Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Kakashi was in hell, or something close to it.

He had just arrived at the outskirts of Training Ground N37, the farthest one out from the center of Konoha, and they were just about to start another vicious evil training drill of death, as Naruto had taken to calling them recently, and in hundred-degree weather to boot. As he joined the two boys waiting for him under the single tree in the training ground, he wiped a small pad of sweat away from under his hitaiate and quickly re-rolled the long sleeves of his jounin blues, thinking wistfully of the sleeveless ANBU uniform that had been his standard uniform for years. (Sucks to be a jounin, some days).

“So, cliffs are very different from trees, on an energetic level,” he began explaining, not yet bothering to look up from page 217 of Itcha Itcha. It had just gotten to the really tense part right before Keiko’s second declaration of love, and this explanation shouldn’t take him very long anyway. “You’ll still have to infuse the soles of your feet with chakra, but the energy signature in the rockface that you’re going to be looking to match is both striated and undular. You have to think in terms of the underlying formative geology —”

Midway through his concise, useful explanation, the two genin boys in his charge peeled off their shirts and launched into their complaint session.

“Tch,” Sasuke muttered, barely even under his breath. “This sucks.”

“Wrong as usual, Sasuke-teme!” Naruto replied, not under his breath at all, as he kicked at a poor, guiltless tuft of grass. “This really sucks like a motherfucker!”

Immediately, Kakashi broke off his explanation and closed Itcha Itcha with a hard snap. “Naruto, who taught you that word.”

“This motherfucker of a Sasuke did,” Naruto answered chipperly. There was a hyper-aggressive challenge in Naruto’s stance and eyebrow as he did so.

Instead of responding to the challenge, Kakashi cocked an eyebrow over at Sasuke, who shrugged and shook his head blankly. Possibly lying. In the nine months that they’d been together as Team 7, Sasuke was the only one of the three who had successfully lied to Kakashi so far. It had only happened once, but once was enough.

“Well, stop using it already,” Kakashi grimaced at Naruto, allowing his tone to grow as dark, icy and scary as possible without losing any of its characteristic sweetness.

“HA! You can’t make me, you ancient old fart of a motherfucker!”

Resisting the very strong urge to jump straight to violence as a solution to his current problems, Kakashi pulled in a very strong inhalation through his cloth-covered nostrils and switched his focus to glare darkly down at Sasuke. Sasuke merely returned eye contact, with a mild, unflinching challenge in his small, angular face.

Naruto prattled on, regardless. “Fuck you for making us wait out here in this unbearable heat, Kakashi-Sensei! Fuck your whole life!”

(Well, yeah , but…)

“You motherfucker!!”

This time, Kakashi barely resisted the urge to cradle his forehead in his hand.

...There had been just one left. One single swear word that by some blessing of fate, one tiny miracle, the one unique act of grace to show its face in this poor kid’s otherwise blighted life –the one single swear word that Naruto had somehow neglected to pick up or overhear or understand enough to cognize and internalize and formulate for his own use during the last twelve years —

“You motherfucking jounin motherfucker!!”

…This one stupid word had finally gotten lodged in his tiny little genin head, in his adorable but miniscule, almost non-existent brain.

“Fuck training! Fuck motherfucking conditioning!”

(... What would Namikaze Minato say, if he were to look down on Kakashi’s miserable attempts to actually influence his kid’s life for the better, in any way… Kakashi could practically see the badly-hidden disappointment in his old teacher’s crestfallen face…)

“You motherfucker of a fuc—”

“Naruto, shut up, you’re being annoying!” Sasuke interrupted him after a very obscene minute and a half. 

“Well, fuck you too, Sasuke! Fuck the whole system! Just fuck it all, you motherfuckers!!”

…And now, thanks to Sasuke, Kakashi was doomed to hear this word coming out of Naruto’s broken spigot of a potty mouth over and over and over again, as regular as birdsong in the morning. 

“Fuck me, too! Fuck this nonsense! Fuck the ninjas who make up these dumb assignments! You fucking fuckers can’t make me do anything!!”

Gradually, Kakashi realized his upper lip had gotten stuck smashed high up underneath his nose, by the intensity of his lower lip muscles drawing down. His fists were clenching, unconsciously. His arms were even trembling, slightly. He was glad his face was hidden from view, because if it weren’t, he probably would have ended up Portraying An Emotion on it. 

Through sheer force of habit, he smoothed his features out, narrowing his one uncovered eye at Sasuke, holding him locked in a death glare while speaking directly to Naruto.

“I can and I will.”

“Like fu-”

“Naruto, shut up!” Sasuke interjected wisely, using a quick heel-hook to nail Naruto hard in the shin. “He can and he will,” he added darkly, with a final sharp glance up at Kakashi.

(Good. At least one of them took him seriously. Leaving out the lying to his face incident, or possibly pair of incidents).

“Df-f-u-OWWW!!!” screamed Naruto, who surely couldn’t be in that much pain over a simple heel slam. “Sasuke, you shit-for-brains, piece-of-goatcrap, fuck-headed cunt-bastard!!”

Of course, there would be no stopping the swearing entirely. To do that, one would have to stop Naruto from talking at all, and to do that, one would need either extra-strength genjutsu or extra-strength duct tape. A lot of extra-strength duct tape. And neither option was considered acceptable to use on students, which was a rule made up by people who had never had any students to use them on, Kakashi was sure of it.

“...You done?” Kakashi asked Naruto.

“Eh, tte-bayoooo.!”

“So, as I was saying—”

“Anyway, Kakashi Sensei, why does Sakura-chan get to stay home for this training!! Just because it’s hot out!? Just because she’s a girl?!? It’s no fair, Sensei! You’re picking favorites again!!”

(‘......again’???)

Sasuke hmphed very softly, in what Kakashi now recognised as his I’m in agreement with Naruto, and I hate it hmph.

(The fact that he, Hatake Kakashi, a Konoha Jonin, feared and respected by his peers and enemies alike, former child prodigy, former ANBU, and a very busy man, had now reached a point in his life where he had fully categorized all twenty-three of Sasuke’s different hmphs, and could automatically sort them into their proper category without even glancing over in the young Uchiha’s direction to check his facial expression…)

“It’s no fucking fair,” scowled Naruto.

Instantly, Kakashi flipped his dark frown into a light smile. 

“Maa, Naruto, Sakura gets to stay home because unlike you, she can probably figure out how to do this in her sleep, if she doesn’t already know how, and because her parents are sick, and she’s tending to them, and because she probably needs a lot of rest, after she tried healing you so many times on our last away mission,” he explained to both of them with inordinate politeness. “In spite of the fact that you have Nine Tails chakra that can heal you in less than a day. Remember how I told you the scrape wouldn’t have happened in the first place, if you’d just completed your cliff running training, like you were supposed to? Remember how you then managed to get yourself so injured you could barely move? ”

Naruto spread his hands wide, then clapped both of them against his triple-scratched cheeks. “I can’t believe I’m getting lectured about this by you!”

(…... What’s that supposed to mean? )

Kakashi eyebrows contracted as he blinked in surprise at Naruto, who was standing on Kakashi’s right, which meant Kakashi didn’t get an immediate visual on his other genin student, as a strange, half-throttled cough came from Kakashi’s left.

Anxiety spiking, Kakashi’s head swiveled in alarm, near panic —

Only to find that Sasuke was hiding a snicker behind his hand —

An actual snicker, like a laugh —

..….What the fuck!

“Both of you, get going already! Before I lose my temper!” Kakashi barked at them, his fingers clenching so hard around the spine of his book, he nearly broke the binding.

A Naruto-led chorus of bitching, moaning, and this sucks so bad, waghhh wagh waghhh, why is life so hard, he’s such a dickhead whining played them out as they both finally, finally left him alone. It was a bit weird not to hear Sakura’s screeching layered in soprano over the top, Naruto’s rambling not quite thick enough to drown out Sasuke’s deep hmphs (all of which fell into the exact same category as the one from earlier....)

...But at last they finally left Kakashi alone to relax in the very partial shade of Training Ground #N37’s only actual tree. Sinking to a seat in the thin branches, he finally returned to Keiko-chan…

Only to be interrupted by the recurring need to throw shuriken after shuriken at the pair of them whenever they slacked off over at the base of the cliffs, which ended up being a frequent need.

And... a recurring need to... stew on things.

This wasn’t normal Naruto-bad-mood. There was something else going on with him today, but Kakashi was a damned motherfucker of a fuck if he knew what it was. The kid was a puzzle to him on his best days, but —

“....fuhuhuhuckk!!!” Naruto yelled as he immediately fell off the low line of cliffs he was supposed to be scaling.

“Oi, Naruto!” came Sasuke’s voice.

“What?”

“You suck!”

(…Kakashi chucked another shuriken and then buried his face in his book, pretending he was anywhere else. His annoying fucking students were going to drive him up the fucking wall one of these fucking days…)

As for Sakura… he’d kind of lied to Naruto; she wasn’t at home because of the healing she did on their last mission. The main reason he was isolating her at home was because her parents had gotten it, and she was busy tending to them, which meant she had likely already been exposed to it… ‘It’ being the suspicious cough, the one that had been tearing through the local population the last few weeks, in spite of the agonizingly hot weather.

She'd screamed and railed at him for a good ten minutes, (I'm fine! I'm fine! I don't WANT to skip training!! You're going to make me fall behind, Sensei!!), but Kakashi stood behind his decision. If Sakura got it, that would be bad. Kakashi's complaint-bingo chart would get filled in a day. If she already had it and had perhaps spread it to the boys yesterday when she met up with them for lunch, then that was good for her, since she’d have someone to commiserate with, but bad for the boys, and potentially very very bad for everyone, especially the complaint-chart, which would be filled within the hour. If Kakashi thought those two complainers were hard to wrangle now … 

(In fact, that could well be the source of the bad mood Naruto and probably Sasuke were both wrestling with today…)

And…

If she had already had it when he went over to her house to drop broth and soup off for her parents…

Kakashi snuck his water bottle out from his bag, checking to make sure the two genin boys across the field were plenty preoccupied with their bitching and moaning before lowering his mask, as a familiar cough began to tickle in the back of his throat for the third time that day.

If he had it…

If all four members of Team 7 got sick at the same time…

(Would Konoha survive such a situation…?)

*

Over on the grass, under the ledge of the cliff they were supposed to be climbing, Naruto was busy fanning himself with his hands and making declarations.

“Conditioning is the worst.”

“It’s not that bad,” said Sasuke, even though it was.

“Sasuke…. let’s slack off, today. It’s way too hot for this shit.” 

“Your funeral, Thin Hammer.”

“He’s not even looking. Is he looking?”

“I would assume so,” Sasuke snarked imperiously, picking at the skin on his thumb with his teeth and staring glazy-eyed up at the cliffside, already giving up on his next run up the side. Nothing had been going right today, nothing.

Naruto peered his yellow head around the rock they were hiding in the shade of. “Ha! Wrong as usual, teme! Kakashi Sensei is just sitting over there, reading.”

“Doesn’t mean he’s not looking, Last Place!”

“I think he fell asleep —”

A shuriken went whizzing past Naruto’s ear, embedding itself with a thunk in the cliff wall they were supposed to be walking up. There was a small paper tag attached to it that said Do Your Work <3. As soon as Sasuke grabbed for it, it exploded lightly, singeing his fingertips. 

“Gaaghh!!” Naruto screamed for him. “HE’S THE FUCKING WORST!!”

“He isn’t that bad,” Sasuke muttered, just to disagree, though he felt a strong impulse to add an imprecation of his own.

“Seriously, he IS though!!!” screamed Naruto again. “ All his choices in life are questionable, but this one is one of the worst of the worst!!”

“...hmph,” uttered Sasuke, nostrils twitching, not quite agreeing, but not quite disagreeing, either.

Naruto was unusually mad, and so was Sasuke, but for once, it wasn’t even really directed at each other. It was the heat... and (for some weird reason) the lack of Sakura... and the unfair expectations Kakashi Sensei was sending their way... 

(The bigger issue that was twisting Team 7 into knots — even Sasuke knew it — was how close they had come to losing Sasuke to Orochimaru during the Chunin exams. Everytime they drifted close to the subject, Sasuke tsched them and pretended it didn’t matter, but the closeness of the call, and the looming threat of Orochimaru coming back at some point — well, it had everyone on edge… Sasuke could tell from how Sakura threaded her hands through her hair when she let her eyes rest on him for more than four seconds; he could tell from how Naruto kept grimacing and growling whenever Sasuke moved into Naruto’s blindspot, out of his field of vision, and as for Kakashi…)

But wait — 

Speaking (or not-speaking, as the case usually was) of attacks on the Village, was that —

From up above, past the edge of the training ground, above the edge of the cliff, shouts echoed towards them.

Smoke.

Something was wrong.

Before Sasuke could make a move to investigate, Kakashi was gone from under the tree — and snapping his fingers at them as he sprinted past them. “You two stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Naruto scrambled to get up, but Sasuke was already on his feet: 

“Why can’t we go with you?”

“Because you haven’t finished cliff training yet. Keep at it. I’ll know if you stop.”

He sprang up the side of the cliff as though vertical was the same thing as horizontal, quickly disappearing into the line of trees at the top, out of sight. 

“...He’s the worst,” Sasuke sighed, finally resigning himself to falling into total agreement with the dumbest kid in their Academy class.

“The WORST!!!”

*

…They didn’t call him a genius for nothing: 

Kakashi was a thinker. It was in his nature, always had been. He thinks, and thinks, and thinks, and acts, and acts, and acts, and sometimes he thinks and then he acts, and other times he acts and then thinks, and most of the time it’s a seamless dance between the two, and somewhere in the long, zigzagging, curlicue-spiral of thinking and acting and planning and acting and revising the plan and revising the course of action, he always came up with —

Well, something.

Pretty much always.

With this one exception.

…For once, there was no cool trick, no neat way around the current problem.

The thirteen splendid, wonderful, awesome, super neat, noble, honorable missing nin he’d been pursuing for the last four hours were now using kids as human shields. 

Civilian kids. 

All of the hostages were under fifteen years old, by the looks of it; most of them under ten.

The missing nin had them trapped in some sort of painful-looking, razor-blade-based jutsu. They were ordering Kakashi to surrender immediately. It was pretty clear they intended to kill him as soon as did, and kill the kids slowly, one by one, if he refused.

….This time, when it came right down to it, there was no clever way around the problem: it was just either him, or some random civilian kids.

So he did what was obvious.

*

Chapter Text

Part Two

“No trace of him anywhere, huh…?” 

Sasuke and Naruto and a few of the others had been searching for most of the day. Which pretty much amounted to following Akamaru around the village as he sniffed fruitlessly at fire hydrants and fence posts that Kakashi had probably leaned against at some point. 

(Dogs were very dumb creatures, in Sasuke's opinion).

“You’re sure he isn’t at Sakura’s?” Shino asked for the fourth time.

... no, Sasuke glared without answering verbally.

“He can’t have just disappeared!”

Kiba thunked Naruto in the side with his elbow. “He’s a ninja, ya bonehead. That’s sort of what we do!”

“Mmneh,” Naruto growled, shoving Kiba’s arm away. “It’s probably a trick, then. He’s already back at home again, I bet you anything.”

They went back to his apartment.

Checked again an hour later.

Like before, he wasn’t there. 

Their impromptu detective squad shrugged and adjourned for the day.

Then Sasuke and Naruto went back to Kakashi's apartment, to pound on the door, and once again receive no answer at all.

...He was still nowhere to be found.

*

…They didn’t kill him immediately, which was a surprise.

What they did to him instead wasn’t much better, if it was even better at all.

“Don’t move...”

Right after Kakashi had surrendered, they had tied his arms behind his back and beat him until he was black and blue. They sorta sucked at it, compared to other opponents he had faced. But the big guy in the group had managed to wreck his collarbone pretty good with his steel-toed boot. Kakashi was pretty sure the bone was badly fractured in a couple different places.

By comparison, the guy who had stabbed him in the side was absolutely brutal. No holds barred. He'd had the others drag Kakashi to the edge of a cliff, where a small pool of water was trickling slowly over the side of the rockface.  

"Scream, already!" he'd barked in frustration as Kakashi sagged against his hold, biting down on his bottom lip as the knife twisted into his side...

Kakashi was not a screamer. He just wasn't.

The guy had kept trying for a while, but he seemed to have lost interest after a half an hour or so, and retreated to the edge of camp, throwing sour glances Kakashi's way every now and then.

Ever since then, the others had been forcing Kakashi to remain crouching in the shallow pool of water, balancing on the balls of his feet, his bare feet submerged up to his ankles, to increase the effectiveness of the lightning release paralytic they'd had him under for the last however many hours.

One of them was using a lightning nature jutsu to counter the electrical signals in his brain as he fought to free himself from the genjutsu’s hold, effectively paralyzing him in one spot. The lightning jutsu was weak as shit, but annoying as fuck...

They had doubled it up with a genjutsu restraint, which kept whirling through every corner of his frazzled mind. One of them was casting it more or less continuously, whispering don’t move don’t movedon’tmovedon’tMOVE over and over again in his head. The command went ricocheting through his nerve centers, immobilizing him against his will...

He could shift his legs slightly, but he couldn’t move his arms even a fraction. Not just because of the jutsu and the genjutsu: they had taken triple precautions and also coiled chakra-inhibiting wire all around his arms, binding them in place. Even his fingers, which were covered in tags.

It wasn’t the usual chakra-blocking wire and tags, though. This stuff was somehow collecting chakra from him, sapping his strength, getting tugged out of his gut, out of his circulatory system, out of his brain, being siphoned off straight into the wire, which literally became heavier and heavier around his arms, until one or another of the missing nin came over and to smugly collect it, at which point the whole process started over anew…

…It wasn’t that bad at first, but as multiple hours passed, the position he was in became more and more excruciating. Every time he tried to rise out of his crouch, the lightning jutsu paralysis struck him again, paralyzing his muscles into place.

Every time he started to gather enough chakra to break the lightning jutsu paralysis, someone else replaced the first genjutsu caster, and don’tmovedontmovedon’tMOVE resounded in his brain, like a bell struck by a hammer.

Every time he gathered enough chakra to shatter the bell and hammer for good, the scant chakra he had would get siphoned off into the increasingly heavy weight of the wire, and funneled into their weird little side project…

Whatever the hell they were up to was obviously not good. Normally, chakra thieves used hit-and-run guerilla tactics, draining and dumping in one go, but these ones were weirdly tenacious, prolonging the whole thing past what he expected, almost past what he could bear... They were dropping clues about it left and right, but Kakashi didn’t yet have enough information — or frankly, enough mental clarity and energy — to figure out what it was.

His teeth slammed together as a low current of electricity went coursing through him for the fourth time in about twenty minutes, hard and rough and coarse as it burned through his body…

He was used to it (he’d been used to the taste of electrocution since he was three years old, thanks to his chakra nature), but being used to it didn’t make the sensation any more pleasant.

In addition to all that, he definitely had it — the sickness. The fever they were all contracting, all across all of Fire Country. Whether Kakashi had come here with it, or got it from one of them, it didn’t really matter. Kakashi suspected he had brought it with him, but the guy in their group who also had it seemed to want him to catch it, too. He had been coughing in and spitting onto Kakashi’s exposed face often enough.

The cough was now trapped in Kakashi’s chest, and his throat. He had noticed the cough worsening right away on the first day, as he leaned forward to clear his throat, and got pummeled back into place. (“Don’t move!”). The other symptoms showed up as well after only a few more hours.

None of them were any fun. Runny nose. Itchy eyes. Muscle fatigue (like that was a big change…). He was feeling each one, so he knew he was just at the beginning of what would almost certainly become a very weakening stomach flu, if he lived long enough to experience it.

(Sakura parents' cases had been terrible. Stomach contents spilling everywhere, and you couldn’t hardly sleep with the fever you were going to be running. Kakashi could barely remember any times in the last few days where the taste of vomit wasn’t burning in the back of his throat already, but there would be more up ahead, if Sakura mom’s case was anything to go by… 

Ino caught it first. Tried to spread it to Sakura, but apparently only ended up giving it to Sakura's poor parents. Some of the dumber residents of Konoha had started passing along the theory that the more you spread it around, the faster you got over it yourself. 

Naruto's excited smile as he repeated it like a mantra: The more you spread it, the faster you can get over it yourself...

Please don’t be so dumb as to believe that, Kakashi had pleaded at Naruto non-verbally, but it had come to nothing in the end...)

Focus on the situation at hand, Kakashi barked at himself. This isn't the time for memories and nostalgia. It's time to get it together, kill these fuckers and get back home. 

It became his mantra, but it didn't make it any truer than Naruto's had been...

*

I wish I were—

As usual, the thought I wish I were dead began showing up in his mind several times an hour — (or minute, in certain minutes) — before quickly getting buried, locked away, repressed, shoved down as far out of sight as possible. It was a familiar old ghost of a thought, but it had certainly been haunting him much more frequently the last few days, ever since he surrendered.

Someone stepped closer, close enough for him to smell their fear. He tried to lunge, just to try to do something. As the too-familiar don'tmove genjutsu pounded through the space between his ears, the person who had stepped closer moved away quickly, so that Kakashi only caught a tiny snippet of the conversation.

"You've made contact with him, then?"

"...Yes, he and Kabuto should be here within the next day or two..."

....Kabuto....?

Had he heard them right...?

He and Kabuto...?

Kakashi should have been sharpening up, but his wits were anywhere besides where he currently needed them to be....

*

At the end of the, Kakashi was pretty sure it was the third day, as the sun sank down below the horizon, and the twilight grew colder than the others, so cold it boded for a freezing cold night, the thought started to show up a bit more frequently than usual.

I… wish…

“Don’t move.”

...Someone was poking him on the back. Just plain poking him, like a child would. The surprise of it made him shift his feet a little; he would have lost his balance but for the paralysis jutsu more or less locking his muscles into position again.

“Leave me alone,” he mumbled reflexively, too tired to stop himself.

Whoever it was just laughed and ignored him, prodding harder. They pushed something gritty — dirt? sand? — into the slowly scabbing stab wound on his side, and just on instinct, on the rebound from the sharp spike of pain, Kakashi flared his chakra hard enough to light up the night —

The siphoner caught all of it on the wire, and sent it into the weird funnel thing, but only barely. And then adrenaline double his momentum, and Kakashi was rearing back, about to fight —

“Don’t MOVE!”

He lurched forward, stuck in his crouch again by the genjutsu. And then electrocuted back into place for good measure, with all the prowess of an academy student showing off their first ramshackle lightning technique to their chagrined teacher. It was low-level and clumsy, and made Kakashi think back to Naruto’s first day trying an atmospheric lightning-release jutsu, which he had bungled so badly, Sakura and Sasuke both ended up with their hair standing on-end for the rest of the day…

Their water nature techniques were not that good either, to be honest, the ones they were using to give him water every few hours, and to drench him with whenever he started to dry out. Neither were their interrogation techniques. If they were smart, they would have electrocuted him after throwing water on him, to make it hurt more...

But whatever they lacked in brainpower, these missing nin were clearly deeply committed to their cause. They also really seemed to hate Konoha quite a lot, and him, Kakashi, in particular. For some reason. They might have told him, but he was either in too much excruciating pain to hear them, or just not paying attention...

Had they mentioned Kabuto, and an unknown traveling companion...? Or had Kakashi hallucinated that comment...?

