Sakura is working absently on the latest patient in critical care, monitoring their chakra recovery carefully and making sure the broken legs are healing straight. She likes the work, even if it is bloody. For one thing, it only takes a certain kind of concentration, so the rest of the time she's free to think about other things.

There are times when all she thinks about are patterns. She like the idea that her cells reproduce according to a precise and intricate algorithm. When Sakura looks at healing scrolls, she can understand the movement of the chakra throughout the body; there is power in the way it flows, in the paths it follows. She's good at healing because it takes control to see and manipulate the flow, to restore it. They are small and intricate, but she can handle that, and she likes putting things back into their proper position.

When two people come together, it is according to some precise and intricate dance. The two of them join and recombine and a child is produced. Within a village, the community moves in patterns, children growing up, genin becoming chuunin, the elderly and the more powerful ninja dying. Sakura understands that. Sometimes she sees the world like it was a body, and knows that time will travel like chakra, in a prescribed pattern. She can see the inevitability of Sasuke's leaving, and knows that either he or Naruto or both will die young, because they are very powerful. She knows that Tsunade must die because she's powerful and old, a lethal combination. She knows that Orochimaru will die like everyone else someday, because that is how the pattern works - that's just how time travels.

Konoha is stormy today. There is a flash of muddy-gray yellow darting around on the training grounds, and she know it is Naruto, working like always. Through the hospital window he is just a small blurry shape, but the trees look greener because he is there, and the day feels less dreary when she looks his way. In the village itself, rain sloughs off the layer of dirt on the roads and runs down to the gutters, carried off to the streams far enough away that the village will not flood.

She wants to divert the course of the rain, stop it from leaving. But if you change the natural flow of chakra, you kill the body; if you stop the rain from leaving, the village floods. Even when Sakura sees all this, though, and knows some things are inevitable, she stills wants to reach out and shift the pattern.