AN: Um, so… I'm sorry for the lateness! Things got a bit hectic around here. I want February to be over so badly right now because I hope March will be better. Anyway, thank you for all the wonderful reviews! Fifty, last time I checked. That's spectacular! Something I certainly never hoped to achieve with just two chapters… but anyway, I digress. As always, unbeta'd and probably not without its hidden errors...
Monday. Ten forty-three. Her day off. Sakura wasn't sure what was worse: sitting around doing nothing, or sitting around doing nothing under the pretext of doing something. She had a book of crafts in front of her, and she was flipping haphazardly through it, wondering if there was something in there that suited her as a hobby.
She had come across knitting earlier on, but she didn't really like knitting so much. It wasn't that it seemed like a matronly hobby, she just thought it was too… common. Sakura had decided that if she was forced to choose a hobby (if only to appease Tsunade), it would be something exciting or unique. Something different.
Flower arranging had been something she might have considered, but because Ino's family ran a flower shop, Sakura was predisposed to disliking the art. She didn't want a hobby to share with Ino, she wanted something of her own.
Bug collecting? No, Shino might have a fit…
Maybe she could start making those necklaces of flowers and grass like when she was a kid…?
Or she could take up the kazoo. That was unusual and unique.
Sakura sighed. Why was this so difficult?
Somebody knocked loudly on her door all of a sudden, whipping Sakura out of her frustrated state of concentration. She stared dumbly at it, as if she couldn't comprehend the meaning behind the sound. Then she shook her head and called out, "Door's open!"
The doorknob turned and clicked, and then the door swung open slowly, revealing a blonde kunoichi and a lazy tactician.
"Good morning, Sakura!" Ino cried, traipsing into the apartment like she owned the place. Shikamaru closed the door behind him and sighed. He really didn't see the need to come all the way up here…
Sakura blinked as the two made their way over to the couch, where she was sitting, and sat on either side of her (although Shikamaru more reluctantly than Ino). "Huh? Ino? Shikamaru? What are you doing here?" she asked, turning her head from side to side to see them both.
"That's what I was thinking," Shikamaru grumbled, rubbing his neck. He flinched when Ino reached around behind Sakura (unbeknownst to her) and pinched the flesh on his hip all of a sudden.
Ino rolled her eyes. "Well, we were going to come visit you at work, Sakura," she explained. "But that other nurse… not Shizune… damn, what was her name?"
"Otsune?"
"Yes, that's the one. She said you had the day off." Ino's eyes flashed dangerously. "Now, why didn't you bother to tell me you had the day off? We could have made plans!"
Sakura gestured to the book in front of her on the coffee table. "I've been trying to find a hobby."
"Hobbies are trivial," Shikamaru mumbled, only to be on the receiving end of another of Ino's pinches.
Sakura didn't know what was happening. Ino's facial expression never faltered or gave away the fact that she was pinching Shikamaru, and Sakura shrugged off his odd faces like nothing. All she knew was that she would have agreed with Shikamaru if she hadn't been in this particular situation. "Why are you trying to find a hobby so badly?" Ino asked, a little confused. "Trying to impress some guy?"
Sakura frowned. "No, Ino. Unlike you, I'm trying to find a hobby to develop my personality further, not catch the attention of some guy."
"Well, same thing. Anyway, you should have called me. I could help!"
"How, exactly? By reading this book for me?" Sakura snorted. "I doubt it."
Shikamaru sighed. "Hobbies are useless. Why should you have to spend your time on something like that? I could think of a million other things to do with my time rather than collecting and arranging bottle caps…"
"She's not going to be collecting and arranging bottle caps," Ino said hotly, crossing her arms over her chest.
"Then what am I going to be doing?" Sakura frowned. Leave it up to her friends to argue over her prospective hobby.
Ino snatched the book off of the coffee table, pulled it onto Sakura's lap, and began flipping through it quickly. Shikamaru pretended not to show any interest, but he couldn't help glancing down at the pages every so often. Sakura blinked and watched the pages turn, sometimes catching a glimpse of something that looked interesting only to have it rudely replaced by another page that Ino deemed more worthy of her time.
"Dammit, Ino!" she finally cried, slapping her hand down on the book before Ino could turn another page. "I can't pick a hobby if you keep doing that!"
"Doing what? Flipping pages?" Ino asked, shooting Sakura an incredulous look. She obviously didn't understand the problem.
Sakura's hand curled into a fist on the page. "You're turning the pages too fast," she stated plainly. "I can't read four hundred words per second."
"You don't have to read four-hundred words, you just have to read a couple of words and look at the picture!"
