"I told her I didn't want it."

"What?" Naruto asked in bewilderment.

"You heard me, Naruto," Sakura said, trying to quash the conversation as the two made their way out the Hokage Tower.

Naruto looked at her, squinting in confusion. "But I thought you wanted to be the Head Medic? No one's more qualified than you, even Shizune said so. You did so much before and after the War, you're pretty great!"

The last thing Sakura felt like doing was explaining why she felt the way she did, especially to her best friend. For all his good qualities, intelligence and comprehensive thoughts weren't among them.

"Look, Naruto can we just not talk about this?" Sakura pleaded, letting the emotion seep into her voice. "I just want to go home and rest."

Naruto seemed torn for a moment. "I didn't mean to push. I just don't want to see reject something you want when it's right in front of you."

Sakura shivered slightly, though she didn't know why. She just knew this wasn't something she was ready to talk about.

"It's fine, Naruto. It's just… I need to figure this out myself. You don't always have to save me."

It was scarcely two weeks later when it happened again. Sakura had barely managed to make it through the rest of the day without breaking down into tears.

Those tears took all of ten seconds to appear once Sakura had gotten back home to her apartment later that evening. The warm water streaked down her face, dropping to the ground in a pitter-patter sound to her heightened sense of hearing. She tried rubbing them away but she couldn't stem the flow.

Rationally, Sakura knew death was a guarantee in her profession. Tsunade had drilled that into her head from the very beginning of her apprenticeship. In her head, Sakura knew there were some people you just couldn't save, through no fault of the medic. In the war, Sakura had seen many die. Innumerable on the battlefield and many in her own care. In hindsight, she supposed, it was easier to numb the feeling when the entire world was at stake.

But here, eight months after the Fourth Shinobi World War had ended, she had hoped the fallout from the war had finally ended. Two weeks prior she'd lost an elderly couple whose chakra network had been damaged from the sudden intrusion of the God Tree. What made it worse, ironically, was the fairly quick removal of the chakra absorption cocoons from that divine entity. Randomly, a small percentage civilians, lacking training to control chakra, would be hospitalized due to the damage done to their less adept chakra network. It was an extremely tricky procedure, made harder by the fact that such damage had no standard treatment due to its unprecedented nature. Sakura had been assisting Tsunade in researching an effective general solution to healing the damage, but it was slow going.

That very afternoon, Sakura had been unable to save a young girl. She'd come in, positive that the Fifth Hokage's student, a famous medic in the war, would greet her after a successful operation and she'd go on to live a good life.

Only she never would.

The war just found a way to keep on taking from her, from the world. It took Neji, it crippled Gai, tens of thousands of ninja perished or injured. Before it had started, she'd hoped the boy she'd had a crush on - that she, in her younger days, even thought she loved - could be turned back. But the war took him too, after a fashion. She'd had to see first hand, repeatedly, that he had changed far too much, and was willing to go much too far. The Genjutsu he used to make her think he'd killed her was the final nail in the coffin.

She was beginning to despair that it'd keep taking away everything worth living for, even after Madara, Obito and Kaguya had been defeated.

"Sakura, open up!" came a muffle voice, accompanied by a pounding on her front door.

Sakura sighed. She couldn't even say she didn't expect this, knowing the source. He always seemed to have her tuned in, ready to leap to her rescue as if she weren't a trained killer but a helpless wallflower.

Sakura made her way to the door after ensuring she'd hid the evidence of her state of mind, and opened it.

"Naruto, must you knock so loudly? There might a family five miles away that didn't hear you shouting my name."

Not looking at ashamed or apologetic, Naruto asked, "Can I come in?"

Sakura beckoned him inside. "Where's the fire?" she asked in a calm voice.

He looked at her as if trying to find something. "You can cut the act Sakura. Ino told me what happened today."

And like that, he bulldozed through her admittedly weak defenses without an iota of subtlety. A tear escaped and she furiously wiped it away. "Yeah, well, Ino should mind her own damn business. I'm not a Genin fresh out the Academy, I know what this line of work entails."

Naruto's expression softened. "Sakura… she's just worried about you. I'm worried about you. Talk to me. Please," he begged her.

"What do you want me to say, Naruto?" she asked harshly. "That I feel useless, hollow, on edge, is that it?"

"I -"

"That I can't do anything right?"

"Just let me -"

"Naruto, she was so young, barely eight years old. I should have been able to save her. I fixed up cases just like hers three days ago." Naruto looked like he wanted to say something but held it back. "I was barely able to wake her up in time to say goodbye to her parents…"

"Sakura, it wasn't your faul-"

Sakura shook her head, a furious expression on her red, tear-streaked face. "I could have saved her. If I had just researched more to develop an effective procedure, healed her faster, ended the war more quickly so her chakra network wasn't damaged."

After a few moments of silence, Sakura said, "I just feel so powerless and empty. Whenever someone needs my help the most I fail. I'm not like you, Naruto. I never pull through in these situations."

Naruto actually looked angry for a split second before he closed his eyes. His expression changed to a small smile. "That's not true, Sakura. You won't listen to me that it wasn't your fault. You don't think you've done incredible things and pulled off amazing things in hopeless places. But it's not true. Let me show you."

