Long after that scream-worthy night, Hitomi would wonder how exactly an exercise had turned into such a mess. She would only need a few seconds of contemplation – her gloomy stare fixed on nothing tended to give shivers to some students – to realise, again and again, that everything was Naruto's fault, and that realisation would make her glare at him until he gave her the Stare. He was the only one able to beat her with that technique and she regretted teaching it to him every day.

Everything had started a few days before that damned night, when Iruka had announced that the class would spend a night on training ground number six, usually forbidden to students, for a survival exercise. It was a first for the Academy to organise such an event, and students owed this opportunity to a suggestion from Inuzuka Tsume, Kiba's mother, who thought the students weren't crafty enough outside of the classroom.

The students had been divided into teams of three by Iruka. He had pretended to pick them randomly, but he couldn't fool Hitomi: he had formed Team Eight and Team Ten as they would be after graduation. The Yūhi girl was paired with Naruto and Sasuke, which probably meant that, in less than two years, she would be part of Team Seven instead of Sakura. Would they follow similar paths? Like all kunoichi, Hitomi deeply respected Tsunade, and would be infinitely grateful for everything the Sannin would like to teach her, but she was no medic and didn't intend to become one.

Fortunately, in this version of the universe, Sasuke and Naruto got along well. The Uzumaki boy was sometimes jealous of his friend-turned-rival-but-still-friend, be it about his unwanted success with girls or about the grades he got seemingly without any effort. There was conflict between them sometimes, yes, but they often trained together, shared their lunch at least twice a week, and they had often gone to see a movie together, several times this year alone. Their relationship was as lively and shifting as a flame, but it made them progress and, if they had a problem, the other was there to help. Sasuke had handled a civilian bully who had decided to pick on Naruto when the little jinchūriki hadn't stood up for himself; Naruto was always there when Sasuke needed to talk about his parents, about the void they had left in him when they died.

The true conflicts, the ones that could have set them apart with no turning back, Hitomi had handled them by stepping between them. She was the only student in their class group to be able to form a bit of killing intent around herself, as well as a softer version that allowed her to threaten them without even opening her mouth or touch them. One time, though, she had had to trap them in her shadow. She hadn't been happy about it and they had felt it, the both of them. Since then, they did their best to avoid going through that ordeal again and pouted rather than getting angry with each other. Wise, wise boys.

The three days following Iruka's announcement had been devoted to intense preparations. Hitomi had made sure, on the first day, that her two friends knew how to behave in a hostile forest. They probably didn't need all that information to make it out okay, but one never knew when knowledge could come in handy. The second day, she had approached Shikamaru's and Shino's teams and proposed a non-aggression pact they had both accepted on behalf of their teammates, which was a relief for her.

Spending a night in the forest was just the first goal. Each team had to keep the flag they had gotten before entering the training ground, then steal at least one from another team. The exercise looked a lot like the one she had read about in the Previous World, during the second part of the Chūnin exam. At least this forest didn't have giant tigers and chakra leeches, and the students weren't allowed to kill each other.

The third day, Hitomi focused on packing. Since she had already been out of the village, she was the person to talk to about traveling gear in the Fellowship. Shino and Kiba had a good idea about what was necessary too, but they didn't have real experience in the matter so, when it was brought up, they all looked at her. "Take a blanket, but not a sleeping bag. It's warm enough to go without a tent, and they are too easy to spot anyway, even in the middle of the night. As for sleeping bags, well, it's hard as hell to get out of them in a hurry and it's gonna be a problem if you're attacked in the middle of the night. Take a coat or something like that for when you'll have to stand watch. No need for a change of clothes this time, but make sure you don't forget your weapons and usual gear."

Then she had focused on her friends' specific needs. She made sure, for example, that Shikamaru had as much ninja wire and smoke bombs as he could possibly need for the traps he was starting to love so much. It had been months since he had stopped buying them: Hitomi made him far better tools than what he could get in the armoury: it was better quality, more varied, and probably far more dangerous than what the Academy students were authorised to shop for anyway. She was working on a lot of projects at the same time, including smoke bombs that wouldn't disturb Kiba's smell. She hadn't gotten far with it yet, though. The Konohajin scientists had been working on it for years, so it wasn't likely that she would find a solution any soon.

On Wednesday afternoon, instead of going home, the students gathered in the Academy's courtyard, each of them wearing a backpack. Hitomi was the only exception: she had chosen to take storage seals instead, since Ensui had advised her to work some more on them. She was also heavily armed for a simple student, with her tantō, her two pouches of senbon and her trapping gear. She had added a few novelties to the kit Ensui had helped her assemble in Sunagakure, an eternity ago.

