A/N: Wow, it's been actual years since I've posted anything. And I know this isn't anything I'm supposed to be working on, but honestly, a lot of things have changed in these two years. My writing style, for one, and hopefully for the better.

Basically, this is a hanahaki disease!au. I haven't seen any for SasuNaru, so I decided, why not write one! It will be a two-shot (most likely). The rating for this fic will be justified in the next part, and I apologize in advance for the lack of SasuNaru in this part. It will be an angsty, feelsy rollercoaster ahead, so please hold on tight. Also, this takes place after chapter 699 and before chapter 700 (so in the time skip, essentially, before Naruto has begun to love Hinata but after Sasuke has left the village). As such, it will most likely contain spoilers for anyone who only watches the anime. Apologies for that. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy your read, if you choose to stay!

Title is from Bastille and Gabrielle Aplin's Dreams.

all we had (and all we lost)

part one

It is spring in the Land of Rivers, and the cherry blossoms flooding the air look especially ugly.

Villagers overwhelm the park Sasuke usually frequents, all eager to participate in the famous sakura-viewing festivals the Land of Rivers is so well known for. The air bites his nose, still crisp and sharp despite the quickly oncoming heat of summer, and pale pink heart-shaped petals whirl above his head. They dance in the wind to an endless waltz only they can hear, spinning in elaborate and organic shapes.

Danse macabre, he thinks. Maybe that is the more appropriate term.

A petal gets lost from the crowd and lands in his hair, straining in the breeze. He frees it with slightly numb, pale fingers and brings it close to his eyes.

It is almost translucent, like skin faded in death. If he holds it to the early morning sun, he can see the veins in the petal, spindly and delicate. The blossom tinges from a flush of soft pink in the center to a deeper blush on the outside, and it almost looks as if it has been fused with blood.

He releases the petal and watches it whirl away into the sky with impassive eyes. No, Sasuke has never liked the spring. He never will, most likely.

A minute more, and he turns to leave. The park is too crowded for him to enjoy the morning anyway.

It is neither unusual nor unheard of for a disease to mutate from a jutsu gone awry. It happened after the First Shinobi World War, when malformed seal jutsus aimed at controlling the bijuus' poisonous chakra backfired and recast themselves upon their users. An endemic was launched in Kiri, quickly contained but no less deadly for its short reign.

Tsunade is a renowned, respected medic-nin, known for her talent in antidotes and cures after the Second Shinobi World War. But even she does not quite know how to deal with jutsu-born diseases.

The problem is that jutsus are always so easy to deform, so easy to mess up: one boar seal instead of a tiger seal and a fireball could activate instead of a nice simple heating jutsu for boiling water. In order to even begin the process of combating jutsu-created diseases, one must first trace the origin of the malformed jutsu and then unravel what exactly went wrong.

It's a lengthy process, but also one that Tsunade, thankfully, has not had to deal with much in her long life. Until now, that is.

She crumples the report in her hands and sends the messenger hawk waiting on the windowsill away with a sharp rap on the glass. Her head pounds, but not from the sake sitting untouched in the hidden drawer in her desk. The dawn chooses that moment to break over the mountain with the Hokages' carved faces, throwing shadows into the pits of their blank eyes. Her own stone face is stern, forever watching, and Tsunade turns away from it with a grimace.

The urge to gamble rises in her, but she stakes it down. This time, she doesn't need the bad luck gambling brings her to tell her what her kunoichi's intuition already knows.

"Hanahaki disease," she says out loud, with only the reaching fingers of the sun to keep her company.

The words fit together strangely in her mouth, jumbled and clumsy, and leave a lingering taste of petals and blood thick on her tongue.

Naruto knows nothing about flowers, beyond the fact that Sakura's name is derived from the prettiest flower of them all and that Ino's family runs a flower shop, located in the rebuilt downtown of Konoha.

