Welcome one and all! This story, is actually based on the book Surviving The AppleWhites. But with a twist. Okay, a LOT of twists. But go with me okay? (and for those fans who have read my other stories, I am indeed not dead :D) Remember, if you don't understand any of this, read the book! So please enjoy!
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NOTE:
E.D: Naruto
Jake Semple: Sakura
Cordelia: Neji
Hal: Hinata
Lucille: Shizune
Archie: Genma
Randolph: Iruka
Sybil: Anko
Destiny: Moegi
Zedediah: Sarutobi
Melissa: Shikimaru
Winston: Tonton
Mrs. Montrose: Anko
Govindaswami: Jiraya
Priscilla: Konohamaru
Jake's uncle: Kakashi
Jeremy Bernstein: Kabuto
Marcia Manning: Karin
Ages may change, some other characters might come in here or there, and everyone (except Sakura and Kakashi) are family.
CHARACTERS ARE OOC JUST WARNING YOU NOW!
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"My name isn't blondie. It's Naruto. Na-ru-to."
"What kind of name is that?"
The girl slouching against the porch railing had pink hair in an impossibly high ponytail, bright green eyes, a nose ring, many other earrings, a black tank top, black poofy mid-thigh skirt, combat boots- black of course, and a choker necklace with a variety of plastic bangles.
"My kind." Naruto Konoha said.
He had no intention of telling this creep the story of his name. He could tell by looking at her that she'd never heard of Narutamotoza Minato, his mother's favorite writer.
Being probably the only sixteen-year-old guy in the whole country named Narutamotoza, he had no intention of giving her even that little bit of ammunition to use against him.
Naruto, he thought, was at least dignified- like a hokage's name, which he just might be.
"What kind of name is Sakura Haruno?"
Two can play at that game, the girl's face said.
"Mine."
Not an original bone in her body, Naruto thought. Just a plain ordinary delinquent.
According to his friend Shikimaru, though, Sakura Haruno was famous. She had been kicked out of the public schools in all of Japan. Shikimaru wasn't sure what all she'd done to acheive that particular distinction, but the word around Tokyo was that one thing she did was burn down her old school.
She'd come to Fire Country to live with her uncle, Kakashi Hatake, a neighbor to the Konohas, and go to Tokyo Middle School.
The plan had not lasted long. No one in living memory had been thrown out of Tokyo Middle School, but Sakura Haruno had managed to accomplish that feat in three weeks flat. At least the building was still standing. It was only the middle of September, and she had run out of schools that were willing to risk taking her.
Mr. Hatake was inside at that moment discussing with Naruto's parents, his Aunt Shizune, Uncle Genma, and Grandpa Sarutobi the arrangement the two families and Sakura's social worker had worked out for continuing Sakura's education.
Sakura Haruno was the first person Naruto had ever met who had a social worker. He thought that was probably only one step away from having a probation officer, which is what Sakura's parents would have when they got out of jail.
That was why Sakura had a social worker- because her parents were in jail for growing marijuana in their basement and offering some to an off-duty sheriff's deputy.
Naruto didn't know how long they were going to be in jail, but at least a year.
He figured criminal tendencies ran in the families. The kid had burned down her school just after her parents were arrested.
Naruto's Aunt Shizune was a poet and had been conducting a workshop at Tokyo Middle School when Sakura was kicked out. The whole terrible idea had been hers.
She'd told Mr. Hatake about the Creative Acadamy, which was what Naruto's father had named the Konoha home school.
Only Aunt Shizune, whose view of life was almost pathologically sunny, would get the idea that after an entire state had admitted it couldn't cope with the kid and after Tokyo Middle School had been defeated in less than a month, the Konohas should take her in.
The Creative Acadamy didn't even have any trained teachers, let alone guidance counselors and armed security guards. There were a whole bunch of buildings the kid could burn down at Wit's End- the main house, all eight cottages, the goatshed, a toolshed, and the barn.
But somehow Aunt Shizune had convinced everybody else. Naruto had been the only family member to vote against letting Sakura Haruno join them.
He'd begged his grandfather, who usually had more sense than all the rest of the family combined, to put a stop to the idea.
"You know how Aunt Shizune can't ever believe a bad thing about anybody!" he told him. "Her attitude about people is downright dangerous."
He'd only fixed his hat and said that he rather envied Shizune's rose-colored view of things.
"More often than not, I've noticed, it turns out to be true." Then he had declared taking Sakura Haruno in a noble and socially responsible thing to do.
Noble and socially responsible! More like suicidal, Naruto thought.
He had thought that even before he'd laid eyes on Sakura Haruno. Now he was sure of it.
Sakura pulled a cigarette out of a pack from who-knows-where.
