Sakura squeezed her knees together, desperate to not let any of her clothing touch Naruto's orange pants or white shirt with a red whirlpool decorating the back. She winced as her knees ached and stole a glance at Sasuke. Sasuke had laced his fingers together, as if already anticipating what Sakura was thinking. Naruto was trying to curb his boredom with counting the fine strands on the end of his calligraphy brush. He lost count after a few hundred and ended up starting over.
"Kaa-chan said that our sensei is going to be someone really cool," Naruto blurted out. He nervously glanced at his teammates and sighed, looking at his hands. Scarred and dotted with ink that he hadn't washed off since that morning while working on his calligraphy. Neither Sasuke nor Sakura looked entirely thrilled, or interested, in the slightest.
Normally, Sasuke thought, shinobi in Konoha used leaves to disguise their shunshin. He hadn't any time to finish that thought, though, since a chill of a cold, harbinger of blood wind made terrible memories resurface. He whirled around to see a thin, lanky figure with eyes that he saw his own reflection in.
In a clap of thunder, a woman in a Jounin vest and a navy blue shirt that was two sizes too big appeared.
"You three must be Team 7," she decided.
Sakura felt the urge to make a good impression, having not seen a real kunoichi before. She'd seen them from afar, maybe passed them by in the market, or maybe even saw one walking down the halls of the Academy, but she could tell this woman, too thin to still be breathing, was real.
"I-I'm Haruno Sakura! It's an honor!" Sakura dropped to the ground from her seat on the steps of the narrow stairwell and knelt and bowed deeply. Her heart pumped blood and screamed in her ears and her frail frame shook as the Jounin remained silent.
"Honor?" the Jounin repeated quietly. She shook her head, "No, really, Sakura-san. It is truly an honor to meet such a pitiful and worthless girl as you. I thought all the worthless girls all died before they could have kids, but I was wrong. I'm even more honored to meet such a rare bird as you, a girl who'd deceived her teachers with Daddy's money to write such high marks on your Academy reports."
"W-what…?" Sakura's head shot up and tears shone in her eyes. Then anger replaced it, "I-I didn't…! You have no right—"
The Jounin moved so quickly that the air around her heated up. Her black eyes, glassy, stared into Sakura's green ones unwaveringly. She seemed to be smiling in her black eyes, laughing as if Sakura's existence was a huge joke. "No, Sakura-san, you have no right to speak to your temporary instructor like that. Do you know what they call this?"
"I—"
"Defiance," she cut in, cutting into Sakura's weak defense. She tilted her head, "And do you know why, in a very militaristic village as this, this has such a terrible image that appears in mind?"
"Leave her—" Naruto leapt forward towards the Jounin.
"Ah, that brings me to my next subject: Uzumaki Naruto," she said. Something snapped and rang within Sasuke's and Sakura's ears. It was a gong inside Naruto and he was on the ground coughing and wheezing and holding his side, ever so slightly deformed, in pain. A few drips of blood raced around his lips and mixed with spit and quickly fizzled out dry on the ground in the sun.
"Born to a mother during an unfortunate time: when the Kyuubi attacked. Your father died in the attack and left your mother alone to raise you. She tried her best, I'm sure, but if there's one thing that Uzumaki Kushina has utterly failed in, it is making sure that you didn't redefine the meaning of idiot," she said smoothly. "Congratulations."
On the ground, Naruto glared hatefully at her, "You…don't know…"
"Right," she sighed sadly, "I'm not your mother, I'm not you, I don't know."
Sasuke sat still, frozen, in his position. His eyes darted from Sakura to Naruto and then to his sensei. She looked at him and slipped a hand in her pocket. Sasuke's lips pulled back and revealed white as he let a kunai fly. Something made a sound similar to someone dragging their nails across a chalkboard and Sasuke cried out, hitting his head on the stair step at an odd angle and then black spots danced in his vision, "T-takami…"
The Jounin narrowed her eyes dangerously, "Uchiha Sasuke, the last Uchiha. Truly, a prodigy. You're an outlier in your generation with Konoha's most prized kekkei genkai and skills that could put most Genin to shame. Your intellect is almost that of a Nara's, your taijutsu is greater than that of many Hyuuga Genin, your ninjutsu repertoire is greater than that of any of your peers, and your genjutsu should truly be something to behold," she said slowly. "Or so I had hoped."
