Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, shape, or form, own any of the Naruto characters in this story. However, I have managed to endear myself to Neji by kicking Sasuke in both shins when he called Neji a loser. And then I endeared myself to Sasuke by giving him twenty pounds of tomatoes. Life is so sweet…

Dedication: To waking up one morning and realizing that every drop of sweat and blood you shed is suddenly worth where you are now. And to Reeanne, Courtney, Ashley, Daysi, Kraig, Jordan, Lincoln, Stephenia, Sonya, Sadie, Elpetha, Paige, and Anthony, for showing me that there really are people out there who I can relate to, and for being my first real friends. You guys rule.

Chapter One – The Sisterhood of… Mass Chaos…?

Only holding your hand, we cross the freezing night…

It was a peaceful summer afternoon in Konoha. The sky was blue, the trees were green, and anyone who was foolish enough to walk to their destinations were finding that their shoes were not heat resistant, and that melting rubber hurt a lot. A light breeze traveled through the quiet city, but it was a dry breeze, so it really only helped melting shoes spontaneously combust. A rather humorous scene for those who were smart enough to drive or stay inside.

The lulling peace was suddenly and violently shattered on one Pine Street (A/N: Well, it is Konoha, after all. I don't think there are many non-plant-themed street names). The raucous beating of drums and wailing of guitars came from a white two-story Victorian house with a huge front lawn and a beautiful flowerbed in the area between the front and back yards. Inside the Victorian's garage, a teenage girl with flower-pink hair and bright eyes the color of sea foam danced to the deafening music that was the Nightwish record "Dark Passion Play". As Whoever Brings The Night blared into the hot summer day, fourteen-year-old Sakura Haruno's white tunic shirt and loose black capris flowed with her every movement, making her look almost elegant.

Her friend, Ino Yamanaka, finally came outside and shut the music off after the fifth time the CD had rotated through all the songs and gotten back to The Poet and the Pendulum, grinning when the rosette stopped midair and promptly fell on her butt.

"Hey, Forehead," Ino laughed, "I don't know if you noticed, but today's the seven-day mark. We only have one more week until school starts. You know, high school? The big leagues? All those Jocks…?" She laughed again and dodged the shoe Sakura pitched at her, cringing when she heard it hit the medicine cabinet on the other side of the kitchen. (A/N: What? Am I the only one who keeps medicine in the kitchen anymore?)

Sakura glared playfully at her friend as she took off her other sneaker and walked barefoot into the house – pausing to grab her Nightwish CD from the radio.

Sakura lived with Ino in the home that had been left to them in Inoichi Yamanaka's will. Sakura was an orphan who had no memory of her parents and had been adopted by the Yamanakas when she was six. When she and Ino were thirteen, Inoichi and his wife had been killed in a fatal head-on collision with a drunk driver, and with no other heirs, their family's money and property had gone straight to the two girls. The Yamanaka family was very well off in terms of wealth, and while a good sum of the inheritance money went to the usual food, house, clothing, and luxury funds, most had been put away for the girls' college fund. They both planned to go to Sonoma State University in California once they were out of high school, and that wasn't some cheap little community college. Both girls also worked part-time at a nearby Starbucks – Ino on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, and Sakura on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday afternoons – and Ino's aunt in Florida helped them out when money was tight (something that usually only happened when they'd blown the money they earned from Starbucks on stuff they didn't truthfully need, such as new iPods and cellphones to join the other seven or eight they each owned).

Just a year before the crash, as a present to the two girls, Inoichi and his wife had decided to move to the peaceful, secluded town of Konoha from their much noisier and crowded home in San Francisco, California, where the couple worked as lawyers. While the girls had never complained about their close-quarter neighborhood and had thoroughly enjoyed the more than 200,000 dollar yearly income their parents brought in each year (A/N: It's true! Go look up the average yearly salary for lawyers in San Francisco!), the Yamanakas could tell that Sakura and Ino needed a more open, close-knit atmosphere (A/N: And the city I molded Konoha after in this story PWNS SAN FRANCISCO SO EPICLY IT COULD SET THE ENTIRE CITY ABLAZE!!!)

