Disclaimer: Standard disclaimers apply.

Revised 15 Jan 2017

Past is Prologue

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If someone were to ask Sakura when she thought everything had gone wrong, she'd chuckle grimly and say: April 1st, seven years after the war, four days after her twenty-fourth birthday.

She'd tell them that it had been a muggy day heavy with the promise of more rain—prominent enough that even she with her decidedly normal olfactory senses could smell it. But it had been the first day of Spring, seven promising years since the eve of the Alliance's victory, and her team had decided to have a celebratory training session.

Sakura remembers because that was the day Kakashi had brought out his dogs, despite knowing that it would rain, and she had innocuously complained about the wet dog smell that would inevitably follow them until they bathed.

She didn't really mind the smell, not really, and she supposed that Kakashi knew that because he had only patted her head and said Essence of Wet Dog is in now, Sakura-chan.

She'd say that it was a normal day as far as the rag-tagged Team 7 went, and there was no reason to be wary of anything other than the usual injuries that came from being on a team with such power houses—demigods, really. As with all other ninja activities, training sessions had their moments of danger, but one does not become a shinobi without knowing how to manage risks and how to prevent life threatening injuries in friendly spars.

Despite being ninjas with positive control of that precious life energy called chakra, they were still—for all sense and purposes—human. Unless, of course, you were Naruto or Sasuke, but Sakura had accepted long ago that those two would die of something completely arbitrarily extraterrestrial; because if a goddess couldn't kill them, then what hope did they as mere mortals have?

Nevertheless—bijuu and doujutsu notwithstanding—they, too, were once simply human children in the academy without knowledge of the power dropped onto their heads. In the Academy, all second year students learned how to combat humanity's fallacies with applied knowledge of their chakra.

Humans, her sensei had dryly explained, were simply sacks of meat. Intelligent sacks of meat, but meat nonetheless.

They were just as fragile as a pig, or any other large mammal, and would undoubtedly break if mishandled. Their only saving grace as shinobi—as anything, really—was the fact that they could control chakra. There was a reason why civilians were so breakable and delicate; and that, besides the obvious, was why chakra control was so important.

And so they, as eight year old children, learned to cushion blows and falls with chakra to prevent irreparable damage or life threatening injuries. Unfortunately, the Academy's way of teaching this was by literally punting children across the training grounds; and, as children were wont to do, they learned that if they did as they were supposed to, it wouldn't hurt as much—or at all—when they hit the ground…or tree.

Sakura had first applied this new skill during that terrifying moment when Mizuki-sensei (the bastard) had lifted her the same way you'd a lift a toddler and launched her not so gently across the field. New to the program Iruka-sensei had been standing by to catch those who were having significant trouble grasping the concept of the chakra cushion, and she remembers glowing under his very good, Sakura-chan! when he didn't have to catch her.

Therefore, she had been aware of her exceptional chakra control from an early age and had henceforth never had a problem with cushioning blows or falls with her chakra—it was as natural to her as breathing.

And that was why, for the life of her, Sakura could not understand why things had happened the way they did.

She had been going through her katas, relishing in the feel of total muscle control and the sensation of the pre-rain breeze against her skin while her other teammates sparred in the distance. Kakashi was playing a childish game of keep-away on steroids with his summons, and Sai was testing out a newly developed ink that was resistant to water in the nearby lake. It had been a pleasant day.

Until Sasuke, who for all the world was a genius but was prone to his moments of stupidity, powered up his Chidori to give Naruto a playful shock and Sakura froze. She forgot herself in that one moment where the long buried post-traumatic stress that was solely reserved for the Chidori paralyzed her and iced the blood in her veins.

It was like being seventeen and under that awful genjutsu of Sasuke plunging his Chidori encased arm into her chest again. She was back on the battlefield with agonized tears running down her face, feeling like her lungs were collapsing under the trauma and betrayal and she couldn't breathe.

The unnatural sound of artificial chirping birds and the smell of ozone consumed her senses and Sakura was lost to it all. There were times, obviously, when Sasuke or even Kakashi used the Chidori on missions, but it was entirely different when she was caught unawares while relaxed and confident in her own safety.

And because the roaring in her ears failed to abate and the pupils in her wide eyes dilated to the point where they were unseeing, Sakura was heedless to the warning call sent her way.

