<currently untitled> (Naruto fanfic)
an excerpt

If there was one thing Naruto hated, it was traffic. Traffic was noisy and smelly and annoying, but worst of all, it stopped games. Games such as the one he had just been playing, until some cars came by and they all had to break apart and drag their nets out of the street. Naruto couldn’t see his ball, and had a sneaking suspicion that it had been kicked aside and lost in the grass growing up out of the ditch at the edge of the pavement. He sighed, and then glared ineffectually at the cars driving by until they were finally all gone.

“GAME ON!”

There was a flurry of movement as teens with sticks and teens dragging nets spilled back onto the asphalt, and then someone tossed the previously- considered- missing- in- action ball into the midst of the players, and everything non-essential to the playing of the game was shoved to the back of Naruto’s mind and he charged after it.

The clatter and scrape of wood on pavement, the jeers and taunts and shouts, the scuff of cross trainers on the asphalt, the sun beating down on his bare back; they were all perfectly familiar and Naruto’s favourite part of summer. There was nothing like a good game of ball hockey to completely epitomize why Naruto loved summer break. Okay, so they would play well into autumn, and usually all the way through winter right back into spring and the next summer, but still.

A stick somehow finding its way between Naruto’s feet and sending him crashing down to the pavement interrupted his train of thought, and he cursed loudly in pain as he heard his team mates call for a penalty for tripping. The downside to his preference of playing shirtless in the summer was that he often ended up with frequently- nasty cuts and abrasions when the games got a little rough.

Naruto got to his feet and hissed in pain as he prodded at the wide stripe of road rash on his right forearm, and then at the patch on his right side. Neither was too deep, but they both hurt like hell, and he would need to clean them out; he could see the grit in them, and he had hurt himself enough while playing and then ignored it to know that ignoring tended to be a bad idea.

“I’m gonna have to duck out, guys,” Naruto said as he bent to pick up his stick from where he had dropped it. “This mess needs cleaning, and I have work in a couple hours.”

Sakura stepped forward out of the group and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “I’ll come with you. I should get going anyway, and you’ll probably need help cleaning that; you’re right- handed. Plus that’ll even up the teams.”

“Thanks, Sakura!” Naruto said brightly, then winced as he brushed his arm against the road rash on his side.