AN EDIT: WELP, NEVER MIND. The masses have spoken, and buff manly names it is for Naruto's band of yandere honeys. Please enjoy your regularly scheduled interlude, and ignore this if you didn't see the first version of this chapter. Sorry for the confusion.
It was a rough time, being Haruno Sakura.
It hadn't always been that way. She hadn't had a troubled upbringing. Aside from a short stint of bullying, which her best friend Ino had saved her from soon after it began, Sakura's troubles had started and ended at getting good grades for as long as she could remember. Her parents were alive and well, and loved her very much. She had friends inside and outside of the shinobi forces, and even the attention of a few boys. Indeed, Sakura had one of the best lives a burgeoning kunoichi could ask for.
Then she graduated. Things had been going downhill ever since.
She'd been looking forward to her genin cell for years. Her parents, both low-ranking shinobi, had filled her head with tales of their genin cells and the bonds they'd forged with their teammates. To hear them tell it, your genin cell was your family, handpicked by the Hokage himself to best compliment your strengths and weaknesses.
Sakura wanted that. She craved that closeness, that bond that went beyond friendship, beyond family. She wanted a team like the legendary InoShikaCho cell, the one that had single handedly united the Yamanaka, the Nara, and the Akimichi as friends. She wanted it bad.
When the time for team assignments had come, she could barely sit still in her seat from excitement. The potential combinations, the sheer possibility of it all, had kept her up through the entirety of the previous night. To think, in the next few moments she'd know who her second family would be, who she'd be sharing the rest of her life's joys and sorrows with.
It was staggering.
When Iruka had called out her name first for Team 7, she'd almost fallen out of her chair. Who was it going to be? Ino? Did she want it to be Ino? Would that be a waste? Would it be better to forge that special bond with someone new? Who was it going to be?
Uchiha Sasuke. Rookie of the Year. The coolest beauty the Academy had to offer.
Sakura was over the moon. She'd been trying for years to break through the chilly facade that the Academy's up and comer walled everyone out with, to no avail. But now! Now they were family. Sisters in arms, the two most talented kunoichi of their class. Away from the suffocating atmosphere of the Academy, away from all the boys who tripped over themselves trying to impress her every day, she just knew Sasuke would open up.
She'd wanted to be her friend for so long, and had looked up to her for even longer. It almost didn't matter who their third teammate was. She'd be happy with her team one way or-
Uzumaki Naruto. Dead last. The loudest idiot the Academy had to offer.
She was disappointed. She wouldn't lie. If she could have chosen anyone else in their class to fill that third spot, she'd have done so right then and there. It was harsh, and maybe a little cruel to think of another human being so poorly, but she wanted a family. She wanted friendship, bonds, a deeper understanding than she'd ever experienced with another person.
She didn't want romance. There were few enough boys in the Academy that interested her that way, and Naruto was not one of them. He was loud, obnoxious, and as stupid as they came. A fool, through and through.
If that was all, maybe it would be okay. Her parents had never said that their teammates were perfect, or even that they'd liked them right from the start. Quite the contrary. If Naruto was just a fool, Sakura could look past that. But he wasn't just that. He was also obsessed with her.
She felt cheated. Naruto hadn't even passed the test, and yet here he was, ruining the dynamic of her new family with his sheer presence. It made Team 7 a mixed blessing at best.
Or so she'd thought. God, she'd been so stupid.
Their genin test, the real one, had been the first sign that things were not what she'd thought them to be. Their sensei - another disappointment, showing up late and putting minimal effort into his introduction - had showed them their objective, the two bells, and told them that one of them would have to fail. Right then, she'd made her choice.
Sakura chose Sasuke. Sasuke chose Naruto. Naruto chose them both.
Seeing the dead last flood the training grounds with corporeal, free thinking clones had thrown her apparent knowledge of his skills into question, right from the start. Seeing him coordinate with them, moving with speed and intensity that he'd never shown before, only cemented the notion in Sakura's mind. At the end of the day, though, a jonin was a jonin. No matter how skilled he'd suddenly become, Naruto couldn't take their sensei head on. Not alone.
So Sakura had turned to Sasuke, offered her hand. And that should have been it. That should have been the start, the beginning of the most beautiful friendship Sakura had experienced to date.
But Sasuke had refused. Spit on her offer. Spit on her friendship, and thrown herself in with Naruto.
They'd failed, and Sakura had been tied to a training post as punishment while her teammates ate lunch. She hadn't eaten breakfast, couldn't have eaten breakfast. Sensei had told her not to. So she hung and watched, aching and hungry, while they ate without her.
