Er. . .

Okay, so I got halfway through my ItaSasu fic "Christmas and Gray" and I was working casually on the second chapter of Anathema

And then I stumbled upon some delicious KakaSaku fics (run from the perv police!) and so I couldn't help it

I'm such a failure. Once again, this is me being weird with my writing style, and I don't expect y'all to like it

This is my first het Naruto fic . . . dang

Luvs!

-Maiden

I'm trying to think up a dedication . . . I guess I don't have that many friends, oh dear . . .

(X) (X) (X) (X)

Lapis

(X) (X) (X) (X)

Since the early days, her imagination had always made her susceptible to things that weren't really solid.

At the tender age of six, Sakura declared herself a pirate. To her, holding the pirate name meant that she would be both feared and revered—two things that she was never quite good at being. She felt no awkwardness in parading around Konoha in her sea dog attire and after much begging and pouting, her mother conceded to fashion her an eye patch.

The funny piece of black cloth clashed with the young girl's bubble-gum locks and she sometimes had to feign obliviousness when old men smiled warmly and chuckled or when high-school girls kneeled in front of her and laughed, patting her hair lightheartedly.

Sakura didn't care.

On Sunday mornings she would drag her sleepy mother out to the lake where she found comfort in sailing the paper boats she had painstakingly crafted throughout the week. In her mind, when the light autumn breeze gently blew the boats out onto the small lake, the strong, salty ocean wind blew her sturdy pirate ship out onto the endless ocean as well.

The little girl often noted a lonely boy with bright blond hair watching her. In his hands, the boy clutched an old plastic toy boat, the kind that a person could attach a string to and sail it near the shore as if it were a kite. The little boy had a pair of big, sad blue eyes, but underneath the coat of sadness, Sakura detected energy and enthusiasm.

Once during the winter, when Sakura ran towards the lake only to find it iced over, she had seen the little boy lying calmly in a snow bank with his eyes blankly staring up at the cold, gray sky.

Sakura had offered him her thermos that day. It had been full of the sweet, tongue-scalding hot chocolate her mother had made for her. It delighted the boy, and his ecstatic response was enough to sustain Sakura when her mother scolded her for losing her belongings.

When she returned to the lake in the spring, the boy would not be there and Sakura would not see him for six years.

Later that year, Sakura turned seven.

The little girl had traded in her eye patch for a bright red ribbon, courtesy of Ino-chan. She no longer felt content with herself and much preferred melting into the homogenous crowd than strutting intrepidly outside of it. It came to be that her green eyes would now watch the people around her, as if daring them to criticize her.

She still visited the lake, but satisfied herself with napping on a warm bench under the shade of an ancient pear tree.

She was always watching. Her eyes never missed a thing. Over time, she noticed two brothers who occasionally stopped by the lake to sail paper boats. The two looked strikingly similar with their ebony hair and coal-colored eyes but as Sakura watched, she realized the younger one's movements proved him to be the more vibrant of the two.

Sakura liked watching the younger boy. His smile was wide and his dark eyes shined with love and trust. She silently admitted to herself that she felt a bit jealous every time the boy would turn to his brother, look up, and grin with accomplishment.

"Aniki! Look how far out my boat went!"

From her place on the bench, she would smile when the older boy calmly placed his hands on his brother's shoulders and turned the small one around. He would bend his knees just enough so that he could rest his chin on his brother's shoulders and extend his arm to point at the water.

"No Sasuke, look, my boat is passing yours."

And the scowl that worked its way across the little one's face was not a real scowl. Not compared to the expressions she would see on the boy five years later.

Time slowly passed in Konoha, and with that passage, lives slowly changed.

Within another two years, Sakura had convinced herself that she was in love with the little boy she used to watch by the lake. Although, by her twelfth birthday, the little boy was no longer so little, and his eyes, shown with anything by love and trust.

So came the fateful day when the three of them were thrown into a messy, dysfunctional team. On graduation day, Sakura sat stiffly in between the two boys she had unknowingly grown up with. The irony was that the sad, blond-haired boy had grown into a loud and happy idiot and as for the smiling, laughing ebony-haired child, she never saw a smile from him and never heard his laugh.

She went along with it all and acted as a stranger.

Even when she squealed at Sasuke's goal of "to kill a certain man," her subconscious knew exactly who "that man" was. And it didn't quite faze her when Naruto declared that he would "make them acknowledge him," because it was archived somewhere in her memories that it was because she knew that they never did.

But the other man, the silver-haired jounin teacher, she had never known and she wanted to know about him. Because she was Sakura, always watching, always learning of others and this man, she had never seen.

(X) (X) (X) (X)

So . . . short . . .

Okay, so I think this is gonna be a KakaSaku . . . like yah . . .

Sorry, can you hear the fuses blowing in my brain? I can!! So I think I'm laying off the SasuNaru for a while ::het fans cheer::

Review if you have the time, and if I get a reasonable response, I'll consider continuing, but right now, this is how it stands.

Luv yees!