Those Boys Are My Boys

There were some days in Sakura's life that were so bad she named them. Sakura's POV. NaruSasu/SasuNaru. Team 7 centric. Slightly AU.

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CHAPTER 1

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Once, I came home from a pleasantly unsurprising grocery run to find the front door of my apartment unlocked and slightly ajar. My parents, the only ones with a key aside from myself, were on holiday in Suna for two weeks and definitely would not have come home unless it was an emergency. That meant that either a), one of my parents was fatally injured, b) someone was pregnant, or c) there'd been a break in.

Alarmed, I set my groceries down with minimal clinking by the welcome mat and crouched inside, brandishing a kunai and snarling like a wildebeest. This pose is intended to frighten and not flatter. My expression did exactly that. So when I hobbled into the kitchen like a hunchback that's caught the scent of human flesh, only to come face to torso with my sex-god crush and sort-of-when-he-feels-like-it best friend Sasuke Uchiha standing in front of me dripping wet and in a towel, I was not so much pissed as I was embarrassed and confused. I mean it wasn't my birthday so any notions of surprise wild, passionate love-making fizzled and died right there in the depths of my dirty little mind almost instantly.

Sasuke wasn't embarrassed, possibly not even aware of the enormity of this collision. He never is affected by something as frivolous as embarrassment; it's as if embarrassment doesn't dare touch him, like he expects you to feel embarrassed for yourself for having stumbled across what should be his embarrassment but is only a condescending look instead. If only I could have been like him, because I was positively mortified. However, as blasé as Sasuke genuinely was, he didn't say anything, and this just made it awkward. We stayed frozen, staring at each other dumbly like two academy students who've just gotten up to do a speech unprepared, when Naruto's voice broke the spell.

"You better not have used all the hot water just because you, and I quote, 'forgot to shampoo so you had to start again'!"

Then he emerged from the dimly lit gloom of my hallway, also shirtless, and heading for MY bathroom to use MY shower. Now, by no means is Naruto unattractive. It's just that he was standing next to Sasuke at the time and there really is no comparing. He is nowhere near worthy of the sex-god title – perhaps sex-I'm-desperately-horny title, but that's just because I've never been able to get past the image of a goofy little kid I used to know whenever I look at him. I've practically grown up with Naruto and he's like my brother, or retarded inbred cousin with only half a brain to work with. This is also why I found it so easy to beat him like a racket to a tennis ball. And also, he was standing next to Sasuke, and there's no comparing, and did I mention this already?

I knew Naruto knew he was screwed when his eyes fell upon the red-faced snarling hunchback me, because his face fell, and all blood drained from said face, and his forehead beaded with sweat, and also because he said: "Well, we're screwed."

I valiantly ignored the massive distraction that was Sasuke's chest and glared at him with as much intensity as I could muster looking as ridiculous as I did in that moment.

"S-Sakura!" he stammered. "Hey there! Uh, what are you doing here?"

I clenched my teeth to hold back a series of scarring and probably blasphemous insults. "I live here." My voice was dangerously low. I think I even scared myself a bit there. Quite proud of that, really.

Naruto gulped. There was a slight clanging of the hanging pots in the kitchen, the only indication that Sasuke had moved at all, high-tailing it home before he could get his. But he would. Oh, boy, would he, for making my nose bleed so.

"Hey! Get back here you coward!" Naruto shrieked.

It was no secret Sasuke was the fastest of us three Sannin. We each specialise in our own individual areas of combat and defense and make up for each other's weaknesses, which is what makes us such a formidable trio, if I do say so myself. I, in my strength and taijutsu; Sasuke, in his speed and genjutsu; and Naruto, in his stamina and ninjutsu. Each of us top each other and each of us are weakest in the other's specialties. I, weakest in stamina and ninjutsu (okay, just because I don't have a bajillion jutsu like the boys do doesn't mean I'm behind—their asses would be dead if I didn't heal them all the time); Naruto, weakest in speed (no, really, he carries that big scroll all the time now and it's like he's got ten tonne shackles on each ankle) and genjutsu (he can barely detect one at all unless he's in Sage Mode, but that doesn't count because it tires him out in ten minutes flat); and Sasuke, weakest in strength (we arm-wrestled a lot but now he won't play with me 'cos last time I accidentally broke his wrist in seventeen places) and taijutsu (seriously, all he's got is basic academy stuff in his arsenal without that sword of his).

Anyway, that's how we knew Sasuke could be in Suna before we could blink fully, and was therefore pointless to attempt pursuit.

So I turned my full, rampaging attention back to Naruto, who was suddenly a sweaty, blubbering, nervous wreck.

"W-wait – hear me out! Okay, so Sasuke and I have been going on a lot of long-term missions lately, what with rebuilding the neighbouring village after it was attacked and all, s-so we haven't had a lot of time to do certain things, like, well, cleaning a-and… paying water bills – so our water got cut off—"

"Okay, first of all, you couldn't wait until I got home to ask like a respectable human being?" I seethed, creeping closer. "And secondly, shouldn't the Hokage be able to get around his water being cut off or perhaps hire someone to handle the bills for him during long absences considering you literally get to tell everyone within the walls of the village what to do?"

"You overestimate my power, Sakura – and well we were going to ask you, but we have a meeting with a very important and very wealthy daimyou in half an hour to discuss future plans of forming an alliance with the Hidden Cross Village and Sasuke and I had been… training… and we were dirty and we desperately needed a shower and I still do so—"

"How am I supposed to sleep at night knowing you two morons can break in at any time?"