"That's not how I do things, pig!"
"Forehead!"
"Origami," Shikamaru said all of a sudden, eliciting two stern glares from the females who sat beside him.
Ino's sea-green eyes flashed dangerously. "Who are you calling an – "
Even though Ino misinterpreted Shikamaru's statement as something insulting and brash (go figure), he decided he would rather not be punched in the face due to a simple misunderstanding. After all, he did not like pain, and besides that it would be very embarrassing to be at the mercy of a girl. Even if it was Ino, and he didn't exactly think of her that way, she was still a scary person to deal with.
Before he could say anything in his defense, Sakura beat him to it. "Oh, origami!" she exclaimed, looking down at the book that was open on her lap. On the left hand page, the word 'Origami' graced the top in thick black strokes, followed by pictures of hands folding a piece of square sky-blue paper in various steps. She moved her hand from the middle of the right-hand page, revealing a picture of a sky-blue paper crane, and immediately thought it was probably the prettiest thing she'd ever seen.
"That is cool," she remarked quietly, tapping the picture with her index finger.
"Maybe you should take up paper folding," Shikamaru suggested. "Since you're so adamant about this hobby thing."
Ino thought it was a brilliant idea. She insisted that they go out and buy Sakura supplies at that very moment. If Sakura had been paying attention, she might have protested, but she didn't even notice until she was out in her apartment hallway, her sandals half on her feet.
-
"Why haven't I done origami before?" Sakura asked to no one in particular as they went into an old-looking store she didn't remember seeing before in her life. She stared fondly at some small hand-woven baskets piled on a shelf. Ino grabbed one and looked it over before tossing it back in the pile.
"I don't know," she replied with a shrug. "We're ninja, not artists. Although, a paper shuriken would be kind of cool to make. I wonder if you could use it as a real weapon… I bet, with some practice and precision…"
Shikamaru sighed. "Stop looking at that stuff," he said, clearly annoyed when he noticed Ino move to pick up some wooden mannequin. She glared at him briefly and picked it up anyway, making a big show of turning it over in her hands and examining every inch of it carefully. She didn't put it down until Shikamaru gave another aggravated sigh and wandered off somewhere.
Sakura eyed a big bin of soft-bristle brushes. "Paper shuriken really don't have a point. I mean, not where we're concerned," she said carefully. "We have real ones. I like the little flowers you can make."
"Not so infatuated with the paper crane anymore?"
"No, they're still cute. Besides, I'm just testing this new hobby out."
Sakura thought it was odd to say she was taking her new hobby for a test drive. Hobbies were usually things you enjoyed doing and didn't exactly call hobbies until you'd been doing them for years almost religiously. People didn't just go out, decide to do something they sort of liked, and call it a hobby. It felt strange, but Tsunade didn't really give her a choice. Finding a hobby in a few days' time wasn't exactly easy.
Suddenly, Shikamaru approached, holding a large stack of colourful paper.
"Oh," Ino seemed surprised. "You found the origami paper already."
He just shrugged and handed the stack to the pink haired ninja.
"Er, thanks, Shikamaru," Sakura said, looking down at the perfectly square sheets of paper and flipping through the multitude of colours haphazardly. Blue, orange, red, green, yellow, purple… pink…
"How much will this cost me?" Sakura asked, holding the papers up and inspecting the thickness of the stack with a frown. There was a lot of paper.
"Not much," Shikamaru said. "I think it's ten ryo for fifteen sheets, so…"
Sakura tried to count the papers, but Ino was talking about numbers behind her, which was slightly distracting (to say the least). "Wait, if it's ten for fifteen, what happens if someone wants to buy one or two?" Ino was saying.
Shikamaru was irritated. "Nobody's going to buy just one sheet of origami paper, Ino. You usually buy them in packs. Twenty, thirty, and I bet they have fifty or one-hundred packs…"
Sakura stopped trying to count and glared at the two of them. "Do you mind?"
Shikamaru just shrugged, but Ino rolled her eyes. "Why don't you just go to the counter and let the shopkeeper count for you?"
"It's probably less trouble for you," Shikamaru grumbled. "And us, too."
Ino blinked. "How is it easier for us?"
"Nothing, never mind."
Sakura stared at them for a moment before deciding that they were absolutely right. She turned on her heel and made her way to the counter, where a small elderly man was sitting on a tall stool, watching her (and her friends) closely with harsh, icy eyes nearly covered by thick folds of wrinkled skin. But as she approached, his mouth split into a wide, semi-toothless grin, and he made a vague gesture towards her, beckoning her towards him. His eyes still looked cold, even though his demeanor was anything but.
