A/N: this one features Team Seven.
Warning: character death.
The moon is bright, and the night is young. Soft is the first snow on the grave of the man who betrayed Konoha twice. He deserves no gravestone, and if Rokudaime Hokage didn't love his old friend so much, he would have been buried nameless and forgotten in the darkest place of the forest where no one walks and nothing lives.
The shinobi of the Fire Country aren't afraid of the cold. Their blood runs hot, their lives end fast, what's there to fear? How can you worry about anything, anything at all, when there is a woman next to you, her hair like a thousand cherry petals covering the frozen earth, her eyes shining brighter than the moon. The legendary healer who failed only once, just once, on the same strange winter day choked with snow.
"We shouldn't do it," Sakura says, again and again, but he knows they will anyway. New poison in old wounds, every time is the first time.
Today is her turn.
Naruto covers her body with his own, buries his face in her hair, and lets his hands roam beneath her long heavy cloak. Her skin is like the inner side of a petal. No kunoichi can flaunt such perfection. Her special jutsu made scars disappear, rubbed years off. She'll stay the way they used to see her when there still were three of them--forever.
Naruto doesn't hurry. He'd stay here until the villagers started searching for them. But even the crimson heat of his chakra that awakens the frigid earth into wet early bloom beneath their bodies cannot chase winter away.
He wants to put a kage bunshin in his place, to see everything that happens next, but without the false beautiful veil of caresses and kisses he won't be able to believe his own eyes. He tried.
"Now, please, now," he whispers, rising above her, desperate, excited, scared, and Sakura smiles at him.
The wind carries away the quiet sound of henge, and Naruto watches, unable to tear his gaze away.
Winter was made for him, and he's made for winter. He's an ink painting on rice paper: black and white and two drops of blood for eyes.
Naruto doesn't want to think about secret jutsus, about what they found in one of Orochimaru's secret labs, about gods of death who can carry a soul between the worlds—maybe they can carry it back just the same. Might they? Those who came from the underside of existence to dance to Tayuya's weeping flute—he must not return the same way, right? Right?
Wrong?
To see him in her arms, just like before, to kiss him without shame, just like before, to feel her between them, to change the world. He has changed the world once, he broke it into bits and built it anew—and he will, he must do it again.
Naruto will believe—till the first star of morning.