I do not own Naruto!

'thoughts'

'inner/shukaku'

"speaking"

Sooo sorry for the wait! Got distracted, you know...

This is going somewhere! I promise! I have the majority of the story planned out! Constructive criticism is extremely welcomed! Compliments are good too!

This is told more so from my favorite red head's POV! Hope you like it!

It had been forty minutes since she had told me to go to the other room. Two hours since she had found me atop the cliff. Five hours since she had set out to look for me. Five and a quarter of an hour since Temari had injured herself. Three and a half months since she had met us.

Shukaku was whispering things to me. I didn't understand the whispers. It was pissing me off.

He had quieted down considerably when she had come to the top of the cliff. He had wanted to see what she would try to do. I'd seen how she calmed him, and it puzzled me.

Shukaku was not sentimental. He was not kind, compassionate, forgiving, or considerate. There was not a single sliver of a redeeming quality in his entire being. He was a bloodthirsty, sadistic bastard that I hated with every bone in my body. But he had stopped his incessant bitching whenever she spoke. Which was something that he never did. Ever.

So what was it that made him calmed? Was it her? These questions had been a large part of what had fueled me to reconsider my decision to jump.

'She's pretty, isn't she? Hot? Sexy? Come on, kit. You've already undressed her in your head, why not do it for real? It would feel good, you know. Her moaning beneath you while you-'

'SHUT UP!'

'You know you'd like it. Wonder how she is? Her skin? Imagine her eyes glazed over in pure ecstasy!'

'SHUT UP YOU FUCKING PARASITE!'

"What?"

I opened my eyes to find her in the doorway of the living room. Her eyes were wide with surprise. Had I said that out loud?

"What did you say?" No, I hadn't. I'd probably growled. There was still an honest curiosity in her voice, no anger or fear.

I deigned to give her a look that showed I had no interest in answering her question.

Her gaze narrowed, not liking my refusal to answer her simple question.

"Well, what do you want to do?"

Huh?

Seeing my blank expression, she explained. "You know, what do you normally do? For…fun?" She seemed to realize how dumb her question was after the fact.

She looked at me thoughtfully. "Come 'ere."

I cautiously got up, wondering what she was doing. She motioned that I sit on one of the barstools. She rummaged around in the cupboards, not seeming to know where what she was looking for was.

I watched as she got out a box of cookies that Temari had cleverly hidden. Cookies had been known to mysteriously disappear in the middle of the night without a trace. I loved cookies. I think that she knew it was me stealing them.

As soon as she popped them into the oven, she turned and looked at me with a skeptical look on her face. "So, I'm just gonna come out and say it, get the elephant out of the room so to speak, why're you depressed?"

"What gave you the idea that I'm depressed?"

"You never talk, you're always up in your room, ergo you're antisocial, you don't take an interest in anything as far as I've seen, you cut yourself, and you just tried to commit suicide. What other conclusion was I supposed to come to after seeing all that?" As she named each reason she ticked off another finger.

"I wouldn't know. But I'm not."

She still looked at me, skeptic. "Prove it. Name one. An interest, I mean."

I just looked at her blankly. Really? She expects me to just come up with something on the spot? Cookies, I supposed. But I wasn't going to tell her that.

She sighed in resignation when she realized I wasn't going to answer.

I jumped when her phone rang. She quickly fished it out of her front pocket and flipped it open.

"Hello? Oh. Okay. Okaayy. No, it's fine. No problem at all. You're welcome. Of course. Bye."

She hung up and looked at me contemplatively. "Looks like I'm spending the night."

I could feel my eyes widen at this. She was going to stay here. But he was always worse at night. I could hurt her. Not to mention the other problem that my body was having with that. Well, could you expect a red blooded adolescent male to think of anything else in this type of situation?

'So take her. Make her ours, kit.'

I had no response for him. None whatsoever because right now he and I wanted to do very similar things to her. And that was disturbing me. A lot, actually.

The smell of cookies alerted her to what she had put into the oven. Hurriedly, she grabbed an oven-mitt and snatched the tray out of the metal box, careful not to touch the insides of said box.

She immediately got out a spatula and shoveled the burning hot cookies onto a plate. Sakura pushed the cookies to the side and looked at me inquisitively.

"Why did you move here?" Her voice after a few moments of utter silence startled me a little and it took my clogged brain to come up with an adequate answer, "Huh, isn't that funny. I've known your family for months and I don't even know something as little as that." She mused.

"Temari found a good job here." I only gave her the partial answer.

She watched me, eyes narrowed. "Do you want a glass of milk? For the cookies?"

"Hn." She apparently took that as assent and took two glasses out and poured us both a glass. She then tentatively touched one of the cookies, testing to see if they were still too hot to touch or not.

She gave me a few on a napkin and gave a few to herself. The rest were left on the plate, presumably for Kankuro and/or Temari whenever they got back.

I wanted them. I decided to steal them later when she wasn't looking. What they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

She finished her cookies quickly, almost as fast as me, and looked at me thoughtfully for a few moments before standing abruptly and pulling me into the living room. Sakura left me there with a look that said I should stay there if I knew what was good for me. It was amusing, even if I didn't show it.

Sakura returned a few minutes later with her backpack. She sat down next to me and took out her homework and started working on it.

What was wrong with her? Really? Was there a name for it? A medication maybe? Did she prevent people from jumping off cliffs every day? How did any normal person just do what she had done today and just walk it off and do something normal like homework? I stared at her for a few moments.

