Sorry about the grammer mistakes—too and to are pretty much my biggest weakness. Mostly because I used to always use 'to' by default, and now I over compensate. As for heel—I honestly didn't know it was spelled that way. Well, you learn something new every day.

To alayneni – Whoever said Kankuro was the Puppet Master? ;] Also, why on Earth would he have a roommate who explodes things, hm?

I paced back and forth in my living room again. Every fourth back-and-forth between the couch and TV, I ran my fingers through my hair, sometimes leaving them entangled on the top of my head for a few paces before bringing my decrepit nails back down to meet my mouth.

"Cherry? You still there?" I heard Destiny call from the abandoned headset, lying on my couch. I stared at it for a second before taking a deep breath and breaking the walking cycle to pick it up.

"Yeah," I breathed, "Yeah, I'm alive. At least in RL."

"Too bad. Get in that tunnel, after those guys stop coming out, and Puppet—guard her," barked Tomato, his character motioning at the tunnel and the monsters marching out of it.

"Yeah, why are we going IN when everything is coming OUT?" I asked, phasing back into pre-epiphany mode and running my thumbs over the familiar buttons. Tomato scoffed.

"I don't know, to dance." His statement wasn't necessarily the most sarcastic thing I'd ever heard itself, but the way he said it made it seem like he'd held it's personified head under the sarcasm river a little too long and accidently baptized it into the Religion of Sarcasm so well that it stood as the Pope.

That's right. Tomato's statement about dancing in an empty tunnel is now the Pope of The Church of Sarcasm.

"There's no diamond in there, we checked awhile back," Puppet noted, upon reaching the rest of the group and recognizing the cave. There was silence from the headset while Tomato contemplated this, before grunting and replying:

"Ugh. Cherry, what do you wanna do." (I put a period there, you see, because he didn't ask me what I wanted to do: he commanded me to tell him what to do.)

…

"Oi, Naruto," I started, before taking another chunk out of my apple, "You up for the arcade this weekend?"

"Ah, I can't. Coach got mad at us for locking that Freshman in the women's sauna after the semi-finals, and he's making us do Suicides. Wish I could," he explained, flipping his head to move his hair out of his face and grabbing his burger off his plate. Sasuke's eyebrows quirked from across the table, and Kiba was just grinning.

"That was still hilarious."

"Yeah, man, but I heard Rodney's not gonna try-out next season," Naruto told Kiba, who was still busy re-hashing the hazing ritual. Naruto's comment went ignored for a few seconds before Kiba snapped back to reality and began discussing something about Wide-Receivers 1 and 2 (or something).

"Which Arcade?" Sasuke asked, looking down at his BLT and deciding to pull the bacon and lettuce out from between the slices of bread, throw them over my head, and take a bite from the now tomato-only sandwich.

"The one down south, 'Space Port,' or something cyber-y like that; I just call it 'The Arcade'. Why, you been?"

Sasuke scoffed, the typical Tomato way.

"Yeah. I have the high score on like three of the pinball machines."

"Oooh, three. I have 5," I pulled my hand in front of his face, waving my five fingers around and making an 'o' with my lips. Sasuke closed his eyes.

"What's your last name?" I choked on my rootbeer, thinking about the 'Chapstick' discussion we had last night. Of course, he thinks he had that with imaginary Cherry, but I still remember it.

"Haruno," I said simply, nonchalantly ignoring my choking. No reason to make a scene.

"So SH." Oh, initials. Like he thinks he could beat me.

"SMH, ho. That's the high score on the cowboy one, Mortal Kombat, the Simpsons one—"

"I've beaten you three times," he interrupted, picking the tomato off the bread (or rather, the bread off the tomato, considering there really was more fruit then wheat) and cramming it into his mouth.

"US?" I realized the irony; how three different worlds had suddenly collided into one boy, and how everything had started pointing at him.

"Uchiha Sasuke." There was no explanation further than that, although I knew the Japanese customs. The rest of lunch was silent, other than the sound of puckered lips and Ino's giggles, upon her entrance into the group and failed seduction of Sasuke.

…

"So we just pull the two acids together and get a non-reaction. But we still need 3 more non-reactions, and we only have 1 more Acid," I suggested, pointing at the lab book in front of him, which was backwards to me. He shut his eyes for a few moments, his eyesbrows furrowing as he did.

"Sakura," he said, still with his eyes closed, "we're diluting the acids to .5 millileters."

"Yes, but—" I was interrupted by a loud shout from upstairs, a pounding on the staircase, and an older boy walking into the kitchen.

"Sasuke, go upstairs. It's my time with the downstairs," the boy commanded, his long ponytail swishing behind him as he pulled the fridge open. Despite the malicious intent, his voice was recognizingly monotone, leading me to believe this was his brother.

"You don't take turns with floors, bastard. You take turns with assets. Use the TV, we'll use the table," Sasuke decided, turning his head away from his brother and focusing and pointing a pale finger at the notebook.

Sasuke's brother promptly walked over behind him, grabbed the back of his chair, and brought his arm down in one swoop, swinging the chair backwards too. Sasuke groped for the table with his arms outstretched, then tried to move his legs back to catch him on the ground. The latter succeeded, although it looked like he was doing an incredibly impressive limbo-move.

Sasuke, ever the cool kid, stood up smoothly as he pulled the chair off the ground and replaced the legs against the tile. He turned his head to stare at his older brother and glare cold eyes in his direction.

"What were you saying?" The comment in my direction was sudden, although there was no sense of rush in his voice. I just didn't expect the conversation to focus on me again.

