Sasuke has never felt rage the way he feels it right this moment. It's like a flood of lava, coursing through his veins, burning him to cinders from the inside out. He can feel it almost like a living, pulsing thing. It's a wonder he isn't turning to ash.
"My eyes, my eyes!" the girl chants as she holds her hands over her eyes. She looks silly; surely she does, and yet Sasuke is the one that people are looking at weirdly.
"Shut up," he says, but she doesn't seem to hear him. It's no wonder. She's very loud.
"So indecent, what will my mother say? Her innocent daughter getting flashed in public."
Sasuke grinds his teeth together as he tries to fight back the blush that inches its way down his cheeks. "I said shut up!"
"You shut up, nipple man!" she shouts back and Sasuke chokes on his spit.
It's like the whole arena holds its breath, the quiet almost overbearing when it arrives on the coat tails of the loud buzzing from before. Then someone snorts, a single snort, and people are laughing so hard they're crying in the stands. Sasuke recognises the shrill cackle like laugh of Sakura and glares up at her. She's bent over, leaning on Sai with how hard she's laughing, and Sasuke feels a sudden, violent urge to commit multiple accounts of homicide.
"I'll kill you," he tells the blonde moron, a simple statement of intent. It's liberating.
"Rude," she says. She still has her hands covering her eyes and she's not even really turned toward him, but is rather speaking to the boulder just to his left.
"I'm going to squish you like a bug." Sasuke grinds his foot into the ground for good measure and has the pleasure of seeing her mouth agape in astonishment.
"Oh my God, are you getting off on this? Creepy. I thought you just liked exposing yourself, not the whole squishy kink stuff. Konoha sure is different."
Sasuke nearly falls on his face.
Sakura nearly falls off the balcony in her obvious delight. Sasuke wishes she had, she's louder than everyone else in the stands put together.
"I will erase you from the face of the earth," he promises and activates his sharingan.
"Yikes," the girl says. "You might want to visit someone professional. Murder is not an acceptable coping mechanism for nipple exposure syndrome. I'm pretty sure."
It's like a switch goes off in his brain. Suddenly he is past the annoyance, past gritting his teeth and clenching his fists as he holds himself in check. For a moment, Sasuke sees God.
He smiles serenely at her and charges up his chidori.
"Holy crap on a crapstick. Nipple man, you need to chill. Embrace the chill."
"I've never been more⦠chill in my life," Sasuke assures her softly. Then he's running as fast as he can, readying up his arm to trust it through her ribcage and that garish orange monstrosity of a shirt, to squeeze the life out of her heart between his fingers. He can almost touch her with his fingertips, his vengeance completed like the softest of fruits on his tongue, when she disappears.
Sasuke almost crashes into the stadium wall, just barely managing to get his feet in order and deaccelerate enough that he can jump up on it and stick to it with chakra. His chidori fizzles out as the smile slips from his face.
The girl is standing on other side of the arena, looking none the worse for wear and still with her hands covering her eyes. She's fast, too fast for a genin, to be able to move that far that quickly and for Sasuke who has two tomoe in each eye to not even be able to see it. For a moment, Sasuke forgets his humiliation fuelled rage and is impressed. Then she opens her mouth.
"Did you just try to electrocute me? You're practically naked, my dude pal, that's breaking so many safety regulations that I don't even know where to begin."
Her voice is a grating, incessant, infuriating, and inescapable bane on his ears and his life. "I'm not naked!" Sasuke screams at her so hard his voice breaks in the middle of it. "I'm wearing clothes!"
"Well," she says, and the doubtfulness oozes off her in waves. "They're not able to do their job properly when you leave them hanging open like that."
Sasuke opens his mouth on a silent cry, dragging his nails through his hair in despair, but she just keeps on talking about how he needs to tie up his shirt firmer and ask his mother for advice instead of being a silly boy and how modesty is important for everyone didn't he see, unheeding of how Sasuke is breaking apart at the seams. He'll never recover from this, he'll never live it down and he's never ever ever going to step foot in Suna again. Ever.
He'll kill her if it's the last thing he does. It's ok, Sasuke is not the heir, the clan can do without him if it must. It's not like they can live with the shame now attached to his name, anyway.
"Um, Uzumaki-san, you do remember that this is the chunin exam?" the proctor asks and Sasuke regains some semblance of control with the reminder that he has a purpose other than the total annihilation of his new nemesis.
Given the way the girl grows stiff and blanches, she didn't.
Sasuke moves into position to attack, hand by his thigh pouch in preparation.
"Oh man, oh man, isn't this a pickle. How am I gonna fight properly if I can't use my arms?" She actually sounds vexed by the thought, like there is not an obvious solution to be had.
"So take your hands off your eyes," Sasuke grits out through clenched teeth.
"I can't do that!" she shouts back with fervour, jumping out of the way of the kunai Sasuke throws at her instinctively at the sound of her voice. "I'll have you know all nipples entice me equally. Not that I find you particularly enticing, mind you, but it's the principle of the thing, I can't just make an exception willy-nilly."
"Then I guess you'll just have to live with losing," Sasuke assures her before he launches another valley of kunai.
She dodges again, jumping out of the way with a somersault. Then she shrugs, a motion that doesn't go well with her hands over her eyes and just makes her look like she's having a seizure. "Eh, I'll figure something out. Can't be worse than my genin exam."
Sakura is dying, if the croaking noises she's making are anything to go by, and Sasuke would take more pleasure out of that if it isn't because he keeps being ridiculed by an idiot.
"How you even became genin is a mystery to me," Sasuke mutters under his breath. Apparently it wasn't quiet enough to escape notice, though, because the girl acts like she's the one who has been insulted in front of a live audience for the last ten minutes.
"Hey! Uncool." She pouts at him. She pouts. With her lips. "I'll have you know I'm a great ninja."
"I'll believe that when you beat me," Sasuke taunts. "Which you won't."
"I will, too!" she retorts like the kid she is.
"Will not!" Sasuke retorts because he is a mature person who is not letting a perverted girl get the last word in.
"Well I guess I have to just kick your skull in," the girl says before she disappears from his sight again. "To show that I will, too!"
Sasuke is just about to open his mouth and dispute that statement most vehemently when her foot makes a fast acquaintance with his head. He recognizes that, wow, the idiot kicks kind of hard, and that maybe this is going to hurt very much, before his sharingan deactivates and everything goes black.
When he wakes up the match is over, Sasuke is still a genin, and the idiot is not only a chunin but the champion of the whole tournament. He also has a concussion and is as such relegated to the sickbay carriage with all the other losers, and Sasuke is not happy.
Sasuke hates her. He hates her. She's the most infuriating, extremely irritating, super annoying person he's ever met, and Sasuke has Sakura and Sai for teammates. He knows what he's talking about. So when he says that Uzumaki Naru is the very worst ever, he really, really means it, and it really really really isn't cool to laugh, so fuck you, Kiba.
Kakashi pats him on his shoulder when he comes inside to visit, because he is precisely that kind of jerk.
Sasuke gives him the bird.
