Team Ten

Sasuke touched her brand new hitai-ate with a satisfied smile. She'd decided to wear it over her eyes instead of bandages, which left her eyes much more accessible in case of an emergency.

Sensei tried to fail her after her inability to produce a satisfactory Henge or Bunshin—her nii-san's last gift to her wasn't any of his business—but she kicked up a fuss until they let her pass. After all, Rock Lee passed and he couldn't do any of the three jutsu they were supposed to learn! She could produce an accurate Henge of anyone she knew well before losing her sight (so basically, her family or the Hokage) and she had made two Bunshin, sort of (Neji said they didn't have faces and it was a little creepy. She retorted that she hadn't known he could even do jutsu like regular people).

So now here she was, securely in the bottom half of the class, waiting to hear her genin team assignment. Neji had lost his number one rookie position to some idiot named Akio, but the only person who didn't know that was solely due to sensei's prejudice was Akio. Fortunately, after today she'd never have to put up with that useless jerk ever again.

"Team Nine will be Tenten, Rock Lee and Ito Toshi."

Sasuke smiled and waved in the direction of Lee's exuberant celebration. She liked Rock Lee, who was a little crazy but determined to overcome his "disadvantages" in a way she could definitely empathize with, and Tenten was all right for a girl. She didn't know Toshi very well, but he seemed like a nice guy. She wished them the best.

She wasn't too worried for herself. Kakashi had dropped by her apartment unsolicited for the first time since he came to introduce himself to congratulate them on passing and remind them that if anyone found out Sasuke knew ninjutsu, she didn't learn it from him. He also assured them that the Hokage had insisted they be put on the same team.

"And Team Ten is Hyuuga Neji, Uchiha Sasuke, and Saito Akio."

Dammit.

Their jounin-sensei was an older man with, Neji later confided, a proliferation of unfortunately-styled facial hair. His name was Kobayashi Yoshinori, and he didn't like girls, weaklings, or ninja who couldn't get their priorities in order.

This obviously included Sasuke, but for some reason he thought Neji was weak and misguided as well, which was just stupid. Akio, the suck-up, quoted the ninja rules verbatim and was immediately his bestest student ever.

Oh, and Yoshinori-sensei hated Kakashi.

As a sensei, he was very strict. They met each morning at one of the training fields at dawn—always a different one, which made it very difficult for Sasuke—and ran through a "warm-up" of push-ups, sit-ups, running and basic kicking and punching drills.

Sasuke confounded him from the beginning by managing the runs with only a dozen or so stumbles, no matter how convoluted a route he took. She just followed the bright shine of Neji's chakra and trusted him to avoid major obstacles like rocks and tree roots wherever possible. If she expended a bit of her chakra it helped her maintain her balance with the smaller obstacles. Her chakra sense was fairly reliable now when it came to people, but with trees it helped to be familiar with the area.

Then Yoshinori-sensei switched to randomly mixing up their morning routine, demonstrating the next activity instead of calling it out. This confounded her for a time until Neji came up with a system of pulsing his chakra in a particular way to indicate different actions. This was such a useful idea that she tried to do the same, but either his chakra pulses were somehow related to his Gentle Fist style or her ability to detect them was related to her abnormal sensitivity because they couldn't make it work the other way.

They still snuck off to the ANBU barracks to tell Kakashi (he'd failed his team again) about their cool new technique and he was appropriately impressed. The uses of a private, inaudible, undetectable language on missions were innumerable.

Sasuke hated Yoshinori-sensei right from the start for deliberately excluding her for no good reason, but Neji was the type to let someone fight their own battles and wouldn't have hated him just for that. However, Yoshinori-sensei was convinced that Neji had somehow faked his earlier success at the Academy, and was now "settling in" to a "more appropriate place" as a mere branch member.

So there was no love lost there either.

They ate breakfast as a team, completed two or three D-rank missions, depending on the difficulty, then split up for individual training, which was code for Yoshinori-sensei taking Akio somewhere for private tutoring and leaving the other two to fend for themselves.