"Better not light that thing," he said, thinking about lighters and matches and very big fires. "Wit's End is a smoke-free enviroment."
The girl took out a yellow plastic lighter. "You can't have a smoke-free enviroment outdoors." she said.
"We can have it anywhere we want- this is out property, all sixteen acres of it."
Sakura looked him square in the eye and lit the cigarette. She took a long drag and blew the smoke directly into his face so that he had to close his eyes and hold his breath to keep from choking on it.
Then she said one of Paulie's favorite phrases.
No one managed to break Grandpa's adopted parrot of swearing.
Naruto suspected that they wouldn't have any better luck with Sakura Haruno.
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So far so good, Sakura thought.
This guy was bugged by cursing and smoking. She had news for him. She intended to do a whole lot of both.
She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke at him again. He turned away and moved down to the other end of the porch steps.
Doesn't bother me, guy- you can bug off completely as far as I'm concerned.
Sakura hadn't been any more than two years old when she found out certain words affected people. It had surprised her considerably, since her parents used those words at home all the time.
She'd learned them the same way she learned all the other words she knew. People didn't make a fuss when her parents used them, but once she'd seen how some adults reacted to those words when she said them, it had become a game.
She could still remember the old woman with the mean, pinched-up face who told her to take her sticky fingers off the display case when her mother took her to the bakery to get a cake on her third birthday.
She had smiled her best little-girl smile and said just two words. The woman had gone all white and slumped right down to the floor. The image was as clear in her mind now as if it had happened yesterday- the way she'd just disappeared all of a sudden from behind the counter.
All the fuss and furor afterward had made a permanent impression on her. Nobody could ever tell Sakura Haruno words didn't have power.
If the rest of the Konohas were anything like this boy, she thought, she ought to be able to bug them quite a lot for however long she was going to be stuck with them.
She leaned back against the support post behind her watched the smoke float out of her nostrils. She hated adults making decisions for her and expecting her to just go along with whatever they said.
Her parents had tried that and given up. But because of that big mistake they made with the sheriff's deputy, they'd been carted off to their seperate minimum-security prisons and she was stuck with a bunch of strangers who didn't get it that she wasn't going to do what she didn't want to do.
She would just have to show them! She intended to make her time here to be even shorter than her time at Tokyo Middle School.
The smoking part was going to be a problem, though. This was her last pack of cigarettes. It was miles to town, and out here in the Fire Country boonies there was no such thing as a bus.
She squinted against the smoke that was blowing back at her now.
Maybe, since there were tobacco fields along just about every road, she could tear off a few leaves and learn to roll her own.
She was pretty sure this guy had been told to keep on eye on her while her uncle was inside, to make sure she didn't set fire to the porch or something.
He wasn't much to look at. Blonde hair and blue eyes. Although there were these strange whisker-like marks across his cheeks, but other than that, nothing interesting.
He was sitting there now with his scabby elbows on his scabby knees, staring off down the driveway.
Sakura couldn't see the main road from here, the way the drive curved around a row of trees and bushes, but out there was a wooden sign with Wit's End spelled out on it with bark-covered twigs.
Quaint and rustic and weird. Sakura had never known anyone who named their house before. Her uncle said the place had had a name ever since he was a kid.
It had been built on a farm till it went bust and somebody bought it, built a bunch of scruffy little cabins up against the woods, and turned it into a motor lodge. They'd named it Bide-A-Wee, added an office wing, and lived in the big two-story house.
Then the Konohas, all artsy types, her uncle said, had moved down from New York and bought it. The scruffy little cabins were still there, but now the house was part house and part school.
There were four Konoha kids, but Sakura had only met this one so far- this Naruka or Umuto or whatever his name was. Being home schooled, the Konohas hadn't been at Tokyo Middle School during what she liked to think of as the Sakura Haruno Reign of Terror. She wondered what the others were like.
Suddenly there was a shout from somewhere off to the right of the house. A brown-and-white German shepherd-sized animal with huge lopsided horns came tearing around the end of the porch and down toward the road.
A bunch of white papers streamed from its mouth and fluttered around. Right behind it, shouting at the top of his lungs, came a tall boy in jeans and a T-shirt.
Sakura nearly choked on the smoke she just inhaled. She thought he might be the most handsome guy she'd ever seen,
He had long brown hair pulled into a short ponytail and white, pearl-like eyes.
The animal he was chasing was a goat. A smelly one. As fast as it had galloped by, it had left its odor very clearly in the air. Goat and guy disappeared around the bend in the drive, but the shouting went on, getting fainter and fainter.
"Neji," the guy on the step said. "And Wolfie."
"What's all the fuss?" Sakura's uncle came out of the house, a pig- with a pearl necklace!- waddling at his heels. The Konoha adults were right behind.
