Hello my dear readers!

So, the story is now possibly getting started. We see a lesson today and a little bit of MadaSaku relationship-building. I promise that there will never be a chapter without MadaSaku interaction unless it is explicitly stated to the audience in the Author's Note above. I'm going to try to avoid lesson-only chapters because writing MadaSaku is just so wonderful to do.

Warning: To those of you who are Anti-LGBT, this is NOT a good chapter for you to read. There IS anti-gay bashing in this chapter. I'm sorry if it offends you and you can feel free to hate me, but just know that it totally didn't mean to happen. It just came out and I thought it was funny, so it stays. If you want to attack me personally, please do it over PM. I know people get all up-in-arms about this stuff, but I urge you to keep it out of the reviews. You'll only make yourself look like a fool, and even though I disagree with you on this issue, I don't want you to make a fool of yourself. Or, even better, just quit the story altogether. No hard feelings, right? :)

Lesson #1: The Oxford Comma

Sakura arrived at six o'clock sharp. Konoha High was just barely becoming alive and there were still janitors in the hallways, waxing the floors for the oncoming school day.

She wore the standard uniform, a more or less respectably long skirt, colored navy blue, a white button-up shirt, and a feminine blazer of a similar color to the skirt. She had forgone socks in favor of black flats and she had decided to wear a bit of makeup that morning because she needed to feel pretty—or rather, get any confidence boost she possibly could—in order to survive Madara.

Sakura had a feeling she would be wearing makeup consistently until Bastard-sensei left Konoha High.

While she had initially been excited to learn English from a Tokyo U professor, Sakura was now greatly regretting the fact that Madara had come to teach at her school. She must have been delusional to think that any relative of Sasuke's would be a good teacher. To be fair, she hadn't actually seen Madara teach at this point, but she was highly doubted that anybody as much of an asshole as he was could be a decent mentor of any sort—especially since he was a gorgeous asshole. It was seriously unfair that even if Madara was a good teacher, she probably wouldn't be able to focus on the blackboard with his beautiful form standing in front of it.

It shouldn't have surprised her, really. Sasuke was something of a dick and Sakura had still managed to have a crush on him in middle school. It was no surprise that while Madara was a dick of massive proportions and much worse than Sasuke, he was also much prettier than Sasuke. Of course that wouldn't deter her from admiring his beauty. At least she wouldn't be stupid enough to have a crush on her teacher.

No, he wasn't even her teacher—he was her substitute teacher. If she had a crush on him, which she vowed to herself would never happen, no matter how attracted she was to him physically, being a substitute was worse. It meant that when he stopped teaching at her school, there would be nothing stopping her from pursuing him…

Other than the fact that he was an asshole, he was Sasuke's uncle, he was an asshole, he was much older than her, he was an asshole, and she wanted to go to Tokyo University and it probably wouldn't look good on her application that she was dating a professor there. Oh, and of course, because he was an asshole.

She made her way up to the office on the fourth floor and then quietly knocked on his door, futilely hoping that he wasn't in and she could actually enjoy the two hours she had before class started.

It was not to be. She heard his voice beckon her inside and she opened the door, entered, and then shut the door behind her with a click that had an ominous sort of finality to it.

"You're seven minutes late." Apparently that was an acceptable greeting at god-fuck-me in the morning.

"I got here at six," she told him, trying to keep her tone respectful. "It takes that long to get to the fourth floor." Apparently.

Madara looked at her disapprovingly. "Then you should have come seven minutes earlier. Tomorrow, I want to see you here at 5:53am. Tardiness is not an attractive trait in a student, especially one aiming for Tokyo University."

Sakura gaped at him before recovering herself. "How did you-?"

"Sasuke-kun."

That treasonous, sneaky, lying motherfu—Sakura paused her mental tirade and corrected herself. That…that traitor! Now that Bastard-sensei knew she wanted to go to school there, he was going to lord it over her like no tomorrow!

She cleared her throat and regained composure as much as was possible. "I won't be late next time, Madara-sensei," she said through gritted teeth.

"Good. Now, yesterday I had the class take an assessment to see where they are at with English. You were…absent, so you will take the assessment now and we'll go over it when you're done." Madara sounded smug and Sakura was certain that this was going to be a very difficult, trying test. And he wanted to go over it one-on-one? Somebody kill her now.

Setting her backpack down, she approached the desk and accepted the packet that Madara passed to her. It was at least five pages long and Sakura swallowed heavily. This was not fair.

Taking out her mechanical pencil, she set to work. However, Madara stopped her just after she wrote down her name.

"I want you to use pen. It won't do for you to erase your mistakes—I want to see how you get to the correct answer after getting it wrong."

