Summary: She may have been a damsel-in-distress, but he was never a prince. SasuSaku, mostly.
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Masashi Kishimoto and I am making no profit off of my interpretation.
Happily Ever After or Something Like It
When she was twelve, Sakura had a crush.
And, with Uchiha Sasuke in her class, who wouldn't? He was cute and smart and mysterious and strong and (people said, although he kept rather quiet about it) really rich. He was like a prince from a fairy tale and he was in her class. It was practically fate.
She daydreamed a lot. When class got a little boring, when Iruka-sensei had to repeat his lesson again because Naruto had been skipping and Kiba had been drawing and Shikamaru had been sleeping, Sakura found refuge inside her own head. Her dress would be white, of course, and flowing. The wedding would be huge, with everyone in the village invited, and there would be cherry blossoms everywhere. She and Sasuke would honeymoon in Wave Country, somewhere with a lot of beach and no ninja, and they would live happily ever after.
And, aside from the occasional fear, like when they almost got separated after graduation (but they were put on the same team in the end, because it was fate), or when she actually saw Wave Country for the first time and realized that a vacation there would be more like a service trip, or when Sasuke almost died on a mission and Sakura finally learned what being a ninja really meant, she was happy.
When she was thirteen, Sakura fell in love.
At the time, of course, she didn't really understand what her new feelings were. A week or two later, when she realized what had happened, she tried to remember the exact moment, the time when she first knew that her heart would forever belong to someone else.
All she could remember was the blood. The pain. One eye swollen nearly shut, the other stinging as blood dripped inexorably into it. The rough, uncomfortable feeling of wind on the back of her neck, her hair cut ragged and short.
When she tried, she could remember other little details. The red of his eyes. The dangerous blankness of his gaze. The contrast of the black curse to his white skin, so strange, so alien, so intriguing
The burn of his chakra. The emotionless, angled lines of his back as he broke the bones of their enemies.
She hugged him, then. She wanted to stop him, and all she could think to do was hug him. She feared him and clutched him to her.
When Sakura remembers the first time she hugged Sasuke, she rubs her chest. It had hurt, hugging Sasuke. She could not remember any real heartache, but there had certainly been a dull pain. The huge, monstrous bruise underneath her breast had lasted for weeks.
She had been in love and in pain. She quickly got used to it.
When she was fourteen, Sakura started to dream.
Sasuke left her, abandoned her, knocked her unconscious and disappeared into the Konoha night, betraying their village. Betraying her. She cried for weeks.
Then she stopped crying and became a ninja.
Oh, she had been a ninja before, of course. A rather poor one, admittedly, but a ninja nonetheless. But now she could crush stones with a finger, knock a man unconscious with the touch of a hand, heal and kill and destroy.
She was a good student, obedient, a quick learner. If she pushed herself a little too hard, got a little too caught up in her exercises, well, who was going to blame her?
She exhausted herself, mentally and physically, to try to keep away the dreams. It didn't work.
She and Sasuke would be fighting, in the dreams. Together or against each other, it never mattered. All that mattered would be the splashes of blood, dark red on his pale skin. All that mattered would be the rasp of breath in her throat as she dodged and thrust and bled. They would kiss, in her dreams, and Sasuke's kiss always tasted like blood.
She would wake up, shaking, sweating, and cold, to find that she had thrashed out of her covers in her sleep, to find that she had bitten through her lip and blood really was pooling in her mouth. She hated waking up but she hated the dreams even more and worked herself to exhaustion to try to get them to stop.
The day she learned how to break bones, she practiced until she depleted all of her chakra and passed out on the training field. In her dream, she broke every bone of Sasuke's body, lovingly, one at a time.
Ino found her and woke her up, carried her to her house, prattled on about comfortably mundane things.
"Do you ever dream about boys, Sakura?" Ino asked, eyeing Kiba speculatively as he loped past, the muscles in his arms bulging noticeably under his loose shirt. "Do you ever think about the future?"
Sakura tried a small giggle and was pleased by how realistic it sounded, issuing from her tired body. "Ino, I'm a bit too busy in the here-and-now."
She didn't dream about love. She dreamed about pain, and it scared her.
When she was fifteen, Sakura fell in love. Again.
Naruto had been her teammate just as long as Sasuke had. Longer, maybe, because he had not stolen away from her in the night like a thief but had warned her, promised her, come back to her.
She loved Naruto with every fiber of her being, because he was pure and perfect. He was bright and fun and treated her like a delicate, porcelain angel that would break if he studied it too carefully. He was everything that Ino was always looking for in a man, and Sakura was lucky to have him so earnestly and honestly in love with her.
And she tried to forget that she was living a lie, that she could never love Naruto the way he loved her, that her dreams every night were about another man, another place, another time. But his name was taboo and they lived their lives pretending he didn't exist, pretending that they didn't care.
When Sakura dreamed, it was of Sasuke branding her heart, Sasuke burning a mark on her chest.
