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Sasuke wonders what his life would be like had he not had so many scars. If he was born into a normal family, no doujutsu, no legacy. Just a child with the time and space to explore and grow and love and learn, and not lose.
Would he have been happier? Would he have been hopeful and bright-eyed, able to smile easily and to walk along the street of Konoha without a quiet reminder of burdens and bonds on his shoulders? To not look on the bright and happy things in life and immediately, cynically, immediately think of all the ways things could and would go wrong.
What would he have been if he had not met one knuckle-headed ninja and a girl with hair and eyes like spring? Who might have he been? He can feel nothing but gratitude toward the friends who risked it all to pull him out of the darkness. But what if he never had to be lost in the dark in the first place?
He knows things he wishes he didn’t. Like the feeling of death, at his hands and others. Of killing the person you loved most. How the greatest hatred comes from the greatest love.
But he thinks of how true courage is found in the face of fear, how love is found in the most unsuspecting places. How strength is found in being weak. How the feeling of having friends to walk with you through the darkest, most trying times, is something more precious than gold. How the feeling of forgiveness, of yourself and others, of redemption and compassion is after a lifetime of hatred makes it easier to breathe every day. Had he never been lost in the first place, he could have never been found.
...
Sakura wonders how a girl from nowhere and nothing becomes one of the strongest kunoichi in the world. Her parents were nothing more than genin. But yet, they were happy. Living a life of mediocrity.
How she might have ended up like them. Another third-rate genin, content to marry some other lower-ranked shinobi, still obsessed over her hair and pretty boys. How she might have been had she not pushed herself, if she didn’t meet her boys who pushed her beyond the moon and then some.
She was woefully underprepared for this world-- a world of monsters and gods and men. What was she? Just a girl from a normal family with no auspicious birth or fate or past lives of greatness-- just Sakura. Just a girl. Weak, pretty. Transient. Fragile and delicate. But unyielding and loving and tenacious. She could've given up. She could've cried and given up. She could have resigned herself to a life of mediocrity and followed in her parents footsteps, a world where lives and fates lay in her hands, where she would not have to worry about waking up with everyone she still loves being alive.
But would she have been happier?
She changed and grew and bloomed and, well, it would have been so easy to succumb to her nothingness- she came from nothing, and in other circumstances, she could have died as nothing. She would’ve never bloomed into the woman she is today, she would have never reached her full potential. She would have never been great. She would have never changed.
...
Naruto wonders what might’ve been if he weren’t born who he was, without the pain of being a Jinchuuriki, without the pain of only getting to know how amazing his parents were only after they were dead. If he didn’t grow up alone in a world that hated him for being born, for things beyond his control.
Would he have had friends? Siblings to joke around with and laugh with? Looking around him today, he knows he is beyond lucky and blessed and grateful. But looking back on all the pain he had to endure to get to this place, would he redo it again?
He is okay now, he knows. He has found love and family. He finally has a place to come home to, friends to patch him up when he’s hurt, and friends to punch things with when he’s mad, and even friends to punch when he’s mad. But he still wishes he knew what it felt like to come home to a mother and a father and siblings. To go eat out with friends after school, to have a best friend to confide in and laze around eating ramen with. It would have been so easy.
If only he had just been born differently and things would have been easy for him to be happy. Being happy certainly has not been easy for Naruto. But he finally is.
...
Growing up is not easy, they think. They are all a few months, weeks, days, minutes scant of adulthood without ever knowing the arrival time of an abstract idea.
They are somewhere, something in between, straddling the line between the children they once were and the adults they will become.
Something liminal, like the time between night and day, between day and night, but whether it’s the sun setting on childhood and the moon rising on adulthood, or the moon setting on childhood and the sun rising on adulthood is something they yet have to find.