Things you should know before reading: This story deals with mental disorders, specifically DiD. I am not going to treat this like some authors do; I am going to be dealing with all the nasty, icky aspects of it, because it is a mental disorder, and it's not going to be happy daisies once she falls in love or kicks the bad guy's butt.

That said, I have taken some liberties in editing canon to add the story. Nothing big, just gave Sakura's mother and father names, etc, since not much is known about her family. Enjoy the story, and please review; it helps keep me motivated. Constructive criticism is always appreciated!

Shatterbox

It had happened slowly. The first signs had come when she was young.

Her father was a shinobi, a simple chuunin, and her mother was a civilian. He'd knocked up her mother, and they'd been forced into marriage for her sake. He was never terribly happy with Sakura, or her mother Natsumi, and he often told them they were useless, worthless, and unwanted. It wasn't until the night of her sixth birthday that the problems at home started. She had come home from spending the day in the park, and timidly asked if he had bought her a present. He'd been guarding the gate all day and was frustrated - enough to take it out on her by kicking her across the room. Ironically, after that, he was the most affectionate he'd ever been. He'd bought her a new dress, took her out for ice-cream, and even let her watch a movie. It was short-lived, though; there were more incidents like the first. They were infrequent, but the pain in her heart hurt much more than the ribs he cracked or the bruise he left on her back; crying only made him angrier, so she shoved the tears and pain far away from her normal thoughts. It wasn't really there, it was just inside her head, it had to be. Her father might not love her, but he would never abuse her. . . right? Then, a week before she turned seven, one of the Hokage's messengers had shown up at their doorway to inform them that Haruno Botan had been killed on his most recent mission. Sakura shed very few tears for her father.

Then, she went to the academy. Not just the civilian school, but the ninja academy. The taunting and teasing of the other girls had hurt her, and so she pushed all the pain into the same corner of her mind she had hidden them in when her father was. . .displeased with her. When she was not being picked on, she smiled, laughed, and was perfectly fine. The insults, though, brought out her whimpering, quivering side, and she only ever cried when they were picking on her.

"Silly civilian brat!"

"Hey, look, it's the walking billboard!"

"Should pinkie really be in here? I mean, this is a kunoichi class. . ."

So she shoved all the negative emotions away, and only let them out when she was alone, or when the girls really hurt her.

After the first time she was beaten up for fighting back, Sakura put the anger into a different corner of her mind, and that tiny corner of her had taken on a voice of its own. It said the things she wanted to say, some of the things she really thought. . .

It got worse when she was assigned to Team 7. Every derogatory word Sasuke said to her hurt her, and in the back of her mind, the little voices she had long ago dubbed Inner Sakura mumbled things. She loved Sasuke-kun, really, she did, but Inner Sakura did not. Inner Sakura got the worst of all the pain that Sasuke inflicted on her, and because of that, Inner Sakura would talk about him occasionally. Sometimes, anger would be clear in her voice: "Sasuke's a jerk, and you know it! He'll never love you, and it's not because there's something wrong with you. There's something wrong with him, he's not entirely sane! Look at his eyes, look at how he loves causing pain!" Other times, the voice would take on a mournful cast: "It's no wonder Sasuke-kun dislikes us. . .we're so pitiful, and weak. How could he ever love someone so useless?" And then, at times, Sakura would muse on how ironic it was that her inner voices were telling her that the boy she loved wasn't sane.

After Sasuke left, Sakura had allowed herself to be whole for a little while, to feel every drop of grief that Sasuke's desertion had caused. When she stood at the front gates of Konoha and sobbed a request for Naruto to bring Sasuke back, the tears trickling down her face were not just tears for Sasuke, but tears for every time the Uchiha had hurt her, tears for every time that she had been called "forehead" and "civvie"; they were tears brought on by anger, anger at her inability to save her teammate, anger at how useless she was, how unnecessary. . .

After Naruto had come back, body broken and all alone, she had locked that pain, too, away in what she had come to refer to as Box #1. Inner Sakura got both quieter and louder at the same time. She didn't speak up as much, but Sakura found herself acting on the emotional impulses of her inner self occasionally.

Naruto left the village to stay safe, and when he left, she stopped letting herself feel the anger and pain of Sasuke's betrayal. Over the years that Naruto was gone, the feelings (of anger, of sadness, of loneliness) she ignored and locked away in her mind piled up. She never noticed that when she went on missions, she couldn't remember very much of what happened during the fights. It was just a black haze most of the time, and she told herself it was just her mind's way of dealing with things. Her teammates were usually different throughout the missions; sometimes, she was with some of the ninja from her class, other times it would be people she had no prior acquaintance with, and sometimes, it would be a mixture of people she knew and others she didn't. Because the people she worked with were so many and almost always different, nobody noticed that anything was wrong.

