Content/trigger warning: This story has central themes of self-injury. It may discuss in detail the act of self-injury, the emotions before, during, and after self-injuring, descriptions of injuries and/or scars, etc. It may also discuss other difficult issues, such as past abuse, that will be noted as they occur throughout the story in a TW at the beginning of each chapter. These TW's will be cumulative so as not to repeat them constantly and therefore listed as "all previous TW's".
Please use discretion, read with caution, and reach out to your country's crisis services if needed. Thank you.
Chapter 1 TW- self-injury, alcoholism, witness to past abuse
The first time Sakura ever self-injures, it is an accident.
She's at the academy, age 9, and worrying about how to balance all of her electives in a way to make her parents proud.
She's naturally good at genjutsu and wouldn't mind working in that area, but her taijutsu form is terrible and she needs help and, oh, what about the special kunoichi classes required for female ninja-
She's anxious and tense and right as she feels like the world is about to cave in, it all slows. And as suddenly as she started worrying, she felt herself relax. When her friend points out that she was holding onto herself, hugging herself, so tightly that her fingernails have pierced her arms and left behind blooded, half-moon marks, Sakura laughs it off before going to the washroom and cleaning the area the best she can.
She isn't sure why this helped her to calm down, but she'll remember it.
The next time she self-injures, it is a year later. The academy was hosting its annual field day to showcase the children's skills to their parents and others in the village. Sakura waits anxiously as the minutes slowly tick by only to realize that her parents aren't coming.
When she moves to stand by the lone group of orphaned kids, sectioned off from the happy family displays in the training fields, one of them asks her why she's standing over here if she has parents.
Sakura blanches, then reddens, and finally voices together an incoherent string of words- trying to convey her parents were busy that day- before running off.
At dinner that night, Sakura hesitantly asks her father why her parents couldn't come to field day. She knew her mother would never speak up and her father, at only two drinks in, was as happy as he could ever be. When he tells her he didn't have the time to waste in watching her disappoint him, Sakura swallows down every feeling, every protest, and just nods.
That night, when the pain seems unbearable, when all she wants to know is what's wrong with her, why won't they love her, she remembers the relief her nail-marks gave her before and hesitantly draws one of her practice kunai across her arm.
It doesn't even break the skin- it's too dull for that. Instead, it leaves a viscous, angry welt, but it still hurts and Sakura cries in relief. She doesn't know how or why, but she knows that this, this marring of her skin, is making her feel better when nothing else has.
Over the years, the self-injury slowly gets more and more severe. While it starts out infrequent enough, when more and more things that she perceives as stressful- her class standing, her parents arguing, her fight with Ino- build up, she turns to self-injury to relieve the stress.
What was once a sufficient amount of self-injury to ease her mind was suddenly lacking. It took more wounds, going deeper than ever, to get the same results. What began with practice kunai turned into real kunai turned into razor blades.
Sakura isn't stupid. She knows that this behavior isn't exactly normal, knows that getting caught doing... whatever this is, can only lead to trouble.
So she's careful. She tries not to mar her arms too badly and instead sticks to harming the tops of her legs, her hips, her stomach.
Her self-injury continues on for years, either unnoticed or uncared about, even through the disaster that is team 7. She's sure her sensei knows- after all, he seems to know everything- but can see why he wouldn't expend the effort to discuss it with her. How disgusting she must be to him, perfectly healthy and whole and yet slicing her skin open, when there are shinobi that come back from the battlefield with real wounds, or even those that don't come back at all.
After the fallout of team 7, Sakura is left alone and the self-injury only worsens. This has been her way of dealing with overwhelming emotions for so long now and she can't imagine how she would ever do without.
So she buries her feelings into her skin.
