wow, updating the day after my last one... dont expect that to happen too often -- i shocked myself lol --

ok, i promised i wouldnt forget again, thankyou to all people who review, motivate me to stick with this story and convince me that i must not completely suck as a writer: Babybugichoo95, yukibozu, torakama, Merridaine, starlit.kiss7, you.broke.a.promise, Gothic Saku-chan, cutegerbilofdeath, PiratexNinja, Archerelf, angstar54, Aiyo Rei, Kotone111, soojinyeh, Queen-Cocaine and TellerOfLies, Archerelf, amy14, yukibozu, Queen-Cocaine, ScreamxforxmexBaby, .Wax.Butterflies, Icha Icha Ramen and of course dailyangel, u rock :)

im also pulling the chapter that had my survey on it, thankyou again to those who did it, its helped soooo much :)

onwards:)

Masked Happiness

Chapter 10: Strangers and Paper Planes

Ignoring the now decreasing pain in her arm, Sakura pushed the heavy door of the girl's bathroom open before hearing the deafeningly loud screech of the school bell signaling the death of her punctuality.

Breaking into a sprint Sakura hurtled up the corridor to her locker, and, in her desperate attempt to avoid being too late, she pulled out the required textbooks only realising afterwards that they were the support foundations of her tiny tower of crap that had filled her locker, and that was currently raining down around her.

Swearing loudly and ignoring the little voice in her head that, despite her annoyance, yelled in a voice not unlike Naruto's, 'Timbeeeeeeer!', she threw herself down onto the ground and scrambled to gather her possessions, knowing now that nothing would save her from the wrath of whichever teacher she had first.

As she grabbed anything she could reach and threw it back into her locker with the force of her infuriation (and massive quantities of unknown inner strength), she noticed that something was blocking the sunlight that had previously been close to blinding her as it poured in from a nearby window and, looking up from the pile, she saw a pair of feet directly in front of her.

Ignoring the immense drama that tends to follow such impressive and generally staged entrances like these, Sakura's eyes shot upwards to see who it was that was watching her. The glare from the sunlight seemed to create a halo of pure white light around the unknown person's short, choppy maroon hair, before said person wordlessly reached out a hand as a clear invitation to help Sakura up from her current residence on the not so clean floor.

Pausing for a moment as she assessed the situation, she realised that her knees were beginning to protest quite painfully at their prolonged contact with the cold, hard ground and that, from that height, this strange newcomer could probably see straight down her slightly loose top. She grasped the hand that had been offered to her and found it warm and strong as it gripped her own firmly and lifted her easily to her feet.

Realising how close she was to the person now and blushing slightly, Sakura glanced up again, able to see clearly in the absence of the blinding sunlight who it was, only to let out a small gasp as she backed away too quickly and tripped on her belongings. As she hit the ground with a thud she stared back up at the stranger's face and wondered what he would do this time, remembering with a certain amount of unease the strange happenings of their last encounter.

As she stared at him though, and he stared back, her fear began to ebb as she saw the nearly hidden mixture of disdain (that she suspected was always on his face, much like Sasuke), and curiosity spread across his features. They continued to stare at each other before he gave an almost imperceptible shrug, as if more to himself than her, and walked away.

Completely mystified at all that had just happened and the mysterious stranger's once again odd behaviour, Sakura remembered with a jolt that she was now extremely late, and resuming her muttering of swear words, she grabbed the last of her belongings and threw them back in her locker before running off… and running back to grab the forgotten textbooks now once again at the bottom of her locker and, narrowly avoiding a repeat of what had happened minutes before, she slammed her locker and ran off again.

Her worry at what her teachers reaction would be when she arrived so late to class was quelled the instant she entered the classroom and found an empty chair behind the teacher's desk. Walking around the noisy classroom, full of distracted students who were taking advantage of their teachers absence by having loud conversations and paper plane contests, Sakura eventually made it to her desk (having narrowly avoided a collision with an oncoming paper plane and having to take the long way round the room to avoid the 'runway'), and flopped, unceremoniously down into her chair with a sigh.

Closing her eyes and considering everything that had happened, not just today but also analyzing in more depth what had happened yesterday between her and the mystery man, she rocked backwards onto the two back legs of her chair, deep in thought and ignoring with surprising ease, the winner of the paper plane competition.

She heard the nearby scraping of a chair and opened her eyes to find Sasuke sitting in his seat which was pulled surprisingly close to her own. She blinked out of shock, mostly at being interrupted in the middle of her thoughts, and said blankly,

'What?'

