Hello. This is my first story, so it might take me a little while to get it working. I was inspired by other stories about Naruto characters in asylums, my own experiences being in psych wards, and also a little by Amanda Kreuger. If you don't know the story, watch A Nightmare on Elm Street (the third and fifth ones). Any reviews would be very helpful. Thank you.

A Christmas Present for Konoha Asylum

-------------------------PROLOGUE-----------------------------------

She had been working on that floor for two years. Unit 7A, home of mentally disturbed patients suffering acute crises. The general hospital could place a legal hold on them for as long as they needed to. Most patients were gone in four days. A few stayed much, much longer. Once they had been there for a month, they were taken away from her wing and taken to another place… Strangely, Sakura herself did not know where that was. Was she oblivious? But she wondered. Some of the patients stuck with her, and she wondered what happened to them as she remembered their strange stories.

Some of them could have been kept in jails, for they had committed violent acts against others, but it didn't suit this town Konoha. Why keep them in jail with the other criminals, the ones who were "sane"? Surely they would be picked on and taken advantage of? No, it was best to keep the "normal" offenders away from these particular ones …the ones who were criminally insane.

Sakura had never been to the courtroom, never seen what it was like for a person guilty by reason of insanity receive their trial and sentence. She knew only what they looked like after their suicide attempts or when it was revealed that they lacked their necessary medications, when they were brought to 7A to recover and receive acute attention. She had not worked with murderers. She had only worked with misdemeanor offenders, attempting to turn their lives around as they were given medications, medical support, food, shelter, and recovery programs afterward as a next step.

So it was almost understandable when she misheard her boss' instructions that she was to transfer to the psychiatric hospital to work with those patients who so often disappeared.

She mistakenly thought the patients she would have would be the same ones she knew from 7A. She thought she was going to that place where the ones who didn't recover in the month she got with them went. Little did she know that those patients all went to a different facility – a board and care, as it were, where they were slowly reintegrated back into society, after carefully relearning how to be self-sufficient and manage their crises. No… little Haruno Sakura, 22 years old, was going to the hospital – or, as some might call it, the asylum – that housed the mentally ill violent patients she hadn't worked with yet …namely, the murderers.

Konoha rained on her the day she went to the asylum for the first time. It sat on the outskirts of town, a half mile from any other buildings, with grassy fields already dead from the summer past. There were no more trees near this asylum… it was as if the beauty for which Konoha was known was denied to exist near these condemned people.

The main gate security guard let her in after carefully inspecting her papers and ID cards. She was told that she would receive a new badge at the end of the day, after her orientation to the facility. It struck her as interesting that she herself felt like a new patient upon hearing the word 'orientation'.

As she was finally shown to the office, she passed the main facility where the patients were held. She saw the smaller part of the building that jutted out, almost like a box added on to the bulkier architecture of the building. After a moment of pondering, she came to understand that this was probably the medical wing of the hospital, for acute injuries. Of course. These patients were residents here. They wouldn't be gone in a month. Instead of seeing them flicker in and out of her wing, she would be joining them in theirs…

As she stared, a face suddenly appeared at one of the windows in the hospital wing. She couldn't make out features – the face was too far away, and her contacts were blurry at the moment – but she could have sworn the face looked at her before it disappeared.

Sakura was finally in the place where the mentally disturbed never left.