Disclaimer: Naruto, all characters and settings, and anything else you would recognize as pertaining to this cartoon does not belong to me. I do not intend to make any money off the writing of this fan fiction; it is merely for entertainment purposes.
Title: Enigma.
Summary: Mr. Madara Uchiha has a certain reputation that sends his unlucky new students scrambling for a transfer on the very first day of each semester. Sakura Haruno, one such unlucky new student, decides to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Pairings: Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Madara, unrequited Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke, slight Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Obito, slight Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto.
Author Notes: This story is somewhat inspired by Madara-sensei! by Of Healing Love on this site.
Chapter I: First Impressions
The new school year began—bright, early, and all too soon—at Konoha High School in late August at the conclusion of a lazy, relaxing summer break. With the rising sun spilling through the windows, bleary-eyed students streamed into the already crowded cafeteria, where they were directed to the class representatives who held their semester schedules. The lines for breakfast were packed, but many students just couldn't stomach the thought of food so early in the morning and settled for craning their necks in search of familiar or friendly faces.
Naruto Uzumaki, Sasuke Uchiha, and Sakura Haruno were several such students lucky enough to find a seat in the corner so they could observe the room as a whole and avoid being trampled by the bustle.
Sakura made brief eye contact with Ino Yamanaka, who was in line to get her packet from the senior representative, and they shared a playfully competitive glance that plainly said, "I'm going to make better grades than you this year and win Sasuke's heart!" She sometimes struggled to define their complex relationship but felt comfortable that she could count on her ivory-blonde friend whenever she truly needed something.
"Who did you guys get for Chemistry?" Naruto pored over his schedule. His freshly laminated school ID was tucked between his lips, rendering his question almost incomprehensible. It was unlike him to be so invested in his academics, and Sakura, pleasantly surprised, smiled at the sight. He spat the card into his hand and asked, "What about Honors English?"
"Mr. Hatake," Sasuke deigned to reveal. His schedule had long-since been folded and stuffed into his pocket, no doubt memorized in its entirety within the first couple minutes of receiving it. He was free to sneer at passersby and altogether project his disdain for the roaring din of several hundred different conversations taking place at the same time, but he tore his eyes away to stab Naruto with incredulity. "You're taking Honors?"
"Yeah, so? Eh. I got Mr. U-chi-ha," Naruto enunciated with sing-song syllables. He blinked a few times, slowly. "Hey. Isn't that your name, too?"
Sasuke pressed a finger to his temple while Sakura looked on in exasperation. "Yes, idiot. My uncle is a teacher here."
"Well, why aren't you in his class, then?"
"Because we're related," he ground out.
"Don't worry, Naruto. I got Mr. Uchiha, too," Sakura interjected to console him. He halfheartedly returned her smile.
"You probably should worry."
She raised an eyebrow at Sasuke's muttered comment and took the bait. "And why's that?"
He picked at a loose thread on his shorts for so long that she wasn't sure he was going to answer. Finally, he told them, "You're not going to like him. Trust me."
At that, Naruto fretted, grumbling under his breath, as he stared a hole through his schedule. The paper crumpled at the edges where his fingers dug into it. "Think it's too late to ask for a transfer? I wanna be in Mr. Hatake's class instead."
Sakura shot him an offended look at his tactlessness, but he didn't seem to notice in his increasing agitation. She took pity on him because it was no secret that the boisterous blond struggled to keep up and relied on sympathetic teachers to earn grades high enough to pass his classes.
Her offers to help him study for his tests, while appreciated, often went unpursued when it was more in line with his natural charisma to manipulate his way into a few "pity points" here and there to turn a high D into a low C. At times, Naruto forgot the simplest of mathematical formulas, but never did he fail to ultimately talk others into doing what he wanted. There was a career somewhere for such a skill, he repeatedly insisted, and there wouldn't be any "triganomentary" involved in it.
Sasuke laughed in his humorless, empty way. "Probably. He's got a reputation. I bet a ton of people are lined up outside the guidance counselor's office right now trying to get transferred before all the seats are gone."
Naruto squinted at him for a long moment. "Why have I never heard of this guy?"
"You have—you just never listen."
"I listen!" he protested. "What's he like? You're making him out to be a complete hardass or somethin'."
"That's one word for him." Sasuke crossed his arms and stared at the floor from between his shoes. "He's also the only teacher who actually takes his job seriously in this dump, so you won't be able to slack off like you do."
