Towards the Sun

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Time waits for no one.

The few days remaining before the first stage of the Chuunin Exams went by in a blur and Sasuke presently felt exhausted. However, his fatigue sourced neither from the numerous hours spent studying nor from the excessive training sessions they had endured recently.

He shot a sidelong glare at his blond teammate who was innocently perusing a booklet on poisons and the countering antidotes - all while muttering under his breath. Revision was already tiring in itself and Naruto simply wouldn't shut up when trying to memorise certain facts and figures. The two of them were waiting for Hanabi to arrive; although it was still an hour before the start of the examination, they had agreed to meet early in front of the Academy to take note of the other participants.

Letting out an exasperated sigh, the black-haired Genin said, "You can stop cramming all that information into your head already. They're gonna test our information gathering skills - shouldn't you be focusing on those, instead?"

Naruto merely shook his head in response. After a short pause, he finally replied, "Sakura-chan did everything without cheating, so I won't cheat either!" This actually left Sasuke at a loss for words.

"Alright," he conceded, impressed, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"Sorry for the wait!" announced a small voice after a few minutes. The two teens turned around to greet Hanabi, who was as quiet and polite as her elder sister Hinata. "Good morning, Sasuke-san, Naruto-san."

Over the past few days - especially when he had gone over to their place with Naruto for studying and training - Sasuke had discovered that, except for their white eyes, the two sisters were nothing alike. While Hanabi was calm and confident (and so down-to-earth that Sasuke wondered if she were some sort of replica of her late cousin Neji) Hinata was - well, Hinata was Hinata. Sasuke hadn't yet found appropriate adjectives to describe her.

But then again, he had no right to be comparing her to others as he himself knew what it meant to be in such a situation.

Back at the Hyuuga compound, he had observed her tending to the many flower bushes in the back garden. Alone and surrounded by the vivid blossoms, she had seemed to be revolving in her own little world.

Wait, flowers? Sasuke racked his brain, trying hard to remember some detail... Amongst the colourful plethora of plants growing there - Sasuke could remember seeing some patches of medicinal herbs too - he hadn't managed to find any rose bush. Maybe they were grown somewhere else within the compound? Hmm? Oh, whatever. It was time to stop thinking about the past and come back to the present.

The three teammates advanced into the Academy and so began their little inspection.

One fact was for sure: everyone was definitely younger than Sasuke and Naruto. Glancing around, Sasuke thought that the oldest person he had spotted so far was a fifteen-year-old rookie. Most of them were gathered in groups of three but only a minority of them were wearing the Konoha forehead protector. Apparently, there would be quite a lot of foreigners this time around. But foreigner or not, every single person they passed stopped whatever they were doing just to stare at the two of them. "The heroes of the war" seemed to fly from mouth to mouth in waves of whispers. Naruto, though, seemed too engrossed in his revision to notice all the attention he was receiving. If he leaned closer, Sasuke was sure he would hear the sound of cogs whirring frantically in his teammate's brain.

As they finally came to a halt near their examination room, Sasuke took out a small notebook and decided to follow suit. A little more revision never hurts.