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Sakura was—to put it simply—annoying.
She was loud, had zero regard for personal space, and could be every bit as abrasive as Naruto. Worse, she always seemed to need rescuing.
Annoying.
Sasuke shoved a mouthful of noodles into his mouth, the word looping like a mantra in his head. Kakashi had decided to treat them to dinner to celebrate the fact that they hadn't died during the Chunin Exams—though not for lack of trying. Naturally, the choice of restaurant had been left to Naruto. After all, he was the "hero" who had saved them from Gaara.
Naruto was still riding that high, practically vibrating in his seat, though even he had gone quiet for a few days after the Third died. He was also the only one on the team who technically hadn’t lost a fight during the exams—a fact that made a vein pulse rhythmically in Sasuke's forehead.
He turned back to his bowl. If someone held a kunai to his throat, he might begrudgingly admit that he didn't hate Ichiraku Ramen. He just didn't love it enough to eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner like the loser sitting next to him.
Kakashi sat on Sasuke's other side, eye glued to his book, periodically dropping his mask with supernatural speed to steal a bite. Sasuke had spent more time than ever with him learning the Chidori, and while he had to admit the man was no slouch when it came to training, the constant proximity had only highlighted Kakashi's weirder quirks—and his penchant for unwanted meddling.
And then there was Sakura—annoying, combative, overbearing Sakura—perched on Naruto's right and locked in a heated argument with the blonde idiot, their voices bouncing off the narrow walls of the stand and giving Sasuke a mounting headache.
“I still can’t believe that lazy bastard forfeited,” Naruto moaned, a spray of broth and half-chewed noodles escaping his mouth.
“Don’t call him that!” Sakura snapped, though her eyes remained fixed on her own bowl as she blew on a spoonful of soup. “Besides, he was out of chakra. He wasn’t going to win against Temari anyway.”
“He had plenty of chakra left!” Naruto countered, waving his chopsticks dangerously close to Sasuke’s ear. “He just didn't want to break a sweat. It’s embarrassing! How are we supposed to look like the coolest Genin in the village when our smartest guy just... quits?”
Sakura huffed but leaned her shoulder playfully toward him. “It’s called ‘strategy,’ Naruto. Something you wouldn’t understand if it hit you in the face. Shikamaru knew he couldn’t win, so he saved his energy. It was actually very mature.”
“Mature is just another word for boring!” Naruto barked. He turned his head, looking past Sasuke to appeal to their sensei. “Right, Kakashi-sensei? You wouldn’t have quit, right?”
“Mmaa,” Kakashi’s voice drifted from behind the cover of Icha Icha Paradise, sounding suspiciously muffled as if he’d just swallowed a piece of pork. “Knowing when you’re beaten is a vital skill for a shinobi,” he said, his tone maddeningly light.
Sasuke felt a muscle in his jaw tighten. He had to agree with Naruto. To him, "knowing when you're beaten" sounded too much like an excuse for weakness. He stared down at the reflection of the overhead lights in his broth, wishing he could just tune them all out.
Sakura shifted on her stool as she leaned closer to glare at Naruto with a smug grin. “See! Even Kakashi-sensei thinks it was smart!” She chirped, her voice rising with a triumph that made Sasuke’s ears ring.
“It’s not smart, it’s giving up!” Naruto shouted back. “A real ninja never gives up, no matter how much chakra they have left! If you have enough breath to say 'I forfeit,' you have enough breath to throw a kunai!”
“You’re one to talk about what a 'real ninja' does!” Sakura grumbled, patience finally fraying. She leaned over her bowl, pointing a finger directly in Naruto’s face. “You’re the only one of our group who didn’t write a single word on the written exam! Not one! How did you even graduate from the Academy?”
Naruto flinched, his bravado popping like a bubble as he gave her a dramatic, wide-eyed pout. “Sakura-chan,” he wailed, “why are you bringing that up? It was so long ago! Besides, that was part of my strategy! I didn’t need to write anything because I had the guts to stay in the room!”
“It wasn't strategy, it was luck!” Sakura shrieked, though there was a hint of a laugh in her voice. “If it hadn't been for the tenth question, you would have failed us all before we even set foot in the Forest of Death. You didn't even try to answer the questions!”
