"So what do you think comes next?" Ino asked as she sat at the ramen counter with Hinata and Naruto.
She was sitting on the far end with the other two to her side, hoping that it would mean that fewer people would look in her direction and notice what she was.
"Busy work," Naruto said.
"Right, it will be D-rank missions," Hinata agreed.
"Ehh, but, didn't we just prove that you're both really good at this?" the Yamanaka girl asked.
"There isn't any sort of major crisis going on," Naruto said. "We suck at sneaky stuff and need training at it."
"They will also want to watch Naruto-kun and I to ascertain our loyalties," Hinata said. "Even the higher ranks in an organization spend most of their time on mundane things."
"So...what you're saying?" Ino said.
"Is D-Rank missions are coming," Naruto said with a sigh.
"Why did you guys come back here anyway?" Ino asked. "Well, Hinata I can see since she's the Hyuga heir and all, but if I were you Naruto, I'd have just stayed over there. I mean, you know what I mean."
Hinata, on Naruto's other side, turned her face away so that her discomfort with Ino's backwards statement could be hidden from both her and Naruto.
"Because this is home," Naruto said simply as if it was obvious. "Right Hinata?"
And on that, Hinata flushed and failed to build up the courage to say that wherever Naruto was was home. She couldn't even accept an offer to live with him in separate rooms. Two years and the best she could say was that she didn't faint around him any longer and could act normally around him.
Most of the time.
"Hinata?" Naruto repeated questionably.
She rubbed her face quickly and turned about.
"Oh, of course," Hinata said swiftly. "We had a duty to serve the village. And we may still visit any time of course."
"Whatever, I still think it'll be something awesome starting tomorrow," Ino declared.
Teuchi turned to look toward the girl at her loud comment, and she immediately pulled herself in to hide her appearance at least a little bit. She really did hope they could get her something to keep a henge up fairly frequently. Or she could research until her own jutsu. Ino had heard of a lot of people had found ways to maintain some simple long term henges.
Ayame set out a bowl of ramen in front of each of the ninja, still noting how Hinata and Naruto looked so different. She'd heard that kids sometimes seemed to grow overnight, but it seemed to be really the case with these two. And she didn't know what to make about the "come back" comment and shrugged it away.
"Excuse me, Naruto-kun, Ino," Hinata said suddenly. "I...ummm..."
"Ladies' room got it!" the gorgon said.
"Right," Hinata said with a flush.
"I shall be right back." Sakura grimaced as she limped her way home from the test. Damn Kakashi-sensei was not nearly as useless as he acted up front. The man was powerful and devious and he'd turned that whole affair into one big mess.
A mess that had gotten her tied to a tree stump for part of the day.
It also bothered her that if the standard method was to team the top rookie with the dead last.
And she was on Sasuke's team.
And Shino was a lot more useful than she had been in the obvious part of the test, so he clearly wasn't the dead last.
But did that mean she...
"No, no," she told herself. "That couldn't be right."
The girl was as of yet unaware that being tied to the stump had put her in good company. If she'd been told that both the Fourth Hokage and the Sannin Jiraiya had both ended up tied to the stump it might have been comforting.
The other thing that troubled her was that she suspected that they'd almost failed the real test as a team.
"I'll be fine," Sakura said. "I need to go on a diet anyway."
"Is this wise?" Shino asked. "I do not think so. We need to all be at full strength to have a chance."
"But it'll disqualify you as well," Sakura protested. "Tell him, Sasuke."
"Hn," Sasuke said. "She's right."
"Am I wrong? I do not think so," Shino said. "We have already failed individually, if we are to succeed, we must not have a weak link."
Sasuke turned to look at them coldly.
"A weak link is definitely unwanted," he noted.
"Is a hungry teammate weak?" Shino asked. "Yes, I believe it is so. Should you then eat? Yes."
Sasuke grimaced and looked away briefly.
"If you're going to risk it, might as well use some of mine as well," Sasuke noted.
It'd be useless to fight without at least Shino's hungry satisfied, and if he split his evenly with Sakura, that wouldn't happen.
It was when Shino started feeding the pink haired girl that Kakashi reappeared and passed them.
She wondered if they would have passed if Sasuke hadn't given in at the end there.
"Now it sounds like I'm blaming Sasuke for being useless," Sakura muttered to herself.
Sakura needed to talk to someone about this. She wasn't used to being considered dead weight or useless. She always got the best scores out of everybody on the tests of knowledge even if her practical wasn't the best. Someone that knew a little bit about Sasuke wouldn't have hurt either.
A barely noticed and soon forgotten flash of light out of the corner of her eye brought her to look toward Ichiraku's and frowned as she saw her continual nemesis: Naruto. The real dead last of the class, who'd spent a couple of years regularly harassing her.
She considered that a moment.
Naruto knew what it was to be underestimated, and he spent a lot of time with Sasuke! And he did have a crush on her, so it should have been somewhat easy to talk to him.
"What am I thinking about, toying with his emotions?" Sakura wondered quietly before looking around. "It is a ninja thing to do..."
Firming herself up she started walking over toward the ramen stand and forcing a smile on her face. Best to start with talking to Ino since talking straight to Naruto would be suspicious.
"Hello, Ino, I haven't seen you for a while," Sakura said. "Guess what, Sasuke and I just passed our final test to be full genin together. How did you do?"
"Tsh," Ino said without looking around. "It's just your lucky day, Billboard Brow. Now you get to show Sasuke-kun just how much of a dork you are."
Sakura frowned. The least Ino could do was turn around and look at her when she said something like that.
"Hey, uh, Sakura-chan," Naruto said. "We haven't talked much since I got back."
"Oh, Naruto," she said with an apparent cheerfulness that Ino saw through pretty quickly. "I didn't see you there, so how did you do?"
