I LOVE your Sakura AU, thank you so much for making it 🥹
Even though her ending is supposed to be “good”, I always thought that canon didn’t do her justice and threw any character development she had out of the window so she can be with Sasuke
I SO wanted her to finally move on and just let go
And I don’t have anything against Sasusaku
But I think it’d be much more beautiful if Sakura long let go of her feelings by the time Sasuke came to his senses and they developed their relationship TOGETHER from the START
And, once again, your work is AMAZING and I can’t wait for next pieces ❤️
Btw, can I ask a question?) Will we see Naruto’s and Sasuke’s reaction to her condition (maybe flashback to before she left the village?), if not, can you please tell me a bit about it? I can’t imagine them to ignore her after the incident, especially considering that they are at fault as usual
Thank you so much for the kind words! I've also never been a fan of how Sakura ended up. I have no beef with SasuSaku, but my biggest issue was that we never saw Sasuke try to make up/connect with Sakura in the same way we saw him do with Naruto, so their romance in Boruto just felt so...abrupt?
As for what happens to Sakura and her friends....
Sasuke was essentially put on probation/jailed, but broke out and defected to Otogakure as canon. This devastates Sakura, as she's both in deep denial about his contribution to her injuries and also the fact that she basically threw herself in there for nothing.
Kakashi shuts down completely. It's a nightmare replay of his own past, including the female team-mate being horrifically injured by the chidori. The guilt of everything is eating him alive so he basically withdraws into himself and uses her demotion to civilian status as a way to trick himself into thinking that if he just 'rips off the bandaid' and cut ties, she'll be able to move on more easily.
Naruto is the only person who is really able/willing to face justice. After the incident, he was basically also put on probation/awaiting trial but busted himself out to join Jiraya.
So for context, Sakura got clapped hard by the Rasengan/Chidori combo (hearing gone, nerve damage, eyes shot etc) and basically had to be put in a coma to try and stop the damage from getting worse, but unfortunately none of the medics in Konoha had the ability to reverse anything but the most superficial damage. So Naruto joined Jiraya in an attempt to find and bring the only person in the world who could give Sakura a sliver of hope.
I felt like this worked well with canon and the desperation to get Tsunade to be hokage and Naruto basically begged her on his hands and knees to help Sakura. Tsunade made it there in the nick of time managed to save everything but her eyes.
But Sakura's life has fallen apart, her career is over, her parents dead from Konoha Crush and her eyes gone...and Naruto is the most convenient and available person to take out all her rage on, so...while he deserves a lot of that rage..she is essentially punching down on who she perceives to be the cause of all her problems.
Lee is in the same boat as her, but while he tries very hard to be there for her, Sakura can't stand to be with him right now, as it just makes the reality of life hit that much worse- especially when she finds out there's a surgery that might give him a better chance than she'll ever have.
And Ino visits often at first, but then it's awkward...and painful as the weeks go by. They have lunch and gossip but at some point, there's not much a shinobi and civilian have in common, especially after the shortage of manpower post Konoha-crush has Ino entrenched in the shinobi life more than ever before.
I hope this answered some stuff! Thank you so much for the questions and the interest! I love Sakura and I just wanna give her the development and power she deserves!!
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The tears are the worst fucking part.
They always are. They come out when she’s angry or hurt and embarrassed, and they make her feel like a little girl, which only ever makes her feel worse. It sucks to feel like you can’t hold your ground in an argument because your eyes are burning and trails of tears are blazing hot down your cheeks.
But she didn’t even get the chance to argue.
“We’re not punishing you,” Shiro had said gently, guilt visibly lining his features as her first tear fell, which only made her snarl at him. “But your bond to your element could use some strengthening, Katie. It won’t take too long, I’m sure of it.”
Just a couple vargas, he has promised her. Gather the list of ingredients for the next few meals, and see how the exposure to a natural environment makes you feel, map out your relationship with your lion. Easy peasy.
Easy for everyone else to say. The rest of them seemed to bond with their lions like it was fuckin’ easy, snapping up their elemental control like it was second nature. Hunk was as solid as the rocks and earth he represented, and it showed in the way he was and the way he acted. Shiro felt like the awesome and incredible presence of the sky to everyone he met. Keith was the most fiery person she had ever met, probably. He acted like he was powered by a raging inferno, always moving, always flickering. Lance was —
Well. Lance was water, simple as that. Everything he did was as playful and stubborn as a running river. Even his expressions have the same practiced fluidity of them, like he grew up imitating the tide.
She supposes he did. She supposes it makes sense, that he is the one sent with her, to help guide her along, so to speak.
It still kind of stings.
“Could you stop fucking humming,” she snaps, glaring at her teammate.
