Summary:

There is trouble with drawing the wrong conclusions too fast. There is also trouble with drawing the right conclusions too slow. Sakura has done both. [drabble] [one-shot]

Disclaimer:

I don't own Naruto.

She is five and he is five and they are both so young.

They are both but children.

Mother is away again, away at the Stone she often speaks of and never lets her see.

The Stone where Father always is.

forever-always-eternal-lost

"Be a good child," Mother mutters, distracted and distant, smoothing her short choppy strands of hair, already turning away, already walking away.

Left at the park, Sakura's first remembrance of the only progenitor she's ever known is her turned back, so impossibly tall and far-away and alone, even standing in the bustling marketplace streets with her cool gaze held high and desperate despair in her eyes long since lukewarm.

Fingering her hair, the exact color replication of Father's, which Mother can never seem to bare looking at long enough to give her a neater haircut, she absently wanders around.

Nowhere to go, nothing to go to, nobody to go with.

A slightly concave tree trunk is smooth and the grass underneath it is soft so she sits and she stays and she people-watches, for lack of any want or particular desire in contrast.

There are the usual neighbors and fellow residents of Konohagakure who she vaguely recognizes, but only as a category in general, the generality of being another face in the crowd.

Sakura lays her head against the silvery bark, letting the curtain of moss drape over to cover her distinct hair, and continues people-watching.

Not exactly... bored, per say.

Very peaceful, one might prefer to describe the feeling numbing her bone-deep.

Or apathy.

Others bother her for her 'large forehead,' a matter which Mother never bothers about, except to roughly tell her to toughen up and ignore them, because it could be worse, because you could be dead.

(She usually walks out of the house at that point, to visit the Stone once more, nearly obsessive about that daily ritual, back turned and towering.)

Something drifts into her half-lidded line of vision, it's motion drawing her gaze.

Lifting her face away from the trunk, she waits, head tilted and curious, as this part of the park is on a short hill, and while it serves as a good surveillance point, not many actually venture here.

A... family, it seems.

The boy around her age is worriedly looking up at his father, who silently stares sternly at the lightly frowning elder son.

Gently, the woman with them nudges her husband, causing a blink and a slight, barely-there smile directed at the younger child, relaxing him instantly.

They're all black-haired and black-eyed and dressed in somberly-dyed clothes, but they're a family and they seem close.

After a second, the frowning one softens and teasingly pokes the forehead of his sibling.

They seem happy.

Sighing, a soft puff of air that stirs the drowsing, crackly, rusty-red leaves on the twiggy branch above her, Sakura rests her skull back onto the bark, feeling the invisible bumps and sores of the wood press into her bones.

She watches them until they pass out of sight, presumably heading home.

It must be nice to be like that.

Like... a family who's close and really love each other, even if they have their disputes at times.

Sakura traces nonsense circles onto her curled-up knees and thinks of smiles and ashes and stones and parents until the sun sinks down to a glimmering glow and Mother is calling from the main park gate.

Slipping away, she answers the call.

.

.

.

She is eight and he is eight and they are still too young.

They are see-sawing between children and tiny little killing droids.

It is a realization she does not achieve until the black-haired black-eyes boy around her age steps into the classroom and is no longer smiling.

'He is not a child anymore.'

But he is not an adult, either.

She thinks that perhaps he doesn't know he isn't grown-up, however, when he refuses to ask for help on anything, something dead and wounded and born from shifted ashes arising in his gaze.

Imagining bloodstains the hue of flaky autumn leaves curling off his slender, corpse-pale fingers is all too easy, too simple.

'I was wrong,' she concludes, reaching back to the hazy half-remembered memory that first made her sit up straighter at his introduction into her class.

'Were they really happy?'

Sakura wonder, now, if Sasuke also visits the Stone her mother won't let her see.

She prays he doesn't end up like Mother, though, a slave to the past.

Deep and deep and buried even deeper inside, she knows it's already too late.

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My first actual drabble, methinks.