"Dude, what are you even doing here? Only the new genin are supposed to be here?"
Naruto was hardly surprised when he heard a vaguely familiar voice call out to him the moment he walked into the classroom with a hitai-ate secured around his forehead in place of his usual goggles. Because of course people would ignore the very real hitai-ate and assume Naruto would never really graduate. Of course they would. But he had graduated, even if by less conventional means.
Naruto didn't dignify the callout with words, though. He was done having people just underestimate him all the time, and so he would prove his worth with his actions. As much as he wanted to be silly and light-hearted, he just wasn't in the mood, still reeling at the fact his desperation had led to him being completely fooled by Mizuki the other day.
The blonde formed his fingers into the seal for the Shadow Clone Jutsu, and made two clones pop up beside him. All three Narutos glared at the boy who spoke to him, and then the real Naruto went and found a seat beside Hyuuga Hinata, who was one of the few people who seemed to be fine with his presence. Quite as she was, Naruto thought she seemed really nice and hoped to be on a team with her. She mumbled something when he sat down, but he wasn't really in the mood to chat, so he mostly stayed silent after a quick "good morning".
Once everyone was in their seats, Iruka-sensei walked in and addressed the class. Naruto was glad to see that he had recovered from his injuries, still feeling a mix of anger, frustration and guilt at how it had all happened. He was angry and frustrated at how Iruka-sensei had kept on underestimating him and thinking he needed protecting, and very, very guilty about how easily he had fallen for Mizuki's lies. But he had to push forward, and do better.
Iruka-sensei said some encouraging words about how far they'd all come since they started out in the academy, which Naruto mostly tuned out. It was true, he had come far, but it wasn't like anyone realised just how much. Then, it was time for the interesting part - team assignments. The graduating genin were assigned to teams of three, each led by a jonin who would be responsible for training them until they themselves were promoted to the chunin rank.
"Team 7 will consist of: Haruno Sakura, Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke," Iruka-sensei declared, and Naruto rolled his eyes.
Naruto had once thought Sakura was pretty, smart and level-headed and asked to be her friend. Sakura, however, had interpreted the interaction as Naruto asking her out, and reacted poorly. Naruto didn't really get it - they were kids, and he was pretty sure he wasn't even interested in girls anyway. But ever since then, Sakura had treated him with nothing but disdain.
He wasn't so worried about Sasuke, though. Sure, the guy was cold and distanced, but Naruto knew what had happened to his clan. He had a reason to be this way, and maybe he just needed a friend? He never treated Naruto badly, he mostly ignored the blonde. And that was fine, it was a blank slate Naruto didn't mind working with.
Eventually, the other teams all filed out as their new senseis came to collect them, leaving just Naruto and his new teammates sitting and waiting for their new sensei, Hatake Kakashi. At first, Sakura tried to sweet-talk Sasuke and get on his good side, but Sasuke wasn't having any of it. He was trying desperately to ignore her, and eventually she got the message and backed off.
An hour passed in silence. And then another hour. And then another. Naruto had reached his limit - he couldn't just sit and wait for this long. And so he decided to prepare a test of sorts for his new sensei. It was a rather simple setup - Naruto took the chalk duster the teachers used for the blackboard and positioned it above the doorframe so that it would fall as soon as the door opened.
It didn't work. As soon as the door open, and hand blurred through the air, batting the duster across the room. A man with silver hair, a mask covering the lower half of his face and a hitai-ate that was angled to cover one of his eyes walked into the room, brushing remnants of chalk off his hands.
"Very funny," said Hatake Kakashi in a rather dry tone. "Meet me up on the rooftop in five minutes."
Just as soon as the man had entered, he left. Despite what the 'prank' might have led others to believe, Naruto wasn't here to play around. He followed out the door, and immediately headed for the stairs.
"Let's see," Kakashi drawled lazily. "First off, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourselves? How about… your likes, dislikes, future dream, hobbies, things like that."
Naruto felt tense, nervous even. As much as mucking around always took the edge off, Naruto was a genin now, and it was time to start getting his act together so he could finally get people to stop underestimating him so much. And yet… would any of them see his efforts? There was nothing he could do but try, so Naruto volunteered to go first.
"Um… I like ramen, especially from Ichiraku's, and I dislike what everyone thinks of me. My dream for the future is to become the Hokage, and I'm gonna work as hard as I can to get there. My hobbies are gardening and makeup!"
Naruto didn't need to look around to see how his introduction would be taken - Sakura was already pointing a finger at him and starting to yell.
"Makeup?" Sakura shouted. "That's for girls, and you're a boy!"
"Oh, I am?" Naruto replied, allowing a bit of his cheek to come back in. "Says who?"
