Even when he had been a child himself, he had disliked children. It was just the way he was wired, or maybe it was the other way around, but something about being near small people made his skin crawl. Perhaps it was because he had a hard time relating to their wide eyed, naive and raw emotional responses to everything around them. Or perhaps because there was nothing rational or sensible about children, nothing that he could even begin to fathom.

Anyway, the point was: Kakashi Hatake, didn't like kids and he had never bothered to hide the fact. So he couldn't begin to comprehend why the Hokage kept trying to make a bunch of snot nosed, fresh out of the academy, babies, his problem.

Theoretically he knew why. He didn't have any offspring himself, for obvious reasons, and he was one of their most skilled and knowledgeable jonin, another fact, and he was spending his time doing anything except passing said skills and knowledge on. Though in all honestly, he couldn't care less.

He hadn't grown strong because his chronically depressed father had held his hand and showed him the way, and he had already been quite advanced by the time Minato found him. Real talent would grow under any conditions.

Real talent that all of the previous teams he had send back to the academy, had lacked.

And therein lie his current issue, he could simply not fail this team. Although the Hokage hadn't actually ordered him to pass those kids, the moment he had seen Naruto's name appear, he knew he what he was in for. Even if there was another jonin out there with the power to keep the Kyuubi in check once the seal started weakening, even if there was another jonin out there with similar first hand knowledge about said seal... there was simply no one else Kakashi could stand to trust with the boy's life.

It was non negotiable.

Did he like it, no, but he owned it to Minato-sensei and he had seen enough of how others treated his son to want to keep them away from him. He was hardly planning to become a parental figure in his life, the kid had enough traumas already, but he wouldn't treat him differently from his teammates and, sadly, that was a full step up from what he was used to.

So Naruto was a given and as if that wasn't big enough of a responsibility, he got the last Uchiha in the same deal, free of charge. Team seven was one big fat target heaped on his back, topped with a whole lot of incoming trouble. That was something he could feel in his bones.

Kakashi lifted his head away from the memorial stone he had been visiting and wondered whether he was ready yet to face his team to-be.

It was with not a small amount of resignation that he had taken to shadowing the three would be genin, a week before their official 'graduation'. Just so he could get an idea of how screwed he was. The answer was very.

Due to lack of any sort of guidance in the boy's life, Naruto was chronically underdeveloped compared to his peers and still struggled with simple things that no twelve year old had a right to find so hard. Writing and reading, being just two topics in an extensive list but the most troubling one was definitely his lacking abilities in self care. Even brushing his teeth was done wrong, not surprising considering the boy probably had to learn it from a toothpaste commercial. It was almost a relief to know that the demon fox would serve to keep his gum and teeth healthy.

He would have to teach Naruto basic life skills along with trying to shape him into a proper shinobi. Trying being the keyword here, as from what he had observed, the boy was far too mellow and impressionable for the life ahead of him.

Then there was Uchiha Sasuke. Let it be known that Kakashi had been about as fond of that clan as they had been of him and they would have sooner invited a pig to sit at their table than let him pass by without a sneer. But he could sympathize with the boy, traumatized and anti-social as he was. Because Kakashi understood what it was like to come home and find your parents in a pool of their own blood.

He recognized the rage, the pain, the obsession to better himself so he would never again have to feel as he did that night, and he saw his younger self reflected in the boy. That's also how he knew, without a doubt, that Sasuke would be the most difficult the work with.

Then there was the girl, Haruno Sakura, almost an afterthought in his mind as she would be to many others. Within team seven, she was doomed to forever be overshadowed by both boys. Aside from her pink hair, there was nothing outwardly remarkable about her or her life. Good chakra control, bright mind, more academic than physically inclined but that didn't have to be an issue. He knew better than anyone that a good assassin didn't need to be a musclehead.

He had been happy to hear from her instructors that although she had apparently had an obnoxiously childish crush on the last Uchiha, she had grown out of it months ago and had matured significantly since then. Interestingly, she somehow didn't seem to be affected by the influence of the adults in her life and treated Naruto like he was any other dumb kid. She would be the easiest to work with.

And it was a good thing too, seeing as he would have his hands full with the boys. She would be lucky if she got the scraps of his attention and he knew it.

He bend him neck back towards the memorial stone and decided they could wait a little longer. Perhaps he should pray for once...

Somewhere between five in the morning and whatever hour their sensei would finally show up at, Sakura had a epiphany. Despite his threats in her memories, Kakashi Hatake probably didn't have the clearance to actually fail this team, least of all permanently. Even if Sasuke had shown less promise, like Naruto, both were too valuable as assets to waste in the genin reserves.

