To be honest, Sasuke had felt a whole lot more confident about this challenge before he arrived at the Academy the next day. Laying awake in bed the night before the task had seemed a lot easier. What could be more simple? All he had to do was pick the classmate that looked the least annoying and strike up a conversation. He thought that it would be easy.

That was until he got to class and realised that everyone in the room was eyeing him warily. Even the girls were a little skittish around him, when usually they swarmed him. It didn't take him long to figure out why: when you break a guy's nose, people are probably going to be wary of you for a while. Sasuke took his seat as quietly as as he could and decided that for the next few days he would put his friend-making plans on hold. For now all he wanted to do was ensure that his classmates weren't petrified he might snap and punch them in the face.

Sasuke soon decided that instead of going ahead and talking to people, he should use this time to observe the class and decide which of the idiots around him might make the least intolerable friend. He didn't have particularly high hopes for anyone but, then again, he'd never actually paid much attention to any of the kids in his class before either, so maybe some of them might surprise him.

It was an easy decision to rule out most of the girls. Usually he'd just ignore them and their incessant giggling, but for a while he watched them, just to make sure that he wasn't judging them too harshly. What he saw... well... frankly it scared him a little. Every time he turned around, one of the girls was watching him. At lunch, he noticed that a great deal of them were actually following him. Even more disturbingly, when he sneaked a look at a couple of girls' notebooks when no one was looking, he found that they had not been taking notes in class. No. They were too busy doodling hearts around his name and tacking 'Uchiha' onto their own. One notebook had a painstakingly drawn wedding picture that made him shiver with fright. There was no way on earth he was going to have a wedding reception with that much lace lying around, that was for sure.

There was only one girl that wasn't ruled out because of creepily stalking him. Hinata Hyuga seemed to have next to no interest in him, which was actually more than enough for him to actually consider her briefly as possible friend material. The only reason that he hadn't noticed her sooner was that she was so quiet and shy she was nearly invisible. He watched her for a bit, trying to figure out a way he might approach her, when he noticed it. Hinata was different to the other girls, but in her own way, she was exactly the same. The only difference was that, unlike every other female in the class, Hinata had a different stalking target. It was hard to imagine for what reason the girl was always watching the class clown, but it was clear that she was crushing hard on him. Sasuke didn't try to sneak a look at her notebook, but he imagined that the girl probably had a doodle somewhere with the name Hinata Uzumaki printed neatly.

So Hinata was out. Leaving aside the point that stalking creeped him out, it was clear that she wouldn't be interested in his friendship. She was too busy blushing over Naruto.

Sasuke then turned his attention onto the boys. Which... didn't really give him much cause for hope either. Most of them were idiots. They were loud, rude, and most of them looked like they took pleasure in rolling in as much dirt as they could find during lunch break. Sasuke didn't mind dirt, but there is a difference between not being a clean freak and taking the invention of soap as a suggestion instead of a necessity. If the men that Sasuke saw around the village were any indication, most of them would grow out of this dirty phase in life, but he needed to make friends with them now, not ten years from now when all of them realised that they'd never get a girlfriend if they didn't wash.

It was after observing the group of boys in general that Sasuke started to think that maybe he was going around this the complete wrong way. He was making assumptions based on what the group did. He needed to watch specific people, and see if their individual redeeming qualities made up for the fact that they shared some unattractive qualities with the masses. So Sasuke decided to turn his attention to individuals. He started, naturally, with the clan kids. Not because he was a snob that didn't really want to make friends with a civilian (maybe...), but because he figured that they were probably his best bet for finding a friend, considering that he would have more in common with a clan child than he would a civilian.

The first he observed was the Inuzuka boy: Kiba. Sasuke didn't really know all that much about the Inuzuka, but he knew that they worked with dogs as partners. He also knew that they were supposed to be a friendly and informal bunch, and he thought he could make that work to his advantage. After all, it would be much easier to start a friendship with a person who was friendly as opposed to someone that refused to talk to him. Kiba, it seemed, was friendly. He seemed to be on good terms with everyone in the class; even most of the girls. Though Sasuke did suspect that it was probably the puppy that he'd started carrying around at the start of the year that attracted the girls to him, rather than his friendliness. Unfortunately, Sasuke began to see quite quickly that Kiba would not make a very good friend for him.

