Chapter Four
The words had to be spoken: she had to find out how Sasuke would react to them.
More importantly, she had to find out how she herself would react to them.
The answer, on both accounts, turns out to be, not much. Naruto is oddly calmer, the anxiety brightening into adrenaline.
Shrugging, Sasuke tells her to join the club.
It's a long bus trip on the best of days, and given today's traffic build-up it's going to be over ninety minutes. The silence, their silence, can only last so long.
"So," Naruto says, nestled comfortably in her seat, "Sakura was saying you're a jerk about Haku. What's the deal?"
It's unlikely that this is what Sakura had in mind when she said she might have to pair them up after all, and could Naruto please check that this would work.
"Sakura's over-sensitive." A glance at the endless line of cars crawling in front of them convinces her to elaborate; with a sigh she even leans back into the seat, pulling her legs up so the skirt spills around her thighs, exposing several centimetres of skin. "Look, if Haku wants to live as a woman, that's her business, and I do appreciate the separation of gender from physical sex. But this extreme fascination with gender identity is ideologically unsound – if gender is a social construct created to support a hierarchical dualism, then it's really just a case of cultural Stockholm Syndrome, and you cannot be born the wrong gender because actually you're not born any gender at all, that's imposed on you later. It's – I am a person. A female-bodied person, to be sure, but a person first and foremost." She looks tired and cranky and alive, impassioned despite the lecture-style delivery, her fingertips rosy as she wipes sweat from her brow.
"But women are people. Persons. Also I don't think it's so much that Haku wants to live as a woman as that Haku is one."
"Given our cultural context, I'm not so sure they are. At least, not the same way men are. And my point was that Haku isn't a woman not because she happens to have a male body but because outside of patriarchal socialisation there are no women."
"That's sick," Naruto says. "Women not being people, I mean."
"Precisely. Which is why I'm opposed to the idea of trying to make people into just women, or just men for that matter. It's, well, if I suddenly woke up a boy one morning, I don't imagine that'd matter. That is, if I'd been born a boy I'd have been socialised differently, so of course that would've changed who I am, but."
There's this feeling, like reality has shifted unexpectedly into a higher gear, only unlike in the bathroom Naruto is less bloodthirsty and more effervescent, champagne bubbles bursting through her.
Sasuke is stupid so often, and in really creepy ways: not the simply dumb and can't hep it sort of stupid that plagues Naruto in Math class but a disingenuous fascist kind of stupid. It takes a certain type of intelligence to twist reality the way Sasuke does, which makes it not only borderline evil but dangerous.
It's the difference between a lowlife skinhead and Nietzsche. Whom Mum would throw a fit to hear called anything as simple as evil, but Naruto can't see it any other way.
If you write that the vast majority of people are subhuman sheep that should be controlled by their betters, you've got to expect a certain amount of name-calling. Not to mention the racist stereotyping, or the frankly unbelievable sexism.
Given all this, it's a giddy relief to discover that the reason she's been fuming at Sasuke is that – well, that Sasuke's mostly really right.
"I'd try wanking, I suppose," Naruto confesses, pulling her legs up to sit sideways, her back to the window, motion sickness forgotten. "If I was suddenly turned into a boy, I mean."
Sasuke, who presumably has quite a lot more experience with dicks, snorts. "Yeah," she says rather softly. "I expect you would."
"What? You wouldn't?"
"Sure," she says, taking the tone of an adult speaking to an ill-behaved child. Naruto's brow furrows, both in annoyance and because thoughts linking Sasuke to masturbation should not be entertained in public. The skeez line is crossed, irreversibly, by the vivid idea of Sasuke flushed, touching, before Naruto snaps back into reality. Sasuke's voice is livelier now, younger: "I'd be more interested in the social experiments, how differently I'd be interpreted, how the world would change around me. I mean, regardless of how one feels about it, in present society there are men and women, there are distinct gendered experiences." For a second her face registers discomfort, then smoothes. "So if Haku is a woman in present society, then that's how it is. It's not the society I want, but, anyway it's none of my business."
