Chapter Text
It was raining on the day Kakashi was called into the Hokage’s office. Raining and wet and miserable, and Hiruzen was determined to have them walk back out in the weather, his ANBU detail trailing at a distance. It was, Kakashi suspected, yet another trap designed to convince him of the necessity of his new assignment, and so he was quiet as they walked. He’d already argued until his throat was sore that he wasn’t the right choice for a sensei—anyone’s sensei, let alone the traumatized Last Uchiha and his own sensei’s son—but the Sandaime was set on the matter. Further arguing would do nothing but piss them both off at this point.
It was only when they stopped on a seemingly random street that Kakashi really paid notice to his surroundings. It was the sort of place that would have looked gray and dumpy even without the rain providing a morose atmosphere. The building that stood before them should have been demolished ages ago in his personal opinion. It leaned to the right at a crooked angle, the stone exterior crumbling in places, windows busted out half the time and the ones that were still technically intact were cracked. There were no signs of life here or anywhere on the street at all, though just an alley over stood the outskirts of the Red Light District.
“This,” the Sandaime said once Kakashi had gotten a good look, “is where Naruto lives.”
Kakashi stilled.
That couldn’t be correct. He’d known Naruto was moved out of the orphanage when he was five and put into an apartment. He’d seen the apartment, even: an old-but-not-crumbling building in a not-great-but-not-awful part of town, somewhere off in the northern sector and not here, not this building that smelled of mold and decay even from halfway across the street, not this building that sat rotting in the epicenter of Konoha’s slums.
But that was seven years ago, a part of him whispered. You don’t know what’s changed since then.
They’d kept him busy with back to back ANBU missions, A-ranks and S-ranks that wore him down to the bone, with just enough time in between to rest up in the hospital, usually chakra exhausted and in blinding pain. As soon as he was able to walk, he’d be assigned to some new horror, off again without even a moment to spare to check in on Naruto.
And that was how you liked it, the vicious, twisting amalgamation of guilt and grief reminded him. It was true, though.
At first, Kakashi had wanted to keep Naruto, had bartered and begged and threatened. It hadn’t changed anything, no matter how much he’d shouted at the Hokage that this wasn’t what Minato-sensei would have wanted, that Kushina-nee would have killed any of them before letting Naruto go into an orphanage when there were still people alive who would have taken him in. It hadn’t changed anything and Kakashi was sent off on missions that required too much focus and energy for him to have anything but weariness left when he finally made it back to Konoha.
And then the guilt had set it. First it had just made him angry, seeing Naruto alone and unloved and left to cry himself to sleep as a baby. Angry that Kakashi couldn’t do anything about it, not unless he wanted to leave Konoha altogether.
(He’d thought about it more than anyone ever knew back in those first two years. How hard could it be, he’d wondered, to take care of a child while on the run? But Naruto wasn’t just any child, and Konoha would hunt them both down with a vengeance. Kakashi trusted in his own skills, but he wasn’t sure he could protect Naruto and himself from the entirety of ANBU long enough to teach Naruto how to protect himself. And that, ultimately made him abandon his plan every time.)
After the anger had burned through, though, looking at Naruto was just a constant reminder of all the things Kakashi had lost and all the things he’d failed to do. He’d kept contact to a minimum: a stuffed dog for Naruto’s third birthday left on the boy’s pillow, scoping out the apartment when the Sandaime said Naruto was going to live on his own, and a quick check-in a month after that to make sure Naruto was doing okay.
I should have done more, Kakashi told himself, not for the first time, as he looked at Naruto’s current living conditions.
The Hokage didn’t bother showing Kakashi Naruto’s apartment on the inside—he must have realized that just a glance at the place was enough.
“Naruto needs you,” he said, and that was fucking rich coming from the man who’d blocked all of Kakashi’s attempts to take care of the boy back at the beginning. “And he’s not the only one.”
Kakashi had nothing left to say to the Hokage. Or at least, nothing that wouldn’t count as treason. Instead of responding, he body-flickered away.
I should have done more, he’d thought. But he couldn’t change the past no matter how much he wished he could. Still…I can do more now.
There were still 3 days before teams were officially assigned, and Kakashi was going to make the most of that opportunity to watch his new students and get a feel for them. If he was going to be their sensei—and he was, there was no way out for him even if he’d wanted it and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted out anymore anyway—then he was going to do it right. He’d already fucked up with Naruto once (or a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times, if you wanted to count every mistake individually).
