A/N: A slow burn, SasuNaru/Team 7 Fix-It Fic. Posted on AO3, now bringing over to fanfiction. Thanks for reading!


It's not like Sasuke's surprised a boy has fallen for him, too. There are enough girls after him – it's be stupid to assume everyone in their class is straight. Some guy might want to be Mr. Uchiha, and he doesn't really care.

No, the surprising part is that it's Naruto.

Sasuke doesn't know a lot about romance. He doesn't really care to, not right now. But what he has picked up from his admirers is that you are genuinely very nice to your crushes. All the girls act like everything he does is perfect, as if he can do no wrong. Naruto – Naruto doesn't. He argues with him, he never agrees with him, he fights back at every opportunity. If it wasn't for the kiss, Sasuke wouldn't have a clue.

But maybe that's how Naruto deals with his crush? It's not a guy thing – Sasuke isn't stupid enough to think there's an inherent difference in girl-crushes vs. boy-crushes vs. other-gender-crushes, so it must be a Naruto thing. Constantly fight with your crush and be a rival. Huh.

A rival isn't a bad way to go about things.

Too bad he's not interested.


He catches himself staring at Naruto out of the corner of his eye, sometimes. Whether it's spamming clones so they can weed the garden faster, or throwing himself wholeheartedly into catching Tora, he's always pushing himself.

It's… interesting.

Maybe if he wasn't keeping an eye on Naruto, he wouldn't have noticed, but Sasuke is so he does. Kakashi dismisses them for the day, and disappears. Sakura gives him an apologetic look – she asks him to hang out almost every day, but not every – and babbles out something about helping out her dad and runs off. He squints at her, watching her wring her hands together, turn red, and then flee when he offers up no response but a grunt.

Naruto waves as she leaves. "Bye, Sakura!" he crows, and Sasuke turns his squint onto him. The other boy doesn't seem even slightly tired from their missions. It doesn't matter that he made over 30 clones over the course of the day to help patch the roof – Sasuke had kept track – or that they had had to chase down that godforsaken cat. Naruto, it seems, has stamina.

He catches Sasuke's squint, and glares at him. "What're you looking at, bastard?"

Sasuke ignores the insult. He's quiet for a moment, mulling it over in his head. "…Are you going to train after this?"

It's hard to resist a smirk at how startled Naruto is. "W-What?" He rallies quickly. "Of course! I need to train lots if I want to be the Hokage!"

The Uchiha surveys him for a moment. "You have a lot of stamina. Spar with your clones until you're too tired. It might help."

Naruto stares at him, thunderstruck. Sasuke waits. One… two… three… four… He manages to count all the way to eleven before the other manages to speak. "Why are you telling me this?"

He's suspicious. Sasuke approves. He smirks, before turning to go. "If you do that for a week or two, I'll start sparring with you. But you need to get good first, idiot." He ignores the sputtering and yelling at his back, and keeps walking, hands in his pockets, all the way back to the compound.

Sasuke wonders if this counts as flirting.


Naruto, apparently, is actually taking Sasuke's words to heart. He shows up every morning tired, and naps on the bridge, sprawled out like a starfish and snoring. He's rejuvenated and fresh by the time Kakashi finally shows, so a nap must be all he needs, but it's a bit of a damper on Sasuke's morning. Without Naruto there to argue with, Sakura can focus only on Sasuke. It's… annoying.

He brings a book from the Uchiha Library, and still, she doesn't stop. She leans over his shoulder and tries to read it and he has to hide it from her because it's Uchiha Clan Material And Not For Nosy Teammates and she pouts at him. "Sasuke! I just want to read it! What's it about?"

Sasuke sighs. "It's clan techniques. You can't read it."

She droops. "Oh. Okay." Sakura stares at her feet, and Sasuke starts to wonder when he became a bleeding heart. Is this why they're put on teams? To make them actually care about people?

That Man's team had died and quit around him. No wonder it didn't work on him. Sasuke frowns down at his book for a few more moments, listening to the birds chirp nearby and Naruto's quiet snores. "Don't you have any books to read, Sakura?"

She blinks at him, surprised. "Er- N-No, I don't."

He frowns. "Bring one next time. Check one out from the library if you don't have anything at home." He has no idea if her parents are civilian, or ninja – he knows they're ALIVE, because he'll never forget that exchange that made her more abhorrent for him and made him soften slightly towards Naruto, but he knows no details. He doesn't care to.

But for now. Sasuke reaches into his bag and pulls out a second book, offering it to her. It's nothing fancy, just a book on elemental ninjutsu. He had brought it along just in case he needed something less-secret to read. "You can read this for now. Take care of it."

She takes it reverently, holding it carefully in her hands. Sakura's face is bright, is the sun, cheeks red and teeth gleaming and she BEAMS at him. "I will! Thank you so much, Sasuke!"

"Hn."

