Un-beta'd again ^^; the idea kind of just hit me amid planning out chapters of Gift and writing out a scene in Hime-sama...

Hopefully it's to your liking. At this point Team 7 is 15, Itachi is 20, and it's been about two years after the epilogue of Nerves.

Sorry about all the cheese ^^; I have a tendency for it when I'm not writing long, fantasy-AU ItaSaku fanfiction....

A fluffy discovery is made when Sakura stubbornly refuses to tell anyone her new pet's name....

What's in a Name

"I am not something you walk all over, mister," she said tartly. "I like you and this whole cohabitation thing is fine by me, you're not a terrible roommate, but I draw the line at you behaving like I'm a piece of furniture to walk all over. I'm a person and I should get some respect!"

Dark eyes regarded her coolly, revealing nothing but a vague sense of boredom, as if listening to her tireade was a necessary, and not too pleasant, chore.

Sakura threw up her hands in frustration, verdant eyes searching the ceiling for patience.

"Argh!" she ground out, temper reaching the end of its short fuse. "You…you…you cat!"

The six-month-old feline in question dipped its head and nonchalantly began to bathe a paw.

She'd purchased him about a month ago, mostly on a whim. Having moved into her new place nearly a year and a half ago, it had taken the promise of a three-week-long hiatus from missions as her lackadaisical cell leader recuperated from a particularly grueling solo S-rank for her to realize just how empty her apartment felt.

Her parents had not been there to fill it with their warmth in her absence.

For the first time in over a year, Sakura had cried herself to sleep.

And when their next mission had finished and she returned again to a dark, unlit apartment that smelled musty from disuse, she had taken her mission paycheck, gone down to the marketplace with only a hazy idea of what she wanted in her mind, and returned home within the hour with a new cat in tow.

It was nice to come home to the apartment feeling warm with the life-force of another creature, even when the creature was only a cat.

Actually, especially because it was a cat.

In Sakura's experience with dogs (this was limited to Akamaru and Kakashi's summons, but she felt it was a pretty accurate cross-section of the species), they tended to form strong ties with their owners and, unfortunately, Sakura did not have that kind of leisure.

Between her missions with Team Seven and recent work at the hospital coupled with her ongoing chakra training under the Hokage's tutelage, she didn't have time to spare.

Caring for a dog's emotional needs would have been strenuous.

An aloof kitten was much easier to handle.

Though it would have been nice to get a little affection now and then.

The creature would trot over to the door as soon as she was home, and then promptly trot back off to wherever it had been before her arrival.

Still, the apartment felt lived-in when she returned from missions, and that stood to greater importance in her mind.

And over the weeks, Sakura learned just what living with a cat meant.

It started off with lint rollers.

Her pet was a small, black-and-white tuxedo kitty with dark eyes and an adventurous, if aloof, personality.

She discovered this after her first mission away from Konoha for more than a day when she returned home to find that he had discovered her laundry hamper. All her clothes in there had been headed to the wash though, so Sakura had merely been amused.

She was less so when she accidentally left one of her dresser drawers open and found all her favorite tops covered in downy black fur the next day.

And then there was his standoffishness.

She didn't mind that he didn't shower affection on her like a dog and easily took care of himself when she was gone (provided she left out enough food and water), but most cats at least leaned into their owner's petting and might even crawl into their laps for attention.

Sakura, of course, had to have picked the one I-need-all-my-space cat in Konoha.

And yet as time passed, she saw little glimpses of kitty affection.

Or rather, what she liked to interpret as kitty affection.

She found that when her teammates came over, he sat in the windowsill and gazed unblinkingly at them, not coming down to prowl her house as usual until they had gone.

She liked to think that it was because she was familiar to him; a comforting presence.

Then again, almost anyone would have been compared to Naruto, and even Sasuke.

And then there was the mine-rubbing.

After purchasing her little pet, Sakura had spent some days studying scrolls on cat behavior and veterinary techniques, and thus had learned about this early on. Cats would rub their faces against things they ruled to be their possessions to leave scent pheromones as marking.

