Teamwork 3 - chapter 5 - chunk 3 - Naruto POV
:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD WRITING MOOD WHEE.
So this scene with Naruto and Sakura alone came kind of out of nowhere; I just wanted them to have fun and then go, but Sakura started being a worrywart and blah. Oh well.
The first scene probably needs to be edited and some detailed crit or sumtin, but I did what I could and now I need outside eyes for halp. But if you just want to go "aw cute" or "wtf", that works too. XD I'm still writing, so y'all might get the rest of the scene soonish! which is also the rest of the chapter, incidentally. done omigod done i'm posting as soon as i'm done reading it over. But in a new post because I still need crit for the narusaku worrywarting scene prettyplease with a cherry on top. ;__;
*purrs*
previous bit
"--Naruto?"
"Uh -- sorry, distracted. Alright, if you insist..."
"And you, Sasuke-kun?"
He shrugged. "I'll set the camp. Just go."
"We'll climb around the outside and come back toward you, maybe something will run your way," Sakura said. Sasuke just waved them off and crouched to start digging a fire pit.
They went in silence, uphill and around, Naruto with his eyes half-closed and the wings of his nose fluttering as he caught the fresh scent of prey. Rabbits, yes, lots of them. Smaller rodents, too, but those didn't feed much unless you caught a lot, and that was a waste of time and looked rather pitiful to boot.
The bushes and plants weren't very tall, but they were densely entangled. Naruto saw a couple of what he suspected to be deer paths, but the rest seemed at first sight to be a solid block of bramble-bound greenery. Grinning, he fell into a crouch and looked for a crack to crawl in.
He was bigger than quite a few predators around the island, but there were the huge lizards to take into account, and the deer made cracks too. He forgot Sakura at first, delighted by the grass and leaves surrounding him, hiding him from view. It was tempting to just find a burrow and lie in wait for the next rabbit. But he was too impatient to wait long, and there were too many scents to explore. And he had to bring food back to his mates anyway.
"...Naruto?"
Naruto jumped a little, and grinned at Sakura over his shoulder for reassurance. It didn't seem to work very much; he saw her swallow and wince.
"Don't go all foxlike on me... Please?"
It was the please that did him in. Naruto sighed, anticipation simmering down. "Sorry. Look, there's a burrow here."
She looked down at her hands, at the string coiled there, not making a move to set up a snare. "No, I'm sorry, I mean -- it's totally harmless, right? I know that. But it's just that it feels a little weird when you ... stop talking."
Naruto quirked up the corner of his mouth in a rueful half-smile and plucked a leaf out of her hair gently. Hunting meant he should stay quiet -- and strangely enough, when he was tracking something it really wasn't hard. But they weren't really hunting, they were just setting traps. Granted, if something was flushed out under his nose he'd go for it, but... Yeah. "You really sure you want me to just babble whatever goes through my head?"
Sakura threw him an exaggeratedly wary look, and then sighed, sobering up. "... Alright, do whatever you want."
But he was pretty sure that doing that would weird her out again. It should have weirded him out too, how at home he felt in the thicket, but it was hard to fret when there were so many fascinating scents just asking to be untangled and paths needing explored. So he watched her slim fingers as they flew through a series of complicated knots, balancing a rock here, bending a branch just barely off the edge of snapping there, and tried not to wonder too hard whether he would catch something if he threw himself on his stomach and stuffed his arm as deep down the burrow as it could go.
"Do you want to try? It's not hard, you just hold the string like this and... Naruto?"
Naruto blinked and looked up at Sakura's face. "Ah, it's okay. I don't have your tiny fingers."
"My fingers are not tiny. And yours aren't that big anyway. And -- Naruto..."
"Hm?"
She was chewing on her lip again. "... I'm sorry."
Naruto ruffled the hair at the back of his head and grinned. "About what? It's okay, I mean, you're right it's freaky--"
Her stricken expression stopped him cold, left him confused.
"Did... Did Sasuke-kun --"
-- Oh. "No, no, he didn't tell me, he -- I just remembered later. I mean usually I'm pretty gone when I'm like that but that time I wasn't as much, and it was kind of a weird state, kinda floaty, you know, but -- yeah, so. I remembered."
