"Don't be stupider than you can help, then," Sasuke snapped back, folding his own arms in turn. The fact that Naruto was stalling -- seemingly on purpose, here -- was enough to raise his already hair-trigger temper on the subject. He'd wanted to approach this with a degree of calmness given how his conversation with Sakura had gone, but clearly his former team still had their way of disrupting any plans laid around them.

"Only a handful of people know the truth about my brother and Konoha, and most of them are dead," he said. "I wasn't joking when I said I'd hunt you down if you hurt him, but I also wasn't joking when I said I need to know how you came to start considering Itachi a friend, of all things."