blackkatmagic:

The first time Sasuke really
notices Naruto is during their Academy class’s unit on sealing.

To be fair, it would be kind of
hard to miss him after the way he
shoves so much chakra into the exploding tag he’s supposed to be making that he
blows up the back half of the classroom and launches himself about twenty feet
into the air. A couple of the other kids are a bit singed, and they end up
having to share a room with another class until the terminally overworked
Mokuton user can fix the wall and ceiling, but Naruto wanders back in the next
day looking sheepish and entirely
unharmed.

Since Sasuke saw him take the
brunt of the explosion, this is worthy of note. So is the fact that he managed
to shove enough chakra into the tag to burn out the safety seal that was
supposed to keep things like that from happening.

Under the cover of Iruka-sensei’s
yelling, Sasuke looks down at the diagram on his paper, a jutsu that his father
dismissed as unreasonable and unusable given normal human limits, and thinks, Huh.

“All your old designs?” Shisui says
with some confusion when Sasuke tracks him down after class. He rocks back on
his heels, eyeing Sasuke a little warily, and swipes ineffectually at an
ink-stain on his cheek. “Yeah, I still have them—I wouldn’t throw them out
after you gave them to me for safekeeping, brat.”

“I need them,” Sasuke says with determination.
“All of them.”

Shisui blinks, then tilts his
head, studying him for a moment. “You know the amount of chakra they need would
kill most jounin,” he says, though it’s too curious to be an accusation. “I
think even Sarutobi-sama might have trouble with some of them. You’ve got a habit
of thinking big, kid.”

“Are you going to give them to
me or not?” Sasuke demands crankily, because he’s got curfew in three hours and
he still has to pick through his plans to find the easiest one and find Naruto.

“Of course.” Shisui sounds
offended that he’d think otherwise. “They’re your designs, Sasuke. Check the hall closet, top shelf—Tenzō!”

Shisui’s boyfriend takes one
look at the manic light in his eyes, the scrolls scattered over the breakfast
table, and the ink smeared across his face, then blanches and turns right back
around.

“No no no!” Shisui lunges after
him, grabbing up his scrolls and vaulting clear over the table. “Tenzō, no,
come back, I swear this one isn’t like last time, this is a brilliant idea, you will be blown away!”

“Urgent mission, ANBU called, I have
to go!” Tenzō calls over his shoulder as he bolts.

“Tenzō! That wasn’t even a convincing lie! Come on, you’re the only
one in the village with Mokuton, you have
to try this or my brilliance is wasted, it’s a gorgeous jutsu! Tenzō!”

Sasuke rolls his eyes as the
yelling fades behind him and heads for the closet. The box with the jutsus his
father rejected is right where Shisui said it would be, and Sasuke clutches it
and thinks a little gleefully about the potential of even one of these jutsus, provided he can get Naruto to agree. The destructive
power. The awesome might. The possible explosions.

(Somewhere deep in R&D’s
basement Mikoto pauses in the middle of creating a devastating combination
jutsu, and turns to smile fondly at the picture of her youngest son on the
wall. She’s so glad he got more of her proclivities than Fugaku’s, even if her
husband does tend to complain about the property damage more frequently since
she introduced him to the wonders of explosive chakra techniques.)

Naruto is just heating up water
for his nightly cup of ramen, halfway through trying to factor a new jumpsuit
into his monthly budget while still having money for Ichiraku’s, when there’s a
knock on his door. A little wary—because Hokage-jiji usually warns him when he’s
going to drop by, and there’s no one else who visits Naruto—he pulls it open,
and finds himself face-to-face with the weird nerd who spends pretty much all
of their time in class drawing on big scrolls. Iruka-sensei yells at him to pay
attention almost as much as he does Naruto, which automatically makes Naruto like
him.

But he and Naruto have never
even spoken before, so Naruto has no
earthly idea what he’s doing here.

“Hello?” he asks.

The boy thrusts the shoebox he’s
carrying at Naruto and says, “Your chakra reserves are amazing will you try my
jutsus?”

This is, Naruto learns much,
much later, the Uchiha equivalent of a marriage proposal.

Even if he’d known, he probably still
would have lit up with glee and cried, “Yes!”

“Not a word,” Mikoto tells her
husband as she ladles miso soup into five bowls instead of the usual four.

Fugaku rolls his eyes at her,
ignoring her warning to offer, “I don’t think Kushina would have liked anything
more than for you to take in her son.”

“And now we have an excuse,” Mikoto says triumphantly,
waving the ladle like it’s a weapon to stab Danzō and the other Elders with. “We couldn’t approach him but they didn’t say anything about Sasuke
now did they? Hah!”

“I think,” Fugaku says dryly,
casting a glance at where Sasuke is looking halfway to manic as he explains one
of his jutsus to a beaming Naruto, “that the Elders are very shortly going to
have much bigger things to worry about.”