First Arc: III

"Team Seven… Haruno Sakura, Uzumaki Naruto, and Uchiha Sasuke!"

I slumped down in my seat with a muffled groan of relief. I'd done it. Five years - five fucking years - in the Naruto world and this was my greatest achievement: I had successfully avoided screwing up the formation of Team Seven. I was officially progressing with the start of the plot. Yippee kaiyai, I was going to die.

Dear fucking lord, I was on Team Seven at the start of the plot. I was going to die.

"Here," Chouji said, sympathetically passing me a mochi.

"I love mochi," I answered, and shoved the whole thing in my mouth before I could accidentally say anything else. How Chouji kept the ice cream inside from melting I had no idea, but he'd found out my weakness a year ago and now sprung them on me at random moments when I needed them most. If I hadn't stopped myself speaking I might have accidentally confessed that I loved Chouji too, and then Shikamaru would genuinely use his shadow to walk me into the river and leave me there.

"We can have mochi as a team, Sasuke-kun!" Sakura said in far too high-pitched a voice from a few rows in front of me.

On second thought, dying. What a lovely idea.

.

Much as I wanted to crash the newly formed Team Ten's lunch, I settled for flipping Shikamaru off and leaving them to it. Ino was with them, which meant Sakura would be without her usual partner and - knowing my luck - searching for her new teammates to eat with instead. Or searching for one of her new teammates.

In the spirit of teamwork and protecting my precious people, I hid behind one of the lesser used buildings and ate my lunch perched on a beaten up training post. Noodles, fish, tomato sauce; it wasn't Granny's famous tuna bolognese, but it was as close as I could get with the ingredients available to me. It was my comfort food, and I'm blaming it entirely for the fact that I didn't notice Naruto sneaking up until he was almost directly above me.

"Uzumaki," I said around a mouthful of tomato. "What the hell are you doing."

His face screwed up in an angry pout. "Bastard! What does Sakura-chan see in you, huh?"

"Fuck if I know. I think she just has bad taste."

"Don't insult Sakura-chan!" He finally dropped from his awkward crouch in the tree, swiping at me as he went past. I dodged, trying to both keep my noodles upright and avoid getting tangled in the thirty feet of rope that he pulled from god knows where, but apparently Naruto's complete disregard for proper nutrition trumped my attempts to protect my lunch. It went flying, he and I went sprawling, and though I avoided the worst of the rope it tangled unpleasantly tightly around my wrists.

"Why," I ground out, glaring as I started working my hands loose. He answered with a ram seal and a poof of chakra, transforming into an exact replica of me. Almost exact. I don't grin like that.

"Hah! If you won't tell me then I'll just ask her, then when she realises it's actually me and I beat you she'll - hey!"

I gave up on the last of the rope. My hands were free enough; I lunged upwards, kicking out at him and using an elbow to aim for where I knew his solar plexus was. That's the issue with henge; it's an illusion, it changes how you look, but the solid you underneath doesn't change. It makes for an easy way to throw off an opponent, unless of course they saw you change and are familiar enough with your actual body to -

I missed. What the fuck. What the fuck? My elbow skidded along his ribs, and he used my moment of lost balance to slam me back against the training post and pin down the knot holding my wrists in place.

"Sasuke-kun!" someone gasped, with perfectly horrendous timing because apparently the universe hated me.

"No," I said, glaring at Naruto and refusing to look.

"Sakura-chan!"

"No," I repeated, finally getting my hand out. I pinched his ear until he dropped both me and the henge with a pained whine and backed away from both of them, Naruto rubbing his ear and scowling at me, Sakura looking between the two of us and the post with her face suspiciously red.

You are twelve kindly desist from perving on me. On anyone. Urgh.

"I," I said with as much dignity as I could, "Am going to get more lunch."

"Oh, you can share mine, Sasuke-kun -"

"No."

...

Interlude: Kakashi and the Sandaime being nosy bastards and poking around Team Seven's various homes.

"It's a kitchen."

"I'm told he likes it here."

"In the kitchen."

"We all have our foibles, Kakashi. Besides, it's a nice kitchen - he's got a lovely view of the garden."

"The lock on this door says Mitsuo's porn stash, Himiko get your own."

