It was a week before the genin of team 7 were summoned by the Hokage again to inform them that they'd be training with Team Gai for the foreseeable future.
They had spent the previous week training themselves raw. Sakura did not remember any time in her life when she had trained so thoroughly. The had established a fine routine. They all spent the night at Sakura's house, in the large bed her parents had left behind. Naruto and Sasuke firmly believed that they were doing this only for Sakura, they didn't like to admit to themselves that they found great comfort in being together as well.
Nightmares were a daily occurrence. For Sakura, they had started only after Kakashi's death.
But Sasuke was plagued even worse. Seeing Kakashi die and being powerless to stop it had re-awoken the worst of his nightmares. He realized how much interacting with Team 7 had helped him repress the nightmares that haunted him since the massacre of his whole clan by that man.
Even though he had not realized it at that time, the prospect of training with Kakashi, bickering and competing with Naruto and even seeing Sakura for their morning trainings had brightened his life. Though he was careful not to consciously acknowledge their importance to him, subconsciously he had taken great comfort in not being alone anymore.
But Kakashi's death had forced him to come to terms with how much he cared about them all. He did not think he'd retain any sanity if he lost Naruto and Sakura, even though they annoyed him more than he could bear sometimes. Needing them made him furious. How could he avenge his clan if he filled part of the hole left by their absence with some other people? But when he had nightmares and Sakura awoke him before he saw the worst bits, he was more thankful than he could believe he had the capacity in his heart. He was constantly pulled in two directions: to let them in or to not let them in. For the time being he was consoling himself with the lie that the only reason he was with the idiot and the annoying fangirl was because they needed him. Though the idiot was a lot quieter and the fangirl was not a fangirl anymore.
Naruto was also torn. On one hand he felt Sasuke-teme had finally accepted and acknowledged him as a brother and that Sakura-chan didn't hate him anymore. But on the other hand he felt guilty that he got their acceptance at the cost of Kakashi's death. It felt like he was taking advantage of Kakashi's death. It made him miserable. Kakashi sensei was one of the most important people in his life. How could he feel some degree of comfort in the acceptance his teammates gave him when it came at the cost of Kakashi's life? And so he too tried to pretend that being close to his team did not comfort him as much as it really did. He tried to tell himself that the only reason he was there was because he could not, in good conscience, leave Sakura alone to deal with her guilt.
He was careful to keep up his cheerful facade. He was the only glue holding their team, and Sakura, together at the moment. He knew if he relaxed even slightly, his team would drift apart and he'd be left alone all over again.
Sakura, on the other hand, was miserable because she was facing the first big loss of her life. She had finally realized that being a ninja meant more than she had even realized it did. She'd been happy to be on the same team as Sasuke (just Sakuke, not Sasuke-kun anymore). She had not realized that she needed to train and get stronger because as they progressed they'd get harder and harder missions and she'd need to carry her own weight and protect her team-mates. She had been a liability for her team and her team-leader had paid for her mistakes with his own life. She didn't know how she would overcome this. She was breathing because he had given his life. She was alive because he was dead. There was no growing past this. She could not quit being a ninja. All she could do at this point was to live by Kakashi's teachings and make sure she never made the same mistakes again. She had to protect her comrades at any cost. She had to make sure no one ever had to do what Kakashi did for her.
And so Sakura finally found a reason to train as Naruto and Sasuke did- unflinchingly, unstoppably, obsessively. But the boys had also realized that getting stronger was the only way for Sakura to overcome enough of her guilt to be able to function on a day-to-day basis. She would not be normal by any means, but just okay enough to not fall apart constantly in public. And so training had become a refuge for Sakura, as it was for Sasuke and Naruto.
They set all their hopes on training. Sasuke trained in the hopes that he'd grow enough to be able to beat that traitorous man and avenge his clan. Naruto trained in the hopes that he'd be strong enough to be acknowledged by everyone and become Hokage. Sakura trained in the hopes that she'd grow enough to not be a liability to her team and that she'd be able to protect them as they protected her, as Kakashi had protected her.
When the nightmares woke Sasuke up before the sky was light, he'd usually not be able to fall asleep again. He'd leave the house and start throwing kunai at targets. Naruto and Sakura began to follow him whenever he left the room. A strange sense of camaraderie developed between the three of them. They were like a pack of little duckings, who had lost their mother duck and all they had left was each other. They had appropriated the old training ground in which Kakashi had taken them up as a genin team and near the memorial at which they had seen Kakashi spend so much of his time. Sakura had developed a habit of tracing Kakashi's name and talking to the stone when she was too exhausted to continue training or when the guilt became too much to bear.
They obsessively practiced all the team formations and strategies Kakashi had taught them until they could do them in their sleep. It made them feel slightly better, as if by learning all the things Kakashi had tried to teach them, they would keep a part of him alive. In a way, perhaps their new found camaraderie was also a tribute to Kakashi's memory; they had not really understood his lesson on how those who abandoned their team-mates were worse than trash, except perhaps Naruto for whom the presence of people around him was a blessing he would never take for granted, having being deprived all his childhood of people with whom to share his life. But having Kakashi give his own life for one of them was the greatest embodiment of that lesson. Taking a team-mate for granted was a mistake none of them would make again consciously.
Sasuke, torn between hating and loving his teammates in the desperate consuming way that Uchiha were known to feel these emotions had taken to teaching Sakura and Naruto Taijutsu as a means of expending his anger at them and also making sure they'd be strong enough, especially Sakura, to not hurt in the way they were hurting now. Sakura, for whom physical exertion had always been a weak point, was thoroughly beaten up day-after-day. But she also made great progress and the beatings helped her understand that Sasuke cared and in a twisted sense she felt glad that she was paying some price for her carelessness, thoughtlessness and naivety for romanticizing what being a ninja meant. Naruto was simply glad that Sasuke was trying to help and always hungry for training, he soaked it right up.
Naruto, for his part had taken to teaching Sakura and Sasuke all he knew about traps and stealth. These precious skills honed by trial and error over a depressingly lonely childhood to play pranks that'd make people acknowledge his existence were now easily transferred to a ninja setting. They were driven by the regret that if they'd perhaps had more of these skills they might have been able to at least recover Kakashi's body. When Sakura began reading books on the subject and explaining more strategies and ideas with Naruto, they began to make faster strides in their stealth as well.
Sakura, who was good at reading and understanding and applying also began to read about chakra control, at which she was the best among the three and sharing exercises and tips to help the boys improve their control as well.
For each little skill they learnt and improvement they made was accompanied with the feeling that if they'd had known this skill before that disastrous hellish mission, would they have been able to save Kakashi?
They were unforgiving in their spars. They beat each other into the ground everyday. It was the only way to apologize and to sleep at least a few hours a night.