They were the taboo class in a juvenile detention center. Nine kids in a classroom on the far end of the building, with bars on the windows and desks that were bolted to the floor. They were the black sheep in an institution full of adolescent criminals, the kind of kids everyone knew not to fuck with.
There was Nagato, a ginger boy with dozens of heavy metal piercings implanted into every available inch of his face. He'd organized the students of Amegakure Metropolitan High School into a makeshift mafia.
Konan, a short-haired beauty, was his right-hand woman. In her spare time, she ran a bootleg piercing parlor out of the second-floor girl's bathroom.
No one was sure how Itachi Uchiha, a handsomely apathetic senior, wound up in the danger-class, but it was generally believed by the student body that he'd killed a man at some point.
Itachi's fellow Konoha transplant, Kisame Hoshigaki, was a (former) gang member who beat the piss out of people for money. Rumor had it that he'd slit someone's throat from ear to ear, but it wasn't something he'd ever bothered to confirm, or deny. The black gill tattoos under his eyes tended to unsettle people.
Kakuzu had amassed thousands of dollars as a loan shark/local drug kingpin. It's been said that one can count on a single hand the number of things he wouldn't do for money.
Zetsu was the kid with multiple personalities who had been busted in several different schools for growing "psychotropic flora" in storage closets and unused classrooms.
Hidan was Kakuzu's foul-mouthed foil. A violent religious zealot, he'd been expelled and subsequently arrested after he'd knifed a handful of students in the school parking lot.
Deidara had been taken away from Iwa Central High via paddy wagon when a janitor discovered that he'd been building bombs in the chemical stockroom.
And finally, there was Sasori, the baby-faced sociopath who'd taken his superintendent's $50,000 sports car for a joy ride and wrapped it around a telephone pole. He had a bad habit of stealing things and, at one point, he'd threatened to scalp his old biology teacher for showing up 10 minutes late to class.
This was the class in which Madara was trusted. He'd served more than fifty years on the local police force, and, for the last few years, had chosen to work as a teacher at the local juvie. On Day One as teacher of the "Akatsuki" class, he'd walked in and caught Sasori and Deidara trying to choke one another, and Hidan doing lines off his desk.
Introductions had been brief, and after threatening to stick the two fighting boys in handcuffs, he informed the class that he did, indeed, keep a loaded gun in his desk. Following this, the class went silent, all except for Hidan, who told him to take the gun out and "fucking kill yourself" with it. Madara bumped the gun drawer with his hip and made a motion to open it, effectively shutting the strung-out blowhard up.
With the classroom now settled, Madara turned toward the whiteboard and uncapped a marker.
"Today, we learn systems of equations, page 37. Books are on the back table."
oOo
A/N: blah this is garbage. Will possibly revise in the future, at some point.