Possibly the longest thing I've written in ages. Might have awkward word usage. And not for just any effect either. It just... happened.
Edited on August 30, 2007. Thanks to DancingDragonBlaze for pointing out the gender mishap on the bottom part.
"See here, you're unable to spot the obvious. You should've just made this," a finger pointed at a number on a sheet of paper, "the value of x. You could've avoided other nuisances if you did that earlier. I'll write another equation. Make sure that you answer it correctly this time."
Naruto had often wondered how he'd managed to get himself into a tutoring session with the slave driver from hell, also known as the student council president or dictator of the student body.
So maybe it wasn't such a bad thing getting conned – and by his trusted Iruka-sensei, too! – into having tutoring sessions with that person since his grades were getting higher, but still! Uchiha-senpai was someone nobody did not want to be their tutor lest they had masochistic tendencies.
Uchiha-senpai was not one for corporal punishment. No, she was the sort who'd make people mentally writhe in pain and anguish – Naruto felt very academically enhanced nowadays; back then, he wouldn't have known what anguish meant – and wish that they'd never come across her in a bad way.
"Uzumaki-san, are you alright?" Uchiha-senpai asked.
Naruto quickly nodded. She hummed, obviously pleased.
"Here's your new problem," she said. "Answer it."
Naruto snatched his pencil, his hand slightly quivering. His brows knotted and he concentrated solely on the problem. If he got it wrong again... he didn't know what he'd do.
There was just something about the way Uchiha-senpai spoke and the way she chose her words. Something menacing and commanding.
He set off to work, hoping that he got the new problem right.
Sasuke propped her chin on her arm that had the elbow resting on the table. She scrutinized her charge. She had been doing so for quite a while now. Looking and examining Naruto, that was.
The boy hardly looked as if he was in high school. He looked... two years younger than his supposed age. He had unruly, sunny blond hair and tanned skin. He had a boyish face. His jaws weren't that firm yet and his shoulders weren't at all that broad. Upon each of his cheeks were, oddly enough, three whisker-like scars. And then there was his most noticeable feature. His bright blue eyes that really did show what he was feeling and perhaps even a smidgen of what he was thinking.
He was, indeed, rather cute.
Sasuke caught her smile and crushed it before it even appeared on her face. Naruto hadn't even noticed a single thing.
Sasuke liked tutoring the boy. That would be saying a lot because she didn't like – though it wasn't as if she hated a lot of things either – a lot of things.
Naruto had managed to wiggle himself inside her life which was rather odd since most of the people that she considered were a part of her life were very intimidating people, some much more than her.
They continued on like that for a while. Sasuke tutored and Naruto got good grades. She would watch him as he worked. Then later on, there was a change.
Sasuke wasn't needed as Naruto's tutor anymore. He constantly got high grades and Iruka-sensei had deemed it fit to relieve her of such a troublesome person. All of a sudden, the two of them were miles apart again. It was almost as if nothing had ever conspired between the two of them. As if she hadn't spent three hours in his house, teaching him and somewhat terrifying him. As if he had never gotten closer to her than a meter.
He simply just wasn't enough of a someone and she was what everyone wanted to be. Of course they wouldn't see each other in such close proximity as they did then. Of course those tutoring sessions weren't supposed to mean anything.
Of course, Sasuke wasn't supposed to feel empty inside.
Naruto blinked. Sasuke just stared.
Naruto grinned.
"Hey there, senpai," he cheerfully said. "Been a while, huh?"
After more than five months of not really seeing each other, the two of them had met in the oddest of places. In the small hall where the bathrooms were.
"It's good to see you, too, Uzumaki-san," Sasuke said.
And as usual, Naruto noted with a slight shudder, Uchiha-senpai was just as intimidating as ever.
She gave him a curt nod before she stepped inside the female bathroom – Naruto had thought that perhaps she'd go to the male.