"Found everything you're looking for?" he asked, taking the origami paper from her, his voice reminiscent of a creaky wooden wheel. Sakura wasn't sure if she felt like smiling back at him, but luckily the courtesy her mother had instilled in her since she was a child – "Sakura, always be kind and gracious to your elders!" – forced her to smile back at the old man, regardless of whether or not she truly meant it. She was startled to find him looking her over brazenly like she was some kind of artwork. It gave her the chills.
"Ah, yes, I believe we've found everything…" Sakura said quietly, and threw a nervous glance over her shoulder at Ino and Shikamaru, who were waiting anxiously by the door, watching her with mild unease and curiosity. She wondered what they had to be nervous about. After all, it wasn't like they were being overly scrutinized.
"Your hair is a titillating shade of pink, my dear," the old man suddenly said, still grinning as he held the paper in his hand. He hadn't even made a move to count any of it. Sakura laughed weakly, wondering why exactly he had chosen the word 'titillating'. She didn't like that word. Even though it was a perfectly normal word, it always sounded dirty. He could have said 'your hair is a nice shade of pink' or a 'lovely shade of pink'. But no, he had to say titillating.
Maybe she was reading too much into this.
"So, you're taking up origami," the old man deduced after a moment of awkward silence. He pulled the stack closer and thumbed through it idly. "I'm sure your husband is very happy for you."
What era was this man living in?
"Um, I don't have a husband," Sakura said quietly, giving a forced nervous laugh. She immediately regretted saying anything because he gave her a toothless grin again.
"Then your boyfriend is probably very happy for you," he continued, counting the papers.
Sakura stiffened, and then gave a sharp nod of her head. "Oh, he is," she assured him, looking away. She had to look away. She was a horrible liar, she knew, and one look into her eyes when she was lying would give her away. "He's, uh, the happiest guy in the world."
"Who, that young man back there?" the old man inquired, leaning slightly to look around Sakura. He gave Shikamaru a long, hard stare.
"No," Sakura replied before she even had a chance to think about it. She kicked herself in the head, mentally. She should have said yes! Shikamaru was her friend! He would understand, surely, even if it was troublesome to lie to this man.
The old man looked at her again, and his stare was nothing but suspicious. "I see. And your boyfriend lets you wander around Konoha with other men?"
Sakura glanced back at her friends and then gave an oddly explosive laugh like he'd just said the funniest thing in the world. Ino and Shikamaru jumped at her sudden outburst, but remained anxiously standing at the door, waiting for Sakura to finish up.
"Um, no, no, Shikamaru is… Ino's boyfriend," she lied, forcing a smile. "Besides, my boyfriend… he trusts me."
"Might I ask his name?"
"It's… uh…" Sakura looked away again before responding with a light shrug of her shoulders. "His name is… Naruto."
The man stopped moving. "Uzumaki Naruto?"
Sakura glanced at the old man to see his reaction. He was giving her a rather disdainful look, like he figured she could do better. Honestly, Sakura wouldn't have fought him on that. As much as she cared about Naruto as a friend, she probably couldn't bring herself to date him. She could do much better than a boy with an intense love of ramen, semi-nude women, and a never-ending well of immaturity. But she wasn't ever going to admit that to anyone.
"Yes," Sakura replied after a moment. "Uzumaki Naruto. Why so curious?" She tried to play off the question like it was nothing, but she really wanted to know why this old guy was so keen on finding out about her personal life.
The man stiffened, then relaxed, his fingers processing the papers as he studied her. "Well, to be honest, I wouldn't have expected someone as pretty as you to be involved with someone as… beastly… as him."
Sakura wasn't exactly sure if he'd answered the question properly, but she didn't exactly like the old man's snide undertone, so she let it go. She also didn't really want to linger around waiting for him to slowly count origami paper while dissecting her love life like it was a dead frog. She began to fidget. "So… er… how much do I owe you?" she asked, trying to smile as sweetly as possible.
He tilted his head slightly. "One thousand ryo. But for you… eight hundred."
Sakura's pink eyebrows practically shot up into her hairline, surprised that he would have given her a discount despite his obvious disapproval of her fake love life. "Well… thank you," she practically gushed.
"I can't ask such a pretty girl to pay full price. It would be a crime."
Ah… that's why.
She reached into her bag and pulled out some coins, enough to cover the cost of the paper.
Just as she slapped the coins down on the counter and was about to grab the papers and shove them into her bag, Ino and Shikamaru appeared at her sides, evidently bored with standing silently at the front of the store. Sakura painfully watched as the old man took the paper's back and began to place the stack in a little paper bag.
