I N S I D E R


Insider; gossip central of Fire Country's rich, famous, bitchy, and shameless. News just in; Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha caught on camera for your viewing pleasure! Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show; a tornado just met volcano. SasuFemNaru, ItaSaku, slight KakaFemNaru, KakaRin.


CHAPTER 09
~:: NO–ONE ELSE FIGURES OUT ::~


Secret love, my escape,
Take me far, far away;
Secret love, are you there?
Will you answer my prayer?
Please take me anywhere but here!


Entering the dressing room, Sasuke felt the eyes of the other models immediately settling on him; he ignored them. The chairs had paper name tags on them, and he quickly dumped his jacket and backpack over the back of his own before going to check the crowded notice board.

He needed to make sure he knew which days he was working, and what his entry times were supposed to be – if there was even one person off by a few seconds, the show would crumble. He had no intentions of being the one to do that when he was likely close to being disliked by Kushina Uzumaki and her demonic, terrorist son was already plotting his death.

He recognised some of the faces – Tayuya had worked at Harunos with him, and that orange hair couldn't belong to anyone but Juugo, so there were familiar faces – but most of the people he hadn't worked with before. You'd think, being the butt of anorexia gossip and bulimia jokes, models would have better things to do than gossip about his sex life, but if the whispering were anything to go by, they probably started those jokes themselves.

One guy in particular, a dark skinned man with blond hair so bleached it looked white, and with a lollipop in his mouth, was giving him a particularly strange look, but he shrugged it off and continued to search for his name on the time lists.

Thankfully he found it quickly, because the door to the dressing room slammed open; he recognised Kushina immediately, but he had to take a couple of glances at the blonde behind her before he recognised Naruto.

She looked completely different, and he was not referring to the reversion to her natural hair colour when he said that; just one night in Kumo seemed to have sucked the life right out of her. He could tell from the set of her shoulders that she lacked her usual energy.

Her clothing was incredibly muted compared to the brighter tones she had worn in Konoha; pale denim shorts, a thin white cotton t-shirt with a wide neckline, showing the skin of her shoulders, a pair of loose-laced military boots covered her feet, and a multitude of single-thread silver chains and bracelets adorned her neck and wrists.

She looked like she belonged in the fashion world, but she had dulled after one night in her home town, and the thought made a few thin frown lines mar his brow.

He tried to take more notice of the barely-but-not-quite-invisible patches of concealer on the bare skin of her neck (had he really left that many marks...? That was very abnormal), but once again, he couldn't get away from the... bothersome.

Again with the bothersome and the irritating; why did it always come back to that?

Kushina started explaining the set up of the shows then jerking his thoughts form Naruto momentarily; the actual show would start on Monday, so they would be spending the next day and this one practising. There would be lunch provided, and they would finish at 7:30PM, and the next day would be used for dress rehearsals.

There would be two groups for the two large halls, covering the different collections – one group was being supervised by Kyuubi, and his own by Kushina. It was a relatively simple process for such a widespread event, or at least he thought it would be. Then Kushina dropped the bomb on him.

"I know most of you were expecting me to be down her to work with group one, but there are shipment problems at the moment, so I'm leaving you to Naruto. She's not a professional, but she learned to walk on catwalks and stages; if something in your performance looks unnatural, she'll see it better than I can, so take her seriously. Oh, and don't get on her bad side today – you'll regret it."

And with that, she turned and disappeared from the room, leaving them with a few words of good luck; the room then descended into a series of hushed, surprised whispers.

"Hush it! Group two, go get yourselves into hall three; Kyuubi's probably sleeping on one of the technicians' rafters, so start shouting about lunch to wake him up. He'll be pissed off though, so do what he says if you want to keep the job... he tends to fire first and think later, so good luck with that."

The second group caught the dismissal and left the room with some rather wary expressions on their faces. Sasuke watched them leave until he was left standing with Tayuya, Juugo, lollipop guy, and a few other faces he didn't care about enough to notice beyond the fact that they existed.