The main thing that Sasuke saw getting in the way of friendship was that Kiba had a short temper. Sasuke knew himself well enough to know that he didn't exactly have the patience of a saint. They would drive each other crazy with fighting. The other thing that Sasuke saw as an obstacle was the fact that Kiba was enormously childish and competitive. He would make silly boasts all the time, then lose his rag when things didn't go his way. He wasn't a gracious loser. Realistically, Kiba would never willingly make friends with someone he suspected might be better than him, and seeing that Sasuke was consistently the top of the class, he ruled out the possibility of friendship with Kiba for now.

Next he thought he might have been looking in all the wrong places. So he turned his attention to the quiet and collected Shino Aburame. Shino looked to be a good choice. He was even more quiet than the almost invisible Hinata, and he seemed to have one of the keener minds in the class. Shino never got angry: in fact, he never really showed any emotion at all. Unlike the loud and popular Kiba, Shino kept to himself. In fact, it seemed that most of the class avoided him. Not that he minded that much; he seemed to like the solitude. Sasuke thought that he seemed to be rather like him, in a way. The only down side that he could see in befriending Shino was the fact that the boy only ever showed enthusiasm over bugs. Sasuke knew next to nothing about bugs. What would they talk about together, if all Shino was interested in was bugs, while Sasuke was less than enthused? It wouldn't work.

So Sasuke put the matter of Shino aside for the moment, and turned his attention to someone else. Shikamaru was the next to catch his attention, and if Sasuke was completely honest Shikamaru seemed like the most promising of the whole bunch. Shikamaru wasn't loud or boisterous, unlike the other boys. He spent a lot of his time lazing around, napping at his desk during lessons and napping under the tree in the school yard during breaks. To Sasuke, he appeared to be a very low maintenance friend. He wouldn't make any unreasonable demands of Sasuke, and Sasuke would reply in kind by not making any demands of him. The other thing that also convinced Sasuke that befriending Shikamaru would not be an utter waste of time was the fact that the boy was actually a lot more intelligent than he let on. Shikamaru rarely bothered to speak up, but when he did say something he was never wrong. From an obscure piece of history knowledge, to astute observations about their classmates and teachers, Shikamaru was right about everything. When Sasuke realised this he was also blown away by the fact that Shikamaru was probably also deliberately flunking tests in order to hide his intelligence. He suspected the reason that he did so was out of laziness, but still, it was a very impressive thing to pull off. Even (most of) the teachers, who are shinobi trained to look past the obvious, had no idea the boy was a genius.

The problem, however, with befriending Shikamaru was that he already had a best friend. Shikamaru was almost never seen without Choji. They sat together in class, they sat together under the tree in the yard at lunch and at the end of the day they walked home together. Choji knew Shikamaru so well that sometimes when someone asked Shikamaru a direct question it was Choji that answered for him. Choji covered for Shikamaru when he was feeling especially lazy, as sometimes opening his own mouth to form words required too much effort to be worthwhile. Choji was a cheerful individual, and it was because of him that Shikamaru even had a shred of popularity. Actually, it was probably because of Choji that Shikamaru bothered to wake up during the school day at all. Sasuke didn't fancy his chances of breaking through the walls of their friendship. Shikamaru's best friend was Choji, and that was never going to change. Sasuke would just be a third wheel in the friendship if he tried to butt in now.

After discarding Shikamaru as a potential friend, Sasuke was almost ready to give up. He briefly considered the last clan boy in the class, Choji, before immediately discarding him as an option for the same reason as Shikamaru. Choji was undyingly loyal to Shikamaru, he would never abandon his lazy friend.

So, after a solid week or so of observation, Sasuke had to come to the conclusion that he was stuck. This friend-making thing was going to be a lot more difficult than he originally thought.

"So how's it going?" Matsu asked casually, flicking his wrist and sending another volley of shuriken down to the bottom of the garden.

Sasuke grimaced as Matsu's weapon's sunk with a series of thuds into the large post set up at the end of the garden. His aim was good, all four of the blades were sunk deep into the red circle of the target.

"Uh... not bad." Sasuke said carefully. "What about you?"

Matsu squinted at the target, then sent flicked another two shuriken. They embedded themselves neatly inside the red circle. "I think I'm making progress."

"So does that mean that you're close to making a friend?" Sasuke stared at Matsu in surprise. It had only been a week, yet Matsu had managed to get close to someone already?!