This behavior was always more pronounced after a visit from her teammates. He tended to start with her couch where they'd sat and work outwards from there.

Even Sakura wasn't an exception.

She found herself inviting the boys over more often just for the pleasure of having her cat twine around her ankles possessively afterwards.

All in all, she couldn't find anything to complain about, though her teammates did not agree….

Itachi learned of Sakura's new housemate through his usual channel; during a moment of eavesdropping on his little brother and said sibling's teammates.

It wasn't that he and Sakura never talked; it happened, though rather seldom. She just tended to behave somewhat more reservedly around him (out of respect for his rank or because he was one of her teammates' older brother he had yet to know), though with a consistent sweetness and honest wholeheartedness that he had come to admire in her.

But their conversations were limited.

He was a jounin and an ANBU captain, she was a new-made chuunin with a busy schedule.

The handful of times they had been able to talk candidly at length had all centered around large moments in their respective lives; before her chuunin exam, when he had been formally named the Uchiha heir, after the death of her parents.

They had been earnest conversation all, and important, but for her day-to-day life, he picked up what he could from his secret little hobby.

"But Sakura-chaaan!" the noisy blond was whining, "It's just a name!"

"Exactly, Naruto-kun. It's just a name," the rose-haired kunoichi replied tartly, shrugging off her friend's plaintive tone. "I don't see why you care, it's not as if you like him."

"It's because he doesn't like me!" Naruto retorted. His face twisted into a pout. "And neither do you…."

"Oh come on Naruto, implying that I'd tell you if I liked you won't guilt me," the girl snapped, more tired than irritated. "He's just a cat and it's my business what I call him."

"She's right, dobe. Shut up, you're giving me a headache."

And there was his brother, hiding his own curiosity – and probably waiting for a more opportune time, as Uchihas were wont – with curt words.

Itachi could easily have stepped away at this point, or just continued to content himself with quiet spying, but this new development had interested him and neither his brother nor Naruto could e trusted to procure the cat's name. One because he would make no headway against Sakura's staunch defenses, the other because he would be unaware of any obligation to share said information with his older brother.

After all, the ANBU captain had already come to the conclusion that Sakura would only be so stringent about not revealing her cat's name if it shed a very personal light into her inner mind.

It was all the more reason to step out and join the conversation.

"Hello, otouto, Naruto, Sakura."

The responses were the usual, "ani-ue," from his brother and "Itachi-san," from the other two.

Sakura was the only deviation from the norm.

She greeted him by name as usual….

And then she'd laughed.

It wasn't an all out laugh; it couldn't even have been called a chuckle. It was just a quiet, smothered giggle on the edge of hearing that she silenced by biting her lip, but Itachi heard it nonetheless.

It was so unexpected that he unconsciously let the pet-related topic of conversation drop, until it would have been too suspicious to bring it up again out of the blue.

"You're a funny cat, you know that?" Sakura told her pet as she combed her fingers through his short black fur. "You like being warm; you're always curled up by the radiator, but you'll still always sleep in my room at night, even when I have the window open and my room gets chilly."

Her fingers found his favorite spot behind his ears and a soft, rumbling purr vibrated below her fingertips. Following the curve of his skull to a slim kitty shoulder and down to a paw, she tapped the feline appendage with a hum of amusement.

"Little kitty walked through paint," she yawned in a tired, sing-song voice as she stroked the small, white paw gently. "Your belly and your chin and all four of your paws got white but the rest of you stayed black."

As if offended by this teasing, the creature promptly extricated itself from her grasp and hopped off her bed to disappear into her bathroom.

Sakura huffed and rolled her eyes and made a face.

"Well fine then, see if I care," she said tartly, tossing herself back down onto her bed and pulling the covers over her. "You can go stay in the bathroom and sulk and I can get some rest."

Except that she couldn't because she'd forgotten to turn off the bedroom lights, and by the time she got up and got to the switch, her little black-and-white had managed to teleport from the bathroom to her bedside table without her realizing it.

"I have no idea if I'll ever get used to that," Sakura muttered under her breath as the cat fixed her with a silent, serious look.

