Chapter Text
Unlike what everyone seemed to believe, it did not start with seeing dead people. That actually didn't come until much, much later.
I.
It started with the Smell.
Of decay and rot. That only Sakura seemed to pick up, not that she would have described it that way. She was only 4 years old, and didn’t think anything strange of it. To her it smelled kind of sweet, and perhaps, a little sad.
It felt, like sitting in the kitchen watching dust particles swirl in the sunlight coming through old curtains while her Mama cut up vanilla beans, maybe too much, the scent ripe and heavy in the air. Cutting her fingers on the knife, blood in the mix metallic and unfamiliar then. Waiting for the cookies to bake for an eternity, aging, but when she looked around no one would be there anymore, not even ghosts. Cookies already forgotten and stale on the counter. Sweet, and a little sad.
The first time she realized the smell didn't really go away, she thought it was coming from herself. But no matter how much she washed up it never really left. She would catch a trace of it playing in the woods, ever present and almost comforting after a while. Or suddenly, when walking with Mama to the market through town. She would stop confused, tugging the hand that was holding onto her own, but by the time Mama looked back in question the smell would already be gone from her senses. Forgotten.
On a particularly hot and boring summer day a few months after her 4th birthday, nose itching, Sakura got curious enough to try and follow it to the source. If there was one. That day, summer solstice, felt on the edge of something, air still and heavy but the smell more cloying than usual.
She remembered in a daze tracking the scent through their little traditional house to the shrine proper, then into the sprawling courtyard, until reaching the old cherry tree planted right on the edge of their property. She didn't really see anything that could be the source, but the earth beneath her feet thrummed with something she couldn’t quite name.
So she dug. And dug. Enthusiastic in a way only a child could be getting covered in more and more dirt. Bony little fingers sinking into the ground, air sweltering but the earth cool and soft beneath her nails under the shade of the tree.
She found a cat.
Or at least the remains of what once used to be a cat.
Probably a dear pet to someone long ago that was buried beneath the old cherry tree before Sakura and her Mama had ever lived there. Sakura had never had a pet though, and did not know the custom of burying the dead occasionally applied to them. She hadn’t even seen a human funeral yet.
She might not have known what was done to bodies after death but she understood Death itself. No one had explained yet, but standing there suddenly Sakura knew it, deep within herself, without question. There was an end, that existed for all beings.
Hot air, cold earth, sometimes heavy, sometimes faint smell of vanilla.
For Sakura, for Mama, for the trees that cast their shadows on her form now, for the birds she could faintly hear outside of her window when she had woken up that morning. An end, a beginning, and another end, for everything Sakura knew and yet not knew to be.
She also knew what a cat was, so she could clearly see that what she dug up was a long dead cat. A few of the bones still had bits of fur and desiccated skin clinging to them.
She took the remains to Mama, hands gentle and reverent on the dirty bones, to show her what a treasure she had found. Mama seemed surprised but Sakura did not quite understand the expression on her face. Had she been a little older, a little wiser, maybe she would have seen the minute panic on Mebuki’s normally serene features. Sakura of 4 though, did not really care, still so excited by her new little discovery.
She had found it.
Haruno Mebuki on the other hand knew this day might have been coming.
But she looked at Sakura poking the bones with childish glee on her face and thought maybe, just maybe, she had found the bones accidentally whilst digging around in the yard. Children did that, right? She gave Sakura a couple of cookies, after she made the girl wash the dirt off of her hands. Sakura seemed loath to leave the bones alone though, so at the end Mebuki caved and helped her clean at least the tiny cat skull to keep for now. It was unnatural for a Haruno, to hold, to keep, so perhaps this was actually nothing but a child playing with a toy. She told her little girl what an adventure today must have been, and chose to believe that this was not the start of something.
Mebuki did not start feeling stupid about that before the fifth time Sakura came home with the corpse of one animal or another.