It's beautiful in its recreation, he notices, as he steps over the threshold into the shop. Konoha itself is beautiful in its recreation, but also sad in the way that he no longer knows the shortcut to Ichiraku's through the maze of remapped streets. He doesn't mind too much, though. There is no lost love between the village that raised him and the village that accepted him, and Naruto is more than willing to give this new rebuilt Konoha his everything.

(Well. Maybe not everything, because there's always a little piece of him that is forever somewhere else.)

"Naruto," Ino says, pleasantly surprised from where she is standing behind the counter. "What brings you here?"

After the end of the war, she had retired briefly from missions, choosing to mourn for her father's death and take care of the flower shop that he had started in his own youth. Her smile is full across her lips, gentle and kind, but if Naruto looks a little closer, he can still see the haggard shadows under her eyes and the ghosts of war layered on her back. It's not unique to Ino; he's seen it on Shikamaru, on Lee, on Hinata, on himself when he looks in the mirror for too long in the morning. This is what war does to people, and he hates it.

"Just paying a visit," he says cheerfully instead. "Your hair is pretty when it's down."

"Don't give me false compliments, Uzumaki," she scoffs in return, smoothing her hair gingerly, but he still hears the tinge of gratefulness to her voice anyway. "Now tell me what you really came here for."

"Nothing, I swear." Naruto moves through the shop, peering at the bouquets arranged artfully near the display case. There are bunches of pinks and purples splotched together, big flowers and little flowers, all tied neatly with shiny ribbons. He's always loved flowers, even if he knows nothing about them. They have a gentle grace, unfit for the world he lives and fights in, but thrive nonetheless.

Ino's voice skips over his shoulder, startling close. Naruto jerks around to see her standing scant inches behind him, a small smirk curved on her lips. He almost forgets she's a ninja sometimes with her standard purple training gear traded out for a soft frilly blue apron like it is now, but moments like these never fail to remind him.

"Flowers for a special… someone, maybe? Spring is the time for love, you know! Seize it while you can."

Naruto blushes despite himself. "No, you're wrong—"

"Is it Hinata?" She leans closer, blue eyes radiant. "It is, isn't it?"

"N—"

But before he can finish, a familiar tickle hits the back of his throat, and he clamps his mouth shut before he chokes. A breath is pulled in harshly through his nose, resisting the urge to cough. Luckily, Ino seems to take his sudden silence as an answer instead of something out of the ordinary.

"I knew it!" she crows, moving past him into an aisle crammed tight with more pastel pinks and purples, indicative of the height of spring. "Flowers for young love. How sweet. You shouldn't give her roses, if you're just starting to woo her. That's too forward. Maybe some acacia blossoms?"

She plucks a bloom of bright, sunshine yellow flowers from a bucket and holds them out to Naruto.

He smiles tightly, the tickle in his throat still present, and doesn't open his mouth.

"You're right," Ino says in response to his smile. "Too yellow, matches your hair but clashes with hers. Lilacs! These are perfect." The acacia flowers are tossed back in the bucket carelessly as she moves onto her next victim.

Naruto swallows harshly, and it's only the tight self-control he's learned from splitting leaves in half with his chakra that allows him to speak without sounding like he's about to throw up. "I—I should really go. Meeting with Tsunade and all that. Future Hokage stuff. Yeah. I'm sure you have other customers as well," he lies, even though the shop is blatantly empty, an oddity for an early afternoon.

Ino pauses then, and something flickers across her eyes before she gently returns the lilac to its container.

"You know, business has been exceptionally slow lately," she says airily, moving back down the aisle to return to her place behind the counter. Ino doesn't look at him when she speaks. "Apparently, there's some kind of rumor going around."

"Rumor?" He sounds slightly less forced.

"Yeah. About a disease of some kind. The victims are throwing up flowers, from what I've heard. Bizarre, isn't it? Bad for business too." Ino laughs a little, and if Naruto didn't suddenly feel so nauseous, he might have felt empathy for the hard, fake edge to her laugh.