And then proceeded to rub itself against her bedside lamp, the window, her pillows, and a large portion of the bed's headboard.

"Possessive much?" Sakura asked, raising an amused eyebrow at the cat. He was mine-rubbing again over everything he deemed was his, which, Sakura had learned very early on, was everything in her entire apartment. Nothing had escaped the creature's possessive prowl, not even the inside of her kitchen cupboards, an incident she tried not to remember.

She'd thrown her teammates out wish surprising speed and had had to replace several dishes that had fallen to their doom.

Crossing the room in five footsteps, she snagged her pet by the scruff of his neck, and placed him back on the floor, just outside the halo of light cast by her bedside lamp.

"Sorry to tell you but, that stuff's mine Mr. Silent-but-possessive," she said, making shooing motions with her hands. "No scoot. I need sleep."

The cat trotted off to her open bedroom door, sat there a second as if contemplating her, then meowed once.

Loudly.

Throwing her hands up in the air at this new gesture of defiance – he'd never meowed before, she'd even once assumed him to be mute but now she was sure he was going to get vocal – she burrowed herself under her covers and tried to get to sleep.

This cat of Sakura's was throwing off the team synergy, and driving Kakashi nuts.

Naruto was nothing if not doggedly persistent; the boy had declared he'd become Hokage who knew how many years ago, and his occasional outbursts showed no sign of that decision ever fading.

And now he had turned his attention to the curious case of Sakura's pet.

Kakashi sighed as, for the third time that week, the sparring match between his three students came to a very abrupt end as the group's sole female unexpectedly slammed the loud-mouthed blond through a tree.

"Maa maa," he soothed, sighing again and rubbing the back of his neck. "Maybe we should call it a day. We have a mission tomorrow so rest up." As his kids made their exits, he gently tapped a slim shoulder.

"Sakura, a word."

"I'll catch up to you guys," the rose-haired kunoichi called to her teammates, giving them a small wave before she turned her attention to her teacher, her gaze steady and tinted with wary curiosity.

She had an inkling of an idea why she'd been asked to stay.

Always on his toes when it came to his students, Kakashi, in spite of repeated abuse for his lazy, tardy, lackadaisical, porn-reading ways, was nothing if not a team player. Moreover, he was now the closest thing Sakura had to a father, and he felt it was past time to find out the mystery surrounding her pet.

He was pleased when she spoke up without prompting.

"I'm sorry about the fight, Kakashi-sensei," she told him dutifully. "I never meant for it to be a secret really, just…it just happened. I didn't really want to tell anyone at first because Naruto started making a big fuss about it and then it just got embarrassing and-," she stopped, biting her lip to keep from babbling. "I promise I won't try to let it get in the way of our teamwork."

Kakashi shook his head. "Sakura, is it really all that bad?" he asked, his single visible eye concerned. "It's just a name."

He knew they were the wrong words as soon as they were out of his mouth.

Sakura's green eyes smiled up at him, soft but serious. "Yes sensei, it's just a name. I'll talk it over with Naruto so that he drops the issue," she promised, and hurried to catch up to her friends.

"C'mon this is the best time!"

"Dobe."

"I'm serious! She won't notice, she was really tired from the mission."

A huff.

"Fine, let's go."

A grin.

"Hah, I knew you'd see it my way, Sasuke-teme."

"Dobe."

Two soft puffs.

Itachi sighed quietly from his perch in the eaves of the main house. He had a decent idea of what Naruto and his brother were up to. He also had a pretty decent idea that they would be discovered and sent packing. With a soft whisper of fabric, he slipped down from his seat.

Might as well follow them and put a stop to it all before anything happened.

"I think I like your ears best," Sakura said, her voice light with amusement. "They're always so attentive, you know? Quirking around even if you look all bored."

She reached out to touch said ears, which, predictably, twitched out of her reach as their owner hopped off the couch and trotted lightly away, dark tail flicking arrogantly at her as if to exhibit his scorn for her attempt at petting him.

Sakura merely laughed, already much used to her pet and housemate's antics.

