Chapter 13

Disclaimer: Naruto and its characters belong to Masashi Kishimoto. The plot is the only thing I take credit.

I deleted the original *boring* chapter 13 and the scene of Naruto's nightmare was inserted in Chapter 12-which didn't change aside from that insertion. So, Sasuke did not go to Naruto's apartment right away. I was trapped in a deadlock with the first version so I decided to change it to fit the ideas in my stupid head. Forgiveness is asked by this humble writer for the lateness, revision and not-that-great writing *bows*

Enjoy ^^

Payback was going to be a real mad bitch in red 5-inch pointy stilletos, bondage outfit and whips in each of her hand.

It was another normal Monday morning for the students of Konoha Academy—except for one blond teen.

Naruto scanned the throng of incoming students from behind the large tree, keeping his eyes open for a certain actor with a hair styled similar to a duck's butt. He avoided his friends today so he could focus on his current stake-out, determined to settle everything with that Uchiha, man-to-man, and prove that he was no sissy.

He still could feel the faint stinging of the bruise on the jaw that Sasuke gave him as a souvenir from last Friday. Sasuke had been messing with him long enough and Naruto had given him enough leeway but it had been going long enough. No one made him faint and get away with it, no one, especially some stuck-up actor who thought that he was the shit. Naruto will make sure that Sasuke would resemble shit after he was through with him.

He just couldn't help but lose his consciousness after seeing that blood; blood reminded him of his mom and memories of her were something that he didn't want to reminisce too much about. It reminded him of how much he hated show business and the people living behind its curtains.

Besides, hating causes too much wrinkles and Naruto didn't want to look like he was thrice his age before he even got out of high school.

He hadn't noticed Shikamaru get behind him and dragged Naruto by his bag. Naruto struggled to get the bag strap that strangling him loose but his friend ignored his choking, continuing the rough treatment until they finally reached the first floor corridor. Shikamaru finally let go, making the blond fall down on his ass on the floor.

"What did you do that for?" Naruto complained, standing up and dusting his pants. He looked at his friend with a glare.

"You were creeping the shit out of the students out with your unsuccessful attempts of espionage," Shikamaru explained to him with a frown. "One of the janitors even called the police to report, 'a pervert lurking in the school grounds'. And you are late."

"Me? A pervert?" Naruto looked at Shikamaru with disbelief. "They should arrest Sasuke if they were talking about perverts! I was waiting for that damn bastard to return a really great favor."

"Return that later," The genius said, turning his back to return to their classroom. "Mizuki substituted for Kakashi today—you know how that man could get with you."

"Great, another bastard to deal with." Naruto sighed and fell behind Shikamaru, not really enthusiastic about the fact that he was going to face one of his most hated teachers. Teachers and students both share a peculiar relationship of love and hate with each other and Naruto just happened to share a lot of hate with this particular one.

There goes the wrinkle again.

[ () ]

"Break time!"

Sasuke got off the set, grabbing a bottle of water from the cooler before heading towards his own dressing room. Everyone he met along the way avoided greeting him, seeing a dark ominous cloud above the actor's head complete with matching mini-lightning flashes and thunder rumbles, reflecting Sasuke's not so good mood.

He had spent the whole weekend planning for his next approach for Naruto and was ready to put it in action when Kakashi called him Sunday evening that the schedule had been changed and was moved on Monday morning, flushing all of his hopes down the toilet. Sasuke didn't even get the chance to see Naruto this morning. His phone vibrated, a message coming from his manager that the break had been extended for another hour, which means the chance of seeing the blond was also extended.

Sasuke decided to walk around their production company's grounds, which was composed of buildings in a compound for on-set shootings. He gave a simple nod to his fellow workers, remembering to be at least politely civil to the ones he worked with, work ethics and things like that. He gave the posters of blockbuster-hit movies lining up the walls of this corridor a fleeting gaze, some of which he recognized from his own childhood while others were decades before he was even conceived.

He took a left turn and the next corridor was now lined with large pictures of the production outfit's talented and famous directors. Below the pictures were information about the director's life and his works; Sasuke actually read some of them, especially from those he respected and admired. The next picture was of Minato Namikaze, a man with blond hair and blue eyes, reminding him greatly of Naruto. It was not the physical appearance but more of man's overall presence.

