Naruto: Dreaming of Sunshine

Neither Sasuke or Neji looked surprised. They both would have been able to tell that too. Maybe it was for the benefit of the medical ninja? Did they think I had avoided it? Or were they supposed to spread the information that I hadn't avoided it?

I gave up.

"Thank you, Tsunade-sama." I jumped off the bed, gathering my discarded sleeve. "Okay, let's go watch Ino and Lee."

I walked back into the competitors section and was immediately besieged. Kiba wrapped an arm around my shoulder and tucked me into his side. "With your hair," he crowed. "I can't believe it. I'm going to tell everyone."

Oh no. "Everyone is here," I tried. "You don't need to mention it ever again."

His grin was not kind. "Oh, no," he said, steering me until I was wedged up against Chouji. They were doing to me what we had done to Hinata yesterday – tucking me safely and defensively in the middle of the group, like a penguin huddle to keep out the cold. "This is never, ever being forgotten."

"It worked," I grumbled quietly. He was far too gleeful. I didn't like it on principle.

"That's why it's amazing," Kiba said. "And why I'm going to tell this story for the rest of your life. Also, did you know Hana once ripped out a guy's throat with her teeth?"

"That's… impressive," I settled on.

Down below, Ino and Lee faced each other in the middle of the arena. As one, they lifted a hand with two fingers extended. The seal of confrontation. Whether they'd discussed it previously, or whether it was just habit, it was a nice gesture.

"I am looking forward to this fight!" Lee said brightly. "Please do your very best, Ino-san."

Ino started the fight with genjutsu, because she was too smart to ever try and face Lee with taijutsu. But genjutsu was of most use when you didn't realize it was there, and much less when someone saw you casting it.

He broke the first layer easily, was distracted by the second layer for long enough for Ino to set up other traps, but broke that before too long.

Ino was heavily on the evasive for this fight because it did her exactly no good for Lee to be able to attack her. Once that happened, it would be pretty much over. So she was avoiding it with as much cunning as she could.

Of course, Lee made no easy target.

"Stand still and let me hit you!" Ino's voice shouted out from the corner of the field, as Lee easily blocked a set of thrown shuriken. After training with Tenten, that was hardly going to be a challenge for him.

He went for the place her voice had come from, narrowly avoided the trap set to force him out of the ring, narrowly avoided the back-up trap that was supposed to immobilize him, avoided the third trap after that, and sprung back to safer ground.

"A well thought-out attack, Ino-san!" he congratulated. "I almost fell for it!"

It went back and forth a little while longer. In the end, I wasn't sure if Ino made a mistake, if Lee had finally been able to locate her, or if something else had happened entirely.

He closed his eyes, breathed deeply and centered himself, then launched himself across the field. The first two attacks caught nothing, but the third hit.

The Hiding with Camouflage Technique that Ino was using shattered and broke.

Lee ducked low, swept her legs out and kicked her into the air.

I winced.

She rolled to her feet outside the ring and shook her head ruefully. But she still came back and linked hands with him in the Seal of Reconciliation to the applause of the crowd.

The fight after that was Kiba versus Chouji. And for once, even Chouji seemed excited to get down on the field. It had nothing on the way that Kiba was bouncing in place, but still. They too formed the seal and waited for the referee to call the start of the match.

"Super Multi-size Jutsu!" Chouji roared, planting his feet steady on the ground and growing. He grew and grew until his head was as tall as the stadium itself, so that we could look out and see eye to eye.

We cheered for him, whooping and waving.

"Inuzuka style," Kiba shouted in turn, throwing a soldier pill to Akamaru. "Human Beast Combination Transformation; Double-Headed Wolf!"

It was a fight of giants. They might not have been seriously trying to kill each other – Kiba most certainly didn't use the Fang Wolf Fang – but every impact made the earth quake and rattle. Every growl and snarl sounded six times as mean.

Subtle? Not particularly. Impressive? Oh yes.

Kiba walked away from that one the winner, likely because he had the aggression to want to win that no amount of bribery could match. But undoubtedly that fight would go down as one of the most memorable of the exam.

I was more worried about Hinata's fight against the Cloud Genin. There had been a simmering tension between our groups the whole time, and I most certainly had not helped it with my match. Not even a little bit. The opposite of 'helped it' you might say.

And the fact that, at this point, Akantai was the last of the Cloud shinobi to still be in the exam. Omoi had lost to Temari. Karui had lost to Gaara. Netsui had lost to me. That was bound to be a motivating factor for him to want to win this match.

They glared at us. We glared at them. Battle lines were drawn in the sand.

"Kick his ass, Hinata," Ino advised, voice low. "Kick his ass hard."

And Hinata took to the field. Hinata faced off against a ninja wearing the symbol that had had such an effect on her life. He probably knew nothing off it, had probably never been involved in anything like that, but that attack had not been a one off. Hidden Cloud's habit of 'acquiring' new blood limits was not unknown.

"HI-NA-TA!" Kiba hollered, breaking her name down into the syllables of a chant. "HI. NA. TA."

Ino's voice joined in, and Lee and Chouji. I gave it the stomp-stomp-clap backing of Queen and it took off. There was no sporting crowd in the world that didn't like a good chant.

