These Hands, Sakura...

"I told her I didn't want it."

"What?" Naruto asked in bewilderment.

"You heard me, Naruto," Sakura said, trying to quash the conversation as the two made their way out the Hokage Tower.

Naruto looked at her, squinting in confusion. "But I thought you wanted to be the Head Medic? No one's more qualified than you, even Shizune said so. You did so much before and after the War, you're pretty great!"

The last thing Sakura felt like doing was explaining why she felt the way she did, especially to her best friend. For all his good qualities, intelligence and comprehensive thoughts weren't among them.

"Look, Naruto can we just not talk about this?" Sakura pleaded, letting the emotion seep into her voice. "I just want to go home and rest."

Naruto seemed torn for a moment. "I didn't mean to push. I just don't want to see reject something you want when it's right in front of you."

Sakura shivered slightly, though she didn't know why. She just knew this wasn't something she was ready to talk about.

"It's fine, Naruto. It's just... I need to figure this out myself. You don't always have to save me."

_________________

It was scarcely two weeks later when it happened again. Sakura had barely managed to make it through the rest of the day without breaking down into tears.

Those tears took all of ten seconds to appear once Sakura had gotten back home to her apartment later that evening. The warm water streaked down her face, dropping to the ground in a pitter-patter sound to her heightened sense of hearing. She tried rubbing them away but she couldn't stem the flow.

Rationally, Sakura knew death was a guarantee in her profession. Tsunade had drilled that into her head from the very beginning of her apprenticeship. In her head, Sakura knew there were some people you just couldn't save, through no fault of the medic. In the war, Sakura had seen many die. Innumerable on the battlefield and many in her own care. In hindsight, she supposed, it was easier to numb the feeling when the entire world was at stake.

But here, eight months after the Fourth Shinobi World War had ended, she had hoped the fallout from the war had finally ended. Two weeks prior she'd lost an elderly couple whose chakra network had been damaged from the sudden intrusion of the God Tree. What made it worse, ironically, was the fairly quick removal of the chakra absorption cocoons from that divine entity. Randomly, a small percentage civilians, lacking training to control chakra, would be hospitalized due to the damage done to their less adept chakra network. It was an extremely tricky procedure, made harder by the fact that such damage had no standard treatment due to its unprecedented nature. Sakura had been assisting Tsunade in researching an effective general solution to healing the damage, but it was slow going.

That very afternoon, Sakura had been unable to save a young girl. She'd come in, positive that the Fifth Hokage's student, a famous medic in the war, would greet her after a successful operation and she'd go on to live a good life.

Only she never would.

The war just found a way to keep on taking from her, from the world. It took Neji, it crippled Gai, tens of thousands of ninja perished or injured. Before it had started, she'd hoped the boy she'd had a crush on - that she, in her younger days, even thought she loved - could be turned back. But the war took him too, after a fashion. She'd had to see first hand, repeatedly, that he had changed far too much, and was willing to go much too far. The Genjutsu he used to make her think he'd killed her was the final nail in the coffin.