These People I Can’t Stand 2/?
Title: These People I Can’t Stand
Rating: T
Warnings: Bucketloads of Sasuke, fluff, drugs including but not limited to fanfiction crack (in later chapters)
Other pairings: Undecided
Setting: School AU, and they're still twelve at the moment
Chapter One
Chapter Two: Same
“Did you hear? About the new kid?”
“My sister knows someone from his old school. We should stay away from him.”
“I heard he punched someone just for sitting next to him.”
“Yeah, and broke his arm and leg like it was nothing!”
“Really? That’s not true, the way I heard it he killed that kid. That’s why they had to get out of town. They changed their names, too.”
“Kid? I thought it was a teacher.”
“It was his mother.”
“No way! It makes sense, though. He doesn’t have one.”
“Sasuke?”
His name alerting him from blocking out the schoolyard gossip as background noise, Sasuke looked up from his book. That it got his attention might have also had something to do with being said by someone who wasn’t irrelevant, but he wasn’t going to admit that every second of the day. All the same, Naruto had an audience.
“I bet they don’t know anyone from his old school at all.”
Wishing he had kept on blocking the noise, Sasuke looked back to his studies like a good boy who does extra schoolwork on lunch breaks. Or a desperate boy who plans on acing the test his brother somehow didn’t two years ago. “Neither do you, dobe.”
“So? I’m just saying it’s this guy’s first day and everybody’s already made him into a monster. That’s not fair.”
“He does look pretty scary,” Sakura butted in.
Sasuke nodded. “You missed the morning classes, have you even seen him? What they say-“ He pointed with his pencil in their general direction without looking up. “-is starting to sound like something randomly picked out of a horror gekiga, but you don’t know him any better.”
“So it’s okay that they’re spreading nasty rumors of him?”
Naruto looked like someone had kicked his puppy and told him it was his fault for not taking better care of it. Oh god, he was taking this personally, wasn’t he? Naruto had that annoying habit of sticking his nose into other people’s business and making it his business to fix whatever was wrong. Sometimes it worked and made him a new friend. Sometimes it just got him problems that wouldn’t have to have been his.
Sakura saved him the trouble of carrying on the conversation. “Of course not! But we can’t help it if they do, and we have nothing to defend him with. Maybe you should talk to him yourself first.”
“You know, I’ll do just that!”
“Don’t get yourself killed,” Sasuke muttered.
“I heard that, bastard.”
“Then don’t. Just saying.”
Naruto stomped off determined to come back with the new kid in tow, to show his friends the famed monsterboy was just a kind, misunderstood soul who was ready to be their new best friend. The defiance and sincerity with which he took on the challenge would surely only make it more painful.
Sasuke barely knew the boy, either, but he had at least seen him before. He had looked him in the eye, and known those eyes were the problem-bringing type the minute he had. They were cold, full of rage, and daring you to give him an excuse to take it out on you. They allowed no one in and promised sharp fangs on a hand brought too close. Gaara Sabaku had issues. Sometimes you just knew.
It helped, of course, that Sasuke had issues, too.
It didn’t surprise him when Naruto came back alone and furious, telling them how ‘the jerk just glared and told me to leave him alone’ and proceeded to declare the other kids could spread all the rumors they wanted and see if he cared. Things would go back to normal if they just stayed away from the boy.
Except they didn’t, because you can’t look into hell without having it look back at you, apparently.
It took Gaara a few days of reconnaissance before approaching him, and Sasuke should have seen it coming. Maybe the freaky ginger kid had never come across someone who had things in common with him, and was curious, taking his time deciding whether it was a good or a bad thing that he now had. Then he was just there all of a sudden, talking to him out of his own initiative, saying things Sasuke knew were true and wished weren’t. It wasn’t even gloating; Gaara was just telling him what he saw, because it was common ground.
And because this is twelve-year-old boys we are talking about, it didn’t take many sentences into the conversation for them to switch to a language they were more comfortable with. It turned out Gaara spoke Fist just as fluently as his glares had warned about, and what Sasuke lacked in vocabulary and grammar he made up for with the will to get his point across.
He could hear his name being yelled somewhere in the background, and then Sakura appeared, forgetting how scary she thought Gaara looked and tried to pull him off him. An A for effort, but she ended up stumbling back with what was going to be a black eye.
Naruto caught her before she fell on her back, and the rest was predictable.