"Says—" Sakura started, but she was interrupted by a small 'poof' sound as Naruto transformed into the 'girl' version of his appearance. Sakura didn't take well to this, but didn't have the words to express herself.
Naruto spared a glance at Kakashi, who seemed to be content just watching to see how the interaction would resolve - if it even did resolve. Surely as a jonin sensei he would talk about the practical uses of makeup - even with the transformation jutsu, it was still good for ninja to have manual infiltration skills on hand.
"I use makeup too, sometimes," Sasuke helpfully added, before jumping into his introduction so that Sakura didn't have a chance to say more in this particular conversation. "I don't like many things, but I do dislike many things. And… I don't like summing up my ambition as just a dream, but I do have an ambition - to restore my clan and, without fail, kill a certain man."
"Oh, you mean your brother?" Naruto asked casually - to him, it seemed fair enough. After all, the general but quiet consensus was that Uchiha Itachi was behind the Uchiha Massacre.
Sasuke choked on his spit. "…how?"
"It's not exactly a secret, Sasuke. I mean, that your brother, you know… So like, it's definitely fair enough that you want revenge, and seeing as we're supposed to be teammates, let me know if you want help!" Naruto rambled cheerfully. If they were going to be a team, they needed to build rapport, and Naruto figured this was a good place to start.
"I'll keep it in mind," Sasuke muttered and turned away, clearly not wanting the interaction to go any further.
There was an awkward pause, and eventually Kakashi made a light cough as a reminder to get things moving along. Sakura realised that she was the last one, and gave her introduction.
"Well, my likes are…" Sakura blushed, and mumbled something inaudible. "And my hobby is… my future dream…"
Naruto rolled his eyes when Sakura let out some kind of squeal, whereas Kakashi's expression didn't change at all. It rubbed Naruto the wrong way, that the man who was supposed to be his new sensei was showing no real interest in any of his new students.
"What about you, sensei?" Naruto asked, hoping to get at least something out of the man.
"Hmm, very well," Kakashi sighed. "I don't feel like telling you about my likes and dislikes. I've never really thought about my future dream and as for my hobbies… I have many."
Really? We get nothing from this guy? Naruto groaned audibly. Well, eventually he'd start to crack the man's shell and get to know him, at least after passing the 'secret' jonin's test he'd heard about over the last week.
"Okay, okay, now onto business," Kakashi spoke with perhaps genuine interest this time. "Tomorrow, we'll have a mission! It'll be a survival exercise."
Interestingly, Sakura was the first one to speak out in protest. "Why are we doing an exercise when we're supposed to do missions? We've had more than our fair share of exercises in the academy!"
"This is no simple exercise," Kakashi chuckled, and leaned his head into his open palm. "Of the twenty-seven graduates from your class, only nine will make it as proper ninja, and the rest will be relegated to the Genin Corps where they have little to no hope of doing any real ninja work. In other words, this exercise is an extremely difficult test with a failure rate of 66% or higher!"
Naruto rolled his eyes yet again. Like any reasonable ninja, he'd kept an ear out for information about genin life so that he could come prepared, and learned about these tests already, and heard specifically that genin trios passed or failed the tests as a team - which meant that if he wanted to make it in the ninja world, he needed to find a way to work with these two.
"Finally, I'll be determining if you pass or fail. Meet me at 5am in Training Ground 3, and bring all of your ninja tools with. Tardiness will not be tolerated. Oh, and you'd best skip breakfast. Okay, dismissed!" When Kakashi finished speaking, he disappeared.
"I'm leaving too," Sasuke announced, and walked off, and that was that.
Naruto was just about to open the door to his run-down apartment building when he decided to give in to the urge to confront whoever was following him. About half-way home, he had slipped into an alleyway and changed back into his 'boy' form the moment he'd felt eyes on him, but apparently that hadn't thrown off or dissuaded his follower.
There wasn't much he needed to do that afternoon, and he wasn't planning on doing any kind of intensive training when Kakashi would be testing him and his new teammates the next morning. So, in one motion, he turned and flickered over to where he though the sensation originated from.
"Hinata?" Naruto asked, at first surprised that she of all people was following him - but then he reflected on all the times she seemed to be sneaking glances at him, and wasn't so surprised after all. "Can I help you with something?"
"Um…" Hinata responded impressively, probably startled by Naruto's swift arrival. Sometimes he forgot that he had a few jutsu most new genin hadn't learned yet - only because most of them didn't work nearly as hard as he did.
"Sorry for startling you like that," Naruto apologised earnestly, scratching the back of his head. "It's just, you were following me and I was wondering why? Normally a Hyuuga wouldn't be caught dead in this part of town."
"W-well, I…" Hinata paused, and took in a deep breath. "I wanted to t-talk to you… But I don't want to waste any of your t-time so I'll just go!"
