Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. Seriously.

Author's note: Merry Christmas, dudes. Oh, and thanks Steven Kodaly for beta-reading this! It should be easier to follow now.

Getting an Uchiha to accept you as someone of worth was hard. Thankfully, Naruto Uzumaki remembered this as he casually strolled behind the spoiled young man. Using stealth that his present self knew, but his past self hadn't, he actually managed to get behind Sasuke without being detected. It was considerably easy, too.

"Yo," came Naruto's voice, cracked with puberty. His reflexes prepared for the consequences.

The effect was instantaneous. The would-be traitor in front of him turned around, startled, and unleashed a physical attack of desperation. Naruto ducked and grabbed his rival's ankle in a motion that flipped the young Sharingan-user on his back.

"What the hell are you doing, Loser?!" Sasuke sputtered, irritated and surprised. He had been expecting Kakashi. Then again, he had also expected to see Naruto get his ass handed to him. 'Displeased' was a minor statement as to his emotional state towards his teammate.

Naruto was a stepping stone to him; this was all wrong.

"I am trying to cooperate with his highness," Naruto curtly replied, smiling bitterly. Sasuke's eyes widened in anger in the split-second he could have used to react,"-because I have to."

While the self-centered avenger was down, the blonde ninja stepped on Sasuke's chest, perfectly aware of the kunai being tossed at him from Sakura's direction. She was aiming for her favorite spot in back of his head, so the shot was easily avoided.

"Let Sasuke go, you.. You…!"

"That's not a toy, Sakura!" he shouted, finding himself annoyed with this jog of memory as to how immature their female teammate had been. "Were you really trying to KILL me? That's not a very nice way to react to someone who was going to win a future for you, you kno-"

"I DON'T NEED YOUR HELP, LOSER!" both Sasuke and Sakura interrupted simultaneously, causing the demon vessel to flinch.

There was a silence as Naruto brainstormed a way to deal with this turn of events. A stroke of brilliance rewarded his efforts.

"Hmm… So, you think you can take down an elite on your own? Copy-ninja Kakashi? The man of a thousand jutsu?" he argued, feeling his face turn red with the frustration. Hunger made him irritable, but his intellect was a lot larger than most were aware.

The two he had respectfully addressed felt their jaws drop. Was their teacher really that famous? Could it be that Naruto actually read up on someone? Finding he had finally captured the rest of Squad Seven's attention, the trademark smirk appeared of the face of the Yondaime's son. For the moment, they were at his mercy. This would do.

"What would you suggest then, Naruto?" Sakura asked, her voice shaking a little.

Yes, this would do just fine.

Meanwhile, the head of the team fingered his prizes restlessly. It was hard to concentrate on an erotic novel when you constantly had to fear a plan that was probably escalating in tactical brilliance. The three would-be ninja were smarter than he had assumed.

At first he had waited for them to come, expecting one of the genin to foolishly challenge him like the ones that came before. Time had passed slowly, and no one came to fill his expectations.

Today is just full of surprises, he mused to himself. Then, he dropped the book entirely.

The forest had suddenly become eerily quiet, the birds having ceased to sing. Even the chirps of insects had become few and far between. This calm interested Kakashi, but was nothing compared to the thundering footsteps he heard moments later.

Orange swarmed into his vision, clouding it with the sheer numbers of his opponent. Something inside him was disappointed when he realized that it was truly just an attack staged by only one of the hopefuls. It was even Naruto, at that. Just as he had begun to think he had misjudged the boy, he had to go and pull something like that.

"So it's true. You really can conjure up solid clones. Not that it matters, though," he felt himself quip.

Kakashi didn't even need any real techniques to bat away the dozens of clones coming at him. They were as unrefined and careless as their original turned out to be. All the same, the jounin couldn't resist the replacement gag.