They buried what she dug up under the old cherry tree again, only that very first cat skull had remained sitting pretty on Sakura’s bedside table eyeless sockets judgemental every time Mebuki walked by, with soft prayers and Mebuki decided it was time to stop ignoring reality.
“How do you find these things, Sacchan?” she asked.
Sakura tapped her nose, smudging some dirt over it, and said that she smelled something and just followed it. Said that the Smell came from them.
Mebuki hummed in what could have been but was not really true understanding. Death was simple yet complicated, especially for a Haruno, their customs a little more so to explain fully to a 4 year old. For now though she told Sakura, privately thinking that while they were in Konoha at least, “What is dead belongs under the ground, honey.”
What is dead belongs underground?
Somehow that felt strangely wrong to Sakura and she asked Mama why so.
“That’s the way it is here,” Mama told her, and Sakura prepared to argue but they were already done re-burying her precious treasures. She felt the tears burning behind her eyes. Mama sent her to wash her hands with a sad look.
Sakura could only glance back at the old cherry over her shoulder as Mama led them back to the shrine, and she accepted. Because Mama had said so, and that was enough reassurance for now.
She never went searching for buried animal corpses again, and learned to ignore the Smell as best as she could.
But sometimes, on the village road or when walking near a park, the familiar scent of death and decay would reach her nose, and the presence of something long gone itched in the back of her mind. She could almost feel the cold but so very soft earth on her small fingertips, under her nails. Sweet, and sad, and ever present if she just paid attention.
She moved away.
II.
Sound came next.
While growing up Sakura started hearing things. She was just shy of 6 years, and incredibly proud of that fact.
She couldn’t exactly hear words or anything. It was more like white noise. Constantly in her ears, the voices of what she didn’t yet know to be ghosts past and present all mixing together. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes grating. Yet, each passing day the voices got a little bit louder, the words almost clear.
It wasn’t as loud by their shrine located on the outskirts of the town, but whenever she went into the town proper, and she was old enough now that Mama allowed short trips on her own, the not quite buzzing would start.
There were times Sakura just sat and listened for hours on end in the closest park, hoping she could parse it out.
Children in the neighborhood started calling her creepy for that.
Mama found her once sitting on a bench, she had probably zoned out again but was too late coming back this time. Blank eyes looking at the maple leaves scattered on the ground, so so red and so so dead, humming a tune she heard on the wind that day. It was late fall, it never got too cold in Konoha but the chill was slowly setting in, Mama must have been worried. She asked if Sakura was okay, and in her voice there was an urgency Sakura did not pick up.
“Can’t you hear it Mama?” she asked head tilted, but Mama told her that she couldn’t. That Sakura was a very special little girl. Sakura pouted at the “little” part for the sake of it. She was almost 6, not a baby, but her attention remained on the humming that was now coming from leaves.
Sakura was finally 6 years old, when Mebuki caved in and took her to a cemetery for the first time.
The smelling alone could have been handled by ignoring it. The occasional Haruno had been blessed by one of the Senses.
Mebuki’s own mother had been the last to awaken any. It had only been hearing, though unusually clear.
But even then Haruno Akari, named for the reddish purple color of her hair like red plums just as she had named her granddaughter Sakura after her soft pink hair, had been the first one to do so in several generations. Harunos, a family older than all the shinobi nations combined, had considered the ability to be dying out. Akari had been good at what she did, but she was thought to be an outlier.
Mebuki herself did not have any of the Senses, and yet her baby girl had awakened two in the span of a couple of years.
She explained as they walked hand in hand towards the largest cemetery in town that when people died they were buried in the ground, just like those bones she had dug up so long ago. Most people in Konoha that was. She talked about the Uchiha, a founder clan along with the Senju. Uchihas believed in burying their loved ones after death. She went on to tell Sakura about how the custom of making elaborately decorated and sealed coffins for it, which Mebuki uncharitably thought were ugly, had started with the early Uchihas.
