Thank you @l1p3k4 for beautifully capturing this scene from A Game of Puzzles! I love what a puppy pile they are, and Sasuke’s fond look just kills me every time! I absolutely recommended working with them; l1p3k4′s commission info can be found here.
And for anyone interested, a snippet of the scene that inspired this lovely artwork can be found below:
Sunday finds Team 7 squished onto the couch together for the third week in a row. It looks like a giant bag of colorful candies has been strewn across the coffee table, but closer inspection reveals the candies are, in fact, tiny bottles of nail polish.
Sakura stretches to select another bottle closer to the boy's side of the coffee table. It's yet another shade of blue, she notes, eyebrow quirking incredulously. Does Sasuke own every blue ever produced? The growing cluster of blue polishes, easily twice the size of the next closest color cluster, suggests that yes. Yes, he might very well.
The rest of the polishes Sakura has yet to sort are even farther out of reach, and she has to balance herself with one hand on Naruto's knee to get to them.
"Ack!" Naruto yanks the brush for the midnight blue polish away from Sasuke's hand, which rests on his other knee, the moment she touches him. He's been extremely quiet and focused for the last fifteen minutes, and he's only two fingers in. “Warn me next time!”
“Sorry.” Sakura leans back to set the maroon polish with the other two reds. "I can still paint your nails, you know."
"You were taking too long," Sasuke says, not looking up from Naruto's painstakingly careful progress on his middle finger. "It turns out Naruto's hand is surprisingly steady when he actually focuses, anyway."
Perhaps as testament to the aforementioned focus, Naruto only pauses to glare at his teammate for the jibe before resuming his work. His tongue visibly presses into the side of his cheek. Cute.
“Incoming,” she announces, stretching past him to snag another bottle.
“Sakura-chan!” Naruto protests.
“What? I didn’t even lean on you this time.” The viscous liquid shifts as she tilts it. It’s dark, nearly black, but Sakura squints suspiciously, looking for hints of blue. She’s made this mistake before. A couple of different angles reveal nothing new, and Sakura sets it to the side, satisfied that all is as it seems this time. “This time I am going to lean on you, though, so heads up!”
Once again Naruto yanks Sasuke’s half-painted hand out of the way as she approaches. The moment she balances her hand on his knee, it's knocked out from under her so that her stomach is splayed across Naruto's knees. Sakura doesn’t even have the chance to respond “what” before Sasuke's hand is being plopped squarely in the center of her back.
She pauses, arm still outstretched for the polish.
"Am I being used as a table?"
"Yep," Naruto replies, popping the "p" without a care in the world. Somewhere above her Sasuke snorts, clearly amused.