She seemed at a loss for words, mortified and guilty, and he cursed himself for being so stupid as to tell her he'd overheard. She'd been confiding in Sasuke, and -- well, he was the one they'd been talking about in the first place, but there was a reason Sakura didn't want to tell Naruto himself.
"Sakura-chan..." He leaned closer, raised a hand to caress her hair softly, unsure that this was the right kind of approach. "Sakura... It's alright. I'm not angry. I mean -- I get so used to the whole Kyuubi mess that sometimes I don't even know what I'd be like if he wasn't there. But --"
She shook her head no, teeth worrying at her lower lip, unable to meet his eyes. "If you don't have a problem with it, then why should I? It's so -- selfish -- narrow-minded..."
"What?" he blurted out, confused.
"He's a part of you now, right? I should just accept that. Sasuke-kun doesn't even blink, and yet I..."
"I thought we decided Sasuke is a total freak," Naruto countered, trying to inject some humor in his voice. It didn't seem to help Sakura very much. "Aw, don't beat yourself up because you don't react like him, okay? I mean, he's from a clan of weirdoes who can grow more pupils, what does he care if mine get kinda cat-shaped, right?"
Sakura seemed even more miserable. "... But he accepts that part of you."
And she didn't; she didn't say it, but it was on the tip of her tongue and they both knew it. Naruto's shoulders sagged, and he swallowed a bitter aftertaste in his mouth. Yeah. There was that.
"I still don't think it's fair to compare the two of you like that. I mean, he's -- he's Sasuke, you know? And you're you. You aren't the same people, so of course you're not gonna react the same way. I'm not angry at you, I promise, so--"
Sakura placed a hand on his mouth to cover his strained smile. She looked up at him then, but to him it still seemed like it wouldn't take a lot more to make her cry. "Maybe, but you're hurt. I didn't want to hurt you."
He kissed her palm, his hand covering hers, and gently guided it off his face. "You know, Sakura-chan, you fret way too much. Why does it freak you out so much anyway?"
"Well --"
"I mean okay, it looks weird, but why does it get to you so much? Are you, uh, worried Kyuubi's gonna take over or something?"
She frowned, shook her head no slowly. "...I... Maybe a little. Not very."
"Are you scared for the baby, what it means for her?"
Seeing Sakura's startled face, he'd just managed to give her another worry.
"No, that's not it. It's -- it's about you. It's not about the baby or me." Her fingers clenched around his own and Naruto watched the realization bloom on her face. "... I'm afraid it will get worse and you'll stay stuck like that."
"Sakura-chan, I'm not gonna--"
"And you won't notice," she interrupted him; "but --little by little -- you'll be gone. Naruto'll be gone."
She shuddered; the rest of her words came out as a rush.
"And there will be that fox thing in Naruto's body, who just sniffs things and hunts and goes into heat, and oh, it will still hang around and cuddle up at night, but -- it will be like living with someone who has brain damage. It's still the same face, but some part of them is lost and it's so empty behind their eyes!" She looked up at him, eyes huge and scared. "And you-Naruto can never chat or plan out a mission or prank Kakashi-sensei again -- or tell me you l-- You l--"
"I love you," he blurted out. He didn't even think; he pulled Sakura on his lap, crushed her against his chest, hugging hard and tight, and her hands shook a little when she clenched them in his shirt.
"I love you, love you, love you. And it's never gonna happen because I don't want it to. Man, I need my brain to raise our kid or she'll go around sniffing her buddies' diapers in preschool. And then when she grows up she'll hate our guts because the boy of her dreams calls her the butt-sniffster and it will be horrible, worse than war and cholera."
Sakura choked, or maybe that was a laugh. She hugged him a little harder, pressing her cheek against his neck, head bowed. "... I'm sorry, I know I'm being stupid..."
"You're not stupid at all," Naruto said softly, a hand cupping the back of her head. "It was really scary when I started waking up in weird places and having strange dreams. I -- kinda thought about that kind of stuff, too. Not being myself anymore." He smiled a little; his pride hurt from admitting to thinking so much he'd scared himself. "But it's been years and I haven't gotten that much more brain-dead or anything..."
