Note to all the picky people out there: I don't own any of the Naruto characters (wish I did tho).
However Hailey does belong to me!
And Ari belongs to Lokelani87!
Ari sighed heavily. Man, she was bored! They had been stuck in the Hidden Sand Village for a week now and they still didn't know how to get back to their own world. And to make matters worse, Gaara was busy Kazekaging, Kankuro was sick, and Temari was busy taking care of him. In other words, ninja lessons were cancelled for the day and Ari and Hailey had absolutely nothing to do.
They had been playing tic-tac-toe, but the game had become dull around the 137th round.
"So what do you want to do now?" Hailey asked for the millionth time.
"Once again, I have no idea," Ari groaned.
"Well we have to do something."
"Tic-tac-toe?"
"Nooooooooo!!" Hailey said quickly.
"How about we go bug Kankuro again?"
"Nah, Temari said she'd beat us if we did it again."
"Oh ya."
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Both girls pondering what they could possibly do to amuse themselves.
"I've got it!" Ari exclaimed.
"Care to share?"
"You know how Gaara never laughs?"
"Well who would, if they had his history!"
"That's what we're going to do! We're going to try to make him laugh!
"You do realize how freakishly hard that's going to be?"
"Yep." -
O.o "Well I'm in." XP
"Ok then," Ari murmured sneakily,"let's go."
-- 30 minutes later--
The two girls stood just outside Gaara's office door, each clutching a squirming chicken in their arms.
"You ready?"
"Yep."
"Ok, on the count of three, one… two… THREE!!"
They burst into the room, let go of the squawking birds, and proceeded to chase them around the room howling,"Please wait! We wish to rule you, our chicken brethren!!"After a few minutes of this, they caught them and marched to the door muttering,"Bad chickens, bad!" under their breath. Right as they reached the threshold, they both snuck a look at Gaara.
He was sitting at his desk rubbing his temples with his eyes closed, a look of exasperation and embarrassment on his face. The Lord of the Wind country sitting in front of him looked like he was trying hard to suppress his laughter.
As soon as Ari and Hailey were outside the building, they looked at each other and said simultaneously, "Oops." They let the chicken go and sat down on the steps.
"He's going to kill us, isn't he?" Hailey sighed.
"Well, how were we supposed to know the Lord of the Wind would be there?" Ari grumbled.
"Yah, but he's still going to kill us."
"You're probably right, but if we can make him laugh beforehand, then maybe he'll let us off."
"I hope so."
"Yah, me too."
They waited for Gaara to emerge and thought of what they could do.
"I got one, how about we pull the ol' cream-pie-in –the-face gag?" Hailey suggested.
"Sounds good, but how are we going to get two cream pies in the Sand Village?"
"That's easy, while we were at Gaara's house, I saw a can of whipped cream in the refrigerator and some tin pie plates were in the back of the cupboards.
"O.o"
"What!? I was hungry! Now come on, we have to hurry if we want to catch him on his way out."
Hailey and Ari quickly sprinted back to the house and made their whipped cream pies, then returned to the front of the building that held Gaara's office. Hardly minutes later, the door opened and out stepped Gaara.
At first he didn't notice them, but once they began shouting at one another, he looked up. As soon as they were sure he was watching, they charged, and with a wet slap, collided, spraying whipped cream everywhere. Hailey and Ari both made a big show of gasping for breath and
wiping the gooey mess out of their eyes. The entire top half of their bodies were splattered in white, their faces completely covered in thick cream.
"What are you two doing?"
Their heads whipped around, hair slapping their faces and getting stuck in the muck.
"You didn't think that was funny?" Ari asked in an amazed voice.
"No I thought it was weird," he replied coolly.
"What about the chickens?" said Hailey.
"I thought that was annoying AND weird."
"Awwwwwww!" they whined in unison.
"Come on; let's go home before you embarrass yourselves further. I need to check on Kankuro then I'm going to train, you two can come as well, as long as you don't throw anymore pies.
A short while later, they were in Kankuro's room. Hailey and Ari had washed the cream from their faces and hair, and put on new shirts.
"Dang, I feel like crap," Kankuro moaned.
"It's just a cold, you'll be over it soon," Hailey laughed.
"Yah, I bet you'll feel better tomorrow," said Ari.
"I sure hope so, cause this sucks."
Suddenly, an idea dawned on Hailey, if Gaara wouldn't laugh at them, maybe he'd laugh at his brother. "Hey, Kankuro," she said, an evil grin spreading across her face," guess what Temari told me."
"What?" he croaked.
"She told me that she was going to cook you pancakes and force-feed them to you!" (Note: I have read many a fanfic where Temari was a horrifyingly bad cook and that her pancakes have often caused Kankuro to cry)
As expected, he shrieked, jumped from his bed, and raced down the hallway. Gaara, Hailey, and Ari quickly found him hiding in Gaara's room. He was rolled in a ball in the corner and slowly rocked back and forth, eyes wide, muttering "Pancakes" over and over, in a trembling voice.
"Did you have to bring that up?" Gaara sighed.
"Sorry, I forgot about the pancake issue (yeah right)."
Once again, upon mentioning the word "pancake", Kankuro screamed and threw himself into Gaara's closet, slamming the door behind him. The muffled cry of "PANCAKES!!" drifted through the door.
"Oops," Hailey said, batting her eyes innocently.
Ari was turning purple in the face from the effort of suppressing her laughter. However, Gaara simply sighed wearily," Its going to take hours to get him out of there." He ran a tired hand through his hair," Oh well, I can deal with him later, I need to train." He turned around and walked out the door. As soon as he left, the two girls collapsed in laughter.
"I can't believe that didn't get him!" Ari wheezed.
"Neither can I," Hailey gasped. She hauled herself to her feet and walked to the closet door. "Sorry, Kankuro," she added sheepishly.
"PANCAKES!!" he replied.
She shrugged and walked with Ari out of the room.
"What else can we do?" Ari asked.
"Well, I do have one more idea," Hailey said.
An hour later, the girls stood with Gaara out at the training grounds. He reached back and uncorked the gourd. Sand poured out and swirled around him, but, suddenly, it stopped. He grabbed a handful and brought it to his nose.
"What did you do," he said sternly, "it smells funny."
"Well, we wanted to say sorry about the stuff we did earlier, so we washed your sand!" Hailey trilled happily.
"You, what?"
"We washed your sand! You see your sand still smelled like old blood, and we thought that the villagers would warm up to you more if it didn't smell like that. So Hailey and I emptied your gourd into a canvas bag and put the bag in the washing machine. We looked around and found some lavender-scented detergent and washed it. But we knew you'd be mad if we left it wet, so we used Temari's blow-drier to dry the sand out then we put it back in your gourd," Ari explained.
Gaara stared at them, speechless.
"Doesn't it smell pretty?" Hailey asked nervously.
He blinked, then hung his head, his hand covering his mouth. And low-and-behold, his shoulders started to shake and muffled laughter escaped his fingers.
Hailey and Ari looked at each other, grinning madly. They screamed together," We did it! He can laugh!" Each girl then broke into their own little victory dance and finished by jumping into the air to score a high-five.
"Is this not the most awesome day in the history of ever?" Hailey sighed.
"It is Hailey, it is," Ari replied.