One & Only.
As almost every day, the pink-haired young girl sat on the grass that grew between the individual tombstones and stared at the sky. A seemingly endless sea of ​​white, thick and thinner clouds of mist enveloped them like a second skin. It felt like the breath of times long past and the dead people buried underground. Silence had a completely different sound in this strange place. For normal people at least, but not for Sakura. Sure, it wasn't commonplace for an eight-year-old girl to spend most of her free time in a cemetery, but what made her really unique was the fact that she could see the dead. Since she was born, she had psychic abilities that were not only strange to other people, but also scary and so they were mostly avoided when she walked through the streets of her home village Konoha-Gakura. She didn't care. She herself knew that she was not like everyone, that she lived in her own world, but she was happy nonetheless. Loneliness was not her enemy, it did not scare her - on the contrary: Like a second shadow, she followed Sakura, was her constant companion. In time she had come to terms with it, in fact, she even preferred a visit to the cemetery at any time to a conversation with a person, although the name "Haruno" was not written on any of the weathered tombstones.

It might sound strange, but for her there was nothing better than watching the people here as they rise from their supposed final calm to meet old friends and acquaintances again.
At that moment a fresh autumn wind blew through her shoulder-length hair, carried a bit of white sea in front of her and the occasional sound could be heard from the few leaves that at this time of the year still clung to the massive treetops that lined the cemetery. In summer, when all the leaves were in the lush green on the branches, it seemed as if the trees were talking to each other. Quietly. Whispering. But she couldn't understand what they were whispering to each other in the gentle wind. In the meantime there was no more magical place in their eyes, because everything that seems to be lifeless was full of life and every gust of wind, no matter how insignificant, transformed the cemetery into a place that contained an indescribable amount of magic and undiscovered. Sakura couldn't put her fascination into words when she came here, where usually only mourners went. Not a single one of them noticed the beauty that was everywhere in faded elegance.

A faint, barely noticeable smile crept onto her lips as she thought of the people who came here now and then to renew the flowers in the graves and then immediately disappeared again without scrutinizing their surroundings.She didn't seem the least bit interested in all the natural splendor.

Slowly, almost reverently, she turned her gaze to the ghosts, who sat laughing happily on the stones on which their names were neatly worked, freed from all the burden and impatience that represented their invisible prison while they were still alive. Impatience. That was exactly what had kept them all from enjoying such a sight, but now that time was no longer an issue, all human idiosyncrasies had been dusted and washed away in the rain.
Suddenly there was a noise - a branch that broke under the weight of a person - and Sakura startled out of her trance state. This was a small, blond boy who was about her age and was well known to her. He had been rejected by the villagers as well as they themselves, which is due to the mark that has shaped his stomach since he was a baby. Naruto, that was his name and was allegedly possessed by the devil, they claimed, but Sakura did not believe the rumor. His parents had died under mysterious circumstances and loneliness had been his companion since then, but that seemed to hurt him a lot more than she did, which was because his kind of loneliness was different from hers. And so it was not uncommon that she saw him here and he began to weep bitterly in front of his parents' grave, as if he would never stop again and it was not just as rare that she felt the violent urge in her to take him in her arms and put some comforting word in his ear. The girl did not like to see people sad, because for her grief was a sign that happiness was draining more and more from the body.

Once again she pondered for a long time whether she should go to him and speak to him, plagued by curiosity and pity, because she liked him. Because he came to the cemetery almost as often as she did, but also because she saw in him someone who could understand her, since he was basically not much different. She inhaled the clear, cool air deeply, as if it were the last bit of air that was left to her and finally straightened up. Her bones were frozen stiff from the time she'd been here and felt heavy, like she wasn't eight but eighty years old. With small steps she approached the boy, careful not to disturb the quiet of this place with loud noises.