"I believe he's been finding seals around the compound and copying them. A very Uchiha trait, to use something without understanding precisely what it does - perhaps a valuable lesson to learn from his sensei?"

"Lucky sensei. I'll send them a gift basket. Are these - these are ANBU gloves. He's made arm protectors out of ANBU gloves. Are these Itachi's?"

"Hm. Sasuke-kun has shown a remarkable resistance to letting go of the past. Uchiha and their obsessions… I would hate for such a promising young student to be lost with his ghosts."

"Someone should probably do something about that."

"Kakashi."

"Is that the time? I appear to be late for my hair appointment."

...

I didn't want to sit with my new team when we piled back into the classroom after lunch. Shikamaru and Ino had closed ranks around Chouji though, and even Shino was safely ensconced with Team Eight. Faced with a choice of Kiba's crudeness and Hinata's stuttering or Naruto's pouting and Sakura's fawning, I chose the option less likely to cause a fuss. I'd have to get used to Naruto and Sakura anyway, I reasoned. They were the two main characters. The heroes. They were good people.

"Did you find out why she likes me?" I muttered, sliding into the seat next to Naruto. He stuck his tongue out and pointedly ignored me.

Rude. It was an honest question. If I knew what I was doing that was so damn attractive I'd know how to stop.

"Listen up!" Iruka said from the front. "Your new senseis will be here to collect you. From there on you'll be with them, following their schedule and training and doing missions when they say. You need to come to the Hokage tower tomorrow to register as a team and get your photo taken. Any questions, ask your senseis!"

What followed was the expected roll call, teams being collected one by one and filing out in threes until there were only the three of us left. Sakura sat on the edge of her seat, all but vibrating from tenseness and darting glances between me and Iruka every now and then. Naruto, though he hid it better, was also battling nerves, with his shoulders hunched and his face in its customary pout. Even Iruka started fidgeting, tapping his fingers on his desk and staring at the door with a moue of distaste.

I wondered if it was for show. He was a chunin; surely he could wait silently if he wanted to? Maybe he was used to being expressive because he worked with kids. Maybe he was just that open a person, and that's why he spent more time in the village and not on missions.

Me, I settled myself as comfortably as I could on the chair, and dropped my head in my arms to doze. I'd thought about bringing a book, but the current one I was reading was a collection of love poetry from a field of lilies to the waxing moon - I don't know, I found it, the pictures were pretty. I didn't particularly want to bring it out in front of my team though.

So. Dozing. Verging dangerously close to napping, but managing to avoid it. Iruka left after about an hour, with much apologising and assurances that our sensei wouldn't be too much longer (lies; he knew exactly who we'd been assigned to). Sakura tried to strike up a conversation when he'd gone, but I avoided that with the spectacular technique of not answering.

Another hour, and Naruto balanced a chalkboard eraser on the door frame.

"Naruto! Take it down, what if it falls on our sensei!"

"They're a pretty shit sensei then if they fall for a trick like that!"

"Don't swear!"

"The bastard swears all the time!"

Yes, the exclamation marks after every sentence are accurate. I know. I hate it too.

"Sasuke-kun, tell him not to prank sensei!"

"Oh hell no," I baulked. "I'm not being the one in charge of this train wreck."

"Yeah, yeah Sakura-chan, I'm going to be the hokage so I should -"

"Haruno can be," I cut in. One day, Naruto would be a very competent and inspiring leader. That day was not this day. He was annoying enough as he was.

That did feel a tad too harsh to say though when both of them screeched to a dumbfounded silence and stared at me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and fished for a better explanation. "She's the smartest in our year," I settled for, waving an awkward hand in her direction. "Smart people make good decisions."

"You… think I'm smart?" she asked in a small voice. I resisted the urge to frown and shrink away. Those looked like feelings.

"Hn," I said, then flushed with mortification at the fact that I'd just hnned, and deliberately buried my face in my arms for concentrated dozing time. Thank kami I was too pale to flush properly. And the light was wrong. They hadn't seen anything. Nope.

Although, it would actually explain a lot if canon-Sasuke's trademark reticence and grunting was, in fact, supreme social awkwardness rather than arrogant superiority. I wasn't an exact copy of the guy but I had the same first seven years, so I wasn't that far off.

