It’s Only Been a Moment (a Lifetime)

The first time Sakura accidentally time travels, she doesn’t know where she is. Or what’s going on. Or, obviously, when she is. She’s just eaten a god.

There were a lot of hops between dimensions. The topography of the earth had changed and mutated. She could be anywhere.

She lands on a battlefield.

–

She doesn’t hesitate. She comes from on high, falling from the clouds, and lands on bended knee in a crater half a mile wide. Some of the foot soldiers—well, they’re all foot soldiers, but some of the rank-and-file have fallen from the impact. She raises a fist from the ground and looks around with shrewd green eyes, darting to foreheads and shoulders in search of village symbols.

She finds none, not even the now-familiar “Shinobi” that Naruto—somehow, fuck—conned every village into adopting. She’d laugh if it wasn’t so crazy.

As it is, she spins around looking for clues. The battle hasn’t exactly stopped, but all have turned to the new arrival.

At a certain point in the war, her reputation had proceeded her into battle, just as it did all of the heavy hitters. Her and Naruto, though. They could heal.

Some were happier to see team seven then the kages.

“Why are you fighting each other?” She demands, because—none of these are Edo-Tensei, and they don’t appear to be white zetsus either. Had some fuckers used the distraction of the conflict to hit their enemies?

In this, that had become the last stand of humanity?

Like hell.

She slammed a fist into her open palm, ready for an answer that couldn’t possibly good enough.

“Stay out of this, foreigner!” Shouts some brave soul on the farthest edge of the field from her.

Another, opposing, yells, “These are Uchiha lands!”

Yet another, “These are Senju lands, you daft cur, and we will die before we let you take another mile of it!”

Then there’s snarling and the sound of resuming violence, steel on steel, and Sakura can only stare.

Okay, yep. Nope.

She can see now, the clan signs woven into armor. Red and blue and various shades of brown.

Sakura presses her hands to the earth and nature breathes.

“Hey!” Shouts a young voice, and Sakura turns to see a—Senju, probably, based on his coloring—dart forward, shinobi-fast. It’s just a kid, though—a kid like Kakashi, like Itachi, like Sai and like she could have been, if things had gone differently—a kid who shouldn’t be used this young.

If there was one thing she and Naruto agreed on, had agreed on since Wave, it was that change needed to happen. Change in using shinobi as weapons; change in using children on the battlefield.

“You can do the tree thing!” shouts the kid, and he can’t be ten but all the Senju warriors defer to him as he passes, weaving through the wave of branches. “You can use the wood jutsu like my brother!”

Realization knocks the breath from her lungs, even as wood wraps around the whole battlefield and pulls apart warring shinobi like tussling children.

“Your brother… Hashirama?”

The kid with a sword nodded, eyes wary but expectant, and Sakura heaved a huge sigh.

She looked at the sky.

“You can figure out a way to bring me back now!” She shouted to the clouds, and—obligingly—Sasuke fell out of them, landing easily. His red eyes took in the struggling shinobi and he shrugged them off to focus on her.

“The idiot said not to come back without you,” He offered, holding out a hand.

She took his wrist instead, gazing into red eyes that shifted and whirled, black spinning—and she looked around to see a more familiar destruction.

–

The second time it happened, she had not just eaten a god, but she had managed to mostly get a handle on her god-eating-derived powers.

Thank god the mokuton had erupted before she ate Kaguya, though of course without it she wouldn’t have been able to—probably—

The point is: really she didn’t mean to time travel again.

But she did, it happened, and so she accepted it with grace and the knowledge that she wasn’t getting a Sharingan-induced rescue. Last her teammates knew, she’d been doing solo training on a riverbank.

At least she recognized some things, this time.

“Well, you’re looking better than the last time I saw you,” She tells Senju Tobirama, who is Not Dead even a Little.

“Who the fuck are you?” He fired back, looking tired and unamused.

“Random shinobi falls from the sky, and you’re not even a little bit alarmed?” She tries, grinning despite herself.

“I didn’t sense you until you appeared out of thin air,” He says flatly. “Obviously, you’re the result of some jutsu.”

He’s standing on a wooden bridge across a familiar river, the rustic version of what will become a large road going past training ground nine in Konoha.

