I think I had a little mental break and (peers at my unfinished time travel stories) yeah, I think I'm following a theme with experimental time travel fanfics.

Disclaimer: I obviously don't own Naruto or else Neji would have lived, damn it.

The first vivid realization of wrongness came to Sakura when she was two years old.

She was travelling with her parents to the Land of Iron to visit one of the Haruno Clan compounds. The Haruno Clan was a clan of merchants, ridiculously rich because of their trade in fabrics, food, furniture, and basically anything useful enough in daily life while simultaneously extravagant which means the majority of their customers were nobles. Fifteen years before Sakura's birth, her father ran away to pursue his dreams as an artist and the clan head, her grandfather, all but disowned him. When Haruno Kazuki heard that his wayward son married a shinobi from the Fire Country and had a daughter these days, he called for Haruno Kizashi to be summoned for the first time in seventeen years.

Sakura tired easily back then like most children did, so she spent the majority of the trip sleeping while bundled up in thick winter clothes. That was when it happened - she dreamed of a pale hand holding an open book. Shaky scrawls of various animals could be vaguely seen on the pages.

"You're getting better at that, little brother," said a voice from the sidelines. She turned her head to look at the bluish-white-haired boy standing by the doorpost. Nii-san , her mind supplies gleefully. He was bruised and visibly sweaty and dirty, but she didn't care, because Nii-san was home!

"You don't have to lie," she replied, and the tug on her lips felt genuine. "Welcome back."

Initially, Sakura dismissed them as simply strange dreams of an overactive imagination, but for nights on end the dreams kept coming, even as they returned to Konoha with more fortune than her parents knew what to do with. She would admit, they were quite scary. The fortune, that is. The dreams felt more familiar than anything else.

"-look, it's you!"

"How did you do that?"

"-sama said that I was a cut above the rest. Did he tell you that, too?"

"I still can't do it right."

"Nii-san, thank you."

The events in her dreams were choppy at best, muffled and painful at worst, and she realized that none of them were in order. She kept seeing the bluish-white-haired boy, her nii-san , in her dreams at different ages and different times. She saw other people, too: a blonde who wore too much purple, a young man with blood in his eyes, a boy who had the sun in his heart, to name a few.

Haruno Sakura grew up with these dreams.

. age 5 .

"Your daughter is amazing, Mebuki."

Sakura was lying on her stomach on the sitting room's floor, a pencil in her hand and a sketchpad opened in front of her. On the opened page was a half-finished sketch of her mother. She made sure to draw the subtle laughter lines on her mother's young face, around her eyes and on her lips. It was impressive, even more so for a five year-old .

Her mother was standing with her guest a few feet away, overlooking her daughter with a proud gleam in her eyes. "Kizashi calls her a genius," Mebuki said wistfully, "He's not wrong."

"Definitely not mistaken there," her mother's friend replied, "Does that mean you're going to enroll her in the civilian school?"

There's a pause before Mebuki answers, "We don't know yet. Kizashi thinks it would be safer for her there. I disagree; she won't be taught how to protect herself during life-threatening situations in a civilian school - at least, I think so - but then again, being a shinobi basically guarantees her a life filled with death."

Mebuki didn't want to admit it to herself either, but the thought of her daughter running around killing people frightened her, never mind the blood on Mebuki's own hands.

With a small sigh, Sakura closed her sketchpad and placed both it and her pencil on the table. She didn't want to hear another spiel about her innocence. Unknown to her parents, she lost it a long, long time ago, and she sees more dead people in her dreams than she knows in real life. She would tell them that if only it wouldn't result in a Yamanaka getting sicced on her.

Also, her mother has killed a total of thirty people over the course of her life before leaving active duty due to an injury to her leg. Hypocrite, Sakura thought strangely gleefully.

With a quick goodbye to her mother, Sakura put on her sandals and walked towards the park. She was getting too pale due to her penchant for staying indoors and a voice in her head had been berating her lately for being such a hermit. It sounded suspiciously like her grandfather. Speaking of which, she was quite glad to know that Kazuki was repairing his bonds with his eldest son.

Her father was off with her grandfather, too, bathing in some high-end onsen away from the Land of Fire for some 'bonding time'.

The park was unusually empty. It was always teeming with people whenever Sakura walked past it with her mother on their way to the markets, but now it seemed as if there was a repellent that stretched a twenty-foot radius. Upon walking closer, Sakura spotted it - or rather, him .

She had seen him before but only in her dreams, and for a while she didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He was the boy with the whiskered face. His heart was kind and good , everything she was not, and though she called him the rudest nicknames and he blatantly showed annoyance with her in the majority of her dreams, she also recalled dreams wherein he made her heart soar with unfamiliar feelings as its wings.

She also saw him turn into a semi-fox-like monster in her dreams a few times.

If Sakura had been any other child, she would have run away. Any other child's mother or father would have warned them to stay away from the demon child. But she wasn't. Her parents knew the rumors about the blonde boy, that he was supposedly a demon, but neither Mebuki nor Kizashi gave her explicit warnings to stay away. And furthermore, she had been dreaming of people who she never met before and now she was seeing one of the more prominent fixtures of her mind. Sakura certainly wasn't going to let this moment pass.

Sakura took a deep breath and approached him. "Hi," she said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. The boy's head snapped up to look at her so quickly that she thought he might get whiplash and he stared at her with wary cerulean eyes. For a moment she wondered what she would say, and she briefly considered how this may not be a good idea after all. And then she blurted out, "You looked lonely."

The boy's eyes narrowed as he looked her over. He wouldn't find anything except for a socially awkward five-year-old with pink hair. "So what if I did?" the boy asked, sounding a little defensive.

She shrugged, aiming for nonchalance. "Do you want to play tag?" she asked.

"...Really?"

Sakura nodded. The blonde looked dumbfounded for a moment, and then, with more enthusiasm, he replied, "Okay."

And so Haruno Sakura became a long-lasting fixture in Uzumaki Naruto's childhood.