Chapter Text
It starts by accident.
Hatake Kakashi comes home from a mission early, for a lot of reasons, none of which are good. He decides to go to a civilian grocer, just to remind himself why he does it—to see the civilian couple kissing behind a curtain that isn’t close to thick enough to hide their amorous attentions from the world—to see some teenage boys posturing in the street, projecting their voices just a little more than they need to, so the whole world knows how strong and smart and different they are—to see the children, playing in the mud with little shinobi dolls, yelling out nonsense jutsu names as they smack them into each other. (Fire Cloud Tornado no Jutsu! Sealing Ice Snake Dragon no Jutsu!)
Total chance. In another world, nothing goes wrong on the mission, and he never drops by the civilian quarter to smell the dye, or the cured leather, or the freshly baked bread. In another world, he dies on the mission, and all of his team comes home in his place. Replay it a hundred times, and ninety-nine times out of one hundred Kakashi never comes to this street.
Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, he never sees a little girl, with outrageously pink hair sweat-slicked to her slightly-larger-than-average forehead, doing a snake seal in a brightly colored civilian garden, and then shifting into (blue, pupil-less eyes, long blonde hair, meaning—) Yamanaka Ino before falling to her knees beside a basket of artfully woven flowers, chest heaving with exertion.
And if he hadn’t seen her—
Hadn’t seen her do that transformation jutsu, even though no transformation jutsu on earth ends in a snake seal—
Hadn’t seen her do a transformation jutsu into a near-perfect replica of an actual human being on what had to be her first or second try—
Everything would have been different.
But that’s not this world.
Kakashi stops, grocery bag held loosely in his hand, and he is staggered at the ability of a seven year old child to successfully execute a flawless transformation jutsu with the wrong seals.
He is walking towards her before he can think better of it, lifting his headband to bare Obito’s sharingan eye, and he sees the academy transformation technique before him.
In the swirl of the chakra of the technique, he reads the seals that were used to perform it.
Dog.
Boar.
Ram.
Except, of course, he saw her complete it with a snake seal.
What the fuck.
She looks up at him, then, and screws up her face in suspicion.
“Who are you?” she asks, in Ino’s voice.
“I’m your friendly neighborhood jounin,” he says.
She narrows her eyes further in suspicion.
In proof, Kakashi taps his forehead protector.
“Could be fake,” she immediately responds.
“It’s not fake.”
“Could totally be fake.”
He laughs, and flashes his hands through the actual seals for the transformation technique, and shrinks down to her eye level.
He opens his mouth and is interrupted with a finger to the face.
“Hah! I knew it!”
He blinks.
Double checks that he has, indeed, transformed into Ino as well.
“You got the seals wrong! You’re a faker!”
Kakashi blinks again, and then begins to laugh. It breaks his concentration, sending him shooting up to his full height, slamming his hand against the white picket fence before him, bent over double.
He is brought back to earth by a tiny, seven-year-old hand pulling at his forehead protector.
“You don’t deserve this,” the girl is saying in Ino’s voice, jerking his whole head as she tries to pull it off of his head. “You’re a faker, I’ll tell my teacher about you.”
He bats her hands away from his forehead protector, and stands up to his full height, still chuckling, and looks down at her tiny pupil-less glare.
(She still hasn’t dropped her technique.)
(Her chakra is tight-knit, clean.)
(Her chakra is nothing but a puddle, but she is holding the technique like it’s nothing.)
(Like he would hold it.)
She stomps her feet and screws up her face, and he tries and fails to hold in another bout of laughter.
She jumps up at him, hands flailing wildly, and misses his forehead protector, but succeeds in slapping him in the face.
He tolerates it, and gives her his best eye smirk.
“You can do the transformation jutsu, can’t you, twerp?”
She frowns thunderously at him, eyes blazing, and slowly works her way through the three seals of the transformation jutsu.
Dog.
Boar.
And, of course.
Snake.
This time, he is watching her with Obito’s sharingan, and watches, in disbelief despite himself, as her chakra forms a perfect ram seal as her hands make a messy snake.
He is still standing there, slack-jawed behind his mask, as she poofs into him, sharingan eye spinning (but not actually a sharingan, thank the Sage).