He was more interested in Naruto anyway – she was dripping with fury, and it was a new side of her to him. He's seen her upset, happy, mildly irritated, in the throes of ecstasy, and plain pissed off in the two weeks he had known her, but never so glaringly furious; Naruto didn't even bother to hide it from the people assembled in the dressing room before her.

"You lot can start rehearsing show five on the runway; go wait at your entrances – you start when the lights do."

Sasuke knew better than to argue with her, but Tayuya... well, she wasn't so eager to listen to her new supervisor.

"Why should the fuck should we listen to you? You aren't a model, or even a designer! The only reason you're even here is to get out of Konoha! You have no authority over us! Heck, you can't even get a decent hair job – your roots are still showing through!" she snapped at Naruto.

There was the unmistakable silence of people pretending not know the idiot who had just stepped on someone else's landmine.

Naruto's face remained blank, calmly assessing Tayuya with short flicks of her eyes – Sasuke had seen that look before, and it confirmed Kushina's statement that Naruto actually what she was doing. Still, someone had to shut Tayuya up, and it didn't look like Naruto was going to be doing that in the next few moments.

"That's leftover dye you moron; she's had the red stripped out, you know how long that takes from the spring shoot at Haruno's" he interrupted irritably.

Tayuya glared at him – they never did get along during the Haruno's shoot, and it certainly hadn't changed in the half year or so since he had last seen her. Juugo was alright, he was the only one of his old friends that he still kept in contact with, but Tayuya set his teeth on edge.

"I suppose you would know that wouldn't you? What's your game Sasuke? You screw her to get a spot on the final show, huh? You thought she'd put a good word in to Mama for you? That's certainly blown up in your face hasn't-"

There was a smack of skin against skin as Naruto hand connected against the fuchsia-haired model's face; silence reigned through out the room, until Tayuya's brain caught up with events, and her eyes widened.

"God, I've been itching to do that to someone all morning..." Naruto muttered with relief, stretching her fingers out in front of her.

"Y-You just punched me!" Tayuya gasped.
"That is what it's called isn't it?"
"You can't do that!"

Naruto stopped stretching her fingers and smirked at Tayuya with almost scary glee.

"Actually I can; you see, you're right. The only reason I'm even here is because my mother thinks I need an intervention. I don't actually work for her, so anything I do to you is outside of your contract."

Sasuke put a hand over his mouth, but even that didn't keep the snort of laughter from escaping his lips, and he wasn't the only one who did so; Lollipop guy was almost choking, and even Juugo had a hand covering his mouth.

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm baby-sitting you, and since you supposed to be an adult, I figure you can stand up to a smack on the cheek or a kick in the shins if you give me any shit."

Naruto turned to look at the whole crowd then, the trace of humour gone from her voice, and the irritation back on her face.

"Lets get something straight right now – I do not want to be here. I hate Kumo, I hate this place, and I'm not much fond of you lot either; the only reason I'm stuck baby-sitting you is for the sake of something to do. I can leave any time I want, and believe me, pissing my mother off would be so much fun right now..."

She glanced at Tayuya again, then at the rest of the group.

"I'm not a model in the professional sense of the word, but whether any one of us likes it or not, I do know what I'm doing; Tayuya favours her left side, Juggo's eyes wander easily, and Omoi tends to hunch his shoulders..."

Eyes widened as she continued to list all the little ticks in the people in front of her, pointing out minor weak spots that might affect the final performance, all from a few considered glances when they weren't even moving.

"... and Sasuke, if you frown like that on opening night, Kyuubi'll have another reason to gut you out – you're a walking advertisement, and advertisements don't frown."

Sasuke swore he heard subdued twitters of laughter as his frown deepened.


Naruto was very much contemplating the pros and cons of filling her mother's coffee maker with animal dung as she headed for the end of the runway, muttering instruction to the lighting teams in a walkie-talkie.

It wasn't bad enough to help her mother out with her stupid fashion show, nor that she had to baby sit a bunch of uppity models – including Sasuke and Omoi – but she was stuck with her blonde hair again.

