Team Assignments


The next day Sakura woke up dirty, stiff, and sore in the Haruno training yard. She pushed herself up off the ground and blinked in the bright light.

Suddenly she gasped, scrambling upright through the pain. Was she late to meet her team?

Her sudden nervousness and excitement disappeared as she saw the hitai-ate, so new and shiny and perfect yesterday now half-buried in the dirt. Her throat closed, and it felt like she couldn't breathe.

Uncle Shin was much, much, stronger than Iruka-sensei. He was right.

Sakura picked up the headband and carried it inside. She washed her wounds mechanically, dressing the cuts and scrapes from the kunai, shuriken, and wire the same way she always had.

Then she did something she had found in a medical book a few months ago on one of her many trips to the library. Sakura focused on the tiny bit of chakra in her body that she could feel. She slowly, painstakingly, turned it into base chakra and pushed it around her body. She didn't know if it healed her faster than she would've normally, but it did make it easier to move. It also told her exactly how much chakra she had for the day, too.

After that, she got dressed in her usual brown tunic and packed a few weapons and basic supplies, then glanced at her hitai-ate. It was still dirty, bloody, and burnt from the fire ninjutsu Uncle Shin had used last night.

Sakura washed the blue headband and tied it around her waist where she could hide it better. She didn't deserve to wear it.


Sakura wasn't late for the team assignments, but she wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not.

She sat in her usual seat in the back corner of the classroom and watched everyone else. Ino had thrown a fit over Naruto sitting next to Sasuke, which was funny because Naruto liked Ino and Sasuke didn't care either way. Those three were fun to watch because they took her mind off the pain and helped her forget about Uncle Shin. Naruto had even graduated, which surprised her.

Sakura caught Hinata's eye and smiled.

"Good luck on your team, Sakura," Hinata murmured.

"You too, Hinata," Sakura grinned, then winced. Her voice sounded too loud to be proper to address the heiress, but Hinata smiled at her anyway. She let out a small breath she hadn't known she was holding.

Sakura looked back to the Naruto in front, just in time to see him and Sasuke fall into the most awkward-looking kiss she'd ever seen. Her eyes widened and then she broke out into quiet, mad giggles as the rest of the class roared with laughter. Naruto and Sasuke argued fiercely, both grossed out and defensive. And then Naruto was soundly beaten by Ino. Again.

She giggled again, wondering what those three would be like as a team.

Then she panicked. When Uncle Shin disappeared this morning, did that mean...? No, he couldn't be a jōnin instructor, the village thought he was just a chūnin! He had forbidden her to let anyone know about his ANBU tattoo so the Hokage wouldn't give him a team… Would he?

"Alright, genin, settle down." Iruka-sensei grinned at the group in front of them. "First off, congratulations on graduating from the academy!"

There was a cheer from everyone in the class. Sakura tried to smile, but her headache was steadily getting worse as Iruka started listing off the genin teams.

The pain and nausea from the seal Uncle Shin had put on her chakra was getting worse too. She never complained though. It meant her chakra was coming back after last night.

"Team 7 will be Haruno Sakura, Uchiha Sasuke, and Uzumaki Naruto," Sakura heard Iruka-sensei say her name, bringing her back to the world around her. She looked at her two team-mates in shock.

"Good luck," she heard Hinata murmur again.

"Aww, come on, I have to be with him?! Wait, who's Sakura?!" Naruto twisted around to squint at the class behind him. Sakura wished she could disappear. Uncle would hate this, even if she did manage to stay a genin ninja and not have to go back to the Academy.

"Idiot," Ino huffed and slammed Naruto's head into the desk. She turned to glare at Sakura in the back of the room. "Don't think you're better than me, pinky. Sasuke is mine," Ino hissed. Sakura nodded quickly. Ino was the daughter of the head of the intelligence division. She had to be strong, and there was no way Sakura would, or even could, challenge her.

Sakura saw both Naruto and Sasuke looking at her at her along with the rest of the class. She stared down at her desk as her cheeks burned. She didn't know what they expected her to do and sighed in relief when Iruka-sensei cleared his throat.

"Team 8 will be Hyūga Hinata, Aburame Shino, and Inuzuka Kiba..." Sakura managed a smile when Hinata sighed at Kiba's indignant shout.


