The Girl Who Waited

第8章

"I forgot to tell you," Sakura tells the little plant outside Sasuke's apartment. "I took down a member of Akatsuki."

Ino has told her since they were children that flowers grow better when you talk to them. Sakura hopes that's true of fruit, too, because she has been coming here every night for ten days straight, because she can't sleep.

The nightmares she has are horrible: detailed visions of Sasuke returning to the village, only it's not him. In these dreams, the village burns while a figure, face a shredded amalgamation of Orochimaru and Sasuke's features, laughs.

She shivers, and keeps talking, picking away dead leaves with bare fingers. Her gloves lay neatly to one side, still a little too big for her, but finally sporting a minute tear in one of the knuckles from her fight with Sasori.

This time her trembling is for another reason, because she remembers too well the sensation of having her body be manipulated and moved in someone else's control. She doesn't understand how anyone would choose that feeling willingly.

"It was three weeks ago, but so much happened since then I forgot. With the new team and everything, you know? And I wanted you to be the first one I told all about it, as soon as we..."

A lump forms in her throat, and she is unable to finish the sentence.

As soon as we brought you home.

Except they hadn't.

Instead, she had looked up into a face that she could barely recognise. She had stood frozen—And useless! Always so useless!—as he prepared to destroy them with a technique even the infamous Snake Sannin considered excessive.

And then he was gone.

She wishes she had someone to confide in about these dreams, someone real and not a lonely plant growing in the shadow of a long-abandoned home. But that would mean uttering Sasuke's name. Besides the fact her entire body hurts when she does that, she can't stand the pitying looks she gets from people when she does.

Sakura squares her shoulders and goes back to pruning the plant, viciously destroying any weed that makes an incursion into its patch of soil.

"Lady Tsunade says she thinks I'll be stronger than her one day," she continues, forcing an upbeat note into her voice. If she pretends long enough, maybe she'll believe it.