Because Sasuke wasn't unfailing, and Sakura was all loud colors and warm hands. [Karin-centric, exploring her relationships with certain Leaf-nin.]
A/N: Uploaded on my phone for now, I'll get around to actually editing this piece eventually - this ended up wayyyy more SakuKarin than I originally planned, but who says that's a bad thing? enjoy um this is mostly my Karin headcanon w/ gratuitous leafnin love b/c she deserves it and i think it's a beautiful thing
Defense mechanisms have a place in nature, and in humans. They develop easily enough with the right (right?) stimuli, and individual manifestations are almost always different from one another. Karin winced as she traced over a particular bite mark on her arm. It didn't hurt so much anymore, no, but the memory was fresh. The hole where Sasuke stuck his hand through her ached, and she lurched forward like he did it all over again.
She reflected on the human body for a moment, and how weak it was.
In Orochimaru's lairs, he was her protection, and her world. She remembered when she finally met him, after only hearing whispers and shouts of a boy with talent unraveling in another hideout. She realized Sasuke would be her protection. Her new walls, and she wouldn't have to build them up by herself. It got lonely down there, in the white snake's hideouts - especially once the white snake himself was, for all intents and purposes, gone. And Karin got tired of spending her days here, there, anywhere - because she had no where she belonged. Sometimes, she considered the fact that she would be happier if Orochimaru was still alive, and maybe she would still have people to help and someone to serve. Those days, she would stare at Sasuke's ever-retreating back, and she would mutinously stab him over and over in her mind.
When Sasuke's magnum opus, his ultimate quest for goddamned revenge, seemingly came to a close, he shot his lightning through her fucking chest. Now, she couldn't go home, because Sasuke rammed his lightning into her home (not his, no one else's besides hers) and destroyed it. That was the first time she saw her.
She was bleeding out on the ground, but she could hear the conversation. When had Sasuke gotten so cold? Oh, right, she thought, dully, he's always been that way. The sun never reached those hideouts, but Konoha was a radiant, sunny place. She'd never been. Karin turned her face away when Sakura kneeled down to heal her. She heard the girl make a noncommittal sort of grunt as she flipped Karin over on her back. Yeah, Karin would've probably grunted at her, too, if she could. She knew it wasn't like that, and she knew Sakura was innocent, as innocent as they came, an angel, probably, even in Sasuke's eyes. So, what was she? What was Karin? Hellfire? Satan? Nothing so significant, she thought, before passing out.
It went like that for awhile. She would pass between another realm and her waking life every now and then, indefinite amounts of time collapsed, always greeted by an obnoxious halo behind an even more obnoxious head of pink hair and wide, round, green eyes pulled together in an expression Karin couldn't quite mark. This girl was a real healer. The genuine article, the minted version of what Karin could've maybe been, probably wouldn't have been. Karin hated her for it.
After Konoha released her permanently, Karin decided it was time to "search within herself," or something terribly annoying and Konoha-esque like that. The walls she built up were thick, and it wasn't his fault. They had been there from the beginning. Every scar on her body served as a reminder that she was used, discarded, dispensable. Ino had called her a bitch once before. Karin couldn't deny it that time, or ever, really. Sakura had smiled at her apologetically (more out of guilt and embarrassment than anything else) and ghosted her fingers over her exposed shoulders like they were goddamned lovers. Could this sufferable, pink-haired person with delicate fingers wrapped around the world genuinely apologize to, no, care about her? Could Karin ever be more than a blip on Sakura's radar for Sasuke? Karin leaned into her experimentally, and quickly pulled back before sprinting off.
At the time, she had gotten back to her apartment in Konoha. She sang a dozen love songs to herself that night, and none of them were about the raven-haired boy that shot a hole through her heart with his own will. Sakura had cinnamon-dusted shoulder blades and downy skin, but Karin wasn't fucking romantic. Her downstairs neighbors hit their roof after a particularly long caterwaul courtesy of herself, and she laid down in bed.
It hurt more than usual that night. She spent hours tracing over the crescent moon scars on her limbs, but none of the marks from him - she knew exactly which ones were his. She continued to gingerly touch the marks on her shoulders, where Sakura had touched hours ago, and she decided they didn't hurt so bad anymore. That alarmed her to the point she broke out in an awful, cold sweat. Another human being shouldn't be able to have so much power over you; this was a rule that Karin chanted each time Sasuke or Orochimaru walked by, and it had spread to a mantra for every second of her every day life. Sometimes, she would see people in Konoha that looked like someone that had sunk their ugly, bloodied teeth into her before. She knew it was impossible - most of them were probably dead. Isn't it sad to have scars from dead people on one's body? The reminder that she wasn't enough to save them hangs heavy in the sky above her and the earth below at all times. And doesn't anyone in this damn village think her life is sad?
Yet, she finds herself breaking one of her (many) rules almost every day now a days. She lets Naruto drag her to Ichiraku, and he's kind, thoughtful, enough to only invite her when Sasuke isn't there, and she sits dangerously close to Sakura every time. She'd never known a human being could actually radiate warmth.
It's an easy rule to break, after all, because she loves them. She loves her, more than she loves herself, she likes to think. It's easy to love someone else, with pale, peachy skin, free of anyone else's burden. Nothing in her life has been easier than loving this village and the people in it. And most days, it is not easy to love herself. Because each day, she wakes up in a blur, and she looks down to see the crimson stain of hair rushing over her shoulders, and the red fuzz tracing up from her pajama pants to her belly button. She spends an hour tracing the scars, and she's satisfied with the knowledge that no one will ever see her this vulnerable.
So maybe, if she falls in love with this girl who has pink hair and vermillion eyes and a thousand regrets, just like her, then she can truly feel protected. And it's not healthy to depend on someone so much, she knows - it's one of her rules. She knows she'll never be able to cast off her guards and walls and come to terms with who she is. She knows that much. All Karin is asking for in Sakura is a place to call home and an excuse to build up her walls again. Only this time, she'll have Sakura in there with her. And it's not healthy, nor will it happen, but the possibility gives her a warm feeling in her chest that radiates out and makes it feel like she'll bleed right through the top layer of her skin (what was that called again? Orochimaru told her once) and everything will be covered in blood again. It's different this time. It's her's.
She scratches a message on the flipped side of her own eyelids, and it will be there until she dies. No man will ever have power over her, ever again.
She hears him say, "Don't move, Karin."
Once more, with finality.