SN

Sasuke doesn’t see Neji again for a solid week and a half, which shouldn’t be extraordinary given the size of the student body at Konoha High, but still is extraordinary given the fact that Sasuke now pays attention to who he passes in the halls, and to who is in his classes. After the first week, when Neji doesn’t return to the alcove, Sasuke decides he might try eating in the cafeteria after all.

But Neji must be one of those kids who eats out every day -- his family is pretty rich -- because Sasuke never finds him. What he does find is a slowly-growing group of pests.

It starts on his second day in the cafeteria. Sasuke had counted on his trademark glare to keep unwanted visitors away -- his elementary school teachers had always said he could freeze the blood in your veins with a single look -- and for the first day, despite the overpacked and unruly crowd, Sasuke has the whole table to himself.

But on the second day, as he is halfway through his lunch, someone sits down next to him. “Hi!”

Sasuke doesn’t look up. He continues chewing, surveying the intruder from the side of his eye. All he gets is a vague orange blur, so he swallows and turns to face the figure.

It’s a boy. Not the boy -- no, this boy is something else entirely. Dressed head to toe in orange and black, blonde hair sticking up in wild spikes, and -- are those whiskers on his cheeks? Sasuke stares.

The intruder seems not to notice. He’s slurping down a cup of Instant Ramen like his life depends on it. When he notices Sasuke looking at him, he sits up and swallows. “Hi! I’m Uzumaki Naruto. Who’re you?”

Sasuke looks away. “Get lost.” He returns to eating, not looking at the blond boy. A healthy dose of rudeness is enough to fend off most intruders.

But not this one, apparently. Instead, Naruto scowls and jabs Sasuke in the ribs. “You don’t need to be mean. I came over here ‘cause you were eating alone.”

“I know.” Sasuke grits his teeth and scoots further away from Naruto and his pointy elbows. “I like it that way.”

Naruto studies him for a moment. “No, you don’t.”

Sasuke can feel his face flush with anger. “How do you know?”

“Because!” Naruto smiles, his face wide and open and sunny. “Everyone wants a friend.”

Sasuke fights down the urge to laugh in his face. “Not me.”

Naruto considers this for a moment. “Okay. I’ll be your rival, then.” He scoots over along the bench, until he’s closer to Sasuke than before.

Sasuke has nowhere else to move -- he’s at the end of the bench. “What are you doing?”

“Gotta know your enemy.” Naruto slurps up another mouthful of ramen, soup dribbling down his chin. Sasuke looks away in disgust, scanning the cafeteria for somewhere, anywhere else to sit -- but every other bench is taken. So he eats his lunch in stony silence, listening to Naruto chatter on with his mouth full about his math homework and the cute girls in his class and his asshole gym teacher who made him run three extra laps for insulting his face mask.

Sasuke can’t wait for lunch to be over. But the next day, he returns to the cafeteria, because maybe Neji will be there today, and Naruto will probably have forgotten all about him.

As soon as he sets foot on the linoleum tiling, Naruto is standing up and flailing his arms. “Sasuke! Hey, Sasuke! Over here!”

And Sasuke swears, every single head in the entire cafeteria turns in his direction. He would look like an asshole if he just turned around and left. Not that Sasuke particularly cares what anyone else in the school thinks of him, it’s just that maybe Neji is in the crowd, watching him to see what he’ll do. So Sasuke walks over to where Naruto is and sits down at the table.

“What’s up?” Naruto is grinning from ear to ear, like he didn’t just embarrass both of them in front of the rest of the school. Sasuke glares daggers at him.

“How do you know my name?”

Naruto shrugs, his grin not losing one bit of its wattage. “Sakura told me.”

“Who’s --” And then Sasuke catches sight of the pink-haired girl sitting next to Naruto. “Oh. You.” She is definitely in a few of his classes, though Sasuke’s drawing a blank as to which ones.

The girl -- Sakura -- smiles, a little shy. “Um, hi.”

Sasuke scratches the back of his neck, awkward. “Hey.” She probably doesn’t know that he uncovered the identity of the secret admirer leaving notes in his locker a few months ago. She wasn’t terribly subtle in her letters, but Sasuke doubts she expects him to know that the same person who wrote terrible, sappy love poetry to him is also the girl sitting across from him now.

Girls having crushes on him is nothing new. Sasuke remembers the first day a girl gave him chocolates in junior high, her pigtails bobbing eagerly as she blushed and shoved the shiny red package into his hands before rushing away, giggling. He had asked his brother about it that afternoon, both of them sitting at the dining room table doing their work (math homework for Sasuke, tax returns for Itachi). “Nii-san,” he’d said, “a girl gave me chocolates today.”

“Hmn.” Itachi hadn’t looked up. “I knew it would happen eventually.”

Sasuke frowned. “What do you mean?”

Itachi looked up, then, and seeing Sasuke’s frown, had smiled. “We’re the loner types, you and I,” he’d said, and Sasuke had felt proud, for a moment, to be in the same category as his brother. “Girls like that for some reason.”

“Oh.” Sasuke thought that over. “I don’t like her. She’s annoying.”

Itachi shrugged. “You don’t have to like her.”

Sasuke kicked the table leg. “What should I do when I see her next? Should I pretend I’m happy she gave me the chocolates?”

