Chapter Text
Sakura stands stiff-backed and blank-faced as she watches the priest usher her parent’s souls into the afterlife. She politely thanks the Hokage for his attendance, and watches him walk away as her parent’s colleagues congregate around her to give their sympathies. She knows none of these people, just barely more than acquaintances to her parents, but still the only people that have shown up to their funeral.
They, like her, are somber.
She wonders if she’s the only one who realizes how unbefitting this farce of a ceremony is to her parents memory. She can almost hear their ridiculous arguments and loud laughter if she focuses hard enough.
Everyone leaves eventually, having paid their respects, except her.
Sakura stands by her parent’s graves on a beautiful sunny day, and life in Konoha goes on as if nothing had ever happened. She stands there until the sun has gone down and the moon is far enough into its rotation that she can’t read the names on their shiny new tombstones.
And then she turns on her heel and walks home, taking back alleys and avoiding even the possibility of human contact. Her emotions are too real, nerves too raw to deal with any other people today.
A wisp of blonde hair catches the corner of her eye, and she sinks into the shadows further. It’s not her, just some nameless Yamanaka, but it could’ve been. There is no one in the village who she can turn to and let see her bleeding, broken heart. There might’ve been once, but not anymore.
The door lock echoes in the silence and she throws herself back against the door, head hitting it hard enough to bruise, but she’s too numb to feel even that. She sinks, with shaking and sore legs, to the floor.
Her parents are dead.
Her parents are dead.
Her parents are fucking dead.
She fights the scream, the anger, the tears bubbling up at the back of her throat, biting her lip so hard it bleeds. She takes her loss—her tears, her sadness, her anguish—and crushes it down until it can fit somewhere small and hidden in her, where no one can ever see it. She wraps her raw nerves; the tendrils connecting her spine and brain and ties her feelings up tight until she’s left empty and scraped raw. She doesn’t know that if she started screaming that she’d ever be able to stop.
She’s seen how they whisper after Sasuke-kun, “That poor boy,” they say. “Such a tragedy,” they say whispering in shallow sympathy, not even caring that he can still hear them. She sees the way they scorn Naruto, drawing away their children and all but spitting in his face. “Monster,” they call him, not even bothering to lower their voices. She knows how orphans are treated in Konoha, knows how many of her mother’s and her father’s friends have died alone with no family but what they’ve made by their graves until her mother and father were the last ones left.
There are few things in this world that she has left and her feelings are one of them. They are not for her neighbors, or her classmates, or the strangers on the street to whisper about with their fake sympathy. They and their fake feelings can fuck off.
She picks herself off the floor, legs seizing from so much movement after so long, and leads her funeral procession of one up the stairs. Her feet guide her past her bedroom and into her parent’s.
Their bed lies in the center of the room, mostly empty of the comfort a younger Sakura had found there. But…
If there’s anything left of them, it’s in this room. In their bed, where they read her bedtime stories and comforted her after nightmares. At the desk by their window, overflowing with her mother’s paints and pencils, and her father’s notebooks full of cramped kanji. In this room where she learned how to read and write and doodle and made up stories about princes and princesses and monsters and gods.
She wraps her mother’s quilt around her shoulders, and inhales her father’s aftershave and her mother’s perfume.
After a long, terrible, day, Sakura finally goes to sleep.
There’s a girl in this forest, light footsteps making no sound on the ground as if she isn’t there. She knows that she is on the border of the Land of Hot Water and the Land of Fire, so close to the shattered remains of Whirlpool that she can feel her blood singing for it.
Up ahead are familiar strangers, a honey blonde head weaving between enemies and cutting them down without remorse, breaking bones and smashing skulls. She fights with her back to her partner, a man not too tall but not too short, dusty pink hair stained red with blood and wielding twin kusarigama as if he were born to it.
She steps forward as one of the nin cuts through the woman’s calf. She repays him two-fold, but she’s down and they’re surrounded. The man pulls back towards her, his kusarigama moving so fast that they become hard to see.
A stone spike from their enemies pushes past his defense, and buries itself in his shoulder. He’s down to one arm, one weapon. There’s bodies surrounding the two but they’re still outclassed. Surrounded and down for the count.
