Author's note: Welcome back to Red; here's chapter 2 for you guys. This chapter has been looked over by my friends Janine and Mark. Neither of whom are Naruto watchers/readers! Give some love to the two very dedicated friends! I think I shall name Janine as my official beta on this fic!

Enjoy chapter 2.

RED

Chapter Two; Two friends.


'You really shouldn't be here.'

'You keep telling me that.'

'You're going to get yourself killed over something that really doesn't concern you.'

'Of course it concerns me. It concerns all of us. This country is dying.'

Hatake Kakashi listened to the rattling rain for a moment more before casting a wary glance at his typewriter.

A pause.

A sigh.

'Are you going to be like this all day?" he asked the rusty machine, tapping a few of the keys flippantly before letting another sigh escape through his nose.

'I don't know why I expect you to help me. When's the last time you ever offered anything decent up?'

He scratched his scalp through his silvering hair before stretching and getting up from his wooden chair, pushing away from his desk with a sense of almost pious injustice. The smell of stone, mildewed floor tickled him as he rose to as much of his full height as he could imagine before the tiny basement roof could clap him about the ears. Unperturbed by the machine's lack of contribution to his latest masterpiece, Hearts in the Desert, Kakashi dawdled up the rough cut basement stairs into the kitchen of his small house.

He hadn't realised he'd spent the night in the basement. It had seemed like an hour.

Another missed appointment with Time, then.

His wife's face confirmed it. Night time had passed him by in a dull blur of white on white – the occasional tap and click of a key here and there had threatened to offer some distraction, but the darkness had passed uneventfully. Not a single word written. Not a single second noticed.

Wondering how much he could get away with, Kakashi slid into a chair at the small, round wooden table in the middle of the kitchen. The tablecloth was clean – his wife was almost obsessively immaculate – but worn, and tattered at the edges.

'How are you this morning, dear?'

His wife dropped a plate of burnt toast before him. The scent of the blackened bread couldn't quite hide the distinct aroma of her outrage.

Anko is a woman of many talents. Her toast is always impeccably crisped. Her vocabulary is warped with mild swears uttered in a vicious lace of the teeth. Her heart is wrapped in sand, but melts and loves at the most gentle of touches.

'Smells delicious, Anko…'

His lying skills, appalling as always, let him down, and Kakashi bit into the toast under the watchful, reproachful glare of his wife of eleven years. As the bitter taste dug into his tongue, he hoped this was his punishment.

'Why didn't you come to bed last night?'

He just about managed to not sigh through his nostrils. Experience had taught him that it didn't help.

A lie was best. A massive, extravagant lie that she would never believe.

'The most amazing thing happened to me in that basement, Anko,' he shovelled out through a mouthful of toast. 'There I was sat, writing away, lost for ideas, feeling our livelihoods sinking away into a black abyss, when all of a sudden a haggard, wizened old fairy appeared… she granted me one wish… I wished for the words to write my next story, and she granted it, and I spent the rest of the night typing so furiously that I didn't even realise the sun had come up…'

Hatake Kakashi is a very ordinary, very extraordinary man. He is a terrible writer. And a terrible liar. He wears a patch over one eye, for reasons almost lost in the past that Time would soon like to bring up again.

He also has, without knowing it, the ability to tell the future.

Anko watched him, buttering a charcoaled piece of toast stiffly.

'You're an absolute cretin. An imbecile. An idiot.'

'You say that now,' Kakashi winked with his one good eye, 'but my basement-book will be the greatest story ever told! You'll see!'

Lips pursed, and one lone eyebrow lifted in just the right manner to make Kakashi sweat a little over his words, Anko finished buttering the toast and let out a raucous, shrill cry.

'Oy! Forehead! Your breakfast is ready! Get down here, Pig!'

There was a pattering on the stairs. Anko plated up the toast gruffly. She was a svelte woman, slender in all the right places, with long, pale legs and a stern face. In the right light, she moved like a crane fly, casting long, cold shadows that were surprisingly warm when they caught you.

Sakura, sixteen years and two days old, bolted into the kitchen, hair scraped into a messy ponytail, and threw herself onto a chair next to her Father, who had buried his existence into yesterday's newspaper.

