Naruto - Ripples Series: Naruto Characters: Naruto, Sakura, ensemble. Pairing: NaruSaku, unrequited others involving those two. Type: angst, get-together, futurefic Warnings: depressing, unfinished, character death Spoilers: Sasuke retrieval arc Word Count: 446 Etc: I've tried several times to get this to have some kind of conclusion, to no avail. So I'm posting what there is and hoping it'll come to me eventually. Multiple pairings in the fic, as it's focused on the reaction of their peers to Naruto and Sakura hooking up and I decided to include more than just canon. I tried to be fancy with the structure, not sure how well that worked out.
After Naruto kills Sasuke at age seventeen, he and Sakura are nearly consumed by grief. They turn to each other for comfort, desperate to fill the void. Three months later they start dating, to nobody’s surprise.
The first thing Naruto does is drag Sakura over to see Lee and apologize. He tells them there are no hard feelings—he merely lost to the better man. The taijutsu specialist had seen it coming, so it’s easy to grin and wave as he watches them go. That night he trains until he shatters three fingers in his left hand. Guy comes with him to the hospital, offering silent support instead of boundless optimism—at this point, that’d be cruel. Eventually, the speeches come, encouraging him to find someone new. Tenten does the same, quietly disturbed by how depressed her teammate has been. He never tells her how it feels wrong to think of any other girl like that.
The first thing Sakura does is drag Naruto over to see Hinata and apologize. She tells them there’s no need and smiles, graceful and sad. The Hyuuga girl had seen it coming, and tries to convince herself she only sees Naruto as a role model as she wishes them well and watches them go. That night she cries herself to sleep. Neji sits outside her door, wanting to offer comfort but not knowing the right words, not when he also feels at a loss about it. Hinata throws herself into her missions and the security of her teammates. Neji dismisses his emotions as frivolous and asks for something S-ranked. They never talk about it.
Ino hears the news and is surprisingly quiet the rest of the day. She spends the time in her room, looking through a box of knickknacks—a dried cosmos, a pink headband, photographs and notes. Shikamaru watches clouds in the tree outside her window until she decides to talk. He listens, calls her troublesome, and smiles once her bitchy self is back again.
Gaara hears the news and spends two hours staring out the window, taciturn and impassive, before going back to assigning missions. He isn’t sure why his chest feels tight, but assumes it’ll go away in time. He makes sure not to think about Yashamaru. Kankurou and Temari spend most of their free time with him for the next two weeks. The gesture confuses him, but he doesn’t mind.
Sai makes a hobby of bothering them at every opportunity, mostly about their sex life. His smile is painfully omnipresent and as vacant as when they first met him, but they’re both so busy trying to sort their own lives out neither notice his regression.