Team 8

Chapter 17: All That and a Bag of Chips

Haruno Sakura felt her mouth drop open as she watched the medic-nins run out into the arena and carefully place the body of Hyuuga Neji onto a stretcher. She barely saw them carry the genin away. Instead, her eyes were fixed on the blood spattered on the ground.

"Damn, that was cold," Kiba murmured next to her, jolting her out of her shocked reverie.

"Hn," Sasuke grunted. Sakura turned towards her crush, but his eyes were intently fixed on Uzumaki Naruto. Their former classmate appeared to be getting chewed out by Gekko Hayate, the jonin referee.

Sakura turned to her sensei, who was sitting in the row behind them. He'd allowed them a break from training in order to watch the finals, for which she was very grateful. "I never thought Naruto could be so... brutal," she said after a moment, hoping Kakashi could explain what they'd just seen. He'd been better about doing that lately.

The last month had been very different from their earlier training. During the first team meeting since their elimination in the preliminaries, Kakashi-sensei had said he'd been very disappointed by their poor showing. Sasuke, who'd been silent since the medic-nins fixed his jaw, simply exploded, demanding that Kakashi train them. Kakashi-sensei had claimed that he was allowing them to develop their own skills, but if they couldn't be that responsible... What followed had been the most grueling work-out Team 7 had ever undertaken.

Since then, every team exercise had been like that. Kakashi-sensei had even started showing up for meetings on time—mostly—and his little orange books had been conspicuously absent.

Sakura jumped when Kiba made a disparaging noise. "I thought you were the brains of this team, Haruno," he said in a challenging tone. "You saw what that jerk did to Hinata."

Sakura turned back toward her teammate, since Kakashi-sensei hadn't even acknowledged her question. "You think he's still that angry about it?" she asked.

What she'd seen was... so far beyond what she expected from Naruto, it just didn't make sense to her.

"She's his partner," Kiba replied with a shrug.

Sakura felt her eyes bug out at her teammate's insinuation. "Hinata is a nice girl!" she snapped, slapping the back of Kiba's head. He'd let slip once that his sister did that to him, and it really irritated him. It was Sakura's best weapon for keeping the crude Inuzuka in line.

"Not like that," Kiba protested, blocking her second swat. "Who has the dirty mind now?" he asked with a smirk. "Look, she's his teammate, and they train together almost constantly. Akamaru and I run across their scents all the time, especially near the training grounds. How often do you see one without the other during the day? At least before her idiot cousin put her in the hospital."

Sakura frowned. "Why didn't you say so then?" she asked.

"I meant partner, like Akamaru," Kiba shot back. "If someone deliberately hurt him, I'd kill them." The puppy wrapped around his neck yipped and licked Kiba's cheek, making him blink.

"That's why Sasuke's strategy was flawed," Kakashi-sensei said in a contemplative tone. "Taunting him did provoke a reaction, but since he couldn't attack Neji, you took his place. Maybe you got off lightly." With that, Kakashi-sensei reached forward and mussed Sasuke's hair, which Sakura knew irritated him to no end.

But was that the only reason Sasuke-kun's scowl deepened?

OoOoO

Naruto scowled up at Hayate.

"Do you understand?" the jonin asked again. "One more late hit and I'll throw you out of here myself!"

"It wasn't a late hit," Naruto said, swallowing his anger. "You didn't say anything until after I hit him."