go.
NINJA WERE NOTHING but trouble. That was what ran through Kuchiki Sachiko's mind as she surveyed the rain pounding down over the miles of rice fields she owned. She had harvested what she could before it had gotten truly awful, a few sacks worth a pretty ryo with the shortages from skirmishes between Iwagakure and Kumo. It would line her pockets for a brief period, feed her children well enough until their bellies ached a little less, but it wouldn't last—it never did, with conditions like these. She was fifty-six, going on fifty-seven, with her youngest only nine years old and, fortunately, her last. She had lived long enough to take part in wars and make her peace with them, and with another brewing on the horizon, she knew her days were limited, and her childrens' even more so.
Sachiko almost loathed to lie to them; to stare into their innocent faces and wide eyes, so much like her own with her husband's nose and ears, and tell them that, yes, everything would be okay, and that Kaa-chan would take care of them and make sure they had everything they wanted. It was obvious enough to her older children, twenty and twenty-five respectively, that she lied out of necessity, and they turned a blind eye to it and pitched in where they could. She might find a few ryo tucked into her worn, tattered shoes; she might find a couple stowed away in the pots and pans she rarely used, because they couldn't afford so much food for a single meal; and she might even discover some hidden deceptively within the threadbare stuffed animals in the corner. She would deny the help if they asked, so they took stealthier measures to make sure she took it and never returned it. Sachiko, despite the offense taken at being perceived as unable to take care of her own family, would flip the ryo in her hands in thought, grimace at the image of ribs protruding out from under skin, and hide them away on the inside seam of her apron and sew it shut.
She had saved a hefty sum this way, obtained healthier, heartier meals for her children and grandchildren: deer in the morning, procured from the butcher down the street who used his former ninja skills for less than acceptable means; vegetables and fruit for lunch to replace what nutrients they had lacked in the years before; and for dinner, rice to fill them up and bone broth to wash it down, because clean water was only seen once in a blue moon. She would never give her children the feces-laced, cloudy water that the rest of her village was drinking that made them ill and, eventually, gave them enough parasites that eating wouldn't be their first concern.
"Kaa-chan," one of her children called for her. His tiny hands were embedded in the wash basin, their clothes turning the water dark with dirty, mud, sweat, and tears. When she turned to him obligingly, hand falling to her sternum, she saw he was not looking at her, but out beyond the rice fields, eyes trained on something she couldn't see through the rain with her blurry vision. "There's someone out there."
Sachiko huffed. "Out in this weather? They'd have to be insane, or—"
She swallowed the words when the rain brought a dark red trail of blood to her porch steps, just shy of her feet. It cut a crimson swathe through the clear water, disappearing as quickly as she had seen it, but she knew the look of a lethal amount of blood, having seen it many times before. When she looked up again, peering above the rice, she watched the abnormally tall stalks—nourished by her kekkai moura—sway as they were pushed aside, and violently. When they bowed, they did not return to their former stance, and she stiffened as a head of pink hair became steadily more visible the closer they got. At the basin, she could hear her child drop the soap into the dirty water and get to his feet, coming to her side to watch as the intruder crawled through their crops and nurtured them with their blood.
"Kaa-chan, we should help them," he said, after a minute, watching the same threads of blood float through the water as she had. "They could be really hurt!"
Her mouth pulled in distaste. It was, in all likelihood, a ninja who had found themselves fatally wounded and stumbled their way from the war fields and into their crops by accident. She knew how this would go: the ninja would approach them, offer them some halfhearted promise while delusional from blood loss, in exchange for healing or a safe space to stay; then, when all was said and done, they would apologize, for what they had said was untrue and something they couldn't do, offer them a paltry sum of ryo or expensive ninja equipment they knew nothing to do with and couldn't sell, and vanish back into forest, either ending up dead or somewhere they were never coming back from. Sachiko had been on the butt-end of a bad deal one too many times, and this was a risk she wasn't going to take. Not again.
"If they really want help," she said snidely, turning him around by the shoulders and pushing him inside,"they'll make it to the door and knock. If I'm feeling considerate, I might help them."
"But Kaa-chan, that's cruel," he said, as if he knew what cruelty was, but didn't fight her as she wheeled him towards the kitchen and out of sight from the broken windows. "What if they die?"
Sachiko flicked him in the back of the head. "They're ninja. They know what they're getting into. Now sit and eat your lunch while I go get your siblings and nieces and nephews."
At that, she watched his face contort and sour. "I still don't understand why we have to keep Nii-san's kids, too. Aren't there enough of us as it is?"
She deliberately ignored his hypocritical comment—having gone straight from wishing to help a stranger and right to resenting his relatives for being in the same home as him— and made her way to the front side of their hovel. Outside, squealing and playing in the mud, much to her delight, were her six missing children, each one thoroughly covered in it. She doubted they even realized they were playing in a mixture of dirt, cow feces, and fertilizer, and brought her fingers to her mouth in a shrill whistle. They stopped and turned to face her with sheepish grins, the rain already clearing them of some of the swill they had just covered themselves in.