"Aa, um, I was just gonna say that the acid's dilution really only makes the equations that need to react more difficult to create." The older Uchiha looked between us, but I pretended to continue staring at the paper and not notice the dark eyes jolting back and forth at Sasuke and I. I don't know if Sasuke was doing the same thing, but he didn't form his reply until his brother was completely up the stairs.

A couple of hours passed, and the only thing that we seemed to be getting through was time. His patience began to run as low as my level of concentration as I stared at the intricately designed wallpaper coated smoothly to the wall behind him. I mean, I knew he was Japanese, but the way the flowers in the corners were painted simply screamed oriental.

"Sakura! Are you even listening?" I jolted at his comment, mostly because I wasn't listening, but also at the irate tonal change in his voice. He had been so bored with the words that came out of his mouth all night that the emotion quickly lodged me back into reality.

"Aaah…" I thought about my answer for a moment; this was Sasuke, and he already didn't like me (or at least he didn't like SAKURA), so there was nothing to lose by saying that I wasn't. On the other hand, I could continue my faux-ditzy responses like, 'Yeah, but I don't get it?'. I chewed on one of the ends of my pink braids, looking down at the paper slowly before turning my eyes back to him.

"No I was not. Please insert another quarter." Sasuke's face fell against the table as soon as the words left my mouth and he groaned loudly. I must admit, a frustrated Sasuke was significantly more fun than the usual Sasuke.

"I've told you almost 15 times. At some point you must get bored with the wallpaper, right?" He asked the table, his face still planted in it. He straightened up again and ran his hand through his hair, only making the back more spiked. I started to wonder how he even got it like that; like, at first I thought it was gel because of the way it seemed to stick out the same way every day, but he ran his hand through it just now with no problem, so that must be some damn good hairspray. I suppose it could be natural, but that's just strange, no one's hair sticks out like that, especially the Japanese. Aren't they notorious for flat hair or something?

Then again, I have natural pink hair, so I'm not I'm allowed to have much of an opinion on the subject.

"SAKURA!" He yelled that time, his quick and large hand movements mirroring the anger in the shout. He exercised his fingers for a moment then stood up so fast the chair fell over (again), then paced into the kitchen.

"Let's just pick it up tomorrow or something. My mind has lost the ability to soak in knowledge."

"You can't lose something you didn't have in the first place, and you're absorbency level is about as low as glass," He muttered, returning from the kitchen and sitting back down across from me with a glass of water.

"First of all, I'm a sham-wow, okay? Secondly—" I stopped at the strange noise I began to hear. Not strange bad—strange as in new, and never heard before. It was a sort of pleasant sound. I recognized what it was suddenly, a familiar low rumble I had only heard over a headset.

Sasuke was laughing. The boy I had quickly categorized as ever-serious and never caring was actually laughing. At something I had said, nonetheless.

I'd heard Tomato laugh at something Destiny or Puppet had said, even something I quipped once in a while. But Sasuke laughing at something Sakura said? I blinked at the oddity.

"A-are you laughing?"

"A sham-wow? Really? You're a sham-wow?" He was smirking, a chuckle still breathing out of his mouth after he finished talking.

"Well-I-yeah! A sham-wow, Billy Mayes and everything! That commercial is most definitely a demonstration of the way my brain takes in knowledge. I just have to, you know," I moved my hands in a twisting motion, squeezing out an invisible towel, "purge it once in a while."

He chuckled again at my hands, massaging his brow-line as he did so. "So what, you forget everything you learned?"

"Wha—no! I just store it another place, like the sham-wow does with the drain," I suggested, nodding my head at the elegant comparison. It may have been odd, but it actually worked pretty well.

"And the—" he made the same squeezing motion with the towel, twisting his hands, "is done by…?"

I shrugged. "Going to the arcade or something. I can't just sit here and look at the wall coolly like you can."

Sasuke, at this point, began putting spirals away. I'm guessing he probably realized the session was getting nowhere, because honestly, it hadn't been since his brother had retreated upstairs.

"Then let's go to the arcade."

"I—what?" I stopped talking suddenly. It was 10PM on a Thursday night and Sasuke Uchiha/Tomatohn had just offered to go to the arcade with me. Weren't Asians obligated to have no social lives? I mean, I know that's a little racist, but—

"I'm serious. We have to get this next part done by Monday, and if the only way we're gonna do that is to," he did the squeezing towel bit again, "by going to the arcade, then that's what we'll do."

"But uh, it's Thursday night. And it's 10PM," I replied obviously, padding my fingers against each other. Sasuke looked at me like I was stupid, or atleast moreso than he initially thought, before stuffing the spirals in his backpack.

"I mean tomorrow. We'll just go there after school."

I threw my pale red satchel's worn strap over my shoulder and adjusted it so the weight was comfortable. "Poor Naruto's gonna have to ride home alone."

"Who the hell cares, seriously," he muttered quietly as he grabbed his keys and I followed him to the door. The fact that he was taking me home went completely unspoken of in the car, even though he hadn't since the first session we had. I didn't even notice it's oddness until I was standing on my curb watching him drive away.

Aaah finally! I'm so sorry! I'm gonna try and update this as often as I can, since I'm taking a break from the SoMa one, but I've just got a lot I have to do. Blah blah excuses.

I know this one's sorta short; I had a-whole-nother part typed and everything but realized upon re-reading that this separate part didn't fit the timeline, and therefore must wait until the next chapter.

In the meantime, you should all entertain yourselves by reviewing. That would be lovely.