Entitled: Deviating Mainstream
Fandom: Naruto
Length: 4400 words
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto and etc.
Notes: I will not write Naruto for just anyone. The birthday biddy had better appreciate this. Love you, Annie! (Even if you are now an old coot.)

Fact: Her name is Sakura, she is twenty years old, engaged to someone else, and way too good for him.

This doesn’t stop him from stepping in front of her car. Sleek and silver and shiny and apparently dust repellent, and the sound of her breaks is the loudest warning cry he’s ever heard.

She hits him in the thigh, and he goes flying past a blur of mothers covering their children’s eyes, mouths slack and disbelieving and he thinks that she had better be worth this, and then hits the ground.

For a moment he is preoccupied with rewiring his body to breath, has to remind himself not to look in the sun, and then there is the sound of hysterical heels scurrying towards him, and the fluttering of nervous hands about his chest and face, and when she touches him, her hands are just as soft and pampered as he had known they would be. He catches one and reflects on the rarity of classical beauty.

Fact: He knew that her hand will be soft, because he has waited for this moment for a very long time.

“Oh my god,” she whimpers, other hand catching her lower lip, eyes round and so very green. “Oh my—okay. Okay, can you um,” she holds up a hand, “How many fingers?”

“I’m not concussed,” he says, still examining her palms, coral pink and powdery soft, “But I could give you a line about being struck by your beauty, if you’d like.”

A couple of people on the street are rolling their eyes, and his stomach squirms because for a moment he’s sure they know, they know that underneath his fancy suit he’s just—

“I just hit you with my car,” Sakura says, kind of bewildered, and then shakes her head, biting her lip again anxiously, and squinting around intently for inspiration. “I can’t believe you’re trying to—oh, shoot, where’s my phone? I need to call the ambulance.”

“I’m fine,” he gets to his knees, his feet, takes a hold of her shoulder, “I hate hospitals. It’s like paying people to feel me up.”

Her mouth opens a little in shock, and then her eyes glint in something like wicked delight before she ducks her head and mutters, “You know, I’m a med student.”

Fact: Sakura has been engaged to a young man named Sasuke since she was seven years old. She has never had a friend that was not of the upper class and pre-approved, she is entirely to shy, entirely too impulsive, and secretly harbors a lust for rebellion.

He knows, “And you hit me with your car.” He leans on her just a shade more heavily, and it isn’t all fake, his knee is a little twisted up, but not so bad, “I don’t care what you say, I’m not cashing in my medical insurance.”

“I wasn’t going to—” she breaks off with a flustered giggle, and it’s obvious that she has no idea what to do with him, no idea how to sort him, so he sticks out his hand and looks into her eyes and tries to commune that they’re soul mates. It doesn’t take her long to blush.

“I’m Kiba,” he says, enfolds her hand in his own, “And it seems you’ve busted my leg, meaning that I couldn’t possibly walk across the street to that delightful little restaurant. Would you be so kind as to drive me there?”

“I don’t know,” she says, kind of stunned, and is looking at his nose, his left ear, never his eyes. Shy. “They might, you know, they might take away my license for this, or something.”

“I can keep a secret,” he smiles daringly, and she looks at him in sweet confusion, then smiles back, tucks her hair behind her hair and draws in a breath.

“I’m Sakura.” She says, and her voice shakes only a little, “And since I did sort of run you over, I think it’d be—it’d be only fair if I—uh, if I bought you lunch. To pay you back, I mean.” She looks at her shoes furiously.

Fact: Everything he has done in the past several minutes has led up to this moment. This opening.

“Well,” he lets her hand go, doesn’t do something stupid like bending over and kissing it, he’ll save that for later, “Yeah, I suppose I could fit that into my schedule.” He grins at her, and when she blushes, snaps open the locks on her car doors, he recites fairytale warnings in his head. Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf.

Fact: His name is Kiba, he is nearly twenty one, he has been watching her for three months, and he is a very good con artist.

Fact: Seduction is a delicate process. Sakura makes it hard. No matter what he does, she won’t sink to his level.

“Are we friends?” she asks him abruptly, at the end of their lunch date, with the words spilling out of her in a fluster of garbled syllables. He has to piece them back together, tilts his head.

“Sure,” he says after a very long pause, during which he had watched her grow progressively tenser. He takes out his phone and asks, “What’s your number?”

“Oh, I—” she starts to look uncomfortable here, and he raises his eyebrows. She spins the ring around her finger, staring at it pensively, and then looks up with a quick, drawn in breath.

“I’m engaged.” She says quietly to the table top, and her eyes are so genuinely sad that for just a moment, he wants to touch the side of her face. He doesn’t.

