“Sakura, you’re, rather fortunately, exempt from this assignment.”
Though Sakura bounced on her toes, obviously pleased, those were the last words either Naruto or Sasuke expected to hear from Kakashi. As much as he pressed teamwork, and the importance thereof, onto the three of them, why would he suddenly split them up?
“What? Kaka-sensei!” Naruto exclaimed, his finger pointed accusatorily at the older man. “I don’t even know what the ‘assignment’ is yet, but how come Sakura-chan isn’t in it?!”
“Sakura gave the best definition of teamwork, Naruto,” Kakashi replied with a simple shrug.
Sasuke wore an expression of indifference. He hadn’t even bothered to answer the question. He tapped his foot impatiently. Whatever. He had better things to do than listen to Naruto haggle his way out of another assignment that would probably be done in an hour.
“Also," Kakashi’s voice gave off the aura of distance and complete disinterest, yet there was an obvious mirth hidden there that only the three genin knew of. And that was only because they’d been around Kakashi long enough to tell the difference. “Since you seem to be so curious, Naruto, your assignment is this:
Naruto and Sakura leaned in close to the older man.
“You and Sasuke are to spend three days together, in the place of my choosing, completely isolated from everyone else. There, you two will either find the proper meaning of teamwork, or you can quit being shinobi.”
The volume with which Naruto screeched his indignity made even Kakashi wince visibly. “You expect me to spend three days alone with that bastard?! Kaka-sensei, you’re kidding, right? Right?”
Naruto looked back and forth between Sakura, who suddenly looked crestfallen, to Sasuke, who he wanted to punch for not even reacting.
“No,” was Kakashi plain, flat answer.
“He’s right to protest for once, you know,” Sasuke finally, slowly added, aiming a disbelieving glare at the silver-haired man. “One of us wouldn’t make it back out alive.” Most likely Naruto, if Sasuke had to choose.
Kakashi hummed as he crossed his arms over his chest, making a show of pretending to consider Sasuke and Naruto’s reluctance. He studied the two boys for a moment, before coming to a conclusion. He squatted down to Sasuke and Naruto’s level, clasping a hand of both of their shoulders. The jounin stared them straight in the eye, his smile thankfully obscured by the mask over his face.
“Alright, how about this,” he started, infinitely amused when Naruto perked up. “You both spend a week together, instead?”
Sasuke sputtered, aghast. Naruto laughed uncertainly. Neither of them could believe it.
This had to be the worst practical joke in the history of Konoha.
---
Once Sasuke and Naruto were allowed to pack a few things from their respective homes, it had only taken Kakashi about twenty minutes to lead them to the outskirts of Konoha. It was another five minute walk through a denser area of forest, before the three came upon a mid-sized clearing with a fairly small house in the middle.
It was about an hour past noon, and the sun was high in the sky, allowing Sasuke and Naruto to both get a good look at the house. Though quite weather-worn, the house looked of minimalist design. If Sasuke were to actually take a look at the details, rather than scowl disdainfully and pretend that the building wasn’t there, the house would have proved elegant in a simplistic way. With some work, it would have been even more so.
“Here we are,” Kakashi said offhandedly, gesturing towards the paper sliding door. “How do you like it?”
“It’s perfect,” Sasuke replied sarcastically, emphasizing his displeasure with a perfect monotone.
As Naruto’s eyes swept over the house, surveying in depth the place he and Sasuke were to live together for the next week, he couldn’t help but grin. It would be a challenge, trying to deal with Sasuke and his stick-in-the-mud syndrome around the clock, but not one he couldn’t face and conquer. Kakashi told them that they could either learn to work together, or face the prospect of no longer being shinobi. Naruto didn’t figure that the latter was even an option, and if Sasuke’s begrudging compliance was any indicator, the dark-haired boy didn’t think so either.
However, as it was, neither one of them were particularly eager to take the first step into the house.
“Are either of you going to move?” Kakashi asked with some humour. “I would suggest that you get acquainted with the inside of the house, because there is quite a lot for you to do once you have.”
Naruto was the first to question, raising blue eyes to stare at dark ones. “What do you mean, ‘a lot to do’? I thought all we had to do was get along!”
“Of course not,” Kakashi said, reaching into one of his pockets. Out of it he pulled a small scroll, handing it to Naruto with infuriating amusement. “That’s your list of duties.”
Sasuke’s sigh was one of long-suffering. Someone must obviously have it out for him. “Why must you ask so many questions, dumbass?”
