A/N: First of all, thanks to everyone who's been reading! Particularly to the sweet soul theconstence who reviewed. /tear. You are awesome. For anyone else out there who wants to throw me a bone, it would be much appreciated! Reviews do help the words come out of my brain sometimes :)
I should probably mention, I've aged the characters a bit to allow for certain events later in the story. They're about fourteen/fifteen at this point. Also, I likely won't be updating everyday, but since the prologue was short, I figured I'd throw this chapter up here too. :)
Lastly, Ino won't be reappearing for a while, but don't worry - she'll be a major player in the story soon.
Chapter 1
"The 'I' in Teamwork"
...
"He's late!" Naruto whines and points out the obvious.
Naruto does that a lot, Sakura finds.
She watches him argue with Sasuke about the probability of their jounin sensei falling for Naruto's simple practical joke and ruefully ponders the wisdom of the powers that be. Who the heck decided to put the three of them on a team? On the one hand, it makes sense. Naruto was the worst student at the academy – how he graduated is a mystery to her – and Sasuke is the best in terms of practical application, and Sakura is the best in terms of theoretical application, according to her exam scores.
(Damn right we are!)
But, that being said, their personalities hardly make for anything cohesive.
Sasuke, for one, is less of a brick wall than a steel door fastened to the steel wall of a steel building. He's impossible to read and completely closed off to everyone around him, a quality that, while mysteriously attractive to every girl in their graduating class (Sakura had been pelted by innumerable spitballs at the announcement of her being on his team), does not bode well for teamwork. At least he would be reliable in battle, though, which is more than could be said for Naruto.
He, for his part, is the complete antithesis. Loud, brash, unthinking and impulsive – Naruto is a bit of an enigma for Sakura, perhaps even more so than Sasuke. At least with Sasuke, he's cold and consistent in that unabashed coldness, but Naruto is at once terribly lonely and painfully outgoing. It's a combination that she doesn't understand and that has coalesced to form a personality that Sakura can only describe as "loud."
(I think you mean "idiotic.")
Then, of course, there's her, who hasn't spoken a word to anyone but her parents and her sensei at the academy, when they deign to call on her for the right answers, since her second year of school. At least it's somehow comforting that her teammates know as little about her as she does about them. But then again, there isn't much to know about her, and she suspects that's not the case the other way around. Sakura would characterize herself more through states of being rather than actual characteristics:
Perpetually anxious, scared, lonely…
(Awesome! Smart! Ambitious!)
…socially crippled, inept, shy…
(Too good for those bitches at school, if you ask me!)
…crazy, maybe.
Sasuke and Naruto, though – they've clearly got more going on in the personality department than she does.
As for their sensei…
Sakura recognizes him vaguely. She's met him before, she recalls, but can't quite place where or when or why, and she chalks it up to having perhaps passed him in town at one point or another. In any case, the chalkboard eraser Naruto rigged to the door lands in his hair with a slight puff of dust, and she can only assume he let it happen. His aloof demeanor likely masks something far more skilled and dangerous than he's letting on – after all, he's a jounin, and jounin must know a lot about a lot of things if they can so easily discern what is something and what is nothing.
The sun shines blindingly bright on the roof as they all take their seats, awkwardly side-by-side and waiting for their sensei's instructions. He leans against the railing in no obvious hurry. His one visible eye droops, his shoulders slumping so dramatically that the posture seems to negate the prestige of his jounin vest. He's clearly bored, Sakura thinks, wondering if perhaps it's her fault – should she have said something already? Were they supposed to have introduced themselves?
As if on cue, he says, "Why don't we start with you introducing yourselves?"
None of them answer. Sakura glances sideways at Sasuke, who is sitting with his fingers laced and his mind clearly somewhere else, and Naruto, who is grinning dumbly at nothing. Should she say something? What is it she's supposed to say?
Naruto looks at her and Sasuke and shrugs. "What do we say?" He asks, and Sakura is glad to have him to break the tense silence that seemed to be closing in around her. She feverishly wishes she could use her genjutsu to dissipate into her surroundings and disappear, but she doesn't because that would be rude.
