Sakura wonders, sometimes, whether Sasuke can ever be retrieved.
She has seen the parallels, after all. She is no oracle, but the future stands in front of her every day, and she knows its face better than her own.
Sakura may appear to cling to the desperate hope for redemption, for acknowledgement, for everything the way it used to be. But she trained under Tsunade, this deceptively slim girl with her flower-petal hair, and she has seen what blazing, passionate Naruto does not want to face.
She pieced it together, over her first year with the fifth Hokage. She was weak, once (she is stronger now) but Sakura was never stupid.
She hears the way her teacher says Orochimaru's name; with bitterness and grief and a disgust too personal for words. She hears love gone sour; nostalgia made sick with distance and regret. Sakura hears, in Tsunade's voice, all that she ever felt for Sasuke, projected into a future where he had gone past saving.
When the Hokage mentions Jiraya, it is different, and yet the same. Tsunade is fond of him, and if a shared childhood and the terrible memories of mutual tragedy can result in anything, it might even be called love. But for Sakura's teacher, Jiraya too is a might-have-been, and the same past which ties them together is also a wall between them.
Sakura thinks of her own relationship with Naruto; quarrelsome and confusing at times but still pure, still strong. He is her teammate, her ally, and, in a strange way, her responsibility. They love each other, because they have no other choice. But what might years and a lost friend, a lost passion do to them? If Sasuke, Sasuke always sitting in the back of their minds, hovering on the edges of their conversations; if Sasuke turns out like Orochimaru, gone to the dark and broken beyond repair, might not the past become a wall between them too?
Sakura sees the parallels. And, where the information runs out, where Tsunade falls silent, she guesses.
She remembers the way Sasuke fixated on Naruto; how the boisterous, determined, utterly different boy was the only person alive who distracted the Uchiha from Itachi, from death, from revenge. Sakura knows that Naruto loves Sasuke still, while she has begun to harbor doubts. She will never speak the doubts, for his sake, for the sake of her own confidence, but they are there nonetheless.
And if those two boys, her two boys are tied together by more than the duties of a teammate, if Naruto is as close as Sasuke ever got to love and Naruto will die to bring his rival-friend-opposite back; might it not have been the same for the sannin, for the team so like her own? She knows that Jiraya fought to try and drag Orochimaru home, long ago. She knows that Tsunade did not help him and that the Hokage has regretted it all her life. And she knows, because Naruto told her about Kimimaro and Kabuto, that Orochimaru's collection of favorites is full of boys with pale hair.
In the end, with Team 7 and with the sannin, it does not matter who loved or wanted or obsessed over anyone else. Sakura loves Sasuke and Naruto, Naruto loves Sakura and Sasuke. That is enough. As for the third teammate, for the last Uchiha… well, he is the problem. Whoever Sasuke was tied to, whoever he loved, the bonds were not enough to sever the love-hate he had for Itachi. They can only hope (a fool's gamble, the kind of wager from which her sensei has lost more than from any other bet) that those bonds will be enough to bring Sasuke back when he is finished killing.
Sasuke has gone down into the dark for his brother. Orochimaru went because something in his brilliant, inhuman soul was fascinated by the idea. He went into the dark for knowledge, and for that alone. But aren't they the same, in the end? Will they end up the same? Will Sakura's team end in heartbreak, will they all die alone and apart, crippled by their own and other's tragedies?
In her more cynical moments, she reflects that the fate of the sannin may be the fate of every group of ninja who ever tried to love each other. Konoha is a place founded on ideals, ideals Naruto embodies so well, but in the end shinobi are just humans who kill and die for a living. It is not an easy thing to be.
She shakes the thoughts off, usually, and busies herself with learning. But Haruno Sakura is not the sort of girl to forget about the possible consequences of devotion. Sasuke, who broke her heart when they were twelve, taught her to be wary. Tsunade, practical, fiery Tsunade who has been broken so many times by grief; Tsunade, by example, reinforced the message.
The girl who wept on a bench a year ago as the boy she thought she loved walked away into the dark is changing. She knows that Naruto, wherever he is, will be changing too. The question lies in whether the change will be enough.
Sakura thinks about the sannin, how they must have been when young, about clever Orochimaru and passionate Tsunade and foolish, determined Jiraya. She sees what they have become. A snake in the dark who, for the sake of knowledge, pushed humanity and morality until they snapped. An old woman with a young face and the burden of a village on her shoulders, still heartbroken over the dead. And an old man, his enthusiasm made cynical with age, cracking his jokes and writing his pornography and remembering the past. Once, they were children, bright with hope, tied by affection. Now they are one madman with a pale face and two humans bittersweet with sorrow.
Naruto thinks that the worst case scenario would be dying in the attempt to win back their teammate, or having to kill him for the safety of Konoha.
Sakura knows that the most terrible end is already in front of them; in their teachers, their predecessors, who had to live on in the knowledge that they failed to save the people they loved.
She is no oracle, but she sees the future, or a possible future. Her future. It has pale blonde hair, and fierce brown eyes, and it drinks to drown the past.
Sakura sighs, and goes on with her work, her training, her hope. The parallels are there, woven of flesh and blood and tears. But she is a kunoichi, and all she can do is go forward.
The possibility that Sasuke cannot be retrieved is too terrible to contemplate, so for the sake of her love and Naruto's she pretends it does not exist.
But the parallels are there, quiet and searing in the back of Sakura's mind. The parallels are there.