She is five when she first thinks there might be something wrong with her and she is staring at the shinobi standing in her living room covered in blood. She knows that the shinobi is her father and that she should be terrified at the amount of thick, red liquid covering him, but she finds it relatively easy to step out of her shoes and ask him what she should do to help.
She will have nightmares about this night, not just about her father covered in the viscera of a mission gone wrong, but of her own innate ability to not have the reaction a five year old should. The nightmares will gnaw at her until she is forcing herself to care about something as small as a sparrow living in the tree in their yard dying the next fall.
That is how Haruno Sakura forces herself to reconnect with the world by dragging herself through the motions of spending too much time and energy on everything around her.
She is twelve when she thinks that she cares too much and not enough about everything around her. It shows in her interactions with her teammates and soon she is thirteen and she still cares too much but now she has a goal and she'll be damned if she lets the first time she genuinely connects to something go down the drain with failed Chunin exam results and a runaway teammate. For once in the entire time that she was shoved into the fray with those two it had ceased to be about each of their issues and more about being a team and she finally felt like she had centered herself and opened her eyes. The circumstances were not ideal, but they had all meant something to each other and theylivedtheylivedtheylived.
She is thirteen and she is Haruno Sakura: apprentice to the Godaime, teammate to outcast Uzamaki Naruto and wayward Uchiha Sasuke, and she cares.
She is fourteen she has just sewn a man's arm back on after watching it be cleaved off right in front of her. She is suddenly five again watching her father standing in a puddle of blood in her parent's house and she is finally having the correct (Tsunade would say healthy, but they've been known to disagree on the definition of that word) reaction. Her breath is running short as she hauls her trauma patient over her shoulder (Shinto, she thinks, his name is Shinto, they just made Chunin, and he has a weird fascination plum candies) and focuses on triage protocol because Shinto's hair looks blonde if the light hits it right.
Tsunade will pat her on the back, say she did well, and send her on her way to her shift at the hospital. A silent war, she thinks, is a hell of a time to finally become a "healthy minded individual".
She is fifteen and dark things continue to crawl into her life. She had formed her opinion of the Council a long time ago, but now she thinks they are just being unnecessarily cruel when she first spots Sai waiting for them at the gate. It only takes her a small amount of time to see that the similarities between him and her wayward teammate begin and end at their appearances and the fact that she knows they can both go on a killing spree when given the order by their respective overlords, which is just as unsettling in real life as it is in her mind.
It has been two years since her and Naruto have seen Sasuke and she's left thinking that maybe it was two years too soon for her.
But it isn't, because soon she's Haruno Sakura: savior of the Kazekage's brother, slayer of Sasori of the Red Sand, and probably the best damn med-nin after Shizune and Tsunade in all of the Hidden Villages. Chiyo died that day, she will think, but she gave Sakura something so important that Konoha's pink haired kunoichi will be forever grateful towards the old woman until the day she dies.
Too soon she starts thinking with her "healthy" mind, too soon after seeing red eyes and Chidori aimed at her, about Sasuke. She told Naruto that tears won't bring him back, but she somehow ends up crying over him again. She knows now that Sasuke wasn't some exercise in caring, but an anchor that kept her from following him off a dark precipice that she knows she couldn't have climbed out of on her own. She cries because she knows that while Sasuke and Naruto will have their bond that is terribly lonely being on the outside of, her and Sasuke's bond is tied by their own tremulous sanity and he will never know that by giving in he had saved her from becoming something very close to Sai.
His thank you is something that makes her want to turn the thing nearest to her to dust and her resolve to become someone that can help with his own climb out of that dark pit has gained another lining of steel.
Where Sasuke developed a foothold, Naruto slowly brings her out of the last bit of the ravine by dragging her out of the hospital when she's exhausted herself to the point that movement sounds like a bad dream and basically moving into her small apartment during the small interim between missions and news flowing in from Suna on Sound's movements.
She doesn't know exactly what her reaction is when she's told that Sasuke succeeded in killing Orochimaru, but she knows that Naruto's grip is cutting into her wrist and she's thankful for the anchor. While she's certain that this won't bring him any closer to her and Naruto who are looking for him at the top of that cliff, she can't help but be thankful for the fact that she will never have to fight Orochimaru while he wears Sasuke's face.
She is sixteen when they accidentally meet alone for the first time. She had thought that he killed without remorse these days, but she can still see the slight drag in his movements that tell her so much more than she thought was still possible. They somehow end up sitting under a tree in Ame hoping to escape the rain as she stitches his side back together and shoves his ribcage back into working order. She can see the stories his scars tell: he's too fast to be caught off guard so many times. These are from his hesitation and from a man with a proclivity to turn into a snake. His expression is as close to as exasperation as she can remember from their genin days when he asks her if there was a reason she was scowling at his chest, she can't help the small smile that overtakes her face.
"You know, most people have the sense not to mouth off to me when my hands are this close to all of their vital organs." She chews on her bottom lip to hide her amusement the best she can when he scoffs. She knows what he's thinking, can hear the condescension in that simple sound.
Maybe she shouldn't, he's shown that he won't hesitate to do real damage to them, but maybe it's because she needs to show him what he's responsible for that she doesn't hesitate and the large oak beside them explodes in a rain of pulp and bark.