They saw him again that year, but not for long. Just long enough for Sakura to run at him, to try to attack, to be pushed out of the way. She couldn't fight him. She wasn't worth his attention. She wasn't good enough yet.
The only things she was good for were lies, pain, and dreams.
When she was sixteen, Sakura stopped crying.
Sometimes she thought of the little might-have-been girl, with her foolish dreams and fantasies. The memories were always dredged up from the depths of her mind with a hint of amusement, as though she were studying a fascinating aliencreature.
Sasuke had come back to Konoha (of his own free will, didn't that count for anything?). He was tried for his crimes against the village and sentenced to death (but he hadn't done anything, hadn't killed anyone, didn't that count?).
He asked for Sakura to be his executor and she didn't cry. She was not very surprised. There were songs about such deaths. Legends. The traitorous ninja, brought to justice, killed by his lover. Sasuke (and his clan, always thinking about his clan) was going to be granted immortality in death.
She kissed him, once, as he stood against the wall. He was casual, never ruffled, every inch the haughty and arrogant genius. So little had changed.
She was not surprised when he tasted like blood to her mouth. When he bit down on her lip hard enough to hurt.
She stepped back. The stale air of the room left no wind to sting her swollen lips. She slashed his throat. She did it clinically, scientifically. She was a doctor, and knew exactly how to kill a man so he would feel no pain.
As blood drenched her arms, spurted across her shirt, her throat grew raw with her own repressed screams. She took the pain that she had denied him and brought it into herself with his blood.
She would not cry anymore. All she could do was feel.
When she was seventeen, Sakura got married.
She joined the ANBU, committed acts and deeds that she could not even have imagined five years ago.
She watched her friends and partners grow into strangers before her eyes.
Naruto seemed to grow younger with each passing year, becoming less mature as time ticked on, going off duty only to play-fight with the young children of the village, to laugh and talk loudly without caring who heard. Shikamaru seemed to move on a different plane entirely, referring to everything as numbers and strategies, barely able to make himself concentrate on the physical world for more than a few moments. Kiba ran to the hospital every few days, complaining of stomach aches and age-old bruises and migraines and half a dozen other imagined illnesses.
It was in this year that Ino began sleeping around, began collecting pregnancies and children as though they were limited editions (which, as Shino was assassinated and Neji was poisoned and Chouji disappeared on a mission, perhaps they were).
"You should find a man, Sakura," Ino told her, tucking a flower into her bright blonde hair. She was meeting Kiba for a date, if Kiba could stay out of the hospital long enough to show.
Sakura smiled, but said nothing.
"Not interested in dating, Sakura?" asked Kakashi-sensei, but she could tell from the slant of his eyes that he understood. Everyone he had ever loved had died too.
Sakura smiled, but said nothing.
All of her friends had found their outlets, their ways to run and hide from the pain, but she valued every mission, every failure, every death and wound. She brought the pain into her until she felt like screaming and she smiled at it and welcomed it like an old friend.
Like an old lover.
The pain was the only romance Sakura ever endured. The only romance she ever allowed.
She was wedded to her pain, and did not think she could live without it.
When she was twenty-seven, Sakura laughed.
After years of begging, she finally gave in when the Hokage ordered her to quit being an ANBU.
"It's unhealthy, Sakura," said Naruto, still her same devoted friend, no matter the uniform he wore. "Life sucks. Get a genin team."
So she tested a few teams (but not with the bell test, never with the bell test, what good had teamwork ever done her?) until she found one that she liked. They were a rather boisterous lot, but that suited her just fine. She had grown tired of the quiet.
When she first met them, the girl was sitting next to one of the boys, her arms crossed and her forehead wrinkled. The girl was blonde, dimpled, and adorable, Ino's eldest (nine, she had nine children already, and she was working on Sai for a tenth), and the boy that she was next to looked like he couldn't believe his nine-year-old luck.
"It's such a good thing that we're best friends, isn't it?" the girl was saying. "Such a good thing that we're on the same team. I feel bad for people who don't have friends on their team. They must be all alone. Boy, it's a good thing we're best friends."
But Sakura caught the disappointed, hurt gaze that the girl directed to the second boy of their team, a pale but frowning boy sitting slightly apart from the others. He, a ninja taught, if not yet fully trained, also caught the gaze. He scowled, quickly looking away.
Sakura laughed brokenly, as though she had forgotten how. The genin looked at her as if she were crazy, as if they wondered what was wrong with this strange, hacking woman in front of them.
She learned their names and goals, punched a crater into the ground (just to earn their respect), and dismissed them.
She caught the girl as she tried to flounce out, pulling her to the side. She tried to explain about love and pain and the difference between the two.
The girl obviously thought she was crazy, but anyone with free-love Ino as a mother would probably think the same. Sakura smiled, ruffled the girl's hair, and let her go home.
Leaning against the Academy wall, Sakura laughed and laughed and laughed. She laughed until it hurt. She clutched her chest as if she were holding together an ancient wound, tears running down her face.
Maybe Naruto was right. Maybe she needed a genin team.
She had forgotten that joy could hurt, too.
Fin.