"How about your likes," he deadpans. "Your dislikes, your future dreams, hobbies. Things like that." He lists them off as if he's not even remotely interested in hearing the answers, let alone giving his own, but at Naruto's urging, he concedes at least this much, "My name is Hatake Kakashi."
Every other answer he gives is ambiguous and vague enough to mean absolutely nothing, and just as an awkward silence once again threatens to settle between them, Naruto volunteers himself, thankfully. Sakura is beginning to appreciate the same qualities in him she'd been criticizing only ten minutes earlier. At least with him around, she won't have to speak as often.
"My name's Uzumaki Naruto!" He announces brightly, as if he's about tell them all they'd just won the lottery. "I like cup ramen, but what I like even more is the ramen from Ichiraku that Iruka-sensei treats me to! What I dislike is the three minutes you have to wait after pouring hot water into instant ramen, and my hobby is eating and comparing different kinds of ramen! Oh, and my future dream is to surpass the hokage so I can get the entire village to acknowledge my existence!"
Sakura does not react to this bafflingly simple-minded rambling, but only because reacting will draw attention to her, and she'd rather go last rather than next.
But really. What?
(Did I say idiot already? I did? Let me say it again: idiot.)
Sakura carefully schools her face into its typical expression, somewhere between apprehensive and shy, to squash the amused smile threatening to emerge. It's true, though – Naruto, while thankfully talkative in lieu of either her or Sasuke wanting to speak, clearly uses words with a quantity over quality type of logic. If logic applies at all.
Kakashi, however, seems to have found something interesting in his speech judging from the nearly imperceptible widening of his eye. If she hadn't spent so long observing people from her position placed invisibly amongst them, and because there isn't much to do but watch people when you're incapable of interacting with them for fear of being reprimanded, she might not have noticed. But it was certainly there.
"Alright then," Kakashi smooths over Naruto's enthusiastic declarations. The boy deflates marginally at his sensei's lack of approval, but not enough to diminish that dopey grin on his face. "Next?"
He looks at her. Sakura freezes at the scrutiny. She shakes her head, her short hair whipping around her face, and Kakashi sighs.
"Alright then. How about you?"
She breathes a sigh of relief as Kakashi and Naruto both turn to Sasuke expectantly. He responds without the slightest movement or hint of interest, staying motionless in his pensive posture. "My name is Uchiha Sasuke. I have lots of dislikes, but no likes in particular." With his phantasmal complexion and his hands over his mouth like that, if he hadn't been blinking, Sakura could have mistaken him for a corpse. She finds him unsettling and wonders again why the girls in her class all harbor such affection for him. "…Oh, and, I don't like summing up my ambition as just a dream, but I do have an ambition. The ambition to restore my clan, and without fail…"
Here he pauses dramatically – does he know that pauses in the middle of a sentence are dramatic? Sakura has to wonder. It seems at odds with his stoic personality that he would intentionally create an aura of suspense for an audience, but here he is, just trailing off at random intervals, letting the wind whip through his hair ominously…
"…to kill a certain man!"
Ah, well. Sakura supposes if there ever was a declaration that deserved a dramatic pause, that would be it.
(…This guy's bonkers.)
Whatever damage control Naruto's boisterous personality had done for their clearly unbalanced team dynamic promptly disintegrates with Sasuke's statement. A long, strained silence passes. Kakashi looks unimpressed. Naruto shuffles nervously.
"…Okay," Kakashi shrugs. "Next?"
Sasuke "hmphs" quietly, and amidst her surge of panic at suddenly having their undivided attention, Sakura realizes that he really must have some sort of ego complex to be so annoyed at their lack of response. Maybe she'd jumped the gun earlier when she'd decided Naruto and Sasuke were opposites. More like two peas on the opposite side of the same pod.
"Um… I'm… Haruno Sakura… I…" Her words trail off, disappearing into the breeze.
