A/N: The first draft of my first attempt at a character study (minor spoilers for the manga). I beg all of those who read it for feedback, as it will be revised and revamped as soon as I find a beta-reader.
Another girl would find her self-value crumbling whenever her shishou and Hokage insists on telling her to "Avoid paying attention to such a ridiculous affirmation" whenever she questions her on how deserving she is of the unofficial title of "The Second Tsunade", but temperance (and a more resilient ego) allows Haruno Sakura to take the blow as a minor reminder of who she is.
Sakura is not a particularly nervous person. She is a shinobi and a medic, and neither can afford any less than a firm hand and a clear mind when they are required to act.
However, she is still a human, and part of the burden she must bear with her mortality, the one she calls "heart", entails anguish, despair. So she takes her feelings, her burdens, takes them all and stows them away in a desk-drawer of her psyche, from were she can pull them out at a proper time, when she's not a ninja or a medic but just a person.
It's when she holds them in her small, thin-fingered hands that she allows the tremors to invade her limbs, her thoughts becoming muddled as she watches this disease called "torment" take hold. None of her healing jutsus, nor her herbal medicines or her acupunctural precision can relieve her, and she has to resort to this, painful and archaic as blood-letting.
As much as she fears these lapses of reason, she knows that she is fortunate enough to be able to control them. No matter how full the drawer gets in between, Sakura knows her control is near perfect, and that she can take it, no matter what kind of monster she has stowed within it.
But she also knows that she is not perfect. Madness would have overtaken her a long time ago if that weren't so.
She is conscious of her humanity. That though she manages to slay the vicious beasts of her drawer (after they have finished their initial rampage, of course), they might leave her weak. They might leave her a bruise or a nick as memoirs of their passing, and in the worst cases they could even stab her and leave her anguishing in a pool of blood, trying yet failing to stem the flow, burgundy like life, before it utterly escapes her.
And, though this has happened to her in so few occasions that she needs only one hand to count them, Sakura knows and is afraid of the moments in which the drawer opens of its own accord, and she has to stuff her demons back inside, or fight them before they can touch her, because she might be Sakura-the-medic or Sakura-the-kunoichi when this happens.
She knows, with the stark realism that invades her contradictory life, one of delivering death one moment, and trying to impede it the next, that she will not be the only one shattering against the iceberg if she cannot deal with them.
Her hand might slice a bit too far, or her kunai land a bit too close- and she will have lost a patient's life from a tiny puncture in the jugular, or a comrade's from her inability to hit the enemy's carotid artery in time to slow his reaction.
And she can never quite forget the moments in which she has had to do untimely battle with the stowed-away creatures, with defeat peeking over her shoulder for every second of perturbed concentration.
The first time she remembers this happening occurred while she was a child, and Sasuke, her Sasuke, was on the edge of a maelstrom, stepping further in right before her eyes, while she tried to find the words that would reach him and wrap around him so firmly that he'd have to turn around and walk back to get them off of him. She was grasping for a taijutsu move (a genjutsu, or a ninjutsu, anything would do) at the same time, one that would take him out or confuse him for the fifteen minutes she'd need to find Kakashi-sensei, or Iruka-sensei, whoever she could find first, because she couldn't do any more than delay him.
Sakura-at-twelve thought she knew the extent of her weakness. It turned out she was even punier than she'd anticipated, because her words failed her and the jutsu was never recalled. It was with that image that she sank into unconsciousness.
The tears she shed that day and the next were not only for Sasuke, though there were of course plenty for him: they were for her weakness and her failure, to herself and to the first person whose devotion she shook off without much thought, a person with a bright smile and warm eyes that tried to make amends for faults not his own.
The rest are memories of a war she'd known she'd have to take part in (without that particular label on it), but that she never aspired to be a vital part throughout. A war that isn't about lands or kingdoms just yet, but about evil spirits and ambition. A war about her warm-eyed, bright-smiling, amends-making someone and the demon in his gut, the same demon that he endured the arctic side of hell for, and who gambles in terms of flesh and blood.
It would be poetic injustice to have this twisted bit of him torn out, after all that he's done in order to live despite the red chakra and harrowingly sinister voice in his head.
It would be sheer, unforgivable injustice to see those blue eyes fade into the empty marbles that she's seen on corpses: Sakura has seen the Reaper before, and she knows that there is a thin line between "highly possible death" and "certain death", one that even Tsunade cannot erase without consequences (one that Chiyo obliterated and never came back from). She has learned to accept the silence in these cases.
But she knows that she will not be able to accept the silence if this happens to Naruto.
She feels and odd kind of despair when she tries to imagine the scenario, a despair so great it won't fit into her drawer, and so agonizingly slow it doesn't matter when she decides to deal with it, it will simply disperse into her body and devour her over time.A cancer of the soul.
Time will teach her the whys and how-comes of this situation. Time will one day clear her mind, and she'll be able to see into the chasms and far up into the mountains within it, and she'll realize that, though she's over a decade late, she has begun to love him, not because of his muscles, or his eyes, or the red-and-white ceremonial hat that he will one day attempt to flatten over the mess of yellow he call 'hair'.
In defiance of all the rules of romance as dictated by Icha Icha, she will love him because she doesn't need him. She has grown wings of her own by now, wings that will be even stronger by then, and she doesn't require anybody's help to use the. But she will want to have him by her side, and she'll feel a little more complete than she does on her own every time his scarred hands press into her own, grown sensitive from years of ShÅsen no Jutsu.
In the meantime, her instincts give her discreet prods in his direction, and though she deliberately ignores them, the spark will live yet, fanned by the winds and fed by the ashes of the fire she remembers having lit for Sasuke.
Sakura is not a particularly nervous person because she is smarter and stronger than that. She's learned to endure mortality as Medic-Sakura, Kunoichi-Sakura, and as simply Sakura, taking on her treacherous monsters full on without a trace of fear. She cannot use her 'monster strength' or her kunai against them, and she cannot use her hands to heal the wounds they inflict upon her. But her spirit has grown wings to carry her through when her legs cannot hold her any longer, her resolve is a better weapon that the sharpest tanto and, when she's done fighting, she will melt it into the strongest healing tonic she's ever had.
This is the reason why Tsunade quickly shoots down her student's notion of being just like her.
Sakura does not, and never will, fit the title of "Legendary Sucker"