Sakura sighed and nodded, straightening up, and he missed her warmth against his upper body a little bit. She didn't move off his lap, though, allowing him to keep his arms around her.
"But it keeps happening and no one really knows why. I asked."
"So find that out," he suggested, the solution so evident he didn't understand why neither of them had thought of it before. "I mean, Jiraiya is all about the seal does this and the seal doesn't do that, but hey, it's not his seal. And he knows more about the chakra side and the possession side than what it's doing to my brain. Besides he's a writer, not a shrink, that's not the same way to know people. Maybe there's some kind of influence he missed. And Tsunade knows more about the body than the mind and also she's the goddamn Hokage, she has no time to research that stuff. But maybe there's an explanation for the foxiness. Maybe you'd feel better knowing all the gritty details. Then you wouldn't have to worry about what it could do."
Sakura closed her eyes as she considered it; Naruto watched her. She seemed less tense already, provided with an outlet for her worries. "... It would be a lot of work."
"Well, yeah." Naruto wasn't sure she minded, though. He knew Sakura liked keeping busy.
"And I can't get started before we're done with the Chuunin tests anyway."
She frowned then, brisk and professional once again. Naruto grinned.
"Hey, I'm not gonna blow up in one lousy little month. The sleepwalking's been tapering off for a while now. And it started when I was, what, thirteen? Fourteen? You've got lots of time." He gave her a suspicious look. "It's not like you have to throw yourself at it, right? Just take it slow. The way it's going, we've got years."
"You think we've got years," she rectified, but it was stern more than worried.
Also, she was still on his lap. So he kissed her nose. Sakura's cheeks reddened slightly and she pouted a little, which only prompted him to kiss her on the lips. Seeing her mollified, he leaned in for another, slower kiss...
For a second, she met him, lips parting under his own; and then she tensed up and looked around quickly. "Oh crap! I can't believe myself. What if someone came and attacked us?"
Naruto grimaced at the reminder. Damn it! "Aw, we're in the middle of a thicket, we'd have heard them..."
"And maybe not!" She squirmed out of his lap. "Damn it, how stupid--"
Naruto wanted to feel guilty, but he couldn't get past his feeling that he would have known. His senses were still running high, tracking the faint sounds and smells all around; the idea that someone might have gotten the drop on him seemed ludicrous. But for all he knew that deep-rooted sense of self-confidence was totally wrong.
"And it's getting late and we still haven't caught anything, and the traps might take hours or days to bring anything in..."
Naruto perked up. "Or we could rush through and herd something Sasuke's way." A chance to give chase to something! His skin tingled. Ohh, yes. Yes yes yes. ...Oh. Right. "...I might go a little foxy again. Is that okay?"
Sakura hesitated. Naruto waited, stomach clenching.
"... Yes. Alright. Yes." She managed a brave smile, squaring her shoulders. "Okay. Let's hunt."
+
They burst out of the bushes at a dead run, chest angled low, on the edge of balance. The small tusked deer veered hard to the left when it ended up out of cover, but Sakura veered with it and a kunai flashed out of her hand. The deer tumbled, back leg spraying blood on the grass; Naruto was on it the next second. They rolled down the riverbank, once, twice -- then his claws found purchase in its jaws and he twisted until its neck broke.
He sat straddling his kill, grinning toothily, as Sakura let her momentum take her down the slope to join him.
When Naruto looked up through the reeds, Sasuke was watching them, knee-deep in the stream, his hand still resting on the shuriken holster strapped to his thigh. Naruto snorted; he kept grinning, with fangs and all. "Poor widdle Sasuke-chan, did we startle you?"
Sasuke snorted and turned his back on them. "Idiots. Both of you."
Naruto expected Sakura to sober up and remember she'd been uneasy, still was a little; but instead she grinned, cheeks still flushed from their wild run. He kind of wanted to kiss her again, and give her windblown hair another reason to look that mussed.
