Hi, people! This is the suggestion thingy I said with Sakura and Sasuke stories. Suggestion format can be found in the author's note of Understanding. And, here's the first, I guess:

Suggestion From: MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Setting: AU, high school

Genre: Hurt/Comfort

Prompt: umbrella, owl, email, arrow, Hello Kitty, ice cream

Disclaimer: Not mine.

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"Pancakes and Sleet"

"Sasuke? What're you doing here?"

Sakura finds him under a street lamp in the end of March, staring down at his beat up Converse with a frown on his face that looks a lot sadder than his usual relatively indifferent expression. His hands are stuffed in his pockets, a wool hat on his head, the black jacket he wears too thin for the sleet-rain. After a short inspection, she confirms his lack of umbrella. When she speaks, he looks up to her, exhaustion etched into his face. They both share the same best friend and are therefore friends by necessity, and she realizes how little she really knows about him.

As he withdraws his gaze back to his shoes, he says, "I'm waiting for Itachi."

Her brow creases in confusion because Itachi does not seem like the type of person to leave his sixteen-year-old brother out in weather like this. "Is he late?" she asks.

"Yeah."

"By how long?"

"'Bout three hours. And my cell phone's broken - but you know that."

With a sigh, she holds out her hand for him to take. He looks at it and does nothing. She tells him, "You're coming with me. I bought myself a car with the birthday money I got. It's a piece of shit, but whatever."

"But I told Itachi I'd wait here."

His heart isn't in it, though, she sees and he accepts the hand anyway. He stands there shaking so she gets closer, holding her umbrella a little higher to cover both of them. Her heartbeat doesn't speed up at all. "I haven't been to your house in a while," she says, and their shoes squeak and splash in the dirty sleet that lines the sidewalk, "so you'll have to direct me."

The boy next to her shifts uncomfortably and somewhere in the distance an owl hoots sadly. "That's the thing," he says, and reaches up to fix his hat. He is sopping wet and the chance of him coming to school on Monday seems slim, she thinks. "I can't find my key anywhere. Itachi said he'd pick me up this morning at three."

"Well, then you'll just have to come home with me." His compliance with this is worrying. "You can use my cell in the car."

"Okay."

They walk close together in silence, sleet-rain coming down hard around them and there is a seventy-three percent chance of snow by midnight, the weather man says. Sakura's car sits lonely in the senior parking lot, bought for eight hundred dollars with birthday money and a month's worth of wages and will need twice that in repairs if she doesn't take good care of it. She has been seventeen for two days, and is horribly afraid of crashing. It takes three tries for the keys to open the door, but the heat click on and the car starts on the first try. Small miracles where she can get them.

Once she is situated, she pulls his phone from her pocket and tosses it to him without looking, knowing that the running back of the football team is unlikely to miss. "The code to unlock it is three-seven-three-seven," she says, putting the car in reverse and craning her small body back to see behind her, her height and the sleet-rain making her life difficult.

"Hello Kitty?"

She winces as she makes her final point of the K-turn, having forgotten her background was so childish and wishing that she had remembered to change it yesterday because having Uchiha Sasuke see it is more than just a little humiliating. "My cousin," she mumbles, and hopes that is enough of an answer. It seems to be, and her ears pick up the sound of ringing. A thin-sounding voice comes over the other end suddenly, followed by a short laugh. This is not going to have a good outcome, she thinks.

"Itachi?" says Sasuke in a smaller voice than she expects, and tries not to listen, an attempt made impossible by their close proximity. "It's me...Yeah, you said you'd - Oh...Well, I'm heading to Sakura's, you remember Sakura, right? Yeah, Naruto's friend. Pink hair. Itachi! So, um, yeah, about picking me - Okay. Um. Give me a moment." He moves the phone away from his mouth and looks at her warily and asks, "What's your address? And, uh, can I stay for around an hour maybe?"

She shrugs, not particularly caring and thinking that with a shared best friend, he should not have to ask her address. "Seven Ichiraku," she says. "Right off of Sacagwa."

