Chapter Eleven : Dedicated to my lovely reviewer MoonAbyss!
"You want me to do what?"
'Why does everyone always say that?'
"Climb trees," he clarified with a lethargic sigh. Mari raised a skeptical eyebrow at him and crossed her arms in disbelief.
"Dad, you sure you didn't bump your head waking up earlier? How the heck is climbing a tree going to help me with chakra control?" He'd lost it, hadn't he? He'd finally lost it.
"Easy, you climb them… without using your hands," he grinned, though you could only tell because of his visible eye.
"Without… using my hands…"
'He's lost it.'
Kakashi sighed. "Yes, you'll be climbing trees without using your hands, Mari."
"You're kidding," she dead-panned, unimpressed.
"Am I? Why don't you just stand back and watch?" The brunette watched curiously as her father made a hand sign and walked towards a tree. But he didn't stop there, oh no, he walked straight up it. "It's quite simple actually. I focus a specific amount of chakra at the soles of my feet and this allows me to stick to the surface of the tree for however long I can keep my chakra flow steady. It is said in theory that it is the most difficult to concentrate your chakra at the soles of your feet. Even advanced ninja have difficulty drawing a precise amount of chakra to a precise point in the body," he explained patiently. Seeing he had her attention he continued. "You will be, as I said, climbing trees as I have just shown you. This will give you a much greater control over your chakra and thus a greater advantage in battle."
'Perfect! If I can master this, then I'll be able to master that fire jutsu I read in the scroll last night. I have to get this! It's the only way to keep up with my superiors and eventually surpass them!'
"Alright, let's do this!"
Kakashi watched as she took a running start towards the tree, seeming to focus intently on what she was doing till the very last second. She only got two steps up before she crashed back into the ground, landing roughly on her backside. He chuckled as she swore under her breath.
"Language, Mari."
"Uuurrrggg! I'll show you language! I'll master this tonight!"
"Not so fast. This takes time; you aren't just going to master it in one night."
"But-," she tried to argue, looking over to him pleadingly from her place on the ground.
"Just do your best. No one's asking you to kill yourself over it."
Mari kept quiet, simply giving him a curt nod before standing once more, backing up and starting towards the tree again. This time she took out a kunai and began slashing the tree where she stopped before she fell to keep track of her progress. The way she was going at it you would think she was trying to kill herself – or maybe just give herself a concussion. Kakashi decided to let it go for now. There was no arguing with her when she became determined to do something. She probably wouldn't even listen if the Hokage himself ordered her to stop, she was just that stubborn.
'And that hard-working for sure. She always takes training so seriously. I wish she would let loose and have a little bit of fun with it. She shouldn't make the same mistakes that I did when I was a kid.'
She certainly wasn't the same though. She had Naruto and Hinata – she was friends with a few other kids too, and Kyo, Ishio, Saya, and Tatsuyoshi were like extended family. She didn't have the same trust issues that he used to, but she was certainly every bit as serious at times like this. Sometimes he worried at how she would have turned out if he hadn't left ANBU and straightened out his views on life before they found each other. 'And maybe I should go ask the Hokage exactly what happened in that clearing. There has to be some kind of reason for her sudden need to be even better than before.'
So that was exactly what he was going to do.
"Nnnnggghhh…"
"Wow, Mari, what's wrong with you? Finally realize that you should just give up at being a ninja or what?"
"Shut up, Kiba."
"Touchy this morning, I see."
"If you were smart you'd shut your trap and stop taking my seat, dog breath."
"I don't see your name on it Hatake."
"Ah, whatever. You're not worth it," She growled.
Mari was completely drained of energy. She'd trained until she dropped last night – dropped unconscious that is. Her dad had to drag her back home after coming back from wherever he'd disappeared to that time. She'd gotten a few more hours of sleep, but she was still low on chakra as it hadn't had enough time to replenish yet. As such, she was feeling rather sluggish.
'At least I know I'm better than him,' she figured, still seething at her classmate. She could probably take the stupid mutt even in this state. She wasn't the second best in the class for nothing. 'Second best,' she scoffed, 'not for long.' She was going to make it to the top of the class – or at least become the best rookie in her year seeing as they'd be assigned their teams today.
