Chapter Text
What they never tell you about ghosts, is that it is not just the scorned and regretful that are left behind the veil to wander ceaselessly. Never tell you about the dead children that cannot go on because there is so much left unfulfilled, about teens that watch their friends gradually move on from their deaths, or suicide victims that only notice how much they impacted life when they’re dead.
They don’t tell you about the murdered who watch their killers live free. About the ninja that fell in battle and stand watch over the village uselessly, because what can they do now? They can’t go home. They can never go home. ANBU, whose names are never carved into the memorial stone on undercover missions, lives sent to the wind and forgotten. They don’t tell you about the people who cannot move on no matter how hard they try, no matter how much they do.
But Sakura knows the people that everyone else forgets.
Sakura will always know.
Because she is the only one who can remember them now.
They walk the streets, follow her home from school, and hiss at kids when they throw rocks at her with laughter and insulting names. They tell her jokes and ask her to pass on messages. They teach her jutsu and tell her stories.
They are her friends when nobody else is.
❦❦❦
Sakura had always been odd. It was a label that was dragged alongside her everywhere. She was called it as though it were her name. Her pink hair was odd. Her bright, viridian eyes were odd . The way her veins lay stark and obvious beneath her pale skin was odd.
She was odd because people could not explain the aura that followed her.
It was easier for people to dismiss her oddities as a lonely child playing by herself when she was younger. It was easy to say that she had an abundance of imaginary friends and an overactive imagination. That when she spoke to herself, she was playing around.
It was harder to convince themselves when she started the academy, and children would avoid her out of fear .
It used to bother Sakura when she was small, the way that classmates would move from her desk in class when she sat in the only open seat, forcing themselves into a two-person bench to get as far away from her as possible. It used to bother her how her peers would make fun of her pale skin and call it creepy how easy it was to see her veins and give her names like “ Yōkai” and “ Yūrei.”
When her parents were
ordered
recommended to bring her to a specialist in fear she was having some kind of psychotic break brought on by lack of friends, Sakura learned to keep to herself.
Shadows were thicker than Nara’s around her, faint whispers of voices lighter than wind followed like hissing snakes, occasionally an empty child’s laughter would echo after her. Once, an Inuzuka was asked what she smelled like, and the response was “ Fresh soil and funeral flowers. ”
Sometimes when disgusting whispers of insults followed her, ( “Konoha and its cursed children.” ) People that Sakura hadn’t even heard speak ill of her would end up in the hospital.
The dead did not appreciate insults toward their friend.
❦❦❦
Sakura is eight and angry.
She had always found the memorial stone to be a place of quiet contempt.
Names were missing, she knew. Names of children in masks they shoved off into war because they were promising, children that they couldn’t honor on the stone because they were ANBU and they were too young for it, and Konoha was the friendly village . Names of adults and teens and everyone in between who were sent on suicide missions they knew they wouldn’t come back from but went through with anyways because it is for the village.
Spirits would smile softly at her when she would rant about the unfairness of it all to them and pat her head with cold, cold hands only she would ever be able to feel and whisper, “ Thank you, Sakura-chan. ”
And Sakura didn’t want to be thanked. She shouldn’t need to be thanked for remembering them, for being angry that they don’t have the same respect for fighting for the village that the people on the stone do, for being mad that they don’t even have a gravesite .
Then the Uchiha Massacre occurs, Sakura gains dozens of new spirits she can see, and the village does nothing to remember them. There is no monument raised in their name. There is nothing left at the Uchiha Compound to remember them. They don’t even give the damn boy that survived it all anything but three days off from the academy.
They don’t even help him clean the blood from the compound. The place he lives in. The place his whole family was murdered in.
Sakura is eight when the Uchiha clan dies. She is eight when the seat beside her in class that had been empty for so many years is filled by a boy with nearly as many ghosts following him as Sakura.
She is so angry, that her academy classmates complain about how cold their classroom always is, how they swear they can see their breath if they look close enough. Sakura is so furious that darker and darker spirits find themselves drawn to the pink room in the Haruno house where a girl sleeps, emanating wave after wave of pure hate.
Sakura is eight when her circle of spirits gains demons .
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Sakura is ten when she meets her first ROOT ghost.