It wasn't what she wanted. It wasn't what she'd been dreaming of for so very long. They were supposed to be family. Family didn't sit by and eat while family went hungry. Why did Sasuke look so smug? Like this was retribution, like Sakura had done something to deserve this. What had she ever done to her? What-
Naruto poked her, right in the sensitive juncture above her right hip and below her ribs. She yelped, whipped around on him, ready to lash out with every ounce of frustration and disappointment that had been building in her since she'd been assigned to this team.
He offered her a fishcake.
As it turned out, that was their team's dynamic in a nutshell.
Neither of her teammates were anything like she'd expected. She'd been right in thinking that Sasuke would open up outside of the Academy, but that was all she'd been right in. Seeing Sasuke for who she really was didn't make befriending her any easier. It was the opposite. The girl that emerged from the impassive shell of the last Uchiha was far more poisonous, and far colder than she ever could have imagined.
Except when Naruto was involved. Whenever the dead last was around, talking and laughing and smiling like the sun, Sasuke melted. Sakura hadn't believed it the first time she noticed the shift in demeanor, the tenderness in her expression as she watched the boy of their team try to beat Kakashi in a one-armed tree climbing contest. She hadn't believed it the second time either. But after a certain point, she'd been forced to accept it. Sasuke preferred Naruto over her, by a wide margin.
It was depressing. She cried herself to sleep the night she finally admitted it to herself, and stayed home feeling sorry for herself the next day. Or rather, she would have if a certain fool hadn't come barging through her window at half past noon.
And that was the supreme irony of it all. Sasuke had shed her Academy persona and turned out to be a girl Sakura couldn't even call a friendly acquaintance, let alone family. Naruto had done the same, shed his own facade, and turned out to be...
More.
She hadn't trusted it at first. The friendly smiles, the spirited encouragements, the simple kindness of him. It was all so platonic. It was everything she wanted, but it wasn't Naruto. She couldn't do anything with Naruto without it turning into some desperate attempt at romance. She knew this. She'd learned. Naruto was never nice for the sake of being nice.
Except he was. She'd spent weeks waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for anything, really. But it never came. As far as she could tell, he just liked her.
It made her smile. It made her feel warm inside to see his eyes light up when she saw her. When it was just the two of them and their sensei, Sakura felt like she could have that genin cell her parents promised her. If only she put in a little effort to be better to Naruto, she could grasp it.
But that was the problem. It was hardly ever just them.
And as she watched Sasuke leap into his arms and seal their lips together amidst a field of lava and corpses, she realized it might never be again.
"Sakura?"
"Ah!" She jumped, eyes fluttering against the exhaustion weighing them down. It had been a few days since she'd had a decent night's sleep, and not just because of the memory of her teammates embracing one another so tenderly while she watched. On the outside. Alone.
"You don't have to keep watching them," Kakashi said, tapping her with his book. "Your sensei can do some things himself, you know?" Sakura hesitated, glancing back at her teammates.
They'd fallen asleep as soon as the fight was over. Just collapsed to the ground, Sasuke sprawled across Naruto's chest, happy as could be. It had been two days since then.
As if that wasn't bad enough, they couldn't even get to them. The boy from Suna, the terrifying killer that had dragged Naruto down into the caverns and almost stopped her heart in the process, wouldn't let them go. Sakura had sprinted to them, past the lava, past the corpses and the unconscious monster that Naruto had trapped with mokuton - how could he use mokuton? - and then the boy had grabbed her.
She'd been wrapped up by fingers of sand thicker around than her waist and hurled clear across the field. If Kakashi hadn't caught her in midair, she didn't know how far she'd have flown.
Kakashi had asked the psychopath to let their teammates go, so that they might care for them. His response?
"You are not his best friends."
She could have screamed.
So here they were, taking a short break from their trek back to Konoha for water and rations. Team 7, the chunin and his client, and the monster from Suna. Sakura wasn't sure who she wanted to strangle first. Or harder.
"I know, sensei," she finally said, slumping in defeat. All the same, her eyes remained glued to Naruto's sleeping form, obscured as it was by the sand and Sasuke. "It's just... They've been asleep for so long, and he won't let us help them-"
"I gave them water."
Shut up shut up shut up I will end you. She glared murder at Naruto's self-proclaimed best friend, crushing her unappetizing rations bar to an even more unappetizing paste. He stared back at her, unfazed.
Kakashi rubbed her shoulder in soothing little circles until she let the rations paste go. He handed her another one, unwrapped. "Chakra exhaustion always hits the hardest your first time," he explained in patient tones. "I wouldn't be surprised if they slept for another day or two, with what they were throwing around at the end, there."
"He isn't chakra exhausted."
Kakashi tilted his head, playful brown eye going flat as he turned it on the boy from Suna. He'd allowed the foreign nin to tag along. If Sakura had to guess, mostly because his sand was so horrifically fast and strong, and currently wrapped around two members of their team. But that didn't mean he had any more affection for the boy than she did.
"What makes you think that?"