Naruto leaned into Sasuke’s space, a cheeky smile on his face. “Oh, like Sasuke-kun answered the questions,” he drawled, pitching his voice into a high, mocking imitation of Sakura’s infatuation.
Sasuke felt his blood boil. He turned his head slowly, staring at Naruto as if he could incinerate him with his eyes alone.
“Moron,” he hissed, the word laced with pure venom. “The whole point of the exam was to cheat.”
Naruto let out a cackle, clearly thrilled that he’d managed to get him flustered.
“Sasuke is right,” Kakashi intervened. He didn’t lower his book, but his voice carried that lazy weight of authority. “The written exam wasn't actually about the questions. The first part of it was a test to see if you could gather intelligence under pressure and coordinate with your team to ensure everyone passed.”
He tapped a finger against his chin, looking up as if reflecting on a particularly messy mission. “In a real-world scenario, the two of you would have failed. Naruto, because you came up completely empty-handed. And Sakura, because you played it safe. You relied entirely on your own brain and didn't even attempt to help your teammates.”
He turned his head slightly, his lone eye curving into a smile. “A shinobi has to know how to utilize their surroundings—and that includes the people sitting right next to them.”
Naruto looked deeply offended and retreated into his ramen, pouting. Sakura dropped her head in shame, her smugness from acing the exam evaporating instantly.
Annoying, Sasuke thought again.
Regardless of whether she had technically "failed" the spirit of the test, she was still likely the only person in that room who could have answered the questions on her own. Sasuke remembered some of them—complex battle analyses that held real, practical applications. And Sakura had solved them like they were nothing. He knew that if the test had been based purely on textbook knowledge, both he and Naruto would have failed miserably.
Apparently, mentorship was the only thing Kakashi was offering for dinner because the moment the last noodle disappeared from his bowl, he vanished in a puff of smoke. Naruto, now several pounds heavier after three bowls of ramen and visibly about to burst, barely managed a groan of protest before he waddled out of the stall in a daze, mumbling about his "ninja way" and a desperate need for a nap. This left Sasuke and Sakura alone in the sudden silence of the stand. With a weary sigh, Sasuke tossed a few ryo on the counter to cover the wreckage of their meal and stood up. Sakura followed suit, her earlier shame still lingering. They walked away together in the opposite direction of Naruto’s clumsy retreat, the cool night air finally cutting through the lingering heat of the ramen and the headache of the evening.
Sakura was walking uncharacteristically a step ahead of him. There was none of her usual chatter, no pestering questions designed to bait him into a conversation. Instead, she was mumbling under her breath, her fists balled at her sides.
“Tch, ‘real-world scenario.’ How could he even say that?” she grumbled. “I memorized every page of the chakra theory scrolls. Since when is being prepared a crime?”
Sasuke was only half-listening, his own mind a simmering mess of irritation. Naruto and Sakura’s bickering had managed to strike a nerve that was already raw. Because when Sakura had been taking Naruto to task—reminding him that he was the only one of the Rookie Nine who hadn’t answered a single question—she had looked at Sasuke for a split second, seeking validation.
He’d read it clearly in her eyes. She genuinely, annoyingly, believed that he was like her—that he had solved those problems because he was a genius who knew the answers, not because he’d used his Sharingan to copy them.
He stared knives into her back, his eyes focused on the space between her shoulder blades. That space once covered by long, pink hair was bare now. The shorn strands swayed just above her collar, a constant reminder.
He felt the curse mark stir under his skin, throbbing with heat.
Sasuke had never paid any mind to Sakura’s hair—or any other girl’s, for that matter. Not until he had woken up in the Forest of Death to the sight of pink locks scattered across the dirt. Not until he had seen the jagged mess left on her head, matted with blood and sticking to her bruised face.
The rage that had followed wasn't human. It was a viscous flood that had drowned his common sense, the curse mark spreading across his skin like an infection. He remembered the weight of the Sound ninja's arms in his hands and the hollow snap of bone. He had wanted to erase the person who had left her looking like that. He had wanted to tear them all apart for what she’d had to do to keep him and Naruto safe.