Sasuke’s part in the fight was ultimately deemed purely self-defense, and several eyewitnesses were eager to confirm the new kid had dealt the first blow. Naruto, thorough in everything he did, had made no effort to actually end the fight after his friend had been safe, and so he was going to share detention time with the creep.
Afterwards Sasuke felt really stupid for having felt sorry for him.
Of what the two boys had talked about in detention, he only knew that no one else -including himself and Sakura- would ever be treated to the full version. To his surprise it wasn’t because the new kid had killed Naruto the moment their supervisor had excused himself from the room to go cough his lungs out and decided not to return for two hours. To an even bigger surprise of his, when Naruto walked out the front door to his patiently waiting and patched up friends, Gaara walked out right next to him, and even hesitantly returned the wave Naruto gave him when they parted. He spared Sakura and him a brief glance, but did or said nothing, and just walked off to the two older kids who had showed up to wait for him. Not even a death glare.
Apparently Naruto had even more in common with Gaara than Sasuke could ever have dreamed (had nightmares?) of having. Or so he told them. The credibility of his words diminished with every second he spent convincing them that the monsterboy really was just a kind, misunderstood soul, and that he was going to be their new friend, starting tomorrow.
But Gaara didn’t show up at school the next day, or the one after that. He stayed absent for the rest of the week.
His return was poorly timed in a sense, as the same day happened to get picked by their old headmaster Sarutobi as the day to have the heart attack that would finally force him to retire. As if Gaara hadn’t been the subject of enough wild mass guessing already, the most recent addition to the mythos was that he had somehow caused it. No matter, all students got the rest of the day off starting from the first period, to recover from the shock, and though Sasuke couldn’t care less about the headmaster, he did have a shock to recover from.
“What do you guys wanna do?” Naruto looked from Sasuke to Sakura, and finally to their fourth wheel, as they made their way down the street to no particular destination.
“Go home?” groaned Sasuke.
“Are you inviting us?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not going either, we’re gonna do something fun together!” Sasuke rolled his eyes. Naruto could be such a nursery school teacher sometimes.
“We could just find a nice place to eat lunch in,” Sakura suggested.
“The beach.”
All heads turned to Gaara, who had said his first word of the day. This morning he had simply walked over to their table and sat down next to Naruto like he belonged there, and had tailed them in quiet determination since. It took a while for anyone to comprehend the grumbled syllables had had some relevance to the conversation, but finally they all agreed. It was a cloudy, slightly chilly day. They would most likely get the whole place to themselves.
For obvious reasons, Sasuke kept Gaara under a strict surveillance the whole day. He expected him to at least throw some spontaneous trauma-triggered hissy fit at some point or, on the other extreme, act like he was desperate to get accepted into the group, like he should be. Perhaps apologize to them for the bruise Sakura’s mother’s makeup didn’t quite cover and the similar black and blue (and green and purple, by now) marks all over Sasuke’s body -and no doubt Naruto’s, as well.
Mostly the guy just sat there, keeping a bit more distance than they kept from each other, and stared. At the horizon, at the sand he kept digging his toes in, at them.
Even when Sasuke dared to leave Sakura alone with him for a few seconds to attempt to catch Naruto and throw him into the ocean for a joke that must have been said to taunt him to do just that, the only thing that looked different when he came back was that they were… talking. Or trying to, about the subtle differences of their eye colors. Her giggle had never sounded so forced.
The sun was beginning to set when she scooted to Sasuke’s side, almost close enough to lean against him. She thought he didn’t notice, so he didn’t bother to object to it. The day had already been strange enough to slip from promises made to yourself about not letting an affectionate girl child violate your personal space.
“I don’t think he knows how,” she whispered, and he didn’t have to guess who the topic of the day was.
“To be friends,” she added, after a pause.
A little more than a hearing distance away in front of them, two pairs of feet waded in the languid waves. Since when did Naruto talk without an eardrum-breaking volume or waving his hands like a windmill? And did Gaara suddenly look taller? After a while it occurred to him he was simply walking with his back straight.
“I won’t let him hurt you again,” Sasuke beat out of himself. It sounded a bit more chivalrous than he had intended, and the ‘you’ did mean Naruto as well. There, he had admitted he cared about them yet again. Was there no end to his humiliation?
Now Sakura did lean. Definitely too chivalrous.
“I know. But that’s what I meant… I guess that’s all he knows.”
Naruto’s laughter chimed across the beach, and the boy next to him flinched but didn’t move away when a hand made a short stay on his shoulder.
And just like that, no one even asking for Sasuke's consent, Gaara was adopted.
Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five
Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight
Rating: T
Warnings: Bucketloads of Sasuke, fluff, drugs including but not limited to fanfiction crack (in later chapters)
Other pairings: Undecided
Setting: School AU, and they're still twelve at the moment
Chapter One
Chapter Two: Same
“Did you hear? About the new kid?”
“My sister knows someone from his old school. We should stay away from him.”
“I heard he punched someone just for sitting next to him.”
“Yeah, and broke his arm and leg like it was nothing!”
“Really? That’s not true, the way I heard it he killed that kid. That’s why they had to get out of town. They changed their names, too.”
“Kid? I thought it was a teacher.”
“It was his mother.”
“No way! It makes sense, though. He doesn’t have one.”
“Sasuke?”
His name alerting him from blocking out the schoolyard gossip as background noise, Sasuke looked up from his book. That it got his attention might have also had something to do with being said by someone who wasn’t irrelevant, but he wasn’t going to admit that every second of the day. All the same, Naruto had an audience.
“I bet they don’t know anyone from his old school at all.”
Wishing he had kept on blocking the noise, Sasuke looked back to his studies like a good boy who does extra schoolwork on lunch breaks. Or a desperate boy who plans on acing the test his brother somehow didn’t two years ago. “Neither do you, dobe.”
“So? I’m just saying it’s this guy’s first day and everybody’s already made him into a monster. That’s not fair.”
“He does look pretty scary,” Sakura butted in.
Sasuke nodded. “You missed the morning classes, have you even seen him? What they say-“ He pointed with his pencil in their general direction without looking up. “-is starting to sound like something randomly picked out of a horror gekiga, but you don’t know him any better.”
“So it’s okay that they’re spreading nasty rumors of him?”
Naruto looked like someone had kicked his puppy and told him it was his fault for not taking better care of it. Oh god, he was taking this personally, wasn’t he? Naruto had that annoying habit of sticking his nose into other people’s business and making it his business to fix whatever was wrong. Sometimes it worked and made him a new friend. Sometimes it just got him problems that wouldn’t have to have been his.
Sakura saved him the trouble of carrying on the conversation. “Of course not! But we can’t help it if they do, and we have nothing to defend him with. Maybe you should talk to him yourself first.”
“You know, I’ll do just that!”
“Don’t get yourself killed,” Sasuke muttered.
“I heard that, bastard.”
“Then don’t. Just saying.”
Naruto stomped off determined to come back with the new kid in tow, to show his friends the famed monsterboy was just a kind, misunderstood soul who was ready to be their new best friend. The defiance and sincerity with which he took on the challenge would surely only make it more painful.
Sasuke barely knew the boy, either, but he had at least seen him before. He had looked him in the eye, and known those eyes were the problem-bringing type the minute he had. They were cold, full of rage, and daring you to give him an excuse to take it out on you. They allowed no one in and promised sharp fangs on a hand brought too close. Gaara Sabaku had issues. Sometimes you just knew.
It helped, of course, that Sasuke had issues, too.
It didn’t surprise him when Naruto came back alone and furious, telling them how ‘the jerk just glared and told me to leave him alone’ and proceeded to declare the other kids could spread all the rumors they wanted and see if he cared. Things would go back to normal if they just stayed away from the boy.
Except they didn’t, because you can’t look into hell without having it look back at you, apparently.
It took Gaara a few days of reconnaissance before approaching him, and Sasuke should have seen it coming. Maybe the freaky ginger kid had never come across someone who had things in common with him, and was curious, taking his time deciding whether it was a good or a bad thing that he now had. Then he was just there all of a sudden, talking to him out of his own initiative, saying things Sasuke knew were true and wished weren’t. It wasn’t even gloating; Gaara was just telling him what he saw, because it was common ground.
And because this is twelve-year-old boys we are talking about, it didn’t take many sentences into the conversation for them to switch to a language they were more comfortable with. It turned out Gaara spoke Fist just as fluently as his glares had warned about, and what Sasuke lacked in vocabulary and grammar he made up for with the will to get his point across.
He could hear his name being yelled somewhere in the background, and then Sakura appeared, forgetting how scary she thought Gaara looked and tried to pull him off him. An A for effort, but she ended up stumbling back with what was going to be a black eye.
Naruto caught her before she fell on her back, and the rest was predictable.
Sasuke’s part in the fight was ultimately deemed purely self-defense, and several eyewitnesses were eager to confirm the new kid had dealt the first blow. Naruto, thorough in everything he did, had made no effort to actually end the fight after his friend had been safe, and so he was going to share detention time with the creep.
