Naruto: Dreaming of Sunshine

'Cause you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable

And life's like an hourglass, glued to the table

No one can find the rewind button, girl.

So cradle your head in your hands

And breathe... just breathe,

~Anna Nalick; Breathe (2 AM)

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"I propose a race!" Gai-sensei boomed, as we passed the outer Konoha outposts. "The first one to return to the village is the victor!"

Lee cheered, bouncing with restrained energy. We'd been rushing back to Konoha, but even the harsh pace didn't really seem to affect him any. I doubted it even registered as 'harsh'. "Gai-sensei!" he said, eagerly. "Since you are already carrying Shikako-san, should we make it a piggy back race?" He spun, to look at Tenten.

"No," she said. "No, Lee. I'm not going to-"

He bounced closer, grabbing her hands and holding them up. "Tenten," he beseeched. "It Is Training. We Must Work Together As Teammates." The capital letters dropped like stones, emphasis and earnestness.

And, I decided, if I had to be carried back to Konoha when I was perfectly capable of walking…

"Come on, Tenten," I wheedled from Gai-sensei's back. "It'll be fun."

"You don't know what you're saying!" she said, but it was too late. Lee had taken the faint hint of weakness as total capitulation.

I dropped my chin down on Gai-sensei's shoulder. "It's not much of a race with only two people," I mused, casually. "Does no one else think they have a chance?"

The air sizzled.

There were words that should probably never be said in a group of teenage boys. Especially not in a group of teenage boys that had just spent a week proving they were the baddest things around, no really. That was probably up there with 'I double dog dare you'.

That I held in reserve, just in case no one took the first bait.

Kiba smirked. "Oh, it's like that, is it?" he said. "Hinata! We gotta stand up for our team."

"I know what you're doing," Sasuke said flatly. He crossed his arms and scowled at me.

I widened my eyes, innocently. Dare you, I singsonged, in my head. He twitched. He was weakening.

Then Ino barreled into his back. "I know you can do it, Sasuke-kun," she cheered, entire countenance showing nothing but delight at roping him into this.

Sasuke staggered forwards, feet shuffling quickly to avoid landing on his face from the unexpected attack. Then he appeared to decide that if he were moving in this direction anyway…

"No one said start!" Kiba hollered, chasing after him. Lee was a blur of green vanishing after them both.

Gai-sensei zipped forward, probably nowhere near as fast as he could go but more than fast enough to catch up with the running Chunin. I clung tightly to his shoulders and laughed into the wind.

He led them on a merry chase towards the gates, just close enough to feel like they could catch up, if only they tried.

Then he slammed to a complete halt on a dime, finishing right before the gate desk and slapped his hands down on it. "First!" he roared.

Lee performed a similar feat only seconds later, a semi-frazzled Tenten half strangling him as she held on. Sasuke was maybe a step or two behind him, and Kiba trailing only a little bit further than that.

"Ah," Izumo said, managing to look only a little a taken back by the display. He didn't even ask why they were racing, probably presuming that the answers were 'Gai and Lee'. "You're back early."

"I was not fast enough!" Lee said, head held low. "I must train harder! I will sprint to the road marking ten times before the rest arrive!"

Tenten's eyes had time to widen fractionally. "Put me down first!" she shouted.

I muffled my laughter until she was out of earshot.

"ID card?" Izumo asked.

I leant forward over Gai-sensei's shoulder and dropped into his waiting hands.

"Hmm," Izumo said. "I'm not sure this is valid. It says here that you're a Genin, yet I can see that Chunin vest with my own eyes." He was clearly teasing.

I beamed at him.

"Welcome aboard, Greenie," he said, passing it back and grabbing the rest from the others. "You can call me Izumo-sempai and I'll make you do all the running around, okay?"

"Izumo-sempai," I agreed, watching as he also proceeded to hassle Sasuke – who returned the favour without missing a beat.

