empathy (rewritten 2019)

prologue

Sakura Haruno

A great friend, comrade, and hero.

Naruto picked the words out himself. He watched them engrave the letters one by one on his chosen tombstone. And he adamantly urged her parents to let him plan the funeral, calling for Sakura blossoms to decorate her deathly body. A service he paid for, flowers he ordered, and a grave he designed. So why was she so angry?

The funeral had passed and everyone had left. Naruto--whispering, blaming himself--chose to stay and Sasuke, pitying him, watched. The two stood in solemn, pathetic silence before she, panting and desperate, ran and collapsed before the rectangle of packed dirt and trampled pink petals. The men watched as she, shoulders shaking, ran her calloused, dirtied fingertips across the engraved letters, feeling the words.

Naruto recognized her. He sent her on a mission five days ago. She wasn't to return until five days more. She used to hang around Sakura, the two of them attached by the hip. He still didn't know her name.

Him, empathetic and confused--he reached to lay a hand on her shaking frame. And her, angry and torn--she spun and growled and punched him on the cheek. Sasuke was by his side, standing in front of his wounded fellow, glaring down at the girl who could, really, pack quite a punch. The Uchiha looked him up and down, scoffing at her tangled crimson hair, her battered and dirtied uniform, and her bruised knuckles. She barely cleaned herself to pay her respects, and she dared to lay a peasant finger on the Hokage?

"Back off, before I--"

"Before you what, huh? I have no reason to fear you, Uchiha. I know what you did."

"Don't speak to me in that tone, you--"

"Guys, quit it!" Naruto said, holding his cheek. He looked at the woman and offered a laugh. "You pack quite a punch, don't you?"

"Don't try and laugh this off--laugh off what you did." She crossed her arms, staring up at the blonde man. Sasuke gripped his kunai, stepping in front of the hysterical woman.

"Me? I didn't do anything." Naruto was nervous--between the angry woman who had just punched him and the irked Uchiha, if a fight broke out, he wouldn't know who to stop first.

"You know damn well what you did. To her." She pointed to the stone with a shaking, still hand. "You treat her like crap and when she dies you think you can act like a friend? Her death is not a chance for you to gain attention."

"What do you mean? I planned this funeral. Of course I care for her." Naruto said, face hurting. Her accusations, he pretended, were false, but he knew deep down what he did. His heart was still heavy from a week ago. "I treated her like a friend and I loved her so much and I can't believe you'd say that I didn't care! Who are you to say that? I knew her since we were in the Academy!"

"And I knew her since you all abandoned her. When you thought you didn't need her?" She said. Sasuke scoffed. How could she know Sakura for that long without us knowing? "And you have the guts to show your face? Plan a funeral for a girl you pretended to know?"

"We knew Sakura well, if you haven't noticed. We were a team."

"Until you left her."

"We left for the team," Sasuke stepped in front of him. "Naruto left to get stronger on his own and so did I. We could only assume she would do the same in Konoha." Naruto considered intervening but Sasuke was spouting more words than he'd uttered in a year--hands dropped and free, shoulders without tension, eyes cooling down to a sizzling black; as if he were holding it in until Sakura died.

"It wasn't our responsibility to stay with her." He finished.

"And there it is!" She scoffed, kicking the trampled Sakura blossoms. It cost Naruto a fortune to order those flowers and the funeral service paid them no mind as they rushed out to the morning market once it ended. "You treat her like she's your burden. Like she's so weak, she needs some assistance."

Naruto was out of the conversation, watching two strangers fight over a dead friend. The girl--he still didn't know her name yet--spoke from a part of Sakura's life he could never know of. "Hey, let's not fight--"

"What if she was weak? You weren't there during the Chunin Exams. During our missions. You wouldn't know the kind of pathetic decisions she made back there." Sasuke pushed on, blatant before a dead fighter's grave. "You wouldn't know how often we cleaned up after her mess. I don't know who you are, but you have no right to judge us on how well we knew her."

"I'm her friend. A better one than you, obviously." She looked at Naruto. "And after what he just said, you still say you guys care about her?"

"He's just being a bit harsh." Naruto said, pushing Sasuke to the side. "But we don't need to prove ourselves to you. I know I was a good friend to her. I know she deserved a place on the battlefield."

"That's not what you said told her a week ago, was it?" She wasted no time in her response. She watched the blond, gasp and bite back a guilty scowl. "I'm not here to waste my time explaining this to you two. You don't deserve an explanation. You can defend yourself all you want, saying you left for the better of the team, but you did it for glory," she looked at Naruto, before turning to the raven. "and you did it for some pathetic revenge. She loved you two so much and you underestimated her so much that she died with you two never knowing the real her."

She scoffed and, with a knowing glance at the grave, she walked away. "Who's the pathetic ones now?"

Sasuke watched the woman disappear in the morning fog and the squashed petals caught in the frigid wind. He gathered his coat and left, leaving Naruto to stare at the grave and the blossoms and the words. He was always left the aftermath.

But this time Naruto blinked and stared and thought hard of the girl he knew, the girl he loved and the girl he watched as she was laid down into her coffin. He thought of her smiles and her laughs and what could have lied beneath them. And he thought of that stranger, angry and green eyes, speaking of laughs he'd never heard of, secrets he was never told, and truths he fought to keep hidden. He thought of her.

You blame yourself, but you don't even know the half of what you've done.