II
What Grief Is
Sakura's eyes widen with the familiar sight before her, a horrifying image that overlaps with the one forever stuck behind her eyelids.
No.
No.
No.
Her knees give out under her. The flicker of hope shatters when her hand cups Sasuke-kun's cheek, thumb brushing over the wet red - so so red - blood, and feels that he is cold, cold like death.
Death.
Sakura never saw it but she knows, somehow she knows just from the blank tint over Sasuke-kun's face.
"This isn't genjutsu, is it?"
Sakura always had perfect grades at the Academy. She memorised the hundreds of shinobi rules, wrote them down in tests and quizzes without hesitation, a complete link between her mind and her pen.
The #25 Rule of the Ways of the Shinobi: A shinobi must never show his or her true feelings under any circumstances. The mission always comes first. A shinobi must have the strength of character never to shed any tears.
Her heart was absent when she memorised it. Only now as cold fingers dent into her throat, as Sasuke-kun's cold skin burns into her gentle warm hand, as her eyes sting and blur with the tears building up - her character never enough to keep them down and hidden - did rule #25 brand itself like molten metal into her heart.
Sasuke-kun is dead and this isn't genjutsu. This isn't the test of a cruel sensei she has to pass, this isn't the horrifying safety of an illusion, two times deceiving with its unreality, with its closeness to the real thing, but never quite there, never quite as raw.
The tears spill past her waterline, the lump in her throat bursts into a howl of pain and Sakura lets her head fall down, hides her face in her arms and against Sasuke-kun's stilled chest. Fingers grasp desperately onto the fabric of his shirt, uncaring of the prickles of the senbon.
She is weak and she is useless. And she is crying like a little lost child begging for her mother. Because she is one, she is just a child and now she has seen death.
Death. Death. Death.
It is so agonisingly worse than the genjutsu that haunted her for months. It is so agonisingly more piercing, marking her deeper than anything in her life ever has, tearing her apart with two chakra-laden hands and the sharp edge of a kunai.
Sasuke-kun is dead. She will never see the small curl of his lip into a smirk, never hear his smooth voice call her name, never see the cool dark shade of his eyes again.
There is only void, a dark sucking hole inside her chest with the shape of the boy she loves, of a teammate she has the duty to support and protect.
And all Sakura can do is cry.
Her hands twist the cloth, the excess water dripples back into the bowl. Carefully, Sakura lays it over Kakashi-sensei's forehead, dragging the corner of it to rest over his scarred eye. She can feel the heat of it against her fingers even without touching the skin and she can sense the turmoil of chakra in those thin pathways.
Naruto freaked out the first time it happened, yelled with his loud mouth over how Kakashi-sensei had died. Sakura explained to him what they had learned in the Academy about chakra exhaustion, its signs and consequences, and he listened with closed eyes while his finger scratched the back of his head.
Kakashi-sensei faked being fine after the battle a little too well, but once he finally went to sleep, he didn't wake up. Now he just needs a couple more hours to regenerate his chakra and then they can finally return home.
She craves Konoha as she has never craved it before.
Sakura loves Konoha as she has never loved it before.
Her heart hasn't stopped its frantic beats in her chest and she is certain it never will. The only thing that seems to calm her is tending to her teammates, her worry entirely absorbed in them and not in her.
Sasuke-kun shook off his wounds and is now somewhere rivalling with Naruto. Kakashi-sensei would have too, if he hadn't passed out. It will never not terrify her to see Kakashi-sensei, a powerful jounin, perhaps the most powerful of their village, like this, a broken useless doll on a futon.
A broken useless doll like her.
She understands now why he casted that genjutsu on her, why he branded the sight of Sasuke-kun's mangled dying body into her eyelids. He showed her what the field is, he showed her the risks and the pains of being a shinobi in the safety of their home, the safety of an illusion that can still be actualised into reality. He showed her horror and what only now she recognised as grief.
Kakashi-sensei gave her the knowledge to decide whether to follow her hitai-ate or pull back before she is too deep, before she is stuck to the real image of Sasuke-kun dead, or Naruto or him or any of her other comrades.
"I won't let my comrades die."
His words are heavy in her chest, never quite quieting their murmur in her ears. They wedge themselves in her just as deeply as Sasuke-kun's broken body.
Of the hundreds of shinobi rules, none stirs in her as Sensei's words. None stirs in her as Naruto's resolve to find his own ninja way.
Sakura wants to wash away the red from Sasuke-kun's skin, the small wounds still scattered through him. She wants to wash away any pain darkening his heart, the one she sees a glimmer of from time to time, when for a moment the coolness splinters and there is a second of bottomless emotion in his eyes.
Grief.
More, she wants to make sure none of it ever touches him again. She wants to be his shield, his tool, as Haku was when he stood in front of Zabuza and took Kakashi-sensei's fist into his heart.
The shattering grief hasn't vanished, even against the full force of her relief now that Sasuke-kun is alive, but it fevers like something else through her veins. While the genjutsu paralysed her, the real sight of his blood urges her on.
Sakura won't pull back. She is a shinobi from Konoha, a member of Team 7 and she won't pull back from the grief, from the pain, from the devastating shadow of death.
Her eyes turn down to the red and blistered skin of Sensei's hand, hurt by his own jutsu. The lightning of his raikiri still shudders in her muscles, the blue flickering hues and the piercing shriek of a thousand birds.
There's fear in her still, but she is no longer scared of Kakashi-sensei and she's glad for it. How could she when he spoke words as that, when his eyes trembled while he pierced Haku's chest and laid the boy down gently, with honour and respect, closing his dead eyes even if he was his opponent?
She remembers him standing in front of the cenotaph, slump shoulders and cast down head, and for the first time she sees him and wonders what names he meets there.
Sakura understands him a little better and she understands the weight of the hitai-ate wrapped around her head a little better too.
She made a balm meant for burns from wild herbs, one she learned from the book Iruka-sensei recommended to her, his attentive eyes always perceptive to when she adored a subject and needed to know more.
Kakashi-sensei is nothing like that. When he saw that her chakra control was exemplar all he offered her was a compliment but he didn't teach her what to do with it besides climbing trees and he also didn't tell her where she could teach herself.
And he won't in their next trainings, his eyes will pass through her and he will use her to inflame the productive rivalry between Naruto and Sasuke-kun. He won't even try to be subtle about it as he wasn't when they were climbing trees.
Sakura misses Iruka-sensei, she misses how his praise was more than empty words and how he saw her as more than a nameless student in the middle of sons and daughters of great shinobi clans. How he saw her as equally worthy of being in his class.
How he saw her as Sakura.
There is a burning sting in her chest that rises to her eyes but Sakura doesn't let the tears fall.
A shinobi doesn't cry.
She is weak and she is useless, she knows that, the mission branded it into her. But she also has a flicker of hope that maybe she can be more than that, even if she is the only one who believes so.
Carefully and with clean gauze, she cleans his wound and spreads the balm over Kakashi-sensei's tattered hand. Even under the ragged flesh, she can see the mark of older wounds. Scars. Maybe that is why he always wears his gloves.
She wraps his hand in bandages, the monotone work asking all of her attention and she gladly offers every drop of it back.
She knows that there won't be another scar branded down into Kakashi-sensei's skin and it is all because of her work.
He won't notice, but somehow this time she doesn't care. She will notice, even under the glove, and that is enough for her.
Sakura's chest bubbles with a warm flutter, like when she cleans her room and everything is right where it belongs.