After Iruka reminded them of the rules, the children were led to the entrance of the training ground. Five Jōnin, including Maito Gai and Shiranui Genma, would supervise the exercise with Iruka and Mizuki. Their role was to make sure that the rules would be followed dutifully by the students, especially the one that forbade the different teams from attacking for the first two hours of the exercise. Hitomi fully intended on exploiting that time to make a secure and easy to defend little camp in their corner of the forest.

From the moment teams had been announced, she had taken the lead of hers, with an ease that almost shocked her. She was, after all, the most experienced, and the oldest. She felt good when her two teammates looked at her, waiting for her orders, both focused and calm, so sure she would lead them well. With a sign of her hand, she instructed them to follow and went deep inside the forest without any hesitation.

It took her twenty minutes to find the perfect place, a clearing that was several metres wide, marked in its centre by a big oak. If she perched on its branches, she could observe her surroundings without too much trouble. The tree was old enough, its branches sturdy enough, so that a camp could be established comfortably far above the ground. The following hour was spent trapping the hell out of their clearing. Hitomi's hands had become nimble with the cables, mechanisms, and springs that would help her trigger her traps with the edge of a kunai, safely linked to her branch of their tree. Very quickly, their tree had become a true fort. She straddled her branch, Sasuke and Naruto sitting right under her.

"Sasuke, you're the most offensive of us three. You'll be in charge of finding Aimi's team and stealing their flag. If you have to harm them for it… Don't hold back too much but still play by the rules."

"Why Aimi?" Naruto asked, picking on her icy tone.

A vaguely cruel smile appeared on Hitomi's lips and made the two boys tense slightly. Their years around her had made them wary of her memory, of how it made her warped and resentful sometimes. "I'm not exactly done making her pay for what she did to Hinata," the girl said with a wicked gleam in her eyes. "And I will feel a little less bad if we take hers since she makes the other civilian students' lives a living hell."

"What do I do if I find another team on the way?" Sasuke asked while standing up.

"The examiners didn't forbid us from taking more than one flag. Take as many as you want but leave enough for our allies."

The Uchiha boy nodded, already focused on his mission and, a few seconds later, he had disappeared amongst the leaves, perfectly silent. He still had around forty minutes before he was authorised to attack anyone, but looking for a target before that time wasn't against the rules. Other students had probably had the same idea.

Sasuke gone, Hitomi turned to Naruto, who was almost hopping up and down on his branch with impatience. "Here, take the flag. Tie it to that branch and stand watch. I'm gonna continue working on our traps. When night falls, I'm gonna take your place and you're gonna sleep for three hours. Then it'll be my turn."

If there hadn't been a rule forbidding teams to hide their flag out of the training ground, Hitomi would have just sealed hers away. She couldn't, since, technically speaking, the dimension where sealed objects went was… elsewhere. More than once, the girl had wondered if life was possible there. She had seen more surprising things than that.

Naruto nodded and obeyed, leaving Hitomi to her preparations. She had learned to draw explosive seals and thought about using them. Maiming and killing were forbidden, Iruka had been very clear – and perhaps he had been looking in her direction when he said that. Her seals were of an average potency, so it was probably enough to kill a child, future shinobi or not. With a pout, she put those away where they couldn't be found and worked on other traps.

Night had fallen an hour ago when Sasuke came back to camp. One moment Hitomi was alone on her branch; the next, the Uchiha boy was there, already leaning away to dodge the kunai she had thrown by reflex. He answered to her frown with a smirk, so obviously full of himself he could have died if he had jumped from his ego. Brat. He had two flags hanging around his neck: the pink one was Aimi's, and the green Kakeru's – one of the top ten kids who wasn't from the Fellowship.

"Well done," she whispered with a nod to the flags. "Ours is hidden there. Use the green one as a lure on another branch and tell me how it went." She couldn't suppress a snicker when he told her, after obeying her orders, how he had used the several storage seals she had given him before the exercise. Imagining Aimi furious and covered in mud made her almost regret she hadn't been there to see it. Once he had taken them by surprise, Sasuke had just had to surpass them physically, which hadn't been hard, then he had tied them up and watched as a Jōnin had retrieved them before leaving.

While coming back to the camp, he had stumbled upon Kakeru's team and hadn't hesitated before fighting them. One of the team members had managed to trap him in a genjutsu, which was surprising considering that Sasuke's clan was specialised in that shinobi art, but Uchiha Sasuke could never be fooled for long. He had beaten his three opponents, tied them up, and left even before a Jōnin appeared with their flag. Maybe he was a bit pissed at them.