“True.” Sakura looks around, taking in the older—although technically, ‘newer’; time travel is confusing—constructs of her village. It’s… lacking.

“And besides,” Huffed the would-be second Hokage. “Based on the color of your hair and the appearing trick, odds are you’re exactly who I think you are.”

Sakura turned back to him, surprised.

“You didn’t find a way to give yourself memories from the future, did you?”

Although transferring memories from his resurrected soul, to his past self, all the way from the pure lands… Well, if anyone could do it.

“Thank you for confirming your origins.” He snipes, snottily, and she can’t help but laugh.

“So how do you know me?”

“Oh, I don’t. I just know about you. I know exactly who you…”

“TOBIRAMA!” Shouts a voice several decibels louder than needed.

“Kawarama,” Returns the unflappable voice of the second Hokage, tinged with amused annoyance.

“Oh fuck,” Says Sakura, realizing abruptly what’s wrong with this picture. “I’m not time travelling.”

“Oh?” Tobirama turns to her, eyes pulling away from the short-haired teenager running over.

“Pretty sure this is an alternate dimension. Or alternate timeline, at least. I think I changed things the first time.”

“Undoubtedly.” Tobriama acknowledges. “I take it none of the changes were reflected in your timestream when you returned?”

“Oh no. It’s well recorded that Senju Kawarama and Itama’s deaths were a major factor in the Warring Clan Era.” She glances at him, then around. She snaps her fingers. “That’s why there’s a village this early. You can’t even be twenty yet.”

Tobirama recovers enough to scowl at her, even as she dissolves into wind like she was never there, two or three leaves falling where her shadow was a moment ago.

Kawarama reaches him, entirely out of breath.

“Your angel from the sky is infuriating.” He tells his brother plainly, but Kawarama just laughs, amber eyes lit up with joy.

“I’m gonna marry her,” He insists, as he’s been insisting since he was seven, and only the three-dozen witnesses from their clan have saved him from their disbelief at the pink-haired, mokuton-wielding angel who fell from the sky and saved his life.

“We’ll see.” Tobirama huffs, reaching out to ruffle his kid brother’s hair.

Senju Kawarama and Itama’s deaths were well recorded. His heart clenches.

If his little brothers had died, he’s sure they would have been. He would have never let the world forget them.

He also would have burned the Uchiha to the ground, so. Probably for the best that Hashirama and his peace talks didn’t have Tobirama as an opponent.

–

The third time is the most ridiculous.

Mostly because there’s a third time.

“Oh, come on!” She hisses, dropping from a lower height each time. This time she lands on a tree branch easy as anything, hopping down to ground level and looking around for the inevitable.

“Oh, my brother’s angel.” Blinks a dual-colored boy, sitting shirtless in a clearing. Kunai litter the ground around him; the earth is upturned. It’s such a normal sight that Sakura relaxes, a little.

“Who?” She asks, bringing on green-wreathed hand to her broken wrist. She’d snapped it like a twig, like an amateur, and the distraction had resulted in this.

Worse yet, she had barely dregs of chakra left after the fight.

Her wood release had given the chakra monster pause, though, so: win.

She’s sure Naruto would handle the rest.

Better not pop back in when they could still be fighting, though.

She looks over the young man in the clearing, surprised to see he’s only a few years younger than her. From the way he moves, pained and grimacing as he sits up, he’s got bruised ribs.

Sakura barely has any chakra left, having gone all-out for the first time in months.

Still, she is… herself. She brings both hands to his sides, ignoring his surprise, and heals.

The boy—Senju Itama, she had done her reading after last time—smiles up at her, awed and shocked.

“I know,” She grins, soft and proud of her skill. “It’s not often you get a mednin as talented as me.”

“They have healing jutsu in the future,” Says a boy raised on a battlefield, and Sakura frowns.

Well, shit.

She just got something to do in this next door dimension.

–

The third time is long.

She goes door to door healing injuries and illnesses, performing miracles for people who still thought fevers were bad spirits.

“I thought Hashirama was famous for his healing technique?” She demands, voice rough and head spinning as she stands from her latest patient, absolutely woozy from lack of chakra.

A strong hand settles her, solid at her elbow. She leans into it without really thinking.

“Yeah,” Says Kawarama, the boy with the scar, all grown up. He sounds amused. “Doesn’t work on anybody else, though. You should see the fits it gives him.”

