Lavender Rain [TIME TRAVEL]

Arc One: A Different Type of Halcyon: When One Grows Up They Learn

"And she weeps for the childhood that is no more,
For the innocent laughter replaced with misery and pain.
The child-like dreams of rainbows and castles with babbling brooks,
Replaced with starving lips, scarred wrists, and an agony of deep enriched rage."

When Haruno Sakura was a little girl in her last life, she learned many difficult things. 

When she grew up, she learned that while it was old men who declared the war, it was her and innocent youths like her who had to fight and die. The pink-hair medic also learns how unfair and cruel war can be.

Throughout it all, she learns of heartbreak and loses.

Of betrayal and grief.

Of what-if's, of could-of-be's, and has been's.

Of deep and never ending love.

She also grows up to be tired, so very tired. Weary and exhausted to the bones beneath her skin.

In her last life, she also learned plenty of lessons until her last breath, before starting anew. One of them was that pain demanded to be felt. It did not care if she was hurt or healed from previous torment. It came in like a tsunami to her, and left only wreckage behind for her to clean up. Pain also left imprints in places where bandages or medicines couldn't fix or heal. Pain left scars. It left smudges like ink from a brush pressed in one place too long on paper. It left bruises, smears, stains, and traces left behind that could be tracked and unburied. Pain was agony, and she feels as if she had been accompanied by both since the day her first friend died.

And as the bodies of her friends and loved ones drop one by one, she learns that grief is a struggle. Loss is an agony, and a loved one gone is nothing but an abyss of hopeless despair. And she learns as she witnesses the cries of mourning that it's strange how grief and loss change things, not just the surroundings, but also the people.

Kakashi-sensei is the biggest liar when he said time made things easier. That dealing with the loss would get easier. It's utterly excruciating. It was as if someone had wrenched her heart out of her chest and pierced it with a poisoned dagger every time she failed to heal another person.

And when she hears it, the inconsolable wails of the people she loves, she learns. She learns that grief is the price you pay for love. The agony, the grief, the languishing pain that crawls through her beating heart until it latches onto her lungs, and suffocates her slowly as she wishes and begs to forget. But how can one forget despite the pain? Despite the suffering? How could you ever forget someone that gave you so much to remember?

People had always talked about how grief was emptiness, and she learns it is not. It was a full and heavy thing this grief. It was an absence where you tried to fill it with things you wish you could, but knew you couldn't reach for them no matter how hard you tried too. Grief was the rusty and cruel sharp chains your skin was caught on that when you pulled away left scars of bitter hope and lost dreams. It was of mountains and ocean waves pressing down on you with all the futures you'd thought you would have.

Sakura had slowly learned during the war that it was better for her to harden her heart, because she knows that in the darkness there's sorrow, and like shadows that swirl at the edge of night, will only leave her drowning in nothing but despair if she allowed others to get too close.

And oh, did Sakura try.

Tried so hard to stop loving and caring for others to ease her pain, when she knew they too would one day be gone.

Yet it was a failure, as much of her life was constantly because love had carved itself into Haruno Sakura's veins. She tried so hard to forget, but love had grown roots around her ribcage and sprouted flowers in her heart. Sakura could not unlove her friends, her family, and her home, as she could not unlove anything else that had brought her pain, misery, despair, and betrayal throughout her life. There is agony in her heart, and her soul burns with pain too. Shadows smother the light that seeks to shine, much like how water puts out a fire. Life has been cruel since the day she learned what hate was and what it did.