Chapter Text
[. . .]
"I'll see the color of your eyes in the light of my embers."
[. . .]
Chapter 1
Pink Tricks in Deep Blue
[. . .]
"Is she a spirit?"
Zuko peers down at the wet, shivering body draped unceremoniously across the creaking raft.
Only three hours after his hasty escape from the North Pole, the half-hearted raft in Prince Zuko's and Iroh's possession collided with the gasping body of what appeared to be a girl. Zuko and Iroh had reacted immediately on impact—Zuko remembers rising despite his exhaustion, thrusting a threatening fist of fire toward the intruder, only to falter at the sight of her. The look on her face still burns in his mind—young, his age, with a peculiar diamond marking her forehead. She'd hauled herself aboard and revealed an additional pecularity, a pink head of hair, nearly tipping the raft in the process.
Just to, moments later, curl inward, turning her back to them, her body shuddering as she expelled an alarming amount of seawater.
It's only been a few minutes since the fact.
She continues to cough, but the water has long since left her lungs.
Iroh, the braver of the two, hovers closer to the wet slop of hair and blood. "...Rather curious, nephew," His uncle responds, pulling at his beard in thought. "I cannot yet say if it is or not."
That's not encouraging.
Zuko eyes the girl warily. He doesn't know what to think, trying to mark her exotic coloring and tattoo. There's not much to go off of. None of the native nations and tribes around this area coincides with her picture. Even what she wears is an anomaly—a dark and torn, sleeveless tunic and baggy, navy, nearly black pants sagging against a pair of used sandals.
Though the frigid ocean water has washed away most of it, Zuko still catches sight of the darker spots along her body that smell eerily of copper.
He's never seen someone dress that way before.
So far, Zuko articulates a solid story: a girl not of this place somehow managed to find her way to his raft to escape from whatever misfortune she was dealing with. The issue is, was she the dealer or the receiver?
There's something not right about her.
It's why Zuko mistakes her for a spirit at first. There's something in the way she looks—something that refuses to settle into anything ordinary.
She isn't... ugly. There's a mocking strangeness to her that sets him on edge.
Her features carry an unearthly quality, shaped just slightly outside the hands of nature. She demonstrates the kind of beauty that doesn't comfort, but lingers in the mind all the same, like that of the palace concubines he's seen rushing in and out of chambers in every which direction back home. There's an uncanniness to her, and the quiet wrongness is amplified enough that it should repel him, but—
—but instead, it pulls him in.
It makes Zuko want to puke.
His uncle comes even closer, and Zuko narrows his eyes. "What are you doing, uncle?" He rasps sharply.
Iroh reaches forward with his hands and turns the stranger on her back, before beginning to administer a warm breath of fire through his palms. He doesn't quite touch the girl, but the hot skin of his hands is close enough to provide a much-needed warmth.
"I am helping," Iroh responds calmly, and Zuko bristles. Before he can bark at the man to get away from a possible enemy, Uncle's gaze lifts and locks on his own with expectancy. "Surely you won't leave a frail old man such as myself to do all the work?"
"Work of what?" Zuko curls his mouth in disgust. The girl doesn't move anymore, still as a corpse. It draws his attention to her again, and his eyes take in the dull gaze she pins to the skies. "She's not even—she's dying."
Iroh frowns.
Zuko immediately feels terrible. Guilty, because even though he knows he's right, he should at least...
No.
No, this is stupid.
Why waste his breath and chi on a dead girl?
"She's an enemy, Uncle," Zuko insists, though that's after he begrudgingly comes closer and sits on his knees on her other side. "We don't know her. She could—"
As Zuko ignites his own fire and places it somewhere on the lower section of the girl's body, his Uncle interrupts him with a huff. "That does not mean we shouldn't try, Prince Zuko. A little kindness goes a long way."
Zuko scowls.
Kindness never saved anybody.
It didn't save him.
"Uncle—"
"ありがとう…"
The voice doesn't come from either of them.
The raft enters a sudden quiet, ruptured by the husky voice of-
The angry teenager zips his mouth shut immediately, widening his eyes and looking down.
The girl looks directly at him with half-lidded eyes. They're the color of the rarest jade. He knows, because his mother owned a favored bracelet colored the same vivid hue.
Her fingers twitch, and she manages to lift her arm, just enough to snag the tips of her pruned digits against the gray edges of his sleeve. "...Sasuke?"
What?
Zuko makes a face.
Who the hell is Sasuke?
[. . .]