The info on the man consisted of his early life, works and awards garnered throughout his entire career. Most of his works were considered as legends, even Sasuke knew that much. Minato died at the age of thirty-one, the cause of it was a broken heart after his lover died just a year before him due to a freak accident.

References were listed at the bottom in a smaller font size and Sasuke read through them—Raitei Productions, Jiraiya the novelist, Famous Scandals, Kushina Uzumaki—Uzumaki? Sasuke double read the entry again and saw that he was not mistaken; Uzumaki was really written on it. Maybe this information could help him understand Naruto better. He checked his watch, indicating that he still have an hour left before the shooting resumes and the library was at least two hours away.

The choice was obvious, of course—screw work. Sasuke went back to his dressing room, donned his baseball cap and sunglasses and quickly left the building. He hailed a taxi and thanks to the driver's driving fit for the drag-racing tracks, Sasuke reached the library just under an hour.

"If you don't know how to spell silence or know what it means, get the hell out of the library. The golden rule here is 'shut up or fuck out'." The distressed librarian fixed her tweed jacket and A-line skirt before returning to her post. High school students were a great pain in her thumb since not every one of them went to sacred halls of the library to read or to study; they either go here to hang out and mess with the librarian and worst, some actually treat this as make-out motel. She saw a young man standing by the other side of her table, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. Just great—another kid to worry her wrinkles over.

"What do you want?" She snapped irately at the young man. Her jaws, and her skirt, almost dropped on the ground when the man removed his sunglasses and revealed that he was not an annoyance but her wet dreams in flesh; Sasuke Uchiha.

"I believe you could help me with a lot of things," Sasuke said, flashing his most attractive smile and leaned on his elbow by the desk. "As long as you keep this a secret, that is." The librarian swore that she had just reached seventh heaven.

I hope Naruto forgives me for flirting around.

[ () ]

"Miss your boyfriend?"

Kiba ducked to avoid the flying notebook that was sent to his direction and grinned at the glaring blond. As their usual Monday afternoon, their History teacher had once again disappeared from the face of the academy, doing whoever knows what. The four of them decided to let their teacher be after hearing strange sounds and chanting coming from the man's house when they decided to investigate the disappearance of Hidan-sensei one night. The nightmares and the afterimages that will permanently stick with them throughout their life would not be worth it.

"And you'll miss your porn collection if I told Hana-neechan about it, dog-breath," Naruto threatened.

"Tough luck." Kiba's grin got wider, displaying his canine-like characteristic. "The genius that I am, I hid it where no one, not even Sherlock Holmes, would find it."

"Let me guess," Shikamaru said, "Under your bed?"

"No—what? How the fuck did you figure that out?"

"That, my friend, is called deduction. When someone says that 'a place that no one would ever find', it usually means under the bed. Idiots tend to feel more secure if a very important item of theirs would be hidden near them."

"Who are you calling an idiot?"

Naruto ignored his two friends as Kiba argued with Shikamaru, his eyes drifting once again to the vacant seat of Uchiha. Aside from the detention he had received from Mizuki, his day went well without the presence of Sasuke. Naruto didn't have to argue in the middle of the class, didn't have to look behind his seat to throw dirty looks every ten seconds, and didn't have formulate plans on how to sneak behind Sasuke one dark night and push him off the nearest cliff available.

Everything was the same as it had been without Sasuke lingering around, just like the old times where he would be the loud blond whose attention revolved around Sakura. Then why did Naruto feel like there was something amiss? He had been so used to the early verbal arguments, the smug looks and that stupid smirk that Sasuke always wore when he had the upper hand.

Maybe Naruto missed him.

Slowly, the thought hit him like a poisonous snake slithering forward stealthily that you wouldn't realized it until it bit you in your feet. Did he just think of that? There was no way, no fucking way, that he had just thought of the horrifyingly ridiculous idea that he was missing Sasuke. And even if Naruto's mind had been lately preoccupied with Sasuke instead of Sakura, that didn't mean he also liked the bastard.

"I don't miss him!"

"Really? But it looks like you do." Shikamaru yawned before continuing, ignoring the pointed look delivered to his direction. "You keep on yapping about how you don't like Sasuke but you keep on looking at his desk since this morning like you were expecting for him to poof magically. Actions speak a lot louder than words."

