Story: Forgetting

Summary: She'd put in all the unimportant stuff, like how to memorize a medical text in two days, and perfect chakra control and the ability to splice in transplants, but somehow Kami had missed 'forgetfulness'.

Notes: Typical post-desertion SasuSaku TEH ANGST. Found it on my hard drive and figured it was useless there. Hints of NejiSaku at the end. Leaving love would be nice, and appreciated with much fanfare and joy and dispersing of chocolates.

Disclaimer: Nope.

Forgetting. That was the special part. The key message that somehow Kami had never managed to compute into Sakura's brain. She'd put in all the unimportant stuff, like how to memorize a medical text in two days, and perfect chakra control and the ability to splice in transplants, but somehow God had missed 'forgetfulness'.

Naruto had it in spades. There were days where he would make an inane comment, and she'd wonder how he could do it without thinking of Sasuke. How any of them could function normally, see flashes of dark skin and pale hair, and not remember.

She honestly tried. There was training with Tsunade-shishou, ramen with Naruto, missions with the Rookie Nine, and drinking with Ino. Occasionally there was clubbing with Ino and Tenten, but that tended to get out of control quickly, so Sakura reserved those outings for the particularly painful days (his birthday, her birthday, the anniversary of when he left, the anniversary of when Naruto left, when her mother died, when her father died, when Kakashi almost died . . . all right, so they went clubbing quite often).

Sometimes Sakura would use her free days to research memory-removing jutsu. She wasn't completely serious about employing such high-level jutsu . . . but there were times when she was just desperate enough to want to forget so badly that the insane seemed mildly permissible.

Even though she trained and got stronger and worked harder than almost any other kuniochi in the village, she wanted him gone. Out of her head, his smirk, his eyes, the idiot fan that was on every fucking street corner in the Uchiha district, which Naruto had somehow convinced Tsunade not to disband and sell quite yet.

She stopped eating tomatoes. She dated men with bronze skin and warm hands, because when they kissed her she wasn't reminded of all her pathetic adolescent daydreams about cold, perfect hands and cold, perfect skin sliding along hers and

Haruno Sakura was very, very bad at forgetting.

She was good at pretending to forget, but overall, she failed at her attempts. She stopped flinching (after two years) when someone slipped up about 'that Uchiha boy, the one who wasn't a genius', and when her mother got very bad at the end, bad enough that she forgot who Sakura was (Kami, even her mother could forget everything, why couldn't she) but not what Sakura who had talked about, she mimicked Sakura's childhood cry of Sasuke-kun, Sasuke-kun, and it would have been embarrassing if her mother wasn't fucking dying while she was plaintively crying it.

Tsunade's method of escape was tempting. Sakura would sometimes find herself in the grocery store, fingers wrapped around the thin stem of a bottle of chilled sake, wondering if the numbing was worth the hangover and the hour of training she would miss in the morning. Usually she decided that it wasn't, and put the bottle back, and choose something chocolately instead.

Ino got over him and his disappearance enviously quick for someone who had claimed he was her soulmate. She gave Shikamaru appraising glances after a while, but Temari had gotten her head there faster, and for a while there Ino and Sakura were once again united in a common cause – forgetting.

Obviously Ino had succeeded, because she was dating that new ANBU, the captain who always tied his black hair in a high ponytail, the one who could peel a banana with chakra strings at fifty paces. Sometimes, while recounting this skill, Ino would waggle her eyebrows and say something about his skill with chakra strings and zippers at fifty paces, and Sakura would stop listening.

Sakura had dated around the village. Quite a lot, actually, but she never dated any of the Rookie Nine, and she never dated someone with dark hair and pale skin. In a village whose primary genetic traits were these, it was a bit hard to find decent men who fit the bill and weren't genin or anyone's grandfather.

The only time when she got even remotely close to forgetting was when her hands were coated in someone's blood, when the nurses yelled medical histories in her ear as she took her chakra scalpel and sliced into someone's lover, someone's child, and built them back together. She wasn't a doctor per se, because she didn't have a degree, but she fixed them up passably.

More than passably, as the years passed. She fixed people quickly, with minimal damage, and she made herself look at the body, not at the face. She avoided distinguishing characteristics, features, anything that would identify the person as a friend, a colleague, a sparring partner. She worked better, all shinobi were supposed to work better – Rule number three: emotions intrude on a situation; always view the objective as separate from shinobi – when emotions, friendships were not involved.

That was why ANBU wore masks, after all.

Never mind that the best ninja she knew wore his emotions as part of his face. Sakura followed the rules, her best trait, and she wouldn't risk her patient because she paused when she shouldn't have. Sakura was nothing if not efficient.

They didn't praise her like they praised Tsunade (yet), Naruto (never), or Kakashi (hah), but people remembered the Godaime Hokage's apprentice, and if was mostly for her hair color than her medical skills, all right. But they remembered her.

She had a mental list prepared, just in case he came back and still saw her as weak. She had a list of people she'd saved. The Kazekage's brother, four daimyos, every ANBU captain, and each of the Rookie Nine, with the remarkable exception of Hyuuga Neji. Suna still sent a representative to her when they had a very bad case. They respected her. They expected her.

But none of them had dark hair and cold hands. None of them fulfilled the memory in her brain that she tried to kill, tried to stifle with medical knowledge, chakra control, genjustu, and how many of each drink Ino could have before she would collapse. She had Naruto, Kakashi, Ino, Shikamaru, and Sai's medical histories memorized. She knew most of the bingo book, the geography of Suna's desert and Konoha's forest, and the last four hundred names on the monument.

She also knew the layout of the Uchiha district. She knew how many shops were closed, where he had used to sleep when it was only him and streets littered with ghosts. She knew how he organized his shirts, what shampoo he used, the way his sheets felt against her palm.

Once – just once, just once, it wasn't that awful a thing to do – she knew what it was like to feel the dusty sheets under her bare back, her calves, the bottoms of her feet as she propelled her hips upward. Just once, and the sensation haunted her the same way their owner had. She should have felt disgusted with herself, with the way her breath had rasped out to disturb the dust of the apartment, but she could only regret that she had been alone in the room.

Naruto stopped promising, eventually, before every meal that he would find Sasuke. He joined Sakura as Tsunade's apprentice, but he didn't have medical texts to memorize. He went on missions that spoke of the sharingan's appearance, but it seemed that he was only doing it mechanically, a motion he had forgotten the reason behind.

Sakura had to wait five years before she laid her glowing hands against the body of Hyuuga Neji. They were shaking, because she wasn't looking at his face, but his body was lean, pale, his palms worn by calluses from years of flicking kunai and shiruken and katana. There was a flash of dark hair before she forced herself not to notice.

Later, much later, she found that his hands were cold.

I . . . don't know. Probably written post-desertion when I was feeling all depressed, etc.

Thoughts?