IV

What Strength Is


Her feet hurt from standing for hours on the red bridge, arms propped on the rail, gaze on the running water underneath her. Every second there is a painful prickle of a senbon in her chest, but she bears through it, she bears through the memories, so vivid it is as if Sasuke-kun and Naruto are standing beside her, bickering with each other, waiting as they always have to wait for Kakashi-sensei.

She bears through it, she bears the entire day of waiting and bears when he never comes, not that day and not all the others of that week, and Sakura doesn't cry.

Her throat is raw and so tight she can barely breath, her eyes sting and the river under her is only speckles of light and green, but not a drop falls past her waterline.

Her tears are not like Naruto's, they can't change unmovable wills and they can't touch the hardest coldest of hearts. They are liquid cracks in a shell and not the flames of a burning fire, they are the frail character of a teenage girl, they are weak and they are useless.

She had hope that maybe without the boys there to cover her, he would see her. Why would Kakashi-sensei come when he has no students left? He never saw her and now he is free from pretending he does.

Her feet drag away from the shattered token of Team 7 and she makes a promise to herself never to return there alone.

As she enters her room, the photograph mocks her, the photograph that gave her strength to push through her fear, the photograph that rose the Will of Fire into her, that bound her to her promise of never abandoning her teammates.

It mocks her, it sneers at her and it tears her with sharp icy fingers.

Sakura shouts as she grasps it, picks it up high and just as she whips it away, her hand holds tighter, defying the barriers of her anger and hurt, a direct link to her own core, now only a small wisp of chakra, but alight still.

She turns the frame down, picture hidden against the wood of her bedside table.

She doesn't break it or cut it, she lets it rest there in her own bedroom.

They stay right beside her as she sleeps, right beside her as she sits on her balcony and by her desk, but Sakura doesn't see them as they never saw her.


Only now does Sakura remember this loneliness. It is a hidden memory yanked forward by the familiar loss she feels again. A cold time before Ino found her crying one day and adopted her as a friend, helped build her confidence, when Sakura had only plushies, flowers and Konoha's forest as her company.

Her parents worry but she doesn't have the strength to tuck her sadness in, deep into her chest, and smile. She bares it in her face and she bares it in her voice.

Sakura is no shinobi of Konoha. The hitai-ate sits on her desk but there is no letter, no indication, no summoning from any superior when she no longer shows on the mission desk.

Kakashi-sensei seems to have forgotten her completely, seems to have never even bothered mentioning her to any kind of official system meant to deal with her situation.

Maybe he thinks her too much of a failure to be a shinobi and hopes she will pull back now, when she failed to pull back at the genjutsu of blood and kunai and Sasuke-kun. Maybe he hopes she will take the hint when he left her to wait forever on the bridge.

It is almost enough to wake her ego into action, but her inner self is quiet now, so impossibly quiet when there's a hole in the size of three people and home in her.

Maybe he never remembered her, maybe the image of her on his team never went deeper than the first layer of his eyes. People can't forget what they have never known, never seen.

She wants to hate him but she doesn't have the strength to throw the resentment at him and it stays only in her hands, crusted into herself.

It hurts more than Sasuke-kun leaving, it hurts more than her missing Naruto. Because there is understanding in her for the two of them, Sasuke-kun has the duty to his family and Naruto the duty to their team and his friend.

Kakashi-sensei, his own name spells it out, not only did he abandon her, he abandoned his duty.


Kaa-san can be very sneaky for a civilian, Sakura thinks as she looks down at the grocery list in her hand.

Chrysanthemums

Her eyes lift to the sign reading Yamanaka Flowers and the blonde girl behind the counter across the glass doors.

Ino makes her heart twist. Before, Sakura thought it was only anger, irritation, rivalry, now she understands those motions run deeper in her. They are the refraction through a glass window of hurt, sadness, missing.

Her feet move inside the shop and she feels like a little child again, crying against her knees, trying to hide what made others so apparently repulsed with her. She can't hide her weakness now, it is a film glued to every cell of her body.

Ino treats her as any other costumer, asks what she is looking for and how she likes the arrangement she made. The flowers find themselves in Sakura's hands and from behind the counter her clear blue eyes turn sharper, that sharpness that makes her feel as if her mind is being torn open and peeled off layer by layer.

A flicker in her expression and a softness Sakura had never seen in Ino washes over her face.

That is how, a couple of days later, she is on a team training with Team 10.

Asuma-sensei asks if she has seen Kakashi and Sakura simply shrugs. His eyes are intent on her face and he sees her, before they pull away. He takes a long drag from his cigarette, the sound of sizzling tobacco rustling in her ears, and says that Kakashi-sensei is probably caught up on missions because he hasn't seen him either. She can't be sure if he is being sincere or trying to spare her feelings, but what she doesn't miss is the frown over his eyes.

That morning is most fun she has had since the Chunin Exams, before chaos tore through her team and crumbled everything around her. Her expression changes between a smile that makes her cheeks hurt and a frown of focus and determination, so that she won't drag down at least this team, even if only for a few hours.

It ends too soon and the smile falter when she waves the team goodbye.

Her eyes watch her sandaled feet on the way home, the dirt of the unpaved street crackling under her. The sound has always soothed her and now it is the backdrop for Sakura's wonderings.

She wonders what it would have been like to have always been a part of another team, where things weren't as complicated and there wasn't a genius Uchiha with a hurting heart after revenge and a mad man after him, and there wasn't a knuckle-head no one saw, just as they didn't see her now, and that has more courage and determination in a finger than all of Konoha jounin together.

And it's with a sad smile and shimmering eyes, her hand rising to press onto her sternum, rubbing away the gnawing ache there, that Sakura realises that she would never have given them up.

It isn't just Sasuke-kun.

Sakura loves her team and love bears through pain.

It is Naruto with his bright smiles and his overflowing energy that bounces off Sakura's one. He helps her let out her inner energy, that she had always been too afraid other's would see. At first it started with his incredible ability of making her lose her temper. Slowly, day by day, he pulled her along on his outbursts of emotions, his pranks and his lashes out at Kakashi-sensei's tardiness.

Just as Ino, Naruto helped her unleash some of her true self, helped her accept and cherish these parts of her, less meek, less of the soft pink-haired girl with excellent grades and even better manners, and more of the fiery pink-haired girl with a loose tongue ready to speak her mind against anyone that came her way and an even looser patience.

