"Team Seven," Iruka-sensei said, making Obito tune in and stop playing Cat's Cradle with razor wire, "is Uchiha Sasuke,"

Girls sat on the edges of their seats.

"Haruno Sakura,"

Sakura punched the air. "YES!"

"NOOO!" screamed about half the remaining girls.

"And," the teacher raised his voice above the ruckus, "Yamamoto Obito."

Obito saw Sakura's head turning as if on a swivel. "...who?"

"Rude," he mumbled to himself, catching a tiny nod of agreement from Aburame Shino beside him. (Not that he had any room to talk, barely knowing the names of his classmates too. At least he never vocalized it! Have some tact!) Obito arrived a little later than most and his only choice was beside either Aburame or Inuzuka, the extra seats farther away having been marked off-limits with sticky notes in Iruka-sensei's handwriting. Obito picked the quieter one.

Still, when Sakura's eyes raked over him, he waved just a tiny bit at her. She might not have seen it though.

Granted, he did look different from normal; he was wearing a new, better outfit he'd been saving up for, and both a gas mask/rebreather hybrid over his mouth and nose and his hitai-ate were hidden by the usual high scarf, with seal-ified goggles resting on the top of his head. He did some of the seals himself, even, in the kind of chakra-blood-ink that goes transparent once set. You didn't hang around two sealing masters for years without picking things up.

Enhanced vision was fucking wicked, by the way. (—kind of like the Sharingan, for the five seconds he had had it—)

Team Ten turned out to be Ino-Shika-Cho, and Team Twelve was Hyuuga, Aburame, Inuzuka. The other teams were made of purely civilian children. Statistically, those were the ones that never made jounin.

(Obito really shouldn't dismiss them, since for all appearances he was one.)

Mikoto-obasama's second son seemed to recognize that too, seeing as he was glaring at both of his teammates.

That still hurt. Obito had been— in the past life— back then— they'd all been eagerly awaiting the birth of Fugaku-sama's second child. If it was a boy, Mikoto had told Obito, they were going to name him Sasuke, and if it was a girl, Mito.

Obito could have been the babysitter.

He'd died before the baby was even born.

That kind of hurt, it. It didn't go away. It just. Kind of. It. It.—

—It sat there, waiting for him to feel pretty okay again. Then it. Attacked. Out of, nowhere usually. Mostly. Shredding up his chest.

He'd gotten... not used to it, but. It wasn't unexpected anymore, and he'd figured out how to deal with it, particularly in the wake of the Uchiha Massacre. Thankfully none of the main clan knew about the Uchiha who lived at Madame Akiyama's, or Itachi could have gone after them too, but being exiled from the clan meant being marked as dead, then 'posthumously' made excommunicate and anathema. Itachi was only thirteen when he killed the clan so he wouldn't yet have learnt that; Obito only knew them by a stroke of strange luck.

Still, thinking of Itachi hurt, too. It hurt differently, maybe, but was no less painful. Sasuke, he only knew as potential. Itachi, he had actually known, as much as a teenager can know a genius toddler.

Losing Obaachan and Mikoto-obasama and all the dozens of cousins he grew up with (little Shisui! Izumi-chan! Arata-nii!) was what really hurt, though.

He lost them before they died, with his own death. Losing them again still, despite it all, hurt.

And now little Sasuke was glaring at him. Not that he was little, exactly, he was a year younger than Obito had been when he died, but still so immature. Peacetime standards. Children didn't grow up as fast, which was good, of course, but it was also super annoying if (when?) you were reincarnated. He was allowed to be annoyed by good things, okay? His feelings had nothing to do with the objective goodness of Real Childhoods for the Real Children.

"FOREHEAD!" the Yamanaka screamed as she exited with her new team. "I'LL BECOME THE PRETTIEST KUNOICHI AND WIN SASUKE-KUN'S HEART! JUST YOU WATCH!"

"IN YOUR DREAMS, INO-PIG!" his new teammate screeched back.

Obito slowly bent over and pressed his head to the desk. Then, nose still pressed to the wood, he slid his goggles down over his eyes and activated the chakra vision. Through the desk, he watched himself swirl chakra around the tenketsu of his knees. It was better than dwelling on the utter shallowness of his new teammates (and himself), and that he was once more on Team Seven.

Team Seven.

Obito just hoped this one wouldn't be doomed too.

...Speaking of, who was their sensei? He lifted his head to see that all the other teams had been collected already. Was their teacher late? Was there a bureaucracy fuckup? What was going on?

Iruka-sensei was even repeatedly checking the classroom clock and frowning in concern. It had been thirty minutes since teams were announced, and no other jounin had shown up.

Weird. And... ominous, Obito decided. It didn't bode well for the team, if their sensei couldn't even be assed to show up on time.

(One might say there was a meeting, or a mission, or an unavoidable accident—but potential jounin sensei were given a week of leave preceding team assignments, and word of an accident or even an excuse would have reached the Academy by now. No. Their sensei was just late.)

Finally, Iruka-sensei stood up, bag under his arm. "I have a meeting to go to," he said apologetically. "You three'll be okay here until your sensei shows up. Use the time to get to know each other; they shouldn't be more than another half-hour late. Congratulations again on graduating!"

"Thank you, Iruka-sensei," they chorused, some (Sakura) more enthusiastically than others (Sasuke), and the man made his exit.

It was perfectly silent for like, a solid three minutes. Sakura may even have been holding her breath. Wow.

Obito sighed. He was going to have to be the mature one? Well, he supposed he could manage, as long as the multiverse didn't come crashing down upon his shoulders for it. "So what do you guys like to do?"

Sakura finally took a breath, turning to look back, up, and sideways at him. "Huh?"

"What do you like to do," Obito enunciated. There was a tier of desks between them and the new mask was muffling his voice even more than his scarf usually did, so he made sure to speak extra-extra-clearly. "You know, for fun?"

"W-well... hey, is it even any of your business?"

Obito frowned. "We're teammates. That means getting to know each other. I'm trying to get to know you. Hobbies, favorite games, anything, really. Uchiha-san too."

He'd... half lost her attention at that. She was back to watching Sasuke and pretending she wasn't. "Um, you go first?"

At least she realized this kind of thing was a two-way street. Three-way street? How would that even work? Obito was clearly terrible at metaphors. The universe should never let him use them again. "I like training, with chakra, mostly. Developing new techniques and stuff. But music is fun too." Auditory genjutsu, fuck yeah! And classical music was relaxing, even when trying to meditate.

"...Training," Sasuke said more than asked, and quietly.

It was annoying, talking at them from two tiers up. Obito stood, planted one hand on the desk, vaulted neatly over—

—and, with a touch of chakra to his fingertips, sent himself soaring over the tiers, and with the air resistance from grasping trails of chakra, all but floated down to gently land on the floor before them.

"Yes," Obito said, pushing his goggles back up on his forehead. His eyes crinkled into a smile. "Training."