He clears his throat and regrets it almost immediately when he tastes the first brush of blood on his tongue. "There's no way a disease like that exists. I mean, where would the flowers even come from, right?"

Ino looks at him for a long, long moment, and this is another one of those times when he remembers, with a jolt like cold water, that Ino is a member of the Yamanaka clan. She can read minds and expressions the way Sakura rips through medical scrolls, and Naruto has always had a particularly easy face to read.

At last, she says, voice carefully neutral, "Where indeed? Now hurry and go to your Hokage's meeting. I'm sure you don't want Tsunade to whoop your ass for the fourth day in a row."

"She told you about that!" Naruto splutters indignantly, and Ino laughs, an almost-real laugh, before waving her fingers at him in the universal 'now-shoo' gesture. "Fine, fine. I'll see you later, Ino."

He ducks out of her shop and barely waits a moment before transporting to his apartment.

It's not a second too soon as he stumbles to his sink and retches, coughs, violently, the tickle in the back of his throat becoming a burning itch. He tastes blood again, coppery but sweet, and his chest heaves as he struggles to draw in air.

'The victims are throwing up flowers, from what I've heard.'

Ino's words echo in his mind as he looks down at the mess in the sink.

An amalgam of flower petals, yellow like the acacias Ino had shown him in the shop but shaped sharp like the points on a star, decorates the bottom of the cracked white basin. Splotches of red tint some of the petals, blooming bright against the stilted off-white.

'About a disease of some kind.'

Disease.

Naruto swallows hard, ignoring the tickle lying in wait low in his throat, and flushes the petals down the sink.

He ignores it at first. And, at first, it is ignorable. The urges come only a few times a day and rarely during the night, and if he really tries, he can suppress it deep down in his throat. The uncomfortable itch is omnipresent, but manageable.

Even if it is a disease – and if so, how come nobody else seems to have it? – Naruto is sure that it can't be too far outside Kurama's realm of healing. Almost nothing is, not even a hand shoved burning through his lungs or a near-extraction (although he does have to give Sakura her credit where it's due). And if he wishes, sometimes, under the silent blanket of darkness, that the fox's healing powers weren't so encompassing, that he could have scars to count along with his memories, nobody has to know.

(Naruto guesses he got his wish in the end. Apparently, complete regeneration of his right arm is impossible even for Kurama.)

But diseases are, admittedly, something that Naruto has had little experience with. Even when his breath misted out in puffed clouds of white during the harshest winters when he was young and had no parents, no friends, no teammates – only a figurehead of a Hokage and an emptier, heater-less apartment – he had still stayed healthy. Not even a fever had touched him.

Naruto wakes to suffocation and flowers clawing their way up his throat. He doesn't make it to the sink or toilet before he's leaning over the side of his bed and petals are tumbling from his mouth. They feel like blades scraping his tongue and flesh, but the petals themselves are soft, softer than any flower he has ever felt. When it's over, he breathes and presses his forehead into the wrinkled fabric of his sheets, and feels lost.

Kurama is silent in his head. The place where his right arm should be tingles, uncomfortably, and a sudden, inexplicable urge to cry rises high in his throat, overwhelming the prickle from the flowers.

"Fuck," he says, and rolls over back into his blankets.

The flowers lay on the ground, a red and yellow mess that he doesn't touch until much later that day.

The thoughts press in on him in flashes during the day, heavily at night. They crowd in when he passes the training ground they first used so long ago, the three wooden poles long since removed in the wake of the war. When he opens the drawer where he used to keep a worn, scarred hitai-ate, and finds only empty dust instead. When he watches the next generation spar with unformed muscles, soft flesh, gentle punches, and remembers the sting of humiliation and blank eyes staring down at him from above.

When he stands by Tsunade during diplomatic missions, sees the way even the daimyo bows respectfully to him now, and misses acutely the man he had always thought would be by his side at this point. When he turns on the shower and hears the roar of a waterfall instead, their beginning and their end, the place he lost him and the place he thought he'd found him again.

