[Fic] "Take Deeper Roots" -- Chronicles of Narnia/Naruto

[edenfalling]

branchandroot requested: Naruto and Narnia, Sakura and Susan, the hidden sides

Sakura spends a year in Narnia. Susan watches, and does her best to help. (2,250 words) [AO3 crosspost]

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Take Deeper Roots
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Peter found the girl during a battle with the northern giants -- a seeming human, if not for the hair as pink as cherry blossom, who could lift the giants' own weapons and strike back with strength equal to theirs. When the fighting ended, she laid hands on the wounded and healed their hurts nearly as effectively as Lucy's cordial, though more slowly and without the miraculous bypassing of pain and exhaustion. Peter knew a prime ally when he saw her, and quickly enlisted her aid in the rest of the campaign. Narnia emerged victorious with a quarter of the expected casualties, and the giants retreated back beyond the moors to trouble Narnia no more that year.

The girl -- who was, in truth, older than any of the Pevensies had been at the start of their reign, strange though that was to think -- gave her name as Sakura and said little of her past except that this world was not her own, and she had not traveled willingly.

"Should we expect others like you?" Edmund asked her upon the army's return to Cair Paravel.

Sakura shook her head. "The portals aren't meant to work like this. I've been transported before, but it was to a half-world, made of nothing but void and platforms. The circumstances under which that person used the ability on me this time were unique, and likely impossible to reconstruct even if someone wanted to try."

"Never underestimate the lengths to which true friends will go to rescue one of their own," Lucy said earnestly. "But until the day they open your way home, be welcome in Narnia. Our home is yours."

Sakura pressed her hands together in front of her chest and bowed from the waist, briefly.

Over the next weeks she became a familiar figure around the castle, sliding easily into the role of an honored noble ally. She assisted Peter in training the guards and army, working to adapt and teach her weaponless fighting techniques to bodies drastically different from her own. She joined Lucy discussing bones and herbs and magic in the spacious, well-lit chambers that served as a hospital, where students came from all the northern lands to study healing along with the queen chosen to that task by Aslan himself. She spoke with Edmund about ciphers and codes, roads and supplies, and how to live with yourself after impossible choices.

She did not speak with Susan.

There was no animosity to her silence, or at least none that Susan could feel. Rather, they simply seemed to have nothing in common. Sakura's training was in war, medicine, and spycraft, not in the art of managing a household or a country: of balancing accounts and tempers, needs and wants, appearances and reality. She did drift around the edges of Susan's days on occasion, watching as Susan received guests (and made sure the arrangements were in place to feed, house, clothe, and entertain them in the fashion they expected), as Susan kept the castle and its hundreds of inhabitants ticking along like well-oiled machinery (no what what crises, major or minor, arose to disrupt her plans), as Susan sat in her study and read letters, treaties, and ledgers (though the marks on the pages often seemed to swim and switch places if she let her concentration slip so much as a heartbeat).

One day as autumn gave way to winter, Sakura knocked on the door of Susan's study, a book of Narnian history in her hand. "The library is too large to heat, even if fire were safe around so much fuel," she said. "May I sit in your window to read?"

"Has Edmund refused your company?" Susan asked in surprise.

Sakura laughed. "He invited me, but we're too used to talking. None of his work got done, and as you can see, I didn't read so much as a dozen pages." She held up the book to show how close her fabric bookmark was to the front cover. "I thought that you--" She paused, as if reordering her thoughts.

Susan allowed her the opportunity.

"You seem comfortable with silence," Sakura said eventually.

Susan blinked. That was not an assessment she usually received. Most people, upon watching her listen to pleas, sympathize with woes, offer praise and thanks, give gentle directions, and all the other ways she used words, thought her the kind of person happiest in the company and attention of others. Her frowns and struggles in her study only added to that impression. And yet, for all that she loved the warmth of companionship, she loved even more the moments she could set aside her burdens and simply contemplate the sea.

She wondered what Sakura might say about her siblings, if she asked, what secrets her own familiarity and expectations had led her to overlook.

She suspected Sakura would hold her own silence.

"I give you fair warning that I may curse at my figures," Susan said, raising the ledger in which she was calculating the army's expenses over the past month. "If that is no obstacle to your concentration, be welcome. There is a blanket in the cupboard under the window seat should the glass prove chill."

"Thank you," Sakura said.

They passed the hours until twilight in companionable quiet.

Sakura returned on the morrow, and shortly it became their habit to share the shortening afternoons. Sakura carefully worked her way through all the extant histories of ancient Narnia, then moved on to the propaganda works put out during the Witch's reign. After a time she began to ask Susan questions, which slowly evolved into discussions of history, magic, and Susan's own journey between worlds to a new land.

"We came from war into war," Susan said as she sealed and stamped a letter to the Duke of Galma. "The difference is that in Narnia, we weren't helpless as we had been in Spare Oom. We were chosen, called -- first to the task of deposing the Witch, and then to the task of rebuilding what she had destroyed. In the face of that need, how could we turn away?"

"There was a war in my world too," Sakura said, her hands wrapped around her knees as she sat neatly curled in the window seat. "I wasn't called here, though. It's not the same."

