Compromise

noun:

an agreement or settlement of disputes that is reached by each side making concessions.

the acceptance of standards that are lower than acceptable.

Sakura spat a mixture of dirt and blood. Grit lodged into her gums, leaving swollen punctures. She didn't have the time to care right now. Hanabi was sluggish. The girl was good at hiding it, but Sakura had gotten used to her pace, her subtlety over the past couple days—at least enough to detect the difference. She'd taken a few hits on their last encounter, more so than Sakura had. It was entirely possible she'd been poisoned.

For now, we'll pretend, Sakura thought. There was nothing else they could do. It had been a day since their last drink of water, and a fortnight since they ate. Both had severe scarring on their legs and arms from whatever technique the enemy had used, and their hearing was still recovering. On top of that, a team of eight or more had been on their tail. There was simply no time to sit down, much less address Hanabi's poison. So they would both pretend that it wasn't there.

Sakura would not wait for her to stop breathing, though. Or sneak off in the night. She wasn't like that. Hadn't been like that, at least. There was always some way to make it out. The other members told her that everyone believed that until the day came where they had to drop the dead weight.

Too important, she reminded her phantom self, tucked underneath layers of righteousness taught by Kakashi-sensei, as they wound through the forest floor, she's too important to lose here.

The thicket curled around her and the trees, foliage chafed against her day-old burns, sending them screaming. Sakura's hair clung to her forehead, soaked in sweat and coated in ash. She'd begun clearing a pathway for Hanabi, whose pace was gradually declining. She snuck a glance back.

"You okay?"

"Yes, Sakura-san," the girl replied with a smile that wasn't exactly forced but was clearly practiced. Like she'd been waiting.

How old was she again? Only thirteen? Was that possible? Sakura shook her head, fighting the wave of nausea that came with such a gesture. They had grown so desperate. They no longer treated war-effort shinobis as humans, only fodder for the enemy to sate, for now. But Hanabi was more than that. She needed the right time to bloom, she needed years of training before she unlocked the formidable power that the Allied War Effort could harness. Sakura couldn't let her die here.

"Hey," she said softly. And then a little louder so she could be heard over the rustling and the haunting murmur of the forest.

"Yes?"

"This is nothing, you hear me? I've been through tons worse. We're gonna make it out of this."

She'd tried to sound convincing, but it fell on deaf ears. However young, the second-in-line to the Hyuuga dynasty was not naive. She averted her gaze and said, "Of course."

It served as a stark reminder. Simple. Quiet. Unassuming. Submissive. Hadn't those traits described Sakura once? Where had that gone? When did that Sakura die?

Five years ago, she thought bitterly.

Her wrist brushed off a twig that had tried to bury itself in her eye.

Both Hanabi and Sakura stilled. They'd simultaneously picked up on a sound in the distance.

Water. Running water.

And then it was a brutal race of elbows, scratched faces and falls spurred by roots before either of them made it to the stream.

Sakura nearly collapsed. Hanabi actually got on her knees at the sight. A gravelly ground gave way to a narrow creek. The forest had parted for this beautiful sight, their salvation.

They'd drunk their fill and then some more, having lost the containers to save it in. Hanabi leaned against a dry stone, eyes closed, taking in how the creek cancelled out most other sounds, especially the voices of the forest. A blessed respite from the sounds that followed them even when their enemies had lost them.

"If only," Hanabi said suddenly, "if only I still had enough chakra. I would've easily been able to spot the water with my Byakugan."

"Don't beat yourself up," Sakura replied. "We need you to conserve as much energy as possible anyways. Otherwise we're never getting back to headquarters in one piece."

Hanabi's hand went to her hair, once a sleek, brown braid and now a nest of strands that fell around her face and eyes. She unsuccessfully tried to tuck it behind her ears, "What happens at headquarters?"

This caught Sakura off guard. "What do you mean 'what happens at headquarters'?"

"Oh, I-I haven't been there."

"You've never been to headquarters?" she swallowed. "How did you get sent on this mission, then? Didn't you at least—"

"No, they deployed me from the Leaf. I met up with you at the Urushin landmark, but only because I was escorted there by another shinobi. I think the decision to enlist me was pretty last minute—probably only done because you'd lost contact with your old teammate."

Sakura bit her lip, trying to stop the fury rising on her face. The underaged girl before her had never even been primed in the basics of this war and yet they'd already sent her on a third-grade mission. How many years pf training had it been before Sakura had been first sent out? Two, at least.

Had they sent her here to die? Did the Hyuuga clan even know what they'd thrown their precious daughter into?

Sakura pushed away these burning feelings as soon as they arrived. Her brain didn't want to deal with it. Just do as you're told, was what her superiors said anyways. She'd take that advice for now.

She scanned their surroundings. Hanabi had once again fallen silent, trying to soak up the few minutes of rest. They needed to move. She didn't know how far the enemy was, but they couldn't afford to catch up here.

Sakura popped open a mostly empty pill bottle. Inside, there was a single multi-coloured drug capsule. The kind that were supposed to have medicine in them. She twisted the tiny capsule open, and poured the remnants of a mashed leaf inside to give it weight, and then closed it. The capsule had had nothing in it originally. They'd run out of any such supplies weeks ago, but by intuition, she'd kept the bottle.

"Here," Sakura said, handing the capsule to Hanabi.

"What's this?" the girl looked up.

"It's a pain reliever. It also helps with fatigue and some common infections you can get out here in the wild." She put a hand up to dismiss Hanabi's protest, "I had a few in my pouch that I'd forgotten about. Already took one."