“There are other ways too,” Mebuki said in what was not really reassurance. Some, only a minority in Konoha, burned the bodies instead. Though the Uchiha had looked down on that practice as blasphemous, to them the physical bodies of their ancestors were just as sacred as their souls. Shortly after the formation of Konoha as a village, their way of things had caught on with them being such a powerful and well-respected clan. Nowadays cremation was only done by a few families here, or in emergencies in the field for reasons Mebuki chose to gloss over for a child that did not yet know wars or bloodline thieves existed.
Instead she told Sakura burial was the most prevalent custom here because the ground was soft in Konoha, land plentiful. They kept their dead, and then enacted stones and monuments because they wanted a place to visit and grieve.
“Grieve?”
“It means to feel sadness, Sacchan, especially when someone dies. Because that person is gone.”
Face adorably scrunched up Sakura said, “Gone? Why would they be gone?”
Mebuki’s face went through several complicated expressions before she settled on an amused huff.
“You are right dear, I suppose for you, they wouldn’t be gone.”
All was well if she never really understood the feeling, Mebuki thought, Harunos don’t grieve anyway.
The scent of decay she used to follow around like a puppy when she was smaller got stronger with each step as they walked, the voices louder than ever before. Sakura looked ahead, and on the green neatly trimmed grass sat rows and rows and rows of stones. It didn’t feel right.
There was a strange electricity on her skin, that not quite buzzing in her ears.
Sakura could understand now, albeit vaguely, that what she had been hearing were the voices of those that had passed away. Mama again told her what a special girl she was, but that what she could smell and hear she should never tell other people. That other people did not smell or hear the dead.
They did not?
Stupefied Sakura nodded. The feeling of something not being quite right starting to overwhelm her the longer she stared at the cemetery.
“What is dead belongs under the ground,” she heard herself say. Although this time it was even harder to believe the words.
Mama murmured her voice low, “Yes, though not quite like this.”
When Sakura looked up at her confused once more, she only said, “I’ll explain more when you are older Sacchan.”
They got ice-cream on the way back. Hers was a lemon popsicle, it was supposed to be sour, refreshing, but the overly sweet smell of death did not leave Sakura’s nose.
The noise continued in the background.
It got somewhat worse over the years.
The voices were exciting to hear at first, and Sakura still remembered listening intently for long periods of time to pick up even the smallest of words, but now the constant noise tired her and she started getting headaches. Sometimes it was hard to focus on what the living were saying.
She slowly got better at tuning out the voices though, or focusing on particular sounds instead to drown out most of the others. Mama gave her a journal, her grandmother’s, and Sakura learned more about the gift of Sound. How to better manage her responses to overwhelming sounds. How to meditate.
At some point she started making her own notes on the worn pages. At first she was hesitant to do anything to the journal but Mama reassured her that no object left behind had to be sacred. With a knowing smile on her face, Mama told her that the dead did not mind.
When she saw the now determined glint in Sakura’s eyes, she said, “You don’t have to care about legacies either, Sacchan,” as if she could read what Sakura had been thinking about leaving behind in between the pages.
“Yes, maybe it’ll help someone down the line, or maybe it won’t, and the paper will crumble away. As it was meant to do. It is all fine.”
Mama took her swimming. Naka River ran through Konoha, waters heavy with history, not that Sakura knew that yet.
There were off-shoots of the river as well as little lakes strewn all around the great forests that surrounded Konoha on all sides. She said being under the water might help Sakura, as it used to help her own mother. When Sakura first went under all she could hear was the sound of the current and the entire world had been muted. It was beautiful. Peaceful.
Water called to her, just as the earth did.
She would go swimming, away from the town whenever days got too loud, let the water quiet the world, then quiet her own brain. And when she was tired enough she would drag herself ashore and lay down among the greenery dappled with sunlight, damp earth under wet skin.