You got blood on your face, you big disgrace, waving your banner all over the place.

Down below, Hinata ducked and dodged and wove, hands lighting blue fire into the air. Her Protection of the Eight Trigrams was a delicate defense and her attack was brutal. I loved the contrast.

Her opponent didn't go down easy, but he went down. She stood over him, blazing with fierceness and chakra and looked deeply, deeply satisfied.

"That's a hard act to follow," I said to Sasuke, nudging him with my shoulder.

He gave me an offended look. "You don't think I can do it?"

I regarded him with as much faux seriousness as I could. "I don't know, Chojuro looks pretty mean."

"Go away." He pushed off the rail, turning away. "Start panicking about fighting Gaara or something."

I made a face at his back because he might just have got the last word in there.

His fight with Chojuro was good. Chojuro had the Hiramekarei which was incredibly recognizable as one of Hidden Mists Legendary Seven Swords. It looked massive and out of place in the hands of a Genin, but there was no denying he was skilled with it. Maybe not legendary, but the seeds of it were well and truly there.

It seemed Haku wasn't the only dark horse that Mei had managed to dig up for this exam.

Sasuke wisely kept his distance, and fought back with a stunning arsenal of ninjutsu – some of which I didn't even realize he knew. The speed at which he could cast them, switch between styles and use them to twist the battle to his liking I was familiar with, but it was perhaps even more impressive from the outside when I didn't have to worry about plotting my own response.

He won. But it was perhaps not as clear cut a victory as he might have liked.

The last fight of the day was Tenten vs Haku, which was a very different sort of fight. Haku might have been fast but I was willing to bet Tenten used Lee as target practice because she had a preternatural ability to hit what she aimed at no matter how fast he was going. His own ice senbon were shot out of the air with impunity, and Tenten kept producing more and more weapons from pockets that could clearly not have held them.

Hammerspace! She had to have finished the seal.

It was also a fight of two people who didn't particularly want to actually hurt each other. It was … interesting. Tenten had such potential to be lethal, with her weapons and precision and it was mostly put to use in avoiding damage. If she could shoot his senbon out of the air, she could surely have hit him too. And there were so many vulnerable spots on the human body. That she never took advantage of them meant that Haku could bring up ice mirrors to block her in and trap her.

There was something important here, and I tucked that thought away to deal with later. Maybe we'd been trying to help Tenten the wrong way – suggesting ways to be more and more lethal. Maybe what she needed was a way to be less.

She resigned with good grace in the end, though it took another ten minutes after the end of the fight to pick up all the discarded weaponry.

"You guys go to dinner without me, I want to check out the field," I said. Sasuke was mostly right. Now was the time to start panicking about my match.

"We'll come with you," Ino volunteered. "Won't we, Chouji?"

"But dinner," Chouji protested, then subsided. "Yes, Ino. It won't take long, though, will it?"

"Not long," I agreed. "You won't miss anything."

We broke away and headed down to the field, quiet and empty now.

"What do you need?" Ino asked. She was one of the people that wasn't totally unfamiliar with how I worked, the kind of things that went into seals in the first place.

I considered. "Can you find out how big the field actually is? Exact dimensions." I dropped my bag on the ground and rummaged through until I found a tape – I'd brought so much stuff with me 'just in case' but it seemed like it would turn out useful after all. I had an idea how big the arena was, and I would err to the side of caution and go smaller, but exact was always better.

I took a sample of dirt, shoved it in a plastic jar and stowed it away. Then I sat down, closed my eyes, pressed my hands flat against the ground and started channeling chakra into it until I could feel it all. Soil types, the density, where it was packed hard or loose or where the foundations of the stadium were. If there were pipes or wires running beneath our feet. If there were springs or rocks or animal burrows or other hazards less obvious. All that information was necessary.

There was a reason seals didn't travel well. What worked in one place wouldn't work in another, even perhaps the next field over. They were specialized, an exact tool for an exact effect and couldn't be repurposed for anything else.

By the time I'd done that – and written it down so it was useful – Chouji was about ready to pick me up and carry me off to dinner.

"Okay, okay," I said, reaching for my bag only to find it swiped out of my reach.

He put his other hand on my shoulder and hustled me towards the dining hall. "You have a big fight tomorrow!" he said. "So you should eat up tonight. That way you'll have plenty of energy!"

"Sure," I said agreeably, jotting down a few more ideas and letting him direct me. Then I got a little bit distracted and by the time I was paying attention again, I was sitting at the table with a plate piled high with food in front of me.

I blinked at it.

I looked at Ino. She snickered. "You just kept saying 'sure' so Chouji made a plate for you."

I poked it with my chopsticks and shrugged. Well then. Okay. "Oh, that reminds me. Tenten! I can't believe you finished the seal and didn't tell me."

She looked startled, because I'd interrupted her conversation with Lee. "It's not finished," she laughed, realizing what I was talking about. "I just figured there was no better time to try and use it. Not that it did much good," she finished, a tad rueful. "I can catch you up on it, though?"

I hovered in indecision. But ultimately… it wouldn't help right now. "When we get back home?" I amended.