One thing he had managed to pick up was that one of them wanted to get him fired, apparently. It was a weird detail of the way he kept gloating over Kakashi’s crouched form, the endless smug gloating he threw at him. Bet you’re gonna lose your position as sensei! Bet you’re gonna lose your rank as jounin! When was the last time Konoha stripped anyone of their rank, anyway...?  

(It was particular enough that Kakashi was pretty sure this guy had once been a jounin-ranked sensei in his own village, before getting stripped of his rank and title...).

And the whole group of them, they were afraid of him. They were absolutely right to be — if he had an inch or two of leeway, he’d be making them suffer, relentlessly — but they were taking lots and lots and lots of precautions to make sure he didn’t gain even that single inch. 

Or half an inch.

Really, the amount that Kakashi had been able to move in the last… (...shit, how long has it been…? Two and a half days, or three? four?)... could probably be counted in single-digit centimeters.

*

Finally, at nightfall of the, whatever the hell day it was, Kakashi was allowed to move, but just his mouth, woodenly, trying to swallow without chewing much, in order not to jostle his tender jaw. His captors were feeding him some undercooked rice, washing it down with just enough water to keep him alive, but they were being withholding with the water, and the rice kept getting stuck in his inflamed throat…

He was so tired. It was an effort just to keep his right eyelid propped open. He made himself constantly make and re-make the effort, though. The other eye had been covered by his headband this whole time, and he didn’t want to add lack of sight to the growing list of his current inabilities.

The only upside to this situation was that he'd wisely left his genin behind in the safety of the Village. Silently, he thanked his past self for deciding not to let them come along, when Sasuke had asked...

He'd considered it for a moment, before deciding he wanted his space, and wanted them to actually pay attention to his instructions for once...

(He wondered if they would hate him for this, the way he himself had sometimes, briefly, very spitefully hated Minato for dying when Kakashi was only 16, and not ready to face the world on his own yet, no matter how much he lied about it...)

...He wondered who their replacement sensei would be.

Wondered how they had taken the news.

(...or if they had actually noticed yet).

A gruff voice behind Kakashi’s shoulder, and then a hand trying to jostle him out of place. Kakashi barely avoided biting down hard on his tongue as his broken collarbone shifted agonizingly under the weight of the stranger’s hand.

“How does it feel, Kakashi?” the man said in an overly familiar tone.

No energy for a proper answer, so Kakashi just grunted lightly.

“Shouldn’t we ease up?” one of the others asked. “He’ll die too soon if —”

“Keep going,” said the man behind him, digging his fingernails into Kakashi’s back, rubbing the pad of his thumb along the back of Kakashi’s neck. “I’m liking the look on his face.”

Fuck you, too, you piece of shit… Kakashi said in his mind, since Naruto wasn’t around to say it for him.

The next man’s voice was shaking with fear. “Don’t slow down. Not even a little! He'll kill us if he gets free."

"But this is —"

"The worse off he is, the easier it will be to interrogate him.” 

“You have to be kidding me, Kento. He’s pathetically weak, barely even —”

“Don’t stop even for a second! If he gets a single opportunity to fight back at all, you won’t like the consequences —”

Cowards, Kakashi thought at them, glaring from his one available eye. Motherfucking cowards.

….They weren’t just afraid of him, then. They were absolutely petrified. Even the ones who were grandstanding.

Well, maybe that was just logical, considering all the things Kakashi was imagining doing to them, the second he got free.

(...Although the idea of him fighting anyone at the moment was rather laughable, let alone fighting a group of thirteen missing nin, most of whom seemed to be chunin-ranked, but some of whom were jounin… when he hadn’t had a chance to eat or sleep or even relax or ease the strain on his muscles, for hours, maybe days now… No chance to recover his energy, or even sit down, or stand up… No chakra reserves to speak of…)

“...He’s passing out — quick, get Iwato —”

“DON’T MOVE!”

And once again, Kakashi’s eyes flew open against his will, and he was paralyzed into wakefulness, paralyzed into the hold they had him bound in, despite the weakness in every muscle, the trembling he couldn’t control, that not even the lightning paralysis could stop…

“Weren’t you saying something about interrogation, just now?” he asked mildly. His voice came out like dust, the bitter taste of acrid vomit rising in his  throat.

“You’re right,” said the thick-handed man behind him, rubbing his hand into Kakashi’s hair. “It’s been long enough, I suppose. Ready to start? Go find Shieburo.”

Someone made a sign for a water release, and then a massive wall of water slammed down onto Kakashi’s head and back, the immense pressure overwhelming the paralysis jutsu and causing his crouching legs to buckle and his body to lurch forward —

He would have collapsed at last except for the long-fingered hand of the newest jutsu-caster coming to wrap around his throat, lugging him back up into position. Soft, thin fingertips traced over Kakashi’s exposed face. It was a gentle touch, until they moved back down to his neck and squeezed.

“Almost. You can almost come out of it…”

The sudden increasing pressure around his windpipe caused him to start to cough, hard and choking, against the fingers.

(This asshole must be Shieburo...)

The nin speaking to him leaned in closer to his ear, to be heard over the sound of Kakashi’s coughing.

“Tell us everything you know about the Uchiha boy, and this will all end.”

He took just a moment to grit his teeth together painfully before he looked up at the person squeezing his throat, blinking in confusion.

“...Who?”

The hand clenched tighter.

“Sasuke. Everything. Now.”

For a second, as the hand released him, just before the man behind him slammed his hands into Kakashi's back, piercing him with a thunderbolt loaded with electricity than they’d inflicted on him in the last two or whatever days put together, Kakashi’s mind flicked quickly over to the three genin kids he’d been training for the last nine months, all three of whom were no doubt at least one hundred and fifty miles distant from here, tucked into their beds in the Village, safe and sound...

(Remembered how shabbily Sakura had been hiding her suspicious cough the last time he came by to drop off more vegetable broth and squash soup, sniping at him as she offered him a chocolate milk from her parent’s fridge and screaming at him not to treat her different from the boys. How vulgarly Naruto swore at him when Kakashi had asked them very nicely to start their cliff-training already, just a few days ago. How smugly Sasuke had burst into Kakashi’s apartment at 10:45pm a week back, holding up the filled-in answers of the crossword puzzle Kakashi had given him that morning, a shit-eating triumphant smirk spreading across his angular face….)

Kakashi was a shinobi. He had been his whole life. He should know better by now than to indulge himself in the sentimentality of last wishes, but…

…It woulda been nice to have had one last goodbye.

I wish…

I just kinda wish —

Chapter Text

It had been two days since anyone had seen him.

Then three.

The adults in the Village were saying don’t be impatient; he does this sort of thing all the time. He was probably out doing something or other for the Hokage. Some classified mission or something.

…It was an excuse for ignorance, the first few times.

And after that, it was an outright lie. 

Ebisu and Iruka were such shitty liars, they might as well have just shouted that they didn’t know anything, dropped a banner proclaiming that they were trying to fool everyone into relaxing about it.  (Even Naruto seemed to be able to tell that those two were pretending to know what they didn’t). 

The other adults presented a bit more of a challenge, but everyone had tells, and they told them to Sasuke, who could read everyone loud and clear, even without flaring his Sharingan eyes. 

There was an uncontrolled twitch in Might Guy’s left eyebrow, high up above his beaming smile of reassurance (Beaming Smile of Reassurance). 

There was a slight hesitation in Asuma’s gravelly voice as he cleared his throat, and a barely-perceptible tremor in his hand as he flicked away a wisp of smoke from in front of his face.

There the tiniest biting of the underlip by Kurenai when she looked past them, at the line of the horizon.

(That last one would be the hardest to pick up on, except for the fact that it was the same tell Sasuke had himself. According to his mom, anyway; she had always nagged him not to worry it, constantly pushing chapstick at him —).

…At any rate, they were all lying.

They didn’t know where he was. 

No one seemed to.

*

Someone was speaking nearby, or maybe even yelling, but it was like they were underwater. Or maybe Kakashi was the one underwater. His body lurched like he was being dragged down, into the ground itself. Smoke whirled in his face, stinging his eyes. The world got heavy and dark and cold, and then —

And then suddenly everything was gone. 

Everything.

Sight —

Hearing —

Touch —

Smell —

There was no air —

“Stop,” Kakashi said breathlessly. His lips formed the word, and he pushed air out of his mouth, but he didn’t hear any of it, couldn’t feel his vocal chords vibrating, couldn’t even feel his tongue press against the bridge of his mouth. “Stop. STOP. Stop it. STOP.”

Word after word, attempt after attempt, but nothing —

No sight, no —

No hearing,

no smell —

“STOP!” he shouted again, heaving lungs pulling in huge gulps of oxygen, but unable to feel any of it fill his chest.

Nothing —

His head rattled, and his fingers shook, and his eyes squeezed tightly shut. When he tried opening them again, it was still the same. Everything —

Everything — 

Everything was gone. Lost to the void of nothingness in front of him, around him, all over him. He had no spatial sensitivity anymore, because there was no space anymore. Time wasn’t passing either. His chakra pathways were all dead. Even all the cramps and aches and jolts of the pain he’d been accumulating the past few days, the ones he'd been trapped with just moments before — it was all —

(...Moments, or had it been hours — how long had he... how long was he going to be...)

Everything was —

Stop PANICKING, he yelled at himself, and then repeated it out loud. 

“Stop. Just stop.”

…Still nothing, nothing, couldn't even feel his own heart racing, but —

You can do this, he told himself. 

The strength in his words wasn’t his own; the small part of his brain that wasn’t panicking was speaking to him in clear, calming tones, using the memory of the voice of a long-dead friend to lay a thin blanket of rationality around his trembling shoulders. 

You’re not insane. You’re not dead. You’re Hatake Kakashi. Ninja Registration Number 009720. This is genjutsu. You are being tortured for information, and you are not going to give in —

“Rin,” Kakashi said her name out loud, just in a breath of a whisper that wouldn’t have been audible even if he could hear himself, and though he still couldn’t find his chakra pathways, couldn’t feel or smell or see a single thing, saying the name was grounding; it somehow helped him visualize himself attaching the soles of his unfelt, unfeelable but not doubt still aching feet more firmly to the ground. “Thank you.”

I’m with you, she answered immediately.

Her dark brown eyes, shining with excitement as she tugged on his elbow —

“Kakashi-kun,” she called to him, and even though it was almost fifteen years since he’d last heard it, her voice was clear as a bell as it echoed through his otherwise-empty mind.

“... Obito and I are going to get dango after this. I know you don’t like it, but will you come with us?”

He hadn’t liked either one of those, back then, Obito, or dango, or spending time on stupid, frivolous, recreational activities… The first time she had asked was the day after they’d finished Minato Sensei’s bell test. He’d only lowered his eyebrows at her, instead of bothering to reply…

(How he wished, now, that he had said yes…)

“…Don’t worry, Obito-kun. I’ve gotten a lot better since then, and I can stitch this up for you in no time! Don’t listen to Kakashi. You’ll be okay…”

It was the first time Kakashi had really been able to pull up any mental images of Rin that weren’t tainted by the macabre, violent end she had received at his own hand. Something about the stillness surrounding him, the lack of any sensory input — it was enough to allow him to pull back long-forgotten memories of the time when she’d been alive, the (relatively) carefree days before the unthinkable had happened, before —

(No sight, no smell, no touch, no taste, but —) 

“I’ll always be watching over —”

(She had said those words to Obito, so many times, every time Obito had bitched and whined and bawled for attention. Kakashi could still remember the first time he had overheard her murmur that phrase quietly to Kakashi’s first-slain teammate, as the two of them sat huddled together under the cherry tree, the wind tossing their hair and sending sakura blossoms swirling through the air around them; Rin had been speaking in a low voice, but in spite of being fifty feet distant from them, busily gathering his shuriken from the target practice dummy he’d embedded them in, Kakashi’s sharp hearing had picked up every word —)

“... I still don’t understand. How do I get the leaf to split in two?”

He could still picture the chestnut-tree leaf in her palms, cradled against her lifelines. He had had to reposition it in her hands at least a dozen times as he tried to explain the unexplainable. Wind Chakra manipulation was definitely not her strong suit. Her chakra nature had probably been fire, like Obito’s, but in spite of months of practice (every afternoon, just the two of them, after Sensei left), they’d never managed to find out for sure… 

He shivered, wanting to feel the warmth of her hands, that fierce fire she brought with her to every session of Team Minato training — wanting to feel Rin’s presence again, the dance of her chakra over his shoulder —

wanting to feel anything at all —

“... thought you might like some hand-knitted ones, since you’re always complaining about your feet being cold. They’re warmer than the regular kind, the ones from the store —”

…No sight, no smell, no touch, no taste, but Kakashi could hear, he could hear her —

*

“....take anything useful you find in there, and then get out. Bring the boy, if you can. But above all else, avoid that damned blue beast. He’s stupid, but strong, too strong for you…”

…Kakashi was back. His body was coated in a thick, thick layer of sweat, and all his fingers and limbs were shaking, and every nerve in his body was screaming in panic, his brain on high alert, but he was back. 

…And as he came back to himself, Rin’s voice faded into the depths of his memories, again, and for no discernible reason, water sprang into his eyes. Suddenly, Kakashi wanted more than anything to mourn; it felt as though he had just lost her all over again, as though she had only just barely died… 

Bring her back —

He ducked his head to one side and did his best to hide his face from view as liquid spilled from his covered Sharingan eye, either tears or possibly blood, and his heart thudded so hard and loud in his chest, he wanted to pass out from the sudden explosion of sound.

Rin…

“Ah. So you managed to break free, did you?”

Shivering, Kakashi cracked his right eyelid open, squinting up at the owner of the voice. ‘Free’ seemed like a very relative term, seeing as how he was still immobilized on the ground —

Long strands of sleek black hair fell against Kakashi’s cheek as Orochimaru suddenly leaned over him, his scent like death and his expression vicious and reptilian. In a voice dripping with contempt, he said, “This is absolutely nothing. You’re complaining about nothing, Kakashi-kun. You think you’re in pain right now, try having both arms consigned to hell by a vengeful shinigami.”

(A very self-endangering part of Kakashi almost wanted to laugh…).

“Orochimaru,” he muttered instead, as he tried but failed to crane his neck up. 

“Your stolen Sharingan must have broken Kabuto’s genjutsu clean in half, eh?” Orochimaru began to chuckle, a deep, dark, and very disturbing sound.

It's not the only thing I want to break in half, he thought to himself, straining against the bonds around his arms.

Orochimaru's smirk was practically audible in his voice. “Too bad. Well, I suppose there was always potential in you, although to be frank, I never saw it. I wonder what the Sandaime would say about our reunion, if he were here now. I remember he came to see me, after the funeral for poor little Uchiha Obito… He asked me to train you. He wanted you and I to wield that Sharingan power together, in order to build the largest library of jutsu in the entire shinobi world. Did you know that? I suppose he must have thought you alone weren’t suitable for the task of being entrusted with such a rare and grand power...” 

“Sarutobi Hiruzen was a very wise man,” Kakashi mused.

Orochimaru didn’t rise to the bait, unfortunately.

“Just think: you and your thousand jutsu, all to benefit my research. What a sweet, idyllic world we might be living in, now, had I said yes…

“Of course I said no,” the Sannin continued, straightening up. “I’ve always had a good nose for quality, and I couldn’t possibly have worked with such inferior product, built on borrowed powers.”

"Speaking of," said a new but sadly familiar voice, from just behind Kakashi's shoulder.

Something pulled, leeched off of him...

His vision blurred for a moment, but when it cleared again, the person behind him had moved around to stand next to Orochimaru. Kakashi was looking at — himself. The beginnings of himself, anyway; the person had stolen his hair, his face, his height, his build.... was currently stealing his expression, his stance, his chakra signature... It wasn’t a clone, but it was more than a simple henge —

Ah. So the siphoned-off chakra they’d been pulling from him for hours and hours was going into creating a convincing Kakashi disguise for Kabuto to wear. His own chakra lined the area around Kabuto's heart, camouflaging him even to Kakashi.  It looked almost like he was putting on Kakashi’s skin…

"I won't fail you, Orochimaru-sama," said the Kakashi in front of him, with a deep, servile bow.

"See that you don't."

"Kabuto —" Kakashi began, voice rasping over the syllables.

Kakashi’s skin started to crawl as Kabuto’s version of him threw a quick warm grin at him, before holding up a peace sign and flickering away…

….Fuck.

So Kabuto was already off, no doubt looking to make as much mischief in Konoha as he could, probably lure Sasuke out of the village, all while impersonating him, Kakashi… 

Kakashi would have liked to believe he would be a difficult man to impersonate, but that all depended on how well other people actually knew him, the real him… and if Kabuto’s instructions had been to stay away from Gai at all costs, and he succeeded in that, then it was fairly good odds he could pull off the rest of the infiltration…

Gai, Kakashi sent his thought out towards wherever his oldest living friend happened to be right now, and at the universe in general. Gai, please be vigilant, PLEASE don’t be fooled…

Chapter Text

Part Four

“Hmm….” said Gai in a low, thoughtful undertone to Neji, as Tenten opened the handcuffs around his eternal rival’s wrists, and Lee pulled a shrugging, slightly wincing, very-abashed-looking Hatake Kakashi to his feet.

“...How do you mean?” Neji returned reluctantly, after a few more seconds had passed.

“Thanks for the rescue,” Kakashi said to Lee in the meantime, resting a hand on Lee’s shoulder for the briefest of moments. “I owe you one.”

“HMMM,” Gai replied to Neji, placing his chin in his hand.

*

…Time-dilation genjutsu. 

It’s been months. Years. They’ve stopped looking. It’s —

…Time-dilation genjutsu. 

It’s been months. Years. They’ve stopped looking. It’s —

…Time-dilation genjutsu. 

It’s been months. Years. They’ve stopped looking.  It’s —

Time-dilation genjutsu, Kakashi, he continued to remind himself, interrupting the thought-wave that came crashing back in. It doesn’t matter what it feels like. I haven’t been here that long. It’s been at most a we—

He bowed his head as they began one more session, ripping off a couple more fingernails from his bound hands. He was in so much pain, he couldn’t think straight anymore, but a foreign voice slithered into his mind anyway:

…Spill your secrets —

Not Orochimaru. He was gone. That much Kakashi knew for sure. If Orochimaru were here, he’d have successfully gotten Kakashi to break by now, even without functioning arms or jutsu. 

Other than that, Kakashi had almost no idea what was happening past the headband-blindfold that was still tied over his eyes. Usually, his sense of smell could help him out, but at the moment, his nose was too stuffy. His ears were still ringing with the after-effects of the genjutsu they kept using. So he was still trying to gather scraps of details from vision alone. Most of the time, when Kakashi was actually aware of what was happening to him, he had been blindfolded, but every now and then they raised the blindfold to scream at him, and —

Spill your secrets —

And laugh in his face, but once, when they’d raised the blindfold, there was… there had been —

Spill your secrets —

…a weird crow, circling in the sky.

All crows were weird, actually, but this one —

A Team Ro kind of crow...

...Was that... had that been real, or had Kakashi been hallucinating, again?

It’s been months. Years. They’ve stopped looking. It’s —

Time-dilation genjutsu. That's all this is. It hasn’t been months or years. It probably hasn’t even been a week; otherwise, my fingernails would have started growing back in —

He lost track of the thought as someone struck his back and shoulders. They were starting with the belt now…

*

"Kakashi," said Might Gai.

Kabuto looked up from where he was resting against a tree, having been deposited there a few minutes ago by Gai's charming little students.

"You are not looking well."

Kabuto sniffed and shrugged.

Gai lowered his extremely thick eyebrows as he started to grin. "You will be back to your old self in no time at all, of course, but perhaps you are not currently well enough for a competition between two rivals, hm?"

"Sure," Kabuto shrugged again, keeping his expression nonchalant.

"..."

"I'm fine, Gai. Let's have a competition, but maybe let's get home and have some breakfast first. I'm kinda hungry."

There was no immediate response, but as Gai moved away to field some questions from his students about what kind of bandages to use on Kabuto's 'wounded' hands, he emitted a low, rumbling "...hmm..."

Kabuto fought the urge to flinch, wanting this whole sting operation to take less than no time at all.

*

Kakashi still hadn’t slept yet, but when they weren’t actively torturing him, he was able to sort of let his consciousness drift… 

He came back to himself as they pried his mouth open and craned his head back to pour water down his parched throat, forcefeeding him a few soldier pills in a row. Several. Kakashi felt them scrape the sides of his throat on the way down, but just growled in rebuttal, because he really couldn’t do anything else.

He received a swift slap in the face for making noise. The once-sensei jounin who’d been supervising his interrogation all night tutted at him reproachfully. “All this bottled up aggression. Need someone to take it out on, don’t you?”

Kakashi swayed. The balls of his feet were aching from having held his weight for so many prolonged hours, but even so, the electrical paralysis kept him from shifting much of his weight further back onto his heels.

“You should have tried taking it out on your students,” said the jounin conversationally. “That’s what I did —”

Kakashi’s growl turned so furious, it would have made Bull quiver. “Basta—”

This time, he received a huge blow to the head, one that would have sent him reeling, but for the genjutsu still screaming at him don’tmovedon’tmovedon’tMOVE . 

“And don’t talk back,” the jounin added firmly.

*

Infiltrating Konoha was a perfect cakewalk, like it had been every time before. It was almost disgustingly easy. Well, Kabuto might have experienced disgust, if he hadn’t already been so familiar with the myriad soft spots and vulnerabilities in their defensive measures. He was already a professional, and had been for years. 

Tricking the gate guards was hardly even worthy of the term; the pair of idiots on Team Gai practically carried him on their shoulders, as he pretended to be suffering from near-chakra exhaustion, the gate guards just greeted him jovially and waved them on. 

Kabuto had already overcome the much larger hurdle of getting past the Blue Beast undetected, it would seem. Might Gai wasn’t someone to underestimate. Orochimaru-sama was rarely wrong, but he had been wrong about Might Gai. Kabuto knew better. Gai wasn’t stupid, by any means, but he was incredibly distractible. He’d been awfully suspicious of Kabuto so far, but all Kabuto had had to do was stick a vial of low-grade poison into Tenten’s elbow when she and the others had been busy shuffling around with the medkit to bandage his ‘injuries,’ and just like that, Gai-san was lost in the urgent need to ferry her off to Konoha Hospital for treatment…

“Kakashi-Sensei!”

“...Yo,” he said boredly to the stupid Akimichi brat, whose eyes were shining as he greeted him. 

“You’re back! I can’t wait to tell Naruto!”

“Mm,” Kabuto replied, throwing a tired peace sign skyward. “Thanks, Neji-kun. Lee-kun. I can take it from here.”

Now, to find that medical textbook…

*

“What is it about Sasuke?!” shrieked the missing-nin named Shieburo, as he clawed madly at Kakashi’s face, jerking it this way and that. “Why him!?”

Hatake Kakashi. Ninja Registration Number 00972…

(...Shit, what was the last number…?)

Shieburo’s partially-shredded, pale-green sleeves draped over Kakashi’s face as Shieburo released his clenching, long-fingered hold to start pulling on Kakashi’s hair. Shieburo was always dressed like a dying moth; he was almost seven feet tall and almost leaner than the whip he had just been using to strike his captive with — and this was just a hypothesis on Kakashi’s part, but he felt more and more sure he was right after every interaction — and was probably second-place runner-up in the battle of candidates for Orochimaru’s next body.

And (unlike Sasuke, who didn’t even want to be a contender in the first place), Shieburo was very sour about it.

“Answer the question! What does he have that I don’t ?”