A pale-haired boy who says his name is Shin. He tells her stories of Danzo and his brother and tells her stories of horrible murders disguised as missions that he had been sent on under the assumption that the Hokage was aware of everything Danzo was doing.
In return, she helps him differentiate between things that Danzo had led him to believe were normal and things that weren’t abusive manipulation tactics taught by a sick old man.
He disappears shortly after she turns eleven.
He doesn’t pass on, and it makes Sakura worry about his implications about ROOT and what Danzo has done to them even after death.
❦❦❦
When Sakura is eleven, a nice kunoichi teaches her everything she knows about Medical ninjutsu.
She is twelve when she finishes her training, and Rin gives her a bright smile that crinkles the purple rectangles on her cheeks when she completes the night before she’s assigned her team.
“ Good job, Sakura-chan .” Her voice is soft, and Sakura’s eyes widen when her skin begins to fleck off into nothing, a faint glow starting to leak from the places her skin used to be, “ Watch over Kakashi-kun for me if you get the chance, will you? ”
It's one of the few passings that Sakura cries over.
❦❦❦
“Team Seven: Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura, and Uchiha Sasuke.”
Sakura is twelve, technically friendless, and although she is the best kunoichi in her class, people still find excuses to insult and make fun of her. But that is nothing to her. Sakura is the pupil of some of Konoha’s most dangerous shinobi, shinobi that were killed in fear of their prowess if they were to defect.
Her green eyes trail to the raven-haired boy beside her and the blonde behind her in their own time before shrugging and rolling her eyes when Naruto begins to complain, and Sasuke makes a face in distaste.
They wait for hours , and the most annoying part about it is how most of the time is spent in a one-sided argument between Naruto and Sasuke. To anybody else, Sakura would seem to have been watching the clouds outside the window for the last three hours, when in reality, she’s been watching in mildly disguised amusement as the younger demons that have taken to following her around rearrange their faces into terrifying amalgamations to make the others laugh.
One of them screeches, and Naruto’s words pause for a second in confusion as a chill passes down his spine when it uses his shoulders as a springboard to crawl on the ceiling with a warbling cry that Sakura knew to be a giggle.
The door cracks open, and an eraser drops onto their sensei’s head with a soft thunk and puff of chalk dust. The childish demons on the ceiling hang from their feet and point and cry out at the man, and the ghosts in the corner of the room roll their eyes with fond amusement or scoff as he stands there for a moment with a deadpan stare at the three genins in the room.
“My first impression of you all is….” He trails off, looking for the word, “Hateable. Meet me on the roof.”
He disappears. And with a sigh, Sakura is already halfway up the stairs to the roof when her teammates register the order.
“Kakashi-senpai was always a bit of a troll.” Uchiha Shisui says as he pops into existence beside her, his empty eye sockets still leaking blood that drips on his soaked shinobi grade clothing and mixes with the water that seeps onto the floor and disappears as he moves up step by step, “Wah, Pinky-chan you got lucky ~.”
She raises an unimpressed eyebrow at the spirit, and he gives her a bright smile full of mischief and laughter, “Hatake Kakashi?” She mumbles, her voice barely echoing in the stairwell, and she can hear her classmates begin to stumble up the first set of stairs.
“Yep.” He pops the p, and Sakura wipes the water on her cheek away with an experienced hand, “He was my ANBU leader, so he’s powerful, y’know? He was always fun to have on missions outside of them too.”
Sakura can hear Naruto’s voice echo up the staircase, getting closer by the second, and she stops in front of the door to turn to the dead teen with a slight twitch of her eyebrow, “Go ahead, ask.”
His empty sockets stare at her, and Sakura never had asked if he could see without his eyes now that he’s dead, “Why didn’t you shunshin?” He pouts exaggeratedly, “Are my skills too hard, Pinky-chan? Is Shisui-sensei not good enough for you?”
“Hm.” She rolls her eyes fondly and turns her attention to the boys at the bottom of the staircase she stands at the top of with a twitch of her lips that could have been the beginnings of a smirk, “Where’s the fun in that?”
His sharp laugh echoes in her ears even when his spirit disappears from her side, and Sakura pushes open the door when her potential teammates reach the halfway point.