The burnt bread was never bemoaned. There were no luxuries like eggs, or cheese, for breakfast any more. Sakura could remember dipping small soldiers of toast into a sweet yellow egg, letting the yolk cling to the bitty black toast before tearing into it with her young teeth. Now, the butter was stretched and thin, barely whetting the appetite of the dry, greedy bread.

Sakura ate hungrily.

'Father,' she said as she chewed, forgetting to be ladylike in the comfort of her home, 'I won't be home till late. I'm meeting Naru--'

'That blond idiot?' her Mother spat, wiping her hands on her neatly tied apron. 'Why you must waste your time with that imbecile is beyond me, Pig.'

A noise that sounded disturbingly like an oink came from behind the newspaper. Sakura giggled and polished off her toast, stuffing the last mouthfuls through her lips and washing them down with the glass of water her mother handed to her.

'He's not an idiot, Mother,' she defended as soon as her mouth was empty. 'He teaches me things!'

Anko made a hmmm noise. 'I'm sure he does. Like how to be an idiot.'

Sakura rolled her eyes discreetly, but Anko caught them.

'Don't roll your eyes at your Mother, Forehead, unless you want to feel my rolling pin on your ar--'

Sakura was gone. Smoothed down her uniform, raced out of the kitchen and into the street. Her Father had winked at her on the way out.

These days, the rain refused to lay off.

Naruto could remember a summer three years ago when it had rained all through April and May, and even a little of June. But July had been glorious, and the winter had even been mild. He didn't mind that. He didn't mind if it balanced out.

For the briefest of moments, he wondered what would happen to Konoha if the rain failed to stop falling. The trees, so splendid and magnificent in the sun, would pass away. Drown. Flowers would wilt and die, their once gorgeous petals washed away in a tide of grey, wet misery. The river bank would burst, and he and Sakura would be swept up, above the houses, away from the beautiful time spent together, giving and taking, into a place where they could no longer hear the words in each other's mouths.

With a doleful glance upward, Naruto wished fervently for the rain to stop.

Wishes often fall on deaf ears. The rain will hardly stop for the next five years. Only for snow; only for faint, wet sunshine. That is because Heaven is crying, and it takes time to dry tears.

He was supposed to be in Juvenilles today but he really hated Tuesdays and often skipped the afternoon class. He hated those classes because they taught him to hate. He didn't like that they did that. Naruto was the type of person who made up his own mind.

So he was meeting a friend (well, the friend didn't know that yet, but they would meet, this afternoon), and contemplating going for a walk before he met up with Sakura in the evening. He had nothing new to teach her today. But she had cookery, and a deal to keep.

Loitering every Tuesday near the local munitions factory in the outskirts of Konoha had told him that his friend passed by at about two o clock for the weekly pick up of steel and iron. Naruto took a seat at a small sandwich stall and ordered two sandwiches, his hungry belly instructing him to munch on one of them. He took off his Juvenilles cap and fanned himself with it. The rain was hot today. Sticky, like flesh.

At two o' clock, his friend passed the sandwich stall without noticing him. He pushed a wobbly looking wheelbarrow through the rain, and his hair stuck to his face. At ten past two, he returned, wheelbarrow scarcely filled with tatty pieces of scrap metal.

Naruto called out to him from beneath the protective roof of the sandwich stand.

'Oy! I bought you a sandwich!'

The boy in the street had to mop his black hair out of his eyes he was so drenched. He met Naruto's blue-eyed gaze with his own, before shouting back, propping his wheelbarrow in the mud soaked ground.

'I can't just leave this here!'

He gestured with long arms to the wheelbarrow.

Naruto sighed. Friends could be so stubborn.

'Bring it over!' he called back, his voice echoing in the small stand. 'Just don't get that mud any---'

'No way, kid,' a voice from behind Naruto interrupted. He turned his head slightly to look at the owner of the stall who had just sold him the sandwiches. 'You're not bringing that thing in here.'

He wanted to scowl. He wanted to rant at the man, cut him with words, make him see sense.

He could not.

With a sigh, Naruto swiped up the sandwich from the counter, determined to at least have his money's worth, and walked away. Put it behind him.

He hadn't brought his umbrella with him. He refused to put his cap back on.

Annoyance still glinting in his face, Naruto handed the sandwich to his friend, who'd watched the scene unwind with an awkward look on his rain-drenched face.

'Here,' Naruto handed over the now sopping sandwich. 'Don't say I'm not good to you, Sasuke.'