Her mind siphoned some of the emotions from one Sakura to the other. The Sakura that most of the world saw received a little bit of the other's anger, so that she could knock in the heads of those that displeased her. The Sakura that fought got most of the anger, and the Sakura that sat in her room and cried got the hurt. It got to the point that, even when training, the soft Sakura disappeared, and the angry Sakura came out. Tsunade noticed that her beloved apprentice was different when she was fighting - but then, most shinobi were; so the Godaime brushed off the strange aggressiveness and emotion that overtook Sakura when she fought. She never allowed anyone to see her grief, and that kept Box #1, the box full of sadness, safe. It was normal for shinobi to be more aggressive when fighting, so nobody noticed the effects of Box #2, the one full of anger.

When they rescued Gaara, Sakura realized it was the first time in years she remembered a fight. She could remember, for once, the adrenaline that pumped through her body, the pain that she had suffered through when struck, and the sickening feeling of the poison trying to squirm its way into her veins. She shrugged the strange occurrence off and paid it no attention.

After they met Sasuke, she realized that the encounter with him was the second fight she had remembered in a long time. The excitement of retrieving Sasuke, the dread that exploded through her mind when they realized Sai was an assassin, and the utter, crushing heartbreak and disappointment when Sasuke tried to kill her pervaded her mind for days. In those few moments of panic, everything she saw, heard, and experienced was hyper-real. She remembered the way her heart beat in her ears, how cold the bandages on the kunai handle had been, and the exact timbre of Sasuke's dark voice. Sakura had come back from that trip disillusioned, sad, and lonely; she slipped into the painless black haze for days that time.

During Pain's attack on Konoha, the patches of black in her memory were only here and there, few and far between. She had healed, and healed, and healed, until her chakra was gone. Then Konoha broke, and she screamed for Naruto like she had never screamed before, watching what she did through a dim haze of loss and pain.

Attacking Sasuke was strange, just because of how it happened. She had made up her mind to kill him, and then her thoughts disappeared until she came out of the black haze with a kunai inches away from piercing his heart. At that moment, she had been so confused that she could barely think, and then Sasuke made to kill her with her own kunai, paralyzing her with fear. She had never been quite so glad to see her blonde teammate as she had been at that moment, and later, when he dropped from the poison on her kunai, her heart nearly stopped beating for a second.

The War was an interesting time, just because of the patches of haze that fogged her memory. It had made it hard, sometimes, because people would ask her questions she should know the answers to, and she would just stutter, unable to answer them. One of the moments that stuck out clearly was when she had smashed 'Neji' into the ground. All of her was giggling in glee at that, glad that she finally got to 'avenge' Hinata. . . if just a little bit.

When the War was over, when Madara was dead and they had captured Sasuke and brought him home, things did not go the way Sakura always hoped they would. Instead of Sasuke just 'coming home', he was detained in an extremely secret facility beneath Konoha. That much was to be expected, simply because he was an S-rank criminal. She only got to see him once before he was locked up, and then she was left to herself.

Naruto began disappearing more and more often, and she got to spend less and less time with her shishou. She knew why, of course; Tsunade was grooming Naruto to be the Rokudaime, and part of that included sentencing Sasuke. Despite the fact that she knew Naruto was going to be the next Hokage, that was the reason the unwanted feelings still boiled up inside her mind. There were the feelings of betrayal (if Naruto got to see Sasuke, why couldn't she, just for a bit? she was important too!), the feelings of loneliness (Naruto, Ino, Hinata, Shikamaru. . .everyone was too busy for her), and the feelings of inadequacy (Naruto had practically won the war by himself, and she. . .had stayed in a med tent). All those feelings got pushed away and packed into her boxes.

The feelings of loneliness, betrayal, and inadequacy were not the only ones pushed away, though. She shoved away the confusion in her mind over the handsome med-nin that she often did surgeries with when Shizune was busy, the strange warmth in her heart when Naruto hugged her, and the boiling heat that spurted up whenever Sai touched her. Those particular emotions got put into Box #3, which was stuffed full of romantic attractions she didn't want to deal with.

It came as no surprise that the holes in her memory became more and more common and they lasted longer. Why should she want to stay conscious and thinking for a world that barely held any appeal for her? The only thing she really woke up for any more was work and, on occasion, training; the rest of the time, she let one of her inner selves take over. The Inner Sakuras were quite pleased with this, and so they all lived in a weird sort of harmony that worked quite well, even after Sakura figured out that something was wrong with her. She didn't know for sure what was wrong with her, but now that she knew that something was wrong with her, all the others knew as well, and they all kept it a secret. It worked.

Or at least, it worked until someone noticed.