She hated her hair – all she ever got from it was comments on how foreign she looked, or how much like her father she looked, and she didn't want either of them. Sure she had followed in her fathers footsteps, but she didn't want to be in his shadow.

At least the babies were behaving themselves now; the lights had started the sequence they would be using on opening night, and they were moving down in procession down the stage.

Her mother had given her group one deliberately – she was trying to get her to talk to Omoi, despite knowing she had no intention of doing so. Or maybe she was trying to get her to talk to Sasuke, do something that would save her mother the public embarrassment.

She snorted at the very idea of easing her mother's discomfort over her public image. It was hardly going to affect her clothing sales more than it was going to make directors wonder how much more skin they could persuade her to show in sex scenes.

She glanced at the people walking past her seat in the audience seating, looking for anomalies in step, posture, they weren't bad really, but she could still see oddities. Half a step too fast, too slow, head leaning too far forward and making random girl wobble on her heels, shoulders too slouched, feet too heavy, face too frowning...

Heh, maybe she could have some fun here after all and relive some stress at the same time; just because it wasn't too bad didn't mean they had to know that. All she needed to do was improvise her irritation a little.


Sasuke slumped into one of the chairs of audience seating; forget Kyuubi or Kushina, Naruto was going to kill him with all this practice.

He didn't know where she kept picking up all these faults from! He'd have said that she was completely making them up, but they were valid faults that needed to be corrected; whichever the case may be he'd never been so exhausted from one morning of practice before.

She wouldn't even let them sit down when she was going through the technical details with them – if they kept a decent stance standing, they would do better on the runway she said. Eight hours since 4:30AM of constant standing...

Tayuya had tried to sit down once, and Naruto had promptly informed her that if she did, then maybe she would talk to her mother about the finale after all – she'd make sure to point out how unsuited she was for it. Tayuya had decided not to sit down in the end.

He was several rows from the front of the stage, and it was far from the lighting, so he was in a very good position to overhear Naruto's conversation with lollipop guy as they stormed into the room.

"Will you listen to me Naruto? I'm trying to talk to you!" the guy called out, stepping up his pace in an attempt to catch up as she emerged fro the stage exit, and headed for the stage with a box of what looked like various coloured tape.

"And I already told you I have no intention of listening – did you think four years was going to change that?" she snapped, kneeling down on the runway and pulling out a roll of green electrical tape.

"How can you be so cold about this? Do you really not care at all?"

Naruto tore of a piece of the tape and began marking something known only to her out on the stage floor with it.

"I do care, just not enough to take anything you say into consideration, so stop wasting your breath Omoi – I'm not coming back! As soon as my mother stops freaking out, I'm going back home!"

He realised she wasn't using her home language as she normally would have had she been talking with a fluent speaker in Konoha. Why was she bothering with that when the guy was obviously a speaker of the same tongue?

His foreign linguistic skills weren't brilliant, and his accent kept layering over the top of his words. He didn't have a good grasp of the language Naruto was apparently forcing him to speak in.

"Naruto, this is your home! You were born in Kumo! You can't keep running away fro-"
"This place has never been home to me Omoi! This place is nothing but years of bitterness and frustration! It's suffocating! I hate it here, and I always have! You know that!" Naruto snapped, much louder this time.

She glared at him, and stood up wit the box of tape to mark out anther anonymous marking with some yellow tape.

"Naruto, I know you have problems with your mother but if you just take the time to try and meet her halfway then-"

Naruto stood up and actually punched him; this was a completely different side of the slightly-little-whacked-up but generally friendly girl he had ever so slowly been getting to know for the past two weeks. It was completely different to the slap across the mouth she had given Tayuya. He didn't even know Naruto knew how to throw a decent punch.

"I don't want to meet her half way Omoi! I could care less what that woman thinks of me or my life! If you think she has the capacity to give two shits about me beyond bad publicity, you're still as fucking naïve as you were when I left!" she yelled.