That suited them just fine. They retreated to 'their' forest training area and divided their time between sparring in the Gentle Fist style and Sasuke throwing kunai, shuriken and the occasional ninjutsu at Neji to dodge or block. Neji could maintain his Heavenly Spin long enough to actually deflect projectiles, and Sasuke was familiar enough with the chakra pattern it produced to know when to stop throwing things. Then they settled in for an hour of 'chakra awareness' training, followed by one of Kakashi's chakra strengthening exercises.

Overall, they were pleased with their progress, and if no one else recognized it, they weren't too concerned about other people's opinions, anyway. They'd made genin, and Yoshinori-sensei wasn't the one who decided if they deserved promotion to chuunin.

D-rank missions sucked. Sasuke wasn't sure how it was even possible for Yoshinori-sensei to find so many things to criticize about these simple tasks. He had an idea of exactly how these missions should be accomplished, and any variation was the same as failure.

Weeding:

"The good plants have a thin, straight leaf, like this, and the weeds have a sort of feathery cluster, like this."

"Right, thanks, Neji."

"Stop petting the plants and get moving, Uchiha."

"Yes, sensei."

Dog-walking:

"I ask you one time not to walk around in each other's back pockets, and what do I get? Tardiness!"

"I was lost, sensei…"

"You can apologize to the client tomorrow, Uchiha."

Trash pick-up:

"What is this, Uchiha? Your bag is completely empty!"

…and so on.

When they did succeed, he treated it as a given that any competent human could have done something so basic. Or that they should have done better.

Finding Tora:

"I picked up a foreign chakra signature pretty quickly and Neji was able to spot her in a nearby tree. Akio set a trap and after that it was easy."

"With the Byakugan I expected it would take much less time. But I suppose one can only expect so much."

Babysitting:

"Well, I suppose they're alive."

Painting:

"Don't get excited, it's just a fence. Next time we'll try something with wainscoting."

Even Akio started to get a little discouraged. But at least he got some kind of praise during all those private lessons.

"I'm not convinced you're ready, but it's getting a little embarrassing how far behind you lot are."

Neji grit his teeth.

"Today we're going to start learning the most basic chakra control technique: tree-climbing. The key to mastering any new jutsu is to discover it for yourself, not depend on the experience of others. I'll show you once, but I expect you to master it on your own."

Sasuke growled low in her throat. She could feel the smug satisfaction radiating off the man. No matter, she and Neji had developed several strategies for dealing with him. "Is this a jutsu?" she asked.

"No," he said, sounding annoyed. He always got annoyed when they asked questions. He launched into an explanation about how this was a 'technique' not a 'jutsu' that she quickly tuned out. All she cared about was that it wouldn't do any good to try and copy it with her Sharingan.

Neji let his hair fall into his face and surreptitiously activated his Byakugan. He watched as Yoshinori-sensei gathered chakra in his feet, maintaining it at a consistent level as he walked calmly up the tree trunk. There was some kind of…interaction between his chakra and the tree. It didn't look that complicated.

"Well, I'll come and get you for a mission this afternoon. We'll halve our number of missions until every one of you masters this technique."

It was Neji's turn to growl. Once he'd started earning money from missions, he'd insisted on paying his share of the food and rent for their apartment instead of just living off Sasuke's inheritance. One mission a day wouldn't cover it.

Sasuke touched his arm. "We'll figure it out."

"As if," Akio said snidely, shamelessly eavesdropping. "You two weirdos can't do anything right."

That banished any lingering feelings of guilt over not sharing their insights into this new technique with their teammate. Fortunately, Yoshinori-sensei wasn't nearly as concerned about teamwork as, say, Kakashi.

"Well, we can just watch you," Sasuke said, smirking.

"Like you could watch anything. And I'm going way over there where this Hyuuga can't see me either." Akio marched off noisily.