I mean, I had his memories of his first seven years. Minus the baby memories, no one keeps those. I felt like I was him. Don't get me wrong, I still remembered seeing him skip off into the big empty greyness beyond Itachi's Tsukuyomi, but I also remembered being him, Itachi's baby brother in the flesh, and I still missed my Sasuke-mum as much as - if not more than - my first mum.

Neither of them came close to my grandma though.

Sakura took a breath. "Naruto," she said hesitantly, and I could feel her glancing my way for approval. I kept very still and ignored them both. "As the team leader, I think you should… not prank our sensei? So we, um, make a good impression?"

"Boring," Naruto complained. "I still think it wouldn't get them if they were any good."

I wasn't actually sure about that. Hadn't Kakashi fallen for it? It was a long time since I'd seen the anime - and I'd never read the manga - but certain things stuck in the mind. He could've been faking, but on the other hand the eraser was non-lethal, made no use of chakra or seals that could be detected, and even the smell of chalk wouldn't register as anything unusual. It's entirely possible that the trap hit that perfect sweet spot of being simple enough to go unnoticed while still being effective enough to do what it needed to.

If you laced the chalk with an odourless contact poison…

"There," Naruto said. "I put it back. Happy?"

"Not really," a new and surprisingly deep voice drawled. I tilted my head to the side so I could look. "My first impression… I don't like you. Meet me on the roof."

He vanished in a cloud of smoke before I could see more than a mass of grey hair and baggy clothes, but it was enough to confirm that that was, indeed, Hatake Kakashi. Sensei extraordinaire, future hokage, Sharingan no Kakashi, and possessing of even worse hair than I had.

Seriously. I'd like to say it was just unbrushed, but I used to have curly hair in my old life. I recognised the floofed up look of not enough conditioner and too many split ends. Frizz gone wild. That there needed a wide toothed comb and a hair mask stat, and if I had to guess at what it actually got then I'd put my money on a dog brush and a complete lack of product.

"Should we go?" Sakura asked, twitching nervously towards the door. I raised an eyebrow when she looked at me for confirmation, and she shook herself. "I'm smart," she mumbled. "Team captain." Then, louder, "We should go."

"C'mon, bastard! You'll make us late!"

"It's Kakashi," I grumbled, levering myself out of my seat and joining them. "He likes late."

.

"All right," Kakashi said, when the three of us were sat cross legged on the roof. "Introductions. Go."

Naruto and Sakura exchanged glances, then Naruto shrugged comically and folded his arms behind his head, squinting at Kakashi in suspicion. "Um," Sakura started. "Introduce ourselves how, Sensei?"

"Likes, dislikes, hobbies, dreams," he drawled. "That sort of thing. Blondie, you go first."

"Hey hey, what about you, Sensei? We don't even know your name!"

"Maa, that's true, isn't it," Kakashi said, scratching at the mask over his chin. It looked weird in real life. It had looked pretty weird when it was fictional as well, but in real life it was fitted tight over his nose and mouth as though it were made from a thick spandex. No creases, no sign of where it was tied, no air holes or breathing tubes - how the hell did it not bother him? It made me uncomfortably aware of my lungs just looking at it, I can't imagine what it would be like to actually wear.

"I'm Hatake Kakashi. Things I like and things I hate… I don't feel like telling you that. My dreams for the future? Never really thought about it. As for my hobbies… I have lots of hobbies."

He eye smiled. Beneath the mask, I could just make out the edges of his lips, and I can confirm that they didn't move. It should have been creepy, but it was actually really impressive how happy he made his one eye look.

"What was that?" Naruto demanded, pointing aggressively. Sakura twitched at his lack of manners. "We didn't learn anything except your name! That's not how you introduce yourself!" He huffed, putting his hands on his hips - oh, at some point he'd leapt to a standing position. I wasn't sure why, it was probably better for inspirational speeches. "I'm Uzumaki Naruto! I like instant ramen, and I really like the ramen Iruka-sensei got me at Ichiraku's, but I hate the three minutes you have to wait after you pour the water in the ramen. My hobby is eating different kinds of ramen and comparing them, and my future dream is to be the greatest Hokage! Then the whole village will stop disrespecting me and start treating me like I'm somebody important, believe it!"

