Author's Note: So, it's been a few months. I hope you hadn't all given up on me, though I wouldn't blame you. First off, let me just say you guys are awesome. Such lovely feedback, it made me smile. All the reviews, favs, and follows are sososo appreciated. I thought people would find this one kind of... weird, and it is, but I've mostly had a lot of fun writing it (with some spots of hair-tearing frustration here and there).

I hope this chapter won't be too much of a let down after the extended wait. I didn't get around to covering near as much as I wanted to.

The rest of the day, Sakura kept thinking over what Naruto had said to her, to the point that it seemed to consume her every thought. Part of her railed against the claims of a relative stranger and wanted to deny that he could possibly be right. But the more she thought about it the less reason she could find to do so.

She was surrounded by servants that were ready to jump at any request she made and the guards watched over her and kept her safe, but there was not a single one she could call a friend. She could not speak to them as an equal nor could she think of any of them as companions. Most of them would probably be appalled if she even tried to befriend them.

Her mother was overbearing, even though she meant well, but her determination to mold Sakura a certain way had created chasm between them that could not be bridged. And her father, the only person she'd been close to as a child, had drawn away from her very suddenly and set about finding his daughter a suitable husband.

Though she was not alone in the literal sense, she certainly felt very alone. No one saw her for who she was, only who she should be. No one had ever really asked what she wanted or seemed to give a thought to how she might feel. It was very isolating and Sakura often thought she might as well have been invisible.

But somehow, with Naruto she had felt a little less alone. Maybe it was because he didn't seem to have any expectations of her, or maybe it was because he was the first boy her age to show some interest in her, though she still couldn't figure out why. He talked to her like he actually understood how she felt, like he actually cared. It was comforting, but also unsettling, as she found herself trying to decide if the whole encounter had even been real.

Naruto had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and disappeared much the same way. Although Sakura didn't much believe in spirits or ghosts, she had to wonder if the strange young man had actually been some otherworldly being, or even a simple conjuring of her imagination. But then she'd remember the heat of his hand on her wrist, telling her mind that he was very much real and alive.

The whole encounter just seemed too odd to be real and at the same time too real to have been imagined, but Sakura supposed the only way to be sure was to go back and meet Naruto again as he'd asked. If he did appear again, she would ask him just who he was, and what he was, if she had to.

Sakura's mind was resolute two days later when she slipped out into the forest, making her way briskly up the path to the Inari shrine. At the top of the path, she saw the shrine come into view, but no Naruto in sight. She sighed gustily, unable to understand why she felt so disappointed. She should have known. Though now Sakura had to wonder if she was losing her senses to have imagined something so vividly.

It was a harsh dose of reality, especially with the realization that she'd been excited at the possibility of seeing Naruto again. Her mind didn't want to accept that what she believed to have experienced was not actually real. But, just because he wasn't here now didn't mean he was just something she imagined. He had no way of knowing when she would come back.

Sakura wandered toward the shrine, passing under the torii and peeking around in the hope of spotting blond hair or a blue kimono. Of course, there was nothing of the sort. When she reached the end of the shrine, she started back out, intending to return home and try again another day.

She walked through the last of the torii when she heard a voice call out to her off to her left. "Sakura-chan."

Sakura turned, and there he was, emerging out from the trees that lead deeper into the forest. How had she not heard him make a sound before he said her name?

"I was starting to think you might not come back," Naruto said.

"I was starting to wonder if you even real." It sounded ridiculous now that she'd said it out loud. She waited for Naruto to laugh at her, and to her mortification that was exactly what he did. His laughter was deep and unrestrained and though Sakura liked the sound of it, she didn't like that it was at her expense.

"Stop laughing at me!" she said, her voice rising shrilly, but Naruto just hunched over, arms around his middle, and laughed harder.

Sakura's hands formed fists at her sides and she had to fight the urge to hit him. It really wasn't that funny. Not from her end at least, being the one laughed at.