It is a remarkable copy of him, and as she reaches forward to wrestle his forehead protector from his head, he snags her copy of his mask with a finger, and drags it down to reveal a very distressingly accurate copy of the bottom of his face.
She doesn’t notice because he is a jounin.
(And also she has just, really horrible situational awareness.)
“Hah!” she crows in his voice, jumping up and down in excitement, his forehead protector clutched in her hand.
It’s a really a very uncomfortable experience, watching a child do a weird victory dance with your body.
Kakashi does not recommend it.
While she’s distracted, he unties her copy of his forehead protector from her head, swaps it with the one she’s swinging around in a blur of motion, and then ties his own forehead protector back around his head.
It takes him backing away from the fence for her to realize what he’s done.
She looks at the forehead protector in her hand, her mouth hanging open stupidly as she swats at the top of her head with the other hand, and then turns to face him, outraged.
He grins, and continues backing away.
“Hey!” she shouts, running towards the fence and then trying and failing to jump over it, falling straight on her face.
(His face.)
He barks out a laugh, and she makes a strangled, angry noise at the dirt.
He waits for her to get back up on her knees, with a yelled “That’s mine,” (which, hah, no) and a “Give that back!” before giving her a cheerful wave, and body-flickering away.
He is on the roof of a neighboring house and watches as her mother opens the door, and frowns at the ruckus the girl is making, yelling at empty air for him to get his gross, ugly, stinky butt back here.
“Sakura, what—” then her eyes fall on Sakura-Kakashi, and the faint smile on her lips dies a rapid and tragic death. “Who are you?” she says, her voice as low and dangerous as a civilian’s voice is capable of getting, glancing at the knocked over basket of flowers in his garden.
Sakura flinches in his skin.
“It’s me, Mom,” she says, hunching his shoulders like a scolded child, which, he supposes, she is.
“Sakura? Is that you?”
It takes Sakura a second to understand that she is still transformed, and then she nods, guiltily.
“Stop that at once.”
Sakura hesitates.
Like.
Like she didn’t bother to learn how to break the technique.
What the fuuuck.
“Um.”
“Sakura,” her mother repeats.
Sakura hunches down a little more and hesitantly goes through the three seals of the transformation technique.
Kakashi’s sharingan is still revealed, and he can confirm that watching someone make a snake with their fingers while their chakra makes a ram is still a truly bizarre experience. It doesn’t get any less weird the second time.
She shrinks back into her normal form, but she has notably not dropped the transformation technique.
She is simply using it to transform back into her own form.
He can still see the swirling chakra of the transformation technique around her with Obito’s sharingan.
“I was scared someone had taken you, Sakura, you really scared me.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
He laughs under his breath, and shakes his head as Sakura slinks towards her mother.
She is a civilian child.
Loud-mouthed and obnoxious.
Nothing more than a puddle of chakra.
She will never be able to use an A-rank jutsu, maybe one B-rank jutsu a fight.
Even liberal use of C rank jutsus would leave her incapacitated at her enemy’s feet in any fight of real length.
She will have to fight her entire career on D-rank jutsus.
Nothing going in her favor but enough chakra control to mentally form a seal while physically making another.
Bizarre, yes.
But useful?
Well.
Who knows?
But Kakashi would very much like to find out.
As Kakashi arrives at his apartment, and, as he realizes he forgot his groceries in the middle of the street in front of the girl (Sakura, apparently)’s house, he recalls his father.
Hero of the third shinobi war, held in the same esteem as the sannin.
Civilian born, with nothing but a puddle of chakra.
Maybe the techniques won’t take with Sakura, but.
It’s a place to start.
His father had always wanted a proper apprentice.
(He had wanted Kakashi to be that apprentice—)
(But Kakashi was born with a brain for memorizing techniques, an ocean of chakra and no patience for honing the academy three into what his father made of them.)
Really, it’s the least Kakashi can do.
The next day finds Kakashi leaning against the wall of the outer fence of the academy grounds, porn out, but attention on the grounds before him.
Sakura doesn’t notice him, but some of the other children do.
Shinobi children, mostly.
The Nara boy, in particular, keeps glancing at him out of the corner of his eye.
Naruto doesn’t.