The taller boy looked uncomfortable as he looked from the wet bread to Naruto, and then back to the shop.

'You shouldn't be buying me lunch.'

Naruto tutted as Sasuke stuffed the sandwich into a jacket pocket. 'Right. You would have gotten your own.'

'That's not what I'm saying.'

Sasuke picked up the wheelbarrow by its handles. The few pieces of metal in it clanked against each other as he began to push it, quite vigorously, through the mud. Naruto walked beside him.

They fell into a strange sort of silence. Of course, it wasn't silent – the sound of their feet pushing through the mud and the wheel of the barrow slipping through the ground was almost as pronounced as the hiss of the rain. Their breathing – Naruto's still angry, and Sasuke's quieter, was almost drowned out.

'You really need to get some sort of cover for that thing,' Naruto pointed out after a few minutes, nodding down at the rusty wheelbarrow. 'Look. The metal you picked up is getting soaked. Won't it rust?'

'We only buy galvanised metal' Sasuke replied, guiding the wheelbarrow out of the path of an oncoming rock. 'It shouldn't rust.'

Naruto nodded. His blond hair looked mousy now, saturated with rain water. He didn't want the noisy silence to return.

'You been busy?'

Sasuke glanced at him. 'Not really. Bits and pieces.'

The two were heading across to the other side of Konoha. Most of the village's factories were located in the western outskirts, but Sasuke lived in a small section of town in the east. Konoha was about five miles wide, give or take, but Naruto usually appreciated the exercise he got keeping his friend company on the walk. The rain, however, dampened his spirits.

And Sasuke wasn't generally a talker.

The two young men had known each other for a very long time. Sasuke had left school at thirteen to help out with the small blacksmith business that the family ran, but before that, he and Naruto had made a notorious name for themselves as the two 'fighters' of the playground. Fist fighting. They loved it.

Their first fight had been completely hate-fuelled. Young madness. Naruto remembered it brightly. Sasuke had been the best fighter in the year above, and Naruto, being his cocky self, had proclaimed he could beat him. Sasuke, with a sneer he had perfected over the coming years, had smoothly commented that Naruto was a runt – indeed, the height difference between the two was still fairly noticeable – and had no chance.

Naruto had won.

They'd both broken their noses, and Sasuke had come away from the fight with a nasty cut along his right eyebrow that his elder brother had scolded him about. Nothing hurt him more than the chunk bitten out of his pride, however, and in their next fight he had pummelled Naruto so hard that his wrist had broken. Not having fought since Sasuke was forced to leave school, the score stood at twelve wins for Sasuke, and ten for Naruto.

Naruto was happy to give up on trying to beat Sasuke now. They'd grown close, in a way, hugging with bloodied fists. And the world was trying to get in the way, but that didn't stop Naruto loitering around the metalwork factory every Tuesday and meeting up with his old nemesis for a little while. Didn't stop him buying Sasuke a wet sandwich to eat on the way home.

Didn't stop Sasuke taking it.

'You know,' Naruto said quietly as they moved on to a busy street, 'A friend of mine suggested I carry a torch around with me, for my own safety.'

That earned him a snort from his taller friend. 'Save yourself the money. I'll forge you a dagger for free. Might be a little more handy.'

Naruto's smile made his eyes crinkle, despite the rainwater flowering down his face.

'Apparently, you can tell a Red from a Leaf if you shine it in their eyes. Something to do with the eyes glowing.'

Any amusement was gone from Sasuke's face, as if the sky had washed it away. He watched Naruto for a moment, expression unreadable.

Just before he could reply the two were interrupted by the shout of a skinny blond girl across the street. Her voice crawled out from beneath her blue umbrella.

'Naruto! What are you doing?'

Naruto ignored her, his eyes locking straight ahead. Sasuke watched the shimmering metal in his wheelbarrow, dotted here and there by little tears of rainwater.

The girl did not stop.

'Oy! Naruto! Why are you walking with him? What are you doing?'

Eyes forward. Eyes down. Listening to the tiny clanging of the scrap metal as the rain pummelled it.

'NARUTO! Can't you hear me?'

Peaceful fists curled.

'What are you doing?!'

Heartbeat, heartbeat. Righteousness. Fury.

'Why are you walking with that stinking Red?'

Blond stopped. Black caught his breath. Gripped the handles of the wheelbarrow. Blond spun.

