Reborn as Sakura and Hinata: Lost in the Wind (Part 2)

The New Council

I didn't want to pull a Shikamaru but..

What a fucking drag.

Attempting to avoid loudly rapping my nails on the desk in front of me, I instead elected to tap my foot under the desk. This felt like being in the academy again; some old guy lecturing us about boring shit that they said mattered but in the end probably didn't. I mean, it probably would matter at some point, but right now old man 'I'm too old for this shit but I'm going to stubbornly cling to power before I either die or am kicked off' was introducing us to the other surviving council members that escaped the purge. Not like we needed to be initiated or told how the fuck a council works like we were all a bunch of brainless twats, that was what the old council was composed of.

It might have actually been interesting to hear about what was going on behind the scenes in the village or whatever, but at this point all I knew was that I was bored out of my fucking mind and this guy was still talking about the Uchiha. Of course, of course he'd spend a fucking century on the Uchiha's new relevancy because these geezers had some sort of perverted fixation for the goddamn clan. At least Sasuke seemed to be as bored of the talk as I was, giving the shortest of answers to meet the bare minimum of the questions and clarifications asked of him.

This whole situation was not helped in the slightest by the faint but ever present pain behind my eyes and under my ribs. To say that I had still not recovered from Sakura's house was something I wasn't ashamed to admit in the slightest. That was a goddamn horror show of the senses that all but ripped my very soul from my body, and it certainly felt like it had done that.

It was a sensory overload of the highest degree, a smell so condensed that it was like the very air itself was composed of sugar, coating the inside of my lungs and making it impossible to breathe, and the more I breathed it, it was like it was piercing into my bloodstream, developing into a headache that felt like every single neuron had fucking exploded.

And I had never puked so hard in my fucking life. I didn't puke often; I really didn't, never gotten food poisoning, didn't catch viruses or bacteria or whatever. I had thought my only weakness was gore basically, obviously not the simple battle wound, I'd be a shit Shinobi if that was the case, but the traumatic stuff, the eye gougings and the watching two men have trees explode out of them. Of course, there was the odd anxiety attack where my stomach would knot up with the threat of it, and then the odd occasion where it did actually happen, not like finding out you'd be a father at seventeen made that an overreaction or something.

Well apparently Sakura had managed to create a new one! I still couldn't think about eating something sweet without gagging, and it didn't help that if I did actually puke it was never a good thing because then it becomes this awful feedback loop where the smell of it and the acid in my nose only makes me want to puke more and then I just end up on the verge of a panic attack. And now there was just this pain still sitting there in my gut, and taking a deep breath would occasionally be met with a sharp pain in my ribs because I was still too tense. I wonder if I pulled something...

Long story short, I didn't think I'd ever been so overstimulated before, and I wasn't planning on making that a habit because the next time it would probably kill me.

Being bored only made the pain more evident, and I had to consciously calm the tapping of my foot before that also became too loud. Something for a distraction, anything.... I wished Hinata was here, everything was better with Hinata, even boring things. I'd have rather been with her right now, laying down and not being forced to sit in a chair while feeling like this. Or with Sakura, because, despite how I was kind of scared of the idea of being in that house again, I wanted to know if she was okay.