Kakashi takes a deep, shuddering breath, tries to put Naruto out of his mind.
Focuses on the little pink kunoichi-to-be.
She is really—
Quite horrible.
Her stance is perfect.
Her hold on the kunai is perfect.
Her aim is just—
Atrocious.
Before the turn got around to her, she had been proudly spouting the exact right way to do it, how you have to hold your kunai like this and have your stance like this, and she had been 100 percent right.
However, as all ninja eventually learn—
Knowing and doing are different things.
Now she’s staring at her feet, color high in her cheeks, being comforted by Ino.
Looking at Ino again, now, Kakashi is struck by how accurate Sakura’s rendition of her was.
He’d think she got it so right because of how close they seem to be, but she had his face correct down to the mole on his chin, so.
Nope.
It’s as she’s wiping at her eyes and leaning her face into Ino that she sees him.
Her eyes widen, and her face gets red all the way up to her pink hairline as she sputters at the sight of him.
She points, chattering at Ino.
“I told you!” Kakashi hears her yell. “Look, it’s the faker I was telling you about!”
Ino’s gaze drifts to him.
She’d been one of the shinobi children that had noticed him.
She’d been one of the shinobi children who had recognized him.
“I’m going to go—”
“Sakura, wait—”
Sakura doesn’t wait, racing over to him to shove her finger in his face.
Her arms are just long enough to almost jam it into his nose.
He quirks his visible eyebrow.
“Are you hiding your weird gross eye so that I won’t recognize you? I’m not stupid, I know it’s you.”
His…
Weird gross eye?
That’s not a way he’s ever had Obito’s sharingan referred to before.
“Sakura, Sakura,” Ino is calling out, running behind her.
(The fact she wasn’t able to outrun Sakura’s clumsy steps isn’t a great sign for her future as a ninja, but the Yamanakas have never really been known for their physical prowess.)
(Also, y’know. She’s seven.)
She grabs Sakura back from Kakashi, bowing to him with a strained smile as she spins Sakura away from him and Sakura squawks “Ino, what—”
“That’s Hatake Kakashi,” Ino says in a hushed whisper he can hear just—
Every word of.
“Uhh,” Sakura says, glancing back at him and sticking her tongue out at him because she is seven years old.
He resists returning the favor, not because he is a twenty one year old man, but because he is wearing a mask, and he does not want to have to smell spit on his mask for the rest of the day.
Ino jerks Sakura back around, presses their cheeks together so Sakura can’t make faces at Kakashi anymore.
“He’s a jounin!”
“Noo,” Sakura says. “He can’t even do the transformation technique right, that’s impossible.”
There is a moment of silence in which Ino frowns, and then separates from Sakura enough to glance back at him.
In her eyes, he can see her wondering.
Did Kakashi actually screw up one of the academy three?
He’s hurt.
Really.
Deeply, truly.
Ino smushes her cheek back against Sakura’s again.
“I’m pretty sure if he did, he was just messing with you. Kakashi’s the worst.”
Kakashi holds back a snort.
Wow.
Seven-year-olds.
Ino pauses.
She glances back at him.
He quirks his eyebrow up pointedly.
“I mean, you’re great. Dad has no bad things to say about you.”
This time, he actually laughs.
He fondly remembers Inoichi’s face when he showed up two hours late for his last debrief.
Good times.
“I have bad things to say about you,” Sakura offers. They have turned back to him. “I think you’re stupid, and gross.”
Ino’s face as Sakura proudly declares her contempt for him is priceless.
He is a bit sad he doesn’t have Obito’s sharingan out to remember this moment forever.
Behind the two children, Iruka jogs up, leaving Mizuki to watch the rest of the children, his face twisted with the fear of a chuunin instructor who has realized his children are being obnoxious at a jounin.
(It’s a very specific and frequently realized fear.)
“Sakura, Ino—” he scolds, color high in his cheeks as he plants a hand on both Sakura’s and Ino’s shoulders and pulls them back from him a bit. Apparently he heard Sakura’s proud declaration of contempt, and Kakashi has to hold back a chuckle. “Kakashi-senpai, I’m so sorry,” he says, a forced smile on his lips. “I was distracted by the other kids but that—”
“Iruka, don’t worry about it.” Iruka doesn’t relax. “It’s okay if you teach your students that I’m stupid and gross. I’m not judging.”
