V
What a Shinobi Is
It is still there, forgotten between magnets, pieces of paper, photographs and a list of tasks, but it is still there. Sakura watches the curved edges of the paper, yellowed and crisp, embalmed in years of cooking. Her first grade report from the Academy, the first grade report of her life, and her parents pinned it to the fridge as she looked up with a bright smile, her heart bursting with pride at the series of A's in Iruka-sensei's handwriting, bursting with something warm as her parents looked down at her and saw her and were happy with what they saw.
It's the first time in years Sakura realises that it's still there, the first time in years Sakura remembers the time when the word shinobi was a vague shimmery image in the shape of dark cool eyes and blue confident ones; when people jumping on top of rooftops were like kami-sama, breaking the limits of what was human and so far away from her hand as it followed their path; when death was a strange distant thing that belonged to everyone and no one in concrete, especially not to Sakura herself.
Do her parents regret pinning the report there? Do they dread now the full scope of what it marked and that they weren't able to see then? How could they have seen it? Sakura was only a child with a whim, with a cute crush on a boy and an admiration and first bond with a girl. They didn't know what it meant to be Uchiha and what it meant to be Yamanaka and they especially didn't know Haruno could ever be a last name among those.
The list of A's was only excellence and not a path for excellence in death. The Academy raises children for death and that was something their civilian eyes couldn't see, that was something their eyes of mother and father, set on indulging their daughter's whims and supporting her dreams independent of what they were, didn't want to see.
They see it now. Even if Sakura speaks of nothing, even if she hides everything, especially not the scar on her stomach from a man whose heart was a wooden casket and its twin on her back, especially not the scars and the wounds that never had the time to become scars Sakura also brands into others, the blood that festers in her hands and the hole in the shape of three men in her heart.
They see it still, they smell the blood like two scared doe, their eyes big and open, pleading on her profile and it burns her.
"This is different from missions. This is war." Her dad says.
Sakura turns her gaze back to them, stout even when her heart hammers against her ribs. "You can't forbid me from going. I don't belong to you."
"You don't, Sakura, but can't you do this for us…? Please. Can't you stay for us…?" Her mum asks as her fingers, damp and cold, encircle her own. There is so much pain in her eyes and gnawing openness, the vulnerability of a plea. "We love you and we wouldn't bear it if we lost you, our daughter, our only child, the most precious thing in our lives…"
It's not just fear for her death, Sakura knows, it is also fear for if she comes back alive without too many pieces, cut away and fallen onto the battlefield, never to be mended, never to be found.
"I'm sorry…"
And it's all Sakura can say to the two people that love her most in the world, to the two people that gave her life and have guided her, supported her through all the days she has inhabited this earth, the two people that moulded her into the person she is today.
Sakura leaves her parents' home, her own home for seventeen years, and settles in a small empty apartment. The wound is too deep, the choice she made too searing, even when her parents tell her that will always be her home. She can't bear to watch the terror and the dread in their eyes, she can't bear the creases of their love in their faces, can't bear to see how she deformed their love into pain.
Sakura's love is pain and now dad and mum's love is also pain.
Her heart breaks as she cuts herself from her parents, as she sits on the cold wooden ground of the new apartment because there is no furniture there, as she trains every day for the war that is to come, hoping that will be enough to come back to them.
Sakura's duty to Konoha is greater than her duty to her parents, her love for her village burning through her with a fire greater than all other things in her life, her duty to Naruto, her teammate and her best friend, and her duty to the injured not yet under the skilled touch of her chakra.
She understands Sasuke-kun a little better now, she understands the tugs tearing through him and how his choice was selfish and selfless, an indulgence and a sacrifice.
The last of the stretchers with the last injured disappears between trees, towards the medical post, but Sakura doesn't have the time, doesn't want the space to think and let the battle settle into her.
She jumps up into the branches, searching for a place where she can keep watch over another wave of Zetsu clones and resurrected people.
She likes that they don't bleed. Her hands are spotless even with the countless of chests that have caved around them. If they don't bleed, if there's no blood, no life in them, it's not murder.
This is different from missions. This is war. Her dad had said and only now can Sakura see how large the abyss is and how it festers deep into her heart.
Sakura doesn't break now, but each death, each speck of blood, each glazed look void of life and full of terror from her comrades, settles like cracks into her flesh. She won't break now, Sakura knows that, she won't do it because she can't. But already she knows, already she can taste the bile and the pain, a looming dark weight, from when the cracks will be free to deepen and her pieces ready to crumble.
Her eyes suddenly stumble onto a gleaming mirage and her feet stop. She needs to focus on it to make sure that it is real.
Kakashi-sensei is sitting on a tree branch, one leg outstretched, the other bent, where he rests his precious Icha Icha Violance, and she recognises it from its bright red colour, not like blood, like roses. The image is so entirely ordinary, so entirely familiar, it shakes the trunk under her feet, cracks the earth and washes everything with a sense of novelty.
Sakura smiles. It's a piece of home above the desolated battlefield. It doesn't belong there and yet he slots himself perfectly into the landscape around him.
"Kakashi-sensei?" She calls from a branch up.
"Hmm?"
That is enough permission for her and she jumps down to sit in front of him, legs dangling down the side of the branch. Sakura isn't completely sure why she needed to slot herself beside him too, to insert herself into the perfect image of Konoha, with its porn reading Copy-ninja, and not Hot Waters with its Third Division taichou. Comfort? Comradeship? Relief?