There was a pause after his enthusiastic shouting. I'd known, roughly, what he was going to say, but I honestly hadn't been expecting that. That was… a lot of words. And volume. Did he really just come out and say it about the whole village disrespecting him? Wow. This was not a subtle person.

Which was odd, given that he wore neon orange and regularly evaded patrols while he was out pranking.

Kakashi tilted his head, the very picture of unconcerned boredom. Forget ninja techniques, I wanted this man to teach me his acting secrets. "Huh. Pinky, your turn."

She blushed, but sat up straighter. "I'm Haruno Sakura. What I like is… I mean the person I like is…" She blushed harder, and, naturally, looked at me. I pictured myself as stone and tried not to react. Naruto glared. The whole thing was so damn unfair. "My hobby is… My dream for the future is…" Save me. That was a genuine squeal. Help.

"And," Kakashi prompted when she trailed off into giggly fantasy land. I mean, her giggly fantasy land probably had a lot more in the way of weddings and holding hands than anything else, but still. Still. I was being objectified and I didn't like it. "What do you hate?"

She opened her mouth, cut a sideways look at Naruto, and changed what she was about to say. "People who are disrespectful! And loud! And gross!"

"Yeah!" Naruto cheered, completely missing the point. "Bastard, do you!"

"I'm Uchiha Sasuke," I said, then realised that oh shit, I'd actually have to do this introduction. What had canon-Sasuke said? Something about Itachi? Well that was out. Um. "I like shuriken. I dislike fish. My hobbies are…" Think, think, what did I do besides read poetry books and train, think. "Plants? And my dream is -" eyeballs! No, fuck "- to be tall."

"To be tall," Kakashi repeated.

I could, potentially, have chosen a better dream, but I'd said it now. "Hn." It wasn't even untrue. Being tall meant surviving. Being tall also meant getting over the stupid bout of malnutrition I'd given myself in my first year living alone. It turns out that the diet of a twenty something girl with a pretty sedentary lifestyle is really not enough for a seven year old, chakra using, highly active proto-ninja with a lot of growing to do. I'd upped the calories now, but I was still frustratingly short and twig-like.

I was pretty sure canon-Sasuke was taller than Naruto though. I had faith in my genes. I'd get there.

"Well, now we all know each other," Kakashi said, and eye smiled insincerely at us again.

"We get to go on missions! Sensei, Sensei what's our first mission? Are we saving a princess, finding some long lost treasure, do we fight bandits -"

"Do you ever shut up?" I grumbled under my breath. There are fics - many fics - where Naruto is surprisingly mature, or where the self inserted character says something profoundly wise and everyone gets along and it's all lovely and grown up and everyone is sensible and it's all grand. Why, please, was this not one of those fics.

"Think of it as a survival mission," Kakashi started explaining ominously, and I tuned him out. Bell test, don't eat, two thirds failure rate, yadda yadda. Unless he'd changed something - which I doubted, I was pretty sure I'd matched canon so far - I already knew the drill.

But should I change something? Things would be different, just because I couldn't remember how they were meant to go. Not to mention the whole problem of Orochimaru and canon-Sasuke's merry jaunt around the continent being a missing nin. I had no plans to do any of that. But… what did I have plans to do? I'd made it to the start of canon; that had been my biggest worry so far. Now that I was here, I had a plot - and with it, some plot armour. I knew that Danzo wouldn't make a move on me, I knew that no one was going to try to take my sharingan except for Orochimaru. If they had done, it would've been in the story.

"Training ground three," Kakashi said. "Five tomorrow morning. Don't eat breakfast beforehand - you'll just throw it up." He cackled in a way that I distractedly decided I'd learn how to copy, and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Should I try to solve the big problems before they became big problems? Akatsuki, mainly. Gaara, he was a major plotline. Obito. The fact that everyone still thought Itachi was bad when he wasn't. But realistically, I was a piddly little nothing-person. I had a kekkei genkai I couldn't use, a good grasp of the academy basics, and some vague foreknowledge that I had no way of explaining how I'd got. I'd be better off supporting Naruto and Sakura and waiting for them to fix it like they did in the original.

So… team? I should focus on making Team Seven as strong together as we could be?

"Um," Sakura said, looking between the two of us. "Should we… Would you like to have a team dinner, Sasuke-kun? We can go to Yakiniku if you don't like fish."

