First Meetings
Pairing: you decide
Premise: He'd never met them before the village had assigned him to their team, but…Sai was always around Team Seven.
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Ch. 1
OSMOSIS
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Uzumaki Naruto was not mentally retarded. He really wasn't even stupid…after all, not every child who applied to the Konoha Ninja Academy was allowed in, and among those who were accepted there were a few dropouts.
Most children as ungifted as Naruto were not allowed into the school, but the Academy had made an exception for him. The young boy had no family to miss him or to sue the school, after all.
By his second year, he was used to taunting of "dead last" and "idiot", as well as "usuratonkachi" from a dark-haired boy whose name he did not know. Naruto was often jeered at during class, and even instructor Umino Iruka, who had seen it his responsibility to look after Naruto, was hard on him inside and outside of class. He had accepted his idiocy by then, and had sadly become content with last place.
It didn't help that none of the other students wanted to study with him. A few had almost let him become their friend, or asked him to their houses to study together, bad students like him. Each time that he came close to another student, though, he met their parents and he was chased away for a reason he didn't know.
And so, Naruto had gradually come to understand that he was an unwanted person and a bad student.
His home life was sad, a mixture of video games, ramen, and tired study hours spent looking out the window, being overtaken by a sense of sadness, realizing once again that he was worthless, and concentration. For some reason, studying required far more concentration on his part than on his peers', and he chalked it up to the fact that he was stupid. Little did he know that Haruno Sakura studied almost as long as he did, but when she fell off-task her friend Yamanaka Ino 'corrected' her through teasing.
Some nights, Naruto would go to bed with a book and read until he fell asleep. He did not realize that he would not learn anything that way, by tiring out his mind with words and not absorbing them at all, but he simply did not know any better.
He fell asleep in class one day. Iruka had continued to lecture for a while, but when he'd walked by Naruto's desk the instructor had rapped the table quickly, and Naruto's head shot up as he suddenly became alert.
"What--?" the blonde boy had asked, looking around the room until he guiltily raised his head to meet Iruka's eyes.
A vein throbbed in the instructor's temple as he calmly said, "Naruto, I understand that you're having a SIGNIFICANT amount of trouble with the coursework but it would be rather foolish for such a poor student to attempt to learn through osmosis."
"Os-what?" Naruto asked.
Two rows ahead of him, a girl answered, "Osmosis. It means that you're trying to absorb information from the book by putting your head next to it instead of reading it, like how water can be absorbed through a membrane."
Naruto blinked and a few students snickered at him as his face turned red. Turning to face his instructor, he stuttered, "I wasn't—that's stupid—I wouldn't--"
Iruka just laughed and patted him on the head in a fatherly way. "Just pay attention to the lecture, Naruto," he said.
Ashamed and struggling with the new word, Naruto went home that night and carefully read the chapter. It had all stopped making sense for some reason, and because Naruto didn't know the difference between a bad decision and a good one, before he fell asleep that night he opened his book to the chapter, laid it over his head, and turned out the light.
Nothing happened, and he fell asleep.
He still didn't know anything in class the next morning, but he'd gotten rest and he found that it was easier to pay attention. Naruto considered this with a sense of false hope and did it again that night, and the next night, and one day he found that he remembered information in class that he could have SWORN he hadn't read. He'd even answered a question in class correctly, receiving a look of surprise from Iruka that was followed by a short pause in the lecture as the dark-skinned Chuunin flipped through his notes to MAKE SURE that Naruto had answered the question correctly.
He studied in high spirits that night. The exam was the next day and if he didn't finish his studying in five hours, he wouldn't be able to go to bed early, and if he didn't go to bed early then he wouldn't have enough time to learn in his sleep. Naruto had decided that he learned the best that way, but he'd study while he was awake too just to have his bases covered.
And so he went to sleep with the sun that night, waiting for his mind to absorb the chapter he needed to understand by the next morning. He already knew, somehow, that he would do well on the test.
What little Naruto didn't know was that one of ROOT ninja passed by his bedroom window every night as he returned from his missions. The rat-masked boy had taken notice of the student's recent sleeping habits and had taken it upon himself to study the situation.
The rat-masked ROOT entered Naruto's bedroom silently that night and pulled the book off his face. His older brother had once joked about learning in such a way, and he had not understood it at that time, as he did not understand many comparable expressions, but the blonde boy was a living illustration of it.
He did not know why he enjoyed these nightly visits so much. If he had been able to look inside himself, he would have realized that since his brother had been sent away on a mission to another country he'd missed him, and that the idiot sleeping with the book over his face resembled his brother just enough to make the emptiness go away.
And so, he sat down in Naruto's room that night as he always did and began to read the chapter aloud to the sleeping boy.
Naruto actually enjoyed the next morning's exam, and he finished a few minutes before time was called. As he checked his answers, though, an unsettling feeling arose in his stomach. He'd realized that when the answers came to him, it was not in his voice that he heard them, but in someone else's.
He shuddered, and because he thought it was due to the cold temperature in the room he turned in his exam, sprinted out of the building, and flopped down on the nearest hill so that he could lie under the sun.
Naruto decided to keep sleeping with his book over his face. Maybe, just maybe, one actually could learn by osmosis.
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