AN: beta'ed by the talented and wonderful enemyanemone! I honestly don't know what I would do without her. SHE'S THE BEST
As soon as her mother places the dish in the center of the table, Sakura vomits, doubling over, nearly toppling out of her seat. She begins to cry, tears streaming down her face.
"Please," she sobs. "Not my eyes. Please." She begins to rock herself back and forth. The chair squeaks under her weight.
Her father reaches out to steady her, but Sakura flinches before his hand makes contact with her shoulder.
"Sakura?" Kizashi says uncertainly.
"Please," Sakura mumbles, shutting her eyes. "Go away, please."
"Sakura."
"Hurts," she whimpers. "Kaa-san, it hurts." She opens her eyes again, and her blank gaze swivels towards her father. She can feel Kizashi stiffen. Her mother gasps, and something falls to the floor with a dull thud.
"…Oh my god," Mebuki whispers. "Sakura," and Sakura feels her mother's hands touch her face gingerly, wiping away the wetness that's dripping down her face. There's just so much pain, and all she wants is her mother and her father and their embrace, because she can feel the darkness beginning to wrap its tendrils around her mind. Her vision starts to cloud, and she starts to hyperventilate.
"We're here, darling, just stay there, okay? We're going to take you to the hospital," Her mother says desperately, pulling Sakura into her familiar embrace, but Sakura just shivers.
They end up taking her to the hospital, despite her father's reservations.
"She keeps on repeating that she has a red string on her finger." Haruno Mebuki tells the doctor.
The doctor is a plain man, with nondescript, brown hair and dull eyes, and an odd habit of licking his lips until they are chapped. Sakura immediately detests him. The fact that he'd been poking and prodding her also contributes to the sentiment.
"Does she?" The doctor asks absently, busy scribbling away into the yellow file. He glances down at Sakura's hands, looking nonplussed.
"We don't know if she's telling the truth, of course," Mebuki admits. "My husband doesn't believe in the strings of fate, and as for myself, I…I cannot see them anymore." She nervously twists the bone-white thread on her ring finger and glances guiltily up at her husband, who just snorts at the ridiculousness of Konoha folk.
The doctor, still conducting a chakra scan on Sakura, hums absently. He gently pulls down Sakura's left lower eyelid. "Subconjunctival hemorrhage likely due to heavy vomiting," the man mutters. "The redness will clear up within a few weeks. Her vitals are completely fine. "No signs of trauma, and you say she didn't hit her head?" His hands, flickering with green chakra, pause over her forehead. "…Huh. That's strange. I could have sworn..."
"What?" her father asks sharply. He hadn't let his guard down since they had entered the office. He eyes the doctor the same way he looks at Ino's father whenever they cross paths. To say that her father was distrustful of authority is an understatement; it was the reason why he had fled to Konoha years before, after all. But Konoha valued bloodlines as much as the current Kiri regime abhorred them. New immigrants, especially children, were closely monitored for any sign of emergence, anything that would increase their value in the eyes of the higher ups. And if their parents protested…Well. It was better to acquiesce.
"…Nothing you need to worry about, Haruno-san." the doctor says a little too cheerfully. "Sakura-chan, can you give me your hand? I won't hurt you, I promise." Sakura, clutching onto her mother's skirt, reluctantly stretches out an arm towards the doctor. The red string is still there; it wraps around her pinky and trails off somewhere into the air. She tries not to think about where it ends.
"Well, I don't see a string of fate on her finger," the doctor says after carefully examining her hand. "But there have been exceptions." He turns to her parents. "We'll have to put her under further surveillance to determine the exact causes. I suspect that Sakura may be developing a new bloodline limit, but it's too soon to—"
"No, that's quite enough." Sakura's father growls. Her mother timidly places her hand on his arm to calm him down.
"Darling," she starts, but Kizashi ignores his wife and addresses the doctor.
"Enough is enough." he says harshly. "We are done here." The doctor licks his chapped lips, slightly flustered.
"Please calm down, Haruno-san—"
"I will not. Sakura, let's go."
"Haruno-san, Sakura-chan's case is very unique—"
Her father bolts upright from his chair and lunges at the doctor. "I told you, my daughter," he hisses, gripping the other man's collar, "My daughter will never be someone's lab rat, as long as I live."
Sasaki-sensei licks his lips again, flicking his pale tongue like a snake. Then his eyes flash. The man drops the flustered attitude as easily as a snake sheds its skin. He gives her father a small smile, and Sakura shudders at the sight.
"I suggest that you think very carefully about what would be best for your family, sir." the doctor says softly, staring levelly into her father's eyes. "For all you know, I could tell my supervisor about my…concerns about Sakura's personal safety." He eyes the jagged scratches on Kizashi's arms. "Who do you think Konoha would side with, Haruno Kizashi-san: you or me?"
Her father snarls.
"How DARE YOU—"
"Dear, please!" Mebuki pleads, pulling her husband back from a rash decision. Sasaki-sensei just smiles placidly into Sakura's father's red face.
