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Dearest diary,
This is my first entry. I’ve decided to start a diary today, officially, because today is officially the day my love story with Sasuke officially begins. I can just tell. Call it kunoichi intuition!
Sasuke and I are on the same team! It almost feels like a dream... I couldn't even process everyone's reaction properly, I was so shocked… wish I could see Ino's face! I won I won I won!
I didn't even have time to celebrate, because I got hit with a bucket of cold water. I went to complain about that idiot Naruto and got called out by Sasuke! Honestly, I felt extremely guilty. Naruto can be, and almost always is, a pain, but I was unfair to him. Sasuke was right (like always! he's soooo amazing!)
I've decided that, starting today, I'll treat Naruto better. I'm going to be a better kunoichi from now on, so it's only fair that I also become a better person. I'm excited to live adventures with Team 7! (and so my love story with Sasuke begins too, teheehe)
Genin Entry 1 of ???
My first training session was chaotic!
Kakashi, our teacher, gave us a mission where we had to capture a little bell he was carrying, and whoever failed would go back to the academy. I could never subject myself to such humiliation and lose the chance to live this new story with Sasuke, so I did everything I could to pass that test. That was the ultimate test of love!
I stayed close to him the whole time, but ended up losing sight of him. When I found him, he was practically dying and I fainted. Now, with a clearer head, I realize I was the victim of a genjutsu... how embarrassing! Well, more things for me to work on. Love really does blind us...
When I woke up he was right there, waiting for me... aww... I hugged him, relieved that he was alive (genjutsu, genjutsu, genjutsu, say it three times in front of the mirror...)
I have then, officially decided Sasuke is the coolest, most secretly good person in the entire world, and nobody can convince me otherwise!!
Here's proof, in case future-me forgets: today Kakashi-sensei tied Naruto to a post as punishment and said none of us were allowed to feed him. We were all so hungry. Sasuke acted like he didn't care at all, ate his lunch all cool and quiet like always… and then just, casually, "accidentally" gave some to Naruto when Kakashi wasn't looking! I saw it! He didn't even make a big deal about it, he just did it like it was nothing!
I gave Naruto some of mine too, obviously, because Sasuke doing it first made it feel less scary to get caught. He's like that, I think: pretends he doesn't care about anyone, acts all cold and mysterious, but then does stuff like this where you can just TELL he cares, he just doesn't want anyone to know it.
I love that about him. I really do. He's a good person underneath the ice prince act, I just know it.
Diary, I have more evidence for the "Sasuke secretly cares" file!
Today on our mission, some enemy ninja attacked out of nowhere and I froze. I completely froze, I'm almost ashamed to even write it. But Sasuke was there in like half a second, standing in front of me like it was nothing, ready to fight for both of us. He didn't even look back to check if I was okay first, he was just already between me and the danger, like his body decided before his brain did.
Afterward he acted totally normal about it, didn't even mention it, like it wasn't a big deal at all. But I noticed. I always notice.
I used to think being cool meant not caring about anything. I don't think that anymore. I think Sasuke is proof that the coolest thing you can do is care so much you don't even think twice about it, and then pretend you didn't.
Badass-est diary,
Controlling chakra is so easy! I didn't know I could be capable of this.
It's in moments like this that I realize I'm really becoming a ninja: I climbed a tree in such a cool way! Even Kakashi praised me... but I don't think Sasuke cared much.
Dear diary, it was the first time I saw cruelty and poverty up close, and I feel almost childish having to come here to vent about it.
It was also the first time I saw death so closely and so intimately.
He had needles all over his body, could barely breathe. My heart weighed a thousand tons seeing him, and if I could have made it lighter, so it would be easier to pump, I would have given my heart to Sasuke right there in that moment. He was so cold.
Now, with a more level head (and with Sasuke alive, thank goodness!) I realize how terrible I was. I basically abandoned the only mission we'd been given, to protect Mr. Tazuna, I broke rule #25, and I cried, cried, cried, in front of the very people I was supposed to protect.
That mission was also the moment I first felt a sense of community, with an entire village coming together to protect their homes.
