Notes: A love confession/ "couple moment", hmm? And more angst. -stares- Goodness, you readers are silly. :P But, thank you again for your reviews and compliments!
"Hmm? Only two of you?" Kakashi raised his one visible eyebrow. At his words, Sakura pouted and Naruto sulked.
"Sasuke isn't here," the blond made a face.
"Maybe Sasuke-kun is sick!" the pink-haired girl fretted. "Maybe we should go check on him?"
"Well, he was perfectly fine yesterday," Kakashi thought aloud, rubbing the back of his head. "But he might have caught something…"
"Please, let's go check on him, Kakashi-sensei!" Sakura pleaded.
"That stupid bastard is fine," Naruto scowled and got thwapped on the back of the head by his teammate. "Ouch!"
"Don't talk about him like that!" she said crossly.
"Okay, okay," Kakashi held up his hands, cutting off Naruto's retort. "We'll split up and go looking for Sasuke. Sakura and I will go to his house and Naruto, you check the training grounds; perhaps he got carried away again…"
"Thank you, Kakashi-sensei!" Sakura squealed and grabbed his hand. "Let's hurry! I'm worried about Sasuke-kun!"
"Ah…!" Kakashi was dragged off.
"Hmph, serves you right, stupid jounin," Naruto rolled his eyes and turned in the direction of the open-area training grounds. "Stupid Sasuke…" He started his search, hands shoved in his pockets and an annoyed look on his usually-grinning face.
The subdued chakra was gathered at the base of the tree just five yards ahead of him. Naruto checked for any signs of attack, but just noticed the overwhelming exhaustion lingering in the air. Moving forward quietly, he reached the large tree and slipped his head around it to gaze down at whoever was lying there: it was Sasuke, and he was sleeping. His clothes, hair, and skin all looked drenched and filthy, used weapons lay strewn about his slumped figure, and for a moment, Naruto thought he had been attacked. Before he panicked however, he saw the tree across from them covered in shurinkan and kunai. Ah, just training then… He breathed a quiet sight of relief, then shook his head. Snap out of it, Naruto, he told himself. You don't care about him any more than he cares about you, which isn't saying much. But then Sasuke shifted in his sleep and let a little sigh escape from his slightly-parted lips and Naruto felt his face going hot. Stop that! You're not a stupid little fan-girl! Sasuke's--
Naruto knelt beside his teammate and studied him quietly for several moments. Then, he reached out and touched the other boy's cheek softly. "Oi, Sasuke…wake--"
"Nn…" the black-haired genjin turned his face into Naruto's hand, his pale lips brushing the palm. Naruto squeaked and his blush flared up hard.
"O-oi! Stop that! I'm not Sakura, dammit!" he tried to pull his hand away but Sasuke made a soft noise and Naruto gulped and watched him sleep for a moment. He didn't realize he was leaning over until their faces were centimeters apart, their breathing uneven: Sasuke breathing soft and slow, Naruto not even breathing at all. He blinked, then closed his eyes and pressed his lips gently to Sasuke's.
When he pulled back, black orbs were glaring up at him. Naruto yelped in surprise and fell over onto the ground. Sasuke sat up and waited for him to recover.
"And what the hell were you doing?" he lifted a dark eyebrow.
"Sasuke, you bastard! Don't scare me like that!" Naruto gasped, clutching a hand to his chest. "I thought you were sleeping!"
"You weren't exactly quiet," the other boy sighed.
"You knew I was…?" he turned an even darker shade of red. Sasuke grinned, crossing his arms over his chest. "Th-then how come you didn't stop me?"
It was Sasuke's turn to blush: "I just…didn't."
"So, you wanted me to kiss you?" Naruto blinked.
"No!" Sasuke snapped, but he quickly looked away. "I mean… Well, we kissed before, right? So, what does it matter?"
Naruto recalled the fluke-kiss in the classroom the first day they had become teammates. "That doesn't count."