"Let go," the doctor says, and after a long moment, her father loosens his hold on the man's shirt, and the man takes a step back.
"I see that at least one of you catches my drift," Sasaki says, smoothing out the wrinkles on his shirt. "So, Haruno Kizashi-san. Do we understand each other?"
Kizashi, held back by his wife, glares back at the doctor. "Fuck you," Kizashi seethes. Sasak-sensei just gives another one of his pale, enigmatic smiles.
"See you soon, Sakura-chan," he says.
After the altercation at the doctor's office, Sakura begins to get regular check-ups at the hospital, but after a few weeks, it becomes clear that the visits are doing little to help her physical or mental state. She refuses to go outside until her mother finally convinces her that it would be alright. Her skin turns translucent and she begins to refuse her meals, which saps the strength out of her limbs. Her cheekbones jut out, making the hollows of her cheeks more apparent. She looks like a skeleton, all skin and bones and brittle, pink hair. Her clothes become loose and baggy, and eventually her mother has to buy her clothes two sizes down. In any case, this also makes her forehead look more prominent, which increases the teasing at the playground.
"Did your forehead get even bigger, Ugly?" someone shrieks when Sakura walks past the sandbox one day. It sounds like Ami; Sakura doesn't turn to look. Ami's soulmate, a burly boy a year older than them, snickers audibly. "Uggllyyy," he sing-songs, and the rest of the children quickly pick it up. "Ugly, ugly forehead!" they scream. Something hits her back, and it hurts, but she keeps on walking, trying hard not to flinch. A shrill voice cackles, and suddenly there are more rocks hitting her, more and more and more, and she cries, curling up on the ground in a defensive posture.
Someone, please, she thinks, lying on the ground, shielding her head from flying projectiles with spindly arms. Please, save me.
Suddenly there's a yelp of pain from one of her tormentors, and a familiar screech that fills her with relief. "What do you think you're doing to my friend?" Ino comes to the rescue like a tornado, rage blazing in her sky-blue eyes. Sakura, cowering, sniffles and hides her face between her knees, reflexively crossing her thin arms over her head. She doesn't see what Ino does next, but the volley of pebbles and the jeering voices stop.
"Cowards," she hears Ino grumble. "C'mon, get up, Sakura. You okay?" She finally lets go, all snot and tears, so tired and so relieved that Ino is here.
But even if Ino could save her from schoolyard bullies, Ino couldn't save her all the time. Her friend had her own parents to go back to, and there was only so much time before Sakura needed to go back to her own home.
So when it becomes time to say goodbye to Ino, Sakura reluctantly returns home, chokes down dinner, and kisses her parents good night before heading upstairs to her room. Maybe if she was awake, she wouldn't slip into that strange otherworldly realm, she hopes. She sleeps fitfully, snatching relief in cat-naps, waiting each night for what seems like eons for the sun to rise and the shadows to recede.
But somehow, even with all of the precautions she takes, she finds herself in that monochromatic world again and again and again.
She meets new people, an old woman standing in front of a bakery, desserts in the display cases writhing with plump, white maggots; a young man, who smiles at her before jumping into a churning river; a couple, the man with heavy-set eyebrows and a stern expression, the woman heartbreakingly beautiful with a perfect oval face and long silky hair, who smiles at her kindly before coughing up blood as both of them are impaled by a ghostly sword. None of them have eyes, but blood trickles from their sunken eye sockets and down their pale cheeks. There are others, whose faces she forgets, but whose shrieks linger in her memory even after she shakes herself awake.
Help us, they beg, scream, whisper. Please. Help us.
Please.
Sakura covers her ears, but nothing she can do drowns out the prolonged shrieks of the suffering, nor the hollow moans of the dead, with their fan-emblazoned clothes and gaps where their eyes should be.
She wakes up with dark shadows under her eyes and a throat hoarse from screaming.
Sakura's body continues to deteriorate, but Sasaki-sensei seems to be making progress on his front. From the vague, excited hints he drops in front of her from time to time, Sakura manages to gather that whatever she is experiencing is something soulmate-related. When she first learns about it from him, she gives a small, humorless smile.
Take that, Ami.
Sometimes, though, when the cries of the dead are too much to bear, she wishes that Ino were her soulmate. If Ino were with her in that world, she thinks, Ino would only need to give one big radiant smile and all of the dark spinning commas would probably disappear into the shadows where they belong. Ino would know what to do with the blood and the piles of broken bodies scattered around the abandoned compound like bags of sand. There's so much blood that it saturates the ground and permeates the air, giving it a reddish hue. Sakura drowns in it. She wakes up with the taste of it still coating the roof of her mouth, the sickly sweet metallic tinge lingering in her nostrils and on her tongue.
But Ino belongs in the land of the living, sunshine-bright and happy. She wouldn't bring her friend down there with her. That isn't what friends do.
Her soulmate isn't her friend, she savagely thinks to herself as she lies in her futon, gasping, eyes wide open, heart pounding furiously against her thin chest.
She never wants to meet her soulmate.