"And you were not helpless. You have the strength of a giant and can snatch people back from the very brink of death. Your companions must miss you sorely," Susan said.

Sakura's hands clenched.

Susan made a soft, inquiring noise.

Sakura smiled, but it didn't touch her eyes. "I am strong," she said. "I worked so hard, for so long, to be strong. To be useful. But no matter what I do, it's never enough. My... my precious people -- Naruto, Sasuke -- they always pass me by. They love me, but they don't look back. They don't see they're leaving me behind. They only see each other."

Susan set down her paper-knife and the letter from the Council of Seven Isles.

"In my world, some people are born with an affinity for certain elements, powers they can use more easily than everyone else. Sasuke is lightning and fire. Naruto is wind, and nature itself. I'm nothing." She laughed, a sound of mirth as empty as her smile. "I'm named after a tree. Did I ever tell you that? In my language, 'sakura' means cherry tree, cherry blossom. Sometimes I think they're a storm raging across the world while I'm stuck in the ground, never getting anywhere. How can a tree compare to a typhoon?"

Susan rose from her desk and joined Sakura in the window seat.

"Have you heard the titles Narnia has given to me and my siblings?" she asked.

Sakura nodded, evidently wary of this abrupt change in topic.

"Peter the Magnificent, Lucy the Valiant, Edmund the Just," Susan said. She set her hands on her lap, smoothed the folds of her skirt. "Susan the Gentle. I do not ride to the wars. I earn no glory. I order no deaths. I stay home and manage kitchens and accounts." She looked up and caught Sakura's eyes. "Am I weak?"

"Of course not! But I don't have your gifts," Sakura said. "I do go to war. Someone needs to stay home, to keep our village alive and whole, but I can't be that person. I can't and I won't. But I can't keep up, either. Trees catch fire. Trees blow down. And the storm moves on."

"One tree may die," Susan agreed. "But trees do not stand alone. The forest endures. And here is a secret: wind and fire and lightning are only ever what they are. A forest is alive, and whatever lives, can change." She reached forward to touch Sakura's tight-clenched hands. "A storm is not subtle. A storm cannot heal. You can. And even beyond your magic and your skills, you are Sakura Haruno -- a true and loyal friend -- and that is reason enough for anyone to see you, to love you, and to grieve your absence."

"But not to stand at my side," Sakura said. "They ran on ahead; that's why the portal only caught me."

"Perhaps they run forward because they know and trust that you will guard their backs," Susan said, but when Sakura shook her head, she didn't push. Comfort could not be forced. She had seeded a thought in Sakura's mind, like rain falling light and soft onto tree-covered hills, but only time and Sakura herself could say whether Susan's words would sink into the forest soil and bring new growth.

"I thought, when I first saw you, that you might have dryad blood," Susan said instead. "If you are named after a tree, perhaps that thought was truer than I knew."

Sakura seized the change of topic like a drowning sailor seizes a rope and a chance of rescue. "My world isn't like yours, but some things are familiar -- we both have animals that talk, though I think the causes are different. We do have legends of a magical tree, almost like a god, that could change shape and whose fruit was the source of chakra. Maybe there were other, lesser trees with powers of their own. Who can say if one of them took human shape and a human lover, generations ago?"

"Who indeed," Susan said. "If you are still here come spring, we must take you to the Forest Dance, when the Trees and dryads shake off their winter sleep and put on their finest flowers and leaves so fresh that the green seems gilded at the veins."

"I think I'd like that, if I'm still here," Sakura agreed. She glanced out the window at the lowering sun. "I'm sorry, I've been distracting you. I should go."

Susan let her leave without protest, though in truth she had little work that day and had welcomed the distraction. That night at supper she watched as Sakura laughed and talked and danced with Peter, Lucy, and Edmund, as if she could outrun the doubts she had carried within her from one world to another.

Sakura did not come to her study on the morrow, nor the overmorrow, but on the third day, she knocked on Susan's door with a book of Calormene poetry in her hand, and settled into the window seat with a hesitant smile. Susan smiled back, and they passed the afternoon in comfortable quiet.

In the spring, Sakura outlasted even Lucy in the wild, heart-stopping swirl of the Forest Dance, moving amongst the Trees and dryads as if her blood had turned to sap, joy snapping from her upstretched hands like lightning channeled and returned to the storm. The hold she kept on her magic was loose and power crackled through the air, little skirls of wind rising as she spun: for branches shaped the wind even as they danced to its tune.

How could a storm compare to a forest? Or to put the question another way, what use was a storm save to cleanse the land and bring rain to feed new growth? Susan had no doubt that even now Sakura's friends were searching for a path between worlds, a way to bring their missing piece home. She would do the same for any of her siblings, should they be lost, and love was no less strong for being born of choice rather than blood.

Sakura stumbled from the dance as the moon inched out of sight beyond the edge of the clearing, eyes alight with the heady thrill of life and growth and change. "You were right," she said as she leaned on Susan to steady herself. "You were right."

"And you are exhausted," Susan said. "Come back to the castle before you fall asleep here, with naught but rocks and roots for your pillow."

