AN: A strange sort of drabble I came up with in my sleep. Yes, yes, I know that technically only Sakura and her mother would be referred to as "Haruno women," but trying to make up and then work in maiden names would just be confusing and troublesome. So I left it at Haruno.
Unbreakable
They say in Konoha that the Haruno women are made of steel.
I don't know how that all started, really, since my family's only been in Konoha for about twenty-five years. I think the Third said it once to my mother when she was a young widow with a year-old infant daughter; a gentle little attempt to comfort her. I don't know. The first time my mother told me that, I was as proud as a seven year old could be. Steel – hell, yeah we were made of steel!
Of course, I never really asked why the Third Hokage would tell that to my mom, or why so many of her ninja friends liked to say it too when they came to visit. Caught up in my own little drama world of best friends and gossipy secrets and the Academy as I was, it never even occurred to me to wonder how a woman who was definitely not a ninja herself would even have so many shinobi friends.
When I was twelve, and the drama in my life became frighteningly real, I asked my mother why they said that. I mean, look at us. Me, with my silly pink hair and delicate little hands, and all my girly tendencies. Her, with her gentle face and a body that was weak even compared to me. How could people look at such soft creatures and say we were made of something as tough and deadly as tempered steel? And though I poured all the bitterness of a traumatized, angsty pre-teen into my voice, my mother only laughed. (I mean, I was in pain, here, couldn't she at least pretend to take my pain and darkness seriously? Mothers. Jeez. They just never get it.) But if that wasn't enough to damage my delicate sense of wounded dignity, she cuddled me in that way only mothers do and told me the story I'd only known in bits and pieces before.
Apparently, the saying goes back to my great-grandmother, born in a poor village in the north of the Snow Country. She lived in a blistering cold world with nothing to shield her but a shabby house and a large, constantly hungry family. When she was sixteen, she married, and when she was sixteen and a half, she was widowed by one of the freak avalanches that sometimes came with the heavier winter storms. But my great-grandmother managed not only to survive the winter, but to birth her child completely alone and nurse it along until spring melted the snow enough for her to leave her hut.
Funny how, as a kid, I was more impressed with her ability to survive her love's death than her ability to bear the baby (ah, the melodramatic heart of a twelve year old). Now, though, as a medic-nin and having witnessed a few births myself now, my awe for my great-grandmother has grown exponentially. Never mind surviving without the man of her heart - how the hell did she survive a natural, anesthetic-free birth? But survive it she did, and the baby, too, into the bargain.
In the Snow Country, an unmarried mother is almost sacrilegious, but my great-grandmother didn't give a damn. She ignored all the jeers and whispers from the rest of the village and went right on raising her daughter on her own, claiming that she had already married once and it hadn't been worth the trouble. I wonder sometimes why she really refused to marry again - was her heart really too broken for another man or was it just stubborness and a lack of interest in any of the likely candidates? But I digress. My great-grandmother and my grandmother lived in their hut and (I assume) were peaceful enough despite their isolation for seven years.
Then the slave raiders came through. I don't know what happened to my great-grandmother, but I like to think that she went down fighting, because the only way she would let slavers carry off her only child was over her dead body. Since they did, indeed, take my grandmother, I bet that's exactly what they did. I hope she left a few good gouges for them to remember her by, though.
So at the tender age of seven, my grandmother found herself chained to the hull of a dirty, crowded slave ship, headed for heaven only knows where. But even then, my grandmother showed that she was indeed her mother's daughter, because at the first place they docked, she somehow managed to get herself loose and ran off into the streets of the Wave Country. My mother says that my grandmother probably didn't fight her way free – after all, what's a starved, chained seven year old girl going to do to a bunch of grown male slavers? No, more likely she sweet talked one of them into letting her go. Though Mom did hint that it's possible the "sweet talking" involved a carelessly unattended dagger being held up to it's original owner's balls. Either way, it left my grandmother wandering around, orphaned and alone, in a country already paralyzed with crime syndicates and poverty worse than the Snow Country.
I don't know how the heck my grandmother made it, more or less in one piece, all the way to the borders of the Fire Country. But make it she did, and there – you guessed it – she met a Fire Country farmer, married him, and settled down none the worse for the wear. Except she had some strange obsession with shoes. She'd let her children – a daughter and two sons - wander around in whatever clothes they liked, but they had to have good, serviceable, well-fitting shoes, or else.
So I guess my mother's childhood was the best of the lot. Her parents were loving, honest, good people, and her younger brothers were friendly and good-natured. They had a nice little house, a reasonably profitable farm, and of course, good, dependable shoes.
So when the plague hit, it was kind of a shock to my poor mom. Her secure little world took quite the blow when her father was among the first to die. But my grandmother, well, she just kept plowing along. Plague or no plague, there were fields to plant, animals to tend. Husband or no husband, there were children to feed and rent to be paid. It wasn't until she started to feel the first signs of illness herself that my grandmother finally called her three kids in from the fields and introduced them to a strange blond man who wore clothes that no respectable farmer would be caught dead in. (He had good shoes, though, my mother always adds at this point in the story. Blue sandals that looked light but durable.)
The man was a shinobi, and he had come to take them to a safe place for a little while. Mom says the shinobi must have been friends with my grandmother, because he refused to accept payment for this mission. Instead, he hugged her once, told her to take care, and then took my eleven year old mother and her two younger brothers to the Hidden Village of Leaf. The ninja apparently had some sort of authority in Konoha, because he had it arranged that my mother and uncles could live in a little apartment near the Hokage monument.
That kindness aside, my mother found herself in the strange new village of Konoha, newly-orphaned, frightened, and totally out of place. But once again that Haruno backbone straightened, and my mother, as the oldest, went straight to work. No one would or could hire an eleven year old for a full time job, so she very cleverly worked out a schedule wherein she held three part time jobs in different parts of town. The money she made for her family went into rent, food, and even sent her two brothers to the shinobi academy. They trained to become ninjas, and all the while my mother worked.
When my uncles died in the ninja wars that ravaged the generation before mine, my mother says she came as close to snapping as any person can. But Haruno women don't snap. They bend, they twist, they cry and scream and grieve. But they never break all the way. So she went right on living, because not poverty, slavery, plague, nor even loss can stop a Haruno woman.
When I was born, the birth was long and painful, and my mother never really recovered physically. But even now, when she has a day so bad that she can't even get out of bed on her own, she smiles at me and tells me to stop hovering, dear, it's only a little fatigue. She likes to tell me how like my father I am; he was a worrywart, too. I wish I'd known him. He must have been a strong man – after all, only strong men can handle Haruno women, you know.
And even though part of me does worry whenever I think of my mother's pale face, another part of me watches her with a quiet sort of awe. Underneath those delicate features and that soft fragile skin is a thin sheet of bendable, but unbreakable, steel. Like my grandmother before her, and my great-grandmother before her, my mother is strong in a way that can't be taught or trained into you. And I intend to carry on the tradition.
They say in Konoha that we Haruno women are made of steel.