Chapter Text
The sky had gone wrong.
It wasn’t night—not really. Night still remembered stars, still knew how to hold light gently instead of strangling it. This sky was empty. Starless. Colorless. As if the universe itself had turned its face away, unable to watch what it had done.
Sakura tasted iron.
Her hands were slick with it, her sleeves darkened past recognition, chakra burned down to ash in her veins. She knelt where she had fallen, one knee screaming, the other numb, lungs dragging in air that refused to feel like enough.
“Kakashi-sensei—”
The name left her mouth automatically. Reflex. Muscle memory.
There was no answer.
For a moment—just a moment—her mind refused to understand what her eyes were telling it. Kakashi Hatake was simply… not there. No body. No blood. No outline of a man-shaped absence.
Gone.
Not dead in the way death sometimes allowed—a body, a ritual, a place to kneel and scream. Gone—torn apart in a way that left no trace, no body, no place to grieve. Just a void. Torn apart in another dimension, scattered so completely there was nothing left to retrieve.
Nothing left to fix.
The realization hit like cold water to the face. Sharp. Stunning. Brief.
Shock, clean and merciless.
Her gaze snapped away, searching desperately for something that still made sense.
“Naruto—!”
She dragged herself forward, fingers clawing at broken stone, nails tearing, pain registering only distantly. He was too still. Too quiet. Lying a few feet away like he’d simply… stopped.
Her heart seized.
“No,” she whispered, the word trembling apart. “No, no, no—”
Naruto lay on his back, orange torn to ruin, his chest—gone.
A blast meant for her, clean and absolute, carving out everything it touched. There was too much red and not enough of anything else. Too much space where his heartbeat should have been.
She crawled to him anyway.
Her hands hovered uselessly over his body, trembling, waiting for a rise that never came. She stared at his face, willing it to move, to scrunch up into a grin, to complain, to breathe.
It didn’t.
Naruto Uzumaki—loud, stubborn, radiant—lay quiet at last. His expression was almost peaceful, lips parted slightly, as if he’d meant to say something else and simply… hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
His final moment, spent exactly the way he’d lived.
Protecting her.
The devastation was total.
It didn’t shatter. It collapsed. Folded inward until there was nothing left to hold her up. Sakura felt something inside her cave in completely, soundlessly, like a star going dark.
She didn’t scream. She howled.
A cry so deep and primal, it felt as if the earth itself had cracked open beneath her. It wasn’t just a sound—it was an overwhelming force, a torrent of sorrow that ripped through her chest, making her whole body tremble as if it might split apart from the pressure. Her throat burned, voice cracking as her sorrow poured out, unrelenting and unstoppable.
She wanted to tear the world apart, to rip Kaguya from the sky and make her feel this loss, this ache, this hollowness. She wanted to scream until her lungs bled.
But instead, she cradled Naruto’s head in her arms, her fingers trembling as she pulled him close. And then, with tears streaming down her face, she kissed his crown, soft and broken, as if that was all she could give him now.
The cry slowly faded into a low, guttural sound, choked by the weight of exhaustion. Her body, so raw and shattered, began to give in, weariness seeping into every limb. She let go of Naruto’s head gently, her hands trembling as she lowered him to the ground, as if reluctant to release him, even in death.
Her arms ached, but there was no strength left to fight it. She didn’t have the energy to cry anymore, the grief too heavy to bear. For a long moment, all that remained was the hollow silence of the wasteland, the sound of her own labored breathing too loud in her ears, the absence of her team pressing against her like a suffocating blanket.
She looked around, hoping—hoping against all reason—that someone, anyone, would emerge from the shadows. That the fight wasn’t over, that they weren’t all gone. But the battlefield was silent. Nothing stirred.
The weight of that truth sank in like cold steel.
And then—
A figure.
Distant. Lying face down.
Her heart skipped. The last breath of energy she had left surged through her in an instant. She didn’t run—she couldn’t. But she dragged herself forward, trembling with the effort, body protesting with every movement, hands scraping across the broken ground. The wind felt too sharp against her skin, but it didn’t matter.
If it was him, if it was Sasuke—
He was still breathing. He had to be. She couldn’t lose anyone else. Not like this.
When she reached him, she collapsed beside him, her vision spinning, dizzy from exhaustion and the heaviness of the world pressing in on her.
Sasuke’s dark hair soaked with red. His Sharingan flickered weakly, the once vibrant crimson dimming as blood pooled beneath him.
Her hands shook as she reached for him, and with what little strength she had left, she turned him onto his back. His body was unnaturally limp, but the faint rise and fall of his chest gave her some small, reluctant hope. The trembling in her fingers wasn’t fear this time. It was something darker. A recognition of the gravity of the moment.
She pressed her palm to his chest, feeling the weak, erratic thrum of his heartbeat beneath her touch.
“I’ve got you,” she said, already pressing her hands to his wounds, already channeling chakra that wasn’t there. “I can— I can fix this. Just—just hold on.”
Her hands shook violently. The green glow sputtered, thin and unstable. Medical ninjutsu demanded precision, demanded calm, demanded chakra she had burned through hours ago.
She knew it was useless.
She kept going anyway.
Denial was her last refuge, the only thing keeping her from facing the impossible truth.
“I won’t let you go,” she whispered fiercely, desperately, as if saying it enough times might make it true. “Not you too. I won’t—”
Her chakra fizzled out completely.
Nothing answered her call.
The battlefield blurred. Her arms gave out beneath her. Somewhere, impossibly far away, Kaguya still existed. The war still existed. The world kept moving forward without them.
But Sakura Haruno was out of time.
She tipped backward, landing hard against sharp stones she barely felt. Her gaze drifted upward, past Naruto’s still form, past Sasuke’s fading breath, past the empty place where Kakashi should have been—
Up to the sky that had offered nothing and taken everything.
Her lips moved.
“Please,” she whispered, the word tearing itself from her chest. “Not like this.”
Her throat burned.
“Please… anything but this.”
Her breath shuddered, thin and shallow, already halfway gone.
“If only I—”
If only I had been faster.
If only I had been stronger.
If only I had known.
If only I had one more chance.
The thought never finished forming.
Darkness crept in from the edges of her vision, soft and heavy, pulling her down. She was so cold. The pain receded first, then the weight of her body, then the sound of her own breathing. It all felt like it was drifting away, slipping from her grasp, and with it, the world.
She felt like she was floating.
This must be what dying felt like, she thought dimly. Nothing and something at the same time. No pain. No gravity. No screaming ache in her chest.
But it wasn’t peaceful.
There was something inside her, a nagging tug, like a forgotten task tapping its foot impatiently, demanding her attention. She was supposed to be doing something. Going somewhere. What? Where?
Her eyelids felt impossibly heavy. Exhaustion wrapped around her like a lullaby, sweet and merciless. She wanted—desperately—to close her eyes and never open them again.
Then a voice cut through the fog.
“Child, wake up.”
Gentle. Ancient. Firm in a way that did not permit refusal.
She frowned—or tried to. She wasn’t sure she still had a face.
“You have to wake up now, child.”
Who…?
The word echoed soundlessly in her mind. She tried to open her eyes. They wouldn’t move. Tried to turn toward the voice, but it came from everywhere and nowhere, folding around her like wind.
Was this it? Was this death playing tricks on her?
Another voice broke through—different, younger, and frantic.
“Please wake up!”
The words weren’t distant, and they were sharp with fear, cracking at the edges. It was human and desperate.
Her chest tightened.
Before she could reach for it—before she could decide whether she wanted to open her eyes—something yanked her hard from the center of herself.