After a minute, Neji laughed quietly.

"What?"

"I can still see him."

"Whatever, like he'd have any good ideas, anyway. What do we need to do?"

"The trick is to channel chakra into your feet. There was something significant about the point of contact with the tree that I couldn't quite make out…why don't you channel as much chakra in your feet as you can and I'll see what happens."

"Okay."

Seconds later, she was rubbing her backside and cursing Neji's stupid ideas.

"If it's any consolation, I think I've got it now," Neji said, not sounding at all apologetic. "You have to match your chakra output to the tree's, then maintain it. His chakra output never varied the entire time he was climbing, so that part must be very important."

"And finding the right level in the first place," Sasuke complained, gingerly feeling the cracked bark around where she'd planted her foot. "Is the tree even still standing?"

"Stop whining. This should be easy for you with your sensitive chakra-sense," Neji pointed out.

"Well, yes, but…is it the same level for each tree? I mean, does the species matter?"

"How should I know?"

"Well, let's try it and see."

They spent the rest of the morning running up and down different types of trees while Neji tried to compare the extremely subtle differences in chakra output. Sasuke helped him determine how much chakra to use and he alerted her when her chakra started to get out of balance until they got the hang of it. The most difficult part was that it drained a lot of chakra; without Kakashi's strengthening exercises they could never have kept it up for so long.

It took Akio another three days to master the technique, much to his fury.

Yoshinori-sensei lectured them for helping each other instead of working it out on their own.

Eventually, the Hokage began to question why they were still sticking to D-rank missions and they were assigned a simple, C-rank escort mission. The client, a rug merchant, wanted some extra protection from bandits as he took his wares to Grass Country.

Neji took rear guard with his "adequate" Byakugan while Akio and Yoshinori-sensei scouted ahead. Sasuke was assigned to making nice with the rug merchant's wife.

It was boring. There was no other way to put it.

Bandits attacked twice, and Sasuke was not allowed to fight either time. Neji was able to report that Akio was competent enough, especially since he came from a civilian family, but so far nothing special.

But mostly she sat, and chatted, and was fussed over for her "delicateness, the poor dear."

Two steps across the border they were ambushed by Grass nin.

It might have been okay, but they attacked right when Akio and Yoshinori-sensei were at their furthest from the caravan.

Sasuke sensed them only seconds after Neji saw them, so when he called out a warning she was already tumbling out of the cart and taking a defensive position in front of the client's wife…whose name she still didn't know.

"Six ninja," Neji reported, appearing on her left.

"I'd say four genin-level, one chuunin and one jounin," she supplied.

"Well, this should be interesting."

"Quite."

"Keep those eyes covered; if you pass out we're both in trouble."

"We don't actually have to beat them, just hold them off until Akio and sensei return."

He grabbed her shoulder and turned her sharply to the left. "Fireball, now!"

She didn't hesitate. "Katon: Goukakyou no Jutsu!"

Furious cursing suggested a direct hit, but that the enemy wasn't incapacitated yet.

The two Leaf genin stayed back-to-back, rotating so he could engage the nearest opponents with taijutsu and she could maximize the damage with her ninjutsu attacks.

When she was facing the caravan and it just wasn't safe to use fire jutsu she attacked with a random mix of Gentle Fist and standard Academy taijutsu that Neji said was confusing as hell. Not in those exact words, but she understood his meaning.

An extra strong pulse of chakra sent her diving under the earth in the first earth jutsu Kakashi ever taught her, just in time to beat Neji's Heavenly Spin. She strained her senses, and the moment the jutsu ended she broke back out, punching an enemy ninja in the jaw as she did.

They actually managed to hold their own against the four genin for several minutes, but then the other two decided to stop sitting around and join the fight. Sasuke sensed the chakra build up and reached for her hitai-ate, but it was too late.

