introductions
Hello, my name is Haruno Sakura. My likes are few and in between, and I have little that I truly hate. My dreams? (a wry smile) I don't have any at the present, and I doubt that will change; dreams are for those with surety, and my surety has long since shattered. I do have a tenant that I live by: that truth must be founded on evidence, and that I must not trust even myself. I am lost right now, but I do not think it matters…
He keeps an eye on her.
She doesn't look ragged as others do, as dirty from traveling, but her vivid eyes contain the same weariness that lurks in the silent corners of all those who have no belonging.
When the rumor had started that Haruno Sakura of Konohagakure had defected, he had not believed them.
"Of Team Seven?"
"Yes."
"That's impossible. She's the Godaime's apprentice and assistant; why would she defect?"
"Like teacher, like student, I suppose."
"Senju at least had a reason – Haruno? She's had no true tragedies; her teammates are still alive, she doesn't seem to have a husband or a romantic interest, her sensei still goes on missions with her… she's respected, admired, valued."
"She must have her reasons."
There are reasons; she has not snapped yet and is sitting two meters away from him, sake in hand and languid in all the grace of a shinobi with too much to ponder and too little to drink. She is too rational to not have reasons… so there must be reasons, yet he does not care to ask, does not care to be curious. It will be a repetition, the same epiphany year after year (and isn't he a hypocrite? doesn't he have the same reasons?) and so he leaves the bar, walking out into a dusky, night-riddled evening, patches of a void seeping through…
Yet he meets her again, a few weeks from the first time he saw the bright pink hair. (He knows not to trust the innocence of the color – Haruno Sakura is known as sapphire, the clear raw mineral, unrefined and yet more true than others. She is cold, ruthless, but it is not in her stance, nor in her manner – only in her results is this truth made a clarity.)
(He remembers once, when he saw an aftermath of her work. The body had been restored, perfect – still clothed in the blood soaked garments. It had been laid out on the bed, hands folded over the stomach, eyes closed and a slight smile on the face. Haruno Sakura is perhaps the only shinobi to have created a technique that uses the dying chakra of a person to restore the body to its prime state; she is perhaps the only shinobi that wastes time on the appearance of the dead. Her work drains all of the person's original chakra and repels all foreign chakra, leaving it in non-existence, in a vacuum. It is unnatural, and you can feel the screech of blade on bone as you draw closer to the truly lifeless doll.)
She is younger than he expected, and he is not sure why.
He had known her age, read her Bingo Book entry and memorized it once he had encountered her in a bar at the depths of the world – that is, Ame, after its complete and utter ruin. Their God and Angel were rumored to have fallen there, in the city of Ochiru Namida. The sky mourns, and it is perpetually weeping over that place.
(Only nukenin stay in the damned city, and even then, never for longer than a week.
Haruno Sakura stays there for a month.
She tells him this later, when he is ready to die and she simply looks at him with completely empty eyes.)
But Haruno is young. Her body is not yet fully developed, and her age clings to her movements as she pretends to be an eternity. It was that moment of surprise that changed so many things, and yet left fate to its own spider silk, undisturbed.
They face each other (he will soon forget the whys and hows of that second meeting, for they are trivial and best left forgotten), and he wonders all the reasons of a departure he does not wish to know.
He scans her, as he scans enemies, looking for weaknesses, recalling strengths, trying to glimpse the antagonism before an attack.
He finds none.
She looks whimsical, almost half there, and he wonders if it hasn't truly sunk in that she has defected. As if she is not a shinobi at all, but merely a poet or an artist. He wonders if it was planned, her defection. He wonders… but he will never ask, and she will never offer. Reasons are incredibly private in the shinobi world. It is perhaps the only thing that can remain private. Others will assume, but there is no certainty without an affirmation from the person in question.
As a nukenin, your thoughts are your own, not your village's, and many hoard this small bit of freedom with all the fierceness of a dragon with its gold.
"Hello."
He starts, warier now than he was before, for what shinobi simply begins a conversation in the middle of the half destroyed forest (some of the chaos and fallen trees clearly her fault)?
"Akamine Rei…" and then she proceeds to recite his Bingo Book entry back at him, words for word.
There is a period of quiet, and he will swear later that it lasted hours.
(And he wonders at the fae, the spirit, that stands before him. For there is something unearthly [something unhinged] about the way she moves, the way she talks, her expressions through the familiar haze of emptiness that characterize their kind of brokenness. He wonders if she had snapped, that perhaps her sanity is only a thin facade…)
"Would you like to get sake?"
"What?"
There is no rhyme or reason to that question, but somehow, it fits her. Unreality is sinking in for Akamine Rei and he will be the first ensnared in Haruno Sakura's peculiar kind of lethalness.
"One cannot drink alone without the conditions for an unhealthy amount of contemplation hanging over their head. You are convenient."
Somehow, he agrees. Somehow, he finds himself in a bar with a pastel ghost, in a rare companionship that should not exist between strangers with the power to destroy a small village.
(He will tire in the end, and she will move on, ever searching for a fitting conclusion.)