Despite her young age, Haruno Sakura was neither stupid nor unobservant. For the past year, ever since the Hokage himself had taken her from the orphanage and placed her in an apartment of her own, she had noticed how the people of the village treated her. It was almost enough to make her want to ask him to take her back to the orphanage, but every time she thought about asking, something made her change her mind. At least in her apartment she had safety and the illusion of privacy, if not necessarily the reality, and that was worth any number of hateful glares and muttered insults.
Demon-girl…hope she dies…murdering bitch…like to drag her into an alley and—shut up, do you want the ANBU to hear you?
She couldn't understand why the elite ANBU would care what happened to her when even her own ninja guards didn't, but the threat of their attention always seemed to make people be quiet. Once, she asked the Hokage, on one of his occasional visits to her apartment, just why everyone seemed to despise—a new word she had read in a book and found quite relevant to her life—her. The old man had gotten a sad look on his face and changed the subject, asking her if she was getting enough to eat. It was another four months before he came back to visit her, and she never asked him that question again. Sakura was nothing if not a fast learner.
If the adults were cold and cruel to her, the village's children could be positively vicious. Even the few who made tentative attempts at befriending her soon found themselves pulled away from her by their parents, and none of them ever spoke kindly to her twice. At times, she almost found herself wondering if her real name wasn't "Freak-Hair" or "Melon Head," or any one of a hundred other taunting nicknames they found for her—and unlike the adults, restrained by either some small remaining sense of shame or, more likely, the occasionally-seen presence of her guards, the children were perfectly willing to progress from verbal to physical abuse.
She learned to sew out of necessity; otherwise, her meager supply of clothing would have been torn to shreds within weeks, thanks to all the playground "accidents" in which she found herself involved. Of course, her patched clothes simply provided yet another inspiration for insults and petty torments, but she was used to that. At least she could feel safe while she slept, now. Sakura's time at the orphanage had taught her the value of such seemingly simple concepts.
Eventually, she found that the novelty of harassing her had apparently worn off to some extent, and, so long as she stayed away from the other children, they would ignore her for the most part. Persuading herself that she preferred it that way, she made it her goal to be as unobtrusive as possible. She never took part in classroom discussions—not that any of her teachers ever called on her even when she had tried—and, during breaks, could always be found sitting by herself as far away from everyone else as possible, hunched over defensively with her knees drawn up against her chest.
She would try to read, sometimes, but the presence of a book seemed to be a magnet for those among her peers who still enjoyed the occasional game of "torment the pink-haired weirdo," and, after she returned the second ruined book in as many days, the librarian refused to let her check out anything else. Despite the damage to his precious books, though, he seemed to be the only person in the village aside from the Hokage who didn't hate her. He still wasn't quite friendly to her, but from what she had seen, he wasn't friendly to anyone, not even the high-ranking officials who occasionally came to the library in order to look up historical records. Curiously, that almost made her feel better than if he had been nice only to her, for all she really wanted was to be treated like everyone else—good or bad—and not singled out for who she was.
As a result, she found herself spending more and more time in the musty library, fascinated by stories of the village's history and the brave ninja who had made such sacrifices, even up to their very lives, in its name. And, because Sakura was a clever girl who excelled at piecing together metaphorical puzzles, one day she realized that amidst the hundreds of thick tomes and ageing scrolls, she had found the answer to the question she had asked the Hokage so many months ago.
- - -
"A demon…inside me?" Sakura whispered, barely able to believe the conclusion she had reached after over a month of reading and trying to find books with the right information she needed to understand what she had read. Hesitantly, after looking around to make sure nobody else was watching, she lifted up the hem of the faded red dress she was wearing. She had become so used to the strange black design around her navel that she almost didn't notice it any more, but now she looked at it with new eyes and shuddered involuntarily at what it seemed to mean.
The scroll spread out on the table in front of her probably should have been placed in one of the special archives for ninja materials; certainly, despite the fact that it contained no actual combat moves, it did not belong in the general circulation section. It had taken her several weeks to read through even a part of it, and she understood very little of what she had managed to read, but the unnamed author had included a number of diagrams—and, to her surprise, she found she somehow recognized parts of more than a few of them.
It took her another week to realize where she had seen the diagrams, or at least something that strongly resembled them, and when she did, she forced herself to reread those sections of the scroll more carefully than she had ever read anything before in her life. Tattooed on her stomach were parts of half a dozen different seals listed in the scroll titled "Advanced Spirit Containment and Filtration Techniques," linked together with other symbols she couldn't find anywhere else she had looked.