'How dare you!' Naruto growled, the rain trailing between his eyes, into his snarled lip. 'How DARE you! This is my friend! Don't you ever--'

Sasuke grabbed Naruto swiftly by the chest of his jacket and turned him away from the girl and the people beside her who were now watching the two of them in the middle of the street. Naruto stumbled a little, caught off balance, and Sasuke righted him, quickly moving them in the opposite direction.

'You idiot,' Sasuke muttered as he grabbed hold of his supplies. 'What are you shouting back for? It won't make any difference!'

Naruto shook himself free of Sasuke's grip. 'How can you just let them say that? You're a human being! Just like them! Just like me!'

Something whizzed past them. The two boys froze momentarily, watching a fist-sized rock roll through the mud with a sizzle.

'Not to them I'm not,' Sasuke hissed out after a moment's pause, shaking his slender body into action. 'Come on!'

Naruto, stunned by the aggression hurled in their direction, had to be pulled along by Sasuke, still clinging desperately to the metal he had picked up earlier in the rusty wheelbarrow. There were shouts coming from behind them; Red lover and Red Rat were the two that rang in Naruto's ears. Sasuke's feet pounded in the mud next to him as they ran along, rain slicking down their backs.

A particularly well-aimed rock struck Naruto in the back, and he slid into the mud with a cry, smearing his clothes with the dirt of the street and dropping his cap. Sasuke ground to a halt, fingers shaking, knowing full well he was stopping in a notoriously antirouge area but unable to leave Naruto to an undeserved beating in the mud. Cursing under his breath, Sasuke gripped Naruto by the sleeves and pulled him to his shaky feet.

'You really shouldn't be here!' he hissed as he steadied the blond, aware that he'd left his cargo unmanned. Naruto gasped for air from their run, coughing the rainwater out of his lungs.

'You keep telling me that.'

Frustrated, Sasuke could barely resist the urge to punch his old rival square in the jaw.

'You're going to get yourself killed over something that really doesn't concern you!'

He didn't often raise his voice, but Sasuke felt the need to. Naruto was an innocent party. He had done nothing to deserve this.

The irony was lost on him in the rain.

Naruto scowled at him stubbornly, rain slitting down between his eyes. 'Of course it concerns me. It concerns all of us. This country is dying.'

A few people had poked their heads out from their shops, despite the rain, to witness the two drenched boys and a rusty old wheelbarrow in the street. A few of the rock throwers had followed them.

'Look!' The shrill, high voice of a young Juvenille was as painstakingly obvious as blood on white paint. 'That stinking Red pushed the Leaf there into the mud!'

More rocks. Sasuke's thumping heart sank as he realised he'd probably have to leave the wheelbarrow. The week's supplies. With a frenzied glance at Naruto, who was absolutely coated in sludge and dirt, he ignored the voice in his mind that swore he was wasting his time.

'You're wrong!' he said, feeling like a rat cornered by a clowder of cats. 'I was helping him up!'

Why is he bothering? They all know his words have less value than theirs. Why does he expect they can hear him?

Dodging another small stone hurled in his direction, Sasuke backed towards his wheelbarrow. Somewhere in his panicking brain, he was still trying to work out how he could escape a public beating without losing his supplies. Like a mathematical problem, his mind scoured over the few equations that led to his escape.

None of them factored in the supplies.

'Poisonous!' somebody was shouting. Naruto could hardly believe what he was hearing, what he was seeing. His back stung from the rock that had caught him. 'Poisonous, filthy Red!'

He could not find the words to express. The thoughts to connect. The will to retaliate.

Mind trapped in a dull sort of realisation, Naruto noticed that somebody was trying to shine a torch in Sasuke's eyes. He looked like a prisoner, face patchy in the beam of a searchlight.

His mind flicked back to Scarlet Row. His time with Sakura there only days before. A small series of hours. Her trembling, damp shock. The bloody red writing all over the doors. The abandoned shoe. The endless rain. Telltale.

This time it was he who grabbed Sasuke, pulling the tall boy away just as a stone cuffed him on the temple. Sasuke staggered for a moment before gaining his footing. They were off. Sandwich and hat lost to the baying wolves.

The wheelbarrow, too, was lost as the two boys raced away, youth and fear giving them an edge. Naruto swept them through a few skinny alleys, allowing himself the short, sweet bliss of the empty air beside them as the hateful shouts faded into the distance.

