Chapter 10

Day thirty-five. Damp tent. Middle of nowhere.

When Sakura woke up the next morning, she floated in a feel-good daze of warmth and safety.

Until she noticed that the source of that warm and safe feeling was Kisame, who was wrapped around her from behind, and then all the warm and safe feelings fled with incredible rapidity.

Then Sakura realized that she had probably been spooning in a tent with an S-class criminal all night long, which was unacceptable, and she wondered whether she should start smacking Kisame or just scream very loudly about how her life sucked.

Kisame woke up while Sakura was trying to determine which course of action was the better one, and the instant he woke up he wanted to go back to sleep to finish his dream, which had involved a pink-haired ninja chick doing a very naughty pole dance with the Samehada wearing nothing but his Akatsuki cloak. Unbuttoned.

Very hot.

Unfortunately for Kisame, Sakura decided at that particular point to both smack him and start screaming very loudly, which made it very difficult for him to try to fall asleep again.

"What the hell!" said Kisame in the confusion of Sakura's punches and shouts.

Then Kisame started to block Sakura's hits and his doing so meant that the entire tent was now in movement and, inevitably, when Kisame started trying to subdue Sakura in a grappling hold and he sat up to do this, the tent poles were yanked forcefully out of the ground and then Kisame and Sakura were floundering in a damp rubbery cocoon and feeling very pissed off with each other.

A loud confusion was the result and it lasted for several minutes as Kisame tried to locate the exit so as to get the hell out and Sakura tried to locate Kisame's head so as to knock it off for unsolicited spooning.

Suddenly, a cheerful whistling made them all halt in their movements – Kisame with an arm outside of the tent and Sakura with her fist drawn and aimed at his head.

Kisame determined that the whistling was most definitely from a human and not a bird because no birds he knew could whistle to Stevie Wonder. He also determined that the whistling person was going to die at his hand in approximately one minute because who can bear that kind of mush.

Then Sakura lost patience with Kisame and the tent and the world generally, and so in a very She-Hulk moment she forcibly ripped the tarp apart and clambered out.

"That thing was expensive," Kisame said, but before he could get on Sakura's ass for reimbursement of his damaged property, the source of the whistling appeared at the edge of the clearing in the form of an old peddler truckling his cart in their direction.

Sakura brightened immediately at the sight, because perhaps she would be able to make this old man understand her predicament and get help, assuming that Kisame didn't kill him on sight because he was still whistling "My Cherie Amour."

The peddler halted and took stock of the strange sight before him: two very dishevelled ninja, one with pink hair and the other with blue hair and, well, blue everything, standing amidst the ruins of a tent which had been pitched in what appeared to be a swamp.

The peddler stopped whistling at that point, which was probably the smartest thing he ever did in his life, because another refrain of "pretty little one that I adore" would have had fatal consequences. In any case, since he had actually seen weirder things than the odd tableau of Kisame and Sakura and their collapsed tent, he began to display his wares in the hopes of making a quick sale.

Sakura engaged in rapid straightening out of her clothes and her hair so that she stopped looking like an escaped lunatic and, with a sideways look at Kisame, she walked towards the peddler, taking care to not step in the ankle-deep mud that was the result of the storm the night before.

Sakura made some civil remark to the peddler about the weather so as to alleviate Kisame's suspicions; however, this did not work very well because Kisame was still suspicious, as evinced by the fact that he was looming immediately behind her and generally conveying his intention of slaying the old man.

"What's your name?" Sakura asked the peddler cordially when the weather remarks petered out due to Kisame's imposing presence.

The old man was silent for a while because the author couldn't come up with a suitably Japanese-sounding name, and then he said with an apologetic toothless grin, "Walter."

"…That's a nice name," said Sakura, who was wondering how the hell she was supposed to tell him anything with Kisame being all alert and scary behind her.

Then, to Sakura's surprise, the old man turned to Kisame and beckoned him closer with many extravagant gestures which he evidently intended to be quite secretive and discreet.

Kisame took him for an imbecile but nevertheless approached him and wondered whether he should just kill him now and steal his money to pay for a new tent, or wait until later to do that.

"I have a message for you," the old man said in a conspirational whisper to Kisame, out of earshot of Sakura. "A man told me that if I found a freak blue shark hybrid while wandering the forest, I was to tell him: 'keep moving, keep a low profile, and restrain your manly urges or you'll make me lose the bet.'"