I made a face. Barbeque and I, we were not best friends. "I like fish. Just not when they're alive."

"We could have ramen!"

"Or there's sushi, if you prefer?"

They both turned to me and I sat back reflexively. "I have food at home," I said before I'd thought through the answer. Because, you know, I'd literally just decided that my goal should be strengthening the team, so the first thing I did was refuse an option to strengthen the team. Sakura's face fell. "Sorry," I blurted. "See you tomorrow."

And then I most definitely did not run away. I sauntered. Casually. Completely in control of myself and my life. Behind me, I heard Naruto offering to take Sakura to Ichiraku's anyway and introduce her to old man Teuchi, quickly followed by Sakura turning him down.

Great, now I felt like a dick as well as an idiot. I sauntered faster.

"Plushie-tan," I said, letting myself in the kitchen door and kicking my sandals off haphazardly. "I hate this. I can't do this. How am I supposed to - they're twelve! And annoying! And they keep having feelings everywhere, what do I do with that?" I pulled open the drawer harder than I meant to and grabbed the first pair of socks that fell out. It was fine. The sideboard was probably a few hundred years old and priceless, no one cared if it had a broken drawer.

"I can't be responsible for other people," I complained, roughly pulling off my old socks and replacing them with clean ones. Ninja sandals, while very practical, were very open at the toe. I'm not walking all that outside into my kitchen and over where I sleep, no sir. Yuck. "Why can't they manage with just the two of them like they did before?"

I froze. Actually, that was a fair point. Why couldn't they? With the added bonus of not spending so much time worrying about hunting me down as they had done for canon-Sasuke. It was perfect. The world would get saved, I wouldn't be caught up in it and risk dying in the process, Sakura would start crushing on someone sensible, and Naruto wouldn't be so hung up on a best friend rival that literally tried to kill him multiple times over.

And I would… Could I take a desk job? No, probably not. We'd be back to Danzo and his views on the sharingan bloodline going to waste. As unfairly pretty as the Uchiha genes were, I wasn't built to be a mother. Father.

Fucking gender bullshit.

No, my best protection was still to become as strong as it was humanly possible to be so that I could keep people away from my eyes without relying on anyone else to do it for me. If I couldn't trust the village to keep me safe - it hadn't kept any of my family safe, and it did a shit job of keeping other people out of danger either - then who could I trust? Who did I have who would always put me first and bring the wrath of Amaterasu down on anyone trying to de-sharingan me?

Oh.

"Aniki," I whispered, looking at the weasel plushie on my bed. I felt behind me for my stool and leant back onto it with wide eyes.

It was just… so obvious.

Itachi was loyal to Konoha. That meant, it had to mean, that what he was doing in Akatsuki - that he was in some way helping Naruto. Was he a spy? Probably. Maybe he sabotaged things. If I joined him, if I helped him, then that would be me supporting the plot, right? Plus, he was ridiculously strong. He'd been an ANBU captain when he was eleven! Twelve. Twelve? He'd never actually told me that he got promoted, I knew about his ANBU role from the things I'd found in his room and from canon foreknowledge. The same foreknowledge told me he was stronger than Kakashi, had a better grasp of using the sharingan, and was going to die at some point - I couldn't remember how, I just knew he didn't make it to the end.

So: clearly I had to save him. No one else would. And while I was doing so, I could help him save Konoha, and by extension Naruto and the world, and he could save me from Orochimaru and Danzo and every other creepy old man that wanted a piece of me.

I didn't actually know for sure if Danzo did or not, but he clearly had a thing for eyes, so. Better safe than sorry.

"Ok," I said, nodding to myself. "Ok. Plushie-tan, we have a plan." Itachi appeared… after the chunin exams. Naruto pulled on the kyuubi's power to defeat Gaara, rumours started, Itachi and Kisame came to check them out. Kakashi got sharinganed, Naruto almost got kidnapped until Itachi stalled enough for Jiraiya to save him, Sasuke and Itachi had their first major showdown of the anime. I couldn't have asked for a better set up.

All I had to do was survive on Team Seven until then, getting in as much training and growing as strong as possible so I wouldn't be a burden on Itachi when I defected from Konoha and joined him. It was perfect. Flawless. Genius plan. Yes.