The boy frowned, glancing down at the entwined genin in front of him. "When we fought, I felt a portion of his strength. It was incomprehensible. Greater than mother's, and then some. And there was more of it, locked away, that he had no use for."
He shrugged, taking a bite out of his own rations. "Chakra exhaustion implies a limit to one's strength. I don't know that he has one."
Was she dreaming? Was this entire mission some elaborate prank? How could he be talking about Naruto, and how could she be almost believing him? Had someone pitched this scenario to her on graduation day and told her it would be her reality in the span of a month, she'd have laughed in their face. It was just so baffling.
Sasuke shifted in her sleep, burying her face in the crook of Naruto's neck.
All of it.
Naruto twitched, raising a hand and brushing ineffectually at his affectionate hanger on. He moved a few locks of her hair away from his neck, hand drifting down to slap her lightly in the face when that didn't move her. Sakura giggled, shoving a bite of rations into her mouth to cover up her smile.
Then Sasuke's brow furrowed, and she caught one of his fingers in her mouth, stopping the slaps short.
All of it.
"Young lady," their client said, perpetually nervous since the events that had put her teammates under. "Are you, ah, quite alright?"
She turned, and he quailed at the look she gave him. She swallowed her 'food' and opened her mouth to give him the most transparent reassurance of her life, and then she heard Naruto groan.
"Naru-!" she cried, only to be stopped short by her sensei's arm between herself and her teamates. Kakashi held a finger up to his face mask, pointing to the psychotic nin from Suna. Sakura fell silent.
The boy was trembling. His eyes were wide as he watched her teammate, her friend, claw his way back to the waking world. And as Sakura watched, his eyes began to shift and warp, pupils breaking down and reforming into four-pointed stars. Different from the ones she'd seen in Sasuke's eyes, but no less monstrous. The green in them faded, a poisonous yellow bleeding in and taking their place.
He raised a shaking hand, fingers half-clenched, towards the sleeping genin. The sands enveloping them stilled for the first time in two days, and Sakura's heart kicked right over a beat. Kakashi remained as still as the sands, ready to move.
Naruto cracked an eye open.
"Fuckin' senjutsu hangovers," he muttered. Deep blue irises swiveled, taking in his surroundings. He paused when he caught sight of her, and that same warmth gripped her as he did his best to smile. He stopped at Gaara, taking in his monstrous eyes and the tension in his body.
"Don't give me that look, Gaara."
The boy, Gaara, gasped like he'd been thrown into Snow Country's frozen sea. His fingers flew apart, and with them went the sand, scattering from Sakura's teammates in thousands of harmless grains. Kakashi disappeared from her side and appeared between Naruto and Gaara in a crouch.
"Hey, Kakashi."
"Naruto."
"You've got some questions for us, huh?"
"I do."
"Great." Naruto grimaced, attempting to sit up. When that didn't work, he looked down, finally noticing Sasuke on his chest. Sasuke, on his chest, languidly sucking on his index finger. He blinked. "Could have sworn she stopped doing that."
She was going to have a stroke. Sakura was thirteen years old, and she was going to have a stroke.
"Need some help?" Kakashi asked, already reaching down and gripping Sasuke under her arms. Naruto jerked up.
"Wait don't-"
Kakashi yanked his hands back, just in time to avoid the unconscious girl's blind stab. Naruto sighed, relieved.
"Yeah, don't do that." He folded Sasuke's hand into his own, running his thumb in a little spiral along her palm until her grip on the kunai loosened enough for him to take it. "She doesn't like getting woken up."
"You can't just lay there!" Sakura blurted. "We- we'll be moving soon, so you need to get up." Up and away from her.
"I will carry them," Gaara declared, but Naruto waved him off.
"Nah, I can do it. Maybe." He wrapped his arms around his hanger on and formed a cross with both hands. "Let's see if this still works."
A clone appeared standing beside them in a burst of smoke, already running through hand seals of its own. "On three, boss," it said. Naruto nodded gravely. "One, two-" Both versions of her teammates flickered, vanishing in a cloud of chakra smoke. Body replacement.
"Three!"
Sasuke stabbed him in the eye.
The clone yelped and dispersed with an echoing pop, and Sasuke fell the remaining half a foot to the ground. Her eyes snapped open, black and bleary, and trained themselves on the original.
"Ow, god!" Naruto, meanwhile, doubled over and clutched his eye. Phantom pain? "Why is it always the eyes with you? Every damn-"
He stumbled forward as Sasuke deposited herself on his back, wrapping her arms around his neck and setting her chin on his shoulder. He grumbled and propped her up, hands settling comfortably beneath her thighs. She smirked, dark eyes hooded.
"I don't trust your clones," she told him.
"Come on! That was years ago. Clone on the left apologized, didn't he?"