Finally, Naruto's laughter settled and he straightened. "Well, I'm here and I'm definitely real," he said, amusement bubbling over in his voice, biting down more laughter. He lifted one arm and held it out towards her. "But you can poke me if you wanna make sure, Sakura-chan."

"Don't tease me," she said, half turning away and folding her arms.

She'd wanted to question Naruto, but she wouldn't be able to bring herself to now. He had already laughed at her once. What would he think of her and her sanity if she accused him of not being real and then asked him if he were actually human? She'd just been overthinking all this, her imagination running wild. Yes, Naruto seemed very different than anyone Sakura had ever met before, but that could simply be because he lived in the woods outside civilization. Someone like that wouldn't act the way she was used to, would seem strange and otherworldly.

"What are you thinkin' about, Sakura-chan?" Naruto said. His voice was much closer than it had been before and Sakura raised her head to see him standing only a few inches in front of her, leaning over to try to see face and looking at her intently.

"Naruto," she scolded, taking a quick step back to get some space between them. "Not so close."

Naruto straightened, a flash of something like hurt in his eyes that had Sakura immediately regretting her reaction. "Oh, I forgot you don't like it when I get too close," Naruto said, scratching at the back of his head.

She shook her head. "It's not that," she said, though it was. Naruto seemed to have no concept of boundaries and she wasn't used to being around someone who invaded her personal space so casually. "You just surprised me."

However, Naruto didn't appear to be listening. He was looking off into the forest, towards the mountains and then he glanced back at her with a grin. She couldn't begin to guess what he was thinking, but she was sure if any other man had looked at her like that, with such a mischievous light in their eyes, she would believe he had very indecent intentions. But on Naruto it just made him look like an ill-behaved child about to play a trick. Either way, Sakura wasn't sure she trusted that expression.

"Sakura-chan, I want to show you something. Is that okay?" he said.

"I… suppose?" Sakura answered, confused.

She was finding that Naruto seemed to move rather quickly from one thought to the next and she was momentarily caught off guard by the abrupt change of topic. One moment he looked hurt by her apparent rejection of his closeness, and the next it was all but forgotten. Sakura wondered if she would ever grow used to his unusual mannerisms.

"This way," Naruto said, and turned back in the direction he'd come.

When Sakura did not immediately follow, he looked back over his shoulder. "Aren't you coming, Sakura-chan?"

His tone was childishly impatient tone and Sakura bit down the desire to scold him for being rude. Honestly, this boy really knew how to stir up her temper, and he didn't even seem to realize he was doing it. Taking a breath to steady herself and her rising temper, she gathered up the hem of her kimono to follow Naruto deeper into the woods pushing aside the hesitance she felt. For all Mebuki's scolding of her recklessness, Sakura had never dared to go any farther into the forest past the shrine for fear of becoming lost. She wasn't completely irresponsible.

Naruto seemed to know his way rather well though, she thought as he led her farther away from the shrine. There was no discernible path here and the trees and underbrush was much ticker. Sakura had to pick her way carefully to try to avoid snagging her clothes, though she knew it wasn't doing much good. When she got home, she'd have to hide away her kimono somewhere the servants wouldn't find it. Fortunately, it wasn't one of her nicer kimonos and no one was likely to notice if it disappeared.

Sakura felt decidedly clumsy as she tramped over dry leaves that crunched loudly under her feet, stumbled over tree roots and fallen logs and pushed low hanging branches out of her way. While Naruto, walking just a few feet ahead of her, hardly made a sound as he walked. He was completely at home here, she noticed, as much a part of the forest as the birds, deer or other any other animal.

"Are we almost there?" Sakura asked after they'd been walking some time. By now, they were deep into the forest, close to the mountains. Sakura had never been so far from home and she was sure without Naruto she'd have been hopelessly lost. She certainly hoped he knew what he was doing.

Naruto paused and she stopped just behind him. "It's not far now. Can you hear it?"