When she looked at the mirror, she was a bit shocked to see that a minute smile had managed to crawl into her face and make a home on her lips. She shut her eyes tightly, opened them again, and then went to a cubicle. This had been a most unforeseeable event. This was not something that should happen. Not at all.
Not when graduation was just a month away.
Naruto loudly slurped his soda through the plastic straw. He was currently in a fast food joint with none other than the famous Uchiha-senpai.
Uchiha-senpai who looked rather out of place and was garnering a lot of attention with her regal airs and her elegantly simple – yet obviously expensive – clothes.
This had all started the day before, Friday. It was lunchtime when Uchiha-senpai had approached him and his band of friends as they were eating lunch and asked him whether he could go out with her. Casually, of course. For old time's sake, she had said. She had also said that all expenses would be payed by her. Naruto most certainly wasn't the type of person who wouldn't refuse such an offer so he shamelessly accepted.
Uchiha-senpai had both of her elbows on the table. Her face was placed in the middle of her linked fingers. She didn't at all understand why she'd asked him to go out with her in the first place. She doubted that he even thought that, well...
Sasuke was a girl, too.
And Naruto... Naruto was a boy.
Naruto was also making this very hard for her.
She then formed a promise to herself. She would do it today.
She raised her head and sat up straight. She put her hands on the table, one on top of the other. She looked very much formal. And Naruto actually noticed this. That was shown when he stopped sipping his soda and looked at her with an eyebrow raised and with a question mark forming on his face.
"What's up, senpai?" he asked. "Why'd you even, you know, invite me out to go do stuff?"
"Uzumaki-san – Naruto-kun, I..." Sasuke started, the smallest bit of hesitancy in her voice.
Then her lips formed a thin, straight line.
Naruto, that idiot, hadn't even noticed that she'd called him by his first name. Just why? Why?! He had noticed when she'd suddenly gotten serious, so why hadn't he noticed that next little act – of course, Sasuke was very much aware that what she was pertaining to wasn't an act, but, rather, it was a word – that she'd done.
"This is unfair," she said, "most unfair. It isn't... it isn't the girl that's supposed to be chasing the guy. It's supposed to be the other way around."
Naruto blinked before recognition slapped him in the face.
"Wait, senpai, do you actually think that I know how to snag other guys?" he asked incredulously. "I'm not a girl."
Sasuke refused to cave into the urge to bang her head on the table as it wasn't just Uchiha-like. She also refused to reverting to barbaric ways such as simply shouting "You arse, I think that I've managed to fall for you!" Being barbaric was also something that wasn't Uchiha-like. And she was supposed to be nothing but an Uchiha. She would stand by her family's implied rules and regulations and norms.
Then again, Naruto was not someone any girl from their family, much less the daughter of the head of the family, was supposed to want to marry in the nearby future.
But Sasuke would think more of that after finishing this ordeal of hers. She just had to do it today. Otherwise, she wouldn't know when else she'd have a chance to tell him.
"I do not think at all that you have any experience in love–" she started.
"Why ask me?" Naruto said, effectively interrupting her. "I mean, you already knew that I'd be no help and all."
She shot him an annoyed glare.
"I was getting there," she said.
Naruto scratched the back of his head sheepishly. An exasperated sigh reverberated in Sasuke's head. She had fallen in love with a total moron and she didn't know if she was stupider than him for that to happen to her.
"As I was saying, I don't believe that you do know anything when it comes to love or confessing. But the thing is, I'm not asking you for any help. You see," this was the point of no return and if Naruto interrupted her again, she would make him wish that he'd never met her, "I... as odd as it sounds, Naruto-kun, it seems as if I've managed to somewhat come to... somewhat come to like you. A lot. So much so that I'm afraid that it isn't at all proper to merely label it as like."
That was possibly the longest and most awkward thing Sasuke ever had to say to anyone who wasn't a part of her family. She just hoped that Naruto had understood it well.