When he stands in the entranceway of Konoha, between two towering gates, and stares at an empty dirt road, waiting for someone who doesn't appear.

(Something is always missing. And at night, in between burning throats and harsh coughs, he feels it most.)

The words slip out of his mouth unbidden, and he's glad that the flower petals don't fall out right alongside them.

"Have you heard of a disease about flowers?"

Sakura pauses mid-sentence, mouth still open just a bit. He can feel her gaze harden on him like pinpricks of steel, and he keeps his own eyes firmly on his ramen, head lowered. When the silence stretches on for another few seconds, he swallows the petals tickling his throat and looks up defiantly. "Have you?" he asks again, and pretends like the words aren't scratching his throat.

She places her chopsticks down carefully on the rim of her bowl, steam from the ramen coiling around her face in soft curls. In turn, Naruto picks up his own chopsticks and stirs his miso pork ramen (the way he's always liked it, routine, safe).

"I have." Sakura pauses for a moment, and he's grateful for the lack of questions. Over the years, the losses, the wild goose chases, they've learned something more important than love—they've learned trust. "It's not very common in Konoha."

"Hm." Naruto thinks of the lie on the tip of his tongue—recently, in Suna, Gaara was complaining about this disease and I wanted to know more—but it dissolves before it can touch the air. Trust. "What's it called?"

This time, there is no hesitation.

"Hanahaki disease."

The words sound practiced, clinical, as if Sakura has repeated them a thousand times over. And she probably has, knowing Tsunade's tutelage. Naruto has no doubt that Tsunade has already heard of it, if Sakura has.

He stirs his ramen again and watches the steam fade slowly. He knows his next question will most likely break even Sakura's curiosity, but he asks anyway.

"Symptoms?"

Another pause. And then, with a quaver: "Flowers. You vomit flowers. Lots of them. It gets worse the more you ignore it, and usually, blood comes up along with it. We haven't had a bad enough case to know what it looks like long-term, but it only gets worse. It doesn't get better. Not—not naturally."

At that, Naruto looks up sharply, chopsticks clattering on the side of his bowl. "But there is a way?"

Sakura smiles a little, and it's sharp, self-deprecating in a way Naruto has learned to recognize in the mirror. "There is a way."

"What is it?" he asks eagerly, leaning forward across the small table they share. "Are you sure it works?"

"It works all right. I don't know how successful you'd call it, but it works." Sakura breathes in deeply, and then exhales, eyes closing. "You have to understand, Naruto. Hanahaki disease—it's uncontrollable. Fatal, most likely. A flower grows right here"—she places a hand over her heart—"in your left lung. And the more you leave it unattended, the more it grows, eroding your lung tissue. Eventually, it becomes something similar to a tumor, and if it doesn't block your lungs first, it'll put pressure on your heart until it gives out. You die either way."

It sounds a little ridiculous: a flower, growing inside a human body? But anything is plausible in their world, and Naruto accepts it. He has to; he knows what it tastes like to have flower petals fill his mouth and flood his tongue. It's a taste he has grown to hate.

"So what's the solution? Can't you just create some non-fatal flower poison and ingest it?" Naruto waves a hand, feeling more at ease now that he knew that his disease could indeed be cured.

"We tried. Believe me, we tried. But it doesn't work. It's a jutsu-born disease, meaning without unraveling the origin of the jutsu, we can't find a real cure. But our cure is—permanent enough. Enough to ensure that you survive, if that's all you want."

"What else would you need?"

The smile appears on Sakura's lips again. Knife-thin, cutting. "You need quite a bit more than just survival to live, Naruto. We are human because we feel. We are not human because we breathe and eat; those are only animals." The smile falls, and she looks ashen, worn-out, under the warm lighting of Ichiraku's. Her hair is limp from work at the hospital, and it falls around her face in wilted strands. "If you want to survive, you surgically remove the flower. It comes out quite easily, actually. But the repercussions are a little more intense, I would imagine, than just undoing the jutsu."

