i'm giggling to myself bc i keep imagining that sasuke's and naruto's friendship starts bc sasuke learns that naruto has massive chakra reserves and he's just like "well /hello destruction/" and they probably become everyone's worst nightmare.
The first time Sasuke reallynotices Naruto is during their Academy class’s unit on sealing.
To be fair, it would be kind ofhard to miss him after the way heshoves so much chakra into the exploding tag he’s supposed to be making that heblows up the back half of the classroom and launches himself about twenty feetinto the air. A couple of the other kids are a bit singed, and they end uphaving to share a room with another class until the terminally overworkedMokuton user can fix the wall and ceiling, but Naruto wanders back in the nextday looking sheepish and entirelyunharmed.
Since Sasuke saw him take thebrunt of the explosion, this is worthy of note. So is the fact that he managedto shove enough chakra into the tag to burn out the safety seal that wassupposed to keep things like that from happening.
Under the cover of Iruka-sensei’syelling, Sasuke looks down at the diagram on his paper, a jutsu that his fatherdismissed as unreasonable and unusable given normal human limits, and thinks, Huh.
“All your old designs?” Shisui sayswith some confusion when Sasuke tracks him down after class. He rocks back onhis heels, eyeing Sasuke a little warily, and swipes ineffectually at anink-stain on his cheek. “Yeah, I still have them—I wouldn’t throw them outafter you gave them to me for safekeeping, brat.”
“I need them,” Sasuke says with determination.“All of them.”
Shisui blinks, then tilts hishead, studying him for a moment. “You know the amount of chakra they need wouldkill most jounin,” he says, though it’s too curious to be an accusation. “Ithink even Sarutobi-sama might have trouble with some of them. You’ve got a habitof thinking big, kid.”
“Are you going to give them tome or not?” Sasuke demands crankily, because he’s got curfew in three hours andhe still has to pick through his plans to find the easiest one and find Naruto.
“Of course.” Shisui soundsoffended that he’d think otherwise. “They’re your designs, Sasuke. Check the hall closet, top shelf—Tenzō!”
Shisui’s boyfriend takes onelook at the manic light in his eyes, the scrolls scattered over the breakfasttable, and the ink smeared across his face, then blanches and turns right backaround.
“No no no!” Shisui lunges afterhim, 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 haveto go!” Tenzō calls over his shoulder as he bolts.
“Tenzō! That wasn’t even a convincing lie! Come on, you’re the onlyone in the village with Mokuton, you haveto try this or my brilliance is wasted, it’s a gorgeous jutsu! Tenzō!”
Sasuke rolls his eyes as theyelling fades behind him and heads for the closet. The box with the jutsus hisfather rejected is right where Shisui said it would be, and Sasuke clutches itand thinks a little gleefully about the potential of even one of these jutsus, provided he can get Naruto to agree. The destructivepower. The awesome might. The possible explosions.
(Somewhere deep in R&D’sbasement Mikoto pauses in the middle of creating a devastating combinationjutsu, and turns to smile fondly at the picture of her youngest son on thewall. She’s so glad he got more of her proclivities than Fugaku’s, even if herhusband does tend to complain about the property damage more frequently sinceshe introduced him to the wonders of explosive chakra techniques.)
Naruto is just heating up waterfor his nightly cup of ramen, halfway through trying to factor a new jumpsuitinto his monthly budget while still having money for Ichiraku’s, when there’s aknock on his door. A little wary—because Hokage-jiji usually warns him when he’sgoing 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 allof their time in class drawing on big scrolls. Iruka-sensei yells at him to payattention almost as much as he does Naruto, which automatically makes Naruto likehim.
But he and Naruto have nevereven spoken before, so Naruto has noearthly idea what he’s doing here.
“Hello?” he asks.
The boy thrusts the shoebox he’scarrying at Naruto and says, “Your chakra reserves are amazing will you try myjutsus?”
This is, Naruto learns much,much later, the Uchiha equivalent of a marriage proposal.
Even if he’d known, he probably stillwould have lit up with glee and cried, “Yes!”
“Not a word,” Mikoto tells herhusband 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 anythingmore 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 Sasukenow did they? Hah!”
“I think,” Fugaku says dryly,casting a glance at where Sasuke is looking halfway to manic as he explains oneof his jutsus to a beaming Naruto, “that the Elders are very shortly going tohave much bigger things to worry about.”