Sasuke is fine and alive, but I think some things in me won't be the same anymore.
I'm a little afraid of the future, but for now I'm happy to have survived this mission!
Diary, I don't even know how to start this one,
Sasuke says I should train more.
I'm well aware.
But he said I'm worse than Naruto. And Naruto can be a pain in the ass, and I almost never see improvement in him, but his perseverance impresses me, because when I do see improvement, it’s huge.. So what does that make me, with no improvement, no perseverance, nothing worth mentioning at all?
And he's right, Sasuke. I don't need to just be a ninja he's proud to have by his side. I need to be someone I'm proud of too, on my own, without needing him to say it first.
But can I actually do that? Is there something in me beyond my brain? (and okay, fine, my looks!) Am I even in the right place, on the right team, doing the right thing?
Do I worry so much about us being a family, Team 7, that I don't notice I might be the one holding everyone back?
Writing this in a rush, exam in ten minutes, my handwriting looks like a crime scene!
Sasuke praised my genjutsu analysis. I know I shouldn't brag, but it's true, and I'm allowed to be proud of one thing today.
There's a WEIRD guy who blew me a kiss and then fought Sasuke, omg, and Ino's here too being hella annoying as always.
I'll write more later. There's a lot going on and I don't fully understand any of it yet.
It's been a while since I last opened this.
Not because nothing happened. Because too much did, and I didn't know which parts of it belonged on paper.
My hair is short now. I still catch myself looking for it in the mirror before I remember it's gone, not sad about it, just recalibrating what I look like to myself. It's practical. I like practical, lately.
I don't fully understand what happened to Sasuke. I don't know who Orochimaru is, not really, not enough to explain it to anyone, maybe not even to myself.
Seeing him like that hurt worse than seeing him nearly dead with needles on his skin. That, at least, I understood: a body breaking is a body breaking. This was different. There was something in him I didn't recognize, and it didn't scare me the way it scared everyone else. I think that should worry me more than it does, because Sasuke, the boy I know, could never scare me, but that thing wasn’t Sasuke.
Naruto was down. Sasuke was down. It was just me standing, and I did what needed doing, and then I needed protecting too, after, the way I always seem to. Even Ino had to come.
He made me promise not to tell Naruto about the mark. Said it might help him get what he wants. Said he wouldn't forgive even me if I got in the way. I still have my head wrapped around it: even me. Not even me.
I keep asking myself if silence is the same thing as loyalty, or if I've just found a very convincing way to call it that.
Dear diary, here’s to hope.
I bought Sasuke a flower today. A daffodil, if you want the specific kind of embarrassing detail future-me will want to remember. Ino came with me and she picked a rose, obviously, very on-brand, as we walked to the hospital together like it was a completely normal thing to do, two girls buying flowers for the same boy, like we didn’t hate each other’s guts for years.
He wasn't even there. Already discharged, already gone somewhere to push himself harder than he should. I stood in the doorway of an empty hospital room holding a flower I now had no one to give to, and I don't know why that felt like such an accurate summary of loving him so far.
I left the daffodil there anyway.
I've been so worried about him since that day. He's different now, more closed off, training alone until late, going somewhere in his head I can't follow him to.
I tried talking to him. He barely looked at me. Whatever improvement I’ve been seeing in him the last months is now completely gone. I feel shut out.
Kakashi's hiding something too. I can tell by what he doesn't say more than by anything he does. I wish I understood what that mark actually costs him, instead of only what Sasuke's willing to tell me.
I'm here, memorizing theory, wondering if that's its own kind of falling behind, or if it's the only kind of progress that's actually mine.
I've decided I'm done watching from the sidelines of my own team. I'll find a way to matter, even if it means studying until I resent the sight of my own notes, or training until I can’t feel my muscles anymore.
Diary,
The village was attacked. I'm writing this with my hands still not entirely steady.
The Third Hokage is dead. I grew up seeing his face on that mountain and thinking it was permanent, the way children think anything that's always been there will always be there. It isn't. Nothing is, apparently, as I’ve been learning lately.
Not my hair, not my feud with Ino, not Third Hokage, maybe not even Team 7.