Afterwards Sasuke felt really stupid for having felt sorry for him.
Of what the two boys had talked about in detention, he only knew that no one else -including himself and Sakura- would ever be treated to the full version. To his surprise it wasn’t because the new kid had killed Naruto the moment their supervisor had excused himself from the room to go cough his lungs out and decided not to return for two hours. To an even bigger surprise of his, when Naruto walked out the front door to his patiently waiting and patched up friends, Gaara walked out right next to him, and even hesitantly returned the wave Naruto gave him when they parted. He spared Sakura and him a brief glance, but did or said nothing, and just walked off to the two older kids who had showed up to wait for him. Not even a death glare.
Apparently Naruto had even more in common with Gaara than Sasuke could ever have dreamed (had nightmares?) of having. Or so he told them. The credibility of his words diminished with every second he spent convincing them that the monsterboy really was just a kind, misunderstood soul, and that he was going to be their new friend, starting tomorrow.
But Gaara didn’t show up at school the next day, or the one after that. He stayed absent for the rest of the week.
His return was poorly timed in a sense, as the same day happened to get picked by their old headmaster Sarutobi as the day to have the heart attack that would finally force him to retire. As if Gaara hadn’t been the subject of enough wild mass guessing already, the most recent addition to the mythos was that he had somehow caused it. No matter, all students got the rest of the day off starting from the first period, to recover from the shock, and though Sasuke couldn’t care less about the headmaster, he did have a shock to recover from.
“What do you guys wanna do?” Naruto looked from Sasuke to Sakura, and finally to their fourth wheel, as they made their way down the street to no particular destination.
“Go home?” groaned Sasuke.
“Are you inviting us?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not going either, we’re gonna do something fun together!” Sasuke rolled his eyes. Naruto could be such a nursery school teacher sometimes.
“We could just find a nice place to eat lunch in,” Sakura suggested.
“The beach.”
All heads turned to Gaara, who had said his first word of the day. This morning he had simply walked over to their table and sat down next to Naruto like he belonged there, and had tailed them in quiet determination since. It took a while for anyone to comprehend the grumbled syllables had had some relevance to the conversation, but finally they all agreed. It was a cloudy, slightly chilly day. They would most likely get the whole place to themselves.
For obvious reasons, Sasuke kept Gaara under a strict surveillance the whole day. He expected him to at least throw some spontaneous trauma-triggered hissy fit at some point or, on the other extreme, act like he was desperate to get accepted into the group, like he should be. Perhaps apologize to them for the bruise Sakura’s mother’s makeup didn’t quite cover and the similar black and blue (and green and purple, by now) marks all over Sasuke’s body -and no doubt Naruto’s, as well.
Mostly the guy just sat there, keeping a bit more distance than they kept from each other, and stared. At the horizon, at the sand he kept digging his toes in, at them.
Even when Sasuke dared to leave Sakura alone with him for a few seconds to attempt to catch Naruto and throw him into the ocean for a joke that must have been said to taunt him to do just that, the only thing that looked different when he came back was that they were… talking. Or trying to, about the subtle differences of their eye colors. Her giggle had never sounded so forced.
The sun was beginning to set when she scooted to Sasuke’s side, almost close enough to lean against him. She thought he didn’t notice, so he didn’t bother to object to it. The day had already been strange enough to slip from promises made to yourself about not letting an affectionate girl child violate your personal space.
“I don’t think he knows how,” she whispered, and he didn’t have to guess who the topic of the day was.
“To be friends,” she added, after a pause.
A little more than a hearing distance away in front of them, two pairs of feet waded in the languid waves. Since when did Naruto talk without an eardrum-breaking volume or waving his hands like a windmill? And did Gaara suddenly look taller? After a while it occurred to him he was simply walking with his back straight.
“I won’t let him hurt you again,” Sasuke beat out of himself. It sounded a bit more chivalrous than he had intended, and the ‘you’ did mean Naruto as well. There, he had admitted he cared about them yet again. Was there no end to his humiliation?
Now Sakura did lean. Definitely too chivalrous.
“I know. But that’s what I meant… I guess that’s all he knows.”
Naruto’s laughter chimed across the beach, and the boy next to him flinched but didn’t move away when a hand made a short stay on his shoulder.
And just like that, no one even asking for Sasuke's consent, Gaara was adopted.
Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five
Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight