First Days of School

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Author's Note: My poor friend…he can't cut his own hair for anything (especially with a razor), so we had to do it for him. It was a great use of time 2nd period.

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It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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As soon as Naruto and Sasuke sat down in their chairs in Guitar, they immediately noticed something different about the person at the end of the row. Naruto tilted his head to the side and he arched his eyebrows.

"…Gaara?"

The sea green eyes looked over at him as though expecting the question.

"What happened to your hair?"

"My sister decided I needed a haircut. She forgot to take into account her skills, or lack thereof, of hair cutting skills."

He wasn't lying. His brilliantly red hair hadn't been all that long, just long enough to brush his eyes of it fell forward and Gaara could tame his hair easily enough. But Naruto knew Gaara's sister, Temari and she wasn't one he would trust for this sort of thing. If he ever needed a girl at his back for a fight, then he'd pick Temari, but for feminine things like this….no. Now the crimson locks were shaggy and uneven, brushing his ears.

Slowly, so Gaara could pull away if he wanted to, Naruto reached for the shaggy hair. Gaara didn't move and Naruto tried to run his fingers through the soft hair, finding he couldn't.

"Hold on." Naruto said, crossing the room to where a girl was practicing the music that they were all supposed to know for the concert next week. "Ne, Hinata, you wouldn't happen to have a comb and some hairspray on you, would you?"

Pale eyes looked up at him, startled and the pale cheeks dusted themselves over with a pink flush. "Um…no hairspray, but I h-have a comb. I-in my bookbag." Hinata set the guitar down, and dug through her white bookbag with purple flowers sewn into it. She pulled out a plain navy blue comb.

As Naruto took the comb, he smiled brightly. "Thanks, Hinata. You're amazing!"

He didn't notice her blush deepening as he walked towards Iruka. The teacher looked at the blonde with an expectant look. "What is it, Naruto?"

"Ne, you wouldn't happen to have some scissors that I can borrow? And can I get a pass for three to the bathroom?"

"What's happened?" Iruka handed him some scissors off of his desk and brought out the pad of pink pads and began filling it out.

"We need to give Gaara a haircut."

Iruka glances at the redhead and looks back at Naruto. "And you want me to trust you to make it better?"
"Hey! I can cut hair!" Naruto mumbled his next words. "Sasuke's helping too."

A smile tugged at Iruka's lips. "Is he? Then I guess I can't say no. Just don't make it worse, alright?" Iruka stumbled a bit as Naruto hugged him, quick and tight.

Naruto returned to his boyfriend and Gaara. "C'mon."

They both stood automatically, but Sasuke asked, "Where're we going?"

"Bathroom." Naruto held up the scissors and the comb. "We're gonna be hair stylists for a period."

Gaara's face didn't change, but there was a look in his eyes that told Naruto that he was wondering whether he should trust the blonde or not. Apparently he decided he could because Gaara followed him to the bathroom, Sasuke sighing and copying the motion.

The Arts building was perhaps the oddest building in the entire school. Here, there were no separate classes, no set curriculums. If you needed to learn something, you went to the classroom next door and learned it from either the teacher or from one of the other students. The hallways were free game, always in use for practice, for competitions and for just sitting and working on whatever you needed to work on. Six rooms were dedicated to practice, three with pianos already inside. The doors were heavier and the glass in them was soundproof. Woodshop was jus beside the Drama room, so that the students wouldn't have to carry any props across the building. They'd tried that once. They never tried it again. The bathrooms were the cleanest in the school, something that all of the students who had the building loved.

Naruto took a stool from the band room and brought it with them into the bathroom. Gently, he pushed Gaara to sit on it.

"Your sister can't cut hair for anything." He told the redhead, tugging at the tangles with the comb.

"I'm well aware."

Sasuke leaned back against the sinks, arms crossed across his stomach. "So what exactly are you planning to do with his hair, Naruto?"
Naruto paused in his untangling for a moment before resuming and saying, "I hadn't thought about it."

"Nice one, dobe."

"Hey, it can't turn out worse than this." Naruto winced at his own words. "Sorry, Gaara."

"No, you're right. It's the last time I let Temari cut my hair."

"Did she even use scissors?"

"No, a razor."

Naruto groaned. "Why did she use a razor of all things?"

Gaara shrugged and Naruto sighed and stepped back to consider the red hair. He'd never had much to do with hairstylists. He hadn't had his hair cut by someone else since before his parents died. Since then, whenever it bothered him, he'd cut it messily short. He could do that to Gaara, but the soft, crimson locks between his fingers wouldn't look good messy with the pale elegance of his face. It was a face similar to Sasuke's and the blue eyes looked directly at the onyx ones.'

"Dobe, you're insane." Sasuke told him flatly, reading his intentions on the whiskered face.

"Come on, we don't have a choice."

"What're you guys doing?" The voice was new and female.

All three heads turned to see Tenten leaning on the doorframe with eyebrows raised. Her baggy cargo pants hung low on her hips and her T-shirt was a few sizes too big.

"Gaara needs a haircut." Naruto explained.

Tenten walked closer to take a look. "That's what Temari was talking about in first period." She fingered the uneven ends. "Yeah, Gaara, you do need a haircut."

Naruto offered her the scissors. "Can you help?"

"I might be able to, but no promises. It'll definitely come out better than Temari's handiwork for sure."

She took Gaara's hair and carefully cut, never measuring like Naruto remembered the hair stylists doing. Naruto has to praise Tenten for her steady woodshop hands, because she handles the scissors with an ease that spoke of long hours of detailed woodwork with Asuma-sensei.

Nearing the end of the period, Tenten steps back and combs out the hair one last time. Naruto and Sasuke had to approve of the end result. Gaara's hair was much shorter and a little messy, but there was something about it that was purely Gaara that made it work.

Gaara ran a hand through the short red locks and he nodded his approval. "Temari's going to kill you." He warned her.

"Probably." Tenten agreed and looked down at the bathroom floor that was littered with short pieces of red hair. "We need to clean all this up now. And find a way to explain it to the other teachers" The teachers in the Art building wouldn't find it too out of the ordinary. Stranger things had happened in the Drama room where the stage and its seats were full of paper ball wars and tag.

All four of them looked at the hair with the long-suffering look of laziness and just not feeling like it. With a collective sigh, they all bent to begin to clean up.

Nearly ten minutes later, the floor was clean when Iruka and Asuma came to check on them. You couldn't trust the prankster with willing accomplices to be out of the classroom for too long. And Tenten had been supposed to deliver something to the Band teacher, an errand that wasn't supposed to take more than five minutes.

All four of them were sitting comfortably by the wall across the bathroom, discussing something. Naruto looked up and grinned. "Ne, do you think we'd be able to start a student-only hair salon in here?"