Prologue

Sakura is annoying, but he still plays with her because she is funny, too.

He can't remember the day that he met her, but he remembers the first time she yelled at him.

He was up in a tree, way up in a tree, climbing farther and farther out onto the thinnest part of the branch. He wanted to see how far he could get. He was only five and he was curious and brave.

"Sasuke-kun!" her tiny voice had shouted. "You're going to fall!"

"Am not!" he shouted back at her from his lofty perch. "Go away."

That's when the branch snapped beneath him, and he began plummeting down towards the hard earth below. He gasped in surprise when instead of hitting the ground, he fell into a pile of suspiciously soft leaves. He thought of that leaf pile often.

"My mommy says boys are stupid!" Sakura shrieked at him. "And she was right!"

Sasuke had watched her run away, frowning at her retreating back. Girls were weird.

Now he is eleven, and Sakura is his friend. He doesn't see her much, since she is often in the castle receiving lessons and doing other such things that little princesses do, but she is sometimes permitted to come outside and see him. They like to run up and down the banks of the creek skipping stones and catching frogs with Naruto. Nobody catches frogs better than Naruto.

Sakura's mother doesn't like when she plays by the water, it's unladylike she says, but Sakura plays anyway. She has mastered the art of getting her way.

"I'm hungry!" Naruto whines as he kicks his feet in the rushing water. "Sakura-chan, can we go to your house and eat?"

"It's not a house, Naruto, it's a castle," Sasuke scoffs. "You're so dumb."

"Leave him alone, Sasuke-kun," Sakura chides, lightly nudging him with her shoulder. "Sure, Naruto. We can go to the kitchens and get a snack."

The trio runs all the way to the palace gates, laughing and screaming as they splash each other with water from the creek. Sakura squeals when Naruto tries to toss a toad down her dress. Sasuke frowns at their rough-housing. Naruto always takes things too far.

The guards let them through the gates immediately upon seeing Sakura's iconic hair, smiling at the little princess as she passes by. Everyone loves Sakura. Sasuke thinks she is like the springtime with her messy, flower crown. Naruto made it for her.

"We have to be quiet," Sakura explains as she leads them around the entryway towards the kitchens. "Mother doesn't like when I eat snacks this late. She says it ruins dinner."

"It does," Sasuke mumbles under his breath. The seemingly unending hunger of his two friends is sometimes shocking to him. He is perfectly fine with three meals a day, thank you.

He'll still take a snack, though.

"You two stay here," Sakura holds a finger up to her lips to signal for quiet. "I'll make the extraction."

Naruto and Sasuke watch from the doorway as Sakura sneaks into the kitchens, grabbing bread, some apples, and cheese and piling them into a basket she grabs from the floor. She is on her way back out when the cook spots her.

"Little Princess! You know what your mother told you about snacking during the day!" the frazzled old woman comes running out from behind the ovens, waving her large arms above her head.

"Run!" Sakura squeals, thrusting the basket into Naruto's arms and grabbing Sasuke's hand as she passes them.

They run tirelessly, flying past the guards at the gate and down the path back towards the creek. Naruto and Sakura are whooping and hollering like idiots, Sasuke is smiling to himself.

His friends are annoying, but they are his.

Sakura drops her bread in the water and cries, so Sasuke gives her his. It's annoying when girls cry, especially Sakura. He hates it, and giving up his bread is a small price to pay to make it stop. She smiles at him, and he secretly thinks that it's nice when she does that.

They stay by the creek until after dark, talking and laughing and collecting worms and cool rocks. Sakura slips and scrapes her knee on a rock in the dark. She doesn't cry and Naruto tells her she is brave. Sasuke thinks she is brave, too.

He walks her back to the palace gates after Naruto goes running home, screaming about how Iruka-sensei is going to kick his ass for being so late. Sakura rolls her eyes at the blonde's antics and calls him foolish. Sasuke agrees with her.

"Goodnight, Sasuke-kun," Sakura smiles at him as the guards push the doors open for their little princess. "Thanks for bringing me home."

