Sakura startles herself into full wakefullness, as per usual. The low levels of anxiety in her gut level off as she conducts a scan of the area.
No hostiles, she signs in Konoha Standard. There's nobody else in the cave to see witness her communicating, but she likes to keep her mind sharp.
There was a time when Sakura, a few weeks deep in denial and depression, wandered around the ruined outskirts of Konoha in a daze. Each step forward felt meaningless and the days dragged on as she searched beneath rubble and ruin for any survivors of Pein's attack. With Katsuyu at her side, Sakura choked down dust and tears in the face of her own hopelessness.
She visited the broken compounds of each clan, searching desperately for survivors. As she skirtined around the old Uchiha compound, Sakura realized she had never stepped inside most of these places before and this certainly wasn't how she had envisioned her first look inside would go.
Each broken down home and the corpses strewn around it was another reminder of the generations of shinobi families who had lived and died here. Under any other circumstances, Sakura would have felt guilty taking priceless tomes of knowledge and clearly important scrolls away from their heritage sites.
Unfortunately, hours of empty labor and pulling corpses rotting under the harsh Konoha sun had cured her of a variety of emotional responses. Apathy was, for a time, Sakura's only option.
She shudders, and tugs the memory of Konoha and that final funeral pyre into the back of her mind. The flames reached toward the sun like sunflowers, burning brighter than even Naruto's Will of Fire. They had eclipsed her vision. Sakura remembers her eyes watering from the thick smoke and the naseau of burning human flesh. The smell hstayed with her, gripping her throat lie a vice and locking her appetite, even as she ran away from the evidence of her final visit home.
Sakura was certain it had burned its way into her memory forever, perhaps even embeded itself into her lungs.
Her only hope for days now has been to encounter other fleeing Konoha shinobi or perhaps those, like she, that had been out of the village at the time of the attack. Instead, the only thing Sakura has found so far has been bodies, strewn like shells around a beach. Most had been concentrated near the village's outkirts or around the little farming villages close to Konoha.
Others...Sakura avoids glancing at Ino's corpse. It has long since entered a state of rigor mortis.
Clearly, Pein and his allies liked to give chase.
Sakura sighs as she shifts on the hard ground and cracks her joints. She can feel her shishou's judgemental gaze on her from beyond the grave anytime she goes too long with no training or anytime she forgets to passively gather more chakra in the conspicuous seal on her forehead. She keeps hoping that she won't need to use any of these measures, but it's best not to have to find out which moves she no longer remembers in the middle of a fight.
A familiar bitter feeling blooms in the corners of her mouth, wrapping around her head.
Another tension headache? Just what I need.
Sakura counts backwards from three before abruptly rising. She spares Ino's wrapped body one more tender look and then sets it on fire, in typical Konoha fashion.
With the weight of her perilously small pack on her shoulders, Sakura gathers the rest of her few supplies and runs out of the cave.
Step one: get the hell out of here. Step two... Sakura's mind, always her greatest point of pride and her best weapon, doesn't fill in the blank. Instead, she runs.
warning: exposition central