Chapter Text
Sasuke
120A.F. Spring 1.17 Afternoon
Sasuke stomped off the training field, furious beyond belief. They couldn’t do this to him! No, he wasn’t a prodigy, like Itachi. No, he wasn’t the Uchiha heir, like Itachi. No, he wasn’t able to use his sharingan yet, like Itachi—but! But that wasn’t fair! Itachi got to fight in a war when he was Sasuke’s age, of course he was stronger. But Sasuke was still an Uchiha, wasn’t he? Part of the main family, no less. They couldn’t do this to him, saddle him with dead last Naruto, some pink-haired civilian-born girl, and most especially definitely not with this white-haired, porn-reading, lazy clanless no-name joke of a jounin sensei.
He was never going to catch up to Itachi like this!
“Oh, but they can,” a voice sing-songed inside Sasuke’s mind. “You knew this was going to happen all along.” The voice sounded a lot like his cousin Fujio, which was dumb because Fujio was just a paper chuunin, so it wasn’t like he knew anything anyway. He’d babysat Sasuke once when Itachi and Shisui were busy with something that Sasuke was pretty sure involved ANBU—because of course his brother would have to be ANBU, too, on top of everything—and told Sasuke he should just give up on being a shinobi while he still had time. “The village already has Itachi,” he’d said. “It doesn’t need you too.” His mama found him, later, just angry and definitely not crying. Fujio hadn’t been allowed to babysit him again. Sasuke hopes he got in trouble.
Probably not, though. The world was monstrously unfair. Ditzy Ino, lazy Shikamaru, and slow fat Chouji got Sarutobi Asuma, after all, the Hokage’s own son. Maybe it’s because they’re all the heirs to their clans, but still. Sasuke beat out all of them in the Academy rankings! And Kiba was a spare too, just like Sasuke, but somehow he got a genjutsu specialist—Sasuke was the one who was going to be good at genjutsu! Just as soon as he could finally activate his sharingan.
The Uchiha compound guards didn’t say anything when he passed them, but they must have sent word ahead to the main house somehow because his mama opened the door before he even got a chance.
“Oh, Sasuke-chan, I’m so sorry,” she said. Sasuke tried to dodge her hug, but his mama had been a jounin before she retired to the Military Police.
“Can’t you fix it?” Surely her and father would have some sway over jounin-sensei assignments. Otherwise, what was the point of being The Uchiha?
She shook her head. “Jounin-sensei have the final word on whether they accept a team or not, love. I’m so sorry. But it’ll be alright, the Academy genin corps—”
Sasuke pushed out of her arms and stared at his mother, vibrating with shock. She couldn’t possibly be implying that—she just blinked at him.
“Sasuke-chan... you didn’t fail your genin-test?”
And that was the cherry on the top of the worst day of his life.
Kakashi
120A.F. Spring 1.17 Evening
Itachi found him trying to bury his sorrows under a pile of smut and the kitchen table he’d scavenged from the remains of Minato-sensei and Kushina-nee’s apartment after the Kyuubi attack. He should’ve hidden at Gai’s place. That would have thrown them off, and he knew for a fact that the big lug was out of the village with his little monsters. Or maybe the ANBU barracks. No one slept in those T&I escapees masquerading as “beds” who didn’t have to.
“Taichou.”
Kakashi had never met anyone able to pack so much nuance of meaning into so few words.
“Itachi.”
Hey, look, he could play that game too. In fact, he invented that game. He taught Itachi that game. Well. That might be going a bit far.
“You told my brother that the Hokage explicitly ordered you to accept him as a student.”
“Yup.” Kakashi popped the P as obnoxiously as he could. “And Naruto. And Sakura. There really wasn’t any point giving them a test.”
Itachi didn’t sigh, but Kakashi could tell he wanted to. You had to take your joys in life where you could find them. Annoyance was a renewable resource.
“You are aware that the children believe you to be, in Sasuke’s words, ‘barely a jounin.’”
Kakashi giggled. See above. Wait.
“’The children’?”
“My mother invited Sakura-chan and Naruto-kun over for dinner, as Sasuke’s new team members.”
“Adorable.”
Itachi did sigh this time. Kakashi tilted his head slightly to see if he’d achieved “Itachi pinching the bridge of his nose in annoyance” status. Not yet. Damn, the kid must be developing an immunity.
“You are aware that most ‘team dinners’ not only involve the sensei but take place at their instigation?”
“Those kids are going to need to learn not to depend on me,” Kakashi said simply. Well, that was a good bit more honest than he’d really wanted to be. Shame he couldn’t even claim drunkenness as an excuse; he’d just opened the bottle for whatever relaxation the smell could bring by association. “Better to start early.”