She didn't mean it to sound rude, and in truth it came out sounding completely void of any emotion at all, if anything polite, but Sasuke couldn't hide the complete shock that leapt to his face at her words… or word.

Staring at her, dumbfounded and lost for words, it took him quite a while to rearrange his features to look a little less stunned and, after what looked like a painful shift in his facial features he managed to look politely curious instead as he asked,

'Nothing, you were just really late, what happened?'

He mentally sighed in relief that he had been able to speak as blankly as she had, because, had he not mastered that fine art of voice control it may well have ended up coming out as an over exaggerated, barked order or a stammering mess.

'Oh, I just… had stuff to do first.' Said Sakura, completely unable to come up with a better explanation and not particularly caring.

She seemed unable to recover her normal composure as she continued to look at him with that complete emotionlessness that scared him more than he let on. She really is over me then… and it's worse than I thought, she's so… emotionless… where has the bubbly, over enthusiastic, head-over-heels Sakura gone? She's completely blank… this isn't like her at all… think about it, if I had ever said that much to her, and thinking back, Sasuke couldn't remember a time when he had, she would have been jumping up and down and gibbering, but she's just… empty… how long has she been like this?!

Sasuke wracked his brains trying to think of the exact point in time when she had changed. Sakura of course had just been deep in thought which was why she seemed unfeeling… she wasn't concentrating.

She continued to sit there and look blankly at Sasuke's unfocused eyes as hers slid out of focus as well, both of them staring straight through each other and too deep in thought to notice.

Jarring them both back to reality and making them jump was Naruto's louder than loud voice as he yelled,

'I did it! I won! Believe it!' and still brandishing his winning paper plane in the air, he began a victory lap around the classroom as everyone else in the class grumbled. He only stopped when Shikamaru hit him exceptionally hard on the head with his textbook, muttering indistinctly, no doubt about how 'troublesome' he was.

Sakura and Sasuke both snapped out of their stupors and Sasuke quickly turned his chair back to his own desk as Sakura just looked down at her own, her eyes quickly falling back out of focus again. Not long after Naruto had fallen into his own chair on the other side of Sakura did the door burst open and Kakashi waltzed nonchalantly into the room, not even bothering to lift his head from his book.

'Hey' he said as he walked straight to the desk, sat down, and continued reading without another word.

Naruto, who had stood and had been on the verge of saying 'Liar!' found that he didn't need to and sat back down, at a loss as to what to do next.

Eventually Kakashi looked up from his book and with 15 minutes left in the lesson, he said,

'Sorry, I was up to a really good bit. Ok everyone, um… just continue with whatever it was you were doing.' And with that he sat back down.

The class stared at him incredulously for a moment and then resumed their previous conversations and competitions (in which Naruto, and this time, Sasuke joined in), whilst Sakura sat and continued to stare at her desk thinking about the stranger and coming up with different possibilities as to who he could be, while her arm throbbed every so often.

15 minutes later the overly loud screeching of the school bell rang through the classroom and everybody's heads, as they proceeded to their next class. Staying behind under the pretense of packing her bag, Sakura waited for everyone to leave, but Sasuke who wanted to see why, decided to do the same and took longer than usual to pack his own bag.

After a few minutes he looked up at Kakashi who was still there, watching them both with an air of complete amusement. He looked at Sasuke pointedly and said,

'Is there something you needed Sasuke?'

Unsure and slightly infuriated as to why he was being asked and Sakura wasn't, Sasuke mumbled a 'no' and left, evidently having finished packing his bag at exactly that moment. As soon as the door was shut Sakura laughed and Kakashi smiled.

After a moment, Sakura said,

'So why were you so late?' Realising her question and the amount of times she had asked him that in the past, she quickly said 'never mind, but, why didn't you get us to do any work? You didn't even give us homework.'

After a moment Kakashi said, still smiling,

'Well, I thought you might have enough on your plate at the moment, and I didn't think that the rest of the class would complain much.'

Looking around at the mess of paper planes people had left behind and already losing the weak grip she had on her distracted mind as it went back to thinking about the stranger, Sakura smiled mumbling,

'No, spose not'

ok, so thats chapter 10 :) (ok, dont ask about the paper planes, i just tried to think of what my class used to do when we had nothing else to do and that was it... :) --- what did u think?! let me know :) -- wow, double digits already... and no signs of slowing down (this may become quite a long fic... is that a good thing or a bad thing though?) -- oh, and how do you like my 'mysterious stranger'? hehe :)

thanx 4 reading:)