Colors and Carousels

Sakura couldn't count the number of times she'd been mistaken for Naruto's girlfriend. Not that she minded. But Naruto acted like it was so… so… offensive.

i. I started writing this, like, three years ago. My apologies if it's uneven, and please tell me if you find it so.

"Oi, Naruto. Hokage-sama will chew me out if you don't go to the hospital," Shikamaru complained. Naruto was ahead of him and Neji, and he wasn't slowing down.

Naruto didn't pause, but he looked back through the trees. Neji and Shikamaru looked battered. Like Naruto, they were dirty and covered in dried blood. Well, in Naruto's case the blood was dry. Shikamaru had a wound still open on his side that was oozing sluggishly, and Neji's left shoulder was bleeding through the bandages he had wrapped it in.

"I'm fine," Naruto called, waving him off. He shot off at full speed, knowing that Konoha's gate would be just around this next twist in the path.

"Naruto!" Shikamaru called, fruitlessly trying to assert his place as captain of the team. Neji shook his head in empathy (or mutual disgust) as Naruto, who actually seemed to be speeding up, did not respond. Shikamaru sighed in annoyance and focused on the dirt under his feet. All three of them, he knew, could barely put one foot in front of the other on the dark forest path, but the closer they got to the village, the more Naruto behaved as if he had just woken from the most restful night of his life.

Naruto whooped suddenly, and when Shikamaru looked up, he saw why. A few minutes later, Naruto flashed through the gate. Shikamaru could barely make out the surprised grunts of the shinobi on duty. He sighed.

"Idiot," he muttered. Neji walked silently beside him, but Shikamaru thought he saw a faint smile on Neji's lips from the corner of his eye.

Things are different when there's a woman waiting for you, Shikamaru thought, and he smiled too.

It was good to be home.

Naruto did not go to the hospital, just as Shikamaru expected. And, as Shikamaru could have probably predicted, he did not go to his apartment either. He had promised Sakura he would return to her (whether she took that literally or not), and no amount of fatigue, dried blood, or doubt would stop him. As he leaped over the buildings and streets with chakra he didn't really have, his thoughts wandered.

He knew there had been a moment of change, a small instant in which everything had shifted, when everything between them began to be shaded in just this way. If he thought about it carefully, he would trace that moment back to a late night shopping trip, but Naruto didn't often think that carefully. It was easier for him to think that the way things were was how they had always been, and even though he consciously knew that wasn't true, it felt that way. And feelings, for Naruto, had always trumped any logic he might have acknowledged.

Bottles clinked on the streets below him, and he caught a glimpse of a stray cat toppling a garbage bin in an alley before it bolted, scared by the crash it had caused.

He had a lot of feelings attached to Sakura, feelings he wanted to put into words. He knew people used different terms for those closest to them, terms like honey, darling, sweetheart—but he wasn't sure how to use them. No one had ever used such names to refer to him, so he had no experience with them. Instead, people usually called him things like idiot or brat, and though those had become endearments in themselves, Naruto knew enough to know that they were not the same as the soft words people used in their most tender moments

A few streets from Sakura's complex, he dropped from the skyline and approached her building by foot, trying not to think about how tired he felt or about the lecture he was going to get for coming straight to her rather than stopping at the hospital. Instead he concentrated on locating Sakura's building.

Naruto had a growing stack of tender moments. There was the way Sakura looked at him when she thought he wasn't looking. There was the way she stood up to Sai for him more and more. There was the way she had scooted her sleeping bag close to his on their last mission together. There was the way Sakura didn't even turn down his offers for dates. Of course, she still called him an idiot, still used him for a punching bag, still scolded him. But if those things stopped, Naruto thought he wouldn't recognize her anymore.

His steps were a little crooked, but he had reached Sakura's building. He seriously considered taking the stairs, like a civilian, but when he looked up at Sakura's window, he saw she had left it open a crack, so he used the last of his chakra to walk up the wall.

All these things—good and bad and painful and new as they might be—were precious to him, but they were not what scared him. Tsunade-baachan, Kakashi-sensei, and Yamato-taicho telling him on three separate occasions that he and Sakura were so cute together scared him. Konohamaru calling Sakura his girlfriend and Sakura protesting only half-heartedly scared him. Sakura holding so tightly to him when he said goodbye before missions on which she wasn't accompanying him scared him. These things scared him because they meant a great deal to him, made it real. Real enough that losing it would be an ugly mess, that losing it would leave a hole behind that he wouldn't know how to fill.

So he ignored all those things. Pretended they never happened, and tried to act like he always had, even though he knew it was making Sakura mad.

