A/N: HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT!
Thanks to my amazing job and talented friends, I've gotten the opportunity to help out on the NARUTO LIVE-ACTION MOVIE! I've been contributing to the project for a while now (mostly the development/story aspect), and I just wanted to share this news with you all, as you're probably reading this story because you love Naruto as much as I do!
I'm so excited and so thankful to use my passion for this anime/manga while at work. Obviously I can't say any details about the project, but hey, if I'm not updating much, at least know that I'm doing some other cool things that I hope you'll love (:
And now onto the good stuff xx
transcendence | by kay wiz | INTERLUDE ONE
THREE YEARS BEFORE.
HER.
Everyone knows she is a hard worker, but perhaps she should have taken the day off.
Thanks to her workaholic tendencies and Ino's rules about personal hygiene, Sakura is late to her best friend's birthday dinner. To be fair, while Ino is a stickler for sleek hair and shaved legs, she is hardly the epitome of punctuality, and couldn't care less when everyone shows up as long as they eventually do. Sakura, on the other hand, finds it particularly embarrassing that even Shikamaru has beaten her to the party.
They may as well be in the daimyo's banquet hall, the never-ending length of this dinner table giving her some sort of vertigo. With a quick hello to their giant group of close friends and casual acquaintances – Ino is a social butterfly, after all – she slides into the dark metal seat beside the lazy Nara boy, grumbling to herself because she has drawn the short end of the stick and is all the way at the end of the table, awkwardly just far enough that she can't possibly join any conversation.
And she got all dressed up and everything, too.
She pulls aside a waitress and orders a whiskey neat, never one for feminine drinks but definitely one for nursing a glass, just to do something with her hands. Everyone seems to have ordered their main course already, and she certainly hasn't eaten since her partial "lunch break" at the hospital, but the menus have been cleared and the food here's too expensive anyway. Perhaps her sweet tooth will just wait for dessert.
"Nice hair," Shikamaru drawls, but she pouts because he isn't even looking at her, so how should he know?
"Shut up." She puts a hand on her birds nest of a hairstyle and wishes she had made enough time to wash out the hospital curls, but it was either clean hair or a layer of foundation, and the bags under her eyes inspired her to choose the latter.
"I wasn't being sarcastic," he says with a sigh and plays with his food. "Geez, girls can never take a compliment."
Admittedly, she sighs a bit more dramatically than necessary, half out of irritation and the other half with a tired smile. "Sorry, I'm just a bit flustered. I hate being fashionable and I hate being late, so naturally I got stuck doing both."
"Well, all's well that end's well," he shrugs. "Everyone else on this end is a friend of Ino's from god-knows-where, so you're saving me the trouble of socializing with strangers."
He doesn't even bother to lower his voice, so she swats him teasingly on the shoulder in case one of the so-called strangers happens to overhear, though everyone seems to be preoccupied already. "Let me guess..." she raises an eyebrow, "it's a bit too troublesome to make friends?"
"I'm just saying, I could have worse conversation partners."
"Gee, thanks," she deadpans.
She finds it amusing that Shikamaru feels the need to sit up straighter at her harmless response. She's known him long enough to see the way he gets easily uncomfortable by sensitive women – the Nara matriarch and Ino, specifically – and she wonders if maybe that defensive reaction comes naturally to him, these days. She has to hold in a giggle at the way his brow scrunches and he groans with annoyance.
"Sheesh," he grumbles, "you girls always have to make things difficult."
"More like, you boys have a lot to learn about how to talk to girls."
She says it teasingly with a smooth quirk of her brow, but her confident bravado doesn't last long - out of nowhere her stomach growls loudly and the grin on her face becomes embarrassingly sheepish. Even the chuunin across the table turns to look at her questionably, and she has to shoot him a disgruntled look until he turns away. Meanwhile Shikamaru smirks down at her with a sideways glance, and she pretends not to be flustered at her unladylike moment of weakness.
"Worked through your lunch break again, did you?" he teases, and she wonders when exactly he found out about her bad work habits anyway.
"There aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done," she huffs. "That's not my fault."
The high-and-mighty look on his face never quite disappears, but he has the decency to push his yakiniku a few inches in her direction. "Here."
She can't deny that it smells heavenly, but she also doesn't appreciate the way his eyes are laughing at her. Even so, her chopsticks are sitting right in front of her, and everyone else is too busy to notice if she rudely swipes something from a dish that doesn't belong to her...
"Shikamaru!" she scolds him, looking away so he can't see her salivate. "I have no intention of mooching off you when I'm perfectly capable of ordering something myself. You realize I technically have two jobs."