Her faulty eyes finally opened to Naruto and there is so much guilt in her at how she treated him, misunderstood him. She may still throw some smacks at his head but they are thrown at Naruto, her teammate, her friend, and not the ill-famed outcast everyone whispers about but no one sees.

It's even Kakashi-sensei, maybe not the person, with his adoration for his perverted books, his tardiness and his laziness, his hypocrisy as someone that idealises teamwork but has never been much of a team player during missions, choosing to read instead of joining them in the menial tasks. With his undying will to protect his comrades and his slumped shoulders at the cenotaph. His complete disregard over her, his unseeing eyes on her face.

She loves him because he is Team 7.

There were even times where he was good to her. She especially enjoyed when he teased Naruto with just enough subtlety in his openness that he didn't understand he was being made into a joke. Kakashi-sensei would glace at her, with what she could see was a satisfied smile and wink when he heard her giggle behind her hand. Sakura didn't giggle when he did it to Sasuke-kun, a lot more imperceptibly, applying his 'underneath the underneath' moto to humour, but inside she was breaking into careless laughs.

And she also gained some appreciation for him when they were on a mission on a farm at the outskirts of Konoha and Sakura shut herself in the bathroom, muffling her crying against her hands because when she lowered her shorts there had been blood for the first time in her underwear and she didn't know what to do. Her insides were being chewed out in mortification, wishing Kurenai was her sensei instead or there was at least another girl in her team.

Kakashi-sensei knocked on the door and the colour drained out of Sakura's face. He asked if everything was okay and when she didn't answer, the dreaded question came, the 'lady problems' question. The little sob was enough for him and he disappeared. Sakura thought he had deserted her to deal with her 'lady problems' alone, when a little later there was another soft knock. He brought her pack, a wide variety of products she still isn't sure where he had gotten them, and left them on the floor outside the door.

Sakura scooped them with lightning speed and when she came back out again, he was reading his pervy book down the corridor. He gave her an eye-crinkle and Sakura's face burned red, eyes snapping down to the ground. With a gentle pat on her shoulder, he reassured her there was nothing to be ashamed of, it was natural and if she was in pain or simply wanted an excuse to get off work, she could sit with him on the tree shade while the boys finished things off.

Sakura accepted the offer, her lower back tired from being bent down to pluck out weeds. She watched him from the corner of her eye, as if it would answer the question of how he knew how to handle the situation. From what the three of them had gathered he was single and had been for a long while before the team. She simply assumed male sensei were taught such things when they had girl students.

It is these small moments of genuine attentiveness and connection between them that confuse her the most, that make his abandonment hurt even more deeply.

But she supposes that then he merely saw her as a teenage girl and not a student, not a shinobi like he saw Sasuke and Naruto.

Her feet stop in front of her bedside table, eyes fixed on the upside-down picture frame. Her fingers reach for it, a small tremble running through them as she touches the cold wood. Sakura doesn't know why she is so nervous when the image is perfectly safe in her mind as well, never washing out after a month of not seeing them.

It thuds softly, wood on wood, as she lays it on its rightful place and she stares down at the photograph.

Her thumb brushes over Sasuke-kun's face, a repeated gesture from many times before, but there is no giddiness at the pretend contact, no squeal of excitement at how close they sometimes stood during trainings.

There is pain, failure, longing, and the ghost of Sasuke-kun writhing on the forest ground, hand clasped around her in a desperate useless attempt to drink in any comfort she could give. There is the ghost of his back, a heavy large pack around his shoulders, hair blueish in the moonlight.

Sakura failed him when she wasn't enough to keep him in Konoha, when she wasn't enough to erase the grief in his heart and that devastating desire for revenge.

Sakura failed Naruto when she made him promise to bring Sasuke-kun back and remained, still and waiting and useless for him to return, only to find him bandaged and broken on a hospital bed.

"Next time, we'll do it together." Sakura promised him then and now she is waiting again, waiting for him to come back, waiting to take his hand and his endless energy to raise her again from the ground where she is a broken useless doll, waiting for the hole in her chest to close back up again, for her pieces to miraculously mend themselves together.

Sakura wasted a year being petrified and now she has fallen into the same frozen statue. She needs to stop relying on everyone to save her, on everyone to do things for her and just do it herself.

That photograph made her burn with love and duty, even through the fear, and now it does so again, even through the pain.

Sakura is weak and she is useless but she doesn't have to be it anymore. She doesn't want to be it anymore. Her eyes want to lay on more than backs, they want to glare at an open path in front of her with Sasuke-kun and Naruto beside her.

Sasuke-kun was right in one thing he told her, they will follow their paths alone. But what he doesn't see is that they will come together again, they will rescue him from the darkness drowning his heart and bring him home.

Another set of bandages, this time wrapped around a large adult hand, cross through her mind and Sakura's heart is full, remembering how right it felt when she settled back on her heels and saw the result of her work.

Kakashi-sensei didn't tell her but Sakura researched it herself. Chakra control is essential for medical jutsu.

Her head raises and out the window she sees the top of a carved stone, a diamond between fierce eyes. Tsunade-sama.


A scream tears through her throat when her body finally comes to a stop against a tree. Sakura knows it's bad the moment the pain explodes in her leg, a blend of the sting of slashed flesh and the agony of broken bone.

Her voice doesn't quiet down, even if she wants to be strong, Sakura can't stop screaming, fingers grasping with bruising force into her thigh, as if that could replace the pain in her lower leg. She knows she has to look, but her eyes are clenched closed, just as her teeth, her stomach churning with the pain and the dread of seeing the horror of her own injury.

Shishou is by her side in an instant that felt like an eternity.

"That's an exposed fracture of your fibula."

Sakura grunts against her raw throat as Shishou repositions her body into a practical position for healing. Tears are gathering at the corner of her eyes but she doesn't cry.

"We're definitely putting cushioning your falls on the list of things to improve. Now, Sakura, open your eyes."

Tsunade-shishou never goes easy on her, she never pulls her punches or slows herself down, whether in fighting or healing, so Sakura can accompany her. She trusts her to handle it, trusts her abilities to keep up and, when Sakura doesn't, Shishou forces her.