"Where is our jōnin?!" Naruto demanded of the classroom door for the seventeenth time in the past two hours. Sakura could practically hear Sasuke grinding his teeth together from all the way across the classroom.

"I don't know, idiot."

"Shut up asshole," Naruto grumbled. As Sakura watched him despite her nagging headache and nausea, she saw his fidgeting get worse.

He began to jump around the classroom, hopping on desks and making paper shuriken from notepaper left behind and aiming for a bulls-eye on the chalkboard from various positions around the room. Sakura giggled quietly when he threw a shuriken from between his legs, backward, and it nearly flew into Sasuke's nose.

Then Naruto stopped moving, and a mischievous grin crossed his face. He tore out of the room, leaving Sasuke and Sakura behind to wait in silence.

Without the distraction of Naruto, Sakura started to worry again. Eventually, she got up and walked down to the front row and stood near one of the desks, trying to get up the nerve to talk to Sasuke. She'd never talked to him before. He was cute, and strong too. He was the strongest genin that had graduated that year.

"Do you think he'll come back?" she asked, just loud enough for Sasuke to hear.

"Probably," he snorted in disgust without looking at her. "Idiot's too excited about actually graduating."

As if on cue, Naruto barreled back into the room. He cackled wildly as he went around the cupboards, spreading what Sakura suspected was super-glue all over the insides of drawers and cabinets, and even in the keyholes and on the feet of the teacher's chair.

He also glued the light switch permanently on, the chalk on the chalkboard, and the erasers underneath the teacher's desk. Sakura decided it was a good idea to keep Naruto occupied at all times.

Sasuke eyed the cupboards now glued shut. "He's going to know it was you."

"Ha! You just wish you had the guts to come up with something this brilliant, asshole." Naruto finished holding the chalk up on the board to dry, stepped back to inspect his work, and nodded. Sakura stifled a laugh. The chalk had been arranged to outline a large pile of poop.

Naruto had kept one eraser back, though. He smothered the bottom of that one in super-glue, pulled over a chair, clambered up to the door, and lodged the eraser carefully between the door and the threshold with the glue-side down.

"Serves him right for being so late," Naruto said proudly.

"He's a jōnin, he's not going to fall for something as stupid as that," Sasuke grumbled. Naruto ignored him, still grinning like a madman.

Sakura sat down nearer to the front of the classroom. Most of her nausea had faded, though her entire body was still sore and aching.

She had never talked much with either of her new teammates before and studied them now from behind a curtain of pink bangs. Sasuke kept to himself, only speaking when someone - usually Naruto or Kiba - goaded him into it. He was the last of his clan, killed in a terrible massacre by his older brother years ago. And he was smart, pushing himself to be the top of the class. He liked to show off, in his own less obnoxious way.

Naruto, on the other hand, was the infamous prankster nobody liked (except Hinata, Sakura remembered with a grin), but he didn't seem bad. He didn't have any parents either.

Team Orphan, Sakura thought without much humor. She still had her uncle though.

Naruto looked at her, then Sasuke. "Figures," he huffed, crossing his arms. "I get stuck with the quiet people."

"I talk," Sakura said softly.

"Well, Sasuke argues I guess," Naruto added, rubbing the back of his head. The Uchiha glared at Naruto. "Eh, could be worse," the blond continued, ignoring him. "Coulda been Shino or Shikamaru."

At that precise moment, all three of them heard the door to the room slide open. Naruto whipped around eagerly to watch his prank in action. The three genin watched as the eraser fell, and landed with a slight puff of chalk dust on a silver-haired masked man.

And stuck.

"Gotcha!" Naruto cackled. "Serves you right, we've been waiting forever!"

Sakura just stared at the older man in the doorway. Though it was funny, even she knew to check for traps as obvious as that. Was he actually a jōnin? Uncle Shin would've had her do hours of training just for falling for that simple trap.

"Well," the man said. "My first impression of you three is–" Sakura held her breath for a heartbeat.

"That you are absolutely worthless." His lone eye crinkled upwards in what Sakura assumed was a sarcastic smile. "Meet me on the rooftop in five minutes."

All she could do was think about those two words. They seemed to echo in her head.

Absolutely worthless.

Sakura knew it. There was no way she was going to be able to stay a genin.