Naruto frowns. "I don't—"

"Imagine your deepest bond," Sakura interrupts, and doesn't meet his eyes. "Imagine someone you wish you could see every day, walking by your side, reaching for your hand. Imagine that. And then imagine all those feelings that have just welled up inside your heart and tearing them out. What's left? Nothing. You're numb. You're empty. You survive, but do you live?"

Something catches in Naruto's throat, and he's not sure if it's the petals or his breath.

(A pier and a river glowing orange in the sunset, a small smile, but genuine. A bento box shoved in his face. A ring of ice, anger and panic. Laughter, rivalry, friendship. A pain in his chest, inadequacy. Not being good enough, never being good enough. Desperation. Joy. Determination. Satisfaction, and heartbreak again.)

"That is what happens when you remove that flower. And it's not a fate I would want to wish on anyone. Much less you, Naruto."

He jolts, eyes wide, and stumbles over his words. "I don't have the flower disease—I mean hanahaki—"

"I've known you for more than ten years. Give me a little credit, alright?" Sakura looks tired, so tired, and Naruto slumps back in his seat. He feels it too: a bone-weary ache, deep in his soul. It settled like a bad cold the day he watched him leave again, back firm and straight as he marched into the forest outside Konoha, away from Naruto. It settled and never left, and came back now with a vengeance in the form of a flower in his lungs.

(It's ironic, almost.)

A moment of quiet. The ramen is no longer steaming, long since gone cold. The customers around them fill their silence with noiseless chatter, meaningless everyday small-talk that probably doesn't involve things like living and surviving and flowers burning holes in their lungs. Naruto tries to imagine a life like that—boring, mundane, ordinary. He can't.

"So what would you have me do then, Sakura? Die?" He laughs, and it digs sharply into his chest. "If you won't let me get the surgery?"

Sakura's breath hitches a little and suddenly, she's vehement, fire. "No! Of course not! I'd rather you survive a thousand times over than die from this sick disease. Do you even know why so few people have this disease? How you contract it?" Her fist clenches tight on the table. "It's a disease built for unrequited love. One-sided love."

A sick feeling spreads in Naruto's stomach. "You mean—"

"If you love someone, and they don't love you back, guess what happens? Surprise! You get a flower in your lungs for your feelings. You get death and you know that, no matter what, the other person doesn't love you the same way you love them." Her eyes are bright green and glassy, like the bottles Naruto sometimes finds embedded in the sand dunes outside Suna. "It stings a bit, doesn't it?"

"Sakura, did you...?" he trails off, and he can't finish. There's only one name on his tongue, and it's one that he and Sakura both don't want to hear.

She smiles for the third time that night. This time, it bites a little more. "How do you think we found out if the surgery worked or not?"

The implications sink in slowly, but when it finally hits, his eyes snap to hers, wide, mouth falling open.

"I don't want your sympathy, Naruto. I only want you to live." Sakura takes a breath and presses the heels of her hands to her eyes before shaking her head and straightening. "There is a way, untested, that Tsunade and I have been theorizing about. Suppose your love is returned. Becomes requited. Then wouldn't the flower disappear? There would be no reason for it to stay. If you want to try that instead of the surgery...if there is anyone who could do it, it would be you, Naruto."

"Don't you think that's a little too much to expect, even for me?"

"I've seen you change jinchuuriki and Akatsuki alike with your words, Naruto. I've seen you make the bijuu listen to you. I've seen you bring back a man Konoha gave up on. I think you can do it."

"I brought him back, sure," he says, voice quiet, "but I wasn't enough to make him stay."

Sakura pauses, then, and softens. "Well, it's a good thing you've always been pretty good at chasing him down, isn't it?" She huffs, clapping her hands together. "It's getting pretty late. I have an early shift at the hospital tomorrow, so I better get going. I trust you'll pick up my tab, eh, Naruto? I clearly remember paying last time so you owe me one."

She begins to stand, the soup in the half-eaten ramen trembling slightly when she bumps against the wooden table.