It took Sakura time to adapt to it, many nights of crying into her bed and cursing at Tsunade-shishou for her cruelty and at herself for her own weakness, but there is always gratitude for not being handled with soft careful hands, as if she is a fragile weak thing that will break at the simplest effort, simplest pain.

Her eyelids peel themselves, it's a slow process that involves shouting commands at herself inside her own mind, and she peeks down.

"Fuck." Sakura hisses out, her head hitting the ground, faint from the familiar sight of blood.

Except it isn't familiar, because this time it's her own blood, her own ripped flesh and exposed bone, when its place is hidden inside her leg where she can only know it's there with her chakra not her eyes.

A fresh tingling spreads through her leg, Tsunade-shishou's chakra numbing her nerve endings, and the pain eases. Now that it isn't the overpowering force made into the centre of her life, she can feel Shishou's chakra working on mending her fracture, moving through her tissues and she pours all her attention into it, memorising the precise and skilled work, even if too harsh for her own liking. Even with dead fish, Sakura prefers to move with more care and gentleness.

She raises herself on her elbows, watching the green glow of Shishou's chakra over her still open wound, even if the bone is no longer there.

"Once you're good enough, you won't have me waste my chakra on you. I won't step in if you make mistakes, you break the bone again and do it as many times as you need to heal it in place. Same for any other injury."

That is her leg, Sakura realises once again, the entire stretch of it finally settling into her. She has never had an injury more serious than a shallow cut or scrapped knees. She has never been in serious danger or taken any risks, put herself in the mark of a deadly jutsu or at the end of a sharp blade.

And when she had there was always her teammates to yank her away or block for her.

This time Sakura did it herself. She managed only to soften the blow of Tsunade-shishou's punch and not the flight across the training ground. It was poorly blocked but it was her doing and because it was bad she ended up with a bone pushing out of her leg.

"Why are you smiling, girl?"

Her eyes lifts from the mending flesh to Shishou's hazel frown and her lips stretch into an impossibly wide grin.

"It's my first broken bone!"

It feels as monumental as the moment she first put on Konoha's hitai-ate around her head. As monumental as when she first saw death coming at her with a grunt and the tip of a knife, Kakashi-sensei pulling her away before she could make the jump herself. As monumental as the first pay check from her first mission.

Sakura is a shinobi and the pain of her broken bone, the sight of her blooded leg marks it into her with a forceful reality no metal plaque, attack that never hit and envelope of money ever could.

The usual starkness of Shishou's eyes falls into a smile with a soft chuckle. "Good think you like it, because it won't be the last."


Sakura passes the Chunin Exams with ease, when there is no Orochimaru, no shinobi higher ranked than genin, no coup against Konoha, no Sasuke-kun writhing on the ground with a cursed seal on his shoulder.

But there is also no Kakashi-sensei guiding her with silent reassurance in the audience, there is no teammates supporting her, no Naruto with yelled encouragements and inflames of her resolve. There is no Team 7.

They are a team, they were meant to do this together, they passed their first test with teamwork and they should have passed this one with it too.

There is a hole in her chest when Hokage-sama hands her the vest, pride gleaming in her hazel eyes at her apprentice. There is a hole in more than the shape of a boy she loves, it is three made into one, all with different substances but of the same nature.

Tsunade-shishou drags her into the back booth of a seedy izakaya, Shizune-san in tow. She offers her a cup of sake, cheeks already pink from the empty bottles on their table, and Sakura, the youngest there, is the only one with enough sensibility to refuse it. Shishou calls her a coward and she doesn't mind, there are enough healed bones and wounds in her body from Tsunade-shishou's punches of doom to prove that she is not one. There is the vest at the back of her chair.

The air is cool on her warm skin when she leaves the izakaya, the moon full and spreading blue light into the pavement and the homes. Just as it was on that night almost a year ago, but the memory doesn't sadden her now.

A smile blooms in her face as she breathes in the crisp night air, a hint of flowers and leaves, fresh grass and earth, the smell of greasy food.

It is the scent of Konoha.

Sakura pushes her arm into the armhole of the vest and then the other. It is the first time the fabric settles over her shoulders, it's heavier than she thought, sturdier and with more hidden pockets. Perhaps a little wide and long for her small frame.

It fits perfectly.

There are three holes made one in her chest and although the chunin vest doesn't fill them, nor the hitai-ate she tightens on her head, Sakura's heart still overflows with burning love and somehow she is right where she belongs.


A part of her is always begging her to give up, when her eyes are heavy from sleepless busy nights or her desk full of textbooks and scrolls still unread, when her pathways are raw and existing scorches her insides, when the pain overflows the vase of her heart or pierces deep into her physical flesh.

When a mission goes wrong and there is a dead Konoha shinobi, dead away from home, and the words "I won't let my comrades be killed" are a sneering sharp blade.

She almost does, it is a year since Sasuke-kun defected and all her teammates left her behind and Sakura spends the day in her bed, the frame turned down where she can't see them and tears at the corner of her eyes where they don't fall.

The sadness, the anguish and the hurt clash into each other and mould themselves into a blazing ball of anger.

She flies through the village for Training Ground 3 and her fist crashes down onto the earth with a visceral shout, ripping up from deep inside her and echoing all around her, crackling the air as her perfectly controlled chakra.

It's her first crater.

It is as devastatingly beautiful as when Tsunade-shishou does it. Not one stone is left unturned in the zigzagging abyss slashing the training ground in two.

Her proximal phalange is broken but it is inconsequential compared to the other fractured hands that led her there, to the perfectly chaotic shape of shattered earth she destroyed with her own small, frail fist.

She heals it herself, this time it is almost intuitive, not much thought put into her chakra as it mends the thin fissures in her bone.

Shishou lands behind her, startling her from the fullness in her chest where everything is where it belongs. She can't be sure if she felt her spikes of chakra or silently watched her knowing the darkness looming on that day, but Tsunade is there for her and Sakura's eyes burn with tears as they have not burned in 365 days.

Her hand lands on her shoulder, heavy but the squeeze of her fingers is gentle. "Go home and rest, Sakura. 7am at the hospital tomorrow. You have your first patient."