“Shut up,” the blonde muttered, unraveling the scroll. The list practically fell down to his feet. Before Naruto could turn back to Kakashi to protest some more, the jounin was gone with a chuckle and a farewell wave. Rolling up the scroll, Naruto suddenly found himself having trouble squelching the sheer annoyance bubbling up inside of him. Yet, as life would have it, Sasuke interrupted him before he had the chance to scream out his frustration over his unpredictable sensei.
“You are well aware that this is your fault, right?”
Naruto turned to Sasuke slowly, gritting his teeth irritably. They hadn’t been out of Kakashi’s presence more than five minutes, and Sasuke was already being a bastard. “Maybe if you had answered the question, instead of acting like the stick up your ass is in your throat too, we wouldn’t be here!”
Sasuke didn’t even bother replying, opting instead to step up the few stairs to the house and push the sliding door aside. Naruto watched as Sasuke disappeared inside. At least he didn’t have to think up another comeback. Grumbling in irritation, Naruto followed the young Uchiha inside, stopping in his tracks when he passed the threshold.
The entire front room and the side room as well, Naruto noticed as he stepped past Sasuke, were a mess. From what he could see through the sunlight filtering in through half-closed blinds, the minimal furniture — a couch, a bookshelf, and a table — were coated in a thick layer of dust. Naruto heard Sasuke sneeze and mutter behind him as the boy opened up the blinds completely.
“This place isn’t even livable,” Sasuke said with some derision, wiping his finger along a dust-caked windowsill.
Naruto unraveled the scroll Kakashi had given him not fifteen minutes earlier, skimming over the messy handwriting. Clean the floors? Fix the sink? Each task on the scroll seemed increasingly time-consuming, and increasingly pointless. He stopped half-way. Paint the house? How the hell would they paint the house with no paint?
“I guess we’re supposed to make it livable,” Naruto replied after some time, tossing the scroll to the dark-haired boy, who caught it deftly. He then shrugged his backpack off of his shoulders, letting it drop to the floor and fanning away the dust that rose from impact.
Reading over the scroll, Sasuke pressed a palm to his forehead as if to stave off an oncoming headache. “Okay, whatever. Let’s just start.”
“Start? Where? How?” Naruto said, looking around. As much as he loathed having to clean, the thick dust was starting to make his nose itch. There wasn’t even a broom in sight. “Argh!”
Sasuke dropped his own backpack next to Naruto’s, finding himself vaguely amused at Naruto’s frustration as the blonde rummaged through his own bag for something. It served him right for asking so many questions. Not that he himself deserved such a tedious assignment, but since he couldn’t avoid it, he would manage. Deciding to leave Naruto to his own devices for a while, Sasuke looked to the left, then to the right. There was only one door leading to another room, and from the outside, the house appeared to be two-storied. So, there must be some stairs around somewhere.
Sasuke chose the only door in the room. “I’m going to check upstairs,” he told Naruto, though he doubted he had been heard.
He pushed the next door aside, grimacing when a spray of dust met him fully in the face. He coughed a little and wiped his eyes; there was one window in this room, off to his right, and Sasuke opened it to let some light in. There were multiple cabinets, a stove, and a small refrigerator surrounding the window, and parallel to the door he’d entered was an alcove and the staircase he figured would lead up to the second floor.
Idly, Sasuke checked the cabinets more out of wariness than any real curiosity, and was surprised to find there that was actually food. Food that wasn’t expired or even dusty. That, Sasuke noted, was obviously Kakashi’s doing. That was probably the only help he and Naruto would get from the man.
Sasuke closed the cabinet as he looked towards the staircase. He trotted over the staircase, testing the first step for any weakness. It seemed sturdy and firm under his feet, if not a little bit creaky. He took each stair one by one, stepping in the middle to distribute his weight, just in case…
Naruto looked up from his bag, startled, when he heard Sasuke’s pained yell. The blonde left the contents of his bag scattered all over the dusty floor, hopping up to sprint in the direction of Sasuke’s stream of colourful curses.
“Sasuke, what’s…?” Naruto said, his words stopping short midway upon seeing the predicament the young Uchiha had gotten himself into. Though it would surely seal his fate with the dark-haired boy later, Naruto couldn’t stop the laughter rising in his throat. Naruto had to hold his sides to keep himself standing upright, and he slowly choked out:
“Sasuke, Sasuke, you’re…,”
In which Sasuke finished irritably, “…Stuck in the stairs, I know.”
