.:The::Language::of::Bastards:.
By BlackFireXD13 gmail
Words: 1,100
Neji, Sasuke, Shino, Gaara… they were all pretty much silent, stoic, and bastardly. And, by some horrendous, twist of Fate, they each decided to enjoy a cup of coffee at a café in the nice, warm, sunny Konoha. At the same café. On the same day. At the same time. Oh, the horror. The horror!
Now, at approximately the same time, Sai—the mysterious ninja no one seemed quite sure of—decided to go to the same café as well. Of course, this wasn't a coincidence. You could call in incidental all you'd like, but I'm going to have to take it upon myself to burst your little disillusioned bubble by writing that, no, it wasn't some stroke of Destiny that had Sai waltz into the café. He very much made a conscious decision to find these particular people. It was fate, however, that he found them so quickly and all together.
He paused by the entrance and observed them.
Their talk was, unsurprisingly, nonexistent. They probably wouldn't understand each other, anyway. While they each could perfectly speak and understand Japanese, they preferred silence and calm. And each different man came from a different background of silence and calm. There was the Hyuuga brand of silence and calm, where a 'tch,' could mean 'moron,' and a 'Ah,' could mean, 'of course.' Then there was the Uchiha brand of silence and calm, where a 'tch,' more often than not meant 'whatever,' and 'Ah,' could mean 'So that's why you're here.' Aburame silence and calm was a very tightly kept secret, loosely centered on amusement and observation. Gaara… was Gaara. His silence and calm was more sinister and creepy than silent and calm. His 'tch' might mean 'okay,' or 'die.' A 'ah' could be translated into 'yes, yes,' or 'Now you've given me a justifiable reason to kill you.'
Sai understood that it took generations to perfect these different codes of silence, and nods, and grunts, and twitches… Well, in Gaara's case it took a few years of isolation and a demon, but still. The effect remained the same. This put a damper on Sai's analysis. His silence wasn't perfected through generations, nor isolation and a demon. So where would he fit?
This worry came from the other ninjas of Konoha (Naruto, Kiba, Sakura, etc.) comparing him with these stoic bastards in one form or another. The general consensus was that he, indeed, was cut from the same cloth as the Lollipop brigade—Sai heard Naruto and Kiba calling them that. He decided it had something to do with the sticks that lollipops were attached to, but he had no idea why that was a general reference to the four men—so Sai had decided to find out if he 'fit' with this group better then with others.
Sai paused a moment more before approaching the four, glaring—except for Shino, you couldn't tell if he was glaring—men, all sending shivers up the waitresses' spines before, "Hey. What is up in your respective atmospheres?"
A collective silence met him and his fake smile.
"Hn," Now this was the Uchiha talking. Gaara flashed a frown at Sasuke, taking his comment as acquiescence. Sasuke caught the frown and interpreted it as disapproval for his show of indifference.
"Tch," accompanied by a shrug as Sasuke leaned back onto his folded hands was interpreted by Neji—who was looking for a reason to fight the bastard Uchiha, anyways—as a sign of dismissal to Gaara, and narrowed his pale, pupil-less eyes at the Uchiha. The shrug made Neji automatically assume that Sasuke was displaying haughty arrogance, and nonchalance instead of the acknowledgment of Gaara's dissatisfaction he meant it as. Gaara misinterpreted the action as well, but the 'tch,' registered as an admonishment.
Shino watched silently, his eyes hidden by his darkened glasses and his mouth covered by the high collar of his coat.
Neji tossed his head, just slightly enough to send a ripple through his chocolate brown hair. Gaara though it was a dismissal or an arrogant maturity display and narrowed his heavily shadowed eyes. Sasuke took it as the challenge it was and narrowed his glaring irises, his nostrils flaring a bit in response to a challenge.
Now, Neji glanced at Gaara and seemed taken aback at the narrow-eyed look from the man. He arched a brow in confusion, before narrowing them at the haughty man who'd snubbed both him and Gaara. Gaara took the eyebrow as a cocky, 'what are you going to do about it?' and clenched his fists.
Sasuke saw the clenched fists, and the particles of sand rising around the ex-jinchuriki's hand. Sai, as well, noticed this and wondered what happened. Not fifteen seconds after he uttered his greeting and there was a fight, boiling like a stew… or something. Maybe his greeting had not been adequate for this group of individuals? Maybe he had interpreted the meaning in his Guide to Becoming Friends wrongly?
Shino was laughing on the inside. Not that you could tell. Really, if he just started chuckling, he'd probably scare the shit out of all the customers in the café, including the Uchiha, Hyuuga and Gaara. Sai might not be, but he was to much of a socially inept idiot to really get the creepy implications of a shadowed, eye-covered, high-collared, intimidating man chuckling under his breath meant.
Neji glanced back at Sasuke, angry at having Gaara's glare aimed at him and not their mutual enemy, and the optic nerves in his eyes started defining and strengthening themselves at the same time as red started to bleed into the Uchiha's irises. Sai stepped backwards. He had been standing by the corner booth for all of 45 seconds and in that time, something had passed between three of the four men, and he was about to witness exactly which clan's jutsu was dominant over the other. Personally, Sai put a bet on Sasuke's sharingan and chidori, if only because Naruto held them in such high esteem. However, that dickless boy might not have enough testosterone to actually make a good judgment…
"Hey, hey, two pretty girls like you shouldn't fight each other unless it's in mud,"
Of course, he was referring to their long, silky looking hair and their flawless pale complexions… it was meant to be a complement? He, for one, didn't notice the twitches.
Neji and Sasuke shared a moment of mutual understanding—crossing bridges of indefinite clan rivalry, deepened and complexified for generations—and turned to face Sai.
Said person gulped.