Hitomi could see how he had enjoyed fighting: his dark eyes gleamed, hungry for more, his body was as tense as a bow, still bursting with formidable energy. It had to be difficult to stay furtive when he was in such a state. Without a word, the girl tossed him one of the rations she had stored in her storage seals. The Akimichi had the best ones according to the whole village, and she agreed. She was glad to have access to them without being overcharged like people out of the clan alliance were.

"In an hour, I'll wake Naruto up so he can stand watch. You'll come and sleep too."

"But…"

"If it was a mission, you wouldn't protest. Sleeping is important for a shinobi."

"You're the one saying this? Who are you and what have you done with my sister?"

That word, so short, so simple, paralysed Hitomi on her branch. Her eyes wide, she stared at Sasuke, the jab about her numerous sleepless nights completely forgotten. A warm sense of belonging bloomed in her chest, her hands stiffened around her own ration. He had never… She knew he was seeing her like family, and Kurenai too, but he had never put their new relationship into words. Respectful of his modesty and the memories of his clan, she hadn't either.

She was lost for words, so they just sat there, silent and staring into the dark, until it was Naruto's turn to stand watch. Hitomi took a few moments to wake up the little jinchūriki then climbed on a higher branch, wedged herself in a split comfortably and closed her eyes. She couldn't afford to sleep during a mission, even as simple as this one, not with her nightmare problem, but working in her Library allowed her body to rest just as well as sleeping did. That way, she stayed alert, ready to react if a problem appeared.

And, of course, problems appeared around an hour later. A noise tore through the night; Hitomi needed a few moments to understand, her mind still half-lost in her Library, what it was. Naruto knew how to choose the perfect moment for everything, including a fucking sneezing fit. It was so grotesque, so improbable, and yet so very much happening. Purely running on instinct mode, Hitomi activated her main trap when she perceived chakra and movement at the edge of their clearing.

With a terrible roar, flames appeared from nothingness and circled the tree where they were staying. The collar of oil pockets she had placed around the roots made the blaze even fiercer – in the centre of all this fire and smoke, Hitomi, Naruto and Sasuke stood proudly, goading the two teams at the border of their clearing to come and get them.

Hitomi had taken the highest position, sword unsheathed and kunai ready to spring more traps. Being surrounded by fire and perched on a tree probably wasn't the best situation, but no one would dare get to them before she decided otherwise. Water Release was the second rarest affinity in Konoha, and Sasuke was probably the only student to have mastered any elemental jutsu in their year yet anyway. Kurenai had even taught them a few more than the ones he had learned with his father.

Searching around with her meridians, Hitomi cut a cable, sending a salve of kunai flying in the direction of one of the two teams lurking in the dark. Naruto and Sasuke were protecting their flags – the lure and, without looking too much like it, the real one too. A member of the second team took a step towards the flames but was stopped by Sasuke throwing three kunai in his direction, and then…

The disaster, the real one.

Sasuke's movement had thrown Naruto off-balance. He fell from his branch – none of the two boys had good enough chakra control yet for tree-climbing. Sasuke was close to it, but Naruto had a hard time, what with the Kyūbi messing with his chakra control.

Hitomi jumped, but even her chakra-enhanced reflexes weren't enough to catch the boy. She froze, paralysed in horror, and watched her friend plunge towards the flames, a distressed cry on her lips. Its echoes were still ringing in the air when Sasuke moved. She had to re-watch her memory of it in her Library later to understand what happened then. A shadow brushed past her, so close and so quick her black curls followed the movement and blinded her for a second.

When she could see again, Sasuke was hanging in a neighbouring tree, Naruto shaken but safe under one of his arms. His other hand was bleeding, cut by the ninja wire he had used for that formidable jump. That wire, once filled with chakra, became a thousand times sturdier and extremely sticky. However, his jump and reflexes weren't the source of Hitomi's shock. She had prepared far too well for that kind of situation to ignore that Sasuke was better at improvisation than she was.

No, what shocked her was the pair of Sharingan she was staring into. Deeply shaken, she felt her whole body tense, hard enough to cause pain later. Sasuke couldn't have already awakened the Sharingan. It was too early. Things didn't happen that way in the canon, not at all.

But this universe wasn't the canon. She had thought about it again and again, tried to stick to what she knew, to assume everything worked like she had read it in another world, and had never stopped to think about what she was changing, about the consequences of her actions. She had thought she had years before doing so. She couldn't even, at this moment, try to go back through the chain of actions and reactions that had led Sasuke to this unplanned development.