A huge wall burst out of the ground between her and Neji, sending them flying in opposite directions. She misjudged the distance to the ground and landed badly, twisting her ankle. Somewhere far away, she sensed another Heavenly Spin. He could only do it three times in one day without resting—they needed to do something quickly.

She breathed in for another fireball jutsu and something struck her across the back of the head, knocking her unconscious.

She woke slowly, head aching.

There were six chakra signatures within twenty meters, probably the same grass nin that ambushed her…earlier? Yesterday? How long had she been unconscious?

She couldn't sense any of her teammates, which could be good or bad. If the whole point of the ambush was to capture her, maybe Neji was still alive.

On the other hand, she was now all alone.

"Ah, she's awake."

Perhaps not as alone as she might have hoped.

Someone kicked her sharply in the kidneys, and Sasuke clenched her teeth together to keep from making a sound. Pain meant alive, and alive meant possible escape. She strained her senses, trying to get a feel for the terrain, but all she could sense was that there were no trees nearby. She might even be on the edge of a cliff for all she could tell.

This was not good. It had been a long time she felt this particular helplessness because of her blindness.

"Well, well. The Last Uchiha."

So not good.

"Our leader thinks we can get a whole clan out of you. About time Konoha got a taste of its own medicine."

It took her a moment to process this. "WHAT!? No way!"

"It'll be easier if you cooperate, girl, but it's not really necessary."

To her great shame, she whimpered a little.

"And I wouldn't hold out hope for rescue, girl. Your teammates left to finish their mission days ago."

Her mind went blank.

"We were afraid you weren't going to wake up for a while there. Too bad for you, you did."

Inwardly, fear warred with fury. Sasuke could recite the ninja rules as well as any genin, and she knew the mission came first. But it was different for a jounin-sensei, and the mission was almost done anyway, and Neji must either be dead or tied up because she knew he would never abandon her like this…

"How much further to base?" someone asked.

"Another day," the guy who'd been talking to her answered. "Hear that, girl? We're almost there."

If she was going to do something, she had to do something now. It would be much harder to escape from a "base" and their plans for her were just too horrible to contemplate. Best case scenario she spent her life being cloned in a lab somewhere. Worst case scenario…

She'd rather die.

Carefully, she tested the ropes around her wrists. Sloppy work; and since the escape jutsu was one where being blind made no difference, it was one she knew well. However, even if she did get the ropes off, how would she get away?

None of her ninjutsu had had any noticeable effect on this lot, and that was her greatest strength. And she would have to seriously incapacitate or kill all of them somehow because it would be a slow, stumbling journey back to Fire Country with a sore ankle and no idea where she was.

She'd have to use her Mangekyou Sharingan. She concentrated on the sensation of her hitai-ate on her face, and to her relief it didn't seem they'd secured it in any way.

Very, very sloppy.

As surreptitiously as possible, she wriggled out of her bonds. She couldn't tell if any of the ninja were facing her, but she waited until there were none within two meters and decided it would just have to do.

When she was finally free, she took a deep breath and jumped to her feet, pushing up her hitai-ate.

"Wha—?" someone said.

Even though it had been more than a year since Kakashi's revelation, she still took delight in every chance she had to see again, even if the Sharingan painted the world in a red haze. But now wasn't the time to dwell on that.

"Please…do something!" she pleaded, focusing all of her chakra into her eyes. If Madara could manifest all those extraordinary abilities, surely she could have just one?

She started to feel very…peculiar. Chakra exhaustion already?

The enemy ninja looked afraid. Or at least she thought they did; her skills in reading facial expressions had slipped somewhat in recent years. Was something happening?

She blinked suddenly heavy lids, staring down at her hands. And now she was…seeing double…?

She didn't remember anything after that.

"Wake up. Dammit, wake the hell up this instant or so help me, I'll—"

"'S not very nice," Sasuke slurred. "Can't I stay home just this once, Mom?"

"You little idiot. Do I sound like someone's mom?"

