Naruto Fan Fiction ❯ To One in Paradise ❯ rusting iron hand, fading cherry blossom ( Chapter 1 )

Summary: “All my nightly dreams are where thy grey eye glances, and where thy footstep gleams.” The lights went out in all of their eyes in the end, and they died before they were even all the way gone.

 

To One in Paradise

 

Part One: The Iron Hand Rusts and the Cherry Blossom Fades

 

They say that when a person dies, you can see the lights leave her eyes, like a candle blown out. His arms fall limp around you. Her breath goes still. He is silent for the last time. All these are signs that that person that you cling to is dead.

 

And yet sometimes, you see the same signs in someone who is still alive. Floating through their days like they care about nothing, and most of all, their eyes, those dead eyes.

 

Sakura saw Tsunade like that.

 

It started a few days after Tsunade returned to the village bruised and bleeding and carrying Shizune's dying body. All she would tell anyone was, “He's dead now.” She didn't have to say who.

 

Ever since, she had delegated half her work to Sakura. She spent her days locked in her study, flipping through papers and inspecting them with those same cold, lightless eyes.

 

Tsunade confirmed it one day, when she was approaching her sixty-third birthday. Sakura remembered it clearly.

 

She entered the room carrying a stack of folders full of applicants to become jounin, and found Tsunade staring listlessly at her empty desk.

 

Something was wrong. Something was different.

 

She dropped the folders where she stood and ran to her teacher. She lifted her, straightened her in her chair, and cried her name.

 

Tsunade's eyes were still dead. “He killed me, too,” she whispered. She gritted her teeth, gasped, and clutched her chest. Sakura's grip around her tightened. Tsunade shook her head. “Some pains, Sakura…you will learn you cannot heal.” She slumped down further and closed her lightless eyes. “And all my days are trances,” she murmured, “and all my nightly dreams are where thy grey eye glances, and where thy footstep gleams…” She laid her head back. “…in what ethereal dances…by what eternal streams.”

 

The passing of the Fifth Hokage from the world was difficult to notice. It took Sakura a moment, before she felt that the warmth was beginning to seep from her teacher's body. She screamed for more medics, and felt at her master's absent pulse, clinging to a last hope of finding something wrong, something she could heal. There was nothing.

 

The certificate of death claimed natural causes. Haruno Sakura knew better.

 

The world moved on. A new Hokage was appointed. It was not Naruto. He had refused the offer, claiming he would rather stay in ANBU. Sakura accepted a position in Neji, Sai and Naruto's ANBU squad as a healer. She liked it, and began to adjust. In time, she even started to forget Tsunade's lightless eyes. She made a friend in the fifth member of their team, a fiery albino girl named Hotaru.

 

Then came the assignment, and everything changed.

 

They were sent to the Grass Country to assassinate an S-rank missing-nin. They were not told who it was, nor given any information as to his fighting style. They descended upon the deserted village they had been directed to, sending Neji and Hotaru in first, with Sai, Naruto and Sakura following close behind.

 

Hotaru returned five minutes later. Sakura ran to her and attempted to move her out of the rain that had begun to pound down onto them all. Hotaru fell apart.

 

Neji returned ten minutes later. Sakura didn't even try to touch him.

 

Their missing-nin appeared five minutes after that. He sent Sai through the roof of a building in nothing flat. Sakura and Naruto saw him and realized why the Hokage hadn't told them who they were going after.

 

There were lines beneath his eyes that made him look far too much like Itachi. The Akatsuki coat he wore did the same.

 

He raised his hand and pointed to Naruto. “They'll have you this time.”

 

Naruto started to scream about what Sasuke had become. He hadn't defeated his brother, he'd become him. He, Naruto, would kill him this time, because he had nothing left to live for.

 

And Sakura felt the lights leave her own eyes, and realized where else she'd seen them missing besides Tsunade. It was in Sasuke, whose eyes had been a little bit deader every day since a horrible night when he was a very little boy.

 

Naruto told her to stay back. She knew there was nothing she could do to convince him otherwise. She did.

 

They fought. Naruto lost. Sakura attacked. She won.

 

Sasuke was left on the ground, bleeding, his eyes as dead as ever. Sakura watched him die, and she said something to him, or to Naruto, or to herself.

 

“Thou wast all to me, love, for which my soul did pine,” she murmured. “A green isle in the sea, love, a fountain and a shrine, all wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, and all the flowers were mine…and all the flowers were mine.”

 

Sasuke died without a word. With no throat, he could not speak.

 

Sakura returned to Konoha alone. There wasn't enough left of her teammates' bodies to bring them back, and barely anything was left of her own. She bore scars from for the rest of her life.

 

Then she looked in a mirror, and saw her lightless eyes, and wondered just how long it would be before her death certificate read, “natural causes.”