Bienvenue. Just a few things before I begin:

1. This is an alternate version of the story "Birthday Tea" and was originally going to be a collaboration between Sissy and me, but that never worked out and so here I am, doing it on my own.

2. All of the pairings revolve around Sakura. It's not exactly a harem-ish thing, it's more sophisticated than that (I'd like to think) but that's the general idea.

3. Why yes, there will be JuuSaku, SuiSaku, SakuKa (KarinxSakura), SasuSaku, KakaSaku, NaruSaku, SaiSaku, and YamaSaku. Don't like it? Review and tell me your favorite pairing with Sakura and I'll try to include fluffles for it.

5. This is going to be a chapter story, I think. I'll try to update it every week, but that'll be hard if I don't receive any motivation. Hint, hint.

6. Did you notice there is no #4? Luls. Anyway, on with the story!

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Sakura was sure she had never been in such an uncomfortable position in her life, and was also sure she never wanted to mold her body into this awkward "monkey-hanging-from-a-tree" form again. Even if it was at a split-second notice, Sakura thought her body, conditioned from years of training to respond to the tiniest snap of a twig with extreme alarm and arrange itself into a defensive stance immediately, could come up with a more agreeable shape in which she could hang around for hours without feeling the need to shift and move around to relieve the aching of her back, neck and shoulders. And her legs, too, which were getting superbly sore, and which she would have to stretch and stretch (that would be so agonizing) later, while Naruto, Kakashi-sensei and Sai stood over her and reprimanded her about separating from their small group.

There was a tiny movement below her and Sakura's eyes snapped toward it, telling herself she was not in the least bit terrified by the relaxing pale, pale, pale human (was he human? he was so so pale, like Sai, but even Sai's skin wasn't so cleanly, desperately, blindingly white) lying in the grass 7 feet under her current hiding place.

In her unwelcome surprise of finding another creature breathing within approximately the same 7 feet as her, in this uninhabited forest, (he chose here! of all places! the glen was 300 square miles wide for Hokage's sake!) her hands and legs had gripped the nearest secure hold they could find (a very convenient tree), and here she was, hanging, like a playful monkey, upside down, head craning to the side, trying to watch the man's actions.

After she had gotten away from the trio of men who always seemed to accompany her on her missions everywhere, Sakura had gone off a little ways to explore a good ten square miles of the forest. It wasn't that she was bored by Naruto, Kakashi and Sai, it was just... they had been searching the exact same scenery for 50 square miles for a week, and they hadn't found any traces at all of where Sasuke and his team might be. That sneaky little bastard had them running all around Fire Country (and some other countries too) every other month. There were always little reports, semi-positive sightings of the guy and his band of 'half-crazy shits', as Naruto liked to call them, but the truth was always disheartening: The reports were all wholly false or merely mistaken. There was one citizen who swore she had been grabbed from behind by this freaking huge man with wild orange hair and almost gored to death when "a vision of beautiful pale skin and bluish raven locks" swept her off her feet and jumped five stories to deposit her on an abandoned building, then lept away to battle the demon. She was given medication shortly afterward.

Nevertheless, Team Kakashi, with the sometimes present Yamato, was always sent out to investigate the accounted sightings of Sasuke. Sakura was tired of it all: the excitement that built up in her every time they went out to search the place where Sasuke was allegedly seen, the rush of near love for the boy who she had once admired so much, the journey to the site, the laughs and jokes along the way. Then the crushing disappointment and her painful heartache when they found he never was there, never had been there... the report was wrong, a lie. Most of all, Sakura hated that she came to loathe these missions... no matter if she spent most of the time talking with Naruto, Sai and Kakashi, becoming closer to them. It was what she could not find... what she still longed to find. Sometimes she could not bear it, and at night did slip out of her tent to double and triple check the areas they had already examined, hoping, in the wee hours of the morning, she would discover some miniscule clue her team had not found the afternoon before. Then, in her daydream, she would return to the camp triumphant, and her comrades would be filled with fresh hope, fresh strength, and set out anew, knowing that on this day, this pure glittering day, they would find Sasuke and they would return him to the village.

But no such thing had ever happened as of yet. Either Sasuke was the shit at covering his tracks, or he hadn't really been where the reports said he most certainly had been.

