SAKURA
SAKURA
Sakura came home to rubble. With her backpack over her shoulder and a report card in her left hand, she stopped in front of the destruction that used to be her house. She didn’t remember what happened between then and later, but next thing she knew she was picking through the wood and rock and wires to try and find her parents.
She found enough of them to know she didn’t want to see the rest. Enough bits and parts that were half recognizable to know they didn’t survive. She found pieces of their dishes embedded in slabs of drywall. Water was bubbling out of broken pipes and turning the dust into something akin to mud. She found one of her stuffed animals, a small pink owl, that was by some twist of fate completely unharmed. Her books were gone, burnt to crisps and then flooded by the spouting water pipes.
As she worked her way through it all she began stacking anything still whole in one place on the sidewalk. It helped. As long as she steered clear of the blood and bits of meat that littered the area. She sorted through it for hours. She found a few kunai, bent and scraped up but still usable. She knew where they came from. Buildings didn’t just randomly explode.
When she found a piece of her mother’s scalp, recognizable by the strands of pink hair still attached, Sakura threw up all over her shoes. The tears that hadn’t stopped since that first moment flowed hot and heavy down her cheeks. Her head was pounding and her hands and arms were scraped up and down, bleeding sluggishly and covered in dust and ash.
After she was done throwing up everything in her stomach she carefully took her shoes off and moved to sit down next to the few possessions she’d saved. She collapsed into a seated position on the sidewalk and tried to think. But all she could see was the arm she found near the refrigerator. The blood smear on the lone standing living room wall. The smell of flesh breaking down in the summer sun.
She felt her chakra swirl up in her stomach, it simmered around with grief and made her gag on nothing. She wondered what Iruka-sensei would tell her about that. They’d just been learning about the chakra channels in class earlier that day.
Her eyes shifted over to the small pile of kunai and shuriken she’d found. Shinobi. They could tear out your spine if they wanted to. They could beat you into the ground if you insulted them. They could destroy a house and family with one fight between each other. They probably barely noticed what destruction they’d left behind. Ninjas were always destroying things. That’s all they did.
She idly wondered where her report card had gone. She was top of her class. Seven years old and civilian born, but she was still top kunoichi. She’d been proud and angry.
She’d tried to underachieve for a while, so she’d be sent home and forgotten, but the problem was she loved learning about chakra and shinobi history. Ninjas used to be different apparently. According to Iruka-sensei, they were lauded as heroes. Those stories were too good to be true, she was sure, but she wanted them to be.
She wiped her hand across her face and wondered when the tears had stopped. It was dark too. She looked around at empty streets. Void of cars and pedestrians. The apartment building across the street, somehow completely unharmed, was locked up for the night. Seals glowing faintly in the dark on the walls. The houses on either side of her own were only slightly damaged, their doors shut and locked like always.
She pulled out her phone and checked the time. Nearly midnight. How long had she been sitting? How long ago had she stumbled upon…
“You can’t keep sitting there,” a voice said. It was scratchy like some adult men she'd heard before, but it was decidedly young.
She looked at the ratty shoes in front of her, an old pair of sneakers that had been spray painted bright orange. They were ugly as all get out. The thought made her giggle a little hysterically. What did it matter? Her only pair of shoes were covered in her own vomit and left to rest on the rubble that was her life.
“Seriously, you know the clans get into turf wars around this time.” The voice sounded tired. She looked up into the face of a small boy, no older than herself no doubt. He had blue blue eyes and scars on his cheeks that on any other day she might have been curious about.
“Nowhere to go,” she said after a moment. His clothes were as broken in as his shoes and were varying shades of black and orange.
“You have a whole city. All of Konoha,” he said. She didn’t answer. “Who’d you lose? Who was in there?”
“My parents.”
He bent down to poke at the ninja weapons she’d found. “These are Hyuga made. This one,” he held up a shuriken, “this one looks Aburame.”
“What does it matter?!” she snapped. She smacked the metal from his hands and he let it drop to the sidewalk with a clink.
“It doesn’t.”
“Go away.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“What are you doing here?!”
