Finally! I finished this on the night right before my finals. Which is good, considering i'm gonna write a drabble about each in my up coming collection. This is dedicated to my friend Julllo, and is based off of the folk fest where i live. Please review.
"I can't see anything," Naruto whined, glaring down the hill to try and see what group was performing on the stage. The Konoha eleven and Deyna were at the Konoha music festival, an excuse for eleven (twelve) shiobi to relax for four days and listen to random people with so called musical talent to try and show off.
"Of course you can't, baka, we're almost on top of the fricken hill," Sakura sighed, popping a piece of gum into her mouth. The hill they were sitting on was more like a cliff, dropping almost straight down to the stage below. There were several stages each at the bottom of different hills, but this was the main stage, at the bottom of the steepest hill, where everyone showed up at the end of he day to watch the final acts. Tents were set up on the drop off, a nice place to hang out, but inconvenient if you were trying to watch anything. The middle was the best, since you could see everything reasonably well. The hill itself was covered in tarps of every color, shape and size, making it resemble a gaudy patchwork quilt. Goat trails wound their ways up the slope, dividing the bottom from the middle, the middle from the top and the top from the plateau where the tents were set up. The top was the only place left with enough room for twelve people to hang out.
"Why couldn't we get a spot in the middle? There was one when we first got here."
"That spot only had enough room for five people. What were we supposed to do, kick out seven of the other people who came here with us?" Sakura snapped, glaring at the blond. Naruto lolled his head so that he could see her, lying flat on his stomach. A small grin had crept it's way to his face.
"Well... Neji is a bit of a downer..."
"No!" Sakura laughed, shoving her blond teammate in the shoulder. "We aren't kicking Neji out because he's bothering you. He and Hinata were the ones who paid to get everyone in."
Naruto rolled his cerulean eyes to the sky. "So we keep Hinata here, who said we have to have Neji along?" The kunoichi glared at him. "Okay then. Um... Shino! Do we really have to bring the bug freak with us? He only wanted to see that metal band on the first day anyway..."
"No."
"How about Deyna? She doesn't really--"
"Uzumaki, if you continue to list reasons why some of us shouldn't be here, you won't be here yourself." Naruto twisted around to see Deyna, Kiba, Shikamaru and Lee standing on the edge of the brown tarp. Sakura turned and smiled at them.
"Hey guys! You've been gone for a while, where were you?" Shikamaru shrugged and lay on the tarp, not bothering to answer. Lee and Kiba were currently in an argument over something, so the newest kunoichi answered for them.
"Eh, we were off looking at the other stages and the food courts. Hinata and Ino split to watch something, and Neji and Tenten are in the food court, trying to find somewhere that'll take an order to feed a small, ravenous army," she smiled, sitting down next to Sakura and taking her hair out of the ponytail that bound it. Dark brown hair fell, dusting against her shoulders, covering the mottled fur on her nape. The fur that marked her as a strange creature, a shapeshifter. A wolf at that, having the amazing ability to use chakra, without forming hand signs, to change her body. It could be done and leave no strain, she was never in danger of running out of chakra. Boy, was she lucky.
Sakura's smile turned slightly more frownish. Deyna had the ability to bend and generate lightning, also at no expense to her body, using chi energy. The chi and chakra had once mixed together with horrific effects, leaving her sick for days. It had turned out that her "friend" had busted one of her tenketsu, causing chakra to leak into her system. After highly experimental, never been tried before surgery, it had been fixed, and she could now bend in both human and wolf form with no ill affects. Ama.
"Hey Billboardbrow!" Came a snarky voice. There were the missing shinobi, hiking up the hill with enough food to sustain an army for a week. It would probably only last them about five minutes. Ino was waving and managing to balance a flat piled high with green onion cakes, pop, and taih noodles. Tenten was carrying elephant ears drizzled with chocolate syrup and icing sugar, clamping down firmly on her lip to keep from drooling. Neji bore a wide assortment of food, ranging from gelato to hot dogs. Kiba, unlike Tenten, made no visible effort to keep from drooling, long rivers flowing from his maw. Shino caught sight of this and gaged, making Deyna laugh.
Naruto, however, didn't go for subtlety. "Hey Kiba, you're drooling." Kiba glared at him and Hinata giggled. She was only holding a small box, seeming about to say what was in it when a rain drop landed on her nose. She looked up at the sky, her white eyes shining in wonder. A small laugh slipped between Hinata's lips, wafting into the air. Everyone stopped and smiled in spite of themselves. it would've been a very romantic scene...
If the sky had decided not to just rip open and drench them with only a single drop as warning. Everyone scrambled to rip the front of the tarp up and set it on poles to form a makeshift tent, all the while attempting to keep the food from getting too wet. Elephant ears were disgusting soggy. Now, it was no small feat, getting the front of the tarp up on those poles, but there wasn't near enough room to fit twelve, count them, twelve teenagers under it.
"Ugh move over!" Grunted Kiba, who was currently elbowing Naruto in the ear to try and make him move.
"I can't!" Cried the kyubbi boy. "I'm already squished between you and Lee!" The group was a tangle of limbs, with some of them in places they really shouldn't be. Tenten had her head shoved into Shino's armpit, Hinata had her legs on Ino's shoulders and her head in Deyna's lap, and no one was really very comfortable. Or could see the stage.