But just as Sakura is turning to leave, Naruto stops her. "Wait—Sakura—if ... it's unrequited love. Then would they just have to return the feelings? Or say 'I love you,' that whole deal?"

"I wouldn't know. Up to you to find out, I guess."

"So if. If I told you, I lo—"

Sakura cuts him off with a look. "Naruto, I think we both know that I'm not the one you should be confessing to. Think about it, won't you?"

He watches her duck under the entranceway and fade into the blackness of the night outside.

Think about it, won't you?

Naruto wants to laugh.

Instead, he cradles his head in his arms and tries to remember how to breathe.

He finds her in the garden at the center of Konoha.

It's a beautiful place, set up by a few enterprising kunoichi after the war as a means for the returning ninjas to recuperate by immersing themselves in community work. Nothing more violent than pulling up stubborn weeds or digging a spade into soft soil. Relaxing. Therapeutic.

Naruto had found it peaceful before. Now, surrounded by blooming flowers, all reaching towards him with upturned faces, he finds it unsettling—reminded eerily of the petals resting in wait inside his lungs. He wonders if the flower growing in his lungs has roots too, if removing it will leave scars deeper than the one in his heart. He wonders what it would feel like to breathe clearly again without the fear of choking over bittersweet petals.

"Naruto-kun," Hinata greets him, the same way as she always has before. She stands, gently placing down the small shovel in her hands, and smooths her dress. It's a lovely purple shade, a hue significantly lighter than her hair and yet still darker than her eyes. Ino was right, he realizes dimly; yellow really does clash with Hinata. "How are you?"

"I'm good. You're planting flowers," he comments, eyes sweeping down at the half-finished flowerbed next to her.

"Yes. Gladioli. They were Neji's favorite," she says, before looking at him. "But you didn't really come here to talk about my flowers, did you, Naruto-kun?" His eyes widen, surprised, and she laughs—delicate, quiet, but genuine. (Maybe he could get used to this laugh, he thinks, even if it isn't a half-smirk or rare smile pulled out by his fingertips.) "Don't be surprised. I haven't seen you since the war ended months ago. Even I am still a kunoichi."

He chuckles, and it sounds a little raw. "I never thought you weren't." And it's true. He will forever remember the way she ran to protect him from Pein, the way she threw herself in front of Naruto before Neji died for them both.

But is it enough for him to love her? Naruto doesn't know. Months of avoidance, of awkward glances across the market, of stiff greetings at funerals, and he doesn't know if he loves her, if she is the reason why a flower is choking him to death.

"I'm sorry if this is a little abrupt," he begins, gracelessly, because elegance has never been his forte, "but... do you still love me?"

Hinata lifts her chin and looks at him, straight on. Unflinching. There is nothing left of the girl too timid to fight her cousin in the chunin exams or of the one who used to hide behind fences when she saw him. The one who stuttered uncontrollably, face flushed. And he has respect, if nothing else. "I do. But this isn't about a confession either, is it?"

"No. No, you're right. It isn't." Naruto runs a hand through his hair, coughs a little, and feels a petal seep onto his tongue. "Only a confirmation of what I already know."

Because, if he thinks about it, he realizes there is no way Hinata could've ever caused the disease. Not if she has loved him since before he even knew her; not if she has already given him all her love and he has given none back in return. She would be the one to have a flower bloom in her lungs, and it is that thought that strikes a thrill of fear inside him, causing him to blurt, "Give up on me. Don't love me. I—it's better for you this way."

A flash of hurt darts across her eyes, but Hinata nods, as if she's been waiting for those words all along. "I understand."

"I just don't want you to get hurt—" he tries to explain, desperately.

"I understand, Naruto-kun," she cuts him off, before kneeling down. It's a clear dismissal, and he wonders when Hinata changed. When she grew up, between the war and the present, while he remained so stagnant, caught up on someone who had never stayed. "Although—don't forget. Even if it isn't me, there is always someone else who could... no, will, love you more. There will always be someone else to love you. It doesn't have to be him."