Sakura nodded, her bangs covering her eyes to disguise the fact that she had rolled them, and then grabbed a black pen.

Thirty minutes later, Sakura was stumped. This test was impossible! Was he using the final exam for English majors at Tokyo U? Seriously?

She slogged through the last of it the best she could, nearly tearing her hair out when she realized the last page required a six hundred word essay completely in English about English. It was final: Haruno Sakura despised the English language with the very essence of her being.

By the time she finished, her hand was cramped from writing in the unfamiliar alphabet and it had been over an hour. She looked up discreetly and saw that Madara was grading Naruto's paper. It read 'Placement Assessment' at the top…and was a single page with ten questions. There certainly was not an essay portion.

Sakura felt like crying, but she wasn't sure if it was from frustration or despair.

Trying to mask her emotions, she said, "I'm done," and handed him the packet. The packet. The fucking packet when everyone else had only had one page!

Madara glanced up the clock, then to her, and he tsked. "That took you far longer than satisfactory. The others only had half an hour."

"Yeah," Sakura snapped, "because they didn't have an essay to write!"

He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes roving over her contemplatively, and Sakura flushed against her will. He was looking for something in her expression, but she happened to notice that his eyes lingered on her lower face longer than on her eyes. Was he looking at her…lips?

She flushed a deeper red and averted her eyes.

"You want to get into Tokyo University," Madara said at length. "That is the entrance test for all freshman. If you do not pass, you have no chance of being accepted."

Sakura started at him dumbly for as long as he had stared at her. He had actually done something…helpful? Something that could be considered nice? That was…unexpected.

No, it was not unexpected. It meant that she had probably slept in, was dreaming, and would get reamed out by her sensei when she arrived late for her TA duties. Discreetly, she pinched her thigh. When she didn't snapped awake to a blaring alarm clock, Sakura looked at her sensei in shock.

Madara was already scouring the test, flipping through the pages slowly as he read her answers. Sakura eventually recovered from her surprise and waited expectantly, suddenly wishing she had tried harder to answer the questions correctly. It wasn't that she had been slacking, per se, it was just that she hadn't really taken the test seriously since it was Bastard-sensei's. She was regretting that now.

Finally, Madara closed the packet and set it down. "Dismal," he announced. "Absolutely dismal. You'll never get in at this rate."

Sakura slumped in her chair. Tears threatened her eyes unexpectedly. Why was he such a bastard?

"However, with my help you will be able to at least pass this. You should be grateful that I'm here to teach you. Otherwise, you would have no hope of getting into Tokyo University."

Sakura wasn't sure whether to be shocked by his arrogance or grateful that she was going to get the help she needed. Either way, she was a little bit skeptical.

"I was going to have you help me grade these, but you're not quite at that point yet. You're dismissed. I'll see you in class."

Sakura nodded numbly, her mind in a whirlwind of emotion that she couldn't quite identify just yet, and she exited the room.

English was the second class of the day and Sakura wasn't sure if she was looking forward to it or not. She had decided that she was grateful, in the end, that Bastard-sensei had put her through the hell that was the English entrance exam into Tokyo U, but she had also concluded that it didn't make him any less of a dick. It seemed her salvation would be at the hands of a demon and she wasn't really sure how to feel about that.

She sat at her desk quietly, listening to Naruto bicker one-sidedly with Sasuke about something that she was pretty sure she didn't give a damn about. Something about too much sodium giving one cancer, which, given the blonde's frequent intake of ramen, would probably matter to him. Naruto was currently arguing vehemently that sodium was actually a necessary nutrient for the human body to function and how could something meant for the body kill someone?

"Too much of anything can kill you," was what Sasuke muttered into the hand that his chin was propped up on.

Naruto either didn't hear him or simply decided that he didn't hear him and went on without pausing for breath. After a few moments Sakura rolled her eyes and began to doodle on her notebook paper mindlessly, only pausing when she realized she had begun to draw a face that looked suspiciously like her substitute teacher's.

Oh, hell no. Now even her subconscious was betraying her.

Okay, yes, Bastard-sensei was hot as hell. Did that make it okay to crush on him? No, Sakura decided, it didn't. He wasn't just an asshole; he enjoyed being cruel to his subordinates. In what world was that an attractive trait?

Quashing any possibly traitorous thoughts that might run away with her, Sakura stomped out the idea of Madara being attractive in any way.

So enraptured in her mission to brutally kill any bud of attraction was she that it was only when Naruto had been quiet for a while that Sakura realized the object of her not-crush was speaking and had apparently been doing so for a good amount of time. Not even wanting to start to imagine the shitstorm she would be put through if she wasn't paying attention to Bastard-sensei's first official lesson, she brought her focus to the Powerpoint presentation that had just been projected onto the whiteboard.