"Hello." Carefully, almost as if she hadn't brought her voice in a long time, she spoke to him and thus caught his attention. His eyes were bloodshot from all the tears that suddenly dried up and only left a reddened mark on his cheeks. With shaky hands he wiped away the remaining liquid that was still lingering in the corner of his eye.

"Hello," he replied just as carefully and looked her over briefly."You're here a lot too, aren't you?" He added with a questioning expression on his face. He hadn't missed her either, as she always sat in one and the same place and looked up at the sky, as if she could take some information from him, which was hidden from others.

"Every day!", Confirmed, nodded affirmatively and gave him an encouraging smile. "Are you okay?" She wanted to know, even though his eyes spoke volumes.

"Yes. I just wanted to come here briefly to water the flowers."

"You shouldn't cry in a place like this. Your parents ... They are still alive. I can see them." Seriously, as if she were talking about stars in the night sky and not about the strange gift she was given, she looked at him in his soul mirror, which he tore open in astonishment.

"I don't believe you!", He said and grinned mischievously, as if the tears didn't exist that had just disappeared into the ground on which he was standing.

“Honestly!” A little offended because he didn't believe her, she puffed her cheeks. "I see them every day. They are fine and they are sad every time they see you cry," she told him and fixed her gaze on the ground and on one of her black shoes on which a small beetle was just climbing up . "They want to hug you and comfort you, but they can't because they no longer have a body ..."

"Why can't I do that?"

"I can't say. I don't even know why I can! Look, basically we're both not that different. We two are treated badly by other people. I because I have these powers and you because you ... well ... are supposed to be a devil's child. "She looked at him with her big, emerald-green googly eyes and wondered why she was worried about such things. And he her, with his azure blue eyes, because he didn't know if she could really see his parents.

"Who are you actually?", He finally asked, the smile long gone behind the pain that marked his face. Pain that used to be happiness and happiness. The dimples in his cheeks showed that he had laughed a lot at one point.

"Me? Uh ... just call me Sakura, okay? What about you?"

"Hehe, I'm Naruto! Naruto Uzumaki! And I'll save the world from a villain later!", He promised her and nodded just as seriously as she did before. What he could not yet know was that the world was made up of many bad guys, in the form of harmless-looking people who did bad things to other people in order to advance their own lives. Laser beams and a billowing cloak could not frighten them or drive them away.

"What bad guys?"

"Well, you know ... people who throw stones at those they don't like ...""That sounds great!", She said after a moment's hesitation and then giggled into the hand that she had thrown in front of her mouth. The ease with which children made contact with one another faded with age, as the memories of people faded whose faces you no longer saw every day.

"Yes, isn't it?", He laughed now and so the sad melancholy of the cemetery didn't seem so sad anymore. Like a little light in the midst of deep black darkness they stood there and lit up the whole area with their entertaining cheerfulness.

"You, Sakura-chan? Can we go somewhere else? I don't like this place somehow ..." A little embarrassed, he stared down and rubbed his right foot in the loamy underground as if looking for something.

"Don't ...? I thought you liked him. You are here so often ..."

"Yes, because I somehow feel like I'm closer to my parents here. And because I'm usually alone at home because my grandmother is often away for work," he explained. His sudden, piercing look literally pierced her eyes. Stinging with pain. Although the death of his parents was practically written on the stone here, he kept coming back because the quiet solitude that always enveloped him at home was even more painful for him.

“Where are you going?” Sakura didn't know many places in her actually quite small village. Most of the time she was just here, so she didn't have time to find other places that were as beautiful as the one here. She didn't want to go anywhere else anyway, here she was happy and free. As happy and free as you could be when you were stared at like a disgusting insect by your fellow men in the alleys of the village.

"Come home with me! There's nobody there anyway ... if you like!" Sakura replied in silence, at least a few seemingly endless seconds passed before she gave a reaction - a gentle smile and a slight nod of her head, whereupon Naruto grinned over both cheeks and immediately set off. Her mother wouldn't miss her until she was gone for a few more hours anyway. The