"Hear?" Sakura turned her head one way and then the other, seeing nothing but endless trees in all directions and she couldn't hear anything unusual; just the distant call of a bird. "No I –" she started to say, and then paused, her ears suddenly catching a sound, like rushing water.

With a wave of his hand to urge her on, Naruto started off again and took her down the side of a steep slope. The trees thinned and opened up into a valley clearing with a roaring waterfall gushing over the side of a cliff that was at least a hundred meters tall, emptying into a large pool.

Here, in this hidden valley untouched by human hand, the grass was still lush, vibrant green and dotted with wildflowers, as if unaffected by the coming winter. In fact, it was unseasonably warm for autumn. It gave Sakura the feeling that this place was its own separate world, like she'd stepped out of the world she had always known and into one she never knew existed.

Sakura spread her arms wide, closing her eyes and spinning a slow circle all the way around in a moment of abandon. She stopped and tilted her head back, eyes still closed, and breathed deep. The wild air filled her lungs and tasted like summer.

"It's beautiful," she said, looking to Naruto who was watching her with a warm expression. "But, why did you want to bring me here?"

He shrugged. "I thought you'd like it. Do you?"

"I do. It's amazing," Sakura said, nodding. When had she last felt so happy? She honestly couldn't remember.

Naruto stretched his arms high above his head and threw himself back gracelessly to land with a heavy thud in the grass. "Good. If Sakura-chan is happy that's all that matters."

"What exactly is this place though? It feels… different here somehow," she said.

Naruto's expression became pinched with thought, his brow deeply furrowed and his mouth a thin line, like putting his thoughts into words was a terrible strain for him. "I guess – you could say it has a lot of special energy. Something like that."

"Is it always like this then?"

Naruto gave a humming sound that Sakura took for a yes. "Even in winter?" she said.

"Yup," said Naruto, grinning.

"That's – something like this shouldn't be possible." Every rational part of her mind said it was impossible. A place that felt like summer, warm and green regardless of the season, just didn't exist. Yet here she was, seeing it with her own eyes.

"Why not? There's a lot of things you probably never thought existed or were possible, but that's just 'cause you're not looking clearly. If you open your eyes, you'll find a bunch of things you never thought you would," Naruto said, reaching one arm towards the sky, palm out as if to grasp the sun in his hand. From his position on the ground, he looked up at her, his features devoid of their usual playfulness. "The world you think you see is only half of what's actually there."

Sakura was sure she looked as shocked as she felt. For some reason, she hadn't expected such insight from Naruto. He just didn't seem like someone prone to deep thinking and in some ways came across almost childlike, but apparently she had misjudged him.

"What? You're looking at me funny. Sakura-chan?"

Sakura shook her head, and reached to brush the strands of hair that had come free of her plait away from her face. "It's nothing. I just hadn't thought you were the philosophical sort."

"Philo-what?"

"Nothing. Nothing. Never mind, it seems it comes and goes with you," she said, crouching down next to him. She yanked out a handful of grass stems, which she then sprinkled over his face and laughed as he spat and snorted when a couple pieces fell into his mouth.

He sat up, wiping at his face and hair where the grass still clung. "Sakura-chan, you're making fun of me, aren't you?"

"Well, I suppose that makes us even," said Sakura, and she tucked her legs underneath her to sit beside him.

She gazed out at the valley, the din of the crashing waterfall filling her ears and a pleasantly cool breeze causing the grass to sway. "It seems so peaceful here, it's almost like the rest of the world doesn't matter," she said. It was more of a private thought, accidently spoken aloud and she didn't realize she said it until Naruto responded.

"I'll bring you here any time you want if it makes Sakura-chan happy," His tone was light at first, but when he continued, it was suddenly much more serious. "But you can't ever come here alone."

"Huh?" Sakura looked at him, surprised to hear him sound so adamant, and the expression he wore was very grave as well. "Why? I'm not sure how we even got here. I couldn't find my way alone even if I wanted to."