It is a cut on a genin's arm from a kunai. Sakura asks him his name with a gentle smile and he answers, voice still clogged from the few tears he shed before and already brushed away from his eyes, Saito Itsuki. It is a name forever carved into her heart, her first patient, the first human to trust her hands and that she healed with her chakra.

Her voice is calm as she explains him what she is doing, hoping it will reassure the fear he tries to hide behind stern eyes and a quivering lip stuck between his teeth.

Sakura holds his life in her hands, he trusts them, an oblivious surrender she has never had directed at her before.

It is strange, she thinks, when Itsuki is barely two years younger than her, and yet she can imagine what bubbles in her chakra is akin to what her own mother feels for her.

A voracious need to protect, a heavy weight on her shoulders and a need to do right by the blind trust and open vulnerability of someone who lays their wellbeing in her hands. But all those bottomless fiery emotions flow only as warmth from her chest into her fingers and her eyes and into her chakra.

It is a simple procedure for her, she has healed worse cuts on herself, and yet Sakura gives it every drop of her attention, every inch of her being. For the few minutes it lasts, the centre of her life is Itsuki and his wounded arm needing to be mended.

Sakura remembers a burnt hand that required the same care from her, even if then she had only the knowledge of how to make a balm from wild herbs and her fingers empty of chakra. She put everything of her into making sure Kakashi-sensei's hand wouldn't hurt and wouldn't scar.

It was the seed, she realises now as the same fullness fills her heart once she finishes healing the last of Itsuki's wound and he smiles up at her with a relief.

Kakashi-sensei never thanked her, he never even noticed, but she had. Before she believed it would be enough to know the result of her own work for herself and it was, but now she resents him.

Sakura only ever sees Kakashi-sensei standing at the cenotaph. She passes behind him when leaving the training fields and he never looks back at her.

And she sees him at Tsunade's office, when she is slumped over a medical textbook or filling out paperwork she doesn't have a clearance even to read. The first times her head always snapped up, eager for that one remaining piece of Team 7, eager to see him alive and returning home unlike the other two, and he met her with his eye-crease and a "Yo", but his eye never sees her even when he greets her.

When she didn't look up at him one time, Kakashi-sensei dragged himself behind her, leaned down to read the page she was on and asked how Sakura could understand a single word of it. There was too much wonder in his voice and it only felt like a mock, like a condescending pat in the back at his forgotten student, his other student, that is making an attempt at something.

Sakura mends broken flesh with her chakra when all theirs do is pierce and destroy, but even when they are not there, there is the shape of two boys veiling her from his eyes.

She drinks in Itsuki's gratitude as a parched girl, having the first drop of water in a decade, and she turns to lap at all that his sensei offers her before they leave the room. Later Shishou's eyes glimmer with pride as she lays a fleeting hand on Sakura's shoulder and she burns for it. She burns for every drop of recognition, every gaze that lands on her and sees her.


It takes months for Naruto to answer her letters but they never fail to brighten her day. Sakura grabs the paper in a crinkling hold and squeals when Kaa-san hands it to her. She flies up the stairs for her bedroom and throws herself onto the mattress, yet, just as she is ripping the lip, Sakura stops.

She has a date with Ino at the teahouse in an hour and she always loves to relish in the letters, never rushing through Naruto's scrawls and messy grammar. The perfectionist part of her cringes every time she stumbles through an awful mistake, the softest part of her smiles because it is so very Naruto.

She still isn't sure how he can be smart and resourceful during battles and not at writing basic words.

Her hands press the letter to her chest, there's a twinge there that seems to only be growing. Sakura knows why it is there, or who has put it there.

They know nothing of Sasuke-kun. The past two years are a blank and even if Naruto's letters are sparse, at least once every few months she knows he is alive, safe, bright as he always is.

Too many nights Sakura wakes up in cold sweat, the sight of Sasuke-kun's body pierced with kunai and her hands tainted with his blood, the chakra she has honed for these past couple of years pasted into her pathways, heavy as cement, still and useless.

Too many days, he inevitably spurs into her mind, the curl of his lips into a smirk still so vivid as if the last time she had seen him was yesterday after another team training. Those flashes of unending grief in the shadow of his dark eyes, the scrapping evil waving off his cursed seal, the sadistic twist of his expression.

It won't be long, Sakura reassures herself. She is waiting for them, but she is not still and useless this time.

They will bring him home and maybe that hint of gratitude as he murmured his last words to her won't have vanished. Maybe Sasuke-kun will accept her love now that she can open craters with her fists and mend people back to health.

Maybe he will let her heal him, lay his desolate heart in her careful hands as all her patients do with their bodies and trust them to revive it with the deep nurturing power of her love.

All she can do is hope and train.


Sakura doesn't cry.

The high pitch noise of the monitor sinks her mind, reduces the world to that shrill deadly sound, reduces the world to warm and red, so so red, blood.

Her knees give out and she leans her forehead to the cool surface of the operation table. Her eyes hurt with how tight she is closing them but she doesn't cry.

Her comrade trusted his life into her hands and she let it spill down between the gaps of her fingers.

He is dead because of her.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

Someone turns the monitor off but the sound still stabs through her ears. A nurse pats her back and there is the murmur of words that never quite reach her.

She stands, her body filling the blank of her mind, slotting her into the right place to fulfil her duty.

The soles of her shoes stick to the blood and she doesn't look down to see the marks stamped with a dead comrade's blood in the form of her steps. A man's blood, a human being with hopes and pains and a vision of a future that will never come to be, his life spilt like water on the floor.

The gushing water is not enough to wash her hands. There is blood in her hands, blood crusted into the creases of her skin and the gaps between her nails.

But no, it can't be, she was wearing gloves.

It is there somehow, deeper than the soap and the brush can reach, and she still scraps her skin raw.

Her lips shape the dreaded words to his teammates but she can't hear them even when they mark horror into their faces. She explains what is her duty to explain and she holds one of them back with her enhanced strength when he tries to break through the doors, tries to go after his alive teammate. But there is only death in that room and blood soaking into the white tiles, a sentence carved into time.

Shishou is in front of her somehow. She offers her no words, her face a blank veil and Sakura needs something there, pity, or understanding, rage and disappointment, disgust, anything that can shape her heart away from the drowning void it has become.