Iruka’s breath rushes out of him in a comically loud whoosh.
“Senpai,” he scolds, as Kakashi loses his battle with his own mirth.
He doubles down, and Sakura takes the opportunity to make an attempt on his forehead protector.
“Sakura!” Ino and Iruka shout, scandalized.
They’re so scandalized, in fact, that Kakashi lets her take it.
“Look, look!” Sakura proudly declares, waving it above her head. “He doesn’t deserve it. He’s a bad ninja.”
Thankfully, this time Kakashi has Obito’s sharingan out, so he can forever immortalize the horror on Ino and Iruka’s faces as Sakura waves his forehead protector over her head.
“Sakura,” Iruka says with gritted teeth. “Give Kakashi-senpai back his forehead protector.”
Ino is desperately pulling at Sakura’s arm, but Sakura is refusing to budge.
“But he can’t even do the transformation technique correctly! I bet he hasn’t even graduated from the academy!”
“Sakura,” Iruka repeats, enunciating each syllable of her name separately.
Sakura stops waving his forehead protector, and slumps a little.
“He did it wrong, though, I swear.”
Iruka sighs.
“How would you know? We haven’t started covering the academy three yet. That’s third year material.”
Kakashi blinks.
It—
It is.
Sakura is a second year student.
He’s getting dull—if he was this unobservant in the field, it would have gotten him killed.
He turns to look down at Sakura, and she’s slumped, his forehead protector hanging loosely in one hand.
“Um,” she says. “I read it in the textbook?”
“It’s not in the textbook,” Iruka says softly, hand on her shoulder.
“The library?” she says, voice smaller.
“Sakura.”
Kakashi raises his gaze from Sakura, and sees Mizuki looking in their direction. Mizuki, the career chuunin, who has never learned to hide fear in his gaze.
Dull, dull, he curses himself.
Sakura had been so sure of her incorrect seals. Like she’d read it somewhere. And he’d just seen her rattle off kunai technique word for word from her textbook.
So.
Question:
Where had she learned those incorrect seals?
“Mizuki gave them to me. Don’t be mad,” she continues. “He said that as a civilian child, I needed some help to keep up with my classmates, and he would help by—by giving me scrolls for the academy three. He said I’d have to practice a lot, even though they’d be hard at first. He told me to keep it a secret, so that the other students wouldn’t get—” she hiccupped “—jealous.”
Iruka frowns. He glances back at Mizuki, where Mizuki’s still standing among the increasingly unruly children, and Mizuki masks his fear with a confused smile.
“Sakura, Mizuki wouldn’t do that. The academy three can be very dangerous to be used unsupervised. Sakura, I realize—”
Iruka’s eyes catch Kakashi’s spinning sharingan, and he falls silent as Kakashi’s genjutsu speaks to him.
She’s telling the truth.
Iruka’s face blanches in surprise.
Apologize.
Iruka looks back down at where Sakura is shaking in silent tears.
“I—I—” she chokes out.
Iruka’s eyes widen, and he gets down on his knees in front of her, and takes her hands in his, pulling them away from her blotchy face.
“I’m sorry. You were right, I believe you.” He glances up at Kakashi—
Ask her where the scrolls are, and bring them to me, Kakashi instructs.
“Where are the scrolls he gave you?”
Kakashi lets his gaze wander to the other seven year old as Sakura tells Iruka where her scrolls are, and he finds her glaring bloody murder at Mizuki, her lips curled away from her teeth in tiny infant rage.
Well.
Ino understands what happened, then. The apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree.
She’s gonna need to work on letting it show on her face, though.
He plants his hand on her hair, and ruffles it. She shakes his hand away from her hair, hands rising to her hair to try and push it back into some semblance of order. When their gazes meet, he smiles under his mask, a manic, bloodthirsty smile.
He knows from practical experience you can recognize it from his eyes.
Some of the manic bloodthirst twisted up in Ino’s expression fades.
He pats her head again, which she swats away, and turns his attention back to Iruka.
Don’t open them, Kakashi instructs a moment before Iruka body-flickers away.
Iruka’s eyes widen, and then he vanishes in a puff of leaves.