"It's 'cause there are things out here you don't know about, things that don't like humans. They'll try to hurt you if they can," Naruto said.

Sakura was skeptical and growing tired of Naruto's tendency to be so evasive. She wished he would just say what he meant plainly. "What sort of things, exactly?"

He hesitated, perhaps wondering how much to say. But really, that only made Sakura all the more determined to get the truth from him. There was so much she didn't know about him, and if there was one thing Sakura couldn't stand it was to feel at a loss for understanding in any given situation.

She was a smart girl, always had been, and she often made sure other people knew it too – another of her many traits her mother wanted to suppress, because no man wanted a wife who acted as if she knew more than he did, even if it were the truth. But all her practical knowledge seemed to do her no good here. Naruto had somehow managed to make her feel completely out of her element, like she didn't know anything at all. It was tremendously frustrating.

"Nogitsune," he said, his unwavering gaze meeting her eyes. "There are a lot of yokai out here, most of them keep to themselves, but the wild foxes hate humans. They'll try to trick you and make you get lost, or even possess you. I know it might be hard to believe at first, but it's true."

Sakura couldn't see any sign of deceit in the way Naruto looked her in the eyes to evenly. If it were anyone else, she likely would have dismissed everything he said as superstitious nonsense, but from what little she knew of Naruto she felt very strongly that he was not one to lie. The jumbled pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together and all the things that had defied her understanding before were becoming clearer.

"Why do you live out here then? Aren't you worried the nogitsune will come after you?" she said. Though part of her felt she already knew the answer, she wanted to hear it from Naruto. "And why do you talk about humans as if you're separate from them?"

Naruto smiled then, but it was not the easy, happy smile he'd shown earlier, but something resigned and almost… sad. "The nogitsune are afraid of me, they won't come near me and they won't come near you if you're with me."

"So that's why you insisted on walking me to the edge of the woods before," she said, and though it wasn't really a question, Naruto hummed an agreement.

"Sakura-chan is smart, so I think you already know I'm not human," Naruto said and finally looked away, taking a sudden interest in the grass. "I didn't want to tell you at first, 'cause I was afraid you'd be scared. I've been alone for… a long time. It was nice to be around someone for a change. I really like you, Sakura-chan."

His eyes met hers again and Sakura's breath caught. She wasn't used to this, being around someone who looked like a young man – though apparently was not even human – and was so direct with his feelings. She wouldn't have known how to react to a man saying he liked her, let alone a yokai.

Naruto was a yokai, it still hadn't settled in her mind yet in a strange way, it made sense. She'd felt something about him was not normal, was inhuman, but she wasn't afraid. Naruto had been nothing but kind to her and whether he was human or not, in the end it made no difference.

"So then, what does that make you exactly?" she said.

Naruto only gave her a smile, and a very cheeky one at that. "It's a secret. But since Sakura-chan is smart, I bet you'll figure it out. It'll be more fun that way."

"More fun for you maybe," said Sakura.

"Sakura-chan knows me so well already."

Truthfully, Sakura wasn't sure she believed any of this yet. If she had, she imagined she would not be so calm. Even if some of the things Naruto was saying made a strange kind of sense, he still had every appearance of being as human as anyone else – admittedly odd, but still human nonetheless.

With a sudden gasp, Sakura rushed to stand. "I have to get back. I don't know how long I've been gone." She was aware she was starting to panic, but it had to have been a least a couple of hours since she left. There was no way her absence hadn't been noticed.

Naruto stood, raising his hands in a placating gesture. "It's okay, Sakura-chan, I'll get you home."

They trekked back up the slope and out of the valley. Sakura felt a light-headedness wash over her and she knew something had changed around her. The atmosphere was different, the air cooler and smelling of decaying leaves instead of sweet grass and wildflowers. She almost didn't want to look back, and when she did, Sakura saw exactly what she expected. The summer valley was gone, and she couldn't even hear the waterfall anymore. It was simply vanished.

