寂静 | xXAonoNYmousPXx | 光

"Why were you there?" his teeth grinded with every word. Frustration, anger, and another emotion he could not name, twisted his handsome face into something ugly.

It was a sight she couldn't look away from. "I had to know."

"Fat lot of good it did for everyone, didn't it ey?!" he snarled, slipping the glottal T that marked his childhood for the first time.

Tom stood on his feet and paced around the room. The fire left in his racing heart beat with energy wanting to be released. Hermione had to bite her own lips from making a rebuttal. She couldn't say anything more, say anything further, not without needing to explain herself why the guardians in the forbidden forest beyond the crater would never harm her. Why would she be an exception, when every living thing that ventured would never return alive. That the scene she stumbled on, of him and his men, was purely incidental.

"I forbade anyone from going there for a reason. Why would I bother making it into bloody law?!" his eyes glowed its ominous red as he finally turned to her, but his gaze was looking at something far beyond. Each step forward he made was a step unmoved from where she stood. "Whatever you saw in there... if you saw them, their peace must not be disturbed, or else everything I've worked for-"

He stopped himself before he could say anything further. As if the next words unuttered snapped him back to reality. Then he sees her finally. Hermione remained steady even when his hand reached for the back of her head. His long, gloved fingers threaded through her curly locks, and held her there. Not forcing, but firm, he made sure there was no chance for her to look away.

"Now you've seen me," he whispered where the ghosts of the past couldn't hear in their private world. A genuine admission, a fact only for her ears.

He kept his eyes on her even as her throat slightly bobbed and her hands reached for his face in return. Then he, too, sees a new sight about the woman he calls his wife for the first time.

"I do."

Her golden eyes swallowed him whole as she made her decision, and Tom was brought to an epoch guarded by the starlit lioness.

He felt before he saw, the chilling cold in the air, and the heavy droplets from the sky. He saw the woman protected by nothing but a transfigured cloak, as naked as the newborn babe sleeping protectively on her bosom. Her cries for help drowned in the growing windhowls as darkness crept. The great eye of the grand audience faded with the parting eclipse.

Summary:

There's an insatiable hunger in her, a gaping hole in the center of her chest. Naruto's been swept away by a Sannin, Sasuke's disappeared into the grips of another remarkably less sane Sannin, and the last Sannin rejected her apprenticeship in favor of training Hinata.

Kakashi's disappeared, her parents are running out of money, her team has abandoned her, and her savings are quickly wearing thin. Alone and desperate, Sakura reverse summons and prays.

She wakes up on the wrong side of Water Country, stranded on an island, and with an extra passenger in her head. (naruto gets toads. sasuke gets snakes. sakura gets something... decidedly less normal.)