He repeats this, pauses, and says, "Yeah. I know. Tell Mom I'll shoot him the email when I get - Oh, c'mon, really? It was for spell -" He cuts off and sighs and Sakura has never heard him argue with anyone other than Naruto before. "Bye. See you in an hour...No. Um, you aren't going to for - Okay. Just thought I'd - Yeah, an hour. Bye."

He hangs up and puts her phone back into the cup holder and cross his arms, seeming more self-conscious than she's used to because he is always so confident around her and everyone and maybe Naruto sees this and never explained it to her before. She runs her fingers through her hair and stops at an intersection. The stop light makes his black eyes look red, and she waits for the green arrow to appear, indicating she can take a left and she hates this intersection even more than the junction by DMV.

"Sorry about that," he says after a long moment, and though the heat is working better than usual, he's still shivering. "Great, and now I'm getting your seat wet."

"Like I said, the car's horrible anyway." The light turns green and when she turns Sasuke's eyes go back to back. "And don't worry, if he's late again you can stay as long as you need, or I can drive you to Naruto's. Doubt he'd care."

Sasuke makes a sound like a humorless snicker, if that's at all possible. She lives much too far away from the school, she thinks. "Yeah," he says. "I've crashed on his couch so many times that Minato's told me to call him Dad by this point."

"What?"

Around the bridge of his nose turns a light pink and she realizes he assumed she knew and this is all sorts of embarrassing. "Oh. I thought Naruto mentioned it."

She shakes her head, confused and concerned and what the fuck was that. Though she and Naruto have been friends since they were kids, she cannot for the life of her recall that slip of information ever coming up in conversation.

"Well, um -"

"Yeah."

There is an awkward silence and Sakura shifts in her seat, uncomfortable. She turns onto her street, avoiding the pot hole she knows is there, and eventually says, "I can make you something to eat if you'd like. If Itachi isn't here in two hours, call Naruto. He should be back by then."

"He will be." They exit, leaving the warmth of the car behind them, and she slides her phone in her pocket, mind drawing her back again to her embarrassing wallpaper and cursing her ten-year-old cousin for having an obsession with the definition of all things girly. "Sorry. I should've just walked."

Though she has been to his house once, she remembers the bridge that needs to be crossed to get there and has a fleeting image of having to walk on the edge with cars driving past and thinks that is a very good thing he didn't go by foot. "Don't worry about it," she repeats and opens her front door, unlocked as usual. Inside is warm and smells of cleaning chemicals because her mother is obsessive. "Come one, let's go raid my fridge. Get hot chocolate or pasta or ice cream or something."

"Sakura, it's thirty-three degrees outside."

"So?"

"You said ice cream."

She shrugs and slips off her shoes in the entrance way, not wanting to deal with her mom's freak out if she tracked dirt on the floor and Sasuke follows her example. She has been alone with this boy once from what she can remember, and she was eleven with the biggest crush on him imaginable, so she is unsure how to act. How horribly miserable he seems is not helping this.

"I drink lemonade on snowy days," she says, leading him into the pristine kitchen her mother slaves at three times a week without fail. "I bet you're all normal or something."

"I live off water and coffee all year."

"That's boring, Sasuke."

She plops her bag down on one of the island chairs and opens her refrigerator, peering inside. A half-eaten Hello Kitty vanilla cake sits on the middle shelf, a left over from her cousin's birthday dinner that Sakura had to sit through, counting down the clock until everyone went to bed and she could safely sneak from the house to Naruto's because at seventeen, doing anything family is torture. She chews on her thumb nail and looks around, discovering nothing of interest, and shuts the door to go rifling through the cabinets instead, not expecting anything there either because it is her job to go food shopping now.

She asks, "Do you want to throw your clothes in the wash? I have some of Naruto's pajamas here and I bet he won't care if you wear them."

He makes no comment about why she has a boy's pajamas and she freezes, wondering if he was told of the martini incident and hopes that he's still in dark about it. "Sure," he says, and from the depression in the voice she thinks that he may not be fully taking in her words, and she will be so happy if it's only that. "Um, your room's third door on the left, right?"

