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Sakura wasn't someone to leave unfinished business out in the open. Her desk was crisp, a book carefully pressed shut in the center. Next to it lay a pencil, a scalpel she used as a sharpener and a stack of academic papers waiting to be edited. She hadn't finished the book, as she received an urgent summons, but she'd made sure to leave Ino a message to return it to the library in time if Sakura couldn't.
She owned no plants to take care of, and had no pets to keep her company. There were novels on her nightstand, a scented candle she lit when she drafted herself a bath, and a bar of dark chocolate that she hadn't opened yet. Her bed was a modern luxury, but sometimes she'd sleep on the futon she kept for guests instead. Often, she'd take naps on the creaking couch that grew old in the corner of her office at the hospital.
Truthfully, Sakura had felt more at home in these pristine white hallways than in her apartment. Patients splashed colour into her life, red more often than not. But the building was also awash with flowers and warmth. The hospital wasn't a cold place. It was filled to the brim with life and emotions, whereas skirmishes in the woods beyond the wall often meant the absence of it.
The hospital was a battlefield of its own. Without her, it struggled to stay afoot much like its patients, sluggishly awake like the overworked genin interns torn between studying gashes and muscles. The civilian nurses had built a home where life and death ran closely together, but without Sakura to listen carefully, many of their concerns would meet silence.
Shizune kept up with what she could. It's a hole they had dug themselves, so both her and the Hokage dealt with it.With Sakura gone, Tsunade needed her counsel. But the hospital needed her more. It needed someone to save lives no one else could save, to keep horror from unwinding. It wasn't a question, if the Uchiha was worth Sakura's absense. He was not, and that prickly thought would lace Shizune's tongue for years to come.
There was something in the details of a Team Ten get-together, after, that felt incomplete.
Shikamaru kept a cigarette in his breast pocket for Asuma, but he didn't have anything physical to remind him of Sakura. He didn't have to. He kept turning his head to where she would sit, quietly grateful to be included in a family she couldn't make with her own team.
Chouji grew quiet in those moments, boundless energy reserved for field missions. He brought a book with him to every lunch and every dinner, always a different one. He read them attentively, cheesy romance novels the librarian assured him Sakura had borrowed.
But it hit Ino the hardest, and it didn't just show when her team was there and Sakura was not. Ino was the one who stopped by Sakura's apartment and cleared it out. She returned the book due the week after almost mechanically, went back, lit the candle and stared at the concrete ceiling from where her best friend would never sleep again. She took the chocolate, though she didn't eat it. Had she started she wouldn't have been able to stop, and that wouldn't have been good for her skin.
Ino rinsed her hair every morning, applied make-up with a soft touch, donned her ANBU mask and left with powerful, furious strides in defiance of everything Team Seven stood for.
As every medic knows, some wounds can't be mended.
When Sakura ran, a swathe of black and just the faintest glimmer of stars overhead, she put miles of grass and barren land between her ghosts and her future.