“Yes?” Kurama replied as he turned around. In the past, he found simply avoiding or ditching them only encouraged the harpies.
Ino skidded to a halt only a few inches away from her future husband and took a deep breath. Okay you can do this… what was I going to say again? Oh yeah! “Well uh… Kurama, me and some of the other students were thinking about holding a party since school is over and we want to celebrate graduation-”
Kurama raised one of his eyebrows questionably. “In case you’ve forgotten, I failed my exam.”
The words stopped Ino cold in the middle of her invitation, and she winced as if struck. Doh that’s right. I can’t believe this! I take all this time during class to talk myself into actually asking Kurama out and he fails the test. The girl broke out of her thoughts to see the boy of her dreams was already walking away from her. “Sorry about that,” Ino said after rushing to catch up. “I know this has probably been pretty hard for you. Being the only one who didn’t pass, you must be devastated.”
“Not really,” Kurama replied stoically as he continued on towards the building his apartment was in.
He’s so cool, Ino thought to herself. If she had been the only one who failed that test, Ino would have probably been in worse shape than Sakura was the day they started hanging out together. “But I don’t get how you could of failed! I’ve seen you do the clone technique in class plenty of times.” At least when he actually did it that is, which wasn’t often.
Kurama shrugged and turned back around to head towards his home. “I had an off day,” he told her. Hopefully the girl would take that as an end to the conversation and go away.
But Ino, being who she was, didn’t even register the subtle hint and quickly followed her crush. There was an uncomfortable silence for a few moments, but then the kunoichi fell back onto her faithful back-up topic. “So I haven’t seen you come by my families shop lately. I thought you needed some more wolf’s bane and uh… roses,” she added after a moment.
That was the weird about Kurama. Not that meant there was anything wrong with him! Everyone had a weird stuff about them. So what if lots of people would just think he was a little bit, well, girly. Hell, Ino was glad this was his quirk! It was a sign that they were meant for each other, a connection that no one else could possibly understand, and… it gave her something to fill the awkward silences with before he could blow her off like some looser.
“I have enough of what I need for now,” Kurama told her truthfully as the reason he hadn’t told her to just piss off came back to the forefront of his mind. The girl’s family owned the only flower shop in town. Of course being a ninja owned flower shop, it had a wide selection of plants that Kurama could use to make numerous paralyzing weapons and deadly toxins. The incredible convince, along with the fact Ino could get him the seeds he needed for pretty much nothing, meant that as long as she was chasing Kurama, he didn’t need to worry about his supply of weapons.
Ino let out a tiny sigh of disappointment as any hope of getting Kurama over to her place were shot down. Across the street, she could see the building where Kurama’s apartment was located. “So I guess I’ll be seeing you around, huh?”
“Probably not,” Kurama told her. When the girl looked up at him in confusion, he resisted the urge to roll his eyes and decided to make the explanation as simple as possible. “You graduated, so soon you’ll be going off on missions instead of coming to class. You’ll be far too busy with missions and training to have any real social life.”
The girl let out a nervous laugh to try and cover up the brief expression of horror that found its way to her face. Right, I hadn’t actually thought about that Ino thought to herself. Plus there were all the actual dangers involved in being a ninja. She could end up dead, captured, crippled, or worse! She could go into a battle and come out horribly scarred! Ino forced a lump down in her throat as all the endless bad possibilities that she had never even considered while in school came to mind.
With Ino distracted, Kurama headed for his house. Taking one last look at the terrified girl, he rolled his eyes and opened the door.
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(Posted Thu, 09 Mar 2006 02:18)
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