True to their parent's wishes, as soon as they'd graduated the eighth grade, Sakura and Ino had enrolled themselves at Fire Shadow High, the largest high school in the area with a student body of over two thousand and a staff count of eighty-five.

"Ino-Pig," Sakura sighed as she gathered the shoe she'd thrown off the counter, "One week until we grow up is not what I wanted to hear right now. We're new here – no one even knows us yet. I know you're probably not nervous—" —a quick smile at the memory of all the rough spots where Ino's bubbly personality had saved them both from embarrassment— "—but I am."

Ino threw her arm around Sakura's shoulders, nearly throwing the poor rosette to the floor in the process.

"Aw, don't worry about it too much," she laughed as they marched upstairs, "I'm sure there will be tons of guys who find your shyness quite endearing."

"I'm not shy!" Sakura protested loudly, throwing Ino's arm off, "I just don't like not knowing people. And so help me, Boar, if you try to set me up on any blind dates, I will tear your arms off and feed them to Mr. Fluffers!"

The white and black cat in question lifted his head and gave both girls and cold blue stare, as if to say, "I will not lower myself to eating that."

Mr. Fluffers was not a very playful American Bobtail – it might have had something to do with the horrible name Ino had chosen for him. He did tend to cringe when he heard his name spoken aloud, especially when there guests in the house.

"I still say that cat hates you, Ino-chan," Sakura sighed, walking into her room, "I told you we should have named him Yin. Then we could have gotten another cat and called it Yang!"

Incredibly, Mr. Fluffers actually nodded and followed Sakura into her room.

Or, at least, he attempted to follow Sakura into her room. He was intercepted by Ino, who picked him up before proceeding to give him a near-fatal bear hug that made him squeak.

"But Mr. Fluffers is so fitting!" Ino squealed, swinging the poor cat around in circles, "It's not my fault he's got such long, fluffy hair!"

Sakura was tempted to go and rescue Mr. Fluffers from her sister, but the sound of an angry yowl, followed by a high-pitched screech and the sound of an angry teenage girl charging downstairs to get the Neosporin made her rethink that plan. Obviously, Ino was no match for a cat. Sakura made a mental note to buy some salmon for Mr. Fluffers when she went grocery shopping on Friday.

Now that Ino was too busy fixing her wounded… whatever Mr. Fluffers had clawed all to hell… Sakura had enough peace and quiet to start on one of her favorite pastimes: writing. She had started writing free-verse poems and random essays when the Yamanakas had passed away, finding comfort in the ability to vent her feelings through literature that didn't have to ever be read again for the pain to begin to ease. After she had finished grieving and begun to move on, she still found herself seated on her bed as she was now, typing out words to release any emotions she didn't want to deal with. Her fingers danced across the keys as she began to type…

I am not shy. I do not need the support of others to stand alone.

I am not weak. I do not need to hide behind anyone.

I am not afraid. I do not run from my problems.

I am not careless. My heart does not rest on my sleeve.

I am not stupid. I do not need someone to tell me I'm something to know that I am.

I am not desperate. I do not seek boys or perfumes to validate myself.

I am not a lamb. I do not blindly follow the orders of others.

I am not nervous. I have nothing to fear from my new surroundings.

She paused, reading through what she had just written. A smile lit her face, and she shook her head as she saved the file under the name "8-10-09".

I'm so emo… Sakura thought, silently mimicking the way Ino would say it if she ever saw that poem. The writing had done the trick – for now, at least, Sakura was freed from any previous anxiety, and she charged downstairs to help Ino recover from her "war wounds" in a much lighter frame of mind.

»»««

That night, after dinner (Ino had "food duty" that week, so of course Sakura insisted she go get MacDonald's instead of trying to cook and accidentally starting a nuclear war), Sakura and Ino had decided that they should play their own version of Battleship. The rules were the same, except for one tiny little change: every time one of them lost a battleship, they had to try to sing a song of their opponent's choosing. Since both girls enjoyed multi-language music, this made for an interesting game.

