Work Text:
1.
She isn’t entirely quite sure who she is.
She’s not that innocent girl anymore, with a silly crush and dreaming with her head in the clouds. She’s seen things—things she wishes desperately she hadn’t—and is equal parts apathetic and unable to move on, stop clinging to her broken team, scattered to the wind.
Her sunshine boy with his eyes no longer on her but a future she cannot envision, determined to bring home their wayward brooding teammate with a desperation bordering on obsession. He doesn't listen to her anymore, even if he hears her speak, busy creating a symphony of promises that leave no room for Sakura the equal teammate, only Sakura the weakling, who couldn't act to save the boy she loved and needed another boy, all of them too-young, to do it for her.
(She placed the weight of their twelve-year-old worlds on his shoulders. Is it any surprise?)
Her lazy sensei, who used to spare the time for a hair-ruffle but never to teach her anything substantial. He's a ghost in the sunlight, burdened with the weight of his past: everyone he loves has died save the current incarnation of Team 7, and they might as well be dead anyway with how distantly their paths orbit. He throws himself into ANBU work again, she knows, and seems determined to not make it out alive. Suicide runs and suicide missions; he can't spare any time for her now.
They are a family that loves, but does not understand.
She doesn't feel anything anymore. She can't let go.
2.
The polished blade strikes through her stomach, skin and muscle giving way to cold, unforgiving steel.
Slowly, a smile spreads across her face. Pain, glorious pain, blooms like a grotesque flower, petals unfurling and wracking her body with tremors. This is the first time anything has pierced through the fog that surrounds her in years, alighting her skin and heart with sensation, and it is glorious.
Wetness blooms under her ribs, thick crimson life-blood dripping from her ruptured stomach. The knife pierces deep—this is what she has been trained to do.
And she laughs and laughs and laughs till her throat is raw and bleeding, because the only other option is to cry—and she doesn’t have any tears left to spend.
3.
She watches her steady hand bring the sharp edge of a blade to her pale flesh, pressing just enough to make beads of crimson well up, and then decisively presses it down and pulls. She’s distant, almost a passing spectator, watching her hair brush the wound, stain red.
It’s a pretty color, this crimson, she thinks absently, prettier than her own pink, and she contemplates keeping it this way. She wonders if she could get a similar dye somewhere close?
Then it occurs to her that this is probably the most mundane thing she’s thought about since that night, and she feels laughter bubble against her throat and spill forth, splitting the still air with a haunting echo.
4.
She stands before him, the only thing separating them a gaping chasm.
In some ways it feels no different than their childhood: she, cheerfully and relentlessly pursuing, he, angrily and relentlessly rejecting. But they aren't those people anymore. He is no longer the unfortunate boy who suffered under the weight of dozens upon dozens of ghosts pressing down on his shoulders, burdened with the legacy of a clan hundreds of years in the making as its sole survivor, but one who still smiled, if rarely. He had liked tomatoes and cats, even if he wouldn't admit it.
She's not sure the man standing before her likes, feels, anything at all. He has cut away all the soft animal parts of himself, left only The Avenger standing in its wake. She can barely even recognize him through the feral snarl carved into his pretty, noble features; anger has left his face prematurely lined.
Her face shows no emotion, eyes like chips of ice. She thinks maybe she should have felt something—sadness, even anger. But instead she feels nothing at all, like someone’s ripped out her still-beating heart and now the space between her ribs is unbearably empty. A good shinobi at last.
She doesn’t feel angry. Just tired. She wonders how he’s fallen this far, the once-brilliant boy that she loved and mourned for, turned into this man with bleeding eyes and a crazed smile as he charges towards her.
It’s disappointingly easy to stop him, to catch his wrist and swing him around, feeling his shoulder pop out of its socket and the crunch and grind of delicate bones under her hands. And she watches as his life fades and he spits out blood, gurgling wetly, eyes boiling with animosity until they don't anymore.
Left all alone on the edge of the world, she rests his rapidly-cooling body in her lap and wondering where it all started falling apart.