Characters: Sakura, Naruto, Sasuke
Summary: A lie told will foment distrust forever. But still, Sakura wonders if she can love him.
Pairings: NaruSaku, onesided SasuSaku
Author's Note: This isn't Sakura bashing. I don't like her very much, and I suppose it might show, but really, I do try to portray her as compassionately as I can.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
It's not a warm feeling, but only dread that comes in her stomach when Sakura wonders if she really could love Naruto. It ought to be a happy thought, but it's not.
She's alone now, back in Konoha. The dense trees outside of the village swallow her up and Naruto's stinging rebuke still rings in her ears. The callused fingers of one hand rub ruefully over the bruised knuckles of another—Sakura isn't about to expend her chakra over something so petty as a collection of shallow bruises.
"I hate people who lie to themselves."
The voice was quiet, deadly quiet, and so much more contained than Sakura thinks she has ever heard it before. She could feel Sai's detached fascination, Lee's devastated shock, and Kiba's scorn and disdain at the whole situation, even without turning to face them—and she couldn't have, if she wanted to.
The way Naruto was looking at her, Sakura thinks she would have preferred it if he had shouted at her instead.
He was right. She had been lying then. Sakura knew she was lying and that she wasn't even doing a very good job of it (Sakura is many things, but natural liar she is not). If Naruto had felt insulted—and Sakura knows, from the coldness in those blue eyes that used to be so warm, that he was—then Sakura had given him good reason to be.
He's started to withdraw from her. It's so minute that others might not notice it, but with the acute senses that come from so much interaction with Naruto, Sakura can practically taste him pulling away. He's just a little more cautious around her, a little more wary and guarded. Sakura has seen veils fall over his eyes for the first time, just as the scales start to break away from hers.
He didn't even say goodbye before leaving with Yamato and Gai and the others.
Sakura had lied to him, had told him something that should never have passed her lips. To say what she had said to him, to tell someone that she loved them and to be lying, was as blasphemous and profane a lie as anything in existence. She had lied, and he knew it.
But, Sakura wonders, is it possible that maybe she could love Naruto, the way she claimed to when snowflakes were settling like a bridal veil in her hair?
Green eyes settle pensively on the deep gloom around her. It's not yet dawn, not quite; just the faintest hint of bird song starting to echo through leaves and ferns and the empty lands of the forest. The village walls have been destroyed, meaning that there's nothing keeping nin from wandering out into the countryside as it pleases them.
Sakura hears a man's hoarse shout in the distance, and her mind is transported to Sasuke.
So much time was wasted on that boy, but Sakura didn't know that when she first met him. When she first met Sasuke, she simply saw that he was everything Sakura thought a boy should be: handsome, smart, the top of his class. The thought of being in the same genin cell was in every sense of the phrase a dream come true.
She had had no idea how unkind, how cruel Sasuke could be until she was forced into close interaction with him for twelve hours a day.
Sakura's initial, childish fairytale dream was shattered to pieces on the floor by a boy with glass eyes, but that was hardly the end of it, not by a long shot. Sasuke was not just his unkindness or the way he dismissed her as a foolish girl. He was loneliness, pain incarnate, and Sakura found, eventually, that when the mood struck him, he could be kind.
Everything made way for a second childish fairytale dream. Sakura, she was so sure, was going to be the one to heal him, and when Sasuke looked at her it would be with eyes full of warmth and love, and he would smile again the way Sakura thought he might have before his brother had killed their family.
No matter how much Sasuke tried to break that dream too, Sakura still held on to it, clung to it with foolish and ignorant hands. Not even his leaving could show her the truth of him.
Avengers can't love anyone. They can only destroy everyone.
Sakura knows this now. She knows it in the phantom memory of a hand squeezing her throat cruelly and a chorus of a thousand singing birds. If it had been anyone else, their head would have been struck clean off their body from the force of chakra she would have pressed into her clenched fist. But it wasn't "anyone else"; it was Sasuke.
Naruto was right. She still loved him. But he… He…
He didn't love her. He didn't even care about her anymore enough to just toss her aside and call her weak and useless like he used to (Because that, Sakura has realized, was Sasuke's way of telling her to stay out of things so she wouldn't get hurt; it was callous, it was hurtful, but it was as close as Sasuke could ever come to expressing concern over her welfare). Looking at him, looking at those crazed eyes and hearing those deranged shouts, Sakura wasn't sure that he had ever cared about her, really given a damn about her at all.
And still, Sakura thinks with more than a little bitterness, she thinks she still loves Sasuke. It's nearly impossible to break a bond like that, nearly impossible to fall out of love with someone once in love. It's a slow and painful process. She feels like she's being stretched in every direction, her tendons and ligaments brutalized as her bones pope out of join and her limbs come loose from their sockets.
This is agony in its purest form.
But she's getting there. Maybe before she dies, be it of old age or disease or spread-eagle out somewhere on a deserted battlefield, she won't be in love with Uchiha Sasuke anymore.
She'll be able to see the sun again when she's not in love with Uchiha Sasuke anymore.
Sakura almost laughs now when she thinks of Naruto, but the noise that escapes her throat ends up sounding more like a half-hearted dry sob.
The first thing she noticed about him when they first met was how short he was. Then, how loud. Then, how obnoxious.
He was the exact opposite of Sasuke in every way; even their appearances seem to enforce this way of difference. They had nothing in common except their determination and their overwhelming drive to win.
"I'm gonna be Hokage!"
