Chapter Text
Sakura’s first memory was traumatic and most decidedly weird. It had been a sunny summer day, she’d been maybe three, and her father had taken her fishing for the first time. They’d sat down upon a grassy riverbench, feet dangling above the flowing water. Something about the river had spoken to her, had been calming and peaceful, almost like coming home. Sakura had enjoyed being there very much. Then her father had shown her how to fish. She had listened to him talk in contentment as she went about sampling and cataloguing the different fish that her father was pulling out of the shimmering water.
Then it happened. She’d peered at the water, entranced by its beautiful color and there, upon the water surface, there was a face! It was chubby and heart-shapped, a girl. The girl’s mouth was parted and her eyes wide in horror. Sakura had lurched back, horrified, and started crying. Why was there some girl there? That wasn’t her!
Her father hadn’t understood the cause of her dismay. He had patted her back consolingly and they’d left back home, but Sakura could tell that he was unsettled by the incident. She’d felt shame and fear, but most of all unsettled by the memory of that face that was so foreign… how could it belong to her?
Later, back in the safe confines of her own home, she’d waited until her mother had kissed her good night, and then she’d silently tip-toed to the bathroom. She’d clambered on top of the toilet seat and peered at her reflection again. Just like before, she was greeted by the face of the same girl from earlier, set in a deep scowl this time that looked more like a puppy pouting than the intimidating expression she was accustumed to (wait, what?). Her hair was pink (pink!) and her eyes a verdant green. That was an improvement, at least. The thought had arisen unbiden, but it made Sakura pause. An improvement? Compared to what? She didn’t understand her own reaction entirely. The only thing she understood was that she was not supposed to look like this – and it unsettled her.
She knew her parents whispered about her at night, that they worried about her. They thought something was odd with her in the head. Sakura remembered the one time she’d told her mother one of her stories. Her mother had been horrified and started crying. She’d asked Sakura where she’d heard such a thing, but Sakura had had no answer. These stories… she just knew them. They just came to her like they’d already been there to begin with. They were stories of another time, a time where people wore different clothes and bathed in rivers, a time of fighting and training and more fighting, of sending children to war against the red-eyed enemies. A time of skipping rocks in the river and challenging his brothers to water-walking contests, and getting whipped on the back by father when he failed to perform his duties. A time of being a warrior, of being nimble and running for days on end and without sleep, never faltering, of watching most of his brothers die, murdered in the battlefield, too young to have hit puberty. Sometimes she’d dream about some of these occurrences, though the less pleasant ones were more common. When Sakura was smaller, she used to wake up sobbing, not remembering why, and her parents would console her but then look at each other again, with that look.
“Who is Kawarama, sweetie?” her mother had asked her once, after a particularly violent nightmare.
Kawarama was one of the people in her stories. Sakura had explained to her mom that he was a boy with brown hair and a little scar on his cheek, that he was really good at rock-skipping, a nimble brat who might one day have become an amazing fighter, cheeky as can be and a prankster to bat.
Her parents had assumed Kawarama was Sakura’s imaginary friend. Sakura had tried to explain to them that he wasn’t, but given up when she realized that that just made the worried glances between them increase. As time passed, she began to know more about that world. She never told her parents about the gruesome details of Kawarama’s death, or the lashing that father had given them all for it. She never told her mother of the retribution he’d sought a few years later, of the satisfaction he’d thought it would give him and the emptiness that he got instead. No, Sakura never mentioned any of that. Instead, she told her parents that her nightmares had stopped, and soon after got her own bed. Her parents were eager for some uninterrupted sleep of their own.
The day she accompanied her mother to the grocery store was perhaps her most vivid memory of that time, it was the memory. She’d been holding onto her mother’s hand, walking through the street, observing the world around her when she’d seen them: two faces, carved in a giant stone wall that overlooked the village. There were four faces in total, but Sakura only had eyes for the two on the very left.
“Sakura-chan? Sakura, why are you crying? Did you hurt yourself?”
Her mother sounded concerned, but Sakura could only stare at the face on the left, tears streaming down her cheeks, as she looked upon the carved countenance of her older brother, her anija. Yes. That was Hashirama’s face, undoubtedly! She was absolutely certain. And the other one… the other face was hers. It should be the face greeting her on the other side of the mirror. That was her!
“Sakura?” her mother questioned urgently. “Where does it hurt, baby?”
Sakura made a concentrated effort to calm herself. When she finally had her emotions in check, she asked her mother for a tissue and wiped her face clean.
“Mother, those faces…” she said, pointing at them. “Why are they there?”
Her mother began to explain that those were the faces of the mighty and revered hokage, and that the two on the very left belonged to the two brothers who had founded the very village they lived in. They were the shodaime hokage and the nidaime hokage respectively, founders of Konoha, legendary for their prowess in combat, gods among men.
As her mother spoke, it had all come back to her.
Every single brain process in Sakura’s mind clicked, and suddenly it all made sense – all those stories she knew, those were her memories. Tobirama’s memories.
She was Tobirama Senju.
Tobirama Senju was her.
She’d instantly recognised the face on the right of her own as well – good old Saru! One of her most promising students – though she had no idea about the last one.
She wondered with sadness whether that meant that Saru was dead. Both she and her anija had given their lives in service of the village, prompting a new hokage to step up.
As mother and daughter resumed their trek to the market, Sakura’s mind (or Tobirama’s, as it were) worked furiously.