“Okay. That’s cool. Will your fiancé beat me up for talking to you?” he asks casually, already knowing the answer. Sakura makes a strangled noise, bunching up her napkin and flicking a little smile at him nervously. He wonders if she’s been taught to do that—taught to be demure and coy and just a bit too sensitive, and the thought makes the back of his throat close.

He resolves to think of her as an object.

Fact: It’s the only way he can do this.

“No,” Sakura shakes her head, and is already digging out her own phone, “No, he wouldn’t.”

They exchange numbers and he stands up to help her with her coat, even pays for the meal despite her previous offer. He ignores her heated protests coolly and offers his arm in a way that’s despicably phony, old fashioned, sick. Her eyes light up. She takes it.

It makes him a little bit sad, before he remembers that he’s supposed to hate this girl. She makes it awfully hard.

He has an alarm clock set for when he calls her. Not the day after, but the day after that, so she won’t have given up, but she won’t be ready for him either. He drives the car he’s still paying off to her house, along miles and miles of groomed gravel driveway, and his oxygen is tinted with greenbacks. It tickles his throat and makes him sneeze.

It makes him a little nervous to hand off the car like that, but he watches the servant drive it off with cool, confident eyes and turns to find her just skimming the corner, her hair a little damp and mused. She’s got a string of pearls around her neck, delicately pink to match her earrings, the crisp black two-piece. She might as well invest in one of those dinky name tags and fill it out with, ‘Hello, I’m AN HEIRESS. Pleased to meet you!’

“You have a nice house,” he says idly, runs one finger down the banister, polished and slippery. He’s struck with the sudden desire to slide down it. Sakura fidgets and shrugs uncomfortably—it’s clear that her own wealth makes her awkward.

This, at least, is something he can resent. He takes hold of it and narrows in, sharpens it down to be the knife in her back.

“Thanks,” she smoothes her skirt and smiles brightly, “I kind of thought you weren’t going to call me.”

Her smile is so blindingly vulnerable and honest, so genuinely happy to see him, that he suffers temporary insanity and has to fight the mad urge to go and buy her flowers or some other, stupidly sentimental gesture.

“Yeah, well, I—” he falters for a second, “I’d have to be stupid not to, wouldn’t I?” it falls a little flat, straining the silent house, and Sakura looks so brittle he suspects he could snap her in two.

And then the man comes around the corner, with a ring to match her own, and he understands why. He draws up to her side, making no motion to touch her arm or hand in the way another fiancé might. It takes Kiba a moment to realize that he isn’t glaring really, or at least, not at him in particular. Sakura stands a little straighter, as though torn between stepping away or leaning in. Sasuke regards him for another moment, with a pinch slowly forming between his brows. He makes Kiba nervous.

Fact: Kiba has never been good with quiet people. He doesn’t understand people who aren’t naturally open, and the intricacies of the human psychic allude him, because he doesn’t need to know. Everyone wants some measure of love.

“Sakura,” he says, in such a way that his lips hardly move, “You’ll need to be back by seven.”

Sakura’s face turns very white, and after a moment of studying her, the man turns around, their crisply suited shoulders not-quite brushing, and walks away. Kiba is all set to get the hell out, when Sakura spins around, her voice tight and pained, “Sasuke, he’s not—”

Sasuke only shrugs, doesn’t look around, and turns into some room, away from sight.

Fact: The two of them have known one another for a very long time, and Sakura has yet to decide if what she feels is love or hate, and Sasuke has yet to decide if he feels at all.

Kiba waits, and waits, and finally begins to step back and excuse himself, when Sakura rushes past him, catching his arm and pulling insistently. “Let’s go,” she says, with her face turned to the floor. He follows her to his car obediently, and doesn’t say anything as they snap into place, her face turned broodingly away and out the window.

But when she finally does turn back, her eyes are not red, and she has not been crying.

Fact: She stopped doing that a long time ago.

“So,” he said to fill the silence, “What’s at seven?”

“This event thing,” she said after a pause, a little more quietly than he would have liked, “One of those black tie events where everyone spends the night smiling and lying to one another.” She stops to unclench her hands, “I’m going with Sasuke. We’re—he’s my—I’m supposed to marry him.”

“Oh,” Kiba says, as he’s not sure what to say about that. “Do you want to?”

“Marry him?” He nods, and she sighs heavily, slumping back in a manner more suited to a tired school child than a wealthy heiress. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Fact: She used to think that she was living her own fairytale. But lately, the world’s let her down, and there’s no such thing as princesses anymore. And there’s certainly no need to let them have dreams.

