A/N: I have been checked out of this fandom for far too long, I've decided. I have many plot-bunnies just begging to come out. The ideas that make it to being a workable piece will find themselves here. I call them my maybe-one-shots because they're one-shots, maybe. I know. Creative.

Critical Redundancies

On the whole, Sakura did not cultivate a persona characterized by indecision. Private moments of introspection, quiet meditation disguised with inconspicuous excuses, were one thing; one did not get far as a conscientious medical professional without meticulously established routines of decompression and recentering. But then, the ideals of stoic obedience and a shinobi's duty that had been beaten relentlessly into her head as a preteen had been undercut by the borderline-fanatical loyalty of her allies. Some days, she wondered whether her habit of playing devil's advocate with herself had been an aftereffect of quiet childish rebellion (à la the inner self she had cultivated as an adolescent), or the eccentric personalities who had influenced her in her more impressionable years.

But she did not project her musings onto the world. Patients did not appreciate hemming and hawing and most people, regardless of any obligatory pleasantries, did not, in fact, want you to tell them all about your life's problems. She had learned those, respectively, from her rebel-against-senescence mentor and her, well, idiot.

(When he had gone from being an idiot to hers, she had given up on pinpointing. That much inconsequential navel-gazing couldn't be healthy, she had decided some summers ago.)

The point was: he was an idiot. He was also a big softie (no secret to those who knew him), and sensitive to match (less recognized; see aforementioned masking of personal troubles). So it was only prudent to put some consideration into the idea beforehand instead of blurting out the thought that he was probably a bigger idiot than she had ever realized.

Regardless, something had to be said.

"Naruto?" Her mild tone had this coming out more like a question than she had intended.

He looked up from his dogged study of the cover of one of her favorite novels. His position, crouched with the soles of his feet balancing him on a rectangular cutting board standing upright on her parents' kitchen floor, with one hand dangling from his knee and the other holding the book in front of him, made her swallow a snicker.

"I have a question." She figured it would be better coming from a place of curiosity. Raising her eyebrows and slightly bowing her head, she waited for him to tilt his head in question before continuing. "How familiar and substantive are your shadow clones' consciousnesses, exactly?"

He tilted his head the other way, angled further this time, and scrunched his face up in that ador—anyway. "What's that?" He had combined the words into that drawling tone that he sometimes took, and she had to pause for a second.

"Okay." She nodded to herself. "Uh, so you get your shadow clones' memories and whatever they might have learned, without realizing that they'd learned it, when you dispel them, right?"

His face cleared up some at that. "Right. What about it?"

"How real do those memories feel?"

"I still have no idea what you're talking about, Sakura."

How did one explain this…. "I mean, what you see, feel, hear, learn—all of that—does it feel like it does when you do those things? Like, if Ino wiped your memory of creating and dispelling a shadow clone, would you be able to tell the difference between what you had been doing and what your clone had been doing?"

When the cutting board under him fell and he remained crouched with his feet half on the floor, she raised up her legs from their positions dangling from the counter and sat cross-legged on it. He released his bottom lip from between his incisors after a few moments. "I'd be able to tell anyway 'cause the clones know they're clones and everything, but I get what you're getting at." He met her gaze. "They can't go see Kurama and they never feel as much pain because they pop at some point. But other than that, no. It'd be like having two memories from the same time." He'd put the book down beside him and was scrutinizing her fully now. "Why?"

"What about life lessons? Do they learn those?" She had read somewhere that ignoring salient questions was the mark of a poor listener. By that standard, she was disappointed in her abilities as a conversation partner.

"Eh?"

If she hadn't seen this boy try to pay attention to Iruka's lecture on the importance of hippocampal blocking in genjutsu stability, she would think he had never been as puzzled as he was now.

"Okay, say there's a cat you need to catch." When in doubt, go with analogies designed for children.

"Like that Tora hellion?"

"Exactly." She nodded. "You know the cat is difficult. So, you sneak up behind this cat slowly and grab for its tail since you know it's a weaker appendage." She gestured with her hands, using the first two fingers of her right as walking legs. "But as soon as you—"

"Wait, Sakura, hold on," he interrupted, emphatically waving his hands in front of him. "Are you talking about that time I got my face all scratched up?"

"I—yes. I am."

His expression turned crestfallen. "But that wasn't even my fault," he whined. "Its claws weren't clipped and I accidentally pulled it to myself when I grabbed it and—"

"That's not the point! Just listen."

He swallowed and took a deep breath, nodding once.

"You wouldn't go anywhere near a cat for weeks after that, even the cute orange one." She ignored his grimace. "If that had happened to a clone, would you still have hidden behind me at the sight of kittens?"

"Hey!" he said indignantly.

"The little whirlwind of a brave ninja was terrified of fuzzy pets," she singsonged, enjoying his sputtering for a bit before sobering. "Anyway, would that have had the same effect?"

He closed his mouth abruptly, shifting his eyes to the floor tiles. "Yeah, probably." When he looked back at her, his eyes were focused. "Whatever happens to them feels real, y'know? And they think exactly like me, too."

"So it's as if you've lived that time, as well?" She was so close, now.

He shrugged. "Yeah, pretty much."

This was great. He wouldn't even notice when she finessed the confession out of him. "Then it follows that you've experienced as much more time, in your life so far, as the combined experiences of all of the clones you've ever made."

His narrowed eyes got that cautious glint, the one that appeared far too reliably these days. "Uh-huh…."

Damn him and his burgeoning wisdom.

She steepled her fingers in anticipation. "How many shadow clones have you made since you learned the jutsu?"

He crossed his arms in return. "I don't know. Hundreds of thousands?"

She was smarter and he was stronger. That was how it worked. She refused to be deterred by the suspicious lilt of his voice and his steadily-growing biceps. "How many hours of memories is that?"

He stared right back. "Tens of thousands, probably."

"Let's put it in the middle of that time range, then. That's at least five years."

"Sure." He shrugged way too nonchalantly, and now she was sure he was playing up the aloofness.

The hook was securely in his palate now. "That means you're an eighteen-year-old with as much mental experience as a twenty-three-year-old."

His arms loosened when he blinked. "That…wow, you're right." He took a sharp breath and his eyes snapped back into focus. "Sakura-chan I'm older than you," he breathed.

"That—" Her eyebrow twitched and her hand clenched. That was not the point, regardless of how charming his childish exuberance was. "Yes," she conceded. "You've done more and seen more in life than I have." She would not be re-unpacking the subtleties and implications of that statement today. "But that was not what I was getting at."

He dimmed his manner down to inquisitive as he asked, "what is it then?"

"Look," she paused as she gathered some tact. "You've learned a lot since you broke the rules and graduated the academy with a jutsu most people can never get right. Everyone respects that, respects you."

"Not everyone," he said with a crooked smile.

"I respect you." She waited until his half-smile grew to a genuine one, and couldn't help but return it. "But you're not the smartest or most mature of young adults."

His lips turned down and twitched into a subdued grin as his eyes opened wider. "I'm not the smartest of eighteen-year-olds."

"Yeah."

He sat down, crossed his legs, and dropped his arms. "And definitely not twenty-three-year-olds."

She nodded.

"So you're saying I'm extra dumb."

"Yes." She jerked her hand up. "I mean, no."

"That's what you're saying."

"No! No." She shook her head rapidly. "What I meant was…" she trailed off when she noticed his pinched lips and shaking shoulders. "You're a moron."

"There you go, showing your hand again," he sang before breaking off into a fit of giggles.

She felt the pinch between her eyebrows. "This isn't a joke, Naruto," she yelled.

"Wha—"

"You have shadow clones running around half the time that you're awake. It's ridiculous. At this rate, you'll be thirty-two by the time you actually hit twenty-three, and you'll be grumbling about kids-these-days and your lawn before you get crow's feet,"—stupid genetic longevity—"and will you even remember what a year actually feels like?" She took a deep breath when she ran out, her hands on her knees and head lowered forwards toward his position across from her.

He slowly got up and closed the two paces of distance between them, surprise and concern marking his face. As she straightened back and away from him, heat rising to her cheeks after her unexpected yet irrepressible outburst, he stopped her from turning away with a finger on her chin.

"Sakura, look at me."