He doesn’t even glance at her. “No.”
She rolls her eyes, tears making her breaths stutter, and wipes some of the wetness off her cheeks. It doesn’t really work, and mostly just smears it around, but she’s so bitter that she’s kind of beyond caring.
She hates this. She hates this stupid mission, she hates this stupid forest, she hates her stupid element, she hates that Lance will not stop fucking prancing around, and most of all she hates that she can’t figure this shit out on her own.
She hates that she has to be babied.
“Oh, hey, these are the sugarplums for the not-lamb stew.” Lance stops abruptly, gentle hand on her arm to stop her, too. She resists the urge to yank it away, desperately reminding herself that it’s not Lance’s fault she’s so angry, not his fault that humiliation burns through her, not his fault that she can’t get her shit together. She’s already snapped at him once — more than once, if she’s being honest — and he’s gracefully ignored it. If she keeps pushing, he’ll snap right back, and then they’ll both be miserable.
Plus, she doesn’t actually like snapping at Lance. He doesn’t deserve her lashing out, he’s only trying to help.
“You sure?”
Pidge looks at the small purple fruits , feeling a little helpless. She has no idea how Lance has distinguished them from the various other fruits and seeds hanging from the hundreds of other trees. She has no idea how the hell she’s supposed to memorize all of this garbage. How something as frustrating and unique and random as nature is supposed to be her element, the one thing that represents her, deep to her core.
It’s not fair.
“Yep!” Lance chirps. He crouches down, starting to pull at his laces. “The bark has more linear pattern structures, see? And the leaves are smooth, not serrated, and much darker than any other fruit trees we’ve passed. And it smells like plum jam.” To her great confusion, he pulls off his shoes as socks as he explains, only standing once his bare feet are on the backed earth and moss of the forest floor.
“You’re going to get a sharp rock to the foot,” she says, unsure as to why he’s decided to ditch his shoes in the places he probably needs them most.
He snorts, kicking his shoes to the side and turning to face her, making obnoxious kissy faces and poking at her relentlessly.
“Aw, is Pidgey worried for my health and well-being?”
She scowls, shoving him away. “Nevermind. I hope you get tetanus and lose your whole leg.”
Unfortunately, her threat only makes him grin wider. He blows her one last dramatized kiss before turning to the large tree, wrapping his sweater around the trunk, and using it to scurry up the tree almost faster than she can register. By the time it occurs to her to question him, he’s already ten feet in the air, shifting his weight to a steady enough branch.
“What the hell are you doing?” she yells.
Lance looks back down at her, raising an eyebrow. “…Getting…fruit…?”
“There’s fruit down here!” She gestures to the dozens and dozens of fallen but perfectly good plums on the ground, many of which she’s already scooped up and put in the bag Hunk gave her. “All the fruit-bearing branches are like thirty feet in the air, and the branches are way too thin! It’s too risky!”
“Well, Pidgeon,” he says, hooking his knees around a branch to hang upside down, shooting her a wink and a pair of finger guns, “that’s the fun part!”
Before she can yell at him again to get the hell back down, he’s flipped back upright, scurrying up rapidly thinning branches to reach the higher, juicier fruit.
Pidge heart pounds.
“Lance, get down here!” Her voice is reedy with panic, but he ignores her. “You’re going to get hurt, you colossal fucking dumbass!”
But no matter how loudly she cusses him out, he keeps climbing, barely even pausing to make sure a branch can hold his weight before using it to get higher. He climbs as easily as he walks, as easily as he shoots — like it’s second nature. Despite his ease, Pidge can fucking use her brain and see that as scrawny as Lance is, the branches are scrawnier, and he is going to fall and die and Pidge is going to have to watch it happen.
Just as she’s about to call backup, Lance forty feet in the fucking air and without even the distant thought of a rope, Lance ties his hoodie — filled with fruit — to his back, stands on a branch, and fucking leaps the hell off.
Pidge screams at the top of her lungs.
But instead of falling to his death, Lance lands on a branch jutting out from a neighbouring tree, maybe five feet below the branch he leapt from.
Pidge’s yell catches in her throat.
He’s fine.
He continues like that for the ten seconds it takes for him to make his way down, hopping from branch to branch like a chickadee, smiling so wide his brown eyes are nearly creased shut. He looks elated; the happiest she’s seen him in ages.
Slowly, some of her fear starts to fade.
“You fucking scared me,” she says harshly when his feet are back on the floor. Her heart is still galloping.
Lance shrugs. “I told you I’d be fine.”
“No, you told me risks were more fun, then you jumped down a fucking tree.” She accepts the fruits he hands her, replacing the less appetizing ones she already had in her bag. “Taller than your lion.”