"You're welcome," Sasuke shrugs. "I'll see you tomorrow, Sakura-chan."

Sakura squints up at the stars, trying to see the constellation her astronomy teacher is indicating.

"I don't see it," she whines, stomping her foot against the cold stones of the tower. "This is dumb."

"It's right there," Sasuke points up at the sky.

Naruto and Sasuke had been allowed to join her for her astronomy lesson on the tower that night.

"Alright, Mr. Know-It-All," Sakura grumbles. Why she had invited the smartest boy she knew to come study is beyond her.

"Just follow my finger," Sasuke sighs, coming to stand behind her and pointing up over her shoulder. "Do you see it?"

"I-I see it!" Sakura claps her hands together with excitement, forgetting all about being irritated as she takes in the constellation up in the sky, just to the left of the moon.

Naruto is snoring softly on the ground to Sakura's right. He fell asleep half an hour ago. Sakura crouches to sit beside him, eyes still trained on the stars above her. She notices Sasuke look at her and then look away.

Her astronomy teacher leaves them once the lesson is done. Naruto is still asleep, and Sakura and Sasuke are sitting on the ground next to him. Sasuke is looking at her again.

Sakura bites her lip, deciding if she can be brave. Closing her eyes and taking a risk, she leans forward and closes the small distance between them, planting her lips on his own.

Sasuke doesn't pull away. It takes him a moment to kiss her back, but he does, and the butterflies in Sakura's stomach soar. She is kissing Sasuke.

"Sakura!" Her nurse's voice comes calling up the tower stairs. "It's time for you and your friends to come down!"

Sakura and Sasuke fly apart, breathing heavily and blushing furiously. Naruto wakes with a start.

"Huhmph?" he grumbles, rubbing his eyes sleepily, as children do, (this is a habit he will not grow out of).

"Come on, Naruto," Sakura grabs him by the hand, eyes pointedly averted from Sasuke, "We gotta go."

Sasuke and Naruto are tucked into a guest bedroom, while Sakura is attended to by her nurse. She is tucked in after her hair is braided and her face is washed, and she is rewarded for her compliance with a kiss on her forehead.

Once alone, Sakura rolls to her side and hugs a pillow to her chest, cheeks growing warm at the memory of kissing Sasuke. She doesn't know what possessed her to do it, but she is glad that she could be brave.

Sasuke lays awake for an hour thinking. Sakura kissed him. He hadn't been expecting that.

He thinks he liked it. He has never been kissed before, so he isn't sure.

He doesn't think he would mind if she did it again.

Sakura was twelve-years-old when it happened.

The massacre.

The Uchiha clan, the family that had been such prominent members of Konoha for so many years, turned on their people, turned on their home.

The fight was a brutal one, with the Uchiha clan striking in the night, assassinating the King and attempting to kill as many others as they could – soldiers and citizens alike.

It was a miracle that she had survived. Her own grandfather's throat had been slashed in his bed. Her father had nearly been killed, her mother as well. She remembered sitting in her mother's lap in a broom closet in the kitchens, her mother's warm palm pressed flat over her mouth to keep her from crying. To keep her safe. Sakura would never forget the feeling of her mother's warm blood against her skin. She would never forget the feeling of her mother's heart hammering against her back as they hid.

Sakura wouldn't understand until much later how much danger they had been in. How close she had come to losing her life. How close she and her mother had come to being discovered by that horrible man traipsing through their kitchen - the man with the long, black hair and the deeply red eyes.

Eventually, somehow, the Uchiha were expelled from the kingdom. The fighting had been horrible and had left Konoha burning. It had taken years upon years to rebuild, possibly even longer than it had taken to rebuild after the attack of the great nine-tailed fox. The Uchiha name was a curse that no one dared speak.

Only one Uchiha remained in Konoha after that horrible day. Only one Uchiha had refused to fight against his home.