Kakashi eyes her and inwardly questions this team's assignment just as Sakura had done not long beforehand. Putting Naruto and Sasuke on the same team made sense in many respects – the two are clearly alike and different in poignant ways that might make their teamwork align, if he can manipulate it just so – but this one… He remembers her at the park, years ago, and wonders how she got this far. As if she hadn't endured enough of a hard time already, placing her on a team with a boy who contains a demon fox and the surviving prodigy of an extinct clan is downright cruel, he thinks. She's already not a noteworthy person, and between these two, she'll undoubtedly become even more invisible.
"Speak up, Sakura."
She startles, jolting into a rigid, upright posture, her teeth grit firmly together and obviously unable to speak. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Naruto lean close to her – way too close, really, so that his nose is only two inches from her cheek.
(This guy's seriously pushing it! You should give him a good punch to teach him to respect personal space –)
"Hey," Naruto says suspiciously. He's so close she can smell the ramen on his breath. "I don't remember seeing you around before. Were you really in our class?"
(Only for the past nine years, you idiot!)
Sakura nods.
"Really?! Huh," he scratches his chin. "That's weird. Why don't I remember you then?"
(Because you're an unobservant – )
"Because she's not worth remembering, idiot," Sasuke sneers, which is a feat, really, that someone can sneer without using their mouth. His lips remain hidden behind his hands. But he does it.
(What?! This arrogant bastard has no idea who he's messing with! We could kick his ass!)
To her horror, Sakura's fingers twitch against the rough concrete, loosening her grip on the edge of the stair and curling her hand into a fist. No one else seems to notice, but Kakashi glances briefly at the motion, cataloguing it along with whatever other information he'd gleaned from his team's unapologetically strange responses.
Naruto slaps his forehead. "Oh! Wait a second, I do remember you! Cuz you have pink hair," he laughs, unperturbed by Sasuke's insult.
Kakashi looks at her as if expecting her to speak again, but she stares back helplessly, and at last, he mercifully moves the conversation forwards. "Well, the three of you certainly are… distinctive."
(He thinks we're an idiot), the voice sighs drearily, and Sakura bites her tongue in shame.
"We have a mission tomorrow," Kakashi continues on through Naruto's frequent interruptions. "A survival exercise."
He explains the details of the mission, that only nine graduates will truly attain the rank of genin while the rest are sent back to the academy, but Sakura's attention is focused on his wording.
Survival exercise.
He couldn't really mean life-or-death, could he? No – that wouldn't make any sense. No jounin in his right mind would cart off newly graduated academy students into a real battle. What he's talking about must be figurative, a "survival" to genin rank as opposed to failure and being sent back to the academy, and if that's the case…
(We got this in the bag!)
If that's the case, maybe Sakura will be fine. She's survived thus far without any help at all, and even if she doesn't like her teammates, surely whatever exercise their sensei has planned will be made easier with their help, although…
Sakura does not miss Naruto's grimace and Sasuke's trembling hands.
Some part of her, a large part, is sadistically delighted by that.
They're scared of nothing and they don't even know it.
#
At her sensei's recommendation, Sakura skips breakfast and arrives at the training ground at 4:58 in the morning. In her efforts to avoid other people, she often wakes at this time to train, so the pre-dawn hour affects her very little. After half-an-hour she wishes she could wander away to complete her usual morning routine. She doesn't for fear of being caught in the middle of it – she can already imagine what Sasuke would say, how inefficient her taijutsu is, how little ninjutsu she knows. And he'd be right. Sakura's proficiency in taijutsu relates almost entirely to dodging. Her ninjutsu extends only to the basics in the academy and what she'd managed to teach herself – nothing special at all except the fundamentals of chakra control.
(That's more than he can do!)
Wouldn't that be nice, Sakura laughs inwardly, but to admit as much would be fooling herself. She's seen Sasuke in action and is well aware that his skill far surpasses hers in offensive techniques, even if he hasn't mastered the subtleties of control yet.
No, Sakura is good for nothing at all, except not getting hit and not being seen, which comprise only half of the available, useful skills for a ninja on a mission. She also knows very well that missing that vital other half is enough to get her killed.
(I could do it!) The voice insists.
Two hours later, Kakashi finally arrives.
Naruto is livid and Sasuke's anger rises like a cloud of poorly repressed miasma around him.