Sasuke had made it halfway up the staircase, and was pretty sure that the stairs were sturdy after checking five or six of them. If the bottom stairs weren’t decaying, there was nothing to worry about, right? Right, so he told himself; but as he sat — or hung, whatever — with his entire right leg through one step, Sasuke had the distinct feeling that things would only get worse from then on out.
“Would you stop laughing and help me, damnit?” he ground out, managing to make Naruto degenerate into another fit of giggles.
“Okay, okay, hold on,” Naruto said between snickers, climbing up a few of the decent stairs and reaching his hand out to Sasuke.
It took a few good pulls to dislodge Sasuke’s leg from the stair, and the last tug brought Sasuke out with such force that both he and Naruto went tumbling back down the few stairs in a crumpled heap of a mess.
Naruto groaned at Sasuke’s weight on top of him — the pale boy was definitely no featherweight — and tried to disentangle himself. Naruto breathed a lungful of dusty air when Sasuke rolled off to the side of him and sat up, rubbing his shoulder.
Soon after, Naruto stood, shaking off some of the dust. “Congratulations, Sasuke, you broke the stairs.”
Sasuke tried to resist the urge to roll his eyes at Naruto. Really, he did. Instead, he focused on the task at hand. A good hour had already passed and neither of them even knew what the rest of the house looked like.
“Assuming that this whole house is falling apart, we can’t explore separately,” he said, more to himself than Naruto. He glanced at the blonde, then the dreaded stairs. “I’m going to try going upstairs again; you just have to come with me.”
“No way! There’s no way in hell I’m going to be stupid enough to get myself stuck in the stairs!”
Ten minutes later, pressed uncomfortably close to the wall and three-quarters of the way back up the stairs, Naruto found that he really didn’t have a choice in the matter. By taking one side of the staircase and Sasuke taking the other end, they managed to balance the stairs enough to make it up safely.
It was just as dim at the top of the stairs as it was at the bottom of the stairs and the landing at the top of the stairs served as the only bit of hallway there was. To the left was what Sasuke would say was obviously the bathroom, and to the right, he assumed it was a bedroom. The Uchiha led the way into the bedroom, pushing the door aside. It was sparse inside of there too, with one bed, two blankets, and a basket. Never mind the clutter of cleaning supplies in the corner.
There was a collective groan as things started to make sense.
However, neither Naruto nor Sasuke were looking forward to the work that had to be done. And they had to get those mops and dusters downstairs first.
---
Three hours and a lot of bickering later, Sasuke and Naruto had managed to clear out the front room and the kitchen. Sasuke leaned against a nearby wall, wet mop still in hand, looking over the room in a glazed way. He couldn’t remember having to clean so much in his life. Naruto, on the other hand, looked about ready to pass out with the way he was doubled over.
Naruto stretched up, winced, and then patted his stomach. “I could eat the Ichiraku out of business right about now.”
Mildly amused, Sasuke snorted in reply. “There’s food in the cabinets.”
There was a flash of orange as Naruto dashed to the cabinet. The door swung wide as he leaned up on his tiptoes to push various cans and jars around with increasing insistence.
“I don’t know how to cook any of this!” the blonde finally wailed, disheartened by the complete lack of anything quickly edible. He pushed more a few more jars around, coming upon a container which, upon opening, thankfully held rice. Naruto did a mental back flip. He could vaguely remember Sakura’s instructions for cooking decent rice; what harm could come from trying?
Sasuke watched as Naruto seemed to cheer up considerably upon discovering the container of rice. Sasuke had to admit that he was hungry as well, but hunger was warring with fatigue and in the end, Sasuke opted to watch Naruto bustle around the small kitchen. He almost looked feminine with the way he tapped this and checked that. Sasuke found himself more amused with that thought than he’d been with anything all day.
It took what seemed like forever for the water in the old sink to run clear again, and when it finally did, it took another stretch of forever to find a pot that wasn’t warped beyond recognition. Filling the pot up with water, Naruto set it on the stove, hoping that at least something — like the stove lighting properly, or the rice not sticking and burning or being undercooked — would work out to his favour.
Unfortunately for the blonde, it seemed that the stove was dead-set against lighting. He prodded at the buttons, even looked inside the oven, just to find that it would need to be lit manually before it would ever work again. Naruto grumbled in hunger-induced frustration before turning to Sasuke, eyeing the dark-haired boy warily. He had a sudden idea!
…but Sasuke would probably eat him for dinner for asking.
“Um, Sasuke,” Naruto started, grinning his brightest, off-setting smile.