Sasuke had a mounting list of failures, each one more galling than the last, recorded in a mental ledger he couldn't stop reviewing. The Forest of Death remained a wound in his pride. He hadn’t been strong enough to fend off Orochimaru, standing paralyzed as the snake branded him like catle. He had been unconscious, a useless weight, while Sakura was forced to fight tooth and nail to protect him and Naruto. Everything he had done after was thanks to power bought with a curse.
The pattern had only repeated itself during the invasion. He hadn’t been strong enough to face Gaara alone, his body seizing and his chakra failing while Sakura was pinned to that tree, helpless. In the end, it hadn't been the Uchiha prodigy who had stood between the Sand demon and the girl. It was Naruto. The loudmouthed, talentless loser had been the one to find the strength Sasuke lacked, dragging them both back from the brink while Sasuke could only watch.
All of it—the blood, the sweat, the desperation—was supposed to be fuel to reach a single goal, yet he was no closer to killing Itachi than he had been as a grieving child.
And now, this. It was almost laughable how it chafed him, how he was fuming over a silly test that, according to Kakashi, only Sasuke had passed correctly. But the technicality offered no comfort, not while his frustration was so raw.
Because regardless of his Uchiha blood, he hadn’t actually been any smarter than Naruto when it came down to those nine questions on a piece of paper. Sakura looked at him and saw nothing but effortless superiority, but Sasuke knew the truth. He had been just as empty-handed, just as desperate as the teammate she had spent the evening chiding. To her, there was a vast gulf between his brilliance and Naruto’s incompetence, but Sasuke was realizing—with a creeping sense of dread—that without his Sharingan, that gulf simply didn't exist.
In front of him, Sakura remained lost in her own stifling loop of frustration, her lips still moving in a frantic, ceaseless mutter as she replayed Kakashi’s words. Every few steps, she would shake her head sharply or let out a ragged breath, her fingers twitching—completely oblivious to the dark spiral of Sasuke’s thoughts. Her focus was narrowed to a bruised academic ego, a sharp contrast to the vast, empty silence where Sasuke's pride used to be.
“Sakura.”
She jumped and looked at him, green eyes blown-wide. It was a bizarre realization—that for the first time since they had been assigned to the same team, she had completely forgotten he was even walking beside her.
Sasuke felt a prickling heat climb from his neck to his cheeks, an uncomfortable flush he tried to kill by anchoring his gaze on a distant, blurred point in the shadows.
“Explain the questions to me.”
The words came out far more aggressive than he had intended, but if he’d spent any more time trying to soften the edges, the request would have choked him.
Sakura was staring at him, her mouth gaping, and the silence stretched long enough for him to instantly regret saying anything at all. The impulse to tell her nevermind—to bark at her to just forget it—was clawing at his throat, when she finally found her voice.
“From the written exam?” she asked timidly, confusion still clouding her expression.
“Aa.”
"Oh." The confusion vanished, replaced instantly by a bright smile. “Sure, Sasuke-kun!”
Sasuke didn't wait for her to say more. He couldn't stand the heat still stinging his cheeks. He took off toward the old market, his stride quick and purposeful. He knew a set of stone stairs there, tucked away in a quiet corner where, hopefully, there would be nobody at this hour.
The thought crossed his mind, briefly, that it wasn't too late to turn around and leave her standing there without explanation.
He kept going anyway.
When they sat down on the cold stairs, she took out a pen and a scroll that she unrolled and smoothed on her thigh.
"The first one," she began, her voice gaining a steady confidence as she tapped the paper. "It was about shuriken trajectory in a headwind. You’d think it was a geometry problem, but it wasn't. You had to factor in air resistance and the weight of the standard-issue model. See, if you just look at the angle—"
She drew as she talked—parabolas, vectors, clean and precise lines that looked like they belonged in a textbook. Sasuke watched the ink bleed into the paper and said nothing. He hadn’t been that oblivious in the Academy. He had noted her top marks—he just hadn't cared, dismissing the observation as useless information.
But there was a difference between knowing someone was "smart" and sitting next to them in the dark while they took a problem apart at the seams and rebuilt it in thirty seconds flat.
The second question was code decryption through frequency analysis. Sakura didn't just give him the answer—she explained the why of it. She showed him the logic, the structure, and the exact point where a lesser mind would have tripped.
By the third question, Sasuke wasn’t even paying attention to the scroll.
