Comments: And now, for a curtain change.
Soundtrack for this chapter: Elastica - "Stutter"
Lucid
6 – You sit and stare at me until I'm mad about you
Strands of light fell through her curtains and, finding no resistant in lace, reached out to tickled her eyelids. Blinking, Sakura smiled sluggishly at the world.
Sakura dearly loved mornings. The good sort of mornings where you woke in your own sheets, not the frightening or cold mornings where you woke in a tent in some swamp cursing a foreign landscape. Mornings like this one: soft, and warm. She smiled in a positively lazy way at the alarm clock. Seven thirty-two, such a pleasant number. Seven plus thirty-two was thirty-nine, like three and nine. Three squared was equal to nine, and three times nine was equal to twenty seven which were two out of the three digits in seven thirty-two. It was nice, and circular, and— "Holy hell!"
Haruno Sakura leaped up and tumbled out of bed with the grace of a coma patient. She was half an hour and two minutes late, which meant she had to sacrifice her shower or breakfast. No way was she sacrificing breakfast when she had to train with Tsunade at ten. She pulled on her panties, then quickly did up her leg wraps. Her skirt followed. Finally she snagged a bra from her drawer, pulling it on over her shoulders without bothering the clasp. Like every morning, she then paused to examine herself in the mirror, holding her chest.
Though it was completely normal and the only two boys who'd ever seen her naked probably hadn't noticed it at all, it still bothered Sakura that one of her breasts was just slightly larger than the other. It had been so pretty much since she got a chest at thirteen, to her (and really only her) annoyance. "Grow," she ordered her left breast, and glared at it. After a typical moment of fruitless waiting she gave up, sighed, and threw on a shirt. She smiled at the mirror, grabbed a hairbrush, and bounced down the stairs.
Today was her birthday. Tonight was her party. Today was her birthday. She decided to make toast with her eggs, for fun.
"Happy birthday dear." Her mom breezed by, grabbed the second to last banana on the counter, and continued breezing right out the door. Sakura waved goodbye.
"Bye Mom! See you in three days!"
Her father floated past a minute later, and grabbed the other banana. Sakura pouted. "Don't wreck the house in your drunken youthful frivolities," her father mumbled. "And don't do any jutsu after three drinks. In fact don't have more than three drinks."
"Love you too, Dad," she waved. The front door closed, and Sakura munched her toast while dreaming of her own place. A place where no one took the last banana except with her express permission. In writing.
Writing, writing…her surgery report! And the research paper on seals she still hadn't started! And training!
Sakura shoved the rest of her breakfast into her mouth and darted into the open world. As she passed her yard gate a corner of her mind stopped thinking about her job and started thinking about Kakashi. They'd talked last night, right on this street. It was kind of nice.
If you'd asked her a month ago, Tsunade's youngest pupil would have said that she considered Kakashi to be something more than an acquaintance but something less than friend. Just a few weeks before he'd blatantly ignored her right in the middle of the Hokage's office, then out of nowhere asked her to call him by his first name. Before that their non-mission-related communication had been paltry, especially after team seven was officially disbanded. He'd never been a very good instructor for Sakura except when it came to the basics (and to teamwork, of course), but she owed him her life several times over since childhood, so she respected him as ninja despite the fact that he was more than willing to drop her into Tsunade's lap. Maybe some people just weren't meant to be teachers?
Still, the Kakashi she'd met last night had been… pleasant. The poor man listened while she dumped all of her troubles without letting him get a word in edgewise, and he seemed to actually take her seriously. She supposed that made them friends now?
Yeah, that sounded good. They were friends. She could say, "And this is Kakashi. He's my friend, you know! If you take away his pornographic literature he cries like a little baby; it's hilarious."
Grinning to the nines, Sakura jumped to the fourth story window of the HQ building and bounced into her office. She pulled out a set of patient files. The young ninja had barely had a chance to read half of them before she became aware of another ninja in her office.
