do your worst and your best.

ye be warned: swearing.

chapter one.

konan.

It's the second Monday we've had to spend in class this school year, and I'm still not into the groove of things. My summer was slow and sleepy, and I'm starting to regret that I signed up for Human Biology, Pre-Calc, Practical Law, and a slew of other classes where you have to think instead of just stare blankly at the board.

Then again, it seems like pretty much everyone else in the room is just staring blankly at the board right now, so I don't really feel too bad about it. Deidara, Pein, Hidan, Itachi and I are all in Human Bio, our last class of the day, and Itachi's the only one of us who's bothered to open his notes up. There are a few sophomores – some of the more diligent-looking boys and a couple girls who don't look like much fun – who are taking notes too, but that could just be because this is the first year sophomores have been allowed to take this class. Maybe they think they have to prove themselves, or something.

Well, I notice as I glance a few seats down from me that Hidan and Deidara have a notebook between them, and I'm sure they look diligent from the front of the room – they're each marking things down in the book almost constantly and Deidara has an intense look of concentration on his face – but the truth is that they're playing Dots and drawing obscene pictures of other students. I'm not sure if the teacher, Mr. Morino, has noticed or not, but if he has, he's ignoring them for the time being.

I'm trying to pay attention – I don't really have anyone good to talk to me, because I'm sitting between Itachi and some dark-haired sophomore whose name I haven't learned yet – but it's not that easy to get yourself interested in the function of the lac operon, especially when you have twenty minutes until school ends and Hidan and Deidara's whispers are getting louder and louder.

I think they're drawing the sophomore beside me now; they keep looking in our direction and snickering. Her face is getting redder and redder, and her nose is getting closer and closer to the page she's taking notes on. I kind of feel bad for her – and I'm not sure what their drawing entails; I mean, she's pretty enough, with long dark hair and light eyes. They usually make fun of the less pretty girls.

Then again, they could be drawing pictures of me. If so, I know the pictures are damned obscene. I've seen some of the notebook pages they've dedicated to me; I think they just do it to piss me off. I'm told I make lovely scenes when I'm in the right mood, and they're both drama-whores.

Drama-whores who I've been friends with since second grade, mind you.

I doodle a quick cat on the back of my notebook and think about actually writing something useful down, but before I can get around to it, a piece of paper rolls right under my hand. A quick glance up shows me that Pein's the one who threw it – he's sitting across the table from me and looking way too smug. Not getting caught passing notes isn't really something to have that kind of canary-eating grin over. Maybe the note has something good inside?

I make a face at him and uncrumple the paper, squinting to figure out what it says. Pein's handwriting is atrocious, and I've never gotten the hang of deciphering it, but I'm pretty sure he's written:

Are u going home or 2 town w us?

Well, no need to be smug about that either. I don't know what his deal is.

I'm about to scratch down my own answer – going to town. I don't have anything to do at home. – when Mr. Morino finally barks at someone. "Give me that paper!"

Shit. Sounds like he's barking at me.

I glance up at him, positive I look like a puppy that's just been kicked – I am a good kid, dammit, and I don't need a detention in the second week of school! – but he's not looking at me. He's looking…past me?

Oh. Deidara and Hidan. Neither of them looks particularly guilty; they're pretty used to teachers stopping class purely to call them out. At least, Deidara has his blue-eyed-blonde-innocent face on. Hidan just looks…tired. Huh. Maybe it's a new strategy for warding off detentions.

If they're lucky, they'll get out of this one.

"We don't have a paper, Morino," Deidara points out, tapping the notebook cover they were playing Dots on. "Sorry. Konan's got one, though. Talk to her!"

He sticks his tongue out at me, and I would do the same to him, but Mr. Morino's eyes swivel towards me just for a second.

I do a lame little hand-covering-oh-what-I-have-nothing-here-sir move and pillow my chin on my hand, trying to mimic Deidara's innocent look. I'm not very good at it, so it's my good luck that Mr. Morino basically ignores me.

