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In the beginning, it’s envy. Envy because Sakura is so girly, because she’s small and fragile-looking. Naruto isn’t. She’s broad and stocky, short and masculine and she hates it. She knows that a girl can look masculine and a boy can look feminine and she has no idea what people who aren’t boys or girls do but—she doesn’t want to accept that. She’s okay with other girls looking strong or square or stout, but not if it’s her. Never if it’s her.
Sakura has pink hair. It’s not a big deal, not to most people. But to Naruto it’s everything. She’d been taught that pink is for girls and blue is for boys and Sakura has pink hair and—and Naruto is jealous.
She knows that she’s not supposed to be a girl, not supposed to want girly things like pink hair or pink toys or a pink room or pink skirts and frilly dresses but she does, she is, and whenever someone calls her any different or leads all the real girls away to kunoichi classes she feels like screaming at the top of her lungs. Naruto belongs in those classes. She belongs there.
But then again, Naruto doesn’t belong anywhere. Sakura belongs everywhere. She’s friends with Ino, friends with all the other girls. Naruto would bet that Sakura has sleepovers with Ino where they do girly things like paint their nails and talk about things and—and—and Naruto doesn’t know because all her life people have been telling her she’s a boy when she knows she’s a girl and so she doesn’t know about anything that girls are supposed to do because nobody will let her be one.
Haruno Sakura is the very first person Naruto is jealous of.
Envy turns into anger, sometimes. Only sometimes, because it’s hard to stay mad at Sakura for a reason Naruto doesn’t understand. She only admits it to herself at night when she’s up thinking about how she wants to look as pretty as Sakura does, how she wants pink hair or even red hair, she’d take red hair because at least it looks like pink, looks a little like pink. Only at night, only at midnight, only when nobody else is around to hear her cry.
Tears of anger, tears of sadness. She doesn’t know. Nobody taught her to think her emotions through, so she taught herself to live in the moment. The only thing somebody taught her, somebody that Naruto thinks she might not love anymore, is that girls are girls and guys are guys and she isn’t a girl because she’s a guy. She doesn’t know whether the old man is one of her precious people anymore after saying that, after she’d given him her entire heart, entire being, and he’d said that she was confused. And he’d taught her something she doesn’t even think is true.
And Sakura—girly, precious Sakura—doesn’t know any of this. Doesn’t know that Naruto resents her for being all that she is, for being small and cute and shy and pretty. Doesn’t know Naruto wants to tell her. Wants to be friends with her. Doesn’t know Naruto hates herself because she’s too scared to talk to anyone about herself. About what everyone thinks is himself.
Sakura is the very first person Naruto thinks she might hate. It isn’t true, of course, but it’s a better name for it than anything else she can come up with. What she does hate, and knows she hates, is that Sakura has effectively become the center of Naruto’s life and she doesn’t even know it.
There’s a rule at the academy. It says: don’t fight with other students outside of spars. They’re in the same village to you, loyal to the same things as you, and nothing works unless you work together. Naruto breaks that rule. Spectacularly.
Her first fistfight isn’t with Sasuke, who she thinks is an asshole and would be happy to beat up, but with Sakura, who had called Naruto annoying for the fourth time that day.
Oh, and didn’t it hurt.
“Quit staring at me, Naruto. You’re so annoying,” she says, brushing her hair out of her face with one hand. One dainty hand, small hand, girly hand. Naruto looks at her own hands: rough, calloused, with thick fingers and square thumbnails. Nothing about her hands says, “I’m a girl.”
“Oh, yeah?” Naruto says, knowing that she’s digging herself into a hole that she won’t be able to climb out of. “And what does that make you?”
Sakura glares at her. Her brow furrows, and her lip curls slightly, and it’s all so feminine and girly and beautiful that Naruto sees red for a moment. She isn’t supposed to act like this, isn’t supposed to get mad but today’s one of those days where it’s worse because she had to use the bathroom at school, had to go into the room marked ‘boys’ and people had seen her do it. Naruto’s ten years old, a girl whose body is wrong wrong wrong, a girl who goes into the wrong rooms and hangs out with the wrong people and doesn’t get to go to kunoichi classes. She’s a girl who resents Sakura for everything she is and when Sakura says, “Not annoying? Duh,” she lunges.
