Queen of Air and Darkness

x. she had made the brave protest: i will not be vanquished

When Sakura came back to consciousness, her first thought was to wonder why she was not in her bed in Konoha. The back of her neck burned where the sun blared had down on it, no doubt dying it a rosy pink with sunburn.

Her second thought was that she was parched.

The sun was dipping low in the sky marking an end to the longest day of her life. In the space of a single day she had arrived in Sunagakure, had faced her death, and now as the sunset, was without food, water, and with no companion but a horse. She had hoped the creature would take her back to the castle, to food and rest and healers

No, she had hoped for more. She had hoped for something even more impossible, for a familiar face and an embrace that would do what healers could not.

Instead, she was alone. Sakura stumbled from the horse's side, desperate for water. While she had rested, her body had refueled some of it's magic, giving her more than a drop with which to soothe the pain and begin the long process of stitching the flesh in her side. But without water and food, it would mean nothing. Sasori's would eventually claim her life, if only slightly delayed.

Sakura dismounted shakily. Her limbs were weak from the fight and the journey, and she narrowly avoided collapsing to her knees. They had reached a massive mountain range; on both sides, she could see a labyrinth of foothills spreading into the distance. To her great relief, there was grass peeking out from the rocks and growing in small, lush clumps at her feet. Where there was grass, there was water.

She followed the plant life, chasing ever-larger patches of greenery until she found her prize- a lifesaving trickle of freshwater. She could see it stretch deeper into the mountains, where the tall peaks of stone caught clouds of rainwater that passed over the rest of the desert.

Greedily she drank, luxuriating in the cool sensation. Tsunade had trained her how to purify water with a touch of her hands, a desperately useful trick on the road. She poured some of the clean water on her wound, hissing at the sensation. Her magic had not come back to fully heal the damage—that would take weeks of stored power and intricate work, and even then she expected a scar for her troubles.

As Sakura drank, the sound of hooves on stone and a flicker of movement at the corner of her eye caught her attention. A horse, a dark brown chestnut, drank from the other side of the stream. Somewhere in the recesses of her memory, it was familiar.

Despite the water, her throat went dry. It was the horse Kakashi had stolen when they had ridden out to chase Gaara, still in its riding tack.

Kakashi was still here somewhere, or...his body was.

A lifetime of training to quell panic was thrown to the wayside as she ran across the river. The horse naturally did not register the inner turmoil growing in Sakura, as she threw her arms around it, tears welling in her eyes. It whickered softly as if to say that she was distracting it from its grazing.

She had no idea how long she had been unconscious, and there was no telling how far the horse had come from Kakashi's body. But logic did not deter her, not when she had so little to hang her hopes on.

She stumbled deeper into the canyons and foothills. There was almost nothing to lose at this point: she was lost, grievously injured, and alone in a foreign land. War could be erupting at that very moment between Konoha and Sunagakure on political accusations that the Konoha knights had been behind the Akatsuki attack. Without Gaara and Kakashi, her victory over Sasori would mean nothing.

The sound of rocks falling in the distance jolted her out of dark thoughts of civil war and friends dead on a battlefield. Sakura had grown up near mountains; Konoha was built into a massive cliff face, giving the city extra layers of defense. The crash of boulders could only signal destruction and rockslides.