Most of the time she should have spend sleeping, had been wasted on trying to solve an impossible riddle. How would she convince Naruto and Sasuke to work together when there was no way of knowing things would go down exactly as it had for future Sakura? Could she get them to believe her when she told them the truth behind the test? It was a question that had been haunting her all morning, until now.

She didn't have to. As influential as he was, Kakashi didn't have the kind of power that could rob Konoha's military of their Jinchuriki. Then there was the added complication that there was literally no one else to teach Sasuke about the sharingan and, come to think of it, the jonin was also one of the few who knew a thing or two about fuinjutsu.

Most likely, the outcome of this test had already been decided, and Sakura wouldn't even have to do anything to pass it. Kind of like last time, she thought wryly.

Still there was a a cold layer of sweat coating her palms as she and her soon-to-be teammates kept their eye out for their tardy Sensei. Naruto had already complained about it abundantly and had now taken to dozing off against a tree while Sasuke was too disciplined to nod off but he was blinking suspiciously often.

"Yo."

Sakura nearly jumped out of her skin when Kakashi appeared seemingly out of nowhere, a trail of falling leaves, dramatically scattering around him. The fact that is was mid summer, hardly the time for falling leaves, sort of irked her. However, with her knowing what had been to come and having had breakfast, she was a lot less irritable than the two boys.

Naruto sprang up like a feral cat, not even bothering to wipe the drool of his chin before howling. "YOU'RE LATE!"

Even, Sasuke 'hn-ed' in agreement.

In another purposely docile gesture, the jonin scratched his head. "Oh yes, well sorry about that. A black cat crossed my path and I had to take the long way here."

"Lair!" Naruto immediately called him out. "What kind of lame excuse is that?"

"Well, anyway, let's get on to the test, shall we?"

Mentions of the notorious test with a 66% fail rate, immediately had team seven standing at attention, including Sakura.

"You're objective is to get these from me," He held out the two notorious bells, "by noon." Then he placed a clock on one of the present posts. "To get one of these bells, you have to come at me with the intent to kill, or else you'll never beat me."

"Hah," Naruto grinned, "you couldn't even dodge that eraser. How hard can it be? I'll beat you any day old man."

Sakura tried not to cringe at just how wrong that statement was, but couldn't blame Naruto. This was all a setup to be underestimated, and she had fallen for it before as well.

Unaffected by his student's gloating, Kakashi cocked his head and did that weird eye-smile of his. "The dog with the biggest bark has the weakest bite, this is why you are the dead last."

A growl escaped Naruto, an actual growl, as he grabbed a kunai from his pack. "I'll show him bite." Stepping forward, Sakura yanked him back by his collar the moment he tried to dash at the jonin. This seemed to surprise him, effectively making him forget his anger.

"Huh, Sakura, what you'd do that for?"

She released him to place her hands on her hips like a lecturing academy teacher. "Can't you see he's just provoking you, Naruto? That's a basic mind tactic."

"W-what? I mean- I knew that!" The blond boy stammered.

In the resulting silence, Sakura shifted her feet, feeling a bit like a bad actress for bringing up the point both boys had clearly missed. "But Taicho, there are only two bells."

Kakashi's reaction was lighting fast, but not what she had expected. "Sensei will do Sakura, we're not at war, ne?

She clamped up at her mistake, barely hearing his next explanation about how at least one of them would be send back to the academy and the other two would get lunch. How could she slip up like that, after all those months of carefully acting normal? It would be years before Kakashi would be her taicho, when Sakura herself had been a chunin. Damn it, she had been living too much inside her head.

"Begin."

Still preoccupied with a downward spiral in her mind, vividly imagining how this would lead to her being found out. She scrambled for cover just a bit too late, making her seem slow. It was a good thing that Naruto, just standing there with his arms crossed, was stealing the show anyway but Sakura was beyond hoping that the jonin hadn't noticed.

How can I be doing worse than before!?

She thumped her head against the soft soil beneath her hiding place, a dense bush. In the mean time, her blond teammate was getting his ass kicked rather spectacularly. A noteworthy moment being when he also got his ass poked.

Sakura felt her eyebrow twitch, how gross. Spectacular power differences aside, if he pulled something like that on her, she would kill him outright by any means necessary.