Sasuke cocked an eyebrow. "Did he? Was that him?"
He scowled. "Look, it doesn't matter which clone it was. It was a clone, and they apologized."
"Hn." She smiled faintly, eyes drifting shut, and kissed his neck.
"Guys," Sakura hissed. The client was watching, and so was the chunin tagalong. And Gaara. And her. The only one pointedly not watching them was Kakashi.
Naruto tilted his head. "What's up, Sakura?"
"You can't-" She stopped herself. Breathed. Tried again. "I don't know what's going on between you two, and it's none of my business either way-" The words tasted like bile and felt like failing a test. "-but you can't just do that while we're on a mission!"
Naruto had the grace to look sheepish, but Sasuke just hummed and kissed his neck again.
"Why not?"
Why not? Why not? "It's not professional! This is our job, and he's our teammate! You can't just be- be-" All over him! With him! Together.
"Sakura," Sasuke murmured. "I am being professional. As soon as we get back to Konoha, I'm going to do things to our teammate that you couldn't find in the most depraved volume of Hatake's books. Unspeakable things, Sakura. This is nothing."
This was a prank. This was all a horrible, horrible prank, and they were all going to the Shinigami's stomach for it.
"Sasuke, stop," Naruto ordered. "Be a little considerate. She's thirteen."
We're all thirteen!
"Fine. She can sit in the corner and watch."
This bitch.
It was a good time, being Hatake Kakashi.
It hadn't always been that way. He'd endured more than his fair share of trials in life, even for a shinobi of his renown with his list of battles fought and won. He'd trudged through the crucibles of the Third Great Shinobi War, the deaths of Team 7 - his family, in the wake of his father's inglorious suicide - and the years upon bloody years of service in ANBU. Every one had changed him, and not quite for the better. Yet here he was. At the end of the road, with warmth in his breast and a smile on his lips.
Kakashi had always wanted a Team 7 to call his own.
His coworkers had never believed him, of course. How could you ever be a jounin sensei, they asked. You've been on the fast track your whole life, taking on solo missions that a full platoon of sane ANBU wouldn't touch with a ten foot bo staff since you were a preteen, they said. You don't even like kids, they insisted.
In the face of all that well-reasoned opposition, there was really only one thing for him to do. Go out and request a team from the Academy's next graduating class. Kakashi was fairly sure he'd taken more time off of Asuma's life than all his cigarettes combined when he'd told him.
They failed miserably. Kakashi had been so insulted by their performance that he'd retroactively changed them from Team 7 to Team 6.5 in his notice of rejection, because they didn't deserve to share that moniker with history's greatest genin cells. Even if it was only for a day. Especially if it was only for a day.
The Hokage hadn't been amused, but had approved the name change along with the rejection. He'd had his own Team 7 once, after all. He understood the feeling.
His coworkers pointed to the incident the next time he brought up his desire for a genin cell. How can you be a sensei when you failed a dream team like that, they asked. You got the Rookie of the Year and the two runners up, they said. You've gotten so used to dealing with elite shinobi, you probably wouldn't even be able to tolerate a team of veteran chuunin, they insisted.
So Kakashi tried again. They were so much worse that he didn't even bother changing their moniker to a number. He dubbed them Team Losers and accepted the next available suicide mission to blow off some steam.
The Hokage didn't comment on the name change after reading Kakashi's report. They really had been that awful.
He kept trying. Kakashi was nothing if not persistent, and it wasn't like he was beyond his prime - or even in it yet, really. He had time. He could wait for his Team 7 to show themselves.
His coworkers said he was being unreasonable. They said his standards were too unreasonable. He knew it wasn't true, though. He was a simple shinobi with simple tastes.
All he wanted was a team that would change the world. The next generation's movers and shakers, the three shinobi and kunoichi that would break the world as Kakashi knew it down and mold it like putty in their hands. Reshape it, rebuild it, into something beyond anything Kakashi's generation could ever imagine. He wanted the legends.
That's ridiculous, his coworkers said. The world's lucky to get a single shinobi like that once in a given generation, let alone three. To get all three in the same graduating year, in the same village, in the same team? Get the fuck out of my face, Kakashi, they said.
Then it happened. That fateful day, a month ago, it happened.
He hadn't had high hopes, going into it. The Hokage had insisted, as one past member of Team 7 to another, that this group of kids was the real deal. He'd told Kakashi that this was the closest he was ever going to get to the genin cell of his dreams. But still, he'd been skeptical.
How wrong he'd been. The second he'd started the bell test, he'd seen it. He'd seen the potential in them, the same potential Minato-sensei had seen in his team. The same potential Jiraiya-sama, the Hokage, and the Nidaime had all seen in their own teams. The potential to change the world.