Naruto watches as she picks up a packet of seeds, wrinkled and brown, and drips a few onto her palm. His mouth feels as dry as his voice sounds when he asks, "But what if he's been a part of me for so long that I don't know how to live without him?" Because that is how the possibility of the surgery scares him: if he will no longer know how to fight with him by his side, how to combat his lightning and fire with wind and surging tenacity. If he will no longer know how to walk forward, one step in front of another. If he will no longer know what it is like to have someone who understands him intimately, better than he even knows himself. If he will no longer know what it means to love.

Hinata presses the seeds carefully into the dark soil in front of her, her hair a silken curtain around her face. "Then, you will learn, Naruto-kun. You will learn to stand up on your own again. You always have, after all."

"Maybe you're right." He laughs, and chokes on the petals that flood his mouth, barely catching them in the crush of his fist before they escape onto the wind.

"Perhaps I am." Her hands move surely over the flowerbed, sprinkling fertilizer over the newly planted seeds. "Perhaps you should also get your cough checked out. It doesn't sound very healthy."

"It's just a bug that's going around, no need to worry." The petals scrunch tight in his hand. "I'll leave you to your flowers, then. I'm sure they'll turn out beautiful."

"Thank you," Hinata says. "Goodbye, Naruto-kun." It sounds final. Absolute.

"See you later, Hinata."

He doesn't notice her watching his back as he leaves the garden; nor does he notice her sad gaze when she picks up the daffodil petals scattered in his wake like soft rain.

Naruto feels almost proud when Tsunade brushes chakra-covered hands over his chest and announces, "This is the biggest damn flower I've ever seen. You brat, what have you been doing?"

"Vomiting flowers," he mutters, and coughs a little. Flower petals fall from his lips before he can catch them. It's gotten worse recently, ever since his chats with Sakura and Hinata, and he misses him almost tangibly. "My chest hurts."

"No wonder. How are you still breathing?" Tsunade shakes her head, eyes stern. There's a wrinkle in between her eyebrows, the one he used to see before major missions. (The one he saw when Jiraiya left for Amegakure, before they learned that he would never came back.)

"You know me, baa-chan. Fighter till the end." He offers a weak grin, and Sakura makes a choked noise from the corner of the medical room. It sounds a bit like a sob.

Naruto wonders briefly if Tsunade has hanahaki too, but decides that she is breathing in too deeply to have a flower cutting off her air supply. It must not affect those whose loved ones are dead, and the thought thrills him a little—at least that means that he is alive out there, somewhere.

She presses a hand to his chest again, right over his left lung, and he winces. "Tender? I thought so. How much have you been coughing up each day?"

"Enough to empty the trash can twice. And then some."

"Blood? Is your throat okay?"

"It stings like a bitch to swallow, but other than that, just your average blood loss. Nothing Kurama can't regenerate." Naruto shrugs and feels oddly calm about it.

Tsunade's lips seal tight together, disapproving. "You know that Kurama can't do anything for hanahaki. It's a disease tied to your feelings, and even the fox can't heal a broken heart." She sighs, snapping off her skintight gloves and rubbing her temples. "Sakura and I have been trying to trace the origin of the jutsu. Apart from the fact that it most likely came from Kumo and was originally some sort of attraction jutsu gone wrong—you know, the kind idiots make up in lieu of love potions—we can't find anything else. So your only choice at this point is to get the surgery. We can schedule it for tomorrow if you want, I don't have anything—"

"I don't want the surgery," he interrupts, sitting up on the bed.

Tsunade pauses. When she looks at him again, Naruto barely resists from flinching. Sakura sighs heavily in the corner and he thinks she places her hands over her face. If she's crying or not, he still can't tell.

"Excuse me?" Her voice is steely, the type of slow patience she grants to the Council when they are being particularly unresponsive.

He swallows and says again, "I said I don't want the surgery."