"Sorry, Sasuke-kun." She nudged Naruto, who moved off the deer willingly enough, and crouched to start butchering the animal. "You should have come, it was fun!" she commented with determined good cheer. "We should run together more often."
Sasuke grunted in apparent disinterest, as he cupped water in his hands and poured it down his back. That was when Naruto really noticed he was shirtless, and his pants were so soaked through they looked painted on.
"Whatcha doin?"
"Washing," Sasuke replied caustically, as he picked up a handful of sand. "You should try it sometime."
He still had his back turned. That was asking for it, really. Grinning, Naruto got rid of his jacket and crawled through the grass and the reeds, body low to the ground.
Sasuke kept looking unaware. From the corner of his eye Naruto saw Sakura open her mouth as if to berate him; he flashed her a pleading look, and she hesitated.
'Come on, would be fun,' he let her read on his lips.
Sakura sighed, and a smile grew on her face, reluctant at first and then amused. "... Say, Sasuke-kun, do you remember that Rock genin?"
... And now she was distracting Sasuke for him! Score. Hah, he'd always known Sakura secretly enjoyed it when he pranked the hell out of people. But she'd never cooperated when it was against Sasuke before. Naruto wiggled in happiness and sank in the water with barely a ripple.
"Which one?" Sasuke replied absently as he washed his shoulders. Wet hair clung to the back of his neck.
"Not the one with the sword, the one who did the water jutsu."
Naruto allowed the current to angle his body, and slowly pushed upstream with his hands and feet.
"Yeah? What about it?"
"Oh..."
Sakura paused, and Naruto glanced at her, worried that she was running out of inspiration. But instead she was concentrating on skinning the deer; she had blood up to her elbows but it didn't seem to bother her much. Naruto purred. He liked a woman who was so matter of fact about blood on her paws. Hands. Blah.
"I was just wondering if you saw the seals he was using?" she asked casually, glancing at Naruto in a very 'hurry up already' way. "Because if you still remember them, I wouldn't mind trying it out."
Sasuke was still washing. Naruto crept closer. "Hm. Seems like a taxing jutsu. I'll teach you the hand seals, but you might want to wait until after the test to practice. Naruto, I'll kick you in the face."
Next.
So this scene with Naruto and Sakura alone came kind of out of nowhere; I just wanted them to have fun and then go, but Sakura started being a worrywart and blah. Oh well.
The first scene probably needs to be edited and some detailed crit or sumtin, but I did what I could and now I need outside eyes for halp. But if you just want to go "aw cute" or "wtf", that works too. XD I'm still writing, so y'all might get the rest of the scene soonish! which is also the rest of the chapter, incidentally. done omigod done i'm posting as soon as i'm done reading it over. But in a new post because I still need crit for the narusaku worrywarting scene prettyplease with a cherry on top. ;__;
*purrs*
previous bit
"--Naruto?"
"Uh -- sorry, distracted. Alright, if you insist..."
"And you, Sasuke-kun?"
He shrugged. "I'll set the camp. Just go."
"We'll climb around the outside and come back toward you, maybe something will run your way," Sakura said. Sasuke just waved them off and crouched to start digging a fire pit.
They went in silence, uphill and around, Naruto with his eyes half-closed and the wings of his nose fluttering as he caught the fresh scent of prey. Rabbits, yes, lots of them. Smaller rodents, too, but those didn't feed much unless you caught a lot, and that was a waste of time and looked rather pitiful to boot.
The bushes and plants weren't very tall, but they were densely entangled. Naruto saw a couple of what he suspected to be deer paths, but the rest seemed at first sight to be a solid block of bramble-bound greenery. Grinning, he fell into a crouch and looked for a crack to crawl in.
He was bigger than quite a few predators around the island, but there were the huge lizards to take into account, and the deer made cracks too. He forgot Sakura at first, delighted by the grass and leaves surrounding him, hiding him from view. It was tempting to just find a burrow and lie in wait for the next rabbit. But he was too impatient to wait long, and there were too many scents to explore. And he had to bring food back to his mates anyway.
"...Naruto?"
Naruto jumped a little, and grinned at Sakura over his shoulder for reassurance. It didn't seem to work very much; he saw her swallow and wince.
