Chapter Text
"You wanted to speak with me, Hatake-sensei?" Ino asks.
They're standing in the hallway outside of Sakura's room—Sakura's fallen asleep, drugged into getting a deeper rest than she had last night, apparently, but that's the cost of healing—and it's a small bit of time where they're apart from her, with enough space to talk without worrying about Sakura hearing.
"I did," he says, "though I don't recall saying so."
Ino grins at him, clasping her hands behind her back and radiating innocence. She can't read minds right now, which is weird and unsettling, so she tries not to dwell on that, but she's still a long-time student of how people are and how they act and react.
And I know Hatake-sensei pretty well by now, which makes it easier.
After a moment, he concedes and, with a nod of his head, gestures for them to start walking.
"Alright," he says, "you're correct."
"Where are we going?" she asks.
"Given the situation," he says, pausing at a hallway intersection as a few of the nurses push a hospital gurney through first. "I thought we should go and get more of Sakura's things."
Ino doesn't trip over her own feet, physically, but her thoughts skip a beat. Hatake-sensei had brought them what they'd left from the estate—which had necessitated them going through their shopping lists all over again, with him present, and adding his suggestions to them—but…
"It's not going to be very fun," Ino warns. "Her parents are…"
She trails off, not really sure how to put it. The Haruno are, ostensibly, solidly middle-class with a reputation for fairness and a marked disposition towards kindness. Towards people who they aren't related to.
Some families are like that, Ino knows, where all the ugliness hides on the inside and the outside face the world gets is absolutely lovely.
Total charlatans, she thinks.
"They'll probably be really polite to you," she winds up saying, feeling that settling on that is totally inadequate. "To your face, anyway, since you're her sensei. But."
Somehow, that's enough for Hatake-sensei.
"But," he agrees. "I know, Ino. Is it feasible for you to get into her room without them knowing while I speak with them?"
Ino is tempted to say no, no it's not, but she's been breaking into Sakura's bedroom since they were eight years old and she hasn't been caught yet.
"Yeah," she says. "Yeah, that's not a problem. I can pack up for her. Do you know how long she'll be staying with Tenten?"
"A while," he says, with an edge to it.
An edge that's not directed at her and, Ino realizes that Hatake-sensei is angry at Sakura's parents.
I'm glad he is, she realizes, a second after. He hasn't brushed her feelings off even once, has he?
Ino wishes she'd be able to eavesdrop on her sensei taking on Sakura's parents.
"Is she moving over to Tenten's place soon?" she asks, having not heard if Sakura was well enough to be discharged from the hospital. "Or is this... did Sakura ask you to get anything in particular from her home?"
That's not the question she wants to ask but, since she hasn't yet decided on how to word the one she really wants to put to him, she goes for a lower hanging fruit.
He doesn't answer her.
Which, really, is answer enough.
Outside, afternoon has begun to fade into evening. Still early enough that the streets are bustling, and will be for hours, but there's a feel of coming darkness to the air and quality of light. Once they're a few streets away from the hospital, she looks at him.
"You wanted to speak with me?" she asks, again.
"I met with your father today," he says. "And he mentioned something interesting—about how he can't read your mind right now?"
What Hatake-sensei doesn't say is 'is there anything you want to tell me?' but she hears that loud and clear and it has nothing to do with her bloodline.
"I was going to," Ino says quickly. "I just, there's been a lot going on these last few days and I didn't want to bring it up around Sakura when she's so… she needs to be the focus, right now, while she's on the mend."
Hatake-sensei is quiet as they cross the next two streets. There's people around but no one really paying attention to them. Everyone seems to be intent on going about their own days, whether that be rushing home from work and errands or rushing out to get to work and shopping done.
Ino wonders what he's thinking about. She knows his moods pretty well, she thinks, at this point, but the whys and hows of where his thoughts get him to those moods are a more complicated thing to follow.
"Sakura being in the hospital doesn't mean I only have one student," he says as they cross over a bridge painted in red, something that almost glows in the light reflected off the water underneath. "If you have something you need to talk about, Ino, then please do so. Sakura isn't the only one important to me."
She shrugs a little, though she's touched.
"I know that," she says. "I just… wanted Sakura to have someone put her first, I suppose. She doesn't have an adult in her corner the way I do. I told Daddy about it and we're going to talk about it more, I'm sure, so waiting wasn't bothering me, you know?"
Honestly, she feels this is being a blown a little out of reasonable scale.