She didn't remember the last time she'd told so many lies in one go.

Bless her, Hanabi didn't seem to suspect anything. She downed the capsule.

Sakura walked back to the lip of the creek. She knew firsthand the power of placebos and hoped the fake would give the girl some energy to continue on their journey.

A flutter of leaves from behind.

It was brief and nearly inaudible. She'd calculated the distance to be nine to twelve meters away. Sakura didn't wait, or look back, or signal Hanabi. In a situation like that, certain survival instincts, honed by years of the precarity of war, take over. An autopilot of sorts.

She slipped right into the water, using some jutsu in her arsenal to raise its level to completely cover her, and hid.

She heard a whimper, Hanabi's voice, because of course they'd sneaked up on her. Sakura should have known. She should have been aware that they'd taken too long to rest. But now what did her regrets matter?

The captor's voices were muffled due to the barrier of the water, but she focused her remaining chakra on her ears. Little tricks she'd learned from the war medics.

"You're a little young, aren't you?" one man said. "And where's your other friend? Did she run off without you?"

There were only four people. Three men and one woman. The age range for most was on the younger end of twenties. That was where Sakura's chakra sensing skills ended. But she frowned inwardly, hadn't there been eight?

"We sent our best after the guy, y'know. Don't you worry, he's dead."

She'd already been prepared for this part. Sakura knew her last partner's chances of survival were thin, which was why she'd requested the War Effort to lend her another one.

"Something's not right," a feminine voice said, coming dangerously near the water. "I get the feeling her partner's here somewhere. Hurt her. Tear a limb off."

The screams that followed would haunt Sakura for a very, very long time, even when she'd numbed and everything else left her. She did not stop channeling her chakra to her ears. If she didn't have the courage to step in, then the least she could do was hear them.

I'm sorry, she pleaded. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

She salted the water with tears. There was no use jumping in right now. She couldn't go up against these shinobi. They were too damn strong. They were well stocked on food and water. And they had reinforcements. The best thing to do was run. Get away silently. She could still complete her mission.

Wasn't I supposed to protect this girl? Wasn't she my responsibility?

What have I become?

She didn't have an answer for herself.

"Shut her up, please, for heaven's sake, gag the bitch," the same girl said.

"You think her partner's not around?" another one of them said.

"No, but that's not working, and it's better for us if the girl survives."

"You at least want me to extract her eyes?"

"Not yet, there's something not right. This stream is roaring right now, but when we heard it from a distance it barely made any noise; I thought it'd be a creek," the girl said. Now she was right at the water, and Sakura's heart was rapid-fire gunshots in her chest. "Hand me the canister, will you?"

"But that's our last blaster—"

"Did you hear what I fucking said?"

There was an exchange and Sakura heard a hissing sound, as if something had just been opened. In a plop, a metal can descended into the water. What happened next was another thing in a sequence of actions that Sakura did as per her survival autopilot. There was no level of thought behind it. It was motivated by pure, primal survival.

She came from a modest background. Clanless with no damn skill beyond being an egghead. Worst of all, her teammates sought to cover any inadequacy on her part. So instead of learning or thriving, she was always sitting on the backbenches. Naruto and Sasuke, in their eagerness to save her, confined her growth in a way that nothing else could. And then she was slammed into a different kind of reality. Brutalized by merciless enemy tactics, roughoused by the War Effort training and taught distrust by cowardly partners that had a penchant for ditching her when convenient, Sakura learned what she had to do for survival. She wasn't strong like Naruto. She wasn't stealthy like Kakashi. She wasn't even resilient or brave like Sasuke.

The plain and the average never made it with just stubbornness or heroism. They needed a system of perfected fight-or-flight mode that could aid them in high-stakes situations. Without any emotion interfering.

That's why no matter how passionate Sakura could be about protecting Hanabi beforehand, she couldn't lift a finger when the girl was being tortured. None of that mattered when you remembered you were the weakling.

That's why she didn't think when she grabbed the canister in the water, seconds away from exploding, and threw it right back.

KABOOM!

The blast was massive, and even though her head was tilted down in the water, the flash still blinded her for a second. Debris that had flown through the air, drifted lazily down in the water, slowed by its thickness. Sakura climbed out of the river, soaking. Around her was devastation on a scale she couldn't have ever imagined. The canister had hit the ground before it exploded, a giant crater ringed the impact point. At least two or three bodies, with shredded and dismembered limbs were visible in the smoke. The scent of singeing flesh floated pungently in the air. She tried to ignore the stinging in her eyes.

There was a croak from in the cover of the smoke, a person tried to speak but the voice came strangled. "You… your own. How could-co… you—"

The person gradually came into her line of sight. It was something ugly, but Sakura had seen worse. Their face was molten and black, strips of skin peeling away and revealing the skeletal structure of the face. Their clothing stained rust-red from the motley of blood and ash. Large swathes of skin on their arms had been pulled back and they held something sac-like in their hand. Sakura couldn't identify the gender.

"Fucking idiot," they said before buckling and then slamming into the ground, dead.

Sakura waded through the dizzying smoke to the individual and after looting any supplies not devoured by the blast, retrieved Hanabi's disfigured body from their grasp. She didn't know for how long she cried or how long she stayed there or when those cuts had started appearing on her arms.

All she knew was that by the time she was done mourning and had moved on with her mission, she felt worse for having lost Hanabi's eyes than her.