Naruto and Sasuke fought like shinobi and kunoichi far beyond their years. They fought like heroes and demons forged in the same flames that had melted Kakashi down and reshaped him into the man he was today. Like true veterans of war. They fought at the very limits of their capabilities, pushing themselves to the brinks of their capacities from the very first second. They had no need to pace themselves, and certainly no desire for it.
They fought hard, fast, and clumsy in the best possible way. Like they were already full grown, already legends, trapped in the bodies of Academy graduates. Like they were mad about it, and they wanted out.
Kakashi adopted them into Team 7 the second he saw them move.
Sakura was a harder sell. Where her teammates exploded off the page, proving the Academy reports on both of them to be false from second one, Sakura had hesitated. It was clear that Naruto and Sasuke's performance surprised her just as much as it did Kakashi, but while he immediately took it in stride, she never quite recovered from it. Kakashi ended up tying her to the log.
At the end of the day, though, he'd accepted her into Team 7's fold all the same. She was a hard sell, but Kakashi had always been skilled at looking underneath the underneath. She'd get there.
The only flaw in his shiny new team was their dynamic with one another. Kakashi was no social butterfly, something his coworkers could all attest to, but even he knew a dysfunctional set of personalities when he saw them.
From the way she acted, Sakura seemed to have spent her years in the Academy with the talentless idiot and withdrawn prodigy that their records described Naruto and Sasuke as, and not with the people that they'd actually turned out to be. She acted like she was walking on eggshells around Naruto, and one wrong step could shatter the boy's friendly demeanor irreparably. She'd treated Sasuke like some long lost sister at first, doing her best to spend time with her at their third teammate's expense, but as time went on she seemed to be drifting away from the icy Uchiha girl, drawn to the flame that was the Uzumaki of the team. Becoming resentful of Sasuke's bite.
From the way Sasuke acted, you'd think Sakura had been the one to slaughter her family and not her older brother. Kakashi hadn't seen a girl with such contempt for another human being since he'd killed that noble's newly-wed son mid-coitus with his wife. He imagined it would have been quite unsettling if the Uchiha girl in question didn't look so darn cute trying to flay Sakura with her eyes. As for Naruto... well. It hadn't clicked until he'd taken them to the Valley of the End and told the story of its creation, but her treatment of him was rather historically familiar.
As it turned out, the fool with no friends turned out to be the glue that held the whole mess together, if only just. Naruto treated Team 7 like he'd known them all his whole life, and loved them for just as long. The depth of his affection was frankly a little off-putting, and had inspired more than a few Obito-related nightmares since his induction into the team. Still, Kakashi wouldn't trade him for the world, and as time went on, his other two cute little students were beginning to realize that they wouldn't, either.
He had to admit. There was something intensely cathartic in watching sensei's son heal Team 7 of its many angsts and traumas, just like his father had done for Kakashi's own cell so many years ago.
Yes, Kakashi couldn't be happier with his Team 7. He wanted them to go the distance, and knew with the right guidance that they would. Which was why he here, now, standing outside of the tent Naruto and Sasuke had decided to share on the trip back to Konoha. Because things had happened, and as their sensei, he needed to talk to them about it.
He was tolerant of a lot of things, but students keeping secrets from their sensei was not one of them.
"I'm coming in," he called, shifting the tent's flap aside and ducking in.
He found Naruto sitting cross-legged in the middle of the small shelter, hair hanging free over his eyes while he polished his headband. Sasuke was resting on her knees behind him, arms wrapped loosely around his waist while she whispered sweet nothings in his ear.
Oh my. Maybe not-so-sweet nothings. If he had any shame, his cheeks sure would be burning right now.
But he didn't. "Icha Icha is more depraved than that, you know."
Sasuke blinked, slowly looking up at him. Then down at Naruto. "Really?"
Naruto hummed in agreement. "You read the child-friendly issues, for the brats that are technically adult shinobi, but not really. Those are just the tip of the perverted iceberg." Sasuke frowned, considering this.
"Right." She clenched her fists, a schoolgirl's determined glint in her eyes. "I'll try harder."
"I wish you wouldn't," he said. Then, to Kakashi, "It's time to talk, huh?"
He nodded, sitting himself down and letting the tent's flap close behind him. "Sasuke promised me a few answers the other day, and I'm sure you've got some things you'd like to tell me yourself." He phrased it as a suggestion, but Naruto saw underneath the pleasant underneath of his tone and sighed, nodding.
Another thing he liked about these two. They ran with his bullshit. Most jounin he knew couldn't do that.
"Where should we start?" Naruto asked, while Sasuke went back to whispering very-much-not-sweet nothings in his ear.
"How about the mission?" he suggested. Kakashi was a patient man. He could wait for the real juicy secrets. Those were always the best after a filling meal of unimportant nonsense.
