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Chapter 2

~Dreaming~

"When we have nightmares...
Our minds are really just exploring the possibilities
of what could happen should our dreams fail."

Lady A.R.R.O.

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Sakura Haruno Age: 19

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Sakura's eye bolted open as the thoughts of the night before streamed through her mind. Everything was dark and her body movement restricted. At first, she wiggled her arms and tried to free herself, but to no avail. Her breath accelerated as fear trickled through her still hazy brain, and all she could think about was the pair of evil eyes she saw last night in the darkness, that evil smile haunting her even now.

"Hello?" She whispered and struggled against her confines. They gave no quarter and her thrashing only served to tangle her up more. In seconds she was panicking, spinning herself over and rolling off whatever surface she was laid upon. The ground was hard and knocked the wind momentarily out of her lungs, but she cannoned herself to her feet in an instant and reached for her weapons pack which conveniently was no longer on her hip.

She glared around everywhere and found herself standing in her own apartment. Her pajamas were tangled around her arms and her blankets had trapped her atop her own bed. There was a few minutes of retarded silence where she shook her head and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. Exhaustion was taking its toll on her body and obviously her mind if she was seeing an ex-teammate who was long gone, "I can't believe I thought I saw Sasuke. Are you kidding me, he's probably dead for all we know." For some odd reason though, Sakura hoped she wasn't right. A part of her still mourned the loss of a good friend from the hurt he managed to tear into her all that time ago, even now it ate at her heart and tried to rip her asunder. There was so much she had wanted to say to him, still wanted to say, but after all these long years of waiting and wishing, she'd come to the conclusion that he was never coming home.

Sakura angrily plucked up her quilt from the floor and threw it on her bed lazily, leaving the mattress unmade and sloppy, spinning on heel and charging for the bathroom. She stripped from her nightgown on the way and tossed it haphazardly at the hamper, where it bounced off the edge and rustled lightly to the floor. This wasn't her normal way of doing things, in fact she was annoyingly clean, border-lining obsessive, yet today wasn't a typical morning and her brain hadn't cleared up enough to care about the article of clothing she had yet to figure out how it got on her body.

The shower was hot, just how she liked it and the bathroom steam fogged up the mirror within seconds. She ran her fingers through her long light rose colored hair, ringing through it with her flower blossom scented shampoo, not forgetting the conditioner. Her tense muscles were slowly relaxing and she let out a soft whimper of satisfaction when they finally felt at ease. Moments of calm like this were rare, managing to seal themselves away during the long missions and the weeks of almost living in the hospital, but when she did find a spare second to relax the results were nearly orgasmic for her.

As the shower ended, she pulled back the almost translucent curtain and reached for a fluffy towel to dry her soaked body. Everything was hot and still steaming, as she crawled from the tub and went to the mirror. She streaked across its foggy polished surface to reveal her exhausted face and sighed when she noticed the dark bags under her eyes were still hanging there, a grim reminder of how little sleep she was getting.

For some reason, Sai's comment from the day before flashed in her mind, vivid and stinging, dripping with heated venom that resounded off the walls of her skull.

"Ugly."

She curled her fingers into a fist and slammed it hard against the bathroom's counter top. She was doing it again, like she had for months after Sasuke first left, telling herself she wasn't good enough. Wasn't pretty enough. Wasn't anything worth loving. Each poisoned barb stung her brain like a searing poker and finally, unwanted tears sprang to the corners of her eyes. Years of this mental self abuse had super charged through her mind like blue lightning, forcing her to do the grotesque things she did to her body.

Her eyes sluggishly glanced down at her naked arms, tracing lightly the pink and white scars. Some were old and small, the beginning stages of her own self abuse. When the thought of marring her flesh was still fairly sickening to her, but there were other reminders, other scars that fringed on morbidly disgusting. Those haunting times when she had plunged the blade too deep. When the memories of her betrayal had been drowning, filling her with a level of self-loathing Sakura had never before thought possible in a human being, yet she had managed it to such a degree that when she had taken that sparkling kunai tip down her doll-like skin, she cut so deep that it left a forever lasting impression on both her body and her mind. She had effectively broken herself and left the impossibly small shard pieces of her body as the sacrifice for her obsessive insanity.

"I am good enough. I am pretty…" It was all a lying sham she sold herself to, all in the attempt to keep out the insatiable need to bleed. Though some time ago she had promised someone she wouldn't let herself continue to drown, had promised to try and let go. It wasn't working and she was falling again.

"No. You're not," her mind was reeling, rolling a film wheel of her life in rapid succession, one hurtful image after another. "You're pathetic, you're weak. Why couldn't you just kill yourself when you had the chance? I'll tell you why, everything about you is a useless waste of life. You'll never be as strong as Naruto or Sasuke, and in the end… You will die alone…"

"STOP IT!" Sakura bellowed, gripping to her head, burying her nails into her soaked hair and clawing at the surface of her scalp as her own mind continued growing louder and louder. "Stop it, please," she whimpered and felt the hot tears spill over the edge of her lids.

"Just kill yourself and get it over with!"

She glared at her distorted image in the mirror, the only sounds she could hear was the echoing of her own mind and her soft, quick breathing. Her fists slowly pulled away from her temples and rested on the mirror, as the rage began to boil.

"I mean something. I am strong," she told her own reflection and slammed her fists into the glass, shattering it to pieces. Time seemed to slow as the pieces exploded into the air and floated all around her. When gravity finally kicked in they plummeted to the ground and tinkled across the floor with reckless abandon. She was trapped amidst a field of sharp glass and a closed door.

"Shit," she breathed out, feeling the warm ooze of blood coming from the biting wound on her knuckles. Her eyes searched out a viable escape without too much damage and something flashed in the remaining shards of mirror still stuck in their rightful place. An image prismed out into about twelve other images through the broken shards, each showing a different size, different shape of herself. She slowly began to realize her image wasn't the only one she saw in the glass. That same feeling from the night before crept up her spine, spidering out across her brain.

Sakura drew closer, placing her hands on the counter and grinding a few missed pieces into the palms of her hands. She gasped and yanked her hands back, plucking the few shards out and licking away the pillowing blood pocket. When her attention went back to the mirror, she saw him.

He was grinning at her, evilly dancing behind the refelctor, taunting her, as if to say, "come and get me, little Sakura." The image lunged for her and she screamed, taking a step back and slipping on the wet floor. She landed hard on her side, feeling thousands of tiny pricks of broken mirror pieces digging into her soft skin.

"You will come to me... Or I'm going to kill you," the voice hissed in her ear and was gone, taking with him the foreboding feeling of being watched and Sakura's spun wildly. She laid her head down to cool the dizzying tumble and slowly her consciousness slipped from her grasp.

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