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Sakura clung with mounting fear to the thick tree branch as the pale shape under her hiding place yawned and turned over onto his side. Sakura mentally exhaled a nervous sigh. Still napping. As he had been for the past four hours. She was getting extremely tired of hanging like this, and wondered if her team mates were worried about her. She allowed herself to invent a scene which partly satisfied her pondering and boredom: Naruto, Kakashi and Sai screaming and running around in circles with their hands up in the air and their clothes and hair in disarray, trying to find a decent place to have a sparring session while Sakura took her sweet time enjoying the forest and the many hidey holes it had to offer.

With a distasteful (but quiet, oh, yes, very quiet) snort, Sakura pulled her head out of her daydream. She cracked one eye open to look at the slumbering (PALE, get out in the SUN sometime, geez!) body below her. He was still there, his arms folded over each other, his head turned to the side, his chest rising and falling in a deep, even sleep. His shirt had been taken off sometime in the first twenty minutes she had been frozen to the tree. She supposed it was because the shade had been too hot for him. His rippling torso and arm muscles drew Sakura's attention every time the guy breathed. She thought he was either a ninja, or had a very hard to please wife.

Staring at people for too long made Sakura fidgety. Her body was getting quite restless, and there was this one spot on her nose she really had to scratch. It was driving her nuts. She sneaked a glance at the man again, only moving her eyes. Sleeping quietly. She supposed it wouldn't hurt to, very carefully, very quickly, rub her nose hard into her armpit, in an attempt to stop the irritating itchiness by preoccupying her nose with a horrible body odor.

About a split second after she had done this, (and she wished she hadn't, because the smell and the itching were a terrible combination to behold) there was a rustling in the leaves above her. Above her! She hadn't noticed anything hovering in the dark roof of green black leaves above her!

Sakura braced her body, and, tensing, released her hold on the tree the moment a black, black hand shot out over the place she was and snatched wildly at the air, but Sakura was already leaping onto the next tree a hundred yards away, using her conserved chakra from the past five hours to aid her in an adrenaline fueled getaway.

She ended up returning, (after about ten minutes of panicking and bounding from tree to tree as fast as she could) to the campsite, where the team had slept for the past week and would leave next morning for the Leaf Village, again coming back empty-handed. She supposed her body's natural compass had tried to find the safest possible place for her after that frightening encounter with a bodiless hand and a pale freak of a man. Luckily, she didn't seem to have been followed.

"Hello? Anyone here?" Sakura called, in a soft, slightly shaky voice.

There was no answer.

Sakura sighed and straightened up. The others must be out doing something... looking for her, finding fish for dinner, dressing up as prim little old ladies to chat about their nephews... anything, really. She could stay here or walk around trying to find them. Sakura chose the former. It was safer, and the forest was getting a bit dark. She could see that it was about 7 o'clock by the sun's position, which meant there would be no light for her in a couple of minutes unless she lit a fire. Besides, the others would be back soon, and they would probably be hungry, and need the food she would cook so that they could nag her about goofing off when they were trying to hunt for the smallest signs of Sasuke.

The pit they had dug in the center of the camp at the start of the week was filled with charred sticks, ashes, and fluffy bits of burned cotton. The ashes were a foot deep in parts of the pit, and the gray dust was also scattered in a wide ring around the campsite. Since the area they had decided to search was only 60 square miles wide, the campsite had been in the same place all week. The summer nights in the Snow Country are known to get as cold as -5 degrees, but they had been lucky all week: the coldest night had only been 30 degrees. Because of the cold, the fire pit was built deep and had a wide circumference for the heat to reach all of the tents, and was kept alight all night.

To Sakura, it seemed as though it was colder than 30 degrees tonight, and, with one check to her thermometer, she confirmed her suspicions. 10 degrees. This was just great.

"Ah, fuck you, Snow Country. You think you can beat me down with your weather because I'm used to a much warmer climate?" Sakura made an obscene hand gesture towards the violet sky, with the sinking sun's last rays of light glimmering over the tops of the tall trees. "You can't knock me down!"

The weather chose to respond to Sakura's challenge by sending a very violent gust of chilly wind to whip at Sakura's exposed arms and face. She almost stumbled into the ashy remains of last night's fire.

"Aha! You see! I won't take any of that shit from you! Take this, you mother-fucker!" Sakura grabbed a kunai from the pouch on her waist and screamed, "En garde!" before launching into a duel with an invisible foe with sloppy jabbing of her weapon and overly dramatic dodges. She also amused herself with commentary she provided in a deep voice.

"And the pink haired kunoichi is taking on the big one today! Snow Country's own cold as ice, the mother freaker of the decade: The Weather! Oh, nice swing, Sakura!"

