Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto

Chapter 11

After the meeting with the Hokage, Iruka and the two chuunin who helped him move their belongings came by to show them to the way to their new dwelling. The three men led them to the western part of the village near the woods and relatively close to the Hokage Palace.

The four genin of Team 7 stood in shock as they stared at their new home. It was a traditional, sprawling, one-story Japanese estate. The group entered past the gate and into a quiet, but large, courtyard. A koi pond dominated the northeast corner while bamboo grew on near the western wall. The dirt ground was lightly packed, but not too hard. Iruka explained that the previous owners used to practice their taijustu there.

"What happened to the previous owners, Iruka-sensei?" Sakura asked.

A pained expression crossed his scarred face and he rubbed the back of his head. "They were KIA, Sakura," he said.

"Then why are we allowed to stay here? Shouldn't the next of kin live here?"

"The property has been placed in trust for the sole heir, Warai-san," the chuunin named Kotetsu answered. "Until he comes of age, the Sandaime can use the land as he sees fit."

The others accepted the explanation given to them, but Warai caught an edge to the chuunin's voice and noticed that he specifically mentioned the Sandaime rather than saying 'Hokage.' The girl tucked the distinction away to dissect later.

"Your belongings are just inside the foyer," Iruka said. "There are plenty of bedrooms, but the Hokage wishes that you occupy the east wing of the estate only. If a door is locked, then you may not enter, but other than that, you four have free reign over the place. Try not to break anything, Naruto. It will come out of your salary—now that you have one—if you do." With that last warning, the chuunin left and the genin split up to explore their new home.

"Room or food?" Warai asked her blonde companion.

"Room," Naruto answered, determination in his voice. Sasuke and Sakura were slightly surprised. They didn't get to finish their ramen back at Ichiraku before they met with the Hokage—the dobe must be starving by now.

"Alright," Warai said. She and Naruto gathered their belongings and turned in the direction of the east wing. "You two don't mind if Naru-kun and I share a suite do you?"

Sakura shook her head while Sasuke scowled.

"Just try to keep the volume down at night," he said. "Some of us here are still virgins."

"We are not like that, teme!" Naruto shouted. He glared at the Uchiha and growled. "And I don't like that you even think that I would do that with Wa-chan!"

"Sorry," the dark-haired prodigy said, no trace of apology in his voice. "I guess I got the wrong idea from the way you kissed her today and the fact that you're going to share a room."

"Kisses are different than what you're thinking, Uchiha," Warai responded coldly. "We're twelve, not eighteen. We don't go that far."

"I love and respect Wa-chan too much to go that far," Naruto pressed. He was still pissed at Sasuke's presumption, but Warai's hand on his shoulder calmed him—sort of. "When we're older, then we'll talk about it. But right now, I just want to be with her. And not in the way you think."

"Besides," the girl said. "I said that we'd share a suite, not a room. Get your head out of the gutter, Uchiha." With that last sentence, the couple stalked off.

Sasuke stood there for a few moments staring at the ground. He knew that he'd been snarky and jumped to conclusions. He felt the weight of a malevolent glare on his back and turned to find Haruno Sakura holding her own things and tapping her foot.

"I never knew you were such a hentai, Sasuke-kun," she said before she went down the same hallway where Naruto and Warai disappeared.

The Uchiha refrained from kicking the small cupboard that held their sandals. He couldn't help but hear a faint sound of disappointment in Sakura's voice. Grabbing his training bag, the raven-haired boy went in search of the estate's dojo.

I don't care about them, he told himself. Why should I care about what they think of me anyway?

The Uchiha found the dojo, but couldn't get the vision of a certain green-eyed teammate out of his mind.

"Stupid, sexually starved Sasuke. He's probably as frigid as my Hyoton (Ice Element) jutsus."

Naruto ignored the grumbles of his girlfriend and carefully removed a medium sized wooden box from one of the many cardboard boxes they dragged from the foyer. He breathed a sigh of relief when he noticed that the explosive tags on the box were undisturbed. Quickly and competently, he disarmed the tags and opened the box.

"They're alright," he whispered.

