She was starting to feel homesick . She was tired of sunshine. Every. Single. Day. She supposed it was okay for people like Misa, eternally cheerful, tanned to perfection, but Sakura was not one of those people. She was pasty, and she still burned, and she wasn't cheerful every freaking minute of the day, and she just wanted it to goddamn rain.

"Are you alright?" Misa asked.

Sakura nodded absently. "Oh yes, I'm fine. Just a little grumpy today. PMS."

Misa nodded knowingly. As if PMS could ever conquer her cheerfulness. "Being female's a bitch sometimes." She commiserated.

Aki leaned over and smacked Misa on the shoulder to shut her up. Misa turned and frowned at her cousin, and then concentrated on Gaara again.

At the moment they were all attending a press conference. Sakura and Misa were sitting in the second row, along with the members of the medical committee, and behind them Setsuna. Aki was seated in the front row with Temari and Kankuro, and all those other important political people of Suna.

Sakura didn't really care. Of course, she was committing everything to memory, sure she would have to write a report of her own to send back to Konoha (Tsunade didn't really trust reporters, and with good reason. You should never trust anyone who tells stories for a living. In fact, never trust anyone at all. Stories are too flexible, too easy to manipulate) but that didn't mean she was really interested in what Gaara was saying. Mostly she was just listening to the sound of his voice. Since that night he had taken her out into the desert to see a flower bloom she hadn't seen much of Gaara. He had been locked up with his advisors and other political personages, working on this new proposal, something about water distribution. She hadn't really talked to him in days; she really wanted to touch him.

Maybe that was what had her so grumpy.

She noted that Gaara wasn't a great speaker. He had a great voice and all, but he wasn't exactly inspirational, not in his speeches. He was too straight forward to do that. She tried to imagine him giving an inspirational speech, full of rhetoric and anecdotes and metaphor, but it was very hard. He kept giving up halfway through a beautiful sentence and explaining his thoughts very plainly.

Sakura smiled. Well, at least in her thoughts she could talk to him, and cheer herself up.