He hums thoughtfully.
Ino casts a side-long glance at him, looking up to study his profile. "Besides," she says, "you haven't had a chance to rest either, Hatake-sensei. You need sleep too. You can't be the one to shoulder all of what's going on if you're exhausted."
"An excellent attempt to slide right past my question," he says. "And yes, I will be going back to the hospital after our visit to Sakura's house. And yes, I probably won't sleep very well in that chair either. Right now, though, Sakura is cared for, looked after, and as no one is dying or in immediate crisis, I have the time and capacity to look after you. Why can't your father read your mind, Ino?"
She hesitates. Deliberately.
He looks at her a little more thoughtfully.
"Part of it is to do with what happened on our mission," Ino says carefully, since they haven't been cleared to talk about it yet—though she's reasonably sure they'll have that permission by morning; it just takes time to process orders. "But it just comes down to training. It's easier to sensor train if I learn it separately from my bloodline, Hatake-sensei, and while I couldn't use my bloodline anyway, I took it a step further. For now, I'm locked away from it. If my mind's a fortress, I've hidden the key. Daddy could force his way in, if he really wanted to, but it would hurt me pretty badly."
"And your father is alright with this?" he asks.
"He'd have rathered I'd asked for permission than asked for forgiveness after the fact but, well, given the whole when I locked it down, that wasn't possible," Ino admits. "He's not super okay with it but, like, he'll get there. Daddy just doesn't like it when I do things without his knowing it."
Hatake-sensei sighs. "You're going to get me in trouble."
"Probably," she admits. "Sorry, Hatake-sensei, I really didn't mean to this time."
He waves that off. "No, no," he says. "This won't leave a permanent mark. I'm reasonably certain this is the sort of trouble you're supposed to be getting in to. Just let me know if your dad's going to come after me so I have some sort of a heads up instead of walking into a Yamanaka ambush, okay?"
"I'll do my best," she says, unwilling to make that a formal promise. Sensei are important and all but they don't out-rank her father, Head of her Clan, should she actually be given orders.
Hatake-sensei smiles at her. The shadows make his expression hard to read, behind his mask, but she knows he is. "You always do that," he says agreeably. "Alright. How long will you be without your bloodline?"
Ino makes a bit of a face, scuffing one of her sandals against the ground as they head towards the civilian sector Sakura's family is from. "I don't know yet," she confesses. "It will depend on how my sensor training goes. For now, I'll be operating without them for..."
The foreseeable future?
"...a bit."
"See if you can't nail down a more concrete timeline than that," he advises. "And then tell me."
"Yes, Hatake-sensei," she says.
He falls quiet then and she follows his lead, walking through streets where there's a shinobi here and there, easily spotted in the shuffle of civilians, until she pauses by one alley.
"I need to turn off here to get where I need to be the easiest," she says, taking pleasure at his grimace of how vague that sentence is.
It's still probably for the better to not cheerfully announce her intentions to break into Sakura's home.
He casts a look down the street.
"It's the one with the yellow trim," Ino says helpfully. "And the blue vase by the door."
"Go," he says. "Have fun."
"You too," she says brightly.
"Meet me back here once you're done," he orders and then he's heading down the street at the same pace that brought them here and she, she grins at his back and then darts down the alleyway.
Breaking into Sakura's place has always been a bit of a thrill but doing it with her sensei's permission?
Even better.
There's a saying he'd heard once, a long time ago, that if you wanted to understand a person—meet their parents.
He remembers scoffing and rolling his eyes, even as Obito laughed, and Minato-sensei tried to explain it. Kakashi hadn't understood it then, too busy being all raw, sharp angles and pride, too brittle about the fact that his parents were dead and, obviously, it was a stupid saying because, if so, then how was anyone ever going to understand him?
It's been years since then, though, and he's seen Minato-sensei's comment about meeting the parents to be eerily accurate.
It makes sense, he allows. In that we are all repositories of the victories and flaws of how we are brought up.
He can even apply it to Ino, though he hasn't met her mother.
I should rectify that at some point, he muses, though it's not a priority. She was right, in that, whatever it is that's up with her bloodline, it's not immediately a problem I need to deal with. I'll pry more later. For now...
It's Sakura's parents.
He takes a moment, ostensibly admiring the flowers they have in hanging boxes under their windows, to control his temper. Because he is angry. He's seen the way Sakura is and how Ino had danced around their behaviour. He's heard from Sakura's own mouth how she feels about her past.
