Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. I never have, I never will. I only write these disclaimers so some random lawyer doesn't come along and sue me.

A/N: Wow! I updated pretty quickly for me. I hope that you enjoy this chapter. There aren't any specific warnings for this chapter. Enjoy!

Chapter Three

As an Academy teacher, Iruka had dealt with many troublemakers. So far, he'd label Naruto as the worst of them hands down.

So far the boy had been apprehended for such crimes as Placing a frog in a toilet at the girl's bathroom (he'd been the one forced to retrieve it), posting a picture of Mizuki kissing Iruka on a dare all over the halls of the school (he cursed that annoying perverted jounin for ever suggesting they play Truth, Dare, or Shuriken), and falsifying love notes from the young Uchiha boy, copying them, and sending them to every female in the class (Iruka had been forced to council each and every one of the crying girls).

And those were some of his more docile pranks.

Right now, Iruka was fuming as he made his way through the streets of Konohagakure, looking for said blond troublemaker. "Why me?" he muttered to himself.

Sandaime-sama seemed to have made him Naruto's unofficial caretaker (if that could be considered an accurate description of his grudgingly accepted duties) after he had one time taken pity on the boy and treated him to some ramen. He admitted that he did care for the young boy, and that he saw a bit of himself in him, but that did not mean he wanted to have to search through the whole of the city searching for the brat!

By now, Iruka was thinking of the many ways he could possibly punish Naruto for ditching Kurenai-sensei's class (many of which involved contacting Ichiraku and asking the man to stop supplying the boy with his favorite food for an undesignated amount of time, or forcing him into a study group with Uchiha Sasuke's fan club) as a way to ease his anger. He had already gone through almost the entirety of Konoha's middle-class living area, and was soon going to be forced to wander into one of the more powerful clan's districts.

"I swear, if he wandered onto Hyuuga property, I'm not going to bother trying to save his butt," he said to himself, earning a few odd stares from passer-bys. He smiled sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head in embarrassment while they turned away, pretending to ignore the chuunin.

He sighed again. What messes that boy gets me into- and he doesn't even realize the half of it! I swear, someday soon he's going to drive me mad.

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

By the time it was four o'clock, Naruto found himself miserably lost, hungry, and on-edge from his experience in the Uchiha district. He wasn't sure what he would do when he found Sasuke, but he had a vague idea that it was something along the lines of an interrogation quickly followed by a large dinner at Ichiraku's.

Despite having more immediate issues on his hands (such as once again finding himself at the lake where he'd first encountered Sasuke and his stomach's increasingly large grumblings), Naruto's mind continually wandered from his situation. He couldn't seem to forget the young Uchiha's cries as he had fled his home.

Is that really his home? Naruto wondered to himself. For as long as he could remember, he'd hear people speaking of there own homes- whether it be a conversation he had happened upon, or a discussion at the Academy- and he'd always thought that home was a place where you could go home, and there'd be a family that loved you always waiting there with hugs and kisses.

Talking about it always made him sad, serving as a brutal reminder that his own apartment was not in any way a home.

And what about Sasuke- could a place like that truly be his home? It felt empty. Cold… lifeless. It seemed to Naruto that it, in fact, was- the only person he'd seen was Sasuke, even when he knew for a fact that the Uchiha clan was made up of over a hundred people; it was, after all, the largest and most powerful clan in Konohagakure. Everyone knew that- so where had all the Uchihas gone?

An image of a bloody chalk sketch flashed in his mind, and he paled.

Dead?

Impossible! Part of him shouted. He preferred to agree with that part of himself, and ignore the little whispering voice of doubt. (People die every day. What makes them so special?)

Shaking his head a little, Naruto tried his best to rid himself of that train of thought. Wondering what had happened would get him no where; right now, he needed to either find Sasuke, or find his way back into the main part of Konoha.

"How hard can that be?" Naruto asked himself. "One way leads to Sasuke, the other way leads back to the Academy! Win-win situation, right?"

After wandering around for another half hour, Naruto began to have his doubts. His hunger had increased tenfold and he was still in an area he was unfamiliar with. He wasn't sure how much longer he'd be able to keep walking before he simply gave up, plopped down on the road, and started to eat his own shoe.

