Chapter Text
Sakura is late to her first class as a Teaching Assistant and she tries her best not to feel mortified as she walks into the small seminar room to take a seat near the front, close to the chalkboard. She supposes, to the students in class, like the dark-haired man who sneers at her lateness now, she seems like an unprepared and unprofessional peer. Awkwardly, Sakura shrugs off her jacket and takes out her binder and a pen, along with a tall stack of materials that Shizune had asked her to prepare for today. Shizune pauses in her lecture and nods at her in acknowledgement.
She only half-pays attention, scribbling relevant formulas and noting examples that Shizune gives to the class. For Sakura, there is only the matter of practicing, not the trouble of relearning the material through lecture. She glances at the print-out she had made of their first problem set, due two weeks from now. Chemical kinetics was easy enough, but the work is tedious, requiring many calculations that all seem to loop around each other, so she holds off. She begins to outline her work week with daily tasks instead. It’s a busy week ahead with deadlines for a research conference coming up, and her PI has her doing twice the amount of hours at the laboratory. Sakura considers whether the practice set would be better saved for the breaks between RT-PCR and autoclave.
“Sakura-san?” a familiar voice interrupts her train of thought.
“Yes, Kato-sensei?” Sakura asks, looking up from her paper. She had only filled the first half of the page, despite it being a nearly two hour lecture. The class seems to physically shift towards her.
“Care to introduce yourself to the class?” the older woman asks patiently.
Sakura vaguely feels like a first-year again. She stands up from her seat and turns to face her students. “Hello class, I’m Sakura-san,” she says, her lips curving gently. “I will be your TA for PChem II. I have office hours at seven in the morning on Mondays and Wednesdays at Room 1101 in the Chemistry department. I am also available to meet by appointment. You can find my e-mail and contact information in your syllabi.” Sakura taps on the stack of papers beside her. “Please take one on your way out, and do not hesitate to ask me any questions. Let’s do our best this semester!” She raises a fist in the air and giggles. Some giggle with her. Her seat neighbor, though, stares at her impassively. His expression towards her doesn’t change the class after, or the class after that. She recognizes him, of course -- it is not the first class she’s shared with Uchiha Sasuke, nor the second, nor the third. They had sat through much of their initial science sequence together, but he had never noticed her, or anyone else really. He seemed hyper-focused on something else, something out of anyone else’s reach.
“Sakura,” he calls her, one day after the classroom empties. He looks embarrassed and disgruntled.
She startles at the sound and pretends to not be offended at the lack of honorific. “Sasuke-san?” Not quite looking her in the eye, Sasuke asks to see her notes on the first example they had done in class today. Sakura realizes that he’d been late to class, uncharacteristically. She offers her notebook and walks him through the problem. She blushes as he mutters his thanks. As she watches his retreating back, she shakes her head. It wouldn’t do to crush on her student, Sakura frets; but she knows it is already too late.
Sakura is a morning person. She loves rising as the Sun rises, loves the peaceful quiet of dawn. Today, though, her morning is not so peaceful as her best friend accompanies her on her morning jog around campus. Half of the time is dedicated to Ino’s snide remarks about how ungodly early it is, the other half dedicated to defamatory stories about Ino’s current boyfriend. In summary, all of their time is spent enumerating Ino’s neverending list of grievances with humanity. Sakura puts a single earbud in, half-listening to the blonde’s complaints, half-listening to an audiobook on chronic stress disorders. “You asked,” Sakura whines when Ino announces she wants to quit, “we’re almost done, and you said you wanted discipline.”
Ino pushes through, even when Sakura makes them run up 11 staircases to get to the TA office. The hallway is dead silent as Sakura opens the door. “Why do you have such obscure office hours anyway, Forehead?” Ino demands, raising an accusatory eyebrow. “Do you think you’re fooling anybody?”
Sakura peeks over her shoulder as she begins her post-run stretches. “It’s the only time that fits into my schedule between class, the lab, and the hospital,” she says. She winks and gestures to the empty room. “I mean, I’m so dedicated to my beloved students.”
“I’d hate to be in one of your sections. Those poor, anxious pre-medical students,” Ino says, more bark than bite. She inspects her cuticles with minimal interest.
“Uh, so what happened exactly?” Sakura asks, carrying their bags to the corner of the room. She squats down to take out the containers she’d packed their breakfast in before walking back to Ino.
“Bento for breakfast?” she says, ignoring her question. Her pretty blue eyes seem glassy. “Oh, Sakura…” The blonde sighs as she sits on the wooden desk at the front of the room. She rests her palms against the table and leans back, the bento forgotten beside her. “I was talking to Sai for the first time in three days and telling him about all the coursework I have to do for Endocrinology and then he goes and tells me that he has a stomachache,” she sniffles. “Can you believe him? The audacity, I swear -- I told him to stop, I’m the one complaining, not you!”