After a good ten minutes of running, the two boys stopped to catch their breath, chests heaving in sheer strenuous exhaustion. Naruto could feel a bruise forming in the middle of his back. Sasuke had blood running down from an old scar split open.

Naruto stared at Sasuke for a moment.

It wasn't the blood.

His eyes were red.

Red.

'You don't need a torch,' Sasuke gasped quietly, harrowingly scarlet gaze narrowing at Naruto. 'You don't need a torch to see what I am.'

Naruto was silent, allowing his lungs to work resiliently, listening to the throb in his back.

'Even in the blackest of night…' Voice dull and heavy, like the steel scattered on the ground, in the mud, Sasuke sank to his knees. 'I'm still a Red.'

Naruto waited a little longer, gulping hot, wet oxygen into his mouth. After a moment he stood straight, taking his hands off his knees and tenderly feeling his back. He nodded toward the small cut on Sasuke's forehead, nudging into the right eyebrow.

'Itachi's going to kill you.'

Sasuke felt the cut with a still shaking hand, unable to stop the tremors that haunted his body.

'Great. Add him to the list.'

In the face of such spitting hate and adversity, a sense of humour like that is quite impressive, don't you think?

Do you wonder if he will survive? This black haired boy and his brother? Red to the bone?

Let us be honest.

The odds are against them.

Red to the bone. Red to the death.

As grey melted into black in the slink of the horizon, Sakura waited by the river. It was getting too dark for her to see her own reflection in the water, but she could still catch the small white splashes where the bullets of rain flew down. She'd worn her pink raincoat to protect herself but the wind slid the rain underneath her flimsy shelter and she was a little damp. In her hands she held a small tray, covered by foil.

Sakura kept her promises.

It seemed that Naruto did not.

Naruto had been due at six o clock, and two hours alone in the rain passed slowly and uncomfortably. Apart from the presence of herself, the riverbank was abandoned, chased to emptiness by the bad weather. She felt like the lonely figure in a painting, with only the heavy artist's brush to keep her company as he splattered in the rain. When her watch read eight o clock, she gave up. Sakura wasn't scared of the dark – she was sixteen! – but the rain, warm though it was, chilled her skin through her raincoat as it dried and made her long for the comfort of the living room fire.

He arrived just as she was leaving, typically. They just stared at one another for a moment before Sakura narrowed her eyes, pulled her face into a sulky pout, and dropped the tray on the ground, silently enjoying the sound of the cakes she'd worked so hard on earlier smashing together in a ruin. The moment the soft, tasty buns rolled out onto the saturated grass, Sakura turned and walked away. She didn't look back at Naruto standing in the rain, minus his umbrella and hat. She was too wet to care why he was so late.

'Sakura! Wait! I'm sorry I'm so late – today's been so craz-'

She continued to walk, shielding her ears from his pleas with the sopping hood of her jacket. The rain ran into her face but she didn't care. She was only sixteen, and her feelings were still easily dented and battered. Her feet stormed through the mud, knowing she'd see him tomorrow. Behind her, he disappeared into the scenery, blending in with the rain that wrapped the world.

Instinct took her to her Father's book shop, where the silver-haired man was just locking up. Sakura was waiting for him as he stepped out into the night. He looked at her for a moment with one exposed brown eye, and then quickly locked the door. His long, sleek black coat started to glow silver as the rain began to attack him, but instead of putting his matching black umbrella over his head, Kakashi crouched down and sprung it up over Sakura's.

'You look a little wet, Piggy.'

His tone was soft and melting; Sakura could roll up in it, despite the stony rain. His hair immediately began to stick to his face and she watched for a little while as the strands began to lie across his skin like abandoned pieces of string. When he was thoroughly soaked, Kakashi stood up, keeping the umbrella over Sakura's head, and the two began to walk home.

'Doesn't he normally walk you home?'

Sakura scowled at her Father's perceptiveness, even with only one eye.

'That idiot got to the riverbank two hours late. I was going as he was coming!'

Father chuckled at the heat and unhappiness in her voice. 'You didn't want to stay with him?'

The pretty young girl's scowl deepened. 'Of course not. He was two hours late! I'm soaked!'

She loved her Father's laugh, even when it was at her expense. It reminded her of being six years old, on a beach in a place she couldn't remember, near the smell of her old mother, with a handful of hot, golden sand that erupted when she squeezed her fingers. The shimmering dust fell from his lips again.

