Sasuke loves Itachi.
Itachi is soft and nice and warm and cool and pretty and nice and tall and the bestested most perfect brother ever.
Sasuke doesn't need anyone else.
Sasuke has tried to play with everyone in the clan compound. Most of the other kids don't want to play with him even when their parents say they have to.
It sucks when their parents say they have to.
Sasuke likes playing with Shisui and Itachi best. No one makes them play with him.
Itachi hasn't played with him since turning chunnin. Itachi won't train with him anymore. Shusui does it, or one of mother's nekomata summons when Shisui's too busy.
Sasuke wants to go to the Ninja Academy. Everyone tried to talk him out of it but he wants to be just like Itachi.
He even orders a family meeting where he sits at the head of the room and makes his parents and Shisui on the other side of the room.
He holds up his best finger art showing exactly why he should get to go to the Academy. He's halfway through explaining why he and Shodaime and Maito Gai and Itachi were going to have the best time, see this drawing - when his mother puts her hand on his father's shoulder and does something that makes him grimace and look at her.
His father studies her face and looks away. His mother says they will enroll him at the end of term.
Shusui asks if he can keep the drawing of them with Shodaime.
Itachi isn't there.
He's never there anymore.
Sasuke goes to the Academy expecting that he'll be amazing and perfect and great just like Itachi and he'll find his own Shisui and have the best time ever.
Instead, he finds out he's stuck in a class with most of the annoying clan heirs he's always stuck seeing at boring formal events. The girls are really annoying. Some of the guys are really annoying. Some of the school stuff is really easy, and some of it is impossible.
No one's as cool as Itachi and Shisui anyway. Sasuke doesn't care about hanging out with anyone.
Sasuke's bad at the chakra exercises. Like really bad. Kids keep making fun of him because he can't get them right.
Sasuke keeps practicing.
He'll keep practicing.
There's a different village jounin that stops by every month to tell everyone at the Academy about their specialties. Almost every jounin talks about their ninjutsu or genjutsu.
Sasuke can't even do that stupid leaf exercises. His grades in chakra manipulation are worse than Naruto's and that kid's the dead last.
Ninjutsu are stupid.
Genjutsu is stupid too.
Maito Gai comes and talks to their class when Sasuke's in second year. He talks about the glory of taijutsu and how you don't need anything else to be a True Example of Ninja Values and of The Will of Fire that Lives in Every Konoha Youth.
Maito Gai is Sasuke's new favorite person in the whole world.
Taijutsu is the best ninja art ever. Sasuke goes right up to him after the talk and asks hi if he can give him any tips because taijutsu is his favorite.
Maito Gai introduces Sasuke to Rock Lee.
Sasuke decides then and there that Rock Lee is going to be his Shisui and they can be sparring partners forever even if they aren't in the same class.
Before the second term of second year, his parents sit him down one day and explain to him that he was born very special. He was born without practically any chakra. "No chakra?" Sasuke asks. "Like, a zombie?"
"A little spark of chakra like a sapling," his mother says. "But you have almost no chakra pathways at all. Shinobi use chakra pathways to channel chakra for almost everything."
Sasuke doesn't understand.
His mother reads his face and sighs. "Lots of people in our clan go to the Academy and then go on to civilian schools or apprenticeship when they don't awaken their sharingan. It's not unusual to have small or underdeveloped pathways, which can be worked on, but you were born without them."
His father makes a face when Sasuke's mother mentions civilian schools. He gives his wife a pained look and says to Sasuke, "Itachi will be Head of this Clan. You can make the Uchiha proud by becoming the head of the Konoha Police."
"If that's what you want," his mother interjects.
Sasuke thinks about it. "Is the Police Kage-"
"Chief," his father corrects. "Police Chief."
"Is the Police Chief a ninja?" Sasuke asks.
His parents look at each other and his mother answers. "Not a traditional ninja, no.."
Sasuke folds his arms and says in slow, clear words, "I want to be a ninja."
"Sasuke," his father sighs. He starts to say something else but his mother put her hand on his father's shoulder.
His mother reaches for him, pulling him into a hug. "Sure you can. You can be Mommy's little kunoichi. I'll train you to be my special ninja."
