In this version of events, Sasuke never left, but Naruto did, and Tsunade still became the fifth Hokage.


My life has never been easy.

While I wasn't subjugated to abstract horrors like Kakashi, Naruto, and Sasuke, my childhood was always vaguely unhappy, lonely, and on occasion down right abusive.

My mother was the kind of civilian who believed that a woman's place was in the home, making tea, and being obedient to her husband. There was no room in my mother's ideal world for her daughter to be a shinobi, let alone surrounded by two adolescent boys and an older male teacher.

When I was younger, and my dad was still around at all, it was seen as a phase, like ballet lessons or horseback ridings, but as my mother would say, it gave me "ideas".

Ideas that women were equal to or better than men at something.

Ideas that I was capable of being more than just a housewife.

Ideas that I could be something more than a mother and a cleaner and a woman.

I could be smart. I could be respected.

I could be a ninja.

And that's why, the summer I turned fourteen, I ran away from home.

And I haven't looked back since.


Everyone knows that I was the weakest link on my team. I struggled with taijutsu, and ninjutsu, and even genjutsu at some points.

That first year on the genin team taught me that being smart wasn't enough to get me far, that it wasn't enough to know the theories, I had to implement them.

In Physics, the calculus you use is only useful if you know what you need to know. It's an all application science, and being a ninja is the same exact way.

It's what makes it hard, but when you know it, you really know it.

And that's how I find myself meditating in the middle of a training field five years later, as an above average chunin, and a gifted medic, and an adequate ninja.

And that's also where I find Kakashi lurking in a tree.

Oh, I know he doesn't realize I can sense his lazy blue chakra, but it's definitely him, and I want to know why he's here.

To be honest, I haven't talked with him much in a very long time, years perhaps, and definitely since Naruto came back when I was seventeen. Hmm.

As slowly as possible, I reach into my leg pouch and grabbed a kunai, and fling it as hard and as fast toward his hidden face as I can.

I hear a thunk, and open my eyes. I had caught the spine of his favorite book, and the one dark eye I can see is glaring at me.

"Now, Sakura-chan, why did you have to go and do a thing like that for, hmm?" Kakashi asks me, instantly behind me, and I still folded into a pretzel on the ground.

I stand up and dust myself off, cracking loose joints and grinning at his cranky face.

"Want to spar, sensei?" I ask, and suddenly he doesn't look so cranky anymore.

"I don't think you should call me sensei anymore, Sakura," he says. "You and I both know I was never very good of a teacher. Plus, I'd say you're too old for it."

I laugh. "Does that mean you don't want to spar?"

He smiles behind his mask. "Now, I never said that."

We launch into the fight, no holding back, just flashes of my hair, and his hair, and fists, and feet, and kunai all in a whirlwind of close-range taijutsu. I'm the first to use chakra, forming deadly invisible scalpels, but he senses them and moves away, and forming the seals for a long range attack, I quickly use the replacement jutsu, a log bursting in my stead when a fire dragon attacks.

It goes on for a while, one of us attacking from far away, the other disappearing, and then it ended, us wrestling in the mud left over from one of my water dragons, my arms locked behind me, and the weight of his body pressing hard into mine.

We're gasping, and then I'm laughing at how much fun it was to spar with him, and he chuckles a bit before he starts to get up.

That's when I notice he's hard. And suddenly I'm not laughing anymore either.

I shove him off of me, and his eye widens, and he starts, "Sakura wait, please—"

And then I'm gone.


Author's note: So…new story? Hopefully it will be better than a lot of my old stuff (which I really need to take down).

So yeah, tell me what you think, please?