She drags her through the streets, Sakura's vision a blur to the things around her, and then there is green light under her face and the quiet buzz of chakra. Her head slumps down to see Tsunade's hands enclosing her own, fresh chakra seeping into her abused skin.

She lets her sleep in her couch and spreads a heavy blanket over her, makes sure it is safely tucked around Sakura's small frail body, as if the fabric was enough to keep her pieces together.

The unexpected gesture makes a dry sob, close to a heave compressing the walls of her throat, rip through her and Sakura holds her useless cold hands closer to her chest, curls her neck to hide her face in them.

Sakura is weak and she is useless.

But she doesn't cry.


Her fist punches down onto the ground, it cracks under the shattering force of her chakra, raises dust and large blocks of earth, crashes through it with the crisscross of lightning and shakes the training grounds with loud rumbles.

It is devastatingly beautiful, devastatingly powerful and it is hers, it is Sakura's.

The dust settles and in the middle of her chaos is an unearthed Kakashi-sensei, eyes wide. His shock swells her chest, makes a smug smirk twists her lips.

"Kakashi-sensei." Sakura calls, roguish delight spilling through her voice.

Sakura has more strength in one finger than all of the other three members of Team 7 combined and, with it, she wrenches his eyes to settle on her.

"Found you."

Kakashi-sensei sees her, for the first time he sees her, and she burns for it.


The grass sways around them, fresh as it brushes her legs. The breeze washes over her face and makes the tracks of tears cool against her cheeks.

Sakura holds Chiyo-baa-sama with careful gentle hands, making certain she is comfortable, head on her chest. She does not feel the grass under them or the warmth of Sakura's hands, the rough callouses of her fingers around her arms, and still Sakura embraces her cooling skin as if she is a precious baby newly welcomed into life.

It is as the Suna Elder says, Chiyo-baa-sama's lines are smooth and gentle, peaceful. It is perhaps a small consolation in the anguish drowning her heart.

In the shinobi world nothing braids stronger bonds than the complicity of fighting together, of surviving and laying their lives in another's hands. Sakura did more than that, she let Chiyo-baa-sama use her body as a puppet.

It was only a day and yet she took a heavy, piercing place in Sakura's heart, that was now bleeding at her death.

"Hers was a magnificent end, befitting of a shinobi." Kakashi-sensei voice is heavier than his typical drawled tone and it tolls into her.

Chiyo-baa-sama gave her life for a better future and Sakura will hold that last dream in her hands and give her own life to make it true. She will honour her and save her name in her and into the future.

Her eyes sting with the familiar salt of tears. They fall and Sakura lets them be free. There is no guilt in them, no shame, no prickling over how they roll down her cheeks, no mark left behind into her flesh and into others' eyes of all the emptiness and weakness inside of her.

"Are those the words of a shinobi?"

Sasori asked her, his life an ice cylinder in his chest, his face beautiful, gentle and fragile, like crystal, and as cold as it too.

He asked her before he killed himself through the puppets of his parents, caskets of his grief and his love, his absolute loneliness. (There is the image of porcelain skin and dark distant eyes in her heart.)

Strength isn't about dry eyes and hollow feelings, it isn't about the cold hard surface of a puppet and the empty air inside it.

Naruto burns with power and he burns with strength, Chiyo-baa-sama saw it too, entrusted the shinobi world into his hands because of it, and Naruto never holds back his tears. Sakura wasn't weak because she cried, Sakura was weak because she was weak, and now she cries and she is stronger than she has ever been.

Strength isn't about shielded hearts that no one can touch, it isn't about flesh cut away from everyone around it and victories reached alone.

Her full strength was put to the test in the battle against Sasori, her Will of Fire blazing through her chakra in a fervour of courage and fierceness, pure unadulterated need to survive, the full blown flame of the spark she felt during her first Chunin Exams. Sakura won, together with Chiyo-baa-sama, they won and they were strong because they fought together. Teamwork is what sustains the villages' power. The bonds and trust between comrades is the core of Konoha.

Sakura isn't weak and she isn't useless anymore.

And she cries because she is a shinobi whose comrade is dead.


"Sakura-chan, you shouldn't put yourself in danger like that."

She is a shinobi, it is her duty to put herself in danger, Sakura thinks but she doesn't say anything because this time the danger had been the beast inside Naruto's body and it is that chakra that festers like poison into her wound, into all of his body.


Sakura's fingers tighten around the basket's handle.

"You don't think I've just been sleeping here without thinking, do you? I've been thinking the whole time and something came to me…" Kakashi-sensei said when he was still bedridden from their rescue mission to Suna.

"I've been thinking the whole time"

The weaving creaks under the force of her hold and Sakura pulls the chakra that leaked back into her pathways. It boils with all those sucking disillusioned feelings of inadequacy (of worthlessness) she spent the past years trying to conquer. They always seem to catch up to her somehow, to stir at the softest breeze or the strongest storm.

Her powerlessness when Naruto was erased under the monstrous force of the Kyuubi. Her powerlessness when Sasuke-kun stood above them and so far away even if they had finally found him, farther than when Sakura didn't know if he was dead or alive, farther because there was an abyss between the cool eyes of a boy branded still into her heart and the now distant deadly ones.

It makes her shudder, makes thoughts spring in her mind, thoughts of cells that can't be changed and a weakness can never be shed, of something deeper and marked into her own nature, there and forever.

"I've been thinking the whole time"

And not once did Kakashi-sensei remember her. It's the first time he is doing something akin to a sensei's job to someone other than Sasuke-kun and of course Sakura is left to watch from the edge of the clearing.

Is she not a part of Team 7 as well?

Maybe she won't ever be as powerful as Sasuke-kun or Naruto, but she can be better than she is now, Sakura desperately wants to be better, Sakura desperately wants to be seen. Why isn't that enough? Why isn't she enough?

Is it a fault of his eyes or a fault of her self?

One of the Narutos turn to her and she can't be sure if it's the original or a kage bunshin. All the others do as well in a wave as they raise their hands to greet her.

Sakura smiles, a turn of her lips that raise from deep inside her heart. Naruto needs this, he needs to train under Kakashi-sensei's and Yamato-taichou's watchful encouraging eyes, he needs the support and he needs people to believe in him and push him forward, just as Tsunade-shishou does with her.

