Being alone sucked.
Sakura Haruno realized that this was a rather cliché statement, as she sat on the bus, leaning her head against the windowpane despite the vibrations that seemed to send small earthquakes into her cranium with every jolt of the vehicle. However, as she lifted her head from the torture that it was enduring and turned her head to her friend next to her, she realized that her predicament was not of the same nature as that of many other people who have uttered said statement.
Until approximately two years ago, one of those people had been Sakura's best friend, Ino Yamanaka. In a world where people age until they reach the age of eighteen, and then stop aging until they meet their soul-mate so they can grow older together, at age seventeen, the two girls had made a pact for the hunt to officially begin.
It's not like it was particularly hard: Because of this whole soul mate business, a huge industry had bloomed, with online dating and organizations claiming they had found the perfect algorithm for finding your soul mate. Sakura couldn't help but peg those as little better than scams, but there were many people who practically found their soul mates as soon as or even before they turned eighteen. But Sakura had truthfully always been skeptical: Even though she knew it to be true, she also found it hard to believe that soul mates were something you were born with, regardless of how you developed as a person. As the pink-haired girl surveyed her friend, contentedly sifting through the photos on her phone, she could, with a pang of sadness, already see a measure of matureness in Ino's eyes that were that she never saw in her own, no many how long she spent scrutinizing her own face in the bathroom mirror.
At the date of their respective eighteenth birthdays, the two had been of equal height: However, soon after, Ino had met Sai via one of the many dating websites available, and the two had been happily together ever since. Sakura often wondered how people knew that they had found their soul mates, since it would take at least a year for them to notice the difference in aging. However, when she posed this question to Ino, she just shrugged and said 'We just knew, you know.' Sakura would often secretly scoff at that. It wasn't that she didn't want to find the love of her life: In fact, she was often envious of her friend's gradual aging, so in sync with their partners. She just felt that the whole idea of meeting a stranger and just falling in love with them irrevocably was such a preposterous idea, especially from a sheer biological perspective. She believed love was cultivated. And yet, when she saw Ino and Sai, so obviously delirious in their joy, something would twist inside her. It would happen when it was supposed to. Or so she tried to convince herself, as she recalled that Ino would be old enough to drink in a year. And there Sakura was.
'Sakura. Hey. Forehead!'
'What?' Sakura snapped out of her reverie, to stare at Ino, who was ushering her off the bus with hurried hand gestures.
'It's your stop, dummy!'
'Oh, right.' Sakura fumbled for her bag, then lurched off the bus, nearly knocking over a senior citizen in the process. Once the doors hissed shut behind her, she pulled her coat tighter around her and strode along the street that would take her home, shivering in the bitter October wind. Ever since she had started studying medicine, she and Ino had grown further apart. These bus trips were the only time they ever spent together now, but Sakura couldn't help but wonder if a part of it was the fact that Ino was already outgrowing Sakura as a friend.
In this world, there were a lot of stories. Horror stories, Ino dubbed them. Tales of unfortunate people, Sakura thought haughtily. Stories of people who went decades without finding their soul mates, watching as their family and friends slowly moved on and even passed away, while they remained eternally in the state of an eighteen-year old. An image of a girl with Ino's smile and Sai's eyes looking old enough to be Sakura's sister came to the pink-haired girl's mind, and she promptly shivered once more.…
When Sakura got back home, she locked the door of her tiny studio apartment, then strode across the hall/tiny living room and dumped her bag on the small coffee table with a resigned sigh. Her small cat, named Naruto as a pike at friend´s whisker-like marks on his face, padded over silently, and Sakura leaned down to stroke his orange fur. Suddenly, her phone rang, startling Naruto, and causing him to retreat, padding over to the corner of the room and lapping at his bowl of water.
Sakura rummaged through her pockets, pulling out her phone and pressing the green button on the call screen.
'Hi Dad. How are you and Mum?' The gravelly voice of her father came from the other end.
