After she'd finished washing and dressing, Sakura found herself in front of the mirror nailed to the wall to the right of the door to the backyard. (Sakura had always hated that it was situated there—it was close enough to the outdoors to be regularly covered in pollen and dust, which meant it had to be cleaned more often than if it had been positioned more out of the way, upstairs or something. But kaa-san said that visitors wouldn't see it if it were upstairs, and that was apparently its purpose.)
She'd never made much of a habit of it, of examining herself in great detail rather than passingly, but she figured she had a few minutes to spare. She was nine, now, but she still looked the same as she had when she was eight; short, with lilac eyes, blond hair, and irregular bruises from training scattering her visible skin.
All of her family had been born blond, but only half stayed that way: herself, Ren, Sayuri, Ayame, Fujio, and Kohana had kept their mother's locks, while the rest had darkened gradually into some amalgam of both parents.
Her hair was one of the few which had never darkened at all.
Sakura didn't know why she was thinking of this, why she was doing this, why hair was a concern to her at all.
She kept staring in the mirror.
Her hair was back in the trademark ponytail of her family. The only one who didn't have one, right now at least, was Fujio, and that was only because his had been cut off during a mission—he was already in the process of growing it back.
Besides the bruises, she had a nick just above her right eye from a spar one week before. Shin had been punished for that, the cut far too close to her eye for comfort.
She kept on staring.
She was alive.
Wasn't that an odd thought?
That life itself existed, continued to exist, perpetuated to the point of sapience...
And she was one of the many who was currently alive, currently breathing and moving and thinking like so many others.
And Zoro Akimichi wasn't.
The image in the mirror did not change.
The house was empty.
Kaa-san had changed her work hours last year, was almost never home. Himari went to Ren's during the day and helped with his kids—she had seizures sometimes, so she could never be left alone, but that didn't mean she could just sit around and do nothing. Fujio and Ayame were both with their teams. Training would be a bit hard for them, today, but they hadn't even hesitated in walking past the kitchen without grabbing anything to eat.
She'd probably find that more heartwarming later.
Even Kohana was gone, also breakfast-less but unable to find a substitute for her shift in time to spend the day with Sakura. Sakura hadn't asked her too, of course, but Kohana had been incredibly sorry nonetheless.
Everyone else was gone on missions, hadn't been around in weeks at least, so Sakura was alone in her house staring at a mirror she'd never paid much attention to and marveling at the utter absurdity of the mere existence of life.
Outside her window, two boys began shouting ('Gross! Gross! Keep that away from me!') and she finally forced herself to snap out of her reverie.
Besides the walk to the Academy and the Nara compound, the walk to the Akimichi compound was the trip she made most often in life.
Nothing much was different during the walk that day. A few new tenements had been built, blocking the sun with their height, but they'd been built over the course of weeks; she'd already seen them. People rushed to and fro and children played and merchants sold their wares.
Most she recognized. The few she didn't blended in perfectly.
Nothing stood out.
Nothing was different
It was late winter, cold and dry, the kind of temperature that cracked your lips and made your cheeks so red they hurt.
Around her most people were bundled up, wrapped in as many layers as they could get around themselves. Some of the ninja were more freely dressed—their frequent movement made it less necessary, and even if they had to stand still for a long time they could just rely on pumping their chakra to stay comfortable.
Sakura looked far more like the latter than the former, but she didn't run.
She didn't use her chakra either; doing so was considered rude while mourning.
She shivered instead.
As she neared the Akimichi compound most sounds fell away. She could hear the call of the Akimichi wailers—unlike the Yamanaka, who mourned in silence—and their cries seemed to block out all of the others.
It probably did, to a fashion. Everyone knew what their wails meant, and whispered or moved away from the stark white walls of the compound as a sign of respect.
Within the compound the sound was even louder; hundreds of voices crying out.
Their last funeral had been only one month ago—a little girl who had caught the flu too soon after having had the pox.
The Yamanaka, who were nearly as large, had managed to avoid a funeral for almost four months.
The Nara streak had ended last week, with one of their elders.
Death, with populations as large as theirs, were common enough occurrences.
That didn't make them any easier, any less important, any less painful to those they directly affected.
Sakura had only met Zoro three, maybe four times. Her impression of him had been positive, but fleeting—he had made little impression, his personality not unusual enough to leave more than a passing mark.
She knew, too, that he hadn't been that close to Juro. He'd been too old when the youngest was born, too far into having his own life and, because he was neither the first nor the second born, not tied up as much in his role as older brother as Ichiro, as Ren. Even Kaede, sweet Kaede, had spent more time with Sakura than Zoro had Juro, despite his time already off the earth.
The pain of her brother's death still lingered.
The pain of Juro's brothers' deaths—the second and fifth, and now the third—would linger too.
She couldn't imagine his pain.
.
Sometimes, when most of the world had fallen asleep and the only noises left were from those who wouldn't or couldn't join their brethren in slumber, Sakura would sneak out of her window.
The Yamanaka Compound was located in the midst of everything, piled in on every side by buildings and parks and training grounds. The Akimichi were, if anything, even worse off—their compound was located smack in the middle of blocks full of apartment buildings, with only a few scant scatterings of trees to break up the monotony.
The Nara, on the other hand, were located at the very edge, near the walls. Their lands were piled high with trees and wildlife instead of wood and clay, and you could easily get lost within the compound and forget the city it was a part of.
This made middle-of-the-night trips to the compound a bit inconvenient, both in terms of distance and routing, but Sakura still made the trek at least once a month.
Usually, she ended up in Shin's room alone.
He would be awake (he was always awake), but something during the day would warn her subconsciously (if it were conscious she'd have just planned out spending the night in the daytime) that he wasn't doing well, that he'd gone without slumber for too long.