Sasuke opened her eyes but saw only darkness. For a moment she panicked, then memory came rushing back to her. Then she really panicked. She tried to sit up, but her limbs wouldn't respond and her head felt like it was about to crack open and spill her brains out onto the ground.

"Easy, now. You're safe. You have chakra exhaustion—I warned you about that. But your chakra pathways seem undamaged, so it looks like you got lucky…this time."

That triggered another memory. "K—Kakashi? What are you doing here?"

"When your team returned without you, I came to find you."

"Really?"

"Of course. Say, do you know where all this fire came from? Nothing I've tried has put it out."

"Don't remember…a fire…"

"Well, I'm sure I'll think of something. Go to sleep now. I've got you."

Sasuke recovered from her adventure, though neither she nor Neji forgave Yoshinori-sensei for not even trying to save her. The team co-existed—barely—until a reprieve arrived in the form of the chuunin exam.

"You've completed more than twice the required number of missions and mastered the basic chakra control techniques expected of any genin," Yoshinori-sensei began, which was the nicest thing he'd ever said to them. "But there's more to being a chuunin than just that. Chuunin are squad leaders; as such, they need to be intimately familiar with their own abilities and the abilities of their subordinates. So, though I've decided to nominate all of you for the exam, I want each of you to carefully examine your own—"

He never got to finish his sentence as all three genin jumped for the permission forms. Neji showed Sasuke where she needed to sign.

Yoshinori-sensei scowled but, once the nomination was in, there really wasn't anything he could do. Everyone was a genin once; they'd learn the same as everybody else.

The exam was held in Suna that year, which, according to the more experienced genin, meant it would be extra hard. For once, all three genin on Team Ten were united behind a common goal, even if it was just to show Yoshinori-sensei that they weren't as pathetic as he thought they were.

The first part was a scavenger hunt. They'd barely gotten through the gates of Suna before all the genin were turned straight back around with a list of items to find in the desert, from a dwarf cactus (whole) to an egg from a blue-spotted lizard. They had three days.

Oh, and squads of sand ninja would be patrolling the desert to make sure the heat exhaustion didn't get them, though if you had to be carried out it was an automatic forfeit.

Akio gained a new appreciation for his teammates as they continuously and effectively scanned the area for incoming ninja (this was supposed to be a search and retrieval challenge, not a free-for-all, but plenty of the teams were quite willing to complete their lists using someone else's handiwork), and Neji used his keen eyes to find even the most elusive item on their list. He even found one of the eggs three feet inside a wall of solid rock. Akio felt positively superfluous as he took his turn chipping away at the rock with an increasingly blunt kunai—they didn't want to risk breaking the egg using a jutsu.

Their team stumbled back into Suna with twelve hours still to go, the first team non-sand team to return. They gratefully rolled out their blankets and collapsed, waking reluctantly what seemed only moments later for the second exam.

Sand nin must really love the desert, because here they were again. This time, they had five days to cross to some random corner of the dessert, retrieve a flag, and cross the finish line with flag in hand.

Thirty teams started the exam, and there were only twelve flags.

The path to the flags was almost insultingly well-marked; obviously, they were more interested in the free-for-all battle than desert survival skills this time around.

Sasuke had a hard time running in the sand, with all its sudden dips and rises, so they quickly abandoned the most obvious strategy: getting to a flag before the other teams.

"It's a dumb strategy anyway," Akio said. "Then all the other teams will be after you. It's better to camp out on the route back and steal a flag."

He turned out to be a genjutsu specialist, so they plotted out how to snare the enemy and set up a bunch of more conventional traps around a rocky outcropping not too far from the finish line, but not so close they would be easily discovered by other teams trying to set up an ambush.

The first team they caught had the same idea as them, so no flag. It didn't make sense to let them go and have them take a flag or ruin the trap, but they certainly didn't want to kill them either. Finally, Akio put them under his longest-lasting genjutsu and they tied them up as securely as they knew how.

Most of the test was spent trying to keep the other team contained and trying to find enough food and water to keep all six of them alive.