"Sakura, what do you want?" the gorgon asked still without turning.
Sakura laughed nervously at Ino's question and put her hands behind her back.
"I just want to know how you guys did on your test, that's all," Sakura said. "We had some sort of teamwork test where we had to get some bells away from our sensei."
"Yeah, we had something like that," Naruto said. "It was kind of embarrassing, Hinata and Ino did most of it."
Ino felt herself flushing a bit and turned her face further away as she grimaced at Sakura's rather blatant display and Naruto's naive buying of it.
"Uh...Naruto....kun," Sakura said, moving to sit down next to him.
Ino rolled her eyes at the clumsy way Sakura was pushing herself at Naruto and wondered what she was trying to get.
"You've spent a lot of time with Sasu..." Sakura paused as she looked over toward Ino.
For a moment there she thought she saw Ino's braids move around, but that was just silly. Unless she had some sort of new jutsu that allowed her to move her hair around for some reason.
Ino meanwhile resisted the urge to turn around and shout at Sakura as she realized what the girl was doing. She was about to do it when Naruto said something first.
"Umm, Sakura-chan...that's kind of Hinata's seat," Naruto said.
Ha! Ha! Take that Sakura! Ino thought to herself.
"Oh, I'm sure she wouldn't mind if I just sit down a bit to talk to you," Sakura said in a bit of a confused tone of voice and trying to keep her temper as Ino was very clearly snickering over where she was sitting.
"Uh, There are...other seats, Sakura-chan," Naruto said. "Look, Hinata's food is right here and she just went to the bathroom, so she's going to be right back."
"Arrg! Naruto!" Sakura snapped. "I'm being nice to you so just forget about the mopey girl and talk to me, damn it!!"
Naruto frowned and turned around completely, crossing his arms as he turned to look at Sakura.
"Look, I don't know what the problem is," Naruto said. "But you can't have Hinata's seat."
"Why not?" Sakura asked.
"Because. It's. Hinata's," Naruto said a bit irritated as he had to explain it again.
"I thought you...shut up, Ino," the pink-haired kunoichi snapped. "I thought you liked me, Naruto!"
"What does that have to do with taking Hinata's seat?" Naruto wondered.
"Miss, maybe you should head on home," Ayame said firmly.
"We don't want you hear disturbing business," her father added.
"Hee hee! Shy girl 4, childhood crush 0!" Ino said. "Ha! You're really going to be very good at getting Sasuke, Sakura."
She quietly brought her hands together and gave herself a complete henge to turn around and look Sakura in the face.
"Haven't you figured it out yet?" the Yamanaka asked. "Naruto liked you, past tense."
"I like her now, Ino-chan," Naruto said. "She still can't have Hinata's seat."
"Not the same kind of like, Naruto," Ino said. "And don't call me Ino-chan. Anyway, Sakura, now Naruto likes Hinata."
"Uhhh, Ino-chan," Naruto said nervously blushing as he looked around.
"What? She barely speaks above a whisper and faints all the time," the pink-haired girl protested. "Why would he like her?"
"I don't know, how about money, elegance, beauty and..." Ino paused and held out her hands in front of her chest before flushing slightly. "Plenty of reasons. Anyway, Sakura, you're old news. And you can't complain about it."
"Would you please keep it down, Ino-chan," Naruto said.
"All right, Ino, so I don't have to worry about Naruto anymore," Sakura said. "I'm still on Sasuke's team under Kakashi and with Shino Aburame! You've got two wastes of space dragging you down, so I'm sure to get my moment to shine, how about you?"
[You really are annoying.]
"Eh?" Ino and Sakura said looking over toward Naruto as a burst of wind lashed out and tossed Sakura across the street into some bushes.
"Ack, sorry! Sakura-chan, I didn't...Mjolnir what did you do that for?" Naruto asked standing up to head out towards her.
"Forget this," Sakura said pulling herself dizzily out of the bushes. "I'm heading home!"
And then she stomped off as Naruto watched with a helpless expression.
Ino snickered next to him and turned around to continue eating her ramen. Her illusion dropped a moment later as she did so and she was back in her not-quite human disguise. She wasn't aware just how close she'd come to instinctively dropping and paralyzing Sakura the way she had Tenten, but ignorance was bliss.
Sitting back down himself, and shaking his head in confusion before blinking and looking toward Ino.
"Really, please don't say anything about me liking Hinata-chan, okay?" Naruto whispered. "I...I don't want her mad at me."
"Naruto, girls only get mad when guys they don't like say that they like them," Ino informed him rolling her eyes as she did so.
Behind the counter Ayame and Teuchi both smirked in response to the statement.
"Uhhh, what does that mean?" Naruto asked. "Just please don't...ahh, Hinata-chan, how are you doing?"
Hinata stopped as she came around the corner and under the cloth, she blinked and frowned, wondering why Naruto sounded so nervous.
"I'm...fine, Naruto-kun," she said in confusion before sitting down. "Did something happen?"
"A thief tried to steal something from you," Ino said. "But Naruto told them they couldn't have it."
"A thief?" Hinata said looking around. "What did they try to steal, did I leave something here?"
"Nah...it was just Sakura-chan and she didn't seem to believe that this was your seat," Naruto said quickly before turning around and burying his embarrassment in his food.
Hinata's eyes narrowed momentarily and then widened as she realized that Sakura had wanted to sit beside Naruto and he'd apparently told her "no".
Maybe she should ask if he was still interested in sharing the apartment. Or maybe she should tell him about how her father had made some sort of arrangement for them to be engaged...the engagement which had no legal basis and which she only knew about from overhearing her father and which she'd never yet mentioned in two years.
Right, she should just eat her ramen.
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(Posted Tue, 31 May 2011 17:48)
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