Talk: This actually was written a while back, but for some reason I didn't feel able to post it until now. However, this has been on my mind for a very very long time.
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Hidden Leaves
Despite popular opinion, Naruto was a genius. However, this popular opinion was consistent in that it wasn't any sort of conventional intelligence.
It was only when Naruto was sent to see a psychiatrist (it was declared mandatory when a teammate died and he went kicking and screaming all the way to the office) that someone figured it out. Sakura then looked it up as soon as he bragged to her about it with a happy face, and then she wondered why she didn't figure it out before. Hinata, however, pointed out that all ninja receive a great deal of training in that area and everyone just assumed that he had learned it there and ran with it.
Perhaps it was only Kakashi and the Third that realized that there was no way for Naruto to receive that sort of training -- one usually received it from a parent or mentor. And Iruka never really noticed that Naruto had no mentor before him. If anything, Naruto taught him a thing or two about the subject.
The thing was that in all of Team 7, the only one that received proper pre-genin training in all the shinobi ways was Sasuke. Sakura had been too meek to find a mentor due to bullying, and Kakashi... well...
That was the problem -- it wasn't actually a mandatory part of the training in Konoha, but it was what made Konoha what it was.
Everyone that fell through the cracks somehow, they learned it from Naruto. (In Hinata's case, she had been trapped between her duty to her clan, Neji's bitter resentment, and her own slow development. Naruto taught her that she could find a way -- her own way.) And Naruto, lacking greatly in self-awareness, would never realize this. He just did it, lived it, breathed it. It didn't help that Naruto also seemed to have the gift of making the impossible possible.
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Despite popular opinion, Sasuke was also very gifted in both emotional and general self-awareness. It didn't help that he was a loner by nature, which made things downright awkward sometimes, no matter how he knew what was happening. On a larger scale, he had been caught in a vortex of events that he couldn't escape from on his own... until Naruto came along.
Naruto became his stepping stone, changing his destiny one breakthrough at a time. Not the least of which was letting Naruto live.
Naruto, however, didn't appreciate the morbid way he called it a whim. He eventually wondered if Itachi had done the same to him, but he wasn't sure if he could handle that thought.
Until he found out that he could.
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Despite popular opinion, Sakura was not that fortunate as a child. Most children of non-shinobi families were sponsored by a mentor. In her case, her parents didn't really want her to become a shinobi at all, and were against any sort of encouragement like a mentor. She really had no idea how she got it into her head that she would become one no matter what her parents said, but she studied hard and it wasn't until she was a jounin that they confessed that it was hard for them to not be proud of her.
She had cried then, and wondered if Naruto would ever get to hear something like that too.
In actuality, it was her single-mindedness, sense of duty, and her less-than-bleeding heart that allowed her to become a medic nin. It was why, despite Hinata having the chakra control to do what she did, only she was allowed to handle the difficult situations.
In Naruto's world of endless possibilities, Sakura was forced to acknowledge that there were some impossibilities that just weren't possible. But he did help to make their last moments full of hope, and that, she felt, was what made life worth hanging on to.