His father looks worried. Sasuke's used to it.
Shisui is the one who tells Sasuke about the first shinobi. "The first shinobi were civilians according to legend. Raise your elbow higher." Sasuke adjusts his kata.
"The first ninja were the dark mirrors of samurai. They fought without engaging in direct combat. They were assassins in the night, they poisoned their targets, stole information, and were the spies of the daimyo. When we learned to manipulate chakra, those who could use it were encouraged to become ninja and those who couldn't disappeared. Straighten out your foot."
"That is, except for the rare kunoichi. Originally, these were mostly women which is where the term comes from."
Shisui took a kunai from his holster and drew the four strokes on the ground in his choppy handwriting.
"Most ninja look for chakra or chakra techniques when they look for other ninja, but a kunoichi doesn't need to use these. A kunoichi uses poison, stealth, and any underhanded tactic you can think of."
"If genin are the helping hands of villages, chunnins are the strong arm, jounins are the heavy fist, and ANBU is death. Then within that, kunoichi are the poisoned kiss."
Sasuke tells his mother about he's going to kiss the enemy. His father turns purple and has to leave the room.
The second half of his year at the Academy starts with his mother enrolling him in kunoichi classes. She must have said something to a teacher because after that the teachers don't ask him to do any chakra manipulation. Sasuke makes it one whole day before rumors break out and the girls in his classes start being weird in a different way. Instead of fighting for his attention, people stare and whisper.
Kunoichi classes are interesting. Most of the Academy stuff is boring but Sasuke's so behind on the kunoichi curriculum that he takes to studying the material during his other classes for fun.
His mother celebrates his first perfect score in the kunoichi classes by helping him build his first persona.
"Building a persona is the key to a good undercover role," she says. "We're going to talk about a person and at the end of the day, you'll try to have a conversation with me as that new person. Let's make it easy. For your first persona, I want you to make Daisuke the opposite of Sasuke."
"What's Sasuke's favorite food?" His mother asks.
"Tomatoes!" Sasuke says.
"What's Sasuke's least favorite food?" She asks.
Sasuke takes a minute and thinks. "Dango," he says, wrinkling his nose. It's slimy and sugary and gross.
"So, if Sasuke loves tomatoes and hates dango, what does Daisuke love?"
Sasuke thinks for a minute and says, "Dango?"
"Good! And what does he hate?"
Sasuke blanches. "He can't hate tomatoes. No one hates tomatoes. Tomatoes are perfect."
His mother gives him a look. "Sasuke, she says in a warning tone. "What does Daisuke hate?"
He mutters something that may have been tomatoes.
His mother ruffles his hair and pulls out a plate of onigiri.
They spend an hour snacking through the onigiri and discussing how Daisuke would react to each of the different fillings.
Once his mother decides Sasuke is good enough at being Daisuke, she dresses up as Daisuke's mother and takes him out clothes shopping as Daisuke.
Sasuke spends the whole time as Daisuke, complaining about his mother and trying to go look at stuff like trains and robot toys. He even steals a candy bar when no one's looking and is yelled at by Daisuke's mother in the middle of the market and pulled by his ear back to the store to return it.
When they change out of their costumes in a little changing room tucking inside an old willow tree, Sasuke's mother holds him close and tells Sasuke that she's very proud of how well he handled being Daisuke. She tells him to put everything about Daisuke in a box and open his Sasuke box in his head to go back to Sasuke.
He tries to picture it, and even in his head he imagines himself fumbling with the boxes.
She sneaks tomatoes into all his meals for a whole week.
They go out again two weeks later, and it's a little easier to close the Sasuke box and open the Daisuke box.
Sasuke's father starts complimenting Sasuke's kunoichi skills. Sometimes he says things that hurt Sasuke, like how he'll never be considered a man since he can't do the family kanton jutsu, but at least it's because of a medical condition.
No one ever compliments Itachi's kunoichi skills.
Sasuke doesn't say it, but he thinks, maybe, he might be a better kunoichi than Itachi.
Sasuke starts his third year at the Academy knowing how to disguise himself as a merchant boy, a minor noble's son, a shop apprentice, and a genin mission desk delivery runner. He mother makes him promise not to tell anyone about the last one. It's treason and Sasuke knows from his mother's expression when she says it, that treason is Very Bad.