I ate, and I scribbled and when everyone else was done they tugged me along after them, still working on my notebook.

I dropped down outside the cabins and asked Tenten if I could borrow her little camp table that we'd been picnicking off. It made a good set up for a worktable, and even though it was getting dark there were outside lights to work by.

"Are you going to be out here long?" Ino asked, settling down beside me. She seemed pensive, but not upset or distressed.

I hummed. "Probably," I admitted. An all-nighter before a big match wasn't great, but I could manage it. The pay-off was worth it. "It might take me all night to make what I need. But don't worry, the Jounin have a watch set up. I'm not going to be alone."

Then I spread out my ink and paper and went to work.

Sometime later I raised my head. It was colder, darker and Asuma was smoking a cigarette somewhere nearby because I could smell the smoke. But there was also familiar chakra circling cautiously out of our perimeter. It wasn't approaching, wasn't trying to cross or attack, but it was there all the same.

I looked up and waved to Gaara.

He came closer. It was almost timid except he was too intense to ever be timid. Wary, maybe. "Shouldn't you be asleep?" He rasped, curiously.

I nearly shot the statement back, before I remembered that he didn't sleep. Oops. "Nah. Uh. You aren't keeping watch for your team?"

"They sleep better when I'm not there," he said.

Foot, meet mouth, apparently. I winced. "Right," I said, and hurried on to an explanation like that would take the awkwardness away. "Uh, I'm preparing for tomorrows fight. I mean. I have some stuff, already. But. Since I have time I thought I would make some specific seals…" I trailed off. This was not a success. "Uh. Do you want to know what they are?"

He crouched down on the other side of the table, which at least meant I wasn't staring up at him, but looked at me like he wasn't quite sure I was… okay. I was clearly making a great impression. "We are fighting tomorrow," he rasped.

"Yes," I agreed, because that was a statement. "I'm looking forward to it." I tried a smile, to see if that would lighten the mood a bit.

"Why would you tell me what your weapons are?" He asked bluntly.

Oh. So that was the problem. The bluntness was a little startling, but really. So useful. I could answer that.

I leant back, onto my hands. "The thing is," I said, calmer now. "I'm not going to win. I know I'm not going to win. But that's fine. I don't actually need to win, you know? I don't really want to, either, if I'm honest. You have so much more riding on this exam than I do. I mean, I don't want to have to do another one but it wouldn't be the end of the world. You want to be Kazekage, so you do have to win. That's why you're here, right?"

Otherwise, they'd have just promoted him themselves, from Genin to Kazekage. That was what I had always assumed went down. But he was here to present Sand, to show what he was and what he could do.

"But we can both get what we want out of it, if we fight well," I went on. "If I put up a good fight, show what I can do, then I can be promoted even if I lose. And if I fight well, then you can fight well and show them what you can do, and you get to go on to be Kazekage. Win / win situation for everyone, right?"

He stared at me for a long moment. It was honestly really unnerving. I tried to meet it, but I was never going to win a staring contest with him.

"No," he said.

I opened my mouth to try and sell my point further. I just had to hit the right points.

"Don't tell me what your plans are," he continued before I could. "I must be able to fight those that come for me when I am Kazekage. If I cannot do it here, then I am not enough."

He looked frustrated, trying to articulate it, but I could see his point.

I nodded. "Okay. That's fair." I gave an awkward cough. "I'm, uh, going to continue though. I have a lot to do?"

He nodded but didn't move. I wondered if it would be rude to go back to working and ignore him while he was right there.

"Wait here," he said, just as I decided to pick up my brush once more.

He left. I shrugged, because I wasn't going anywhere. I went back to ruling a table onto a scroll – I thought that if I managed to link the individual cells to a master seal, then I could probably get a dispersion effect by cutting them up into tiny scraps of paper. The Cherry Blossom Blizzard Explosion that Sakura had once suggested but we'd never found reason nor method to make reality.

Gaara came back while I was ripping the pieces up and stuffing them into little fabric pouches. He paused, clearly decided not to ask, and set a cup of tea down on the table.

"Oh," I said, not having expected that. "Thank you?"

He nodded, gravely. Then handed me a plain manila folder. I took it, confused.

I opened it. "Oh." It was a copy of Sasori's ninja file. Classified intelligence. I didn't know what kind of information Tsunade could get from Hidden Sand, legally or illegally, but this was unmistakable. There was barely anything blacked out. Shit. This was worth more than its weight in gold.

"Oh," I repeated softly, looking up at Gaara. Something, something hard and twisted in my chest eased a fraction. He'd heard me. He'd understood. He was warned and prepared and. And. He had handed it back to me.

Someone else was doing something.

I wasn't alone.

I swallowed, clutching the file. There was a lump in my throat. I hoped I wasn't going to cry.

"You warned me," Gaara said slowly. "So I wanted to help you back. This is… This has nothing to do with our fight tomorrow. Whether I win or lose, I want you to have this. To help Naruto."

"I will," I said. "It will. I'll look after it."

I yanked my sleeve up, drew a storage seal in ink on my arm and sealed the folder within it. It was safe there. The safest.

"Thank you."