"You see, Sasuke-san, your true weakness, the weakness that you must get rid of to somehow make your life better, is your existence. You live in a rather disgusting way, living only to kill one person, as if that is all a shinobi's life is. Your eyes are closed and arrogance keeps you from ever being able to become a real shinobi. When I was your age, people like you either had the skills to keep themselves, their teammates, and their mission alive and successful, or died. I can't tell you how sad I was when more than half of the people I thought had so much potential just," she spread her hands out helplessly, "Were murdered. I saw it happen, once. On a mission, a girl with the same Uchiha blood running through your veins as you do thought that it would be easy. Her eyes lit up red, something that I still think is rather amazing, and then she raced towards the enemy. I won't tell you exactly what happened, but I can tell you that only I walked back to Konoha to tell them that our team of ten shinobi was dead. Oh well, is what I'd thought. I still do."
She gripped Sasuke's collar roughly, shaking him until he opened his eyes, "I still think that because there is nothing I can do to bring her back, and really, do I want to? She was useless them as a shinobi, and useless now as a shinobi, and useless in the future as shinobi."
"You're just a…" Sasuke coughed.
She let Sasuke go, throwing him to the ground and sat on the edge of the stairwell. She glanced over her shoulder and saw a twenty-foot plummet to her death if she jumped off right then. Tempting, very tempting. She looked at the three of them, moaning in pain or crying, and huddling unconsciously together. "You're probably blaming some crazy, silver-haired bitch for pointing out how weak you are and how useless you are and wondering why she came all the way here and wasted the good part of her day being purposefully even later than Konoha's famous Copy Ninja and then beat the shit out of you. Well, I'll clear up one mystery for you three: my name is Takami. Since I'm your temporary sensei, I don't think telling you my full name is all that necessary."
Takami clasped her hands together, "Right, then! Tomorrow I'd like to see the three of you on Training Ground 1 at eight AM. We've got a lot to work on, or a little, depending on how you look at it."
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Kakashi slammed Takami against the wall next to his apartment door. Moonlight lit up her face from the window at end of the hallway. Kakashi half expected his sister to look away and mumble an apology, because that's what she would've done, but she stared straight into his eyes, unwavering, unafraid. She said nothing to the man about four inches taller than she and didn't resist against his grasp.
"No, Kakashi," Takami said lowly, "What the hell is wrong with you? Did you really believe those reports about Sakura, and that the price of being a prodigy from Konoha's most renowned clan was free? Did you really believe that Kushina has the time to make ends meet and rein in Naruto? I know you had your little heart set on being their sensei, to mold a team into something great, and that you're frustrated you're stuck with Genin already fitting nicely into shinobi molds, but," Takami's eyes shone with frustration, an emotion only Kakashi was allowed to see, "This wasn't my call."
Kakashi growled with unsettled frustration and let her go, shoving her off to the side. She tripped but caught herself and gave Kakashi a hard look, "Good night."
Takami slipped into bed after crushing something to smithereens in her mouth and slept with absolutely no regrets. The three Genin, the ones she wanted to fail so badly to free herself from any obligation to Konoha and rip out just one heart and then her own, had potential. That she was sure about. She turned over and looked at the photographs that lay face down on her floor. They weren't like Kakashi's team at all; Hinata was already skilled and smart, Shikamaru even more so, and Lee was simply a side project to keep Kakashi busy since Hinata and Shikamaru needed little to no guidance. Maybe he could teach them genjutsu, but Team 7 was a clean slate. An annoyingly clean slate, with absolutely nothing to boast about besides Sasuke's limited katon jutsu repertoire. It would take time, a lot of time, to etch anything into it. Takami cursed under her blankets. The Hokage knew she was a ticking time bomb, trying to leave Konoha, and saddled her with a task that would tie her down to Konoha only more firmly.
