I have no excuse, except maybe ten things that occupy my time more which results in no time for everything else. Have fun.

PS: I'm trying to get better at emulating humor, so constructive criticism would be helpful.

Sakura's toes twitched. Her gloved fingers turned the page with the familiarity of someone who regularly wore gloves while reading. Her pupils dialated and her pulse steadily increased.

Kakashi snatched her book just as she reached the second paragraph on the page.

Sakura growled and resisted the urge to tackle him while anime-crying. "Why did you take my book?"

"Because you have a job to do," Kakashi said.

It was then that the rosette noticed the glimmers of light through the murky window. "It's morning," she remarked rhetorically. "Fork. I've been up all night. Motherforking fork."

"Yup," said Kakashi with an air of 'not my problem'. "You need to learn to get sleep at the same time as everyone else."

Sakura groaned and snatched her porn away from her teacher's sicky fingers. Like the combat expert/evasion arist/war veteran he was, Kakashi took a step backwards with the book before his only female student could reach it. Like the experienced fighter Sakura was and a Fairy Tail mage who'd been rained never to give up, Sakura continued playing Kakashi's game of keep-away until Sasuke opened the door.

Seeing Kakashi and Sakura dance around a book was a bit weird, to say the least. But the boy had long learned to leave teenage girls alone whenever they did anything that even remotely resembled training, so he very silently walked away.

~?~

Sakura lost the battle for her book and was then forced to endure an explanation for what magic was (but they called it chakra here for some reason), and was then told to climb the tree without using her hands. (Well, she could think of several more useful ways to do that, and ones that required less effort than just running up the trunk using magic.)

Sasuke, in all honesty, would have just burned the tree. He didn't really see the point of this exercise since firebending didn't have anything to do with running up trees and instead came from the breath, but he followed his teacher's instructions anyways.

Naruto just pretended to walk up the tree, actually flying using his powers concerning space-time. He was therefore the first to finish the exercise and got to kill people that were after their client. (It was more fun rearranging their faces, though. He didn't know why he was forbidden from doing that.)

~?~

Gato came to the bridge the day Sasuke finally finished with the tree exercise. Sakura was still working on it.

Sasuke drew his swords, but Naruto fucked up his brain by giving him visions of being offered deer teeth over and over until he started seeing broken sunglasses in the place of teeth, or little Gatos in the place of the teeth, or little Gatos on the teeth, or little Gatos being squished by rocks, or Gato being squished by a rock, or watching as Naruto drank all his blood, or having all his teeth ripped out himself, or having his cardiovascular system messed up-

You get the gist of it. Basically torture.

It didn't take long for him to break, and he screamed whenever he saw the colour yellow for the rest of his life from then onwards.

Naruto turned back towards the bridge-builder, floating a few centimeters above the bridge's surface. "I got rid of the idiot. You're welcome."