He was going to do his damnedest to make sure he didn’t fuck up like that again. Even if it killed him.
Which meant observing all his students so he knew what he was getting into beforehand, and that meant a few discreet home visits were needed.
The inside of Naruto’s apartment was both better and worse than he’d expected, somehow.
Kakashi thought he’d been prepared—for unstable building structure, for broken water pipes, for the mold that would undoubtedly be everywhere—but nothing, nothing could have prepared him for the reality.
The door to Naruto’s apartment first tried to electrocute him, something he only dodged out of familiarity with the pin-prick feel of lightning right before it struck. When he’d finally managed to open the door—after disabling an impressively advanced seal that had taken him at least fifteen minutes to figure out—he’d then had to avoid another three surprisingly well-laid traps, and by that point, he was starting to seriously reconsider whether the files the Hokage had given him on his students were at all correct.
Because Naruto’s file said he was loud, disruptive, messy, and impatient. That he dove headfirst into things without thinking them through. It claimed he wasn’t particularly book-smart, that his fighting skills seemed purely instinct based and were therefore unrefined. That he barely understood chakra as a concept let alone the application of it, and that anyone who got him as a student would have a hell of a lot of work on their hands.
And Kakashi, having nearly been maimed at least four times in the past half hour due to the extensive defenses Naruto had placed on his apartment, thought that was a load of bullshit.
The apartment wasn’t messy like he’d thought it might be, but he wasn’t sure he’d call it clean either. Mold and mildew stains—which looked as if they’d been scrubbed at to little effect—dotted the ceiling and the corners of the room. The sink was dripping and the door to the fridge hung at an angle. Peering inside revealed that the temperature control was broken, but there wasn’t anything inside anyway. In the cupboards, there were about a dozen containers of instant ramen and, shockingly, a half-empty bag of rice that suggested Naruto at least knew how to cook a little. The dented pot and pan that sat in the other cabinet only reaffirmed that suspicion.
The kitchen and common living space were merged together and held little of interest besides at least twelve different potted plants and a low table, upon which sat a few loose scrolls: most were blank, but two of them were clearly storage scrolls. With handwritten, non-generic seals on top. Kakashi leaned closer but didn’t touch—nearly everything in the damned apartment had been trapped one way or another and he wasn’t risking it—and tried to make sense of the seals to no avail. They were definitely storage seals despite being almost nonsensical, but while his first thought was that they obviously must not work, he remembered the seal that had been on the front door: unusual and complex and tricky and unlike anything Kakashi had seen before.
Either Jiraiya has been more involved with Naruto than I thought or…
Or Naruto had figured out sealing by himself.
Kakashi wasn’t sure which idea was more outrageous, but he knew which one was true. He’d seen Jiraiya’s work before, and this wasn’t it.
Incapable of processing beyond that for right now, Kakashi moved onward into the small, closet-like bathroom. Like the rest of the apartment, the bathroom was weirdly well-kept for such a run-down place. The floor was stained with a rust-colored splotch that Kakashi didn’t look too closely at, the lid to the toilet was cracked in half, and mildew clung relentlessly to the ceiling above the shower, and yet the room only smelled faintly musty with an undertone of citrus. Hanging on a thin wire over the shower, two kid-sized black t-shirts and a pair of orange-brown shorts were drying. A closer inspection revealed shaky hand-stitches in places—patchwork, Kakashi realized, because Naruto was fixing his own clothes. The material was cheap, the shorts stained with dirt rather than that being their natural color, and the t-shirts had been cut and re-sized, something made evident by the amateur sewing. And yet it wasn’t half bad work for a kid untrained in tailoring.
The fact that it was a necessity of Naruto’s life, however, made Kakashi’s blood boil.
The bedroom was also barely more than a closet. A single futon was rolled up and tucked into the corner, and a decently well-hidden trap was set up to be triggered by a nearly invisible wire on the windowsill, but it was as barren as the rest of the apartment had been, maybe more so. Emptier than even Kakashi’s apartment, and before this week, he hadn’t technically been home for more than an hour interval in years.
Fuck, this was a mess. At least Naruto seemed like he’d figured out how to function, but…nothing about this situation was good.
Kakashi shook his head, re-set all the traps he’d initially set off, and then left. He’d seen enough here, and he still had to look in on the other two.
Kami help him.
