with a bit of luck..

...he might find a way to make her dislike him.


03

Was it just him, or was Haruno Sakura even more annoying than before? Somehow, they ended up in the same class and he had to suffer through the whole day, listening to her loud and annoying voice as she grabbed literally every opportunity to yell out answers during recitations. She was just the type of person who wasted no time letting every living soul within the general vicinity known that she was smart. She practically basked in the glory and he was just downright irritated by it.

Even worse? She developed this incredibly clingy behaviour towards him.

"Sasuke-kun! Good morning!"

"Sasuke-kun! Let's have lunch together!"

"Sasuke-kun! I made this for you!"

"Sasuke-kun! Come to our football game later on!"

"Sasuke-kun! Want me to help you with math?" (He hated this one the most)

It was impossible, very, very, impossible to get her to leave him alone. What else? Oh yeah! She seemed to enjoy camping out in the untamed fields behind the Uchiha compound. A normal person would like hanging out in cafes, arcades, beauty salons (since she was a girl) but Sakura? Nope. The pink haired freak practically lived in those fields like a meerkat.


Isn't he just amazing?

A dreamy smile graced her features as she watched, for the hundredth time, her beloved Uchiha Sasuke-kun elegantly taking down an opponent during karate practice. The way his mysterious obsidian eyes shone after sensing an opening, and the way he smirked after taking the other boy down flawlessly...he was just swoon worthy. He was smart, too. His grades were impressive and in martial arts, he was rumoured to be on par with the one year older Hyuga Neji from the Hyuga house. And despite his dreamy looks? He never flirts or takes advantage of it. He is just wonderful.

"Sakura-san...?"

She was snapped out of her reverie by a light-blue eyed girl with long, dark blue hair.

"Hinata-san!" She smiled, recognizing the girl from her Physics class, "What's up?"

"Nothing...uh...I..." Hinata had always been awkward with her (though she didn't know why. Hinata acted the same way around Ino) so she waited patiently for the Hyuga girl to compose herself enough to form a coherent sentence, "C-Can I sit down with you?"

"Of course!" Sakura quickly cleared away her handouts and thick textbooks, trying to be as approachable and friendly as she could, wanting to make the other girl feel more comfortable around her.

"I was just wondering...why you always go here," Hinata said in her soft voice. "I always come here to observe Neji-nii-san with practice, but you...um...you're in the football team, right? I was wondering if you wanted to join the martial arts club or something..."

Neji-nii-san...? Oh yeah! She was talking about Hyuga Neji, her older cousin. Hinata was in the martial arts club, too, but she heard that Hinata wasn't very good at it so it's been causing some problems with her father and her. Maybe that explained her extremely shy personality? Because she felt like everyone else viewed her as inferiorly as her father does?

"Oh, I just come here to observe Sasuke-kun," Sakura grinned, "He's that black-haired one at the back. Right beside Uzumaki Naruto. You know Naruto, right? He's that baka in our Physics class that keeps on throwing spitballs behind Kakashi-sensei,"

Sakura loved Naruto. He was an oddball, yes, and an annoying one at that, but she grew rather fond of him and sincerely loved him and looked out for him the way she would to a brother. She raised a brow slightly when she noticed how Hinata's face reddened when she mentioned Naruto.

"Yes, I know Sasuke-kun," Hinata smiled slightly, "I've seen him in our family's parties before. He seems to look up to his older brother a lot,"

"Ehh? Really?" Sakura knew very little about Sasuke's family. Come to think of it...she knew very little about Sasuke himself. She knew where he lived, she knew the classes he took, his vacant times in school, his impressive records in karate, and she even knew his grade point average. But she didn't know his parents, his brother, the way he acted around them, the way he thought and viewed everything around him. She knew he liked martial arts and tomatoes and the color blue. But that's all. She doesn't really know him, if that makes sense at all.

Come to think of it, she never really talked to him before. Like, just talked. Have a normal conversation. It always involves her trying to act cute and him trying to run away (yes, she wasn't naive. She knew Sasuke-kun avoided her. She always thought he was just shy but now she wasn't so sure).

Sakura ended up walking back home with Hinata. The awkward atmosphere seemed to have ebbed away and now they were laughing over something they remembered that involved Inuzuka Kiba throwing an egg at somebody's head and then followed by Ino chasing Kiba around the whole school, yelling something about the expensive prices of hair conditioner.


Sakura loved hanging out at the fields ways off behind the Uchiha compound. It was, like all fields, a wide expanse of land covered with untamed grasses that grew past her ankles. And the best part? The edges of the field were lined with Sakura trees. The pink petals fall around when the wind is quite strong, and bathes the field with petals, creating an almost winter-like, dreamy impression.

Sakura loved sitting underneath the trees, with a romance novel in hand. The sunset at the end of the day baths the fields in shades of red and gold, and the snow-like petals falling daintily to the ground turns to fiery glowing embers swirling in the wind.


"Extension?" Sasuke looked up from his Calculus textbook.

"Yes," Uchiha Fugaku—Outo-san—said. He was busy scribbling something on a very thick notebook, "I was planning on extending the compound to house more facilities for the clan. Like a small park or a clinic, to make us more independent. The Hyuga have several facilities in their compound too, I thought I could do the same for us. Your aunts and cousins would be happy, too,"

Outo-san was the family head, so stuff like this was his to decide. Sasuke nodded, "Sure, that sounds cool. How are you going to extend the compound, though? I thought the land on both sides already belonged to the village,"

"Oh, I bought the fields right behind the compound. I'm going to send some workers over there tomorrow or the day after to get rid of those pesky cherry blossom trees."

Sasuke stopped writing. His hand went still. His pen was poised over the paper, with the ink slowly bleeding out to stain it.

"I think I'm going to start selecting landscapers and architects tomorrow, too."

Sasuke was still. The thoughts running through his head were new. Foreign.

"Sasuke?" Outo-san asked, puzzled by his sudden silence. "Anything wrong?"

"Uh...you see..."

"Sasuke-kun! I saw a lot of Sakura trees behind your family's compound!"

"...it's...uh..it's just that..."

"Sasuke-kun! Aren't they beautiful? I love Sakura trees because they're my namesake!"

"It's not that important...but...well..."

"Sasuke-kun! Want to go the Sakura fields with me later?"

Sasuke shut his eyes.

"Never mind. It's nothing," He finally said.

Otou-san doesn't look convinced. "You should speak up if there's something with the plan you don't agree on, Sasuke. Are you sure it's nothing?"

"Yes, Otou-san," He said, looking out at the open window, into the blackness of the night.

"It's nothing,"


A/N: remember in the chunin exams? sakura was the only one who could answer all those jonin level questions in the exam. im trying not to exaggerate her intelligence too much, but sakura really is smart xD (mostly in a bookish kind of way) and btw in the second shippuden movie, i recall hinata adding the -kun honorific to sasuke's name so that's why she calls him sasuke-kun in this story.

and also..to NOM DE PLUME: thanks for your detailed reviews :D i like reading them :)

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO READ, REVIEWED, FAVORITED, ETC. :)