"What's taking so long, Sakura?" Ino asked sweetly, tilting her head in that faux-cute way that she was prone to doing sometimes when she was annoyed or irritated and didn't want to outwardly express it.
"Oh… nothing, Ino," Sakura replied in a tone just as sickly sweet and full of urgency. "We've just finished."
"Yes," the old man said carefully, placing the bag on the counter. "You can make a paper flower for your boyfriend now."
Ino and Shikamaru gave her some very interesting stares, and immediately Sakura wished she could just sink into the floor and die. Why did he have to go and say that?
"Oh… that's right," Ino said all of a sudden. "Her boyfriend."
"Ahahaha, yes!" Sakura gave a weak laugh and pulled at Ino's arm lightly. "Speaking of boyfriends… mine's waiting for me right now!"
"Yes, at the most expensive teashop in town!" Ino was fluttering her eyelashes, the damn girl. Sakura hated it when her friend did that. She only did that under two conditions: when she was angling for some kind of freebie or when she was lying and wanted people to believe her. Damn damn damn. Sakura chewed on her lower lip and hoped that Ino was finished telling stories.
Of course, she wasn't.
"That Hatake Kakashi really knows how to treat a girl, you know," Ino finished with an evil little giggle.
The old man looked surprised and suspicious again. "Hold on," he said, pointing a long, wrinkled finger at Sakura. "You told me you were involved with Uzumaki Naruto."
"Ah, well…" Sakura glared at Ino momentarily. If looks could kill, Ino would have been dead seven times over by now. "I apologize… Naruto is actually my ex. It hasn't been that long, so sometimes my mind gets carried away…" She would have denied Ino's little story vehemently, except the chances of the old man believing her would be next to none. How could she expect him to believe her if her own story was thrown back in her face by her closest friend?
…And wait, why did this even matter? It wasn't like Sakura planned on coming back to this little shop in the near future anyway. She was just going to keep up this hobby – or, façade, really – until things returned to normal and Tsunade forgot she even said anything in the first place to Sakura about having no life. Then she could return to testing people's reflexes and pressing ice packs to people's swollen extremities.
"We really should be going," Shikamaru said all of a sudden, clearing his throat. "I have to go prepare a report for Tsunade-sama, and she hates it when things are handed in late."
"Right!" Sakura nodded almost violently. "So, let's go!"
The old man absorbed this information with a cryptic smile on his face and nodded. "Of course," he replied. "Please, have a nice day… Sakura."
-
Sakura couldn't help the shiver that coursed through her after they left the shop and had gotten out of the old man's line of sight. She turned to Ino to give her a piece of her mind, but Ino (violent as always – and quick as well) gave her a sudden, hard shove. Sakura barely had time to brace herself and jerked backwards for a second before angrily stepping back up and glaring.
"What the hell was that in there?" Ino demanded. "That whole, 'my boyfriend's waiting' thing. What the hell?"
Sakura was fuming. "What? The old guy was creepy! He kept asking me personal things! What was I supposed to say?"
"How about, 'those questions are personal, sorry'?" Shikamaru grumbled, rubbing the back of his neck. Women and their excuses… That was a world he didn't want to enter any time soon.
Sakura shot him a look filled with venom. "Stay out of it, Shikamaru," she barked, and turned back to Ino. "And what about you? I never asked you to throw in your own lies! If you hadn't opened your big mouth, things wouldn't have gotten out of hand!"
Ino made a series of spluttering sounds, and her expression morphed into one of indignant surprise. "Out of hand? All I did was lie about your nonexistent boyfriend, stupid! If you're asking me, you're overreacting! You lied too, you know!"
"Well, there's a big difference between Naruto and Kakashi, okay?" Sakura snapped, and immediately a crumpled look washed over her delicate features. She hadn't meant to say that. She was thinking it, yes, but she really hadn't meant to say that.
A devilish look came over Ino, and she smiled wickedly at Sakura. "I see. It bothers you more that I said 'Kakashi'. That's why you're jumping down my throat on this one. Is there something going on between you and your sensei?"
"Ex-sensei," Sakura grumbled, turning and staring off down the street. She had to hand it to Ino. Although the blonde did have her 'blonde moments' sometimes, she could be remarkably perceptive. "And no," she continued. "Nothing's going on. I swear. Nothing is going on at all."
"You denied it, like, three times in the same breath," Ino pointed out. "That means you're a dirty liar."
