Chapter two, finally up. I would have had it up last week, but I was busy cursing Writers Block to a fiery painful death. Guess it worked. =3 But really, I don't understand how I could get a writer's block on chapter two… I mean, I had the idea and everything!

Shikamaru grumbled as he walked down the street with his hands in his pockets. A single day of uninterrupted peace, that's all he asked for. Not being woken up at an ungodly hour by a broom and yelling. Not having to listen to his blonde teammate whine about anything and everything. Not having to deliver countless folders and paperwork forms, a job usually left to the messenger birds. However, that wasn't an option, seeing as the birds were being rounded up after some orange clad idiot decided it'd be just great to "accidentally" let them all go.

What a lousy mission. Running back and forth all day doing a bird's job. He'd be sure to kill Naruto later. Though not being one to continuously voice his opinion about annoying things (other than calling them troublesome), Shikamaru still complained on the inside. And since he was now running around at sunrise delivering messages he didn't care about, he decided he had more than enough reason to complain.

He stopped at the gate to deliver a security briefing report to the guards. Same drill; appear, hand message, disappear, onto the next person. But as he was turning to leave, he noticed three people walk through the gate. Two boys and a girl, all unfamiliar. Well, at least, the two boys were. One wore all black with purple face paint, and was carrying what looked like a mummy on his back. The other was shorter with blood red hair and an oddly shaped gourd on his back.

The third person was a girl, blonde with her hair separated into four pigtails. She wore a light purple garment with elbow length sleeves and had a giant fan strapped to her back. He watched the girl for a minute. Hadn't he seen her somewhere before? She looked familiar… Of course, to Shikamaru, all women were kind of alike. But still, not knowing was starting to bug him.

~Temari's POV~

She recognized the boy the minute she walked through the gate. Same spiky hair, same bored stance. He seemed to be watching her as she walked by, a mildly perplexed expression on his face. He couldn't possibly recognize her after only seeing her once, years before… Could he? She mentally cursed. Way to lay low in a foreign village Temari. Great job. She thought.

It'd been three or so years since her first out-of-village mission had brought her to the Leaf. They simply had to gather information from the Leaf, during one of the "eye of the storm" moments when the Sand and the Leaf weren't at each other's throats. Though, on the last day they were in the Leaf, Temari and Kankurou decided to test the village's inhabitants. They told their sensei it was merely an extension to their mission, but really, it was for their own entertainment (if you could call it that).

Kankurou had sat for hours in a tree that day, holding down laughter as person after person approached his sister, wondering why she wouldn't move. Temari had laughed inwardly along with him. Really, could they be so ignorant? She was holding her arm up in the air, practically saying "help me up." And yet, no one did anything. Until afternoon that is. That was when some guy with earrings and a ponytail decided, "Hey, she needs to move," and pulled her up. He didn't even ask any questions, he just took her spot and ignored her.

Temari sighed. So now here she was in Konoha again for the Chunnin exams. And that boy with the odd hair was still watching her.

~Shikamaru's POV~

Finally, realization hit him, and he wanted to kick himself for wasting so much time and energy thinking about it. The girl was just a foreigner who had taken his napping spot. Nothing more important to think about. After all, he'd only seen her for a few minutes, back when he was an academy student. His eyes narrowed unconsciously. Oh how he'd hated those classes. His sensei just droned on and on about something he honestly didn't care about, and then scolded him for falling asleep. But really, who could blame him?
Getting his thoughts back on track, he walked in another direction from the group and sighed as he continued his delivery boy mission, all the while wondering why he'd bothered to remember her in the first place.