Sakura, listening intently, knew family was a very delicate subject for him, and she absorbed the information with great relish. She held a small collection of facts that he had let slip through the years—particularly regarding his eldest brother, Obito, who was fragile and housebound. The arrangement took a toll on him and the middle brother, Itachi, and she pieced together that his uncle must have some hand in taking care of them. At the realization, she felt warm gratitude for him and his sacrifices and looked forward to meeting him in first block. She cheerfully swung her feet.
"If he's so great and all, why isn't he teaching at K-Uni?"
"Why don't you ask him when you see him? It's one of his favorite questions."
Sakura bristled at the meaningful, cruel lilt in the suggestion and knew that it definitely was not one of his favorite questions. She jumped in to say as much. "That's probably not—"
"—All right, I will!" To punctuate, Naruto balled up his schedule and tossed it into his backpack. He always rose to the challenge, and nothing she could say would dissuade him.
Truthfully, she also wanted to know the answer. Anything Uchiha-related was worth her intrigue.
The first warning bell was imminent when they integrated with the tide of students looking for their new classes. On their way past the front office, Sakura couldn't help but notice there was, indeed, a notable line outside Mr. Umino's office, but she seriously doubted it was because of Mr. Uchiha. It was only natural that friends would want to test their luck with transfers to try to get into classes with each other, especially for the last year of high school.
With a light, optimistic step, she shadowed her friends up three flights of stairs to the senior floor. Dead-center sat the English classrooms, the two of them, positioned directly across the hall from each other. Sasuke departed without so much as a backward glance into the room on their right, designated as 4E-1, and Sakura jolted when a gloating Ino brushed by her with a flip of her mane and disappeared through the very same doorway.
Pig, she thought without malice. Despite herself, she grew envious that Ino had her first class with him. She shook it off and turned to the left classroom, 4E-2, where Naruto had already made himself at home somewhere near the middle of the staggered rows of tables facing Mr. Uchiha's desk and the room-length whiteboard pinned up behind it. About twelve others, including two she recognized as Hinata Hyuga and Choji Akimichi, filled the back couple rows.
Taking a moment to survey her surroundings, she immediately noted the absence of decor across the steel-gray paneling. Opposite the door, three large windows were drawn against the sun. She lamented the light and fresh air trapped behind the shutters but didn't move to open them without permission. All in all, it was a coldly clinical atmosphere equipped for learning and little more. It didn't bother her, and she chose her seat without a fuss.
What did bother her was how empty the other chairs around her were. By the time the second warning bell rung, they had yet to be filled, and Sakura knew, in that moment, that Sasuke hadn't really been exaggerating. She entertained righteous annoyance on behalf of the absent Mr. Uchiha. They weren't even going to give him a chance, were they? It was sickeningly disrespectful.
When the infamous man himself walked in, Sakura's first impression was of a vision of Sasuke in twenty years. Her second impression was that his hair was a very inappropriate length to be professional, but such a thought was easily discarded considering how glossy and well-kept the spiky locks that hung down his back were. He wore a charcoal suit with a buttoned-up shirt as dark as his hair. A black tie complemented the dismal palette, but it fit him in every sense of the word.
Tittering near the back suggested that she wasn't the only one who approved of their teacher's immaculate appearance.
Mr. Uchiha placed an unpeeled orange beside the things neatly arranged on his desk and flipped through his planner and gradebook. Officially, class had started, but he had yet to address them. With such a great absence of students, conversations were relatively quiet and continued on in the face of their teacher's apparent indifference.
Five minutes after the bell, he looked up at them with eyes the hue of molten onyx.
Sakura perked up eagerly, wanting to make a good impression, herself. Her spiral notebook lay open to the first page, clean and ready, and her mechanical pencil was clutched in her hand and poised to write. She was a shameless teacher's pet but didn't consider it a negative trait. Her near-flawless grades and attendance attested to that.
"Less of them every year," Mr. Uchiha commented to himself in his deep, pleasing baritone. Sakura heard it only because she had chosen a seat in the very front row.
"Oh, yeah. Hey, Mr. Uchiha, why're you a high-school teacher?" Naruto suddenly demanded from two seats behind Sakura and to the right. "Shouldn't you be a professor at K-Uni?"
All chatter broke off, and silence reigned. Nobody dared to chime in or even move. Sakura looked on in mortification and turned her gaze back to the front of the classroom, where Mr. Uchiha had yet to answer. He seemed stunned by Naruto's audacity, but he soon broke out of his stupor with a hard glint in his eye.