The girl covers her mouth in shock at the scene before her, and it’s only then that she notices she’s crying. She gasps and is surprised as every fighter turns to her, surprised by her appearance. Kunai and shuriken, jutsu and punches go right through her. She’s too shocked to dodge as she’s been trained to do, so she does the only thing she can. She screams.
The couple redoubles their efforts, fighting to get to where she is. The enemies are still stunned, clawing at their ears and staring at the girl that isn’t there in some sort of fear. But not the couple. They mow down enemy nin, ignoring any damage they incur on their way to where she stands.
In the end, the field is riddled with bodies, and the couple is barely standing. They rely on each other to hobble over to where she is.
And then they hug her; their blood on her skin feels almost real.
The man wipes her cheeks, gentle despite the wreckage he’s left behind him, “Oh, sweetheart, we never wanted this for you.”
The woman draws the girl down to her level and closes the girl’s eyes. She places a gentle kiss on each eyelid, tears are running down her face too. “My beautiful little blossom, we’re so sorry, we love you so much.”
The man smiles so much softer, tears on his cheeks as well, “Just remember that we love you.” Their grips weaken, darkness encroaching on where she stands with them “Keep your eyes closed sweetheart.” Everything is cold and dark and she can’t breathe and—"Just wake up now, Saachan, we promise, it will all be better when you wake up.”
She wakes up with a choked off scream and dashes for the bathroom, the bile and spit hitting the water echoes loudly in the empty house.
She brushes her teeth and gets ready in the dark. She doesn't need a mirror to do her makeup; can pull her hair into a braid with muscle memory alone. Her hands fall into the pattern without her conscious decision, twisting and weaving until the braid is done.
Forgetting herself, she checks her appearance in the mirror. Her mother's eyes stare at her from above her father's nose. Her braid is just like he would've done, five strands, thick and intricate, something more delicate than one would think a man like him could be.
She runs out of the bathroom before the urge to throw her brush at the mirror overwhelms her. She doesn't need the bad luck.
She starts a pot of coffee and replaces the cream in the dish outside. Without the counterpoint of her mother's kettle boiling, the drip of the coffee maker is loud. The house is still dark; the village as asleep as a ninja village ever gets. For a second she can imagine that her father is upstairs, doing some last minute packing for a mission, and she's just up to see him like she always does.
Did.
The coffee pot sputters as it finishes and Sakura swallows her grief like a physical thing. Her stomach turns, thinking about how easy it had been to forget for one brief moment. She drinks her coffee and forgoes breakfast. The sun rises over the village and she watches it wake up.
At first it's the ninja, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, running errands, going on missions, heading to the training grounds, all things that her parents must have done at some point. Then it's the civilians, opening up shops, taking children to lessons, gossiping among themselves. She feels at once a million miles away and like she's standing in the center of the world.
She finishes her coffee, sets her cup down in her sink, and goes back to bed.
She crawls back into her parents bed, letting the smell of old paper and paints sink into her bones. She wraps herself in her mother's quilt, and she hugs tightly to her father's pillow. She cries.
Tomorrow she can pull herself back together enough to go back into the world. Tomorrow she can collect bounties, settle affairs, and make decisions. But today she's just a twelve year old girl whose parents have died and she's tired.
She falls asleep and doesn't dream.
When she wakes up, it's the next day. She doesn't feel better, still feels hollow, scraped raw, but she's always been very good at faking it.
Her shower is hot, scalding, and her skin turns red under the force of her scrubbing. Her coffee is black and thick, not even enjoyable enough to savor it. As she steps out, she has to step over dishes: casseroles and big batches of foods that are supposed to carry her through her grief. The fridge is full by the time she's done and the sun is high and bright.
She sticks to side streets again; wishes she knew how to hop from roof to roof like the ninja that pass overhead. The walk to the hokage tower is quick. Her business there is much less so.
The mission desk is something that she knows about, in theory, Iruka-sensei is always more than willing to talk about the policies and procedures that go into being a shinobi. So she knows what she's doing in theory. In practice, it's a little less concrete.
She stands in line, keeping her head and eyes down, steadily ignoring the glances her presence gets.
Once she gets to the front, the ninja manning the desk is even less impressed. She looks up to meet his eyes, because her parents had taught her to be polite if nothing else. She sees him clock the lack of forehead protector and knows without a doubt that he let her see him do that.