She concluded that she must have somehow been reincarnated after her own passing. She was gratified to see that the village which she and her anija had built from the ground up was prospering, though she knew that she’d need to assess its inner workings personally to feel confident in that. Since Hashirama’s passing, Tobirama’s only goal in life had been to see his dream through. Now that he’d been reincarnated, he would continue to do so.
A part of him wondered whether Hashirama had been reincarnated as well. Did his own reincarnation mean that everyone did? Or was he an anomaly? Were there more people who remembered their past lives?
Sakura could recall that she had researched the topic of reincarnation and souls deeply back in her first life in hopes of bringing her late brothers back to life, though it had been to no avail. Perhaps, one of her many experiments had unwittingly resulted into her current predicament, which would mean that her situation was likely unprecedented.
She’d immediately longed for her research notes to look over them, something which was of course not possible, followed by the dawning realization that… she remembered none of it! Her research was gone!
She didn’t even remember how to read, let alone any of her jutsu creations. All those years of work…
Though Tobirama had been a man who never faltered, a man with a will of iron, right then, he almost broke down. All of his life’s work… gone.
Sakura had spent the entire next week in a daze, hardly paying attention to anything, trying and failing to remember the particulars of her research. Sure, she remembered some of her ideas, but not their implementation.
A week into her moping, however, she inevitably got over it. It would be an enormous waste of time, but if she’d done it once, she could do it again. Sakura was certain that some of her notes must still be around, and she remembered passing some of her jutsu on to her students. She’d just need to gain their trust first to get to the jutsu… though that would probably be hard. She’d taught her own students to be paranoid, and her own story was as unbelievable as they come. But she would cross that bridge when she came to it.
And so, Sakura began to make plans. The first thing she’d need to do was make sure she became a ninja: she’d worry about everything else once she’d made it that far. The Academy acceptance age was six, so she still had some time to ease her parents into the idea. Of course, she’d need to begin her training before that. Getting an early start was key to developing deep chakra reserves and flexibility, so waiting for the Academy to begin her education was absolutely out of the question. However, Sakura was at a loss on how to proceed. Not just on how to train herself in secret, but also on how to go about convincing her parents to let her go to the Academy (that she herself had created). Both of her parents were civilians and much too protective of her for their own good. For the moment, Sakura had to resign herself to doing flexibility exercises and basic push-ups and sit-ups when she was alone, but she knew that it was far from enough.
What she did do was teach herself to read. Learning the hiragana alphabet was accomplished within a day of asking her mother questions about one of her picture books and reviewing everything later.
From there, she’d shown her parents that she’d picked up reading, and both had been exultant. It was odd, receiving so much praise for something that, in Tobirama’s childhood, had been expected, but Sakura rolled with it. It meant that her parents were quick to buy more books for her, this time some with kanji (and furigana) which had enabled more independent study. As with everything Tobirama had set out to do in his past life, Sakura’s focus on her goal was unfaltering and laser sharp, and so she made quick progress. Pleased with herself, she’d also begun to try summoning her chakra. It was surprisingly hard, especially considering that she had no recollections on how to go about it, nor any on the ‘beginner’ exercises recommended to learn. She only remembered learning to walk on water and walls as a young child, so she’d tried that, and of course failed. And failed. And failed again.
It quickly became apparent that the difficulty was too high, so she’d tried to look for alternatives. If one could stick to surfaces, then that meant that surfaces could stick to you, surely that should be easier?
This approach turned out to be the right one, and after two days of struggling, Sakura had managed to stick little pieces of paper to the tip of her index finger. From there, she began working on improving her results, sticking the paper to other parts of her body, then doing the exercise with more than one piece of paper, doing it while she was reading, doing it to larger objects, etc.
Another area of study she’d begun to pursue was sensing. Tobirama had been the best sensor in history during his time, and yes, that had had something to do with his bad eyesight (he’d eventually come up with a jutsu in order to fix it, but he had spent his childhood and half his teenage years with very blurry eyesight), so of course he’d perfected sensing out of necessity and sheer survival instinct. Now that Sakura’s eyesight had no such deficiencies, she hadn’t automatically started developing her sensory skills, but she was still determined to regain every bit of her range either way.
Sensing was perhaps the hardest to learn, for it was a skill that came with no instructions manual: either you could do it, or you couldn’t. Fortunately, she had excelled at it in a past life, and her continued training was starting to pay off. At first, she’d been forced to cling to her mother in order to try sensing her, but as she improved, physical contact stopped being a necessity and her range slowly but surely began to increase.
Her fourth birthday came and went. By the time Sakura was proficient at reading, writing, wall and water-walking, could stick an entire newspaper worth of paper scraps to her body, and could sense the going-ons within the entire house, nearly half a year had passed. Her flexibility was at its peak (she could touch the back of her head with the tips of her toes) and she could do push ups and sit ups for half an hour straight without tiring. At this stage, she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that she needed to start training in earnest if she wanted to continue improving.
This meant that she would need to go outside, and, though she was tempted to sneak out at night to go about her training unbothered, Sakura knew that that was a foolish idea. First: she was a toddler. Her body would tire without rest. Second: she was defenseless. She may be the second hokage reincarnated, a man who could level brick walls with a finger, but right now, she was a weak little girl.
Fantastic. Where in her previous life she would’ve been one year away from being thrown into a battlefield, in this one she’d never even held a kunai before. Just fantastic.