Sasuke's mother learned her kunoichi technique's from her father, who learned it from his mother, who learned it from her mother, and all the way back to before ninja had chakra.
"That's why I know you can learn our techniques. They were always meant for people without chakra." She shows him a hidden panel in the dressing room containing a strong lock box.
Inside the box there are two different sets of books and scrolls.
"These," his mother said, indicated to a fresh looking collection. "Are the oldest copies we have. They've been sealed to remain in tact. There," she says gesturing the the worn out set, " are our hand written copies. As you work your way through the books, you are supposed to write your own copy of the last set of books, as legible as possible and replace the previous set. Your copy and the originals go back in the box for the next generation. Then, you keep the other set to annotate and work through. Any improvements you discover will need to be added as a foot page in your personal annotated copy and in the copy for the next gen."
Sasuke looks over the old work notebooks and realized that those pages must have been written by his mother.
He can't wait to get started.
Sasuke stumbles across Gai-sensei in the middle of a Rock Paper Scizzors challenge with some with old man on his way home from playing with some civilian kids as Daisuke in a park.
Sasuke panics for a minute and then remember he's Sasuke in his Sasuke clothes and he doesn't have to figure out how to act around Gai-sensei as Daisuke.
Sasuke cheers when Gai-sensei wins but he's really confused about the thing he keeps calling the old man. "What's an eternal rival?"
Gai sensei explains the concept to Sasuke and it's like a whole new world opens in front of his eyes. Rock Lee is his best friend and the greatest sparring partner in the whole world. Itachi is the best brother. His mother is the best mother, but he's never thought about a rival.
Sasuke goes to class early the next day just to he can storm right up to Yamanaka Ino and declares her his rival as top Kunoichi in the class. She laughs at him until he reminds he that she's dropped class rankings since his transfer and that if she ever wants to a real kunoichi, she's going to try harder than that. She's shocked for a moment and then responds with a bitter attack about his pathetic chakra reserves. He goes after her pathetic horde of minions. She goes after Lee. After that, it's on.
It takes two different teaching assistants to pull them apart, and Sasuke's pretty satisfied with the black eye she's sporting, even if she is holding a chunk of his hair and there's blood trickling down the side of his face.
All their classes turn into a race of bitterly trying to one up each other. Ino's pink haired shadow takes to glaring at him every chance she gets.
Sasuke tries to talk Lee into declaring her his rival, but Lee takes one look and becomes completely useless. Now all their sparring matches are about Haruno this and Haruno that. Sasuke has to talk Lee out of getting color coordinated leg weights.
Sasuke really likes having a rival but he also misses the days when he was younger and didn't have to explain to Lee for the hundredth time why he can't get her a lock of Haruno's hair, no really, it's weird Lee.
His mother listens to all his school stories with a delighted look on her face. They talk everyday after school, with two different plates of snacks. One plate for Sasuke so they can talk about his day. The second plate for Daisuke so they can discuss his day.
"Stop pressuring Sasuke. It's too much. He's never going to graduate with his reserves," his father's voice snaps from the study. "You can't keep living vicariously through him."
Sasuke isn't supposed to be home, but Shusui never picked him up. Sasuke knows he wasn't supposed to hear this.
"That's rich coming from you. You took Itachi right out of my arms and you made him everything you were never good enough to be." He's never heard his mother talk like that.
"This is cruel."
"I didn't need chakra to slaughter half my kill count, and the only people with a higher death toll was the Yondaime himself." His mother sounds furious. "He's mine. Sasuke is my legacy. You took Itachi away from me and I won't let you take Sasuke too."
Sasuke doesn't hear his father's reply. He runs to Shisui's house and hides on the porch. Shisui doesn't home.
Eventually, Sasuke heads back home when he's tired of waiting. His mother is waiting with a third empty plate.
"It's time to make a new persona. Let's talk about your day, and then we can get started in Saki-chan."
His mother teaches Sasuke how to be a girl. She talks to him about how he thinks Saki-chan should be, and then makes suggestions for how to change her so that Saki isn't Sasuke or Daisuke, but a whole new person of her own.