Matsu grinned at him, then stepped to the side, gesturing for Sasuke to take his turn at trying to hit the target. Sasuke hefted one of his practice shuriken into his hand and tried to concentrate on aiming, but sadly all his attention was on the older boy and what he might say next.

"I don't know whether I'd call her a friend yet..." Matsu said. "But a girl in my class sprained her ankle when we were running the assault course on Wednesday. I carried her to the nurse's office."

Sasuke frowned at him. "Does that even count?" He wanted to know. "You just did what any classmate might do."

Matsu grinned at him. "Yeah... maybe... but I also stuck around to help her bandage up her foot, seeing as the nurse wasn't there when we arrived. She said that doing that was really nice of me. She also said that she was glad I wasn't like the other boys: she called me a gentleman." Matsu glowed with pride at the praise, but Sasuke wasn't that impressed.

"Just sounds like she's got a crush on you." He said flatly. He turned to the post and flicked his hand, sending his shuriken whirring towards the target. Thunk!

"Whatever." Matsu shrugged. "I don't mind if she does. She's nice."

Thunk!

"So what's her name?"

"Mimi."

"Hn."

"What's that supposed to mean?!"

"Sounds like you're looking for more of a girlfriend than an actual friend." Thunk! Thunk!

"Shut up midget, girlfriends can be friends too." Matsu sniffed. "Besides, how much progress have you made?"

"..." Thunk! "A... a little..."

"Sasuke." Matsu stared at him. "Have you even spoken to any of the kids in your class this week?"

"Don't be stupid! Of course I have!"

"What did you talk about?"

"..."

"Sasuke..."

"Ino asked if she could borrow my scissors. I said yes."

"Sasuke! That's not a conversation!"

THUNK!

Sasuke turned to Matsu with a scowl, all out of shuriken. "At least it was something!" He said defensively. "None of the girls in my class needed to be carried to the nurse's office this week... you can't blame me! There just haven't been that many opportunities to speak to any of them!"

Matsu shook his head, then began the trudge down to the bottom of the garden to collect the shuriken. "No offence Sasuke, but if you're just waiting around for opportunities to talk to other people, you're never going to get anywhere."

Sasuke tried not to let his disappointment and frustration leak onto his face as he made to follow Matsu. "I guess you're right." He said grudgingly. "But it's just... none of them are easy to talk to, you know..."

"Well... all you can do is your best." Matsu said wisely. "Good luck."

Sasuke figured that he was going to need a lot of 'good luck' if he was going to make a friend before graduation. It turned out that the great Sasuke Uchiha had finally found something that he had absolutely no talent for.

Three weeks into his task, Sasuke had truly hit rock bottom. He didn't know what he was doing wrong! Matsu didn't seem to have that much trouble. He'd actually become quite good friends with Mimi over the past few weeks. She'd even come over to their house for dinner! Sasuke wanted to dislike her out of pettiness that Matsu had found a friend first, but she had turned out the be totally unhateable. She wasn't a member of a clan, but she did come from a family of medic nin. She told all of them over dinner about how she was going to intern at the hospital in her final year, and then eventually become a medic nin herself. Sasuke thought she was cool: she had an actual goal and was working hard to obtain it, as opposed to some of the girls in his class, who simply wanted to be kunoichi because they thought it would be cool or romantic.

So Matsu's new friend Mimi was very likeable, and contrary to Sasuke's earlier teasing, it seemed that Mimi really was Matsu's friend because she genuinely liked him, not because of a stupid girly crush. Sasuke was jealous. How come he wasn't able to make a friend as easy as that? It was so unfair.

And it wasn't for lack of trying either. Sasuke had tried to strike up conversations. Some had worked better than others. He had quite a good discussion with Shikamaru and Choji one afternoon about shogi. It turned out to be the only activity that involved movement that Shikamaru actually enjoyed. Sasuke knew the rules of the game because it was one of the few things that he actually did together with his father before. The conversation was going well until Sasuke remembered this fact, and he had to beat a hasty retreat before the memory triggered a panic attack right there in the middle of the classroom.