On the fifth date, he takes her to a concert. She spends the first ten minutes tightly at his side, until the tempo picks up into something throbbing and savage, and she pulls off her sweater-set and starts dancing wildly, feeling the music in waves of purple and red, smells the tang of the jungle in the air. He can’t do much more but follow in her wake, forgetting everything but the young woman beside him and her ruthless, magnetizing smile, her bare arms, touched by none but the sun.

She’s exhilarating, intoxicating, and he wants to see more of this girl—this recklessly passionate one she keeps locked so tightly inside. So he watches her very closely, until the cracks become wider, and she begins to step outside.

On the twelfth outing, he sees her angry. Not at him, thankfully, because he can’t remember anything more terrifying. Her hair fluffs up and her face contorts, legs spreading and bracing, knees bent like a boxer. She looks like, at any moment now, she’s ready to throw a punch.

Fact: Sakura does not just get mad. Her temper is an explosion of pent up emotion, and often manifests physically.

“What do you mean there isn’t adequate funding?” she bellows at the male nurse. She looks half and all the way mad.

“We don’t have the money, Ms. Haruno,” the man says through his teeth, and glares at her as if this were somehow her fault. Sakura bristles horribly, and snatches up the child who’d been the cause of such dispute, shoving it into the man’s arms.

“I’ll pay for his treatment,” she says sharply, is already scribbling something on a check, wadding it up and peppering it into the man’s face, before she storms out in a fit of ire. “You can’t just refuse to heal people!” she snarls under her breath, is walking so quickly that he has to jog.

She steams about it all the way back, before abruptly pulling into a side street and turning to face him, her eyes wide and determined, “Would you help me, if I were to…to fix that system?” she asks hopefully. He has the impression that she doesn’t propose her own ideas very often.

A little part of him thinks her very brave, and very kind.

“Sure.”

He ends up putting it off. When he should be pecking her check, her jaw, the corner of her lips, her mouth, her throat—(it escalates, naturally,) he finds himself unwilling. He thinks of the butterflies he caught and chased when he was young, how he’d show them to his mother, who’d cried for every single one, and explained to him that now, they could no longer fly. The oil on his fingers was too heavy. He’d broken their wings.

So he walks her home and holds open the door and, when the occasion requires it, holds her hand. And every time he tries again, tries for that picture perfect seduction, but the oily grin has never fit his face well, and it slips off as though he were water whenever she looks at him, eyes round and trusting.

One day, he realizes that he’s not even faking it anymore.

Fact: He’s kissed a lot of women. And all he can do is dream of kissing her.

And then one day, the little paradise he’d been building up comes crashing down. When he answers the door, it’s Sasuke on the other side. He twists the knob compulsively, and waits to wake up.

“I don’t really care what the two of you do,” Sasuke says blankly, and even at two in the morning, he looks like he might have stepped out of a magazine. Kiba blinks.

“I haven’t touched her.” He says, quite honestly. Sasuke pauses, and looks at him a little too intently for a moment, then shrugs and looks away, like he doesn’t really care.

“Fine. But you should know our wedding’s in three months.”

“Three—” he can’t finish the sentence. Sasuke doesn’t say anything, just regards him with those emotionless black eyes. Kiba licks his lips—damn, he needs to hurry up this game. The only question is if he’ll have the guts to go through with it. “That’s soon.”

Sasuke kind of shrugs. “There’s no point in putting it off for any longer. It had to happen some day.”

Kiba nods vaguely, and then, because he can’t stop himself, because the question comes blurting out of him before he’s had time to stop it, “Did she—did she say yes?”

Fact: Kiba has acknowledged what everyone else has known for a very long time.

His only warning is when the lines around Sasuke’s mouth and eyes tighten, and then the smaller man says, very quietly, “And how is that any of your business, Inuzuka?”

It takes Kiba half a second to realize that Sasuke’s said his last name, and another one to realize that the man knows. Added together, he doesn't have time to duck. Sasuke isn’t a large man, but he can hit pretty viciously for a boy in a suit who sits at a computer all day. Kiba spits red, and acknowledges himself as totally screwed.

“I might not,” Sasuke watches him from above, and there is something icy about his tone, his eyes, “Be what she deserves, but the reason I’m here is so that she doesn’t get stuck with scum like you.”

Fact: Sasuke does not know how to love, only to destroy. He hovers somewhere between malevolence and silently guarding,

His head is pounding, and he feels like his eyes might boil into flames, it’s so hot. He can’t quite catch his breath—has to grope to snatch at Sasuke’s leg. “She’s miserable with you.”

“I know!” Sasuke yells, so shockingly loud and raw that Kiba lets go in shock. The two of them stare at one another for a moment, and then Sasuke’s jaw tightens and he turns sharply on one heel.

“Her mother left her for a man who was like you,” Sasuke says, and that’s all he has to say, because the agony is unspeakable.

