I do not own Naruto
The Good Samaritan
Chapter 1 Tuesday Nights
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She only came there on Tuesday nights.
After the grind of the hospital rounds and when she wasn't on some sort of mission. She always had Wednesdays off so she stayed into the early morning hours before going home and sleeping peacefully. She had been coming here for five years.
Ever since he left.
She started doing it for him, she supposed, but it had changed somewhere along the way. It had become a sort of mission for the girl. A way of saying goodbye to a friend, of showing respect for his departed family, brutally murdered before their time. The simple acts of cleaning, repairing and packing stuff away had been a balm on her wounded soul. The first year she had snuck in to work on the houses of the compound, but then she had been caught and brought before the Hokage, who happened to be the woman who had taken on her training in the absence of her team mates.
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~*Flashback-4 years ago*~
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"Sakura, why are you doing this?" Tsunade had questioned her.
The young girl simply shrugged, not knowing how to explain.
"It's all I can do for him," she plainly states.
The Hokage had gone and witnessed for herself after she had been told her student was breaking into the Uchiha compound. She had expected maybe the girl was taking mementos of her childhood crush. What she had found was a different story altogether.
The young girl had been cleaning in the time she'd been sneaking into the Uchiha compound. She had scoured every drop of blood and gore from not only her team mate's house, but every house on the compound. There was still evidence of the massacre, broken doors, furniture, and such, but as far as Tsunade herself could see, not a drop of blood remained from the mindless slaughter.
Ten great houses in all, each having a large family, aunts, uncles, grandparents, parents and children, all dead save one. The amount of bloodshed had been so horrendous that the Third Hokage had even considered simply having them burned down. If it hadn't been for the remaining Uchiha, Sasuke, he certainly would have. Tsunade had gone over house after house with Haruno's former sensei, Hatake Kakashi, and both had been speechless at the amount of work done by one little teenage girl.
They had argued at first, about whether to let her continue or not, but Hatake had convinced her it was cathartic for the young girl. Tsunade took his opinion seriously. After all, her own parents had died in the Sound invasion, and along with herself, he was the now the closest thing to a parent she had. He argued this was no different than cleaning a grave or standing at the memorial as he did almost daily. In fact he insisted, it was probably better, both for Sakura, and if the boy ever returned, her teammate and friend. The village elders had wanted his bloodline back again. How hard would it be for him to come home to that nightmare? She wasn't flaunting what she did, it was done in secret, and even Anbu investigation had proven she hadn't taken anything from the estate but garbage.
Tsunade had finally given in. She had called a nervous Sakura into her office and told the kunochi that even though she didn't like her dishonesty, her motives, she believed, were pure. She then gave her the choice of taking on the restoration of the Uchiha compound as an unpaid, solo, class D secret mission.
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**4 years later**
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It had been a tremendous amount of work. She smiled as she closed up yet another of the Uchiha houses on the compound. Except for a bi-annual dusting out, this house was acceptable to lock-up.
The first year had been the hardest. The dried blood and gore wasn't even the worst of it to her mind. After all she was a ninja and training medic, she had seen plenty of gore, and it hadn't even smelled that bad.
Then came the first day she had walked into one of the kitchens about two months after she began her project.
The faint smell of rot had puzzled her, until she had walked into the kitchen storage area. She had opened up a potato bin and had to run back outside to vomit. The smell of slimy, putrid potatoes turning to liquid was absolutely revolting and that was not even one of the worst foods. She never knew vegetables could smell so bad. She supposed it was because they had been kept in the airless bins where they rotted, but she had definitely wished the Uchiha had eaten out more.
The fish was even worse; rotten, maggot ridden and glistening with a slurry of oils and mold. She learned quickly not to eat anything for dinner on Tuesday nights or it would come back up most assuredly, and violently.
Instead she simply had a large breakfast early Wednesday morning when she had finally gotten home, before going to bed. Other food stuffs, things that were preserved or canned, she had secretly donated to a local orphanage, putting the boxes outside the doors in the predawn light on Wednesday mornings.
After Tsunade had given her permission to work on the compound, she had gone through every house and taken all the children's clothes and most of their toys, leaving only the toys that looked like family heirlooms. After making sure there was no evidence of the Uchiha clan symbol on the children's clothing, those had been left on the orphanage doorstep. The marked adult clothing that had Uchiha fans on them were cut into rags for cleaning. She simply burned the part with the fans on them, it was the most respectful thing she could think to do. They should never leave the compound. The unmarked clothing she distributed to charities that could find uses for them.
