A/N: Please refer to chapter 1 for my take on the long wait. I know I took forever, so make sure to give it a glance.
Sacred
(2)
The sky cries for many hours and she thinks it almost ironic to mimic her own suffering. The sky cries for days—three, in particular. And amidst the tears that won't stop flowing, she knows it's good news.
She knows that the village, this small and ignorant and blindsided village, rejoices in the fact that it rains.
In a place like the desert, so hot during the day and so cold during the night and so insufferably dry all the time, rain is more than an event to rejoice from; it's a blessing. A blessing from the gods; from Tefnut, goddess of moisture, dew, and rain.
At only eight years of age, she understands how important it is for Tefnut to gift them with a blessing of this magnitude. And it goes on for no more and no less than three exact days.
Sakura can't help but wonder if it's meant for her—if Tefnut has seen her and felt her heartwrenching pain, the hurt of losing a best friend, while she lies on her small and dirty bed, and has decided to mimic her in this way.
Sakura cries for days. She doesn't come out of her house. She eats out of pure necessity, and her parents try to coax her into coming to herself by being in brighter moods around, but giving her enough space so as to not overwhelm her fragile mind. They know, deep down, exactly what's going on. They know she just lost a close person to her, or how she probably wasn't going to see that person ever again—and even if she did, for some reason, she wouldn't be able to approach him for fear of the amber, dark eyes of the Pharaoh looking at her like he did when they were six and curious.
Sakura knows all these things as well, deeply hidden in the bright corners of her still innocent and hopeful heart.
She knows. And it's why she keeps crying.
She thinks about Naruto constantly, but mostly about the certainty that if he was still with her—living with his adoptive parents, poor and always crawling around town for a slice of bread, and harvesting wheat all day long almost every day for something—they would be jumping and playing under the cold droplets, like the other two times in their short lives when it had rained in the village.
But he's gone; gone, taken without at much as a word to her or to his worried parents, and if her mother hadn't been summoned to The Palace by the Pharaoh himself to check on Naruto as his new healer, she wouldn't have known about his whereabouts at all.
So she cries and the sky cries above her sturdy roof, comforting her in a way that makes her hurt, but making everyone else in the village happy. She thinks to herself that it's more of a curse than a blessing.
"Sakura, honey, you need to wake up."
She can hear her mother shaking her arm slightly, and her eyelids twitch against the impending light that comes through the small square on her room's wall.
It's not too long before she opens her swollen, overly-sensitive eyes to look at her mother's face looming over her, a small smile on her ageing face. She looks down at her daughter's vividly green eyes and represses the urge to frown in worry—she's been crying all night too, it seems.
"I know," her mother soothingly starts, moving to sit right beside her hip at the edge of the small bed. "I know that your friend is gone."
Sakura visibly flinches.
"But not all hope is lost, I mean, take the Uchiha boy as an example. You have hung out with Sasuke and Naruto before, right? I've seen you."
Sakura doesn't know why her mother is mentioning Sasuke, a boy that she can barely talk to without embarrassing herself in front of the entire village, in a moment like this, while talking about her friendship with Naruto, but she nods nonetheless.
"Exactly. And you and I—and the whole town—know that he lives in The Palace, just like Naruto does now."
"Yes," she responds, waking up once and for all. "He's the Pharaoh's grandchild. What are you saying, mother?"
Sakura does not yet follow, but her mother makes her point clear in the next sentences, hand patting Sakura's leg reassuringly over the thin blanket.
"What I am trying to say, baby, is that..." She pauses, grasping at the correct way to approach this. Sakura wonders what's wrong when her mother stares at the wall above her with coal-rimmed eyes, tired as if she had aged ten more years in the span of five seconds. "You hang out with Sasuke sometimes. You'll most likely hang out with Naruto too, by default. But you must wait for them to get used to each other. Surely, they will let the two boys go outside where you can meet them one day."
Sakura's eyes widen with surprise as realisation dawns upon her; it hadn't even crossed her mind. But then, how would her mother know what they have been doing to him while she must wait? How would her mother know when he's going to leave The Palace and go out to play with her and Sasuke?
Her mother may be his appointed healer—as she is for many at The Palace—but she shouldn't be able to question the workers for information on anyone's schedule.
"How are you so sure?" She asks. Her mother, sand-coloured hair and eyes as big and green as her own, chuckles a little and leans closer. She plants a kiss on her forehead, parting her light amber hair in the process, and leans away.
"Trust me."
As her mother leaves the tiny room, Sakura clings to the hope planted on her mind as best as she possibly can.
Fall turns into winter, and winter turns into spring, and Sakura turns nine with the passage of the seasons.
Life in Konoha keeps busy as usual. Her mother updates her on Naruto's condition whenever she has to inspect him for regular check-ups, even if the best thing she can say is that he's physically healthy, but Sakura can live with that.
A day after her birthday, a man in a black horse shows up at her doorstep with an official letter from the Pharaoh's Palace and a small package wrapped in expensive paper, and Sakura can barely keep the excitement in herself because she knows who it is that sent them. She pushes past her mother and practically grabs the letter away from her father's rough hands, who just shakes his head and bids farewell to the messenger.
She first opens the letter, sitting on the only chair at the kitchen table, with shaky fingers, and scans through the several symbols with a knowledge she had acquired a few summers back from her mother.
She notices someone else has learnt to decode and write as well, someone she knows well.
There are birds and stones and eyes, but Sakura scans through as if he were telling her the words himself, filling the blanks here and there with her imagination. There is a section that makes her smile; she doesn't even notice her parents hovering over the letter from behind her.
