"Hmmm... What's with this suspicious looking new style?" Ino asked, voice dripping with false sweetness. "You know, I gave you that ribbon so you could STOP hiding that forehead of yours, not to make it even easier."
"Cut it out, Ino-pig," Sakura growled, irritably brushing away the hand poking at her red hair ribbon, today being worn around her temples instead of its usual position tying her hair back behind her ears. "I just felt like trying something different, to commemorate my victory in love..." Her voice voice trailed off as her mind was swept away by memories, to a rose-bordered world of butterflies and chirping songbirds, where Sasuke stared dreamily into her eyes as they shared kiss after sweet kiss in a secluded grove. A crow was squawking something about bee women and marks in the distance, but she ignored it, draping her arms around his shoulders and leaning in toward that alabaster skin and pouty lips... Wow, what a kiss! This had to bee the best yet, even better than yesterday when she actually had Sasuke-kun all to herself and... WHAT!?
Her daydream was rudely interrupted as she snapped back to reality only to discover the most horrifyingly traumatic thing she could imagine... The shoulders she'd grabbed, the skin, the lips... The lips kissing her back instead of flopping in a comatose daze weren't Sasuke's. The skin, smooth and healthy and tanned from long days in the sun wasn't either. The shoulders, a bit wider and firm with young lean muscle had no lingering baby fat like Sasuke's... The deep blue eyes, slowly drooping to half-lidded from wide-eyed shock definitely weren't Sasuke's...
She was kissing Naruto. She'd grabbed Naruto and kissed him. She'd climbed halfway onto the desk, leaned down to clasp NARUTO to her breast and kiss him. And he was kissing her back. And he was good at it. Good enough to make Sasuke look like a concussion victim who just couldn't fight back, whose feeble protests were being drowned in her...
While Sakura quietly turned to stone and crumbled into little bits of mortified gravel, Ino gaped and Naruto whooped in joy. "YEAH, YEAH!" he shouted. "Haruko-mom told me she arranged it, but I never expected Sakura-chan to greet her future husband with a kiss!" He capered about the front of the classroom joyfully as the gravel turned to dust and blew away on icy howling winds.
"AAH! I knew it!" Ino shouted, jumping back a step so she could point at Sakura's ribbon-covered forehead. "The Bee Woman put a mark on you yesterday because you're a pervert! A scarlet woman! What horrible things did you subject poor Sasuke-kun to, you foul temptress!?"
In the back row, Hinata was well on the way to crumbling and blowing away herself. "F-f-f-future husband...?" she whispered, face gone as pale as her Hyuuga eyes.
"Lady of evening! Slag! MAN-THIEF!" Ino's tirade wasn't letting up, even as the rest of the class noticed the situation and gossip filled the air.
Seeing emotional salvation arriving in the form of a certain dark-haired Uchiha walking through the door, Sakura pulled herself together and pounced lips-first to wipe away the mental trauma and publicly claim what she'd made hers the day before.
Instead, she found herself kissing the bottom of a sandal, and between her momentum, surprise, and a push from the footwear's owner found herself a moment later flat on her back with an ache at the back of her head where it had been knocked into the floor and a coppery taste from where Sasuke's foot was still mashing her lips against her front teeth. "You stay the hell away from me," he growled. "Since just ignoring you failed, I'm adopting the methods you used on the dead last. If you bother me, I will beat you." Looking up, he turned a venomous glare first on Ino to stall her own glomp, then swept it around the room to cover his fan club. "That goes for the rest of you annoying females as well," he added. "If you have time to squeal over romance, train and get stronger. I have no time to waste on love." He took his foot off Sakura's face and wiped it against the floor as if he'd stepped in something unpleasant, but was cut off by an orange-suited interruption before he could get to a desk and sit down.
"Hey! you can't treat Sakura-chan like that! You bastard, I'll-"
"Uzumaki! Hallway, buckets, now! Everyone else, find your seat and settle down." Mizuki, Iruka's assistant teacher had arrived, and was quick to break up the confrontation by sending the class troublemaker out to do a disciplinary stamina exercise and having the rest sit for roll call. Grumbling and with many an over the shoulder scowl for his nemesis, the blond boy filled a pair of buckets and complied. A few minutes later he got an extra half hour added to the punishment and had to hold them at shoulder height as well, as he kept muttering obscenities when Iruka arrived and greeted him before entering to start class.
"Hmm, this creates kind of a nostalgic feeling."
Sakura had been waiting at a crossroad while a tight-spaced caravan of heavily loaded merchant wagons passed, the shouting of the drovers, lowing of the oxen, and clicking of the iron-rimmed wheels against the stone paved street hiding the sputter of the crazy-woman's odd vehicle as it pulled up, at least until she spoke. Being lost in thought probably hadn't helped either - between kissing her most unwanted suitor, Sasuke's too-literally forceful rejection, and the taunts and recriminations of the other girls for driving Sasuke away from them all, her day had been utter crap. She'd halfway persuaded herself to go to Konoha General Hospital and get the huge lump that was still trying to pop out of her forehead from under the ribbon checked out, though crawling into a corner to die of humiliation had its own appeal as well.
At the sound of that slightly nasal voice, indelibly etched in her memory despite having heard it for the first time only briefly the day before, she instead spun and jabbed a finger at the older pinkette. "YOU!" Sakura shouted. "This is all your fault! Suddenly appearing yesterday; doing those weird things!"
Peering at the ribbon tied tight over the younger girl's forehead, Haruko ignored the accusation to ask, "Yesterday... After I left, something happened, didn't it?"
Brushing aside the sour memories that just this morning had held the rush of sweet festival wine demanded, "Never mind any of that, what were you thinking doing those things? You stole my first kiss, you unnatural woman!"
"You hit your head, didn't you?" Haruko persisted. "It left a mark, a bump, a lump, didn't it. Something... Extraordinary?"
"There's nothing extraordinary!" the girl denied, "Nothing except Sasuke-kun suddenly turning against me, the one who should hold his heart! After you did those pervy things... Those old stories are true, you did those things and now I can't get married!"
Trying to hook a finger on the ribbon and pull it loose, Haruko swiped her hand at the young kunoichi. "No need to hide it, don't worry about your marriage interview now. Show me what you've got!"
Dodging the grab, Sakura's temper hit its limit. "SHANNARO! That's it, pervert woman! Time to die!" Her eyes blazed with infernal fire as she ripped up a signpost with adrenaline fueled strength. It was blocked by Haruko's dual-neck guitar with a mighty, musical crash, many more following in quick succession as the pair dueled their way back down the street, interspersed with more ordinary impacts from the younger's occasional missed blows.
As the scene vanished in confusion and clouds of dust, Hinata slumped back from where she'd been about to speak. A trickle of blood snuck out of one nostril, thinking about how that conversation could be taken out of context (or even in context, after what happened at lunch the day before) and she pressed her fingertips together in the nervous habit that usually only appeared around a different Uzumaki entirely. "Ano..." she mumbled to herself disappointedly, "I wanted to ask... about becoming a ... B-bridal Candidate..."
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(Posted Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:52)
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