The contents of the box were about two-dozen small scrolls. Some were written in his messy scrawl while others were in Warai's more elegant hand, but all were full of jutsus and pieces of shinobi wisdom the couple managed to copy over the past four years. He pulled out each scroll, mentally checking off his list, until he reached the last two. One contained the jutsus he and Warai took from the Forbidden Scroll the night they learned about Kyuubi. The second was the scroll the old man gave him on his last birthday.

The emblems that kept the scroll sealed were that of his parents. He gently ran his finger over the Uzumaki swirl and the strange, ornate silver half circle that sat below it. Every now and then, the Hokage would give him a scroll saying that it belonged to his parents. Naruto loved these scrolls.

However, the scrolls were sealed in a way that they only opened when he put the right amount of chakra into the emblems with his pinky finger. For someone who had as much trouble with the art of fine tuning chakra as Naruto, this was tricky and he'd only opened two of the six scrolls the old man had given him so far. It wasn't the amount of chakra that was the problem, as Warai told him one day, it was the fact that he had to focus it into his pinky.

"Subtlety isn't your strong suit, Naru-kun," Warai said, suddenly appearing behind him.

"Wah!" Naruto jumped at the sound of her voice and managed to drop the scroll. He turned around and cried, "Don't do that!"

Warai laughed at the look on her boyfriend's face and winked at him. "I finished unpacking our stuff," she said. "Your bedroom's on the right."

Naruto looked in that direction and saw his posters tacked onto the wall through the open door. The couple stood in the small drawing room that connected the two bedrooms and one bathroom in the large suite. Sharing a bathroom wouldn't be a problem for them since they lived together for so long. Naruto just hoped that he could sleep without Warai's body next to him to keep him cool.

"C'mon," she said, interrupting his thoughts. Warai held up another cardboard box and tilted her head. "Let's get this ramen into the kitchen and eat."

"Okay!"

Sakura was amazed at the size of the place. She'd visited the Hyuuga compound once when she and Hinata were paired for an assignment Iruka gave them and the rosette-haired kunoichi was absolutely sure that their new home was bigger than the Hyuuga's. She passed by the suite of rooms she heard Naruto and Warai moving around in and entered the room opposite it.

The girl carefully put her belongings on the floor and turned around to retrieve the rest. Sakura didn't want to take a good look at her chosen living space until she got everything from the foyer. Once there, she noticed that Sasuke's things were still on the ground. She shrugged and grabbed the boxes that belonged to her, but used her foot to push the Uchiha's belongings to the side of the room.

He may not want to put his stuff away, she thought. But if someone came by they might trip over his mess.

She wondered at her changing perception of her obsession now that they were on the same team. This time yesterday, Sakura was planning and plotting all the ways she could get Sasuke to like her. Now, she couldn't even drum up a little enthusiasm knowing that they were living together. Seeing the way he acted when she and Warai took the bells from Kakashi and his nastiness towards the other two members of their team might have something to do with it.

She knew the Uchiha was cold and sullen—it was part of his appeal, actually—but she didn't know that he could be cruel and insulting like that either.

Sakura shook her head. She was getting a headache thinking about this and she needed to organize her room and eat dinner. The kunoichi entered the room and shut the sliding door. She found herself in a small drawing room. A square tea table dominated the center of the room while bookshelves covered most of the wall space. Three more sliding doors were on each side of the room. Closer inspection showed that the one on the left opened into a bathroom, the one on the right led to the bedroom, and the one directly across from the hallway led to a small, private rock garden.

It's beautiful, Sakura mused. Perfect for meditation.

She went back inside and began to put her books, scrolls, and various knickknacks into the bookshelves. Unlike her ex-best friend, Ino, Sakura didn't have much in the clothing department, so it wouldn't take long to put her clothes in the closet. But her books were another matter altogether. When she came across a framed picture of Sasuke she had, Sakura stared into his brooding face and frowned. Sighing, she put the frame on the bookshelf.

Right behind the beginning medical scrolls she got from the Hokage as a graduation gift.

The sounds of arguing and the smell of cooking food brought Sakura out of her thoughts. She cautiously walked toward the source of both the sounds and the smell. The girl was hungry, but she didn't want to get in the middle of an argument to get her food.