Lollipop guy, or Omoi as he appeared to be called, took the blow quite well considering how much force had gone behind it – he remained standing at any rate. He raised his fingers to his lips and hissed a little as the tips touched, jerking them away and staring at the thin trail of blood on them.

Bloody hell, she had split his lip? She was stronger that he had thought.

"You really do hate it here don't you?" Omoi asked quietly.
"I completely and utterly loathe it" Naruto replied, the violence she had just displayed equally evident in her quiet tone.

Omoi stared at her for a long few seconds before turning around and walking away; Naruto waited until his footsteps had disappeared before letting out a long breath of relief, and hopped down from the stage onto the floor to resume her tape-marking at the edge of the metal platform.

"Enjoy the show Sasuke?"


He stiffened in his seat before standing up and climbing through the rows of chairs towards the runway Naruto was adorning with electrical tape.

"I don't know if... enjoy is the word I'd use... but it was certainly interesting. Who is he?" he asked, stepping over the last row of chairs and leaning against the framework of the stage beside her.

"Ex. Sort of – here, make yourself useful and hold these..."

She handed him a pair of scissors as she rummaged around in the box for a roll of multicoloured tape, pulled it out and pulled at it. Holding the strip out towards the scissors in his hand – he snapped the tape off obediently.

"How can he sort of be your Ex? He either is or he isn't..." he countered – he didn't want a cryptic conversation this time.

Naruto stopped marking the stage with her tape and ran her hands through her hair in frustration for a moment – it was tied up in bunches either side of her head. Then her shoulders loosened up, and she started again.

"Omoi was a way to piss my mother off when I was still living here; he was a nice enough guy, probably still is, but I broke up with him when I left. He didn't take it very well."

This was a very different side to Naruto; she was so blunt about everything, not that she wasn't blunt before, but now there was a nasty edge in her words, a coarseness that happened been there before. It was almost like she was a completely different person.

"I thought I saw sparks spitting when she picked you up last night..."

Naruto let out a snort of derision, and turned back to the box; he chopped the tape off the roll she pulled out of it. He assumed meant sparks was an understatement – he just wondered how big of an understatement.

"Why are you so interested anyway? I though you operated a non-communication policy with people you've had sex with" she asked, sounding suddenly irritated for some reason.

He guessed she didn't like the subject of discussion, but she could hardly blame him for being curious having just seen her punch a guy in the face. Even so, she didn't have to snap at him – it wasn't his fault she had problems with the guy.

"You were the one who ran out at god knows what hour" he retorted.
"Well excuse me for freaking out a little – I'm not really fond of waking up in strange beds with handcuffs stuck on my wrists!" she snapped, with quite a bit more venom in her voice than was necessary.

Then she stiffened, and pulled her fingers through her fringe, massaging her temples in small circles, mumbling what sounded like the numbers one to ten.

"You really are completely off-centre here aren't you?" he noted.
"You just picked that up? My, how observant of you..." she muttered, dropping the last of the tape back into the box.

"How do you stand it with your mother around?"

"Shouting and swearing mostly – she tried the whole 'maternal-lecture' thing last night, but Kyuubi had to drag me out of the room before I hit her. She is my mother after all... I have to draw the line with her somewhere." she replied, flopping face down onto the surface of the metal stage.

Her grimaced at the thought of having to put up with that sort of environment; his family had had rough patches, but never that rough. He certainly couldn't imagine what it was like to hate your own mother.

More than that though, he didn't like the nonchalance in Naruto's tone when she mentioned her brother dragging her out of the room; it sounded far too normal for his comfort. Maybe it was because he had a relatively stable family life, but it just screamed 'wrong' and 'bad' to him.

He didn't like this violent side of Naruto either, and the fact that she didn't seem to enjoy it all that much either just made him like it even less; if the place was slowly choking her, why did she even get on the plane? Probably because her mother was type to go to Konoha directly...

But still, she had enough money to get a decent hotel room for a few nights didn't she? Why was she staying with her mother when there were easy means of avoiding it? Maybe she hadn't thought of it – she obviously hadn't planned the journey, so maybe in all the surprise she had forgotten. It was the sort of thing she would do...