Sakura didn't know how to respond, but then Naruto began taking off his clothing, his black shirt to be specific. As his well defined abs and pectorals came into view, Sakura blushed deeply in spite of herself and turned away from him. "Naruto, if you're doing something perverted then -"

"Sakura," Naruto said. "Just look right here." He was pointing to the side of his chest next to where heart was. A long, white scar was visible; Sakura remembered it well.

He rubbed the scar there, and smiled deeper. "Do you see this, Sakura? This is where you cut me open."

"Another time I hurt you," she said unthinkingly, not sure how to respond.

"Don't revise history, Sakura. This is where you saved me," he said, passion evident in his voice. Naruto closed the gap between them and gathered Sakura's idle hands into his own. "You think these hands haven't helped those when they were needed the most, that they haven't performed miracles. But these hands saved my life so many times. These hands gave me the chance to stay in this world, they helped me save this world."

Crying for a different reason, Sakura looked into Naruto's eyes, surprised to see they were reddening.

"Naruto, I -"

Naruto wiped a stray tear. "Sakura, these are the hands that held my heart. These hands hold my heart." He pulled her hands to his chest. "They belong to the person I care about the most in this world. So I won't… I refuse to stand for anyone downplaying the good they've done. Not even if it's you doing it."

Sakura collapsed into Naruto's chest, sobbing uncontrollably and holding onto him for dear life, a firmness he equaled as rubbed up and down her back to comfort her and murmured soothing words to her.

"I just… keep waiting for everything to go away, to be as alone as I feel sometimes," she said into his chest, after calming down.

Naruto pulled back placed his hands on the side of her face. "Sakura, I swear I'll never leave you alone. Not ever. That's a promise of a lifetime."

"Naruto," was all she managed to say before gripping his collar and pulling him down into a heated kiss. She was pleased, ecstatic even, when he soon met her passion after a moment of shock. Sakura had never kissed anyone before, but if it was anything like kissing Naruto she'd been missing out. When their lips met it was like lightning suddenly coursed through her veins, connecting her with the greatest man, the greatest person, she'd ever known. Her heartbeat had quickened, fueling the intensity of the interaction between their dueling tongues.

When they pulled back, Sakura looked Naruto in the eyes and could truly see with her own eyes what Sai, emotionally gimped as he was, had seen. The love there was so evident she felt she had no business calling Naruto stupid for having somehow missed it herself.

"I never told you outright, I was always afraid of it going wrong," Naruto said, breaking the silence. "After I fought Gaara, I felt, no, I knew… I knew that I loved you Sakura. That no matter what happened I'd always be in love with you."

If she hadn't been crying before she was now. "I have no right to ask you to believe me after what I did last time, but I love you Naruto. For everything that you are. For always being there, for being so brave I want to call it reckless. Hell," she laughed slightly. "I even love how ridiculous you are about ramen. It's just so… you."

The two shared a laugh before she continued. "You are the one thing I can't lose, because you give me hope for a better tomorrow, one where we can protect what's important to us. That's why I'm making you the promise of a lifetime."

Sakura stood on the tips of her toes and pecked him on the lips. "I'll always be here beside you. How else can I be sure you're alive?" she asked, smirking.

Naruto looked like he wanted to kiss her (or take her to Ichiraku's, it was difficult to tell the difference). "Okay, if we're going to start a serious relationship I have to be upfront."

"About what?" Sakura asked confusedly.

Naruto scratched his cheek nervously. "Well, heh, we almost kissed before ya know."

Sakura frowned. "I think I'd remember that, Naruto."

Naruto tugged at his collar. "Y-You didn't know it was m-me," he stammered.

"What are you talking about?"

Sighing, he said, "It's easier if I just show you again." He kissed her forehead softly and then leaned down and pressed their foreheads together intimately.

With hooded eyes, Sakura asked, "Naruto?"

"I've wanted to kiss your cute forehead for a long time, Sakura."

Her eyes widened at those words before she smiled. "I see."

Letting him internally sweat for a moment, Sakura said, "You know you kind of shot yourself in the foot."

Gulping, Naruto said, "W-why is that?"

"Because I thought that was Sasuke showing interest in me that day, you goof." She gave him another peck on the lips (but no more, her mother said more three kisses led to trouble). "You know I'm going to get payback for tricking me that day, don't you?"

Naruto giggled like a little boy. "You wouldn't be Sakura if you didn't."

Sakura decided her mother had no idea what she was talking about and pulled Naruto into another deep, earth-shattering kiss and their love began to blossom at last.

(A/N): Cover artwork and concept from Hani-boo's incomplete comic of the same name (I slightly edited the art to work as a cover image). Hopefully I'll get back to my old Naruto fanfic sometime soon~

Whew, that was fun. When I saw Hani-boo's unfinished and certainly dead comic, pretty much the entire events of this one-shot popped into my head. That comic only has a few pages, so I rewrote things to work them into this properly. Please Review and Favorite, they motivate me to do more and do better. And hell, maybe I'll make this a two-shot if you really want it (though I pretty much consider this complete). Maybe a lemon in a possible second chapter? Who knows, you have to give me motivation to do so!

This is the only ship that in canon would have made sense to me in the end. Mostly because the others had no real development from friends. This is not to say you can't like those ships or whatever (that would be ridiculous) but if I liked the canon ships, the canon portrayal would have irked me far more. (Don't flame please, just expressing a preference). So I wanted to cover some of the material that I think would make sense to reference for a NaruSaku pairing.

Thanks for reading!