They read until Kakashi arrives, jumping lightly down onto the bridge railings. No one greets him, and his eye curves up in a smile as he reaches out to ruffle Sasuke's hair. The boy scowls as he tucks his book away, and Kakashi's eye smile just crinkles further. "Good job, Sasuke."

He averts his eyes and tries to will away the blush that's risen to his cheeks. It doesn't work.


Exactly one week after he told Naruto to train, the blond shows up wide-awake to their morning meeting. He sticks his finger in Sasuke's chest, in his personal space, and grins. "Fight me, Sasuke!"

Sasuke swallows down the quip he wants to make – he doesn't want to actually flirt with this loser – and smirks, instead. "Are you sure you're ready?"

Predictably, the idiot takes the bait, his grin turning into a scowl. "I trained for a week! You said if I would then you would fight me!"

The Uchiha resists the urge to correct him, and flickers off the bridge, instead, over to the grass. It's wider here, better for a spar, and the only thing they'd destroy would be the trees if they're not careful. After a moment of surprise, Naruto heaves himself off the bridge and runs over, grinning widely. Sakura follows, less sure of herself. "Sasuke… Naruto… are you sure? Master Kakashi might not-"

Sasuke levels her with a look, and she squeaks and stops. "I need to get stronger," he says, simply. "I need to spar for that. If you get strong enough, I'll spar with you, too." Left unsaid is the fact that she isn't strong enough, not by far – he's sure that Sakura is smart enough to read between the lines. From the way she wilts, he knows he got her.

Surprisingly, Naruto picks up on it, too, and scowls at him. "Hey, hey, Sakura's AWESOME, bastard! She's really strong and her punches hurt a lot! I'm gonna beat you and then you're gonna apologize!"

Sakura doesn't seem to know what to do with that avid defense – quite frankly, Sasuke's not sure what to think about it, either. To be fair, Naruto WOULD know. Sasuke's never gotten punched by the girl. "Fine, Naruto," he concedes, giving the other a smirk. "If you beat me, I'll apologize to Sakura."

Naruto pumped his fist in the air, and then formed a familiar seal. "Shadow Clone Jutsu!" With a poof of smoke, five other Narutos surrounded him, and Sasuke narrowed his eyes.

"Sakura, you be the ref."

She nodded, straightening up. "No weapons, just taijutsu and ninjutsu." Not like any of them knew any genjutsu anyway, but good idea. "The spar ends when Kakashi-sensei shows up or one of you…" She fumbles slightly. "When one of you get in a spot where you could kill or knock out the other, if this was real."

They both nod at her, waiting for her signal. "One… two… go!"

Sasuke moves, a blur to the eyes, and takes out a clone. And then another, another, another- He dispatches all five easily, but Naruto has summoned three more, and Sasuke has to duck underneath a punch and sweep the feet out from one of the Narutos.

This one hits the ground with a yell and doesn't poof – the real one, then. With the real one on the ground, Sasuke poofs the spare three Narutos in a few moments, before tackling the real Naruto. He pins him to the ground on his stomach, twists his hands up behind him, and sits on his back. "Yield," he says calmly, and Naruto growls.

He can't move, though, and Sakura calls it with glee. "Sasuke won!"

Naruto growls again as Sasuke lets him go, pushing himself to his feet. He doesn't offer to help him up, and the other doesn't even look for it. "Come on, let's go again! Best two out of three!" Naruto doesn't even seem slightly winded, and Sasuke considers this for a moment.

Could be a good workout, if nothing else – and he smirks, taking a few steps back before giving his teammate a nod. "Fine. Again."

The smaller boy lunges forward with a yell, and it's on. Sasuke defeats him again. A third time, a fourth time. They might have even gotten to a fifth, had Kakashi not appeared on the bridge with a small puff of smoke, lifting his hand in greeting and as careless as ever.

Naruto yells at him, Sakura yells at him, and Sasuke lets the tension of sparring bleed off from his shoulders as he shoves his hands into his pockets and wanders back over the bridge. Despite the fact that he won, he's breathing heavily, bits of his hair stuck to his skin with sweat. Naruto doesn't even look affected in the slightest. It's annoying.


It comes to him that evening, when their missions are long done and the quiet darkness of his house is pressing in on him. Both of his teammates have crushes on him. Both of them.

Naruto had easily been shoved into training the way Sasuke wanted, so he would be a better sparring partner. (But why, why, had he never broken a sweat…?) Sakura lapped up the book he gave her, and could easily be persuaded to start learning more, one way or another, to get stronger.

He refuses to let himself get attached. It was why he had isolated himself from Naruto all these years (though it hasn't, apparently, stalled the other's crush). He can't let That Man have ammunition, can't handle the temptation for his eyes, can't do it. It's just… too painful, too.

But Sasuke has to go on missions with these two, and training with these two will be easier if they were strong, and using their crushes to make them stronger will stop him from being dragged down as much.

Yeah. It's a good plan.