"This is the death penalty thing all over again," Naruto blurts, then hastily explains, "I mean you're not acting like I thought you would."
Except of course in the latter case Sasuke defied expectations by being upfront about her wrongness, which admittedly is a bit different from just plain not being wrong.
Naruto isn't so much for words, she took Butler's gender theory and ran with it; she couldn't explain it, not coherently, doesn't get the fancy terms, just feels the rightness in her bones. Practicing rather than theorising is what Mum calls it, but Naruto reckons terminology is less important. The theory people can do that, Naruto will be out there actually doing stuff.
Watching Sasuke talk is beautiful though, and, embarrassingly, inspiring in a way that teachers' lectures or Mum's insistence that you can get through this gradually and there's no need to be ashamed for asking about the difficult bits have never been.
Then Sasuke says, "I do like the idea of a permanent solution, of something – final", and Naruto splutters.
"What the hell? Do you actually remember how it turned out last time people started listening to a crazy guy with a final solution?"
Sasuke's enormous black China doll eyes blink. "Did you really just compare me to Hitler?"
Naruto makes a gesture not quite like a shrug, indicating that the comparison made itself and was more or less sitting there waiting to be voiced.
"I'm fucking Jewish," Sasuke snaps.
Shock and a pothole in the road combine to jolt Naruto into kneeing herself in the chest. "What? Seriously?"
"Yes." There's that exasperated adult tone again, stern rather than angry but not completely divorced from it.
Naruto's too surprised to be insulted. "But, I mean – you don't seem very religious." It might make a certain amount of sense, though, because while Sasuke's skin is among the whitest Naruto's seen, white people don't tend to come with hair and eyes so black they tint blue in sharp light. Sasuke passes as white to the casual eye but Naruto's vaguely assumed an Asian grandparent. With the long history of wandering, she guesses it's natural the Jewish community should be very multiethnic.
"I'm an atheist," Sasuke tells her, then adds with what would be petulance save for the weariness, "It doesn't matter. You're Jewish if your mother's Jewish, if she isn't you're not, it's not something you can change."
"Can't you convert?"
"No," Sasuke says flatly. "Look, you can't just decide to become one of the Lord's chosen; getting into paradise is a touch trickier than just hiring a removal company, you know?"
"I thought the whole idea was you're supposed to choose to believe." At least that's how the non-crazy religious people have put it, which makes no sense to Naruto because believing isn't something you choose, anymore than you choose your emotions. You know if it's real, if it's right, and if you can choose to turn it on or off then it most certainly isn't. "I mean, I don't, so I don't know really, but."
"No? I was sure you did."
"You were?" She leans forward, feeling a smile form. You think about me, you are sure about me. "Why?"
"You seem the type."
"I stopped," she says. Sasuke's cut at the raw, sensitive places before, but Naruto's not voluntarily exposed them to her. "Or, I'm not sure I ever really started. But I definitely stopped when – one day I just realised, you know, not only hadn't he saved me, but – I just really neither wanted nor needed him to. I mean, I never got the idea of a God Father letting people get hurt for their own good, it's like, hello, there's a reason criminal neglect is, you know, criminal. So either he doesn't exist or he's such an arsehole it'd be better if he didn't."
"Indeed." She tilts her head to look out the window past Naruto's shoulder. "How far out in the wilderness do you actually live?"
Twisting to check the increasingly narrow road, Naruto reports, "Another forty minutes, thereabouts."
"Truly there is no god," Sasuke complains dryly, arms crossed under her breasts. Naruto's sure she doesn't consciously intend to emphasise them.
Still Naruto tries to concentrate on them, because it would be easier if Sasuke's fascination lay in her body.
"Hey," she remembers. "Mum's friend became a Jew."
"Liberalism is cheating," Sasuke says, then catches Naruto's what? before it's spoken, her answering voice steady and calloused as a hand: "Liberal Judaism is about belief not blood, that you can convert to. It's just it's a cop-out. Like the Christians conveniently forgetting all the nasty parts of the Old Testament."