Especially after the horrible explosion of the Kyuubi that still makes Sakura wake up in cold sweat at night with fear for him and especially after what he feels is his failure to Sasuke-kun when he couldn't catch up to him.

Maybe that is why Kakashi-sensei is focussing only on him, just as he always focussed only on Sasuke-kun, because they both needed it. He just doesn't see that she needs it too.

Sakura raises her hand to show the basket of soldier pills, made after a couple of hours of meticulous research on the most efficient ingredients that leave fewer after-effects. She lays it on the ground and slips away to train on her own.


Sakura leans on the sink of her bathroom lie she always does every morning, her narrowed eyes searching through the skin of her forehead on the mirror. She is ready to pull back when she catches it, a mere dusting still, but it is there. Sakura squeals, her arms thrown in the air, and she dances, hips swaying from side to side with no rhythm besides the overflowing exhilaration in her chest.

It's soft, but it's purple and it's hers. Her byakugou.


She bursts though the doors of the hospital and her breath catches in her chest. Injured people are spread on cots on the floor, stains of blood on the white tiles, screams and muffled crying, the shouts of muddled medics and nurses running around. Her eyes franticly search for Shizune-san but it is clear she isn't there to lead the medical team.

Her fingers tremble and there's a selfish impulse to return from where she came from, to use her hands to punch and destroy and kill and not to mend and heal. Sakura always finds it harder to keep her pieces together when she is focused on doing the same to others.

With a deep inhale that smells of iron and burns in her throat, her hands rise to her hair and she ties it away from her eyes, away from her duty.

Shizune-san and Tsunade-shishou aren't there, but she is. Maybe she isn't enough but Sakura will give all of her still.


Now Sakura can finally cry.

Everything in her is raw, her hands, her pathways, her heart.

The tears overflow with everything that only now she allows to rise up. Naruto fighting alone, the shadow of the Kyuubi's chakra soaking and festering through the air around them. Tsunade-shishou's frail thin hand, so wrinkly and dry, as she passes out from chakra exhaustion and doesn't wake back up. The horror of Konoha, her home, devastated, made into a crater by Pain.

She can let the emotions crush her down and she can crumble under the weight of them. There is no one that needs her to be strong, to hold on stout and steady, her chakra unwavering as it mends flesh and her smile reassuring for the ones that need a deeper kind of healing.

Her tears are hot and free as they fall down her face, meet at the point of her chin and down onto the murky water. She rubs her hands raw and still there is blood crusted into the creases of her skin.

It will always be there, she knows, but she rubs her hands, boiling water making her skin an angry red and the brush scrapping deep into her flesh. Not deep enough.

She knows it will last, the gaping wound in her heart, the muscle crumbling around itself like the buildings of Konoha, nothing but ash in her mouth, ruined dust. Maybe it will never even scar.

She dreads the nightmares and she dreads the repetition of the horror and the fear of seeing her village devastated. A piece of it seems forever lost now, a piece that maybe was only ever an illusion, her home as the place that she returns to after missions and where can finally close her eyes knowing she is safe.

Never did Sakura think Konoha's walls could ever be this vulnerable.

She isn't sure how long she rubs at her hands, she isn't sure if time has even passed, before the voice sounds behind her, far enough that she knows it's at the entrance of her medic tent.

"Sakura."

Sakura swallows and she clears her throat in an attempt to hide the tears from her voice. "Sensei."

"Can you take a look at this old man? I might have pulled something."

"Sit on the cot."

With cold water, she pats her face and eyes gently, trying at least to make her puffy face presentable. When there isn't any more shuffling behind her back, she moves, head down, to stand behind him.

Her hands press to his back and she closes her eyes, mind concentrated on spreading her chakra softly through his body. Kakashi-sensei isn't a fan of physical touches, much less medical ones and Sakura wants to make this as pleasant as possible.

Her brows crease when she finds nothing to note. There is some minor damage to his muscles, but nothing the body won't and should not heal on its own with a good night's sleep. His pathways are also slightly raw, but again the treatment is simple rest.

Is it the sharingan maybe?

Sakura lets her chakra recede and picks up the chart. She writes down her assessment, eyes purposely not lifting from the safe form of the paper, as she starts, "The first time I realised I wanted to be a medic-nin was on our mission to the Land of Waves."

Even with how that mission broke her, taught her true grief, Sakura will always hold it dearly and safely in her heart. It is the mission that helped open her eyes to her purpose as a shinobi, as a member of Team 7 and as her own person.

Kakashi-sensei is as still and slumped as he was before, but she knows he is listening, if only because it would be physically impossible for him not to be. She lays the chart on the cart and moves around the cot to stand in front of him.

"You don't remember this, but after you used the raikiri your hand was burnt so I put a balm on it and bandaged it."

"I remember." He mumbles, nothing passing behind his voice.

"But you—"

"I wouldn't be a very good ninja if I didn't notice someone touching me in my sleep." There is a smug glint in his eye as he says it.

"You were passed out."

"I'm that good." The glint turns into a bloomed out smirk, even the shape of his mask shifts over his mouth.

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"You needed it." Kakashi-sensei answers simply, almost as if he shrugged the words out.

Her eyes narrow at him but he doesn't react in any way, unfocussed eye still fixed on some point of her face but seeing beyond it. At least that is what she would have thought before.

"I'm still checking your sharingan, Sensei."

His lid closes into a crinkled smile. "That's why I'm here."


The strongest woman Sakura knows, the measure of her own ambition of strength, Tsunade, and she looks so frail. Sakura's fingertips brush through the veins in her bony hand and she carefully lifts it, a care that she never needs when handling Shishou, a care that would be thrown back at her with a proud lashing out were she awake. Still, Sakura cradles it in her own and places a soft kiss on it.

Her eyes are tired from watching over her and, even when her heart breaks at the sight, it also holds onto more than hope that she will push through, that she will wake up. It is certainty.

Because this Tsunade, withered and fragile from protecting her people, is still Tsunade, is still the strongest person Sakura knows.


The dust settles on the overturned clearing she made with her own fists. Her chakra control faltered with precision, enough to make each punch and kick shudder like lightning up her arm, enough to break the skin of her knuckles and let her warm blood soak into her gloveless hands, but not enough to shatter her bones, only crack them so it wouldn't take too much chakra to heal herself. There could be other more important people to heal, anyone would be more important than Sakura.

