Well, I've mostly been going nowhere fast for the last few days, trying to tie up those last three scenes in Ch.3 before I start working on the kids' fights for 4.
How the hell did I get from 'Night of the Living Dead meets Zeiram: The Animation' to 'Naruto and Sakura have a (semi)romantic heart-to-heart'? And, more importantly, how do I handle it now that I have?
Gah. Here's the full bit, suggestions welcomed:
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JULY, TWELFTH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI
Sakura was nervous, and she didn't know why. Gatou was dead, his company was in disarray, and his pet psychopath hadn't shown her face in weeks. There was absolutely nothing to suggest that the maniac hadn't just packed up and left, but some fragment of her subconcious kept insisting that they hadn't seen the last of that twisted mind.
As time had gone by, Team 7 had settled on the routine of having Naruto - or rather, his obligatory retinue of shadow clones - do most of the watching while the other three members took shifts staying close to their principal. While the clones couldn't observe any better than their creator, they -could- be in as many as twelve places at once, making up in redundancy and proximity what they lacked in acuity. Naruto himself simply rested and studied most of the time, conserving his chakra to replace the guards when the energy supplies holding them together ran out.
The construction workers who actually had to labor on the bridge while the four ninja apparently sat around and did nothing had been surprisingly understanding. All but a very few of them had had experience in other professions, like fishing, which made up for long dry periods with bursts of intense activity, and the site's grapevine had comfortably absorbed the idea that ninja duties followed the same pattern.
"Oi, Boss!" one of the men clustered around the bottom of the newest piling shouted up at Tazuna. "When are we due for lunch?"
"Finish that, then take a half hour!" their superior bellowed back.
"Yosh'! We'll do that!"
Naruto had been stretched out on his belly with an elbow on either side of the scroll he was working on, but now he rolled over to stare up at where his teammate was perching crosslegged on one of the bridge's railing's posts. "Ne, ne, Sakura-chan?"
She blinked and swore as his voice broke her concentration, disrupting the finely-metered flow of chakra she had been using to fold an origami crane in the palms of her cupped hands and tearing the delicate paper. "What?!"
He flinched and crab-walked a couple feet further away. "Eheheh... nothing, nothing!" he said, with a nervous grin.
She glared for a moment longer, then sighed. "Sorry. If I need to concentrate that hard then I guess I haven't got it down yet, have I?"
He nodded blankly. "If you say so, Sakura-chan!"
Sakura snickered and fished out another sheet of origami paper, then paused for a long moment before setting it gently on her knee. "Naruto?"
He twisted around to sit upright as he took in her tone of voice. "Eh?"
"A couple of weeks ago... You remember what happened just before those Nuke-nin attacked?"
His face scrunched up in thought for a moment, and then he grinned. "Oh, yeah! There was that puddle... and..." Halfway through the sentance he seemed to remember exactly why he had thought the incident was funny, and also why mentioning that fact might not be the smartest thing for him to do.
The girl on the pole had taken out a kunai and begun twirling it between her fingers - left-handed, since, trained ambidexterity or not, that wasn't something you wanted to do with your off hand - as he spoke, and she kept the motion and matching glare up for a moment before tucking the blade away and letting him off the hook with a smile. "If it hadn't been me, it actually -might- have been funny," she admitted. "But that wasn't what I was really thinking of. See, Sensei said something while I was trying to get the dress clean that stuck in my mind - that he thought you'd done it because 'bad attention was better than no attention.'" The last phrase she delivered with a fair imitation of their teacher's voice and accent, with its gutteral 'r's and odd pitches.
The smile on Naruto's face slid away abruptly, and he glanced aside rather than meet her eyes. "Yeah?"
She stared at him, taking in his fisted hands and the tension in his jaw - a posture, she suddenly realized, much like that he'd adopted that first day, when he had told her and Sasuke about his status as a Jinchuuriki.
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Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
How the hell did I get from 'Night of the Living Dead meets Zeiram: The Animation' to 'Naruto and Sakura have a (semi)romantic heart-to-heart'? And, more importantly, how do I handle it now that I have?
Gah. Here's the full bit, suggestions welcomed:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
JULY, TWELFTH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI
Sakura was nervous, and she didn't know why. Gatou was dead, his company was in disarray, and his pet psychopath hadn't shown her face in weeks. There was absolutely nothing to suggest that the maniac hadn't just packed up and left, but some fragment of her subconcious kept insisting that they hadn't seen the last of that twisted mind.
As time had gone by, Team 7 had settled on the routine of having Naruto - or rather, his obligatory retinue of shadow clones - do most of the watching while the other three members took shifts staying close to their principal. While the clones couldn't observe any better than their creator, they -could- be in as many as twelve places at once, making up in redundancy and proximity what they lacked in acuity. Naruto himself simply rested and studied most of the time, conserving his chakra to replace the guards when the energy supplies holding them together ran out.
The construction workers who actually had to labor on the bridge while the four ninja apparently sat around and did nothing had been surprisingly understanding. All but a very few of them had had experience in other professions, like fishing, which made up for long dry periods with bursts of intense activity, and the site's grapevine had comfortably absorbed the idea that ninja duties followed the same pattern.
"Oi, Boss!" one of the men clustered around the bottom of the newest piling shouted up at Tazuna. "When are we due for lunch?"
"Finish that, then take a half hour!" their superior bellowed back.
"Yosh'! We'll do that!"
Naruto had been stretched out on his belly with an elbow on either side of the scroll he was working on, but now he rolled over to stare up at where his teammate was perching crosslegged on one of the bridge's railing's posts. "Ne, ne, Sakura-chan?"
She blinked and swore as his voice broke her concentration, disrupting the finely-metered flow of chakra she had been using to fold an origami crane in the palms of her cupped hands and tearing the delicate paper. "What?!"
He flinched and crab-walked a couple feet further away. "Eheheh... nothing, nothing!" he said, with a nervous grin.
She glared for a moment longer, then sighed. "Sorry. If I need to concentrate that hard then I guess I haven't got it down yet, have I?"
He nodded blankly. "If you say so, Sakura-chan!"
Sakura snickered and fished out another sheet of origami paper, then paused for a long moment before setting it gently on her knee. "Naruto?"
He twisted around to sit upright as he took in her tone of voice. "Eh?"
"A couple of weeks ago... You remember what happened just before those Nuke-nin attacked?"
His face scrunched up in thought for a moment, and then he grinned. "Oh, yeah! There was that puddle... and..." Halfway through the sentance he seemed to remember exactly why he had thought the incident was funny, and also why mentioning that fact might not be the smartest thing for him to do.
The girl on the pole had taken out a kunai and begun twirling it between her fingers - left-handed, since, trained ambidexterity or not, that wasn't something you wanted to do with your off hand - as he spoke, and she kept the motion and matching glare up for a moment before tucking the blade away and letting him off the hook with a smile. "If it hadn't been me, it actually -might- have been funny," she admitted. "But that wasn't what I was really thinking of. See, Sensei said something while I was trying to get the dress clean that stuck in my mind - that he thought you'd done it because 'bad attention was better than no attention.'" The last phrase she delivered with a fair imitation of their teacher's voice and accent, with its gutteral 'r's and odd pitches.
The smile on Naruto's face slid away abruptly, and he glanced aside rather than meet her eyes. "Yeah?"
She stared at him, taking in his fisted hands and the tension in his jaw - a posture, she suddenly realized, much like that he'd adopted that first day, when he had told her and Sasuke about his status as a Jinchuuriki.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."