"Don't go all foxlike on me... Please?"
It was the please that did him in. Naruto sighed, anticipation simmering down. "Sorry. Look, there's a burrow here."
She looked down at her hands, at the string coiled there, not making a move to set up a snare. "No, I'm sorry, I mean -- it's totally harmless, right? I know that. But it's just that it feels a little weird when you ... stop talking."
Naruto quirked up the corner of his mouth in a rueful half-smile and plucked a leaf out of her hair gently. Hunting meant he should stay quiet -- and strangely enough, when he was tracking something it really wasn't hard. But they weren't really hunting, they were just setting traps. Granted, if something was flushed out under his nose he'd go for it, but... Yeah. "You really sure you want me to just babble whatever goes through my head?"
Sakura threw him an exaggeratedly wary look, and then sighed, sobering up. "... Alright, do whatever you want."
But he was pretty sure that doing that would weird her out again. It should have weirded him out too, how at home he felt in the thicket, but it was hard to fret when there were so many fascinating scents just asking to be untangled and paths needing explored. So he watched her slim fingers as they flew through a series of complicated knots, balancing a rock here, bending a branch just barely off the edge of snapping there, and tried not to wonder too hard whether he would catch something if he threw himself on his stomach and stuffed his arm as deep down the burrow as it could go.
"Do you want to try? It's not hard, you just hold the string like this and... Naruto?"
Naruto blinked and looked up at Sakura's face. "Ah, it's okay. I don't have your tiny fingers."
"My fingers are not tiny. And yours aren't that big anyway. And -- Naruto..."
"Hm?"
She was chewing on her lip again. "... I'm sorry."
Naruto ruffled the hair at the back of his head and grinned. "About what? It's okay, I mean, you're right it's freaky--"
Her stricken expression stopped him cold, left him confused.
"Did... Did Sasuke-kun --"
-- Oh. "No, no, he didn't tell me, he -- I just remembered later. I mean usually I'm pretty gone when I'm like that but that time I wasn't as much, and it was kind of a weird state, kinda floaty, you know, but -- yeah, so. I remembered."
She seemed at a loss for words, mortified and guilty, and he cursed himself for being so stupid as to tell her he'd overheard. She'd been confiding in Sasuke, and -- well, he was the one they'd been talking about in the first place, but there was a reason Sakura didn't want to tell Naruto himself.
"Sakura-chan..." He leaned closer, raised a hand to caress her hair softly, unsure that this was the right kind of approach. "Sakura... It's alright. I'm not angry. I mean -- I get so used to the whole Kyuubi mess that sometimes I don't even know what I'd be like if he wasn't there. But --"
She shook her head no, teeth worrying at her lower lip, unable to meet his eyes. "If you don't have a problem with it, then why should I? It's so -- selfish -- narrow-minded..."
"What?" he blurted out, confused.
"He's a part of you now, right? I should just accept that. Sasuke-kun doesn't even blink, and yet I..."
"I thought we decided Sasuke is a total freak," Naruto countered, trying to inject some humor in his voice. It didn't seem to help Sakura very much. "Aw, don't beat yourself up because you don't react like him, okay? I mean, he's from a clan of weirdoes who can grow more pupils, what does he care if mine get kinda cat-shaped, right?"
Sakura seemed even more miserable. "... But he accepts that part of you."
And she didn't; she didn't say it, but it was on the tip of her tongue and they both knew it. Naruto's shoulders sagged, and he swallowed a bitter aftertaste in his mouth. Yeah. There was that.
"I still don't think it's fair to compare the two of you like that. I mean, he's -- he's Sasuke, you know? And you're you. You aren't the same people, so of course you're not gonna react the same way. I'm not angry at you, I promise, so--"
Sakura placed a hand on his mouth to cover his strained smile. She looked up at him then, but to him it still seemed like it wouldn't take a lot more to make her cry. "Maybe, but you're hurt. I didn't want to hurt you."
He kissed her palm, his hand covering hers, and gently guided it off his face. "You know, Sakura-chan, you fret way too much. Why does it freak you out so much anyway?"