"You're late!" Naruto loudly points out the obvious, as usual.
"Well, a black cat crossed my path, you see…" Kakashi offers the excuse in a placating tone that does not mollify Naruto or Sasuke in the slightest. Sakura is still too unsure of the situation to be angered by it. Is this part of the test too? "…Anyway, I'm setting an alarm for noon. You have until then complete your mission – which will be," he continues, cutting off Naruto before he can ask, "to take these from me."
Kakashi holds up two small silver bells for their examination before tying them to the belt loop of his pants. "Those that can't do it will be strapped to that wooden post over there and will go without lunch."
Ah, that explains his order to skip breakfast.
(That lying bastard!)
Sakura put her foot down at that, the corner of her mouth dipping in disapproval.
That's my sensei. Lying to me was part of the challenge, and I failed it.
(But how the hell could we have predicted this?)
It's a good point that Sakura does not acknowledge.
"Wait a minute," Naruto squints at the bells as if they might multiply under the intensity of his stare. "There are only two! Does that mean one of us has to skip lunch?"
Kakashi's eye narrows in a facsimile of a friendly smile. "Correct. That same person will also fail the mission and be disqualified."
"Disqualified?" Sasuke repeats suspiciously.
"Yes. That person will be sent back to the academy."
The three of them look at each other wearily.
Camaraderie?
What camaraderie?
Although Naruto looks more confused than determined, but perhaps that's just his resting face.
Kakashi snaps them out of the tense pseudo-standoff, oblivious or uncaring about the effects of his potentially life-altering words. "You can use your shurikan and all your jutsu – you'll have to," he glides over the apprehension on his students' faces. "You won't be able to take the bells unless you come at me with the intent to kill."
Sakura chews her tongue nervously. Intent to kill is one of the many, many things that she's not yet developed –
(Says you!)
- and she internally quails at the impending failure of this task. There's no way she'll be able to take a bell from their jounin sensei, not without any true offensive skills. The best she can do is hit a target with a kunai, and although Kakashi had been struck in the head earlier with a chalkboard eraser as a result of Naruto's simplistic stunt, there's no way he would've survived and become a jounin if he were truly so unobservant.
This is going to be impossible.
Sakura will almost certainly be sent back to the academy with Naruto, and perhaps Sasuke, and she'll be forced to endure that torment again until next year because she can't quit, not when nothing is standing her way, just like she can't not try even though she knows she's going to fail, and even though she really, really wants to give up right now.
This is going to suck.
(Maybe for him!)
"Are we ready –"
Kakashi does not get to finish the question before Naruto charges at him, kunai in hand. Apparently the guy had been working himself into an emotional frenzy at the thought of failing, and the pressure warped into a sense of potent urgency. Sakura watches Kakashi move, or rather, disappear, and reappear behind Naruto. He'd crossed the distance in less time than it took to blink, his movements completely obscured by his speed, and now he's somehow pushing Naruto's own kunai into the back of his neck.
This is hopeless, Sakura decides right there and then. She should give up and go home and try again next year, if only she didn't hear the voices of all the adults and the bullies and the students reminding her, "You're quitting from fear? That's nothing!"
It's easy to say, she thinks disdainfully, but there is no glory for her in failing with supposed dignity. Whether she gives up or gets disqualified of her own accord, reprimands and torment are sure to follow, and all she can do is prepare herself for the inevitable results of this test.
"I didn't even say start yet," Kakashi chides amicably, releasing Naruto from the hold. The three of them back away from their clearly dangerous sensei. "I think I'm going to like you guys," he says cheerily, and then, "Begin!"
Kakashi watches his three students jump into cover, relieved by their quick action. Of the three of them, Sasuke will likely give him the greatest challenge, though not anything truly formidable. Naruto will probably charge him outright in a moment or two, judging by his unruly behavior and lack of ability to be anything but outrageously conspicuous, and Sakura… He frowns. She's the curve ball. He really has no idea what she's capable of, but if her demeanor is anything of a hint – and as it's all he has to go by, he has to believe that it is – then he can count her out already. It's incredibly unlikely that she'll even have the guts to approach him, let alone to exert enough effort and skill to actually steal a bell.
