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She's not weak, hasn't been since she was in the Exams and decided enough. She will always be ten steps behind Naruto and a league behind Sasuke, but for the first time she decides to at least try and narrow that gap. Sakura Haruno is many, many things, not all good. She is angry and selfish and violent, but then, so is Sasuke.
It's just that he doesn't care, no one has ever made him care, and she's had what she's supposed to be drilled in her head from the time she could walk.
So one day Sakura's sitting in her tiny apartment, fifteen years old and already a legal adult, a kunai in one hand and her hitai-ate in the other. That's when Ino barges in, shouting about Chouji and a crate full of peaches. She stows the kunai away and smiles quickly, like she wasn't just contemplating abandoning the village.
Like sometimes she doesn't wonder what it would be like to leave, and track the boys down for leaving her behind. And maybe, after that, she won't come back. Maybe she'll see all there is to see, and get so strong no one will ever dismiss her as useless again. Maybe she'll get into fights she can't win, and heal those who really need it, and fall in love so many times it doesn't mean anything anymore.
She's strong enough, can match Lee blow for blow in a taijutsu match, but it's not enough. It will never be enough compared to the last Uchiha and the Kyuubi jinchuuriki. Kakashi-sensei had pegged her as useless the second he laid eyes on her, a tag-along, just someone so that Sasuke and Naruto could be put on a team together without anyone important getting in the way of their training. So what if she had good chakra control? That was a dime a dozen.
She will never be anyone important.
But then suddenly she was. Suddenly Tsunade singled her out, and she was worth something, she was special.
And she got so strong the earth shattered beneath her fist.
But they still don't come back.
So she closes up her apartment, leaving her hitai-ate on her pillow, steel plate shone to shiny perfection and the leaf whole and unblemished. She has a pack laying heavy between her shoulder blades, and nothing holding her back. There's nothing between her and them but roads and countries and two members of the Sannin.
She likes her odds of bringing them home, even if she has to drag them kicking and screaming.
Sakura can't stay. She can't leave Naruto to wander and Sasuke to ruin. That's not who she is. She's not Tsunade, swallowed up by her own grief. She is no one's copy, n one's replacement. Sasuke has never looked back to her, has never extended his hand the way she desperately wanted him too, and never will. So Sakura thinks fine. She thinks I will be okay, but they need me. They always have.
Sakura lets her sandals eat up the road, and lets the idea of him go.
Because Naruto and Sasuke are out there, getting stronger, training and living and taking the quiet plunge into insanity. And she should be right there alongside them, even if they don't want her there. Even if in the grand scheme of things she will never matter as much as them.
She exists, she isn't useless or a waste. Tsunade saw that.
Now she just has to track them down and prove it.