Some Fall By Virtue

Some Rise By Sin

Sakura wasn't entirely sure when she realised it. That nagging feeling in the back of her head only grew the older she got. The one which gave her a sense of deja vu. It was always there, always present, and though it had taken her a while to find the correct word to describe it, deja vu summed up her situation perfectly.

Every time she looked down at her arms, they were blank for a moment, before the markings returned on her left arm. Black characters which rang a bell faintly in the back of her mind. Her soulmate mark. There was just one problem – no one could read it. One language existed in the Elemental Nations, and the gibberish written on her arm wasn't it.

Faulty, they called her. The girl with the faulty soulmark. Her hands curled into fists, hating how the bullies had changed from insulting her forehead to laughing at her exposed soulmark. The bullies weren't the worst though. Sakura was angry. She was a teakettle of rage, and the pitying eyes which followed her around the village were the absolute worst. A faulty soul, they called her.

She wouldn't be good for anything.

Sakura was determined to prove them wrong. She was a child born of fire and steel, with ice in her eyes and blood on her tongue as she choked on the toxic opinions of those around her. She was spiteful, and she hated the world. She hated it so much. She hated it enough to make herself want to burn it to the ground. She tilted her head occasionally whenever that thought came to her, staring down at her hands as though they might have an answer as to why that thought felt so right. It felt like it fit her perfectly, like a glove. She didn't understand why. It was just one of those things which always seemed to happen to her. Only to her.

But making the world burn was harder than it sounded. Sakura was a smart girl though, and her mother often told her so. She knew exactly what she needed to do to become capable of burning the world to ashes. To make them stop calling her faulty. Her nails dug into her palms at the thought, beads of blood welling up in the white crescents her fingernails had left. She wasn't faulty, and she definitely had a soulmate. They just weren't... there.

Oh, Sakura wished they were. She couldn't recall the amount of times she had dreamt of them turning up riding a white horse, ready to sweep her off her feet and carry her away into the sunset. Wasn't that every young girl's dream? She always laughed at those old thoughts nowadays. She was seven years old. Thoughts like that had long since passed – because part of her knew that she wouldn't be encountering her soulmate. The same part of her which screamed of deja vu. The same part of her which yelled out obscenities inside her mind.

Inner, Sakura called her, because they were meant to share a name. They were meant to be the same person, but Inner was everything she couldn't show the world. Not unless she wanted to die a gruesome death at the hands of her own village. Who in their right mind would want to burn the world to the ground? Inner laughed at that. They weren't in their right mind. How could they be? What with everyone staring at her in the street whenever she walked by, eyes sometimes pitying, others staring at her with a different message behind their veiled gazes.

To some she was an abomination.

Sensors claimed her chakra was vile. She had heard them talk about her once, saying that her chakra was twisted and wrong. It was why so many eyes followed her through the village. Because her soulmark was wrong. Because there was only one other person who'd ever had an incorrect soulmark – his had been missing – and his chakra had been warped to show it.

They compared her chakra to Uchiha Madara's, whispering about the similarities between her and Konoha's first missing nin. It just made her want to burn them down that much quicker. They didn't get to judge her like that. They didn't get to decide what path she would walk down. They didn't get to assume she would turn out exactly like the last person with wrong chakra.