They work on Saki for five weeks and then they debut her at a Go club. His mother wears her persona of an old, male travelling salesman and introduces Saki as her daughter who is old enough to go on business trips.
Saki learns how to play Go and she's awful at it. She spends have the time looking away and blushing, or looking at her father like a lost lamb. Most of the Go players are very kind to her and the ones who aren't kind are at least respectful to her father.
Saki follows her father into a different shinobi changing stating, his time tucked behind a seal area hidden in a cluster of cherry trees.
Saki is tucked away into a box and the Sasuke box gets opened in his head.
His mother hugs him close and tells him he's on his way to being the best kunoichi in Konoha. He's so happy.
The kunoichi training doesn't get him out of clan dinners. He's still stuck going to meeting with his parents in his best formal clothes, trying to be on his best behavior with different Clan Heads and Clan Heirs. Shino's his favorite. Shikamaru and Chouji are okay, but Hinata's impossible to talk to and Kiba's really rude. Ino used to be the worst because she would fawn all over him, but now that they're rivals, they spend almost as much time roughhousing and Kiba does with his sister Hana.
He's shoving a spoon into Ino's stomach to make her let go of his hair, when the Yamanaka Clan head starts laughing at them.
Yamanaka san tilts his head at Sasuke and Ino and says to Sasuke's parents, "You know, if you ever want to let Sasuke marry out of the clan, he and Ino might make a good match."
Sasuke immediately drops his spoon and starts apologizing to his parents as Ino begs her father to never ever joke about that again. Sakura, sitting on Ino's other side as her personal guest, goes white at the thought.
He sees his mother send his father a satisfied expression when the Yamanaka aren't looking.
Sasuke is pretty sure Itachi won't let them sell him to the Yamanaka. Then again, Sasuke thinks as his eyes glance over the other people in the room, Itachi isn't here.
Sasuke is sparring with Lee when two members of ANBU pick him up and take him to the Hokage tower.
Sasuke never sees a body. He is simply told that everyone he has ever loved is dead. He will never see his mother or his father or his uncles, aunts, cousins, friends-
"What about Itachi? He was on a mission in Rock Country. He's okay, right?"
The Hokage tells him about Itachi and he doesn't understand.
ANBU escorts him to the compound and he feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up when he sees that it's empty. There's no one there. There's paint everywhere on everything in brown and blacking splatters.
ANBU helps him into the main house and he throws up when he sees the dark red stains on the floor.
He asks to be taken to the Yamanaka house instead. Yamanaka-san lets him in without a word and tells him he can stay as long as he likes.
He curls up on Ino's trundle bed and wraps himself in a pile of blankets. Everything feels cold.
Ino gives him a manicure, then a pedicure, and then she combs out his hair for hairs, all while keeping a low running commentary on everything that happened at school.
Sasuke doesn't hear anything. He doesn't cry. He doesn't talk. He talks all of his confusion and sadness and desperation and tries to put it in a box. A box isn't strong enough. The edges of the box threaten to rip and overflow. He takes everything out of the box and crushes it into a diamond. Every piece of unhappiness is shoved into the jewel until he has nothing left but a stone for a heart.
At the end of the transformation, he gives Ino a cool look over breakfast and tells her she's never going to catch up to him if she keeps skipping school. It's not quite as strong as his usual snipes, but it's enough to make Ino burst into a big grin. She makes a quip about his ugly face. Sasuke huffs and goes back to eating. Ino keeps smiling.
He stays at the Yamanaka house while genin team clean up the compound. He tries to move out of Ino's room but he has horrible nightmares where everyone leaves him and he can't see any faces.
He winds up crawling into Ino's trundle bed anyway.
He tries to go home after they clean out the compound. The ghosts are so thick he can barely breathe.
Yamanaka-san says tells him he can come back to their compound any time.
Sasuke is tempted. He's so tempted.
He nearly says yes, and then he remembers his mother's promise to keep the clan's kunoichi training a secret. He thinks about walking away from his last piece of family and he doesn't have the strength to lose this too.