“I want to move,” Kakashi announced through a hard sniffle, so dizzy and exhausted, he couldn't keep the words from tumbling out of his mouth. “I want to move.”

As expected, Shieburo brought the handle of the whip smashing into Kakashi’s cheek. 

“Tell me. What’s so special about—”

EVERYTHING, Kakashi screamed in the privacy of his own mind. EVERYTHING is special about Sasuke. He trains and he trains, and he never gives up, and although he’s usually the quiet one, he makes these little side comments that always —

“What does that mean, everything!?” Shieburo screeched, pulling on Kakashi’s earlobe, yanking his head over to the side to yell straight into his ear. "Everything WHAT, what does that mean!?”

…shit, part of that had been out loud.

Hatake Kakashi. Ninja Registration Number 0079…

No, 0097—

009—

…something.

*

Naruto sat bolt upright in bed, flinging his sheets to the side. 

“He’s back?!” 

“Un!” Chouji nodded.

Springing up, Naruto threw his pajamas off, and in almost the same instant, he was dressed in yesterday's jumpsuit. He'd been feeling much too anxious and depressed to get clothes on or shower, before, so he was a bit smelly in the armpit area, but that didn’t matter. Even though Sensei was gonna criticize him about it, Naruto would be only too happy to field the complaints. 

“How did he seem?”

“A bit battered, but he’s okay. Hey, where are you —”

“I’ll be right there! I gotta go get Sasuke.”

*

“I want to move,” he repeated through clenched teeth, the thought stuck on a loop in his head, and slipping carelessly out of his mouth as he fought the urge to scream like a beast.

Someone stroked his cheek. “You can move once you give us more information, Kakashi.”

More…?

“You already gave us the passcodes. Don’t you remember?”

…he did remember. That was the problem.

“I… didn’t tell you.”

“You're so far gone. Can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake anymore, huh? Don't you remember when you told us the location of the ANBU safehouse, yesterday morning? I think that was when we gave you this lovely little decoration…”

Fingers on his back, digging into the bruising and torn flesh. Kakashi grit his teeth, head reeling. 

And then —

A — was that a noose? 

A noose was thrown over Kakashi’s head, carefully arranged under the collar of his jounin vest, and then tightened against his neck. He could hear someone securing it to a nearby — tree? outcropping…?

“...Your father went out this way. You can too, if you like. You’ve already dishonored yourself like he did, by betraying your village.” 

I have…

...no idea if that’s true or not.

“You can quit anytime you like, Hatake-san,” said another new voice. “Take a step to the left. You probably don’t remember, but you’re crouching at the edge of a pretty steep drop. ” 

But —

But what about the….

There was some reason he couldn’t move, but he couldn’t remember what it was at the moment. 

Gen…

genin…

GenJUTSU, he corrected himself. It’s the genjutsu — the don’t move — and this is more of the same. There is no cliff. Probably no noose either. This is an interrogation, after all. They’re trying to trick me. 

Although, the question of ‘why’ still remains… to… 

Remains to…

He had to break off trying to string one mental thought along after another as his coughing surged and he gasped for breath, the noose or cord or whatever it was around his neck cutting into him even more fiercely each time he wheezed for more oxygen.

“...Really? You’re going to continue? So stubborn! Okay, then, let’s just keep on with it….”

*

Kabuto kept his outward expression blank, but inwardly, he was absolutely preening with delight; he could barely believe his luck. This little pink-haired child  had the medical textbook they needed. This was going to be laughably easy.

“Hi, Sakura-chan,” he said, almost cheerfully, but with the distinctly bored tone that never left Hatake-san’s voice.

She contracted her brows. “What do you mean, ‘Hi, Sakura-chan’ ?’”

Kabuto crossed his arms over his chest, glaring down at her, but retaining the very offhand, listless manner. “Going to be one of these mornings, huh?”

Her lips twitched, and then her eyes narrowed, and then she shrugged and said, “Come in, then. My parents are fine, by the way. Thanks for not asking. And Ino's coming over in a few.”

“I won’t take long. I just need Kuuro Ayame’s medical notes. They’re in the textbook you checked out last week.”

“Oh?”

Kabuto sighed, keeping it just short of heavy. “Doing some research for Gai’s team. You heard about the illness Tenten contracted all the sudden, right? The librarian told me that you have a textbook that might be useful.”

Sakura bit her lip. “She’s still in the hospital, is she? You should be, too. You look terrible.”

“...Well, I did just escape being imprisoned for half a week,” Kabuto answered lightly, scrubbing at his spiky white hair. 

She smiled lightly back, but the edges of the smile quivered a bit, as she drew the book Kabuto had come here for out from the stack of them on her bedroom desk. “You shouldn’t joke about that kind of thing, Sensei. We were really worried about you. When we first got the report that you were captured and under interrogation, we —” 

(she kept extending, and then retracting, the hand with the book in it. She clearly saw him reaching for it, but was trying to drive her stupid little point home —) 

“W-well, anyway, let’s just say, it’s lucky for the bastards that captured you that Lee-san and Gai-Sensei and everyone found you first. You don’t even want to know what Sasuke was planning, and Naruto wouldn’t stop muttering all sorts of vulgar curse words under his breath…”

“M,” he replied, extending his hand expectantly.

She finally sighed and nearly, very nearly deposited the book in his palm, but before she did, she added, “By the way, Kakashi Sensei, what would you say was our worst mission for hire of all time?”

He frowned. “Sakura. Please don’t waste my time with th–” 

Without warning, the little girl threw the book out the open window and pounced onto Kabuto’s shoulders like a feral animal, jumped on his head, beating in his face and hollering, “Inooooooo!!” at the top of her lungs.

He flipped her off of him easily, slamming her flat onto her back on her bedroom floor, letting his face grow as dark and annoyed as he felt. “Sakura-chan, don’t test my patience!”

“You’re acting just a little too nice, Kakashi-Sensei,” she belted out as she rolled to one side and started boxing at him with small, balled fists — they were small, but they packed a punch — “Just a hair. It’s not suspicious at all, except it is!”

“How dare you assault—”

“INO!!!”

As the Yamanaka girl hurried around the corner, Kabuto sliced his fingertips into the Haruno girl’s abdomen, abandoning the fight (and the village itself) as quickly as possible, leaving with the flung-off textbook with the notes tucked safely inside, and flinging off his annoying Hatake Kakashi reinforced-impersonation-henge as soon as he was ten miles past the gate.

So she had seen through his disguise, he frowned as he wiped at the trickle of blood coming from his nostril. He’d underestimated a genin, so what.

He had what he had come here for.

*

Shaking. Exhaustion. Can’t… 

Insects.

There were -

Bugs. Walking on him.

Female voice, near him, but not one he was familiar with.

“... not worth it,” she was telling him, voice low and grave as she loosened the noose around his neck just a little. “What they’re going to do to you tomorrow is insane, and inhuman."

There were bugs on his skin. On his face.

"You might be a Konoha shinobi, but I can tell you’re a good person — you should give up.”

Crawling on his bound arms. Under his clothing. Real bugs, this time, not genjutsu.

He was pretty sure.

“...Are you an Aburame?” Kakashi coughed out.

“Once,” she answered nonchalantly as footsteps passed them nearby. “The insects follow my commands. They’ll kill you if I ask them to. There’s enough poison in one bite to be lethal. You’ll be dead in less than a minute.”

An implicit promise in her calculated phrases, all chosen to sound like threats to someone like Shieburo or whoever the hell the ex-sensei jounin was, but all of her phrases asking: How badly do you want it? How badly do you need out? You don't have to do it yourself; I'll take care of it, if you give me the word.

“I’m…”

“...Why are you this loyal? Konoha doesn't deserve your strength. What has it ever actually given you in return?”

Kakashi lowered his head a fraction, which was all he was capable of at the moment.

I really can’t explain it. Not to someone like you.

*

On the evening of the sixth day, as soon as the mednin who had been working to stabilize her internal bleeding for the last several hours rounded the bend out of sight, Sakura was declared fit for combat (by herself, Sasuke, and Naruto; they didn’t deem it worthwhile to ask her parents or a medical professional or anyone useless like that), and the three of them snuck out of the Village together. 

The main gate guards didn’t see them leave.

The ANBU agent that always trailed behind him anytime Sasuke did anything after nightfall in the last five years grabbed the wrist of the ANBU agent who was always trailing Naruto day and night whenever he wasn’t with Kakashi or on team missions (and what an assignment that must be). The porcelain-masked pair of them seemed to — if Sasuke was not mistaken — let them go.

(That was…affirming, on the one hand, and disquieting, on the other…)

Disregarding the irrelevant, Sasuke looked over to his left, at Naruto, and then to his right, at Sakura. It was already past twilight, getting late into the summer evening, so he couldn’t see the set of their faces, really, but that didn’t matter. He could almost feel how determined they were. It matched his own feelings perfectly.

They’d look all night if they had to.

Chapter Text

Part Five

*

When his genin team arrived at dawn of the (fourth? fifth? sixth?) day, Kakashi didn’t even recognize their voices at first. 

He must have been pretty much unrecognizable himself, at that point. His thoughts were starting to track and stick together a little better than they had yesterday, but all he knew for sure was that he was out of it. Really out of it. 

Head to toe, he felt like a mess. He was very thirsty. He’d been crouched on the balls of his feet for the last however-many hours straight. His toes were numb, but they must have been very wrinkled, too, the skin on his feet all pruny from having been submerged in water for far too long… 

Either hours, or -

Or days…

It had been days, and not weeks, right? 

(Or was that more genjutsu…?)

…at any rate, it seemed it might be close to sunrise, based on the temperature of the air around him having increased slowly, ever so slowly, in the last hour or so. His headband was still pulled down, secured tightly over both eyes (he hadn’t been allowed to so much as lift the eyelid on his Sharingan eye ever since they captured him), but the mask that always hid his nose and mouth and jaw was long gone, and he could feel sunlight on the skin on his face.

In addition to the sunlight, and in place of the mask, there was sure to be a thick coating of dirt and sweat and blood and grime. Blood creeping down out of the corners of his mouth from the two molars that Shieburo had cracked during the 'interrogation' (screaming session) yesterday. Blood still flowing down from one nostril from when that one big guy had popped him a sharp one, after Kakashi had lost the battle against temptation and mouthed off to him. No doubt there was plenty more blood trailing down his chin and jaw and neck, from kunai scratches made by that one angry former-jounin-sensei. (He seemed to have been making some sort of tally on Kakashi’s face, but if he had explained his reasons, Kakashi hadn't, at that, been point lucid enough to track them…).

Blood everywhere, really. Blood loss would do him in soon, if chakra depletion or dehydration didn’t get him first. The deep, dirty stab wound on the side of his torso, left untreated for the last few days now, was itching and stinging like crazy; it had been re-opened again at some point, and then left dripping freely all through the night.

(There had to be a hell of a lot of blood mixed into the shallow pool of water underneath him…)

Those were all ignorable problems, though, or almost ignorable. The other injuries — broken collarbone, broken finger, ripped-off fingernails — they certainly hurt, but except for maybe the stab wound, they weren’t life-threatening.

...What was really making him a mess, making him feel like he was losing it was the fact that he couldn’t breathe.

There was still a noose around his neck, cutting tightly against his adam’s apple, digging at the skin of his throat each time he drew a breath, digging in harder whenever he lost his slow, careful control over the itch inside his throat and started to cough. It had been looped around and connected to the rest of the chakra-inhibiting wire and tags that were still wrapped tightly around his wrists and chest and arms, so the noose kept digging  in harder and harder whenever he started to overbalance in one direction or another.

The longer he sat there with it, the more he realized how similar the two sensations — inability to inhale fully, and inability to regenerate enough chakra — really felt. Both were just enough to make him want to die, and not powerful enough to actually kill him…

...

"...ei!!"

..When he heard raised voices, he was in the middle of being electrocuted at a low level, again. The current was simmering through him, and through the water under his feet, and through the metal wire around and in his arms…

(…How many times had he been lightly electrocuted in the past 24 hours? 

Countless…?)

*

Voices. 

Not just voices.

Yelling. 

In spite of the noose, and the fact that he couldn’t see anything due to the blindfold, Kakashi lifted his head at the strange assortment of sounds. For a second there, it sounded like —

"Gyah!"

had sounded like —

“Kyaghhh!!”

…That screaming shriek of a battle cry sounded an awful lot like — like — 

“ FFUUCCKK!!”  

...Shit. 

Not HIM — not THEM —

…Someone, the person who had just been electrocuted, cut straight through the wire on Kakashi’s neck, then pulled the noose off of Kakashi’s head, allowing Kakashi his first deep, unrestricted breath in the last several hours. Then they yanked the headband away from his face, uncovering his eyes at last, and for a second, everything was way too bright and hazy and too much to process.

Yellow. Orange. Blue.

And screaming.

…something about a sensei, but Kakashi was too out of it to track what they were screaming about.

Morning sunlight bathed the mountainous forest he was perched at the edge of, glaring off the dew; the vivid colors of the horizon just past the cliffside he was all of ten feet from mixed and swirled before his eyes, and for a second it seemed like there were boys and girls and enemy chuunin flying everywhere. Maybe they were people he knew, but his brain was so addled and unfocused, he couldn’t even remember anything right at the moment—

The boys’ yells faded off a bit into a fight in the background. It was a fight — they had enemies — so Kakashi needed to get up, help — but — 

A soft hand resting on his shoulder, painfully jostling his broken collarbone, as a young girl’s voice relea — release — released him from the genjutsu paralysis —

“Kai!”

…At last.

A-ah…

Oh— 

…oh, wow — 

It felt so good not to have to hold that position anymore —

For the first time in five days, or maybe six, Kakashi’s trembling knees finally impacted down into the mud and water and blood pooling below him as he all but collapsed on the spot.

Coughing violently, each cough pulling harder and harder at his empty stomach, Kakashi tried to catch himself with his bound hands. His head was pounding and spinning in every direction. He tried to make it stop, but it was like all his muscles had locked up again…

"Sensei!!"

…He had bitten into his tongue, by accident. Fighting the urgent need to vomit, he wheezed for breath and then coughed more blood from the sides of his mouth. He had already been tasting coppery blood, all the last few hours, due to the broken teeth —

"KAKASHI SENSEI!!" 

The voice was... the yelling was... too much. He wanted to curl in, hide —

…The girl’s voice was very close to his right ear, saying something to him, over and over, but his mind was still drifting dangerously, and it was like there was cotton clouding his hearing in both ears. She sounded angry, though. Really, viciously angry.

"...-lease, Sensei, just try to breathe--"

But then, things finally started to slow down, just a little. The walls of his skull were still throbbing with pain, but his head was attached to his neck, and that was, well, that was probably a good thing. It took him just a few extra heartbeats to remember his name, his ninja ID number, and his responsibilities: next thing to do was to try to establish just enough of some kind of sitrep, try to get his orientation back —

Slowly, dimly, vaguely, Kakashi became aware of the distant fact that this wasn't true anger. She was just horrified, and afraid.

She’s in danger…

(Still, it felt — it felt so good when the girl just held your head in place for you, cradling your head against her torso. Warm, and soft, and —)

— and she was in danger. They all were.

Kakashi commenced Argument Mode.

“Get away from me, Sakura,” he said, although every syllable scratched hard at the sides of his too-dry throat. “That's an order.”

“Don’t move, Sensei, just rest —”

(I’ve had just about enough of ‘don’t move’ —) 

He shoved her away with his still-bound arms; without her to hold up part of his weight, he lurched unstably to one side and barely managed to catch himself from pitching over the side of the ledge they were perched on. Sakura was there at his side again a split second later, lugging him back towards a safer position.

Through his hacking coughs, he informed her: “I’m telling you, your orders are to stay back —” 

“And I’m telling you no! You’re coughing up blood; you could die if we don’t —”

An incoming attack, sudden and unpreventable, before she could finish.

Kakashi pushed forward like a charging bull and knocked right into her small waist with his shoulder, much more clumsily than he’d like, given that his arms were still pinned together with the chakra-inhibiting wire, but at least it was enough to force her backwards, out of harm’s way (at least for the next split second or two —). 

His legs gave out, muscles seizing and spasming —

(How he was even still conscious right now, even he didn’t know —)

Sakura, screaming at him —

Adrenaline running through him, Kakashi used his bigger build to push Sakura underneath him, out of the path of an incoming enemy projectile, crushing her small body under his very tired one, and then tried to roll to his feet, which simply refused to hold him.

“Don’t,” Sakura shouted into his ear, “Just let the others handle it —”

No. That wasn’t his style; never had been, never would be. Together, they stumbled out of from the shallow pool of water and blood that he’d been crouching in for the last however long — and then they both got knocked right back into it, sent flying off their feet from the force of the undulations in the ground below them as it was tugged to the side like a housewife straightening a rug by the yank of the earth-style release that Sasuke really hadn’t mastered yet —

…Kids, these are kids, these are just kids, these are my KIDS—

She was pushing him away, putting herself into the line of fire, shouting, “Leave it to us!”

Against Sakura’s instructions, Kakashi chose to engage, bringing his bound hands up to absorb the next fireball.

It was the wrong move. The fireball was weak, definitely not on the same level as the Uchiha-grade ones that Kakashi had once been used to dealing with on a daily basis, but it tore through him all the same; he only just barely managed to shove Sakura back out of the way in order to dispel the fireball before it hit her; the force of it impacting on him sent him flying backwards, straight into Sakura’s shoulder. Somehow, he managed it, though, the very tiny amount of chakra surrounding his chakra coils getting more or less blasted away in the force of the blow, and every chakra pathway in his body shivering agonizingly painfully, as he worked frantically to send enough of it into his bound hands, and bring his wire-wrapped arms up in front of his body —

He did it, he managed it, he absorbed it, somehow, but —

The next fireball arrived seconds later, but this time Sakura moved to catch it — and howled with pain as the countering technique she was brand new to rebounded through her small system, burning her from the inside —

“Sakura,” Kakashi gasped brokenly, colliding with her for a second time. He only had a split-second to move his leg into position so that the kunai flung at her hip would embed itself into his thigh instead of his student’s. He couldn’t really yank it, not with his fingers tied together still, but he wasted no time pushing it out — 

Shit — there was a paper bomb attached — with his hands and arms still wrapped in wire, and his legs barely operating, he could only kick it a few feet away before it exploded —

It was a fairly small explosion, by paper bomb standards, but it was more than enough to knocking both of them flying back, right towards the edge of the cliff, towards the plummeting, two-hundred foot drop over the cliffside…

Sakura was behind him, thrown further back — he had absolutely no way to reach for her —

But then he lost track of her completely as blinding pain erupted in his body.

Kakashi whited out for less than a second before his confusion and nausea and lightheadedness all evaporated: The level of pain in his body forced him to wake himself up completely, but it also stole away precious time, time he badly needed in order to get his bearings:

…He was folded in an ell-shape, torso and face pressed against the sloping ground, his aching legs dangling over the edge of the two-hundred foot drop below.

Below him, Sakura was shouting his name frantically, clinging onto one of his ankles, her body weight making the over-sore muscles in that leg shriek with tired agony. That was the source of the sharp pain that had brought him back to reality a moment ago, but —

Doesn’t matter —

She was welcome to keep hold of him, even if she weighed fifty times as much as she did, because holding on meant that she hadn't fallen to her death in the dried riverbed several hundred feet below them. The prospect made him shiver, or maybe that was the blinding, agonizing pain still running through every inch of him —

Sakura shrieked in fear as Kakashi’s full-body shiver reached his spasming legs, and the sound she made almost allowed him to generate enough adrenaline to get his exhausted body to move, to burst into action again—

MOVE, Kakashi, he screamed at himself, don’t let her fall, don’t let her fall —

But his wrists and arms were still pinned together in the chakra-inhibiting wire, so he was pretty much completely useless. He couldn’t even reach down to take hold of her hand. And they were sliding back —

He leaned his upper half into the dirt, pitching himself as far forward as he could go, his bare face scraping against dirt and stone as he pushed his jaw into the earth, cheek pressed into a patch of blood-slicked grass. He clutched feebly at tiny tufts of bushes and plant life around him with the edges of his wire-wrapped fingers, even the broken one, leaning himself as far forward as possible so that the two of them wouldn’t slide over the edge, as they slowly lost the war with gravity…

It’s not gonna be enough —

They were going to fall, but in his current condition, he wasn’t strong enough to —

Suddenly, Sakura released her grip on his leg and jumped away from him.

And as Kakashi was in the middle of commencing a full-on panic attack at the realization of the unthinkable having just occured, that she had just deliberately let herself fall, Sakura clambered up next to him on her own strength, climbing steadily up the cliffside with chakra-infused feet, just like she had been taught to do — even though she had only gotten the theory from him, and none of the practice, as far as he knew.

Once she got to the top, she reached for his arms to lug him up, but hesitated for one moment, her hands actively searching for a spot on his arms to tug on that wasn’t covered in barbed chakra wire or slick with blood…

“Sense–” she choked. He glanced up into her wide green eyes, her pale face; she looked frightened, more frightened than he’d seen her look in months — then she had to break away from him to fight off an enemy attacker.

“Sak–”

He broke off, coughing and struggling just to inhale. 

Weak.

Weak weak weak.

Kakashi sank his face into the dirt in front of him, making the cuts on his cheek and chin sting, not that it mattered; he was just glad that his mind was sharp, for once. His todo list was long, and getting longer. He was still half-dangling. He needed to crawl or roll forward. He needed to make his legs move. He needed to gather enough chakra to swing himself up. Above all else, he needed to prevent the violent death of his three genin students.

It was all beyond his abilities at the moment. 

Too weak.

Slipping… 

This is just sad, Hatake. He was too weak to pull himself up, even. His broken collarbone hurt like fuck, like it was splintering into pieces again, as his muscles strained to hold even his own weight. He was going to fall… except…

Well, he couldn’t fall, because if he fell, he died, and if he died, these kids would have a dead sensei instead of a living one, and right at this particular moment, a dead sensei was the last thing they needed.

(He would know —)

Get UP, Bakashi, he barked at himself as he slipped another couple of centimeters backwards, legs kicking in the empty air, They need —

No, actually. They didn’t really need his help — they were doing pretty well, all things considered — they were here to help him — but —

But this was ridiculous. Three genin against — how many were left, at least seven chunin — ? 

Get UP, he yelled at himself again, still to no avail —

Another moment of agony passed, only a moment, and then Sasuke was right there, crouching down in front of Kakashi’s bound arms. His Sharingan eyes flared fiercely as Sasuke silently grabbed hold of Kakashi’s biceps and pulled, yanked Kakashi up to safety, dragging him several feet away from the ledge, heedless of the metal barbs on the wire that sink even deeper into Kakashi’s bound arms, and into Sasuke’s own palms.

Kakashi's head sank down as the overwhelming dizziness threw him for a loop, and then a few more.

...Somewhere behind Sasuke, there was a scary, vaguely feminine yell (shyaaaaAAGH!), followed by a furious, animalistic growl: Naruto was over there going nuts on the enemy nin. Worried, Kakashi craned his aching, bleeding neck to see around Sasuke’s shoulder. There was a strange red haze in the air. Naruto must be using Nine Tails energy, or maybe there was just a red haze over everything in his vision because… eh, who knew, really, but….

