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Kakashi sighs and carefully dodges the nurses as he exits the hospital.
“Bedrest, my ass,” he mutters. He's had worse. He didn't need rest then, he doesn't need it now.
On his way out the door, he catches a glimpse of pink dashing toward the village gates. The scent of cherry blossoms linger in her trail, and a pang of dread aches in Kakashi’s chest.
ANBU, as he often says to his drinking friends, is not a good place for traumatized teenagers.
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He doesn’t come across his only remaining student again for two months, and by that time her birthday has come and gone, and the fourteen-year-old stands tall in front of him. He wonders if she’s even taller than both of the boys by now.
“Sakura,” he says simply, his tongue caught in his throat at the last syllable.
Sakura stares at him, silent a moment longer. “Kakashi-sensei,” she returns, hesitant.
“Ma,” he says, “you don’t have to keep calling me that if you don’t want to. Hell knows I haven’t been a very good teacher to you.”
She doesn’t respond, just continues chewing her lip raw. Kakashi laughs bitterly. “I suppose it’s in bad taste for me to offer to train you now, isn’t it? ANBU is demanding enough on its own.”
He watches his student—ex-student—cough out a sob, watches her collapse on the floor with her hands over her mouth, watches her stare wide-eyed at the ground while she shakes and chokes on her tears.
“I want to die,” she admits when the tears calm down, and they start all over again when she speaks.
Kakashi doesn’t say a word as he sits on the floor beside her.
It takes hours for her to calm down, but when she can finally speak without crying, she is laying with her head in Kakashi’s lap.
“You know how . . . during the autumn, people rake up the leaves and burn them?” she asks quietly. Her voice is hoarse.
“Yeah.”
Sakura is quiet again for a few minutes. “Sometimes I feel like the people are the government and we’re the leaves.”
“Plants and fire don’t mix,” Kakashi tells her with a nod. “It makes sense that we’d burn.”
“We are our own weaknesses,” she says, as though reciting from a book. She laughs, and she laughs, and she cries yet again. “I wish I’d just burn already.”
Kakashi thinks they’re just the same.