"Hey, I've got nothing better to do!" Naruto insisted before Hinata had the chance to run away. "Wanna come hang in my rooftop garden for a bit?"
"Really?" Hinata wore a look of utter disbelief, as though nobody had ever offered something like that to her before. It made Naruto angry, and in that moment he cemented his resolve to become Hinata's friend.
Hinata tentatively followed Naruto up to the rooftop of his apartment building, where he had been working on the garden for almost a couple years now. As the door opened, Naruto admired his own handiwork. Taking up half of the rooftop were five rows of soil-filled concrete with different plants growing out of them. The two rows on the left had a variety of vegetables growing - Naruto had found growing his own produce as a satisfying way of cheapening his grocery bills since nobody really sold to him at a fair price. The two rows on the right contained a mixture of herbs and flowers. But it was the row in the middle that Naruto was especially proud of.
"Is that… Aconite?" Hinata asked, sounding just as shocked as earlier.
"Yep!" Naruto nodded proudly, and walked over to the middle row. "I've also got nightshade, hemlock and a bunch of other poisonous plants! They're a real pain to grow, and I've actually had to section off some parts of the row with extra soil and treat each section differently so that they can all thrive, but it's worthwhile and a really fun challenge!"
Naruto watched as Hinata walked between the rows, taking in each and every one of the plants in the row of poisons. He saw her stop in front of one of the plants, a patch of bright blue flowers with long, thin petals and jagged thorns running along the stem.
"What's th-this one? I've never seen it before."
Naruto was momentarily worried that Hinata's finger would get too close and she might prick it on one of the thorns, but it seemed she had experience with poisonous plants and kept a safe distance.
"That one is my absolute pride and joy - it's a rare plant that has a few different names, but the one I like most is 'Sage's Mercy'. I can't buy seeds easily so I often watch merchants coming in and out of the village - especially plant traders who bring things in from other nations. There was this one guy who musn't have known very much about plants, because he was trying to sell Sage's Mercy on account of its beauty, not knowing about the plant's properties. So… I may have liberated it from him?" Naruto watched for Hinata's reaction, and was pleased that she didn't seem particularly offput by Naruto's admission of theft. "And it wasn't easy to figure out how to grow it, so I had to sneak into the library and see what I could find. I almost killed it a couple times, but managed to save it, and you've come just in time to see it flower!"
"What does it d-do?" Hinata asked, eyes shining with an element of curiosity.
Naruto grinned almost evilly as he answered the question. "There's a mild hypnotic poison in the thorns, but that's not the interesting part. If you crush up the leaves and mix them with warm water at the right temperature, you get a poison that can shut off the victim's access to their Tenketsu, much like your clan's Gentle Fist."
Hinata's eyes widened in understanding, and she took a small step back. "Th-that's… incredible. Aren't you worried growing something like this where it could be stolen?"
Naruto shrugged and shook his head. "Nah, as I said it's rare, and not many people recognise it. Even less people know about the petals, or how to mix the poison. Honestly, the only reason I know about it is because of a scroll on rare poisons I bought off some weird guy with long white hair who passed through town half a year ago. It was weird - I've never seen him before, but somehow he felt familiar… anyway, what did you want to talk about?"
Naruto walked over to the other half of the rooftop, where there were a few stools and a small table set up. He perched over one of the stools, never the type to sit normally. Hinata followed, and sat with her knees together and her hands resting neatly in her lap. Naruto didn't miss the way she subtly fidgeted with her fingers - clearly whatever Hinata wanted to say was important and not easy to talk about.
"D-do you think I can make it as a ninja? B-be strong like you?" Hinata asked, fumbling on her words a couple times and going a bit red in the face.
Naruto didn't need even a moment to think about his answer. "Of course you can, Hinata! With the right training and hard work, I think anyone can be if they play to their strengths right. But… why ask me?"
Hinata took in another deep breath. "Everyone looks d-down on you, but you never give up. You failed the academy exam and s-still became a genin. People in my clan t-told me I should give up on being a ninja, b-but—"
"Bullcrap!" Naruto shouted, unintentionally startling Hinata enough that she almost jumped out of her seat. "Sorry! But I've seen you spar in class, and you're probably one of the best of us! I think that if you can get over your nerves and focus on working hard, you'll be a kick-ass ninja who I'd trust to have my back. I know, do you wanna train together sometimes? My schedule might change now that I'm a genin, but I usually do a couple hours of training every morning at 5:30am, except for on weekends. I use Training Ground 43, since it's right next to the Forest of Death that everyone tries to avoid. Come any time you want!"
"Really?" Hinata looked up, once again with an expression of disbelief.
"Really!" Naruto nodded. "So, do you need to get back home? Or do you wanna help me harvest some of the vegetables?"