His mother's training manuals are there. Concealed poisons, immunization techniques, interrogation techniques, tips for weapon concealment and adaption, and other Uchiha kunoichi secrets. Sasuke's always wanted to be a shinobi like his brother.
Now, he's going to be a kunoichi like his mother. He will make her proud and do what needs to be done.
"Is it okay?" Sasuke asks hesitantly, "If I come by when it's too much?"
"Of course," Yamanaka-san says kindly. "Of course you can.
Sasuke tries to join Gai for training before he goes back to classes at the Academy. He only makes it thirty minutes before he interupts Gai-sensei recommendation for building calluses on his knuckles to say,"Mother says I'm not supposed to get calluses," and he has to sit back down to help his hyperventilating.
He doesn't say anything else for a long time. Gai-sensei keeps him company for the whole day and every day after that until Sasuke starts again at the Academy.
There are five main class groups at the academy as far as Sasuke is concerned. Genjutsu. Ninjutsu. Taijutsu. Kunoichi studies. Civilian Junk.
Sasuke remains near the middle of his class by brutally throwing himself into learning everything he can about countering techniques and by having perfect scores in the Kunoichi lessens.
Going back to class is horrible. People don't even lower their voices to talk about him. People ask him outrageous questions. He stops responding to anyone in class besides the teacher, Ino and occasionally Naruto just to tell him to stop being annoying. If he has to do a class project and he can't have Ino, he tries to grab Hyuuga or Haruno because they're the only people who seem to understand him just fine without using any words.
Sometimes if he knows the project is chakra related and useless, he'll pair himself off with Naruto just so he won't drag anyone else's grades down.
He waits almost three months before he packs a bag and goes into one of the changing rooms around Konoha. He knows that there technically built for ANBU to be able to slip in and out of uniform without leading an obvious trail to their homes, but they are all open to any Konoha ninja.
The keyword is ninja. Sasuke is technically a civilian.
Sasuke uses his mother's old hitai-ate to key him into the room. He hurries so he won't be caught. He closes the Sasuke box, tucking his diamond heart inside, and opens the Saki box.
Saki's father has just died in an accident at the Capitol. She's here visiting her aunt alone. She pulls out an ill fitting black dress a little too large and pulls on a pair of black lace fingerless gloves, because Saki is sad but she's still Saki.
She goes to the Go club, crying almost the entire time, explaining that she's been dealing with the funeral arrangements with her aunt's help back in the capital. She spends most of her visit crying and being comforted by the old club members in between games. She manages to get halfway through a game before she has to excuse herself to cry. She tells them that her father loved Go and she wants to keep playing in his memory after she moves to Konoha.
Saki's a civillian girl. She can cry over her father as much as she wants. Civilians girls cry all the time and it's fine.
Saki goes shopping for more Konoha appropriate clothes on the recommendations of a couple of the older women in the club. She buys clothes with ribbon and lace and most of it is dark colors. Sasuke wants to buy blue but Saki's favorite color is pink and her father loved seeing his cute little girl in pink and red so she's buying pink.
Saki sneaks into a different changing room and locks herself in. She lets herself cry herself dry and then she puts herself in a box and opens the Sasuke box.
Sasuke gives himself a while before he takes the diamond out of the box and settles it in place of his heart. The rule is he can't open the door until he's completely Sasuke. No one will notice if he cries in a hidden room off an alley.
He decides that he'll be Saki and Daisuke anytime it gets to be too hard to be Sasuke.
He plans a schedule for them in his head, making sure he doesn't spend too much time as any of the other personas. Otherwise he'd never be Sasuke at all.
Lee gives him worried looks when he thinks Sasuke isn't looking. Sasuke can't seem to make himself care other than to find it annoying. He used to be sad about it but he shoved the sadness in his diamond. Now he's numb.
He can't miss his family if he's numb.
He likes being numb.
Lee graduates the Academy on an exemption and gets placed on a team with Gai-sensei. Sasuke is burning with jealousy lee assured him that it won't change his friendship but how can things stay the same when Lee has the only thing Sasuke even wants.
He wants to scream at Lee that he should have turned it down but he also wants to scream at himself for being so stupid He knows how genin teams work and how they're balanced.
