Giggles and chatter ensued. Only to be expected when talking about relationships and half your audience was preteen girls.
Sakura remembered her academy days with embarrassment. Her motivation back then had been half rivalry with Ino and half adoration of Sasuke in hopes that if she was the best kunoichi in class that he would notice her.
She had strove endlessly for even the smallest acknowledgement but berated and abused Naruto when he went to even greater lengths to receive hers.
She wore the guilt of her decisions like a shackle. One that had been forged and welded closed directly around her heart leaving no chance of breaking free.
Or so she had thought.
Sakura figured she must have gasped like a fish out of the water.
"Rinyūaru—"
"Is it because of Otou-san?"
Sakura abandoned the dishes, kneeling and placing her hands upon her son's shoulders so she could look him in the eye. "I loved your father—"
"And you can't love Naruto?"
"Oh, Rinyūaru, it's not that I don't love Naruto," she started.
"But you love him more."
"No, baby, that's not it."
Her son wrenched away from her grasp. "Then what is it? He's practically my dad at this point. He makes you happy doesn't he?"
If only it was a matter of happiness. If that was the case, Sakura might never had looked twice at Sasuke. But, with all the promises and arguments and tears that made the story of Naruto and Sakura, how could she ever forgive herself if she let him play second fiddle after thirteen years?
"Naruto can be a father to you without being with me," she said, completely side-stepping the question.
"But he loves you," Rinyūaru insisted. "He's here all the time. He talks about you all the time. You should see his face when you're not looking. I've never seen someone so in love."
Sakura wasn't as unaware as her son believed her to be. She'd have to be unbelievably dense to not realize that Naruto still carried a torch for her. So, yes she was aware and did not need everyone from her dead teammates, her coworkers, the gossip in the jounin lounge, and her son to enlighten her that Naruto often looked at her like she was the sun around which he orbited.
Sometimes love wasn't enough. Sometimes the circumstances just sucked, and everyone silently agreed it was better to be happy and separate, pining in secret, than together and miserable because Sasuke's ghost hung between them.
Despite maturing quickly, as their career required, emotional maturity lagged behind. For all that Rinyūaru was training to be a ninja, he was also just a twelve-year-old boy desperately wanting a father to call his own.
As for herself, Sakura had been emotionally running from her problems since the age of seven when she transformed her friendship with Ino into a rivalry over the cutest boy in their class and hadn't stopped running since.
"Naruto and I will get together when the sky turns pink," she said frankly, hating how Rinyūaru wilted before her, "but he will never stop loving you, or being a father figure, if that's what you want."
"Naruto was there when Rinyūaru was born. And the first thing he said, after claiming that my son already shared his father's broody looks straight out of the womb, was that there would not be a child more loved and protected than 'our little dragon,' he declared."
Sakura felt herself get a little misty eyed, reminiscing on one of the most important days of her life, and the memory of Naruto, dressed in formal Hokage robes covered in viscera from the birth of her son because he had been too impatient to hold the babe to let the nurses clean him up.
How could she not love a man that dropped everything to be there for her? Who wasn't afraid to step up and tell the world that he could love another man's child as his own.
She had just been too scared of trapping him, afraid that Naruto would resent his impassioned declaration, and this would be the first promise he failed to keep. And it had been so easy to push it all aside because Rinyūaru's safety, health, and wellbeing came first, second, and every time, even before her own.