A Boy for a Flower [Naruto Fanfiction]

Part 1 - I

The water was cold as I dipped my bare feet into them. It was just a slow trickle against my skin, but it was cold enough for me to retract my foot from it immediately after touch. Though I felt that I just had to get that flower at the other side of the small lake. It was a beautiful orange flower with black dots nearing the middle of it with the cat-tail like stems coming out from the middle. My mother would absolutely love that flower.

The mud at the bottom was squishy but solid enough for me to walk across to reach the flower. Every step was labored since the mud seemed that it wanted to cling onto my foot. Forging my way forward, I never lost sight of the flower.

Of course, because I didn’t pause to look down the mud, I didn’t notice the slight drop in front of me. I slipped into the freezing water, gasping from the sudden coldness and the sheer surprise of falling. The water surrounded my vision and hearing. I struggled to reach the surface again, but I couldn’t grab onto anything and the cold was beginning to reach through my clothes. I kicked my legs, which was the only thing keeping my head above the water from time to time. I tried to make it to the mud I was walking on earlier, but I couldn’t quite reach it.

Suddenly, a hand grabbed mine. Thankful for the help, I glanced up to see an unfamiliar face. He had giant round glasses in front of his black eyes. A slight smirk played on his face as he stared down at me. His silver hair was tied into a ponytail which was hardly noticeable because of the high collar of his shirt. A sash was tied around his waist and his pants only reached up to his ankles. On his hands he wore warm gloves that were holding onto my hand that made my heart skip a beat by the heat of them. He was wearing a cloak over his outfit with his hood up over his face like he didn’t want to be seen or something.

“Are you all right?” the man asked, helping me back onto the water’s edge. I shivered from being soaked to the bone from the water. He immediately picked up on it and quickly took off his cloak and placed it onto my shoulders. I wrapped it tighter around me, easily picking out his scent from it.

“Y-yeah... thanks.” I nodded with a smile spreading across my frozen blue lips. The man studied me closely, as if I had something on my face that was gross and hairy that deserved to be stared at until for some odd reason it disappeared.

“What were you doing in there anyway?” he inquired with the raise of his eyebrow. At the very mention of it, I suddenly felt embarrassed. If I told him that I wanted the flower to give to my mother, what would he say? Would he laugh at me? Sure, I was 18 and was still kind of attached to my mother and nearly drowned in a shallow lake.

“Um... swimming...?” I tried to lie. Lying wasn’t something I was really good at. The man just seemed to get even more confused, but let the subject slide, luckily.

“I... see...,” the man said.

“And what were you doing here?” I returned, turning the attention from me to him. It wasn’t everyday that someone traveled through this forest. It was heavily guarded by the ninjas of my village who wouldn’t let just anyone pass through. Just who was this guy? How did he happen to be there when I was taking my... journey through the lake?

This seemed to interest the man much more greatly, “I’m a traveler. I’ve been searching for a rare medicinal flower that has unique properties that makes a wound’s healing rate much faster than normal. When I heard it only grew near the Hidden Village of Waterfall, I came here; that’s when I met you.” I thought back to all I knew about flowers—which was something I liked to study about. All the different types of flowers piqued my interest so profoundly that I had to learn more. Then I found myself with my nose in a botany book all the time, making my mother caution me that reading was fine but I couldn’t be reading all the time for it was bad for my eyesight. By the time she told me that, though, it was probably already too late because I was finding it kind of hard to see.