"That works." Naruto gave his headband one last once over, satisfied, and tied it back over his forehead. Then he looked Kakashi dead in the eye - another thing most jounin weren't capable of - and told him, "The client's an ass."
"A very polite ass," Kakashi agreed. He'd assumed as much as soon as they'd stumbled upon the man and heard the parameters of his mission.
"The Wind Daimyo got greedy," Naruto explained. "Turns out he was using Miura to shop around for a better deal than Konoha was giving him for his missions. Met with a bunch of representatives from the Great Hidden Villages, even a few satellites villages. All while he had a Konoha team on hand, guarding him. Tatsuno's team never noticed. Can you believe it?"
Kakashi wanted to say he couldn't. He really did. But he'd been dealing with the incompetence of chuunin since he was six years old, and the idiocy of civilians for even longer.
"Anyway, he said the wrong thing to the Iwa representative, and they sent that team of chuunin after him to do... something. I don't know what they were thinking, to be honest. Kill him so the Wind Daimyo keeps giving us his business? Try to ransom back a minor noble the Daimyo has a dozen carbon copies of?" Naruto shrugged.
"Suna caught wind of it and sent Gaara's team to nab him, maybe intimidate him into putting a good word in for them, I don't know. When Iwa realized their team hadn't checked back in when they should have, they upped the ante and sent Kurotsuchi's team. She ended up running into Roshi's team on her way out of the country and enlisted him just in case things were more dire than the Tsuchikage had thought."
"And here we are," Sasuke murmured. Naruto chuckled, leaning back into her embrace.
"Here we are. Any questions?"
"No, that's about what I was expecting." Kakashi sighed, scratching the bridge of his nose. "The Daimyo's been pushing Hokage-sama for better rates since last year. We thought something like this might happen."
"Right. So, what's next?"
"Let's go with how you knew that," Kakashi decided.
"Yeah, about that." Naruto reached up to rub the back of his neck, was intercepted by Sasuke, and directed towards brushing her hair instead. "I don't really know how to say this in a way that won't make you think I'm a plant, or crazy, or-"
"We're from the future," Sasuke cut in, rolling her eyes at the look Naruto gave her. "You were taking too long."
"I was trying to think of the right way to put it! We need him to believe us, we can't just say-"
"That would explain it," Kakashi said thoughtfully.
Naruto froze. "What."
"You two haven't been doing a very good job at being thirteen years old," Kakashi said. "Even thirteen year old prodigies. You have all the tells of veteran nin, and high rank ones at that. Watching you interact with one another, and more recently, fight-" He chuckled good-naturedly. "Well, it wasn't hard to see underneath that underneath."
When it became clear that Naruto was too stunned to pick things back up, and Sasuke was too preoccupied with one-upping Icha Icha's filthier dialogues to care, he decided to confirm another suspicion of his.
"Sakura isn't the same, is she?"
"She'd better not be," Sasuke said darkly.
"Sasuke," Naruto said sternly. "Friendship." She scoffed but didn't elaborate, resting her chin sullenly on his shoulder.
"So it's just you two," Kakashi mused. "Unless I'm from the future as well. But I'm fairly certain that's not the case." Naruto coughed at that, eyes going shifty. Oh?
"Yeah," his cute little student muttered. "You, uh, sort of died a couple days ago, the first time around."
Well. That was morbid.
Naruto opened his mouth, hesitated, and nudged Sasuke, giving her a meaningful look. She shrugged in response, uncaring. He groaned. "You really believe us?" he asked. "I wasn't expecting you to believe us."
"I'll need a full debrief before we move on from here, obviously," Kakashi said, eye quirking. "But from what I've seen of you two recently, I'm open to the idea. I certainly can't think of a more reasonable explanation."
"We could be plants," Sasuke suggested.
"Sasuke."
"Plants that possess a functioning pair of sharingan and the Kyuubi?" Kakashi asked, raising an eyebrow. "The former might be possible, if it were a very good plant, but not so much the latter. Naruto wasn't allowed outside the village gates prior to his graduation, so a theoretical plant would have had to infiltrate the village, kidnap him, break the Yondaime's seal, extract the Kyuubi, and then seal it into themselves without anyone being the wiser."
Sasuke thought it over. "Could have been Orochimaru."
"Sasuke, shut up."
"Possible," Kakashi accepted. "But highly unlikely. I've seen the Yondaime's seal, and had it explained to me by Orochimaru's teammate. I don't understand even a fraction of its workings, and some of it was even beyond him. It may well be the most complex bit of fuuinjutsu ever conceived."
Naruto nodded along, whiskers twitching with a prideful little grin. "Mom and dad went all out."
Kakashi relaxed. "Oh, good. You know. I was wondering if I should just come out with it." Which brought up a question he probably should have asked at the start of the conversation. "How old are the two of you?"
"Nineteen," Sasuke said.