"Better that than the fundies, though. I mean I'd rather have someone who likes God because he's nice than because he's some dick on a revenge trip against humanity for their sins." She shrugs, her shoulders jutting against the glass as the bus takes a left turn and asphalt is replaced by gravel. "People get so crazy about it, it's weird, just look at the whole Muslims vs. Israel deal, they've been at it forever and it's just getting worse."
"Oh, fuck, you're a Paki hugger. Of course you are."
"One, shut the fuck up being racist." After years of living next door to Mrs Afareen, the admonishing is automatic, vehement. Still, although Sasuke looks and certainly acts white, it's pretty weird accusing a Jew of racism, especially since Naruto herself is white to the bone. "Two, well yeah, you can't just take someone else's land."
"Actually that is how every nation was made."
"It's still wrong. Fuck's sake, you can't treat people like that!" This is definitely the death penalty argument déja entendu, and nothing has changed but everything has shifted, twisted; deepened somehow
There's still the thrill of getting furiously up close to another person.
Naruto saying, you can't treat people like that, burning with it, because half the time Sasuke does.
"I'd like to see you act calm and reasonable surrounded year after year by people who believe you don't even deserve to exist." Ignoring Naruto's blank stare, casually shocking the air out of her, and Naruto honestly could not say whether she did it on purpose, Sasuke continues, "Well, I'd like to see you act calm and reasonable period. More importantly, aren't you a socialist? I thought you lot were of the opinion land can't be owned."
Still reeling, Naruto spits, "That's obviously sort of an everybody or nobody deal, or it won't work." It's unclear if the question has anything to do with socialism when she adds, too defensively to be truly belligerent, "What do you know, anyway?"
"That it doesn't seem to work particularly well in practice." In Naruto's mind haughty is an expression stuck firmly in works of melodrama, something to describe a fantasy princess or the villain threatening her, but Sasuke brings it alive in the mundane setting of the bus. "Actually, it doesn't always work so well in theory either."
"You've read Marxist theory?"
"Some, yes. Sakura got hung up on Jameson recently, I gave in to curiosity."
Suddenly Naruto wishes very much to have read Jameson, whoever he is. While the Sasuke Uchiha CliffsNotes version is sure to be less accurate and more speckled with insults than Mum's, it's also certain to be a good deal more entertaining, but she'll wade through hell and high water before she admits ignorance to Sasuke. "Cool," she says.
"Not really. Jameson's rubbish. If you insist on reading Marxist theory, at the very least read Althusser or Adorno."
This swiftly confirms that almost-fascist, no doubt capitalist Sasuke is familiar with a greater number of Big Name Marxists than Naruto. Wow.
This either says something incredibly odd and interesting about Sasuke or something equally denigrating about Naruto.
"Why would you read all that stuff?"
Naruto knows from the experience of helping Mum search for quotes one horrible afternoon when all the careful bookmarks had been lost during the move that it's not exactly light entertainment to slog through this kind of texts. No doubt they've broken lesser minds.
"I figured as a capitalist I'd better know mine enemy," Sasuke says lightly.
"But Adorno's about art. You read Marxist art theory."
"Kakashi was a painter," Sasuke says tightly, carefully, looking at something outside, beyond Naruto's shoulder. "He did."
"Oh," says Naruto, struck silent, wanting to reach out, kindly, softly, only she doesn't know how to do that, be that, not with Sasuke. There's only one person this Kakashi could be, and probably Sasuke wouldn't want Naruto's sympathy, much less her touch, but then Sasuke rarely knows what's good for her. "Er, Adorno, he's the one who wrote about poetry, right?"
"Well," says Sasuke. "He wrote about 'the subject's unquenchable erotic longing to be freed from itself in and through the Other.'" The citation marks are tangible but the quote doesn't come out rehearsed: more like a song, a beautiful, though incomprehensible, fragment remembered by heart but spoken spontaneously, with feeling. She'd like to hear Sasuke sing. "Look, it's complicated and you're stupid. Another time."
"Yeah," Naruto agrees. Stupid, smiling: there's going to be another time. "This is our stop, anyway."
"Right." Sasuke rises with precision but also with haste belying her composure.