She is Haruno Sakura and maybe she shouldn't be getting so much pleasure from the look on Uchiha Sasuke's face, eyes shocked Sharingan red, but she never claimed to be truly mature.
When she promises not to pull that again he allows her to finish healing him, only asking why she insisted on it in the first place when he rises and pulls his sleeves back over his shoulders.
"Whatever you and Naruto think," he sighs, "we're not a team and we have no obligation towards each other. Don't think that I won't remove the two of you if you become a problem." She takes him in one last time before hauling her own pack back over her shoulder and rolling her neck.
"If you won't accept that as my explanation, think of it as repayment for all the times you had to save me back then." She pats her brace of kunai, taking in the area around them for the safest route back home. "Plus, you took out that Ame patrol. I would've been in trouble if they found me." She laughed at the pointed look sent towards the remnant of the tree around them.
She is sixteen and she thinks maybe the world isn't so horrible to make her have to kill Uchiha Sasuke in this lifetime.
She is seventeen and she was wrong.
The boy she once knew is gone. He was replaced by a murderous psychopath who craves death and destruction to all those who he views worthy of his wrath. She has seen him in action. She has seen what he has become.
She knows what her responsibility towards him is. His sacrifice has allowed her to become human and it would only be right if she ended it all for the both of them.
It will be terrible, she thinks, but the three of them have a history with terrible and getting a year older seems to mean some sort of quota of terrible things need to happen before they are allowed to continue on alive.
And maybe, she thinks, living with the blood of a former teammate drenching her clothes won't be as bad as Kakashi and Tsunade make it seem.
She is Haruno Sakura and she cannot make the killing blow.
She is twelve again and is saved by Kakashi.
She is a little girl and she suddenly can't find herself caring.
Naruto isn't much better. They both wander the streets and know that the next time they meet the thing that used to be Uchiha Sasuke, one or all three of them will vanish from the face of the earth.
She is eighteen and she is fighting a war.
This time her enemies are out of the shadows and she knows where to strike.
She just doesn't know about her allies.
His hair is longer, is her first thought. Her second is to shatter his ribcage and incapacitate him.
(She succeeds.)
She is no stranger to manipulation. She knows she manipulates those around her on a painful, daily basis. Naruto has probably gotten the worst of it from her.
(I love you!)
She knows that he is using them. She knows that they aren't Team Seven. She knows that he will end her (them) the moment he sees fit. She knows all of that. But Naruto pulls her over to the fire the lone Uchiha sits at alone and she lets him.
It's not terrible.
It is terrible when she is pushing his internal organs back into place while trying to stem the torrents of blood fighting their way out of his body.
She had told Tsunade that having his blood on her hands, soaking her clothing wouldn't be as terrible as the older woman thought it would be.
It is.
He stares up at her weakly, long hair nearly covering his eyes, and she has to hold back her rage when he whispers a small thank you in her ear.
(That's her line.)
He somehow ends up not dying (the mark on her forehead says what she does not want others to know) and he finds her by the river they had set up camp near, trying to get his blood out of her pores.
He says nothing, just leans against the tree and watches her. She knows that logically, he shouldn't even be awake at that moment. He has always found ways to subvert her thinking.
She stays at the river for over an hour, scrubbing her skin raw. He says nothing. She finally moves to stand, ignoring the needling pain in her legs from sitting too long. She passes by him. He says nothing.
She is so tired of him saying nothing.
She is nineteen and she has won the war and done the impossible. She has fulfilled her quota of seeing and doing terrible things for the year. She hopes that the world won't ask more of her. She cannot give anymore.
Her team somehow knows this.
When she walked back into Konoha for the first time in over a year is was with her entire team at her side, wayward ones included. He still hadn't cut his hair. It was still nicer than hers.
Konoha was still rebuilding, so she wasn't surprised when she didn't have an apartment to go home to along with her other teammates. Kakashi is neither surprised nor thrilled when his former students show up at his door and invade his space and Sakura halfway moves into her office in the hospital, Sasuke and Naruto sleeping in the room almost as much as she does. She knows why the three of them are nearly always together (the two of them shadow her around the hospital and have the gall to think she doesn't notice them. This is her hospital) and it brings her some comfort to know that the two of them are usually just around the corner and she's not alone in the chaos that is reconstruction.
Sasuke talks a lot now. He tells them his thoughts, what he has seen, what he has done. He does not ask for forgiveness and she finds herself respecting him a little.
He doesn't sleep much so when she wakes from her nightmares he is always there, pressing a kunai into her hand and telling her what she has done that day to save lives.
He starts telling her what she has done to save his life.
She finally works up the courage to tell him what he has done to save her life the day Kakashi is named Hokage.
"I could've been like Sai, you know."
"You are nothing like him."
"I know. You made me this way. You gave me something to care about. You don't know it, but when you let go of everything Sasuke, I gained everything. So, you did something good at least."
His eyes stared blankly back at her, "Even if I don't understand a word you're saying, if I had even a small part of you becoming the person you are today I think that might be my greatest accomplishment."
She snorts loudly and rolls her eyes, "Hardly. I'm not a very good person, you know."
"You are Sakura. That is more than enough."
She is Haruno Sakura and she finally understands what being at peace feels like.
She has also kissed Uchiha Sasuke.
It wasn't terrible.