"Eighteen."
"And why did you decide to come back?" Another question he should have asked already.
"I died," Naruto said. He didn't seem particularly broken up about it, but there was a certain melancholy about him. Like something involved in his death had bummed him out, if not the event itself.
"So did I," Sasuke added.
"I'm sorry," Kakashi said, and he meant it. Dead or not, he couldn't imagine his future self had wanted anything but the best for his students. Just like his present self. "What happened?"
They shared a look. "It's a long story," Naruto began. "And we're not sure how much we're supposed to tell you."
"Oh?"
"We didn't exactly go back by ourselves. Someone sent us, and before we transmigrated, he warned us not to cause... ripples." Naruto paused, struggling with the words. "Basically, he said that this whole thing was about changing ourselves, becoming good enough to face what killed us the first time around. Not changing the past."
"Not changing the past," Kakashi repeated. "As in, not saving my life?"
"Exactly," Sasuke agreed.
"Okay, look," Naruto said, spreading his hands. "Do you want to be dead, Kakashi? Is that what you'd prefer?"
He thought about it. A month ago, when his life was what it was and his mythical Team 7 seemed so distant and unattainable, he might have said yes. But now? "I'd say no."
"That's what I thought. Anyway, if you being alive causes ripples, we'll deal with them. I'd deal with them twice if it meant you getting another chance," Naruto said. "But I don't want to make things worse if I don't have to."
"That, and he's embarrassed of me," Sasuke added.
"You should be embarrassed of you."
"What did she do?" Kakashi asked. "It can't be so bad that my knowing about it would change things, can it?"
Sasuke smirked.
"She's not doing it again," Naruto said firmly. "That's all you need to know."
"What about-"
"Sasuke, no."
"Sasuke, yes."
"Don't make me bring clone on the left into this," Naruto warned. Her smirk turned predatory.
"Do it. I dare you."
"Mah, mah," Kakashi said, waving a placating hand. "Let's not get hasty. There's only so much room in this tent, and we're just having a friendly little chat." They didn't seem convinced. Best change the subject. "We'll come back to the touchy bits of your future later. For now, tell me about those abilities you put on display back there. How did you come into them?"
Naruto hesitated, looking to Sasuke. For once, she met him with equal solemnity. "Should we tell him?" he asked.
"Do you think he deserves to know?" she asked.
Naruto glanced his way. Kakashi considered putting his many infiltration skills to use and assuming a compassionate, trustworthy front, but decided against it at the last moment. There was no telling how skilled these two were in what fields, and a shift in his demeanor that extreme would likely tip them off to the untruth of such a gesture anyway.
That, and... well. Maybe he was getting soft. He just didn't have it in him to lie to sensei's son like that.
Naruto smiled. "He does."
Sasuke hummed. "Then tell him."
They told him.
It was an interesting time, being Orochimaru of the Legendary Three.
It had always been that way. Admittedly, it came in waves. His early childhood, before his parents had been brutally murdered on the road by a group of unruly bandits, had been occupied by academics but little else. His time in Konoha's Academy had taken that several steps further, sparking a yet lasting interest in ninjutsu and its boundless depths. His genin team had been a chore in the beginning, but had picked up with the Second Great Shinobi War. The peace that followed had been dull, but had been followed soon enough by the Third Great War.
Interesting pursuits came and went. It wasn't until soon after his exile from Konoha, though, that things became truly engaging. Not until a woman thought long dead, a legend that outstripped his own in near every way, came to him with a request that changed everything.
Well, he supposed calling it a request was rather generous. He could have refused, but his life immediately after wouldn't have been pleasant. Luckily, he hadn't wanted to.
Uchiha Madara had offered him the knowledge of the Nidaime Hokage's Edo Tensei and the true immortality he'd been chasing for so many years. In exchange for the former, she demanded he resurrect her when she died. If he did so, she promised to give him the latter.
Naturally, he was suspicious. Why did she need him to resurrect her from death if she had the key to immortality? Who was to say she wouldn't just kill him once he'd fulfilled his end of the bargain?
He didn't dare ask either of these things when she was so close and he was so painfully mortal, of course. But she gleaned it from his demeanor anyway. Apparently, she'd only recently found the path to eternal life and was no longer in the proper shape to walk it. She was past her prime, she explained, and while she could still swat flies like Orochimaru in her sleep, immortality was another matter entirely. She'd need all her strength to achieve it.
At the end of the day, he'd agreed, fearing for his life more than anything else. But the curious seed she'd planted in him stayed, and as the years passed, it began to bud.
He chased immortality for over a decade. Joined Madara's adopted Akatsuki, left it, and created his own village in the time it took him to realize that true immortality was something he just couldn't manage on his own. He'd tried everything. Everything.