Beneath him, Ino rushes to Sakura, and gathers her up in a tight hug.
“You believe me, right, Ino? I’m sorry for not telling you, it was just—he said. He said—”
“Yeah, totally,” Ino says, meeting Kakashi’s eyes above Sakura’s head. He nods to her, and gives her his best comforting eye smile.
A moment later, and Iruka has returned in a second puff of leaves, three scrolls in his hands. Standing among the children who have at this point basically entirely given up on their kunai practice to stare towards Kakashi’s group, Mizuki’s face pales. Their eyes meet, and Kakashi gives Mizuki his best eye smile.
Leave and die, a genjutsu copy of him whispers in Mizuki’s ear.
Mizuki jerks, and Kakashi gives him one last eye smile before turning back to Iruka.
He examines the scrolls in Iruka’s hands through Obito’s sharingan, and finds a jutsu wound through the paper of each scroll. It’s an information protection jutsu, designed to modify the contents of the scroll if anyone but a select individual sees it.
It is a common sight on jutsu scrolls.
It has no business on scrolls for the academy three.
Ask her which is which, Kakashi instructs Iruka.
Iruka frowns briefly down at the three identical scrolls before doing as requested.
“Um,” Sakura says, disentangling herself from Ino, and leaning over them. After a moment she nods, and taps the scrolls in order, from top to bottom, “clone, replacement, transformation.” When Iruka stares blankly at her, she looks away. “I could only get transformation to work. I was going to ask Mizuki about the other two, because no matter what I did, I couldn’t get them to work.”
Yes, this was likely because they all had incorrect seals.
(He decides to temporarily set aside the fact Sakura had been able to tell the three scrolls apart, even though he had only been able to distinguish them by the subtle color gradations in the jutsus tied around them.)
Have her open the transformation scroll, then close your eyes before she does.
Iruka frowns, but then obeys.
“Okay?” She takes the scroll from the pile, and glances nervously around her.
She opens the scroll, and Kakashi immediately closes his eyes, and covers Ino’s.
“Hey!” Ino squawks.
“Yeah, see! This has—”
Kakashi opens his eyes, and focuses Obito’s sharingan on the fully unrolled scroll.
In the moment his eyes fall upon the words they begin to change. Some subtly (those describing the shape and texture of the chakra, the dismissive tone of the work), some more boldly (the seal sequence, the lack of instructions on how to break the technique, the introductory paragraph that proclaims it the most trivial of techniques that only the most incompetent students couldn’t master on the order of hours).
Thankfully, Kakashi has Obito’s sharingan and therefore perfect recall.
He was able to see, very clearly, the sequence as it was originally printed:
Dog.
Boar.
Snake.
He removes his hand from Ino’s eyes, and she slaps at his hand as it leaves.
Which, you know.
Fair.
“Wait,” Sakura says. “Wait, it changed, I swear, tell me you saw it.”
Tell her you saw it, Kakashi instructs.
“Of course I saw it,” Iruka responds.
Dog, boar, snake.
Iruka’s eyes widen.
“Dog, boar, snake,” he repeats.
Sakura relaxes. She glanced at Ino.
“You saw it too, right, Ino?”
Ino, without a trace of hesitation, nods.
“Yeah, of course, Sakura! Definitely.”
Sakura settles some more.
Then her brow furrows.
“Is this. Is this the right technique? This. This was the faker’s seals.” She looks down at the forehead protector now pinched under her armpit, and then up at Kakashi.
Kakashi smiles at her.
“I told you,” he taunts, voice lilted in an obnoxious sing-song, and irritation burns through the guilt that had been forming in her eyes.
She whips out his forehead protector, and then throws it at the ground at his feet. Kakashi snorts out a laugh, and flicks it up to his hands with a twitch of his toes.
“Sakura!” Iruka repeats, scandalized.
“I still don’t think he’s a real ninja,” she grumbles under her breath. “How do we know it’s not a henge.”
Still chuckling, Kakashi whips the dirt off his forehead protector by slapping it against his pants a couple times, and then ties it back onto his head.
It’s fine, Kakashi tells Iruka.
Iruka makes a face, but quickly smooths his expression.
