The funeral was a small, quiet affair that happened in broad daylight without a cloud in the sky. The few attendees scattered after Tsunade-sama, prompted by awkward silence and meaningful glances, cleared her throat and muttered a few raspy platitudes about duty and the indisputable honor of dying in service to the village. Nothing special—just lines from the same boilerplate script that had apparently been passed around in some village-wide memo that Sakura hadn't been privy to. She looked youthful as she always did, but blonde hair seemed to have wilted and she was accompanied by the faint but unmistakable odor of stale alcohol. In a loose, tired fist that would suit a sleeping baby more than Tsunade of the Sannin, Breaker of Mountains, there dangled a familiar necklace crusted in dried blood.
Sakura kept staring at it like one hypnotized, certain that it wouldn't take more than the pull of gravity to dislodge the necklace from Tsunade's grip. It became the focal point of her vision and she watched it swing almost merrily like a pendulum. Tick-tock , the necklace sang over the bland murmurs of anonymous well-wishers paying their obligatory respects to Sakura who stood as a surrogate family member next to the closed coffin of the orphan who'd had no one else. Tick-tock, the necklace gleamed cheerfully in the afternoon sun. Tick-tock, the necklace counted every passing minute that Kakashi-sensei failed to show up to his own student's funeral service.
It didn't take long for Sakura to run through the common script of I'm sorry for your loss and thank you for coming with everyone who'd bothered to show up.
If she still cared, she would have exchanged a subtle and slightly treasonous twitch of her eyebrows with Ino over the unbecoming state of their village leader. If she still cared, she might have been annoyed that a weeping Hinata took so long to stutter her way through condolences that were not on the script for crying out loud. If she still cared, she would have performed backflips in her eagerness to escape from a subdued Rock Lee who took her hands and poured his soul into the apology he gave for failing to protect the flames of youth.
But she didn't care. And that was why she gave the same polite smile to Ino that she gave to Hinata that she also gave to Lee. Her mouth felt numb and strangely toothless as if she'd just gone to an overzealous dentist, so she wasn't sure if it really was a smile on her face, but she didn't let it go even when everyone left and the corners of her lips trembled with exhaustion.
Kakashi-sensei never showed up, but they found him at the stone when they went to trace a new addition. She went to join him and then her feet lost their purpose when she was filled with the sudden doubt that she'd ever stood shoulder to shoulder with her jounin-sensei. Their formation had always been him leading and her following and it just felt inappropriate to break those rules at such an occasion like this. So she came to a stop a few steps behind her sensei's tall and unapproachable back and watched silently as Tsunade-sama traced Uzumaki Naruto into the stone. Naruto had finally gotten what he'd always wanted.
Sakura didn't cry and she felt bad, but her body had sort of locked up to the point that she couldn't force anything out but that frozen smile. It was a shame that she couldn't, in the end, bring herself to muster up any feelings for the boy who'd made her a promise and died for it. After all, they'd never been friends. Just. Teammates. And now everyone was acting like her team had been the Sannin of her generation rather than a poisonous cocktail of the most incompatible, destructive ingredients whose only understanding of teamwork was the shared willingness to explode at the slightest provocation.
When Tsunade-sama's finger was finished tracing the last character and lingered for a moment in the grooves she'd just created, she muttered something under her breath about that stupid brat and this damned necklace. And then she stood and stalked past Kakashi and then Sakura without sparing a glance at either of them. "Shizune," she barked at a tearful woman holding a crying pig. "Let's go."
They stood for hours, Sakura and Kakashi-sensei, observing a silent vigil that failed to do any good for the dead and only gave the living a sense of fulfilling guilty duty. "Sakura," Kakashi-sensei sighed at last when the sunset washed the stone aglow with the colors of a melting mango sorbet. "You should go home and get some rest."