"Name?" Mr. Uchiha asked.
"What?" Naruto screwed up his face in confusion. "No, I asked—"
"—What is… your name?" he emphasized slowly, as if he thought he was too stupid to understand the words in a complete sentence.
"Oh, uh, Naruto Uzumaki!" he declared loudly and with pride.
"Three months of before-school detention and an F for the day, Mr. Uzumaki. Gather your things and stand outside until your next class."
Sakura pressed a hand to her mouth in mute horror. Naruto sat ramrod straight, now the one who was stunned, and their classmates were in similar states of stupefaction. It seemed like everyone was waiting for Mr. Uchiha to rescind the punishment as a first-day jest, a way to break the ice, but the cold expression didn't waver once. He wasn't joking.
When Naruto began to throw his book and pencil into his backpack with unnecessary force, Sakura snapped out of her daze and lifted her hand from her mouth to the air. She didn't wait to be called on when she pleaded, "Mr. Uchiha, please, Naruto didn't mean it like it sounded. Besides, that's a really harsh punishment for just asking a question."
His stare landed on her, and she was dismayed by how wholly apathetic he was. Then came the dreaded word. "Name?"
"…Sakura Haruno," she whispered around a tight knot of fear. Her other hand, fallen limp around her pencil, tightened until her knuckles turned white.
My GPA! she mourned.
"See me after class, Ms. Haruno." He looked to Naruto, who stomped to the door. "You, too, Mr. Uzumaki. If you walk off without speaking to me, I'll make sure your grades feel it all semester and well into college—should you even make it that far."
"Yes, sir," he retorted snidely, retreating out to the hallway before his insolence could be addressed.
"Let me make something clear," Mr. Uchiha began in a deceptively even tone after the door slammed shut. "You've become accustomed to the substandard because your teachers have always been lazy and incompetent—"
Across the hall, Mr. Hatake's Honors English class had reason to celebrate, and a cacophony of laughter and conversation drifted through the door to interrupt the scathing lecture. Heads turned, and longing gazes were thrown.
Mr. Uchiha paused for a few seconds to see if the noise would abate before deciding to speak over it. "Case in point. You'll be disappointed to learn that I enforce numerous rules for my classroom, and you will take care to follow each one while you're in attendance. If you cannot, expect to join Mr. Uzumaki in failing this class. And I'll remind you that this is a core class, meaning it's required for graduation. If I will it, you spend Christmas or summer with me, and, suddenly, it's no longer funny when your diploma is in my hand instead of yours."
He scanned their tense and anxious faces for a hint of comprehension, but no one wanted to speak up to either agree with or defy him. With a bland, unimpressed look, he turned away to pick up one of his dry-erase markers.
"Rule number one," he said, writing something out in elegant Latin script, "no cell phones. You, young lady in the back, bring it up here. F for the day. You can sit in on my lecture or dismiss yourself; I don't care which."
Sakura turned her head to thoroughly pity the brunette girl who trudged by, then returned her attention to the board, which now proclaimed "Madara Uchiha" in ominous black strokes like a terrible prophecy come to life. She shivered in dread.
"Every afternoon," Mr. Uchiha continued, capping his marker with a pointed snap, "my last class will clean this room from top to bottom. Every morning, my first class will also clean this room from top to bottom. Every time I see someone slacking—in either class—I will randomly select a multiple-choice question on your final exam and transform it into an essay. For my ambitious troublemakers, there are one hundred possible essays to earn."
Against better judgment, the protests surged.
"Aww, why do we have to clean? No other teachers make us do that!" Choji cried above the other voices.
"I've already answered your question. If you had listened, you wouldn't have needed to open your mouth and waste my time. Name?"
"Choji Akimichi," the rotund boy grumbled. "Let me guess—F for the day, out in the hall?"
"On the contrary, I was under the impression that you singled yourself out for a noble reason. Find the janitorial closet just down the hall and collect the cart inside. You will do the cleaning on your own today while your peers attempt to learn something." He jerked his chin at the door. "Off you go, Mr. Akimichi. And I suggest you don't let yourself get sidetracked on the way back; we wouldn't want you to miss anything important."
Sakura sank lower in her seat as a crimson-faced Choji stormed past her and left the classroom just as noisily as Naruto had. Chancing a glance at the clock, she was horrified to realize that roughly thirty minutes had passed and that they still had an entire hour to go. The day had only just started, and it was already shaping up to be a disaster. Oh, god, what would he assign for homework? It was a truly terrifying thought even to a diligent scholar like her.