Taking a quick survey of the area, he senses Sasuke in a nearby tree, mostly obscured by the cover of thick green foliage. On the other side of him, he catches a flash of pink in the bushes. Sakura is hidden there, then, and retreating further into the forest. He sighs at that confirmation of his previous suspicions. She's not even going to try. Hell, he chuckles, she's not even going to stay and watch Naruto make an ass of himself – which he's already in the process of doing.
"Alright!" Naruto announces from four feet in front of him, a distance Kakashi could cross in an instant and kill him just as fast, if he so chose. "Let's face off, fair and square!"
From his cover in the tree, Sasuke is surely face palming.
"Are you sure this is the best way to go about this?" Kakashi asks disinterestedly, hoping that Naruto will be able to see through his aloofness and find the warning hidden in his words.
He doesn't, of course. "Of course I'm sure! It's my way!"
Naruto then proceeds to rush him, not even drawing a weapon beforehand, and Kakashi reaches for the book in his side pouch.
"Alright then, Naruto. I'll teach you the first shinobi technique, taijutsu…"
#
Fifty yards into the forest, Sakura stops walking. She can hear the sounds of a skirmish from where she'd come and figures now is as good a time as any to cast her genjutsu. Hopefully she's far enough away, and Kakashi is distracted enough, that he won't sense the subtle fluctuation of chakra from this distance.
She weaves the genjutsu around herself with her body as the point of perceptual interference.
Normally, a genjutsu is cast on a target through intent and the particular formulation of the jutsu. According to the texts she'd researched, the caster's chakra controls the victim's chakra in the central nervous system, manipulating his or her mind into configuring both images and sensations – and that, Sakura found, had been overly complicated for her purposes. She wanted a generalized illusion, not one that relies on specific images or which can only be used to target one person at a time.
The other style of genjutsu, the one that she learned, uses a physical object as a point of sensory interference. Like a trigger. When viewed, it subtly manipulates the viewer's chakra in much the same way certain ocular jutsus work, like meeting the eyes of a sharingan user. Or so she's read.
In particular, she designed her genjutsu to distort the victim's visual perception upon looking at the point of disruption – namely, her body – and erase her from their field of vision. In much the same way the human brain will filter out unnecessary information, like background conversations at a party, or the trees surrounding a target in favor of the target, Sakura's body simply becomes an unnoticeable piece of the background to the point of being imperceptible.
It suits her.
Invisible to any onlookers now – or so she hopes, since Kakashi's skill level might exceed the quality of her jutsu – she's instantly more relieved, although not completely relaxed. She's practiced this technique for nearly six years, using it for at first an hour, then several hours a day as she worked up to it by building her chakra reserves. Thus far, no one has seen through the illusion. Not even the chunin teachers passing by less than a foot away. Admittedly, that may in large part be due to the fact that no one ever looks for her, but she has no reason to think that advantage won't be the same here. Kakashi has probably written her off already, understandably so, and perhaps it'll work in her favor. If she decides to try and take the bells at all, that is.
(Of course we should try! You don't want to go back to the academy, do you?!)
No, of course not…
But there isn't much she can do about it. Sakura has no skills that might allow her to subdue Kakashi and take one of the bells, and she doubts he has any weaknesses obvious enough for her to exploit.
Sakura circles around the edges of the forest, lightening her footsteps to the point of silence and sidestepping twigs and dead leaves. She's spent so much time in the thick coverage of trees that make Konoha distinct from other lands that avoiding the natural traps of the forest are second nature to her. It's an easy task to stay within range of the ensuing battle and keep hidden, and she watches in utter bewilderment as Kakashi shoves his fingers into Naruto's butt, sending him sprawling into the gentle current of the river a few yards away.
(What. The hell.)
Considering what she's just seen, when she squints at the book in her sensei's hand, she's unsurprised to find the title as inappropriate as his actions.