He was, luckily, saved from finding out exactly what year-old shinobi-worn sandals taste like when he heard the softly calling voice of a familiar brunet Academy teacher. Naruto's face brightened in a gleeful smile. "Iruka-sensei!" he called out, waving his arms around excitedly.

It was only another few seconds before the kindly chuunin instructor rounded a corner and came upon the young boy. Somewhere between relief and finally finding his quarry and frustration at the boy who had monopolized his day, Iruka settled into TeacherMode. "Where were you today? You completely blew off the second half of the day and nobody had a clue where you were! We were worried, you know!"

Naruto just continued to grin at his sensei, hiding his grimace inwardly as he briefly thought of the day's "excitement." "I just got really bored, y'know! So I decided that I'd just go for a walk, and I ended up getting lost! So, I've been wandering around for more than and hour now! If you hadn't shown up, I don't know what I would've done!"

Iruka blinked at the blond, for a moment unsure what to do, before the fact Naruto had ditched finally registered in his mind. "You skipped school for no reason again! And you were nearly on Hyuuga property, you know- and you don't want to know what they could've done if you wandered onto their land!

"Honestly, Naruto, for all you say you want to be Hokage, you can't even manage to behave for one day in the Academy! Can't you try and get your act together for once?"

Huffing slightly, Iruka folded his arms again, trying to look like an imposing, patronizing adult. It took him a few moments to realize that he'd gone a bit too far, when he heard the small, choked sob from the boy standing in front of him. For a moment, Iruka had forgotten that, for all his bravado, and for all the trouble he'd caused, Naruto was still just a kid- he needed gentle encouragement and support, not just to be scolded and put down.

It was only then that it occurred to Iruka: he was the only one who would give the boy a chance, so that job fell solely to him. Eyes softening, Iruka crouched down and hugged the boy. "I'm sorry, Naruto. That was too harsh… you really are a good student, but you should try and cause a little less trouble. Okay?"

Tears still running from his eyes, Naruto nodded his head a bit. What Iruka said wasn't what had gotten to him really. It was just that when he heard his sensei speaking to him, it was suddenly Sasuke's voice that was whispering in his ear.

"Honestly, Naruto, you're always bragging about being Godaime, but you can't even manage to hit the center of the target, you dobe."

"Stop being such a moron."

"You idiot, leave! Get out or I'll kill you!"

He hadn't really noticed- he'd been too scared to do anything but run, really… but it seemed to him that maybe Sasuke had been a little scared too.

So he cried. For himself (I almost died today, but would anybody really care if I had? Did anyone care about them, those two that I saw?) and for Sasuke (Sasuke cared about them.), cherishing the warmth that his sensei offered him.

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

For two more days, Sasuke avoided going back to the Academy. It had taken the shinobi searching for him nearly a day to actually check the Uchiha complex, and after they forced him back to the hospital for a check-up, he was then taken to the Hokage's office.

"Uchiha-kun, why don't you take a seat?" asked Sandaime, gesturing to a large, cushioned chair that had been shoved in front of his desk only a moment before by disgruntled ANBU, muttering to themselves about having graduated from performing such menial tasks when they hit chuunin.

Nodding, Sasuke settled himself in, trying to ignore how small the large its wooden frame made him feel. He hoped that he would only have to be here for a short time- he knew what Sandaime wanted to know, and he didn't have much to tell the old man.

"I assume you realize why you've been taken here?" the Hokage questioned. Sasuke merely nodded. Sarutobi sighed. "Then I'll get right to the point. There are only a few questions I'd like to ask you, first and foremost being if you know what has happened to your brother; of the entire clan, he is the only one we cannot account for."

Sasuke tensed at the mention of his brother, but forced himself to relax and remain impassive as he explained. "I would assume he has defected from the village, as you most likely wouldn't have taken kindly to his slaughtering Konohagakure no Sato's most powerful clan."

The only sign of Sarutobi's shock was the miniscule widening of his eyes. His voice was steady when he said to Sasuke, "Thank you for coming here, Uchiha-kun. You have answered all my questions.