“Yeah, because I’ve done it before.” He places the last sugarplum in the bag and then ties it shut, securing it to his back and then throwing an arm over Pidge’s shoulders. He starts walking in a random direction, and Pidge struggles to keep up with his wide strides.
“…Oh.” She supposes that makes sense. He looked comfortable as he climbed.
They walk for the next several minutes in silence. Pidge notices that the tear tracks on her face have dried, and the terror she felt for Lance earlier has replaced her anger, her embarrassment.
She wonders if that was the point.
“Hey, look at that.” He points to a small, budding yellow flower dotting the base of a tree. “That’s hairflower. They grow at the bases of confler trees, because the confler trees always host sodiko birds, which are their biggest pollinators. Cool, huh?”
“How do you know all this stuff?” she blurts, barely letting him finish his sentence. Some of her earlier frustration bleeds into her voice, but luckily it doesn’t sound too accusatory. “I don’t — we’re not even on Earth, but somehow you recognise all the random wildlife. Nature is supposed to be my element. I don’t — I don’t know why I’m struggling so bad when you have it so easy.”
Lance trips over his feet, slightly, stumbling. He removes his arm from her shoulders, stuffing his hands in his pockets. His shoulders hike up somewhere near his ears, hunching his posture.
Guilt churns in her stomach.
“Lance, I didn’t mean —”
Did she?
What did she mean?
“I’m not dumb,” he says quietly.
She swallows. “I know.”
“It’s — I’m not good at the classroom shit. I have to try really hard to understand what a textbook is telling me, and I never understand instructions that aren’t explained to me three times in four different ways. I can’t even begin to understand all the fancy shmancy engineer stuff you and Hunk do. I will not pretend to understand how Altean alchemy and magic works.” He looks at her finally, and hurt clouds his eyes, but his voice is steady, firm. Practiced even, like it’s not the first time he’s had to explain this. “But I’m not dumb.”
“I know,” Pidge repeats, quieter. She doesn’t know how to take back her words, to say them better. How to fix how she feels, honestly. Because it was a lie, her backtracking — she did mean what she said. It was a mean thing to say, a mean thing to think and believe, and she had allowed herself to think it, to feel it, to say it and believe it.
That’s not fair to Lance. That’s not fair to her friend.
It isn’t even true.
“I know,” she repeats again, firmer this time. “I’m sorry. I forgot. But I know you’re not dumb.”
He hesitates for a second, but then nods, accepting her apology. He puts his arm back around her shoulder.
“I’ve always been better at learning things I can do, physically, or things that I can see have a purpose. Like dance, or shooting, or learning the names of cool things like plants and rocks. I’ve always been good with names and faces. And piloting, too, I hope I’m good at that.”
She hates the doubt there, and hates more that she might be part of the reason. “You are. Good at piloting, I mean.”
He grins at her. “Thanks. You are too, you know. Even though all this element shit is a learning curve.”
She snorts despite herself. “Not to you. You’re the living embodiment of water, basically, you naiad.”
“Yeah, ‘cause I spend time in it. I go to the pool, like, every day. I don’t even play mermaids all the time. I do boring meditative shit, because apparently that’s what Blue needs.”
She looks at him in shock. She hadn’t considered that anyone other than Shiro really meditated, or that anyone else had to work towards working with their elements. Especially not Lance. “Really?”
He nods excitedly. “Yeah, man! I thought I was good, but when Hunk unlocked his earth weapon thingie, I asked Blue what was up and she said I just needed more practice letting elemental quintessence flow through me, whatever the hell that means. Apparently it’s easy to summon when you’re panicked, but if you want to do it on a more regular basis you have to learn how to recognise it, so you can call it.”
That makes sense, she supposes. But she still feels like she’s missing something.
“How the hell am I supposed to frolic around a forest between missions? There’s not exactly one in the castle.”
Lance shrugs. “I don’t know, genius. You figured out how to turn a magical lion invisible, can’t you puzzle out how to grow a garden in space or something? Aren’t you a science nerd?”
Pidge stills.
Oh, duh.
It’s such a simple solution — plant a garden. She used to have a garden, back home, that she and her mom worked on regularly. Her mom would show her how she genetically modified plant seeds, and then they’d monitor the new plants and plant traits together.
Suddenly she understands why Green is the lion of curiosity and science as well as nature — the two are linked, everywhere, even in her. She belongs in the forest as much as she belongs in the workshop.
She can do so many weirdo experiments. Isn’t that what science is, basically?
“I owe you one,” she tells Lance, walking again beside him.
He chuckles, adjusting the bag of fruit on his shoulder and nudging her with his elbow. “You owe me twenty. Now, come on, we have lots more stuff to gather. I’ll show you how to identify it.”
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