She smoothes back the long blond hair (which turns black in her mind), crooning a soft song that can't be heard over the retching, gently washing the sweaty face with a cool cloth, touching the pale skin and feeling another's. She helps up the limp body, carefully helping her friend (her mother) to the bed, laying her down, undressing her, slipping her beneath the covers, singing softly, sending her into a deep sleep before slipping away down the hall to make a hangover tonic. The motions are ritual, a tradition maintained all her life, from the day that she was old enough to walk and understand till whenever all of this stopped. When she has finished the tonic, she moves to the bathroom, cleaning up the floor and the sink, propping a window open to let in the sharp winter air. She feels sick, deep down inside, but at the same comforted by the routine. She has done it all her life, and she will continue to do it until someone else takes over for her. She takes care of them, and she always will.

The next morning, Ino has hardly woken when she pushes the tonic against her lips and makes her swallow. Immediately, the pain is gone, and instead breakfast is there, hot and steaming and delicious. As she watches her best friend eat, she smiles, and tries to forget black hair, streaming over a sweat-soaked back as her small child's hands push it back, black hair that mixes with red on the tiles of the bathroom where it all starts, where it all ends. Ino looks up at her, and in her mind the blue eyes turn to green, staring up at the ceiling, empty.

"Sakura, I'm sorry," she says, embarrassed.

"Sakura, I'm sorry," she says, humiliated.

"It's alright," she says, to both of them. "Really.

"No, it's not."

"No, it's not."

She smiles. "Really, Ino. I'm used to it."

"Oh." Ino turns her beautiful head to stare out the window to the snow-covered town.

"Eat your breakfast," Sakura says before walking out of the room and into the bathroom down the hall, where she quietly closes the door and sits down on the cold tiles, tucked in between the sink and the toilet, body curled up as it had been that night so many years ago, when she sat and watched as her mother's blood turned the floor red. It makes the tile warm, makes her feet slip as she tries to get away. There is so much, and there is nothing she can do. There is no tonic she can make, no food that can comfort, no song that can bring upon peaceful sleep. She feels tired, trapped in that small space, until the door opens and Ino comes and gently pulls her out into her arms, rocking her back and forth like a child, humming tunelessly as she shakes and shakes and shakes. And when they walk out of that bathroom, they are as they were, talking and laughing, trying to cover the horror of what has been, what could have been, and what will be.

They are there to save each other.

They are the only ones who know how.

A/N:

This is going to be longer if I ever get around to it. It doesn't really work as a one shot.