Gift-drabble for Fallacy. She wanted to see me write NaruSaku, so I figured I'd try it out. Not sure it worked, but... yeah.

If you're looking for Chapter 4 of IYH, I'm working on it. Really! Just had my muse dump a ton of content on me, so I'm sifting through it and shoving everything into order. Pleasedon'tkillme.


For all the burning chakra that swirled and lashed around them, it was Naruto that flinched first. The gentle brush of her palm on his jaw and her fingers sliding into his hair was almost too much to bear.

The stone cliff - built up over thousands and thousands of years - cracked and crumbled and fell at the mere brush of a long-dead demon's tail.

The blood of his enemies - hours, days old - cracked and crumbled beneath her touch, falling like macabre snowflakes into the slowly widening pool below.

Her voice was soft, and it took a moment to gather (dragging, kicking, screaming) his wandering attention up from the pink water to her pink hair and she was singing, crooning a soft lullaby that he had never heard before but wish he had because it sounded like something a mother would sing to her wayward child and he'd never had a mother but Sakura-chan was hugging him close, fangs and blood-stained eyes and all and she didn't care--

The lullaby softened, drifted away into the star-speckled sky as her lips pressed against his crown, forehead, cheeks - kissing away the tears he couldn't let himself feel because he would surely break under the strain - and then her mouth was hovering over his and she was whispering something over and over again--

"Let go...I'll catch you."

...He let go.