The pain and the burst of fury is not enough to supplant the dark sucking self-loathing crusted over her. It's not enough to wash away Sai's voice that drowns her, makes her lungs ache against her ribs and her heart cold and empty.

"Naruto's been shouldering that promise for a long time. It's like what has been done to me. It feels like a curse."

Everything is crumbling and her hands can't hold any of it. They can only destroy, they can only shatter and hurt like the tree trunks that splintered against her fists and the earth that opened up with the doom of her feet.

The holes she makes are never enough to swallow her, to make her disappear. They are never as wide and boundless, as dark and empty, as the abyss in her own chest.

Sakura's knees give out and she crashes like grains of sand onto the ground. She is so small, but never small enough to be irrelevant. Her smallness is destructive like her chakra, her smallness creeps up around and into everyone, infects them like a parasite, and ruins them from inside out.

Team 7 is her most dear, most devastated fatality.

Kakashi-sensei is the only one with eyes sharp enough to see her and run away before she could touch him.

Sasuke-kun is a criminal. A murderer. The word racks through her in a dry burning sob. A wrecked cursed boy.

Naruto is a hero. A fool. Naruto has always been as much a fool as he is brave, as he is strong. A hurting cursed boy.

"Naruto really loves you."

Forever she has wanted to be loved, even now her heart craves it with a violent ravenous hunger that gnaws at her.

Naruto's love tastes only bitter, Naruto's love doesn't fill her with warmth and a mirroring flame in her own chest. Naruto's love is only self-loathing. It is a chain locking him to her ruin, locking him to the girl from years ago, weak and useless, and that still lives inside her, locking him into a curse.

She has always known that it hurts him for her to reject his love, throw it back at him as a useless thing, like Sasuke-kun did to her own love for him, but it is never enough to make Sakura want to accept it in her heart and shape the bleeding muscle into a form of her own love.

She loves Naruto, but she doesn't love him as he loves her, she is not in love with him. Maybe she can learn, maybe she can try to mould it into something romantic and fervent, something like declarations under the rain and a warm everlasting company in life.

It will never be the same as her love for Sasuke-kun. That love is a bleeding wound. That love is the width, length and depth of her entire heart. It is endless and it is infinite and with each new day it carves cracks into her flesh and breaks her into pieces. It is irrational and it is unconditional.

Her love is pain.

But there are more important things than her love and than Sasuke-kun, even when he is everything to her. Because there are more important things than her selfish small self made of nothing and ruin.

There is Konoha.

Tsunade, the strongest woman she knows and the rock that has kept her floating these past years, is still in a withered shell on a futon.

Danzou, the man that broke Sai, erased him and built him into the outline his cruel hands needed him to be, without a drop of love over the clay he was shaping and the full breath of life already imbibed into it, the looming shadow that decays and deforms Konoha and that now has engulfed it fully, that now is its beacon, its undeserved Hokage.

Akatsuki, the ones with the power and the carelessness to raze an entire people into nothing but dust over one bijuu, the ones that see Naruto has nothing but a vessel to a cursed power and will throw him away, lifeless and cold, when they drink every last drop of the beast he carries.

Sasuke-kun, a member of the organization that wants to see Naruto dead, a member that already stole a life for the bijuu it encases, a trigger that can ravage war between Konoha and Kumo.

Shikamaru knows it will lead to war, he has seen all the steps in his mind, he feels the fragile balance and the thin, fraying tie of peace between the villages. He knows what their duty is, as Konoha shinobi faced with a missing-nin wrecking chaos and death outside the sanction of their village.

Danzou has already called the order, has already allowed foreign hands to kill one that used to be their own, used to be Konoha's.

Even Kakashi-sensei can't see how serious this is. At least Sakura hopes it's a fault of his eyes and not of fault of his duty, as he deserts Konoha, his own beloved village, to beg for Sasuke-kun's life with Naruto and Yamato-taichou, like a fool.

Those who break the rules are scum, but those who leave their teammates behind are worse than scum.

Aren't Kakashi-sensei's words also a curse?

They seem only directed at Sasuke-kun. Naruto and Sakura had promised each other they would do it together next time and now they left her behind again.

Why does he throw away that promise and not the other? Why does he go back on his word there and not on everything else?

Sakura has always belonged to Team 7 and yet they never seem to save her a place in it. Even Sai and Yamato-taichou are more Team 7 than she is, they knew of Naruto's resolve while he hid it from her.

Why?

Because she is weak? Because she is useless? Because they don't trust her? Because she can only hurt and destroy them?

Because there is no place for her in Team 7?

The one person she can depend on, the one person that never left her behind and truly trusts her, is in a coma, so far away from her.

Sakura has never felt so small. She has never felt so significant, as if every movement of her hands could tremble the air around her and shatter all the remaining pieces still together somehow.

Already her heart trembles with the looming decision she has yet to make.

Her fingers tighten around the earth and her forehead falls onto it. Her lungs aren't enough to pull much needed air into them and she is drowning in the nothing inside of her. Her heart tries to flee away from her chest and up her throat, tries to carve its freedom out of her ribs, and Sakura is certain she is dying.

She doesn't know how long the panic consumes her, doesn't know how long she lets it kill her from inside out, the fear shaking her like earthquakes through her flesh, the anguish tearing her with sharp cutting fingers.

"Sasuke causes Naruto pain but I think you do too."

She doesn't want to shatter anything and anyone anymore, especially not Naruto, her teammate, her best friend. She doesn't want to make a mistake. She doesn't want to fail.

And she will.

When she can breathe again, one memory paints the back of her eyelids, so certain and so real even if it has always ever been a genjutsu. It haunts her like it never has before, it haunts her because it will be true.

Sasuke-kun begging her to save him from the death the kunai pierce into his flesh.

Naruto will hate her forever, she will lose him as she will lose Sasuke-kun.

Sasuke-kun will never fill his place in Team 7 again. Sasuke-kun's cool eyes will close forever but they won't fall even more, they won't turn into evil red stains. He will return home to them and will rest forever in its earth and beside his parents.

Sasuke-kun's love is also pain, so deep and destructive that it crumbles and rots into hate, and she can never take the burden of it into herself.