"I don't care about Konan's paper; she's probably taking notes, like the rest of the class –"

False. Very false. I can see some of the annoying sophomores across the room, a pink-haired one and a couple of blondes, sniggering at the suggestion that they might be taking notes. Itachi's brother is sitting beside them; he mutters something to them and they shut up pretty quick.

" – instead of distracting everyone around them. Come on. Hand over the notebook." Mr. Morino doesn't move from his spot in front of the chalkboard, just holds out his hand and waits for one of them to come up and give up their game. For some of the other teachers, this probably wouldn't work, but Morino is huge and thoroughly fucking terrifying when he works himself up well enough. I mean, he's got the build of a football player and some seriously nasty scars on his head – I heard someone say that he was attacked by a fucking bear when he was in college.

Somehow, I don't doubt that he's going to win this, and judging by the whispers I can catch from around the room, neither does anyone else.

I mean, if he faced a bear, he can take Hidan and Deidara. If that's even true. But whatever.

While Mr. Morino's been talking, Deidara's been furiously and completely obviously scribbling out various drawings and Hidan's been – well, completely ignoring both of them. I guess I should be proud. He could be "fucking this" and "fucking that" all over the place, and –

Ew.

He could be cussing all over the place, and I hate listening to his bitching. I mean, don't get me wrong – they're both my friends, even if Deidara tried to sell me out and Hidan's a whiny little girl, but there's only so much you can take.

Deidara finally slouches up to the front of them room and flips the cover, which he's ripped from the back of his notebook, into Mr. Morino's waiting hand. Morino takes it with a smug little teacher-smirk and glances at it briefly before tossing it onto his desk.

Deidara slouches back to his seat, and I pick up my pencil, ready after that little break to take some notes. There's only ten minutes of class left, anyway. I guess I should get an okay start to the year.

Mr. Morino turns back to the board once everyone's settled down and quiet again, and picks up his chalk. Then, with full-on teacher smirk, he turns back around and nods at Hidan and Deidara.

"Whichever one of you is playing with the red pen has a terrible strategy. Don't close up all of the outer lines first. Black pen was going to grind you into the dust."

Then, he puts his chalk on the board, ignores the stifled laughter that's going around the room, and starts scrawling notes on the lac operon across the board again. I toss Pein's note back at him, don't bother to check his reaction, and do my best to copy down the basics of the operon in the eight minutes we have left.

xxx

Twenty minutes later, I'm leaning against the hood of Kakuzu's car, waiting in the goddamned humidity for him to show up already. I hate waiting, almost as much as Sasori does – especially when Kakuzu doesn't usually do this to me unless he has a meeting with a teacher after school to grade-grub.

We only live about ten minutes apart, and I'm on his way, so he usually gives me a ride to and from school. It wasn't that easy convincing him, but once I pointed out that I'd be saving money by carpooling – and that I'd give him ten bucks a week for driving me to and from school – he warmed up to the idea.

Okay, so it was mostly – entirely – the ten bucks a week.

Of course, today, we're not going straight home. We're all going to one of the parks about twenty miles outside of town – all ten of us - mostly to just mess around and hang on to the last shreds of summer before the crushing reality of junior year sets in for about half of us, and the torment of senioritis sets in for the rest.

Most of the other student-driven cars are gone, and with them, most of the students. Deidara, Hidan, Kisame, Zetsu, and Tobi all piled into a car about ten minutes ago and went screeching out of the lot on ancient tires; they've been carpooling in Deidara's car, because it's the prettiest. It's also the shittiest, when you get down to mechanics. I don't care if Deidara's painted all over it and it looks good as new. That thing is a deathtrap, especially with all five of them in it and Deidara behind the wheel.

Kakuzu finally enters my line of sight, jogging down the stairs in front of the school with something tinfoil balanced on his hand.