Sasuke’s eyes slid slowly towards Naruto, and he raised an eyebrow at Naruto’s expression. “What, dobe?”
“I’m completely serious when I say this, and I’m really hungry right now so I don’t want to fight, but,” Naruto continued, taking in a deep breath, ruffling his hair idly. His next words were strung together in the effort to get them out as fast as possible. “Do you think you could use your fire jutsu to light the stove?”
The stretch of silence after Naruto spoke was awkward, and it increased his apprehension. Sasuke simply stared at him, rather incredulously, before a small smirk played across his lips. He pushed himself away from the wall, setting his mop aside.
“You really are pathetic,” he scoffed, striding over to the stove.
Finally, some food! Naruto thought, watching as Sasuke tilted the top of the stove up. He’d seen Sasuke’s fire jutsu probably a thousand times over by now, but the same question never failed to plague him.
“Do you ever burn your tongue?”
Sasuke looked up. “What?”
“I said,” Naruto repeated, grinning. The idea of the ‘genius’ Uchiha blistering himself from practicing his jutsu was too funny. He had to know. “Do you ever burn your tongue?”
“Idiot,” Sasuke said simply.
That probably meant yes, Naruto figured, but he knew it was unlikely Sasuke would ever admit it.
It took Naruto longer than he anticipated to prepare the rice (he didn’t remember Sakura saying it took a whole half hour), but he was hungry enough that even if the dish didn’t come out perfectly, he would eat it anyway. Naruto reluctantly passed a bowl to Sasuke — who had annoyingly chided him repeatedly about stirring the rice; what did he know, anyway? — and they ate in relative silence.
Naruto yawned between bites, pointedly ignoring Sasuke’s snide comments about how horrible the rice had turned out. Yet, Sasuke was done with his bowl minutes before Naruto, and dropped his bowl in the sink. He glanced at Naruto over his shoulder. The blonde seemed to be falling asleep in his rice.
Sasuke wanted to leave him there and claim the bed in the room for himself, but he couldn’t even walk up the stairs by himself. With a laborious sigh, he shook Naruto awake.
“Come on,” he said in the most exasperated tone he could muster. “I can’t go upstairs without you.”
If Sasuke were to put any real thought into it, he would probably find a way to blame Kakashi for the predicament with the stairs as well. It seemed like everything inside of the house was set up purposely so that he and Naruto would have to do things together. It was beyond annoying for Sasuke, who prided himself on being independent, but instead to the point of being downright inconveniencing.
Sasuke groaned inwardly at the pace with which Naruto moved. The blonde was like an elderly zombie, and Sasuke thought that they would never get up the stairs. Naruto woke up some when they came to the bedroom, sleepily pushing past Sasuke to flop on the bed and snuggle under both covers.
Sasuke couldn’t even find the voice to protest. With a growl, he stomped over to the bed, pushing Naruto out of it with a loud thud.
“Hey!” Naruto squeaked drowsily, rubbing his arm. “What the hell?!”
“I’m sleeping there, dobe,” Sasuke said matter-of-factly. He had a look that practically said ‘I dare you to disagree’ as he sat on the bed, bouncing a little to test it.
It...
Sasuke bounced again.
It wasn’t that bad. A little more soft and worn than he cared for, but it would do. Sasuke didn’t get much of a chance to get comfortable and appreciate the bed before Naruto was climbing back into it, scooting him over until he was at the edge of the bed.
“Bastard!” Naruto exclaimed with a huff. “I’m not letting you have it!”
Sasuke pressed back, and soon, both boys were pushing back and forth, trying to get the other to fall off of the small bed. Naruto wouldn’t be kicked off twice; it seemed to Sasuke like he’d rooted himself into the sheets of the bed or something and Sasuke pressed a palm to his forehead.
“Fine,” he finally acquiesced, snatching one of the blankets from Naruto’s clutches. If Naruto wouldn’t let him have it, and he couldn’t dislodge the idiot, they’d damn well have to share.
Yuck.
Share.
Sasuke gave one last good push at Naruto and wrapped himself up in the blanket he’d stolen. Naruto looked over his shoulder, silently sticking his tongue out at Sasuke, before purposely bumping the prissy Uchiha again.
Sasuke’s last thoughts before dropping off into slumber were that somehow, someway, Kakashi would definitely pay in the worst way he could think of.
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Chapter notes: Sad to say, but I don't own Naruto or make any money off of it! Masashi Kishimoto does, though, obviously. XD