What if, just like Naruto, Jiraya too had someone in his life a long time ago, someone that loved him while he was oblivious about it, someone who he could never love back, not really, for reasons that later in his life he came to find foolish.

"...There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again." Eric Roth

When she first caught sight of the babe's corvine tuff of hair on that tiny little head, a stab of panic buried itself between her ribs, drowning the joy. How could it happen? She had calculated everything, drank the tea, counted the moons… Where did she go wrong? But it didn't matter...all she could do was cry for the child of her body that could not live to see its first nameday.

A sister for a kingslayer; a princess for a kingdom. A precarious alliance forged through a marrige, and a union that would become as undestroyable as it would be unmendable. "-so soon have you forgotten the promise i made you?"...where you go i shall go; where you die i shall die and there shall i be buried.' Her hiss drew blood: "You lied then. You lie now." (minor jonXsansa)

During an infiltration gone horribly wrong, Hinata gets captured. A rescue mission is set underway and nothing can stop Naruto from being a part of it, even though Neji has already broken his cheekbone declaring the whole thing to be his fault. Naruto never denies it...but sometimes not everything is as it seems. (set in an indefinite time after the Fourth War)

"If I stop today it was still worth it. Even the terrible mistakes that I made and would have unmade if I could. The pains that have burned me and scarred my soul, it was worth it, for having been allowed to walk where I've walked." - Gia Carangi -

"I love you... I love everything about you that hurts. No one will ever love you as much as I do... Why isn't this enough?" - Closer

This is a snapshot, a moment in the middle of a story that you won't know yet. Just one single moment in the mind of Sirius Black as he contemplates where he is and with who... and then coming to a surprise realization without even meaning to: that Lily Evans, despite her history with his best friend, was in fact in love with him. Too bad it cost Prongs a couple of cracked ribs...

Everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to holdit against your bones knowing your own life depends on it... and, when the time comes to let it go.

YOU knew she could lie, that she could do it rather well in fact. You just never thought she would lie to you. Or that it would be this hurtful...