Truth Well Hidden

Sakura: Of Psychos and Druggies

Haruno Sakura, the beloved daughter of Kizashi and Mebuki.

That was the life she lived, happy and carefree in a blissful environment with her loving parents. She was content, she was happy.

Even Sakura herself does not know what happened, how it happened, why it happened or even how it happened in the first place. One day she was happily talking with her mom about why girls were pretty and boys were not, the next, she was being screamed at by her hysterical mother.

Sakura had worried for her mother, scouring through medical books and searching through the medical library. She even went as far as to ask the doctors and nurses. Each time she came to the same conclusion.

Her mother had gone crazy.

Sakura, not knowing how to react, tried her best to keep her mother happy, to not worsen her condition. She did what she was told, reading books too advanced for her age, dressing up in pretty and impractical clothes better worn by dolls. When her mother had sneered at her, slapping her after saying that she was too fat, she stopped eating dinner.

Sakura thought that that was the worst of it.

She was wrong.

Next was her father. He had been loving and kind, aiming to help his wife get better and keep his precious daughter safe. He told jokes and cheered her up whenever she almost spiralled into depression because of her mother's condition.

The next thing she knew, he was back at two o'clock in the morning, reeking of booze and giving off a strange smell that Sakura could not pinpoint. She heard him stumble into the house and tried to help him to bed, but she was rewarded for her efforts by her father throwing a beer bottle at her. Her father, the one to be there for her when she thought she was alone. Her father. He had befallen the same fate as her mother, and by choice.

"This cannot be real! It can't!" Sakura chanted as she curled up in a ball on her bed, rocking back and forth.

Sakura prayed for it to get better, for her to wake up in bed, to see her parents laughing with her again, to cheer her up to make her forget about all the bad things.

But what she knew was that it didn't get better. Her prayers had remained unanswered.

Mebuki had found a knife in the house and had started to slice patterns into her flesh, watching as it oozed from the wound she inflicted upon herself. She did not even flinch in pain.

This was the scene Sakura walked into. She gently pried the knife from her mother's reaching hands, telling her softly that she cannot hurt herself, that it was wrong to hurt herself. Sakura had chastised her mother like she would a child.

Mebuki's question, child-like and innocent-sounding, scared Sakura, "If I cannot hurt myself because it is wrong, can I hurt you instead?"

Sakura's heart almost stopped. She gulped in fear and pushed down the bile she could feel rising in her throat, forcing herself to speak.

"Of course you can, Mebuki-chan," she spoke as though speaking with a child, as she knew her mother preferred these days.

"Then wouldn't Sakura-chan be hurt?" Mebuki asked again, innocence staining her words.

"Yes, I would. But it is better that I get hurt than you, Mebuki-chan, who is my kaa-chan, to be hurt," Sakura said softly, tears streaming down her cheeks as she face her mother.

"Yay!" Mebuki clapped her hands together.

"First, let us bandage your wounds. It wouldn't be good for Mebuki-chan to hurt herself more!" Sakura feigned cheerfulness, carefully staunching her mother's blood with a towel the way the medical books said to, bandaging the wounds tightly enough that blood stops flowing out but not right enough to cut off blood circulation.