Maybe she was a little screwy herself. Maybe she was used to hectic events. What did I know; I hadn't really taken the time out to actually sit down a talk to her…ever. I had merely observed her, disinterested, while she interacted with Kankuro and Temari. She hadn't seemed important or special or significant to my life in any way, shape or form. So I had ignored her. But maybe I should rethink that approach. Perhaps…

I realized that I was just staring intensely at the area a little to the left of her face, having been lost in my train of thought. I quickly fixed this and got up to retrieve one of the books from the large pile I had borrowed from the library. I hadn't tried to check them out because the librarians I'd spoken to before never wanted the let their books go to someone who looked like me. They always gave me those disapproving stares and grilling questions that were a little too invasive that only a true librarian would give. I would return them when I was done with them on my own sweet time thank you little-miss-prissy-bitch. However, upon further thought, I had never tried to check out a book from the library of Konoha. I had already made that assumption from my previous experiences in Suna. But the people there had already made me an outcast. Oh, well. Why tamper with a system that works? As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

It was around midnight that she started yawning. I ignored her. This was normal behavior for someone who had the day she'd had. Sakura closed her homework up and put everything back into her bag. A hand ran though her pink locks, untangling them a little.

She leaned back and closed her eyes. Deep, slow breathing soon followed.

She was sleeping? Really? Just flaunt it my face why don't you?

'C'mon, one little peek won't hurt anything! Pleease!'

'Fuck off, raccoon dog.'

Shukaku cackled at something he said that I couldn't make out. I thought it sounded something along the lines of I would one way or another. I proceeded to ignore him.

I went back to my book on Theoretical Particle Physics. I'd already read it, of course. But I wanted something to do and she hadn't allowed me to go upstairs to me bedroom so I could concentrate on controlling my adorable little mental problem. Who wouldn't want one of those? Aren't they just so popular and fashionable?

I sighed and read on.

About a half hour later, she shifted. I looked at her distrustfully. Sakura unconsciously leaned to her right. Farther and farther she shifted; until she was finally resting her head on my shoulder. The pinkette frowned in her sleep and moved me as though I were a pillow to make herself more comfortable. It took her a few moments, but she found a spot. Unfortunately for me that spot happened to be in my lap.

I stared at her in shock. To say that I was unsettled would be a gross understatement of what I was feeling. No one ever touched me. Ever. Well, unless it was to restrain me from hurting myself like she had done not too long ago.

My siblings had developed this fear of me. It was probably rooted from how many of my 'lapses in concentration' they'd seen and had to deal with. I don't really remember what happens in my lapses. They also knew the truth about what had happened that night. They'd known who'd really done it. It was no break in. My father hated me and for a while they hated me too. So in some corner of their minds there was a part of them that feared what I might do to them one day because of what had happened with our father.

I could see that they were trying to help me. But I didn't want them to. I had learned years ago how to become self-sufficient. I saw no reason to change that. When I was finally kicked out, I would move somewhere off in the woods and only come out when it was absolutely necessary.

But this also meant that I wouldn't be able to get up and devour those cookies that were still waiting for me in the kitchen.

A little growl of irritation escaped me.

I thought about it for a moment. There was nothing really I could do. I could wake her up. But, as I had learned from Temari, a female's sleeping disturbed was not pleasant to deal with. I don't think that Kankuro even knew what he had gotten himself into that night.

I sat there for at least a good hour, waiting for the possibility of her wanting to shift her position again and get off me to happen.

After what seemed like the whole night, I heard a car pull up. A door open and shut and I heard a slight murmur. I could pick out Kankuro's voice from it. The car drove away and keys entered the slot in the front door. He clicked the lock over, extra quietly. I head the door open, a slight creak resounding into the silent night. He crept in, trying to be quiet, but, Kankuro being Kankuro, epically failed.

He peeked around the wall, looking to see if we were still up.

"Hey Gaara, Temari's-" I cut him off with a menacing glare- he was talking in a voice that was only slightly quieter than normal. It was still loud in the stillness of the night. Sakura shifted on my lap in response to the unprecedented noise.

When he saw her lying on the couch his eyes bugged out and his hands slapped themselves over his mouth in a state of self-induced horror. He also knew the terrors of waking our sister.

After a moment or two of her not waking up and beating the shit out of the one who woke her, a smirk began to spread across Kankuro's face.

Ignoring this I said, "Help me get her off!" in a stage whisper.

He shook his head, smirk still in place. And. Left. Me. There.

The bastard that called himself my brother left me with a potentially volatile female in my lap!

'Scared, boy?'

'Fuck you! You cannot say that you wouldn't be too!' Gods, I hated him.

Huh. That shut him up. What a fuckin' surprise. He was a little wary of her. Who'd thunk it?

'No. That's not it...'

The beast receded to the back of his mind, leaving me in peace. I didn't care about what he'd been saying, as long as he shut up.

Sakura moved again so that she was lying across my lap and her head was on the other side on some pillows.

I tried to calm my breathing, to control the urges that he was forcibly creating in me. I roughly pushed him out of my mind and chained him down in a small, cramped corner. He proceeded to growl obscenities at me. But those were easily ignorable compared to what I normally dealt with. This was just noise, and relatively quiet ones at that.

I was eventually ably to lull myself into a sort of half-sleep where I was sort of resting but still aware of my surroundings. Unfortunately for me this state caused me to sometimes think that I was somewhere else.

And so I "woke" up thinking that I was on top of the cliff again, before Sakura had shown up.

My heart was fast and I felt cold. The air of the late fall had been biting my nose and ears. I had been thinking about Suna and my life there.

I looked around to see the cause of the disturbance being Kankuro coming down the stairs in a rather undignified manner. I didn't think that he remembered that little miss was here, considering how he had come down in his boxers.

I smirked. The next five minutes were going to be fun. For me.