Waking up next to an old man and a scarred teenager after jumping through a portal to escape Kaguya's death rods is unimaginable.
And yet here Sakura is, perched on the opposite edge of a terribly crafted raft across the two.
Her eyes stare unflinchingly into an angry pair of gold.
Have been, for the past hour, since she's brought herself back from the brink of death.
She doesn't know how she got here. The last thing she remembers is running alongside her sensei and his ex-lover, dodging several strikes while trying to determine a proper angle to hit the unholy Rabbit Goddess, who was being terribly distracted by her two beloved teammates. Naruto and Sasuke had kept their attacks on command, dodging the sudden swats mid-air, trying to seal her away and giving everyone enough time to evade every fatal attack.
Ultimately, Sakura had slipped up.
She doesn't know. She probably did, because she remembers the heated gaze of a chilling Byakugan just before being mercilessly shoved into a cold wasteland.
Now she's here.
Next to two souls whom she cannot understand whatsoever.
Just after regaining consciousness through the thick ache on the center of her forehead, she had flinched away from the warmth of the unknowns, nearly toppling over the edge again and undoing their hard work of keeping her warm (at least, she assumes they did). The older man had immediately put his hands up to placate her, probably expressing with a soft tone that he wasn't a threat.
But that couldn't be said about the boy next to him.
A boy her age, she thinks, with an angry scar on his left eye.
His body was tense, prepared for combat. Sakura remembers placing herself subtly in position, in case this was an ambush to get her off-guard.
But nothing happened. The older man kept talking, but Sakura could barely understand. He gestured calmly at the raft, then at the ocean, and then at the fuming teenager in that order, of which said teenager kept hissing back other words that sounded extremely unpleasant.
Some consonants sounded familiar to Sakura, but the entire phrases couldn't be deciphered. It was clear that she must have stumbled into a faraway land yet unheard of. Their attire was strange, and their features were foreign to those she was used to seeing ambling across crowds.
And their language...
Everything about them was strange. Not in a bad way, either, but it caught Sakura off-guard.
So she had only stared at them in response, keeping her face blank. It wouldn't do well for a shinobi of her caliber to let her emotions get away like that. Her silence frustrated one of them, but being unable to understand the teenager's minced words, she was unable to determine a reason for why they kept her alive. She had to work off speculation only.
Eventually, they seemed to understand that talking to her was worthless. Well.
One of them did.
The older man continues to talk, sometimes. The glaring teenager at his side, however...
Sakura has been watching him very carefully for the past hour. Out of the two of them, he seems more inclined to hurt her. Granted, the boy leaves several parts of himself open for an attack, which tells her that maybe he doesn't intend to harm her, but Sakura can't trust that. Nor has she acted on her desire to take them down yet. For all she knows, this boy may be a wayward Uchiha with a secret Sharingan disposal technique hiding up his sleeve. Sakura isn't so arrogant as to believe that there aren't Shinobi out there who can take her down.
She's strong. But in this vulnerable state...
She only has a drop of chakra to her name. If she were to act impulsively, then repercussions are sure to occur. And she's not a rookie shinobi, either. The older man may seem kind and calm, but he, too, hides a power. It's in the passive way he holds himself—back straight with confidence and calloused hands curled in his lap in an orderly fashion. The smile he wears is too kind.
Sakura doesn't trust it.
Doesn't trust either of them.
But Sakura can't forget their kindness, either. The older man and the boy had been recuperating her with some sort of warm hand jutsu, when they didn't have to. It confuses her immensely, their lack of orderly conduct, but she figures that maybe they were hoping to keep her alive for her bounty. Or maybe they are just kind enough to grant her this, knowing who she is and what she's currently struggling to do. Saving the world.
But then they would know her, wouldn't they?
She doesn't know.
Either way, she'll keep an eye out.
She needs to.
Across the world, her friends are fighting. They need her.
Whatever it takes, she's going to find a way back and defeat Kaguya. She's going to find Naruto, Sasuke, and her beloved sensei and keep them from harm. She's going to fight and protect her loved ones with all she's got.
It's going to take some time, she knows that.
She doesn't know if she has any.
But she's not giving up, no matter the torture of fearing coming up from her chest and knotting her esophagus into a bloody, panicked mess.
Sakura has no idea how this older man and teenager survived Madara's Tsuki-no-me, but...
But she'll get her answers.
She just needs to wait.
That's all I can do, Sakura thinks dismally, never tearing away her sights on the boy with a glare so similar to the boy who left her behind.