"No, when I lie, I – "
"Look everywhere but at the person you're lying to? Yeah, I know. You're doing it right now. So… why are you so averse to Kakashi? I mean, you'd rather I tell that old guy your boyfriend really is Naruto? That obnoxious – "
Sakura crossed her arms and shifted her bag onto her shoulder. "It's personal. I can't really talk about it because it's a… medical thing."
Ino looked interested, and she smirked at her pink-haired friend. "Has that stopped you from telling me that crap before?"
Sakura was appalled that Ino would even think it was okay to discuss someone else's physical examination out in the street – or at all, for that matter. And sure, Sakura had discussed some things before, but she never gave out a patient's name, and it wasn't usually about something as embarrassing as this. She remembered once discussing a giant pustule on some guy's back when he came into the hospital one day, and how disgusting it was that during the removal procedure, it had burst in a wonderful explosion of pus and blood, spraying Sakura and two other nurses in the face. But that seemed different somehow.
Shikamaru wondered how far he'd get if he snuck away now. Would they notice he was even gone or would Ino, in all of her insane glory, somehow detect him trying to sneak off and make him stay? He was scared of her sometimes. She was pushy and persistent and often angry, and whenever he accidentally made her mad, he caught himself looking over his shoulder or just staying home out of fear for his own life.
Luckily, Sakura wasn't as bad. Yes, she could get angry sometimes (sometimes even worse than Ino), but that was always evened out by her sweet and nurturing side. Ino didn't have one of those. It was Ino he feared the most.
Perhaps it was better to stay…
…but they were ignoring him completely now. It would be a waste to stand around doing nothing when he could do nothing somewhere else, preferably sitting or lying down.
Experimentally, he shuffled back about a foot, and Ino's sea-green eyes snapped towards him, glittering dangerously. "Where do you think you're going, Shikamaru?" she asked, her voice low and dangerous.
He shuffled forward. "I'm not going anywhere," he grumbled.
Damn. Foiled.
Sakura tapped her fingers on her arms. "Ino, I'm not going to tell you what happened. Ever. So drop it, okay? And for that matter, let's drop this whole boyfriend thing. I don't want things to get blown out of proportion…"
Ino grinned all of a sudden. "Fine. I won't bother you about Kakashi anymore."
"Why do I still have this odd feeling?" Sakura eyed her friend suspiciously.
"That's probably because while I'm not going to sing juvenile songs about you and your ex-sensei sitting in a tree, I am going to tell Naruto that you absolutely want him!"
And with that, Ino ran away, cackling evilly. Sakura felt the colour drain from her face and she ran after her friend to catch up, screaming furiously about how Naruto wouldn't think Ino was joking. Shikamaru sighed.
He supposed he could go now, if he wanted.
-
Once they were out of view, the old man slid down from his stool, his back hunched over from years of bad posture. He shuffled over the dry, cracked wooden boards to the back, which was separated from the rest of the store by a hanging cotton curtain that was a washed-out green colour with some kind of faded circular pattern.
There was a man in the back, bent over a wooden carving, scraping off some wood bits with a dented shuriken.
"Ennosuke, you should go out more," the old man reprimanded lightly, watching the carver with mild interest. The man was young, maybe a little older than Sakura, and he was focusing on his carving with intense concentration, looking as though one wrong slice might make him snap.
"I don't feel like going out," Ennosuke grumbled. "My art isn't finished yet."
His sculpture was roughly the size and shape of a human head, just a little bigger and not very defined at all.
The old man narrowed his electric blue eyes. "You don't even have a subject. How can you complete this artwork if you have no one to sculpt?"
Ennosuke paused, and then looked up at the old man. "Grandfather…" he regarded the small, wrinkled man with slight suspicion, but nothing could hide the excitement he was feeling, and his lips curled up into a smile. "You've found me someone?"
"Yes. You'll never find someone so perfect."
Ennosuke's happy smile died all of a sudden, and he looked away. The old man frowned. "No one," he added hastily, "as perfect as Momoko, of course…"
Ennosuke waved it off with a graceful flick of his hand. "Who is it, grandfather?" he asked, sounding bored. "Who've you found for me?"
The old man smiled.
AN: I want to get another chapter out relatively soon, but I'm not going to make any promises because in the event I am unable to keep them, I don't really want to find a severed horse's head in my bed. Thanks again for all the reviews!
Oh, and if you're wondering why I used 'ryo' instead of 'yen'... it's because as an avid player of Naruto: Ultimate Ninja, I'm used to dishing out a thousand or more ryo to Ebisu and Konohamaru for one damn capsule. Yeah, that's all.