"Well --"
"I mean okay, it looks weird, but why does it get to you so much? Are you, uh, worried Kyuubi's gonna take over or something?"
She frowned, shook her head no slowly. "...I... Maybe a little. Not very."
"Are you scared for the baby, what it means for her?"
Seeing Sakura's startled face, he'd just managed to give her another worry.
"No, that's not it. It's -- it's about you. It's not about the baby or me." Her fingers clenched around his own and Naruto watched the realization bloom on her face. "... I'm afraid it will get worse and you'll stay stuck like that."
"Sakura-chan, I'm not gonna--"
"And you won't notice," she interrupted him; "but --little by little -- you'll be gone. Naruto'll be gone."
She shuddered; the rest of her words came out as a rush.
"And there will be that fox thing in Naruto's body, who just sniffs things and hunts and goes into heat, and oh, it will still hang around and cuddle up at night, but -- it will be like living with someone who has brain damage. It's still the same face, but some part of them is lost and it's so empty behind their eyes!" She looked up at him, eyes huge and scared. "And you-Naruto can never chat or plan out a mission or prank Kakashi-sensei again -- or tell me you l-- You l--"
"I love you," he blurted out. He didn't even think; he pulled Sakura on his lap, crushed her against his chest, hugging hard and tight, and her hands shook a little when she clenched them in his shirt.
"I love you, love you, love you. And it's never gonna happen because I don't want it to. Man, I need my brain to raise our kid or she'll go around sniffing her buddies' diapers in preschool. And then when she grows up she'll hate our guts because the boy of her dreams calls her the butt-sniffster and it will be horrible, worse than war and cholera."
Sakura choked, or maybe that was a laugh. She hugged him a little harder, pressing her cheek against his neck, head bowed. "... I'm sorry, I know I'm being stupid..."
"You're not stupid at all," Naruto said softly, a hand cupping the back of her head. "It was really scary when I started waking up in weird places and having strange dreams. I -- kinda thought about that kind of stuff, too. Not being myself anymore." He smiled a little; his pride hurt from admitting to thinking so much he'd scared himself. "But it's been years and I haven't gotten that much more brain-dead or anything..."
Sakura sighed and nodded, straightening up, and he missed her warmth against his upper body a little bit. She didn't move off his lap, though, allowing him to keep his arms around her.
"But it keeps happening and no one really knows why. I asked."
"So find that out," he suggested, the solution so evident he didn't understand why neither of them had thought of it before. "I mean, Jiraiya is all about the seal does this and the seal doesn't do that, but hey, it's not his seal. And he knows more about the chakra side and the possession side than what it's doing to my brain. Besides he's a writer, not a shrink, that's not the same way to know people. Maybe there's some kind of influence he missed. And Tsunade knows more about the body than the mind and also she's the goddamn Hokage, she has no time to research that stuff. But maybe there's an explanation for the foxiness. Maybe you'd feel better knowing all the gritty details. Then you wouldn't have to worry about what it could do."
Sakura closed her eyes as she considered it; Naruto watched her. She seemed less tense already, provided with an outlet for her worries. "... It would be a lot of work."
"Well, yeah." Naruto wasn't sure she minded, though. He knew Sakura liked keeping busy.
"And I can't get started before we're done with the Chuunin tests anyway."
She frowned then, brisk and professional once again. Naruto grinned.
"Hey, I'm not gonna blow up in one lousy little month. The sleepwalking's been tapering off for a while now. And it started when I was, what, thirteen? Fourteen? You've got lots of time." He gave her a suspicious look. "It's not like you have to throw yourself at it, right? Just take it slow. The way it's going, we've got years."
"You think we've got years," she rectified, but it was stern more than worried.
Also, she was still on his lap. So he kissed her nose. Sakura's cheeks reddened slightly and she pouted a little, which only prompted him to kiss her on the lips. Seeing her mollified, he leaned in for another, slower kiss...
For a second, she met him, lips parting under his own; and then she tensed up and looked around quickly. "Oh crap! I can't believe myself. What if someone came and attacked us?"
Naruto grimaced at the reminder. Damn it! "Aw, we're in the middle of a thicket, we'd have heard them..."
