Chapter 1
Sakura’s parents are civilians.
Her father shaves his face over the bathroom sink using a shiny flat razor, not in the high branches of a tree with a steel kunai meticulously sharpened to a 15-degree angle, sharp enough to cut through mist. He keeps his mahogany hair long and wears it loose, without fear of it obscuring his vision in a fight. He wears fragile crystal glasses on the end of his nose when he does his accounting at the kitchen table. He is careless enough to set the occasional scroll down on a wet ring of condensation sitting atop the stained wood where a cup of water once was and not even notice as the rice paper wilts.
Her mother does laundry with unscarred hands, early in the morning when dew is still dampening the grass, working colorful garments over a bamboo washboard she brought back on their last merchant caravan along with rare tea and spices—from the Yuga Market, she’d claimed, with pride. She wipes sweat from her golden hairline with the back of her hand when she straightens from washing. She sweats from the smallest of tasks, pale cheeks turning the same shade as Sakura’s petal-pink hair. She smiles from the smallest of joys, and looks nothing like Sakura at all.
Sakura’s parents are civilians.
It does not spare them.
Sakura is eleven years old and still in the academy, caught dangling somewhere vague and vulnerable between a civilian and a shinobi, and her parents are disfigured mounds of blood and unrecognizable substances mixing with the mud under torrential rain. Sakura is under a large wooden crate that fell off their wagon when the attack began, knocking her briefly unconscious and hiding her in one fell swoop of cosmic cruelty and luck. The screaming stopped minutes or hours or days ago. The rain is breaching the boards, her muscles cramping from holding her hunched position for too long, and the mud is cold and slimy and grainy, and she can see through the wide slats of her hiding place enough to wish she couldn’t see at all.
They are miles out from the village, and no one is coming.
It takes another hour of sinking into the soupy ground beneath her box before she accepts that.
Sakura is eleven years old and a coward, and the sun is almost down.
She unburies herself, steps over the tens of meters of mutilated bodies, and begins to walk.
…
She wakes up in a warm, clean room with a tube connected to her arm, a needle pinching in warning when she tries to bend her elbow. People flip through papers on clipboards and say words to her and expect her to say words back, but she doesn’t think she can.
She catches the words “bandits” and “Iwa,” but doesn’t put them together, yet.
She does not remember making it past the gates into Konoha. She doesn’t remember making it very far at all. But she dreams of white masks like painted plates. She dreams of two cats circling her slowly. She dreams of a white fox with black eyes and red slashes on its cheeks, bleeding in the rain, tilting its head and watching her fall to her knees, picking her back up with its teeth.
…
The orphanage is a strange place.
The springs in the bed are rusted, so Sakura ignores hers and sleeps on the wooden floorboards with her newly-acquired threadbare blankets for comfort and her back pressed to the peeling paint slowly escaping the wall furthest from the door. She finds it odd that Naruto is not here. He doesn’t have a clan compound to retreat to, like Sasuke. She expected him to be here, and finds herself disappointed that he’s not. He is loud and Sakura hasn’t successfully made friends with anyone in class other than Ino and Shikamaru, but still, she laments. She remembers a time when Naruto and her would take turns pushing each other on the swing, before her parents forbade her from playing with him. She wonders if it would be okay to be friends, now that they’re dead, but doubts he will waste any more kindness on a coward like her.
Meals are more punctual and less edible than Sakura is used to, but some of them are served hot and that makes a difference in a bone achy winter like this. Bland oats boiled in water with roasted chestnuts Sakura gets her wrist slapped for trying to single out and salvage from the mush. Seared, salted and dried minnows she worries her teeth on and licks the oils from her fingers after eating. Foraged greens thrown together in bitter salads, tossed with the cheapest sesame oil available, accompanying almost every lunch and dinner.
“You’re lucky to be born in Konoha,” the staff remind her and others, often. “You’re lucky you get these meals, that bed.”
Sakura is lucky, probably, but part of her retreats ever further into herself, into whispers that swirl in her lungs, never expelled: Are we?
Are we lucky?
…
The academy is becoming a strange place, too.
Iruka-sensei is watching her closely, and she is watching him right back. The scar on the bridge of his nose is more interesting than before. Where before it was a painted line, now it is skin splitting open, a clean slice, likely cutting through the cartilage of his nose. He sees where she’s looking and motions with his eyes for her to look down at the test she is supposed to be taking. The sounds of pencils and nervous shifting, wood desks and chairs creaking, rise up around her like a bamboo forest.