From what she knows of the man—hell, from what she’s lived her own self– sitting by and watching people suffer was literally intolerable.

“God, I need food.” She pushes against Kawarama’s chest, barely feeling the definition there at all, she’s so tired, and stumbles a few feet away, determined. “Who has the best chakra control in the village?”

Kawarama catches her before she can fall.

“You just healed half the clan. Of course we’ll feed you.” He leads her to a door and back onto the street. Every step feels like burning muscle strain. Her vision dances black.

She takes deep breaths and staggers along next to him, grateful for the arm around her waist.

“What do you mean by ‘chakra control?’” He asks, casually curious.

“I hate the past,” She grouches.

His laugh is like the wind through the leaves, more snicker than anything. It’s endearing. He leads her to a mat that she gratefully collapses down on, positioned traditionally in front of a low table stacked with hearty dishes.

“Oh, fuck the hell yes.” Sakura breathes, eagerly reaching. “Senju, I could kiss you.”

That earns her a brazen chuckle, warm at her side. He leans his head on her shoulder to watch her eat, direct bowls to her when she can’t lift her arm far enough to reach.

“You know, I’ve been planning to marry you since I was seven years old.” He says, casually. The lack of fear, but obvious respect, is a heady combination.

Usually the people who don’t fear her are complete morons, and rude on top of that.

She has a feeling this is different.

“Ambitious, for a child. I’m the apprentice of the fifth hokage, you know.” She boasts, but it’s just playing. Already ‘apprentice to Tsunade’ is the least of her titles.

She ate a god. She is the strongest shinobi alive.

Kawarama hums.

“I did not know.” He sits back, weight on his hands, to watch her eat. “One brother wants world peace. The other raises the dead. I guess I had to put all my ambition somewhere.”

She shovels rice into her mouth, then frowns.

“What about the little one?” She asks. “The stupid one, with the bruised ribs?”

She isn’t expecting him to chuckle.

“Itama has his hands full with the rest of us.” He grins, confident and startlingly attractive.

“Actually,” he starts, confidingly, “I’m pretty sure his goal is turn all our hair grey.”

Sakura snorts, sending water half-up her nose.

–

The fourth time she lands in the middle of a battle, again.

She hits the ground from only a few feet up. It’s the First Shinobi War, from the look of things. She doesn’t need to look hard.

“Hi, honey,” She says, still breathless from the travel, but Kawarama bursts out a laugh and cuts through enemy soliders without blinking. She’d like some context, maybe, but even with how the world banded together against impossible odds, she doesn’t really need any.

Konoha has gone to war, and she can feel the war drums in heart.

They sing.

Later, she will learn that it was the first major battle in what had previously been skirmishes. She will learn that it was the best and most powerful of opposing forces, united against Konoha in a way that, once, killed Tobirama himself.

At the time she just slaughters her way through them, happy to be dealing with something simple, for once. In her time, she’s dealing with politics and it’s exhausting.

Punching and slicing her way through a few hundred shinobi is a reward on its own, especially without the consequences of failure that had hung over them in the Fourth War. Once upon a time an old lady had used her body with utmost precision, turned her into a flawless apparatus of death.

Now Sakura is all of that on her own, and finally given an army to unleash it on; she chases the feeling she’d first touched at fifteen, against Sasori. With no assistance necessary, with nothing hanging in the balance, she shines.

Until one of the gold and silver brothers stands over Kawarama.

She isn’t sure which, but—

It hardly matters.

So far Sakura has been thrilling in her speed and flexibility, using kunai and pure skill to kill her way across the field. Part of her was proud of her progress, the test of prowess; it was always said that the best ninja could be devastating with nothing but the basics.

How often had Kakashi decimated with only the ‘academy three’? Of course, then he defaulted to maximum power sharingan chidori, so.

Sakura had never understood that urge to go full-out at the drop of the hat.

Then she’d pumped Naruto’s heart with her bare hand; she’d reattached Sasuke’s arm with grim horror; she’d had people die under her glowing hands. She had never understood, not really; and then she’d gone to war.

Some part of her will always be fighting that war. It’s never been a problem, actually. It isn’t a problem now.

