"Is there something you needed Sasuke?" Tetsuo asked when he got tired of the feeling of being stared at, which was something that was rather uncomfortable for an experienced ninja because it kept triggering their danger sense.
The boy had been sitting there staring at him for more than an hour, obviously wanting to ask him something, but either unwilling or unable to bring himself to ask. He had naturally felt a great deal of unease and discomfort for that entire hour, unease and discomfort that was now bordering on torture. Since he wanted it to stop, it had been up to him to ask what the boy wanted, despite the fact that he was loathe to do so since it would give the boy the upper hand in this situation, which was something the boy didn't deserve.
"Yes." the Uchiha boy replied almost imperiously. "I need a full evaluation of my skills."
"I already evaluated you." he said, remembering that slightly disappointing evening a few nights earlier when he and Kakashi had evaluated the Uchiha's Taijutsu, and Ninjutsu skills in order to see exactly what they'd need to work with him on.
While the boy's speed and reflexes were good and, aside from a few flaws, his Taijutsu was Low to Mid Chunin, and his Ninjutsu repertoire was somewhat impressive for a boy his age, the Uchiha child's mental state disturbed the both of them. If Hatake Kakashi, who most definitely wasn't the poster-boy for mental stability, was worried about the boy's mental state, he knew that he should be beyond worried. Right now, the boy didn't have the right attitude to become a Chunin, and if a promotion got pushed through anytime in the near future, he would be concerned for any team the boy got placed on.
He would have been willing to say that the boy was dangerously overconfident in his skills and his individual prowess but, that wasn't quite it. From what he'd seen during their evaluation spar and afterward, especially during the incident with the statue earlier, it was clear that the boy had known when he'd bitten off more than he could chew. Instead of retreating so he could come at the problem from a different angle later, the Uchiha had still pushed through, not caring about the potential cost to himself. That was something that could very easily get the boy killed either during training or in the field one day if it wasn't corrected.
"You only did an evaluation of my Taijutsu and Ninjutsu ability." Sasuke said. "I want a full evaluation of all of my skills."
"All of them?" he asked incredulously, wondering what was up with the boy now.
He didn't need any more problems coming from that quarter, especially when he had his hands full with the Haruno girl who was a headache and a half all on her own.
"Why would you want something like that?" he asked "And, why would you even expect me to be able to do something like that right here and right now? Does it look like I've got the Academy guidelines and all of the textbooks on hand?"
When it became clear to him that he wouldn't immediately cater to the unreasonable demand, the Uchiha boy stood there and scowled at him. Considering the fact that something approaching a scowl was the child's default mode, it was possible that the boy was only mildly annoyed by the fact that he was questioning his demands rather than immediately giving in to them. Then again, mildly annoyed could actually be the boy's default mode, and he'd just pissed the kid off because he'd decided not to cater to the whims of the poor orphaned Last of the Uchiha whom just about everybody seemed to suck up to despite the fact that up until about four years ago, just about everybody - him included - thought that it had been one of the boy's relatives, quite possibly the boy's father, that had set the Kyuubi loose on Konoha.
Out of a desire not to speak ill of the dead, he didn't bring up his suspicions regarding the Uchiha after the Massacre but, there was not speaking ill of the dead, and there was this whatever it was that a majority of the villagers had decided to do after the Uchiha had been slaughtered, which seemed to have been to wipe clean from their minds all of the sins the Uchiha had committed back when the arrogant bastards who had run around the village like they'd owned it were still alive. It was strange really, there were people who had absolutely despised the Uchiha when the clan was still alive who had never said a single harsh word to Sasuke after the Massacre, and offered the boy everything short of the moon. He would have expected them to have been more wary of the boy, especially considering the fact that it had been the boy's brother who had slaughtered the clan, parents included, but that had turned out not to be the case.
"There was a traitor in the Academy, and I want to make sure my education hasn't suffered as a result." Sasuke finally said, pulling him out of his musings on the bizarre treatment of the boy and the memory of the Uchiha Clan after the massacre.
"I'll see what I can do on such short notice." he replied, after a bit of thought on the subject, as the boy's demand didn't seem as unreasonable as it normally would have been in that light.
It wasn't as if he really had anything else to do with his evening since he was out here, and cobbling together a rough approximation of the Academy Curriculum from faded memories from over a decade ago was as good a way as any to kill time. Normally around now, he'd be putting his daughter to bed but, since he wasn't at home, and wasn't going to be home for a long while, that wasn't an option. About the only reason he had been able to take two months to go camping with his team though had been because he and his wife had hit a little rough patch in their relationship, and his wife needed a little space at the moment. Their arguments had been getting a bit worse lately, and if a little time apart was what it took to repair their relationship, he would gladly give his wife all the time she needed. As they say, distance makes the heart grow fonder, and by the time he returned, she should be very happy to see him again. Either that, or she'd be waiting by the door with the divorce papers when he returned.
The thought of what the traitor who'd wormed his way into the Academy could have done to the Uchiha aside from glossing over several potentially serious mental problems, disturbed him as well. Something like this could seriously affect the team, and thereby affect him, now that he really stopped to think about it rather than grumble about the low quality of this year's batch of students as he tried to repair all of the visible problems with his new students. It was entirely possible that the boy had missed some sort of vital lesson and didn't even know it, which meant that he wouldn't know that the boy didn't know since the boy couldn't alert him, and he might not ask the question that would reveal the boy's ignorance on the subject for a good long time, by which it would have been too late. The same went for Sakura, whom he would have to evaluate as well, considering the fact that the two of them had been in the same class, and neither fit the profiles that had hailed them both as extremely gifted and ready to be out in the field which had been in their files.