There were not many people on the bus to start with, and at this point it's abandoned, the two of them stranded with only the driver and each other.
Clearly, Sasuke has excellent reason to be eager to leave it.
Sasuke Uchiha, undisputed Queen Bitch of Sannin Academy, was possibly the last person Naruto expected to bring home, but here they are, at the bus stop only a couple hundred metres from her house.
"Will your parents be home?" Sasuke asks, in the particular toneless voice straight A students across the country have mastered, the one teachers think of as polite and Naruto shudders at the snideness of.
"I don't think so. Dad'll be home for dinner, Mum too probably."
Sasuke nods, and they're here, passing through the garden, Naruto digging through her pockets for the key, then leading the way through the crowded hallway into the kitchen. Unlike their old place, this is a house Naruto has seen from the outsider's perspective many times, still sees from the outside every day, though the strangeness is blurring into familiar changes, but she can't know how it looks to Sasuke.
Probably like the servants' quarters, though.
After much agonising she decided yesterday that Sasuke visiting didn't merit any cleaning, then broke and cleaned up anyway because not doing it would be ostentatious. Now the wiped counters and washed dishes are a mocking contrast to the half-filled moving boxes littering the floor, piled up in heaps in the corners.
Naruto likes the house, with the chest-high counters and yellow-painted Ikea furniture, but it's odd having Sasuke in the middle of it.
"So, like, do you want something to drink?"
"I came here to fight," Sasuke says, breaking the awkwardness and the homeliness both. "I've already endured a bus trip through purgatory for it."
Taking her eyes off Sasuke long enough to open the basement door is an incredibly tense experience, Sasuke's attention like a shiver up her back as she turns the handle. "Right through here. Have you got a change of clothes? Okay, go on down and I'll just get my stuff upstairs."
Sasuke descends the steps, her dress extremely blue in the half-dark before she finds the light-switch; Naruto turns her back and jogs upstairs to dump her school stuff and hurry into the gym clothes. The faded gray tshirt under her bed smells more of dust than of detergent, but at least there's no hint of sweat.
The underground chill has smeared gooseflesh over Sasuke's arms, exposed by the tank top looking, for a moment, almost like a corset, wound tight around Sasuke's impossibly narrow waist.
"I didn't bring – I'll go back for a pair of shoes," Naruto says. Dad prefers them both barefoot, but her trainers have served their purpose in scuffles, as good to kick in as to run in.
"Don't bother." Sasuke kicks hers off, striking a practiced stance, one heel resting against the edge of the mat. It bears stitches from frequent use, was bought off a gym teacher who'd finally got the budget to invest in a replacement, but it works well enough.
Naruto steps forward, taking distant note of Sasuke's things neatly arranged on the one chair, just beside the not yet mounted sandbag and, admittedly, not so distant note of Sasuke's breasts being suddenly very noticeable in the little top.
Beyond being appealing, they're a relief: most of Sasuke is eating disorder skinny, the trousers hanging off the bones of her hips where Naruto's bite softly into flesh, making an indention there's not enough mass on Sasuke to form, but provided Sasuke's a bit young for silicon a minimum of extra fat is needed for that kind of boobs.
Then Sasuke brings her arms up, still measured and confident and careful, and Naruto follows her onto the mat, circling, feeling the sticky material under her feet and the hefty pulse in her hands.
She fights on instinct and impulse, sudden tricks and intuitions, has played around with Dad and fought for too real with too many kids. Sasuke has proper training and moves in patterns, breaking them with calculation.
They neither of them follow the rules of holding back; there's an almost languid first few minutes, the fight getting its feet, the jabs testing soft, but the violence spirals fast and furious.
There's tumbling and crashing, Sasuke feinting and twisting and turning everything around and around, like a demented carousel, and Naruto hits her everywhere she can, kicking pushing pulling as they go rolling. Larger and heavier are good, but then it's pretty obvious that everyone Sasuke's ever fought has probably had better reach and more bulk, and certainly Naruto never expected it to stop her.
For a moment she's breathing into Sasuke's ear, her fingers scrambling over the sudden roughness of the scar, a knee burying in her thigh.