“Ack! Get off me!” Sakura shrieks.
Naruto doesn’t care. She lashes out with one fist, manages to hit Sakura right in her pretty round face, and Sakura thrashes in her grip. “No! Hit me back! Or are you scared?” Naruto taunts.
Sakura growls. She looks like she’s on the verge of tears. Naruto can hear Ino yelling for a teacher in the background. Why, she thinks distantly, aren’t they all being supervised right now? “You’re a boy!” Sakura says, and pushes back against Naruto’s grip. When her arm strays too close to Naruto’s face, she takes one look at it and bites it. Not hard, because blood tastes bad, but—hard enough to hurt. To really hurt. “You’re a guy, Naruto! A dumb, stupid, annoying guy, and guys AREN’T SUPPOSED TO HIT GIRLS!”
Naruto cries first, and her tears are ugly and snotty and not at all like Sakura’s quiet crying. Her tears don’t stick to her eyelashes. They don’t drip gently or roll down her cheeks. Her tears are salty and drop messily down onto Sakura’s face. Her tears come with a generous helping of snot. “You stop!” Naruto screams. “I hate you! I hate you! You’re stupid, and annoying, and dumb! It’s you!”
“I haven’t done anything to you!” Sakura yells. “You’re crazy! Stop it!” She frees her arm from Naruto’s mouth and whacks her in the nose. She thinks she sees stars for a second. It becomes hard to think, hard to feel anything other than ouch ouch ouch until reality slams itself into her and she comes back in full force, a maelstrom of anger and hurt and I’m gonna hurt you too!
She’s about to pull back, about to set up for a real punch, one that Iruka-sensei had said would knock an enemy out for a while if you had the arm strength and the right angle, when someone snatches her by her armpits and drags her back. She kicks. She yells. She screams. She flails her arms and legs and struggles and thrashes and shouts put me down! but nobody puts her down. Instead, they grip her tighter, tighter, tighter, until she can’t move and can’t see past the tears and can’t breathe because she’s so wound up, because her throat hurts and her chest is heaving and she wants to get out and hit things.
She calms down, finally, after what feels like an eternity of struggling. Her spit has gone sticky in her mouth, something that always happens when she cries. The occasional sniffle manages to escape, and the someone who’d captured her finally lets her move enough to turn around and look at them.
She blinks a few times. Iruka-sensei comes into focus and she cringes away from him, but her legs are shaky and she falls down, only barely managing to catch herself before she faceplants.
“Iruka-sensei, I—”
“Naruto,” he says, “I’m very disappointed in you.”
This sets off another round of tears. He’s disappointed in her. Iruka-sensei is never mad at her, never yells at her unfairly, never ever ever gives her detentions when she’s not supposed to get them, never calls her a demon or a freak or anything. He’s just Iruka-sensei. He’s just . . . disappointed in her. It makes her feel empty.
“I’m not sorry,” Naruto says stubbornly, crossing her arms and sniffling.
“Naruto . . . ”
“She’s stupid.”
Iruka-sensei sighs. “Look. I’m not sure what your argument was really about, because quite frankly it seems out-of-character for you to attack someone for calling you names. I’m not going to pry, and I don’t want to force you to say sorry, but . . . please try to talk it out with her. We don’t appreciate needless conflicts between students.”
Naruto gets up, slowly but surely, already regretting getting into any of this. She made Iruka-sensei disappointed. She feels hollow. “I’ll . . . I dunno, Iruka-sensei. She’s just so—so—”
Iruka-sensei gives her an indulging smile. “I know. I know, Naruto. Come on. Let’s get your nose checked out. Looks like she did a number on you.”
