Weeks pass.
Weeks of retreating from the once casual touches of my friends and what was left of both of my families, small brushes and touches would riddle me first with disgust, and now… I think I even fear it.
I still can't look Kakashi in the face.
When I get up in the morning I feel like I'm a thousand years old. I move slowly, I'm so hungry I feel weighed down in the middle. I take a cold shower to shock myself awake, and then I eat…something. I don't remember what it was.
I'm so tired.
I curl back up in bed to listen to a thunderstorm roll in. My room is so dark, that I forget to check the clock as thunder lulls me back to sleep.
I dream. A middle age man is clutching at my arm, begging me to save him of an incurable disease, pleading with me for a life I cannot give him back. It cuts to a little boy, barely nine, with big wide eyes that pierce me with their hopefulness, and I have to tell him somehow he has stage four leukemia, and his small hand is icy cold on my skin. Then suddenly it's Kakashi, coming down the street towards me, with a look in his eye that could melt the sun, reaching towards me with his large, firm, hand, and a grim set to his mouth behind his mask.
I shock myself awake, legs flying off of the edges of my bed, my head slamming back into the headboard as I gasp, a breath caught in my throat, and I'm forced to cough.
After that it's too hard to stop the tears, and I find myself laying there until the storm passes, and I glance at my clock.
I'm almost an hour late.
"I'm sorry I'm late."
When I make it to shishou's office, she frowns at me, and as I settle behind the desk outside her office, I see it deepen out of the corner of my eye, and I sigh.
"What is it, shishou?" I ask.
"Sakura….are you okay?" she asks me, her eyes piercing me, and I can't meet her gaze.
"Of course, why wouldn't be?" I ask as I stand back up, and she gets out from behind her desk.
"Sakura, everyone's been noticing how tired you've been. How jumpy. Please, tell me what's wrong." She asks of me, and steps closer still.
I back up again. "Shishou, really, nothing's the matter. I'm just not sleeping very well. I think I need a new mattress."
"Stop lying." She orders. She reaches out to grab my shoulder, and I awkwardly back up towards the wall, trying to escape her grasp.
"Shishou..." I say, sounding desperate now, begging her. "Don't…"
She connects with my collarbone, and I flinch deeply, connecting with the paneled wall behind me, a thud freezing time in the cluttered office. The sunlight and peaceful scene I see from the windows mock me, as I start to sweat, and tremble, terrified.
"Don't…Don't touch me!" I whisper, choking on my own breath and too much saliva and panic. I shove her slightly, not even liking touching her back, knowing if she held on too long she'd betray me, hurt me even. Take too much.
I want to start running, and I turn when her voice freezes me better than any restraining touch ever could.
"I'm setting up an appointment for you. You need help Sakura, and I'm letting you know when it is. If you don't show up I'm not letting you be registered for active duty until you do."
I want to whirl around and exclaim at how unfair it is, when Sasuke was allowed to wallow in his self induced apathy for the longest time, but complaints will get you nowhere with a powerful woman like Shishou, and I steady my shoulder and walk out the door.
I don't hear from her again until that night, when a messenger hawk brought me a slip of paper with merely a time and a date on it:
"12:45 tomorrow, Ibiki"
I crumple it in my fist and curl back up in bed, my hands grasping my cold feet like a child sulking after being sent to bed with no dinner, only I sent myself home from work, leaving poor Shizune to handle Tsunade by herself.
I can't bring myself to feel any guilt, however, and I can't make myself be ashamed of my reaction or my actions. The thought of even Shishou's hands on my skin makes me...shudder.
It's repulsive, disgusting, allowing a person to have that much control over me.
I just can't handle it.
I know my way around the interrogation headquarters. I probably know too well for someone my age, but when you're the third best medic Konoha has left to offer, you're needed a lot to heal the people being…interrogated. There is a reason the hallways has a slight downwards grade towards a big creepy drain, and the rooms all sort of…pour into it. The floors all used to be white, but now they're sort of a grayish-orange, and a deep red in some spots, after years, decades, of bloodshed to find other nations' secrets and to protect Konoha's own.
Ino works down here, using her skills as one of the Yamanaka clan to help assist in any way she can, and her supervisor is Ibiki, one of the scariest men currently living.
He doesn't give off the aura of "cuddly therapist" but he does know the human mind, and if I'm too terrified to do some introspection, maybe he can help me.
But I don't think I need any help.
The painfully bright lights seem at odds with the actual interrogation rooms, but Ibiki's office is gently lit with two lamps and natural light from a window, a bookshelf sits in the corner, covered with old, worn looking books with titles like "Mind and Body: The Inter-connection" and "Jutsus for Mind-Control" and other vaguely terrifying things.
The sun is still shining, but another storm is on the distance, I can smell it through the window, hot, damp air being driven in by a surprisingly cool breeze, bringing a smell of rain into the room.
I sit on the soft, squishy chair and hesitantly lean back. I'm almost relaxed when Ibiki barges in himself, his taciturn face looking into a file. I jot when I realize it's mine, my past, my present, my personal life.
Every mission I've ever had, my relationships, my teammates, the many different women I call mother, my teachers, the man from Ichiraku.
I feel startlingly bared to him right now, and I feel the same as when someone tries to grab my hand. Stop, you're taking too much.
"I would prefer if you didn't read into me so much, Morino-san," I say. "It makes me nervous."
He looks at me for the first time, at my calm, quietly collected demeanor, and smirks.
"Your façade will be a tough one to crack," he remarks, disregarding my statement, at first. "Very well. I'll play along."
He sits behind his desk, his large, scar covered frame barely fitting underneath it.
"Let's begin, shall we?" he says.
Sorry that update was a little later after the first two. I was on a roll when I wrote them, plus Kaka-saku kind of makes my head spin with a delirious kind of happiness, but I've been busy.
Hope you like the chapter! Please review if you find any mistakes, I'll be more than happy to correct them.