I saw Sasuke fighting Gaara and I couldn't move, couldn't even say his name out loud. For one long second I thought I was about to lose him, again, the same fear from the bridge, and that was when my body could actually move. At the fear of losing him for real.
Everyone keeps repeating the same things. The village will rebuild. This is the shinobi way. I don't think repeating something enough times is the same as it being true, or at least not the same as it being comforting. I'm not okay. I don't think anyone actually is, underneath the rebuilding talk.
I don't have anything wiser to add tonight. I just needed to put it somewhere that wasn't inside my own chest.
I cut an apple for him today and he knocked it out of my hand without even looking at me.
I don't think he meant to, because his eyes had that faraway look they get, somewhere I can't follow him to. Naruto walked in right after, and Sasuke's whole face changed, sharpened into something almost cruel, and he challenged him to a fight on the spot. I chased them up to the roof and got in between their attacks, which everyone agrees now was a spectacularly bad idea, but I couldn't just stand there and watch them tear each other apart over something neither of them will explain to me.
Kakashi pulled us apart. Gave Sasuke a whole lecture about how revenge only ever leaves you empty. I don't know if it landed. I keep replaying the look on his face before he knocked the apple away, like he was furious at something that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with fruit that happened to be in his eyeline at the wrong moment.
I have a bad feeling. I'm writing that down so that later, whatever happens, I can prove to myself I saw it coming.
He really left.
I want to write down, honestly, that I knew before I even started running that I wasn't going to stop him. I went anyway, because no amount of knowledge has surpassed my faith so far. I used every argument I had in me, even confessing the only thing I had left that hadn't already failed: that I loved him, not the version of loving him I used to write about in here at twelve, all breathless and half-invented, but the version that comes from actually knowing him.
I offered to leave with him. I begged, honestly, in a way I used to think I was above.
Sasuke thanked me.
He never thanks me. For anything. I think that's why I still don't know whether to laugh or cry remembering it.
The last thing I do remember is him behind me. I never saw it coming. When I woke up the bench was cold and he was already hours gone.
I wish I could write that I was angry. The truth is more complicated than that, and I'm old enough now to let it stay complicated instead of flattening it into a feeling that's easier to spell. Some part of me thinks he did it so he wouldn't have to watch my face while he walked away. I don't know if that's mercy or just a story I need, but I've decided it doesn't have to be one or the other to matter to me.
I promised myself he'll come back. I don't know if I believe that, exactly, or if I just need something to believe to be able to stand up tomorrow. Maybe those end up being the same thing, eventually, if you hold onto them long enough.
Either way, I'm done being the version of myself who has to beg someone to stay. Next time, I bring him back myself.
Dear diary, long time no see.
It's been two and a half years since I last saw him. Two and a half years spent rebuilding myself, deliberately, piece by piece, so I'd never again be the girl who had nothing to offer but a plea.
We finally found him.
He wasn't the same. I knew, logically, that he wouldn't be, but still, nothing prepared me for looking into his eyes and recognizing nothing there.
I'd rehearsed a speech. Hundreds of times, over years, word for word. I couldn't say a single line of it.
Naruto tried. Screamed, begged, in that specific way only he's capable of. Sasuke simply didn't care, the way you don't care about a chapter you've already closed and don't intend to reread.
I remember promising myself I'd get strong enough to bring him back with my own hands. I'm stronger now than I've ever been, and I still felt exactly as powerless as I did on that bench, years ago.
The difference is that this time, I didn't cry in front of him. I'm choosing to count that as a kind of progress, even if it doesn't feel like much of one yet.
Naruto almost died today. I mean that literally, not the way I used to write things like that at twelve, when everything felt like the end of the world by default.
Sasuke had a hand raised over him, and for exactly one second, I counted it, later, lying awake, nothing happened. He didn't move. I've spent two and a half years cataloguing every version of him I could remember, trying to work out which one was real, and in that one second I saw something I recognized. Not mercy, necessarily. Something more like hesitation, like a part of him that hadn't fully agreed to what the rest of him was doing.