When another team finally stumbled into their trap three days later, it was almost too easy. They sat and stared off into space as Neji walked up and snatched the flag straight out of the girl's slack grip.

"Well," he said.

"Guess we should go," Akio said.

"I already untied our friends," Sasuke said, emerging from their temporary shelter. "Judging by the last few days, they should wake up in another two hours or so. We'll be long gone by then."

They encountered no one for the first half of the trip back, but they didn't let up their tense guard for a second. This was, after all, the most logical place for an ambush.

Finally—

"There!" Neji shouted, just as not three, but six other genin burst out of the sand in front of them. "Two teams!?"

"Hey, did the rules say anything about the whole team needing to get across the finish line?" Sasuke asked.

"Um, no?"

"Who's the fastest runner?"

Neji threw the flag at Akio. "What are you…Akio, down!"

"Katon: Goukakyou no Jutsu!"

As the massive fireball dissipated, Akio took off running.

The six foreign genin dug themselves out of the sand, cursing, and took off after him.

"Okay over there?" Neji asked.

"Fine. I just used up a lot of my chakra with that jutsu."

"It did seem bigger than I remember. And it doesn't help that we've been running around in the desert for almost a week without much by way of food or water."

"I said I'm fine."

He stepped up in front of her and pulled her arms around his neck. "Just this once. I promise I won't tell."

She laughed softly and tightened her grip. He lifted her up onto his back and headed for the finish line.

They were the fifth team to bring a flag, so they had another brief rest before the third and final exam was announced.

"This portion will be one-on-one combat," a sand chuunin announced.

"Like a tournament?" someone asked.

"Not exactly. You'll each be paired off, and the winner of each fight will have the chance to become a chuunin based on their performance. The loser definitely fails."

"What?"

"But that's not fair!"

"Shut up!" the chuunin yelled over the protests. "Being a ninja is not about being fair! Only through overcoming adversity and becoming the best you can possibly be will you succeed as a ninja! Each of these tests is designed to pit you against one another. You may have noticed that some teams did not have all three members make it through the first parts of the exam. You can't let anything hold you back from achieving your full potential!"

Akio was nodding, but Kakashi was still Neji and Sasuke's favorite adult and he would have called bullshit on that in a second. He'd run all the way to Grass Country to save Sasuke when she wasn't even his student.

"Different village, different ways," Neji said with a shrug.

"Apparently."

The matches were apparently a big deal, because the genin soon found themselves in some kind of arena which was packed full of spectators. The first two competitors cheerfully beat the hell out of each other for the crowd.

Sasuke and Neji waited in a special section of the stands designated for the competitors. He spent most of the first few matches narrating the action at a half-shout so she could hear him over the noise of the crowd.

Injuries were common, and one poor girl was killed during her match—to thunderous applause.

"They weren't kidding about Suna being tough," Sasuke said, shaking her head.

Neji didn't say anything.

"Neji?" She automatically put a hand out, but he was still standing only a few inches away. "Are you okay?"

"I'm up," he said. "They just posted my name."

"Okay. Who are you fighting?"

"You."

She numbly let him take her hand and pull her into the arena.

"This is stupid," he said, angrily. "Now there's no way we can both pass."

Somewhere, an official told them to start.

"Don't yell at me, I didn't make the rules," Sasuke protested.

"This isn't a fair test. Our greatest strength is as a team," he insisted.

"My greatest strength, you mean. You will make a great chuunin, all on your own."

"But that's just what I'm saying—chuunin almost never fight alone! That's why we've been training for years to develop strategies to work together."

"Yeah, but I'm the one who doesn't have a chance in hell of passing without you. And even if I did pass, I wouldn't be much use without you, anyway."

"Stop moping."

"I do have valuable skills, but I'm not one of those ninja who can work solo. Who designed this stupid test, anyway?"

"Are you two going to fight or what?" the official demanded.

Neji raised his hand. "I forfeit."