"Since the overwhelming majority of this class's difficulties were centered on the usage of the comma, I thought we'd start with that. The comma is an integral part of the English language and if you can't or are unwilling to grasp an even basic knowledge of its use, surrender yourself to flipping patties and please remove yourself from this classroom this instant."

There were a few disgruntled huffs around the classroom, but no one was stupid enough to object even in a whisper. Sakura thought she saw Inuzuka Kiba inch towards the door from the corner of her eye, but his friend Shino tugged on his ear hard enough to elicit a slight whimper before the classroom was silent again.

"Good. Then the lesson will begin. Take notes or you will all fail tomorrow's quiz with certainty."

Sakura flipped through her composition notebook for English until she found a clean sheaf of paper and then moved her eyes to the projected image.

Madara began to go over the basics of the comma, starting with the Oxford comma and its necessity. He had barely gotten into the meat of the discussion when a girl named Mizuki raised her hand. Sighing as though he had been personally insulted, he called on her.

"In English newspapers, they don't use the Oxford comma," she said, a little too smugly for Sakura's liking. It was quiet for a moment and Sakura used that time to say a small prayer for Mizuki's drastically shortened lifespan.

"Tell me, Mizuki-chan, what are you planning to major in college?"

She hesitated, clearly not expecting the irrelevant question.

Madara plowed over her. "Are you majoring in journalism?" he asked curtly.

"…No."

"Then tell me how it is relevant what a journalist does in regards to learning English. I'm very eager to hear your answer." Unfortunately for Mizuki, he wasn't being sarcastic. Instead, Sakura was one hundred percent certain that he was enjoying this immensely and would be using her answer to thoroughly humiliate her in front of the class.

"…It's not, sir," Mizuki replied. She was clearly intimidated and had caught on to the impending character assassination, now acknowledging him much more respectfully.

"I'm so glad we had that discussion, then," Madara said pleasantly, only it wasn't pleasant at all. "The Oxford comma is necessary. Unless you plan to make a fool of yourself, use it." There was a clear threat in his tone that had Sakura wondering if he was teaching an English class or if he was attempting to commandeer unruly children at a boot camp. In fact, she wondered if he thought of it that way.

He pointed to a slide that read: 'Incorrect: I ate dinner with my grandparents, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.' Below it, it read: 'Correct: I ate dinner with my grandparents, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington.'

"The difference between the two sentences is that in the correct statement, you had dinner with your grandparents and two of the most famous presidents in the United States. In the incorrect statement, Lincoln and Washington were gay lovers who happened to also be your grandparents."

A snicker that sounded decidedly Naruto-like rang through the classroom.

"Is something funny, Naruto-kun?" Madara asked saccharinely. "Perhaps you find the concept of two men loving each other as something to be mocked?"

The classroom was so quiet one could have heard a pin dropped. Naruto looked like he had eaten too much ramen and was going to be sick, recognizing the danger for what it was.

"I understand that young men find such topics distasteful. Unfortunately, in a world where bigoted fools are spreading like a cancer in the underbelly of a diseased cow, that is a widely accepted behavior. However," he went on, "in my classroom, if you act as a bigoted fool, then you will be treated as these bigoted fools should be—ejected from society. Out of my classroom, now."

"Hey, I have nothing against-"

"Out."

Without another word, Naruto left the room.

"Now then," Madara said, yet again pleasant and calm. "I trust there won't be any more interruptions?"

The rest of the students were silent.

"Good, good. On to the next subject…"

Sasuke looked at her meaningfully, his eyes saying, 'I warned him and he didn't listen.'

Sakura nodded back, sighing, and silently communicated, 'He never learns.'

There were no more interruptions after that.

Okay, so, before anybody gets pissed that it was Naruto - this just seems like the kind of thing he would find funny. I thought it was funny, too. I am NOT, in any way, implying that Naruto is actually anti-LGBT. In fact, I think someone like him would be totally open-minded about the whole thing and really chill about it. So no, I was NOT hating on Naruto at all - he just happened to be the guy (I was going to choose Kiba, but Kiba actually wanted to leave the classroom and it just didn't work out that way) that fit the profile of what I was trying to accomplish.

Also, if you don't use the Oxford comma or didn't know how to use it, don't be offended. Madara is just a dick in delivering his lessons and that was on purpose; I honestly think that it's important that you guys don't think this is my message to people who don't know English very well. I think it's great that everyone is learning (although I'm pretty sure you're not here for the learning aspect ;) ) I truly respect anyone who is here to better their English and this is not meant to bash you in any way. Madara's just meant to be a dick and this is the best way to portray that. Sorry!

Now, all you people who DON'T hate me for the chapter, I really hope you'll be kind to me and review!