Then it passed, and he walked away like none of it had mattered, and I hate that I noticed the hesitation at all, because noticing it means I still care what it means.
I used to think loving someone meant believing the best version of them was the real one, buried somewhere underneath everything else. I know now that isn't always true, and sometimes people bury things because they've decided not to be that anymore, not because it's waiting to resurface. But I still believe, and I've earned the right to say I believe it now, rather than just hoping it: there's something in him worth all of this. I watched it hesitate today. That's not nothing.
I'm not chasing a fantasy. I know exactly what I'm asking of him: to become, eventually, the person who hesitates, instead of the one who doesn't. I only have to still be standing here when he does.
Training again at dawn. Tsunade says my chakra control is finally catching up to my temper.
I lied to Naruto today. The ugliest lie I've ever told, on purpose, out loud, to his face.
I told him I didn't love Sasuke anymore. Told him to let it go, forget the promise, that I was done needing anyone to bring anyone back. I've never watched someone try so hard to believe something while some part of me stood there knowing it wasn't true. Naruto saw through it in about a minute anyway, called me out for lying to myself right along with him. It didn't matter. I'd already decided. This wasn't going to be his weight to carry anymore. It was always mine.
I found Sasuke standing over Karin, sword raised, about to kill his own teammate over something I still don't fully understand. I told him I wanted in, that I'd come to join him, that I still loved him, that revenge could be something we did together instead of something that kept taking him away from me. He didn't believe a word of it, and he shouldn't have. He said if I meant it, I'd have to prove it myself: kill her.
I walked toward her with the intention laid out plainly in my hands, and I froze. I don't regret freezing. I think I'd regret it more if I hadn't.
He came at me from behind with Chidori before I'd even turned back around. Kakashi-sensei got there in time and I remember him afterward, furious in a quiet way I'd never seen from him, staring Sasuke down like he genuinely couldn't recognize him anymore.
I keep circling back to one detail. He didn't hesitate that time. Not the way I keep telling myself he does, deep down, when it counts. I have to sit with that instead of writing around it.
I went back out afterward. Alone again, because apparently that's a decision I keep making under a different name each time. I'd made a poisoned kunai days earlier and never told anyone why. Some part of me must have always known it would come to this.
I found my opening and went for his back. No confession this time, no lie dressed up as love, just the blade, and my intention, finally aligned with each other for once. And still, at the very last second, I hesitated. Flashes of who he used to be got in the way of who he apparently is now, and I couldn't finish it.
He turned and had me by the throat before I could recover. There was nothing rehearsed about how close it came this time. No performance, no test to pass. Just a decision he was fully prepared to make.
I don't know how to end this entry. I don't think there is an ending yet.
A boy I healed on the ward gave me a letter today. Confessed his feelings, plainly, said he didn't know if he'd survive the war but wanted me to know regardless. I've never had someone hand me their heart with that much honesty attached to it.
I told him the truth, that I already love someone else. He took it well, better than I deserved given how distracted I must have looked accepting it. Said the person I loved was probably a good man, wherever he was.
I sat with that after he left. A good man. I don't know if that's the word I'd have picked for Sasuke on my worse days. But I still choose to believe it.
He came back.
Sasuke simply appeared on the battlefield, in the middle of everything falling apart, and started fighting for us instead of against us, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, after everything.
I didn't cry. I want that on record, with my own handwriting, because it matters. The old me would have, out of relief or vindication or the sheer shock of finally being right about something. I just kept healing the person in front of me, because that's the job, and some quiet, steady part of me that's grown over these years simply thought: there it is. There he is. I knew it, I knew him.
I don't understand what changed, or exactly when, or whether "changed" is even the right word for it. Maybe it was always going to happen on his own timeline, and nothing any of us did or said or nearly died trying to say ever moved that timeline by a single day. I used to need to believe my love was doing something. I don't need that anymore. I only needed to still be here when it happened.
Naruto looked at him like he'd gotten his best friend back. I looked at him and just thought: good.
There's still so much to do. I know that. I'm not handing myself a fairy tale in the middle of a war. But for the first time in years, I let myself believe the ending might actually be a good one, not just one I've talked myself into surviving.
