I'd like to thank everyone for sticking with me this far; I'm teeling you now the rest is going to be one hell of a ride.
If you have any questions about any scientific/medical shiznit, PM me. I researched for an hour; I need to nerd all over SOMEone.
Enjoy.
Naruto walked around Konoha, over and over and over. Something told him, though, no matter how long he walked, that he couldn't get away. He carried his pain with him, tucked into an envelope by a dead girl. It was magnetic, stuck to his skin. He couldn't drop it, even if he wanted to. It was made of glue and memories, and it stuck like a knife in a wound.
He nodded in passing and voiced hasty greetings, missing beats here and there, deviations from his usual demeanor. Walking past, never seeing the same faces twice. Much like life. They didn't know what was going on; they never would. It would all be a horrible accident, just another defection. He could hear them already, gossiping and going chia chia chia behind paper fans and splayed fingers. Little fluttering lies and puzzle pieces… Why-no, how-could she have wanted this?
He had never liked mind games.
Naruto contented himself with sitting on the wide wall surrounding the Konohagakure, the Village Hidden in the Leaves. Watching the lights blink out one by one as night fell was somehow satisfying, giving a sense of finality. It was like so many fireflies dying, one by one by one by one.
He stretched out on top of the wall, hands behind his head and eyes wide open. The manila envelope rested on his stomach, feeling heavier than it could possibly be.
Minutes passed, then an hour. With an anbaric buzz, the streetlights flickered on. Naruto sat up slowly, registering the paper packet's slow slide to the ground next to him. He glared at it. Stupid thing. Can't just leave it be, can I?
And he couldn't. It was like a scab that he picked, over and over until it scarred.
Reluctantly, he pulled the metal tab holding shut the flap to the envelope. Confusion flashed across his face as a folded note slid out from under it. It was about as long as the first, and even more disturbing. Naruto mentally shuddered as Sakura wrote about games, lies, mentalities, and closure. Pushing the painstakingly written note into his pocket to join its predecessor, he pulled out the first of what seemed like an endless supply of thick papers.
He scanned the organized type quickly. Her name was in bold at the top, along with her age, weight, height, and physical statistics, all dated to about five years ago, genin-age. Her photo smiled out at him happily, a small, innocent girl taken back in time.
He riffled through them, one for every year Sakura had completed as a shinobi. He stopped at the most recent one, dated to approximately three months earlier.
The light made the already dark, geometrically perfect typeface even more contrasting. It bleached all the color out of the photograph on the upper right hand corner of the page, leaving its lone inhabitant a pale ghost.
Sakura.
His mouth fell open. She was hardly recognizable as the little genin from the first picture; a completely detached, dead-eyed statue.
There was nothing out of the norm at first; everything there was required for Leaf-nin. The handwritten notes in the sides, though, were a different story. An ugly scrawl that could only belong to the constantly inebriated Hokage was scattered throughout the description of Sakura's health, much of it unintelligible to Naruto. Medications and shorthand of that same science were all the same to him; they made no sense whatsoever.
Squinting at the page, he brought it closer to his eyes in an attempt to decipher the illegible mess that was the Hokage's handwriting.
What Naruto read scared him. He had no idea what in hell dissociative identity disorder was, but obviously, the Hokage suspected her student had it. There was also a paragraph on depression scribbled in the margins, as well as notes in red about parasuicide. Depression? My Sakura-chan? Never! Naruto clenched the edge of the paper tightly, creating a web of wrinkles. Crazy old Tsunade…Fucking paranoid! There's nothing wrong with Sakura-
And then Naruto caught himself. Because there was something wrong with Sakura; Hell, it looked like there had always been. It was like getting the rug pulled out from under you, thinking that you knew everything, but you really knew nothing.
Naruto flopped back onto the wall and threw an arm across his eyes for the second time that day. "Setraline," he said dazedly. "What the hell is setraline?"
Setraline, peroxitine, topiramate…
The streetlight had no answer.