Sakura nodded at his back and did as she was told. She walked home. She unlocked the front door and slipped off her shoes and called out I'm home to her parents who were eating a late dinner in front of the TV. Her mother started to say something about fixing her a plate and having her join them, but her father just shook his head and murmured something that had her mother pause and walk over to envelope Sakura in a hug.
"Tell mommy if you need anything. I love you," her mother whispered in Sakura's ear. And Sakura just nodded and slipped out from her mother's arms, too tired to protest that she was too old and had experienced too many terrible things like Zabuza and Orochimaru and Gaara melting into sand and dead teammates killed by traitorous teammates to need anything from mommy. Mommy couldn't bring the dead back to life any more than she could make traitors loyal. But Sakura didn't vocalize these thoughts and instead went to her room, folded her body into a fetal curl under her bedcovers, and tried her hardest to force herself to cry out of those frozen tear ducts.
When nothing came out—that was when she knew there wasn't any grief inside her. She knew it wasn't grief because it wasn't anything remotely close to the sorrow she'd felt at the death of the grandmother who raised her. Grief had left her soaking her pillows with tears in a bed that felt too big without her grandmother's warm body breathing slowly and rhythmically next to hers. Grief had made her crave her mother's embrace searching for and failing to find the familiar scent of her grandmother. Grief had eventually fossilized into a nostalgia that left her with the occasional urge to find the family photo album and flip through the photographs of her grandmother cradling a baby Sakura.
But this was different. This wasn't grief because she couldn't cry to release the something that was bubbling in her chest and left her aching and vulnerable. This wasn't grief because she couldn't go seeking the company of fellow mourners because it was inconceivable and downright offensive to think that anyone might trivialize her situation by claiming to understand what she was going through. This wasn't grief because it made her sick to her stomach when she caught a glimpse of the photo of Team Seven that she used to admire as a nightly ritual before going to bed.
Even now, she could remember the giddiness that had her giggling at her own blushing reflection as she painstakingly ironed every section of hair so that it was perfectly straight for her team photo with Sasuke-kun. Even now, she could remember the way her heart fluttered like a caffeinated butterfly as the warmth of Sasuke-kun's body in such close proximity seeped into her arm. Her faith in her future with Sasuke-kun had been so certain and so unwavering and so convicted that it bordered on universal truth. So how? How had she been so wrong and so blind and so stupid and so—
Something shattered and she could hear the TV turn off and her parents' voices murmur worriedly through the thin walls of her bedroom. There were footsteps outside her door, floorboards creaking, someone sighing and she squeezed her eyes shut, willing them to leave her alone, leave her alone, leave her alone until finally her wishes were answered with the sound of receding footsteps.
When her mother finally came to her room a few days later with a tray of soup and stepped cautiously around the broken glass of the photo frame, she lovingly ran her fingers through Sakura's greasy, matted hair and simply suggested that maybe Sakura should take a shower and go on a walk. And because Sakura had always excelled at obeying adults, she did exactly that.
The sun was right where she'd left it. Bright and golden and loud like Naruto. The memorial stone, too, was right where she'd left it. Black and glossy and silent like Sasuke.
She hated it. She didn't know how Kakashi-sensei could suffer the sun and stand around for hours staring at that rock. But then her journey home made her start to understand that perhaps the quiet, undisturbed memorial grounds were infinitely superior to the crowded streets of her own village. More than the sun and more than the rock, she hated, she loathed the sympathetic glances people threw her way and the telling silence of hushed whispers when she passed by.
She heard the elderly women with flinty eyes who'd always been kind enough to pack a couple extra apples into her bags clucking their tongues about that terrible Uchiha boy who hadn't had the decency to die in the massacre with all the rest. And under that hot yellow sun, she wanted so desperately to turn back around and rip those wretched tongues from those poisonous mouths that her fists quaked and her whole body became an epicenter of rage.
It was this trembling, hot emotion of violence, not grief, that brought her to an unsurprised Tsunade-sama who just smiled clinically and said "It won't be easy, Sakura. But you already know that."