It wasn’t like Kakashi thought Sasuke was going to be the pinnacle of health or stability. But he’d thought—naively hoped—that it would at least be better than Naruto’s, because at least the village didn’t hate Sasuke. At least Sasuke had family money. At least Sasuke was the Last Uchiha, and that gave him some respect and sympathy and probably a lot of people willing to cut him some slack to suck up a little.
But as Kakashi was rapidly learning, no one gave a single fuck about his students outside of what would make them look good on paper. Because Sasuke—the sole, traumatized survivor of the murder of his entire clan—was still living in his old family home in the middle of the Uchiha compound. The family home where he’d come across his brother killing their parents, where he’d seen his parents’ dead bodies, where Itachi had proceeded to torture and mentally scar him.
Kakashi had only found his own father’s body, and that alone had been enough for him to leave the old Hatake lands untouched for the past twenty-some years.
This cannot be healthy, Kakashi thought, dread curling in his stomach as he slipped in through one of the upstairs windows. Sasuke was out training and there was no chance of running into him, but it was more subtle to enter through the window, and the fewer people who knew Kakashi was making house visits, the better. The room he’d entered was obviously Sasuke’s. It was equally obvious that it hadn’t been used in years despite the fact that it was dust-free and clean.
Most disturbingly, there was a human shaped lump tucked under the covers of the bed in the corner, which upon examination was revealed to be a cleverly positioned bundle of blankets. A decoy.
Probably in case Itachi comes back, Kakashi thought grimly. It was a relatively smart strategy—not that Sasuke had any hope of escaping if Itachi decided to come torment him all over again—but it reeked of serious paranoia and mental issues that Kakashi wasn’t even remotely qualified to comment on.
Not unfounded paranoia, though, he told himself in a half-hearted attempt at optimism. He wasn’t sure that made anything better.
The house itself was meticulously clean, the scent of lemon and bleach strong in the air, especially around a room that had clearly been Fugaku’s office. Kakashi blanched. Was Sasuke repeatedly going into the room his parents had been murdered in and cleaning?
Fuck, okay, step one, Naruto and Sasuke need to not be living where they’re currently living, he noted. That was a top priority. Naruto was living in a shithole that would be difficult to secure and was too far away from other ninja in case someone did try to come after him, either for being the jinchuuriki or Minato’s son, not to mention that it was a health and safety hazard. And Sasuke…Sasuke was likely re-traumatizing himself every fucking day he lived in this house, and if the Hokage and the Elder Council thought he was a flight risk now? That would be nothing compared to what this level of psychological damage could do if nobody put an end to it.
That very thought was reinforced not a moment later when Kakashi realized that the main living area was the most secured part of the whole house, a pile of blankets and a pillow on the sofa indicating exactly where Sasuke slept.
When he sleeps at all. The sheer amount of kunai, shuriken, and ninja wire hidden around the area wasn’t reassuring Kakashi that Sasuke was sleeping.
At least the rest of Kakashi’s examination of the house went smoothly. There were no strange leaks or broken furniture or creaky doorways. The kitchen was well-stocked and clean—aside from some interesting scorch marks on the stove—and the contents of the fridge were somewhat balanced, if a little heavy on the tomatoes. It was obvious Sasuke had plenty of weapons, plenty of supplies, plenty of resources in general. It was just…well, it was just that he lived in his dead family’s house, which was in his dead family’s compound, and he was going to drown in it if Kakashi didn’t get him out.
He could feel a headache forming. When the Sandaime showed him Naruto’s apartment, he didn’t think that was going to be the tip of the iceberg that was the shitshow of his soon-to-be team.
He sighed, making his way across town and into the civilian sector. At least Sakura—though civilian raised, which came with its own…irritations—had parents, according to her file. She, out of all of them, would probably be the most well-adjusted. It was a good thing he’d thought to save her for last.
Sakura’s family’s house was a little two-story place with window boxes filled with flowers and trimmed hedges and a backyard with a big tree and a swing hanging from it. It was quaint, in a word. And occupied by all three of the Harunos at present, which meant Kakashi wouldn’t get to snoop as thoroughly as he’d wanted. He could still observe, though.
Sakura was very…pink. That was Kakashi’s first impression. Pink hair, pink dress with little flowers printed on it, pink cheeks. Her room was pink, too. Pink walls, pink bedspread, pink everything. Even the towels in her bathroom were pink. It was not helping his headache.
The Harunos were average for civilians, Kakashi decided. The father was a very serious looking man dressed in nice clothing. He was not particularly heavy but not muscular the way all ninja were. His hands looked soft and untested. The mother was slender and pretty in a vague, generic sort of way. Her makeup was well-don, her dress both expensive-looking and terribly impractical. She chattered endlessly about her day: the market, gossip with one of the neighbors, tomorrow’s weather.