How foolish the words had seemed then. Sakura hadn't hesitated to tell Naruto just how stupid it was, the first time they met, that he thought he would ever be Hokage. She was sure of that. How could Naruto ever succeed? Him, the kid who couldn't even pass the graduation test let alone perform decent ninjutsu?
He was just the kid that every parent not an older nin (something interesting Sakura has noticed is that the shinobi who never tried to ostracize Naruto are the ones who had been roughly in the same age class as the Yondaime Hokage) told their children to stay away from. Sakura never understood why, but she still listened to her mother and stayed away from Naruto for as long as she could help it. She didn't realize until later just how lonely he had been, how cruel it had been of anyone to tell anyone else to stay away.
When they met, Naruto was just a scrawny little kid, with a distinct air of neglect around him. Sasuke seemed neglected too, but it wasn't as pervasive in him as in Naruto. Sasuke had the neglected air of one who had at least once been loved; Naruto, on the other hand, had never been loved or cared for at all.
He was loud, obnoxious, an attention seeker who'd do anything to be noticed.
Sakura had been utterly abhorred when she was made aware of her teammate's interest in her. That kid wanted to go out with her? In the egotistical, narrow-minded way of a twelve year old who had never suffered very much, Sakura saw absolutely no reason why it should be wrong to reject him as violently as she often did. She didn't see Naruto, nor did she want him.
She only saw Sasuke.
Then, everything started to crack.
Sasuke was dangerous; Sakura was forced to come to terms with this. Not dangerous in the manner of a skilled nin who knew his own mind, but dangerous in the way of a rabid dog who could lunge forward and snap at any moment. A destroyed water tower was all the testimony needed to present the case of Sasuke's deteriorating control of his impulses. And here, Sakura had thought Naruto was the brash one.
When he left, Sakura had the first inkling of the Naruto she should have seen all along. Though he had always wanted to be the only one in her life, though Naruto had always wanted nothing more to be with her, and even though Naruto knew that Sakura wanted Sasuke back because she loved him, not Naruto, he still promised to get Sasuke back.
The promise of a lifetime. No matter what it took, he would.
Naruto didn't get Sasuke back.
Naruto went off with Jiraiya once his wounds were healed enough to allow it, and Sakura was left to stew with that one moment, and eventually forget it. She forgot that one moment of pure selflessness from Naruto when he had had absolutely nothing to gain by being selfless, and instead her mindset of the immature, rude little boy who always tried to ask her out and whom she always rejected out of hand, and at times with the word "No" stamped on the knuckles of a closed fist.
Now, things are different.
What did I know of suffering? Sakura reflects bitterly, pulling her knees up to her chest and feeling a drop of dew hit her neck and slide down her back like a stroking finger. What did I, who had lost nothing, know of what it was like to lose everything, or what it was like to never have anything to start with?
If I'd known then what I know now, would I have still been so dismissive?
Not a child.
Not a rude, obnoxious little boy.
Not beneath her notice. If anything, above it and everyone else's, for what he has endured.
As for Hokage… When he was twelve years old and the only jutsu he could perform with anything resembling skill was the Kage Bunshin, Naruto had no chance. He was just another little nobody that paled in comparison to Sasuke, and the thought that he would even make it to adulthood without ending up cannon fodder hadn't even occurred to Sakura. Now, it feels like, in a few years and when Naruto finally passes the Chunin Exam, he may very well come to be known as the Rokudaime Hokage of Konohagakure no Sato.
And he is kind. He is selfless. And for all that he is impulsive, and brash, and still doesn't always think things through, he's grown up. Sakura doesn't see that scrawny little boy who wanted nothing more than her to go out with him anymore. She can't find that, anywhere in the newfound gravity that doesn't sit well in Naruto's bright blue eyes.
Can I love him?
The question sits like a yoke on Sakura's slight shoulders. Those four words are her chains now, wrought in iron and unbreakable even by the strongest hands. They will drag behind her for the rest of her life, or until she finds an answer that can make the metal break and release her.
I'm not sure. But is it even worth it?
Would he even believe me, if I said it again?
Naruto would be so easy to love. He still has his faults, but it's easy to love him now. Sakura knows him, her heart is aware of him, and now that she knows the true depths of him, of who and what he is, there is no boundary between them anymore.
It's possible to love more than one person at once. She's still in love with Sasuke, hoping not to be, in time, but maybe, maybe she could love Naruto too.
But Sakura knows…
Sakura fears…
She doesn't know for certain, but she does fear that maybe she has used up all her chances. The look in Naruto's eyes was of utter distrust, the expression that says "I'll never believe you again".
If she comes to love him truly, the way he loves her, and tells him as much, chances are Naruto would only believe that she was lying again, that for whatever reason she was trying to manipulate him, turn him away from the path he has chosen.
Being rejected is a heady experience for Sakura. It's happened once, and she didn't like it. Now, there's every chance it will happen again.
And if it happens again, it will be for good.
Her heart twinges, half-aware, half-knowing, half-uncertain. It questions her mind, her soul. It doesn't know if Sakura really knows what she wants. She stares down at her hands again. They are just human hands, callused, with a small pink rip of a scar on one finger. They can't move the world, or make someone believe something they are determined not to believe, and they can't tell her if she can love Naruto.
They tell her that she might be able to, but that such a love will be wrought in pain and distrust, that she and he will never be able to look at each other with truly open eyes, not when there's still such a persistent ghost hanging between them.
If they ever lie in the same bed, an intangible corpse will make the distance long indeed.
The sun is rising now, but the gloom is still impenetrable to Sakura's eyes. She stares, somberly, across the shadows of ferns and the occasionally panicked run of a deer, and contemplates the consequences of a little, devastating lie.