Story: The Oddity

Title: Therapy

Summary: "The City is like Netherland. Children come here and they never grow up."

Character: Haruno Sakura, who gets way too much shit for being a regular teenage girl.

Disclaimer: Do not own.

Notes: At this point I'm pretty sure no one is reading this . . . which is discouraging. Ah, well. If you're out there, drop me a line. Offer a character suggestion. I'm kind of at a stand-still.


"I don't believe in fate," she says at once.

"Oh?" I ask. She looks young to be so cynical, but I'm not condescending enough to say it aloud. "Why?"

"She doesn't care anymore." The girl eyes me from under a curtain of pink hair. "Why should she? We're too sick to fuck around with."

"Ah," I say. I know, even without the information written in her neat little file, that she is from the Konoha district. They travel in teams in those parts. "Where's the rest of your team?" I ask.

She props her heavy black boots on my desk and blinks at me, her hair falling haphazardly around a face that is too angelic to hold a Konoha sweeper. The wear on her gloves begs to differ.

"Team?" she finally says.

"You're from the Konoha district," I say. "Where are the other three people in your team?" Her little file says that her name is Rin. I highly doubt that it's true.

"Team?" she repeats. "Golly gee, I have no idea what you mean." She tightens the strap on her left glove casually. Her eyes are green and one-dimmensional.

"Who are you looking for?" I ask. I lean back in my chair and remove my glasses. "Hozuki Suigetsu? He's about your age, I believe." She looks at me flatly, but I see I am close. Not him, then. But someone close to him, maybe a member of his own team.

"Never heard of him," she says tonelessly.

"Really?" I feign surprise. "You've never heard of Team Hebi? They're famous in these parts. Or, should I say, infamous." She doesn't move, and it is the immobility that gives away her interest. Someone has trained her well, but I am better. It's my job, after all, to see inside her head.

"No," she says.

"Oh," I say. "Word is that Uchiha Sasuke is from the Konoha district. You wouldn't happen to know him, would you?" The leather in her gloves crinkles as her fist clenches. She is here for the Uchiha boy.

The Uchiha boy has gone, two days before, into the Suna district. I consider telling her this.

"How do you know him?" I ask instead.

"Know who?" she says. "I don't know anyone."

"Uchiha Sasuke. Were you on a sweeper team together? Friends before this?"

There is a twitch in the corner of her lips. "I wouldn't say friends," she says. "I annoy the shit out of him. He annoys the shit out of me."

"Hm," I say. I know the sound is infuriating. "Hm," I say again.

"What?" she demands.

"Nothing," I reply. "Just . . . hm."

We sit in silence for a few minutes.

"He's an idiot," she says finally. "Wants to kill his brother. Won't come home until he does." I know this already, of course. There aren't a lot of people in The City who don't know about the Uchiha detonation that tore up half of the Konoha district.

"Retrieval team?" I ask.

She eyeballs me. "Not technically," she concedes. "He's a teammate."

Ah. Loyalty runs deep in Konoha. It's not something the other districts have grasped yet. Eventually they will, and Konoha's brief stint as head district will end.

Even here, in Nami, the only district that has exiled teams and is always, always neutral in the district wars, we fear the fall of Konoha.

"How long has he been searching?" I don't want to know about this petulant Uchiha boy, who has already been in my office and sat staring at the walls for the requisite hour. I want to know about her, "Rin," who has pink hair and green eyes and dusty knuckles. This is my only chance. By tomorrow, her team will have broken in and taken her back, just as Hebi took Uchiha.

No one stopped them. Nami has long ago given up on saving these children.

"Two years," she says, and for all the weight in the words, it might as well be two centuries.

"You were what, thirteen?" I ask. She nods absently, and doesn't seem to realize that she has just given me her age, one of those few pieces of information we can use. "Have you spent the past two years looking for him?"

She shrugs.

"Learning?" I prompt.

She cracks a knuckle on her left hand. I take this to be assent, but I don't want her apathy.

"Do you honestly think that you'll find him?" I ask, placing my glasses back on my nose. They recreate a barrier, one that I want, for now, to enforce. "Two years is a while. How long were you on a team with him before he left? A year, if that?"

"Sasuke-kun," she snaps, "will come home. If Naruto and I have to break every bone in his body."

I know who she is now.

"Why so defensive," I say, tone mocking. "You must have utter faith in your own abilities of persuasion. How many sweepers have you killed, looking for him? That's quite a few notches in your lipstick case, kid." She reacts as I expect, dropping her feet from my desk with a thump. She jumps to her feet and in seconds is screaming in my face.

"You have no idea," she shrieks, slamming her fists into the surface of my desk. "You have no idea!" She is still yelling when, a minute later, her hour ends and security comes in to take her away.

She is Haruno Sakura.

She has a reputation of being tough and fair and having a healing touch.

She is in love with the Uchiha boy, enough to face exile from the Konoha district to find him.

She is fifteen. She is a child.

She has blood on her hands, blood she will never be able to justify.

And I am just a youth counselor, spending hour-long blocks with children like her, dead inside. They never stay longer than a single night.

The City is like Netherland. Children come here and they never grow up.


This was uplifting, right? Hehe. Thoughts?

Next: No fracking clue.