Sakura opened her eyes to the brightness of the sun shining through her window. She sighed and sat up, deliberately taking her time on her day off. The sky was beautiful and blue and she was embarrassed to see it was already almost eleven in the morning. She dressed herself and, in a strange gesture of sentimentality, took the old picture frame off her dresser. The faces that had changed so drastically shocked her when she really looked at it for the first time in a long time. Sasuke was still smiling in the picture and she easily recalled how much she had loved him. Tears welled in her eyes as she held the wooden frame to her chest and sobbed dryly. She couldn't count the number of times she had cried over him—his leaving had been nothing compared with his subsequent death.
She took the picture with her into her kitchen where she began to eat her breakfast, still examining the photo, which she calculated was now more than five years old. Her green eyes scanned the old wood grain of the frame. She noticed that the photo had lost a lot of its original color because of the sunlight's bleaching effect. She decided that she would keep it somewhere safer so it wouldn't fade anymore.
Three knocks on the door and the turning of the doorknob. Sakura looked up, surprised, and realized that she had had a date scheduled for a quarter past eleven—it was eleven thirty. She blushed and stood up from her kitchen table, only to be met by Naruto's smiling face. She looked down and realized that he had brought her a single sunflower, clearly from Ino's flower shop. She smiled and greeted him, embarrassed that she had left the photo face-up on the table. He didn't seem to notice, however, as he handed her the flower, still beaming.
"Sakura-chan, you slept in," he laughed, noticing her disheveled hair and her half-eaten breakfast on the table. She frowned and blushed deeply, busying herself with finding a vase for the flower. She surveyed the flower in its simple beauty, each sunny petal immaculate. Sakura felt her heart flutter with realized adoration. She placed the tall stem in a clear vase and set it on the table.
"Thank you," she said softly, smiling and placing her arms around his shoulders. He blushed and laughed, hugging her tightly around the waist and kissing her cheek.
"Do you want to go now?" he asked, his blue eyes shining with excitement. She laughed at his charming enthusiasm and nodded.
"Just one second," she replied, turning to collect her dishes from the table. She paused for a moment and took a last look at the old picture. Her eyes turned from Sasuke to the boy in the middle of the picture, and she realized in that moment that, no matter what happened, Naruto would always be the same. The blonde boy in the framed photo grinned with magnetic enthusiasm and Sakura smiled at it one last time before turning it face-down on the table. She brought her dishes to the sink and smiled as Naruto waited and rambled on about his training and what they were going to do that day and whether the weather was going to stay nice. She took his hand and made their way out the door. Sakura glanced once more at the face-down frame on her table, then turned around and shut the door.
He would be there, unchanging, forever.