"…Who said this, exactly?" asked Kisame, though he could already guess who.

"It was…" the peddler narrowed his eyes and rubbed his balding head in an effort to recollect, and he mumbled something about a hermaphroditic monk with a scythe.

"Oh," said Kisame, "Hidan."

"That's it!" exclaimed the peddler, and then he looked expectantly in the direction of Kisame's pockets for some sort of reward for having delivered the message so aptly.

Kisame thought that leaving the peddler alive ought to have been reward enough, but then again he had just qualified Hidan as a hermaphroditic monk with a scythe so he deserved payment for that. To leave Sakura perfectly mystified, however, Kisame decided to snatch a bag of fortune cookies from the peddler's cart and simply overpay the man for those so that Sakura would have no idea as to the general import of the transaction.

Meanwhile, Sakura was watching Kisame's back and trying to catch snippets of the whispered conversation, but all she heard was "hermaphroditic" and that didn't help her at all. However, Kisame's satisfied look and the peddler's even more satisfied look told her that they were somehow acting in collaboration and so the old man was not going to be of any use for helping her out.

"Here," said Kisame, tossing the fortune cookies to Sakura, "and pick up your crap. We're moving on."

Sakura looked at the bag of fortune cookies and was thoroughly puzzled by the incongruity of the situation, but she nevertheless returned to what had been the tent and picked through it to find her gear, and Kisame followed suit, and then they were off again a-whizzin' through treetops for no reason that Sakura could discern, which was essentially business as usual.

When they paused for a lunch break a few hours later, Sakura decided to eat some of the fortune cookies for desert because the main meal had been gruel again.

Sakura accordingly got up to get the bag of fortune cookies and she brushed by Kisame in doing so, and then Kisame inhaled, and when he did he held his position in a state of frozen realization because he had just understood why he had been more intent on Sakura than usual as of late, and the reason was very simple: pheromones.

"Are you aware," said Kisame by way of conversation, "that you're ovulating right now?"

"…No, I didn't know that," said Sakura, looking towards Kisame with a shocked expression. "And you would know that, how?"

"Smell," said Kisame, and he did not add that the smell screamed 'ravish me, I'm in season!' though he would have liked to.

"Well that's nice and civilized," said Sakura, and she perched herself on a large boulder, crossed her legs rather more tightly than she would normally have and proceeded with obtaining her desert. She ripped open the bag of fortune cookies, broke a cookie and munched on it and then unrolled the little fortune paper, but before she could read it, Kisame had wandered over and grabbed a cookie and, to Sakura's horror, eaten it without taking out the fortune.

"Hey!" said Sakura, "you're supposed to read the fortune!"

At this point Kisame frowned and rolled his tongue over his back teeth and said, "so that's what that was," and he dislodged the soggy bit of paper from his molars.

Sakura wrinkled her nose when he unfolded the tiny soggy fortune and she muttered about how disgusting he was, and Kisame reminded her that he had a ready-made spitball in his hands right now so she should shut the hell up, goddamn pheromone-emitting kunoichi.

"It says… what the hell kind of language is this written in?"

"You're holding it upside down."

"Oh. Right," said Kisame. "Your life is like a box of chocolates."

"Aw," said Sakura, "that's a nice one."

"A nice one? I've never understood this analogy."

"It's pretty obvious," said Sakura, "in a box of chocolates, all the chocolates have different things inside them, tasty things like almond paste and caramel and coconut…"

Kisame put the paper back in his mouth and swallowed it, and before Sakura could complain he said a little sadly: "I have only ever received one box of chocolates in my life."

"And…?"

"They were stuffed with rat poison."

"Oh," said Sakura, "I wonder why," and she bit her lip so as to not laugh shrilly at this revelation.

Then Sakura remembered that she hadn't read her own fortune yet, and so she unfurled the little paper, fully expecting "your life is a highway" or some other comfortable platitude. You can imagine her dismay, then, when she read:

"Your life is like a toilet bowl."

Kisame was not nearly as polite as Sakura and he made no effort to restrain the booming laugh which erupted at Sakura's fortune.

"That's a good one," he told Sakura when she looked positively affronted, "hey, sometimes you get puked on instead of –"

"Whatever!" said Sakura, and she ripped up the paper vindictively and threw the pieces at Kisame. "I'm having another."