"Of course I don't like him!" Naruto crossed his arms indignantly. "I already told you that I was really looking forward to breaking that bastard's face for what he did."

"Well, he does owe you an apology," Chouji agreed.

Naruto told his friends over lunch on what happened last Friday, excluding the part where he fainted over the sight of blood, his own nonetheless. He didn't want them to know how he became a sissy when faced with blood, even if they were close with one another; Naruto just couldn't get himself to open up about his childhood. His hand unconsciously drifted to the scars on his face, a permanent reminder of his dear mother. Naruto remembered the arguments that were getting more and more frequent, his mother silently sobbing in his room when she thought that her son was asleep and how she finally decided to walk out of the house with her son. Then people shouting and huge, solid rectangles, lots of them, falling from the night sky.

The event made it to the headlines of newspapers and TV, the story of how the lover of a famous director died after being fallen over by steel beams. Since the couple had been so private about their personal life, a lot of rumors circled around the death of Kushina Uzumaki, rumors about her being a drug user and that what happened was not an accident but it happened because she was so high in drugs, that she planned to kill herself and her child because her husband didn't love her anymore. His parent's 'friends' told twisted versions of stories of the family; Minato was a neglectful father, Kushina was a high-strung wreck and their child was mentally retarded.

A year after that, Minato's heart stopped while he was in his study, following Naruto's mother to the grave. Naruto was passed on from family to family because he had no living relatives to be with. Adjust was always the biggest issue and the people he had been with wasn't keen on accepting someone with such a bad reputation, accepting him only because of the money. It was not until he was ten when Jiraiya, a distant relative of his father finally found him and became Naruto's legal guardian. The old hermit was a pervert extraordinaire, writing novels with too much sex included, claiming that peeping on women bathing in hot springs was research work but he took good care of Naruto. He took three years off his travels to concentrate on Naruto until the blond convinced him that he was capable of being on his own and he had Iruka, their nosy but kind neighbor to help him out. Jiraiya agreed and dropped at least twice a month.

Kiba, Shikamaru and Chouji's families frequently invited him to their homes when no one was available and Naruto had gotten close with them too. He moved in an apartment near to his high school when he turned sixteen and Jiraiya still drops by, along with Tsunade, his high school principal who had been a really close friend of his mother.

"—and Sakura really loved Ino but she pretended to like Sasuke to fool everyone." Kiba said., catching Naruto's attention that had crawled back into the past.

"Yeah and you really like that creepy bug-guy with the sunglasses from class B, who you hang out with every Saturday and Sunday and ignore me, the greatest best friend in the universe. And you just use you rpron collection to hide the fact that you worship the male anatomy," Naruto commented snidely.

"Hey, that's foul!" Kiba was obviously irritated with the comment. "I know Shino looks creepy in tandem with his bugs but he's a nice guy. Besides, his mother and my mom are friends so it is natural for me to hang out with him. The guy needs a cool friend aside from his creepy-crawlies."

The bell rang, abruptly halting the two's conversation. Like Zombies that received the signal for brain-buffet, the students rapidly packed their things and zoomed out of the room while the others that decided to remain and walk out of the room in a humanly manner, and not eat brains that would make them more stupid than smart. Naruto groaned, remembering that he still had to be human and meet with the unpleasant ogre that bathed named Mizuki, whose sole mission was to ruin the lives of the students that didn't like to kiss his footings.

"I think Mizuki gets more and more intent on making my life hell."

"He's a teacher, dude." Kiba patted the blond's back sympathetically. "Its not in his job description to make your life easier; much like parents and wives."

His friends wished him tons of good luck, knowing that Naruto would need more than luck when facing with that teacher. Naruto bid the three goodbye and begrudgingly made his way towards the teacher's lounge and found the asshole sitting all alone there.

'If I die before I leave, please take his soul to hell.'

[ () ]

Of all the possible and horrible chores that Mizuki was currently hatching in his mind, Naruto wished that it didn't include cleaning the mini barn or worst, the boy's bathroom in the gymnasium that suspiciously smelled like Shrek who had just decided to take a bath in there after taking a dip in the muddiest puddle he could find, which happened to be right behind a piggery with two-hundred pigs.