Her sorrow at the dissolution of team 7. Her loneliness at being abandoned. Her rage at herself for being so far behind her teammates in skill level and so stupid as to focus on boys and social standing instead of training. Her resentment at her sensei for his always seeming to ignore her in favor of the boys. Her grief at the thought that her team would never be like a second family like the academy always told them. Her fear of the uncertainty of the future. Her devastation when she realizes she will never make her father proud. Her anger over the fact that she's treated differently as a civilian born than she would be as a clan child and the unfairness of it all. All of it, a cataclysm of worries and fear and sadness, is enough to drown her.
She carves out all that hate, all the pain, until she's left riddled with a body full of scars but she can finally breathe again.
Then, she meets Tsunade.
As a sannin and the world's best medical ninja, it doesn't take Tsunade very long to notice Sakura's self-injury.
And Tsunade... Tsunade is a mess herself. Despite being Hokage, she can barely go a day without drinking, without finding any way to lose herself for a little while. She's in no state of mind to try and counsel Sakura and might even make the problem worse if she tried.
What she can do as the girl's current sensei and Hokage, however, is strongly encourage (read: order) Sakura to attend therapy and cheer her on quietly from the sidelines.
So at the age of 14, five years after beginning self-injuring, two years after the dissolution of team 7, and one year after being taken on as the Hokage's apprentice, Sakura starts attending therapy once a week as long as she's in the village.
It isn't the smoothest process, in the beginning.
It doesn't help that Sakura doesn't want to be there. She's reticent and sullen and for once acts like the teenager she's supposed to be. She knows this is meant to help her, but still. Talking to someone she doesn't know, a civilian even, about her most painful secret isn't something she enjoys doing.
When Sakura finally decides that she will actually try in therapy so she can be better- she might as well try since she's forced to go- she realizes that she is smarter than almost every therapist she meets with. Despite their supposedly vast education and experience, Sakura throws them for a loop, using her intelligence, advanced vocabulary, and maturity to run circles around the therapists.
It's juvenile and should be beyond her, but Sakura can't take discussing something so intimate with someone that just can't keep up, and it provides her a vindictive sense of joy to mess with them.
Finally, Sakura is assigned a brilliant therapist, who has years of experience treating shinobi patients and is intelligent enough to understand Sakura completely.
Sakura's stress level is at an all-time high with practically running the hospital, entering ANBU, and still running missions. Still, she's recognized that self-injury could potentially leave her weak in the field, so it's something she only does while in the village with the chakra capacity to heal herself.
Sakura's therapist doesn't like that fact that Sakura still continues to occasionally harm herself, but since it's only when she's in the village, the severity and overall frequency of her self-injury has gone down, and she's not suicidal, the therapist is, for now, content. While it's still worrying that Sakura doesn't seem to see a problem with harming herself- only making sure the time and location are acceptable first- Sakura otherwise adjusts well to shinobi life.
So Sakura continues her on and off- pattern of self-injury, never getting too severe to require further treatment but also never giving it up entirely.
As a medic-nin, it's easy to heal wounds with no one ever knowing, and besides the relief self-injury gives from overwhelming emotions, Sakura also likes the scars she can leave behind. The scars that show that her pain is real when she begins to doubt herself.
She leaves certain scars behind intentionally- like the one from the day Kakashi-sensei just up and left, barely a word of goodbye, or the one from the day she lost her first patient as a med-nin- so that can remember that the pain was real and not all in her head. The scars laid out across her skin are proof of it.
To this day, only the Hokage, her therapist, and Sakura herself know of her self-injury.
Since Sakura seems to have hit a plateau in her therapy- not getting any better but not getting any worse, either- the therapist recommends she try group therapy.
Group.
As in, with other shinobi present.
Sakura wants to protest, wants to argue that her self-injury is hers and no one else's, but since she's not willing to give it up completely she has no ground to stand on.
They assure her that group therapy is anonymous- it occurs in a sealed room with each participant under a henge so no one would ever discover her identity.
Begrudgingly, Sakura agrees, as she realizes she's not entirely sure what she's in for.
AN: This is my first fanfiction ever! I'm super excited to share it with you all and I would love any comments or feedback you have. Thank you!