Name: Advantage: Us
Author: sirona on ao3
Word Count: 30,947 (counting all 3 chapters)
Summary (provided by Author): When your parents are world-renowned tennis players, it is natural that you would want to follow in their footsteps, Naruto reasons when he asks to be sent to tennis summer camp. What happens after that is all that bastard Sasuke's fault. A tennis AU where both boys' parents are still alive.
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Work Text:
Healing takes a long friggin' time. Naruto spends the next two weeks before school starts almost locked up inside the house – all his friends from school are still away somewhere nice by the seaside, and they're not likely to be back before the beginning of September.
He fills his time with Google. He starts off with searches on the other guys from camp, just for the fun of it. There's not much about Lee, but Naruto bets that won't last long. Shikamaru is only mentioned once or twice, because of this father, Shikaku Nara, being the coach to Britain's Davis Cup team.
Most of the info he finds on his friends from camp is, unsurprisingly, on Hinata and Neji Hyuuga. Hinata's father, Hiashi Hyuuga, is the World Tennis Association President, and a holder of many competitive titles himself. Neji's father holds a place on the WTA Board of Directors, but in a purely administrative capacity. Naruto can see why that would piss Neji off, but he can't see history repeating – the Hyuuga family is very well-off these days, so there is no reason to suppose that Neji might have to give up the sport in favour of his cousin. Naruto makes up his mind to speak up to Neji next year – there's no need for this artificially created antagonism between the two cousins.
Once he has exhausted this line of enquiry, his curiosity gets the better of him. He doesn't know Kakashi's surname, but the name is unusual enough that, when combined with 'tennis' as a search term, it yields immediate results.
Naruto reads on, mouth agape, to Kakashi Hatake's myriad achievements. Holder of first place on the rank list since he had been 13, gone pro at sixteen, takes the Grand Slam at age nineteen, well on his way to achieve the Super Grand Slam before a horrific fall from a second-floor window breaks both his legs in five places and shatters his right hip. Foul play is suspected, involving one Orochimaru Sannin, but never proved. Kakashi had been told that he might never walk again, let alone play; they hadn't reckoned on Kakashi's sheer pigheaded stubbornness or the unfailing support of his tennis buddy, Minato Namikaze.
Two years later, after seven surgeries, a year of rigorous and gruelling physical therapy, and two trips to the Oxford University psych ward, Kakashi had been back on his feet and had started training again. Unfortunately, the one thing the doctors had been right about was his performance on court – the shattered hip had just been too damaged to withstand the punishment of a four-hour, five-set match. Kakashi had retired and, at his buddy's urging had gone, albeit grudgingly, into teaching.
Naruto is reluctantly impressed. It seemed that while Kakashi had taken on many students before, none of them had lasted more than a week under his obsessively demanding tutoring. He and Sasuke had lasted a whole three and a half weeks; and it seemed that Kakashi had coached Sasuke more than just this one time.
After this revelation, there is no helping it. A month after school has started, and two weeks before his cast comes off, Naruto watches his fingers type in 'Sasuke Uchiha' into Google as if they are no longer connected to his body. Seconds later the search spews out thousands of hits.
Naruto closes his eyes. He is dying to rummage through all the gossip, the theories, the screwed-up relationship Sasuke has with his family, his brother's interviews about him, his father's dismissal of his accomplishments, his mother's veiled praise of the same. His stomach twists at the thought of how this might very well be seen as betrayal of trust, even though he barely knows the guy.
