By the time Iruka let Naruto back inside, the chalkboard had stopped being the enemy and gone back to being just a chalkboard.
Naruto, tragically, had not stopped being Naruto.
He stomped into the classroom like he'd been personally wronged by architecture, throwing himself into his seat in the back row. The desk rattled. A couple of kids jumped. Someone muttered, "Here we go," under their breath.
From my spot near the windows—third row, girls' side—his chakra felt like it always did when he was mad: bright, unstable, sloshing right up to the edges and looking for something to crash into.
"Uzumaki Naruto," Iruka said warningly, without even turning around.
"What?" Naruto complained. "I just sat down!"
Iruka wrote something about the First Hokage on the board with unnecessary force.
On Naruto's other side, Uchiha Sasuke sat like he'd been carved there: straight-backed, arms crossed, eyes half-lidded. His chakra was tighter, hotter, coiled in on itself. If Naruto was a bonfire, Sasuke was a forge someone had shut the door on.
In front of the two of them, there was an empty desk. Sakura's spot, in the world I used to know. Here, it was just… empty. A quiet hole in the seating chart.
I tried not to think about that too hard.
My own desk was a disaster—in a controlled way. Textbook open, actual notes on one side, doodles creeping down the margins like ivy. Little seal designs wound around the kanji for "fire" and "water," spirals and interlocking lines that might do something one day if I ever figured them out.
"Pssst."
A pink-tipped pencil poked the edge of my paper.
I glanced sideways.
Yamanaka Ino had somehow achieved maximum elegance while slouched at her desk. Her hair was pulled back with a neat clip; her writing was tidy and slanted. Her chakra felt like a sharp, clear pool—surface-bright, with things moving thoughtfully underneath.
She tilted her head toward the back of the room.
"So," she whispered, lips barely moving, "how bad was it?"
Naruto chose that moment to lean back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk, earning himself another "Naruto!" from Iruka. He flailed, overbalanced, and almost fell. The room tittered.
I kept my voice low. "Define 'bad'."
"On a scale from 'mildly scolded' to 'lifelong ban from the market district'?"
I thought of Iruka's headache face, the buckets, the climb, Naruto nearly slipping off the Third's nose twice.
"Mm. Somewhere between 'irreparably disappointed' and 'personally offended on behalf of all Hokage everywhere.'"
Ino covered her mouth, shoulders shaking.
"Serves him right," she said, once she'd wrestled the laughter down. "Drawing that mustache on the Third was a crime."
"It was a conceptual statement about the burden of leadership," I said. "You just don't understand his creative vision."
She snorted. "Please. Naruto's 'creative vision' is 'what if I made this worse and louder?'"
She wasn't wrong.
Iruka cleared his throat pointedly. We both dropped our eyes to our workbooks like model students.
"…and so," he said, tapping the page with his chalk, "the First Hokage founded the village with the goal of bringing peace to the warring clans—"
My attention drifted.
Information was important, sure. Knowing the beats of this world's history was survival, and I wasn't about to flunk Academy just because I'd already seen the anime once. But my brain kept wandering away from the words to the people saying them. And the ones listening.
Hinata, two rows ahead, shrank into her seat like she was trying to fold herself into a kunai holster. Her chakra flickered and dimmed every time Iruka called on someone. When he called on her, it sputtered like a candle in a draft.
Kiba was the opposite. Even with his head on his desk, he radiated loud heat, the kind of restless sharpness that made dogs excited and teachers tired. Akamaru, tiny and warm on top of his head, yawned and shifted, their chakra patterns overlapping like two versions of the same song.
Shino sat next to them, steady and muted, like a hummed note under their noise. His chakra felt… organized. Strange, but structured. I filed that away for later.
And then there was Shikamaru.
He was slouched so low in his seat he was practically melting, eyes half closed, hair tied up in that lazy spike. From the outside, he looked like he might drift off at any second. From the inside, he felt like a river with deep, slow-moving currents—calm on top, strong underneath.
If I hadn't already known he was a genius, my weird chakra sense would've ratted him out.
I tapped my pencil against the edge of my desk, trying to pretend I was listening to the lecture and not compulsively cataloguing everyone like a walking mood ring.
This was another thing that hadn't gone away when I'd switched worlds and bodies: the constant awareness of other people's… moods? Textures? Whatever chakra was doing, it had map overlays.