Ino was the first to lose a ship, and was forced to read the lyrics to "Mitternacht" by E Nomine while Sakura danced to the instrumental version. After losing two more ships and having the sing "Boten Anna" by Basshunter and "Fruer Frei" by Rammstein, Ino managed to sink one of Sakura's ships and forced the poor girl to sing Caramelldansen and dance to it. Mr. Fluffers merely watched from atop his kitty condo, an amused smirk on his whiskers.

After awhile the girls simply gave up on the game because they'd run out of songs that only one of them knew the words to. Unperturbed, Ino stationed herself in front of the television set and flipped to Spike, squealing when she saw that Spike's Most Outrageous Videos was just starting. Sakura settled for going back upstairs to her room and surfing the Internet, stopping at random forums and proclaiming her love of her favorite anime characters (Kaname and Zero from Vampire Knight and Goku, Gohan, and Yamacha from Dragonball Z) in between flame wars with anti-animetards (you know, those morons who usually have a poor grasp of grammar and spelling, but who loudly proclaim that "anime iz 4 n00bs roflcopter!!!1! U guys, shuld lissen 2 REEL stuf, leik American Idol!!!"?). When she'd been booted off of pretty much every server she'd gone to, she decided to watch some movies on YouTube, and spent about an hour playing and replaying nigahiga's Ninja Glare video and staring at nigahiga like a kid whose tongue's been frozen to the window of a candy shop.

At some point, the rosette ended up falling asleep, and Ino had to go into her room to turn off the blaring talents of nigahiga before she and Mr. Fluffers went to bed.

»»««

Two days later, Sakura was down at Starbucks, harassing any customers that didn't give Ino more than a two dollar tip. This exercise was cut short when the manager managed to gather enough courage to go out and tell the possibly insane girl to either order something or leave. As soon as Sakura turned to get in line, Ino "accidentally" tripped over the manager's shoe, spilling coffee all over the woman's shirt. However, since the manager herself had a habit of flirting with some of the male customers, no one really bothered to help her. In fact, the place suddenly had more business a few minutes afterwards (ah, the beauty of text messaging (when it's used properly)), so the manager cut her loses and stormed righteously off to her corner.

Sakura ordered a hot chocolate with extra chocolate syrup (Ino pulled many favors for her sister, and vice-versa), then went over to one of the freakishly high table-and-chair sets next to one of the windows, whipped out her laptop, and started writing again. Today she had awakened with the strange and furious urge to start writing – not a poem or essay, but a novel. She was just writing up the first character, a boy named Hikaru, when she sensed someone walk into the now mostly-empty store (she had to admit, the afternoon rush was pretty easy at Starbucks, one reason why she and Ino had taken only afternoon shifts there). She looked up, more out of habit than curiosity, and her fingers immediately froze on the keyboard.

Three boys had walked in, joking with each other about something they'd watched – Sakura felt a twinge of pity for the poor moron who had decided that jumping off the top of a vending machine would be a good idea, but then her focus was immediately redirected to the boys themselves.

The loudest and silliest one was a boy with tan skin, blond hair, and cerulean blue eyes that seemed too old for his boyish face. He was wearing a bright orange shirt with red and yellow patterns on either shoulder, black baggy pants with tears in the knees and one shin, and orange converse. He held a black iPod in his left hand, and around his neck hung a blue sword-shaped crystal on a black cord. He seemed to have whisker-like marks on both sides of his face, but Sakura was too far away to tell.

Behind him was a boy – er, at least, she thought it was a boy, but his/her features were too defined and even to be sure – with long brown hair, which he kept tied at the base of his neck in a loose ponytail. His skin was pale, almost ivory in color, and his eyes were an eerie light violet color that almost looked white. He wore a simple white button-down shirt and black jeans that actually fit, completing the outfit with black Adidas.

Under the blond boy's arm, looking thoroughly murderous at the contact, was the one Sakura had seen first, a boy with black hair, black eyes, and light peach-colored skin. His face looked like it was permanently frozen in an irritated scowl, but that somehow only made him more attractive to Sakura. It took a little effort for her to make herself look at what he was wearing – a dark blue button-down shirt (with the top button undone, she was happy to add), dark blue jeans, a bondage ring belt (A/N: Must… Have…) and black converse – but she wasn't really trying because she cared about his clothes. At the moment she was too smitten with his face…

And then those dark, piercing eyes of his flicked to hers, burning with an intensity that was as frightening as it was alluring.