He's sat in the dark of a hospital room and listened to her cry.
And it's tempting to go in, temper flaring, but he knows better. He knocks, instead, and waits with every semblance of patience.
I must go in with hands like clouds and act as if we are in the midst of days of mint and rain, he thinks. Something soft, intangible, pleasant and passing. Sakura hasn't indicated wanting to move out permanently. If I misstep here, it will make her eventual return to this home worse.
Though he's looking for it, his senses stretched out just slightly, Kakashi is pleased when he realizes that he can't locate Ino. She's managed to blend in well enough to the hustle and bustle around them that her chakra isn't noticeable to him.
I was always an indifferent sensor, if that, he allows. But I'm pleased anyway. I know where she's supposed to be and, from the front step, I can't tell.
He tilts his head slightly, wondering if he ought to knock again, but no, there's the sense of two shadows to his chakra--the undefined masses of energy that mark civilians, though he recognizes these only due to his familiarity with Sakura's chakra--and then the door opens and he...
Kakashi is almost disappointed.
He's angry enough that he's had to remind himself to be careful, keep his calm, be polite. He's wanted something obviously monstrous to rail against.
But the woman who opens the door is painfully, incredibly ordinary, from her soft brown hair, her green eyes and the lines on her face. She wears an apron embroidered with apples all up one side. There's flour on one cheek.
"Haruno-san," he says. "I'm Hatake Kakashi. I'm here to speak with you about your daughter, Sakura, if you've the time."
Her mouth opens, her eyes widen, and then-- "Of course," Sakura's mother says. "Please, come in, Hatake-san. I'll show you to the living room. You're lucky, you know, both my husband and I are home."
Luck had had nothing to do with it, but he curves his one eye into a smile more obvious than he would usually, but he needs to keep them at ease and he doesn't trust their ability to read his smiles through the mask.
"Ah," he says lightly, once he's throttled the anger at how both her parents are home but neither could be bothered to come visit Sakura in the hospital. "No pressing obligations, then?"
If she senses his heavy sarcasm and judgment, she gives no sign of it.
Unwillingly, Kakashi has to admire her poker face. He would not want to play cards against a woman who can keep her serenity in the face of--Kakashi stops that thought there, twisting it off sharply as he amiably takes a seat and waits for Sakura's father to come into the seating room.
"Come into my parlour," said the spider to the fly, he thinks wryly, except he's more than a match for these grasping, scuttling wastes of humanity.
... Okay, he's not doing a very good job of being objective in his own thoughts.
"Now," Sakura's mother says mildly, once she's taken a seat and Sakura's father--a tall, lanky man with black hair--has joined them, "what can we do to help you, Hatake-san?"
Not even Hatake-sensei, he realizes, and wonders at that.
He decides, provisionally, to leave off insisting upon his title for the moment. There are more important things and Kakashi knows that while Sakura isn't willing to cut these figures out of her life, he harbours the hope of minimizing their influence.
Nothing to do but shore up the damage they've already caused and mitigate it going forward, after all.
"I'm here about Sakura," he says. "Your daughter. I understand there were scheduling conflicts for why you haven't visited her in the hospital."
He keeps his voice very, very mild. It's not easy but if he allows his temper to go wild then he's not sure he'd be able to reign it back in.
And Ino's upstairs, packing. I need to give her time for that.
Kakashi also knows she'll be listening to every word she can catch, no matter that her bloodline isn't available to her at the moment. He's kind of glad it isn't, truthfully, though he still doesn't like the way it happened without his giving the go-ahead.
Sakura's father pulls his glasses off, wipes them clean on the edge of his shirt, and puts them back on while Sakura's mother pours tea. Sakura's father looks nothing like her and he remembers that this is her step-father.
"Quite so," Sakura's father says.
"We're terribly busy," Sakura's mother tells him.
He is--he is taken aback by their gall. Their casual composure.
But then, this is normal for them, he reminds himself. Why wouldn't they be casual about it, if it wasn't so much of their normal? They don't see that they've done anything wrong. Or, if they do, it's something they don't care is wrong.
"It's just curious," he says, "that you wouldn't make the time to go and visit her."
Sakura's parents swap glances.
"Well," her father says, "she's always welcome to live here, of course, we'd never throw her out, Hatake-san. But our understanding is that, now that she's a fully-fledged ninja, she's considered an adult. Adults are able to do things without parents holding their hands."