“Don’t —” he choked out imploringly “Don’t let Naruto—”

“But if the Nine Tails chakra gives him an advantage —” Sasuke pointed out, and though he didn’t want to, Kakashi had to concede the point; in this case, the situation had grown so dire, they needed all the help they could get, even if it was from a savage rage-demon imprisoned in a twelve-year-old’s belly. Naruto had picked up some skills as a shinobi, but the truth was his work was often very sloppy, and he really needed as much back-up as he could get, from any available source —

And Sakura was vulnerable, too, with her leg positioned like that when she had someone in a chokehold — anyone could — yep, anyone could overbalance her —

This was worse than genjutsu; this was a nightmare —

Gut lurching, Kakashi started to rise, but skidded sideways on the hard rock, muscles seizing all over —

Sasuke, shaky and pale, threw a shuriken dead into the middle of Sakura’s fight, creating an opening for her, then pressed down hard on the crown of Kakashi’s head as Kakashi again tried to rise up to standing.

“Just stay put!” he snapped.

“I’m okay, Sasuke,” came tumbling out of Kakashi’s mouth, but even he knew it was a big fat lie, and it certainly didn't seem to impress Sasuke at all.

“Sit!”

Sasuke was, one-handedly, succeeding in more or less forcing Kakashi to sit back down. And that was really not good.

A twelve-year-old is ordering you around, Kakashi. Take action. Take emergency action.

He would, he really would, but once again, the whole world had started spinning out of control, everywhere, in several directions at once, for some mysterious reason. He couldn’t even sit up straight, let alone stand and fight. Not good. He wasn’t breathing well, either, but that was understandable, at least; that was either from his illness, or lack of chakra, or just the insane amount of panic coursing through him —

“Shit,” Sasuke swore hard, as he finally got his kunai to slice through the first layer of metal around Kakashi’s wrists, unwinding it from Kakashi’s forearms as quickly as possible. Once Kakashi had the use of his hands back (they were only half-cooperating, tingling like crazy as blood started circulating again after being numb and locked in place for so long). Kakashi started to help him, cringing a little from the cutting sting of the barbs being pulled out of where they’d been lodged in his skin for the last few days, and from the sight of his student’s blood blooming and trickling down Sasuke’s palms. Sasuke was being over-hasty.

“Let me do it, Sasuke.”

“This needs bandaging immediately. More backup should be coming soon, but —”

“You brought back-up?”

“Asuma-Sensei and his team, plus Chouji’s dad—”

Kakashi almost, almost relaxed. He reached out, sensing toward the horizon with what little chakra he’d managed to build up again in the last few minutes, and yes — Asuma’s and Chouza’s chakra signatures were – there , yes — still miles away. Distant, but approaching fast. Maybe three minutes out.

Hustle, he thought at them, just in case by some miracle Ino picked up his mental signal. If they could get here in the next sixty seconds or so—

“Sakura!” Sasuke belted out. “Switch!”

Kakashi blinked, and she was there again, crouching down to be on his level, pink hair flying into her face, and Sasuke whirling into the commotion of the battle she had just left behind. Sakura swore too, when she saw the condition of Kakashi’s bruised, freely bleeding wrists, an almost delicate little cry of “dammit, Sensei !” escaping her lips — but she wasn’t there with him long enough to bandage anything or really help much — Kakashi had only just started following her orders to press his hands deep into the worst of the bleeding on his left wrist (which was fountaining; that had got to be an artery); he was once again trying to muster the energy to get to his feet when Sakura leapt to the side to physically block Naruto from going flailing over the edge of the cliff, where he was going to wind up from having been hurled —

She didn’t quite catch him, but she slowed his momentum down enough for him to catch himself —

And then Naruto was there with him, bending low next to Kakashi, as Sakura stumbled back into the fight, battling off another pair of attackers.

Naruto leaned over and yelled “FUCK!” louder than anyone should ever yell it, louder than it should be humanly possible to yell, right next to Kakashi’s ear. God only knew what brought that on. He was gone again before Kakashi could ask, and Sasuke came back—

It was a like a carousel; it was like some kind of whirling, demented ninja circus: The boys and Sakura kept switching out with each other, two genin at a time fighting fiercely against their seven chunin enemies at a time, and almost matching them blow for blow, too, and the third genin pinning Kakashi down, keeping him from getting to his feet. The hand against his shoulder felt strong and oppressive, like one of the hands of his enemies from the night before, but everytime he checked, it was always a twelve-year-old’s hand.

“This battle is not going our way,” he told one of them, shaking his head and making himself see stars as a result.

“So what. We still fight, don’t we?”

“I’ll help y—”

“Stay where you are! Back-up will be here soon!”

…The problem with backup was that they could get there twenty-two minutes too late, like with Obito. They could get there fourteen minutes too late, like with Rin. They could get there three and a half minutes too late, like he had with Minato Sensei and Kushina-san. 

Or they could just never show up, like with Dad.

Head whirling, heart pounding, Kakashi placed his thumb against his teeth, knowing the summons would certainly kill him, suck up all of the slight trace of chakra that remained to him —

His hand was yanked away from his mouth, not that he really needed to bite it to generate blood anyway, he realized belatedly.

“Stop it! You don’t have the chakra. Don’t pretend you do.” 

He shook his head, more stars blinding his vision. 

“We didn’t come all this way just for you to kill yourself in front of us!”

...That was persuasive, but it stung. Badly.

“Accept my help.”

“Not right now!!”

Someone screamed nearby, and the sound took his ragged, uneven breath away completely for a few seconds, even though he knew without even looking that the scream belonged to one of their enemies, not one of his genin. 

He started to rise anyway.

A small hand on his shoulder again, pressing him down. It might not be an enemy hand, but it was definitely an opponent’s.

He tried to shrug them off, and they pressed down harder.

Kakashi tensed again, gritting his teeth (even the cracked molars, owwww) as he brushed past them: It didn’t matter if the back-up was even one second too late.

Late is late, and that can’t happen —

The hand pressed him back down.

“Let me get up!”

“NOT RIGHT NOW, I SAID!!”

...When did you all get so insubordinate!

This was so much worse than a nightmare; this right here was the worst of all possible outcomes: Having to watch his beloved team who he was so proud of die gruesomely in front of his eyes, because they had picked a fight with a nasty gang of big dogs, for his sake, and he was too weak and pathetic to get up and help them out.

Somebody screamed, and this time, it was one of his team—

Again, Kakashi grit his teeth and (in a furious burst of motion) finally pushed back hard enough to dislodge the grip of whichever tiny twelve-year-old was currently holding him down. Forcing himself to stay upright on two badly trembling legs, he positioned himself in a battle ready-stance and barked, “Give me that kunai, Sasuke.”

“I’m Sakura!”

“That’s what I said! Just give it to me!”

“SENSEI!!!”

That was Naruto, reaching his side again, screaming like an idiot — Sakura had already disappeared again while Kakashi was scrambling to brace himself against a nearby boulder as his balance deserted him completely and he tumbled to one side — his hands sang with fiery pain as the gritty pebbles on the boulder’s uneven surface smashed against the gashes on his palm —

“KAKASHI SENSEI, YOU’RE BLEEDING!!”

“I’m aware, Naruto! Move back, let me — ” 

No, no, oh shit, no, it’s too late, that’s —

Sasuke was right in the line of fire —

“Naruto! Sasuke needs —”

As Naruto’s head whipped around, Kakashi made another concerted effort and reached up just in time to snag the senbon that was about to fly into Naruto’s forehead, plucking it out of the air, gasping as the needle cut straight into his already lacerated palm —

(...sloppy technique, grabbing the point rather than the side; Minato Sensei would be so embarrassed for him—)

“SENSEIIIIII!” Minato’s son screamed, wailing the end of the word.

“GO!!!” Kakashi bellowed back at him. 

Pleasefuck, pleasejust GO, now is not the time to argue —

Somehow, some of Kakashi’s pure, utter desperation and terror must have come through in his tone — or expression, which was in plain view, after all — because wide-eyed and wincing, Naruto spun around and sprinted off to join Sasuke’s fight —

Too late, too late —

— The backup arrived right before the kunai sank down into Sasuke’s unprotected throat, the kunai-wielder caught in place by Konoha’s secret shadow-manipulation jutsu.

Half a second later, the two men holding Sakura’s arms down were immediately ripped away from her by Chouza and Asuma, who started pummeling, and then Chouji’s jaw dropped to his chest as he pointed at Kakashi’s face, asking who IS that person? before Ino swatted him hard on the back of the head.

...Oh, that’s right. Backup.

Arriving in time.

That’s always nice.

Sagging, gasping, each inhale coming sharper and quicker and shallower than the one before, and each exhale less and less steady, Kakashi just looked away from everyone, from allies and enemies alike, staring over the edge of the cliffside at the beautiful mountain scenery in the distance, lit up in the glow of dawn. He flung  the senbon he’d snagged over the side of the cliff so he could cradle his forehead in one very bloody hand. His legs were trembling uncontrollably again. His knees buckled, and then he once again folded over, unconsciously going for his characteristic, habit-formed crouch until all the muscles in his body reminded him sharply that they were not interested in doing anything even remotely resembling a crouched position anymore, and so he collapsed back down onto his tailbone, settling into a limp, almost cross-legged seat. At that point, his stomach lurched sickly, and it was all he could do not to keep himself from falling over to one side and collapsing again, even though he desperately wanted to lie down. His leg muscles were still on fire with pain no matter what position they were in, but before anything else, he needed to check — he needed to see—

One, 

…two,

three. 

They were okay.

All three genin, scraped up but okay, all of them mobile, and quite vocal, and no one with a serious gash, or an arm or a leg missing…

…They’re okay, they’re okay, they’re okay… 

Kakashi shaded his face with his trembling, dripping hand and curled into himself to hide his face from view.

…It was there for a number of reasons, the mask was. But if there was one reason that outweighed all the others, it would be the ability of the mask to shield his emotions from public inspection, the emotions that people always said that he didn’t have, but which were currently in plain sight, on display for anyone to read.

...We’re gonna be okay. 

We’re gonna make it… 

Oh god, oh fuck, I was so worried there...

Chapter Text

Sasuke’s hands were bleeding, not that it mattered. He only noticed after he had caught his breath, and been yelled at by Chouza-san for standing too close.

Chouza being the one to order them around was new, but it wasn’t really that new; it felt a lot like getting bossed around by an older, rounder, and much jollier version of Kakashi.

“Make a wider circle, all of you, and stay alert for more attackers. Asuma will secure a perimeter. Chouji, go help him. Good work, by the way, Team Seven! Now, which of you in each cell have received basic med-nin training?”

Sakura’s hand shot up immediately, and Shikamaru’s, too, more reluctantly, and after getting elbowed hard by Ino. The rest of the little group of genin exchanged more or less helpless looks as Kakashi Sensei —

…suddenly keeled over and died at their feet.

Sasuke’s heart stopped.

“SENSEI!” Naruto screamed, agony tearing through his voice, leaping past Chouza to get to their teacher’s side.

“Stand back, Naruto!” Sasuke yelled furiously, grabbing Naruto’s elbow and yanking hard. “He’s not dead!”

It was a wild lie of a proclamation; well, maybe it was a lie, maybe it wasn’t. Sasuke had no idea whether it was true or false, but, well, it was just that Naruto definitely needed it to be true —

If Kakashi had really just died —

“Shut up a second,” Chouza ordered them all, his hand on the side of Kakashi’s neck, measuring his pulse. “Please move back, Ino-chan—”

Three, four of the worst seconds of Sasuke’s thirteenth year of life passed before Chouza sighed slightly and resumed talking, but only to Sakura and Shikamaru.

“Haruno Sakura, isn’t it? Sanitize your hands. You and I will flush the dirt from the wound on his side. Shikamaru, help me hold him in place. Be careful of how you grip that shoulder. Sakura, do you know the water jutsu for — yes, that’s the one. Ino-chan, you have steady hands; if you would angle his body slightly, and then Sakura, just continue to pour water over the wound, like so. I have him now, Shikamaru; you go try to staunch the bleeding on his wrists and arms. The rest of you, give us some space...”

Once it was clear they were not going to be allowed to hover (Asuma Sensei returned from securing the perimeter and quickly set about creating a new one around the medical team, pushing Chouji, Naruto and Sasuke back to at least fifteen feet distance), Naruto strode away faster than Sasuke would have given him credit for being capable of at the moment. He stormed off ten paces, and then another twenty paces, and then sat down hard on a tree stump. 

Unfortunately for him, he seemed to have sat down hard on a mostly-flat-but-slightly-pointy-edge of sticking-up tree-branch, and recoiled, shrieking and wincing and grabbing at his butt.

His scream of rage and pain had a wail of real tears mixed in. 

Glaring hard, and still fighting to recover his breath after the prolonged fight, Sasuke watched the Naruto Sits on a Pointy Log Drama unfold like it was the most captivating television program ever made, stationing himself into a low, ready crouch, positioning himself midway between where Naruto was scrubbing angrily at his exertion-reddened face, shaking his blond head back and forth in a flurry of exaggerated motion, and then pivoting over to where Sakura, Chouza, and Shikamaru were huddled together, quietly murmuring and bandaging and shuffling around, whatever it was they were doing to prevent Team 7’s sensei from entering the afterlife.

Dimly, Sasuke realized that he had no idea if he should be doing something to help either the former or the latter.

Part of him wanted to help. 

Probably.

He took in a long inhalation through his nostrils and checked:

...He felt nothing.

Still. 

He hated that he felt nothing. Frozen. Empty. Nothing.

Bowing his head slightly, Sasuke tried to focus on the hatred, the anger that was always eating at him, ever since Ita— 

…The anger that he now felt toward their fallen enemies, who lay scattered around the clearing (Ino and Asuma were now checking each one for signs of life, securing the still-living ones with the scary instant-passing-out jutsu that Ino had mastered recently). Sasuke tried his best to fill his belly with the anger and hatred he felt towards the two jounin-level missing nin who had bolted into the woods as soon as Asuma and Chouza got close enough to take them on. He concentrated his feelings on the now-dead enemies scattered on the ground, the two that he had slain himself with his biggest-ever fireball, before they could reach Kakashi Sensei as he dangled from the cliff. The one Naruto had killed as she tried to behead Sakura. The one who had smiled as he tried to stab Sasuke’s spinning eyes out of his head, and received Sakura’s shuriken to the back of his neck as a result.

If Sasuke gave enough attention to them , his rage might build again; he might be able to make it a fuel, make a fire of it…

…There wasn’t enough. 

It was only a tiny flicker, already guttering out, submerged in the coldness and numbness and ice of feeling nothing… nothing at all.

If Kakashi-sensei dies…

Sasuke wanted, no, he craved the painful, searing fire of his rage.

But he just felt numb.

After a few minutes, Chouji headed over to sit with Naruto, who was still very flushed and red in the face. They started talking a little. Sasuke couldn't hear what they were saying from this distance. After another minute, Chouji extended a bag of potato chips in Naruto’s direction, and Naruto took a crunching handful with an enormously loud snuffle.

What a transparent… 

What an emotional… 

Sasuke couldn’t even manage to finish his condemnations in his own head. There was a thin coating of snow and ice falling all over his skin, thin but growing thicker. His head and body had been slick with sweat, coursing with sweet, warm adrenaline just a few minutes ago, but now….

If he dies, he dies. Get a grip, Uchiha. You’ve only known him for what, only a few months, anyway. People die. This is how it works. It’s not like he was…

(Even when he had been trapped in Zabuza’s water prison, Kakashi had seemed invincible; even when he was immobilized, lying prone in bed for days on end, completely out of chakra, Kakashi had somehow seemed invincible; even when he had spotted and jumped in front of one of Naruto’s foolish practical jokes, triggering the release of the unintentionally-dangerous, clumsily-applied paper bomb early, before it could hit Sakura in the face, and getting half his hair singed off his head in the process, Kakashi had seemed, had always seemed…).

Get a grip, Sasuke.

…It’s not like he was —

.

Sasuke balled his bleeding hands,

…

closed his eyes,

……

and bit down on his lower lip to keep it still.

…it’s not like he could have replaced —

*

Asuma was the first to re-join Chouza’s group. Once they had the worst of the bleeding stopped, Chouza gestured them over and the two adults had a short and very quiet conversation. Then, in one fluid motion, Asuma lifted Kakashi, hauling him up onto his back. 

Team Seven’s jounin sensei hung lifelessly from Asuma’s broad shoulder as Asuma casually flicked open his lighter and lit a cigarette with his free hand. The way he was currently standing, Asuma looked a lot like how Kakashi had looked that time last month, on that one C-rank mission where they came across the aftermath of a fight, and Kakashi had had to carry an enemy ninja’s corpse on his back all the way back to the Village. Kakashi had walked behind the three of them the whole way, chiding them for always slowing down and checking over their shoulder every third step. An apprehensive Sakura and a petrified Naruto had just barely started to manage to convince a very skeptical Sasuke that the corpse’s ghost was haunting them, following them, even though Sasuke definitely didn’t believe in ghosts at all, not even a little. 

(Turned out it had been Kakashi-Sensei all along who was making the stupid, overly-convincing ghost noises, when he thought they weren’t close enough to notice the noises’ point of origin…)

“Relax, you all,” Chouza ordered them all with a warm, very slightly forced smile, as Asuma shifted Kakashi’s weight a little too casually. “He’s gonna make it.”

…Some of that conviction didn’t quite reach Chouza’s eyes, though. 

His throat growing drier and drier, Sasuke watched them all ever so carefully. Sakura’s expression was carefully neutral, but her face was very white, whiter than Sasuke had ever seen it. Shikamaru was still flicking blood and grime from his hands as he washed up. He looked like he was about to throw up.

Shikamaru, the jerk, noticed him watching, and addressed him in a lower voice as the others hurried to follow Chouza’s next set of instructions.

“Relax, Uchiha. Really.”

“Tsch. I’m fine,” he replied through gritted teeth.

Asuma grunted at the pair of them and shook his head slightly, stowing his lighter in his pocket and jerking a thumb at Kakashi’s limp, lifeless form. “Son, you have one hell of a strong sensei. It’s not the first time he’s been kicked around and shredded to pieces. This one’s always in trouble of some kind.”

“We got here in time,” Chouza added, hauling himself to his feet. “He’ll bounce back from this, I promise.” 

Shikamaru’s head bobbed up and down in affirmation, and Chouji offered Naruto an enthusiastic high five. The force from the resulting slap made Chouji instantly bemoan offering it in the first place. 

Sasuke's eyes went to Sakura, who wasn’t looking at him, or at them. She was refusing to look at anyone.

“Trust me,” Asuma offered in a lower voice, to Sasuke alone. “It’ll be okay.”

...But there was still a shadow of a lie in Asuma’s eyes.

*

As they plodded along back towards civilization, the three of them at the rear of the pack, Naruto staring at the back of Kakashi's head, and the other two of them constantly scanning, hyper-alert and hyper-vigilant, Sakura broke her silence at last.

"One of them told me, he — Kakashi Sensei, he got tortured for Naruto’s …. He wanted to know about the —"

"Kyuubi," Naruto spat out, like it was the worst curse word he'd ever heard. 

In spite of himself, Sasuke shivered, his skin suddenly going numb again.

"We shouldn't talk about this out here, in the open," he told them. 

“But we should talk about this later," she insisted. "This is not like Land of the Waves, with the chakra exhaustion. This was… personal, and brutal, and..."

"And he almost died,” Naruto finished for her, his voice sounding strained.

Both Naruto and Sasuke glanced over at Sakura, who still wouldn’t meet their eyes.

Don’t count your chickens yet, Naruto, her silence implied . He still might.

*

...He was…

...being…

...carried…?

Carried indoors. Hands, wrapped around his wrists, and ankles. Quiet voices, but not that quiet, bouncing against fairly close walls. 

“...This way, come on…”

Sitrep, Kakashi, he thought at himself as awareness returned ever-so-slowly. 

“No, it’s this way! Can’t you read?!”

Sitrep.

“Shut UP, loudmouth, you’re gonna disturb his sleep…”

Sitrep, now.

...Couldn’t muster it. He was still less than half awake, still more than fully exhausted. His legs and back hurt like they’d been run over by a herd of angry, Bull-sized ninken. Or bigger than Bull.

(...Actually, everything hurt like that).

The hands around his wrists lowered him, set him down on a hard floor. A very slippery, warm hand on his forehead. They pulled away. "Not good," someone said as his dizziness soared. Shaky, choked voices. " Gotta get his fever down, Chouza-san said…"

And then Shikamaru’s voice, very close to his ear. “How should I know. I only finished Unit 1. Sakura, the only halfway responsible person here, or the only one with complete medical training anyway, is dead on her feet, and injured too." Some more mumbling, and then Shikamaru explained, "She went to rest.”

The distant voices again: “...we wake her?”

“No. Before he left, Chouza-san said she needed to rest…”

“What about Ino?”

“Dunno…doesn’t she got the cold too…?”

“Did, Naruto. It’s DID she got the cold, too.”

“Well, where’s —”

Some crashing sounds, and some muffled shouting.

...Okay, so… so… 

"Where the heck did Asuma-Sensei and Chouza-san go…?"

That was a familiar voice, at least.

…Sitrep anytime now, Kakashi. Naruto's here with you, and Sakura is close, but where's...

“Asuma-sensei and Chouza-san just left. They both went after those jounin guys," Shikamaru said, again, way too loudly for Kakashi's migraine to handle. "And Ino got the cold, AGAIN. Chouji said she’s riding it out in a different room…”

Wait, so…

So, that meant the genin boys were the only ones awake, and in charge?

...yikes.

"We're supposed to be in charge of getting him settled."

...Yabai.

It was almost enough to make Kakashi force his tired eyes back open all the way. Almost. The moment he cracked the left one, it sent a swirl of chakra seeping out of his overtired body, and he slammed it shut again with a groan, but in the meantime he had caught a glimpse of wood walls, and a long hallway, and greyish light outside the windows.…

We’re at… 

…Some sort of inn?

Was it pre-dawn? 

Or twilight…? 

And he was maskless. His face was still exposed. That was the next thing he became aware of, before even re-opening his eyes.

Is this…

Yes, this was the first time Naruto and the others had seen his face. Kakashi would probably have been a bit more embarrassed, if he weren’t in too much pain to move.

"Get his arms, Thin Hammer; I'll take his legs again."

Ah. There was the third one.

Kakashi felt his limbs relax, and he almost went right back to the welcome embrace of sleep. The only problem was, someone had used the words 'Sakura' and 'injured' in the same sentence, and so he wanted to... he needed to...

...They were carrying him somewhere; Sasuke had got his hands wrapped around Kakashi’s ankles, tugging on the leg muscles that still felt tired and torn and shredded, and Naruto had taken Shikamaru’s place to grip him under his shoulders. The left shoulder, the one more closely connected to his broken collarbone, was badly protesting this treatment, but — but then he got distracted, as Naruto bumped Kakashi’s head on a — doorknob of some sort…? Ow , in any case. He wearily grunted his displeasure.

“Sorry, Kaka-Sensei…”

A moment later, he was suddenly and unceremoniously folded into a lukewarm bath. 

…Seriously, you two? They had just dumped him in the water with half his clothes still on.

As Sasuke started yelling at Naruto, Kakashi let his head loll back, the water enveloping him, and making all the cuts and scrapes on his battered body start to sting back to life… 

The two genius boys on his team swore at each other for a half a minute straight, then started trying to pull Kakashi’s wet, clinging clothes and bandages from him, in spite of the fact that they were all soaking wet.

…brilliant move, genin.

“Oww…” Naruto moaned, and Kakashi finally prized his right eyelid back open to check what was harming the poor kid now — but —

Naruto seemed to be fine. His oww had been a sympathetic one, generated by what he was looking at, not by what he was feeling himself. Eh... Made sense. Under the shirt, once they finally got it off, would be… scrapes and welts and bruises. Lots of bruises. Everywhere. 