Immortal was a word that was passed around more than all of the filthiest diseases Tsunade accused Jiraiya of having, but Orochimaru had never once encountered true eternal life. Oh, there were approximations. Techniques and bloodlines abound that enhanced durability, longevity, and vitality beyond the average mortal's wildest dreams.
But they had limits. There was always a loophole, always a method to be exploited. And the most infuriating part of it all was that they didn't cover their respective weaknesses. It was always the same old fracture point. The same old mortality. It was suffocating.
So here he was, over a decade later. Honoring his end of a bargain he'd done his best to forget since the day he'd made it.
Well. In spirit, at any rate. Physically, the Orochimaru that was currently resurrecting the most infamous kunoichi in history was just a corpse being animated by his chakra- one of the more useful techniques he'd taken from his time in Akatsuki.
The cave he'd chosen to resurrect her in was dark, dank, and made no more pleasant by the corpse he'd dumped onto its stones. A voluptuous woman from Kumo's forces, with long black hair and equally dark eyes made glassy by her abrupt death. Madara had told him that compatibility between hosts was key for the Edo Tensei, though Orochimaru hadn't noticed any appreciable difference in his past experiments. Still, in case there was, he'd gone along with it.
Best not to make her any more upset than she'd already be for being made to wait however many years it had been since her death.
Orochimaru's puppet, bearing his features and a good portion of his chakra, uttered the words and formed the seals while he provided the energy. At the final gesture, the stone beneath the woman's corpse shuddered and broke apart, swallowing her whole.
The cave's foundations groaned and rocked, writhing with Orochimaru's chakra as he reached past the bounds of life and death, beyond the Shinigami, into the Pure World. Reach, gripping, and tearing.
From its depths came the most powerful woman to ever grace the shinobi world. From its depth came Uchiha Madara.
From its depths came a coffin.
The rose through the stone, an unsettling silence about it as it forced its way to the surface. It came up horizontal, rather than vertical like all the rest of Orochimaru's experiments had. He didn't know why.
How interesting.
The coffin settled itself silently, and for a long minute was still. Orochimaru's puppet watched with equal parts anticipation and trepidation. Meanwhile, the real Orochimaru's blood thundered through his veins, beads of sweat gathering where his hair met the back of his neck. He wasn't there, not really, but he was close enough. Close enough to maintain the technique, and close enough to be tracked down if she could find his trail.
It had been so long since he'd felt anything vaguely resembling fear. The last time he could remember was his fight with Hanzo the Salamander. It was almost a novel experience.
It was almost... exciting.
The coffin's lid cracked, split clean down the middle, and fell apart in two pieces. Orochimaru shivered.
No. It was invigorating.
A hand rose up from inside, slender, strong, and adorned with pitch black nails. It gripped the coffin's edge, knuckles white, and then the woman's aura hit Orochimaru's puppet. It staggered back, serpentine eyes wide, and from afar Orochimaru felt his lips twitching into the beginnings of a smile.
Then, from the coffin, came a soft, trembling hiss.
"Wryyyyyyy..."
From its depths came a woman, slumping onto the edge of the coffin, like the kunoichi he'd sacrificed but not. Her hair was the same glossy black, her skin the same ivory white, but the screaming danger in her posture was different. The rasp of her breath, the blood gushing through her veins, it was all wrong. And the chakra. The chakra.
Uchiha Madara opened her eyes. They were violet, with no whites to them. Just violet, ringed by concentric circles.
"I've upheld my end of things," Orochimaru's puppet said, after he'd forced his control through the terror that had seized its voice. "Now it's your turn."
Madara didn't respond. His puppet twitched.
"Before you try anything untoward, you should know that this isn't my true form. Should you kill the me you see, I'll only flee. I wouldn't recommend tracking me down, either. My grasp over the Edo Tensei is somewhat limited, so if I die, I'm afraid you'll-"
"Naruto..." Madara whispered, locking eyes with him.
Orochimaru cut the connection.
He spent the next week running as fast as he could back to Oto. He didn't waste a moment resting. He ran, and he pondered, and he ran some more. He examined their brief encounter over and over again, to the point of exhaustion, to insanity, until it had been burned permanently into his memory. Then he wondered.
Orochimaru only knew one Naruto of any note, and the last time he'd seen him had been in sensei's office, swaddled in cloth with the Yondaime's ink fresh on his stomach.
He smiled widely.
How very interesting.
AN: By the by, I promised someone I would notice them a while ago, and it's finally time to deliver. If you're enjoying my stupidity and you haven't read Uzumaki yet, it's time to go give Almost Electric's profile a visit! Her Naru/fem!Sasu story was what got me hooked on the pairing in the first place, and what inspired me to write my own take on it when I couldn't find any others. You may well enjoy her story more than mine, so I'd recommend reading both. Just don't stop reading mine, whatever you do.
... Please.