She was tired, the last mission had taken its toll on her in a very definite manner, but coming home to her kitten had been rejuvenating. Lazing across her couch, she snuggled herself into the cushions as she tried to convince herself to get up and make a decent meal. As a superb medic she knew better than anyone the importance of having a balanced meal after her strenuous activities.

"In a second…I swear," she mumbled, feeling sleepiness overwhelm her.

A gentle paw tapping her cheek woke her.

"Hnn?" she murmured, eyes finally focusing on the feline that sat on her chest. "Ah, thanks for waking me-,"

A soft creak made her pause.

Suddenly alert, she concentrated then tossed her chakra out in thin threads like spider silk, searching for what she already knew was there.

Two very familiar chakra signatures.

"Come on, little one, let's go get dinner," she announced, pitching her voice a little louder so that her unseen audience could hear her better.

Still very much aware of her invisible guests, she made her way into the kitchen, turned on the sink, and started to prepare her dinner. As she began to rinse the rice for her meal, she began to talk, pitching her voice every so often so that it would sound like she had spoken just out of the range of hearing whenever it seemed as though she would mention her pet's name.

"I'm so tired…" she groaned, still rinsing. "We didn't think we'd get ambushed by Iwa-nin on our way back; don't worry…we all got out unscathed, but it was just more work than I was counting on."

She leaned down to stroke the feline with wet hands before setting up the rice cooker and starting on the soup.

"I'm aching all over…" there it was, the quiet but noticeable creak that alerted her that her listeners were still about and straining to hear even more. She set the pot on the stove and let it begin simmering. "I could use a good solid eight hours."

Grabbing cutlery, she headed for the table by her window where the two were hiding. The mission must have exhausted them too if they hadn't bothered to split up.

Or they had underestimated her.

Sakura let a small smile flutter over her delicate features.

A mistake they would soon pay dearly for.

As she sauntered by the open window, she let loose a barrage of senbon she kept in her cutlery drawer for such occasions, and was satisfied to hear a quiet yelp as the boys dodged.

Well it wasn't like she'd been aiming for them.

"Now stop it, this is getting ridiculous!" she snapped, poking her head out the window the fix both boys with a glare. "I told Kakashi-sensei I wouldn't let this whole name thing bother our teamwork so quit it!" she hissed. "If I catch you again, either of you, you're going to get punted into next week!" And with that last threat, she slammed the window shut in their faces, regulating their chakra signatures with her chakra web until they were out of earshot and disappearing quickly. They'd got the message.

Sakura paced back to her kitchen to finish up preparing dinner and remove the inquisitive creature that had jumped up to prowl her countertop.

"I really hope that puts an end to it, ne, Heiwa-kun."

Outside the kitchen window, the one she had left open to keep the room cool while she cooked, a darkness-cloaked figure sucked in a surprised breath. He'd meant to catch up to the duo but their head start and actually knowing the location of Sakura's apartment meant they arrived there without being stopped. Unable to pull them away now, he'd satisfied himself with masking his chakra signature and waiting, and he'd been rewarded.

Heiwa…

Peace.

It was his favorite word, a fact that only few people were privy to, the girl in the kitchen being one of them.

After the death of her parents, in one of their few extended conversations, he had explained what he fought for as a ninja. And she had murmured his favorite word with unshed tears in her eyes, he had felt his chest constrict as it so often did in her presence. There had been something intimate about the way she whispered it, bringing to mind warmth in winter and gentle comfort.

Heiwa.

Perhaps it was no wonder she'd kept her pet's name a secret, even though few people would have known the significance.

A hint of a smile curved pale lips.

It was…pleasing.

Ahaha...ha...haaaa...oh the cheese...

Heiwa is in fact Itachi's favorite word according to Narutopedia, and I thought it was more appropriate than naming the cat Itachi. Sakura equates her kitty's actions with the older Uchiha enough anyway without that, and it's a pretty word ^^

And yes, I do in fact have a cat that looks just like Heiwa except it's a girl named Cleo. She's a dear sweet monster and some of the experiences written here are my own, slightly exaggerated.

Please do review to keep the authoress happy, the epilogue to this will be up sooner that way I assure you!