Itachi. He had remained loyal to the Leaf through it all. He had watched with sixteen-year-old, empty eyes while his family fought tooth and nail to take over. When he finally joined the fight, he made quick work of making sure that all members of his clan either left the kingdom or were dead.

He was legendary. The best mage anyone had seen in dozens, maybe hundreds of years.

And he had almost single-handedly wiped his own family away…for the sake of the kingdom.

Sakura, and everyone else in Konoha, owed him their lives.

But once all of the Uchiha had gone, once only Itachi remained, the people of Konoha turned on him. The citizens were distrustful of his dark hair and his swirling, red eyes. They remembered in fear the swift brutality he had employed when he killed members of his own family. It did not matter that he did what he had done for the good of the village, no – they were afraid of him.

When Itachi was eighteen, he left the kingdom behind.

Some said he went to join what was left of his family, who had migrated to a growing kingdom called Sound. Others said his own family would never accept him after what he had done and claimed that he had become a wanderer, with nothing and no one.

Sakura asked her mother about him one day. She asked her why everyone hated him so much. He had saved them, after all.

Sakura's mother had crouched down onto her knees and looked her in the eye, and said: "People fear what they cannot understand, and what they cannot control. Itachi is Uchiha, and likely the most powerful among them, at that. People fear the Uchiha, they are untamable, and so therefore, they fear Itachi most of all."

"Are you afraid of him?" Sakura had asked her mother with wide, curious eyes. Sakura had always liked Itachi.

Sakura's mother only smiled and kissed her on the forehead. "My feelings on the matter are irrelevant, child. He is gone, and the citizens feel safer for it. I wish him luck, wherever he has gone. He deserves our well-wishes, at the very least."

Even at fourteen-years old, Sakura thought that he deserved far more than that.

But the world wasn't fair, and she was finding that simple truth out in more and more ways with each passing day.

Sasuke was twelve-years-old when it happened.

The massacre.

The Kingdom of Konoha, the kingdom that had been home to generations of Uchiha, turned on their people, turned on his family.

The details of how it all happened were always cloudy to him, but he understood enough of the situation to know that his family had been framed for the murder of the king.

Citizens and soldiers of Konoha alike had attacked them. His own brother had attacked them. One of his most vivid memories from childhood was watching his brother stab his own father through the heart.

He hated him, then. Hated his father for being weak, hated Itachi for being strong.

He would never forget the feeling of his mother's blood against his hands as he found her dying in the street, throat slashed and eyes empty and cold. He would never forget being dragged away from her body, covered in her blood, by some other member of the Uchiha clan. He couldn't even remember who it was.

All he remembered after that was running.

Running, running, running.

They ran right through the kingdom gates and out into the wilderness around them.

After that, it was months of camping out in the middle of nowhere, always being on high alert for an attack from Konoha – or worse, an attack from Itachi.

Eventually, the few remaining members of his clan found their place in a kingdom called Sound. A kingdom with a pale king and a growing army. A kingdom where hate and anger ruled all.

And so Sasuke grew up angry. He grew up with hate in his heart for Konoha, and with hate in his heart for Itachi. He grew up moody and lonely, without his parents or his wretched brother to keep him company.

He trained. He focused his anger into becoming a better mage than his brother, a better mage than anyone else. Before long, he far surpassed anyone in Sound. Many of the common-folk feared him. Rightly so. He was almost as cruel as he was powerful.

He caught the King's notice.

He became an army commander at the age of eighteen. He lost no respect due to his youth, however. The men he commanded had seen what he could do to a deserter. They obeyed him without question. They feared him openly.

Revenge was all that filled his head, eating away at his thoughts like a worm in the dirt. He wanted revenge on the village that had betrayed him and his family. He wanted revenge on his dirty, dog-shit brother.

He would watch Konoha fall. He would tear it down with his own two hands.

AN: Just a little blip of a prologue. I have a few chapters written. Wrote this awhile ago and decided to just go ahead and get it out there. Hope you like it! Let me know!

love, loony