The rest of the group was arriving, having travelled at a more comfortable pace. I glanced over them surreptitiously but couldn't see Kakashi-sensei. I knew he was here somewhere – he had to be – but I'd had a really hard time actually finding him on the trip. It was kind of impressive to be avoiding someone so well in such limited space, but also kinda really annoying.

And if I wanted to talk to him, now was going to be the last chance, because once we were in Konoha there would be so many more places for him to hide.

Time to bring out the big guns, I decided.

"Gai-sensei," I asked, as politely as I could, because he didn't have to say yes. Even if he didn't agree to help for me, maybe he would agree to help because sensei clearly needed help with Feelings. "Can we go and talk to Kakashi-sensei?"

Gai-sensei sparkled. I was on his back, so technically I shouldn't have been able to see it, but The Smile was not bound by such mere suggestions of physics. "Most certainly!" He agreed, like he had only been waiting for me to ask. Maybe he had been. He couldn't have missed Kakashi-sensei's campaign of avoidance.

It was a disconcerting feeling of being dragged along in someone else's Body Flicker, but we rolled from place to place with an enviable smoothness, like there was no difference between them at all. And then moved again, only to find Kakashi-sensei leaning casually against a tree and reading like we hadn't just gone on a high speed chase to try and catch him.

"My Eternal Rival!" Gai-sensei said. "Your precious student wishes to speak with you."

Kakashi-sensei didn't look up from his book. "Is that so?" he asked, voice inflectionless.

I leant sideways, no longer even holding on. I could probably get down now, but I felt like I could use the extra height. This might go better if we were at eye level.

"Kakashi-sensei," I said.

He still didn't look up.

"Sensei," I tried again.

Still nothing.

I reach out, put one palm on either side of his face and lifted it. "Dinner at my house tonight. Six o'clock. Don't be late," I said.

Kakashi-sensei blinked at me, like that wasn't what he'd expected me to say.

Honestly, it hadn't been what I'd intended to say. But I could absolutely understand 'I don't want to talk about it' when it was shouted in my face, and had the sneaking suspicion that even 'thank you' would be going too far here.

I wiggled his face up and down, making him nod. "Yes, Shikako-chan, I will be there," I said for him.

He disengaged my hands, but gently. "I'll think about it," he said vaguely, then made an excuse and vanished.

I sighed.

Gai-sensei coughed, politely, like he was interrupting something. "My Eternal Rival has a peculiar stance on punctuality," he said, "and a challenge such as the one issued only increases the chances he will, in fact, be late."

I righted myself, so I wasn't hanging out over empty air. "I know," I said. "But in order to be late he has to show up in the first place. And that's really all I want."

Gai-sensei laughed, and it had a different tone to it. Almost startled. "A canny plan indeed!"

We went back to the gate and were dismissed with the rest of the crowd. Tsunade reminded us to update our ID's for our new ranks in the next few days. We'd been let in on her authority, but our cards would definitely need to be correct before the next time we left the village.

Gai-sensei – finally – put me down. "How nice it is to return to Konoha!" He declared loudly. "We are safely home!"

And I might have been annoyed at having to be carried the whole way back, but I could still appreciate when people had gone out of their way to help me.

"Thank you, Gai-sensei," I said solemnly, facing him and rising up on my tippy toes so that I could press a kiss to his cheek. "You're the best."

He burst into very dramatic tears of thanks, and I slipped away into the crowd. Shikako out.

Tenten, having rescued herself from Lee, pointed a finger straight at my forehead. "No," she said firmly.

I blinked at her. "What? He was carrying me for three days. We bonded." It had been inescapable. Literally.

"I know what happens to people who bond with Gai-sensei," she said, still stern. "You're already wearing too much green. There isn't far to go."

I laughed. "Whatever you say."

We split, probably all equally relieved to be going home. I walked with Ino, enjoying the quiet, enjoying the chance to walk and stretch and generally move about under my own power.

