Partridge in a Pear Tree

~*G*O*L*D*E*N*~

"What the hell is this?" Sasuke growled.

Sasuke had walked towards her apartment after a long day at the library studying for finals only to find a raw bird skewered on a stick lying in front of her door.

She stepped cautiously towards the bizarre object and spotted an envelope lying under it. She nudged the dead bird off the envelope careful not to get anything gross on her hand. On the front of the envelope, the words "to my true love" were written in sloppy cursive.

"Is this a joke?" she mumbled. Her eye was beginning to twitch in frustration.

With a growl, she flipped the envelope over and pulled out a small card that was inside.

On the first day of Christmas,

My true love gave to me

A Partridge in a Pear Tree

Okay, now her eye was twitching full force. This was crazy. Who would do something like this? Sasuke knew she was not the most likeable person on campus, but she never thought she had made any enemies who hated her enough to pull a stunt like this.

"Forget it," she yelled. She threw the envelope aside and kicked the skewered bird to the side.

Whatever was going on, she would wait until the end of finals to try to figure it out. There was no time in her crazy schedule to track down some crazy psycho. She barely had the energy to throw her bags down, take off her shoes, and crash on her bed.

Sasuke had been so tired that she did not remember what had happened when she woke up the next morning. When her alarm went off, bright and early, she hit it off the nightstand.

Finals suck.

With one last groan, Sasuke pulled herself out of bed. What day is today? A quick look at her calendar revealed that it was Tuesday. If today was Tuesday, that meant she had an English final in the afternoon.

Coffee. The fist thing she needed to do was get some coffee. The one good thing about sleeping in your clothes was that you could head down to the coffee shop only having to run a comb through your hair and throw on some shoes.

When she opened her apartment door, she shuffled into the hallway without noticing anything. In less than 5 minutes, she arrived at the small café across the street from her apartment building.

"Morning, Sasuke," the barista greeted when she came through the front door.

Sasuke had been coming to this café since the first day she moved into this apartment three years ago at the beginning of her freshman year. It was a small shop, but it definitely had a comfortable charm to it. Over the years, she had gotten to know the handful of workers who ran the place.

"Morning," she replied with a quiet, groggy voice.

The barista chuckled. "I take it you need a strong shot of caffeine," he said playfully. "Should I put it in coffee or should I just inject it straight into your bloodstream?"

"Hn," she grumbled intelligently. "Coffee."

"Alright. Alright. I'll get you some nice, strong coffee," he chuckled as he walked over to the coffee machines on the other side of the café.

The two or three minutes it took for him to make the coffee felt like forever to Sasuke. The idea of injecting caffeine into her system was starting not to sound that bad.

"Here you go," he said, holding a steaming cup of something (Sasuke did not care what it was at the moment). "One Uzumaki special."

"Thanks, Naruto," she mumbled, practically ripping his arm off to get the coffee.

"MMMmmmmm," she moaned as she took a sip of the most amazing thing in the world, at least at that moment.

Naruto sat down at the table with Sasuke and waited for her to get a jolt of caffeine before he would speak again. He knew enough about Sasuke to know she would not be conscious of the outside world until she got some coffee into her system.

There was no one else in the shop right now because most of the clients of this café were business workers, who would already be at work by this late in the morning, so Naruto was free to sit and chat with Sasuke for a while.

Despite the proximity of Sasuke's apartment to campus, not a lot of students lived there because they were pretty expensive apartments, too expensive for most "starving students."

But, Sasuke was far from poor. Her parents had been wealthy international business managers. They had died when Sasuke was in elementary school and had left her alone with her older brother. Thankfully, her brother was old enough to take of custody of her and the company and smart enough to keep the business profitable and thus able to provide well for Sasuke.

Sasuke was now at one of the best universities in the country and arguably one of the best students at the school. She was studying business in order to help her brother run the company in the future.

Naruto had learned a lot about Sasuke over the years. It had taken some time, but eventually he had gotten her to open up to him and start telling him about her past.

Finally, Sasuke sat up straighter in her chair, which was the sign that she was awake enough to carry on a conversation.

"So," Naruto started, "how was your day yesterday? Anything interesting happen?"

"No," she answered with a much clearer voice. "I was just studying at the library all day."

"You have one final today, two tomorrow, and one on Friday?" he asked, trying to remember what she had told him yesterday when he had asked.

"Not quite," she said after taking another sip of her coffee. "I have one today, none tomorrow, two on Thursday, and one on Friday."

"Eh, I was close," he whined.

Sasuke chuckled lightly. "Not close enough."

"You're such a bastard sometimes," he announced and punched her playfully in the shoulder.

"Hey, it's not my fault you are not smart enough to remember something as simple as the date of four things," Sasuke shot back.

When they first met, insults like these would have been malicious and serious, but now they had turned their banter into a kind of game between them.

Naruto always teased Sasuke about being an antisocial nerd, while Sasuke would point out Naruto's idiocy. However, they both knew their insults were not true. Well, at least now they did.

Naruto knew that Sasuke was just antisocial because a lot of people had left her as she was growing up because of both death and abandonment. She was always afraid that anyone she let close would just leave and so she made no effort to connect with anyone. However, Naruto's persistence had made it past her barriers and inside he found a very sweet and very broken little girl, who desperately needed and, though she would never admit it, even wanted a friend.

On the other hand, Sasuke knew that Naruto was not truly stupid. Naruto just did not have the resources to make it through to the end of high school, let alone college. He was an orphan and despite his determination and cheerfulness, he just did not have the money to continue with his education. However, he had worked hard to get a find job and finally found one here at the café. Now, he was the co-owner.

"Hey, uh…" Naruto trailed off and rubbed the back of his head nervously. "Did … Are you sure that nothing special happened yesterday?"

"No," Sasuke said skeptically. Naruto was acting weird, even for him. "Why?"

"Eh hehe, well, I uh was just … I mean it is … strange that nothing happened at all," Naruto rambled awkwardly.

Sasuke frowned at him. What is he up to? She went over yesterday in her head to try and remember if anything weird had happened.

Suddenly, she gasped.

"What? What?" Naruto asked anxiously.

"Ugh," she groaned and slammed her head onto the table. "I must have been blocking it out of my memory."

"WHAT?" Naruto yelled.

Sasuke looked at him strangely. "Some psycho left a dead chicken on a stick in front of my door."

"It wasn't a chicken!" Naruto shouted, but quickly covered his mouth.

"What did you say," Sasuke growled.

"Eh heh heh, well, I would just think that a chicken would be too … boney to … stick on a stick and …. Uh …" Naruto stopped talking when he realized that Sasuke was not buying his excuse at all and was now glaring heatidly at him.

"Naruto," she said dangerously sweetly. "Were you the one who did that?"

Naruto started sweating. This was not good. He started mumbling incoherently. It was very difficult to find something to say that would not end up badly for him

"I can't believe you would pull a prank like that! Especially right now! You know how important finals are to my future! How could you do something so stupid!" Sasuke was fuming. She did not have the time to deal with this.

Before Naruto could say anything, Sasuke had stormed out of the café.

"It was not supposed to be stupid," Naruto whispered to the empty room. "It was supposed to be romantic."

~*A*N*G*E*L*~