The Reality
During that time in her life when the highlight of her day was having a blanket pulled up to her chin and her father's warm hand on her head as he read aloud a story, Sakura fell in love with the idea of romance and adventure. She wanted it; the excitement, the danger, the fighting monsters that shouldn't exist but did because if it was her dad saying them, they were real. In her mind it was all written out with precision: she was the princess, kind and beautiful (and obviously intelligent, of course) and somewhere there existed the 'tall-dark-and-handsome' prince.
As she grew older she realized she didn't have any royal blood in her family. She really was just an ordinary kid living in a village surrounded by trees who was dreading the day she had to begin school; the neighborhood girls were vicious but they were civilians so Sakura had the grand idea of creating her own fairy tale at the age of five and three quarters.
If she wasn't a princess then she would become the greatest ninja to have ever existed. Her virtues would be the same – kind, beautiful, but much more intelligent and dangerous-like because ninja were cool like that. It was a plan without failure, even if convincing her parents (who were practical and wanted her to follow in their footsteps of manning a general goods store) had taken two full weeks of moaning and pouting and many tears.
Her first day in the ninja academy, Sakura's plan of an epic ninja tale clashed with her princess dream: she had found him. The tall-dark-and-handsome prince (he wasn't tall, yet, but he would be; she just knew it – and he was much paler than she had imagined, but they were kids, and his skin would darken eventually).
From there her life revolved around Uchiha Sasuke and looking back it seemed as if her life had only started upon meeting him.
Sakura is fifteen now. Fifteen and all of her dreams of becoming such a great and wise ninja had been chucked to the bin a long time ago. Now her only dream is to see her village – her beautiful, heart wrenchingly beautiful village – stand for another day. In the corner of her mind she still wants him to come back because in some twisted sense he is her air, her oxygen, but she is just a little older now, and a little smarter.
But still it isn't fair that she should have to choose between two hells. It isn't fair that her friends – and she is beginning to understand how cruel the word nakama is – are asking her to throw away everything that made a basis for her childhood, even if that everything is a traitor who has created so much pain and anguish. It isn't fair that they are only fifteen, only children in this world made for adults, and it isn't fair that the adults they should be looking up to for guidance are too busy searching for knives stabbed in their backs.
She's only fifteen, she wants to scream, only fifteen and she is only now starting to grasp what the word love really means. Her friends are her friends but her dreams are her dreams. Sasuke is the one thing tying those dreams and friends together and to sever him means to leave half her life behind.
Shikamaru is waiting for an answer. She hates it – hates how they have to ask her for this when they are capable of going through with it anyway because it means they know how much of her world gravitates around him. She sobs and she can't stop. Her breaths are coming in short gasps and all of a sudden a flash of blond is in her mind – and it's Naruto and Sai's words come back to her. She's hurting him by acting this way but she can't help it, she honestly can't, because she's only fifteen, only a little girl playing with a doctor's scalpel in one hand and a ninja's knife in the other.
If she could wish for anything, Sakura would wish for time to stop back when they were younger. Then she could stay like that forever, up in her dreams without any intention of flying back to earth, and none of this would have happened, and most of all – she wouldn't have to shove away the excuse of she's only fifteen.
It takes a few more seconds for her breathing to come back to her and her eyes feel tired from all the water they had been leaking out, but she can raise them to meet Shikamaru's.
"I'll tell him," she says, somehow managing to keep her voice steady. "The fool's in love with me...so let me do it."
And now it doesn't feel like she's fifteen anymore. What Shikamaru said before makes sense to her addled brain now; they really aren't kids.
...But she wants to be. This world isn't what she had thought it would be and it isn't what she wants it to be. But in the end, it's just reality.
AN: My endings are always crap nowadays. Eh. Can't help it. The dialogue is taken from one manga's scan and translation of chapter 459 with some slight tweaking of my own. This is mostly me trying to not get angry at Sakura...because she really is only fifteen (and still a favorite of mine). Meh. Probably messed it up with all the repetitions.
As always, hope you enjoyed. ^^
Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto. I own nothing (kind of glad that I don't, actually...).