Sakura’s jaw drops marginally at her best friend’s dramatics. “You can’t be serious,” she says.
“You’re supposed to side with me,” Ino pouts. She snaps off the top of the bento box and begins picking away at the grapes Sakura bought at the farmer’s market on Sunday. Both of them startle at the sound of the door creaking open. “ Oh shit ,” the blonde mouths to her friend. “Guess your plan backfired,” Ino says smugly. She scowls in response.
“Sakura-chan!” a bright voice echoes throughout the mostly empty room. Her blond student waves one arm frantically and uses the other to drag his friend along.
When the pair reaches the wooden desk, Ino winks at them. “I wish my students were this cute,” she says, eyes lingering on the dark-haired one.
Sakura sorts through her folders. “Stop flirting with my students,” she scolds, lightly hitting Ino’s shoulder with a procured stack of paper, “and also, you have a boyfriend, Ino-pig.”
“I’ll excuse myself, then,” the blonde says, sticking her tongue out. “But I’m taking the bento with me, bye!” Ino tugs the end of Sakura’s long ponytail affectionately, collecting her bag and bento gracefully. The door makes an ugly sound behind her as she leaves.
Sakura turns to Naruto. “Naruto-san, I’m guessing you’re here to review your midterm exam?” Naruto nods with such enthusiasm, Sakura’s half-afraid his head might fall off. “Good, because this is your midterm. Now, I want you to start writing every question you got wrong on the board. We can work through each one together.”
Sasuke peers at the top of the exam paper after Sakura hands it off to Naruto. “How do you fail Intro Stat, dead-last?” He seems genuinely astounded. Admittedly, Sakura is, too. She watches Naruto struggle through the second short answer, which her, the professor, and the other five Stats TAs had ranked one-star for difficulty.
“Naruto-san, I think you should stop by each week so I can check your homework,” Sakura suggests as tension begins to form in her temple. Not only is Naruto’s handwriting on the board barely legible, it is also incomprehensibly wrong.
He glances over his shoulder. “Huh?” Naruto’s usually expressive face is completely blank.
“... you do your homework, right?” Sakura says. She folds her arms and tilts her head to the side, willing her temper not to flare.
“Uhuh,” is her student’s lame response.
“Have it done by Wednesday,” she commands, retrieving Naruto’s midterm exam and putting it back in her folder. “We’ll go over it.”
“Yes, Sakura-chan!” Naruto says and gives her a fake salute. Sasuke rolls his eyes.
“Are the PChem grades ready?” Sasuke asks, and somehow his inquiry takes on the form of an unspoken demand.
“I haven’t entered them in, no,” she tells him, “but you did well! You scored 90.” Sakura smiles at him gently, recalling the way Sasuke’s shoulders hunch over his notebook in class. She watches his fist clench. “It was the highest score in the class,” she reassures him.
Dark eyes narrow at her. “I’d like to see my paper. Now.”
“It’s not on me,” she tells him, “but I remember where you lost points. Here, I’ll write the question on the board.” Sakura turns and scribbles characters on the board before handing off the green marker to Sasuke. His fingers brush her wrist for a millisecond as he reaches over and begins his work. When he’s finished, she circles the final step in his derivation, indicating the loss of 2.5 points that cost him a perfect score.
“Why did you take points off here?” Sasuke asks.
“How did you calculate zero from this step?” she pushes, ready to face off against her contentious student. “Write it out.”
“It’s zero,” he declares. He looks to his work, unable to explain why; the answer is zero, of course, like the sky is blue. There need not be explanations for such obvious things.
“You have to show every step of your derivation, and your last stage is not clear,” Sakura begins. She uncaps a red marker and draws an arrow from the last line of Sasuke’s answer. “Here, you can insert values from the table of integrals, but even so, there is a better way to do this.” She squats to write near the bottom of the whiteboard. “Take the integral here and multiply it by e to the power of i times m and theta. When you expand and then simplify the terms,” she says, leaning over the edge and drawing a lazy circle on the board, “you get zero. It’s more efficient.”
“I see,” is the grumbling word of acceptance from Sasuke’s mouth. She can’t explain why, but Sakura feels mildly victorious.
“Sakura-chan schooled you, bastard!” Naruto teases, slapping Sasuke loudly on the back.
“Whatever,” Sasuke says, looking pointedly at the ground. A light pink dusts his cheeks.