'We're fine, dear. I know it's late, but I just wanted to warn you about another one of those people lurking around your area. Apparently, there have been reports from several people that there's been a strange man approaching random residents and asking to look into their eyes. I know you don't believe that these people can even find their soul mates that way anyways, and that they're just loonies, but just be on the alert, sweetie.'
'Will do, Dad. You guys take care of yourselves too. I'll see you Saturday for dinner.'
'Of course. Good night, kiddo.' With a click, Sakura was left standing alone in her apartment, clutching her phone and with a strange chill in her gut.
Those who her dad had chosen to so eloquently dub as 'those people' were the few individuals who had survived centuries without aging, by murdering their soul-mates upon meeting them, and then finding their new reincarnations, and repeating the process. It was illegal, of course, and extremely difficult to pull off. Soul mates were generally not born on opposite sides of the world, but in most cases, they were hard to find. Sakura could never understand why these people had to go to the extreme of murdering the love of their lives, instead of just moving away, but she supposed that fate had its way. In a way, she never believed those stories, partly because of her disdain toward the whole concept of a soul mate, but perhaps, to a lesser degree, because of her utter lack of understanding for how someone could stand spending eternity alone. Yawning, she strode over to the small kitchen adjoining to the living room, absentmindedly filling Narutos food bowl before rummaging through her fridge for something to eat. And swearing as she found it to be completely empty.
'Dammit. I knew I forgot something.' Med school was rewarding, but it was also the most stressful thing she'd ever had to go through. It wasn't uncommon for her to forget things, (once, she was twenty minutes late to class because her phone had somehow ended up in the oven) so as she glanced at the clock, showing ten minutes to ten, she decided that she could probably still make it to the convenience store to get some instant noodles. Grabbing her purse and coat from where she had set them down moments before, she rushed out of the apartment.
Jogging through the dark streets, occasionally lit by a stray lamppost, Sakura silently cursed her own forgetfulness. The evening was still, and the streets had an eerie quality to them. The pink haired girl had taken a self-defense class a while back at the insistence of her mother, so she knew how to defend herself, but as the sound of a car alarm suddenly went off in the distance, she couldn't help but give a startled jump.
When she was only a block away from the small grocery store, she felt a chill pass through her, as though she was being watched. Before she could stop herself, she glanced quickly over her shoulder, spotting nothing but inky black, broken by an occasional patch of light.
Mentally slapping herself, she turned her gaze back to her own path, trying hard not to trip over anything in the darkness, quickening her pace. She was passing a row of cars, parked by the sidewalk.
A stone skittered across the pavement behind her.
Snapping her gaze backwards, Sakura registered nothing unusual. There was a dark blur of movement, something vanishing behind the first car of the row she was passing.
'Probably just a cat,' she muttered to herself. Stepping into the glare of a street lamp, she turned her gaze forwards once more, only to suppress a scream at the sight of the man standing before her. Everything about him was inky black, from the tips of his boots to his long cloak to his raven hair. However, as the blue of her eyes met the black of his, she was shocked to see his irises slowly turning a shade of scarlet red. As their eyes met, Sakura could swear her heart skipped a beat. And suddenly, the world just seemed to snap into place. As though she had been near-sighted her whole life without realizing it, and this man had just given her a pair of glasses.. Stunned, she struggled to reorient herself, feeling a sudden bout of dizziness overcome her.
Before she could yell, or adopt a fighting position, there was a swooshing sound, and she felt her back thud against the pavement, a hand clamped firmly around her throat. Gasping for air, stars swimming across her field of vision, Sakura struggled futilely against the iron grip pinning her to the cold ground, registering, to her horror, the man's other hand, withdrawing a small silver dagger from underneath his cloak. The med student arched her back violently, trying to buck the strange man off. Through her pain and lingering feeling of disorientation, she heard a deep voice growl something. A voice that she'd never heard before, but somehow recognized nonetheless.
'My name is Sasuke Uchiha. Until we meet again, my other half.'