The oldest of them, a wiry old man and beard, pushed his way through the others and headed straight for the wooden rocking chair in the corner of the porch. On his way, he snatched the cigarette out of Sakura's hand so fast Sakura didn't know what happened till it was being ground out on the porch floor under the old man's shoe.
"Smoke-free enviroment," he said and sat down on the rocker. "Remember that."
Everybody on the porch, including the pig, was looking at Sakura, and she felt her face starting to heat up. She looked off the way the goat and the guy had gone, whistling under her breath to let them know that she didn't care. Not at all.
The breathtaking guy was picking his way back along the driveway, carrying what was left of the papers as if he had a dead baby in his arms. It was smudged with red-brown dirt and torn in different places.
"I'm going to murder that goat one of these days!" he said.
Shizune Konoha, the frizzy-haired poet whose idea all this was, ran down the porch steps, one hand over her heart.
"You might have murdered him already, yelling and chasing him like that. He's probably lying in a heap under a bush somewhere, drawing his last breath."
"No, he's not. I chased him into the barn."
"Come of it, Shizune." the man with brown hair and a scar over his nose said. According to the description Sakura's uncle had given her, this had to be Iruka Konoha, the father of the Konoha children. "That smelly demon is hostility personified. It would take more than a little chasing to get him down."
"That isn't hostility. Wolfbane is suffering from post-traumatic stress." Shizune turned back to the guy with the ponytail. "Whatever were you doing in the goat pen?"
Neji 'hn'ned. Sakura thought it sounded slightly rhytmical. "I was not in the goat pen! I was in the meadow. That beastly, smellt, disgusting creature was running loose. Again! He tried to murder me. It was lucky I had my compositions with me to deflect him."
Shizune let out a squeal. "Loose? He was loose? What about Hazel? Where's Hazel?"
Neji walked briskly up the porch steps, pushed his way through the crowd, and stepped over the pig who had flopped down directly in front of the door. "She's halfway to Tokyo for all I know. Ask Moegi!" The screen door banged shut behind him.
"Moegi?" The woman with reading glasses around her neck, who's been jotting notes on a little notepad, looked up now, as if she was just tuning in. She was famous, Sakura knew. She'd even seen her on television once. She wrote best-selling mysteries about a florist who was an amateur detective.
She was also the children's mother, but her name wasn't Konoha; it was Sound. Anko Sound.
"What about Moegi?" she asked now. "She's taking a nap. I sent her to her room half an hour ago, and she promised me she would take a nap."
She stuck her notepad into the pocket of her oversized shirt and put her pencil behind her ear. "If she's out there by herself somewhere, we'd better find her. No telling was she's gotten into."
"She'd better not be in the woodshop again. Last time she drilled holes in a footstool I had nearly finished!" The man who said this had a bandana on his long hair and toothpick hanging from his mouth. This would be Genma Konoha, Iruka's brother and Shizune's husband. He and the old man made wooden furniture.
"Knowing your work, I can't believe it made much difference," Iruka said. "What are a few drill holes more or less?"
"You're just jealous because I have a gallery show coming up and you're out of work- again."
"Stop arguing and help me find Hazel!" Shizune said. "If she gets out on the road, she'll be killed."
Sakura hadn't heard a single car go by the whole time she'd been here. Whoever Hazel was, she didn't seem likely to get run down the minute she set foot on the road.
In a matter of moments, Sakura found herself alone on the porch with her uncle, the old man with the beard, and the pig. The others had gone off in different directions, Shizune and Genma yelling for Hazel, the others yelling for Moegi.
When the voices faded away, it was quiet on the porch except for a few grunts from the pig. The old man stuck out his hand toward Sakura. "Sarutobi Konoha, patriarch of the Konoha clan," he said. "How do you do?"
Sakura looked at the wrinkled, spotted, knobbly old hand. She was not about to shake the hand that had snatched one of her last precious cigarettes.
But she didn't have a choice. The old man grabbed her hand and shook it in both of his, nearly crushing Sakura's fingers in an amzingly powerful grip.
"Welcome to Wit's End- Furniture Factory, Gallery, Studio, Goat Compound and Creative Acadamy." Sarutobi Konoha said.
When the old man let go, Sakura shook her hand to make sure the blood could still get to the tips of her fingers. Then she said a few of her favorite words, just loud enough to be sure they were heard.
Sarutobi Konoha didn't so much as blink. "You out to spend a little time with Neji," he said. "He's taught my parrot the French for that. Spanish, Italian, and German, too."
Well there you have it. First chapter. I do hope you like this story! It took days to finish! If you do like this story, please review and I just might update other stories as well! Please and thank you!
R&R!