When he reached the window, he pushed it open slowly, hoping for no squeaks. It stuck for a moment after he'd gotten it halfway open, but when he pushed a little harder, it went up all the way. He perched precariously on the windowsill, ignoring the little black dots in the corner of his vision.

Moonlight spilled into the room. Sakura was asleep on her couch, and Naruto noticed that her blanket had fallen down from her shoulders. A faint breeze drifted past him from the open window, and Sakura shifted. Naruto turned to close the window—he didn't want her to get cold—but too late he realized that his body was no longer functional. He fell to the floor with a loud thump, and stars danced on the hazy upper edge of his consciousness. The inky darkness that had been pooling in the corners of his vision spread, and when Sakura's face appeared above his, it was fuzzy. And then it was gone, lost to the dark.

Naruto couldn't remember where he was exactly, so he supposed he had collapsed while training. It wouldn't be the first time. However, as he hovered on the verge of consciousness, he thought he could hear the quiet whir of chakra. Then there was a soft, wet feeling up and down his skin—his neck, his abdomen, his arms—like someone was rubbing him with a warm, damp cloth. The rhythmic motions lulled him back to unconsciousness, but right before he was enclosed by the velvety blackness, he caught the faintest scent of honey.

Home.

When he next woke, he was warm, cocooned in something much softer than the grass and dirt of training field 3. He didn't open his eyes. Rather, he floated in the last vestiges of his fading dream of green chakra, and spring cherry blossoms. As the dream slipped away, the honey scent grew stronger. Then something light and feathery brushed against his collarbones, and it was almost like the feeling of grass on his cheek that often woke him when he collapsed while training, except that grass didn't smell like honey.

Naruto experimented by moving his legs: the stiff way they responded told him he had indeed pushed himself to his limits. He settled back down into the softness around him and decided he must have made it home to his bed. He took a deep breath, ready to fall back asleep. But no, something wasn't quite right. His old mattress wasn't this comfortable, and the soft, feathery something tickling his chest was too light to be blankets and sheets.

He opened his eyes slowly and, in the soft twilight that was almost dawn, discovered a pink head of hair resting against his chest. Naruto was on his side, and the arm he wasn't lying on was draped across Sakura's waist. Sakura's knuckles were resting against his ribs, her knees touching his thighs.

Sakura-chan smells good, Naruto thought pleasantly. And as if on cue, Sakura blew out a long breath against his chest and moved a little closer, tilting her head upwards towards his neck, her lips grazing his collarbones, and Naruto felt his eyes closing again.

Naruto slipped quietly into consciousness. He was still in bed, but he was now lying flat on his stomach. He rolled over, scratched his stomach, and smacked his lips contentedly. His dream about Sakura had been a good one, so detailed that it had felt real. He could still smell the honey aroma that had permeated the dream.

"Naruto," Sakura whispered. Naruto lazily opened his eyes. Sakura was standing next to the bed, dressed for work.

"Sakura-chan." Naruto smiled. Oh, he was still dreaming, but that was okay with him as long as it continued like this.

"I'm going to the hospital. Promise me you won't do anything stupid while I'm gone."

Naruto hummed happily in response. He snuggled into the comfortable bed (best bed he'd ever had in a dream), and his eyes drooped a little.

"Good boy," Sakura murmured, brushing his jaw with her fingertips. Naruto giggled to himself while his eyes closed. It had been a long time since one of his dreams had turned out so well, a long time since one of his good dreams has insisted on continuing even after he thought it was over.

He heard shuffling footsteps moving away from him, and eventually he heard a door close. He sighed. Now that she was gone, there was no need to keep dreaming, but he couldn't pull himself away from the bed that was so much more comfortable than it should have been. It was a nice change from the dank cave he, Neji, and Shikamaru had slept in while trying to recover from their fight.

Naruto tumbled suddenly into awareness and sat up fast enough to make him dizzy. Neji, Shikmaru, the mission. . . He suddenly recalled their homeward journey, Shikamaru's complaining, and climbing through Sakura's window. . . where he had fallen. Which meant that he had indeed made it to Sakura-chan's apartment.

It wasn't a dream; it was real. That honey smell—that was Sakura, the real Sakura, and not some figment of his unconscious desires.

Naruto looked around him with wide eyes. The red coverlet, the night table with books and scrolls stacked on it, the prints of flowers hanging on the far wall. . . All of it told him one thing: he was in Sakura's bedroom, and he had spent the night in her bed.

Again.