"I guess I just wanted to see if that's what it was really like, that's all," Sasuke said defensively, and a huge grin suddenly spread across the blonde's face.
"You wanted to kiss me again!" he crowed, crossing his arms back behind his head.
"NO!" Sasuke fumed. "I.. I just…"
"Sasuke looooooooves me!" he continued, glad to be away from the spotlight of this conversation. "Wait 'til the fan-girls hear about this! The super-cool Sasuke is in love with a booooooooy!"
With an angry cry, the raven-haired boy tackled his partner and the two of them went rolling. Sasuke wound up on top, his hands clasping the other boy's and holding them to the dirt, his knees on either side of his hips, his weight pinning the blond successfully beneath him. The blush returned in full, and there was an awkward silence.
"I don't know," Sasuke muttered, his face turned away so Naruto couldn't read his expression. "Maybe I do kind of…like you…"His black eyes shot up to the other's face. "So what if I do, though? I don't care about those stupid girls anyway." His heated gaze suddenly softened when they connected with the blue eyes staring back up at him. "I'm only interested in people who are on my level or better; I want a challenge, and…" he gulped, "you're the only one who challenges me…"
Naruto gulped back, staring up in to the pale, serious face breathlessly. He opened his mouth to reply, blinked, then closed it again. Sasuke's warmth and weight atop him just made it that much harder to speak.
"…like you…"
Sasuke tilted his head to the side. "Naruto…?"
"I like you too," he grumbled, letting his head fall to one side. "I've…liked you for a long time; it's almost like a complex," he wrinkled his nose. "You're so far ahead of me, that I'm obsessed with catching up to you. And when I started to learn about you--the real you--it wasn't just about beating you anymore." He lifted his eyes slowly to look into Sasuke's. "I wanted to get to know you, be with you…"
Sasuke was kissing him this time. Their tongues slicked together clumsily as their fingers found one another's and intertwined, both of them suddenly so highly aware of their own bodies and turning all interesting shades of red as their breathing shortened and escalated all at once. And then--
"Sasuke-kun? Naruto?"
"It's…" the blond tried to speak but his words were muffled by the warm, quick tongue that darted past his open lips. The girl's footsteps were getting closer. "Nn…!" Sasuke tore his mouth away with a breathless gasp for air, his chest heaving gently. Beneath him, Naruto fidgeted: "Sasuke, she's gonna see us!"
"So?" he shrugged, looking at the boy pinned beneath him. "You don't agree to this, then?"
"I do!" he cried, then bit his lip, looking bashful. "It's just…we're not exactly…considering Sakura's feelings in all of this."
Sasuke's lips twisted in a grimacing he rolled off the other boy, rising to his feet. "You still like her."
"Actually," Naruto sat up and rose as well, brushing the dirt off his orange jumpsuit, "I kind of gave up on her some time ago."
"Good," Sasuke suddenly grinned, extending a hand to the other boy. "I didn't intend on sharing you anyway."
"Where will we go?" the blond took the offered hand in his own.
"My house," his companion shrugged. "It's not like anyone's waiting at home for either of us."
Naruto briefly remembered his original intention for finding the black-haired genjin and winced. "Erm, maybe we should go to my house instead," he grinned sheepishly. "Like you said, there's definitely no one there to welcome me home or anything."
Lifting an eyebrow but not arguing, Sasuke nodded and let Naruto lead him down the back streets and to his small apartment.
Sakura pushed her way through the tree branches and into the clearing littered with abandoned kunai and shurinkan. "Sasuke-kun?" she instantly picked up on the chakra residue hanging from the bark of the tree beside her and small strands of it from the weapons. Then, she faintly read a second person's chakra image: "Naruto?" No one answered. Sighing, she turned and left the empty clearing, wondering if Naruto had found their teammate and taken him back to Kakashi-sensei, but also greatly doubting it at the same time. "Those two… If they were a bit sharper, they'd realize that the only one's who didn'tknow how they felt about each other were themselves…"