Sakura never took the clothes from Sasuke's house, he wouldn't care about the relatives' clothing, but his own, she wasn't sure she should make that decision for him. What she did instead was clean and box up his family's' clothes, even Itachi's. Cleaned, and boxed, she stored in the closets of their rooms. Except for the dusting and bedding, she had left Sasuke's room untouched. She stripped the bedrooms, cleaned the futons and folded them neatly. She's scrubbed every inch of the Uchiha house but it had not been too hard. Mikoto, Sasuke's mother, had kept it spotless, it had been a point of pride with her.
The silence of the compound was like a balm to her soul. The memories of many families spoke to her as she cleaned. Flowers pressed into books with the bouquet ribbon still around them. A handmade doll found on a floor, made with such intricacy. A whimsical trinket obviously made with love, given to a mother who cherished it enough to keep it at her bedside, family photos insisted the living not forget the dead.
These last she had taken from all the houses besides Sasuke's and made them into a scrapbook for him to look at, if he ever decided to. She knew that all those faces had the possibility to draw not only a tear but a smile to her missing teammate's face. As young as he'd been, he had cared a great deal for his departed aunts and uncles and cousins, and family politics had meant nothing to him then. At the back of the book she had left blank pages in case he wanted to put his own family pictures in there. It was sad to think them all gone, but it helped to remember they had helped shape this village, good or bad, conspiracies or not, they were an important part of Konoha's history.
Into the third and fourth year of her Uchiha clean up mission she had begun repairing the broken furniture and performed general maintenance on the buildings. It had been a learning experience for her. From patching leaky roofs to the troublesome rash of broken windows she'd come upon one Tuesday.
That one had been a pain. Once she had them repaired she had gone about boarding each one so it wouldn't happen again. Then with the help of her old sensei, Kakashi, she'd developed the rumor that the old Uchiha compound was haunted. Only a brave few of the vandals had come back and she and Kakashi had seen to it, with a few henges of the more scary dead Uchiha members, that those kids wouldn't vandalize the compound, or, most likely, anyone else's house again. As she finished each house she also shut down the utilities to them. Only testing them every six months or so to make sure they still worked. Why? She wasn't really sure, it just became a habit. She kept detailed records of everything for Sasuke's uncertain return.
On the outside of the houses she'd done less. She had not much talent with gardening and she worked at night. With the Hokage's permission to use funds she's hired an old retired gardener to come in twice a month, no questions asked, to do a simple clean up of the garden like yards in the compound. She'd disguised herself when she'd hired him and shown him the request from the Hokage for his work.
She only asked the gardener to do the bare minimum for each empty house to keep it from looking un-kept. From her own pocket though, she given him an extra stipend to come one more day each month to work on Sasuke's house garden and restore it as close as possible to the way Sasuke's parents had kept it when he was a child. It was all she could afford and she'd asked him to do what he could. The man took great pride in his work, she knew. She had even seen him going extra days because, like her, he was proud to make the last living Uchiha's property look attractive and not abandoned. He had brought it back to the loveliness she'd remembered as a child. The old man had even caught some nishikigoi to place in the pond. It was such a beautiful touch. She knew the koi fish were considered lucky. They also were symbols of friendship and affection. It was a perfect touch and sometimes she came to the garden just to enjoy its beauty and serenity while she read or studied. Sometimes it seemed as if the departed Uchiha joined her in her silent reverie, quietly giving her their approval of what she had done for their child.
She'd never tell Sasuke of course. She'd done it for herself as well as him. Even if he never returned she felt it was the one thing, the right thing, to do for his loss. If he did return, she hoped it would sooth his soul to know he was cared for by people from home during his absence. Hopefully it would make him more comfortable to face the past and go on with his life.
She only wanted to make the tortured young man happy. If, the stoic boy she grown up with ever could be, that was. She had tried to help but knew now that he didn't need her in any way shape or form. He'd made that abundantly clear six months ago, when he and his new team tried to kill her and the rest of team seven when they had discovered him while on a reconnaissance mission. There had been another woman with him, and she'd made it clear that she belonged with Sasuke. Sasuke had said nothing, but his violent actions had spoken volumes to her. Sakura cried her last tears for him then and said her goodbyes in his garden. She was glad now her business here was nearly complete. If and when he came back he would think the Hokage had taken care of this business in his absence, and his conceited sense of self would make him believe the lie was true.
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Things you probably already know:
Nishikigoi-koi fish, bright, multi-colored fish in the goldfish family, but much larger.
See you in chapter 2-Homecoming.
K & K