Her classmates give her a wide berth, but their concern is clumsy and poorly hidden. Ino lingers in doorways, running nervous manicured hands through her silky-blonde hair. Shikamaru lays beside her in the grass and talks slowly about shapes in clouds she doesn’t see. Hinata works up the courage to wave at her while passing her on the street, and Sakura nods once to acknowledge that effort. She feels Naruto’s stare often, like a steady burn, one he doesn’t attempt to disguise, unlike Sasuke’s silent appraisals from the corners of his eyes. Naruto offers to train together, and she agrees, but then forgets to follow up with a day and time. Sasuke says nothing, but when Kiba asks her what the orphanage is like, he hits him in the diaphragm and stares at Sakura in silent solidarity. It doesn’t reach her.
Something has shifted inside her, and its displacement continues to ripple.
She feels her shurikens disconnect from her fingertips at the perfect angle with the perfect force; she watches them sink home in the neck of the foreign nin she likes to pretend the wooden training stump is hiding. She feels the molecules in the air shift against her cheek. She feels the seeds in the earth stir beneath her feet. She feels chakra swirl around her senses. She feels everything and nothing, all at the same time. She sees blood and rain swirling like a whirlpool of stomachs gutted and throats cut. She hears the screams drowned out by thunder, and they keep her awake while the others sleep.
It hasn’t rained in at least a day, but the sun has yet to part the clouds enough to dry the soil, and so her black training shoes remain closed-toe and filthy when she stumbles her way out of training ground sixteen, having exhausted herself moving through katas and target practice until the agitated buzzing in her mind grew sluggish and bearable.
She stops just inside the tree line without understanding her instincts, and looks up into the branches above her.
He is around her age. Young, with a pale, hauntingly handsome face and black eyes to match his short, carefully trimmed hair. There is something curated about him: his unfeeling expression; his suspiciously pristine black training pants and long sleeved shirt, like the fabric has never seen sweat; his relaxed posture, crouched on a branch fifteen feet above her with his elbows on his knees, peering down at her like a crow.
“You noticed,” he says, and Sakura considers the adrenaline building in her bloodstream, debating if this is one of those times it might be necessary, or if this is similar to those moments she freezes up in line at the grocery store because someone brushed past her, or looked at her, or breathed too loud. He doesn’t seem to care if she turns hostile, unwary as he drops down in front of her silently, displacing no foliage on the training forest floor. Chakra control, she notes, reflexively.
He tilts his head, observing her, off-putting in the austere smile he tries to force his tight lips into, the expression awkward and unpracticed where the rest of his body exudes control and calm.
The breeze shifts the thinner branches above them, throwing small leaves of shadow and light over porcelain white skin. “Come,” he says, and makes no noise when he turns to walk away, showing no signs of unease putting his back to her. Showing no emotion at all.
Sakura hasn’t spoken to anyone in a week. Her throat sounds dry, shredding the word, “Where?”
If he notices her atrophied voice, he does not care, nothing to be gleaned from his eyes but black iris sinking into a blacker pupil as he angles his head to look behind him, leaving the left side of his face hidden from her. “That question is inconvenient.”
Sakura should not go with this boy.
He is a shinobi, undoubtedly, but wears no leaf forehead protector. He moves through the forest like he is untouched by it, disconnected from nature. Immune.
Sakura should not go with this boy.
“Why should I follow you?” she asks, and hangs on the answer.
The boy stares at her for several breaths, thoughtful, careful, before settling on the answer she needs, clearly tailored to her, predatory in its soothing perfection. “Because you have no reason to stay.”
…
When Sakura disenrolls from the academy, Iruka smiles softly, if somewhat mournfully, sunlight cutting through the window and across his face like his scar as he leans forward, resting his elbows on his maple desk. Her file is open on the desk in front of him, and she barely recognizes her own picture on the page, taken traditionally by the large oak outside the academy at the start of every year before graduation.
“I understand,” he says.
Sakura smiles back, invisible black roots growing into her wounds, displacing scar tissue, filling empty space with pain until it doesn’t hurt at all, and says: “I knew you would.”