Shikamaru growled and yanked Akmaru's foot out of his mouth, spitting dog hair on to the elephant ears in Sakura's lap. "Everyone, stop moving!" Everyone started and looked at the strategist. Shikamaru sighed. "Thank you. Now here's what we're gonna do.."
After some organising, everyone was in a suitable lay out. The konoha eleven formed a tight circle, the food sitting in the middle of the circle. Even though they could all see now, not everybody was very close to the food. Tenten, for instance, was squished behind Neji, trying not to get shoved into the rain. And Neji and Kiba were scrunched together, looking like they were trying to make out or something.
"Nice going Nara. Now we can't move, and if anybody looks under the tarp we're gonna look like--
"Shut up Kiba," muttered Neji darkly, who was currently picturing himself stabbing all of Kiba's tenketsu. Tenten glared at him and smacked the Hyuga on the back of his head, conviniently located right in front of her. Deyna rolled her eyes at Kiba's statement. In her opinion, all humans were perverts, and he seemed to be on a whole other level. Well, she was still new there, and hadn't yet been introduced to the infamous pervy sage. Sakura glanced left to right along the row of guys and asked a very obvious question.
"Hey, where's Choji?" Everyone just seemed to freeze, then groan in frustration. No one could remember where they had last seen the guy.
Naruto spoke up. "I vote Bushy-brows goes and gets him." Lee whipped around, almost throwing Tenten off of him.
"Why must i go find him?!" Lee demanded his wide eyes showing the Rock Lee equivilant of anger. Naruto sighed.
"Because, you can run between the rain drops. We can't."
"If you want someone to go run through the rain, ask Deyna. She's got many trinkets that can make her move much faster than me," Le objected, thinking of the shard of lightning or the mercury sandals. Deyna's eyes went wide with shock, and she frantically began shaking her head. She didn't want to leave. Ino came to her rescue.
"There's no need to send out a search party. He left when Hinata and i went to see that band. He's probably home right now, going through a bag of potato chips." Ino sighed, grabbing the little box that Hinata had been carrying. "Hey, Hin, what's in this?" She asked, giving the little box a shake.
Hinata smiled. "I-it's a b-box of candles. At night people on the hill light them, so it looks like the hill is made of stars," Hinata was blushing at this point and twiddling her fingers, which she did when she got nervous. "W-we've never stayed here until the end... so i though maybe we could do that," she finished, now looking at the back of the tarp. Everyone smiled at the shy girl, making her feel slightly more at ease.
"I think that's a great idea," said Tenten, who reached over the top of Neji's head and attempted to grab some green onion cakes. That didn't go very well, and she wound up knocking the prodigy into her lap. Completely by accident. Yeah, right.
Neji gave her a stern look from his vantage point in her lap, and looked like he was going to say something, when Kiba, once again, interrupted him.
"(cough) get a room (cough)." This sent a flurry of accusations and movement through the area (?). Lee started blabbing about youthfulness, while Tenten and Neji began sending verbal shurikens streaking towards the offender. Deyna also began firing off her verbal cannon, claiming that this was living proof that all humans were at very least closet pervs. This was met with a quick retort from Kiba, claiming that she would probably sleep with Shino if he gave her five bucks. Both her and Shino leaped up at this, bugs and lightning filling the small tent. Hinata was whimpering that everyone one should just calm down, while Ino also jumped into the verbal fray, dragging a disgruntled Shikamaru with her.
All the people who were on the surrounding tarps were getting very angry. They couldn't hear what was going on on stage. Like they say, silence is golden, but duct tape is silver..
"Hey you kids! Put a sock in it!" All of the stopped moving. They had pretty much resumed their former positions, and were now covered in sticky syrup from the elephant ears. A man dressed in a shinobi uniform was standing in front of the tarp with an expression akin to having swallowed a lemon. Needless, to say, things did not end well.
"Over the fence. Now." One by one, the genin scrambled over the fence that had been raised at the back of the plateau to keep the tents seperate from the road. As Hinata landed on the other side, they turned back to the angry chunin who had just kicked them out. "You're lucky this is the last day of the festival, or you'd all be banned from it." Everyone kept their eyes glued to the rain soaked ground, rain running down their faces. "I con't believe the famed Rookie Nine, and the honorable Team Gai would commit something so foolish," he continued, eyes burning holes into their skulls. "And you," he said using a tone on Deyna that had once been reserved for Naruto. "I'm still not sure why Tsunade spent so much valuable time getting them to track you down and bring you here, but it'd start acting like a shinobi if i were you," and he stalked away from the fence.
It was a good thing he didn't posses the byakugan, or he'd have been able to see the obscene gestures tossed at his retreating form. They were very inventive. Some even included sign language. Hinata looked up and smiled. "T-they're lighting the candles," she whispered, and everyone looked at the now star specked hill before them. Sakura smiled and dug out the box of candles HInata had dropped and handed them to Deyna who lit each one, passing them to each person present. They stood there, twelve souls connected by a tiny flame for what could've been an eternity before turning to go.
Naruto turned to Sakura as they began to walk. "You know, i guess we really didn't need to see the stage after all."