Chapter Text
Sakura spends her eighteenth birthday alone, in the foul swamps of Iwagakure.
She spends it sticky and disgusting and contemplating eating a poisonous toad and purging the toxins out of her stomach afterwards, hunger in her parched mouth and shrivelled gut. She only knows she is eighteen because she’s been ticking the days off in the little calendar that Sasuke gifted her once as a bribe for more stories.
It was an expensive thing, metal binding and seal scrawled on the cover to make sure it couldn’t perish in a fire or flood. Sakura did not tell him that she could have drawn a better seal than that, could have made it truly indestructible. She thanked him and then she shoved it in her bag where it stayed untouched until nearly six years later.
It’s funny, how much can change in six years. Minato has been rotting in the ground for six years. Orochimaru has been not-rotting in the ground for even longer, and there wasn’t anything left of Danzo after they were done with him to bury at all. Sakura died six years ago, tens of thousands of times in the endless genjutsus Danzo tried to keep her in.
Too many things have changed. When the war ended, it had felt like nothing would be the same ever again. It felt like hopelessness stretching on for eternity, spending each day aimlessly, lying in bed for hours at a time or walking the streets with no destination in mind. Those days certainly felt endless, but Sakura knows logically that it was only for about a year or so.
A year passed and Sakura was healed from her injuries, Neji awakened from his coma, Kakashi back to his regular duties as jounin minus the elite ANBU team. All of them had moved on except for her, and it wasn’t until Ino dragged her into working briefly as a guard for the birthday celebration of her foreign friend – from Suna, she remembers – that her life began again.
That had been easy. A mission meant money even if she didn’t need any more of it, and a mission meant she had to get out of bed. It meant she had to get up off her ass and start training again, unwilling to be caught off-guard outside of the relative safety of her own home that Kakashi had set up for her.
In reality, it hadn’t been as easy as she describes it now. Habits are hard to break, especially when nurtured over the course of months, helped along by the daytime hallucinations that haunt her still. Some things she will never escape – the snake summons carved into her very bones that she refuses to use, her vehement dislike of gritty war rations, the nausea that rises every time she catches a glimpse of her brown eyes in any reflective surface.
Those, she handles. Alone, because nobody needs to know that she shattered every mirror in her house within a week of living in it. She’s sure they’ve noticed the absence of them, as short as their visits tend to be, but none of them comment. They know better than to.
She has no need for snake summons, useful as they may be. She makes enough money to buy better rations for herself during missions, and she doesn’t need to anyways when Hinata is always willing to offer her a new recipe. Most of these are easy to avoid, find workarounds for.
Six years is a long time. Enough of it to find her footing again, for her hair to grow out from the shorn style Orochimaru had her wear (although she still doesn’t allow it to get too long).
Next year, she will have been a shinobi in peacetime for longer than she was at war. She has not thought about what that might mean for her, the significance in the numbering years of her life. Eighteen is old. Eighteen would have been practically ancient to the six-year-old Sakura, all her peers killed off before their teeth had even begun falling out.
Eighteen-year-old Sakura is not sure how to feel about it. Tired, maybe. Six years is a long time, but eighteen is even longer. She didn’t expect to live past a number that she couldn’t count on her fingers. In two years, she will run out of numbers to count even with her toes combined on account of her left pinky toe getting sliced off in the midst of battle back when she was eleven.
She imagines that most would be happy to have turned eighteen. Not a significant number at all, especially considering the fact that she was technically an adult from the moment Minato tied the Konoha headband onto her forehead, but still. It feels different, somehow.
She has time to think about it, for one. She knew it was coming from Sasuke’s calendar (along with his and Naruto’s birthdays, the dates circled in bold ink with funny faces drawn next to them) and for once she isn’t swamped by work when the day comes.
Technically, she is swamped in a literal swamp in the middle of a mission, but it’s espionage and slow-going at that. Sakura has spent the entire day cramped in a tree, unmoving, waiting for her target to pass by so she can report back to command via the scroll stuck in her boot how many allies the target is bringing with him to infiltrate a secret Konoha base in Iwagakure.
Sakura is a professional but there’s only so many mantras the human mind can repeat to itself about the importance of a mission until it starts to wander. And with nothing on her except the little calendar on her body, she’s been forced to occupy herself with musings on time and age.
Never before has she had time to consider what a birthday might mean to her. When she was very young, before the war increased in its severity and the recruiters came knocking at her door, it mean sweets and presents. Laughter, warmth, her parent’s arms around her.
Then she grew a little older and birthdays stopped meaning anything, the memories pushed to the very back of her mind by the overwhelming desire to survive. Being older meant being bigger, stronger, less expendable. It meant one more step to gaining the strength she needed to make herself important enough not to be killed off in the dark.
Then the war ended and her strength stopped mattering. The brutality that had earned her the frequent praise of Orochimaru had people whispering about her instead, wondering if she was involved in the secret experiments Danzo was conducting on his own people. Those were the days that Sakura stopped going outside at all, hyper aware of the eyes following her wherever she went.
Those days blurred together, torture of the finest degree. She was much too busy with ascertaining for herself what was real or not to be thinking of something as inconsequential as birthdays, but unfortunately mental unsoundness is no longer an excuse she can claim for her carelessness.
Ino herself conducted the psych check to assess if Sakura was ready to be sent back into the field, after all. She asked all the right questions, checked her pupils for any sign of dilation, held her hand and asked her to answer truthfully when she asked if Sakura was still seeing the dead in the shadows.