Nothing but the sounds of cicadas lulled her to sleep.
III.
She could parse out what the voices were saying by the time Sakura started attending the Konoha Ninja Academy. She tried replying back sometimes, the ghosts never replied back.
She still couldn’t see them but recently she could almost Feel the dead. There was a feeling to them. But not really. There was knowledge, but not sensation. Perhaps it was the absence of actual feeling that made it noticeable. The air seemed to collapse in on itself when a ghost, or what Sakura assumed to be a ghost, was there. She avoided walking through them as much as possible.
She almost danced on the roads when walking. People looked at her strangely then, more so than usual at least. Not that she really noticed, all attention focused on the shimmering air and the voices that accompanied.
Sakura was 7 when she started her ninja training like most of her agemates in Konoha. She had wanted to join because she wanted to learn about their village, understand a little more about all the stories she overheard from ghosts that walked through the streets. The physical training was a bonus. Mama had started teaching her how to dance, but Sakura thought it would be good to know how people here lived and fought.
She figured she would stay in the academy for a few years and get what she could before she seriously started training under Mama as a shrine maiden instead, learning the traditional Haruno fighting styles she had been trained in by her own mother. Delicate fans, sturdy bows. Spirits in their ears, bones in their hands.
There were still enough civilian kids in the beginner classes that Sakura didn’t stand out by virtue of being non-clan alone. It was also a blessing that no one from her own neighborhood attended. Yet, Sakura didn’t have any friends. Not that she hadn’t tried, and not because of her strange Senses. She took great care to ignore them when there were people around now, Mama had said so. But children were intuitive, and they picked up on things even if they didn’t know why, couldn’t really explain.
It hadn’t started out bad. There was a girl in their class, Ami, with beautiful bright purple hair and lovely brown eyes. She was civilian like her but still popular with most of the class, because she did so well at the ninja training. She had wanted to befriend Sakura at first. Sakura was not really a fighter, yet, but she was strong, hours and hours of swimming giving her the muscle condition most kids their age didn’t have. She was resilient too, and a little competitive. Ami had liked her. And Sakura had liked her back.
Then she noticed something. It wasn’t the Smell that was so familiar to Sakura clinging to Ami. Though that would come later.
Sakura did not understand why her senses were so confused because Ami was clearly alive, when one day she had touched Ami’s arm with her own when they were sitting close together, and in the same instant she was struck by the realization that Ami would die. And perhaps soon, although Sakura did not know why or how. She just knew she could Feel the absence of something under her fingers, nothing where there should have been life.
This wasn’t the same as the ghosts Sakura so carefully avoided running through, but almost, almost the same. She recoiled back. Ami did not notice at first but as Sakura continued to avoid her after her startling discovery the other girl grew angry, her brown eyes colder than what Sakura had grown used to. Other kids seemed to pick up on the shift of dynamic rather quickly, and soon they became hostile as well.
Sakura had hoped to make friends in the academy, really. The neighborhood kids, all civilians as well, had long written her off as creepy but Mama had said ninja kids were all weird too anyway. But as Sakura watched Ami’s profile from her seat, she thought she was reluctant to get close again. Ami would be gone soon. Well, Sakura knew she wouldn’t really be gone. Everything went away, and came back, and went away again. Again and again. So it wasn’t fear of death or loss that made her hesitant, but all the sensations being around Ami, knowing and not knowing what was coming confused her.
There was a shadow of something she still couldn’t see, yet the faint smell of vanilla slowly getting richer.
Would they bury her too? she wondered. Would Sakura hear her call when she walked by, the way she used to cheerfully tell Sakura good morning when she walked into the class? How terribly sad.
It hadn’t been this hard making friends when she was smaller, Sakura thought, because to 4 year olds digging around and finding old animal bones had been an adventure. Children pretended to hear the voices of imaginary friends all the time. This was before her spells of zoning out on her Senses had started scaring the children around her, before she got better at handling it.