Sakura was entirely silent. Kakashi frowned as he mentally evaluated her personnel file. Sakura was supposed to be loud, a talker and something of a know-it-all incapable of letting a conversation go by without her input. Quick to anger. Dramatic. Very smart but not as good at practical lessons. Creative. Potential with genjutsu.
He watched as she sat silently at the dinner table while her mother talked on and on and on—
“—and she said that the silks from the Land of Tea would come in tomorrow, so I thought we might go and get you fitted.”
At that, Sakura finally spoke, head tilted quizzically. “Fitted for what?”
Her mother rolled her eyes as if Sakura was being dense. “An engagement kimono or two. Or pre-engagement. Whatever you want to call it.”
Sakura’s fists were bunched at her sides, out of sight of her parents but visible to Kakashi from where he watched through the window. Tension lined every inch of her body. “Why would I need that?”
Her mother squinted. “Don’t play at being stupid, Sakura. We talked about this. You’ll meet with Tanaka-san at the end of the month, like we agreed.”
“We agreed,” Sakura said slowly, smile straining, “that I would consider the engagement if I didn’t pass the Academy exam. I passed the Academy exam. I’m a genin now. I’m going to be a ninja of Konoha—”
“This again,” her father said with a put-upon sigh. “Really. You’ve had your little rebellion, proven your point. But now it’s time to think seriously about your future.”
“I am—”
“This ninja fantasy was cute when you were six, Sakura, but you’ve long outgrown it,” he said. “Your mother and I have indulged you enough.”
“But—”
“Enough,” her father said, voice raised just shy of yelling, and Sakura flinched minutely. She did not say anything again, though Kakashi continued to watch the house the rest of the way through dinner and even afterwards as Sakura retreated to her room.
Out of the shadow cast by her parents—he was starting to get a picture here, though it was far from complete—Sakura seemed…different. She tugged the delicate floral hairpins from her long, pink hair mercilessly, tossing them with perfect aim into a small box sitting on her dresser. She collapsed on her bed, buried her face in her pillow, and screamed for a good minute. Then she got up, yanked a kunai out from under her mattress—not completely hopeless, then, Kakashi thought—and held her hair taught in her fist, the edge of the blade coming to rest against the pink strands.
For a long moment he thought she might actually cut it—again, the picture of Who Is Haruno Sakura was getting clearer—but then there was a knock on her door, and Sakura moved quickly, hiding the kunai away again just as her mother entered her room. She eyed Sakura with a critical look and tsked.
“You need to take better care of your hair. Sit, and I’ll brush it.”
Sakura’s expression was carefully blank, pinched only slightly at the corner of her mouth in a way a civilian would never notice. She sat and handed the brush to her mother, who began working through Sakura’s hair methodically.
“It’s lost its shine,” she complained as she brushed. “All that running about you’ve been doing. And the ends are absolutely frayed. No more braids, Sakura.”
Sakura didn’t answer, and for her silence she was whacked on the head with the brush. Hard. Sakura jolted forward at the strike, eyes shutting upon impact. Kakashi tensed.
“As you say, mother.”
She hummed and looked up from Sakura’s hair to give the girl another once over, seeming to speak more to herself than to Sakura. “All that time outside has ruined your skin, too. Perhaps we can cover that with makeup. And we’ll have to get you some gloves for now. Kami knows no one will want to touch your calloused hands as they are. Some moisturizer should fix that with enough time. Hmm.” She pinched at Sakura’s cheek, her arm. Her mother’s expression was displeased. “And you’ve gained weight again. If you cannot manage it yourself, then I’ll have to do it for you.”
“Another diet?” Sakura asked, voice bland but Kakashi didn’t think he was imagining the resigned undertone.
Her mother raised a brow. “Obviously you didn’t keep to the last one. We’ll have to be even more strict if you want to get your figure back in time.”
Kakashi frowned, recalling another line from her personnel file, a special note from her last teacher. Diets too much, which makes her tired during physical training. Has fainted from lack of proper nutrition.
“As you say, mother.”
Yes, the picture was coming together, and Kakashi was not particularly happy.
It would have to wait another couple of days, though. He couldn’t legally do anything about any of his students’ situations until they were officially his students.
Three days. At least that would give him time to make the necessary arrangements.