You turned nine! It's hard to believe it's been a year since I last saw you, but they have not let me outside yet (it's a miracle I have been given permission to send this to you in the first place). I think about you all the time, though, believe it! I ask about you when your mother comes to check on me, but the guards don't let her answer anything that is not strictly professional. Don't worry about me—because I know you do—for it's not that bad over here. I even learnt how to code these stupid drawings!
As Sakura reads through the letter, all dramatised stories about his so-called adventures, her smile grows and she feels something akin to a snort rumbling inside her chest, ready to come out. She had missed the feeling of wanting to laugh because of him, so, so terribly.
Her smile leaves her at the last passage.
Sasuke here wishes you a happy birthday. Do not tell him I said it, but he chose the gift because I could not decide—I still got you something, of course! Enjoy my sweets.
She reads and reads over the symbols, again and again, and she wants to ask her mother about a possible different meaning to the images, but she knows she is reading them right. In which case, she can't help the sudden rush that courses through her body.
She hides her flustered face with her hair as she looks down and leaves the paper on the table—her parents grab it after she leaves the chair and start reading over it again.
She unpacks the small box. Inside, there are sweets she has never seen before (courtesy of Naruto), and the most beautiful white dress she has ever laid eyes on (courtesy of Sasuke, something she has yet to believe).
Nevertheless, from then on, every time she gets a year older, she receives the same box with a different kind of exotic food and a white, gorgeously tailored, embroidered tunic with golden details along the lace. Strangely, they all fit her like a glove.
Lee runs up to them one hot and dry afternoon.
"Girls, have you heard?"
Sakura and Ino are sitting on the latter's front porch, decorated with the finest of flowers to exist in this part of the globe—Ino's mother was known across the country as the Pharaoh's favourite landscaper, after all. She's braiding the blonde's long, silky hair when he appears down the narrow streets.
When he reaches them, he's completely out of breath. Obviously, this was important, so Sakura halts her hands and looks at him attentively, then. It's not that he had run all the way down the long street to reach them, or that he had been so out of breath, because the boy was always running here and there; it was no surprise to them. It had been his panicked voice that had alerted her immediately.
"Have you heard? The Pharaoh's wife is pregnant!"
Their eyes widen considerably, both at the same time. Sakura's narrow in confusion, then, while Ino's glow in excitement.
"Lee, those are great news!"
"I know! I just found out and I have been racing all over town to let everyone know! I only have Shikamaru and Tenten left."
Sakura's brain automatically filters their voices out until she sees amber eyes directed at her and at Naruto with a hidden glint in them. She sees a hand travelling down a woman's front and cupping the space between her legs, and she wonders if that's the one who's pregnant—if that's his wife or just one of many.
"Uchiha Madara's first wife is pregnant?" She asks, confused. "Mother said once that she could not bear any more heirs to the position, though."
There is a long pause where Sakura stares at both of her friends, who look back at her like she has suddenly lost all her smooth hair and grown a second nose.
"What is it?" She inquires, a deep voice in her mind telling her that she's obviously missed something. And that she has.
"You mean Itachi?" Lee asks, thick brows pulled down in utter confusion. Ino looks at her as if she knows what's going on inside her best friend's head—which, even if Sakura feels she doesn't, she does.
"After what happened, Itachi ascended to power. You know that, right? It happened right after they took Naruto."
Sakura frowns and thinks two years back—to when she had heard rumours of death and betrayal in the god-like family, and when her mother had told her she couldn't know about it just yet.
"I didn't... I did not know. Nobody told me."
She looks at the ground and her frown deepens further, biting the inside of her cheek as she puts the puzzle pieces together from that day.
"What happened to Madara?"
"Nobody knows," Lee murmurs, his voice uncharacteristically low.
"Or, at least, nobody tells us. After all, only a handful of people outside the clan can enter The Palace grounds at all, let alone talk to anyone in the main branch," Ino adds. "I heard the entire clan got sent to Suna forever."
Lee chips in, voice a whisper so that no passerby can hear the taboo words that escape his mouth. "I heard Itachi killed everyone and kept the throne for himself."
Ino shakes her head. "That's ridiculous, Lee, they obviously left to Suna and are ruling over there."
"That makes no sense, why in the world would they do that? There's already a ruler there!"
Sakura feels herself grow with more questions by the second. Few things make sense to her at the time about the ordeal.
Something that no one dares to tell her had happened to the Uchiha family, then they had taken Naruto for yet another reason no one bothers to tell her, and then Itachi, the new Pharaoh, is soon to be a father.
On top of it all, she hasn't physically seen Naruto or Sasuke in two whole years, and the two letters that she has from the former are starting to feel too insignificant for her growing need for answers.
Sakura's ten and lonely and confused.
Unfortunately, with the news of a new heir to the throne, The Palace's guards are—impressively—tripled in number. Not only is she not allowed in the sacred grounds, but she's also instructed by her parents to not even get close to them. Basically, she is to avoid the place and its wide perimeter, all around the hill at the centre of the village and as far back as where the sacred temples are located.
It's easy, at first, to follow these clear orders. But after almost three years of not seeing her best friend, she starts noticing some patterns.
She starts realising that Naruto will never be her friend again as he had been since they were practically born. It's simple in her mind. They're not equals now; not as they had been before.
She starts realising that this is true, but that it also is not really his fault that she hasn't been able to see him. He is forbidden to go outside and seek someone as low as her, even as the child of the Palace's healer.
She starts realising that it's only upon herself to see him again—in her hands, not his—and so she spends days thinking it over.
She can't be near The Palace, much less enter without good reason. She can't send letters back, and she can't know for sure if Naruto would ever be allowed outside, or when. So she starts realising that she has to go inside his new home. If he can't go outside, then she must try to get in. She must.
She concludes, one windy afternoon, that it's the fastest way to get her friend back, lest she has to wait until he comes of age and is allowed to do as he so pleases.