"Do you remember the bell test?"
It can't be any of those, not when her mouth shapes this question. Sakura realises now, her mind catching up to her pride.
She is seventeen and elbows deep in blood and death and she doesn't break. The hitai-ate on her forehead spells what her work in the battlefield - mending and destroying - already did.
Shinobi.
His eyes don't lift from his book. "Reminiscing on the old days when you were cute little genin?"
Sakura can't face him, her gaze is on the ground below and her fingers are faint with anticipation. "Do you remember the genjutsu you cast on me?"
"Ah." He does, or at least the sharingan does, and some of the carelessness of before fades from him.
"I hated you for it, you traumatised me."
Kakashi-sensei chuckles and when she doesn't join him, when her poise is as serious as her heart, he cuts the rumbles flat. It's a sudden break between them and the silence and it betrays how unauthentic they actually were.
"I had nightmares for a year, I couldn't hold a kunai without shaking or move on the field. I only understood why you did it when I was staring at Sasuke's body pierced with senbon. I remember realising you wanted to show me, a civilian, the reality of being a shinobi."
Sakura finally lifts her gaze and turns to look at him, finding that his own was already pinned on her and not his book.
"But now I think that you just wanted to scare me off."
Kakashi-sensei is as unreadable as he always is, but he is attentive, mirroring Sakura, as they both try to find what is truly moving behind each other's eyes, try to find the purpose that moves their actions.
"It would explain why you never bothered being a sensei to me."
He realises hers then and there is a flicker of guilt in his expression, but that's not enough for her. Sakura doesn't care for guilt, she burns for something more and so she stares back, trying to pull some word, some reaction, a gaze that sees past her and into the depth of her being. But Kakashi-sensei is more worried about measuring his words than seeing her.
"It was both." Kakashi-sensei finally settles and looks away into the forest. "You weren't so easily scared off."
"Surprised?"
"You surprise me the most of all three. I was the one that didn't see your potential. I mean, I knew you had a sensibility for genjutsu and great chakra control, but I never thought you'd achieve anything great with it. Like what I thought was a silly crush is love where you pour all of yourself into it. It's what made you take that potential and make something great of it."
The words are much bigger than the apology lacing them and that Sakura came searching for, the confession of a failure that avenges her pride, the acknowledgement she has been burning for. They are most of all vulnerable and that jolts into her like lightning.
There is no triumph, no retribution for proving her sensei wrong, no fire of recognition burning through her, kindling and founding an everlasting self-esteem that would keep her pieces forever intact and forever strong. Those were never for Kakashi-sensei to give her.
The words don't change his eyes. They change her own.
All this time she thought Kakashi-sensei wasn't seeing her and yet he is the one that sees her best from Team 7.
Sakura always burned for it and yet her own eyes have been blind to him too.
Does he also want to be seen? Kakashi-sensei is also always warning them to look underneath the underneath. Is that for him too?
Her trembling eyes settle over him. The mask wraps like a shroud around his face, the Icha Icha is always in his hands, the lazy eye-crinkled smile the most emotion he expresses, like always and yet he looks so completely different, because Sakura sees him now. Not everything, but she sees the outline of a real person of their own.
There is only a sudden ache in her chest, a fluttery warm sadness. Sakura failed him just as she has always felt he failed her.
She rests her chin of her knee, ripping her eyes away from him and into the leaves fluttering in front of her.
"When I imagined this I thought it would be much more satisfying than it is." She says with humour in her voice, but doesn't hide how the words scrap against the lump in her throat.
"The last approval you need is from your useless old sensei."
There is a small sad smile in her lips. "I don't need it, not anymore, but I want it."
"You have it, Sakura."
"And you weren't useless, you taught me one of my most dear things, Kakashi-sensei."
Her head turns to look at him as she mimics the words that marked themselves into her heart on that first real mission of Team 7, Sakura's first real mission as a shinobi, even when she was still weak and still useless.
It's what makes her strong, what doesn't let the cracks shatter and break, what burns like fire through her veins and makes her go back to the battlefield where she stares death head-on, where she fights and wins against it with her own hands, her own chakra.
It's her purpose, her duty, her Will of Fire.
Her love made pain and her pain made love.
"I won't let my comrades die."
This is it.
As always, thank you for reading! And for the reviews!
Thank you, Guest, for leaving your thoughts, you didn't need to push yourself back, you can rant all you want! Your points made sense and helped me think about what I wrote, and I love discussing Naruto in general. I couldn't reply you privately, so I'll leave here my thoughts.
About Konoha being like a cult in this fic, in my opinion, Konoha is very cult like in canon. It asks for unconditional service and devotion; your life is entirely dispensable in face of the greater good of the village; has this cult of personality behind the Hokage and the will of fire; you can't get out, the moment you try to leave the village you become a missing-nin needing to be taken down; and is very nepotistic. Itachi thinking he had to murder his entire family (even old people, children, babies) to keep peace is a big red flag. Sakumo was ostracized and driven to suicide because he chose the lives of his comrades above his duty to Konoha.
And yes, there's an hypocrisy in Sakura, the villages differentiate between killing under the sanction of your village and outside of it. Sasuke "killing" Killer-B as part of Akatsuki was considered a horrible, criminal act, while Kakashi is seen as a hero by Konoha (even if he definitely doesn't see himself as such).
As for my Sakura being soft, I think she's as soft as in canon, but it depends on what you mean by 'soft'.
This is the end of my own rant, haha.
Everyone, feel free to share your own.