Forcing herself past a jabbing elbow, Naruto fists Sasuke's stomach and twines their legs, falling over Sasuke for a bright instant before the movement pushes her sideways, and Sasuke eels away, on her feet again and furious, but a good kind of furious, Naruto's chest aching with new bruises she didn't notice getting as she too scrambles to her feet, just out of range, agonisingly aware of every minute shift of Sasuke's body.
Just after a headbutt there's an intrusion, a sound that's not Sasuke's breathing or Naruto's heartbeat, and Sasuke kicks her twice in the ribs before Naruto catches her ankle, both of them pausing to listen.
"Naruto? You down here?" Dad's footsteps are louder than usual, over the insane disco beat of her pulse.
"Yeah," she calls back. "Be right up." With a certain regret she lets Sasuke retract her leg. The ankle fit in her hand, tendons twitching hard enough to tickle under the sweat-slick skin. Like a clown or a puppy, Naruto's hands and feet are too large, out of proportion with the rest of her body except for the extensive hips; she hasn't always been glad for it. "Guess we got kind of carried away, huh?"
"I suppose," Sasuke agrees, stepping off the mat with feet Naruto has now discovered to be lined and dotted with round black patches.
"Don't worry, I'll beat you into the ground next time."
"You could barely keep up," Sasuke scoffs, sweat pearling like glitter on her cheek.
"Whose foot got captured just now?" Naruto taunts, moving towards the steps. "Grab your stuff, shower's upstairs."
"If we hadn't been interrupted, you would've realised why I let you do that," Sasuke insists behind her.
"There you are," says Dad from over by the oven, then registers Sasuke. "Oh, hello."
It must be hours later, the kitchen light on and dinner cooking.
Sasuke says, "Hello, I'm Sasuke, it's nice to meet you" in her for-adults voice. Nearly everybody has one, although Naruto's is more curt than polite: what differentiates Sasuke's from almost everyone else's is its taking on the quality of an adult speaking to another adult.
"This way," Naruto says, pulling Sasuke along up the stairs and towards the bathroom. The door to her bedroom is open but Sasuke doesn't look.
Thankfully the bathroom's always clean. Mum enjoys a spot of bohemianism and Dad, well, Dad works in a garage, but he's anal about the toilet, so the tile is shining, though rather worn.
"I'll get you a towel," Naruto offers. "Er, feel free to use anything else you want."
On her return she finds Sasuke taking off her clothes.
Naruto freezes in the doorway, sweating again, her skin hot and tight, as though it's been thrown in with the wrong batch of laundry and come out shrunken and red.
Her expectation of Sasuke's back, gradually revealed as Sasuke pulls the tank top over her head, as a manifestation of rose prose, as blandly perfect, is so strong that for a moment it lays superimposed over reality, which is made of hollows and a few scars, and something, just above the slipping waistline of her trousers, that may actually be freckles.
Groves of shadow nestle under every individual bone of Sasuke's ribcage, skin pulled taut over the jutting vertebrae climbing her back. It looks like vivisection, like experimental art, with nothing really pretty about it.
What makes it porn is Sasuke looking at her over her shoulder, the same way she did in the basement.
When Naruto said, I want to fuck you it was theoretical truth – she thought she did, with enough awareness and enough distance to test the words. It's real now on a physical level, deeper than Naruto can make words reach, real like her cunt cramping and if she stays she's going to touch her.
For years Naruto's miniscule impulse control has been trained in headmaster offices to little avail; why should she not touch her, except there was another bathroom, in which Sasuke said, this guy with a hint of vomit still on her breath.
"Towel," Naruto offers, and Sasuke expresses her gratitude by shutting the door in her face.
Naruto butchers stretching exercises, sweaty and antsy, because this shit is crazy, but happy all the same because it's never been like this before, has never been Sasuke alive with rightness and snarky with wrongness and kicking her in the stomach with a grin. Sooner than she'd have honestly expected, and possibly due to Sasuke preferring to limit her exposure to poor people germs, the shower is turned off, and Naruto jerks upright, her face bright red from bending to touch her toes. "All done?"