'Sakura, sometimes a man can be late and have a good reason for it! Did you hear him out?'

Sakura shook her head defiantly, the raincoat rustling about her ears. 'Not a chance. There's simply no excuse for leaving a lady standing in the rain for two hours!'

Father smiled.

'What about me?' he said mischievously, 'I'm late for everything. I'm even late now. Your Mother will have my guts!'

It was Sakura's turn to laugh; a laugh still maturing and finding its own tone. 'Father, you're different. If you were on time, I'd be worried!'

'Well then!' Her Father seemed thoroughly amused by her double standards. 'I should think you could forgive Naruto for being late just the once.'

As the conversation swung back around to the subject of the tardy young man, Sakura's mind drifted reluctantly back to how he'd held her hand in Scarlet Row. How his words were sharp, but she did not know what he had pierced with them. How his eyes were pleading but she did not understand how to satisfy them.

She saw the tiny shoe, abandoned and alone on the gravel. And she saw its owner, bright red imaginary eyes aglow in her mind, and did not feel afraid.

'Father?'

He did not turn to her, but a tiny 'hmm?' escaping his throat told her she had his attention.

'Why are the Reds bad?'

She hated how young and ridiculous she sounded. Naruto had seemed so grown up, so mature when he told her the things he'd learned in Juveniles. The Poisonous Mushroom. The Red Plague.

Her Father sighed. She watched the rainwater slink in grey rivers down his coat.

'That's not an easy question for me to answer, Sakura. Let me ask you what you think first.'

She glanced up at the black sky of the umbrella. 'I don't know. I think I'm supposed to say that I think they're terrible – they'll steal our business, they'll cheat us out of money. But I've never even met a Red – I mean, not that I'd want to, if they really are as bad as people say… but there must be little Red children out there, and Red girls that are my age…'

Father chuckled at her confusion, his tall shoulders shaking drops of water off.

'Sakura, you've met plenty of Reds! Quite a few of my customers are Red, and our window-cleaner, and that nice man whose house your mother used to clean. You've probably spoken to a hundred Reds and never even realised!'

He crouched down, spotting her sudden feeling of embarrassment. After a moment of watching her face, he reached out a wet hand and ruffled the top of her head affectionately. Her hair was tucked into her hood, but his hand made a rustling sound.

'You're a good girl, do you know that, Sakura?'

Her confusion became more apparent. Father's smile was warm.

'Listen. I would never, ever tell you what to think. But you shouldn't let anybody else, either. What the Fourth has been saying about the Reds – well, some people believe it, and some people don't. The important thing is to make up your own mind.'

Sakura watched her Father with round, bright eyes. His face was quite young for a man who'd fought in a war not ten years ago. His hair, though, hoary and fine, added the missing years to him.

'How do I do that?' she asked, face quizzical. 'I don't really understand anything about the situation! You and Naruto know so much, so you can make up your own minds, but I can't even tell a Red from a Leaf…'

She trailed off at Father's ever-proud smile. The umbrella was shielding both of them, twisted together to hide from the omnipresent rain.

'Well there you go,' Father said, as though she'd made some electrifying new discovery. 'Think about it.'

He stood, and when he next spoke, his voice was different to how Sakura had ever heard it before. She'd heard him be angry. She'd heard him be mean. Disappointed, sad, bored, impish, and guilty.

She had never heard this.

'Whatever you do,' he said, mouth seeming to move in slow-motion, 'don't let the world around you know of your decision. Keep your thoughts to yourself. Keep your beliefs quiet. Don't change a thing. Do you understand?'

Shocked at the severity of his words and the hard, solid brown of his eye, Sakura nodded, her eyes wide, like a child, and her lips suddenly dry.

'Yes, Father.'

They had reached the front door of their house. A scowling Mother was watching them from the top window. Father pushed a small key into the door with a clinking sound.

'You're a good girl, Piggy.'

He stepped into the house, and Sakura stood still for a moment, watching the drops of rain slip from the edges of her umbrella and thinking hard. Not until her Mother dragged her into the hall, cursing at her stupidity and muttering something about how she must have 'caught it from that idiot she keeps seeing', did Sakura awaken from her thoughts and turn her gaze away from the child with the red eyes that she had never met.