"That's too much!" Warai yelled at her boyfriend.

"Is not!" Naruto yelled back, holding an almost empty bag of naruto (the food) over a large pot.

"You might love that stuff, but what about the others?" she asked. "Even if they accept ramen for dinner, that much naruto is pushing it!"

"Actually," Sakura butted in from the doorway. "I like naruto—the food, anyway."

The couple turned to the girl and both blondes grinned. Before she knew it, Sakura was sitting at the table, a large bowl of ramen in front of her, and caught in a debate over what made the best ramen dishes. She laughed over Warai and Naruto's antics and ate the surprisingly wonderful meal.

One thing was for sure; mealtimes would never be boring living with these two.

The laughing group hardly noticed when Sasuke silently filled a bowl of ramen for himself and left the room.

"Konbanwa!"

The trio in the kitchen looked up as the doorbell chimed throughout their home. Naruto ran to answer the door while the two girls walked at a more leisurely pace. They entered the foyer to find Naruto, along with a recently showered Sasuke, greeting a tall man with a senbon needle in his mouth.

"Konbanwa, Genma-san," Warai replied, bowing. Sakura and Sasuke followed their teammate's cue—although they had no idea who this person was. Both genin realized that this was a jounin, based on his clothing, but other than that, the man was a complete stranger. Naruto just grinned at the man and ushered him inside.

"Welcome to Team 7's home, Genma-san," the blonde boy said. "What brings you here this fine evening?"

Genma had to bite down hard on his senbon to keep from laughing at the boy's earnest expression. He must've been watching a movie with a butler in it or something, he thought. Naruto's penchant for acting like characters from movies he'd watched was well known among the bodyguards assigned to watch him.

"I have something for you and Warai," he said, holding up two large bags. He noticed Sasuke and lifted a third bag for his inspection. "There's one for you also, Sasuke-san."

"What are they and who are they from?" Sasuke asked, more cautious than his peers about the unexpected gifts.

"They're from your, ahem, guardians—graduation gifts, if you'd like to call them that," Genma answered.

"Guardians?" Sasuke and Sakura questioned. The Uchiha wanted to ask the jounin more, but he was stopped by the distinct poofing sound of a teleportation jutsu and the man was gone.

"What's this about guardians?" Sakura asked.

Naruto and Warai wandered into the main living room and sat down at the large tea table in the center. Warai looked up at her teammates while Naruto pawed through his loot.

"You guys honestly didn't think that the Hokage would let orphans live totally without adult supervision, did you?" she asked.

"Why didn't I notice?" Sasuke asked, sitting down. Sakura left the room to get some tea for everyone. Naruto continued his pawing.

"You were too busy brooding," was Naruto's muffled answer; his head was buried in his gift bag.

"Just accept the gift, Uchiha," Warai said. "They probably just gave you things you need as a genin since they don't know you as well as they do us."

"So you know these guardians?" Sakura asked, placing the tea set on the table. She competently poured everyone some tea and watched as Naruto opened his gifts.

"Yup!" Naruto said, holding up a set of kunai. "We've been in contact with them for the past four years. These are probably from Anko-san."

Warai looked at the sharp knives and nodded. "She gave me these shuriken," she said. "But Kurenai gave me a new needlepoint pattern book."

"She gave me a sewing kit and some new Uzumaki patches," Naruto added. "What did Kurenai give you, Sasuke?"

Sasuke looked into his bag and found nothing but weapons and the occasional scroll. "I don't know," he admitted. "I don't know them well enough to know who gave me what."

"Kurenai-sensei is one of your guardians?"

"Yeah," Warai answered absently. She was engrossed in her new pattern book. "Most of the elite jounin are—including Kakashi-sensei."

"He's probably the one who gave me these," Naruto laughed, holding up a trio of books; one was titled Rope Traps and How to Avoid Them.

"Y'know," Warai murmured as she looked at a meditation scroll from Morino Ibiki. "These are probably the last gifts they'll give us for a while."

"Why do you say that, Wa-chan?"

Warai looked at her boyfriend and tapped his forehead protector. "We're genin now," she explained. "We're adults in the eyes of the law. Therefore, we don't need guardians anymore."