The bandages from someone's careful ministrations earlier were now all sopping wet. Naruto and Sasuke started peeling them away two at a time. A lot of the wounds must have scabbed over by now, but Kakashi could feel his body still bleeding slowly, in places, from cuts from the barbed wire, and the tally marks on his neck and face…

And what about that damn cold that had been going around.

As soon as he remembered it, he started coughing, and his eyelid squeezed closed again involuntarily, and his chest went tight. Fuck, it hurt. The two genin boys with him both made slightly strangled sounds, and Kakashi tried to lift his head to tell them it was alright, but found himself incapacitated. If only he weren’t coughing and coughing and coughing...

“Shit,” said a squeaky voice — Naruto’s.

“Get out,” Sasuke snapped suddenly.

“Huh?”

“He’s probably still contagious. We shouldn’t risk both of us getting it, too.”

“Yeah, we should!”

“By what logic?”

“If we all get it, he’ll get better that much sooner.”

“…Oh,” and then there was another of those little hmphs that Kakashi knew far too well, just barely audible past the sound of the coughing fit he was still stuck in, before a begrudging, “That actually does make sense.”

“No, you two,” Kakashi croaked out weakly between his coughs, interrupting Stupid One and Stupid Two before they could implement their idiotic plan. “No it doesn’t, and anyway, I don’t want you to.”

“Too bad!” Sasuke snapped at him, Naruto echoing it a second later. “Yeah, too fucking bad!”

“No, really,” he gasped at them, waking up fully, finally forcing both eyes open. He made himself sit upright all the way in the tepid water, even though it felt like any movement at all was gonna kill him, like the nausea suddenly rising up through his core was going to force his body to turn itself inside out. “I don’t want you to, and anyway, that’s just an old-wives tale —”

“Just stay unconscious, Sensei, it’ll be easier—”

“I’m still captain, and I'm telling you—”

“You can’t boss us around if you can’t even stand up, Sensei!”

Watch me, he started to counter, knowing full well that if he called the bluff, he’d end up floating face down in the water —

He was perfectly ready and willing to continue to fight, but then a black spell came rushing over his vision, and in the meantime, they just overpowered him and made him accept their help.

“Get Shikamaru and Chouji in here, too,” Naruto ordered Sasuke, who hmphed real hard. Shikamaru’s irritated voice floated in from behind them, from the hallway: “I heard you already. Kakashi-sensei is right; that’s an old wives tale...”

YES, one of them has a tiny lick of sense —

“No it isn’t! You just don’t want to get sick!”

A hard, sharp sigh, and then: “It’s such a pain, but I’ll go get Chouji…”

Over my dead body, you dumb kids —

That was what he tried to say, but instead, Kakashi —

...passed out.

*

He woke up what felt like a long, long time later, flat on his back on a tatami mat. Early afternoon sunlight streamed in through the curtains. Possibly afternoon. Maybe late morning. It was hard to tell. 

Everything that had been bleeding and messy in the bath earlier was now wrapped in new, nice, clean, white bandages. So, that was most of his arms and hands. He didn’t want to move them at all yet, knowing it would stretch the scabbing skin, but he lifted them up over his head anyway, to inspect — yep, that was the vaguely familiar smell of the Nara clan’s patented contusion and laceration salve, which Chouza always carried with him. Shikamaru undoubtedly did, as well, come to think of it.

At Kakashi’s bedside, there was a tray with a vase holding a single white cosmos flower and some baby’s breath. The flowers were standing guard over a cup of red tea and Kakashi’s favorite flavor of donut, which had been thoughtfully placed right next to his head. Like, right next to his head; the ends of his silver hair were almost hitting the matcha frosting. The tea looked lukewarm at best, but he recognized it from its dark, smokey scent as another one of his favorites, from a faraway province he went to once on an ANBU mission when he was twenty-three.

Well, this is nice...

What had awakened him in the first place were the muffled, not-so-nice sounds from the hallway. Argument sounds, very familiar ones, and weirdly soothing. But hushed, almost-muffled argument sounds, like they thought he couldn’t hear them.

(Bless their little hearts).

“...not like he’s got anything to hide—”

“It’s because he’s a dick who takes pleasure in being annoying, Sasuke! We should just leave it at that—”

“I’m not the one who came up with the fish-lips theory, Thin Hammer!”

Kakashi sighed.

“Shut up, both of you!” screeched another voice, even more loudly, “How’s he supposed to get any rest with all this racket going on!!”

(... why did Asuma get all the sweethearts, and I got THESE three... ).

“Come in, you three,” Kakashi called out to the empty room, his vocal chords scraping in his sore throat. The sounds from the hallway suddenly went dead, and he drew in a long breath through his nostrils and rolled his eyes without even opening them. “Come in here, I know you’re lurking out there.”

There was a full seven more seconds of hesitation before all three of them came charging in, the door banging shut behind Naruto, who was at the rear of the pack.

“Good morning, Sensei,” they all trilled politely, almost in unison, as Kakashi tiredly propped himself up on his elbows. The phrase raised every last hair on his arms (where they weren’t plastered down by bandages), and his eyebrows flew up into his hairline as he repressed a hard shiver. He refused to say good morning back. For one thing, he had absolutely no clue what time it was, so they might well have been trying to pull his leg. They had literally never addressed him so politely, so it didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility…

Faces neutral ( he taught them that, it shouldn’t irritate him to see them master such a crucial skill), they all knelt around his tatami mat, Sakura and Naruto on his left, Sasuke on his right.

It was… kinda awkward. 

They didn’t have a topic of conversation.

Neutral faces or no, trying not to stare was probably impossible for them, not that any of them seem to be trying that hard. He must look so different without his usual trappings. No mask. No shields up. Bandages everywhere on his fingers and hands and arms. Purple and black and blue bruising under all the bandages…

(Kakashi could remember seeing Minato get banged up now and again, from time to time, like everyone else did, except far less often, due to Minato’s agility and grace and Flying Thunder God jutsu. Only once had Kakashi ever seen an enemy go after Minato-Sensei just for the sake of it, just because it was Minato. For the love of violence, or some sort of revenge or vendetta the guy had held against Minato personally. Sensei’s left wrist had been snapped and his nose broken before he’d managed to get the upper hand in the fight…

What stuck out in the memory was how uncharacteristically vulnerable it had made Minato look. And Kakashi remembered very well the deep, uncontrollable hatred that had filled every bone in his own body as he witnessed the enemy’s attack. It had been so intentional, so targeted. Kakashi had never found out exactly what had motivated the attacker, why they did it, only that they hated Minato…)

“Stop,” he ordered his three genin, after attempting to take a long breath in through his still-stuffy nostrils.

“Stop what,” Naruto growled snuffly back, the first one to snap out of the overly soft, polite, reserved demeanor that didn’t characterize normal Team 7 interactions at all.

“It was just miserable misery,” Kakashi explained as simply as possible, sitting himself up a little straighter over Sakura’s protests, and looking them all in the eye, one by one. “You don’t think I can handle that? It’s not even the worst I’ve ever — ” (He broke off to lick his teeth, wincing a little when his tongue jostled one of the cracked molars, as he quickly checked himself, reviewing his personal history), “Well, it doesn’t feel like the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, anyway.”

No response.

…Which made sense; that had been a pretty shitty thing to say.

Okay… proclaimed all three of their suddenly-not-at-all-neutral faces, their sinking and slumping shoulders. Now you’ve got us all wondering about your mysterious, shadowy past, your presumably terrible childhood, etc etc…

Suddenly Kakashi felt very lost; he had no idea how to recover from this enormous blunder. Stupid, stupid, STUPID move, Bakashi, he chided himself. We don’t talk about the past with the genin. There’s a whole LIST of reasons why not. He wanted to sock himself in the face, but instead he pasted a calm, warm, reassuring smile over his features while he searched frantically for a change of topic. Something, anything to distract them —

Surprisingly, it was once again Naruto who got to the punch first, well ahead of Kakashi, voicing an almost indignant challenge of a question on behalf of himself and the other two genin:

“How could anything… if you’ve had worse than this, how did you come out of it smiling?”

His wording was — quite interesting.

Kakashi leaned back on his aching hands and arms, the warm but fake smile that he had been copying from his memories of Minato Sensei sliding off his face as he considered the question for a moment. Before he could formulate an answer, and god only knew what kind of crappy wool he had been about to try to pull over their eyes, there was a sudden emotional outburst from Sakura:

“You should have just told them what they wanted to know!”

His neutral face slid into a deep, disapproving frown. “Don’t say that.”

“You should have.”

The others agreed.

Kakashi shook his head once, sharply, making his headache jolt back to life, then started pulling a finger tiredly along the socket of his closed left eye, just barely resisting the urge to trace the raised pink skin of the old scar. “I would never do that.”

“But you should have. It wasn’t worth it.”

His shoulders sagged slightly (the broken collarbone screaming at him to just stop moving around already) as he pushed his mouth to one side, avoiding Sasuke's icy glare and Naruto’s burning gaze. “Who would I be if I had? How would I manage to look myself in the eye in the mirror every morning. You know that’s one of my favorite activities. Hey, look!”

Distraction acquired. With all the speed he could muster, he nabbed the beautiful matcha donut that he was certain Chouji had left out for him, and a kunai from Sakura’s thigh holster (she was kneeling nearest). It was truly a big wrench, this act. But two quick criss-crossed slices, and it was done: the donut was in fourths.

“One for each of us.” 

He passed them each a bite-size portion, and though all three of them sent him deeply doubtful and disapproving looks (as they should; that was a pretty terribly disguised distraction; they were probably just indulging him a bit because of his recent, uh, mishap…), they all started to nibble at their bites, albeit begrudgingly.

Grateful that shitty as it was, the deflection seemed to be working, even if just for the moment, Kakashi licked just a tiny bit of the frosting, but he deposited his unchewed bite back into his napkin instead of swallowing.

…Almost got away with it, too. A pair of hawk-like eyes followed his every move as he brought the next bite of donut up to his mouth, pretending to eat the rest, but setting his entire portion back down in his napkin, uneaten.

Sasuke asked his questions like a one-two attack, like an inquisitor making accusations of treason:

“What’s wrong, Kakashi? Not hungry?”

Unsurprised, but a little chagrined, Kakashi sighed a little at getting caught (can’t really be mad; he’s my own student who I’m proud of, after all), and shook his head. 

“...I’m so hungry,” he admitted. The injuries to his abdomen, and the recovery from the flu, meant he really couldn’t safely eat solid foods yet, not even the small bite of donut. He knew his own digestive system too well to even try. His limbs were actually shaking from hunger and weakness, but you couldn’t just eat a donut after half a week (? however long it had been; just thinking about trying to calculate it made him feel woozy and tired all over again) with no food. “Think I probably need to stick to broth a little longer, though.”

Sasuke's glare deepened ominously.

Kakashi slowly sank back onto his elbows. He needed to deal with it, needed to deal with Sasuke especially, in particular, but... he was so tired…

“What broth?” Naruto asked blankly.

Sakura was the quickest on the uptake this time. She shrieked, hit with the sudden realization of what he’d been trying to hide from them ever since they entered his room — that he was fighting just as hard to stay conscious right at this moment as he had been back at the cliffs.

“You’re — you didn’t even eat yet —” Without finishing the phrase, she swiveled over to the other two, and yelled at full volume: “And you’re still sick, you too! You should be back in bed!!”

“We’re not sick, I barely even have a stuffy nose, and Sasuke —”

“Sakura, stop acting like you’re the team mom —”

“She thinks she can boss us around, Kakashi-sensei!!”

...Great. Another fight. 

More yelling...

As the sensei, the captain, he should really probably speak up, and try to manage this — whatever the hell this was about to devolve into, but he was… 

he was so….

…tired…

“Kakashi-sensei, can you please make her chill out—”

Yeah, Naruto, I will, just please let me blink first…

More yelling ensued.

While Kakashi was busy blinking as slowly as possible, one of them, probably Sakura, threw something, and it rebounded off of Sasuke’s shoulder and knocked Kakashi’s mug of tea over, right into the flower vase. When he opened his eye, tea and water and flowers were spilling everywhere. 

Wonderful, Kakashi thought as his stomach dropped sadly and the cosmos flower became drenched in the amber tea. I’d been looking forward to that, too. He couldn’t help but sigh wearily as he hastened to throw a cloth over the spill, his ribs and collarbone protesting every inch of movement…

“See?! What did I tell you, Naruto!”

“Look what you did —”

“I said GET OUT, you two! You’re both still sick, and so is he, and he needs rest! He’s still —”

“He’s right! You can’t boss us around, Sakura!”

“I CAN!” she boomed at them. “I am the girl here, so I am the mom here, so I am the second-in-charge here! And I’m ordering you to get OUT of this room this instant!”

“You can’t just appoint yourself second-in-charge!!” 

“He’s right, for once, Sakura—”

As he finished mopping up the spill, Kakashi raised a single finger and added in a somewhat pained gasp: “Technically I’m still in charge —”

Sakura leveled her death glare on all three of them in turn, Kakashi included. !! OBEY ME , her low, dangerous, growing growl threatened, … obey me, or a fate worse than death —

“...Fuck,” muttered Naruto, and Sasuke hmphed. The boys went out pouting, but they did scamper off at last.

*

Outside, Naruto bumped straight into Sasuke’s shoulder as Sasuke lingered, hesitating, in the hall. Naruto made a face at him. Sasuke was the most impatient person ever born; lingering and hesitation were completely against his nature.

“Sasuke,” muttered Naruto. “What are you thinking?”

“It’s not what I’m thinking,” Sasuke returned slowly, eyes dark as he glared at Naruto, and then at the floor. “It’s what I’m feeling.”

Keeping his eyes locked on Sasuke’s Naruto drew in a long breath and nodded slowly at him, filling the space between them with an unspoken yes .

( I’m feeling it too ).

“...Hmph.”

“Two guys got away, you know….”

“I definitely know,” Sasuke answered, and the darkness in his voice made Naruto shudder, not with fear, but with resonance.

( We’re united, for once. We’re both feeling this identical fury… ).

*

Back in Kakashi’s room, inside, Sakura was busily repositioning pillows and fluffing up the bedcovers for him, before shoving her canteen at Kakashi’s bruised chin, holding it in place for him as he took a long drink.

“You think you could eat anything right now? I can find you some broth or miso, if you want.”

“Mm.”

(...Probably not. But it was sweet of her to offer).

“Later, then. I’ll go order the miso right now so it’s ready when you wake up again. Now come on. Back in bed with you.”

(He had never really gotten out of it in the first place, but okay…)

“Hey, Sakura-chan. Can you —”

She paused on her way out the door, turning questioning eyes on him, and even more than half-asleep, he felt his face warming up a little.

“C-can you not leave quite yet?”

She blinked at him once, then closed the door, knelt, and grabbed him in another one of those sweet, childish, overstrong hugs that felt so good, the kind you couldn’t admit you wanted or missed. It hurt, lighting up pain in his broken collarbone and in all the scabbing wounds all over his chest and arms, pushing at the ache underneath his skin, but it needed to happen, for his sake as much as hers. He sighed deeply, hoping it wouldn’t end…

“Just rest,” said Sakura quietly, her mouth pressed into his hair. “I’ll be here. I have nothing else to do anyway. Unless you have some kind of assignment for us, or something…”

(A sleepy, almost delirious confession just slipped out before he could think better of it or wrangle it back:) “I don’t even know how long I’ll be in charge of you guys for, you know.” 

“What are you —”

“Might… I might get demoted.”

He could practically see her rolling her eyes as she answered, “They’d be fools to —”

“It might happen. I think I ended up… I think I might have accidentally… And after something like this, I —”

Kakashi lost the thread of his jumbled, tired thoughts. Sakura had started carding her hands through his hair, and oh, god, that felt good. It had been a long time since anyone…

“I might lose… my rank...”

“Don’t talk nonsense. You’re going to get a medal. Bet you anything.”

Unwillingly, he let both his eyes drift closed.

“Sakura, you are a…  a life saver.”

“So are you. And you’re a terrible sensei, you know. You should have shown me that fireball absorption jutsu a long time ago. That thing you did at the edge of the cliff? I have no idea how you managed it with the chakra dampeners on. First thing when you’re recovered, I want you to explain it to me, how you did that.”

“...Hm.”

“I can’t believe I was so stupid to try to charge in and copy you like that, without being trained first. I would have died, if you hadn’t jumped in front of me.” 

Her hands clenched ever so slightly into fists in his hair. 

The sensation of pulling on his skull was just enough to jog him back to wakefulness, just enough wakefulness to recollect the moment when it had happened, and answer her honestly:

“...I felt an instinct, and acted like a dog.”

“It saved me.”

“Happy to help. Where are we, anyway?”

“The inn belongs to the parents of some of those kids you saved. They’re very grateful. There's no charge for anything, except they want to see you at some point so that they can cry with gratitude in front of you for a while.”

Kakashi mumbled an uncomfortable, "great."

Sakura kept running her hands through his hair.

He was on the verge, about to drop off, but…

“Sakura, why do your hands smell like lemon?”

“.....No reason.”

…With great effort, Kakashi made himself crack his eyelid back open.

“Why shouldn’t they smell like lemon?” she defended herself huffily.

He just looked at her.

"Why do you have to ask so many questions and be so nosy about everything?"

...This was getting ridiculous. He wasn't nosy about anything. 

“Sakura, don’t start with me; I’m really tired—”

“Okay, fine! Maybe I was making you lemonade, but it tasted bad! There’s so many lemon trees in the yard, but this inn is so dumb, they don’t have anywhere near enough sugar in the pantry for the amount of lemons they’re harvesting! And anyway, you were supposed to be able to drink Naruto’s tea he got for you, but now that’s ruined too—”

“Naruto got me that tea?!”

“He had to empty his goro-goro, but Asuma-sensei said it was a good kind.”

Kakashi suddenly wished he hadn’t forced the issue. He tried to rub his face as blood rushed to his cheeks, but Sakura stopped him, catching his wrist and lowering his arm before he could get there.

“...I like it when it’s not very sweet,” he mumbled, feeling the blush in his cheeks build even warmer.

“Do you?” she blinked skeptically. “Well, okay, but I warn you: it was very bitter.”

“Bitter lemonade for a bitter sensei.” 

Sakura’s hands unclenched as she laughed, but didn’t release their hold on him completely. “You’re not a terrible sensei, by the way. Just a very dumb one.”

“...Well, you are a pretty good team mom, Sakura. In fact, I’m thinking you can be my second-in-command, but only if you don’t tell the other two.”

“How’s that any fun...!!”

Chapter Text

“...So what gave it away?” Kakashi asked over breakfast the next morning, working a bit awkwardly because his chopsticks were cradled in his left hand, due to the break in his middle finger on the right. “How did you know it wasn’t me?”

The three genin made eye contact with each other in turn, leaving him out of it. Both Naruto and even Sasuke snorted quietly into their breakfast bowls, as they did. Naruto’s mirth made Kakashi’s arm shake hard enough to drop a chopstick. Sakura merely shook her head at him. 

“Stupidly easy,” she answered curtly. “He sent a message asking to see me at 10:00am, and then he actually showed up at 10:55.”

Kakashi glanced at Sakura, then over at Sasuke, and then down his arm at Naruto, who was still glued to his side (he had been there for well over three hours now already). All three of his genin were clearly on the same page, but although Kakashi knew what book they were in, he was lost. He didn’t want to lose even more dignity by asking for help, though.

“It’s never been less than an hour,” Sasuke finally threw him a lifeline.

 “Average is about 110 minutes,” added Sakura.

“Seriously?”

“Don’t play dumb, like you don’t already know,” Naruto scolded him, burrowing harder against Kakashi’s sore bicep.

Kakashi had woken up like that a few hours ago, with Naruto tucked under his shoulder, snoring for all the ramen in Konoha. Finding him there was — well, there was no other word for it. It was sweet. But the longer Naruto stayed, the more he had snuggled in closer and closer to Kakashi, and after a while, it had started making Kakashi… uncomfortable. Prolonged contact always did. Touch in general was… not so good, usually. And not just because his arms were still sore and swollen and red from where they’d been bound in chakra wire for five days straight.

(Naruto drank physical touch like it was his lifeblood, though. Drank it in. Soaked it up like a sponge whenever it was offered to him, and occasionally couldn’t stop himself from lunging for it, when it wasn’t (Kakashi was still working out a kink in his neck from when Naruto had jumped on him for entering their team in the Chunin Exams…). It had happened frequently enough, before this incident. Going by the last few hours, the frequency was about to increase exponentially.

Unless…)

“Peppers!” Naruto shrieked, recoiling slightly in revulsion. “Gah, Sensei, I hate —”

“Take four more bites, and then you can be done.”

Sakura giggled as she kicked a foot lightly at Kakashi’s knee, indicating her understanding of and approval for his sneaky plan.

(She ranked middle-of-the-three, as physical touch went. She seemed to get plenty from her parents already, but gave frequent and energetic high-fives, and occasionally let a hand drift to someone’s shoulder, or sometimes leaned her head against Kakashi’s elbow when they were out walking on missions, to indicate that she was tired and wanted a water break, but didn’t want to say so in front of the boys. Once in a while, recently, if Kakashi was sitting down on a park bench somewhere, she would come up behind him and rest her elbows on his shoulders and put her chin on his head, reading Icha Icha over his hair and making loud criticisms about Jiraiya’s always-lurid selection of metaphors. He had usually let her stay there for eight to ten seconds, by which point she would either move on, or he would gently prod her away, and she would accept without taking any offense).

“Four more—how old do you think I am!?”

“Twelve years and nine months,” answered Kakashi as Naruto yelled “Four??” indignantly and Sakura said, “Four and a half, mentally.”

“Try three and a half,” Sasuke stated blandly.

“I’m —!! You —!”

Kakashi grabbed some more vegetables and stuck them in Naruto’s mouth before he could finish his response.

“And try carrots,” Sasuke advised as Kakashi ordered Naruto to chew and Sakura put her hand over Naruto’s mouth to prevent him from spitting anything out. “He’s sort of receptive to carrots.”

(And as for the last of the three… Well, Kakashi had never thought he’d meet anyone who despised physical touch as much as he himself did — but then he’d met Uchiha Sasuke).

Naruto chewed furiously, then ducked out of Sakura’s hold to go attack Sasuke. Sasuke blocked Naruto's swat with the point of his chopsticks before he even got close, and Naruto screamed furiously as his palm nearly got double-impaled.

And yet, he —

…Still wouldn't budge from Kakashi’s side. Instead of leaping at Sasuke, like normal, Naruto turned his face and howled angrily into Kakashi’s arm, making Kakashi blink down at him in surprise. He jostled him slightly, just to see if that would work, but of course it didn’t; hints never really worked on Naruto. He was still stuck to Kakashi’s arm like a sea anemone on coral.

“Tsch. Dumb.”

“Speaking of dumb —”

“You still need to eat more of these,” Kakashi interrupted lightly, not wanting to go wherever Sakura was trying to go with that comment, re-gripping his chopsticks so he could serve a good half dozen more bites of steamed vegetables into Naruto’s emptied bowl. "Good shinobi always need a variety of vegetables, especially the leafy green ones." 

Naruto answered with more puking noises, but he still didn’t lean his head away from Kakashi’s arm, or move his knee away from where it was pressed against Kakashi’s.

So Kakashi put almost a whole head of broccoli into Naruto’s bowl.