It was possibly the best plan Sarutobi had ever conjured up.
"Yesterday, she said she was our temporary sensei," Sakura said. "What do you think that means?"
"Maybe we're going to get another sensei. One that isn't as bat shit crazy as she is," Naruto muttered.
Sasuke's hand flicked back, impaling a kunai into a tree. His eyes widened in horror when he felt something warm drip down his arm. He turned and saw the kunai facing the wrong way and cutting into his hand. He cried out and jumped back, away from Takami.
"Morning," Takami rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands. "I guess the three of you got better sleep than I did. I was just itching to get this day over with."
"What do you mean, temporary?" Sakura blurted out. She slammed a hand over her mouth, as if what she'd just said was something forbidden.
"You'll see," Takami said. "Let's go," Takami turned to walk towards the denser part of the forest.
An hour passed in pure silence, making Takami's skin crawl. She glanced back at Sakura and saw the girl looking entirely dejected. She slowed her pace until she fell into step with the girl. Only, it caused Sakura to jump back in fear. Takami shrugged to herself. It's not like she has no reason to do so. Naruto eyed her warily and Sasuke stared at her with more perplexity than the first time he'd met her.
Team 7 stopped in front of a huge cavern. It was like a lion's mouth a hundred times bigger and a thousand times darker. It was toothless and rimmed grey, its red stripped away. A few glittering bones, a musty yellow and speckled with white, still had a few dabs of flesh stuck to them. Beside the bones littering the ground, hitai-ate, rusted, lay solemnly.
Takami turned around and then sat on a patch of green grass, eerily the only patch of anything living around besides the towering trees behind the ring of smaller, younger, shorter trees. "Let me give you a boring history lesson: this is one of Konoha's special training grounds. Only shinobi with Jounin status can come here, or you'll be stopped by the ANBU up there," Takami pointed to a shadow up in the tree. The three Genin looked up just as the ANBU vanished, "Several of Konoha's most powerful shinobi trained here. Sakura-san, this is what an honor is. No other team gets to come here and train, and you three worthless, incredibly unqualified and undeserving kids, get to come here. For you to come here and walk on the very soil that the Shodaime, Nidaime, Sandaime, and Yondaime trained upon is an honor."
"How come some of the trees look so sickly?" Naruto mumbled. He'd noticed it only because he was trying desperately to not listen to her and avoid her eyes and distract himself.
"Because my brother and I took every Chuunin we killed in the Exams and burned them all here. Their blood was poisoned with my former teammate's toxins. So, the trees suffer from the poison," Takami said, "Good eye, Uzumaki-san. But, tell me what I said earlier. Just so I know you understand what Sakura-san seems to misunderstand."
Naruto's mouth went dry. Something snapped in the air and Naruto's body hit the ground and made a small crater. Sakura jumped back with a yelp. I…I didn't even see her move! Sasuke stared at the silver-haired woman silently.
Takami stood up suddenly, grabbed the three of them, and walked 300 paces forward. Naruto's head swiveled around, seeing nothing but darkness. He unconsciously tightened his grip on her sleeve and she laughed lowly, "How cute."
Takami shoved backpacks into their hands and her teeth almost gleamed menacingly in the darkness. Takami's eyes glowed silver, the only light, however faint, they saw. She pushed Sakura and the girl disappeared with a scream, plummeting down an invisible cavern ninety degrees below the surface. Naruto and Sasuke froze and then tried to run, only for Takami to push Naruto next. "Sasuke!" Naruto cried out, his voice growing fainter and fainter.
When all Sasuke could hear was his heart pounding in his ears, Takami picked up the Uchiha boy, his feet not touching the ground anymore and his eyes reflecting pure animalistic fear, and cast him down into the cavern without a second thought.
"Enjoy!" Takami let out a maniacal laugh as her arm arced forward, drowning out Sasuke's horrified screams.