He sighs heavily and almost looks to be rolling his eyes, no doubt exasperated at her fussy behavior. Even so, she takes a quick glance over her shoulder and sees the amusement dancing in his gaze. "Look, I don't have much of an appetite anyway, and Chouji will kill me if I leave any leftovers. It's already sitting in front of you. Quit being so troublesome and just help yourself."
She can't help but smile at the laid-back way he offers it – only Shikamaru could order someone around and still sound half-asleep.
Without a word, she slowly twists her body back around and refuses to meet his eyes. She pouts as she picks up her chopsticks, leaning over a bit in an attempt to act natural when really she wants to dig into the dish like an animal. With as much grace as she can bring herself to muster, she indulges and pretends like Shikamaru isn't watching her poor excuse of a show. In a second, the beef sits on her tongue and melts in her mouth like cream, and somewhere between her bliss and improper table manners, she grudgingly admits that expensive food is expensive for a reason.
"Mmm, Shika-kun," she closes her eyes and hums delightfully, completely missing the sudden flush of his cheeks, "you sure know the way to win a girl's heart."
HIM.
To Shikamaru, time has always seemed to travel at a snail's pace – slow, steady, monotonous, easy. So he finds it odd that, while chatting to Sakura about clouds and hospitals and dusty books and janken strategies and lord knows what else, the past few hours have gone by without him even noticing.
A few party guests are still lingering here and there, and it's late enough that the restaurant has opened up the dance floor. Tonight Shikamaru has learned that Sakura hates dancing in public just as much as he does, so instead they hold their place at the end of the dinner table while Ino twirls around with strangers wishing her a happy birthday. Meanwhile, he's a few drinks deep, and Sakura's even more so, though she is holding her liquor rather well considering her small size and his lazy company.
She's since adopted a laid-back position to go hand-in-hand with his, sitting sideways to face him properly while an elbow rests at the top of her chair. Her fingers weave through her rosy hair to hold her head at an angle, and as he observes this, she laughs at something he's said, which astounds him because he's never thought himself to be very funny. But there's something about the way she does it, the way her laugh sounds rough and charming all at once, and he hopes she continues to find him amusing so he can continue to hear her smile.
He smirks at her in response because he can't think of the words to say. Somewhere in the fogginess of his mind, he realizes he is feeling nervous – something he has never felt in regards to Haruno Sakura before. Then again, he's known her for a long time. Perhaps she's been so present in his life that he completely missed seeing her grow up. But there she is, right in front of his eyes, the girl who looks so much like a woman in that black dress and mussed up hair, despite the boyishness of her figure and the flexing of her fist. She is the same Sakura he has always known, with the same passions and the same temper and the same wit, but there is a charm in her crossed legs and sultry smile that is very new.
Or maybe that charm has always been there, and he's just been too lazy to notice.
"Hey...can you keep a secret?"
She leans closer to him as she says it, and he can't tell if she's drunk or sleepy or both, but her flirtatious Cheshire smile and that telltale spark in her eyes is enough to distract him. "Hmm?"
She pauses for an extra second and takes her time to answer. "Well...this is probably the whiskey talking, and the mood lighting in this place isn't exactly helping, but..." He watches her trail off, watches her throat as she swallows hesitantly, watches her apple-colored eyes darting back and forth between his. He figures she must have seen something encouraging, because it isn't long before she continues her thought. "You know, Shikamaru," she says teasingly, "you're looking rather handsome tonight."
The mood lighting may have cast a spell, but it certainly doesn't hide his blush.
"I mean, you clean up nice. Who would've thought..." She laughs, and it warms something inside him he can't place. "You're quite the catch, aren't you?"
He can hardly believe this is the Haruno Sakura from his childhood, the Haruno Sakura who pined after Sasuke and trained with the Hokage and saves people's lives. This is the Haruno Sakura who works ridiculous hours and skips lunch and shows up late to a party without brushing her hair. This is the Haruno Sakura he has always known, but this is also the Haruno Sakura he has only just met. He isn't sure what's coming over him, where this wave of attraction is coming from exactly, but as he shifts his chair a little closer to hers and smiles down at her flushed cheeks, he finds he's actually excited to find out.
"Yeah, well, look who's talking."
A/N: Don't freak out. This isn't a Sakura/Shikamaru story, but the Shika-stuff is indeed important! You'll be finding out bits and pieces of Sakura's situation via interlude chapters, so you'll have to just bear with me (; Please don't be angsty over the lack of Itachi, because ANBU-san will be back next time in all his scrumptious glory, I promise!
Please review! This story gets incredible traffic and so many lovely subscribers, but alas, no one ever reviews! Womp womp womp angst angst angst.