“NO! It’s — how could you — that’s the worst one, Kaka-sensei!!”

“Broccoli is good for you,” he answered calmly. “It increases your brainpower.”

“That’s only if you have a brain to get any power increased in it in the first place, though,” Sasuke mumbled into his bowl. Sakura barked into her balled fist  with sudden laughter (her snort sending rice flying across her lap from her pending next-bite), then sent her hand over to receive a high five from Sasuke. He just stared at her outstretched palm and hmphed, and eventually she slapped him on the shoulder and hmphed him back.

Musing silently, Kakashi watched it all happen, trying to read whether and when Sakura’s big crush was going to re-manifest. It had been blessedly quiet for a few months now, ever since slightly after the chunin exams, and in the meantime, she’d been reaching out to Sasuke more and more often. Literally.

But they were still…

Well, all of them were still on very different levels, when it came to physical touch.

Naruto and Sakura did not (yet) understand Sasuke’s aversion to it, so Kakashi had been doing all he could to place himself as a buffer in between them. Kakashi might not like it, but he was certainly used to dealing with sudden, unprompted touch. He’d been friends with Maito Gai for two decades, after all. 

"Speaking of dumb," Sakura resumed.

“Everyone, stop picking on me already!” pouted Naruto before she could finish, and Sakura kicked his shin.

"I was going to say, speaking of dumb, you need to be careful not to overeat, Kakashi-Sensei. I know you must be really hungry, but you should —"

"I know, I know," he sighed in answer. He really did. He really needed to pace himself better, stick to just broth and a few vegetables, but the rice was so fluffy, and steamy, and warm, and even after their long breakfast, his stomach was still growling. He was still so hungry…

“Stop with the face, Kakashi,” Sasuke smirked at him as he reached for Kakashi's bowl and started to clear the food away. "It's making you look sad and pathetic."

“Is it?” he sighed again, only barely resisting the urge to shade his face with his fingers. He was still reeling from the consequences of not wearing his customary mask while around the three of them, and of not having to sneakily hide his face during meals, anymore. “Well, for good reason. That was a really good meal. I'm sad it's over.”

Scooping up a few extra bites of rice with his chopsticks before all three of them and the sudden twisting ache in his intestines reminded him to slow down, he sat back and let the food start to settle in his belly, feeling pleasantly content, and almost actually full.

*

It had been a small meal, so it wasn’t really enough to satisfy his hunger, but it was plenty and then some, after his force-fed diet of shitty burned rice and dried-out soldier pills, from the last few days. 

He let it all settle and digest while he was sitting out in the back yard of the inn, watching quietly from a low lawn chair while his three genin students helped the innkeepers with harvest produce in the courtyard. Sasuke was giving Sakura pointers on how to throw her shuriken without over-angling it; both of them were responsible for using their shuriken to sever the stems of the lemons from the branches of the burgeoning fruit trees, while basket-bearing Naruto clones ran underneath the boughs, trying to catch all the fruit before it impacted on the ground.

It wasn’t a half-bad idea for a training session. For one thing, Kakashi got to supervise the whole thing from his chair (since his tired, shaky legs still wouldn’t let him stand unsupported), and for another, he was going to get more lemonade out of it by the end. The best part was that he had finally dislodged Naruto from his barnacle-hold on his arm. Which was for Naruto's own good, Kakashi reminded himself. All three genin kids (but especially Naruto) really needed something active to do at all times, but especially right now. Otherwise, they were going to drown him in attention and affection, or spontaneously combust at each other during the next absolutely unprompted spat…

(Which could happen at any moment. Sakura was already barking at Naruto not to let the fruit bruise when it landed in the baskets, and Sasuke was correcting her snidely, telling her lemons didn't really bruise…)

Well, at least it was keeping them busy.

Chouza and Asuma came out to join him while Kakashi was shading his eyes, actively avoiding eye contact with the innkeepers, who kept beaming and bowing at him tearfully every time they happened to glance in his direction.

“Could be worse,” Asuma shrugged at Kakashi, who had just started avoiding eye contact with them, too, making a face under his mask like his mouth was full of sour lemon. “They could have caught you stark naked.”

“That sounds like the voice of experience, Asuma.”

His bearded cheeks went rather red. “It was extremely unpleasant.”

“It’s a lot worse if you have to see one of them naked,” Chouza said sagely as he joined them. “The number of times I’ve seen Gai’s shiny, youthful butt thrust into the thin air — starting on day one —”

“Gai is an avowed nudist,” Kakashi confirmed, nodding heavily as Asuma shuddered hard. “But surely he waited until you’d been together as a team for at least a few—”

“No,” interrupted Chouza, “Day one. He flashed us the first afternoon, soon as they finished the bell test. Went skinny-dipping in the pond just north of training field #25 to celebrate. In plain sight of Inoichi’s cell, too, which had two impressionable kunoichi in it, may I remind you. And then Ebisu dared Genma to join in, and pretty soon they were all naked, including Inoichi’s cell —”

“What a first day as sensei,” Asuma chortled, sending cigarette smoke flying throw the air around them.

“Eh,” Chouza laughed as well, his eyes turning squinty from the rounding of his cheeks. “Boys will be boys, most of the time, but Gai will be Gai, every single time. I learned that much the very first day.”

Kakashi and Asuma both nodded slowly. Sage wisdom from the older generation, that being a sensei was as much about what you learned as what you taught. And that Gai’s naked body was a force to be reckoned with.

“We’re heading out,” Asuma said after a minute. “Got a message that we’re needed on a B-rank. Chouji, Shikamaru, and Ino are packing up their things to head out in an hour or so, but Chouza-san has offered to —”

“Not necessary,” Kakashi said, shaking his head. “But thank you. Thank you both.”

“You’re sure?” Chouza asked. “It’s no trouble.”

“Go home,” Kakashi told them, still shaking his head as he lifted a hand and waved it in lazy dismissal. “I’m practically on vacation here.”

Chouza clapped a hand on Kakashi’s shoulder, carefully avoiding spots that were bandaged, despite the fact that Kakashi's loose shirt was hiding most of them from view. Chouza smiled as he tried for a final time, but it was pretty clear he already knew he’d be refused: “Most vacations don’t include genin, Kakashi-kun. Certainly not those three hooligans. Sure you don’t want some help wrangling the devil trio into line?”

Kakashi sighed long and hard. “Thank you again for the offer, but I’ll be fine. I hate to say it, but I’m getting kind of…" He paused just long enough to scrub the pad of his thumb along his temple and rephrase what he'd been about to say. "I’m getting kind of used to wrangling them on my own.”

They both nodded. They had both been in his role, so they could hear the thing he left unsaid: 

…I’m getting kind of fond of wrangling them on my own.

*

As they left, bidding him goodbye and making him promise to rest, Kakashi started reflecting, in spite of himself. Getting fond of the job was one thing, but getting good at it was quite another...

Central question, Kakashi:

How would the others have managed this cell? Gai. Asuma. Kurenai.

Gai would have been a great fit for Naruto. Not so great with Sakura or Sasuke, probably, but Gai had a way of winning people over, even stiff, rigid, angry people like Neji and Kakashi. If nothing else, he would have been a better taijutsu teacher. Kakashi put them through the paces as relentlessly as he could, but Gai had a talent for really drawing out the very best in people, more than anyone knew they were capable of.

He'd have been a great jounin sensei for them.

Asuma, too. He would have had very little patience for their nonsense. He had a tolerant nature, all Sarutobis did, but unlike his dad, when Asuma got upset, he got upset, and would yell and storm and... Well, actually, that might have been a good thing, for Naruto and Sasuke and Sakura. Maybe they needed a stronger hand. Someone to just lay down the law for them. Maybe Kakashi had been overindulgent with them, letting them get disrespectful and...

Kurenai wouldn't ever have lost her temper with them, no matter what. Asuma actually wouldn't give a shit about kids being disrespectful, but Kurenai would. She would never have had to deal with it in the first place, probably, because she had this intuitive way of conveying what was proper and acceptable and what was not.

(Kurenai and Kushina had had that in common. Kurenai may well have picked it up from Kushina, back in the day. She had been close with the Red-Hot Habanero; temperamentally, they were very different, but the two kunoichi had both had a very strong sense of how to get others to bend to their will, and somehow letting people around them think it was all their own idea...)

Thinking of Kushina sent Kakashi back to the question that had been on his mind on a daily basis ever since he'd been assigned to Team Seven in the first place:

…What would Minato Sensei have done with a bunch of wild kids like these?

That was, as usual, a fairly easy question to answer. 

He would do his best by them.

He always had...

*

Kakashi drifted back awake a good while later to a stiff and sore back, and the usual sound of bickering.

“...such thing as too much sugar...I mean, am I crazy, or was that a stupid question for me to ask?”

“Stupid question for a stupid person.”

“Rude,” Kakashi said, shaking his head at Sasuke's comment before he even opened his eyes. “Inconsiderate. I’m putting that on your report card.”

“You don’t write report cards,” Sakura called his bluff disdainfully as she finished sticking her tongue out at Sasuke and passed Kakashi a lemonade. “The other kids get them, you know! You’re so lazy!”

Above his straw, Naruto's eyes bugged and he socked her on the back of her pink head. “Sakura-chan, shut up, we all agreed we don’t want report cards—”

“When did we agree to such a stupid–?”

“Hey, how did you guys even find me, anyway?” Kakashi jumped back in, wanting an answer to the question he'd been wondering for days now. How and maybe also why.

“Pakkun,” answered Sasuke swiftly. A little too swiftly. Maybe he was sick of their bickering, too. 

“Well, kinda,” Sakura corrected her dark-haired teammate. “We were headed in completely the wrong direction, all thanks to Sasuke here—”

“No it wasn’t. The reason we were even able to get there in time at all was because I got us started in the right direction—”

“Anyway, one of Pakkun’s friends picked up your scent, Kaka-sensei," Naruto interrupted, with the air of someone straightening something out once and for all. "He remembered you from a long time ago, I guess. He gave your location to Pakkun, who gave it to Akamaru, who gave it to Kiba, who gave it to Ino, who gave it to Sakura through their magic long-rang-gossip-talking no jutsu. It worked out great! We didn't even have to go back to the Village!”

"Stop saying it like that, like if we'd had to go back to the Village, we would have just quit or something!"

Sakura howled into her lemonade with laughter.

“I'm not-! Sakura-chan, Sasuke-teme... what the hell! You both think I'm lazy and stupid, don’t you?”

Kakashi sighed and examined the blond head at his knee… So much NOTHING going on in that cute little head. That's not what they think, kiddo. They're just poking fun at you because this is an awkward topic for all of us, and right now, they're too scared I'm gonna die to make fun of ME, so you're the next-easiest target. As the two others hid their looks of amusement (very poorly), Kakashi reached over and scrubbed at the roots of Naruto’s hair, trying to get a feel for the empty space inside. Naruto took it as a gesture of affection, for some weird and very depressing reason.

And jumped up to perch protectively on the edge of the arm of Kakashi's chair, as soon as Kakashi retracted his hand. And then Naruto was reattaching himself to Kakashi's arm, which started throbbing in protest...

"Okay, Naruto," Kakashi told him. "Get down; you're gonna break the-"

"Haha!" Sakura burst out snickering before he could finish. "He's trying to get rid of you, Naruto!"

"I'm not-"

"Yes you are, Sensei, you don't have to pretend-"

"I'm not pretending."

"You're always pretending," she fired back.

“I'm not, Naruto. It's fine."

"You see how he's telling you one thing with his words, and another with his face, though?”

Naruto frowned at Sasuke, and then at Kakashi. “He doesn’t even have a face!!!”

“Read between the lines, dumbass," Sasuke drawled. "It’s called sarcasm. Or irony, or something. Misdirection."

Sakura snickered at Sasuke this time, "Now you're the one being a dumbass, Sasuke, it's definitely called lying-"

Naruto howled with laughter, before realizing he was laughing partially at a dig directed at himself, and swiveled around to bonk Sakura on the head -

Kakashi caught his wrist just in time. He was definitely too tired for this. "What I'm honestly, truthfully saying, is we should head back inside soon, don't you think? Looks like it's going to rain soon…"

(...Yeah, getting good at this sensei job wasn't going to happen anytime soon...)

*

The others stayed behind to pack up their picnic and picnic blanket, so Kakashi had just finished hauling himself indoors, limping as pain shot through his legs with each step (guess being frozen in the same position for half a week or whatever was bound to result in muscle cramps...), and was just thinking how good another afternoon nap sounded when Sasuke cornered him in the hallway to file a complaint.

“Something weird is going on with Naruto,” he told him in a low, analytical voice.

“Oh?”

“More than just, you know. The usual. And with Sakura, too. You need to keep a better eye on them.”

Naruto reported something similar a short while later, as he joined them mid-way down the hallway.

“Kakashi Sensei. Something weird is going on with Sakura.”

“Oh?”

Sasuke humphed in agreement as Naruto hrmmed and said, “Can’t explain it, but it’s just something weird.”

And something weird was definitely going on with Sasuke, but that was just by default, and they were all too afraid of it to speak about it in any case. Kakashi included.  

But it was the blond one who seemed to be attracting the most concern from Sakura, at the moment. 

“...something going on with him,” Sakura told Kakashi as he woke up slowly from his second afternoon nap of the day a long while later. “Not just the normal stuff, either. He’s already recovered from his fever, god only knows how, but he keeps yelling all the time, and he stopped showering even though I told him he has to, and he just keeps getting way more worked up about—”

“I’ll talk to Naruto in a bit,” Kakashi hummed at her, wanting to just steal maybe five or ten more minutes of afternoon nap, if he could, before he had to start dealing with them all again. The sheets were light and freshly laundered, and clouds had finally broken; the summer rain was pounding down outside, almost hailing…

“Well, just so you know, now might be a really good time, since Sasuke just went off to find those jounin who got away--"

FUCK.

All the sudden, Kakashi's grogginess fell away like it had never existed.

“...Wait, where did Sasuke go!?!?!”

“He’ll be okay, Sensei,” she reassured him without looking up from her scroll. “Despite what I said earlier, and what Naruto claims, Sasuke really is not dumb, and he's wi—”

“He’s extremely dumb,” Kakashi corrected her immediately as he sprang up to his tired legs, sending chakra into both of them to keep himself upright, threw his shirt over his head, getting dressed as quickly as he could, panic coursing through his veins. “But it’s not his fault. He’s an Uchiha.”

“Hey! Slow down, he's —”

“Sit tight; I’ll be right back.”

“SENSEI!”

*

She had done her best to stop him, but to no avail. Even injured and exhausted, Kakashi was still plenty faster than Sakura, when he wanted to be. Or needed to be, in this case. He was practically flying, infusing more and more of his newly-recovered chakra into his aching muscles with each passing second, as he tracked the location and the outline of Sasuke’s chakra up ahead. 

He was —

Shit, if Sasuke was already —

Kakashi sent out some sensory chakra, wondering if he should call Pakkun immediately — 

Sasuke was with Naruto, but —

He hurried up. Every movement, every stride caused pain, but—

Kakashi caught up to them at the eastern edge of the small village.

Two heavily tattooed men were standing over the body of the ex-sensei, who was already dead. Kumogakure nin, going by the forehead protectors. One of them was kicking at the corpse’s head over and over again. The other one was talking to Sasuke, who had his arms folded across his chest. They looked calm. Naruto and three of his clones were a little ways off, tying ropes around the ankles and wrists of the final missing nin, who seemed to be out cold.

...No killing intent in the air, no bad aura. At least, not directed at any of the people who mattered.

So Kakashi…

…fell breathlessly to his knees in the mud as his chakra supply just about ran dry, and the exhaustion and pain in his legs caught up to him.

His hands plopped into the mud a second later, a jolt of pain shooting through his broken finger at the impact, but at least he’d caught himself from falling face-first in the mud. That would have been embarrassing.

(Like this wasn’t… )

“...Kaka-sensei.”

Naruto. At his side. Hand on Kakashi’s shoulder. Worried for him. Kakashi tried his best to look up, reassure his student that everything was fine, but — it wasn’t. That half-mile sprint had set him back a long way. Everything was aching. Throbbing. His muscles seizing up again. 

It was so — painful —

He tried with everything he had to stifle it, shove it down, deal with it later, but then —

Then he started throwing up. Violently. Barely got his mask out of the way in time. Rice from breakfast that morning got lodged in his throat and behind his breastbone; broth and water and lemonade and flecks of rice and vegetables and whatever else he could heave up went flying into the mud and dirt around his left hand as his right hand curled around his abdomen. Still, his stomach kept hauling up more and more.

…He didn’t quite repent of going running after Sasuke. But now that he could see that everyone was safe and sound, and that they had things well in hand, it would be a lie to say he wasn’t regretting it at all.

Naruto was still talking to him, his voice strained and worried, but Kakashi was going in and out, now, his head swimming and his hearing hazy and his vision cloudy. Sakura wasn’t too far out; Kakashi could sense her chakra catching up to them. Over Naruto’s shoulder, Sasuke shot him a — a look , which Kakashi was definitely going to have to deal with at some point, but…

God, shit, it hurts…

“These your students, Konoha-san?” one of the Kumo strangers called, over the sound of the rain and of Kakashi dislodging the contents of his stomach. It was the man who wasn’t kicking in the fallen nin’s head.

Kakashi caught his breath and swallowed down the last of his vomit; he forced himself to sharpen up, raising his head and his facemask and the lid of his Sharingan simultaneously, to assess the threat:

…There didn’t seem to be one. The man was huge; at least six feet tall, and burly, and grinning viciously, and there were… small scars, like notches or tallies, all over his face. Same with the other guy, the Sharingan informed Kakashi, even through the misty rain. Tally marks, but a very deep scowl in place of the other man’s grin.

“They're not too bad,” the man said simply. "And thanks, by the way."

For what?

“We got your message,” he replied, off Kakashi’s confused and probably pained expression. “It dropped out of the clear blue sky a few days back. Dropped by a crow, I think. The scroll described his location a few miles away from here, in the mountains. But we tracked over to this area as quickly as we could, and lucky for us, we found exactly what we’d been hoping to find.”

“He was an acq-acquaintance of yours?”

The guy nodded grimly. “Sensei. Not that he ever should have been in the first palce. We’ve been looking for this fucking asshole for ages. Decades. After what he did to my teammate…”

The stranger paused for a dark moment, as his comrade kicked the dead man again, even harder than before, and then the first man shrugged and said, “Well, he’s dead now.”

Kakashi closed his Sharingan and nodded through the pain that was swelling back up in his head and abdomen.

“So yeah, thanks again for sending the crow,” said the first man, as the second one started wiping blood from his gore-splattered boot.

“...I didn’t,” Kakashi managed to confess.

“No? Well, thanks for taking on the job of preoccupying him all the same,” he said, pushing his thumb against the skin to the right of his right eyelid, indicating that he could see the part of Kakashi’s face that had sustained visible tally marks. “Although I think probably you didn’t sign up for that job, either.”

Kakashi nodded woodenly, and the other fellow nodded, and then called out to his comrade, who shouldered the body of the dead ex-jounin ex-sensei and his companion. A second later, they had vanished into the woods.

Kakashi closed his eyes.

Listened to the rain, and the fierce, tight growl of his once-again-empty stomach.

Then he made himself blink one of his eyes back open; he tried to stand up, but…

“Sensei,” said Naruto near his ear.

Kakashi didn’t look up again. He was out of energy. The rain continued to fall. He…

He had to face facts.

“...Mm, Naruto,” he said very softly. “I can’t get up. You guys will have to…”

“Sure!”

And then Naruto was at his side — two Naruto’s, both of them burrowing into his sides, lifting his arms up and raising Kakashi limb by aching limb back to standing. Naruto was still a good deal shorter than him, so Kakashi had to put quite a lot of weight on his trembling legs, but in a moment, a third Naruto had joined them, and they were stable.

Naruto had already started hauling Kakashi back towards where Sakura was, her hands balled on her hips and her face furious, when Sasuke finally made eye contact with Kakashi. 

There was still one hell of a look on Sasuke’s face still, but Kakashi was too drained and depleted to deal with that just right now. Later, Sasuke-kun. Remind me.

*

Once they got back to his room, all three of them yelled at him pretty long and hard for getting out of bed and running around like that, and his tired calves, quads, and feet screamed at him for getting out of bed and running around like that, but still, Kakashi couldn’t bring himself to fully regret his actions. 

Not even when Sasuke folded his arms over his chest again, and explained what Kakashi had already suspected.

“That guy. He was coming back for you.”

Kakashi shrugged lightly around his mug of nettle tea, jostling his collarbone out of place a bit, then nodded at the big blues eyes  underneath his tea, at Naruto, where he was resting his blonde hair in Kakashi's lap. It was... it was sweet, it really was, but even the slight addition of pressure from Naruto's head was making his leg muscles ache and throb harder. “He must have been pretty bored," he said, after taking a sip, wincing a little at the heat. "And stupid.”

“Stupid how?” scoffed Sasuke, a thin lining of vicious fury audible in his tone. “You would have been pathetically easy pickings.” 

“And what exactly where you planning to —”

“You couldn’t even stand up.”

“Sasuke, lay off him —”

“What I'm saying is, you shouldn’t promise to protect others no matter what if you can’t even protect yourself!”

After Sasuke's angry bark of an outburst, all four of them went silent.  

…Oof, Kakashi silently told his tea. Ouch.

He was… right, though. Sasuke was.

And it seemed he knew it, too.

"That's not fair, Sasuke-teme-" Naruto began, and Sakura bobbed her head, but Sasuke plowed ahead without them.

“That guy was gonna kill you, he was coming here to kill you, and you basically handed him an open invitation when you bolted out of here to —”

Sasuke broke off.

“Don’t hold back, Sasuke. You can…”

This time, it was Kakashi who broke off in embarrassment. You can let it all out, he wanted to say.

But of course, Sasuke couldn’t. Kakashi knew that better than anyone.

In the meantime, Sakura moved over and tried to pat Sasuke’s glacially cold shoulder in a universally recognizable gesture of reassurance — and because Naruto was still in his lap, Kakashi couldn’t move fast enough to get in between them in time — and so Sasuke —

Yep, that’s what I thought.

Sasuke nearly broke Sakura’s arm as he yanked her away from him, twisting it down and back so swiftly he probably could have given Itachi a run for his money.

“STOP, Sasuke! Stop being a dick! Giving and sharing gestures of affection is normal. Receiving and giving it and allowing it is normal, so if you want to be normal— ”

“GET OFF, Sakura! I’m not interested in being norm—”

“We're not a real team until we do this!” she shouted over him, sneaking out of his grip and darting under Sasuke’s arm so quickly, she probably could have given Itachi a run for his money, too.

She — 

Was hugging Sasuke. 

Who allowed it for all of one single second before flinging her off, and over to the side. 

“...Who made that rule??” Kakashi asked, completely stunned at the one-second allowance, as Sakura returned Sasuke’s toss with a fierce throw of one of Kakashi’s pillows.

“We did, when you were asleep,” she said.

“No, we didn't,” Sasuke returned through gritted teeth.

“...yes we did, teme,” Naruto said quietly. He’d been suspiciously quiet through the whole Sakura-Sasuke interchange, just watching them get fired up. His eyes looked weirdly bleary, but before Kakashi could try to get a better look —

“Team Mom gets to decide,” Sakura declared, pointing her thumb at her sternum just as Sasuke threw another pillow and hit her full in the face.