He really should have done this in the beginning before they left and, because he hadn't, he was going to be paying for it now as he scrounged around for some way to evaluate the Uchiha boy's and Haruno girl's skills outside of Taijutsu, Ninjutsu, Genjutsu, and weapons handling.
Rather than thanking him for even considering doing him a favor such as the one he'd asked for, after he had given the boy a positive answer, the Uchiha boy had turned away and moved towards the fire, as if he'd fully expected the favor to have been given to him, and didn't care how much it would inconvenience the person who was giving him said favor. The fact that the boy was no longer staring or scowling at him was the only good thing that had come out of that entire exchange. He'd say that he didn't know where that boy had learned his manners but, that'd be lying since he'd run into a number of officers in the KMPF who had had the same attitude as the one the boy was displaying right now.
For some reason, as Sasuke moved back towards the fire, Naruto had started scrounging through his pack. Ever since Suzume had taught the boy how to do storage seals, Naruto had packed the same way for each mission, placing a layer of easily accessible supplies over a thicker layer of storage scrolls which contained any spare supplies he may own and might need during the mission, often changing out the supplies on the top layer with supplies that had previously been in the scrolls. For this trip however, there was an even thicker layer of storage scrolls in the boy's bag than usual which caused Naruto's search for a particular scroll to take longer than normal, and had resulted in the boy grumbling as he tipped out the contents of his bag and rooting through them. After Naruto found what he was looking for amongst his storage scrolls, he walked over and handed him the scroll in question over to him.
"What's this?" he asked.
"I got my hands on a black market set of the Academy textbooks a while back when I decided to see if there was something I was missing by not being in the Academy." Naruto replied, shrugging. "I checked them against the copies at the Academy and found them to be entirely accurate."
"Why are you carrying these with you?" he asked, though he knew that he would probably regret do so, since the answer would probably give him a headache.
The boy often did the strangest things for the strangest reasons. Because he also possessed the devil's own luck however, most of the bizarre crap the boy did ended up working out in his favor in the most unexpected ways, especially after he had handed down the skills he'd learned on his mother's knee to his students. Of the three, Satoshi may have been the best con-artist but, Naruto had been the one who had gotten the strangest cons to work. He still couldn't figure out how the boy had managed to con a ninja out of three thousand ryo with a piece of string and a chalkboard eraser last year.
"I asked Satoshi to watch my plants while I was away." Naruto explained.
That explained everything perfectly, especially since Satoshi's kleptomaniac tendencies had gotten worse lately. Satoshi had always been something of a sneak thief like most of the rest of his family, but paired with the teen's gambling addiction, it was a recipe for disaster. Especially since the boy hadn't learned his lesson during the team's first C-Rank, and seemed to have picked up the idea that he'd be able to con his way out of anything the way the team had conned their way out of that situation.
"So, you packed your entire apartment?" he asked.
"Yup." Naruto replied. "Everything but the trash."
Sighing at his students' antics, he pulled the textbooks out of the scroll with the intention of flipping through them and comparing them to what he remembered of the Academy curriculum. As he flipped through the edition of the Academy's History text which was only about two years old, he found himself frowning.
"Odd." he said, as he turned back to the entry on the Shodai Hokage to check something. "It could be because it's gone, and they've all but died out, but there's not a single mention of Uzushiogakure or even the Uzumaki Clan anywhere. Senju Hashirama's wife isn't even mentioned in this."
"What?!" Kakashi said as he snatched the book out of his hands and started furiously flipping through it himself.
"Excuse me," the Haruno girl piped up from her side of the fire. "But, why would the Uzumaki be listed in a Konoha textbook? They're from Iwa, aren't they?"
"WHAT?!" he, Naruto, and Kakashi all yelled at the same time.
"Who the hell told you that?!" Kakashi asked, sounding unusually upset, as if he'd taken that question personally for some reason.
"My mother." Sakura replied, sounding slightly sheepish.
"For your information." Naruto, who had eagerly studied the subject of his clan and their former village after he'd come across a reference to the name Uzumaki in a book on traps which had several traps which integrated seals into them, said in an offended tone. "The Uzumaki were allies of the Senju, with whom they frequently intermarried, who had settled in the Land of Whirlpools and founded Uzushiogakure, which was Konoha's closest ally for generations until its destruction near the end of the Second War."
Both Sakura and Sasuke appeared surprised to hear this. They shouldn't have been. He had been tested on basic information about Uzushiogakure and several notable members of the Uzumaki Clan who had aided Konoha in times of trouble back during his history classes at the Academy. So, they should've been as well, considering the fact that they had been an integral part of Konoha's history, and just about every Konoha ninja above the rank of Genin wore the symbol of Uzushiogakure on their uniforms, himself and Kakashi included.
While Tetsuo and Kakashi were checking the history book to see what else was missing, an Instructor from Iwa's Ninja Academy, which ran on a slightly different cycle from Konoha's, was running a nighttime survival exercise with his students.
"Best money I ever spent." the Instructor muttered as he reeled his chalkboard eraser back in after using it to catch the attention of a particularly inattentive student who was now rubbing a small lump on his head.
Previously, he'd used kunai to catch the brats' attention when it wandered but, he'd been suspended and sent out into the field on a bunch of crappy C Ranked missions after there had been an...accident with one of the students. Ever since he'd returned, he had used the method that several of the Konoha Ninja Academy's Instructors swore by. Normally, he would be reluctant to use a Leaf Ninja method out of principle but, this one had proven to be effective time and again, and with it, there was no risk of suspension for injuring his students if his aim was slightly off.
Edited 10-5-12