But Mizuki, being a teacher who knew what makes the toughest of students pee in their big-boy diapers, had the most brilliant idea of all. Of course, what better punishment was there to give than to send Naruto into the most feared place in the whole of academy—the dreaded Friday Storage

It wasn't until twenty years ago when the mayor decided to build a school named after their great city—and as every other school in the world, Kohoha Academy has its own story of horror to share.

Room 13 was once a classroom for the freshmen students but ever since the 'incidents', it had been demoted to being a storage for broken school stuff. One student from this room died by drowning in the river about ten minutes from the school even with the proper warning signs and the fence that separated the body of water from the facility. It would have been considered as a result of disobedience but it happened at a specific date—namely, every Friday the 13th.

After the fourth death, the classroom was officially shut down and the students were transferred in another room. Students and the faculty avoid this place because of the eerie feeling it gave off and the strange sounds that came inside. Several claimed to have seen unearthly scenes from inside when they pass by it or used it as a place for their courage tests.

The academy's grounds used to be a Japanese camp during the World War II that served as the home of the Japanese soldiers and prison for those who disagreed with the government. Torture had been a common device to get those anti-war people to change their minds or to silence them forever. After the war, stories of supernatural and unexplainable events circulated the area and scared the potential buyers and developers off their plans for the abandoned piece of land.

Naruto gulped as he came nearer and nearer to the storage when he felt his natural instincts pulling him towards the opposite direction and screaming "Run! Run for the safety of your little babies to be!" in a very high-pitched tone. Mortal bullies and arrogant bastards, he could deal with but he wasn't so sure if he faced something that wasn't supposed to exist anymore, i.e ghosts and ghouls; especially headless ones with samurai swords that wanted to behead everyone he met and make everyone resort to wearing pumpkin-heads and pose as Jack-o-Lantern.

"Even our OCD-stricken janitors avoid this place," Naruto said aloud, as he looked at the cracked walls and faded paint outside the room. He bet that with the amount of dust in here, his feet will sink when he stepped on it. He opened the door, which didn't grow a sharp set of teeth contrary to popular urban legend and ate him up. He took a deep breathe and almost choked when the fine particles entered his lungs and launched him into a sneezing marathon. Mizuki didn't even provide him a mask!

He used his handkerchief as cover and entered, feeling the wall for light switch which he quickly found.

It looked like a normal storeroom of the school, basically with the same collection of chairs, books and miscellaneous things, some arranged neatly, others simply scattered. And surprisingly, it was really clean even though you could tell that no one had been in this room for quite a while, which would be expected with the reputation it had. At least, Naruto didn't have to worry about finding dead bodies and students making-out, thankfully. It looked normal enough so no supernatural entity would be interested in a normal looking room-right?

The blond set his bag aside and started going around the room , picking up books and reading the titles and then tossing him aside when they were not what he needed . The bastard assigned him to pick up ten grammar books since they didn't have enough for their class tomorrow. And after about half an hour, he realized that he was getting nowhere because he was picking up the same books he threw aside and there were a lot of books scattered around.

"I hope Kakashi-sensei would be back tomorrow-I will choose his perverseness over Mizuki's assholiness." Opting for a more systematic and less time-consumption, Naruto stacked the books that he already had gone over and continued searching for the assigned title, already having two.

"Aha! I found another one!" Naruto crouched down and tried to reach for the book that was under a cabinet that was tipped on its side, leaning on a chair with chairs crisscrossed like the plant-vine things that protected Sleeping Beauty. He cursed when his hips got stuck in between the legs of the chair but determined not to let a nonliving quadrupedal item win, he wriggled, using his left hand as support, he stretched his right arm as it could go and grabbed the tome.

"Hah! Take that, chair!" He almost jumped in glee when he realized that he was stuck and that if he moved, the chairs might topple over him. He squirmed and wriggled as gently as he could but the more he moved, the more his limbs seemed to get stuck more. He thanked the gods that no one was here to witness his embarrassing dilemma.

But that gratitude turned out to be a little too early when he heard footsteps coming and worst, heard the voice he didn't want to hear the most.

"Of all the positions I could find you in, this has to be the most interesting." The blond could imagine that stupid smirk on Sasuke's face.

Yes, the gods hated Naruto and his existence.

I'm still trying to grope my way in writing because I seemed to have forgotten how to write a story OTL;;; -sneaks away from pitchforks and pillows-