“Helping.”
She glared up at him and her eyes stung with the promise of more tears. “How do you figure that?”
“Your parents are dead. Going on the fact that you’re sitting out here alone, you probably don’t have anyone else, do you?” She shook her head in answer. “Which means you have a couple options. Go to an orphanage and see if they have room for you, which they most likely won’t. Or you could try and attack the nearest Hyuga shinobi in revenge, and you’d end up dead.”
He knelt down in front of her and she found that his eyes were beautiful, they looked like they were lighting up a little from the inside. Her mother would have told her she was being over imaginative or dramatically romantic. A wave of nausea made her close her eyes.
“Any other options?” she asked. She didn’t want to die, not really.
“You can come with me.”
“Where to?”
“Nowhere in particular, I guess.”
“Why, then?”
She opened her eyes to find him in the exact same position. Looking back at her with a very serious expression. She’d just met him but the look didn’t really fit his face. He smiled and he suddenly looked much more alive and real. “Why not?”
“What do you mean, why not?”
“It’ll be fun!”
“Fun?!”
“Yeah!”
“Get away from me,” she demanded but she didn’t move a muscle. She didn’t even look away from him.
They studied each other for a while. “When I found my parents, they’d been ripped apart,” he said suddenly. Her eyes widened. “Every clan had gotten a piece of them. Their bodies were dumped in front of the old hokage tower. Then they came after me.”
“Why?”
He ignored the question. “I figured out how to avoid them, hide in all the right places and know all the right people.”
“How?”
“Trial and error, really. I’m no genius, see, but I know a lot of clever stuff. I can teach you.”
“Why?”
He almost didn’t answer her, she could see the hesitation, but then he sighed and gave a shrug. “Sometimes when you see someone, you get a feeling, right?”
She gave a wary nod. Iruka-sensei would have called it instinct.
“Well, when I saw you, sorting through all that rock and stuff, I felt I wanted to know you. Then when I got closer, I felt your chakra.”
“You can feel my chakra? You’re a ninja?!”
“Well, I’m as much a ninja as you. I just haven’t been to the academy.”
“So how…?”
“The point is, your chakra is strong. Good feeling. I haven’t found someone like that in a while.”
She looked at the small meager pile of her things and then back to his sneakers. “What are we going to do?”
He gave her another smile, this one much less nice and more than a little disconcerting. “We survive. We survive and we make them regret it.”
“Them?”
The boy gave a casual shrug that was anything but. “The clans. The people who killed our parents.” He leaned closer to her and she was caught once again by his eyes. “I’ll tell you something, something everyone will know at some point. I’m gonna be the next hokage.”
“Hokage?” she echoed. She knew her history, of course, but the last hokage had been killed thirty years ago. “The clans won’t let you.” They’d stopped anyone from stepping up. Therewas no hokage. Not anymore.
“They won’t know what hit ‘em.”
She looked at him and for a second she believed.
The next moment she dismissed the idea but she liked him. He felt like he was in control, even here in the middle of the night, knelt by the curb of a street in the middle of nowhere.
“All of Konoha, huh?” she asked. She grabbed her school backpack and shoved a few of the surviving things she’d found in there. Her owl, a watch of her dad’s, a half burnt dress of hers, and a few more odds and ends.
When she stood up he was beside her in a flash. “I’m Naruto, by the way,” he introduced.
“Sakura,” she replied.
A crashing sound came from a few streets down and they both tensed and looked towards it. Nothing in sight but Naruto was right, the streets weren’t safe at night. That’s when shinobi came out to settle things in blood.
“Where do we go?” she whispered, eyes straining in the dark to see anything. Maybe they’d be coming back for her, like they had Naruto.
“You like ramen?” he asked. His tone completely at odds with the situation.
“What?”
“Come on, Ichiraku ramen can make everything better.”
He grabbed her hand and turned to walk down the sidewalk. She followed along, sending a couple last looks over her shoulder at her home.
She pulled the backpack up a little higher and matched her pace to his. She looked down at bare feet and made herself keep walking.