She looked up to see the man in question waiting in front of her desk. Which was a bit of an odd place for him to be, this time of day. Sakura looked at jounin in confusion, then peered around her office for some obvious explanation. Finding no hint of Tsunade-sensei hiding in the corner with a battle axe, she looked back at him as he stood before her. Then it struck the medic-nin: Kakashi-sensei didn't have a desk.
She had a desk and Kakashi didn't. Even though it was a tiny converted storage room with almost no ventilation, Sakura also had an office.
Copy-Nin Kakashi didn't have an office. How cool was that? It was definitely her birthday.
The thought to strike Sakura next was that Kakashi didn't have an office because he didn't need one; he went out on missions all the time and wasn't required to deal with paper-pushing. That stalled her for a moment until her other half argued back. She went on missions all the time! Sure not quite as often as he did, but she was still an active shinobi in every sense of the word. And she had a desk.
"Hi!" she greeted him, and grinned some more. What was he doing here, anyway?
"Did you get your promotion?" Of all the sentences Kakashi could have replied with, this was not one Sakura had anticipated. Shock stripped her of her voice for a second or two.
"What?" she said stupidly.
"You said that if you got a favorable report from Shizune, you'd be allowed to lead a surgery team."
The language of his speech was processing, but the meaning had stalled in the 'reality' recesses of her brain. "Well, yes—but—I mean—what?"
"I wanted to know, Sakura," he said with aggravating slowness, "if you got a favorable report."
Never mind the fact that it wasn't even nine the next morning—Kakashi was taking an active interest in her career? Sakura's eyes narrowed, her brain clicked onto the appropriate channel, and she took in several details at once. Her notoriously perverted ex-sensei wasn't holding his smut novel; in fact the Icha Icha was hidden well out of sight (Sakura didn't doubt he had it somewhere on his person.) He was not lounging unobtrusively against her doorframe like a cat, or flopped down in a chair, or any of the hundred laid back methods he normally used to occupy space. He was standing directly in the center of her office with his hands in his vest pockets.
He stared flatly at her, anticipating an answer. Sakura gaped.
"I...uh…yeah," she mumbled. Luckily she'd checked already.
"Is there a yes buried in there somewhere?"
"Yes," she said in a clearer (albeit slightly annoyed) tone, and gave him an expectant look from behind her bangs. He visibly shifted his weight from his right side to his left—Sakura had never actually seen him do something that physically obvious the entire time she'd known him.
"Oh," he said. "Good for you."
Was that it? "Er, thank you."
"You're welcome."
"Um..." This whole situation had graduated from puzzling to downright weird. "Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?"
He took a step back, and waved genially. "Nope, just checking in."
"Okay. Well...anytime."
"Right. Bye then, Sakura."
He turned, but she caught him fast by saying, "Hey, are you coming to my party tonight?"
"Sure," he replied after a bare moment's hesitation.
"Really?" Sakura was shocked for probably the eighth time this morning. She smiled wide. After all, they were friends now, right? "Great. I'll see you there then. Bring me a present. And don't be too late rescuing strays or the elderly."
Kakashi gave a weak half-laugh at her joke, then a heartbeat later disappeared out of her office as if she'd merely imagined him there in the first place.
The young woman blinked at the now empty spot in front of her desk, then dismissed the scene and returned to the unattractive but satisfying act of biting the end of her pen. She'd just began reading again when a small but noisy crash sounded through the door from the hallway, as if someone had accidentally tripped over the small metal garbage bin and knocked it into the wall.
Or kicked it over?
She contemplated that for a moment or two, calculating the likelihood. Then she started snickering at her overactive imagination. Sakura renewed her pen-chewing, content in the knowledge that the world was still round and that Kakashi, while he could be positively ridiculous sometimes, was still possessing of far too much dignity to ever attack inanimate objects in a public display of exasperation.
There was another little crash, like someone had picked the thing up and then kicked it again.
Huh. "Must be Anko," Sakura muttered, and went back to work.