While she had no idea what her seal was meant to do, it seemed obvious that it had something to do with a powerful spirit of some sort—and not a friendly one, or the symbols would have been very different. Suddenly, the villagers' whispers of "demon girl" and "hellspawn" began to make a frightening amount of sense to her, and she tugged her dress down again to cover up the black markings that had taken on a newly sinister meaning. Like building blocks falling into place, more and more half-remembered scraps of information began to fit together in her mind.
The Fourth Hokage had been the undisputed master of Fuuinjutsu—mystical sealing techniques—even to the point of overtaking his teacher in the art, the legendary Sannin Jiraiya. Eight years ago, he had died killing the Nine-Tailed Fox, perhaps the most powerful demon-spirit recorded in the history of the Leaf. One of the seals partially replicated on Sakura's stomach seemed to have something to do with blood sacrifices, if she was reading the scroll at all correctly. The villagers, or at least the older ones, seemed to think of her as some sort of demon, even if they never quite said it out loud, and their hatred of her always reached a fever pitch right around the time of her birthday—the same day the Nine-Tails had attacked the village and the Fourth had sacrificed his life to kill it.
But he didn't kill it, did he? It's still here, in me, and they all know it. She barely made it to the bathroom before vomiting up everything she had eaten that day.
- - -
The next day, and the next week after that, found Sakura huddled in her tiny apartment, hardly moving from where she lay curled up on her bed. Nobody would notice, she knew—or if they did notice, they certainly wouldn't care. It was getting towards the end of the school year, and with the upcoming all-important tests required for entering the ninja academy next year occupying the attention of everyone in her class, she wasn't even worth sparing the time to harass in passing, let alone specifically look for.
Perhaps her guards had reported her lack of activity to someone, but if so, nobody had cared enough to come check on her, not that she was surprised. The Hokage probably did care—he seemed to genuinely enjoy it when he visited her, even if he was a little sad most of the time—but she knew she wasn't important enough to be brought to his attention. He had to worry about the whole village, not just one young orphan girl.
Even if, by some miracle, he had come to see her, she had no idea what she would say to him. She had so many questions, but at the same time, none of them really mattered now. Before, she had dreamed that if only she could become a strong and brave ninja, like the ones in the stories she read, then maybe then everyone would like her. Sometimes, on days when people had been especially cruel to her, she thought about the monument to the fallen heroes.
Poor Sakura, she had imagined them saying, as they looked up at her name carved into the stone and left flowers or little offerings of food like she had seen some people do. We were so mean to her, and she still saved all of us. Why weren't we nicer to her?
Now she knew, though. Everyone hated her because she had the thing that nearly destroyed the village living inside her. She would never be allowed to become a ninja, and if she were to die, it would probably be a day of celebration rather than mourning. Certainly, her name would never appear on any monument.
She wanted to yell at them that it wasn't her—that she had never done anything bad; she was a good girl and had never asked to have a demon sealed in her—but she knew it would make no difference. Her classmates didn't know about the demon, she was sure, but they still hated her just as much as the adults did. Part of her wanted to hate them back, but that wouldn't matter either. She could hate them all she wanted and it wouldn't change a thing, wouldn't make them accept her or like her, which was all she really wanted.
"I just wish they could see I'm Sakura, not the demon…" she murmured into her tear-stained pillow as her eyes drifted closed.
- - -
"Sakura? Wake up, please. I would like to talk with you." The voice, accompanied by a gentle shaking sensation, gradually brought Sakura out of her nice, comfortable half-asleep state and back to something resembling full awareness.
No you wouldn't, Sakura thought to herself as she reluctantly sat up and rubbed her eyes. Nobody ever wants to talk to me, not even— "Hokage-ojiisan?" All thoughts of sleepiness were abruptly forgotten as she saw who was standing beside her bed.
The old man chuckled at her surprise. "Yes, Sakura," he said. "I would apologize for waking you, but you shouldn't be in bed at two in the afternoon, especially not on a school day." His face attempted to form a chiding expression, but Sakura thought he looked more concerned than anything.
Did he care? If it had been anyone else, she was sure the answer to that question would have been an emphatic negative, but the Hokage was the only person who had ever come to visit her. Sometimes he even brought presents for her, or took her out to eat. Just the fact that he was in her room, when she knew he was always busy, seemed to say that he cared about her to some extent.
"Sakura?" Now he definitely looked worried, and she realized she must have missed something he said. "Are you feeling all right?"