"And we wouldn't be able to understand what went on anyway," her mother says, her voice as soft and relentless as kitten's claws. "All that ninja stuff–we've never had an interest in it. It's so violent, so ugly."
"That 'ninja stuff'," he says, very quietly, "is what keeps you and your husband safe from harm."
"Or leads to the village being nearly destroyed several times over," her father says. "We're still here because our clientele are here and we're too old to relocate and build from scratch."
"If I'd been smart," Sakura's mother says, "then Sakura's father and I, well, we should've moved after the Yondaime Hokage's death, back before Sakura grew into someone who believes in all that nonsense. All of Sakura's grandparents have died in various attacks on the village, Hatake-san. Your so-called protection means very little to us when we die anyway."
Then she smiles and reaches out to take Sakura's step-father's hand. "Though if we'd left back then," she says, "I wouldn't have met my now husband. And that—that's a prize I'd be sorry to have missed."
Sakura's step-father smiles adoringly at his wife.
Kakashi doesn't know what to say. He thinks if he speaks then all the bile that's building up inside of him will come boiling out and that, that will not help Sakura. Sakura still loves her parents. That's why they can hurt her so badly.
Hands like clouds, he reminds himself.
"I'm sorry," he says, his voice so mild and snowmelt soft that it's a warning in and of itself that goes right over their heads. "My understanding is that parenting is not a zero debt scenario. It's not something you pay off your commitment to and then wash your hands of. Sakura is still only thirteen. Legally an adult but developmentally she is a child."
"Are you a parent?" Sakura's mother asks curiously.
I'm more of a parent to your daughter than you've ever been, he thinks, savagely, and the idea should bother him more than it does. He's never wanted to teach, never wanted to be the one to help new shinobi on their first steps towards the future.
But he does, he is, and he's found he likes his team. His girls. A good sensei is no substitute for a parent, in the best of cases, but--
Sakura still loves them. Even though we're taking her things, we're moving her in with a peer, she's still going to expect to come back here. I cannot make this worse for her.
"I'm not," he admits, though it galls him. "But I am a teacher and I have seen that those with supportive families are those that thrive."
Sakura's mother smiles at him. "We've been as supportive as we know how to be," she says earnestly. "And you're a good man for coming to see us about her. This is always going to be her home."
"But you won't visit her in the hospital."
"No," Sakura's step-father says, no hint of regret, just calm acceptance. "We'd only make it more complicated for her. It's for her sake that we step back and let her flourish. She'll do better, be stronger, without having to explain things to us."
They really believe that, he thinks, in horrified wonder. How can they really, truly believe that?
But it's clear that they do, which is the important, terrible thing about the whole situation and, on the heels of that realization comes the fact that these pestilent maw-worms aren't going to change their minds.
There's absolutely nothing he can say or do that will make them treat Sakura the way she deserves to be treated, with love and care and attention.
I won't waste my breath with arguing then, he decides, his heart heavy and his head weary at the entire encounter. They've said so little but it all aches. It's like over-stressing little used muscles, the ache is worse the longer it's left to settle in.
Ino should have had enough time, he decides. And, if not, I doubt these two are going to go up to Sakura's room for any reason. She'll be fine.
"All right," he says, though it's not. "Leaving aside that matter, I'm here to inform you that, due to the nature of Sakura's injuries, the Hokage herself has deemed it vital that Sakura be placed with a shinobi family until she's fully healed."
Her parents nod seriously but they don't ask questions. They don't even ask how she was hurt or how badly she is hurt. He hates them a little more.
"After all," he continues, with heavy sarcasm that they don't seem to hear, "you're not equipped to look after her."
"Thank you for letting us know," Sakura's mother says. "We appreciate it. Tell her that we hope she's better soon."
Do you, though?
Sakura's step-father nods his agreement. "We'll look forward to seeing her when she's healthy."
Will you, though?
Kakashi gets through the mild pleasantries needed to excise himself from their home by dint of sheer repetition of the mental litany: Sakura loves these people, Sakura will be upset if they're upset, Sakura wants to come home to these people, Sakura would miss them if they died.
He stands on the front step, not quite sure how he got there, and takes a deep breath. He feels winded but it's all emotional.
I can't stop her from going back there, he thinks grimly as he retraces his steps, back to where he and Ino had parted, but I wonder if we can make it so she doesn't want to go back?