A clone was soon nabbed to be used as the replacement, but never fulfilled that purpose. Fitted with an explosive tag that went off on contact, Kakashi withdrew his hand. In those few seconds, he felt a different hand clench around one of the bells and yank. The bell in question didn't get a chance to be stolen before the jounin clenched the hand and twisted it around. "Narut-" he prepared to lecture, his eye lazily focusing on the miscreant that touched him.

The hand belonged to Sakura Haruno, stunning him significantly. The next thing he knew, a set of flying weapons flew in from his right. The replacement jutsu worked for him that time around, but Sakura was set free as a result. Sasuke almost smiled to himself at that accomplishment.

Kakashi didn't reappear, and the three teammates(along with a few dozen shadow clones) searched around for him. It would not do to let the enemy get behind them, sensei or no. Sasuke's favored target of an ankle was the first to find Hatake's location. The rest of the Uchiha soon followed as he was pulled into the ground up to his head.

"Earth style: Headhunter jutsu." the gray-haired man stated, appearing behind his victim. He reached for the black hair of the Uchiha boy, only for it to turn yellow. A Naruto clone! Once again, a fast ball had been pulled on him.

"CHANCE!" it yelled, wrenching a hand out of the soil with surprising force and grabbing something that had been next to him on the ground all along. Kakashi's visible eye widened. Another trap!

He got out of the way of the new explosion just in time, but a blade was thrown in his blind spot by the real Sasuke, cutting the cords that attached the bells to his waist by a cross-hair. The accuracy was amazing when the haze from the recent explosion was taken into consideration.

Kakashi sensed the change in weight and reached out to catch the bells, but was tackled by the hyperactive blonde mastermind of the entire operation while Sasuke and Sakura took the damned things. Naruto beamed at them before being thrown off.

Dread caught a hold of Naruto's heart. He was flying with his rear end completely exposed to his infamous teacher. He knew what would happen next, but screamed like a little girl anyway. A thousand years of pain found the way to his ass, followed by an intimate contact with a tree-trunk. The splinters were unimaginable.

Sasuke watched in morbid fascination as their sensei took two fingers to his rival's ass. Sakura honestly thought Naruto was going to die and had screamed accordingly.

Kakashi chuckled after hearing the impact and got to his feet. His back was to the two. They waited for the verdict with bated breath, leaving themselves open for torture at the hands of the sadistic copy-ninja. He brushed the dirt off his clothes just as the alarm bell rang for the end of the exercise.

A smirk played under the jounin's mask. He stalled for a few seconds, leaving his students on pins and needles simply because he could. They had done very well, whether he had gone easy on them or not.

"Well, well. It looks like we have two winners."

Sasuke and Sakura looked at each other and smiled. Sakura closed in for a hug, causing the youngest Uchiha to back away. Before she made contact, however, she felt a pang of hunger. One pang led to another, and she looked at Naruto's twitching form at the tree's base. There were only two bells…

One separate glance told her that Sasuke was thinking the same thing. In a burst of mutual resolve, they set the bells down next to the town's mischief-maker, causing him to smile widely through the scrapes. It also earned them a very disturbing grip on the shoulder from Kakashi. Disturbing in that it was accompanied by one of the most gleeful expressions they had ever seen, anyway.

"Correction. We have three winners who won more than a game. The first to have ever grasped this exercise, I'll add. The three of you acted as one."

Three sets of eyes locked onto the teacher, waiting to burst out into individual happiness.

"You are all worthy to be called Genin. You pass."

Those were beautiful words to Naruto's ears no matter how many times he heard them. Though, as Sakura helped him up, he felt a bit better than he had the first time for two reasons, one being that he wasn't tied up. The other was left to speculation in his brain, as he couldn't quite place it.

As Sakura let go, the Uzumaki boy realized something important. Those injuries given to him by Kakashi had actually HURT. Didn't things in dreams tend to be painless? He pondered this for a minute, but came to the conclusion that he had probably scratched himself while sleeping. That answer satisfied him for the moment, but it failed to explain his literal pain in the ass.