Naruto blinked before his eyes widened. If he had drunk any juice beforehand, it would've been dribbling through the sides of his mouth. He then looked at Sasuke like he had just heard her say that she was actually an alien that was going to abduct him – must've been the influence of all those alien movies he watched last night with Kiba and the others.
"Wait, wait," he said, "did you just... did you just tell me that you loved me?"
It was that time and moment that Sasuke damned the Uchiha Way of Living. She buried her head in her hands in embarrassment and frustration. Naruto really didn't need to make this more awkward than it already was. He was such an ass. A fine ass, but still!
Naruto, on the other hand, had become alarmed, thinking that Sasuke was crying or something like that.
"Hey, hey, senpai! I didn't – oh, you know – I wasn't rejecting you or anything! I was just surprised, yeah, that you'd come to, yanno, feel that way towards me," he exclaimed. "Look, anyone else would be surprised because you're so pretty and all – hell, you're not even wearing make-up right now, right? – and this just seems so unreal. I'd be more than happy to give you a chance and everything!"
He really was quite the awkward gentleman, but a gentleman at the very least.
Sasuke blinked a bit before she raised her head from her hands, showing Naruto that, no, she hadn't been crying or even at the brink of crying.
But Naruto had learned in the days that she had tutored him that he was much better off being careful and paranoid when it came to dealing with her and her constant silently PMSing self.
"You–" she started to say.
"I don't love senpai as much as she loves me, but I'll... I'll give senpai a try," Naruto said with all the seriousness that he could utter, "because I like her."
Sasuke turned away to look at the shop's window, barely concealing a small smile that had appeared on her face.
"Thank you, Naruto-kun," she softly said.
Naruto beamed at her before he delved into his food again. The act, when Sasuke looked at him again, had utterly repulsed her, but, well, repulsion lost to love.
"You're still paying for this, right, Sasuke-senpai?" Naruto asked as he chewed on his hamburger.
Sasuke had a forced smile on her face. Her fists clenched and unclenched. Naruto didn't know whether or not having some sort of relationship with his revered upperclassman was a good thing or not.
"I thought you loved me!" he shouted a few minutes later.
Soon enough, school came around on Monday. Things were certainly interesting.
"Sai-san," Sasuke greeted.
"Sasuke-san," Sai, another senior and Sasuke's fellow classmate, greeted back.
Naruto, whose hand was in Sasuke's, winced as she squeezed it.
"Good morning to you, too, Naruto-kun," Sai said with a smile as he turned to Naruto.
"Good morning, Sai-senpai," Naruto said, trying his very best not to scream with the pain.
"I do believe that you're hurting him, Sasuke-san."
Sasuke, with a firm line – so much of a line that it seemed as if she had no lips at all – replacing her lips, answered, "Don't bother with what's mine, Sai-san. I saw you looking."
"You know, Sasuke-san, in two years' time, you'd be considered a pedophile."
"In four years' time, Sai-san, he'd be legal."
Naruto didn't even know what the two were talking about, but he just wished that they'd finish it since whatever they were talking about was making Sasuke insanely angry. An angry Sasuke was not someone who was nice to get along with. And since he was stuck as her boyfriend for the time being, he'd much not rather have an angry Sasuke on his hands.
Naruto had often wondered how he'd managed to get himself into a relationship with someone like Uchiha Sasuke. With someone older than him by two years.
Conned into being into a relationship, really. But he'd managed to figure out that all the good things in life seemed to result from people conning him into getting into or doing them.
"Really, Sasuke-san, how despicable of you," Sai said, his smile looking more fake and forced by the minute.
"I could say the same about you, Sai-san," Sasuke said, her eyebrow twitching.
Naruto sighed and tried to get his hand out of Sasuke's grasp.
I do hope that this has managed to entertain. Thank you to all who've read through this.
Comments, as always, would be much appreciated.
I'm celebrating three days of canceled classes.