Not Her
Disclaimer: This is a bit sad, featuring character humor, character death and one of the penultimate truths of the universe.
I don't own anything portrayed in this story, other than my emotion in writing it.
It's astonishing how much things can change in just a short few years; it's amazing. Even now, when things have calmed down, after the dust has settled, you could wake up and still find yourself believing that the world was still there, that you could just be there, again, one more time. You wouldn't even do anything differently than before, not really. Maybe you'd stop to enjoy your existence a little bit, see things more clearly than before.
Maybe you would make plans with those friends who you would lose, because of drunken screaming matches or because, hell, they moved because they could, because they wanted to, because they just couldn't stay anymore. Some of your friends were amazing. Not all of them, of course, but some of them. In Hindsight you can see that a few of them were dicks, were inconsiderate, but you wrote it off because they were your friends. Sometimes they could be boring, dull, your friends but not really merely the cogs in your bland social rut.
Maybe you'd change the things you'd done for the better, blessed by the power of hindsight. You'd pay that damn bill; you'd not waste your time going to that bar where you met that woman that you've hated from your core since the moment you learned she existed. Maybe you'd buy into that great idea and live off of that for the rest of your life. Why not?
And of course you would say you love your parents one last time, that last chance. You'd throw yourself into your good relationships, see your mistakes and fix them long before they ever happened. You wouldn't say that sex isn't really important or that they look like their parents or that you didn't care about them that time you were stressed and sad and just finished crying (cleverly hidden by the fact that you were wasted). You would plan and uou would prepare, give them not the moon and stars but light itself, in all of its splendor.
And, damnit, you wouldn't have stubbed your damn toe!
But she wouldn't.
She wouldn't have warned Neji about that exploding tag, have sealed the wound instead of trying to reattach his arm.
She wouldn't have stopped her two teachers from getting married, even if it ended with Kakashi being embarrassed, humiliated and broken.
She wouldn't have knocked the surgical team away from Gaara to intervene and save his life, even if, in hindsight, she could have easily saved his life. Who the hell dies of a heart attack?
No, she wouldn't. Why? Because it ended with her child in her arms. Tears stabbed at her eyes with his peach-colored hair so soft in her hands, his eyes cosed. She loved her son more than she ever loved Him, than she ever could, and she wouldn't change a thing in her life. It all lead to her son.
Wait...that's a lie. She would of saved Gaara, if only to never see His cobalt eyes stare at her in rage, in confusion and in blame. Those unnatural eyes of his were the last she ever saw of him.
Before He was put in that horrible mahogany box.
Maybe, just maybe, she would have saved Gaara, so that Naruto would never have looked at her like that.