A/N: And here's day eight! I've been slacking a little on the updates, I know… I have no excuses. Just a bit of a writer's block that decided right now is an excellent time to take a vacation.

I did warn all you peeps that the next few chapters were going to be a little dramatic, so no complaining when you don't find much humor. It'll come… Eventually.

So yeah. I think the quality of my writing went up. I, for one, am much happier with the end result of this chapter than I am with the quality of any of the others. Hope you think so.

And without further ado

Day Eight—

It's not like Naruto wanted to be standing out in the cold at one in the morning.

Nope.

This is what it meant to be a shinobi – seven freezing hours of hellish stand-still shaking, chattering, and griping every other night, all for the safety of the citizens.

Usually, Naruto wasn't bothered too much by the cold. It was refreshing and it gave him time to think without distractions.

But there was one teensy-weensy little annoyance that Naruto was desperately trying to ignore.

Unfortunately, this 'distraction' was so difficult to ignore that Naruto had to force himself to focus on something.

And, as luck would have it, that 'something' happened to be the fact that he was shivering and freezing his ass off at one in the morning.

Thank you for making my life so much easier, Uchiha Sasuke. Naruto growled to himself, the statement dripping with sarcasm like a pizza hut pizza with extra cheese and a double order of bacon drips with grease. He let out a shaky breath and rubbed his arms with his gloved hands in the hopes that a little friction would warm them up.

Yesterday, Naruto had been called into Tsunade's office where she proceeded to tell him that all of his guard duties, missions, and permanent partner would, from now on, be his rival-turned-best-friend-turned-crush-turned-current-object-of-avoidence: Sasuke. And it just so happened to be that specific bastard standing no less than six feet to Naruto's left on the wall of Konoha.

…Not that Naruto noticed of course.

He scrunched his eyes up and sighed.

Naruto had intended to avoid Sasuke after his wet-dream incident, but it looks like it was impossible now. He was stuck with Sasuke like it or not.

And for the most part, like it he did. Though he got mad at Sasuke easily and frequently, he found it difficult to stay mad at him for long. Already he could feel his anger ebbing away, only to be replaced by the cold night air, and a nervous thrumming in his stomach.

Sasuke stood on the turret no more than six feet away from his little sunflower, doing what Uchiha's did best: angsting.

Yesterday's events kept playing and rewinding inside his head as a constant guilt trip. He was as close to regretting his actions as he could get, which was fairly close, considering that he wasn't allowed to regret. So instead, he was angsting like the sexy bastard he was.

His gaze was angled towards the moon, and he didn't even flinch when the wind bit him with cold. As a matter of fact, it was because of yesterday's 'wet-dream' incident that his stomach was churning uncomfortably and distracting him from the temperature.

"Aren't you cold?" Naruto asked him, genuinely curious. Sasuke was startled out of his angsting, but hid it carefully, not looking towards his partner.

"No. Not really." He answered.

"Liar…" Naruto growled. Sasuke looked over at Naruto, locking gazes with the golden sunflower.

"I'm not lying." Sasuke replied. He turned his eyes back to the moon.

"How can you not be? It's freezing out here!" Naruto said, scooting close enough towards the Uchiha to touch him if he wanted. Sasuke failed to notice how close Naruto had become.

"It's not really that c—" Sasuke turned to face Naruto for a second time, only to come face to face and lip to lip for the second impromptu kiss of their lives. Wide eyes stared into one another until the blue pulled back slightly, a brilliant pearly pink blush blending into his flushed red cheeks.

"T—t-t-teme! Watch it!" Naruto tried to hiss, but failed miserably. He prayed that Sasuke hadn't noticed – that Sasuke's heart might be beating just as loud as his own, thumping against his ribcage and reverberating in his ears.

But Sasuke hadn't noticed the shaky tone; he had just heard the last two words and was following them with the utmost loyalty—faded red lips, parted only slightly, wetting themselves with a deep, red tongue. And for the nth time in the past week, Naruto was silent, words abandoning him like passengers in a shipwreck. But there was no need for words, as Sasuke closed the small gap between them in their first intentional kiss.

Naruto realized what was going to happen a split second before it did, and all he could do to prepare himself was take a deep breath before their lips touched again.

Sasuke could feel the slight wetness of Naruto's lower lip through the skin-on-skin contact. The cold that he didn't know he had been feeling began to flee his body to be replaced with tingling warmth he couldn't describe.

