empathy (rewritten 2019)

chapter two

She used to blame it all on the dreams. On their wishes, on her mother's olden broken kunoichi dream and her classmates' wishes for her to disappear and rot and go and her several coins lying in the fountain, the first rusted coin for her wish to go to the Academy, her second for Sasuke, her third for him, and another and another.

Her mother, a retired kunoichi, passed the exams and became a full-fledged soldier of Konoha. She worked as only that for three years, leaving and packing and moving until she fell into the arms of her husband, a mere librarian--and from then on she slowed down, giving the Third Hokage her resignation letter with a baby bump to prove it.

She was always bitter about her past. About her fall and regrets and love. Sometimes, as Sakura recalled, when she was at the Academy, her mother would bite and scowl and (once) cry. She would see them, through the front window, and watch them exchange cries of desperation and torment; her mother, reminding him of the times she was cut and bruised and broken, and her father, telling her the past was too far back to bring back up. She blamed him for the life they had together--poor, working as librarians, with a daughter who couldn't spare a minute for them before running off to chase some boy. And he told her that he never asked for her to give up such a life of hers--running, leaving, and fighting with nothing holding her down.

Maybe it's our legacy to fall, Sakura thought on her sixteenth birthday.

She, a once-young kunoichi herself, passed the exams and became a full-fledged soldier of Konoha. At the Academy, however, her peers never dreamed her of becoming one. They looked at her dresses and called her privileged. They looked at her test scores and called her a cheater. They looked at her face and mocked her for her wide eyes and an even wider forehead. They watched her, fallen and on the ground, fail her Taijutsu matches, and called her useless.

And that word, no matter how many times she chewed it up and kept it down and laughed it off, followed her, hooking its curves and turns around her limbs and joins, holding and dragging her down with each step she took--on the battlefield, there it was, whispering her name and her worth; in the graveyard, there again, telling her where she should lay; and in the blank fields between villages and missions, wondering what would happen if she turned the wrong way, wandered off, and lived a life in cowardice.

Her mother looked at Sakura and reminded herself of her regrets. And her father looked at Sakura and held her hand as daintily as he could allow. Her classmates stared and laughed and mocked, using her as a beaten down doll--doll, like her, held by the torn edges with strings of curved, malicious letters, moving her right to left and up and down.

They wanted her to stop. To go home and live a life as a failed young woman, who married a powerful man and into a powerful clan. To rot and die and stay away from their precious boy. And their last, needy wish, slapping her in the face with the same expectant gaze as the Hokage did during the last month of her life:

To never, ever, be a strong kunoichi.