Ask her if Mizuki demonstrated the techniques to her.
“Uh, only transformation,” Sakura says. “He said it was the easiest, so I should start with it.”
There is a flash of fury on Iruka’s face before he smooths it away.
The transformation technique is, of course, the hardest of the academy three. Clones are the easiest to get at least something, and replacement is only a little harder. Transformation is hard enough it should be a full rank above them. Or rather, the other two are so easy they should be a full rank below transformation, if a rank existed below E.
Did the seals match?
“Yeah!” Sakura says. “Actually, wait, that doesn’t make sense. If it was wrong, how did he do it? If it was wrong, how did I do it?”
Iruka blinks, and Ino’s mouth falls open.
“You did the transformation technique, Sakura?” Ino says, grabbing Sakura’s arm, and shaking it.
Sakura nods, a little shyly.
“Show me show me!”
Iruka opens his mouth, and Kakashi cuts him off with a quick shake of his head.
There is something purposeful about the jerks of Ino’s hands on Sakura’s arm, jerking her out of, perhaps, realizing that the seals she is about to use are wrong, and shouldn’t work.
Kakashi thinks maybe he’s overthinking it until Ino’s eyes catch his, and her smile slips from her face.
He smiles. The apple really did not fall far from the tree. If only Kakashi had known Inoichi when he was an adorable academy student. That would have been something to see.
Ino takes the scroll from Sakura to free her hands, rerolls it and hands it back to Iruka as Sakura slowly works her way through her three incorrect seals, and once again, Kakashi watches as her chakra forms ram but her body forms snake. She poofs into a perfect copy of Ino, and turns to her with a grin.
Ino, however, is staring at Sakura in open-mouthed shock.
“Did I—Did I get it wrong?”
Sakura’s smile falters.
“No no no,” Ino interrupts, forcing her face into a smile. She grabs Sakura’s hands in her own. “It’s great, you’re great! This is so cool! Just wait until I learn, and then we can switch!”
Sakura smiles like the sun.
When Sakura looks to Iruka for confirmation of her greatness, Ino’s eyes turn to Kakashi, understanding shining in those pupil-less eyes, as well as a little bit of possessiveness.
I found her first, Ino’s eyes say. She’s mine.
That is altogether too strategic (not to mention too old-fashioned) thinking for a seven year old, so he ruffles her hair until she stops and squeals, batting at his hand, trying to escape.
“Hey!” Sakura shouts, when she realizes what’s happening. “Stop that!” She punches his stomach. “Stop! Pervert! Sensei, help, he’s bullying Ino!”
Kakashi stops, lifting his hands into the air to proclaim his own innocence. Sakura glares daggers at him, narrowing her eyes meaningfully.
She grabs Ino, and pulls Ino back away from Kakashi, never letting her eyes leave his.
Tell Sakura to remove her jutsu, and go back to their classmates.
Iruka does, and watches in a sort of muted disbelief as Sakura goes through the transformation technique again, instead of canceling it like a normal human being.
As they leave, their eyes meet again.
“Give me the scrolls,” Kakashi says.
Iruka gives him the scrolls.
“What’s going on?” Iruka asks.
“Mizuki seems to be playing ‘gaslight the civilian children’. Don’t worry, Iruka, I’m sure I can teach him the error of his ways.”
Kakashi smiles at Iruka, and Iruka turns a little green. Whoops. Kakashi must have accidentally smiled his anbu smile.
“But—how could she do it? Mizuki could use the wrong seal, because he’s familiar enough with the technique to drop seals.”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Kakashi says airily, and Iruka frowns, his face making it clear he thinks Kakashi knows something he isn’t saying.
That’s the trick, though.
He really has no idea.
“Tell them that Mizuki got called away on an emergency mission,” Kakashi says, and then body-flickers to Mizuki, and then away with him, leaving an illusion of Mizuki receiving a messenger hawk with a scroll and then leaving without a word.
Mizuki struggles, briefly, before he meets the bare fury in Kakashi’s gaze, and instead pisses himself in fear.
So.
If Kakashi is being honest.
He really had not expected to be standing in front of the Hokage today.
Honestly, even after dragging Mizuki kicking and screaming into T&I, he hadn’t expected the Hokage to care. Maybe Nara Shikaku at worst, but the Hokage?