"Yeah. Top drawer of the dresser, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I think." She runs her fingers through her wet hair as she discovers pancake mix and decides she wants that. There's the scrape of a chair and footsteps down the hall. She calls, "Do you mind strawberry pancakes?"

"No!" comes the muffled answer and she gets to cooking, glad it takes three minutes and wondering if she has syrup because it must be a sin to have pancakes without any.

There are arrows pointing every which direction on the box, and she thinks of the intersection and his eyes in the light and video game controllers propped in front of the N64 she refuses to give to her cousin. Her hair is wet and she needs to be careful not to get it in the batter, and the email Sasuke needs to send must have something to do with Mr. M if it has to involve getting off spelling, though he has got a ninety eight even with that, if she remembers correctly, so maybe it has to do with English instead, though she can't imagine Mr. Hatake caring. Her cell phone rings the cliched Beethoven's The Fifth and she ignores it, unwilling to hear her mother's screeching banshee voice.

Outside an owl hoots again, melancholy and muffled in the pelting sleet-rain, and Sasuke reenters the kitchen, wearing Naruto's TMNT flannel pants and Pikachu shirt and he looks all sorts of out of place. She smiles privately to herself and turns away to take out her obscenely large frying pan. "Laundry room's right across from mine," she tells him, pulling out the pan with only slight difficult which is an improvement from Saturday. "The door's kind of broken, so push it but don't slam. Turn the dial to the right until the arrow hits the seven and press down."

"Okay," he says and there goes the sounds of footsteps again. She cuts a piece of butter and throws it in the pan before setting the flame. He comes back and she pours the first circle, chewing again on her thumb nail as she contemplates how long this will take without burning it. The box gives no instructions by way of time. "Thanks," he says, though he's a boy so of course it is more of a mumble.

"Don't worry about it," she answers, waving her hand and wonders why they have never done this before. She got over that stupid crush years ago, she tells herself, so being just friends is fine by her. They haven't been avoiding each other because of the truth or dare game at Naruto's birthday party when they were eleven, because in nine years they've both matured. So she tells herself. "So where's your brother? If you don't mind me asking."

"My parents dragged him out and he couldn't find a way to reach me," he says and there's a scowl in his voice. "Tomorrow he goes back out to school. And naturally it just had to be today. I have a feeling they didn't tell him because he originally said he'd go to my game and he wouldn't have canceled. I think."

"Considering that your brother skipped out on his high school graduation to go to your middle school one, I doubt it," she says, grabbing a plate from the cabinet above the stove. She turns around, only to see him staring at her in confusion, and this seems to be a day made of confusion so it isn't too surprising. "What?"

"How do you remember that?"

She shrugs. "I don't know. I just have a good memory, I guess." And she does not remember things specifically having to do with him any clearer than she does with other people. "Hey, did we have English homework?"

"Journal-analysis on Jane Eyre." She wants to whack her head against the counter because she hates that book for reasons she cannot place, which makes journaling annoyingly difficult. Then he asks, "Have you started yet?"

"No."

"If you do the last half, I'll do the first half and we can swap."

"You cheat?"

"No."

"Oh. Well, sure."

Like Sasuke, she's never cheated before because she never has had to, but she supposes there is a first for everything. She flips her first pancake and takes a glance back at him and he looks so depressed it's heartbreaking. Maybe she should have offered a shower too, just like maybe he will show up on Monday because he has never been absent from what she can remember, even when his fever is much too high. So Naruto says.

She says, "If you ever get stranded at school again, just give me a call. When you get a new cell phone, I mean."

"My parents gave me some money," he says and she flips off all the pancakes of varying sizes because a single frying pan should not be able to make twelve at once, "so I'm going out to go get it tomorrow. If the weather's good enough for me to walk down to the bus stop."

"Bus stop?"

"The one by the florist's. Know which ones I mean?"

Though it probably isn't good for her hands, she carries over the hot plate without oven-mitts, too lazy to look for them. As she places the plate on the middle of the island, she answers, "Yeah, 'course. Why don't you just drive?"