In the sound of Sasuke’s withdrawing footsteps, the door swings shut.

Fact: He has used people out of a sense of vengeance. All of them wealthy, arrogant women who grew fat on their successful exploitations of the lower class. His younger years were ruined by women like these. The drawback is that when he found someone amongst them who remained untainted, he hadn’t seen her for what she was.

There isn’t much point in anything anymore. There’s a wedding invitation on his table, which strikes him as hilarious, and he can’t even imagine who sent it. The phone is ringing and he isn’t going to answer it, he isn’t going to—

“What?” he snarls on the fifth ring, and hears only the shallow sounds of breathing.

“Is it true?” her voice tugs, a little ragged at the edges. It’s like Sasuke whaling on him all over again.

He grips the edge of the countertop. “I got hit by your car on purpose.”

“I know that,” she hiccups, “But are you—did you—”

He mouths the words. They won’t come out.

“I lied to you.” he manages. The other end of the line goes so quiet that he begins to think that she might have hung up.

“I hate you,” she says, with such an odd tone to her voice, that he can’t begin to understand what she means. People rarely say what they mean.

“I’m sorry.” he whispers, and grips the receiver. “I’m—I do like you. I do. I just—I’m—”

“Just stop it,” her voice breaks through violently, and then there’s a bang, a dial tone, and he goes back to staring at the ceiling. The sun’s going down. It’s a little grayer than before.

He reaches for another bottle.

He dreams about waking up. He dreams about cleaning, washing off his face and getting dressed, putting on his shoes and getting into the car. The day is fresh and clean, the air crisp from the rain, and no one notices him slipping in at the back. He’s missed her grand entrance, she’s already at Sasuke’s side, at the alter.

She doesn’t take his breath away. She doesn’t look like Sakura. Her hair is elaborate and curled and upswept, her back bare and tense. The dress is black and sleek and a cutting compliment to Sasuke’s suit. Her face is turned away from him, and he doesn’t like this girl at all. This isn’t the Sakura he remembers.

Fact: He wants to see her in white.

He says, “Sakura,” and it comes out thickly, slurred, and much too quiet, so he tries and tries again until he realizes that he’s shouting, that everyone’s stopped, and Sasuke is looking at him with danger in his eyes.

Fact: He doesn’t actually care.

Her eyes are haunted, and she says his name very quietly, so quiet he can’t hear her, can only see her lips forming the sounds, and maybe it’s because he’s a little bit hung over, he’s a little bit crazy, and really, really desperate, but he ends up just saying it.

“I’m sorry.” he says, and is moving carefully through the shocked spectators, moving towards her, “I lied to you and led you on and I—I was initially just going after you because you were rich and I—I hate rich people. But then at some point I didn’t want to ruin you anymore. At some point I just wanted to be with you, because I realize that I’m—that you’re perfect, and I love you.” He sticks his hands in his pockets, and he’s right in front of them now, and her eyes look a little wet. She bites her lip and looks away.

“I don’t want him here,” she says very quietly, touching Sasuke’s jacket. The two men look at her hand, resting quietly beside Sasuke’s corsage.

Fact: She doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows it’s not this.

He’s not sure what happens next, because Sasuke puts his hands on her shoulders and draws her in, leans down to whisper something in her ear, something that makes her knees shake. Her hands clench in the material of her skirt, and she darts a quick glance at Kiba—who is so numb at this point, he still can’t bring himself to think or say anything. The sight of them, the two of them, together, makes his head hurt, because there’s something so intimate about this moment, and he doesn’t understand it at all.

“But I—” Sakura trails off and looks at Sasuke searchingly. She takes a deep breath. “You know I’ve always—”

“I know.” Sasuke says, and plants a kiss on the crown of her head so tenderly it makes his teeth ache and he has to look away. “Thank you.”

Fact: Kiba will never know what Sasuke had said that day, because Sakura will never tell him. But sometimes he suspects that the other man had not entirely forgotten what it was to love.

Sasuke turns and walks past him quietly, reaching up to loosen his tie, and then he slips out of sight into a smooth, dark car.

The wedding congregation is in titters, and Sakura has one arm pressed across her stomach, her throat swallowing convulsively.

“Do you want to—” he steps in a little, and when she does not move away, he takes her hand, “Do you want to go somewhere?”

“I don’t have any money,” she says, voice strangled, “That’s why I was supposed to marry Sasuke, you know, because the business was going bankrupt and I—”

“That’s okay,” Kiba says, just looks at her, “I’ll pay.”

She stares at him for a moment, before the day begins to catch up and overwhelm her. She chokes, and then desperately nods her head.

And so he takes her hand and draws her away.

Fact: Life is rarely perfect, and some things are just destiny.