Sakura said no. And she was lying when she did, of course, but some things she knows Ino will never understand. Some things you don’t recover from, your brain just too overtaxed and overstimulated and overused to ever return to its original state.
Sakura has good days and bad days, and what mattered then (and now) is that she was having more of the good ones than bad. Days where the shadows stay silent, lurking figures instead of people whispering in her ear. Days where the people who are real – because she is capable of making the distinction, believe it or not – are louder than the people who aren’t.
Even now, stuck in a swamp in the middle of nowhere, Sakura has the leisure to think about birthdays of all things. She is secure in the knowledge that she will probably return and she will probably have more birthdays even if she doesn’t quite know what to think about them, that the years will continue to tally and soon her memories of Danzo and Orochimaru will become duller.
In the six years that have passed since the war ended, she hasn’t celebrated a single birthday. The first came and went without her knowledge of it, only realizing when Ino knocked on her door the next day with a nervous smile and a badly wrapped gift in her outstretched hand.
The second passed during a diplomatic mission with Kushina to Sunagakure, sipping at strange liquids and sitting still while the Hokages threw thinly veiled barbs at each other. The third, she spent in silence with Neji in a reconnaissance mission. The fourth passed with a pat on the back from Kakashi and a vague proverb about growing wise that she was sure he’d stolen from his stupid Icha-Icha series.
The fifth birthday she spent in the relative privacy of a one-man booth in a drinking bar, feeling out her tolerance with a wide selection of sakes that the owner had recommended. That was one of the more memorable, if only because it ended with her retching up her meager lunch in an alley, hoping nobody would come by and recognize her.
And now here passes the sixth, scrunched up uncomfortably in a tree in the middle of a stinking swamp in Iwagakure, flicking at the pages of her fancy calendar from the boy that she wants nothing to do with.
A rather pathetic way to spend the day if Ino were to judge, but she isn’t here right now and Sakura has had much worse. She wouldn’t have it any other way, really, even if that’s only because she doesn’t really know what she wants at this point. For now, she is content with this – knowing there will be more to come, not feeling dread at the prospect.
This is fine, for now. Sakura will take it.
x
What she didn’t anticipate is the possibility that some of the people around her might have other thoughts about what a birthday should look like.
Ino, for one, but she’s always been strangely careful with what she tries to change about Sakura’s life. Kakashi might have commented a few times here and there about how boring she chooses to live her life, but most of the things he says can be ignored. Neji doesn’t judge at all, and she likes that about him best.
But somehow – somehow, all three of them (along with the rather unwelcome additions of Naruto and Sasuke) have come together to create truly the worst cake Sakura has ever seen in her life. It’s sagging badly on one side with white frosting that appears to be closer to the consistency of milk than cream. Someone has stuck eighteen candles into the cake seemingly in a random pattern, and even Neji has the decency to look a little ashamed at the creation.
Kakashi holds the cake high above all their heads, balancing it on his fingertips like a waiter carrying a gourmet dish. He’s smiling under his mask, probably, eyes curving into half-crescents as they usually do when he’s reading Icha-Icha. Ino holds in her hands two giant bouquets of flowers likely home-grown from her family’s shop while Naruto and Sasuke each hold suspiciously wrapped presents in their hands.
Neji has his arms crossed, shaking his head at the spectacle, but Sakura can see how his mouth tilts up, the smoothened space in between his brows. He looks happy, relaxed. She isn’t sure how to feel about that.
She isn’t sure how to feel about anything that’s happening right now, the cake or the presents or the people that came together to throw a party for her three weeks late. Her books are still caked in mud and she needs to clean her gear as soon as possible before it rusts from all the time it spent in the damp air of Iwagakure, but she stands stock still and she does not do any of the things she was meaning to do when she entered her apartment.
It didn’t come as a surprise because they all know she doesn’t do well with sudden light and movement, but she is still shocked. The missive she received from her handler informing her that she would be coming home to people in her home was strange but not particularly out of the blue, and out of all the things she was expecting it wasn’t this.
It wasn’t a party, a cake, more color than her house has probably ever seen since the day it was built. It wasn’t the first birthday party she’s had since she was five, complete with the candles lit with tiny flames that Neji had once promised her.
She meets his eyes now, keeping her face carefully neutral as she tries to ask him without moving her mouth why this is happening. She wants to insist that this was unnecessary, that the cake looks like shit and she’s too tired to muster up the energy to pretend to be happy for the celebration, but the calendar burning a hole in her pocket stops her from saying anything.
Neji only stares back at her with his milky white eyes, titling his head slightly. Daring her to do something, the set of his mouth a little more playful now.
“Try suiton now,” he says, a reminder of another birthday over a decade ago, in a home that didn’t belong to them during a war that they shouldn’t have been thrust into. “Happy Birthday, Sakura.”
Then comes the chorus of happy birthdays from the rest of them, Ino nearly shouting to get herself heard over the equally loud cheer from Naruto while Sasuke sniffs haughtily at them. Kakashi’s mask moves so he must have said something but Sakura doesn’t hear him at all, can’t see anything past the cake and candles and echoes of a life that seems so foreign to her now.
This is what Minato meant when he promised them that it will get better.
This is what Neji meant when he held her hand and squeezed it tight on the podium of that horrible birthday, all eyes on her in a manner both similar and different from how it is now.
This is time, years that have passed and formed the space to allow her to form the seal for a simple suiton release – to let her laughter run free when the gush of water drenches the candles completely along with the already watery cake to the surprised cries of everybody except Neji, who looks at her while she looks back at him, sharing in a memory that they both know is long past them.