"Inside, children," she said, tiredly. She was unable to produce anger when they were having fun, even at the expense of their own health. By morning, they would be moaning and groaning about chores and post-rain cleanup, but they had a little piece of normalcy, and would treasure it despite the consequences. "Wash off in the rain—and do not play anymore—dry off, and get inside. Lunch is ready."
Their 'lunch' was running later than usual, running into their dinner, but there was nothing Sachiko could do about that. The butcher had no more bones to give her and she had only two hundred ryo left to keep them from starving, once again. In the big cities, like Amegakure and Konoha, that would be nothing but chump change, but in their village, it was enough to keep them fed for at least three weeks, provided there were no other extreme shortages in the supply lines. She patted her tiny stockpile of ryo in idle thought, feeling each individual piece and its engravings, and sighed.
If she was lucky, the ninja would die in her fields and might have enough ryo to get them through another month without incident.
When all of her children were clean and dry, they all sat down at the table and began eating their food: an assortment of various lettuces, spinach, tomatoes that she had cut the rotten spots off of, and corn that had seen better days but ran cheap in the market. She forewent her own meal and took up sentry at the window, eyes tracking the unusually still body face down in the mud. Right when she was beginning to believe they were dead, they twitched and pushed up to their hands and began crawling, and even from the distance and her bad eyes, Sachiko knew what an aura soaked in anger felt like. It had been some time since she had felt it, but this was potent, made her eyes sting with tears, and a finger of ice trail up her spine and through the part of her hair.
This was a ninja she wanted no association with.
She pulled a ratty curtain over the windows hastily. What you didn't see wasn't there, so went the old saying, and she desperately hoped blood loss got to the ninja before the night. When her son sent her a quick, knowing look, spooning another forkful of lettuce into his mouth and grimacing at the taste of tomatoes, she knew her hope was for naught: once she laid down to rest, he would be out the door and helping the ninja before she could blink. A hypocritical, sympathetic heart, he was—she wasn't sure if he got it from her or his father.
When night fell and Sachiko laid on the floor over a thin blanket to rest, she knew she had been right when the floorboards creaked and the soft footfalls of small feet echoed through the room. She closed her eyes and hid them in the lumpy, hard pillow, clutching a fistful of ryo to comfort herself, and listened as he turned the knob and opened the door.
Instead of continued feet patter, there was a gasp, and then a loud thud that sounded suspiciously like a body hitting the floor. Sachiko was up and stepping over slumbering children before she had a second thought, yanking her child back from the door and pushing him behind her. Lying face-first on the floor, covered in mud and bleeding all over her already dry rotting floor, was a ninja. Pink strands of hair, dark with water, were plastered to the back of her head, obscuring the mask that was clearly attached to her face. It was a deceptively small figure, that was certain, but Sachiko knew that underestimating a ninja like this one would be her death—if said ninja didn't die first. And this ninja was very clearly ANBU, one of the more dangerous breeds.
"You have to help her," her child said, reminding her of that ill-made promise.
"She didn't knock," Sachiko replied, if only to be petty.
She could feel his glare on the back of her head, harsh and sharp. "You promised."
"Fine." After a moment, she prayed to the heavens that she wouldn't regret this, and with a well placed shove, rolled the ninja to her back. Her breath caught at the strikingly familiar face—not quite Mebuki Haruno's but a very close rendition—and half lidded green eyes, crusted with dried tears, rain, and mud. She looked, overall, like she had been dragged miles down the road and left for the crows. Something that felt a little like obligation welled in her belly, despite her aversion for ninja. "But you're helping."
Without waking the other children, Sachiko dragged the woman to a bare room, tossed down a sheet and sack of rice, laid her down, and got to work. She tore open the vest and discarded it in a corner to air out, the smell gradually turning from wet dog to rank sourness, and tugged up the girl's shirt, but only after telling her son to turn around. She caught the tiny ends of petals sinking into her skin before there were open wounds, deep and crudely glued together, weeping freely onto her floor.
She grimaced and mentally counted the deep punctures as she uncorked a bottle of foul moonshine—her personal stash that she hadn't touched in years—with a high alcohol percentage. She saw over twenty severe punctures, but there were easily thirty or so injuries interspersed in the same area, and poured the liquid over the wounds. It cleaned the skin around it and Sachiko was mildly surprised that it wasn't a particularly deep tan she had, but such a thick layer of grime that it had almost sunk into her skin entirely. When she looked up to her face, her breath stilled in her lungs when she found a pair of bloodshot, green eyes staring at her warily, a hand halfway up and reaching for something hidden in her pants pocket.
Sachiko went still, her gaze darting from that hand to her eyes, and breathed a sigh of relief when said eyes rolled back into her skull and the hand fell to the floor, limp.