"I'm sorry for you loss."

Taking this as his dismissal, Sasuke slipped out of the chair and exited the old man's office without a word. He felt no need to reply to false and pitying words.

As he left, he barely heard the Hokage's orders to nearby ANBU. "Don't let this leak out; if someone starts to dig too deep, use a cover-up story."

It had been a day since his encounter with Sandaime, and now Sasuke found himself sitting in class, only half-listening to the teacher's lecture. It was theory, something that normally fascinated the young Uchiha, but he had found himself unable to focus on anything that Kurenai-sensei said.

Just a few seats away was Naruto, and Sasuke could feel the boy's eyes boring holes into his skull as the blond persisted to stare at him. Sasuke did his best to ignore him, but it got a bit harder when the boy started chucking small balls of paper at his head. Luckily, this only went on a few more minutes before Inuzuka Kiba leaned over to whisper something in Naruto's ear. Shooting one last glance at Sasuke, Naruto slipped out of the classroom with the other boy.

For about half an hour, Sasuke found himself blessedly Uzumaki-free, and finally able to pay attention to Kurenai-sensei's lecture. Of course, it was then that Naruto and Kiba took it upon themselves to storm back into the classroom with spray paint and silly string, which effectively halted the class and caused complete chaos within the room. Sasuke felt extremely irritated when he suddenly found his shirt died an obnoxious neon orange color and his hair knotted with silly string.

For a few more minutes, Naruto and Kiba's reign of terror continued, until Kurenai-sensei finally got fed up enough to tie the two together with some chakra-enforced ropes and confiscate their spray cans. By that time, the entire classroom was covered in brightly colored paint doodles and masses of silly string. When Sasuke saw the lazy Nara boy completely submerged in it as well as painted various shades of yellow, pink, and green, he decided that he could've been worse off.

For punishment, the two troublemakers were kept tied up in the front of the classroom wearing large dunce caps for everyone to see, and those who had fallen victim to their prank were given an opportunity for revenge (Sasuke himself was particularly proud of the job he had done covering the dobe's entire shirt in clashing shades of purple and yellow). At the end of the day, Sasuke found himself almost smiling at the event. It had served as a nice distraction, keeping his mind from wandering too far.

By the time he had arrived at his house, Sasuke found that the afterglow of the class had completely worn off, and a small chill went through him as he entered his house. Its white-walled hallways were dark and bare, and the small plants that occasionally decorated the halls were beginning to wilt and die with neglect. And, despite his own indifference to plant life, he felt a twinge of sadness; those plants had been his mother's pride and joy. She would've been sad to see them in such a state.

He still found it strange, thinking of her like that. His mother had always been kind and doting, as if trying to make up for his father's cruel negligence towards him. So he had loved her very much; her death was more painful than any other, and a blow just as harsh as his beloved brother's betrayal.

As he found himself once again within the family room, he felt drawn to the chalk figures on the floor. Soon he stood within the outline, the dried blood cracking a bit beneath his feet. Gently, he laid himself down.

"Okaa-san, I really miss you…" he whispered, before his eyes fluttered shut and he drifted to sleep.

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

A/N: That wasn't the longest chapter I've ever written, but it was still over 2,300 words, so I don't think there's any room to complain. I hope you enjoyed it, despite the lack of Sasuke-Naruto interaction. Don't worry, I'm getting to it. One of these days they may even start to be friends. And then, maybe, they'll get together! (That may take year or more, though, seeing as they're only seven. Don't worry; I doubt I'll write out the entire year.)

I hope you don't mind how I did Sarutobi-sama for this chapter; he's really a lot nicer than Sasuke sees him as, and I might get more into his character later when I'm more focused on Naruto. This is also the first chapter with Iruka as a noticeable character, so I hope you thought I portrayed him well enough.

I realize that my characters go through some quickly shifting moods, and I hope you understand that I do that because that's how real people are. New emotions can be triggered by just about anything, so that's kind of how I'm writing them. Some freakish combination of humor, angst, and drama. I hope you think that I'm doing okay.

Review please! Just click that little button in the corner, and tell me what you thought! It's not all that hard! Please?