It's a struggle, but he can find himself to feel happy for Lee. At least, as much happiness as he can even feel nowadays, and he still trains with Lee after he's done training with the rest of his team.
He gets to know Tenten and boy Hyuuga a little through Lee and Gai-sensei. Tenten's nice and sensible but he throws himself at Hyuuga when the boy has the audacity to suggest Sasuke's losses were all due to fate.
Gai-sensei has to keep them carefully apart after that. Hyuuga is instantly apologetic when he finds out that Lee's friend is that Sasuke Uchiha, but the damage is done. Sasuke hates him more than anyone else in the village.
The clan's banking institution sets up an annual meeting with Sasuke to review the accounts. Sasuke didn't think he would have to worry about money for a long time, but it isn't true. The accounts manager explains to his taxes to Sasuke and shows him how if he isn't careful, everything will be gone in twelve years time.
Sasuke shakes with rage. He never imagined that this might be something else Itachi takes too. His home. His fucking home. Every time he thinks Itachi has nothing left to take, he finds another way his brother keeps hurting him.
He doesn't have a chance at Rookie of the Year, not with his chakra coils, but he spends his time fighting Yamanaka Ino viciously for the rank of top kunoichi in their group. He beats her most of the time by the skin of his teeth and earns his title as top kunoichi with a vicious final project on the dance variations of Mist.
Sasuke knows how to send codes with flower arrangements, the history of Geisha in Rice Country, dancing styles from Rock, and the Poetry of Rain Country. He can defeat any student in the academy with his taijutsu other than Lee and even then he's focusing speed over strength training because the calluses of a taijutsu master are a dead give away for a good infiltrator.
He's studies his mother's books and makes himself immune to four poison bases. He's slowly building his immunity to a dozen more. He cannot make a single fucking Bunshin to save his life, but on the flip side, his chakra pathways are so underdeveloped that he can't be put under most genjutsu. There's no pathways for the genjutsus to effect.
He's very bitter the day the teacher's figure it out at the Academy.
He's an Uchiha who can't experience genjutsu. His father would have wept.
He gets his own exemption from graduating. He is told to wait on the roof for his jounin sensei, who he would meet before the formal team assignments.
The woman who meets him on the roof is the sort of woman who has designed herself to make people stare. She is wearing a fishnet body suit with flesh colored lining that has been clearly dyed to her exact shade of flesh to provide the implication that she's naked beneath. Her miniskirt is just long enough to cover the bare minimum yet still imply indecency, and she wears a trench coat flared open.
Sasuke's not sure what the trenchcoat is about, but everything else about her says she's a kunoichi who treats her body and sexuality like a weapon. Then she introduces herself ads Mitarashi Anko, the same name as the village traitor who worked for the sannin Orochimaru, and Sasuke feels himself flash cold with rage.
He's being set up for failure. Lee got a great teacher but the spare Uchiha gets a jounin who doesn't even leave Konoha-
He gives Mitarashi-san terse, one word answers as she asks him about his name, day, training, likes and dislikes. It doesn't take her long to pick up on his abrasiveness and she finally snaps.
"Look you little shit, I asked for your apprenticeship because everything I heard said that you were the most promising kunoichi since Sanju fucking Tsunade. You need to learn infiltration, and poisons and shit and I want to pass on as much as my shit as I can. No one trusts me not to pass on Sensei's techniques but I can't exactly pass on jutsus to a kid who can't do them. You are my only chance to be the damn good jounin sensei and I'm not going to let you shitty attitude fuck this up."
Sasuke blinks rapidly and he nods. He understands.
Someone is setting them both up for failure.
Anko-sensei studied his face a minute and then sprawls on the floor of the roof. "Shit kid, that was my first sensei speech. How'd I do?"
Sasuke leans over her face. "Hn."
Anko sighs. "Well, if it's any comfort if the genin team doesn't work out, I get to keep you anyway."
That makes Sasuke relax a little. Maybe it's not a set up for failure. Even if it's the village traitor, a jounin sensei is still better than getting shunted into the Genin Corps.
Sasuke goes to the Academy for team postings with complete certainty of how his team is going to be structured. He's the top kunoichi, so he's going to get paired with Aburame Shino, the top student in the class, and he's going to be paired with the dead last which is the Inuzuka because Naruto didn't pass.