She ooohed and awwed as the crowd in her own voice as she pretended to fiercely stab her opponent it its side.

However, she was forced to stop not five minutes later when a loud burst of laughter rang in her ears, no doubt coming from the mother freaker of the century: Naruto.

She spun around and her other team mates were, astoundingly, sitting on a log next to her tent with a huge trout lying fish-eyed and open-mouthed on all three of their laps. Naruto, sitting on the far right of the log, was laughing and cheering her on. Sai and Kakashi, however, were not looking at her, but were apparently totally engrossed in examining the trout's belly and tail sections.

"Aw, Sakura, don't stop; It was just getting to the good part!" yelled Naruto, grinning winningly as he glanced at the other two men to confirm his statement.

Two seconds later, Naruto was unconscious.

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"Seriously, though, your acting was pretty funny; I mean, I know you can hit like a guy, but you can actually sound like one too! It's pretty good!" Naruto was fanning the flames of the fire; the stupid wind was having a good old time trying to blow it out.

"Do you want another smack, then, because I'm so good at it?" Sakura flexed her fists and arms threateningly in Naruto's direction.

"Oh, uh, no! I already, uh... so Kakashi-sensei!" Naruto hurriedly changed the subject, while quickly running back to his dinner. "Tell Sakura-chan what we found!"

Sakura swallowed the rice in her throat. Had they found something, finally, that could help them trace Sasuke...?

Kakashi looked up from his book, already done with his meal. He still wasn't comfortable with taking off his mask in front of them, and had eaten his dinner inside of his tent in about ten seconds, lest the others see him. Sakura was pretty sure the day would come, though. The group was so comfortable with each other now. Over the years, Sakura, Naruto, and in even less time, Sai and Yamato, had learned that trying to trick Kakashi out of his mask would never work, despite the many "subtle" conversations and actions taken towards removing it from Kakashi's face.

Kakashi turned to Sakura, and must have seen the hope lighting up her face, because she saw the corners of his mouth through his mask lift slightly. Then he said, "We have found some strands of black, orange, white and red hair in a bird's nest about five miles east of our campsite. Sasuke must not have thought to check if those animals had absconded with evidence. The nest was near a river, anyway, so he and his group might have just been getting fresh water, bathing or washing clothes, anything like that, before continuing on."

Sakura was about to speak when Sai pre-interrupted her. "Of course, we need to check the samples before confirming it's really him. Unfortunately, we did not think to bring a DNA testing kit with us."

Naruto stared at him, and Sakura did too before facing Kakashi again. "Do you know when the nest was made? Were the hairs embedded in the nest, or resting in it? Can you guess which way Sasuke-ku- he might have gone from there?" She saw Naruto glance at her out of the corner of her eye.

Kakashi leaned against the tree behind him, his right hand rubbing his face in a tired way. "It is difficult to say when the nest was made. I'm not an expert on those things, so as soon as it's morning we will start heading back to the Leaf village to check the hairs and get some experts to head down here. But to answer your question, Sakura, the hairs were made as part of the nest, so it's a pretty safe bet the nest was being made at the time that Sasuke and his group was passing through."

Sakura made a small noise and opened her mouth, but Kakashi continued, lifting a hand for silence. "As to where the group was heading next, we found very faded footprints in a small part of the dried bank of the river, but they were going in random directions. Presumably, Sasuke and his group were walking in the shallow water of the river without any notion that in the future they would be confusing trackers such as ourselves. The water must have dried up later, because Sasuke did not cover those tracks. We examined up and down the west and east sides of the river, but found no more prints of any kind."

Kakashi rubbed his temples with his fingertips, indicating to Sakura that he might have a headache from Sasuke's incredible stealthiness.

"But... at least we have a direction now... we know where we're going again." Sakura sat up a little straighter. "This is good, isn't it?"

Kakashi looked at her with one bleary eye. Naruto was staring into the depths of the molten gold fire; a good way to blind himself, Sakura thought. Sai started speaking again. He was, Sakura knew, quite adept at putting dampers on hopeful situations, though she was sure he didn't mean to... most of the time.

"The thing is, we don't know where we should go for sure until we get experts here and have them check everything. Even then, or by that time, we might have gotten here too late and all of the other evidence will be gone. And we will be back at square one."

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So... love it? Hate it? Review and let me know if I should continue it! Also, sorry it's so short. Sissy deleted half of it purposefully.