"All done." She's back in the dress, which makes her beautiful by adding another twenty pounds to her appearance. It's the kind of dress Naruto'd expect to see on Ino, or Sakura – cut carefully just loose enough to hide any extra fat, suggest a model silhouette. It makes Sasuke's very real weight issues seem fake, a feat of expensive tailoring.
Naruto sidles past her, their hands brushing in a badly timed high-five before she's locked in, pulling sweat-stuck clothes off and discovering that Sasuke too leaves wet towels on the floor.
Naruto's grabbed her wrist before, and certainly there was hand-to-hand contact during the fight, but responding, however hesitantly, to the high-five is the first time Sasuke's touched her just because. The imprint of Sasuke's knuckles is swelling red and sore on the inside of her fingers, and Naruto wants to hold her hand, wants to weave their fingers together and press them between her legs.
She manhandles her clothes into the laundry basket and steps under the shower.
Returning scrubbed and wearing her favourite shirt, she finds Sasuke has made herself quite comfortable in Naruto's room. Really there's no call surprise: where else would she have gone? Hallways are not a suitable frolicking ground, seeing as Sasuke Uchiha isn't the type to sit on floors.
"Hey," she says, and Sasuke looks up from where she's sitting cross-legged on the bed perusing Naruto's bedside stack of comics. Buffy and Spiderman volumes are fanned out on the floor, thankfully obscuring the odd issue of Anita Blake. She hurries across the cold floorboards, her bare feet jubilant to reach the rug, and plops down next to Sasuke. She hasn't felt large since the growth-spurt that hit with puberty, but she's lanky and gangly next to Sasuke, doesn't know what to do with herself to contain this awkward, helpless feeling of belonging.
Sasuke closes Neon Genesis Evangelion 8 and places it atop a volume of Battle Angel Alita. "When does the next bus leave?"
"Er, shit," Naruto tries, rubbing at the back of her head. "Last one was hours ago. I'm sorry, okay, I didn't think about it."
"Of course you didn't," Sasuke says. "I should have known better."
"Wait," Naruto snaps back to attention, halting Sasuke's fingers busy with her mobile. She is intensely, ridiculously, aware of her own body and its proximity to Sasuke: belonging is what she's been chasing after, sort of, her whole life, and it hasn't always been sitting next to her. Countless times it's drawn her in, Dad's or Kiba's arm draped across her shoulders, but she's never wanted to fuck Kiba and she can't pretend it's the same. "Look, it's fine, there are buses and commuter trains over by Bridge Station, Mum or Dad'll drive you, it's ten minutes away tops."
"I wouldn't want to impose," Sasuke says in quite possibly the snottiest voice Naruto has ever heard. It's weird, in a funny comforting way, how the lack of insults still translates it to yes, thanks.
Hidden treasure-deep silence descends in the kitchen after Sasuke's declined the dinner invitation and Mum's bundled her into the car, leaving Naruto stuck on sauce guarding duty.
"You had fun, I take it?" Dad asks eventually, his face a mess of lines and wrinkles as he concentrates on seasoning the root vegetables. Fancy dishes are apparently required for Tsunade coming to dinner this weekend, and practice is probably a good idea.
"Yeah," she beams. "It was bloody awesome, I haven't really fought somebody in forever, not really, it was – awesome."
Dad smiles sideways, careful, maybe just of the dish but maybe of her, too. "She's … very pretty."
"No shit. Rich as hell, too." Total enemy of the people, I get it, okay.
"I could tell," Dad agrees, kneeling to tamper with the oven, his shoulder a warm pressure against her hip. "I thought the prettiness was more noticeable, though." Flushed hot, Naruto can hardly deny this. "She's a lot different from your other friends."
"We aren't exactly friends."
"No? You seemed plenty friendly to me."
"Shut up," Naruto grins, warm and tingly with spent adrenaline, flushed with exercise and cooking and the tense exquisite maddening contact with Sasuke.
Who really isn't her friend, or particularly friendly, except she was today. Sort of.
