I have a house, of sorts. It has a living room and a kitchen and a bathroom and a bedroom. It has lots of windows out the back and in the kitchen, and it's decorated with bright colours, from when I was a girl. It used to be so much more to me, but now it is just a house. It's just a place where I live.
After telling the elders of my failure I return here. I don't know what to do. My mind is racing in all different directions, but none of them are leading me anywhere I want to be. I want to run away, but I settle for running around the city. It doesn't take me long to circle the city and return to my doorstep again – too little time actually, so I decide to run further again. I just want to stop thinking, but even while running I can't keep my brain from buzzing at me.
Stop thinking, stop thinking.
I should have acted differently; I could have used all my chakra to at least try to save the others, instead I had a little left, just enough to return to life.
I should have stopped Sasuke. I should have tried harder anyway. I should never have been there. Why did I have to arrive just as he was leaving?
Stop it please.
The sky has been dark for hours when I return to my kitchen, but I can see the lights of Konoha out my window. I eat what was left in my cupboards from before I left, more out of necessity than any feeling of hunger. I can not allow my body to become feeble. I can not be useless ever again.
In the morning, I will go shopping and buy real food I decide before falling into bed.
Even when I am asleep my brain pesters me.
"Only a dream." I murmur, but all the same I run after Sasuke as he walks away. I want to see if maybe, even if only in my dreams, I could have stopped him.
He stops and I close the distance between us. "Sasuke!" I yell after him, and he turns. His eyes are red, and he uses them to look through me.
"Such a worthless heart." He hisses.
The ground feels strange under me. I look down and realize I'm standing in quicksand. I look up at Sasuke in horror. A trap. "Help me Sasuke, please."
But he only watches as I sink deeper and deeper into the sand. I too watch, transfixed, as it rises up past my calves and thighs, until it reaches my shoulders and then my face. One last time I call out to Sasuke before I am swallowed up, but I receive no reply.
To my surprise I come out the other end, in a desert. All around me dunes of sand rise, shifting slowly in the wind.
I start to climb.
Once I reach the top of dune I find a pile of rocks on the other side. In the cracks between the rocks tiny purple flowers grow out of the sand. I reach out to touch one and it crumples under my touch. I pull back, but trip on a rock and fall backwards. Once I'm on my back, I find it rather nice and I lay there, watching tiny clouds float past in the sky. A small lizard crawls across my collarbone and into the shade of the rocks underneath me.
"Only a dream."
Three days pass very slowly when you have nothing to do. For three days all I can do is train and recover, not that the two things go together very well. In that time too, I go to the library and look into the archives to try and figure out what's been going on in the month since I left. It seems not much. Still Konoha is under attack by mysterious ninjas who wear blank headbands, and still, there is not a cloud in the sky.
Every shrine I pass on my way around the city is full of offerings. Anything for rain. We ask the gods for help; we ask each other for help, but nothing is coming. It seems so hopeless.
But I know it is not.
I pass by the Yamanaka flower shop on my way back to the house. It's not really on the way, but I make the detour anyway. Ino's parents still own the place, but it is closed now. No flowers will grow where there is no water, and no one will buy flowers where there is so much fear.
I would have. My house is so lonely, even with the bright colours.
It's lonely because I live in it.