Diary,
The war is over. I keep writing the sentence and it still doesn't feel real, more like a fact I've memorized than something I lived.
I got there after the worst of it. Naruto missing an arm, Sasuke missing the other.
He let me heal him. That's the detail I keep returning to. Not the fight, not whatever passed between them out there that neither of them will fully explain to me, just that he sat there and let me touch him and didn't flinch, didn't go cold, didn't look through me like furniture. I've spent years learning to read every version of his silence. This one was different. It felt like being let in, not shut out.
But he looked so deeply sad.
I didn't say anything profound. I didn't cry at first, because I thought I've used up whatever part of me used to cry easily, somewhere over these last years, and what's left just goes quiet and gets to work instead.
But then, he said he was sorry, and that was when I started bawling like a child.
I think about the girl who used to write in here that she wasn't sure there was anything to her beyond her brain, and, fine, her looks. I think about how sure she was that she was the weak link, that she was the one holding the team back, that being good at theory was somehow a consolation prize for not being good at the things that actually mattered.
It's strange, looking back at her from here. Not because she was wrong to feel that way, but really because she had no idea what she was going to become, and I did nothing to deserve knowing that, I just kept training on the days it felt pointless.
I don't need anyone to tell me I'm strong anymore. I used to need that so badly it embarrasses me now, looking back, needing Sasuke's eyes on me to know I mattered, needing proof I could hold my own beside two people who seemed to have been born already finished. Now I just know it, the way you know your own hands. I put them inside a person's failing heart today and it kept beating because of what I did.
I don't think I'll ever stop being a little in awe of her, honestly, the twelve-year-old with the super long hair who genuinely thought she had nothing to offer. I wish I could go back and tell her: you're going to be the one who saves everyone. Not the one who gets saved. I don't know if she'd believe me. I almost don't believe it myself, some days, and I'm the proof.
I keep thinking about something no one really says out loud, not even now, maybe especially not now.
He was a teenager when all of it happened.
I used to write about him here like he was something enormous and unknowable, half myth, half weapon. And I think part of that was true. But another part of it, the part it took me years to actually sit with, is that he was just a kid carrying something no kid should have had to carry alone, making the kind of decisions no one that age should have to make with that much at stake, mostly without anyone qualified enough around him to say: this is too much, put it down, let someone help you carry it.
I'm not writing this to excuse anything, after all, we are the same age, and the few months I have on him did not make me wiser. Some of what he did doesn't get excused just because of how old he was when he did it. But I think I finally understand something I couldn't back then, that the boy who broke both arms of the boy who hurt me and the boy who used to sneak food to Naruto were exactly the same age, exactly the same person, and somehow both of those things were true about him at once.
Even if I had spent two and a half years not knowing who he would become, he was still Sasuke, and I always had faith in that.
It makes me gentler about it now, looking back. Not naive. Just gentler.
You know what, diary?
I've been thinking about something Sai said once, back before any of this made much sense to any of us: that he couldn't really understand bonds, not the instinctive way the rest of us seemed to, but that he'd noticed something in how Sasuke and I orbit each other, even at our worst. He called it belief, plainly, like it was a technique he was still studying from the outside.
He's right that it's a belief. I believed in who Sasuke could be back when there was no evidence for it at all, when believing it cost me, over and over, in ways a more sensible person might have called it quits over. I've never regretted it, not even on the worst nights.
But I don't think people talk enough about the other half of it. He believed in something too, this whole time, even when he had no reason to and even less patience for saying so out loud. He never once doubted what I was capable of, not my strength, not my judgment, not what I could become if I stopped waiting for someone's permission to become it. He pushed me because he expected more from me, and I understand now that expecting more from someone is its own quiet form of faith, maybe the least sentimental kind there is, and maybe, because of that, the most honest one.
We spent years believing in two different versions of each other that hadn't happened yet. I think that might be the actual definition of what we are.
Sasuke is leaving again.
It could have felt like the first time, but it doesn't, not even close, and I think that's the entire point of keeping this, proof, in ink, that I can tell the difference now.