At first, I'd thought it was just nerves. Trauma brain, trying to monitor every possible threat. But with practice, I'd started to recognize patterns. Naruto's chaos. Hinata's tremors. Sasuke's smoldering pressure.
It wasn't precise. I couldn't read minds or anything. It was more like… color swatches in a paint box, except the paint was people.
"Stop thinking about weird metaphors," I scolded myself silently. "Take the note about the Second Hokage."
"Hey," Ino whispered again once Iruka turned to write dates on the board. "If Naruto gets expelled for real this time, who do you think they'll stick on your team?"
"Expelled for graffiti?" I murmured back. "That'd be a bit much, even for Konoha."
"You never know." She twirled her pencil thoughtfully. "I heard my dad say they're having a hard time balancing teams this year. Too many clan brats, not enough people who can keep up with them. You might get stuck with some super serious type."
My eyes flicked, involuntary, to the back of the room.
Sasuke was staring out the window, not even pretending to pay attention. Iruka hadn't called him out once. That was the kind of leeway you got when you were the Last Uchiha™.
His chakra was a slow, dense spin, like a storm eye. Controlled. Tense. Absolutely full of "do not talk to me."
"Yeah," I said lightly. "Can you imagine?"
Ino followed my gaze and huffed.
"Sasuke-kun would be lucky to have you on his team," she whispered. "You're smart, and you actually take notes. Unlike some people."
"I've also seen him set things on fire with his brain," I said. "I think he'll be fine."
She jabbed my notebook with the pencil again, annoyed.
"I'm serious! You always get like this when anyone says you're good at something. Just take the compliment."
"Compliments are suspicious," I said. "They mean people expect things later."
"That's not how that works," she hissed.
"Isn't it?" I raised an eyebrow.
She rolled her eyes so hard I could practically hear it.
"Anyway," she said, switching gears, "Sasuke's cute, sure, but have you felt his chakra? That boy is walking unresolved trauma."
I choked on absolutely nothing and had to cough into my sleeve to cover the laugh.
"Wow," I whispered. "What a wild coincidence that someone raised in this peaceful, stable village has Issues."
Ino smirked. "Hey, I never said it wasn't hot."
"You need therapy," I informed her, affectionately.
She bumped my shoulder with hers.
"Please. If I'm going to need therapy, I'm dragging you with me."
She wasn't wrong about that, either.
Iruka clapped his hands once. "All right, everyone. Open your workbooks to page forty-two. Practice questions on the founding treaties. If I see one more answer where you confuse the First and Second Hokage, I'm assigning double homework."
A chorus of groans went up.
Naruto slumped dramatically, forehead thunking against his desk.
"This is so boring," he whined, loud enough for half the class to hear. "Why do we gotta learn about dead guys when we could be learning cool jutsu?"
"Because without those 'dead guys,' there would be no village for you to practice jutsu in," Iruka said sharply. "Now focus."
Naruto made a face at his textbook like it had personally wronged him.
I flipped to page forty-two and stared at the questions.
Which treaty did the First Hokage draft to unify the clans?
Describe the significance of—
I'd done this once already, in another life, in subtitles and wiki pages. Now I was here, pencil in hand, actually filling in the answer lines.
My handwriting in this body was neater. Small, careful strokes. Easier to tuck seals between the kana.
A thought flickered at the edge of my mind, unwanted and impossible.
If I do really well at this… if I keep doing really well… do I still end up on Team 7? Or does the butterfly effect kick me sideways into someone else's story?
On the other side of the classroom, Shikamaru yawned, then picked up his pencil with deliberate slowness. His chakra barely shifted. It was like watching a mountain decide to move an inch.
Behind me, Naruto's chakra flared and skittered as he tried to answer the first question, failed, doodled on his paper, got distracted, and nearly knocked his chair over. Again.
…Right. No butterfly flapped hard enough to change that.
I exhaled, tension I hadn't realized I was holding bleeding out of my shoulders.
Whatever team lists the Academy had in mind, canon or not, the universe clearly had a type: chaos magnets and the idiots who enabled them.
I circled the word "treaty," underlined it twice, and started to write.
If I was going to survive this world and whatever it decided to throw at Naruto, I was going to need every advantage I could get.
Even if that advantage started with knowing which dead guy signed which piece of paper.