She nodded, almost automatically. "I'm fine," she said, though she looked away from him so he wouldn't see the truth in her eyes; while she might not be sick, she was feeling anything but fine at the moment. She hated lying to him, but some part of her mind was practically screaming to her that she couldn't let anyone else know that she knew about the Nine-Tails inside her.
She had somehow managed to forget, though, that despite his kindly demeanor, the Hokage was a ninja, and a very skilled one at that—certainly more than capable of telling when a grade-schooler was trying to lie to him. "Sakura," he said, a mild warning in his voice, "you're about forty years too young to be able to fool me. I know you don't like school, but you've never been absent for more than a day at a time before now, and you haven't been to the library recently either. As your guardian, I need to know if something is wrong. I can't help you if you won't tell me anything."
Help me? How? Sakura thought, her earlier, kindly thoughts now turning bitter. Even the Hokage couldn't stop the hateful whispers or accusing glares she was faced with every time she left her apartment. He certainly couldn't force parents to let their children play with her, or tell the children not to call her names and shove her around—assuming he even knew about things like that. Her guards probably didn't think they were important enough to be worth telling him.
"Nothing's wrong," she repeated, keeping her eyes trained firmly on the floor. "I wasn't feeling good, but I'm fine now."
The Hokage looked unconvinced. "Is it because of the ninja academy selections?" he asked, reaching out and nudging her chin up so she had no choice but to look him in the eyes. "Despite what you might be thinking, I do know how your classmates treat you, and I'm sure it hasn't been easy listening to them recently."
"You know?" Sakura blurted out, recoiling from him. "You know what they do to me, and how everyone treats me, and you haven't done anything?" Conveniently forgetting her own thoughts of a moment earlier, she glared at him and scooted back on her bed so she was out of his immediate reach.
She found herself unable to maintain her anger, though, when she saw his face fall. She had always thought of the Hokage as strong and powerful, but now she realized that underneath the ceremonial trappings of hat and garb, he was old, and the hint of sadness she had always seen in him when he visited her revealed itself in every line and crease on his aged face. She opened her mouth to apologize, but before she could say anything, he lifted one hand to stop her.
"Forgive me, Sakura," he said quietly. "You are such a bright girl that I sometimes forget you are indeed still a girl, and not a young woman with experience to match your intelligence. Yes, I know how the people of this village behave towards you, but that doesn't mean I can stop them. I am only the Hokage, not a god, and I have no control over how people act so long as they obey the laws."
Almost against her will, Sakura nodded, his words uncomfortably echoing her own thoughts. It's not fair! she wanted to yell at him. Even knowing why they all hated her, it still wasn't fair. I didn't do anything wrong, so why are they punishing me?
"However," the Hokage continued, interrupting her thoughts, "there are some things I do have control over, one of those being the ninja academy selection process. Regardless of what your classmates might have said to you, you have just as much right as any of them to take the tests, if that is what you wish to do."
Sakura could barely believe her ears. After learning about the demon, she had given up all hope of ever becoming a ninja, but now the Hokage himself was telling her she still had a chance. That was all she really wanted, a chance, because she was sure that once her classmates got to know her, they wouldn't hate her any more—and at the ninja academy, they would have to get to know her. All the stories she had ever read talked about how ninjas had to work together with their teammates.
"Could I really?" she asked wistfully. "I know I missed school, but I promise I'll study hard and be ready for the tests. I really want to get in."
As if by magic, the tired, sad look melted away from the Hokage's face, and he knelt down beside her bed and put his arms around her. "Of course you can," he told her. "Whether you pass the tests or not is up to you, but I promise you'll have the chance, and I'm sure you won't have any problems if you really do want it that much."
Smiling, her eyes bright with unshed tears, Sakura hugged him back before pulling away a little and letting him stand up again. "Thank you, Hokage-ojiisan," she said as she stood up too, walking over to her wardrobe to pick out something to wear other than her pajamas. "I'm going to study so hard and be the best ninja ever, you'll see!"
With a nod and a soft laugh, the Hokage turned and left her room, having completely forgotten that Sakura never answered his original question.
- - -
Author's Notes: Well, this is almost certainly the quickest I'll ever update, since I already had this partially written and didn't want to let a short prologue stand on its own for too long. Hopefully, this chapter has provided some insight into how I'm presenting Sakura's basic personality in this story: intellectually brilliant--a genius in the classic sense of the word--but very emotionally and socially underdeveloped, for obvious reasons. It seems like a logical extrapolation from canon, especially the flashbacks in her chuunin exam fight with Ino, but I welcome any comments or criticism. I hope you enjoyed this! Next chapter will deal with her experiences at the ninja academy.