Naruto 20 themes: don't cry 'cause you're so right

Bonus theme 1. Suicide romance

Kakashi knows he probably shouldn't be seeing their deaths every time he looks at them. Still, it's easy to read future vulnerability in Sakura's stubborn pursuit of Sasuke, inevitability in Sasuke's bitter distance. Easiest of all to see a dozen different ends for Naruto, too fiercely in love with his village, or at least too fiercely in love with the idea of being loved.

The easiest way out after swearing to do the impossible is to die in the process. Kakashi thinks there are obvious reasons for the ninja code, even if most people are too human to follow it.




16. One step forward, two steps back

A kind of dance, trying to balance mistakes with achievements and coming up short: stepping back, back, coming up against your past in the future that you see. Stepping back to survey a room too slowly, the failure you come up against is new, and tastes like anger.

You are nobody's saviour; every breath Sasuke draws in the hospital bed is no longer one that you have won for him.

He side-steps the obvious questions, moves like he knows the game because he does. When you step for the window it is too late, but this rhythm you have always known.




15. Footnotes

Small things, things you will not remember because you are not the sort to do so: blankness in black eyes, words said with the casualness of a moment foresight-blind. So much there to annotate, when they write the history books later, and they will say We told you so as if it were the truth. In time you might even believe them.

You know little of history that you have not written, or that has not written you. Months later, choking on rainwater and dust and betrayal, you will remember all the wrong moments – no belated realisation, just further disbelief.




15. Flesh wounds

Dealing with flesh wounds is straightforward enough: a matter of crude mechanics, chakra merely another tool. Even deeper wounds can be healed, with enough time and effort, and by the time Sakura hears how the medic-nin have saved Neji and Chouji, she has already decided what to do.

At Naruto’s bedside, conviction comes less easily. Chakra gathers at her fingertips, power coming too late and too weakly; Naruto blinks in surprise when she places her hand on his shoulder, long enough for the warmth to bleed into already-healing flesh. Sakura decides: she must learn to heal other wounds, as well.




6. Stuck in reverse

If he is lost on the way of life, then at least it is still safer than turning back. Kakashi likes to think that he is not living in his past. ( Being here every morning is different, does not count, is ritual rather than the trap of habit. He does not see any echoes in Sasuke’s eyes. )

The sun’s glare fades the words into smoothness. He believes no more in a future than he does the past; still, he wonders how faded they will be, years from now. By then there will probably be other names he needs to recall.