Itachi shook his head. “Don’t give her false hope, Sasuke,” he’d said. And so the next time Sasuke saw her in the hallway, he looked away and kept walking. It wasn’t outright rejection, he reasoned, and he wasn’t tricking her in any way. He ignored the way her face fell when he walked past without a second glance.

Since then, there had been a long parade of starry-eyed girls, crushes and confessions. And Sasuke had never felt much more than vague annoyance for these girls. Why, he wondered irritatedly, do they insist on throwing themselves at me? Why don’t they try to keep a shred of dignity?

And now, here is one more. Sasuke tries his best not to notice the way she goggles at him as he pulls out his lunch. Naruto is chattering on again. In an attempt to distract himself from the girl and her rather large forehead, Sasuke tunes into his words.

“ -- told her you were all alone and I agreed to be your rival and all, and Sakura was kinda bored eating lunch with Ino and her friends because they all have these inside jokes because they take Latin and apparently the Latin classes all have, like a secret cult or something, and usually I eat lunch with them or with the teachers in the Teacher’s Lounge even though Iruka-sensei says I’m not supposed to but he lets me anyway because he feels bad for me and also the other teachers don’t like him ‘cause he got Mizuki-sensei fired for, like, doing drugs or something and the teachers think he’ll rat them out too one day, but sometimes Iruka-sensei makes me eat vegetables and won’t let me have ramen so then I like to eat lunch either with Sakura and Ino or with Lee and his friends in the park --” Naruto stops to take a breath, and Sasuke grabs his arm to stop him from continuing.

“Wait. Did you say ‘Lee’?”

Naruto freezes. “What? Yeah, Rock Lee. You’ve probably seen him before. In the morning, he does, like, laps around the school --”

Sasuke’s mind was racing furiously. What had Neji’s cousin said? “Lee and Tenten were looking for you.”  Would Neji be with this Lee person, then? “Where do they usually eat lunch?”

“Um.” Naruto is giving him a strange look. “The park? Like, in the clearing?” He slurps up another mouthful of ramen. “They hang out there in the afternoon, too. We could take you there, if you like.”

And so that’s how Sasuke found himself agreeing to meet Naruto and Sakura after school in the park. Not friends, he told himself. Means to an end. What the end was, Sasuke was a little unsure. Keep an eye on the Hyuga boy, right? Make sure he’s not lying about his friends. About not wanting pity. And maybe if Sasuke sees him again, Neji will look at him with those eyes that make Sasuke feel like not much else matters besides the two of them.

Or something.

Sasuke waits outside the school entrance for a good twenty minutes, rocking impatiently on the balls of his feet, before Naruto and Sakura emerge from the school. They’re laughing and talking, but Sasuke has no qualms about interrupting them. They made him wait, after all. “What took you so --” Sasuke breaks off, realizing that he is talking to not two, but three people.

Naruto glances up and catches Sasuke’s eye. “Sasuke! Oh yeah, this is Gaara.” He gestures to the moody redhead standing next to him. “He’s gonna come with us, ‘kay?” Without waiting for an answer, Naruto grabs Sasuke’s arm with one hand, Gaara’s hand with another and yanks them both forward, down the street.Sasuke tries at first to yank his arm away, and when Naruto’s grip is revealed to be similar to that of a steel clamp, Sasuke resigns himself to being dragged along. He takes the opportunity to size Gaara up.

The boy is around their age, but he has a strange expression -- it reminds Sasuke of photos he’d seen of tigers, crouching in the long savannah grass. (Do tigers live on savannahs? Gaara looks like he’d belong in one.) His hair, which Sasuke had assumed was styled messily on purpose, appears, on closer inspection, to be simply unkempt, like he’d just rolled out of bed and doesn’t care who knows. What to Sasuke had originally appeared to be eyeliner rimming his pale blue eyes was actually dark bags. All in all, the boy looks like he hadn’t slept in a year. Maybe he’s one of those paranoid kids who spends every free moment studying, Sasuke muses. That didn’t explain why he was friends with Naruto.

The pink-haired girl -- Sakura, Sasuke recalls -- is watching him curiously. When Naruto releases Sasuke’s arm to turn and say something to Gaara, she steps up next to him.

“He has a huge crush on Lee,” she says in a low voice, and it takes Sasuke a moment to realize she is talking about Gaara. “Naruto’s trying to set the two of them up. He’s a good friend.”

Sasuke glances over at the boys. Naruto is laughing about something, and a small smile is dancing over Gaara’s lips. “Huh,” says Sasuke, “He doesn’t look gay,” and instantly regrets the words as soon as they come out of his mouth.

Sakura is glaring. “What, he has to look gay?”

“No -- that’s not what I meant.” Sasuke can feel heat rushing to his cheeks. “I just--”

“Whatever.” Sakura huffs and crosses her arms. “I don’t get it. Why does Naruto even want to be your friend?”

Probably for the same reason you decided to leave love letters in my locker, Sasuke thinks, but instead, he shuts his mouth and turns away, feeling a hot wash of shame. In the past, he could get away with saying just about anything to a girl who liked him; she must be pretty defensive about her friend. Or she doesn’t like you enough to let you say something homophobic, asshole.

“C’mon!” Naruto is galloping across the street now, dragging a helpless Gaara by the wrist behind him. Sasuke and Sakura have no choice but to follow him, over the white stripes of the crosswalk and into the park.