Diaries
There is one thing Naruto can never understand about Sakura.
It is her keeping a diary. Her feeling the need to record nearly every single day of her life on paper, to have memories of each passing dawn and each passing emotion written down.
Photographs are for those who want to forget, he says. Diaries are for those who want to wallow in their misery.
This aspect, in particular, intrigues Naruto. Not that his life is especially miserable (which others might think it is, but through which he marches with phenomenal resolution), but it's not pleasant enough for him to want to remember every moment of it, either. So he wonders what makes her life so special that she wants to recall it.
You, she whispers when he's already fallen asleep and when she's not too embarrassed to say it out loud.
He has known her for a long time, of course. Ever since they started dating (again, this is what others call it. They call it divinely normal.) he has got to know her even better. There are things they talk about (Naruto, take your socks off the table right now or I'll kill you) and things they don't (Sakura's one miserable attempt of gaining sympathy for her menstruation pains – Naruto thinks the subject should be a taboo and never breathes a word about it again), but her diary is one of the things that never meet the in-between of their tangled lives.
One very normal afternoon Naruto has returned from a mission, and is tired and shaken in a way only the aftermaths of missions make him. He is lying on his back, resting his head on Sakura's belly, blowing bubbles in her bellybutton. He asks of the tender subject of her diary and she laughs a pearly short laugh, ruffling his hair.
Photographs, she says, are for those who want to have a mirror from their past. Diaries are for those who love their life.
end