"And maybe not!" She squirmed out of his lap. "Damn it, how stupid--"
Naruto wanted to feel guilty, but he couldn't get past his feeling that he would have known. His senses were still running high, tracking the faint sounds and smells all around; the idea that someone might have gotten the drop on him seemed ludicrous. But for all he knew that deep-rooted sense of self-confidence was totally wrong.
"And it's getting late and we still haven't caught anything, and the traps might take hours or days to bring anything in..."
Naruto perked up. "Or we could rush through and herd something Sasuke's way." A chance to give chase to something! His skin tingled. Ohh, yes. Yes yes yes. ...Oh. Right. "...I might go a little foxy again. Is that okay?"
Sakura hesitated. Naruto waited, stomach clenching.
"... Yes. Alright. Yes." She managed a brave smile, squaring her shoulders. "Okay. Let's hunt."
+
They burst out of the bushes at a dead run, chest angled low, on the edge of balance. The small tusked deer veered hard to the left when it ended up out of cover, but Sakura veered with it and a kunai flashed out of her hand. The deer tumbled, back leg spraying blood on the grass; Naruto was on it the next second. They rolled down the riverbank, once, twice -- then his claws found purchase in its jaws and he twisted until its neck broke.
He sat straddling his kill, grinning toothily, as Sakura let her momentum take her down the slope to join him.
When Naruto looked up through the reeds, Sasuke was watching them, knee-deep in the stream, his hand still resting on the shuriken holster strapped to his thigh. Naruto snorted; he kept grinning, with fangs and all. "Poor widdle Sasuke-chan, did we startle you?"
Sasuke snorted and turned his back on them. "Idiots. Both of you."
Naruto expected Sakura to sober up and remember she'd been uneasy, still was a little; but instead she grinned, cheeks still flushed from their wild run. He kind of wanted to kiss her again, and give her windblown hair another reason to look that mussed.
"Sorry, Sasuke-kun." She nudged Naruto, who moved off the deer willingly enough, and crouched to start butchering the animal. "You should have come, it was fun!" she commented with determined good cheer. "We should run together more often."
Sasuke grunted in apparent disinterest, as he cupped water in his hands and poured it down his back. That was when Naruto really noticed he was shirtless, and his pants were so soaked through they looked painted on.
"Whatcha doin?"
"Washing," Sasuke replied caustically, as he picked up a handful of sand. "You should try it sometime."
He still had his back turned. That was asking for it, really. Grinning, Naruto got rid of his jacket and crawled through the grass and the reeds, body low to the ground.
Sasuke kept looking unaware. From the corner of his eye Naruto saw Sakura open her mouth as if to berate him; he flashed her a pleading look, and she hesitated.
'Come on, would be fun,' he let her read on his lips.
Sakura sighed, and a smile grew on her face, reluctant at first and then amused. "... Say, Sasuke-kun, do you remember that Rock genin?"
... And now she was distracting Sasuke for him! Score. Hah, he'd always known Sakura secretly enjoyed it when he pranked the hell out of people. But she'd never cooperated when it was against Sasuke before. Naruto wiggled in happiness and sank in the water with barely a ripple.
"Which one?" Sasuke replied absently as he washed his shoulders. Wet hair clung to the back of his neck.
"Not the one with the sword, the one who did the water jutsu."
Naruto allowed the current to angle his body, and slowly pushed upstream with his hands and feet.
"Yeah? What about it?"
"Oh..."
Sakura paused, and Naruto glanced at her, worried that she was running out of inspiration. But instead she was concentrating on skinning the deer; she had blood up to her elbows but it didn't seem to bother her much. Naruto purred. He liked a woman who was so matter of fact about blood on her paws. Hands. Blah.
"I was just wondering if you saw the seals he was using?" she asked casually, glancing at Naruto in a very 'hurry up already' way. "Because if you still remember them, I wouldn't mind trying it out."
Sasuke was still washing. Naruto crept closer. "Hm. Seems like a taxing jutsu. I'll teach you the hand seals, but you might want to wait until after the test to practice. Naruto, I'll kick you in the face."
Next.