The first time, I ran after him in the dark and begged, and he thanked me and knocked me out so he wouldn't have to watch my face while he walked away. This time he found me. Told me himself, in daylight, looking at me the whole time. Said he needed to see, with his own eyes, the world he'd nearly helped destroy, before he could earn the right to stay in it. Said it wasn't about running from anything anymore.
I asked to come with him.
He said no, of course.
It was something he had to do alone, that atonement isn't something you can borrow someone else's strength for, and that if I came it would just become one more thing he owed me, and he's done letting the people who love him pay for what he did. He said it like he'd actually thought it through before and rehearsed the speech, knowing I would ask him.
He said “maybe next time”, and I believed him.
I cried a little on the way home. Not from heartbreak this time. Something closer to pride.
I'm not afraid he won't come back anymore. I'm just going to be here, getting stronger, becoming someone worth coming back to, for as long as that takes. I will be the home he will return to, at last.
Sasuke is back.
I'd rehearsed this too, over the years. Funny how much of my life with him has been rehearsal, speeches written and never given, versions of this reunion imagined so many times they'd started to feel more real than my actual memories. None of them resembled what actually happened, which was: I was mid-shift at the hospital, elbow-deep in someone else's chakra system, and Ino stuck her head in and said "he's at the gate," the way you'd mention the weather.
I didn't run. I finished the procedure. I want to be honest here, even if it doesn't make for the most romantic entry! I finished the procedure, washed my hands, and walked to the gate at a normal pace, because the twelve-year-old who would have sprinted out mid-surgery doesn't exist anymore, and I'm not sorry she's gone.
He looked older. Not just the years — something in how he was standing, like someone who's finally set down a weight after carrying it a long way.
He asked me to come with him.
Sasuke just said it, plainly, over dinner (a date!), like it had already been decided in his head for a while and he was only now getting around to telling me, that he wanted me to come with him this time. Not the village. Not a mission. Just the two of us, wherever the road happened to go.
I didn't cry, but I did have to set my chopsticks down for a second, just to actually witness it happening instead of living through it the way I usually do, half a step behind my own life.
I thought about the girl on the bench. I thought about the girl in the clearing, kunai in hand, telling a lie neither of us believed. I let both of them sit with me for a moment, and then I let them go, because neither of them needed to answer for me anymore.
This version of me just gets to say yes.
So I did, a thousand times.
Dearest, long-missed diary,
I found this notebook, long lost, in boxes in my room. So much has happened, I can't read through it without getting emotional. This, however, will be my last entry in this diary. So much happened, but like the branches of a cherry tree through winter, I persevered until I reached spring.
I can't write the way I used to anymore, and I don't even have much left to say. I've realized I'm now living, more than ever, a life completely filled by the outcomes of a love I never gave up on, and one that so often comes back to find me too.
I'm not the twelve-year-old anymore, or the fifteen-year-old, or seventeen, or nineteen. I'm a woman now. And I have, now, my own twelve-year-old...
...who took his name, and whose face is almost entirely mine, except for the eyes, which are his, without a shadow of a doubt.
And sometimes I forget, you know? I forget that he ever left at all. When he's home, it's like he never went anywhere, and it's in those moments that I realize, again, that I'm still being bombarded by this love, every single day, in a way I never imagined I'd still be capable of feeling after all this time.
But I know he left, once. And I think he never forgets it either — I see it in the small things, in how he always tells us when he's about to travel, even when he doesn't have to, in how he has never, not once, failed to come back. It's like every day at home is a quiet attempt to apologize for all the ones he wasn't. He's never said it in words. He doesn't need to. I learned to read him a long time ago.
Sarada has his hair, his exact way of frowning when she's concentrating, but what strikes me most is the way she looks at him, with a devotion so complete, so unguarded, that sometimes I have to look away, because I recognize it. I used to wear that exact look myself, once, looking at the same man, years ago, with no idea whether it would ever be returned.
I don't know if I'll ever keep a diary again. Maybe I won't need to, and maybe this was always just a way of keeping hope and faith somewhere safe, until it no longer needed a hiding place.
Thank you, diary, for being that place.
With love, always,
Sakura.