She would climb into his bed, wrap her tiny arms around his body, and murmur in a low voice about nothing at all.
He'd fall asleep, usually, about three or so hours after she'd arrived, and the next day she would go to the Academy with bags under his eyes and he'd go with more energy than he'd had at any point that month.
Sometimes, when both Sakura's and Juro's radars picked up the same signs, they'd all end up crammed inside his tiny bed at two in the morning, wrestling for any available space while Shin repeated over and over that they didn't have to come and they threatened over and over to tell his mom on him if he didn't shut up and pass out.
The first time she had met Zoro had been after one of those nights, when his mother had sent him to collect Juro for one reason or another.
He'd been tall, and round, and polite, and... and...
She really hadn't noticed anything else.
He'd teased Juro, she remembered, about how he kept on ending up in beds that weren't his. Juro hadn't gotten the joke, and then Zoro had apologized—he'd been thinking of Kuro, not Juro—the former apparently had a habit of sleepwalking.
She tried desperately to think of some other, deeper, memory of Zoro, some reasonable explanation for why his death was hitting her so hard, but there was none.
He was a nobody to her, just one of the many people of Konoha that she irregularly interacted with.
He'd made no special mark on her, she hadn't thought of him with fondness prior to his death—hadn't thought of him at all, in fact.
And yet...
It wasn't just that he was an Akimichi, either.
She knew other Akimichi who had died, had spoken to some of them more than even Zoro, and she'd felt sorry on their deaths, but not so much that she found herself unable to think clearly, unable to smile.
She shuffled to the back of the mourning crowd, next to Shin.
He looked less affected than she did, but not by much, and it might've just been because he always looked exhausted to begin with.
Around them Akimichi wails continued to fill the air, their every action demanding recognition for their pain, for the sorrow Zoro's death had brought.
Shin and Sakura stayed silent.
She wasn't sure if it was clan tradition—the Yamanaka mourned silently, and the Nara mourned privately, in one-on-one interactions—but neither seemed to be capable of opening their mouths and screaming their pain out to the world.
A baby was crying nearby.
A little girl asked her mother why they hadn't had breakfast.
A dog whimpered, covering its ears from its perch on someone's front stoop.
Sakura could see Juro at the very front with five of his remaining six brothers and both of his parents.
They were screaming, wrestling back and forth without chakra, without strength, simply expelling their emotions in the most physical way they were able.
The Nara talked through the pain of death. The Yamanaka did that too, as did the Akimichi, but only after several days had passed.
The Akimichi, on the day of the funeral, didn't really talk at all.
Even the Yamanaka talked more, said the words which freed the soul and brought it to peace.
The Akimichi did not believe words did anything, so they didn't waste their time with any.
Instead, the day was given to emotion, to grief, to the sort of unfeeling feeling that Sakura could never pull off.
She'd spend the day here, in the compound.
She'd help where she could—watch after babies, bring water to those who looked thirsty—but there was little else she could do.
Little else anyone could do.
Zoro was dead.
Nothing could change that. Nothing would change that.
When Kaede died she'd been wrapped up in her grief, in her overwhelming misery at the death of her brother.
Now she was sad, she was mourning, but it was less personal.
Then, when Kaede died, her sadness had carried her through the hours and days after his death, had gifted her with the inability to think of anything else.
Now Sakura found herself desperate for a distraction, for a purpose, for anything that might call away from the finality of the death of a man she both did and didn't know.
.
He looked like Juro.
That's what it was, wasn't it?
He looked like Juro, so Sakura kept imagining her teammate, her lifelong soul brother in his blood brother's place.
Kept imagining standing in the shoes of the scarred Yamanaka at the front of the crowd, wrestling with the very same brothers.
Death was final.
Even Arden couldn't change that—all she'd done, however accidentally, was delay her own by several months.
One day Juro would die.
One day they all would.
She remembered the first Akimichi funeral she'd ever been to—the death of her dad's teammate's father.
He'd been old, very old, when he'd died.
His family, his friends, those he had spent decades working with had still done much the same as Juro's family; everyone—from small little three-year-olds, who couldn't even move a potted plant, to current jounin troop leaders, who could lift a house with barely a sweat, to old decrepit retirees, whose primes had long since passed and with them most of their strength—everyone had shoved at each other, screamed in the faces of one another, wordlessly demanded answers, demanded relief, demanded a way to overcome.
She'd found it weird at the time, discomfiting and alien and loud.
Now she couldn't imagine a more visceral way of mourning.
She didn't know if, should Juro die before her, she'd be capable of wearing her emotions on her sleeves as she was meant to do.
She didn't know if she'd want to, even if she could.
She hated this.
Hated every revelation she had, hated every memory this funeral brought to the surface, hated every bit of trying to make sense of the world she'd been forced to do.
Right now she was supposed to be thinking about proper bows, and tea ceremonies, and filing systems, and legal doubletalk.
She was not supposed to be thinking about whether or not it was fair to grieve someone who you only mourned because they reminded you of someone else. She was not supposed to be thinking about death, its finality, and the absolute certainty that everyone she could see would be dead within the century. She was not supposed to be thinking about why the Yamanaka mourned differently than the Akimichi, which one was better, and if she was even capable of mourning Juro as he'd want to be mourned.
For a second she hated Zoro.
The second passed.
For a second she hated herself.
The second passed.
Someone gestured for water and she dashed off to get it.
Later, much later, she'd try to decide how to deal with the prospective deaths of her teammates. For now she'd bury herself, as much as possible, in the aid of others and try to ignore, for a little while longer, the hopelessness of the endeavor.