Thinking about pushing that blue skirt up Sasuke's white legs, over knees and thighs and hips, is not constructive, but Naruto's damned if she's able to stop. Probably she won't be until she's had some alone time with her hand down her knickers, infuriating truth be told.
It's not what she should focus on, but being pretty matters, regardless of whether she thinks it should, which she very much doesn't, only it's never mattered quite this much before. Beautiful people always get away with crap uglies wouldn't, can smile themselves to new chances, which is endearing on one level even as it's sickening on another.
Money tells, Tsunade says, but Dad's right: you see the pretty before you see the rich.
To an extent, anyway. Ino's pretty, she supposes, but it's never mattered, or at least doesn't anymore, because Ino lacks the charisma to keep it compelling. Also she vaguely recalls that the first time she saw Gaara he made her think of nothing so much as the bastard lovechild of a toad and a badger which had been managing its emo pain by indulging in rat poison, and now he registers as sort of cute.
Of course, all of this will be moot when Naruto conquers the world as history's first ugly-and-proud rock star, reforming society in her glittering image.
Possibly she could make room for Sasuke to be her fangirl.
xxxxx
"Someone's happy," Mum says, looking up from her stack of what Naruto assumes to be essays.
Dad turns from the coffee pot, a baggy shadow framed by the window. "Someone's awake. Did I oversleep?"
Naruto sticks out her tongue, accepting the juice Mum hands her. The world is bright and shiny, unspoilt by the ungodly hour, her body loose and happy from the exercise, aching softly in the best kind of way and still bubbly with relief.
That is, and she rubs uncomfortably at her face, she's never actually wanked to thoughts of someone she knows before, because of the enormous icky factor, and she's still sort of abstractedly grossed out about it, but there came a point yesterday evening when it became frustratingly obvious that the only way to stop the dirty daydreams was to act on them, and god, she hasn't come that hard in years. Slept like a valiumed baby in sheets smelling comfortingly of cunt and cotton.
As she swallows the last of her toast, her brain gradually kicking in despite seven a.m. not falling within its normal working hours, it suddenly occurs to her to wonder if Sasuke's straight.
Or, Naruto doesn't believe in straightness as anything more essential than being prejudiced and not having met the right guy or girl to change your mind, but she reckons Sasuke might.
Mind, not that that will ultimately make any difference, as Naruto's never backed down from a challenge, but it'd probably be pretty useful information. At least she was cool with kissing Temari, and entirely unruffled to hear Naruto wants her, so whatever other faults she may have she's hardly homophobic.
"Honey, bathroom now or you'll be late again."
"Ah, right, sure," Naruto mumbles, wiping excess butter off on the sleepshirt. She's humming to herself as she goes, inadvertently and rather stupidly sprinkling the shirt with toothpaste but not stopping until she's running for the bus again and needs her breath for spurting.
Sasuke merely nods when Naruto comes upon her outside the classroom, and – well, she'd hardly been expecting Sasuke to fall passionately into her arms, and it's progress. Naruto grins at her before Kiba drags her inside, grumbling about blocked doorways, and stop fucking waving, you ridiculous prat.
The anti-ism project is finally taking off, and Naruto spends a depressing amount of time putting up flyers. Her initial demands for assistance were met by Kiba's laughter and middle finger, but he changed his mind with extreme and gratifying haste upon discovering that Hinata too has been roped into flyer-duty, no doubt courtesy of Sakura and her sneaky wiles.
It'd be nice, if she weren't so hung up on Sasuke, to develop an embarrassingly huge crush on Sakura, who's the sort of person who deserves being crushed on, deserves it so much and for the kind of reasons that mean she rarely is.
Of course, after Lee got on his knees in the cafeteria to declare her his cherry blossom of love, with petals sweet and fair, Sakura may actually be relived not to have more suitors.
Tacking the millionth flyer to the main notice board, which may possibly be cheating since it already has a set of quadruplets sitting there, Naruto discovers a copy of Lee's ill-fated sonnet and chokes on the revelation that the petal line was followed by talk of a stem. And being mounted.
"My fucking god," Kiba says, coming up to read over her shoulder. "Fuck, I wish I'd heard that bit."