It wasn't long before Naruto was inevitably defeated, hanging upside down from a tree for his troubles. She bit her lip, knowing what followed. Sure enough, a bunch of kunai and shuriken appeared seemingly out of nowhere and brutally hit their sensei. This of course made Naruto protest with earnest worry because for all his pretenses and dramatics, he never did like it when people got hurt.

In her memories, Sakura had joined in on said protest, shouting that Sasuke had gone too far even though Kakashi never actually got hurt. It had simply been an illusion to deceive them, a clever ruse to find out where both she and her teammate had been hiding. This time she stayed silent, only lightly flinching when the weapons hit fake flesh and bone.

She hoped that now he would go after Sasuke first, so that she could free Naruto and convince him to go help their third teammate. The show of good sportsmanship then might just be enough to let them pass on the first try, maybe.

Once he was out of sight, she slowly crawled from under her hiding spot and inched towards her blond teammate. Then she felt it, the not-so-subtle tickle at the base of her skull alerting her, she was being caught in a genjutsu. So she was being targeted next after all. She disrupted the invasion of her cranial nerves before the jutsu could even fully take hold, only hearing the ghost of Sasuke's voice behind her before it faded away into nothing.

Help me.

"Genjutsu, sensei?"

She turned to ask. Only the silence in the clearing answered her. Kakashi-sensei hadn't even stuck around to see how she fared. Closing her eyes, she had to push away a bitter wave of disappointment before it got the better of her. Never, not once in all of the memories that Sakura had analysed, had Kakashi-sensei ever bothered to give her the time of the day.

At first, everything had been about Sasuke. Then when he had left, had betrayed them, and Naruto had gone on his big training journey with Jiraiya, she could honestly state that the times she had ran into Kakashi could be counted on one hand. It was after Naruto had returned that they saw each other regularly again, if only because of Naruto's insistence on spending time together. It was then that she had slowly begun to realize that, while for her they were people she knew through circumstances -barely even friends-, for him, they were his family.

When it became clear that there was a criminal organisation, filled with some of the most powerful ninja in the world, out to kill their favorite knucklehead, all of Kakashi's efforts had gone to making him strong enough to survive. Something she had understood, still understood, but damnit, it hurt to be completely overlooked even when things were as peaceful as they would get.

She released a shaky breath, straightened her spine and ran towards Naruto, not bothering to conceal her movements. No one was watching anyway.

"Sakura, help meee!" Naruto shouted once he saw her,

"Be quiet, Naruto. Do you want to announce to all of Konoha that I'm here?" She hissed, still sort of miffed by being overlooked.

"Oh, sorry!" Only Naruto was capable of whispering as loudly as he shouted.

She tried not to sigh, tried but failed. "Never mind, let me get you out of that trap. Tuck and roll."

"Wha- ouch!"

Of course, he did not tuck and roll, instead he fell flat on his back. Then he scrambled back to his feet with a sheepish grin. "Eh, I meant to land like that."

"Sure you did." She responded absentmindedly, trying to determine the direction the other members of the team would be at. Neither Sasuke nor Kakashi were trying to conceal themselves, which helped because despite her excellent chakra control, she wasn't a natural sensor.

"Let's go help, Sasuke." She said unenthusiastically, after pinpointing where to go to.

Of course, the blond boy had to voice some rather accurate thoughts. "Why? The bastard doesn't need our help, and he probably doesn't want it either."

At this point, she decided to try one of the convincing speeches she had planned to get the boys to work together. "There are no two-man genin teams, Naruto."

He narrowed his eyes in confusion. "Huh?"

"Think about it, all of the genin teams you have run into so far, all of the graduating teams, those guest speakers in the academy. There are no genin teams smaller than three, there are no single genin being taught by a jonin." Actually there were, they were called apprenticeships, but she wanted to keep things simple for him. "Why do you think that is?"

"Uhm, b-because-" He had the same deer in the headlight look as whenever Iruka-sensei asked him literally any question so she decided to take mercy on him and spell it out.

"Teamwork. We're learning how co-operate with others, we're preparing for working in professional squads and we will be practicing shinobi formations. That's the reason why we're put together in teams of three and that's why there no way Kakashi is planning to split us up, it's counter productive. Those two bells are the test, but not in the way you're thinking. He testing us to see if we can overcome the fact that there are only two bells and come together as a team."

His brow scrunched up at her words, processing the information and she could see the exact moment his eyes brightened in understanding. "Of course, it's all a trick! Damn, that sly old geezer sure had me fooled." Sunny, was the exact description of the smile he gave her. "But, not you. You have to be the smartest person I know."

