"I will freaking kill you!"
"You're dead. Dead you hear me!?"
Naruto let the words meld into the back of his head but refused to let them be a part of him. They would float in one ear and out the other like some kind of deranged melancholy song that he was selectively tone-deaf to.
He didn't want to kill Sakura.
He really didn't. Except he had no choice for some reason. For some reason the blood would not stop pouring from the back of her head, a fountain. All over the stained floor with the mice that would stop by once in a while to sniff the blood but then scurry away when they realized that the killer was still there.
Her headband was suspended in midair.
Yet Naruto still had a hold on it as if he didn't want to forget completely about what had just occurred. The murder of one of his once closest friends and wife to the other. They were married just yesterday with all the bells and suits and dresses that such celebrations tended to have. It was the biggest and most happiest celebration of unity mainly because of her smile. Because of Sakura's smile that now lay on the ground frozen in time.
She was so beautiful.
Laying there with the ribbon tied in her hair just like she had when she was seven. A testament to the past innocence of the world when emotions were still pure and human life still mattered.
It was then that he turned to his friend Sasuke who was imprisoned between bars and smiled softly, offering her headband as comeuppance. But Sasuke simply slammed his head against the bars with all the hatred someone would expect someone would have towards the person who murdered his wife. The pain was there in all it's glory with only the Uzumaki seal on his rinnegan to delay the inevitable. The challenge to a challenge that would eventually lead to the end of the world.
XxX
Sakura was there, practically frothing at the mouth before her incomprehensible squeals became legible words.
"Oh my gosh, this is the happiest day of my life!" said Sakura.
"I'm so jealous!" said Ino, accidentally scrunching her features just a little too much for someone joking with their best friend.
The crowd that the annual moon festival had drawn was bigger than ever as if the villagers had caught wind of Sakura's secret and wished to congratulate her. From the red lanterns that swung rhythmically to the tyko drums to the children who eagerly swapped their tailed-beast themed balloons in hopes of collecting all nine, Sakura could not think of a setting more reflective to the way she felt.
"Oh, look, there's Naruto!" said Sakura, skipping over in her traditional Haruno dress, a red ribbon toy she nabbed from a booth skipping along with her.
"Naruto! Naruto! You're not going to believe what just happened!"said Sakura.
"Huh?" said Naruto, showing her the same level of enthusiasm that he showed to the some 10,000 odd documents he received daily for review. But Sakura was undeterred, in fact, seemed to get even more pumped-up as if none of her energy originated from his reaction but instead from some bottomless reserve that ceaselessly fed her emotions.
"Sasuke proposed to me," she said.
As soon as his name left her lips Naruto experienced an intense vertigo that almost left him on the floor. Suddenly he could hear every conversation in the village in a mile radius and could see every facet of his immediate surroundings with a new level of detail that he had not experienced in seven years. But just five seconds after Sakura muttered the magic word, the whites, blacks, and grays converged onto Naruto's vision and he could hardly even hear the person speaking right in front of him. Sakura's lips moved slowly and hypnotically as she droned on about this, that, or the other thing. Probably her assumptions about what the wedding would be like, about what she would wear, colorless things like that. But suddenly the tone of her voice went up which signaled something more...
"Naruto, you will let him won't you?" said Sakura, sternly. "Naruto, I am asking if you will let me and Sasuke hold the wedding here, in Konoha," she repeated.
"Yeah, of course," said Naruto. It had been seven years since Sasuke was exiled with the greatest reason being his attempt to murder him, his friend.
"I knew you wouldn't let me down!" said Sakura, punching the air. "Don't be late, okay?"
Naruto could hear her just fine. He could hear everyone just fine as he walked in broad strides toward the one and only entrance to the leaf village, and the place where his one and only friend would make his return.