Warm blood splattered Sakura's pale cheeks as her badly sharpened kunai knife got stuck in Zabuza's throat. As unsharpened, poor-quality steel dug deep into soft flesh and grated painfully against the back of his neck, a look of pure surprise spread across Zubuza's face as the last thing his dark eyes saw before they lost their life was the oddly blank face of the pink girl that he'd assumed was the weakest of her team.
"You-" He started to say, no. Gasp, in the horrible shaky, raspy exhale of his last breath, but he was cut off before he could finish - Sakura's kunai was messily wrenched out of his throat, severing his vocal cords in the process.
And he fell.
A final, pathetic spluttery wheeze fell from his silently moving mouth as the dregs of a torrential flow of blood spurted and splattered onto sakura, coating her and her surroundings in a sea of red. Gods above, so much red. The thud of his body rang through Sakura's head like a bell. Oh fuck . It was everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere Sakura turned her head, a blanket of blood lay, a final brutal reminder of what she had done.
Sakura shot awake, drenched in a cold sweat and gasping for breath. She stood up and softly padded her way to the bathroom before turning on the shower and shakily turning the temperature to full when the weak water flow came out as freezing cold. Boiling water beat a permanent tattoo of shame on Sakura's back, her shoulders quickly turning pink then red as her mind spun and she tried to scrub the phantom remnants of Zabuza's blood from her clean skin (all the while repeating her brain's current tangent 'Monsters don't deserve comfort'). Sakura's parents had returned for a few days and they tried their best to help Sakura all they could, although they didn't know how to help. Not really. No one did. Echoes of their efforts to comfort their child were evident everywhere in the house, from the fridge to her own room, where they had pasted little motivational notes to Sakura's walls, but they had to leave for another work trip, leaving the young girl alone to deal with her demons once more.
A walk through the balmy nights that characterized the land of fire could help her mind settle a bit. Maybe. Hopefully. Sakura dressed in the first comfortable clothes she managed to get her hands on - a pair of soft joggers she'd found on the cold hard floor of her bedroom and a t-shirt, and stepped outside of the house. She took a deep breath of air and stood still, taking in the sounds and sights of Konoha's nightlife for a few minutes, it wasn't pleasant in the slightest (the smell of piss rarely is), but it was her home. What she was used to, and that was what mattered really. As Sakura slowly crept away from her home, the unusually pleasant scent of dango caught her nose, so she decided to go and buy some to fill her empty, churning stomach in the hopes that maybe some nice food would calm her down slightly.
As Sakura weaved through the streets she'd known her whole life, the sheer ridiculousness of her situation caught up with her in a way it hadn't before. It had never occurred to Sakura before that normal children who have normal childhoods don't grow up dreaming of being child soldiers and of winning glorious fights with supernatural powers most people can only dream of. It had never occurred to her before that maybe her life would be nicer, and without trauma, if she had followed the path of the many merchant generations before her who lead nice, quiet, simple lives and lived to see children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren in a way she probably wouldn't. As she thought about this idea, the more unappealing this idea felt to her. Sakura felt as though if she leads this kind of simple but peaceful life, she would lose the will to live, that she would die out of boredom and inaction, and sure, maybe life would be less dangerous and she wouldn't be plagued with nightmares and trauma at every step of the way, but she just couldn't imagine herself settling down with a husband or wife and children. She couldn't imagine herself in her family's vegetable fields picking the fruits of her labor to sell later on in the day. That life wasn't suited to her, she hated the very concept of living a normal life without action and adventure and taking peaceful strolls through meadows while fireflies danced in front of her eyes like tiny delicate fairies and the pungent scent of flowers wafted under her nose. The very idea of it scared Sakura if she was being honest. She didn't want to lead a boring life where nothing happened, she wanted to make a difference in the world, or at least for the people she cared about, and this was the way of doing that. It didn't matter that she woke with a start every night with tears burning her eyes and a bubbling volcano of self-hatred burning in her heart because she was helping people, and that's what mattered.
Sakura arrived at her destination - the dango stand at the end of the high street not minutes later and after a short conversation with the very friendly owner, walked away to find a wall to sit on or a tree to sit in the enjoy her late night treat. Eventually, she found a nice tree which she walked up to sit and people-watch while her small part of the world carried on around her. Sometimes it was nice to just pretend she wasn't human and instead was just a narrator in a story giving the people around her stories that curled and intertwined with each other in a way human relationships often do. As Sakura watched the world go by underneath her, she felt the painful knot that had worked its way into her heart through stress and anxiety loosen until she felt normal again.