Those were freshly laundered, too…

Naruto was chuckling in his lap, and kicked a pillow at Sasuke when he got close enough, but otherwise stayed rooted in place on Kakashi's legs. Growing more and more fed-up with each pillow that got chucked, Kakashi snapped his left-hand fingers at the pair of dueling genin. “Stop making more work for the staff here, you three! They're already being extrem — hey, are you guys even listening!?” 

“Don’t have to."

"You’re not the team mom, Kakashi!”

He set down his tea, barely resisting the urge to throw a pillow or two himself. Talk back to me one more time, you two. I dare you. “Can you even see how you're behaving, right now? Are you guys twelve, or are you seven?!”

“I’m thirteen,” said Sasuke and Sakura at the same time, stopping their pillow war to give him twin insulted looks.

Kakashi almost, almost let his jaw drop by accident.

“...Since when?” he asked them both in disbelief. 

“Last week,” said Sasuke as Sakura said, “Three months ago.”

“...Seriously?” he blinked slowly, feeling like an idiotic, miserable, absolute failure of a jounin-sensei. “I thought you were still twelve.”

“We know.”

“We had a party for Sakura, remember?” 

He blinked. “We did?"

"The rest of us did. You got an invitation.”

“Oh," he blinked again. "I guess I forgot."

"Stupid motherfucking jounin-sensei--" 

And then, because he'd forgotten their birthdays, and because his legs hurt, and because it was just turning into one of those goddamn days, Kakashi lost control, and blew his lid at Naruto. By accident.

“Could you please, please stop swearing at me like a crazy person and just get off me, for five fucking seconds!!”

...That caused an even deeper and more awkwardly uncomfortable silence than Sasuke's outburst had.

Shit, shit shit...shit, Naruto, I'm sorry —

But he had already scrambled up, way out of Kakashi's reach, at exactly the moment when it fully sank in for Kakashi that stupid motherfucking jounin-sensei was a term of endearment, not an imprecation.

"I'm sor-"

"I'm sorry, Sensei," Naruto said very formally, bowing, his face red.

"Naruto, come back, that was very rude—"

"If we're rude, it's because you taught us to be," Sasuke fired at Kakashi in a dark mutter, who sent him a seriously? Now!? with his eyes, but kept reaching for Naruto the next second.

"That was very rude of me," Kakashi finished as he finally managed to wrap his hand around Naruto's wrist. "I'm sorry."

And... Naruto started bawling.

Shit. What the fuck. Shit.

"Hmph," said Sasuke decidedly, as Sakura nodded and said, "See, I told you he was acting weird!"

"Can it, you two," Kakashi ordered, but of course they didn't.

The last of the three, the actual twelve-year-old in front of him, was not consoled by their cross-talk, or by Kakashi's attempt to get through to him. He only cried harder when Kakashi scooched over so he could rub Naruto's blonde hair like he was rubbing Pakkun’s ears, searching for something to say to lighten the mood, to draw attention away from Naruto's breakdown, and to breeze past the fact that apparently, he’d been getting beaten and tortured all day during Sasuke’s birthday, and clean forgotten Sakura's in the first place… Really needed to find a not-awkward way to suggest throwing a late birthday party…

“It was all my fault,” Naruto sobbed at him, big fat tears streaking down his lined cheeks as he pulled his arm out of Kakashi's hold.

(... Seriously? How dumb can you BE….?)

Instead of asking that, which would have been a bit rude, Kakashi cleared his throat and rephrased his question: “How do you figure?”

“I’m the reason why they hurt you, Kakashi Sensei. I know they wanted information about the village, about the kyuubi—”

“It wasn’t that,” Kakashi interrupted him very sharply.

Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura all looked up at him, particularly Sasuke.

Uh, shit —

He had walked right into it, again.

“You’re kind of right, Naruto. It was stuff related to the village, but nothing to do with the Nine Tails,” he covered as smoothly as he could.

“That one guy said —”

“That one guy lied,” Kakashi said over him, feeling a pretty good idea of which guy it had been in particular, and a rush of hatred towards him for his cruelty. “It wasn’t about that. If it were, you can bet I’d still go through all of it again if I had to, but you don’t have to feel guilty about it, Naruto. It wasn’t anything to do with you, okay?”

“...You swear?”

“I do. I’m not the lying type—”

All three of them made loud, scoffing noises. 

“I’m not!”

He reached for Naruto's arm again. Naruto scrubbed at his nose and refused to make eye contact.

Central question, Kakashi:

How in the name of all the ninja gods are you gonna stop the crying, let alone the bickering....??

“But you still think I’m lazy, and stupid-” he said in a watery voice that reminded Kakashi so hard of his old teammate, he almost thought Obito was there in the room with him, for a second.

Ah - a joke will do the trick.

“That’s because you are lazy and stupid,” Kakashi said.

Naruto froze for a second, then wailed and socked him.

"You could see that I was kidding, though, right? You could tell, right?"

Naruto just sniffled harder as Sasuke and Sakura both nodded at him without hesitation.

“You’re really the hardest-working and least lazy person I’ve ever met, Naruto," said Kakashi more softly and fully genuinely, this time. "I’m not kidding.”

“He’s kidding this time,” said Sakura in a low voice.

“No, I’m not.”

He really wasn’t.

But Naruto just released another rather nasty swear word, right into the air around them, if not quite to Kakashi's face this time, and then stormed out the door all the same.

Fuck, Kakashi thought at himself, for the second time that day. Shit.

“...See, this is why you really need to stop with the subtlety and jokes and nuance and just start telling us stuff,” Sakura decided for him in the wake of Naruto’s dramatic exit. “And you both need to rest more and drink soup.”

“Stop it, Sakura. You’re not the m–”

“That’s true,” Kakashi interrupted Sasuke's snuffling and Sakura's retort, hoping to get them to switch topics so he could work out how to redress this most recent fuck-up in his ongoing fuck-up of a Naruto situation. Central question, Kakashi: How in the fuck are you gonna get them to stop bickering for two seconds altogether. “It’s Sasuke’s turn to be the mom today.”

“Since when??”

“But I!!”

“It has to rotate, or else no one is allowed to be the mom,” said Kakashi loudly over them. “I’m not kidding. If you can’t take turns and rotate like big kids, then I’m gonna be the mom the whole time.”

A girlish gasp burst from Sakura, at his side: “Or, here’s another idea: if you get married —”

“Butt out, Sakura!”

“Shut up, Sasuke! All I’m saying is, don't give up on love yet, Kakashi Sensei,” Sakura told him. “You’re still kind of young. You probably still have a slim chance of finding someone who won’t mind your weird personal—”

“Thank you very much for your input, Sakura-chan,” Kakashi sighed and sat back, rubbing at his forehead with two fingers as he shook his head. They were being so tiring today… 

“Tsk! Why do you always have to be so depressing like that, huh?! You might have given up on love and romance and talking things through in a mature and rational manner, but I haven't.”

Sakura crossed her arms and turned her head away stubbornly as Kakashi tried to defend himself, but failed before he even began: “Who said I… never mind.”

“This is exactly what I’m talking about! You're always 'neverminding' us and saying we'll talk about this later, but then you don't talk about it later! You just make jokes and avoid the topics you don't want to talk about. You have issues, Kakashi Sensei! Communication issues.”

Kakashi looked over at Sasuke for help, but the damn kid just humphed at them, and didn’t make eye contact with either of them.

“You guys just don't.... you're all too young; you don't understand yet..."

...You're proving my point, Sakura said with a lift of her eyebrows.

“Fine! Whatever!” he threw up his hands and struggled to get to his tired feet. "We'll talk about it later! In the meantime, I’m going to go find someone to talk to who can relate to my struggles!”

He limped outside to the porch…. 

Only to be met with a face-full of mosquitos, and the muggy summer heat, and the utter void of people who could understand and relate to his struggles.

*

They were right.

Sadly, they were twelve, and thirteen, and they were actually right, for a change. He did have communication issues. He did give up on fixing them too easily. 

He needed to change his approach.

So the next time Naruto started acting up and pitching a fit over next to nothing, (about two hours later, as they were getting up from their rather stilted and awkward and almost totally silent evening meal, and Naruto accidentally knocked over a glass jar of pickled ginger) Kakashi tried out a brand new (and technically rather illegal) tactic.

“...this fucking motherfucker of a vegeta—”

“You know, your mom would kill me if she saw me letting you act like this.”

That stopped both Naruto (and Sasuke's "It's not a vegetable, dumbass-") in his tracks.

“...My mom?”

“Your mom.”

Naruto and the others stared up at him, as Kakashi maneuvered himself slowly out of his kneeling position at the table. He wanted to wince, and not just from the pain shooting through his legs as he stretched them. He had been teetering on the edge of indecision for far longer than he liked to admit, wondering just how much trouble he was about to get himself into later on, for this. It was a highly illegal discussion, but Sarutobi Hiruzen was dead now anyway, and in Kakashi’s opinion, the Sandaime’s reasoning had been a little wonky in the first place…

“She liked wildflowers,” he announced quietly to the room in general as he sat back against the wall and hung his forearms from his knees, highly aware that these were probably the first and second details that Naruto had ever had about Kushina.

Naruto was still frozen in shock, his blue eyes wide as wheels as he continued to just stare at Kakashi.

“She sang sometimes when she was afraid,” he continued. “She used to sing when we were out for hikes, and she was afraid that snakes or wild animals were going to attack our legs, because of all the thick grass we were tramping through.”

After the final syllable, Kakashi pressed his mouth closed quickly, and had another sneaky look at the inhabitants of the room.

…Yeah, they were all staring at him, as expected.

He sighed.

It’s not only illegal, but also very uncomfortable for me to tell you this stuff… 

He just barely fought off a strong and growing temptation to rub at the back of his neck.

…but if it kept them quiet, and away from each other's throats...

Oh, what the hell.

“She was very independent, and skilled, and liked to do things properly, and all on her own,” he explained softly, without looking at any of them. “Mostly she did them really well. But when she messed something up, mm," he shook his head. "She really… I remember, there were a few times at training where she really…”

“Was she your teacher?” Sakura asked into the silence as Kakashi trailed off, lost in memories of long, red hair and high-pitched screeching and Obito’s building laughter and don’t you DARE tell Minato!! and too many squishy, prolonged, received-against-his-will hugs to count.

Kakashi paused for a little bit to collect an answer before saying, “Kinda, yeah. I learned a lot from Uzumaki Kushina.”

Ku-shi-na, Naruto mouthed silently, finally breaking eye contact as he quickly looked away.

“I have a lot of stories, actually,” said Kakashi into the silence, rubbing at his neck like a coward, instead of manning up and saying is it too late for me to apologize to you, Naruto…? “I could do with another quick nap, though. I’ll tell you all some other time.”

He had thought (or - hoped?) that maybe Naruto would burrow into his arm again, but this time, Naruto was the first one out the door.

*

Kakashi's face was healing. Slowly but steadily. It had been all scraped up from the fall, when he and Sakura almost went flying off the cliff, and he’d stuck his nose in the ground to keep them braced in position. Not to mention the little tally marks everywhere. They were abundant, and they stung after he washed his skin, but they were healing.

As he was inspecting the cuts while he finished brushing his teeth that night, Naruto suddenly resumed his pattern of touching him unprompted by kicking softly at the side of Kakashi’s leg, for no reason.

Then he said, “I’m glad you’re not wearing the mask all the time anymore, Sensei. Even though we have to look at more of your stupid ugly face, I’m glad because it means you can be the one to teach me how to shave.”

Kakashi —

Choked on his toothpaste.

Just stopped dead.

Looked down in consternation.

What.

Then —

Laughed. 

He couldn’t help it. 

“What?” he asked around his toothbrush and his chortling, just to make sure he had heard right.

Naruto growled back, which was confirmation enough. He folded his elbows onto the counter and stared at his totally-facial-hairless baby-face in the mirror, frowning so hard he looked like he was constipated. “I already have peach fuzz, Sensei. Someday I’ll have a goatee, and then I’ll grow a beard. Like Asuma-Sensei.” he proclaimed, like a dare, clearly challenging Kakashi to call his bluff. “His beard is badass.”

Kakashi… just laughed again, even harder, as he tried and failed to picture it. Didn’t even bother trying to hide his laugh this time. Then rested his hand on Naruto's head.

“Okay, Naruto.”

“You’ll teach me how to shave?”

“...I guess.”

Chapter Text

“You’re starting us off on the wrong foot,” Sasuke complained to Naruto, and for once, the complaint was just a gentle reproach, rather than the start of another bickering match. “The kata goes right left, shuffle, right-right left. Here, I’ll show you.”

“Teme, you’re acting a bit like Sakura-chan, like a know-everything,” Naruto complained back, and for once , his big smile proved it was just him throwing clearly affectionate insults at his teammates, which they both received with synchronized eye-rolls, but otherwise good grace.

They had all taken over the inn’s kitchen. Naruto and Sasuke were preoccupied working through a few very slow katas together, while Kakashi leaned most of his weight on the counter and pretended he wasn’t in any pain while he rolled salmon roll after salmon roll.

The rest of the staff had already gone to bed by the time Kakashi woke up from his afternoon nap at 10pm, but the kids were still awake, and had given themselves the run of the place. Only problem was, the genin were all at level zero when it came to cooking, everyone except Sasuke, who was at level three, but who said he wasn’t interested in cooking. 

So that was how Kakashi had wound up cooking for them, late at night, making food for Sasuke’s late birthday dinner, rolling sushi and stewing lots and lots of vegetables, but mostly tomatoes, which the inn garden was chock full of. Lemon salmon rolls, with avocado and cucumber.

And chaperoning Sakura, who was in charge of baking the lemon cake for dessert. She winced a little at her overmitts as she pushed the cake pan back into the oven after checking it.

“Let me see your hands again, Sakura. They feel ok?”

“Yes,” she answered immediately, the squint of her green eyes singing the lie. “They’re great.”

God, she is a shitty liar.

“The burns on them are great?”

Her face went as pink as her hair. “Uh, well—”

(...She'd been so nice to him lately, though...

He decided to let her off the hook. They would work on her lying skills later).

“By the way, I’m really grateful—”

“What do you mean?” she asked into his abrupt silence. “What are you grateful for?”

“Oh, just that those two didn’t die while trying to take on those two ex-jounin yesterday,” he covered casually, turning his attention back to patting more rice into the nori. 

“We weren’t in any danger,” said Naruto as Sasuke added, “Asuma set up a trap, and explained to us-”

“I’m just glad you made it out,” he said firmly.

And that was the last they spoke about anything serious until the dinner was fully consumed and being digested, and Sakura’s (surprisingly delicious) cake was being sliced up and doled out.

“Well… likewise,” said Sasuke, apropos of nothing, and it was only because of his furtive but meaningful glance at Kakashi that Kakashi was able to connect the two threads at all. Sasuke suddenly starting in on his piece of cake as his face went a bit pink. Chin in his hand, he shoveled bite after bite into his mouth, sniffling sullenly through each one, and rubbing at the skin under his nose. He was still a little under the weather; there was dry, flakey skin on and around his nostrils from blowing his nose all day. “I’m sorry for what I said to you yesterday, Sensei.”

“You had your reasons,” said Kakashi, feeling fiercely proud of Sasuke all the sudden, and darting a quick glance at Naruto, to be sure he got the message that Kakashi was sorry for his own outburst, too. “We all did.” 

“It’s been a shitty week,” said Naruto, sounding wise beyond his twelve and some change years. Sounding a lot like his dad, actually.

Quiet reigned for a very awkward sixty seconds or so.

“...By the way, how dare you 'wait here' me like that yesterday, right before you ran off to puke your guts out,” Sakura growled at him, not seriously, but in a very frightening undertone, the kind of growl that sent a chill down Kakashi’s spine. He ignored it. She was changing the topic for Sasuke’s sake, deflecting attention while Sasuke processed his emotions, so Kakashi was perfectly willing to take her diversion, even if it might cost him some peace and quiet.

He took a tone with her in exchange, tapping a finger against the table for emphasis as he said, “So, Sakura-chan, just so you know, just for review, there’s a rule that mednin aren’t supposed to engage in com-”

“Don’t pull that rules bullshit on me, Kakashi Sensei! You of all people-”

“There’s a rule! I know you know it, too. They cover it on day one of mednin training.”

“But you break rules all the time!” she pouted.

“Nevertheless,” he finished glumly, “It has to go on your report card.”

“But Sensei!! I didn’t even-!! I haven’t even-!! You don’t even-!!”

The rest was lost in the roar of Naruto’s “BAHAHAHA;” even Sasuke joined in with a smirk at her expense.

And then, to Kakashi’s surprise, soon after he had finished laughing, Naruto took up the thread again. “So if you’re writing report cards, does that mean that you’re not gonna quit yet after all?” 

“Who said–? Sakura.”

“Well you were talking about not being our sensei anymore, and I had to start making contingency plans for your retirement, and-”

Naruto, the team mom of the day, shoveled a gigantic piece of cake into Sakura’s mouth.

“Quit creating more gossip, Sakura-chan. He’s only like, what, fifty-one years old, or fifty-three? He can keep at it a little longer.”

“Un,” Sasuke nodded his agreement. “A few more good years before the body starts to break down of its own accord.”

Kakashi sandwiched his browbone between his thumb and his index finger, slid the pads of his fingers back and forth, and daydreamed for three or four seconds about retiring all of them…

But then his mind went back to that moment a few days ago, when that one ex-Aburame woman had offered to put an end to his suffering.

“...Why are you this loyal? The village doesn't deserve your strength. What has it ever actually given you in return?”

I really can’t explain it, Kakashi had thought. Not to someone like you.

He couldn’t explain it even still, but he knew what it was he was being given in return. It was nights like this one, days like the ones before, and hopefully the ones ahead. That might not have been a good enough reason for her. But it was for him.

“So this is permanent,” said Sakura like she was starting a formal argument, although the formality was somewhat dented by her half-chewed mouthful of cake. “Just so we’re clear. This isn’t just us four for a while. This is the four of us for the rest of…”

“Forever,” Naruto finished for her. “Isn’t it?”

“Well…”

“Well, what, Kakashi?” asked Sasuke sharply before the others had a chance to say anything.

It was the same question Kakashi had just paused to ask himself, as the reminder that no one needed waited on the tip of his tongue: Well, nothing is forever. Sasuke’s eyes were glittering with some indiscernible emotion, and Naruto’s were shining with happiness, and Sakura’s looked resolved, and who the hell knew what Kakashi’s own expression looked like, but—

“Well yeah,” he answered at last. “That’s true.”

“You’re definitely not-”

“No, I’m not retiring, that’s a crazy idea.” He shrugged at them as he popped a last bite of cake in his mouth, and added, “I guess I’m a bit of masochist, so I like my job. And besides, you three still have a long road ahead of you. Wouldn’t be right for me to pass you off to some other sensei.”

“And Orochimaru is still out there, so that’s… something, too.”

Kakashi sighed and sat back to stretch his legs as Sakura trailed off, and Naruto glanced worriedly at Sasuke, who was refusing to look at any of them. “That’s true. No use avoiding the subject. We will always have shit to deal with. We are the Shit to Deal With team.”

“And we are some badass motherfuckers.”

“That’s right, Naruto.”

“We can do this,” Sakura informed them. “We will do it. Together.”

There was another awkward moment of silence, during which Kakashi snuck a single glance at Sasuke, who had his tongue pressed against his mouth like he was biting down hard on it. In unison, they lifted an eyebrow at each other, and then went back to hiding all their reactions from the other two. Perfectly balanced team, Kakashi thought, staring at the bandages on his arms so he wouldn't have to look at Naruto or Sakura. Two out of four who will always see the glass half full, who need things said out loud, and two out of four who hate cheesy speeches. 

And one of them would almost rather go through another round of torture than say what should have been said two days earlier. "You guys-"

His weakly-begun sentence was drowned out by Naruto's strong one.

“You should have let me say that, Sakura,” Naruto grumbled at her, pointing his thumbnail at his chest. “I’m the Team Mom for the day. I want to be the one who gets to give the inspirational speeches from now on.”

“Well, it’s almost midnight, so you only have about ten minutes before it’s Sasuke’s turn, and also, you’ll have to work on expanding your vocabulary before anything else,” she chided him. “You’re not allowed to swear during an inspirational speech, that’s rule number one. Come on, I’ll help you write a first draft. Sasuke, you can be the audience…”

“Hmph.”

“I don’t want to write a draft!! It’s supposed to come from the heart, without any–”

“Uh, hang on, you three–” Kakashi interrupted, needing to just finally say the thing that had been on his mind ever since he first woke up in the inn in the first place.

They paused in the doorway, arms full of dishes they were taking back to the kitchen, as he dropped his tone into a more serious register..

“Um…”

They were all waiting for him to finish. Once again, Naruto and Sakura made eye contact, while Sasuke did not.

One, two, three. Just make yourself say it, on the count of three. 

“Thank you all, for coming to find me. I’m really grateful.”

“...Goodnight, Sensei.”

*

He did have a good night.

Or, he started to, anyway. 

At about 3am, Sasuke snuck into Kakashi’s room with two kunai drawn, and sat huddled in the corner with his fingers curled around his weapons and his arms wrapped around his pajama-clad knees for almost forty-five minutes.

They both knew the other was awake, but no one made a move to bridge the gap.

Finally, eventually, Kakashi sighed and broke first.

“Come here, Sasuke.”

Sasuke sprang to his feet and darted out of the room.

*

The following night, Kakashi had had almost twenty-four hours to mull it over, so things went a little differently.

Kakashi woke to find Sasuke’s knee blocking his view of the clock. Sasuke was still dressed in his day-clothes, no sign of pajamas, and crouched protectively over him, his kunai at the ready, glaring at the closed door —

And then the window — 

He was trembling violently, his eyes wide, glaring fiercely at the door, and then the window.

And then the door.

And then the window.

This time, Kakashi didn’t bother with words. He maneuvered himself around and sat himself up inch by aching inch, then wrapped Sasuke’s closest limb (his left shin) in a tight hold with both hands, only relaxing his hold after a few minutes had passed (Kakashi’s broken middle finger screamed at him the whole time, but he ignored it), and only just enough to wrap his good hand around Sasuke’s upper arm and rub his bad hand up and down Sasuke’s shaking back, and then Sasuke’s shivering neck, pressing his thumb and then the backs of his knuckles against Sasuke’s shirt and skin, as heavily as he dared, almost like he would be able to push the panic away if he kept at it long enough.

…The full-body shuddering didn’t start to slow for at least four, maybe five minutes. But when it did, long, shaky gasping took its place. 

Well, better than his previous state of not breathing at all.

Sasuke was still wide-eyed, but once or twice he made eye contact with Kakashi, who was doing everything he could to induce it, short of actually speaking to his very clearly shellshocked Uchiha genin student.

Releasing Sasuke with one hand, and sliding his thumb down past his mask, Kakashi bit down on the edge of his flesh with his incisors, and drew a tiny bit of blood.

As he had hoped, the summons produced the world’s sleepiest ninja beagle.

“...‘sup, boss?” mumbled Guruko very sleepily, eyes still drooping as he yawned and stretched his back.

“Sorry to bother you in the night.”

“S’okay… Who we gonna fight?”

“Can you just hang out with us for a bit, actually?”

Guruko answered with another big sleepy yawn, his dogbreath assailing Kakashi’s nostrils harshly, even under the cloth, and his ears flopping behind him as he immediately curled up in Kakashi’s lap to fall asleep.

