Title: Silence
Rated: G
Characters: Sakura
Comments: Sakura-centric (which is ODD for me)
This basically started with the question..what ever happened to Inner Sakura? lol Just to warn you…I can’t write Sakura. At all. Proceed with caution.

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Sometimes if she listens very carefully, she can hear a faint whining, like the sound of an empty wind slipping through the crevices of the leaves. In what was once the refuge of her mind, she had been free to express the innocent delights of an academy student: proclamations of love for the brooding boy who sat across the room, recitations of the ninja book of rules, vows to surpass her rival who sneered at her behind a blonde fringe.

In the whirlwind of stained weapons and deadened eyes that had carried her from graduation to tracing the steps of the boy who had left her behind, she finds that the silence of her thoughts is resounding. The voice that she had at first been afraid to make heard for fear of drawing her parents’ disappointment found its first firm grip in the power struggles between the two boys whose backs she’d been forced to watch for far too long.

So now that voice rings sharply with every word she speaks because she no longer fears the repercussions of her thoughts. One boy had taught her to speak with passion and the other to speak with forethought and she thinks of both every time she argues with her teacher about tactics or lesson plans.

The thoughts she fails to voice now are mere slivers of passing questions, whistling quietly in the grooves they’ve worn inside her…questions about worth and strength and other doubts she tucks away in careful, even folds. One day, when their team is whole again, she’ll take them out and smooth away the creases. Until then, she likes the voice she’s gained, steady on its own but strongest when joined by the echoes of the two who’d taught her how to speak.

The end.