She looked away and mumbled. "That's because you don't know a lot of people." Yet she still had to fight the rising blush on her cheeks.

"Wait, that means..." He cocked his head, "it's all of us, or none of us!"

She nodded.

"Ugh, I guess we have to find Sasuke then. Do you think he'll listen to us?"

A wry smile made its way onto her lips. "Not a chance, but let's try anyway."

He bellowed a dramatic 'aaalright' before dashing off, forcing Sakura to scramble after him. Something niggled at the back of her mind while they ran. "Wait a second? You know where they are?"

"Of course, I can hear them."

Now that Sakura focused, she could hear the clang of kunai in the distance but she definitely couldn't have heard them back in the clearing. Did Naruto have advanced hearing? She couldn't recall such a thing from her memories but it was a rather small detail to notice. However she knew for a fact that he had a better than human sense of smell and some form of night vision, so it wasn't hard to imagine that excellent hearing was part of the same package deal. Well, if anything he would be hard to sneak up on.

By the time they got to where Naruto was leading them, things had gotten suspiciously quiet and no one was in sight.

"What are you two doing here?" Sasuke's strained voice called out from somewhere ahead of them.

"Huh?" Naruto looked around confused.

"Over here."

Sakura, who kind of knew what to expect, started scanning the ground and nearly missed him because of the undergrowth obscuring his head, which was the only part of his body above ground. Grabbing Naruto by the shoulders, she pointed him in the right direction. She had expected laughter from their least mature member, instead his reaction was properly horrified.

"Oh hell, what has that evil pervert done to Sasuke! His body is gone!" The panic in his voice was rather comic but Sakura ignored the urge to smile and made herself sound exasperated. Lest Sasuke think he was being laughed at.

"Naruto, that's clearly a doton jutsu. Sasuke is underground, we'll have to dig him out and we don't have a lot of time so bring in some clones."

While Naruto fumbled to comply and made to create ten clones, Sasuke leveled her with a hard stare, one that she returned in kind. She had expected some protest instead he curtly asked. "Why?"

Their staring contest was interrupted by the clones getting to work, effectively blocking Sasuke's head from view as they hurdled around him with a cacophony of remarks.

"The two bells are a ruse!" She shouted over the noise. "They're supposed to distract us from the real objective of this task. Teamwork!"

Once his arms were free, he pushed away a clone trying to aid him and pulled himself out of the ground. "Not, interested." He grunted.

"What!" The Naruto's shouted in unison, then it became kind of hard to make out what they were saying but there was a lot of 'bastard' and 'duck-shit-head' involved.

"Ugh, Naruto I can't focus like this dispel the clones!" She growled. It took him a few seconds before the clearing was blissfully silent again, it was also then that she noticed the Uchiha had started walking away from them.

Anger bubbled up in her chest, hot and acid.

Naruto was calling after him. "Hey, I literally just helped you out! The least you can do is stick around."

"I didn't ask for your help." The other boy replied over his shoulder. "I almost got that bell a second ago, I don't need a team."

"Didn't you hear Sakura-"

The girl in question held up her arm, stopping Naruto mid stride. "Don't bother, he's beyond help." Her voice sounded oddly hoarse, as if she was holding back a scream.

An alarm went off from behind time and all three genin turned around in unison. There stood Kakashi-sensei, ringing clock in hand and an unreadable expression in his single visible eye.

"That's right, don't bother. You're all beyond help."

Sakura felt her face reddening, this time unable to hold it back. She knew that once upon a time, Kakashi had recognized himself within Sasuke, he had told her so himself years after the boy's defection. Speaking out like she just had against his favorite student, was a really dumb thing to do if you wanted to stay in your sensei's good book, and Sakura did kind of want that. Feeling like she failed somehow, she hung her head.

Silence reigned over the genin of team seven. Their leader, on the contrary, had some more words to say.

"I've seen the most disappointing display of the academy's teachings today. All three of you should quit right here, right now, since none of you have what it takes to be a ninja."

"But I-" Honestly, Sakura thought she was the only one who had shown him what he wanted to see, if he had only cared to look. She was interrupted by him before she could voice those thoughts.

"Yes, you figured it all out right away. Didn't you Sakura? Just like you saw through all the trick questions on your exams, you saw through mine the very second you saw there were two bells." His tone was not happy, and she couldn't understand why.

"Yes I-"

"And you knew your teammates likely didn't know?"

"Well, they're not... that smart." Having a bad feeling about where this was going, she answered cautiously and could practically feel Sasuke crossing his arms in protest behind her.