"Oh," he sighed. The blonde was momentarily saddened at the news. The idea of someone watching over him, however distantly, was a comfort the twelve-year-old did not want to give up.

Sakura was surprised by the sad look on Naruto's face. She was used to the idiotic smiles he used during their Academy days. Sasuke was silent as well while Warai continued to look through her bag.

"I'm sure that they'll still care about you, Naruto," Sakura whispered, placing her hand on his shoulder. She almost pulled back when he turned to her with a glowing smile. This one was different than the ones she knew—this one was genuine.

"I know that, Sakura-chan," Naruto said. "I'm just a little sad that I can't con them into buying me things anymore."

"Really, Naru-kun," Warai said. She was standing up, holding her new katana to the light. "You get the strangest ideas sometimes. No one ever said that we had to stop conning them into stuff like that. Only that they wouldn't buy us as much stuff now that we're adults."

"Nice katana," Sasuke complemented, whistling through his teeth. "Who gave you that?"

"Hayate-san," she answered, smugly. "He knows I love swordplay."

"Oi, Sasuke-teme," Naruto said, sitting next to the brunette. "If you show me your swag, I'll be happy to point out who gave you what. We can even trade stuff if you have something I like and vice versa."

"Why would I want to know that, dobe?"

"So that you can write them thank you cards."

"Thank you cards?"

"Yeah," Warai answered. "This is the first time they've given you anything right? You don't want them to think that you're rude, now do you?"

"Anyway," Naruto said. "Since they all got you basically the same thing, it's a bit trickier to say thanks to the right person. But don't worry, I can usually tell who bought what by the maker's marks on the weapons and what kind of scroll they gave you. See these senbon?"

Sasuke nodded when the blonde held up a pack of the acupuncture needles.

"You might think that these came from Genma-san—you know, the jounin who dropped these bags off—but actually, these are from Anko-san. The little dragons etched into the sides are a dead giveaway."

"Now this," Warai added, holding up a scroll. "Is definitely from Genma-san."

"Normally Ibiki-san is the one who gives out interrogation scrolls or scrolls that will strengthen your psyche so that you don't give in to other people's interrogations," Naruto said. "But the title gives the clue that it's from Genma-san."

Sasuke took the scroll from the girl and read the title. "Gaining Information From Female Interrogation Subjects Using Your Natural Charms…what the?"

"What a perverted title for an interrogation scroll," Sakura murmured. She looked over Sasuke's shoulder as the boy opened the parchment. Both of their faces turned bright red as they read the first few sentences.

"Genma-san's like that," Naruto said, holding in his laughter. He'd learned years ago never to open any scrolls the senbon-sucking jounin gave him and burn all the scrolls he gave to Warai.

"Naruto, why don't you write down what Sasuke got and who gave them to him?" Warai suggested.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to play—I mean train—with my new weapons," she answered. "Sakura-chan, do you want to join me?" Sakura nodded. Both girls stood up, but before they left, Sakura turned to the two boys still seated.

"Since we're going to train and you're just sitting there," she said. "You've got kitchen duty tonight."

"Actually, the boys will have kitchen duty for the rest of the week," Warai corrected. "Sakura-chan and I will be too busy training in the evenings to clean up after dinner."

"What?" Sasuke demanded. "You and Naruto left the kitchen a mess. And I wanted to train in the evenings too. What gives you the right to just—" Sasuke's tirade was halted by Naruto's hand on his shoulder.

"Wa-chan's still mad with us about the cola thing. Don't piss her off," Naruto hissed into the Uchiha's ear. "Just accept it for now. Besides, she said that it's just for this week. Next week will be the girls' turn."

Sasuke sat back down and stared at the dobe. He had a point.

A/N:

I'm back! Yay! Sorry about the long wait. As I said, I was taken to the old country by my family. The Philippines is not somewhere you want to go for early summer, let me tell you…great country, but HOT AND HUMID!

So this chapter feels like filler…but it's not! I swear it's not. All will become clear in due time (I hope).

/scoffs/ No, I don't have writer's block coming on…(I hope)

naruto—(food) a steamed fish-paste cake that is sliced to put in soup; like ramen.

konbanwa—a salutation meaning "good evening."