Careful not to dislodge him too quickly, Kakashi cradled Guruko’s belly in his palm, then transferred him over to Sasuke, who wordlessly drew the small dog into his lap, up against his chest. Guruko snorted and snuffled a little bit in his sleep, then burrowed his head into Sasuke’s shirt and dropped out of wakefulness completely, his fur fluttering with whistley little snores.

Sasuke himself was also starting to even out his breathing, which was very good.

“Sasuke…” Kakashi began.

Sasuke didn’t look up.

Kakashi pushed his mouth to one side, a little hesitant. What he was about to say wasn’t illegal or anything, like with Naruto, but it was one of the top items on The List of Things to Never Tell the Children About (Kakashi and Pakkun had drawn it up together one afternoon, soon after the Sandaime had made the team assignments official). In fact, it was one of the top items on Kakashi’s List of Things to Never Speak About With Anyone If He Could Help It, Even Pakkun.

But, right now, tonight…

(Sakura’s words at dinner came echoing through his mind; she had been right, he knew she had been right…)

“I’m an orphan too, you know. If I never told you before.”

Sasuke’s sharp eyes flashed up at him in the moonlight. 

“Ask Guruko here if you don’t believe me.”

Guruko farted in his sleep, filling the air with a powerful and disgusting odor. Sasuke grimaced, and Kakashi fanned the air.

“I never knew my mother,” he continued slowly, “But my father was the only person in the entire universe who mattered to me at all. He died when I was six.”

“Who killed him?”

“He killed himself.”

Neither of them spoke again after that, but after a few minutes, Sasuke shifted his weight a few inches to find a more comfortable position, and so Kakashi did the same, and then about ten minutes after that, Sasuke shifted a second time, and so Kakashi did too, and eventually they made their way closer to the edge of the room, and then Kakashi drew a blanket around Sasuke’s back, and leaned with him against the wall. Sasuke, mercifully, let him do it, the side of his face gingerly and then (after several more, still-shaky breaths) heavily pressing in against Kakashi’s arm and then ribcage, as Kakashi wrapped his arm over Sasuke's shoulders, and Sasuke cradled Guruko in between them.

I lived through it.

You will too.

And you won’t be alone, not like I was. I’m pretty useless, but I can make sure of that much. 

*

Naruto was busy helping the innkeepers with the laundry, and Sakura was picking up produce from the local market for them to take on their journey home, and Sasuke was shunning everyone’s company as he had been all day, so Kakashi found himself sitting on the back porch by himself all the next morning, watching the renewed rain come down fast and hard. Humid air, wet smells, and the patter of the rain as it hit the muddy turf. He drank it all on, glad his nose was pretty much back to normal after all the stuffiness from his prolonged bout with the cold. He was feeling better today, and also somehow feeling much worse.

(...Possibly it had something to do with the fact that he had barely slept at all the previous night, not that that mattered —)

“Here.”

Kakashi looked up.

Scowl already set, Sasuke took a seat near him (‘near’ in Sasuke terms; he was still about five or six feet away) on the porch, and thumped a mug of hot liquid down between them, somewhat close to Kakashi’s hip.

Kakashi looked at it. 

“What is this?” he asked blankly.

“What it looks like.”

Kakashi spent a good half a minute more taking a long, thorough look at the contents before replying, “I can’t even begin to imagine.”

“It’s hot cocoa!”

Without picking it up, Kakashi sniffed at it slightly, very skeptical.  

“...Is it?”

“If you’re going to be so ungrateful —”

“Don’t take it away!” he yelped as he scrambled to push Sasuke’s hands back before the genin could grab the mug. “I want it, I want it, I’m just… ”

“Hypercritical.”

“Examining it. It’s not even brown, you know. Cocoa is usually brown. How much poison did you slip in here, if I may ask?”

Somehow, Sasuke snaked his hands past Kakashi’s and stole the mug back from him. “I’m going to throw it out now.”

“Sasuke! Don’t. I order you. Don’t. DON’T!”

But Sasuke looked him coldly in the eye and poured the contents of the mug straight off the side of the porch, into the muddy puddle of rainwater gathering on the ground below, just as Kakashi had finally managed to half-rise to his feet to stop him.

“Ahhhh…” he sighed sadly.

“That will teach you not to complain.”

“Will it?”

“One can hope and pray,” Sasuke answered in a voice dripping with sarcasm.

Gingerly, Kakashi sat himself back down again, watching the rain in solitude until Sasuke finally took a seat with him again — well, ‘with’ him. On the opposite corner of the porch, leaning away from him, despite being well out of reach. 

Eventually, Sasuke broke the silence, introducing a new topic for them to not really talk about. “You’re quiet,” he remarked.

“I’m always quiet.”

“Not like this. Something's wrong.” 

Kakashi gave him a long, reflective pause, and then a closed-eyes concession: “Yeah.”

Sasuke’s tone grew very serious.

“What can I do? What can we do...?”

Kakashi blinked his eyes back open, then looked away, rubbing his jaw awkwardly with his left hand, and then the back of his neck, letting his head hang down before softly confessing: “...I just can't believe I almost died, and not even on a mission. And you three had to save me. It’s so embarrassing—”

“Sensei. Look over at me.”

He resisted for just a bit, but then darted a look over at his student. 

Sasuke waited until he was looking, and then rolled his eyes for almost ten seconds straight. “You shouldn’t bother being so disbelieving about something that happens so often,” he added mid-eyeroll. “If anything, the lesson to be learned here is that you should learn to take better care of yourself, maybe. Not that I care, but —”

This time, it was Sasuke who broke off, ears starting to burn pink.

“Sasuke,” Kakashi told him seriously. “I’m really sorry I nearly died on you.”

“Tsh.”

“I’ll try not to do it again.”

“...Hmph.” 

-what?

Kakashi blinked again, barely hiding the fact that he was even more taken aback than before.

A new hmph?

This one… didn’t… really have a category…?

...Mystifying.

It was something in between one of the others, a blend of number 7 (you know, for a dumb person, you’re really VERY dumb), and number 12 (if you ever try such a stupid line on me again, you’ll get my kunai in your eye) —

And then before Kakashi could work it out, Sasuke started giving him shit again.

“You know, maybe you wouldn’t almost die so much if you stopped reading so much erotic fiction, and instead picked up some sort of respectable hobby, like self-defense.”

“Maa, Sasuke, that can’t really be my hobby, seeing as how it’s my job—”

“Then maybe you should really try to improve your job skills, seeing as how your paycheck depends on it—”

Kakashi pushed his thumbs against his eyelids and said, “Maybe you should leave me alone now, so I can rest some more.”

Sasuke got to his feet and made to head back inside.

“Wait, hang on, Sasuke — could you… maybe…”

“No.”

Kakashi folded his hands in his lap and waited.

…A short, pronounced sigh. 

“Fine.”

Five minutes later, Sasuke plopped the re-made hot cocoa back down at Kakashi’s side. Kakashi didn’t smile, but he didn’t not smile, either.

“Thank you.”

“Hmph.”

Wow.

Twice in the same day.

Same one, the new one. It sounded a bit like number 21 (I’m fond of you, but it actually WOULD kill me to show it), combined with number 19 (stop being overly sentimental, you stupid idiot).

Category 24 hmph was… 

…an I love you hmph?

…Or was that Kakashi just reading into things, like the overly sentimental stupid idiot he was…?

In either case, this time, he couldn’t find it in him to bite back the genuine smile spreading over his face, so he didn’t even try.

“Hmph,” said Sasuke again, when he caught sight of Kakashi’s expression, spinning on his heel and leaving the porch in a big hurry.

…Same hmph three times in a row, though.

Chapter Text

A week later, Kakashi was lying to them well enough to convince them that he felt good enough to walk for half an hour or so at a time. So they started journeying back, and then they got him home, and then dropped him off at his apartment, and then the three of him left him alone for a good solid week after that. 

At first, Kakashi couldn’t help but feel a little sad about that, but then he realized they were… respecting his privacy. 

Which was a big first for them. 

He celebrated by taking another nap. And then several more, after the first one. It was a pretty big occasion, after all. 

*

A week after that, Kakashi was still recovering, if slowly. The Konoha mednin had him on a pretty good regimen, so his condition had improved a lot faster. But after almost a week of captivity and then three more spent in bed, he was out of shape, and not by a little. He could run about four miles without cramping, and soon it would be five. He could throw shuriken for an hour. He could do about half of a backflip. 

Sakura, Naruto and Sasuke had taken it upon themselves to put him through the paces of re-training.

Which sucked. 

“Sloppy. Get back in fighting form, Sensei!”

“Come on, lazy!”

“You’re slowing us down.”

Kakashi would have replied to them in kind, but he was saving all his breath and energy for running.

“HAHAHA!” Naruto cried as he passed him for a third time. “Wow, Kakashi-Sensei!! You’re so slow! Bahaha. Pathetic! Loser!!”

That was worth a reply. 

“Don’t rub it in, dickhead,” Kakashi panted, reaching over to flick Naruto’s ear. His collarbone only protested the extension in a vague, achy sort of way this time.

“OW! Why shouldn’t I, it’s not like you ever wasted a chance!!”

That was completely unfair. Kakashi had never run circles around Naruto and Sasuke and Sakura, taunting them with hmphs and namecalling and awkward prepubescent swearing, but he sure should have when he had the chance.

“Be more respectful, Naruto!” yelled the blur of pink hair up in front of him, “Or I’ll kick your ass!"

“Heh! Like you even could, Sakura-chan! Hey, Sasuke, look at this slowpoke. Guess who’s Last Place now!”

“Get BACK here, Naruto!!”

“There they go,” Kakashi remarked to the one genin still jogging at his side.

“Tsch. She’s only doing it in the first place to defend you.” 

Well yeah, but-

“You should hurry up and go stop Sakura from killing him.”

“Maybe you should-”

“You’re the sensei, Kakashi. Quit slacking off and do your job.”

...Bet Gai had never even been tempted to use duct tape on a student. Which one would even provoke him? Neji? Asuma probably just got a big laugh out of Ino’s screeching and Shikamaru’s bitching and moaning.

Maybe Kurenai could relate. She had Kiba to wrangle, after all.

“Hey! Where do you think you’re going!” 

“Sensei!!”

“Kaka-Sensei!! You can’t quit right now! You have more training!”

“I’m going to go find someone to talk to who can relate to my struggles!” he called back to them over his shoulder as he walked away from the oval track, ignoring the chorus of screeching, yelling, swearing, bitching, tsching, and moaning he left in his wake except to raise one hand in a one-finger salute of goodbye, resigning himself once again to suffering alone forever when faced with the dearth of people who could possibly relate to his struggles, when someone nearby called out his name.

Kakashi’s good eye opened, and he met Umino Iruka’s welcome, knowing smile.

“Hard day?”

“Finally, someone who understands!”

As Iruka fell into step beside him, Kakashi let his head collapse over to one side, onto Iruka’s shoulder.

“Let’s go get ramen. I’ll pay.”

“...Wow, you have had a hard day,” Iruka commented disbelievingly, after picking his jaw up off the floor at Hatake-I-seem-to-have-forgotten-my-wallet-at-home-again-Kakashi offering to buy him food.

“How am I supposed to endure this,” Kakashi complained tiredly to his walking companion, wiping sweat from his brow onto Iruka’s shoulder. “I want to kill them. I’m not even joking. Don’t stop me, if I try.”

Iruka’s small chuckles escalated to outright laughter.

“Don’t laugh at me, either! I can’t believe you taught them for three years straight.”

“You think that’s bad, you should ask Ebisu-san about Konohamaru.”

“Ugh ,” Kakashi shuddered hard.

“From the sound of it, Konohamaru-chan just learned a lovely new swear word. I believe it was Naruto who taught it to him…”

Chapter Text

Utatane Koharu was tired, and her hands had grown weak. She was convinced that she had every right to complain about both conditions; after all, she was nearing her eighth decade of life. Arthritis had set in two decades back, so her long, thin fingers shook more often than not, as they did now as she reached for the two scrolls that had just been set before her, the small bones in her hands and the blue-purple veins standing out boldly just under the thin, transparent flesh and the senseless constellations of age spots dotting her once-unblemished porcelain skin. Sometime in the last decade, her eyes had developed a permanent squint. And the obi that she wrapped around her waist when she dressed each morning was every day being cinched a little tighter as her body discarded the softness and roundness it had offered up in former years. Every part of her seemed to be growing thinner but harder, more rigid, sharper, more angular.

Hard job, this, she thought as her hand hovered stiffly between the two scrolls that had just been deposited on the Sadaime's desk (may he rest in peace). So many difficult considerations.

A throb of pain pulsed through a few of her more arthritic joints as she popped open both scrolls and pressed her fingertips down to smooth the papers in front of her, and Homura leaned in to read over her shoulder:

On the one hand, a pardon for Hatake Kakashi, for unintentionally revealing a set of outdated ANBU passcodes while under sustained enhanced interrogation by enemy nuke nin. 

On the other hand, a warrant for his arrest for breaking Lord Third’s plenary gag order and revealing privileged state secrets to one Uzumaki Naruto regarding his parenthood and heritage.

Her pointed fingernails tapped sharply against the top of the desk as she read. Homura hummed. Raindrops cut against the glass of the windows in Hiruzen’s office, their incessant drumming and humming creating a sort of ambient tinnitus to the evening that augmenting the one that had been lodged somewhere deep in her right ear for more than three decades, if she was counting correctly. She flinched away from Homura humming to himself with condemnation as they both read and the rain outside continued building in intensity, plodding incessantly, unrelentingly, unforgivingly.

…Konoha had been built on forgiveness, and the friendship between enemies, but it was maintained by a set of rigid structures to which every individual shinobi must submit. Tobirama-Sensei had drilled that much into them a hundred times at least.

(Had tried to, anyway. Hiruzen had always had a few wild ideas of his own, for which their master had always taken him to task, with a fond and affectionate smirk as often as with a stern and commanding scowl).

Hatake Kakashi used to be… different. She had watched his progress from afar; they all had. Driven, but stringently compliant in his childhood. Strong, but more or less obedient in his youth. The kind of soldier any commander would be able to rely upon, any shinobi would be glad to call a comrade. 

In his adulthood, he had somehow grown willful. And in recent months, he had toed the line towards insubordination too many times for comfort. For one thing, Hatake had failed to capture Momochi Zabuza; what was more, he had failed to recover either Momochi’s corpse or the corpse of Momochi’s companion in order to bring them back to the Konoha labs for analysis. If that had been all, the council could have overlooked it; such things happen, opportunities are sometimes missed. 

But that was not all. When it came to his genin team, Hatake had grown downright rebellious, pushing against Hiruzen’s will, pushing for his own way when signing his team up for the exams. Bucking subtly but more and more frequently against the orders and expectations placed upon him.

“It sets a very dangerous precedent to allow such a venerated soldier free rein for his tongue,” Koharu had whispered in warning her friend; Homura had added his nod of agreement. “Especially Sakumo’s son —”

“That will do, my dear Koharu-san,” Hiruzen told her with an affectionate, indulgent smile. “Thank you for your counsel.”

(Hiruzen, bless his dear, departed soul, had always been a little indulgent toward his troops. Too indulgent, in many cases. Almost sentimental).

And then there was the matter of Hatake’s students. The jinchūriki of the Kyuubi, the last of the Uchiha, and the civilian girl whose chakra control was reportedly the best in a generation. Together, they had a potential unparalleled since the days of Hiruzen’s own team of genin, who had evolved into the Legendary Sannin. If any one of them were to lean towards Hatake’s divergent ideas, incline toward his increasingly headstrong path…

“Do you have eyes on Hatake, Hiruzen-sama?” Koharu had asked.

Hiruzen had merely chuckled at her, running a kunai-callused fingertip down the side of his crystal ball. “Of course,” he had reassured her. “ My dear Koharu-san, I have eyes on everyone.”

“…But who knows what he’s teaching them?” Homura had asked Hiruzen a month or so before the Sandaime’s untimely death, half as a rhetorical question, half as a way of imploring him: DO something about it, Hiruzen, before it grows too late.

Which was bound to happen. Shinobi with divergent ideas, left unattended, always introduced rot and chaos. Look what had happened with the Uchiha, Koharu had wanted to add after Homura had finished speaking. Appoint ANBU personnel to listen in on their trainings, and monitor their leisure activities, and report back to the Council, she had urged.

Hiruzen had simply chuckled again, a grating sound which always filled Koharu with an unpleasant feeling like she wanted to strike someone when it was directed at her.

Leaving Team Seven unsupervised was foolhardy, to say the least. Hatake Kakashi held the fate of so many in the palm of his hand. It could jeopardize the safety not just of the Village, but of all of Kuni no Hi, perhaps of the entire world, if even one of Hatake’s students were to go rogue —

“A decision must be made before the appointment of the Godaime Hokage,” Homura reminded her, the obvious urgency in his low tone bringing her suddenly back to the present moment, and the rain that was now pounding against the windows, and her interim seat next to him at the Hokage’s desk.

“I’m perfectly aware of that,” Koharu returned without any emotional inflection whatsoever.

Koharu had sometimes been accused of being a cold-hearted and unfeeling person. The truth was, there was a world of difference between being cold-hearted and uncaring, and being cold-blooded and rational. And she was one of the few shinobi in this village who was always prepared to be truly, pragmatically rational. She was one of the few who had been taught how to assess a threat, and how to exploit an advantage. How to do whatever it took to expel a deadly poison, rather than let things linger and simmer under the surface. 

She had always had a good eye for opportunities, too, though. It had been her words, her sharp-eyed advice that had eventually led to Namikaze Minato’s face being carved onto that giant stone wall. Had put the idea of creating a special secret subset of ANBU soldiers in Shimura Danzo’s head. And in the aftermath of the Kyūbi’s attack, she had also been the first to throw her weight behind Danzo’s suggestion that they deal permanently with the Uchiha before more bloodshed ensued, even though his method of doing so had felt rather like amputating a rotten limb before the gangrene could spread to the rest of the body.

(Even still, she too frequently saw Kagami’s face in her dreams, like a persistent spectre, his eyes like those of all the Uchiha, so hateful and scornful and despising—)

…It had been she who had gently guided Hiruzen’s suspicions to the goings-on at Orochimaru’s labs, once Orochimaru had outlived his own usefulness. It had been her soft, careful whispers in the ears of the Daimyō that had given Hiruzen his turn in the Hokage’s hat in the first place. 

She had never been given any credit for such feats, but she hadn’t needed it. She knew in her heart she was the only one capable of making and living with such difficult decisions. Of understanding them in the first place, of seeing and analyzing the branching, forking paths of fate before embarking solidly down on one side or the other. Nor had she never been one to overplay or underplay a hand. Careful study of the game and then cold-blooded action, and a willingness to pay the price of one’s decisions. That was what was required to keep everyone safe.

Time and time again, her caution had been proven correct. Homura had been hot-headed, once, as had Hiruzen, but both her former teammates had come in time to see the superiority of her cold-blooded, rational perspective. They always came to her for advice. Even Danzō, for that matter, though that victory had been won over the course of decades, rather than years —

And the other decision-makers in the Village would, too. Eventually. They would learn her value.

“So Kakashi told the kid who his father was,” Nara Shikaku had shrugged and growled at her that morning from his seat on the floor at the jōnin council, which she and Homura had called specifically at a time when Team Seven’s jōnin sensei would be out training with his students and unable to attend. “Is it really such a big deal? Naruto was going to find out eventually anyway.”

“Watch your tone, Nara-san; these are very grave matters, and not to be scoffed at,” Homura clicked his tongue in disagreement, eliciting a handful of nods from the assembled crowd as he sent a look Koharu’s way, seeking her approval. As always, she gave him the smallest fraction of it possible, the habit of not wanting to encourage the renewal of the flame he’d carried for her for so many years now a well-worn grove in her mental and physical habits. 

“This incident of perversely disobeying Lord Third’s edict is may seem like one small stone he has cast in opposition to direct orders,” Koharu declared after Homura had finished. “But how many has he been permitted to throw, now? Reverence for the rules and the rule of law is the foundation of stability in Konoha. Arrogance creates weakness in the system. And yet it happens even to the best of soldiers, when they are left to their own devices for too long. And for how long has Hatake been acting as a captain or a leader? When was the last time Hatake willingly submitted to the contrary orders of a superior officer…?”

It was gratifying to find a few tentative nods in response, mixed with more than a few concerned frowns.

“And how many stones can we permit him to throw, before others begin getting ideas?” Homura asked the crowd fervently, and a touch too dramatically for Koharu's taste. “Not to mention it all stacks up to paint an altogether unpleasant picture of his true loyalties,” he had added in a low whisper as the meeting adjourned, just for the two of them to hear.

She had nodded back, still surveying the restless group of jōnin before them. If only Hatake weren’t so damned popular. It always had been the popular ones who caused the most trouble. Last thing they needed were riots on their hands over the situation, however it played out. Hatake had a distinguished career. Had saved lives and taken them on behalf of the Village for more than twenty years. What was more, Hatake had not just the respect of the other jōnin, but their sympathy, too. According to the reports, Hatake had been captured and nearly killed during the recent incident with some nuke nin outside the village.

Shame he had made it back in one piece, she couldn’t help thinking. It would have been easier for all of them if he hadn’t; Koharu’s current problem would have been solved rather tidily before it ever really arose… 

Then there was the problem of whether Hatake even could be arrested at all. The so-called Copy Nin had received top marks in ninjutsu, taijutsu, and genjutsu for every year of service on record, just like his father the White Fang had, a few decades before. Not to mention that strange Sharingan eye that Hatake had somehow inherited or or borrowed or taken from a deceased teammate or dead friend or something (the details of the story were slipping her tired mind at the moment).

If she and Homura were to send a team to bring him in, and he decided to resist rather than comply, it could be… costly. 

They would have to send an entire brigade of black-ops agents, just to be on the safe side. It would need to happen at night, out of the public eye. It needed to happen sooner, rather than later. 

All this, she discussed in soft murmurs with Homura as her aching fingers hovered over the two scrolls. To little substantial effect. In all the many years they had known each other, Homura had never been able to offer a decently good discussion of pros and cons; he had always been servile, quick to agree, a people-pleasing, hai-sensei! teacher’s pet. He had transferred his inveterate, entrenched habit of obedience from Tobirama-Sensei to Hiruzen, after the former’s death, and now to her, after the latter’s. As she had known he would. He was far too easy to read, and of no real help until her position and plan of attack were already certain.

Briefly, she pondered whether calling upon Danzo would shed greater light on the situation —

That was when a guard rapped on the door, interrupting the ringing of the relentless pounding sound of the rain outside as he broke the news:

…Strangers in the Village, calling themselves the Akatsuki.

Uchiha Itachi among them, the whispers were saying.

A fight involving two Akatsuki and four Konoha jōnin on the Nara river, only this afternoon. Reported target of the attack: Uzumaki Naruto.

And despite the best efforts of the medical team who had been dispatched to the scene, Hatake Kakashi was currently in a genjutsu-induced coma, and showing no sign of waking any time soon.

“He’s not likely going to be able to put up much of a fight, in that case,” Homura remarked in a low murmur at Koharu's side, pointing with his gaze at the leftmost of the papers and scrolls on the desk in front of them.

“Ah,” she hummed in agreement, her mental deliberations also coming to a quick close and her own gaze sharpening on the same set of papers. Opportunity. “That does make things easier.”

Much easier, she echoed back to herself with deepening satisfaction as she reached for a pen. Much simpler. Thank you, Uchiha Itachi, she thought with no small measure of irony as she straightened her papers, steadied her hands, and signed the warrant for Hatake’s immediate detainment and arrest.