He was unable to form a coherent thought; his body was on auto pilot, proven by the betrayal of his hands, one of which found itself cupping Naruto's tanned cheek, and the other winding itself around his waist. Everything moved in slow motion, each small movement felt like a drop of molasses in Antarctica. But the kiss was like a campfire lit by simmering coals – a light cloud of smoke followed by a small-scale conflagration of passion. Sasuke opened his eyes slightly, wondering faintly when he had closed them, and made out a sliver of blue behind heavily weighted lids. This only made him bolder.

Finally certain that Naruto wasn't going to punch him, Sasuke's tongue weaseled out from between his lips and upon first contact, lips opened, and their song was thrust into an entirely new tempo, an almost painfully quick one. Naruto's arms wound themselves around Sasuke's neck, drawing the raven boy down to his height and deepening the kiss the best he could.

Tongues slipped and slid around each other, darting and weaving around the other, sweet and spicy tastes swapped places in a dance that couldn't be repeated even with the Sharingan. Lips slipped over moistened lips, each bout of kissing punctuated with a quick breath and another dive into the mysterious mouth of their companion.

Two sets of bruised lips, empty lungs, frantically beating hearts later, the couple broke apart gently, tongues still connected by a bridge of their combined taste.

There was a small moment of peace as they gazed into one another's eyes, neither wanting the heat to go away, and therefore making no move to separate.

But Naruto was quickly brought back to reality when he felt the cold of the stone wall Sasuke had backed him against sometime during the kiss, seep into his skin. His eyes widened and his heart beat found a new level of volume that even Naruto had considered unattainable before now.

"Don't play with me, Sasuke…" Naruto whispered with a hoarse voice biting back imminent tears. Before Sasuke could register the phrase, Naruto ducked under his arms and tore off into the distance, guard duty be damned.

"Shit." Sasuke hissed.

-----------------

Naruto was confused.

Cold, empty, and confused.

Not to mention hungry.

Panting, not from running but from the effort involved in biting back his tears, he burst into the semi-abandoned apartment building, slamming the door behind him before dropping to his knees, crouching over, and finally letting the tears fall.

His fists and teeth were clenched tightly, the former pressing indents into the floor. His body was shaking and his muscles were tensed. He released his fists, only to clutch his head.

Why did Sasuke do that? Why does he play with me like this? Naruto slammed his fist into the floor, leaving behind a large hole. He swore under his breath.

"Fuck…" Still cursing, Naruto got shakily to his feet; still hiccupping slightly, eyes puffy and face flushed from tears, he set immediately to doing something comfortable.

Like making ramen.

Ramen was his comfort food; it helped him think when things got tough. The three-minute-plus-boiling-time meal was one of the few real friends he had. He plugged in his electric kettle and took out a packet of Original Sapporo Ichiban Ramen.

"Geez… is everyone out to get me or what?" He muttered to himself, wiping loose tears on his sleeve. He hung his jacket on the hook, too tired and distressed to be lazy, and started digging through his closet for something to cover the hole in the floor.

"OW! SHIT!" He shouted in pain when a box fell from a closet shelf and hit him on the head.

"Stupid little mother monk—" He stopped swearing when he realized that it was a box of photos. More specifically, a box of photos from his Genin days. Naruto smiled weakly as he took off the lid.

The first photo was his rejected ninja ID photo – the one where he painted his face and hands in red. He chuckled at the memory.

The second was a photo of him and Iruka eating Ramen on Naruto's Birthday down at the lake while everyone was at the Kyuubi Festival celebrating the demon's defeat, while Iruka was celebrating the host's birth. Another weak smile accompanied by the wrinkling of the eyes.

Photo after photo, Naruto felt the sadness leave him only to be replaced with a warm contentedness. He was jerked out of his reminiscence when he heard the kettle ding. He got up, poured the water into a bowl with the noodles, emptied the soup base into the water and went to go sit down at his kitchen table, box of photos in hand.

He ate his noodles so slowly that they actually cooled off. This was the first time he'd ever placed ramen second to an activity, and he really didn't care. The photo's and associated memories were more than compensation for the negligence of his noodles.

Naruto spent the next few hours going through the pictures of his past, smiling, laughing, flinching, and almost crying. His comfort meal was cold, the hole in the floor was still there, and the sun was just peeking in through his window, letting him know that morning had come. He greeted the day with a weary smile and slipped into his bedroom, accidentally knocking his noodles to the floor in the process and not caring.

And he slept.

Vocab—

Sapporo Ichiban Ramen- Anyone who's had this brand of ramen will agree with me when I say that it is the KING OF ALL RAMENS! bowbow