Sakura then crumbled another fortune cookie away and unrolled the little paper. Instead of a fortune, this one took the form of an interesting factoid to be shared at the dinner table at your local Chinese restaurant:

"Did you know: the sex organs of male sharks are called 'claspers.'"

Sakura took a moment to absorb this information, and then she looked up slowly at Kisame.

"What the hell," she said, "are claspers?"

"Uh," said Kisame, "they're these elongated pelvic fins on male sharks…"

As Kisame's explanation grew more detailed, Sakura's eyes began a slow, horrified downward trajectory from Kisame's face to halt in the general vicinity of his groin.

Kisame slowed his descriptions of the internal fertilization process of sharks to follow Sakura's line of sight and he found that it rested in the neighborhood of Samehada junior.

"I think I'll point out now," he said hotly, "that I do not have claspers."

"Okay," said Sakura disbelievingly, "you sure know a lot about them though…"

"Kunoichi. I don't have claspers," Kisame repeated with more vehemence.

"Whatever you say," said Sakura, and she looked away and felt very freaked out because oh my god what the fuck, claspers!

"I don't," said Kisame, and when Sakura still looked at him incredulously, he snapped open his cloak and began to unzip his pants to prove it.

"Um," said Sakura, "you don't need to –"

"Oh yes I do."

"No – I believe you."

"You do not."

"No I really –"

"Nope –"

"Kisame – stop!"

And then they were fighting because Kisame was determinedly trying to take off his pants and Sakura was determinedly holding his wrists and sure as hell not letting him proceed with that particular venture.

"I believe you – okay?"

"I don't think you do –" said Kisame, and he freed a hand and tried to find his fly, which was proving to be very difficult since Sakura had grasped his pants from the front, including said fly, and more struggling ensued wherein Sakura's knuckles sometimes brushed very pleasurably on a particularly sensitive area of Kisame's anatomy and it was all good fun for him so he pretended to struggle and he let Sakura keep that up for a good five minutes.

"No damned claspers!" shouted Sakura when her hands were starting to cramp.

"Exactly," said Kisame, and then he stopped moving and let Sakura continue her panicked gripping of his pants because it looked pretty funny.

"So," said Kisame when Sakura looked up at him warily because he was no longer struggling, "are you going to let go sometime or what?"

"Eventually," said Sakura, who was in a quandary because if she let go, Kisame would be taking off his pants, and if she didn't, well, for all she knew her hand was right next to a pair of claspers about to clutch at her.

"Just promise you won't take off your pants, okay?"

"Hmm," deliberated Kisame. "Nope."

"Well then I'll just have to keep holding this."

"That suits me just fine, babe."

When Kisame made this remark, Sakura realized that there was one option which she had neglected to consider, and that was to –

"Oh no we don't," said Kisame, and he slammed Sakura forcefully into the boulder for daring to think of such a thing, "crushing the family jewels is absolutely not allowed."

"Ow!" said Sakura, who was suddenly being smashed into a rock, "unnecessary use of force!"

Then they pushed against each other for a while and eventually Kisame whispered, "I think maybe you might want to get your hand the hell out of there" into Sakura's ear as he pressed on her because he knew that would creep her out, and Sakura took the hint and pulled her hand the hell out of there to support her against the boulder instead, and yes she was creeped out.

Sakura then reached a new level of creeped out because Kisame was doing that deep breathing thing against her neck that he had done near the campfire the night before when he was trying to restrain himself from either eating her or from initiating wild sex, she couldn't determine which.

Then Sakura realized that there was some action going on below Kisame's belt when she felt it on her stomach, which she found quite alarming, and then she figured that it was the wild sex option.

And as Kisame's happy second Samehada pressed upon her like this, Sakura had a sudden epiphany: for the first time in her life, she fully understood what it meant to be between a rock and a hard place, and it was a revelation that she could have done without.

Then, precisely because Kisame was about to give way to a manly urge, he suddenly recalled Hidan's admonition to control those manly urges, and that was a real downer in more ways than one.

"Kunoichi," he said into Sakura's hair, as if she had been the instigator of all of this, "I think that's enough fun for today."

Sakura quite agreed, except she wouldn't call it fun, she would call it horrific psychological-scar-inducing trauma. "I'm freakin' glad," she said with a forcefulness born of sincerity.

And so they moved up into the canopy and started their limb-hopping again, and in Kisame's case limb-chopping, because he had a song stuck in his head and he kept humming it and then smacking Samehada around in frustration because it was "My Cherie Amour," so what the hell!

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