"I'm sixteen, remember?" She turns around again, taking out two more plates and forks and syrup from the fridge, covering the inside from view so that Sasuke cannot not possibly get a glimpse at the cake that matches the background on her phone. She should really get about changing that. "I guess I could ask Naruto if his parents could lend him one of their cars. Doubt it, though."

"We can all go if you like." She sits down across from me. "I mean, think about it, when's the last time we hung out the three of us?"

"About a year ago."

That sounds about right, and the length of time has nothing to do with the crush she got over years ago, of course. "Do you want to?" she asks and he gives half a shrug before nodding. "And seriously, take some pancakes. I can't eat them on my own and I bet your hungry."

They each take four and Sakura lets him have the syrup first because guys are always hungry and they share an early lunch. When he eats, he more picks, and whatever is going on must not be a recent problem.

"Do you have a junior formal date?" he asks suddenly. She shakes her head and in the laundry room, the dryer stops, the humming abruptly silencing. "What to come with me?"

And she totally got over that crush years ago, she tells herself. "Sure," she answers with a shrug. "It's like a month away and I haven't exactly tried looking for a date yet."

"Same." He nibbles, though he doesn't look disgusted by it. "A few girls have asked me and all, but I don't know, I guess I just didn't feel like it until now."

"Then I guess I feel special." They eat in silence, though it is not an uncomfortable one. When they finish, she says, "Hey, Sasuke?"

"Yeah?"

"Are you going to be okay?"

He freezes. "What do you mean?" he asks.

She feels her face get hot and maybe she should mind her own business, though he looks about as down as Lee used to look when he asked her out every other week and she always said no. An owl hoots outside the window. She answers, "You were left on your own in this weather -" She motions in the direction of the window. "- because your parents brought out Itachi knowing they couldn't reach you and you still have to wait an hour. That doesn't exactly seem okay."

But Sasuke is a boy, and a typical one at that, so he does not like talking about his feelings and this annoys her to no end. It makes communication difficult. He sinks into the chair a little, and they appear on par in levels of embarrassment now.

"Everything'll be fine," he says. "My family's just really, um, big into intelligence and everything, so I let them down a lot -"

"Sasuke, you have a four point oh GPA."

"- and when Itachi comes home from college, they want to hear all about everything and whatnot and you know, by this point it doesn't seem like I'll be able to get into Harvard like I want to -"

"You want to, or your parents want to?"

"- because my SAT scores were only a twenty-three-forty so -"

"Sasuke, shut up."

He shuts up, and the bridge of his nose is red and he's just so damn perfect that the thought of anyone not being proud of him is insane. He mumbles, "Itachi said I should just do what I feel like."

"And what's that?"

"I don't know."

"Yes you do."

"Go to U Penn."

"Then go to U Penn."

"My parents won't pay."

"Then get a scholarship."

"I guess."

"Do you still want to go to formal with me, Sasuke?"

"Yes."

A car pulls up outside and the headlights shine through and his eyes seem red again. When her cell phone goes off with the generic ringtone, she hands it to him without looking at the number. "Hey," he says, running his fingers through his hair. "Yeah, coming out. I just have to grab my clothes from - Itachi! Heh. Yeah. So, give me like a minute. Kay. Bye."

He hangs up and hands it back to her, the bridge nose somehow redder than before and she can only imagine what his brother said.

"Pull hard to get it open," she says, clearing off their dishes, "and spin the dial back so the arrow points to the zero. You can leave Naruto's clothes on the floor."

"Um, thanks," he says, and disappears. A minute later he returns, slipping back on the jacket that is much to light for this weather and sends her an awkward smile. "So, um, call Naruto I guess. About the mall thing, I mean."

"Sure." She smiles back and hers is not awkward at all because she is with Uchiha Sasuke and just ate pancakes and she got over that crush years ago, of course. "I'll pick you up at two."

She walks him to the door like the good little hostess she is and when she opens the door, the hooting of the owl is much louder than she expects. He says, "Bye. Thanks."

"Bye, Sasuke," she answers as she pretends that she does not wish he could stay any longer. "We should do this again some time."

"Yeah."

He leaves, and she shuts the door gently behind him.

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Okay, so this is my second story that has to do with bad parent-child relationships. What the hell?