“I hear a seven-year-old stole your forehead protector today, Kakashi-kun,” the Hokage says with a smirk twisting his lips. “You sure you’re not slipping? I can demote you if you need it, you know.”
The Hokage snorts, and then bursts into full on laughter.
Now—
Kakashi is pretty sure people who are over sixty years old aren’t allowed to have senses of humor anymore.
Look at Mitokado, Utatane and Danzou.
He’s never seen them so much as smile.
This is bullshit.
Kakashi wants a refund.
Kakashi waits as the Hokage calms himself.
There is a part of him, the part of him that had wanted to stick his tongue straight back out at Sakura when she stuck hers out at him, that wants to say something like—
I let her take it.
But he fully understands that this would not help his situation in the least.
He’s been getting knowing smirks from every anbu and jounin he’s passed all day today.
You’d think that T&I would be better at keeping secrets, given it’s their damn job.
But apparently, nope!
Slowly, the mirth drips away from the Hokage’s face, and finally, the Hokage takes a deep breath.
“Tell me what happened, Kakashi-kun.”
Kakashi nods, and does just that. He tells the Hokage about meeting Sakura, from seeing her successfully complete a transformation jutsu with incorrect seals to finding the scrolls Mizuki had given Sakura. He finishes by telling the Hokage what they had learned in T&I: Mizuki’s systematic abuse of students he viewed as lesser—either coming from civilian families, from low-ranking shinobi clans, or simply students he didn’t like, because they spoke back to him or he just hated them on principle. His current victims were Sakura and Naruto, although the shape of his abuse differed between the two.
The Hokage takes his hat from his head, and sighs a long, sad sigh.
“How many students did we lose?”
“T&I estimated it at about fifty-one over the course of the last seven years,” Kakashi says.
The Hokage leans his head into his hand, and sighs again.
“How did I miss this?”
Iruka missed it, and he’d been standing right next to the fucker, so Kakashi is pretty sure the Hokage is pretty close to the back of the line, as far as responsibility for this is concerned. But the question isn’t really directed at him, so he keeps his mouth shut.
“Thank you for catching this, Kakashi-kun.”
The Hokage’s eyes are deep and earnest, so Kakashi nods.
“Of course, sir.”
There is a moment of silence between them before the Hokage puts his hat back onto his head.
“You’re interested in the girl?”
“Haruno Sakura,” Kakashi corrects.
The Hokage acknowledges the correction with a nod of his head.
“Yes,” Kakashi said.
“You?” the Hokage asks. “You want a student?”
Kakashi pauses.
Want is a strong word.
But—
He thinks of Rin, control and healing and barely a puddle of chakra—trying to be Tsunade, even though Tsunade had Senju blood in her veins and the chakra pool to match it.
He thinks of Rin, looking into his eyes as she died.
Maybe, if someone had taught her differently, she could have lived.
“Want is a strong word.”
The Hokage raises an eyebrow.
He thinks of his father, career genin for twenty years before he could find the right way to use his chakra.
How the whispers after he saved his team were cold and disdainful—
This is what happens when you let career genin start thinking they’re somebody.
“If I don’t train her, I worry that no one would. I think I know what she needs to be strong.”
The eyebrow remains raised.
He thinks of Sakura, shaking with tears when she realized how Mizuki had lied to her, as part of her realized he had done it for no other purpose than to hurt her.
He thinks of the excitement in his chest when he had seen her making one seal in her chakra and a different seal with her hands.
Excitement like he hadn’t felt in years.
That feeling of—
If she could do that.
What else could she do?
If he could teach her—
What could she become?
He feels his lips pull up in a smile that is totally unprofessional, too wide and too toothy for a meeting with the Hokage.
“I think she could be the strongest ninja in a generation.”
The Hokage smiles back, a mirror of unprofessional mania.
The feeling that you might be shaping the ninjas that would define a generation.
For a moment, he sees how the Hokage must have smiled when he realized that he had the three greatest ninja of a generation in his three genin.
Apprenticeship is a fairly archaic concept. It is rife with injustice, nepotism, and abuse. Apprenticeship of non-clan children moreso. Genin are already adults, by ninja law, but academy students are children.
