Sasuke's No Good Very Bad Teammates

Summary: Naruto and Sakura have gone insane.

Or: Just after becoming Team 7 Naruto and Sakura go through a massive shift in personality, leaving Sasuke out of the loop and wondering what in the name of sanity could have happened to them. His only consolation is that Kakashi is just as weirded out as he is.


Chapter 29

Team 7 had yet to be confronted by the Hokage. It was somewhat ridiculous considering how much time had passed, but while in the beginning Sarutobi had kept sending out shinobi to fetch them, he'd eventually given up after one too many times of them bailing in response.

Their third week in Konoha was coming to an end and they still hadn't heard a word from him. To be entirely honest, Sasuke wouldn't have noticed had Naruto not brought it up.

"Don't you think it's time we should talk to him?" He shifted his weight restlessly rather than leaning back and making himself comfortable on his couch. "It's been ages since we've seen him. I kinda feel guilty..."

Sasuke could say with little doubt that he didn't share the sentiment.

Neither did Sakura. "You really shouldn't." She didn't look up from the novel she'd been given by Hinata. "I know you cared a lot about him when you were small, but he's not actually that great of a person."

Naruto's lips pulled into a pout. "Don't say that. The old man did a lot for me back then!"

Sakura didn't reply, and Sasuke tried not to squirm in his seat. Not for the first time, he wondered how someone with a childhood like Naruto's could have ended up this optimistic and forgiving of a person.

Sakura heaved a sigh and set the novel aside. "If you really want to, we can pay him a visit."

Naruto broke out into a smile. "Thanks, you guys."

"Sasuke, are you coming too?"

Sasuke shrugged. "Why not." It wasn't like he had anything better to do with his time.

However, Sasuke knew his teammates. He knew them far too well.

"You go ahead. I'll get my stuff." Because in the very likely event that the conversation went haywire, Sasuke wanted to have all of his belongings with him to allow for an efficient, quick escape.

If Naruto and Sakura were smart, they'd be doing the same thing.


Raised voices greeted Sasuke as he slipped into the Hokage's office, waved through by an exasperated-looking Chūnin guard.

Sasuke hoped he hadn't missed too much of the conversation. Their apartment was starting to become cluttered from all the souvenirs they kept bringing from their travels (they really ought to start organizing them into sealing scrolls), and it had taken him longer than he'd expected to gather up everything he planned to take along.

He saw Kakashi first upon entering the office. He stood behind Sakura and Naruto, nose buried in his book and pretending as though he wasn't aware of the argument rapidly unfolding in front of him.

"It slipped your mind?!" Sarutobi's gaping expression didn't make him look at all like the wise, all-knowing Hokage he was supposed to be. "With everything that's been going on. Orochimaru tried to invade, Tsunade is a missing nin–"

"To be fair," Naruto chimed in because he didn't know when to keep his mouth shut, "that was technically your fault."

"– all this odd behavior, you abandon the village–"

"Hey now, I wouldn't exactly call it 'abandon'."

"– making me worry about your wellbeing, all alone out there. And it slipped your mind to tell me?!"

Naruto shifted uncomfortably on his feet. Sakura's eyes slipped to the ground, half sheepish, half guilty looking.

Sasuke was surprised that they were actually letting Sarutobi's words get to them. He didn't know what they were talking about – maybe Naruto had initially planned to tell Sarutobi about their adventures, and that was what had slipped his mind? – but no matter what it was, it shouldn't be severe enough to justify his teammates' reactions.

The Hokage wasn't done. "Do you even know how difficult it is to explain genin missing-nin?!"

Sakura tried to turn her snort into a cough and only succeeded marginally.

"Hey now, that's just not true," Naruto protested. He pulled out the bingo book he'd gotten from Kiba and thrust their entry into Sarutobi's face. Sasuke still felt undeniably pleased whenever he laid eyes on it. "See? We're listed as Konoha nin. We're not missing nin."

Sarutobi sent Naruto an incredulous look. "And who do you think made sure about that?"

Naruto blinked. "Oh. Uh..."

Sarutobi had begun pacing the office, almost frantically puffing on his pipe. His composure seemed to depend on it. "Who else knows about this?"

Kakashi guiltily lowered his book.

"Erm," Naruto said. "Kakashi-sensei does."

Sarutobi's pipe snapped. He leveled Kakashi with an incredulous stare. "And all of you just forgot to mention it?!"

A pregnant silence followed, broken only by the rustling sound of Kakashi tugging away his book.

"Hokage-sama," he said, "I will take full responsibility for the actions of my students. Please allow me to–"

"This isn't about responsibility anymore!" Sarutobi interrupted. "Do you have any idea... Do you know in the slightest what the village has been like... What we needed to adjust to..."

Naruto and Sakura shared a concerned look. Sarutobi no longer seemed able to form complete sentences.

"Old man... Are you, uh. Are you al–"

"I'm too old for this," Sarutobi interrupted yet again. "This is it. I quit."

"Uh." Naruto looked back and forth between Sarutobi and Kakashi. "You can't just quit being Hokage, I don't think."

"I retire." The vehemence behind Sarutobi's voice left little room to question the sincerity of his statement. "Again."

"Whoa, hold on." Naruto's voice was quickly gaining an alarmed quality as he realized that Sarutobi was being serious. "Who's gonna take over then? You can't just– The village needs you!"