"It seems this class is determined to teach me names by way of discipline," Mr. Uchiha quipped, sardonic, before turning back around to the board. Mercifully, nobody else spoke out of turn for the entire lesson. Even Choji gritted his teeth when he returned and threw himself into his unsavory trial.
Later, they were still hurting from his special flavor of tyranny, particularly Naruto, who spent most of the lunch hour alternating between sharing his feelings with anyone in earshot and shoveling his food in the most nauseating way imaginable.
"Detention for three months! And he expects us to have half the book read by tomorrow! He wouldn't even give me a copy; he told me to check it out of a library," he heatedly ranted, drawing heads from all the way across the cafeteria. Breaking off for a few seconds, he took the time to chug from his cup, miraculously without choking. "Such an asshole, man. Who has time to read, anyway?"
Sakura was already thoroughly engrossed two chapters deep in the aforementioned assigned book and, once again, leveled an offended stare at her oblivious friend. Rolling her eyes, she returned to the text. Somehow, she escaped a branding of Mr. Uchiha's favorite letter when she stayed to receive her punishment, and she was still reeling over it.
"Pick your battles," he had advised. "It would almost pain me to fail such a prospect. Almost."
He already knows us, she realized with a start while mulling it over. He had looked into their student records and probably already knew their names. But why would he pretend otherwise—unless it really was some sort of sadistic game to him?
"Oh, and he made Choji clean the whole damn room by himself. He's probably still up there, too, stuck with Mr. Asshole and missing lunch. Gah, I can't stand him!" Naruto all but shrieked.
Sakura peered over her shoulder and spotted Choji happily chowing down with his friends but wisely refrained from pointing it out. Sasuke sat through the entire tirade with a blank-faced indifference painfully reminiscent of the man in question.
He made no interjections until Naruto finally, finally paused to take a breath and rest his mile-a-minute mouth. "Yeah? Try living with him."
"Wait, what? You have to live with that guy?!"
"Madara was my legal guardian until this summer," he reluctantly muttered. "So, yeah, I live with him. He's even more delightful at home."
Sakura gnawed on her lower lip and stared, unseeing, at her book. While details of the Uchiha family were scarcely circulated throughout the student body, it was common knowledge that the three brothers had lost both of their parents on a solemn, wintry morning. The eleven-year anniversary crawled closer. It was none of her business—and Sasuke made sure she knew that, repeatedly, firmly, callously—but she still marked her calendar so she could spend a few minutes respectfully mourning their passing.
As if on cue, an all-too-familiar voice penetrated their little social bubble. "Sasuke."
Confronted with the source of his antagonism, Naruto's hackles rose, and he growled under his breath like some kind of provoked, feral beast. His chopsticks splintered audibly under the strain of his death grip.
Sasuke wiped his face perfectly neutral and immediately got to his feet to bow to his newly arrived uncle. "Yes, sir?"
Mr. Uchiha crossed his arms and dully asked, "Do you need a ride after school?" in a show of utter unenthusiasm, like he had a duty to perform but didn't have to be happy about it.
"No, sir."
"Then I will assume that's always your answer. Should it ever change, come to my classroom at the end of the day. You'll have until just after four o'clock."
"Understood."
Satisfied, Mr. Uchiha made to leave. Just before he fully turned away, he flicked his eyes over the book in Sakura's hands with an unreadable expression. Not knowing why his interest unsettled her, she nervously flicked to the next page before she was finished with the previous one and bent her head over it with renewed vigor. She was keenly aware of his footsteps as they faded away, and only once they disappeared did she feel comfortable enough to stop pretending to read.
"Yes, sir!" Naruto taunted as Sasuke sank back down. "No, sir, Mr. Uncle Madara Uchiha, sir!"
"Shut the hell up."
"Does he send you out to the hall if you don't finish all your veggies, Sasu—ke? Do you have to put out your homework for his inspection every night? Need a pass to go to the bathroom?"
"God, you're such a dumbass," Sasuke spat, pushing up from the table. He plunged his fists into his pockets and began walking away without so much as a good-bye. "I'm outta here…"
"Aw, come back!" With an apologetic smile aimed at Sakura, Naruto leaped after him. "I was just kiddin'… kinda."
She barely noticed, having thrown herself back into the reading with a strange determination to finish two more chapters before the end of lunch.