I yell in his direction before he even makes it to the foot of the stairs, my voice carrying well across the flat parking lot and bus lane. "Took you long enough!"

"Why, no, you're not getting a bite of my pizza!" He yells back, crossing the parking lot to stand beside me and not bothering to lower his voice. I don't think he misheard me. I think he's just dodging me. "Would you get in the car already? Or would you like to loiter here for another hour or so?"

Let me tell you one thing about Kakuzu: he looks creepy, with scars all over his face and arms, and he acts like a total asshole with his constant sarcasm and money-whoring, but he's not such a bad guy. Once you get past all of his bad qualities and start seeing that he's, you know, a good friend. Loyal and honest and whatnot.

Most of my friends are like that, unfortunately – at least, the whole seeing-past-the-asshole-exterior part. Maybe it's telling that these are the only people who want to spend time with me.

But I love them anyway. It's mandatory, when you've been friends for as long as we all have.

Anyway, it's not like Kakuzu got his scars in a gang fight or self-mutilation frenzy or anything like that, so it's not really a mark of how tough or fucked up or anything he is – nothing like the rumors that started to flit around the school when he moved here about five years ago. It was a car crash, and he was damned lucky to have survived it. I don't know why he didn't do some kind of facial reconstruction, to hide those scars, and I've never asked. There's certain territory you don't touch on, and it took him a long time to explain the whole crash thing to us in the first place.

I jerk open the passenger door and try to snatch the pizza out of his hand while he crosses over to the driver's side, but no dice. The boy's got some damn good reflexes. We both drop our backpacks into the back seat and he jerks the car into drive, scowling at his dashboard.

"Remind me to get the damn drive shaft checked out."

This, I must admit, makes me panic just a little. You would think he would be the one more worried about car malfunction.

Surprise! He's not. He most certainly is not. I'm not entirely trusting of other drivers. It's something I'm working on.

"What do you mean, get it checked out? If there's something wrong, we can just call Itachi, he's a good driver and he can take us to the park – " I start patting the dashboard, like that's going to help anything, and talking just a little bit too fast. Kakuzu gives me one of those you're-an-idiot looks and slaps the dashboard himself.

The radio booms into life. Apparently, that's broken as well.

He speaks over one of Nickelback's older songs. "It's not broken or anything. It just doesn't always catch in the right spots. Getting this thing parked right is a bitch. Anyway. Itachi's probably already there; there's absolutely no reason for him to drive all the way back here when we've got a working car. And I just asked you to remind me because you're good about remembering things like that."

Kakuzu takes the drive out of the parking lot at a speed that's only slightly less dangerous than that of the other boys', and we're on our way to the arboretum.

For anyone who read crocfarm, hey thar. ;)

For anyone who doesn't know what crocfarm is, don't worry. Doesn't matter so much. Hey thar. ;)

Alright, I'm sorry. The first chapter was boring and nearly-pointless setting-things-up. As a reward for reading the setup, you got foreshadowing and hints that ALL IS NOT WELL IN CERTAIN WORLDS. Also, a very tiny pair of possible pairing hints.

And Ibiki fought a BEAR, guys. And then became a HUMAN BIOLOGY TEACHER. OBVIOUSLY, THESE ARE TRUEFAX. 3 Props to anyone who can tell me how the lac operon works. ;)

I still want a beta, and I'm not too picky. ;)

Feel free to bitch, whine, constructively criticize, whatever about the pacing, characters, plot, whatever.

- conversation hearts;;

(Oh, and for anyone who's read anything else I've written – look! Over two thousand words in and Deidara has not died, been kidnapped, been maimed, or otherwise physically abused! I also did not mention Ino by name! Progress!)

(edit: and dammit, lemme know when it looks like ff's fuckin' up my formatting. FF THIS IS NOT FUNNY I PUT THOSE RULERS AND SPACES THERE FOR A REASON.)