"Why don't you stay in a hotel if it's that bad?" he asked.
"Damn bitch stole my cards when I was asleep, and I didn't bring a cheque book..." she muttered.

Well that was him told, she was still stuck in the house of hell though, and he really didn't like the idea of the house of hell. He knew her grandparents didn't live in the city, so she couldn't stay with them if she was going to get in on time during fashion week (which admittedly, she probably didn't). If the relationship with her Ex was any indication, he was pretty sure her old friends wouldn't be jumping to welcome her into their homes either.

"You can stay with me" he informed her before his brain could exert any sort of control over his tongue.

At least the statement jerked her from the exhausted slump on the stage she had been stuck in, and the look on her face was priceless. Her jaw was actually hanging open in surprise.

"I'm sorry, could you... repeat that?" she asked, shaking her head from its sudden daze.
"I said you could stay with me... if you don't have anywhere else to go" he embellished.

He let her process the repetition for a few moments, and her face immediately began to brighten up a bit, though she still looked like she was reluctant to take up the offer.

"Are you serious?"
"I wouldn't have said it if I wasn't, you know that" he replied.

She knew he never didn't anything like this half-baked. If he said something, then he meant it, though his frequent personal decisions to ignore her were in the process of dismally falling around his ears. He didn't have a double suite, but he didn't really think that sleeping arrangements would be much of an issue.

"...I would jump on that offer, but all my stuff is at my mother's-"
"Buy new stuff then. My bank account isn't that much smaller than yours. You can pay me back later if you want, but it isn't going to bother me."

She was staring at him wide eyed now, and it was almost like life itself was slowly easing back into her; her eyes had that bright glint back in them. God, if this was what the chance of getting away from her mother did to her, he couldn't wait to see her face when she was back in Konoha.

She remained stunned for a few moments, and then he could smell her hair on his nose as she squeezed the air from his lungs. A rush of foggy memories came back to him and he froze. Naruto stiffened against him, and her head slowly drew back from his shoulder to look him in the eye.

God that scent... she really did smell like that? He had thought that was just the drink addling his brain, but she really did; he could feel her breath on his cheeks, light, warm, and his heart was hammering beneath his ribcage as he felt the press of her body against his chest.

Without even thinking about it, pressed his lips against her own; her arms tightened around his neck, one hand pressing between his shoulder blades, encouraging him as his tongue flicked over her lips, then between them as they parted without need for prompt.

She pressed against, him, back into the steel framework of the catwalk as he slipped one hand beneath her shirt, the other slipping beneath the short jean-shorts covering her lower quarters, pulling her closer.

His tongue slid against her own, traced her lips as he grasped the soft flesh beneath her bra. Her breath came hot and short on his lips, and all that ran through his mind was that she tasted a heck of a lot better than she smelled (and she smelled really fucking good).

Her fingers laced between the hairs at the back of his head, pulling his lips fast against her owns as his hand groped her ass; one of her legs slipped between his to press down on his groin, and the twitch the friction elicited jerked him back to reality.

Naruto froze in the midst of her own action, and then there was a sudden haste to disentangle limbs and clothing from each other.

"I... Uh... Thank you...?" she mumbled quietly.
"...No problem" he muttered just as quietly.


An update to celebrate the first of the month (in the UK at least).

Cities are freaking out because of all the snow again; coming form the sticks despite livivng in one at the moment, I find it highly amusing. It's like city people have never heard of wellies or gloves or gritters. Seriously.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know how to upload literature on DeviantArt, including things like bold and italics and linebreaks? PM me if you do - it would be greatly appreciated! The help pages on DA are, to put it bluntly, Le Crap. Anyway, hope you liked this chapter - Sasuke dosent really understand the feeling of liking someone anymore, but he's making progress, as is Naruto.

He will, of course, ruin said progress by chapter... 11.
He wouldn't be Sasuke if he didn't muck it up at some point, even if he doesn't have the revenge thing here.

Mini quote; 'Anywhere But Here' by Mayday Parade.