There is another burden and this one she will carry on her own, she will make it hers alone. Because her love is pain but Naruto's and Kakashi-sensei's don't need to be. Sakura isn't strong enough to carry it but she will do it still, she will tug it into her shoulder and bear it will all the chakra circling through her body and all the burning love in her veins.

A kunai, Sakura decides. Kunai have always been blended with Sasuke-kun's death in her mind. The last image will overlap the ones forever in her lids.

Sasuke-kun will die at the hands of someone who loves him and not of some porcelain unfeeling mask, someone that can give him a compassionate death, that will look into his dark eyes and see, not the murderous lost criminal, but the hurting boy, Sasuke-kun.

And if she fails, then she will fail and fail completely and lastly.


Her feet drag across the tatami, her eyes never lifting to watch any of their faces, especially not Naruto's.

"If we fight again, we're both gonna die. I'll bear the burden of your hatred and we'll die together."

He asks her where she is going, Lee and Kiba also perking up to her sudden movement.

"I love you, Naruto."

The shame, the failure, that prickles through her skin feels like it's shedding it off her flesh layer by layer and she just wants to breathe a fresh full breath again. Her shattered ribs crumble into the dark hole of her chest and her mind can't stop torturing her with images she doesn't want to live through again.

"I hate people who lie to themselves!"

She smiles at Naruto, eyes closed into creases so she doesn't see him, reassuring her that she will just check on Kakashi-sensei and their captive ("Kill her"). Sakura never raises her head when she slides the shoji door open and enters the other room on the inn.

Sakura also can't bear to see him, the mask that always hides so much of him is now a beacon wrapped around his cheeks, baring all that she didn't see before in how it hides things.

"There's no reason for you to shoulder this burden all by yourself. As the leader of team 7 I blame my own shortcomings for the team's failure."

Her lids clench close and she doesn't speak when she kneels behind him, her hands raising to press to his back.

"I don't need healing." Kakashi-sensei mumbles and she doesn't care, he used the mangekyou that is enough of an excuse for a check-up, and he also used his hand to swerve a chidori.

The lightning prickles against her back and Sakura's hand holds tighter onto the kunai. The byakugou isn't strong enough to heal her but it's strong enough to delay the death in Sasuke-kun's fingers as they crush her heart and are trapped in her chest, trapped long enough for her to… to…

It will be fitting, won't it?

Sakura puffs out the lump in her throat and she moulds her chakra, the green light flickering against her tightly bound lids.

Kakashi-sensei's pathways are tender from the chakra expenditure of using his sharingan. Sakura's chakra washes over the wounded tissue, slowly mending it back to health. The tatami under her is like cool tiles and the dark wooden walls dissolve into the shrill white of the hospital. It should be over in a couple of minutes but Sakura lets it linger, each movement of hers meticulous and slowed down, as if his life is in her hands.

Her lungs are full, heartbeat is steady, and there is only her knowledge of the human body in her mind, her knowledge of pathways and chakra.

Sakura has never sensed anything like it before.

Her muscles shudder as a wave of cold murderous chakra clashes against her senses. Her eyes widen, horror clasping around her guts and her chakra faltering inside the girl's body as she heals her. It is more terrifying, more evil and broken than Orochimaru's curse mark from that horrifying night years before, it is hate and anguish materialised into pure energy and killing intent.

Sasuke-kun… The love burning through her is a curse and she is glad for it, she will always be glad that she loves Sasuke-kun, even when he is an empty shattered, fallen husk of the boy she first fell in love with.

Sakura's chakra wavers but her will is certain. Her fingers hold onto the kunai once more.

Sakura shakes her head and forces all of her to flow through her chakra once again. It finally reaches the small complex system that surrounds Kakashi-sensei's left eye and she inhales, deep and full, as she fixes the first cells under her skilled attention.

"Bring back Itachi, bring back my mother, my father. And my clan. Bring all of them back! Then I'll stop!"

There is still Kakashi-sensei's hand, Sakura reassures herself and her chakra holds desperately onto the singed skin of his palm and his fingers. There are the lingering scars Sakura learnt of years before and she focusses only on the wounded tissue, her chakra attaching itself into each individual cell.

She knows that even under his glove his skin is smoothing into a soft new pink and whatever pain he was trying to ignore before is cleaned away in her skilled medical justu.

The kunai stops. Its wrapped handle burns into her palm. It stops a breath away from the gap between his ribs and over his heart. She thought she was strong now. Sakura is weak and she can't pierce past her barrier, she can't cut away the thread linking Sasuke-kun to life.

"Where was your strength, Sakura?" Kakashi-sensei asks, accusation clear in his voice

"What?"

"Your fighting style is with your fists not a kunai. I've seen you make craters with a single punch and you let him take the kunai from you. Where was your strength now, Sakura?"

Kakashi-sensei's tone is harsh, scolding and it makes anger boil in her stomach. He never used it on her and now, after years since she was last his student, he chooses to stab her with it. After years when she was burning for him to throw it at her, like he did with Naruto and Sasuke, because even if it would hurt, as it always did when she failed someone, at least it meant he saw space for improvement, he saw her as his student, he saw Sakura.

Her hands yank away from his back and she burns a hole into the back of his head. "What are you trying to insinuate?"

Kakashi-sensei turns his head to look at her over his shoulder and his steel grey eye is enough to make her own burn with unshed tears.

Sasuke-kun's fingers slither onto hers to steal the kunai from her and she lets him. His grasp on her throat is like cold icicles and she can hardly breathe. His eyes are hatred and she can't take it away from him. He swipes the blade and she lets him, she is weak and she is useless, and this will be her last failure.

"You of all people know that I'm weak, Kakashi-sensei." Sakura spats the honorific at him as she settles her hands onto his back, heavy enough that she knows it stings him with pain but he doesn't show it.

She heals the blooming redness and the rest of his wounded hand. As long as she is the medic that heals him, Sakura will never let a scar brand into his skin.

(There is a curse marking hatred and pain into a boy that she can never wash away. Not with her chakra, not with her kunai and not with her love.)

Tears run down her face as she works, her lip stuck between her teeth, not a whimper or gasp leaving her but he still knows. Kakashi-sensei lets her cry behind his back even she is no longer healing him and he doesn't says anything.