Just then Iruka-sensei walked in and told everyone to take their seats while they waited for the remaining students to arrive.
"Better go sit down, Hatake. Wouldn't want to get in trouble, would you?" Kiba taunted from his place next to Hinata. The lavender-eyed girl sitting beside him looked at her friend apologetically but Mari waved it off. She was too tired to start anything anyway. With a sigh, she looked around the class for a seat and saw one open right next to her best friend… and Uchiha Sasuke.
'Aw, screw it. It's not like the guy is gonna bite my head off unless I bother him.'
Uchiha Sasuke wasn't normally one to socialize with anyone let alone girls. Actually, from anyone else's point of view it would seem as though he hated all things female. In reality he just liked avoiding all things female because they tended to have the annoying habit of fawning over him twenty-four-seven. The only girls in the entire Academy who didn't act like his personal lovesick puppies were Hyuuga Hinata and Hatake Mari. So when one Hatake Mari took the seat next to him he was honestly momentarily surprised that she would do so.
Well, until he saw the idiotic blonde sitting on her other side. Didn't he fail the test? What was that loser doing here anyway?
"Hey Naru-kun," Mari murmured tiredly to her blonde friend, placing her chin in the palm of her hand to keep her head propped up.
"Wow, Mari-chan, you look terrible!" came his blunt reply.
"Gee… thanks," she drawled sarcastically, giving him a warning look out of the corner of her eyes. Naruto just grinned sheepishly and gave a small chuckle.
It was then that people began noticing the commotion in the hallway.
'What the hell? Is a herd of elephants having a foot race or something?' Mari thought.
SHHHKKK!
"I'm first!" Two voices chorused.
"I won again, Sakura!" The annoying sound of one Yamanaka Ino boasted from the now open doorway.
"Give it up!" The pink-haired girl countered with venom. "I had to look back to see you! My toe was at least a tenth of an inch ahead!"
'You have got to be kidding me. Are they really doing this so early in the morning?' Mari didn't really need to ask herself that, either. Of course they were having an extremely loud and annoying argument first thing in the morning. They almost always did.
"Have you always been this delusional?" Ino mocked, hands on her hips in the famous "I'm totally better than you and you know it" pose.
Mari rolled her eyes and turned back around, letting her head drop to the table in front of her with a satisfying thud.
"Hey, whoa, where are you going?" Ino called after her rival as she suddenly took off.
"Hi Sakura, what's up?" Naruto said happily as the pinkette ran over to his desk.
'Oh please kami-sama; please tell me she is not coming over here.'
Oh, but of course she was. Mari was sitting next to Sasuke after all.
'Why the hell did I choose this seat? I could be sitting with Shikamaru or something, nice and safe from this guy's insane fan-girls! But no, I just had to come and sit with my best buddy - figures.'
"MOVE IT!"
THUD!
"Hey, Hatake-san, get up so I can talk to Sasuke-kun!" Sakura at least tried to sound nice when asking. The majority of the girls acknowledged Mari's apparent lack of interest in their beloved Sasuke so they didn't view her as much of a threat.
"Nnnnggg! Give a girl a break will yah? You can talk perfectly fine over my freakin' head. It's on a table. Deal with it!" the brunette mumbled past her face full of table, rather uncharacteristically too. Then again, no one normally saw her so tired. She became cranky when she was tired. She couldn't even will herself to lift her head at this point. "An' be nice to Naru-kun. All he did was say hi."
Unknown to Mari, Sakura's face contorted into barely suppressed rage momentarily before her sickeningly sweet mask returned as she instead addressed Sasuke.
"Uh, good morning, Sasuke, mind if I sit next to you?"
Silence prompted Mari to grudgingly lift her head from its oh-so-comfy place on the rock hard desk. Her sapphire blue eyes locked onto Sakura's lighter, emerald green ones with annoyance.
"Oh yeah, and where will I go? In case you haven't noticed, I'm in the only seat that's next to him."
"There are plenty of other seats, Hatake-san!" Sakura indicated matter-of-factly.
