A/N: This fan fiction was inspired by the book "Sold" by Patricia McCormick. If you like the fan fiction I suggest going to pick up your own copy, it really is an amazing read.
Disclaimer: I don't own the book sold or any of the Naruto characters.
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Title: Days Without Rain
Prompt: 1 Beginning
Summary: The events that lead up to more then one tragic occurrence.
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"One more dry season and the fields will be gone"
Sakura shifts her tousled straw hat and looks to her mother. It had been sixty days without rain and what had once been stalks of enviable rice lay brown and parched at her feet.
Michiru Haruno sits knees swallowed in dust at the bare remains of the river, feeling the bank with weathered hands and searching for water that isn't there, a good pounding with Sakura's chakra enhanced first had revealed that much.
It takes all of Sakura self control not to run to her mother and pull the exhausted dam into her tanned lap and cry. She knows now that such a thing is impossible emerald eyes are edged with dirt and when Sakura finally collapses on the bank with her mother she cries without fury, without tears.
A look around reveals more suffering as the now parched land holds bones of cattle, even lizards lie gasping in the heat.
The Beginning of the longest dry spell in rice village on record and the starting line for a maelstrom of coming events.