The skirmish is fast-paced and one-sided and frequently interrupted by Naruto's obnoxious declarations. Surprisingly, however, he does manage to pull off a Shadow Clone Jutsu that Sakura has never seen in action before, only to get fooled by a substitution jutsu that Kakashi performs with such dexterity and speed that it makes her head spin. When Naruto gets caught in an obvious trap, Sasuke darts further into the forest to avoid being the next victim.
Sakura watches him whizz right by her without so much as a glance in her direction.
(Told you! He's all bark and no bite!)
They didn't teach us how to dispel genjutsu in the academy, so it makes sense…
(So? Even if he knew how to dispel it, he would have to notice it first!)
Another good point, Sakura admits, but she'll hardly give herself the credit for it. Genjutsu is about the only thing she can do, and just because she can do it well doesn't make up for her lack of skills in all other areas.
Hopeless, Sakura thinks again, perching herself upside down on a tree branch.
The wood quivers at a sudden weight atop it. She covers her mouth to keep from gasping in surprise. Sasuke had doubled back a bit, probably to keep an eye on Kakashi, and wound up coming to rest exactly atop the branch she's crouching upside down on.
Should I say something?
(Why? So he can criticize you some more? Psh.)
Fair enough. She peeks over the edge of the branch, catching sight of Sasuke's pensive face as he considers his options. She notices that his nails are bitten short and that his lips are chapped and singed, oddly enough, but that is all she has time to notice before his eyes widen in surprise and she turns her head to find Kakashi standing a mere ten yards from her, his eye cast apathetically at Sasuke's hiding place. Again, Sakura stifles her gasp.
"Trees only make good cover if you can learn to suppress your chakra signature," Kakashi says blandly.
Sasuke jumps from the tree and lands directly below her. If she stood from her upside down position, the tops of their heads would touch. Sasuke shoves his hands in his pockets nonchalantly, but his shoulders are too tense to hide his frustration. "This challenge is a joke," he scoffs. "How are genin expected to compete with someone like you?"
Kakashi's eye narrows. "In this world, those that aren't skilled enough tend to complain more."
Understandably, Sasuke takes offense to this.
He launches himself forward with noteworthy speed, sending a kick at Kakashi's face fast enough that he has to put aside his novel. Their taijutsu is clearly unbalanced in skill, however, and Sasuke steps back, forming well-practiced seals.
Sakura blinks in surprise at the rush of flame from his lips, her mouth slightly agape. Fire jutsu? She vaguely remembers that the Uchiha clan had specialized in it, along with the vast powers of the sharingan that she couldn't completely wrap her head around, but the fact that Sasuke can perform elemental techniques as a recently graduated academy student is impressive. Most of her classmates hadn't even bothered discovering their elemental affinity yet, let alone learned to use it.
Kakashi disappears from the blast radius, reappearing behind Sasuke to reverse their positions – and, more pressingly, put himself directly under Sakura's hiding spot.
The bells are in reach.
The air around her suddenly seems thick as mud. Her throat closes in the force of her anxiety. This couldn't be real, could it? She'd just watched Kakashi fool Naruto at least three times and move so quickly her eyes couldn't follow – there's no way he would just be standing below her, oblivious to her presence, right?
(Who cares? Take the bell!)
Sakura grits her teeth, squeezes her eyes shut. The thought of taking that risk, of exposing her presence and making herself vulnerable to the backlash of her teacher, is overwhelmingly terrifying. If she messes up in the minutest of ways, or accidentally flares her chakra even fractionally, Kakashi will come for her – and she'll be powerless to fight him. He'd crush her in an instant.
"That's an impressive technique, Sasuke," Kakashi drawls.
Could he really not sense her? Sakura's heart constricts in her chest.
(Sakura! Take the damn bell!)
There's no way, right?
(Do it now!)
Slowly, through the course of her sensei and Sasuke's witty banter, Sakura stands, pushing her body at an angle to avoid bumping her head against Kakashi's. At her full height, she's less than an arm's length from the bell tied to his waist. Her hand hovers uncertainly before it, her heart thrumming a rhythmic terror, her blood frigid in her veins at the thought of what might happen – what if he notices? What if she's not fast enough? What if this is a trap?
(Sakura! Now!)