"I think it was sweet of him," Hinata opinions shyly. "It's a little, er… inappropriate, but I'm sure he meant well. He spent hours on it, too."
If that itself didn't do it, then the sight of Kiba courting an aneurysm stopping himself either cursing or laughing would be enough to send Naruto into stitches.
Then there's the project commencing in earnest, and while Iruka's introductory lecture is about as rousing as could be expected, at least they get out of Science. About which, well, Naruto's hoping she made a damn good impression slicing up the frog last week, because while she may have the iron-lined stomach and steady hands excellent for dissection, that's about as far as her competence reaches. Before fully committing to her rock star future, she used to want to be a vet, but although she'd be great at the actual job she'd never manage the education.
Thankfully Iruka's verbosity is limited by time-constraints, and Tsunade's short addendum makes for a refreshing change of pace.
"Is she…?" she whispers to Kiba.
"Drunk?" he finishes. "Hell knows, but I hear a couple of seniors got shit-faced for a week on the stuff they found breaking into her office last year."
"If Shizune follows Iruka's example, I could use some of that myself."
"Amen to that," Kiba agrees, but it turns out Shizune keeps her lecture short and sweet, directing them to the first seminars almost at once.
They end up in a classroom with all the chairs angled towards the front, where Neji and Temari get busy unpacking the invisible knapsack of white privilege.
Temari is a gleeful surprise of distilled awesome, but the real question is how Neji got roped into co-hosting duty. His unruffledness is so complete, so smooth, that it's obvious it's a carefully, painstakingly crafted illusion.
That or he is a really very creepy combination of a university professor and a Zen monk.
Also it stands to reason, no matter how suave Neji is, that explaining Racism 101 to and fielding sometimes really rather offensive comments from a bunch of clueless white people cannot be a particularly comfortable experience for a person of colour. Sannin Academy carters to the privileged – the school is so white it might as well have been practicing racial segregation.
It's a trite comparison, but the remembered discomfort of being surrounded by aggressively straight people crawls under her skin, and it's not like there's a PoC closet for Neji to stay in, even if he'd wanted to.
The second seminar, which occurs the next day, is a rather less Zen affair. Among its many other attractions, it features a few spectacular meltdowns courtesy of Naruto, and quite a lot of tactful explaining from Sakura. In Naruto's opinion its best moment is Sasuke verbally bitch-slapping a guy so hard he probably got whiplash, but, well, this wasn't really what she expected she was signing up for. It's not on her to justify her desire for people not to be ignorant arsewipes, she doesn't enjoy being treated like some fucking learning experience.
All right, so a lot of the time she doesn't mind explaining, people wanting to know better is a good thing and should be encouraged, or if that fails enforced by fist, but god, there's a limit, and also she's just not very good at it.
"Because not doing it makes you a bigoted shitface prime for shunning, you enormous dickhead," is not the Iruka-approved answer to whinage about why people should refrain from arseholery. She'd like a realer, flashier, more immediate scene than the classroom with all its stupid rules and carefully constructed sentences.
Still, the teachers seem pleased, for the most part, and Shizune's happy with them when History rolls around, happy enough to restrain herself to a stern glare when Naruto comes in late.
She makes it just in time for the announcement of the upcoming group project. They're not big on those in Sannin, but she supposes it had to happen sooner or later.
She looks around her, a little wildly, because everything has been so good but her pulse still jumps instinctively at the words group project. She shouldn't have been late, or maybe that was actually a mercy, because most everyone seems already to be paired up. Kiba and Shino have managed to snag Hinata, Chouji's with Lee and a Leia-haired girl whose name Naruto loses track of.
This will be great, she tells herself. I am awesome and this will be an awesome project with an awesome group.
Close by there's Shikamaru, once again framed by Temari and Sasuke on either side, which leaves Naruto looking at Sakura tentatively rearranging her notes and Neji being smooth and untouchable and really rather annoyed.
This has promise, Naruto decides. She believes it a lot more after the swift silent negotiation apparently taking place around her is over and Sasuke and Sakura swap groups.
TBC