Immediately Sakura looked back to her laptop screen, feeling her face heat up in a mortified blush. How could she have been caught gaping? How could she have been gaping at all?! That was the sort of thing Ino did while she looked on in quiet amusement!

She tried to ignore the comments he and his friends made to each other as they waited for their orders to be filled, but there was no ignoring the way Ino's "deviant" aura started flaring. Sakura could almost hear her sister inwardly scheming up ways to set up a blind date with the dark boy.

But, surprisingly, her friend said nothing, and gave the boys their drinks with no more of the normal sparkle and flirtation than she graced most of her customers with. Slowly, Sakura's hopes began to rise. Maybe Ino wasn't up to anything, and the boys would go on their way and she'd never have to look at them again and relive the shame.

And then all three of them started towards the table next to hers, with the black-haired boy sitting in the chair closest to her. Oh cruel, cruel fate.

They were so, so close… maybe if she hid behind her hair, she could get a better look at the boy next to her? No, come on Sakura, fight the urge! She ordered herself, Just don't look at them and you won't embarrass yourself any more than you already have…

A few minutes later Ino joined her, toting along another hot chocolate and a mocha frappe.

"My shift's over," the blond announced with a sigh, "So I guess when you're done writing your emo poems we can go home." She shot Sakura a wicked grin before chugging down a third of her frappe.

So much for not embarrassing herself even more.

"It's not emo," Sakura hissed, "It's deep. It's connected to meaningful things, unlike most of the shows you watch and the magazines you read."

For once the scathing warning went unnoticed – pfft, for once? Come on Sakura, really? – and the blond continued grinning. Sakura recognized the evil gleam in her friend's eye exactly a second too late to stop the coming chaos.

"Ah, so you're secretly checking out the dark-eyed cutie over there, then."

For one horrifying second, everything was very quiet and still, like the calm before the storm. Sakura had absolutely no idea how to respond to what Ino had just said, and she sure as hell wasn't going to look over at the table next to her to see how they were reacting.

Hide behind your hair, Sakura… Just hide behind your hair…

At the table next to her, there was the strangest sound, like someone was simultaneously laughing and choking on their drink. Sakura would have bet her next paycheck it was the yellow-haired boy. She also would have readily bet that the following thunk and the resulting hiss were the dark boy kicking said blond in the shin. Hard.

"Ino," Sakura murmured very quietly, "I think I'm done writing. We really should get home and feed Mr. Fluffers."

Translation: Boar, if you don't get your sorry ass outside in two seconds I will kick it all the way to next Tuesday. Then I will feed whatever's left to your stupid cat.

Ino thankfully took the hint and glided down from her chair, winking at the dark-haired boy before sweeping out the door, a very, very irritated rosette in tow, muttering death threats and something about "ninja glares" as she walked.

The three boys watched with varying levels of amusement as the two sisters exploded into a screeching catfight just past the parking spaces in front of the shop.

»»««

"Ino?"

"Yeah, Forehead?"

"We are never, ever speaking of what happened this afternoon."

"Sure thing, Forehead."

…

"Ino?"

"Yes?"

"…You're an asshole."

"That I am well aware of, dear little misfit sister of mine."

"Go choke on Mr. Fluffers' hairbrush."

"Go lick a toilet seat."

…

"What were we arguing about, anyway?"

"Beats me. Hand me the remote – Spike's Most Outrageous Videos should be on now."

A/N: Three thousand, two hundred and ninety-seven words and six pages… I hope you're happy…

The lyrics are from Kimi Ga Ita Monogatari, a song from .hack//Liminality.

I love this story, and it's only chapter one! XD And about the name of the high school… Remember in chapter 137, when the Third Hokage is dying? On pages seventeen and eighteen he says, "To where the leaves dance… and the fire burns… The shadows of fire illuminate the village… And a new leaf sprouts." So… There you go. Tada! Another chapter will be up… Whenever the hell I feel like updating. Nya.