Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
Depth
Haruno Sakura had never gotten her hands this dirty before.
That was their job, she would have explained, if anyone had bothered to ask. They didn't, of course—they had no reason to, no reason to bother with the little girl on the sidelines when three heroes loomed so large in their eyes. Yet she kept the explanation regardless of that, because the impossible just might happen, because it was a ghastly-thin strand of self-assurance in a world made by others.
She never thought she would have to discard it so soon.
They loved me. They cherished me. That is why they protected me. She recited a new mantra to her guilty heart. That is why they sheltered me. That is why they stood by me to the last. That is why...that is why...
That was why they suffocated her, and themselves.
And they'd have died again for her if they'd known she'd be digging their graves there, in that peaceful forest so similar to home and still so far away. Covered in dark brown soil mixed with auburn blood from her blistered hands, scraping feverishly away at the earth with a makeshift shovel. Six feet was what she wanted. Six feet—what a distant goal.
They were the ones who had done her digging before; it had come to them naturally. They'd dug her ditches and built her bridges, and she'd never taken the time to cross them. She'd burnt them. Fire was bright and pretty; fire was lively, if a trifle short-lived. It entranced her more. She'd burnt their bridges with relish, with their assistance, with their condescending smiles that she used to mistake for kindness. The kindness shared between equal friends, not between a toy and its superior owners.
That sort of kindness wasn't kindness at all.
They hadn't wanted her to go along with them on this mission, nor the one before it. Every excursion was too dangerous. Every venture beyond the borders of the village was a menace, a deadly risk. They had been right, and she had known it, but she went anyways. Death means nothing to the one inside the cage. Death does not exist in isolation, where the four walls that keep you in also keep the world out. Life is a notion, an obscure theory. Time can slow down, stop, or disappear.
She didn't know how long she'd been digging; many days and many nights and no numbers to name them. The once-shallow hole was now an unsounded depth, a rectangular russet eye staring up at her with placid indifference. Deep enough, her inner self sighed, exhausted from the climb up the side of the miniature abyss.
Maybe too deep.
The bodies, all three of them, were beginning to smell from their perches in the branches of the trees. As she dragged them down, she saw the wounds that covered their torsos and limbs. An arm fell to the ground with a muffled thump, and she tried to do her typical Sakura-esque shudder. Nothing. Not a tingle of sorrow, or compassion, or even disgust. Just a vaguely empty anger, a sense of regret, as she shoved them into the pit.
She shoveled the dirt over them, her mind keeping its distance. She had enough rations to last here for a while. There was a village barely ten miles off. She could ask for directions, hitch a ride from there—
And what if she did? What good would it do? To return to Konohagakure in a lonely procession of one, not worth a fourth of the team she left with? To live with self-hatred for the rest of her life, self-hatred that she could never express for the new watchful faces determined to protect her as the others had before them?
Her eyes strayed back to the hole that was barely half-filled. Her kunai that was more than half-sharp.
She didn't know what she'd done first, but here she was; falling and feeling the pain and the shudder of the earth as the great pile of soil came pouring over her in a deluge of chocolate rain. After all, it was only right that the girl who had never stood by her team would choose to join them now.
Whatever that was, it scared me. I need some sleep.