WARNING: Manga 440 spoilers.
AN: Substance-less. NaruSaku if you see it that way.
Sakura tried not to gape at him; after all, he admitted he'd never told anyone this before. But she couldn't stop the spluttering way in which she repeated him.
"You… you punched him?"
"Yeah," Naruto confirmed, a slight undercurrent of bitterness.
It was that undercurrent that spoke volumes to Sakura. When she stopped to think about it, it was only logical. Not knowing who your father is until you're sixteen. The shock of discovering he's your idol. That people who could have told you haven't. That your own father is the one who filled your stomach with a curse larger than the whole of Fire Country.
No, Naruto's conflicting reactions of vindication and betrayal weren't really that hard to fathom.
"Wanna know what the last thing he said was?" Naruto continued quietly.
"Hmm," Sakura murmured encouragingly.
" 'I believe in you.' "
Ah, Sakura thought. It was here that the real weight had settled.
It had been a little more than five years since the incident with Pain had flattened the Village Hidden in the Leaves, four and a half since the horrific showdown with Madara.
The village was about half rebuilt, or half the size it had been before Pain had blighted it. Growth was slow, tentative almost. It was difficult to say why—perhaps because so many had died there was not enough man power; perhaps because of those who remained alive, many were shinobi, constantly in and out of the village taking missions to make the money to pay for the reconstruction and therefore further straining the village's resource of laborers; perhaps because there were some who were afraid that reconstruction would only invite more destruction; and perhaps because some no longer believed in the shinobi system, that the village was no longer worth rebuilding.
Whatever the reason, Naruto, more than anyone else, was adamant that it be rebuilt, likely because he blamed himself for the village's decimation and so shouldered the responsibility for its reconstruction and because it was part of the strange paradox of a legacy left to him by his father.
As Sakura saw it, the Fourth had made Naruto damnation while asking him to be salvation, to save a system that had spurned him, to protect the traditions that had led to his life as a jinchuuirki. And while she, like the Fourth, believed whole-heartedly that Naruto could do it, it didn't mean that she couldn't understand the anger—the hurt—he had felt.
And just like that, as Sakura listened to the words Naruto wasn't saying, her initial shocked reaction slipped away when she realized that she probably would have hit him, too.