Somehow, Sakura couldn't seem to remember leaving the forest, all she knew was that when she got home, not near as much time had passed as she'd thought and no one realized she was ever gone. It was almost like she hadn't left at all and she couldn't make sense of it. That place in the forest had been real. Naruto was real, she was sure of it. But every time she left the woods – left Naruto – it was like that reality became distorted, almost like she'd woken from a very vivid dream.

She wasn't sure what she'd gotten into, befriending a yokai when she should have been thinking about her future the way her mother wanted her to. Now that she was home and back in the everyday norm of her life, the doubts started to come. She thought that this with Naruto, whatever it was, couldn't possibly last. Eventually, she would leave home and marry and Naruto would surely lose interest in her at some point. She was just a human after all, and even if he said he liked her now, she was probably just some passing fancy, just something to entertain him.

Though she had some idea of what Naruto was, it only seemed to make her understanding of his nature all the less clear. Why he would take an interest in a human, and why her in particular. She couldn't gauge his intentions because she couldn't judge them on a human scale. Maybe he really was just lonely. It could be just that simple; he didn't have to have any hidden motivation the way people usually did.

One morning, Sakura was working on some calligraphy when a maid came to her to inform her that Mebuki had received a letter. Apparently, Sakura's father was on his way home with important news. She felt her heart sink. It wasn't hard for her to figure out what that meant. Her future was drawing near.

AN: I have such mixed feelings with this chapter. There are parts of it I don't like and I think it doesn't flow as well as I wanted it to, but at the same time I feel like it's probably not as bad as I think it is. I'll leave it to you to decide. If I'd let myself agonize over it any more I probably would never get around to posting it.

I'm well aware that Naruto and Sakura probably aren't acting quite as their canon selves, but I'm trying to keep them recognizable at least. Regardless, 'my' Naruto and Sakura aren't canon Naruto and Sakura, because they don't have the same experiences or backgrounds as the manga characters (and I can't stand Sakura or Naruto in canon anymore, they are both terrible, but that's neither here nor there).

I struggled a bit with how to present Sakura's reactions in this chapter. For one, I didn't want her to freak out, but I also didn't feel I could just have her totally believe everything right off the bat. I mean, would you? Basically, she knows to some degree that Naruto isn't human, and she was suspicious before he even admitted it, but she'll need more convincing. Also, even though Sakura is a bit more on the skeptic side of things, the supernatural is very deeply ingrained in Japanese culture, especially in the Shinto religion, and seems to have been generally accepted as a reality, which makes it a little easier for her to believe.

Chapter Notes:

– Yokai: The word (sometimes spelled 'youkai') is often translated as demon, monster, spirit or goblin, but in Japanese folklore it also encompasses ghosts, gods (kami), spirit possession, and other supernatural phenomenon. The term is very broad and rather vague and there is no exact translation into English. Their moral alignments can range from evil to benevolent and they come in a variety of forms and classifications. There's really only one type of yokai that will be getting any focus in this fic though. Can you guess which one? It's pretty obvious actually, lol.

– Nogitsune: Also called yako, and translating as either 'field fox' or 'wild fox'. They tend to be mischievous, but can be malicious, going out of their way to trick, manipulate, mislead, torment, or even kill humans.

Some are said to even possess people (the victims for some reason, are always women) which is called 'kitsunetsuki', for reasons ranging from revenge, disturbing its nap, or if it wants something that it can only get through manipulation, like food or having a shrine built to it. Symptoms of fox possession include, pain, madness, running naked through the streets, collapsing, frothing at the mouth, violent behavior and more. My guess is that this particular tradition in the myths came from a lack of knowledge and understanding of certain sicknesses and mental illness.

Nogitsune are also afraid of the benevolent foxes, called zenko (literally meaning 'good fox'). I know at least a few of you have figured out where this is going. I'm not trying very hard to hide it anyway, lol.

See you all next update, hopefully sooner rather than later.