A premature encounter
Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to their respective characters.
When he was little, Uzumaki Naruto liked playing in the sandbox. Possessing a shovel, a pail and a scoop, he would just dig there, building castles and moats and so on... at least until some bullies came over and broke his creations down, kicked sand in his face... and solidified his desire to become the Hokage of Konoha so that nothing like that would ever happen again.
Naruto was going to be known to be keeping his promises, naturally, but his dislike of sand – the flipside of the same coin, so to speak – was kept quieter: he simply did not talk about it. (An action that was surprisingly easy for Naruto, who tended to go to extremes – he either proclaimed something from the rooftops or did not talk about it at all.)
Now, however, the bad memories of Naruto's childhood have returned vigorously, as he and the rest of team 7 must have taken the wrong turn at the strange-named town of Albuquerque and have ended up in a desert.
/ / /
"You know, I used to love when mother and the other women of the Uchiha clan used to put sand onto the paths in the Uchiha compound," Uchiha Sasuke said conversationally to Naruto, forgetting even to add "dead last" at the end of the sentence. "Me and some of my cousins used to play in it, making sand pies and all. Well, the girls did. Me – not so much."
"Of course not," Naruto said knowingly, deciding even to drop the "teme" epithet of Sasuke. "I always thought that you were the type to play with girls."
"Am not!"
"Are too!"
"Am not!"
"Are too!"
"Guys! Stop it!" Haruno Sakura yelled loudly, but her teammates did not hear her: their childish argument by now has escalated into shoving – not the best sort of activity when standing on a shaky sand dune: the sand buckled beneath them, and the two boys slid down the slope into a very prickly bush.
"YOWCH!"
/ / /
"Serves you right, both of you," Sakura admonished them a short while later, even as she helped her teammates – both of them for a change – to deal with their scratches and piercings. The bush the two boys had rolled into had no leaves but really long spines, and both Sasuke and Naruto had experienced this first-hand, to their regret.
"Owch!" Naruto winced as Sakura, none too gently, pulled another broken-off thorn out of his posterior. "We defeated an S-class missing nin, yet were brought low by a lowly bush. Oh, the irony!"
"We should make kunai out of these thorns," Sasuke added, equally disgruntled, as he pulled one of the thorns out of his side. "They certainly do hurt!"
"Actually, Sunagakure does do that," team 7's sensei, Hatake Kakashi, nodded placidly, as he peeped over the sand dune. "And, speaking of Sunagakure, I was able to secure for us a passage through the desert – something that Sakura was trying to tell you two, but you didn't listen-"
Naruto and Sasuke just threw the bush's thorns at Kakashi, who promptly dodged them. "You done?" he asked mildly.
"Yes," Naruto grumbled as he and his teammates got back on the top of the dunes – and saw the camels for the first time. "Wow!"
For their part, Sakura and Sasuke took a good look at the completely entranced Naruto, at the camels, at the Suna team and their sensei who were staring back at them with various levels of dislike and mistrust, at Kakashi, who was promptly ignoring it all in his usual manner... They looked at it all, stared at each other, and said:
"Uh-oh."
To be continued?