Before the Hokage’s reforms, which introduced the academy, the only way to became a genin was through apprenticeship, and the results were as varied as they were horrible. Clan secrets stolen, children tortured, and then just plain old neglect and abuse. Jounin cannot, as a general rule, be trusted with the care of children.
Now, in this modern world, you need direct approval of the Hokage, consent of the child’s guardians, and consent of the child themself.
Kakashi has two of the three.
The easy two, of course.
In order:
Approval of the Hokage.
Approval of the Haruno family.
Now, for the hard one.
Approval of Sakura herself.
“You!” Sakura hisses when she catches sight of him standing in the shadow of the tree outside the academy gates.
(Her situational awareness is getting better!)
(Progress!)
“Yo!” Kakashi greets brightly, and her scowl deepens.
“Let’s go, Ino,” Sakura says, turning away from Kakashi, trying to drag Ino along behind her.
“Um,” Ino says. “Maybe we should listen to him?”
He can feel Sakura’s irritation from here.
She glowers at Ino, who is slowly pulling her towards Kakashi.
He squats down to their level as they approach, and she frowns up at him.
“You’re still gross and I hate you,” she says, ignoring Ino’s elbows to her side.
Kakashi laughs to himself.
“I want to train you,” Kakashi says, because if this was going to happen in any way, it needs to happen honestly. At Sakura’s side, Ino’s mouth falls open, while Sakura just looks totally mystified. “What you did, when you used the transformation jutsu, despite getting your seals wrong, I’ve never seen that before.” He pulls his forehead protector up, revealing Obito’s sharingan. “And believe me, I’ve seen a lot. I want to see what you could do, given the training you deserve. You could be as strong as the sannin—you could be stronger, I’m sure of it. I’ll make sure of it, I promise you.”
Sakura stares at him, open-mouthed. The confusion in her gaze grows and grows because, well—he’s pretty sure no one has ever told Sakura she could be a ninja before.
Not to mention a good ninja.
“Sakura,” Ino says, pulling at her arm.
Sakura turns to Ino, and Ino continues.
“You want to be the strongest kunoichi ever, right?”
Slowly, Sakura nods, while Kakashi swallows his surprise.
“To do that, you need a good teacher.”
“But Inooo,” Sakura says, “he’s the worst. He’s not even a real ninja!”
Kakashi barely holds back a snort.
Ino shakes Sakura a little.
“He is. He’s one of the strongest jounin in Konoha, and he’s never taken another student.”
While all of those things are true, Kakashi really doesn’t like that a seven year old knows about them. He maybe needs to talk to Inoichi about what he has been telling his daughter.
Slowly, Sakura turns back to him, and glowers up at him.
“Prove it,” she says mulishly.
Sakura, Ino whines at her side, but Sakura refuses to be moved.
There are a lot of ways to impress a civilian.
Even more ways to impress a child.
Instead, Kakashi leans down, and picks up a leaf from the ground.
“In five seconds, I want you to punch me,” he says.
A mean little smile quirks at the corner of Sakura’s lips.
“Okay,” she says, cracking her knuckles.
(Seven year olds should not know how to crack their knuckles.)
He flicks the leaf into the air beside him, and performs three sealless jutsus in rapid succession:
Clone.
Transformation.
Replacement.
His dad could do it in the blink of an eye. It takes Kakashi a good two seconds.
It’s thankfully still enough to wow a seven year old.
When Sakura punches him, her punch goes straight through him, dispelling his clone. She spends a moment staring at where he’d been before darting her gaze down to the leaf that had been slowly falling through his clone, and then snapping her gaze over to where he is slowly floating down beside her, transformed into the leaf he had tossed to the side.
He un-transforms, and lands lightly on the ground.
“This is the Hidden in the Leaves Technique. It was one of my father’s two signature techniques. I can teach it to you.”
Sakura leans down, picks up the leaf he switched places with, and rubs her fingers over its surface, as if she can feel the faint traces of his chakra his technique left on it.
Ino, by Sakura’s side, is gaping at him.
“Okay,” Sakura says. “If you teach me how to do that, I’ll be your student.”
He smiles at her ridiculous conditional approval.
And so, for the first time in his life, Kakashi gains a student.