At the hospital, Sakura distributed patients' charts to the nurses, then headed towards Shikamaru's room. No one had actually informed her that the tactical genius was in the hospital, but no matter how he might complain, Shikamaru was begrudgingly obedient and didn't try to bend the rules the way Naruto always did. So if Naruto had come home that battered when he had the fox chakra to speed up his healing, she could only conclude that Shikamaru and Neji had been in worse condition.

Because Naruto had been in no position last night to tell her about the mission, she was going to have to find out from someone else what had happened if she wanted to know before she got off her shift, and there were only two someone elses that could give her that information: Neji and Shikamaru. She ruled Neji out, because getting information out of him would be like trying to smash solid rock (which, admittedly, Sakura could do quite well, but she didn't think Tsunade would approve of her breaking a patient for a mission report that she technically had no right to hear). Conveniently, Shikamaru was close by, and any woman bossy enough could bully information out of Shikamaru. (Well, non-classified information, at least. She didn't think he'd capitulate so easily to spies.) She passed through the critical care unit, thankful that no one she knew was there, and made her way to the third floor where jounins normally recovered from wounds received in the field.

The third floor was generally quiet; jounins were good at being silent, especially when such stoicism was expected from them. They didn't complain about shots, didn't refuse hospital food, and didn't resist treatment like some of the younger, inexperienced shinobi, probably because they realized that hospital stays were inevitable, that they'd be back again, and that it would be unwise for frequent visitors such as themselves to make enemies of the staff.

Today, however, Sakura could hear people arguing all the way down the long hallway. She almost laughed to herself; Shikamaru sounded like he was having a rough time.

". . .back three days ago," Temari was saying as Sakura neared the room. When Sakura reached it, she paused in the doorway, unnoticed. Temari was glaring at Shikamaru, her arms folded across her chest. Shikamaru, who was lying in the hospital bed shirtless with his torso wrapped in bandages, closed his eyes in what Sakura guessed was defeat.

"I didn't plan for—"

"Didn't plan for what?" Temari interrupted him. "You never don't plan for things! Use that excuse again and you won't be able to plan for anything for a long while!"

It might have been the pain killer, but Shikamaru looked slightly afraid, so Sakura took that moment to step into the room.

"What I think Temari-san is trying to say is that she was worried when you didn't come back when she thought you would," Sakura offered.

Shikamaru turned to Sakura and gave her a grateful look. Temari huffed.

Sakura pursed her lips and advanced on Shikamaru. The closer she got to him, the more suspicious he began to look.

"However, I do think we have a right to know what held you up," Sakura tilted her head in Temari's direction, "since we waited so patiently for your return." She smiled with mock sweetness.

Temari grinned wickedly, happy to have an accomplice.

Shikamaru put up his hands as if to ward off the approaching medic-nin.

"Sakura, we haven't even briefed the Hokage. You know I can't just—"

"Maybe Tsunade-sama would be interested to hear about a certain shinobi under your command breaking regulation, hmm?"

"Oh, come on," Shikamaru complained. "It's not exactly a secret that Naruto rarely does as he's told."

"And yet you'll still get written up once she finds out," Sakura responded smugly.

"But he did technically get medical treatment, didn't he? Or are you going to pretend you didn't patch him up at your apartment?"

Sakura's eyes narrowed as Shikamaru relaxed slightly—he had her there, and she wasn't so sure she wanted everyone to know that Naruto was asleep in her bed. Although, Sakura thought sourly, it's not like it hasn't happened before.

How much Naruto cared about her and how much time they spent together was obvious to everyone in the village. People said things about it all the time! Sakura couldn't count the number of times she'd been mistaken for Naruto's girlfriend. Not that she minded. But Naruto acted like it was so… so… offensive. He'd splutter and deny it till he turned blue in the face, and then he wouldn't look her in the eye. One time he'd even punched Sai directly in the mouth, no holds barred, before he ran away red-faced. It frustrated Sakura to no end that he was constantly shutting her down. And it was confusing; had she been reading him wrong all this time?

Yelling and a loud crash from the hallway shook her out of her thoughts.

"Oh, what now!" she spat irritably. Reflecting on her and Naruto's status, as well as being thwarted from getting the information she wanted, had significantly darkened her mood.

Sakura glared at Shikamaru as though blaming him for the bad day she just knew she was going to have and stalked out of his room.

In the hallway she found the nurses' station in chaos. In the middle of it sat Naruto, sprawled on the floor, gangly limbs spread out.

Sakura folded her arms and glared at him.

Sheepishly he looked up from under a clipboard that fallen on his head.

"I… tripped?"

Sakura rolled her eyes and, grabbing his arm, hauled him to his feet. She kept a tight hold on his arm as she bowed to the nurses, who were muttering and picking up papers.