She did what she could. Some of it was beyond her knowledge; they were more than just surface wounds, and the poor girl looked like she needed a medical ninja more than some backwater farmer with a handful of ninja experience. She cleaned the area up and stitched them closed, adding the gauze she had found in the ninja's sealing scroll (that she knew how to open, at least) and pinning them in place with senbon that didn't look like they were poisonous and had been rolling around in the bottom of a pouch stuffed full of ration bars.
When she was done, she got to her feet with a loud complaint from her knees. She would be regretting that for a few days to come, but when her child peered around her at the still body in the room, she figured it was worth it.
"Let her rest," she said, ushering him to his own makeshift pallet and laying down on her own. "When she wakes, then you can pester her."
But when morning came, and Sachiko opened the door with a plate of food she had grudgingly made for their guest, no one was there. The sheet had been cleaned, somehow, and folded and put into a corner, only faint blood stains visible upon it. The sack of rice laid atop it, innocent, and even the floors had been scrubbed clean of blood. And there, in the center of the room, was a pile of ryo, haphazardly placed as if she had put it there as an afterthought, along with seven ration bars that had bloody fingerprints on them.
Sachiko harumphed and scooped the ryo up, placing it in her little pocket, and regarded the ration bars with a narrow glare.
"Ninjas." She scoffed, turning and taking the plate with her. "Nothing but trouble."
Sakura had no way of knowing what her unintentional savior had thought of her parting with a vital resource to her survival. She had shelled out three hundred ryo from her meagre supply of just over a thousand, and she knew she couldn't afford to do this again—to go to civilians for help when they were already as troubled as she was. She had tiptoed through the house, inspecting it for any sign that it might have been tampered with, and only found signs of a starving and poor household. She had given them ration bars, as well, to replace the bottle of moonshine she'd found sitting by the door that she was now taking swigs from to distract her from the pain.
It was almost as if her wounds being clean was more painful than them being dirty, really. She took a final swig and corked it, ambling through the forest and avoiding the more social members of the village coming out to play. The woman had looked mildly familiar to her, but nothing immediately obvious was coming to mind for her, and so she dismissed it as something irrational. It wouldn't do her any good lingering on something like that. She was now off-course from Amegakure and, of course, had no way to track Neji now—she would have to go by her instincts and make her way there, if there was anything left of them by now. War Ops, she recalled, were easily wiped out if taken unawares.
It reminded her of Sasuke, in a way—he had taken her unawares, and nearly killed her for it, as well. He might have missed her heart, but he had not missed another vital organ she might have needed, one day. Tsunade had given her a solemn look when she had woken up in the hospital, tugged down her gown, and exposed a grisly scar from hip to hip, and Sakura had known what had happened. He had cut deeply enough to wound her ovaries, and there had been no saving them, as much as her former mentor had tried. It wasn't as if she had any prospects for a future husband; she had originally hoped Sasuke still harbored some flame for her, even after all that time. It had been in the hospital where her love for him had withered and died and turned into something more malicious.
Perhaps it had been then that her problems had started. Sakura's hand went to her belly in thought, darting under her shirt and tracing the scar that still felt raw and fresh, even after almost a year of healing and a unique skin therapy. Her life had spiraled from there, devolving from a broken heart to exile and execution in the span of a few months—though she wasn't so delusional as to think her chakra turning on her like that was because of a broken heart. It had to be something else, something to do with the seal on her head; the Byakugou didn't just change like that. She knew that innately; even Tsunade had said as much, when Sakura inquired if she could change the shape into something less attention-catching, like a circle. She no longer had the well of medical chakra, but a violently shifting lake of chakra that sent a chill through her every time she tried to mold it into some confined shape. Her chakra control, excellent and above even Tsunade's, was her issue, now. She would have to have the recklessness of Naruto and the blind trust in skill that Sasuke had before she could even think about touching that chakra. Not that she even wanted to to begin with.
She paused in walking down the trodden path of broken underbrush and dying grass. What did she want to do? Other than her selfish need to live, what else was there to do? She had no village to fight for, no one to fight for except for herself. She relied on having others to occupy her selfishness, her unnerving sense of right and wrong, but those lines had been blurred and her selfishness was starting to turn inward towards her own wellbeing. She wasn't getting anywhere not touching the malevolent chakra within her veins, and avoiding the deaths her contract required would most certainly kill her.
Living, Sakura decided, just wasn't enough for her.
But then, she thought, as she ducked underneath a set of branches and found herself at a fork in the road, what would be enough for her, in the end?
She ignored the tiny little voice in the back of her head whispering "Nothing," as she avoided the path on the right and set off on the left, walling off the quick succession of imagery that depicted Sasuke Uchiha dead at her hand, mutilated in the same way he had left her, flashing through her mind.
Maybe one day, she would give her ex-teammate the beating he deserved. But for now, she was going to go to the War Ops camp and fulfill her contract's stipulation; after that, if she survived the war, she would entertain the idea of killing Sasuke Uchiha.
And the darker part of her heart told her she wouldn't mind a bit if he was dead.