He’d spent months eating, training, sleeping and fighting three feet from this girl, and it was dawning on him—steadily, with no way to stop the thought—that he had never truly looked at her.
To him, Sakura was just his teammate. He cared about her the way he cared about Naruto and Kakashi. The way he cared about everything else in his life that wasn’t his revenge. She was loud, annoying, clingy, and more often than not, a liability.
And right now, under the amber glow of the street lamps and the stagnant air of the old market, she was anything but.
He looked back down at the scroll. The black ink was sharp against the white surface, but it took him longer than it should have to remember what she’d just said.
"The seventh was the worst one," she continued, her pen dancing across the paper to sketch a diagram. "It looked like a combat timing question, but it was really about the rate of chakra consumption during a sustained genjutsu."
He forced himself to focus on her words rather than keep staring at the way her eyes seemed to brighten with every point she made, or the way her expression softened whenever she reached for a specific word. When she finally finished the last question, she set the pen down and held the scroll out to him.
"That's everything. All of the questions were actually designed to be solved sequentially. If you did it in order, each answer sets up a conceptual framework for the next one. The trajectory physics primes you for the spatial logic in the code. The code primes you for the statistical thinking in the chakra question." She paused and gave him a sheepish smile. "I don't know if anyone else did it in order."
Sasuke wanted to say that no one besides her did it at all.
"I hope... I hope that helps, Sasuke-kun," she said, her voice dropping to a soft whisper.
He took the scroll and looked at it for a long moment—her handwriting, all nine questions, everything he hadn't been able to solve on his own laid out in careful lines.
His eyes met hers. He could see the color in her cheeks—a faint flush she hadn't seemed to notice until the exact moment she glanced up. Her hand flew to her hair, tucking a strand behind her ear, and she quickly looked away, the capable girl from seconds ago giving way to the one who tripped over her own feet just to be near him.
He remembered her hacked-off locks on the dusty forest floor again and something foul stirred in his gut.
It was annoying how much he thought about her hair when she hadn’t even mentioned it once after that day. It was unforgivable how he’d promised himself that he would never let anything like that happen to her again and then he’d been so helpless that she’d had to stand between him and whatever monster Gaara was.
He wanted to reach out, to apologize for the hair, for being weak, for the fact that he couldn’t do anything to save her from being crushed against a tree by a ton of sand.
More than that, he wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she understood. He wanted to demand that she never, ever risk her life for his again. He wanted to run his fingers through the blunt pink ends and tell her how goddamn annoying it was—this constant, nagging need to thank her for never leaving his side.
"Sasuke-kun, are you okay?"
"It’s late. Let's go," he said and stood up sharply.
Sakura rose with him, smoothing her dress with a flustered motion, and Sasuke turned and walked without waiting for her to catch up.
He led the way to her apartment in silence. The fact that he knew the exact turn to take, the exact distance to her door, was just another irritation. He stood back while she fumbled for her key, turned it, and pushed the door open.
She was already half-stepping into the warmth of her home when he said her name. Sakura turned, her expression questioning, and tucked that same annoying lock of hair behind her ear.
He paused. What he was about to say was absurd, and he knew it. But the decision had been made the moment he’d seen her shoulders slump at their sensei’s words—that brief flicker of doubt in someone who had earned the right not to doubt herself.
"Kakashi talks complete nonsense sometimes," he said, his voice level. "Don't listen to him."
Sakura stared at him, her breath hitching.
Then, something in her face came undone. The tension drained from her shoulders and she smiled at him. It was a smile that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her.
"Yeah," she breathed. "You're right. Goodnight, Sasuke-kun."
The door clicked shut, leaving Sasuke alone in the dark, the scroll weighing against his pocket. The village lay quiet at this hour, his footsteps echoing along the pavement as he replayed the night’s events.
If what had unfolded between him and Sakura on the steps by the deserted market stalls, had been a mission, then the intel he’d gathered would be the most dangerous of his life.
That revenge wasn't the only thing capable of taking up space in his chest. That her smile might as well be the only thing left in his life that was actually worth protecting. That if anyone was capable of reaching into the scorched, hollowed-out parts of him and finding something still alive, it was Sakura Haruno.
And that was the most annoying thing of all.