How strange was it that they all grew up to be disgusted by things they used to play around with. To fear the inevitable just because they did not understand. Sakura felt blessed for the world she knew, and cursed for the one that had started feeling so isolated from others.
Mebuki refused to be surprised at this point, when one day Sakura came home with slumped shoulders, and told her she had started feeling Death in the air, in people. Not quite, but close. It was actually one of the older Senses, one that used to awaken first in Harunos in older times, that had made them aware of sickness early enough to make them sought out healers. Before they were fighters and priests.
“Why can’t I really touch them though?” Sakura asked. Her hand waving through something, something Mebuki knew she could not see, but seemed to know to be there.
Mebuki smiled sadly, “It is a dangerous thing, love, to be able to touch the dead.”
Sakura lowered her hand.
“It would make you forget, that you are not supposed to hold on.”
Ami did not show up to class one day. Then not for another week. A month. Not many people questioned it since it was common enough for civilian kids to drop out of the academy after a year or so, though it was uncharacteristic of someone as enthusiastic about the training as Ami had been. When Iruka-sensei told the class she had been really sick and had passed away, Sakura tried to act surprised enough that no one would notice the knowing look in her eyes.
It was an actual surprise when Ami’s family came to their shrine to ask Mama for the funeral services. It was an elaborate affair that was going to take several days. Sakura tagged along with Mama to Ami’s family home to watch how she purified the place, how she purified herself with prayer and washing.
They weren’t going to bury Ami, not really, after all the ceremonies were done they were going to cremate her. Sakura was confused when she overheard, because she had thought most civilians wanted their bodies buried in those ugly coffins in Konoha, bodies trapped away from the rich earth, silent stones with loud ghosts. She had known there were other ways, but had really not thought about what that had entailed.
“They are Uzushio descendants,” Mama told her after they returned home following the wake. The family would join them at the crematorium later. Her hand came down on Sakura’s head softly, ruffling the pink strands, “You can tell by the bright hair, we seem to share the same trait.”
She explained once upon a time people from Uzushio, a distant island surrounded by whirlpools, had lived in Konoha. They had been some of the ninja founders in fact, along with the Senju and the Uchiha. But slowly they had died out, just as their lands had been destroyed, their techniques forgotten. Most that remained here were distant cousins and descendants that were scattered amongst the civilian population. Some customs had survived, barely, but they had.
The shrine they lived in in fact had been modeled after Uzushio shrines of old, dedicated to their gods, adorned with their spirals.
“What gods do we believe in Mama?” Sakura asked.
“None? All? Harunos know Life and they know Death, they practice all religions where people need it.”
She traced the Haruno Circle on her sleeves.
“All gods are eventually forgotten and replaced by new ones, Sacchan. They are just like us that way.”
Sakura saw the gravesite later where Ami’s ashes were placed, the stone was impressive though different from those she had seen in the other cemetery. There were flowers, the scent of incense strong yet not enough to obscure that of sweet sweet vanilla. Mama told her some of the ashes would be going to Ami’s family, where there would be a shrine for her inside their house as well. That didn’t feel quite right to Sakura either.
Trapped inside coffins, trapped under the ground, trapped above ground in little shrines inside four walls. Trapped, trapped, trapped.
Her feelings must have shown on her face because Mama said, “No, not quite like this either.” She didn’t explain what their own family did, and Sakura did not ask.
That night she dreamed of open fields. Worms disintegrating flesh in the humid summer air, feeding flowers that would soon bloom vibrant violet. Millipedes crawling out of bones that would slowly disappear into the soft cool earth. Taking days, months, years.
One day someone would stumble upon them, or perhaps not.
It didn’t matter. It felt right.
IV.
She had not intended to become a ninja, no. She had wanted to be a shrine maiden, like her Mama.
But then.
Sakura was 8, when the Uchiha Massacre happened.
And her world changed.