What was most depressing was that the conversation about shogi was the best attempt that he'd made so far. He'd had a total of four other conversations over the past few weeks. One of them was between him and Ino (Who he had felt was somewhat safe territory seeing as the scissors incident had gone relatively smoothly). He had simply said to her that he thought she did a good job in her spar the lesson before. Ino had beamed at him and taken his comment as an invitation to start babbling at him at six hundred miles per hour. He was quite frankly overwhelmed, and had to escape not two minutes into the ill-fated conversation. The next conversation that he had was with Sakura, who had come up to him ten minutes after the Ino disaster and proceeded to compliment his own efforts in sparring. He wasn't sure what made her so bold as to suddenly speak to him, but beggars can't be choosers, and he graciously accepted her compliments, giving her one in return, as is polite. Unfortunately, his cordial reaction to her attempt at conversation only encouraged her to start talking at him in much the same way as Ino, and once again he had to escape. It was after that he vowed he wasn't going to speak to the girls unless absolutely necessary. He had no idea what to do with them.

The third conversation had been with Shino. Upon reflection of his efforts, Sasuke had decided that he should attempt to make friends with Shino. He could figure out the whole bug situation later. So one day he went up to Shino and asked him what he thought about the science lesson they had just had. Shino had looked at him blankly for a few moments before:

"It was informative."

"You're family uses bug jutsu right? Was the lesson all stuff you already knew?"

"Yes. My family makes sure that I am well educated on biology."

There was an awkward pause. Sasuke tried not to fidget. This wasn't going exactly as he'd hoped.

"It must have been boring then."

"Not really."

"You must like biology a lot then."

"Not really."

It was at this point that Sasuke gave up. Shino wasn't throwing him a bone, and his face was frankly unreadable with his dark glasses and high collared coat. Sasuke politely extracted himself from the extremely one sided conversation and left, feeling thoroughly disheartened.

The fourth conversation was perhaps the most humiliating of all though. Sasuke had been walking home, replaying the bungled conversation with Shino over and over in his head with a scowl. He hadn't been watching where he was going, nor did he care where the rather large stone he aimed a kick at landed when it tumbled back to earth.

"OW!"

Actually, on second thought, he did care where that stone ended up after all. Feeling guilty, Sasuke rushed around the corner of the large hedge that he had kicked the stone over, ready to apologise profusely for his careless action. That's when he saw the poor person that he had hit for the first time: a boy his own age with spiky blonde hair and an obnoxious orange T-shirt. The boy was staring up at the sky, rubbing his head with a frown.

Of course, even if Sasuke didn't really feel like talking with the class clown right now, he still had to apologise. He'd been raised to be polite, even if he hated it. "Sorry." He said shortly. "I didn't mean for anyone to get hit by the stone - I just kicked it away."

The boy whirled around to stare at him, blue eyes widening as he realised who it was that was standing in front of him. "Sure." He said quickly. "It's fine. You didn't mean it."

Sasuke nodded at him, then turned around to resume his journey home.

"Uh... I saw you talking to Shino today..."

Sasuke froze and turned back to the blonde boy, who was grinning sheepishly at him. "So?" Sasuke replied frostily.

"I just wondered... you hardly ever talk to other people..." The other boy trailed off. "...I was just curious..."

"I don't see how it's any of your business." Sasuke said shortly.

"Well... I wasn't gonna say anything... but you looked kinda upset after you talked to him..." His smile wilted somewhat under Sasuke's glare. "...So I was just wondering if you were okay... that's all... Shino can be pretty blunt, huh?... uh..."

"I'm fine. Don't worry about it." Sasuke turned his back on the boy, cheeks colouring slightly with shame. Of all people to notice him failing to interact with Shino, it had to be the annoying dead last. "See you." Sasuke fled before the dead last could rub any more of his failures in his face. The last thing he wanted was pity from someone like Naruto.

So now Sasuke was down at the bottom of the garden, yanking shuriken out of the target post with vicious determination. His aim was to train so hard that he would forget all about his failures, and hopefully be able to face going to school on Monday instead of wanting to hide under his covers for the rest of his life. He had been in the garden for over an hour now, and it still wasn't working. Sasuke pulled the last of his shuriken out harshly, then whirled around to stomp back up the garden to take out his frustration on the post yet again. He was halfway through his handful of shuriken when an amused voice made him fumble and drop the projectiles he had left into the dirt.

"Don't you think the post has suffered enough?"

Sasuke didn't bother to reach down an grab his shuriken, he just turned around to fix his brother with a glare.

"The post isn't alive." Sasuke pointed out. "It can't suffer."

Itachi walked forward, hands in his pockets, to stand next to Sasuke. Together, the two of them observed the tattered post for a while.

"It's still a little worse for wear, don't you think?" Itachi said mildly. "Maybe you should take a rest now."