Kinkaku hovers over Kawarama and the switch in Sakura is flipped. She goes from ‘wow it’s fun to stretch’ to hurling all her power into one goal, into ‘you will NOT’. It’s an intense fight, the strongest she’s had in years.

She tears the gold and silver brothers apart and sends them back to Kumo with the youngest person on the battlefield, a small chunin who looks at her with terror.

But Kawarama lives.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” He laughs, from his elbows in the dirt. She falls to his side, already channeling chakra, and wonders how someone she’s met three times can make her want to wage war.

–

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” He says, when she appears in the middle of him fighting both of his older brothers. “But your timing really sucks.”

“It could be worse,” Tobirama grins, vicious. “You could have been on a date.”

“Aniki.” Kawarama in motion is a beautiful thing. She’s never seen it before—or at least never had the time to focus on him.

“Nice to meet you, Sakura!” Hashirama calls, as friendly as she remembers. She waves back with a grin.

Kawarama fights like a Nara, only better. A Nara will use strategy to plan every hit, every consequence of the fight. This isn’t that. It’s too short term. It’s almost like—

Sakura stands up from where she’d sat down to watch their bout.

“Are you doing math?” She demands, outraged.

“Uh, of course?” Kawarama is all straw-colored hair and amber eyes, shooting a perplexed grin her way as he dodges a palm strike by millimeters. On purpose.

He’s extending just enough effort to move a hairsbreadth out of the way of every hit, not because he’s too slow, but because it’s the minimum exertion necessary.

The sheer mental calculations make her brain hurt, and Sakura likes math.

He’s poetry in motion. Watching him is like watching a dancer, precise and smooth and reckless at once. He’s wearing a black shirt that might be the precursor to ANBU’s uniform, sleeveless to display his working arm muscles. She can see Tobirama’s mounting frustration, Hashirama’s exuberance giving way to something more muted. They’re tiring.

They call it quits and drop to the ground, reaching for bottles of water.

Sakura went from being the worst at taijutsu to the best in the world.

“I want a turn.” She says, and to her amusement the older brothers both blink. Kawarama has seen her in action, though, and it’s his reaction she’s focused on.

He scrambles to his feet like he’s not already covered in sweat, eyes glowing with eagerness. It trembles through exhausted muscles and he’s grinning instantly.

“Fuck the hell yes,” He jogs over to her and gives her an excited once-over, taking in her attire, her weapons, and probably doing math regarding her arm length, and not just the kind of quick figuring most people do to determine range and strength.

She burns a little under his gaze, remembers the time they were back to back and took out an army. As equals. It’s addicting.

–

Except they hadn’t really been back to back. They’d started on either sides of the battlefield, during the first war, and while Sakura thrilled in her own skill, he’d been taken down by the enemy.

This time they really do start back to back. She thumps down a few feet away, and he’s registering her presence as she registers his, grasping the offered forearm as soon as it’s offered.

She spins to press her shoulders to his and grins, as bloodthirsty as she wants.

“Two trips in one year? I must really be special, huh?” He teases, and she’s surprised to find he hasn’t changed at all from her last visit.

“I’ve figured out how to do it on purpose,” She admits, fully expecting the distraction to cost him. It doesn’t. He jerks his head to look at her, but even that is planned in the split second it takes him; a fist goes sailing over his head by the scantest of margins.

He doesn’t look concerned at all.

His confidence is thrilling.

Their teamwork could use some work. While they keep coming back to each other, keep focusing on how they can help, it’s an untried thing; they figure it out as they go along and it’s unpolished, rough.

But they’re badasses. It works itself out.

–

Next week, they fight Hashirama and Tobirama to a standstill.

It’s utterly thrilling.

Sakura has fought gods and monsters before, but even though they should have had it, Team 7 never had a team’s synergy the way Team 8 did, or Team 10. Naruto and Sasuke had the kind of flawless teamwork that came with being born fated soulmates, and she tried to adapt, spent years becoming a person who could fit into the cracks, but—

Her style works so well with Kawarama’s. He is all subtle movements and barely dodging, slinking in close to deliver punishing blows. He uses his hands and feet in equal measure and his flexibility is nothing to sneeze at.

She uses the terrain like children’s blocks, reshaping it to suit her whims. She punches boulders into water dragons and matches Hashirama mokuton for mokuton.

