now fell under that category. “Brilliant, just brilliant,” she mumbled, despair and misery crashing down on her. “Don’t lose hope, Sakura,” she said to herself, feeling as though she might have been clinging onto sanity by her fingernails. Her life was just far too strange, and the amount of screaming she had done recently was probably unhealthy. But as Tsunade said, it was better to let things out in private. Otherwise the feelings would just build and build until a breakdown occurred, and those were downright dangerous when it came to shinobi. “Happy thoughts, happy thoughts…”
Images of the sketches of strange creatures in the many tomes she had sequestered away in her room came to mind. They were so strange. A creature called a griffin with the head of an eagle and the talons on its forelegs, but with the hind of a creature called or a lion, and then there was the oddly similar winged lion which was just a lion with golden wings to match its fur.
Part of her wanted to see those creatures, but the other part of her was screaming in denial and saying it would be best just to stay in her room in the safety of the castle there. Because it was undoubtedly a castle, despite her having never really seen such a style of castle before. The grandeur of the architecture and the splendour of the lands around it left no doubt in her mind. But she couldn’t become too entranced by its beauty.
She needed to get home, sooner or later. Though something in the back of her mind told her it would be later, if at all. Naruto was the closest thing to a seal master back home, but she was fairly certain he’d never touched space-time with a ten foot pole. The Nidaime had taken years to craft the Hirashin.
The weight of the realisation fell down on her like a ten tonne brick. It might be years before she could get home… and what would be the point in hiding in her room for however many years. Chewing on her lip, Sakura scowled at the feeling of tears building up in her eyes. Did she really want to wait years to go back to a world which would have undoubtedly changed so much by that point?
“Stupid summoners…” she muttered. If they hadn’t summoned her there she would have been with Sasuke… Sakura rubbed at her chest, staring blankly up at the ceiling. “Tomorrow,” she mumbled to herself. “Tomorrow I’ll go and find out more,” she promised to herself, pulling the same pillow she’d screamed into onto her chest.
Hugging the pillow, she rolled herself onto her bed, silently making preparations in her head for what she would do tomorrow. It was like a long-term infiltration mission. Sakura closed her eyes. That was all she needed to think of it as. Eventually she’d be back in Konoha with Sasuke.
She rubbed at her chest yet again, ignoring the strange twinge there as she thought of her home. Of what she wanted her home to look like. But would the reality of that live up to all the fantasies she’d dreamed of. It wasn’t like Sasuke would ever sweep her off of her feet and declare his love of her for the entire world to see. That didn’t suit his personality in the slightest.
But she didn’t mind that.
As long as he was there in Konoha… Sakura smiled, palming the odd ache in her chest again. Everything would work out. She knew it would. After all, things for Team Seven, no matter how crazy things went, always wound up working out somehow.
It was just how things went.
Team Seven’s luck, as most liked to call it.