A foreign exchange student falls asleep despite the best efforts of her Canadian tutor, and has the strangest of dreams. AU, DeiSaku.
An AU omake– for the readers and reviewers of Clay, although you don't necessarily have to read Clay to follow this.
Disclaimer: Kishimoto-sama is the sole owner of Naruto and it's characters – I just subvert and play with them. ;D
AN/ I wanted to thank my reviewers of Clay for their comments, which encouraged me to finish this short omake that sprang from the middle of the first chapter of my story Clay and took on a small life of it's own.
a TUTORING SESSION sans ETIQUETTE
'They may think you're crashing, and that you're out of control. You just know that you are living.'
"OW!"
There was a blow, sharp but neat, across the back of her head, indenting her skull with what she would later positively identify as the hard side of a plastic binding. It hurt. But what she could not comprehend was where it had come from, or why.
"Jesus woman - wake the fuck up, ehh!"
There was a sound as if a throat had been cleared, hard, and then an emphasized: "Do you want my damn help or not, ninja?"
Dazed, jade eyes open with difficultly, flicking awkwardly from the thinly painted bed –no, those were sheets of paper-desk in front of her to meet the keen, angled gaze, somehow inches from her own. The eyes bent low; meeting her bewilderment with the quirk of an amused brow, before glancing pointedly back at the scattered sheets on the table.
Her scattered sheets, on the hard, laminated wood of her table. Where she had fallen asleep during their discussion of Da Vinci's earliest 'accomplishments'.
Post-early art history seminar and vigorous sculpting class at the local gym, the information was too much, her period of lucidity ending quickly as her head slipped steadily down to her newly promoted 'sleeeps place-e-y'.
An impatient sigh breathed behind her.
The insulted tutor, bemused and indignant, slid his hand out into her trajectory, catching the soft weight of sleep-addled head - and the pink-haired woman's immediate jolt back upright, eyes clouded and desperately trying to maintain focus, was hilarious enough to help him forgive her. Dazed green blinked confusedly back into clear blue, slightly crossed in such a way that the patient man had to bite his lip to keep from laughing, before, following an impulse, he reached forward to grasp her wrist, fingers gentle as he slowly tapped the small palm to the woman's forehead.
"Idiot, ehh."
Her teeth clicked together in surprise, as Sakura attempting to focus on her tutor's movements, but it was too late to pull away, and his hand enclosed hers further. Angling his head until he was sure he had her attention, he nodded towards the paper. Green eyes followed mutely, before blinking at the open page in front of here where her finger perched, petulantly, on a paragraph.
"It was around where here your 'studious note taking' fucked up, or down, if you want to speak literally, and you crashed."
The finger was more insistent, his sleeve making sweeping movements across the page as her finger softly made concentric circles across the page, as if finding it's bearings. "And this was where I was when you started mumbling about ninjas. Nearly had us thrown out, actually. And- you are bleeding."
His hand left hers, the strands of blonde sweeping out of her vision as Sakura blinked at his last statement, confused as the words brought her abruptly back to the memories of her dream; and the dark green, forest, blood, clay-
Something wet trickled down the inside of her nose, and with a hiccup, she sneezed into her hands, blinking blearily at the strands of red that laced her palms. Ah. So she was.
A slice of white obscured her vision, that blinking up revealed itself as a small white handkerchief, embroidered with a small Canadian flag in the corner, and as she watched, it fell smoothly to her lap until it covered the offending red glare.
"Ew. Go clean yourself up, than go home, eh. We'll continue your tutoring tomorrow. Seriously, eh."
His hand went to her shoulder to squeeze it lightly to curb her protest as it rested on her tongue, the clear blue gaze dropping to her height once more as the man's face split into an easy grin, the white glare of his teeth as bright as the broad, white embossed letters on his garish red jumper: 'TORONTO 2011'.
Finding humour somehow in the situation as his tutee sat, half-awake and leaking, his ease was infectious, somehow causing her mouth to break into a grin back as he angled her carefully upright, large hands smoothing calmingly down her back in quick sweeps.
"None of my tutees have ever failed their Art History Module – and your sleepy, sick ass won't be the one that breaks that streak, ehh?"
The verbal tick that pronounced the stereotype – although she had refused to believe it before she had been exchanged with the University of Toronto – was endearing, and against her better forming judgment, Sakura couldn't help the trust that she felt in his words. She was regaining her bearings as she took a breath, eyes closing briefly as she finished clearing her head, and the stress of her situation bore down on her once more.
This damn course. The damn prerequisite of credits in the humanities that had to be fulfilled before graduation had caused her no end of grief. Ignoring the urge to just say 'screw it' to the whole thing, I'm studying biomedicine for a reason; she stumbled to her feet, cloth pushed gratefully against her nose.
Her fluster increasing, she missed the small grin that split her companions face, as dark eyes carefully followed the delicate woman as she made her way down the hall. She was, by far, the strangest woman he had ever met.
Which suited him perfectly, as he had always, by rule, taken a fascinated interest in the strange.
"I'll see you soon, Ninja."
AN/ Continued: Regarding clay.
Of all the files on my computer of unfinished fiction (not for lack of ideas, but because of my seemingly temporal style that doesn't seem to want to settle) Clay, which was started last summer as a short one shot, was something I felt as if I needed to finish and set up for continuing parts because of my love for this couple. It is in need of and will undergo editing because of the many different styles and my constant roadblock, the level of 'personal' third person I go in to. I've never been one for long chaptered stories (I have a long one shot in my files of a KisaSaku, written from around the latest development of Kisame in the manga) but I want you guys to know that I won't give up, and I hope I won't disappoint you as I try to work through my writers dilemmas and figure out just –how- I'm going to write this thing. X'D