"You almost died, you know," Ino said, gazing down the road without really seeming to see it. Her tone was conversational, light. Completely at odds with the weight of the words.

I watched a sparrow take flight from a tree branch, swoop low across the grass in a graceful arc, and return with a worm clamped in its beak. "I was trying not to think about that," I said. "Besides, there's a lot of ground in an 'almost'."

"Not this one," she said, and it was the first crack I had seen in her composure all week.

It rippled through me like an earthquake, shaking lose the cracks of my own, shining light into dark corners where things were supposed to hide. "Ino," I said, an edge of desperation leaking into my voice faster than I could block it out. "I can't-"

I can't do this. I bit the words off, kept them behind my teeth and struggled not to say them. I can'tdo it, Ino.

I couldn't. Couldn't talk about something like this without shining that light into darkness, revealing all those hidden and ugly places. Couldn't talk about I had nearly died without thinking about the truth of it. And it scared me, of course it did. That was the heart of it, wasn't it? Fear like that was a wild animal, something you had to circle around carefully, had to approach from oblique angles, edge your way closer while pretending you weren't.

People pushed and pushed and the animal only grew larger and angrier, more frightening and dangerous, because it was wild and it was scared and it wanted to defend itself. It needed to be calmed and gentled, before it could be dealt with.

Didn't she know, how fragile my façade was? She had to know. She'd seen behind it more than once. Seen the cracks in it and how it shook and how paper thin the confidence I had in it was. How stretched and how exhausted and how much energy it took to maintain the whole thing. She had to know.

I didn't have the resources to reassure her. Not on this. I couldn't-

It wasn't fair. Why did I always have to be the one that was strong?

I swallowed the words down, bitter and chalky. "Are you okay, Ino?" I asked, instead.

Ino was a young girl and she'd nearly had a friend die in her arms. If I took myself out of the equation, if it wasn't me, then… If it had been Sakura, then I would have helped her. Of course I would have. It was a terrifying thing, and it had upset her. She needed someone to ask if she was okay.

Maybe Ino's façade was just as thin as mine. Maybe I had been the one who hadn't seen. She had been happy and cheerful all the way home, friendly and engaging, and maybe that took all her effort. We hadn't had any privacy to talk about things like this, and it wasn't something you brought up in a group. Not these things.

It wasn't fair. No. But nothing ever was. And I was the one that was strong, that helped them when they needed it, because I had chosen to be. I had picked up that burden and now I had to carry it.

'I can't' meant nothing.

"Are you okay?" I asked, again. There were no extra reserves of emotional energy, waiting to be discovered, here. But Ino deserved what I had left. What little pieces I could scrape together and give her.

"Not really," she said, eyes sad. "But… I'm going to talk to dad about it, okay?"

I felt a flash of relief. And then shame, because I shouldn't have been relieved that she didn't need me. But I was; I was relieved like it was a problem that I had avoided being dragged into.

"Okay," I parroted back to her, hoping she couldn't see it, couldn't see through me.

"And when I'm done," Ino went on and her eyes were searching mine, like she could, "you could come and talk to me. If you wanted."

"Sure," I agreed, looking away. I raised my hand and bid her farewell, walking on towards home.

Mum was the only one home, so while I greeted her warmly, I also didn't feel too bad about fleeing to my room to unpack and to the bathroom to shower forever. A week later and I was still brushing sand out of my hair.

These were the things no one ever warned you about.

But it wasn't fair to be completely antisocial either, when I'd been gone so long, so afterwards I took my notebooks and parked myself on the couch in the living room instead of staying in my room.

"What are you working on?" Mum asked, spying the reams of paper I brought downstairs with me.

"It's a kind of magnifying glass for seals," I said. "Maybe a microscope?" There were a lot of seals I could have been working on – my air barrier had turned out to be total crap and needed to be reworked from scratch, for example – but this was something that I could do inside without needing to 'test' anything, because it was still in the ideas phase. I'd only seen the expansion seal in use once, and while I'd been paying strict attention, it didn't give me a lot to go off.