Once she had overcome her stupor, Hitomi straightened up and moved, too. Shadows would be useless here, but they weren't her only resources. Crouching on her branch, she brushed her fingers to the ninja wire lying at her feet, infusing it with chakra. Immediately, the largest seal she had ever drawn activated, raising a translucid barrier inside the circle of fire. This wouldn't let anything go through without eating away at them like an acid. It was probably the most dangerous seal she knew, one capable of blowing up the whole training ground had she drawn it poorly. It consumed her chakra really fast, but she trusted Naruto and Sasuke to come back, to protect her.

Even though everything was Naruto's fault.

"Do it fast, boys. I want to finish the night in peace and quiet."

Of course, they understood what she couldn't say out loud, the light pins and needles in her fingers telling her she had already spent a quarter of her chakra reserves. They hadn't been full when she had entered the forest, and were even less so when the attack had started, but this seal was still a demanding creation.

Fortunately, Naruto and Sasuke had her back. In a few minutes, their six opponents were all beaten and tied up, and she could relax. Two thirds of her reserves were gone, an uncomfortable situation, even though she had known far worse when Ensui was training her. With a rigorous care and slowness, she cut the influx of chakra towards the wire and her feet, then straddled her branch.

She was trying to hide how taxing maintaining the barrier had been, but the look on Naruto's face as he climbed up again and put his orange vest on her told him she hadn't been able to fool him this time. Sasuke joined them too but stood watch behind her, looking around with his still activated Sharingan. The horizon was turning orange and pink in some places. Dawn would come soon.

"Well, boys… What mistakes did we make during this exercise?" This sentence had become a ritual amongst their peers during Kurenai's classes. Often, they relied on Hitomi's mother to tell them why they had had such a hard time with the exercise and advise them on how to make it easy next time, but they always had to start the process. It was just the three of them this time, though. The two Jōnin picking up their last opponents, who had been stripped of their flags before attacking, didn't really count – although Hitomi didn't doubt they could hear them.

"Everything started when I sneezed. I should learn to do it silently, that's probably how they found us."

"I shouldn't have been so near Naruto, so I wouldn't have surprised him while throwing my shuriken."

"Well, I shouldn't have been surprised!"

"And I shouldn't have chosen a trap that could turn on us so easily just because it was easier to set up," Hitomi concluded. The three children watched each other in silence for a long time, then Naruto started snickering and Hitomi followed, unable to resist. Even Sasuke was smirking, and trying very hard to hide it.

"We still kicked a lot of butts so that's good, believe it!"

"The Sharingan is probably a blessing in disguise, but you'll have to get it looked at, Sasuke, just to make sure it works correctly and you don't risk harming yourself by using it. Mom or Grandfather may know something useful about dōjutsu, I could ask."

"Hm… Anyway, we should go visit my clan lands too. No one went there since I went to live with you, I gave orders that they wouldn't disturb anything, just in case I needed to go back one day."

Hitomi nodded, acknowledging how wise this choice was. She couldn't help but feel dread at the idea that everything was still exactly like Itachi had left it, years earlier. Would she be able to feel the echo of his chakra? Would she see where his tantō had hit? She had learned how to read such signs under Ensui's care, but right now… No, she couldn't say she would have liked not to know. She would never disregard the knowledge her mentor had given her like that.

"You won't have to face it alone, Sasuke, believe it!"

Hitomi muffled a laugh to her friend's enthusiasm, even that simple action leaving her slightly breathless. She didn't need to put her support for Sasuke into words. Their eyes met for a moment and it was enough. They were family, after all. The most important thing for the Nara clan.

When the sun had completely risen, Hitomi slowly straightened up, sending enough chakra to her limbs so as not to fall from the tree. She could still hang on for a few hours if she was just doing it, but she didn't need to: the exercise would be over for their team once they managed to leave the training ground. The children gathered their things, except for the traps they hadn't sprung; a Genin team would probably have to disarm them and Hitomi wished them good luck with that.

Barely half an hour later, they were out – they had had to take a large detour to avoid another team. Hitomi had seen how Sasuke loved fighting and wanted more, but he wouldn't have put her at risk by looking for trouble while her chakra reserves were low.

"Hitomi, debrief!" The dry and demanding snap in Iruka's voice made the girl jump and stiffen, almost at attention. She spent more than an hour arguing her case to the teacher, justifying all her choices. He saw her as the team leader – and thus the one responsible for everything that could have happened under her care. He was right, of course. Such authority on her peers couldn't come without that. At least, he was satisfied when Sasuke gave him their three flags. Still, during the following weeks, Hitomi glared at Naruto a lot, just on principle, and because she didn't like it when Iruka lectured her.