Tender||Sasusaku

Tender

Sakura's thoughts. One-shot. Blank period. 

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or any character except my OC.

Sakura bids goodbye to another patient, her smile unwavering after hours of work. She doesn't care if the back of her blouse feels damp from sweat — thanks to the sudden heat wave in Konoha which has been prevailing for more than a month — and though it doesn't feel like it's evening with the sun overwhelming the skies; she knows it is. Sakura knows because it's her favorite time of the day recently. She looks forward to it like children look forward to candies.

It's almost 6 in the evening. The meeting is scheduled half an hour later, but she doesn't mind going early, in fact, she wants to go, as she strips her rubber tie off of her hair. The person she is going to meet doesn't like it, saying her pretty hairs need their independence.

She knocks on the designated room, once, twice, and the door opens with a click. A nurse welcomes her inside, and she bows her head in greeting. And there it is, the person who has been occupying her mind as of lately — a girl of not over six years of age. Sakura feels light just at the sight of her, and her smile grows. The girl, Yuuko, is busy fumbling with some crayons, her small brows knitted in concentration.

"Hey, there, little champ," she ruffles her hair, and the girl turns to her with her wide, brown eyes glittering and lips pulled in a wide grin.

"Big sis Sakura! See, I made this pretty butterfly," she shoves the paper she held into Sakura's hands, a mix of purple and green and yellow and many other colours. No red. Sakura sighs. This isn't going to be easy to deal with, after all.

One will suppose the damage of war was dealt with as soon as the rebuilding process was completed, but no! The scars imprinted on the souls of these innocent people might never heal, no matter how much time passes. She is one of them, lost her legs after having been trapped inside the roots of the chakra tree. Her parents died in war, fallen shinobis forgotten past their gravestones, and just the thought of it makes Sakura's eyes sting with tears. There are children like her, permanently damaged physically and emotionally as a result of some petty selfishness of some power-hungry grownups. Yuuko, in particular, not only lost her legs but a family. She hates the color red; it's the color of blood, her parents' blood, the blood which stained their corpses when she saw them. She didn't speak for months until Sakura was given her responsibility.

It was a rather arduous task — she had managed children crying over scraped knees before, but never dealt with war-harmed orphans — she wasn't sure she could do it. But Tsunade was persistent, to a fault even. Maybe she chose her because she was a teammate of two emotionally troubled orphans. It was nerve-wracking overall, but she still entered her room. The sight of her left Sakura broken for days. She remembers crying on Ino's shoulders, saying she never wants to see it again the day she first saw Yuuko. Not because she looked horrifying. But her empty face awfully resembled Sasuke's, the one he wore when he was broken, empty. She remembers it as clearly as she remembers not understanding it back then.

Yuuko was a challenge, but a pleasant one. Sakura worked hard at it — she didn't want another child going on the same path as Sasuke's — and Yuuko finally cried. She remembers seating the child on her lap, rocking her back and forth, rubbing the back of her head as she sobbed into Sakura's chest. It was a beginning then, like the first ray of sunshine after a pouring monsoon. And it's been getting sunnier ever since. Yuuko talked, smiled, laughed and felt normal over time. Only she wasn't. Her powerless legs and her fear of the color red haunted her in every moment of her life, still does. Sakura can see her missing, unattended part still missing.

"Big sis?" She is dragged out of her reverie at Yuuko's confused gaze and Sakura's eyes soften at her. This child, shaken from the inside at such a young age, but still fighting for herself, finding her own happiness, trying her best to fit in. She isn't like Sasuke, she is like Naruto. For a moment, Sakura forgets her worries.