She reluctantly tore her gaze away from the bowls and pans in the sink. When he blinked after running his eyes over her face, she lowered her tongue from the roof of her mouth.

He sighed and gently took her hands, unfurling them and running his thumbs along her fingers. She let him.

"My clones don't live different lives, you know."

"I do. I know that." She stared at the swirly, nonsensical kanji on his shirt.

"They're still me. Hey," he emphasized, waiting until she met his dilated pupils again. The color around them really did get as dark as the open sea in the curtained sunlight, from this distance, in a familiar room. "They're still me. And the time I spend with my friends—all the people I care about—it doesn't mean any less because I have more mundane junk and crap I 'need to know' to sort through in my head at the end of each day."

The small upturn of his lips when he paused automatically brought out one of her own.

His bottom eyelids covered a quarter of the blue in his eyes as his grin showed teeth.

"In fact," he went on, "it means more."

Her lips parted. "Huh?"

"At the end of each day, I have happy—and sad and fun and boring and weird—things that I've done with and for those people. Most of those things, I'd never get to do without other me's to pick up the slack." His words were coming out now like he'd released the valves on a dam that had been holding back seasons' worth of rainwater. "Like, would we have been hunting down that girl who keeps stealing your low-level scrolls yesterday if I hadn't sent a clone on that academy thing? I definitely wouldn't have been able to escape baa-chan for a cloud-watching Sunday with Shikamaru a couple weeks ago." He snorted. "Or that C-rank."

She let out a breathy chuckle. "No, I guess not." Leave it to Naruto to demystify her quandaries before her. "What does that make them? Your backup?"

"More like my answer to whichever smart guy decided a day could only have twenty-four hours."

"So your brain living for longer than both our bodies combined, someday, is a 'screw you' to the gods?"

"Any god that limits my time with my people can kiss my ass with three layers of lipstick on," he deadpanned.

"Your people?" She couldn't hide her amusement.

"The ones I steal time for."

If a patient were to come to her with as many tight chests, fluttering stomachs, heated body parts, and palpitating hearts as leads in fictional romances tended to have every five minutes, she would immediately have them admitted for urgent cardiac care. But that was what her body seemed to be doing, right that second.

Looking down at her lap, she shook her head at the absurdity. "I'm sure they're very lucky people."

"Eh…." He clicked his tongue. "Sometimes they can't wait to be rid of me."

She brought her head back up and playfully narrowed her eyes. "Who are these jerks and when do they walk through isolated parts of the village?"

He gave her a solemn look and ducked his chin. "It's mostly just one jerk."

She imitated him. "Give me their name and I'll jerk my hand upside their head."

Clearing his throat, he gave their surroundings a mistrustful look before leaning closer and saying in a conspiratorial whisper, "It might come out that I put you up to it. I won't be able to come up with a convincing defense if people start asking questions."

"Who says? This terrible friend of yours?" She stuck her nose up in the air and sniffed haughtily.

"Well, she does call me dumb sometimes."

She laughed, and he followed her lead with his halting chortles. "Jerk," she managed to say before breaking into another giggle-fit. They basked in their merriment like they were fifteen again and had just come out unscathed from one of their unfortunate and wholly unplanned escapades.

Once the laughter had run its course, Naruto gave her hands another squeeze and let go, stepping back with another smile.

She hadn't realized he had never let go.

She watched him as he bent down to pick up her novel, and then as he grabbed the cutting board, bringing it toward his hand with a hint of chakra keeping it stuck to his big toe. While he tossed the board in the sink and the book in the cardboard box in the corner, she took a moment to jump off the counter.

He turned back toward her and flexed his wrist. "So what do you want me to send first, the clothes or the delicates?"

She quirked an eyebrow at him in a way she hoped came off as mysterious and slinked right past him, making sure to meet his eyes as he turned.

"I think I could go for some ramen before we get to it."

His eyebrows reached up into his longer-than-ever hair. "Is this—"

"You can call it a date."

A/N: Please do leave me some words to let me know how this went. As I said, I'm just now getting back in the groove (and have other things I'm writing, which can be distracting), so any feedback regarding the characters, the tone, the pacing, et cetera, would be greatly welcome and appreciated.