I can't!
Her fingers are an inch from the bells. It's only through her familiarity with fear and her practice at having to hide from predatory pursuers that she's able to stifle her breathing through the sheer, near hysterical trepidation paralyzing her in place.
(You have to do it now!)
I can't! Sakura repeats, and the voice screams at her, (Now! Before it's too late!)
Glancing up briefly, she sees Sasuke's muscles tense. If he moves, Kakashi moves, and her opportunity will be lost.
(Sakura!)
Sakura shakes her head minutely, crying out in equal desperation, I can't!
(Fine!) The voice snaps. (Then I will!)
What?
What does that mean? Her eyes widen as her hand moves of its own accord, wrapping around the nearest ball and yanking, and then the world is spinning, spinning, falling, full of pain as she's yanked from the branch and pressed between a hard body and the harder, rougher bark of the tree.
This time she cannot stifle the gasp of surprise or the whimper of pain. She opens her eyes – when had she shut them? – to see Sasuke's stunned face, his mouth agape and his eyes wide, a face so full of emotion that it feels disturbingly out of character for someone so determined to be unimpressed by the world, and then she sees Kakashi's eye equally as wide in astonishment and a mere inch from her own. Their noses are practically touching.
Then her heart sinks. His eye – there is no other way to gauge his expression – narrows hostilely, and the hold against her collarbone increases.
It was a mistake! I told you! I told you!
(We got the bell, didn't we?!)
He's going to kill me!
Sakura cannot repress the terrified whine, as embarrassing as it is, clawing its way out of her mouth.
"Where did you learn to do that?" Kakashi asks flatly, his voice hard and serious.
She tries to reply, but the words get caught and shredded in the whirlwind of fear whipping the air in her mind like a furious maelstrom.
"Sakura."
"I – I – I taught myself – a book – learned it and I – I wanted to hide – people being mean so I – I'm sorry," she finishes lamely, her voice pitching upwards as if it's a question.
Wordlessly, Kakashi lifts a closed fist up like the joint of his elbow is spring-loaded, knocking back Sasuke in his attempt to get the remaining bell while he was distracted. Kakashi loosens his grip and backs off of Sakura, his expression slowly changing into something less aggressive. He stares her down for a moment longer, considering something, and then smiles.
"Genjutsu natured – it's rare, you know. You did well."
(Ha! Told you! We. Are. AWESOME!)
"I – I'm – thank you, sensei," she whispers numbly, still frozen in place. Kakashi nods and turns around to face Sasuke and Naruto, who has apparently managed to cut himself down from where he'd been dangling in a tree, and in the brief moment before Kakashi speaks, she stares down at her hand still fisted tightly around the bell.
How did I – we – you do that?
(Well, you obviously weren't going to do it), the voice replies in a way that makes Sakura think it must be rolling its eyes. If it has eyes. Could it have eyes? Something like nervousness begins to build in Sakura's gut. (So I did it myself.)
…I see. Thank you.
(You're welcome! I told you we kick ass!)
For the first time, Sakura questions the "we."
#
For all of her internal gloating, Sakura is vastly displeased to be the one that gets to eat lunch. She's starving, sure enough, but Sasuke's venomous glares and Naruto's whining don't exactly create a comfortable environment in which to have a meal. She can tell that Sasuke is particularly displeased. He clearly wants to ask her how she did what she did, much to the satisfaction of the voice in her head, but his pride keeps him from actually voicing the thought aloud. Naruto has no such inhibitions.
"Ne, ne, Sakura-chan! That was super cool!"
"You weren't even there to see it, idiot," Sasuke responds coolly.
"I saw the last part!" Naruto corrects him. "And it was awesome! Maybe you can teach me to do that too, huh, Sakura-chan?"
Sakura blushes warmly at both his praise and the nickname. He might be the first person in her life, barring her parents, to ever speak to her with such overt affection or regard.
Maybe he's not so bad.
(At least he can appreciate a good thing when he sees one. Unlike Sasuke.)
Sakura chances another look at Sasuke's now carefully neutral expression, but for all his self-control, his hands are fisted tightly against the ropes tying him to the log.