“Okay.” It hurts. Of course it hurts. But maybe, maybe, she can fix it. And she can fix Iruka-sensei’s disappointment in her, and she can make herself stop not liking Sakura. Maybe she can do it.
“Sakura, let me just—”
“Get away from me, Naruto! I don’t want to talk to you,” Sakura says, turning around and clutching her books to her chest defensively.
“No, I just wanna—”
“I said no!”
“Look, I’m sorry, okay?” Naruto says, practically shouting at her. “I just wanna make it up to you an’ tell you why I—why I—why—why . . . ”
Sakura—sweet, trusting, beautiful Sakura—cautiously lowers her arms and takes a step toward her. “Naruto?”
They’re alone on the street. Naruto figures that it’s now or never. “I don’t like you ‘cause you’re too pretty,” she mutters, a huge contrast to her previous tone. “An’—an’ you look like . . . a girl, and you have pink hair, and your hands are really small.”
The confession takes something out of her. Scoops a hole in her chest. Takes something heavy and makes it lighter.
“So?” Sakura says, looking confused. “I’m a girl. I’m supposed to be like I am.”
“You—you don’t understand,” Naruto says, clenching and unclenching her fists.
“Then tell me so I can understand,” she says, and her confusion turns into an impatient glare, and the dam inside of Naruto breaks and she tells her everything.
“I mean—I am a girl, I swear I am, I just look like a boy and everyone tells me I’m not and I am I really am and I just can’t stand how you’re all—all—all pretty an’ girly and why don’t I look like you? Why can’t I have pink hair why do I gotta look like—like this? ” she asks, panting, out of breath, gesturing toward herself. Toward her orange jumpsuit because orange is the closest to pink she’ll let herself get. Toward her short stocky figure, toward her everything toward her wrong wrong wrong all of it wrong.
Naruto looks up at Sakura, who hasn’t responded as of yet, and finds that she’s got one hand over her mouth and she’s tearing up and she’s—she’s . . .
“Sakura!” Naruto says frantically. She just made another girl cry. Naruto feels mean. She’s starting to find that she doesn’t like feeling mean. “Stop! What—why are you crying?”
“I’m sorry,” she says, sniffling. “I’m just—that sounds really sad, Naruto, and I—what I said yesterday—and my—my mom is like you so when I heard you say that I felt really bad,” she finishes in a rush.
“She is?” Naruto asks incredulously, disregarding the rest of Sakura’s sentence. Already hoping, already believing, already seeing that Sakura didn’t handle it like her jiji did. Learning that there are other people like her.
Sakura nods, quickly, shortly. “Do you wanna come over tonight? You can meet her and—and I don’t know, this is stupid, I’m sorry—”
“No!” Naruto says, putting her hands up. “I wanna—I wanna meet your mom. It’s okay!”
Sakura is the first person to believe Naruto about it, the first person to make her feel like it’s going to be okay. Naruto’s first friend, her first fight, her first enemy, her first sleepover. The first person who invites her over to her house, the first person to fight with Naruto and the first person to forgive her for it. Sakura is Naruto’s first everything.
(Twelve years later, she’s Naruto’s first wife, only wife, first fiancee, first love, first kiss, first everything. And the hurt doesn’t hurt as much anymore and Sakura’s beauty, her prettiness, her goodness doesn’t sting at all because—because Naruto has it too. She has it all, she has a figure, she has makeup, she has prettiness, and Sakura’s the first person around to see her actually looking and feeling like a real girl both at the same time. A true girl and Sakura tells her she’s been a real girl all along, really, Naruto, you have. Mimori-san, Sakura’s mom, tells her she’s a girl inside and out no matter how everyone else saw you at the time, and she is the second person to make her believe in herself. Harue-san, Sakura’s other mom, is the third, when she goes and yells at the Hokage until he, as Naruto’s legal guardian, signs her medical papers. Naruto has it all, everything she’s ever wanted, Sakura by her side on her bed, in a white gown, in her jounin uniform, in her ANBU mask, in everything, and for the first time Naruto thinks everything will be okay, forever and ever and ever.)