“What.” Itachi was starting to actually get angry, which wasn’t really something Kakashi wanted to deal with right now. He preferred his brain unscrambled, thanks. Kakashi removed Icha Icha Vol.3 from where it had been tented over his face and sat up so Itachi would know he was serious. He refused to come out from under his table, though.
“In his infinite wisdom, our beloved ANBU Commander Danzo has decreed that I shall maintain my current position as captain of Team Ro while simultaneously serving as Team 7’s jounin-sensei. We’re leaving in an hour, by the way. Tenzou should have told you.”
Itachi was silent as he absorbed this information.
“And the Lord Third?”
“Signed off,” Kakashi said. “Really, I should have assassinated him when the getting was good.”
Itachi inhaled sharply and turned to the corners of the room where the silence seals Kushina-nee taught him glowed golden, presumably checking that they were not, in fact, about to be arrested for treason. The kid had good control over his startle reflex. Anyone else would’ve been on their feet with a shout hearing their captain muse about assassinating their Kage. The Uchiha probably did secret clan training in maintaining a stoic façade. It would explain a lot, really.
“Taichou?!”
“Before your time. Tenzou or Yugao can fill you in, if you really want to know all the gory details. Or not-so-gory details, as it happens.”
Blessed silence.
“Kakashi-taichou,” Itachi started hesitantly, which wasn’t a good sign. “I think—”
“Is this about your angsty little brother or about whatever you and Shisui keep whispering about all grim-faced when you think the rest of the team’s asleep?”
“The latter, but,” Itachi folded in on himself, looking about as lost as Kakashi had ever seen him. Again, very much not a good sign. “Then...you already know.”
“No,” Kakashi said quickly. And it was true. Though he could guess. “It’s just that Shisui does grim about as naturally as dogs meow. We can talk, Itachi-kun, but not tonight. We have our mission briefing in” Kakashi referenced his internal clock “thirty-seven minutes, now, and my old man heart can only take so much stress in one day.”
Itachi graciously let him wallow in silence for another seventeen minutes.
“My brother,” Itachi said, and Kakashi threw one of his non-Icha Icha novels at him. Itachi caught it, blinked at the cover, and set it down as far away from himself as he could. “He thinks you’re a clanless shinobi assigned to them because no one expects him, Naruto-kun, and Sakura-chan to amount to much.”
“Aren’t I?”
“Taichou!” Itachi looked genuinely offended, though on Kakashi’s behalf or Sasuke’s he didn’t know. Kakashi sighed. Kids these days. So passionate.
“Calm down. Obviously they have potential. But they all need serious attitude adjustments before we can get anywhere.” Itachi opened his mouth, but Kakashi didn’t give him the chance. “I would have given them Minato-sensei’s bell test, Itachi. Can you honestly tell me that you think Sasuke would have passed?”
Itachi shut his mouth. Yeah, that’s what Kakashi thought. Naruto and Sakura presented their own problems. Sakura he wasn’t too worried about—she had to have a brain in there somewhere to rank first in tactics, theory, history, and chakra control. The play was simply to wait for her crush to fade, and Kakashi already had some D-ranks in mind to speed that process along. Hard to idolize someone when you’re both covered in sweat and stinking of shit from mucking out the Inuzuka clan kennels. And that’s before they even got started hauling the “compost material” around to Konoha’s various farms. Kakashi was almost looking forward to it. But Naruto was a much more serious matter. Kakashi knew firsthand how much easier it could be to pretend you just didn’t hear or see things when the whole village decided to hate you. But Naruto had turned that defensive obliviousness into the foundation of his personality. What an excellent way to get yourself killed. It reminded him of Gai’s father Dai, actually, but that wasn’t much of a help towards making Naruto turn his brain back on. Naruto needed plenty of one-on-one attention to even begin to right the ship. Which brought Kakashi right back around to Sasuke.
“The Hatake—”
“—aren’t a clan anymore.” The Third made that plenty clear to him when the village repossessed the Hatake estate “for the war effort.” Just one more entry on a long list of things that Kakashi didn’t let himself think about for too long. “And besides, one of the long list of things they need to learn is to pay attention to the person, not the name.”
Itachi nodded slowly. His expression was far, far, far too intense for one of the random thoughts that zinged around Kakashi’s brain, mind clearly on what Kakashi was desperately hoping wasn’t a brewing Uchiha coup. At least their mission tonight was as straightforward as Team Ro’s missions ever got, staging a bandit raid on a merchant caravan in order to retrieve intel from a deep cover operative. Kakashi had a feeling the next few weeks were going to be troublesome indeed. Look, he was already turning into a Nara.