"The village needs someone," Sakura corrected. "I guess you could always take the hat early."

"Are you joking? I'd have to stay in the village all the time. We'd have to stop travelling!" He paused. "Besides, I'm not actually sure if I want to become Hokage anymore."

That gave Sakura a pause. "Really? I mean, I know you haven't been as vocal about it. But not at all?"

"I don't think so." Naruto's lips twitched into a smile. "What we're doing, it's been... nice. And besides, I'm still like, five."

"Fourteen."

"Exactly. The point is, I don't really need to become Hokage."

"Well, somebody will have to take over." Kakashi's frown suggested he couldn't quite understand why he was even part of the discussion. "Konoha can't stay without a kage. So if Sarutobi-san isn't willing to keep going–"

"Not a chance," Sarutobi interrupted, shoving the Hokage hat further away from him as though to prove his point. "I've had enough stress for a lifetime."

"Who then?" Sakura asked. "Tsunade? Or Jiraiya?"

"I feel like that's kind of unlikely, considering... you know."

Sasuke did indeed think it unlikely for either an official missing nin or a certified pervert who spent his time creeping on women in bathhouses to take over the Hokage's hat.

"I mean," Sakura said, her voice taking on an odd undertone, "there's always..."

Naruto and Sakura both turned to look at Kakashi.

There was a pause. Kakashi took a large, defensive step back. "Wait. What?"

"It might be a little earlier than expected," Naruto tilted his head, "but desperate times..."

"No. No no no no. You were joking about that. You must have been joking." A desperate glint entered Kakashi's eyes. "Please tell me you're joking."

"You all act like wearing the hat is some kind of torture," Sarutobi grumbled, giving them all a disgruntled look.

"You're the one who's wanted to become Hokage since you were a child," Kakashi argued.

"So? I changed my mind. I'm not gonna sit in this dusty old office all day when I could be doing so many other things."

"I thought it was your dream!"

"Well," Naruto said, "it was. But I only wanted it because I thought becoming Hokage meant being accepted by other people for who I was."

It went unsaid that with the adventures they've had and the friends they've made, Naruto had long since met his goal even without becoming a village leader in the process.

"My life is pretty great right now," Naruto shrugged, "so I don't need it anymore. You, however–"

"It's out of the question," Kakashi interrupted. "I can't even take care of myself most of the time, how do you expect me to take care of a whole village?"

"I don't know about you, but I thought you were doing pretty well with the rookies while we were gone. What's a couple thousand more people?"

Sarutobi's patience ran out. "Would someone already take this blasted hat from me?!"

Naruto and Kakashi shared a glance.

"Not it!"

Both of them legged it out of the window without a glance back.

Behind his desk, Sarutobi let out a noise of great suffering. He did not, however, look surprised in the slightest.


Kakashi, as it turned out, made the mature decision. He waited until dawn and made a break for it.

"That bastard!" Naruto sported an expression of outrage. "Does he think fleeing the village will save him?!"

"Isn't that essentially what you were planning to do, too?" Sakura pointed out dryly.

"That's totally beside the point."

"Besides," Sakura added, "weren't we planning to do our next trip with Kakashi-sensei, anyway?"

Naruto visibly faltered. "It would kind of suck if he was stuck in the village all the time," he admitted, a frown tugging at his lips at the thought. "But somebody's gotta take over. We can't just leave while Konoha's still without a Hokage."

"Why not?" Sasuke raised an eyebrow. "We're teenagers. Since when is this our problem to deal with?"

There was a heavy silence. The fact didn't seem to have occurred to either of them.

"That is... a fair point," Sakura said, sounding impressed.

Naruto, in a similar fashion, looked as though he'd had some great revelation. "Huh."

Another pause followed, this one shorter than the last.

"So what?" Sakura asked. "We'll go after Kakashi, convince him that we're not there to drag him back and then... let Konoha figure it out on its own?"

"I mean, Danzō's gone, so he can't take advantage. Orochimaru's almost comatose, and everybody else..." Naruto seemed to be mentally cataloging all of the villagers. "I guess it can't really go too badly."

Sakura looked into the distance with furrowed brows, evidently following Naruto's lead and checking their current village population for potential disastrous decisions. "... Yeah. I don't think there's anybody left who'd use the position for their own gain. Not successfully, anyway."

"And Konoha's in a pretty good place right now," Naruto added. "We've got good relations with all the other countries–"

"Well. For the most part, anyway."

"– we've got plenty of allies, there's no war in sight anytime soon..." Naruto trailed off and gave a small shrug. "It should be fine."

Even if it wasn't, they wouldn't have to deal with any of it as long as they were far away from Konoha, Sasuke thought, but didn't speak it out loud.

As long as the three of them – or the four of them, seeing as hopefully they'd have soon convinced Kakashi that they weren't planning on selling him out to the village – as long as they were together and free from Konoha's obligations, Sasuke didn't much care about what the village got up to in the meantime.

If a village consisting of thousands of – allegedly – capable shinobi couldn't hold it together without one jōnin teacher and three of his students, it rather deserved to get whatever was coming for it, anyway.


A/N: Work at the hospital is starting to pick up. We're getting patients we're not actually equipped to deal with because the more specialized hospitals need the beds for Corona patients.

It's looking likely I'll be helping out during my school blocks and throughout my vacation, too.

Thanks to To Mockingbird, Igornerd and PyrothTenka for their wonderful help!

~Gwen