"Yeah, go sit in one of them and leave me in peace, will ya? I'm not in a good mood in case you haven't noticed."
"Why would Sasuke-kun want to sit next to you?" Sakura spat.
"Back off forehead, I'm sitting next to Sasuke," Ino announced, grabbing Sakura by the arm before the pinkette could make a move to force Mari from her seat.
"I was here first!" the other griped.
"I walked into the classroom before you did! Everybody saw it!" Her counter-part claimed.
"Dream on!"
"Actually, I got here before either of you," some random girl said, walking up to the bickering pair.
Mari sweat-dropped and clutched her aching head in her hands. Why the hell did the Uchiha have to be so freakin' popular? All this "Sasuke-kun, Sasuke-kun!" was giving her a headache! "What a load of morons," she muttered.
Finally she couldn't take it anymore. She stood up to her full height and a menacing aura surrounded her. All the girls fell silent at the sound of her chair scraping across the floor.
"OI! Would you all just shut the hell up? Go get some lives while you're at it! It's eight o' clock in the morning and I didn't get to sleep until four and now I have a head-ache the size of the Hokage Monument! So help me god, if you don't leave the poor guy the fuck alone, and me by freakin' association there will be hell to pay! Got it? It's just a freaking seat! Who the hell cares whether you sit next to Uchiha-san! This won't be the last time you'll ever see him, so just get lost already!"
Sasuke glanced over once more during Mari's infuriated speech and couldn't help but silently agree. He knew her words would likely do no good though.
'They're so clueless,' he thought monotonously.
In the center of the village in the Hokage's office at the top of the Hokage Tower stood a group of Jounin around, well, the Hokage.
The Hokage's crystal ball was currently fixated of the image of a young raven-haired boy sitting at his desk at Konoha's Ninja Academy. Said raven-haired boy was one Uchiha Sasuke.
"Most promising new student Uchiha Sasuke, is that him?" a particular silver-haired Jounin inquired in his deep, smooth voice.
"Yes, he's the one," The Hokage confirmed.
"He's the only survivor left of the Uchiha clan," a female ninja spoke up. She had black hair and flame colored eyes that gave her a sharp yet beautiful look.
The Hokage looked up at the two of them from under his eyebrows. "That's right."
"Uzumaki Naruto, huh?" The silver-haired ninja mused as the focus of the crystal ball changed to show an angered young boy in a neon orange outfit sitting on the ground. They watched as a black and green clothed figure shifted at the edge of the scene and the crystal ball refocused once more on a pretty, but seemingly angry brunette.
"Isn't that your daughter?" The woman directed towards her comrade.
"I do believe it is."
Yeah so maybe what Naruto was doing might be considered brave by some people. Mari was honestly proud of him, what with him being generally disliked by their other classmates and all. The fan girls thought it was rude and an insult. Still, Naruto did have guts to do what he was doing. And what was that you may ask? He was glaring at Uchiha. But no, not just glaring. He was on Uchiha's desk and glaring with their faces about two inches apart. Sasuke was glaring back. Her dear friend Karma was about to interrupt any moment now, she was sure. Call her crazy, call her abnormal, she called it intuition and there's never been a time when it's failed her.
"Hey, Naruto! Stop glaring at Sasuke!" Sakura demanded angrily. When Naruto had leapt onto the desk, all the attention had been adverted away from Mari and onto him. Her head was still throbbing painfully as she slumped back down into her seat.
Both boys seemed to be ignoring the girls as their glare-off intensified. Their aura's seemed to clash so intensely that the air seemed to charge up with electricity. Chattering, yelling, and Sasuke cheering rippled through the small crowd of girls as they realized he had accepted Naruto's "challenge." Mari would have cheered too if her head didn't feel like it would explode so she settled for silently egging Naruto on the best she could.
It all happened so quickly that if anyone had blinked they would have missed it.
One second Naruto was crouching on the desk, and the next some random guy had bumped him from behind and…
"Oh… my… god…," honestly that was all Mari was capable of saying. She wasn't sure whether she should be sick or laugh her ass off. It wasn't every day that you got to see your best friend and the school's antisocial heartthrob kiss.
"EEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!" Sakura screeched just as the two boys broke apart and started spitting and wiping their mouths on their sleeves in disgust. That was when the brunette started simultaneously laughing and groaning as her head throbbed more fiercely than before.
"I'll get you Naruto!" Sasuke hissed as he tried to get every trace of the kiss off his lips.
"Naruto," Sakura began in a warning tone, an irk mark on her forehead. "You. Are. So. DEAD."
Approximately three seconds later a hoard of fan-girls would attempt to ruin Naru-kun's face. It was a day Mari would never forget… and an event that would make its way permanently into her arsenal of blackmail.
Unknown to the entirety of the school, the Hokage and Jounin were watching everything.
"As usual Naruto is right in the middle of some kind of trouble," the Sandaime narrated. The others murmured in agreement. Naruto was always in trouble. If everything else seemed like it was going wrong one day, you could always count on Naruto to cause some kind of mischief.
"As of today you are all ninja. To get here you've faced difficult trials and hardships, but that's nothing. What comes next will be far more difficult. Now you are only Genin - first level ninjas. All the Genin will be grouped into three man squads and two four man squads seeing as we have an uneven number of students this year. Each squad will be led by a Jounin-an elite ninja." Iruka sensei explained as he stood before his graduating class.
One Hatake Mari glanced over at her best friend worriedly. She'd had to step in and save Naruto from yet another mess he'd gotten himself into but he'd still suffered plenty of damage by the hands of Sasuke's infuriated fan-girls by the time she had gotten to him. The bruises were hardly noticeable at least but he looked like he was in a lot of pain from the way he was slouching in his seat.
Sakura, who still wanted to be as close to "her Sasuke-kun" as possible, had pulled up a chair and made everyone scoot over so she could join our row. Apparently she didn't want to risk sitting by Mari while she was still in a bad mood. The brunette was actually glad for it. She didn't know how long she could take being in that girl's presence without killing herself.
"Well someone's got to be in Sasuke's group. I wonder who?" Ino taunted her ex-best friend from the seat behind the irritated Hatake.
'Dear god, do they ever just give it up?'
The answer was an obvious no.
"I don't know," Sakura replied, sending Ino a glare.
"We want each squad to have a balance of strengths and abilities so that's how we set them up. I will now announce the squads," Iruka-sensei continued, oblivious to the small side conversations that were going on. Or perhaps he was so used to it that after all these years he decided to ignore it. Mari didn't really know. She also really didn't care. Her lack of caring was beginning to lull her to sleep…
"Squad Seven, Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura, Uchiha Sasuke, and Hatake Mari," Iruka announced after a few minutes of reading off the other teams. That woke her up.
'Wait a second, I'm on a four man squad? Why am I on a four man squad? With that sniveling Sakura no less. At least Naruto's on my team, but…'
Mari cast a mournful glance at her best friend who gazed back just as sorrowfully. The two of them had been hoping that they would be on the same team for years, Mari and Hinata had. All the sudden Mari's heart began to ache at the thought of not seeing the girl she'd grown up with every day – her sister. They would no doubt be kept busy with missions and training constantly. How often would they get to hang out anymore – if at all? They wouldn't grow apart… would they?
She didn't want that to happen.
"Next, Squad Eight, Hinata Hyuuga, Kiba Inuzuka, and Shino Aburame," Iruka listed off. Hinata and Mari broke eye contact, but only after Mari gave the other girl a reassuring smile. Hinata shakily returned it. In Mari's eyes, Hinata was practically on her own. Kiba was a loud-mouthed, egotistical idiot and Shino… well he didn't really say much… or do much for that matter. She never got to know the guy. All she ever saw him do was just… kinda… sit there… doing nothing. He could have been sleeping through all their classes for all she knew, but she somehow doubted it.
"Ugh! How did you get in his group?" Ino demanded Sakura. Sakura turned in her seat and smirked at Ino evilly, giving her a peace sign with an obviously delighted, mocking gleam in her eye.
"I don't get it, what do you see in a guy like that?" Shikamaru asked from his place next to Ino. "He's not so special."