She didn't see Bull, who had slipped on the large amount of mud present on the field, barrel towards her at high speeds. Kakashi shouted her name in alarm when she gave no indication of moving, and the breath left her with a loud whoosh when his massively muscled body connected with her own to send her flying.

But she was still in a state of shock, because Sasuke's Chidori was still flaring and she still couldn't breathe, and her chakra control—her reliable, familiar, exceptional control—failed her. Her spine hit the railing of the nearby bridge, audibly snapping under her weight and immediately sending her into cardiac arrest. Her body plunged into the cold water under the bridge, giving way to an anoxic reflex and then rising to float limply.

And for a split second, heart stopping moment, Sakura's heart did just that.

Except, it seemed like the universe had other plans for her; because in the same instant that Sakura's heart stopped, Sasuke had plunged his Chidori deep into the wet Earth, sending millions of volts through the ground for miles.

Civilians would feel it as a curious shock beneath their feet, shinobi privy to the technique would jolt in alarm for a few moments before shaking their heads in exasperation, and Sakura…Sakura would feel like her world was bathed in a glorious light.

For though water is a poor conductor of electricity, the Chidori is essentially a strike of lightning; and plunging it into the wet ground that was already charged with its own natural chakra caused it to react violently with its current and sent the voltage directly into Sakura's body. It miraculously acted as a defibrillator and jolted her heart into pumping weakly and her lungs expanded with a righteous gasp as she was urgently pulled from the water.

And Sakura's unparalleled—reliable, familiar, exceptional—chakra control coursed through her body to heal the damage in her heart and spine in record time. When her brilliant sea glass eyes fluttered open, she found herself cradled in her former Sensei's arms, surrounded by her anxious team, and Kakashi's shaky fingers pushing wet hair away from her face as she gasped for breath.

Her heart pumped strongly and desperately in her chest, her limbs trembled from aftershocks, and Sakura knew as well as she knew that Tsunade-shishou was a drunk that she should be dead.

"Sakura?" Kakashi's concerned voice filtered to her hazy brain and she latched onto his smooth baritone like a lifeline, "Sakura, are you alright?"

And her shaky and alarmingly pale hand had grasped onto the lapel of his flak jacket as she stared, flabbergasted, at his face, heedless of her teammates' mounting concern.

"Kakashi," she whispered, alarmed at the perplexity of her situation, "I stopped breathing."

And her silver haired friend had nodded mutely, his hands tightening around her as her eyes darted around wildly, unable to focus on anything other than the fact that something was wrong.

"My heart stopped."

There was a choking noise that came from her left and in the back of her mind she recognized it as Sasuke.

"Kakashi," she cried, shaking him so that he could comprehend the gravity of it all because clearly he wasn't understanding, "I died!"

And yet here she was: alive, breathing, and whole. She could detect nothing wrong internally nor externally—was devoid of pain when Naruto gently extracted her from Kakashi's arms to hold her in his own and trace calloused fingertips down her face. Sakura couldn't focus, her mind was well and truly boggled. She should be dead, her heart had stopped, her spine had broken—she should be dead.

She could remember it, too. The feeling of life draining her, of sinking into a darkness so vast she couldn't hope to escape as she took her last breath, the shock of pain that gradually faded away as her neurons and synapses shut down. The truth of her finite existence was absolutely terrifying, and it was terribly ridiculous how quickly death sank its fingers into her.

"You're not dead, Sakura-chan," Naruto gently coaxed her chin to look into his tender blue eyes, "You're right here, with us. With Sasuke-teme, Kaka-sensei, Sai-baka, Yamato-taichou—Team 7. You're okay, Sakura-chan, you're fine."

She felt Sasuke's hands land gently on her lower back as they both helped her stand on wobbly legs, and it wasn't until she was sitting in a sterile hospital room with Shizune preening and tutting about that Sakura allowed herself to dissolve into tears.

And when Shizune dropped her needle in alarm to ask her what was wrong, Sakura laughed morosely through her sobs because how stupid would it have been to die from being run over by a dog.

Sakura wouldn't know for many years that, for her, life had effectively stopped that day. It would take many hours and days of testing for her to realize that the high voltage in Sasuke's Chidori had induced electron compression in her DNA, therefore making her immune to the ravages of time and destining her to fate where she would never age another day.

On April 1st, seven years since the end of the Fourth Shinobi Great War, and four days after her twenty fourth birthday, Haruno Sakura became immortal.

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tbc