Kawarama is quick and devastating, almost too fast to counter, and then he decides pure taijutsu isn’t the way to go and she gets her first glimpse at his fighting style.

He uses explosions. Exploding tags, gouts of fire, grenades that start life as shuriken and, as they’re imbued with chakra, burst into shrapnel upon impact.

He lures his opponents right where he wants them, uses tags and wires and traps like they’re going out of style. It’s hard to even describe, but the way he moves, knowing just where to strike or move or flip with a nearly-preternatural edge… it’s entrancing to watch.

No hit lands on him unless he wants it to, and then he redirects momentum perfectly.

Kawarama could probably set up a move twenty steps in advance and execute it perfectly. He could go through enemy troops in such a way that they’re left fighting themselves within minutes.

Sakura is mesmerized.

He weaves into her fighting style, changes and molds to it without effort or without needing or asking her to change, and it’s heady.

The grin he gives her when they take out two kage in a casual afternoon spar is, in a word, blinding.

He hugs her and she can smell sweat, deep and masculine and drenching his stupidly sleeveless shirt. She dunks him in the river.

(The river was not there before the fight, but, eh. Consequence of fighting Tobirama. It’s one of many that exists later in the alternate future, so who’s counting?)

He comes up laughing. His hair catches the water and it falls over his temples, down his cheek, glints gold in the sun.

It’s not the first time she thinks about kissing him, but it’s the first time it sticks. It’s the last time she’s able to stop thinking about it.

–

They’ve got it down to a science, at this point.

She can choose when she comes back, so why not spend a week in the past for every thirty seconds in the future? She steps back into her apartment, and away again with barely enough time to see her wall paper, and falls back into fight after fight with Senju Kawarama.

He hasn’t seen her in a day and he’s exuberant, cheerful, so happy to see her that it hurts.

She spends a whole morning like that, barely staying for a minute in the future, and spending a whole week in the past. She sleeps in the Senju compound and then in a Senju’s bed, muscles exhausted but happier than she can ever remember being.

It takes five years before the sun rises to the noon sky, and Sakura abruptly realizes she’s lived in their room in the clan compound longer than she’s lived in this apartment.

She stays longer, that time. She visits Ino. She has lunch with Naruto, ribs Sasuke, hugs Sai. She plays Go with Shikamaru and ignores the way his eyes trace her laughter lines, the subtle signs of aging at her mouth.

“Troublesome.” He mutters, but squeezes her hand tight.

Sakura has dinner with her parents, goes out for drinks with Tsunade. She talks with Shizune just because she can, and stops by Kakashi’s house to tease him and Yamato.

She steps back into the past thirty seconds after she left, with Kawarama still looking in her direction. She catches his hand and his smile is still dazzling.

–

Sakura has forgotten how many times she’s fallen into the past between one heartbeat and the next. She arrives bare inches above the ground. Soon, if she wanted, she’d be familiar enough to account for the spin of the earth when she does this.

The first Hokage is closer to her than any brother could be; he shows her the intricacies of his jutsu, the true beauty and power of mokuton. She teaches him how to heal, so that he can teach the grandchild he’ll have one day; so that Tsunade, with a foundation to build upon, won’t have to start from scratch. She will reach even newer heights.

Tobirama is a bastard, but she loves him, too.

Slowly she makes friends in the past, with the likes of Uzumaki Mito and Senju Touka, with Uchiha Izuna and Senju Itama, both of whom lived due to her meddling. She doesn’t tell them, but Tobirama already knows. She whispers it, halting, into Kawawama’s shoulder at night; how the names from history were just names until she knows how they talk, how they laugh, what they sound like when they’re in love, and then the stark history of how they died feels like broken ribs pressed into her lungs because she loves them, now, they are hers.

–

Sakura mostly remembers to go back to the future. She spends vacations with Naruto, with Sasuke, with Ino and Sai and Shikamaru. With Tsunade and Kakashi and Yamato and Shizune.

She follows in her mentor’s footsteps and hides her true age in the diamond on her forehead, though with her healing aging has slowed down, anyway, same as Hashirama.

–

The last time she lands right in his arms, and he catches her instantly, spins her without hesitation until she’s laughing. He smiles up at her with white, white teeth and an unflinching happiness that steals her breath away.