'Thank you Shikamaru! He's just a guy – and technically my rival but eh, I don't take the competition to a personal level.'
"You are so beyond clueless Shikamaru. Don't you get it?" Ino asked, annoyed.
"No I don't get it, 'cause I'm not a girl."
Ino sighed as though she were amused. "You are so full of yourself. Jealousy's a terrible thing. I'd hate to be on your squad."
"Now squad ten," Iruka-sensei went on. Did he seriously not hear everything that went on in his class or does he just not care whether they were paying attention? "Ino Yamanaka, Shikamaru Nara-,"
"Ha! Did you say something about hating to be on my squad?" Shikamaru scoffed.
"Ugh!" Ino replied smartly.
'So articulate isn't she?'
"And Chouji Akimichi," Iruka finished.
'At least those two got to stay together,' Mari thought wistfully, knowing how close the lazy Nara and rotund Akimichi were.
"Those are all the squads."
"Iruka-sensei!" Naruto spoke up, standing from his seat. "Why does a great ninja like me have to be in the same group with a slug like Sasuke?"
'Kill me, Kami-sama. Just kill me now. I don't want to have to deal with fan-girls or over-competitive guys. I have a headache. I wanna take a nap, not listen to my teammates argue not even one minute after we were grouped together.'
"Sasuke had one of the best scores of all the graduating students. Naruto, you had the worst scores. To create a balanced group we put the best students with the worst student," Iruka pointed out reluctantly. Naruto deflated a bit as the class laughed at his expense. Mari felt bad for him. She knew he had it in him to be the best; he was just having a hard time because of how everyone treated him. Only three people believed in his dream: she, Hinata, and Iruka-sensei.
"Just make sure you don't get in my way, loser," Sasuke finally spoke up, not even bothering to glance at the indignant blonde. Mari turned to him.
"That was uncalled for, Uchiha-san," she warned under her breath. He glanced at her impassively but otherwise didn't respond.
"Hey, what did you say?" Naruto demanded, growling angrily.
"Hard of hearing?" Sasuke returned monotonously, sparing another glance at Mari who narrowed her eyes at him lethally.
"Knock it off, Naruto! Sit down!" Sakura reprimanded him from his other side. Mari sent a glare at her as well, causing the pinkette to clear her throat nervously.
"Don't worry, Naru-kun. We're in this together, ne?" The brunette finally spoke up, trying to sound comforting despite her raging headache. Naruto didn't look very happy but nodded anyway and took his seat.
Iruka took the moment of silence to speak again. "Ahem! After lunch you'll meet your new Jounin teachers. Until then, class dismissed!"
…
'I'm taking a nap.'
That was exactly what she did.
'Finally, some peace and quiet. Still, I'm going to miss them. This will be the last time I will ever see them as my students. They're all grown up now,' One brown-eyed, brunette teacher thought nostalgically, kicking his feet up onto his desk and leaning back in his seat. The moment he closed his eyes to relax, however, he heard a soft noise that sounded a lot like mewling.
'Huh? What's-, wait, why is Mari still here? Is she… sleeping?'
That was exactly what she was doing. The noise he had heard was actually her soft snoring. She was out cold in the seat she had been sitting at during class, slouched over the desk and blissfully unaware of the rest of the world and its problems.
'Poor kid, wonder what's got her so tired out? Was Kakashi training her late again? The night before the team assignments no less? I'll have to talk to him about her sleeping habits. She's going to need all the rest she can get if she'll be completing missions from now on.'
With a sigh Umino Iruka stood, grasping his bento and heading to the teachers' lounge where he could eat without disturbing his student's rest.
Once again, this chapter was written especially for my awesome reviewer MoonAbyss!
I'd like to thank all of you though, for reviewing, favoriting, and alerting my story. It really means a lot to me! I know I've been slow on the updates but my excuse is Latin class, Japanese class, and remodeling my bedroom to this awesome semi-modern Japanese style. Please keep reviewing! Who knows, they next chapter could be dedicated to YOU!~
*glomps MoonAbyss* Thank you so much! You're review made me cry tears of joy!
