12
She knows.
She knows she's not important to the team. She knows she's useless. She knows she has no spot on this team at all. For she is an outsider. Not similar to them in anyway. The extra, who one cares about. The one no one knows about. She's the 'other one'. She thinks about it all the time. Why? Why is she with them? She's just a cloud of imperfections among the bright sun and moon. She just blocks their light from reaching out as far as it can.
She watches.
She watches Naruto and Sasuke train and interact. A friendship they both wont acknowledge but strong in every sense. Oh how she wishes to be a part of it. She watches them fight together side by side, two power houses with potential she could only ever dream of. They make plans which she is never apart of. They train together which she is never invited to join. She watches as her sensei focuses on them only. Because she isn't worth the effort. She watches as they work. They avoid asking for her help because she's Sakura.
'what good can I do?'
She tries her best.
She trains at night when no one is around to poke fun at her. She attempts to do her best but she just wasn't made for this. It's hard to learn alone without the guidance she needs. Sakura decides to try her best quality. Her brains. She's confident and knows she's the smartest. So she practices languages, decodes puzzles and scrolls, studies up on history and is ready to put her knowledge to the test and share it with her team. And when it's time for their next mission, they have to search for a scroll, she knows its her time to shine.
But she should've known.
Why would she be shining? She has no light to give.
They ignore her.
And in the end, its another mission done by Kakashi's students, Sasuke and Naruto.
She understands.
Really she does. So she sits back and allows her teammates to shine as she continues to cling to a hopeless crush (she understands it's not a crush) and pretends it doesn't matter it all. But it does. She wants to train, she wants to hang out with them, she wants to play and tease and fight and love.
Isn't she a member of team 7 too?
'Maybe one day,' she thinks to herself on a sunny afternoon as she sits in their shadows. 'maybe one day it'll be their turn to sit in her shadow as she shines brightly, a sun or a moon perhaps, above all.'