"I hate you. So much," Sakura said, as she glared at her teacher, who smiled at her underneath his mask.
She could tell. She could see the signs of the mask moving in response to his lips's movement.
"I know," the silver haired man said, cracking his neck, "but if you want to get back home, you're going to have to complete this mission with me."
"Why don't you take Satsuki? Or hell, even Naruko! Why me?" Sakura asked, glaring at Kakashi.
"I have my reasons," Kakashi said, shrugging mysteriously, "anyway, we're going to meet our client in just a day. And I have to stress the secrecy of this mission, Sakura, so you cannot, I repeat, CANNOT tell ANYONE of what you see or hear while you're performing it."
Sakura frowned, and looked around as she finished packing their campsite. Of course Kakashi would make her do it, he was a lousy teacher, a lazy jackass and the kind of person who knew that anything, even the most inane of tasks, could be used to teach someone something, so of course he went about training his students in the most annoying way possible.
"Where are we, Sensei?" Sakura asked, noticing that there weren't any landmarks that she quite recognized.
In fact, all she saw was the sea to the north and a vast plain of nothing but empty farmland behind her.
"This is the Land of Rice Paddies's northern shore. We're going to take a boat from her to the Land of Snow. I have some old contacts I need to keep in touch with there, who'll give us our target and the object we're supposed to retrieve. Then we'll go back to the Land of Fire and meet our client tomorrow."
"Can we really do it that quick?" Sakura asked, frowning.
"Well, getting in stealthily isn't that big an issue, I do it every year, the problem is getting out. After what we're going to do, it'll pretty much be a lost cause, so we're just going to make a run for it."
Sakura nodded. "That's why we've packed so many soldier pills, right?" she asked.
Kakashi patted her head. "Right. We're gonna need them if we're going to run across the sea."
Even though Kakashi's tone was full of confidence, Sakura wasn't. After all, her stamina was the worst of Team 7. Once again, she wondered why Kakashi had chosen her instead of someone more well suited to this sort of action. If anyone could make a run across the ocean, it'd be Naruko, not her.
***
Naruko had been in the middle of a conversation with a friendly shopkeeper who was advising her on the process behind making a properly chunky tomato sauce when she was forced to put her nose on the inner side of her elbow, a powerful sneeze rocking her and staining her coat as she forced herself to avoid spraying the shopkeeper with spit and snot.
She frowned, but the shopkeeper laughed, before handing her a paper towel to clean it up.
The grocery store owner sent Naruko on her way with a bag of tomatoes and some eggs. Following that, Naruko bought a big bag of rice, five kilograms of it in fact, and paid with the third Hokage's money. A little weaving in and out of the crowd later saw Naruko picking up several different kinds of spices, as well as a host of other foodstuffs that had caught her eye, including fruits that for various reasons she couldn't produce in her garden.
Having been growled at by her tummy for quite a while now, the blonde then decided she might as well go home now, have lunch, and then go have her fill of excitement by exploring the commercial district some more. She would also, of course, drag Satsuki into accompanying her. Deciding that walking with four bags on each hand and the large bag of rice slung over her shoulder through the increasingly more dense crowd, as people began to visit the restaurants near the bazaar, would be kind of annoying, Naruko took to the lowest nearby rooftop with a mighty leap. Weighed down as she was, she was wary of making big jumps and instead stuck to small but secure leaps as she began heading to her home.
***
Hinata sighed as she and her team finally finished with the D rank that prevented her from talking to Naruko more.
It was a silly mission, easier to do than actually say, but it still took quite a bit of time. The pay was decent, for sure, but Hinata wasn't hurting for money even if her allowance had shrunk significantly following her promotion to genin. Kurenai also clearly disliked the team they'd been talking with, and Hinata soon learnt why. It turned out that the team that shared their wing of the manor to clean happened to be headed by a jounin who had once been one of Kurenai's, ahem, partners. Kiba had confirmed that it was a relatively recent one, too, judging by when he remembered smelling him on her.
The other team had been annoyed because their teacher was clearly trying to get an excuse to chat up Kurenai, who was clearly not receptive to his advances and had made it clear that she wasn't interested. Of course, the man was persistent, and under the excuse of 'socialization', so was his team.
Particularly the eldest genin of the bunch, a boy two years Hinata's senior, some Kasuga Something boy. She didn't care much about him. Hinata had made it clear that she wasn't interested. Shino and Kiba had made it clear that Hinata wasn't interested. The boy's teammates had made it clear that Hinata wasn't interested.
But like teacher like student, as both continued to hit on females that were edging ever closer to killing them on the spot.
Fortunately, though, Kiba and Shino were very good teammates and were up to running interference pretty soon, helping her avoid having to deal with the irritating imbecile for very long. Their teacher didn't have such a luxury, though Hinata could only try to work faster to alleviate the pressure.
She sighed, wishing the team they'd been paired with was Team 7. At least then she'd be talking with Naruko, and then this whole mess would be fun instead of boring and irritating.
Speaking of the blonde, Hinata wondered what Naruko was doing right then…
***
Sometimes, sneezes can very well be dangerous.
This, Naruko learned as she sneezed just before she was supposed to land, throwing her muscle and chakra control off and making it so that instead of softly landing without rustling all of the groceries that she was carrying, she felt the very sharp pain of her ankle twisting as she landed wrong. Unable to support herself on her landing foot, she crashed forward, bags flying everywhere but mostly on her. It took just a second for everything that Naruko had just bought to be splashed all over her clothes and her face, as she felt an egg slowly dripping down her face.
She huffed, pouting at nowhere as she slowly picked herself back up, wincing a little as she put some pressure on her left foot.