"Fine." He growled in reply, bending down to snatch up the shuriken he had not thrown yet.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Itachi asked. Sasuke straightened to see that Itachi was looking at him with raised eyebrows.

"Not really." Sasuke grunted.

Itachi regarded him thoughtfully for a long moment. "You know," he said slowly, "there is such a thing as trying too hard."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sasuke wanted to pout. He wished that his brother wasn't so cryptic all the time. Itachi had to be the only person that Sasuke knew that could make one's brain hurt mid-casual-conversation.

"Nothing." Itachi waved him off. "Don't worry about it."

Yup. That settled it. Someone needed to retrain Itachi in how to talk: clearly something had gone wrong when he learned to speak the first time. The evidence was in the fact that Itachi could not speak plainly to anyone.

"Hn."

"Anyway..." Itachi pulled one hand out of his pocket to wave a piece of folded paper at Sasuke. "I didn't come down here just to stop you from murdering the post. I came to ask if you could run to the market for me, I'm missing some things we'll need for dinner tonight."

Sasuke reached out and reluctantly took the shopping list from his older brother. No matter how crazy Itachi's mystic talk drove him, he was always going to help him out if he needed it. If Itachi's day could be made simpler by Sasuke running to the shops instead of going himself, then Sasuke would be happy to do it for him.

Itachi handed him the ryo notes and reminded him to be back before four, then waved him away. Sasuke turned and made for the garden gate, wondering if he could sneak some tomatoes into his shopping basket with the budget that Itachi had given him. He was also feeling a little optimistic, maybe this chore would be able to do what his training all weekend had not: make him forget about his troubles.

A/N:

Hey! Some of you may have noticed that there was quite a gap between the release of this chapter and the last. The prequel to this was released in quite a rapid fire way, so I want to apologise now if any of you were expecting 'A Different Goal' to be released in the same fashion. The reason that you guys got the first story so quickly was that I was on break from university, and had the time to spare to write all day, everyday if I so wanted. Now that the mid-semester break is over, I can't do that. I'm going to try for a chapter release once a week however, so it's not all bad.

In other news, I'm hoping that this story will be quite short as well. I don't plan to go into canon material here, even if the changes that I've established in this fic might make things interesting. I'm thinking this fic will be four or five chapters tops. Sorry about that, but I've expressed my feelings on extended Aus before, and I really didn't plan for the long haul when I started this one, so I don't have many good ideas for a story beyond the end of this fic. On the other hand, once I got started trying to plan an interesting AU...well... I just couldn't stop.

As a bit of a creativity exercise, I set myself a challenge. I make no promises about potentially following through on ALL the results of my little challenge, but I am tempted to follow through on at least a couple.

The challenge I set myself was to come up with an interesting AU that might result out of each of the separate members of the the Konoha 11 (Plus Sasuke- does that make them the Konoha 12? I'm never really sure what I should be calling that collective group anyway...) getting involved in circumstances which made them friends with Naruto during childhood. Basically I'm exploring situations which might force Naruto to become best friends with any of the characters in the group, and the consequences on the storyline thereafter. Those kinds of AUs are not that uncommon, but my challenge was to see if I could come up with a satisfactorily interesting scenario for ALL of them. And... I think I did it... I even got a bit carried away and created a situations for Kakashi and for the Sand Siblings.

So the total of possible fics that I came up with was 13. Some I like more than others. Some I planned out to be rather short snapshots rather like 'A Different Decision'. Some I planned out to be LOOONG. I figured that my next story would be one of these 13, and so even though I already have a pretty good idea of which ones I want to flesh out and write more than the others, I thought I'd run it past other people and which of my possible fics people might be more interested to see. So I'd love to hear opinions: which of the group would you guys like to see most befriend Naruto in an AU fic?

For the record, the official list of characters that I have befriending Naruto is: Sasuke, Sakura, Shikamaru (This one is one of the interesting ones, I'm not actually sure whether I should count it as 'so and so and Naruto end up BFFs' like the others, but meh... I needed a fic to stick to him, and this one was the best I came up with.), Choji, Ino, Hinata, Kiba, Shino (again, same thing happened with Shino as it did with Shikamaru), Lee, Tenten, Neji, Sand Siblings, Kakashi.

Also for the record, I will point out that the stories that I had the most fun with making up were probably: Sasuke, Shikamaru, Ino, Shino, Neji and the Sand Siblings. Make of that what you will.