"Sorry about this idiot. I'll escort him out."

Then she turned and dragged Naruto away.

"Ow, ow, ow!"

When they were sufficiently far away, Sakura dropped his arm.

"What are you doing here?" she hissed.

"I'm sorry, Sakura-chan!"

Sakura kept up her furious pace, Naruto trailing behind her.

"I just wanted to say thanks. And apologize. You know. For showing up out of the middle of nowhere. And taking up half your bed."

"How many times have I told you: I don't mind!" Sakura threw over her shoulder as she exited the building.

She was so mad she didn't notice Ino and Chouji approaching from the street.

"You're just always so nice to me. I don't want to take advantage."

Nice? Nice! Was he insane? She treated him like crap all the time, and he thought he was taking advantage of her?

That's it.

Naruto anxiously followed Sakura out of the building. Sakura was mad again, really mad, and he knew it was his fault.

Sakura stopped so quickly that Naruto bumped into her back. He laughed nervously and mumbled an apology while stepping back. Sakura surprised him by pivoting instantly and pressing herself up against him.

"Kiss me," she commanded. Naruto gaped, then swallowed hard. Sakura was looking up at him, an unreadable look on her face and a gaze so intense that Naruto felt a little like he'd been swallowed whole.

This, this was exactly what he'd been afraid of.

Naruto looked away for a moment, trying to catch his breath. On the hospital steps, Ino was standing stock still, her mouth hanging open in shock. Chouji was frozen too. His hand, holding a chip, hovered in front of his open mouth.

"Naruto."

"Sakura-chan. . . people are watching."

"Let them watch."

Slowly, she put her arms around his neck and moved closer to his face. She tilted her head, looking him in the eye to make sure he was watching her, and then she closed her eyes and put her lips on his.

Though the actual contact was almost tentative, there was something fierce behind it. Naruto's eyes shut as his sensations took over. Sakura, as though sensing his relaxation, pressed more firmly against his lips and curled her fingers in the wispy hair at the nape of Naruto's neck. In response, Naruto unconsciously wrapped his arms around her middle.

The kiss was like Sakura: strong and soft at once, the honey scent that seemed to emanate from her confusing his senses until he wasn't sure where he ended and Sakura began. It was the most intimate contact—touch, pure and unadulterated— that he'd ever had so far in his lonely life, and he ached with the closeness of it. Simple though it was, it was something that he had never experienced before, and it overwhelmed him. His mind spiraled away, taking him back to the dream-like feeling of Sakura's knees on his thighs, her breath on his chest, her lips on his collarbone.

Too soon for Naruto the boundaries to his body were reestablished when Sakura pulled away, taking her closeness with her. She smiled at him.

Naruto was dazed, almost like he was underwater and everything had a distorted echo.

"Sakura-chan, you. . ." he started to murmur, and because he couldn't think of anything else to say he finished with, ". . .smell like honey."

"It's the shampoo," Sakura replied, unfazed.

"Sham. . . poo," Naruto repeated disjointedly. Sakura laughed.

"Honey, huh? Are you hungry, Naruto?" Sakura asked, her pitch much lower than normal.

Naruto's eyes widened. Was that innuendo? Sakura smirked before laughing again, and her amusement rang in Naruto's ears. She turned away from him abruptly, grabbing his hand in the process, and began moving off down the street, tugging Naruto along.

"Let's get you some ramen, hungry boy."

Seeing things moving past him jolted Naruto from his trance, and he suddenly realized what had happened: Sakura had kissed him, in public, and now she was going to buy him ramen. Ramen.

He almost died of happiness. If she was going to keep kissing him… Suddenly there didn't seem that much to be apprehensive about.

"Sakura! Aren't you on shift?" Ino called suddenly. Sakura paused abruptly, and Naruto felt her stop through their joined hands. She turned around and frowned at the hospital's façade.

"Right." She looked contemplatively at Naruto, commanding his complete attention as she looked him in the eye. Slowly, her frown turned back into a mischievous grin. Then she looked back at Ino.

"You'll cover for me, won't you?" She winked at Ino before tugging on Naruto's hand again.

For the second time in as many minutes, Ino's mouth hung open in surprise. It wasn't until Naruto and Sakura had rounded the corner down the street that realization hit Ino.

"Hey! I never said yes!" She scowled in the direction her friend had taken before huffing in annoyance as she turned back to the hospital entrance.

"C'mon, Chouji," she growled irritably. "Let's go visit that lazy idiot before I have to work."

Chouji followed, hiding his small grin behind his almost-empty bag of chips.