Fic 5: Protect the Past, Save the Future (IzuSaku, MadaSaku)

Prompt: (three pics; are posted in Pinterest moodboard for UchiSaku RR event)

A/N:  Naruto-verse, time travel

Rating: M
Squicks: major character death, violence

The candles stared back at her, their fragile stubs bobbing in the crystal goblets filled with glittering water.

Her chest rose and fell.

His kunai to her throat, Madara stared at her, his chest heaving.

He’d thought she was strong.

He’d never understood how right he was.

“I had to do it,” breathed Sakura.

Her chest rose and fell.

“I had to.”

His lips thinned, his eyes mirrors of hatred. The ink in them had become blood, crimson and bleeding. For her, for him.

“Lies,” he whispered coldly.

What darkness had she followed, tread in, dragged herself through? What made her think she could do this? Fix things? Like this?

Maybe she couldn’t.

Her chest rose and fell. His kunai was baptised with a single drop of her blood as he pressed it into her skin.

She couldn’t allow it to happen, though. Too much would change. Too much would never be the same. 

She thought saving Izuna would be the right thing.

She had been so wrong.

Mountains don’t rise without earthquakes; she’d thought she could prevent the earthquake, keep the land safe, flat, fertile.

But the fire that explodes from the earth relieves its pressure and encourages new growth.

She’d needed to be the fire.

Her chest rose and fell.

Beneath her, her hands were covered in blood. Not hers. Izuna’s.

Izuna’s precious, life-changing, history-setting blood. It seeped into his wedding robes, soaking them with her guilt.

By her hand, his chest would never rise or fall again.

“I had to,” she repeated, tears falling down her cheeks.

“He was my brother. He was your husband,” snarled Madara, salt wetting his own cheeks.

“I had to,” breathed Sakura, her heart aching.

When Madara’s lip trembled, she inhaled deeply, confessing the truth. “I would do it again.”

“Why?”

How could she explain, without risking more?

But the anguish in his eyes, after he’d already said goodbye to her once before, tightened her bleeding throat and forced her words.

“A long time ago, we met across a battlefield… you were my enemy.”

(TBC?)