He's not happy when he finds Naruto in the classroom bragging about being given a pass. He thinks about being stuck with that idiot until the chunnin exams and he twitches.
It's even worse than he thought. His team is Ino's annoying shadow and that loud orange kid who's in love with her. Haruno shrieked, "No," when they announced the team. The whole class was so shocked at the sigh of her raising her voice that Iruka-sensei apologized to her before moving on.
Aburame Shino is on Team 8 with the Inuzuka and Hyuuga. Sasuke scowls. He was cheated.
Ino winds up in a new Ino Shika Cho team rebuild. Neither of them are remotely surprised. Ino glances at Sasuke as he rolls his eyes. She huffs in amusement in response. Next to Ino, Haruno looks devastated. She glances at Ino with tearful eyes and murmurs something about how hard she tried to get on a team with Ino. Across the room, Naruto keep chanting about how he's going to be on a team with his beloved Sakura-chan like a deranged stalker.
Sasuke folds his arms down and buries his head in his arms.
Anko-sensei arrives on time and is genuinely distraught when she sees two gloomy genin and an orange nutjob waiting for her.
"Alright kids, we're gonna head over to my favorite training grounds and get to know each other."
Anko-sensei takes them to training ground 44 which looks like the place teenagers go to die in movies. Sasuke tries his best to look unimpressed but the wind through the trees makes a wailing sound that sends shivers down his spine.
"Alright kids, you've been in classes together for three years. Can you guess what kind of team you've been designed for?" Anko asks.
A shit team, Sasuke thinks bitterly.
No one says anything.
"Okay, let me put it to you like this. Sakura, did you know that there's a secondary rubric for grading Nara kids at the Academy?"
Sakura looks confused for a moment and covers her mouth with both hands in horror. Naruto doesn't get it, which comforts Sasuke because he doesn't know where this is going either.
Anko-sensei smiles with too many teeth, "You see, most Nara kids have a habit of throwing their grades specifically so they won't be at the top of the class. So to get an accurate reading of their grades, you apply their recent test answers against the algorithm for Nara kids and boom you get their actual rankings. Your sensei applied the Nara algorithm to your scores and surprise, surprise. Congratulations on being the top ranked shinobi in your year, Sakura."
Sakura looks like she's going to throw up.
Anko-sensei must have felt some shred of remorse because ruffles Sakura's hair around her hair ribbon and said, "Cheer up. The amount of fine detail strategy is fantastic for infiltration and tactics."
Sakura looked less sickly at that so it must have been comforting.
"You. Uzumaki kid. Did you know that inventing your own jutsu is a tokubetsu jounin skill?" Anko asked.
Naruto made an expression so rare, it took Sasuke a minute to realize it was embarrassment. "Oh." He says quietly, then shouts a split second later, "Hell yeah it's a fancy skill because I'm gonna be Hokage! Believe it!"
Anko snorts, "Yeah, okay kid. Here's the thing though - of all the jutsu you could have invented, you picked a ninjutsu transformation that changed your gender and transmutes your clothing into a pocket dimension, with a layered genjutsu targeted to affect the sexual attraction aspects of your target's mind." She gave Naruto a thumbs up. "It's badass."
Uzumaki looks up at her in complete adoration, "Sensei," he says choking with emotion, "you are so! Cool!"
Sasuke is on the verge of throwing up a little in his mouth.
"And you, my itty bitty baby kunoichi here," She says, wrapping one arm around Sasuke and he struggles to squirm out from under her, "Have been sneaking around the village under ANBU's nose with at least three separate personas living different lives that actual overlap - and you haven't been caught by a single person outside of ANBU."
Sakura snaps her fingers. "Covert Ops! We're Infiltration, Reconnaissance, and Intelligence."
Anko-sensei beams at her. "You've got it kid. That's who you'll be if you pass my test to become a genin team."
"How can you be three different people?" Naruto asks, caught on the entirely wrong thing.
"There's another test?" Sakura says, voice shaking.
Sasuke considers rethinking his life plan. Civilian life has to be better than getting stuck with these two idiots.