It feels good to be angry. To be rude. To spite and disdain and pick people apart. To crush. To reach inside someone and turn their dial down to the lowest setting. It's an empty, cigarette-like joy she receives from this, from hurting people. All the collected, internal pain - released, turned into violence. There is something liberating about violence. About that crunch of bone as her fist, her knuckles, dive inside her enemies skulls, sinking through the brain matter like putty, coming out the other side or her fist just settling into the crater that was their head. Everyone is fragile, to her. Everyone is made of glass, rotted wood, melting butter. She stands, towering, above them, snarling, smirking, shouting her famous war-cry, pummeling the palm of her left hand with the rock of her right fist. Her black, fingerless gloves. Her pink-red bandanna, zip-up coat, her dark-grey spandex shorts, and her navy blue shinobi sandals. They, her enemies, see a flower petal, all the pink, the bright green eyes, the small thin body. They see a healer, a doctor, someone weak and ineffectual on the battlefield. But then, then she lunges back, she cocks her elbow, she shoots - and the ground splits like a crushed windshield, the forest becomes a maelstrom of smashed trunks and shrapnel-branches, the skeletons of her targets are exposed, bloody and white, crumpled, turned into ground dust. The normal shinobi, they are like mannequins to her, like ice sculptures, like papier-mâché.
They are weak, yes.
So, why does it feel so good? To crush, to pick them apart?
It's a - it's the joy of her own personal slum, the joy of depravity and listlessness, the joy of depression and self-loathing and hate. Something spiky and excusable. Allowable, permissive. To dominate is to feel alive. To destroy is to empower. Violence is liberation. Healing is the opposite. That is her, isn't it? Two opposite halves, coming together, happening simultaneously. Destruction and the putting of things back together. Opening wounds, then closing them. The snapping of twig-like bones, then the building of hospitals. One part is a cackling, mad thing, a liberating wild thing. The other part is a studious, compassionate thing, a thing of warmth, friendliness, and care. How does she swim between these dualities? How does she structure herself within this dichotomy?
But, oh, they are weak. The others. The normal people. The people who cannot blow fire from their lips, who cannot change into one hundred of themselves, who cannot manipulate and trap. Those who cannot bend shadows to their will or see inside the minds of others or become a giant of oneself. The others, the normal ones, they are too weak. Yet, she and the healers are the only ones who can save them. This is the paradox. How do you disdain, disrespect, a person while also keeping them alive and well and healthy? Isn't it easier to let the scalpel fall into their throats? Or to prescribe them too high of doses, or too strong of pills, or - and what about the worst people, the rapists, the murderers, the genocides experts? How does she reconcile it when those people are lying, naked and split open, on her operating table? Do they become just bodies to her? Just procedures, measurements? But then, then in that removed place, in that formal medical distance, where does compassion go? Isn't healing an act of care, a thing made of emotion and decision and the desire to help and protect?
Yet, it feels good, too. It feels good to be rude, to be disdainful, to be spiteful. It feels good to hurt and to break things. Does it feel good to close wounds? To soothe scars? To extract poison from bloodstreams? It must, it has to. A different kind of joy. Something more whole, more fulfilling, more tear-like. The women and the men, Sakura knows, none of them know what they are doing. They cannot, they should not. They can only keep acting, keep working, keep striving, towards the paladin future, and then one day, perhaps, maybe, our great-grandchildren might get there, to that perfect place, where the bad things don't feel good anymore and the good things are mundane within their normalcy. Yes, maybe that will be okay. Okay, she breathes, okay, and she slips on the white plastic gloves, the cream-colored mask, like a shinobi of sterility, and gets to work, with her scalpels, her needles, her threads, and her glowing warm palms.