Naruto's hand held a limp but ready grip on a frying pan as I inched ever closer. "Come on, cut me a break here! Please… Piglet?"

My eyes went bloodshot.

Piglet: diagnosis, worst pet name of all time. The boys teased me a few months back when I was looking after Tonton in place of Shizune while she visited her family in Wave for a week. My hair happens to be the exact same shade of pink as Tonton's skin and the boys got a real jolly kick out of calling me Piglet whenever the opportunity rose, and I got a real jolly kick in their teeth. The name irks me in every possible way one can be irked. I cannot have myself being compared to a pig. It's tacky and it simply won't do. If Naruto intended to satiate my anger with such a degrading form of affection, he desperately needed a reality check and I was more than happy to rise to the occasion.

I snapped. Self-control is not one of my virtues, and certainly not patience. Naruto's face ended up crushed three stories below in the concrete. When I eventually found Sasuke he needed twelve stitches and slings for both arms – he was forced to have others feed him for three days before I gave in and healed him fully. I'm a sucker for a pretty face.

It was a therapeutic experience, and one that needed repeating when I came home once more to find that the boys had been in my room and left a nice little surprise; my goldfish, which I got for my birthday from my grandmother who passed away the previous year, dead and surrounded by smelly, murky poo water that stunk up my carpet for weeks.

That day was so bad that I named it. "The incident" seemed fitting, if a little cliché. Whenever the boys pissed me off or acted like idiots, which they often do, I would simply address them in a sing-song voice that frightened them far more than yelling ever could: "Boys, need I remind you of the incident?"

They both would sober up pretty quickly after that. This pleased me very much as having to beat them up all the time would often wear me out and break a few nails, so this arrangement worked out quite well for everyone in the end and saved me many a trip to the salon. I learned to use their fear to my advantage.

Something that really bothered me about that day, though, was that Naruto had lied to me. Naruto has an obvious tell – he scratches the back of his head and squints his eyes as if looking at the sun – and also his lie was plain stupid. One, the three of us always train together. Always. There are no secret one-on-one training sessions between Naruto and Sasuke that I don't know about. How can I be sure? The boys are very powerful, to put it lightly, and almost every time one or both of them comes disturbingly close to dying, so without me on hand to heal them they would have killed each other accidentally not long after Sasuke returned home.

What this means is, when Naruto said "Sasuke and I were… training", he really meant, "Sasuke and I were doing something we didn't want you to know about, Sakura, for one of two reasons: it will hurt you physically or it will hurt you emotionally, both with irrevocable consequences."

Now a little white lie isn't something to be distressed over. It might not even be a big deal, right? Maybe they just have a secret mutual love for flower-picking and don't want anybody to know about it lest they sully their reputation as the resident superheroes. But it couldn't be so simple, not with Naruto, because he has lots of precious rules he's made up for himself to follow and 'never lying to people you love unless it's absolutely necessary' is somewhere in the top five (along with 'never leave a bowl of ramen unfinished').

So, doesn't that mean he was lying to me because it was absolutely necessary? That left many daunting doors open. Why would it be necessary?

Yes, I have always looked into things far too much for it to be healthy; however I felt that this time it was justified. Why wouldn't they want me to know? I told them everything. They were the first to know of my grandmother's death and didn't hesitate to comfort me and help me get out of bed and to remember that life can still be a bright and beautiful thing, even when someone you love cannot experience it anymore (because we all know what it's like to lose someone precious to us now, and I understood the pain behind the boy's eyes unlike before). And when I tried dating this guy to get over Sasuke and he turned out to be a total jerk-asshole-prick who got me drunk and took advantage of me, the boys were there to beat him until he couldn't walk and watch sad movies and hand me tissues and eat ice cream by my side. To think they couldn't trust me enough to tell me where they were that afternoon hurt much more than I would ever admit. Naruto lying to me was also one of the major factors that made that day qualified for a name as befittingly melodramatic as "the incident".

Naming momentous days had become something of a habit: I named the day the Fourth Ninja War started "The Black Day", the day Sasuke left "The New Beginning", the day Sasuke came back "Homecoming", the day of the Joint Shinobi Alliance Funeral & Memorial "The Day Team 7 Was Silent", the day the boys and I became the new Sannin "The Legendary Day", the day Naruto became Hokage "It's-About-Time Day", and, embarrassingly, the day I was assigned to give Sasuke a full hands-on medical exam "The Best Day". It wasn't lost on me that all of the days I named had something to do with the boys and how big a part of my life they had become. I felt terribly lucky to have people as precious as Naruto and Sasuke, to know that no matter how bad it may get, no matter how much I may want to quit, no matter how grueling missions were or how piercing heartache became or how endless my tears would flow, it would always be us; they would always be my boys.

However, I wasn't so sure after what happened on another day so bad I named it: "The Armageddon". Or, the equivalent of the Armageddon, the world's destruction, i.e., the destruction of the very fabric of Sakura's universe in which her world resides – or did reside, until it was destructed.

I did not use this day to tame the boys. I did not use its name to manipulate or to my advantage in any way. In fact, nobody knew I knew of this day. It is a secret I had once intended to take to the grave, to suffer through in silence.

"The Armageddon" may have been the worst day of my life, had it not taught me so much…