Shikamaru was the first one to come home, calling out a lethargic 'tadaima' just after five.

I sat up. "Okaeri," I called back.

He hung his vest up, and touched the one that was already resting there. Mine. "Congrats," he said with a small smile.

I smiled back, a slowly dawning thing. And until right at that moment, I hadn't realized I was worried about his reaction. That it mattered, good or bad, what he thought about my promotion. That I'd wanted him to be happy about it, but had been worried he wouldn't be. That I hadn't truly known what he would say until he had said it.

"Thanks," I said, voice just a touch too low to be perfectly natural. I coughed, clearing it. "Ino and Chouji were also promoted," I went on, brightly. "Actually, all nine of us made it. Kurenai-sensei said that was probably a record."

He looked briefly surprised. "Sounds like it," he agreed coming over to flop down next to me. He stretched, joints clicking. "Was it different to the Konoha Exams?"

"A bit," I said, launching into an explanation of how it had all been set up.

In turn, I learnt that Shikamaru had spent the past few weeks working in the tower – mostly in the logistics and supply department. It was an interesting fit, but an important field to have a strong basis in if you were ever going to be ordering troops around on a large scale. Which wasn't to say that they were grooming Shikamaru to take over from Dad, but you'd have to be an idiot not to consider it.

Sasuke arrived and we were all sitting down to eat before Dad came home, which wasn't actually a good sign in terms of how his talk with Tsunade had gone.

"Dad!" I scrambled away from the table and towards him. He caught me easily, lifting me into a hug with terrific ease.

I peered over his shoulder at the person who had arrived with him. "Kakashi-sensei," I admonished. "You're late!" I wiggled an arm free and tapped him on the nose.

He drew back with the exact same huffy and offended expression that Akamaru would have worn.

I couldn't stop the giggles, burying them into Dad's shoulder. "Trouble," he sighed fondly at me.

And I just desperately wanted to keep this moment. Just freeze time here for a bit, just live in a second where all my people were here and happy. When we were warm and fed and unhurt. Before the truth spilled out once more and darkness intruded with anger and arguments.

But how did that poem go? Nothing gold can stay.

I folded the moment up like it was a treasured photograph and tucked it away. It would keep. It would have always happened. I would always have it to look back on.

Then I let go and stepped back. "Foods getting cold," I said, focusing on the practical concerns. "You should eat."

"Congratulations on your promotion," Dad said, setting me down. He stepped past the table and set a hand on Sasuke's shoulder as he went. "Both of you."

"Who'd you fight?" Shikamaru asked idly, because that wasn't something I had covered earlier. I'd mostly talked about the first two Exams, because they were the ones that were different. A tournament was a tournament.

"Gaara," I said, even though we'd had a couple of rounds. "We both lost to Gaara."

Sasuke jabbed his chopsticks in my direction. "I'd have done better if she hadn't screwed me over," he complained.

"I kinda did," I said, unable to deny it. "But thems the breaks."

"Oh?" Shikamaru said, looking interested. "How so?"

Sasuke glanced at him, but appeared to decide that telling the story wasn't going to utterly humiliate himself. "She turned the entire arena into a desert," he said. "That's like, the worst place to pick a fight with him."

"I didn't turn it into a desert," I argued. "Gaara did. So, don't say it like that."

"Gaara did when he was fighting you," Sasuke refuted. "Your fault."

"You fought Gaara?" Shikamaru asked, sounding only mildly strangled. "And you didn't forfeit?"

"He was playing nice," I reassured him. "I didn't even get so much as a graze."

"I bet he wished you were playing nice," Sasuke said.

"I didn't so much as graze him, either," I said, tartly, in return. "I was playing plenty nice." Like that had been a deliberate choice on my part and not simply because I couldn't. But whatever.