That's a whole different song and dance, though, and while he feels like he's been drowning in temper born of futility, he has no wish right this moment to go back in the water and listen for whale song.
Ino isn't waiting for him, which he'd half expected, and is quietly grateful for. He steps into the alley and, in the blink of time, casts a henge that has him blending in, perfectly, to the wall. So long as he does nothing but breathe slowly, he is very close to being invisible.
If he'd bothered to mask his chakra, he would be, but doing that would draw attention in the village. They're nowhere near any training grounds. He was last spotted with one of his students.
Should any shinobi question me, the answer presents itself neatly: it's a training exercise for my Genin as she's showing signs of being a sensor.
In reality, it's for him, to give him the space to let his thoughts rampage over one another and to calm down. There's no immediate solutions but, at the same time, there's no immediate urgency.
Sakura will be healing for a while and that gives us plenty of breathing room to figure out what to do.
The worst part is, he suspects, that there's nothing to do. No court in the country would call how the Haruno treat their daughter as abusive—they've fed her, clothed her, supported her through the Academy. They're not wrong that she's legally an adult, for all that she's still not fully grown.
I think I hate that the most, he decides, though it's like deciding between many, nearly identical hatreds. That there's just enough logic in their twisted reasoning that arguing it is futile—and what would we even argue? No court in existence can make anyone love someone. The Haruno might be shockingly cold and blasé about their daughter, but those aren't crimes. And if they were, well, there'd be a lot of people who'd need to be tried. I'm only so angry because Sakura's one of my Genin.
But he understands, better, about where Sakura comes from. That, if nothing else about this, is valuable.
Would I care as much about it, if I heard someone else going through this?
He grimaces.
Probably not.
Ugly but honest. He's not quite sure what to do with it.
"Hatake-sensei," Ino says, laughter in her voice. "The edges of your henge are wobbling."
He blinks, glad she can't see him as he looks owlishly at her, before, with a huff of a laugh, he dismisses the henge.
"Apparently so," he says, taking in her appearance and the bundles she carries. At a glance, he can tell she's taken more than what Sakura would need for an extended stay.
At a second glance, he wonders if she's left anything at all behind.
Well, I suppose that answers if Ino would be willing to help see if we can't break Sakura away from her family. They're not good for her.
"Good job on sneaking up on me," he says.
She wrinkles her nose at him impudently. "You were so lost in thought that it was easy. Here," she shoves a bundle at him. "Take this one and this one too."
He obligingly allows himself to be loaded down with the bags that hold physical story of Sakura's life. Once he's laden to Ino's satisfaction, she readjusts the bundles she carries and, looking as if she doesn't have a care in the world, she heads out of the alley.
"Hurry up, Hatake-sensei," she says, and he marvels at the way she sounds like she's got her hands on her hips even though he can clearly see her hands are full and otherwise occupied. "We need to drop most of this off at Tenten's place, then we're due at the hospital to have a late supper with Sakura. You don't want to keep her waiting, do you?"
Kakashi doesn't tell her that they've got plenty of time, though they do, just allows himself to be bossed about.
Ino talks the whole way there. She doesn't seem to feel the need for his input, which he's grateful for, as he just allows the chatter to wash over him. Now and then he murmurs something, though he couldn't say what it was, still lost in the turmoil the early evening had brought him.
It's only later, much later, once Ino has gone home under a star-studded sky, Sakura is sleeping again, and Kakashi is left sitting by her bedside, keeping an eye on her, that he realizes that Ino hadn't said a single word or asked a single question about how his conversation with the Haruno had gone.
"You're lucky to have Ino," he tells Sakura's sleeping form. "Even as we went there, she kept your secrets for you, though I'm sure she understands far, far too much of how your parents are."
Kakashi thinks of his muddled, circumquaque thoughts and half-formed conclusions and plans with all the wheels missing.
He doesn't know how to fix any of it.
"I think I'm lucky to have her too," he admits, in the darkness. "She made herself just what I needed this evening, with no pressure on me, and I hadn't even realized at the time."
Which tells him just how much, exactly, he'd needed that breathing room.
"The first night you don't need me," he says, very gently, "I'm going to go and talk to my family."
The names on the Memorial Stone can't answer him back but he knows their presence will help as he decides what to do about all of this. He's gentle because Sakura might not hear him but he does and after seeing who she'd grown up with, well...
Sakura deserves gentle and he suspects she hasn't grown up with much of it.