Chapter 4: Sprinkles
Gaara and Sasuke's kiss finally broke when Sasuke accidentally knocked over a jar of multi-colored sprinkles.
"Sasuke!" Iruka's eye was twitching in irritation. "Don't waste my precious sprinkles!"
Sasuke pulled back from Gaara, and finally noticed that his sleeve had caught one of the jars on the table, spilling a rainbow of sprinkles over cookies and table.
"Hn. My bad." he said, seeing just a little more mess than before.
Iruka sighed, trying hard to contain his temper. "Let me explain, Sasuke-kun. These sprinkles I have are not ordinary sprinkles. I have them specially imported from the Land of Birds, where they are made each individually made by monks who have trained several years to be able to make them. The sugar is harvested from the southern area of the River Country, but only on the full moon. At the half moon the canes are processed, and only on the new moon can the sprinkles be formed with that sugar, along with several other secret ingredients, using a recipe that has been orally passed down generation to generation for over three thousand years!"
"All that for sprinkles?" Sasuke was clearly dubious.
A vein popped in Iruka's forehead. "Yes. They are special sprinkles, the best sprinkles in the entire world, with unrivaled flavor and texture. And each jar is worth an entire paycheck. Do not waste them!"
Kiba leaned down to the table and sniffed them. "Hmmm, the brown ones are chocolate. . .yummy. . ." he picked one up and put it on his tongue. "Not bad. But then, I'm not the connoisseur Iruka-sensei obviously is . . ."
Gaara distractedly picked up some sprinkles, and pressed them into the icing on a cookie. Struck with an idea, he picked up one of the heart shaped cookies, covered it in plain white icing, and then put the cookie icing side down into the pile of sprinkles on the table.
"Iruka, they're just sprinkles. We'll clean them up, alright?" Sasuke might have been able to say something worse, but Kiba was hard pressed to think of what that might be.
"Just . . . sprinkles? Just?!"
Gaara looked pleased with his multi-colored cookie, and showed it to Kiba with a smile, both men deciding to ignore the yelling going on around them. Kiba finished piping Shikamaru's name onto the reindeer cookie he was finishing.
"Why is the deer's nose red?" Gaara asked, pointing to the piece of candied cherry Kiba had stuck on the cookie's "nose."
* * *
It was starting to rain. Not much, just sprinkles through the branches, but that didn't matter much. It was bad enough that he'd woken up to frost in his hair, now he was getting damp, and running through the trees wasn't warming him much.
He was cold, dammit.
He looked up, and saw that the clouds were gettting darker, which meant they wouldn't stay with sprinkles for long. His companion seemed to be sharing his thoughts.
"Ne, Kakashi, how much longer?" the blond asked.
"We should be at our meeting point soon. Hopefully, before this rain gets much worse. At least we'll be indoors, and this place has great hot cocoa to warm us up."
"Awesome!" Naruto sped up, eager to get out of the weather.