"I've slept on worse," Sakura said, but she followed Susan across the river and through the gates of Cair Paravel, humming fragments of a tuneless, yearning song just loud enough for Susan to overhear.

She spent many hours in the wood that spring and summer, speaking with the dryads and the Trees. And when two strangers came through a door in the air outside Cair Paravel, where the moles were digging ground for an apple orchard, lightning and wind held ready in their hands, Sakura returned to her friends and her world with her head high and a crown of leaves in her hair.

Susan wished her well.

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End of Story

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As you can see, this time I took the opposite route from An Alternate Solution to the Problem of Madara and dropped a Naruto character into Narnia. Despite that, this is really Sakura's story, not Susan's, which is not what I was expecting when I started writing. It's also a good thousand words longer than I anticipated. Strange how these things happen.

And now to bed. :-)

Comments

[jjhunter]

Oh, lovely yes. I enjoyed this very much, and enjoyed discovering 'Tides' and 'Undertow' to boot.

"Am I weak?" and "wind and fire and lightning are only ever what they are. A forest is alive, and whatever lives, can change" hit right to the heart of things. 'Whatever lives, can change' ought to be a motto on a crest of the world somewhere.

Thank you for this gift of a ficlet.

[edenfalling]

Heh. "Tides" is a little bit of a failed fic, in the sense that the story I finished is not quite the story I tacitly promised to tell when I started (though it was the ending I intended all along). I learned from that. And I do still love all the component parts, even as I can see their flaws as a narrative arc. "Undertow," on the other hand, I just flat-out love, creepy POV character, moral ambiguities, and all. That was a piece of mood writing, basically -- the inspiration was a breathless hot summer at Cass Lake, with all the attendant stifling humidity -- and I was trying to capture that in the plot and theme as well as the ambient physical atmosphere of Kuronami.

I'm really glad you like those lines! They are more or less what I built the fic around, so it's good to hear they worked as intended.

[aceofannwn]

This was lovely.

[edenfalling]

Thank you!

[heliopausa]

I liked this very much, especially Susan's calm watchfulness. (And I enjoyed the word 'overmorrow', which I didn't know before. :) Thanks.)

[edenfalling]

Thank you! I learned the word overmorrow this year, from the A Word A Day mailing list, and I was so pleased that I found a place to use it in my writing.

[autumnia]

I love the way Susan describes Sakura to herself, that a tree is just as important as wind and lightning. That a tree can continue to grow and change while the other two are just themselves. Granted, Naruto and Sasuke have evolved through their own adventures and journeys but as they left their teammate behind (as well as their other friends) and not looked back, they just didn't see that she changed as well.

[edenfalling]

Thank you! Yeah, Naruto and Sasuke have of course grown and changed, but since Sakura hasn't told Susan much about her world and her past, Susan doesn't know any of the pertinent details. (Also, it would weaken the symbolism, but shhh! *wink*) In some ways, though, both of the boys started with tragic pasts and grandiose goals and have never lost that larger-than-life aspect, while Sakura started with a comfortable life and a much smaller goal -- get a cute boy to like her -- and developed her strength and ambitions more gradually, as she ran headfirst into the realities of ninja life, so her narrative arc has a different shape.

[branchandroot]

*sniffles helplessly into her kleenex* Oh, /Sakura/. I can just /see/ her dancing with the Trees, and that's so beautiful.

Thank you!

[edenfalling]

I'm glad you liked it!

I was kind of groping helplessly around for a conclusion after the big and meaningful conversation, and I had a little snippet about Sakura and dryads and cherry trees lying around from my first attempt at that conversation (which itself was an elaboration on Susan's stray though about dryad blood in "Set a Thief"), and it occurred to me that of course the Trees and dryads must dance to welcome the return of spring, and that that would be something very good for Sakura to participate in.

I wish I were a better artist; I would draw that scene in a heartbeat.

[jomanflea.livejournal.com]

That was lovely.
It felt to me like there was almost a rhythmic flow to the story, like waves, but that could just be me :).

And how strongly Sasuke and Naruto were there, particularly in their absence.

[edenfalling]

It felt to me like there was almost a rhythmic flow to the story, like waves,

Hmm, maybe! I did use a more formal tone here, and I was deliberately going for symbolism (and imagery, a bit), so it's quite possible I slid toward more obviously "structured" prose. And I tend to think of Susan in terms of water anyway, so... who knows!

I am of the firm belief that writing about any member of Team 7 without at least acknowledging the other two means you are writing that person wrong. They are a unit, amen, then end. :-)

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

Very nice - a good character development story for Sakura. <3

[edenfalling]

Thank you! I meant to do some character exploration of Susan, too, but that ended up being implicit while Sakura's issues are explicit.

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

Susan's settled at this point. A sequel where Susan is unsettled (has forgotten Narnia) would be FASCINATING. It's interesting how Susan goes from Queen to mere girl again.

[edenfalling]

A sequel where Susan is unsettled (has forgotten Narnia), you say.

Hmm. Hmmmmm.

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

*gives you semi-innocent smile*

[edenfalling]

*eyes you suspiciously*