"What do you want, kid?"
It irks her but she ignores the feeling.
"I'm picking up the bounties for Haruno Mebuki and Kizashi." Her voice doesn't waver.
The man looks her over, like some sort of judge from on high, righteous and mighty and with that stupid senbon in his mouth that a small part of her wants to push back further. Can't judge her and find her so wanting if he's choking on his own blood.
"Yeah, I bet you are." He says. The man's eyes soften slightly as he waves for an aid to go pull the scrolls. "Wait over there and Hayate will bring you the papers for the bank."
She nods stiffly, walking over to a waiting area and watching with shaded eyes as the ninja of her village come and collect their missions and their pay. There's a tall man that comes in, posture a slouch that no good shinobi would actually have, and hair in a wild silver mess above his head. His eyes catch hers and she shivers.
There is an emptiness in those eyes and she knows exactly what kind of pain causes it now. Even more than that, she can hear her mother's voice from her dream, something about this empty man making her mother's words echo in her brain. "Keep your eyes closed sweetheart."
She doesn't close her eyes, knows that there's no good reason to, but she looks away first.
The paige comes back with her papers and she quickly leaves Hokage tower, ready to put those things masquerading as men behind her.
She knows that there's a reason that some ninja are better than others. Knows that most jounin are kept away from genin and civilians. That doesn't mean she needs to see it.
They scare her.
A lot scares her now.
She walks past the academy. Getting almost anywhere in the village requires passing it.
The first year sensei is running his kids through their first kata. It's easy to see who is and isn't a clan kid, even from where she's standing. The kids taking to the kata like water make fools out of their civilian born classmates. She remembers this time for her at the academy, civvie kids dropping like flies as they realize the skill gap between themselves and those children who had been born and bred for ninja life.
Sakura's parents expected her to drop out at this point too.
Sakura’s father never wanted her to become a kunoichi, for all that he and her mother are genin, he’s always been hesitant to support her. It was the subject of many whispered conversations between her parents late at night. She doesn't know why, exactly, he'd been so against her serving her village but she'd rather have him here to make vague noises of disapproval at her career choice than where he is now. Sakura misses those conversations.
Haruno Mebuki and Kizashi were two career genin who usually took missions escorting merchants, they could’ve become chunin had they both been born in Konoha, but it’s the unofficial policy that Konoha tries to keep its foreign born ninjas from actual village secrets that chunin might be exposed to. But they’d been solid ninja, that much she knew, not the strongest, or the fastest, or the most powerful, but they knew what they were doing.
Sakura’s vindictively comforted by the fact that they not only completed their last mission, but took down five jonin with them.
If she doesn’t get to keep her parents, they don’t get to keep their lives.
She dusts off her skirt and turns to head towards the bank. She has things to accomplish today before she can give into her grief.
She's not advanced enough to sense the fourth years coming out to do their spars. Can't feel the gaze of people watching her leave, their eyes caught by the bright color of her hair.
Her errands done, and with the sun high in the sky, she falls asleep in her parents bed. Playing normal is harder than she thought it would be. Her nerves are so raw that even the comforting weight of her parents comforter is too much for her to bear.
She doesn't sleep well, but she sleeps deeply.
She dreams of dismembered limbs and dusty pink hair stained thoroughly red with blood and of her father screaming at his attackers in a language he’d sung her to sleep with that she’d never understood.
She dreams of giant nine-tailed foxes crushing souls and spines between teeth as big as houses and scarecrows releasing their dogs to feast on the bodies of their kills and a boy made out of black fire recreating himself in Amaterasu’s image.
There are gods and monsters, sinners and saints, and Sakura welcomes the reaper themself with the ease of an old friend, watching those that are hers lay waste to fields of soldiers.
Her throat is sore when she wakes up, like she's been screaming for hours. No amount of tea is able to fix it.
She doesn't sleep again after that, preferring to watch the nest of ravens that have set themselves up outside her window go about their day. The village wakes up again, as it always does, and the sun illuminates her father's writing desk.
She can't stay in this fucking house another day.
So Sakura packs her bag, covers up the dark circles under her eyes with a mountain of concealer and ignores the casseroles and hot dishes in the fridge. She locks the door behind her and pretends that she can move on with her life.