"I – I could try, Naruto… If you want," she adds hastily. "But, um, I learned through reading, so I'm not sure –"
"You must read a lot, Sakura-chan! You're like a super nerd! In a good way, I mean!"
Sakura blushes again. It intensifies at the growling of his stomach.
"So hungry," he groans, and although Sasuke does not verbally agree, his gut is a voice of its own. "Hey, you wouldn't want to share some of your lunch, would you?" Naruto asks quietly – for Naruto, anyway – his eyes wide and pleading.
Sakura clears her throat. It feels strange to say so many words at a single time. "Kakashi-sensei said…" she trails off, hoping she won't have to finish, but Naruto quite noticeably can't piece the rest of her statement together. "He said that only one of us got to eat lunch, so…"
But as soon as the words are out of her mouth, a thought follows unbidden, he said that only one of us got to eat lunch. He didn't say which one…
(Because the rules are implicit! Only we get to eat lunch because only we got the bell.)
Yeah, but… Sakura looks between Naruto's pleading face and her partially eaten bento.
(Ah, hell with it. Just give him a bite or two.)
But we already ate part of lunch, so one of us has already eaten. If we give Naruto a bite, then we're breaking the rules –
(We only ate part of it! Surely that doesn't count.)
But…
How can a boy look so much like a puppy? Nervously, Sakura glances around at the empty field. Their sensei had gone off to go get his own lunch, or so he'd said, but he could easily be masking his presence, hiding somewhere close by, and…
…And Naruto looks so damn pitiful there.
(It'll be fine! Just a bite or two.)
Ah… Just a bite…
Anxiously, Sakura looks around again. Kakashi is no where to be seen, and as discreetly as possible, she picks up a small piece of onigiri and plunges it into Naruto's eager mouth.
"So good," he sighs around the bite, his subsequent grin asking for another, which she obliges, since there doesn't seem to be any present danger in doing so.
I guess he really did go get lunch.
(I told you it'd be fine! You really should listen to me more, you know.)
Maybe you're right.
"Ne, Sakura-chan," Naruto half-whispers again. "I know Sasuke is too much of a stubborn bastard to ask, but I can hear his stomach from a mile away. Maybe you could give him a bite, too?"
"I don't need your charity," Sasuke growls, and then so does his stomach, and Sakura blushes more at the hostile words of her inner voice than at the noise. But, really, despite the complaints of the voice in her head, Sasuke is her teammate too, and she's already breaking the rules anyway…
Shyly, she lifts her chopsticks to his lips.
"I told you," he snaps. "I don't need your charity."
She flinches at the tone of his voice but doesn't withdraw her hand, mostly because his fierce anger stills her into immobility. His eyes are cold and his gaze harsh, and really, he scares Sakura as much as he infuriates her inner personality, but after a prolonged silence and some verbal berating from Naruto, at last, Sasuke leans forward and accepts the food. It's so unlike him that the sky seems to crack open in response.
…No, wait, the sky did crack open.
Sakura barely manages not to scream. She drops the chopsticks and instinctively activates her genjutsu to disappear from sight. Launching herself out of harm's way, she looks back only to come face to face with Kakashi. His fingers are pushed together in the tiger seal and pressed against her shoulder, throwing her chakra for a loop and dispelling the genjutsu.
"You broke the rules," he says gently, whatever theatrical display he'd been crafting mercifully vanished at her obvious horror. He'd been planning on making a show of it, just for his own amusement, but it's apparent that she has no constitution for such things.
"I'm sorry," Sakura whispers, tears gathering in her eyes, but he merely places a hand on her shoulder.
"It's alright, Sakura. Those that break the rules may be considered scum in the shinobi world, but those that abandon their comrades are worse than scum. You did the right thing."
Eyes damp with unshed tears, Sakura meets his one eye and finds it, surprisingly, full of approval. "I did?" She can't help but ask, still in disbelief.
"Yes, you did," he affirms, and then turning to Naruto and Sasuke, his voice picks up a jovial quality. "Congratulations, you three. You pass."
#
Feedback? Reviews make my day!
