"To reaching day seven!" Naruto raised his cup of cold tea high.

"To day seven," Hinata tapped her cup to his with a gentle little clink that she probably had to take a class on when she was a kid. The thought amused Naruto, especially when the girl dug into her ramen with a decidedly unladylike vigour.

"Still can't believe you like ramen," he mused. "I think I always pictured you eating like, fancy tuna every day."

Hinata shrugged, her pale cheeks going a delicate pink. He'd have to ask old man Teuchi to turn the heater up for her. "I developed a taste for it a while ago."

"You even like miso base with extra chashu." He grinned, gesturing at their matching orders. "If I'd known we were ramen buddies I would've taken you out way before this."

She snorted, and once again he was struck by how normal the Hyuuga princess could be sometimes. This had been an eye-opening week in so many ways. Sasuke…

"I hope you can take Sasuke-san for ramen soon, too." Hinata said, pulling him out of his thoughts.

"Us." He corrected her, giving her a huge smile so she'd know he meant it. "I want both of us to take Sasuke-kun out for a real excursion one day soon. Sakura and Kakashi-sensei too."

"Speaking of Sakura and Kakashi-sensei," Hinata's gaze drifted over his shoulder, and she waved. "Hello!"

Naruto twisted in his chair as Sakura and Kakashi slipped into the seats beside them. "Sakura-chan!" He gave her a quick one-armed hug. "The old lady told me everything the other day. I'm so sorry, that sounds horrible."

Sakura returned his hug after a small pause. "Thanks Naruto. It's been weird knowing that everyone knows, but at least I don't have to repeat the story a thousand times. Shishou also said she's informed the other kages and asked them to keep us updated if more people like me start cropping up, so maybe it's good to start talking about it."

"Was I really the Hokage?"

She nodded. "You hated it, too."

"No way!" He squawked, raking his hands down his whiskered face.

Sakura laughed, but Naruto caught the edge of a 'drop it' glare from Kakashi and decided to put a pin in his follow-up questions for now. "Anyway, what are you getting? It's my treat; we're celebrating the success of our Sasuke rehabilitation mission!"

He caught Hinata's eye, who stared at him like he'd just eaten an exploding tag before turning to the others. "We were sorry to hear about Obito, by the way," she murmured.

"Oh, right. Sorry." Shit.

"It's okay," Sakura said, but her smile looked a bit faker than before. "I forgive him, and Tsunade's agreed to let him see a mental health counsellor, which is probably what he needs more than anything right now."

Mental health counselling was still a pretty rare thing in the shinobi world. Ninja were weapons; if they dulled, they were sharpened. If they broke, they were discarded. Before Tsunade, the idea of someone getting counselling even though they were a criminal, someone who would probably never re-join active service, would have been unthinkable. But it sounded like a wonderful idea, and he said so.

"I'm getting it too, actually." Sakura's eyes were fixed on her ramen, as if she was revealing this to her boiled egg instead of them.

"I think that's a wonderful idea too," he said, without hesitation. Hinata nodded vigorously beside him.

"It's just for a few weeks, so that Shishou can clear me for active duty again." She was still talking to her food, speaking in an uncharacteristically low voice, but Naruto understood the unspoken taboo of admitting such a thing as a shinobi, even if he didn't agree with it.

Hinata leaned over him so closely that his elbow was brushing her ribs and her hair was dangerously close to his ramen dregs. She placed her hand on Sakura's, forcing the other girl to look over to her. "I got counselling after…Neji," she said, her lavender eyes sad and sincere. "And the war. And the clan. All of it. It helped."

Sakura nodded, mouthed thank you to both of them, and turned to Kakashi. "You're right, Kakashi, this was a good idea."

It didn't escape Naruto's notice that she dropped the '-sensei' after his name. Even Hinata covertly raised her eyebrows at the pair. But if Kakashi thought it strange, he didn't say anything. In fact, at the end of their meal he stood up and said "thanks again for treating us. I forgot my wallet, so you saved Sakura from having to cover me yet again."

Once again, no '-chan' after the name. He'd heard they were apartment neighbours and Tsunade had even confided that Kakashi-sensei was first on the scene when Sakura finally broke the second genjutsu, but he felt like he'd blinked and missed a whole lot of development in their relationship if they were using each other's first names like that. Hinata caught his eye and gave a delicate shrug as if to say 'yes it's weird; but I'm not about to say anything.'

"Before you go," Naruto grabbed Sakura's elbow, "have you thought about when you might visit Sasuke? I think it'd be good for both of you."

"But only when you're ready," Hinata added.

The Sakura he knew would have visited him every day, unprompted; she would have fought to be the one who oversaw his trial week, too. But in hindsight, Naruto couldn't fault Hinata's efforts in the last seven days. She and Sasuke were both clan elites, and she used the same respectful register when speaking to him that she would use with any social peer. It surprised Naruto, and he was pretty sure it had surprised Sasuke too. Sasuke, for his part, was determined to show Hinata no particular respect based on her status alone, but Hinata revealed later that they did, in fact, know one another decently well in childhood. She never got frustrated with Sasuke's rough contempt, always listened to his dangerous opinions on villages, clans, and shinobi culture with genuine interest, and was generally everything Sakura wouldn't have been in that situation. And Sakura never visited, and Sasuke never asked. It was a complicated sort of sadness for Naruto, who foresaw the death of their relationship long before he learned that for Sakura at least, it had died of old age.

But they were still a team, and Naruto had to know that still meant something to Sakura. If not, then the familiar-unfamiliar girl before him was indeed a stranger.

Sakura paused for a moment, before gently pulling her elbow from his grasp. "Would it surprise you to learn I was scared to see him?"

"Yes," he said frankly, and her lips twisted in a smile he knew well. "You're not scared of anything." Sakura was passionate, volatile, loving, and occasionally prone to tears, but she hadn't been scared since they were genin and Sasuke left home without her.

"That was the old me," she said, and the smile was gone. "The new me yelled at a stranger yesterday because he said the infinite tsukuyomi was just more shinobi nonsense, like making a world where we didn't have to kill each other wasn't the entire point of what Madara and Obito were trying to achieve, and even if it was wrong, I don't want to hear a civilian criticising it because they don't know, they don't, and even if death touches the edges of their lives they'll never know what a world without death means to people like us. The new me has to has to wake up my neighbour in the middle of the night because I'm still having trouble separating my nightmares from reality." Sakura's voice was getting louder, her body more tense. Naruto didn't know how to make it stop without making it worse. People were starting to stare at her, and it was only when Kakashi placed a hand on her shoulder that she seemed to realise what she was doing. She closed her eyes for the space of a breath, freeing Naruto from her attention long enough to take a breath of his own. "The new me is so unbelievably scared, Naruto."

"I'm sorry," he said, because he upset her, and because he knew he wasn't the person she really needed right now. "Are we okay?" Perhaps he was still pushing too much, but he hated the idea that she might be scared of him too.

To his relief, Sakura's face softened. "Of course." She hugged him briefly, before she and Kakashi disappeared into the night.