Naruto comes on Wednesday, and the week after that; and the week after that. Each week, he brings Sasuke in tow. Sometimes, they work through problem sets. Mostly, they eat bento and listen to music. When Sakura teaches Naruto’s class, she waits for him sometimes so they can walk together, and when Sakura sits next to Sasuke in PChem, there is a new warmth between them.
“You’re late today, Sakura,” Sasuke tells her one evening before class starts. She’s catching her breath from running up the stairs, and from chasing after the local bus twenty minutes prior.
“I’m on time, Sasuke-kun,” she argues, showing him her fitness watch. “It’s only 5:28!”
Sasuke moves his jacket from her seat and drums his fingers against its plastic. “You usually get here eight minutes ago,” he says with an air of finality. I know you, Sasuke tells her in this roundabout way.
Sakura observes Sasuke's hair fall over his eyes with a quiet fondness. She moves her bags from the table so Sasuke can write more freely with his dominant hand. I know you, too, she replies.
The pub is crowded when Sakura files in after her Bioinorganic Chemistry final, a swollen lump forming at the top of her head from when she walked into a vending machine in her post-exam daze. She feels the site tenderly, grateful that her hair covers most of it. “That bad, Forehead?” Ino chides before kissing the offensive lump. Sai ceremoniously greets her with an insult and a glass of umeboshi chuhai. “Of course you passed,” she says confidently before Sakura has the chance to vocalize her concern.
“Nice lipstick,” Sakura remarks, wrapping her fingers around the base of the tall glass. Her gaze rests on the faded pink-red streaked across Sai’s face and neck. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Yes,” Sai says quickly, “Beautiful and I were about to engage in activities of a--”
Ino nudges her boyfriend with her hip. She gestures to a shot of something clear sitting on the bar counter. “Drink up,” Ino advises, “have fun or else.”
“Mildly threatening,” Sakura says, gratefully sipping on her cocktail. “Nice non-answer.” Ino winks at her before dragging Sai away in what Sakura knows is the general direction of the only single occupancy bathroom in the bar. “Activities,” she mutters to no one in particular.
Sakura slouches in her seat, tipsily calculating minimum grades for her classes. If she gets a 50 on the final, she can pass with a C. This is okay, she tells herself. A C is passing, and she was bound to get a C someday, at some point in her life. One C wouldn’t harm her medical career, after all, if her references are nice and medical school admissions score is high enough. A C is a C. This is how Sasuke finds her, with her elbow on the bar counter, the thin fabric of her shirt riding up.
“Babysitting?” he asks, gesturing to her drink, which is more water than liquor now. The shot sits centimeters away, untouched.
Sakura’s eyes widen at his sudden appearance before she grumbles something in annoyance about the protonation of exogenous cofactors. “Does Sasuke-kun come here often?” she jokes.
He must feel the anxiety radiating off of her, because he dumps the shot into her drink. “Only when the idiot wants to have a drinking contest,” Sasuke says. He leans over her to order a whiskey neat.
“So, often,” Sakura replies. She grins at him. Sakura doesn’t have to look at him to know he smirks back in response. Instead, she watches the water on the counter, how it pools around the cups. He looks at her as she looks at the condensation. She knows he is looking at her by the way he looks away, turning his entire head away when she pivots to look at him. Like they’re in high school calculus instead of in their fourth year at university. Their moment of shared silence feels like surrender.
She takes a long sip of her watery chuhai, mixed with something that might be gin or might be vodka. She scrunches her nose. “Ino and Sai are having sex in the bathroom,” she tells him, an emboldened lack of propriety from the alcohol taking her.
“Interesting,” Sasuke swirls the whiskey in his glass, “Naruto and his girlfriend went to the bathroom some time ago, too.”
Sakura almost spits out her drink. “What?” she sputters, repulsed by the image of virginal Hinata being desecrated in a public restroom. He raises his drink in her direction and they toast to each other. Sasuke chuckles at their shared joke and it feels like a secret. It lingers even after it stops. It feels like comfort, like relief. Like a deep sigh.
Sasuke approaches Sakura with the same languid ease at Hinata’s art gallery the following month. “Sakura,” he says. She cherishes the way his lips curve when forming the syllables of her name. A small flower floats on the surface of the drink he gives her.
“It’s beautiful, don’t you think?” Sakura remarks, admiring an impressionist rendition of the Sun setting over a forest.
“Yes,” Sasuke says as he watches her take a sip.
“Oh,” she says, smiling at the glass, “umeboshi. How did you know?” Sakura glances at Sasuke through her eyelashes.
He takes her wrist to lead her out of the way of a passerby and shrugs. “You notice things if you pay attention,” Sasuke tells her. He doesn’t move his hand, after that.