"And still, you waited until the test was nearly over to convey this crucial bit of information to your team? Is this how you'll treat vital information in the field? Why didn't you run to Sasuke first, so you could form a plan to aid Naruto. Why wait, at all?"

Sakura was completely baffled. Why was she getting scolded like a toddler that stole a biscuit? What about her idiot teammates that didn't even get what the assignment was all about? Indignation was a mild term for what she felt.

"You heard him, sensei." She struggled not to shout. "I didn't go to Sasuke because I knew I would be talking to a drywall, it was pointless."

Said boy turned away with a 'hn'.

"The fact remains, you didn't try. And I wonder what your excuse is for Naruto. Why wait so long to help him. Theoretically, you might understand what this test is about but I wonder... would you have chosen to aid your teammates at all, without that incentive? Somehow, I doubt it." Kakashi's tone was harsh but what he said, unfortunately had some truth in it.

Her vision blurred with incoming tears, and she had to bite her lip to keep them from falling. Naruto, bless him, rose to her defense and she was most grateful that all eyes moved away from her.

"That's not fair! Sakura tried her best, you can't blame her like that!"

"Your performance was the least impressive." Kakashi stated bluntly. "You didn't even care about the objective, the mission was thrown out of the window since the moment I insulted you. You just wanted to soothe your bruised ego. You are not fit to go out into the field and complete your assignments objectively, you are a child."

Naruto opened his mouth in protest, but while he had easily defended her he didn't seem to be able to do the same for himself. He turned away.

"And Sasuke," Kakashi continued on his path, "do I even need to spell it out?"

Sasuke stared the jonin down defiantly, refusing to back down. "You have to know by now, you could have taken those bells from me, and I would have still failed you. All those years in the academy, learning about strategy and team formations. Has anything stuck, at all? Or are you incapable of learning. The smartest member of your team comes at you with information you have overlooked and what do you do with it? Nothing. I doubt you even believed her. Because nobody in your self centered, little world has anything useful to add except for you. Shinobi operate in teams, if you're not capable of teamwork, you're not fit to become one."

Sasuke broke his stare to look at the ground.

"You all fail! Go home, think about what you want to become and if you think you are able, register yourself to the academy for remedial training."

Then he walked away. Sakura gaped at him with her mouth open, not believing what had just happened. Had she just grossly misjudged their chances to pass. Did they truly fail... it was all because of her, she should have kept to the original script.

While releasing a shaky breath, she wiped her eyes. "Naruto, Sasuke, I'm sorry. This is all my fault."

"You have to be joking, right?" Sasuke ground out. "I'm at blame here!"

To say Sakura was surprised at his admonition was an understatement.

"Yeah," Naruto chimed in, "neither of us realized what was going on. Maybe if we had stuck together from the start we could have figured it out."

"I think we all know who really is to blame for this." She said sarcastically while signing 'sensei' in basic academy sign-language with her right hand. Both boys nodded, Sasuke more solemnly and Naruto enthusiastically, eager to shift the blame. Then surprisingly, Naruto signed 'attack' then 'sensei' followed with 'team'.

They looked at each other for a moment and there was no clear start sign, yet somehow they came to an agreement and rushed Kakashi at the exact same time.

Sakura and Sasuke were taking left and right flank, respectively, while Naruto was taking the rear. She pulled out her ninja-wire and tossed one end to Sasuke, which he effortlessly caught. Silently, they closed in on the jonin's retreating back.

Sakura blinked and found herself bound to her teammates' backs all of the sudden.

"Hm, nice try. But you're a couple of years to early to be sneaking up on me." Kakashi said cheerfully.

"Aw, come on old man. Give us a break, we just tried the whole teamwork thing for the first time." Naruto's voice was even more unbearably loud now that is was in her ear. Sasuke 'hn-ed' in agreement.

"Did you? Well, I guess so. Perhaps you three are not incapable of learning."

Then he just walked away again, the audacity!

"What does that mean?!" If she sounded a bit desperate, well she forgave herself for it.

Kakashi looked over his shoulder, sounding lazy when he spoke to them. "Meet me here tomorrow at eight. Don't disappoint me, team seven."

"We did it!" Naruto shouted and Sakura joined in by whooping in joy.

That joy was soon forgotten when team seven realized they were bound together rather skillfully, and none of them could reach their kunai.

Phew... long chapter. I hope it was a bit enjoyable and none the characters were too AU, even better if it managed to conjure a smile for some people.