"You do know that you're directly in line to become the next Hokage?" Tsunade asks slowly, as if Naruto has suddenly gone deaf instead of sprouting a flower in his lungs. "You will get the surgery. It's the only way right now to survive, and at your stage of the disease, it is your only option."

"Sakura said if the lo—feelings were returned, the disease could possibly go away," he insists stubbornly, fists clenching on the worn blue rubber of the examining bed.

Tsunade eyes Sakura, who does flinch and pale considerably. "I'm sure she mentioned that it was only a theory. We don't know for sure, and it's certainly not something I'm about to stake the life of the next leader of Konohagakure on. Naruto—"

"Give me a week, baa-chan. A week to find him. If... if hanahaki doesn't go away in a week, I'll come back to Konoha. I'll do the surgery. Just give me a week." He bites his lip and pleads with her to understand. For the man she used to love, for everyone she had lost. For the chance Naruto still had.

Tsunade looks older, much older, when she finally sighs and throws her hands up in the air. "Fine! Fine. One week. You leave tomorrow. Sakura will go with you—"

"No. I want to do this alone." Tsunade looks furious, and he hastily cuts in, "Please. I need to do this. Alone."

She shuts her eyes for a long moment. Sakura is silent. At last, Tsunade says, heavily, quietly, "I just don't want you to get hurt." It's not the Godaime Hokage speaking, Naruto knows. It's the woman who has come to love him like a son, like the family she never had.

"It'll hurt either way." He coughs again, and more yellow petals decorate his lap. "But he won't hurt me again, baa-chan. Don't worry. We made a promise, in here." Naruto grins and taps the side of his head. "I don't break my promises."

"But does he?"

"I trust him," he says softly. "That's all I can do."

Tsunade rolls her eyes. "That damn Uchiha. I knew I should have arrested him when I had the chance. Fine. You win, brat. I better see your ass back in here in a week, you hear me? Or I'm sending my best ANBU trackers after you."

"Got it, got it." Naruto waves cheekily as she slams the door on her way out, muttering under her breath about foolish nineteen-year-olds who never listen. His hand drops as he turns to look at Sakura, still leaning against the far wall. "I'm sorry, Sakura-chan."

"You're an idiot, Naruto," she says, and her eyes are wet.

He is sorry. Sorry that he didn't love her enough to cough up petals for her, sorry that he never truly fulfilled his promise, sorry that he was leaving her behind. Sorry that she had to be the outsider again, sorry that it was always about him and him and never about him, him, and her.

Suddenly, he finds himself pressed into a soft body, thin arms banded tight around him. Sakura smells sweet, not quite like flowers, but like something intangible and in-between. She murmurs into his hair, "Be selfish, Naruto. You've done enough for me and Tsunade and Konoha. Do this for yourself."

"I'll try." He closes his eyes and lets himself be held. "Thank you."

She clenches tighter in response, and he nearly feels his bones creaking before she's suddenly pushing back, eyes tight and dry. "Come back alive. That's all I'm asking for, okay?"

"Okay. I promise."

Sakura snorts a little at that, shaking her head. "You and your promises. Oh yeah, before I forget, Kakashi may or may not have mentioned in passing that someone with dark hair, two mismatched eyes, and a prosthetic left arm has been spotted quite frequently in the Land of Rivers. He's not really bothering to hide himself, the last I heard, so I would start there, if I were you."

"Alright." He grins, widely, and salutes her with his good hand. "I'll see you in a week, Sakura-chan!"

"Good luck, you idiot." She smiles, and it finally reaches her eyes.

Naruto teleports to his apartment. For the first time in months, he feels excited, like he has something to live for. The burn in his blood is back, the way it has only ever been with him.

I'm coming for you, Sasuke. You just wait.

A/N: End of part one. The next part isn't finished yet (it might become a three-shot, who knows), but I will try and get it done soon, especially if you guys like it! And don't worry, it will be all Sasuke and Naruto interaction from now on. Comments are always appreciated! Thank you for reading.

TBC!