Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“How would you like a job?” Kakashi says one fine afternoon in lieu of a greeting.

It's not a bad opener for all that it makes Kisame smile, sharp-toothed, and measure the relative benefits of shoving him from the windowsill with a water spike. It'd be easy. These days, Kisame doesn't always have the glut of chakra required to casually create his own material for jutsu, but Kakashi did come while he was washing the dishes, water still running in the sink.

Though he supposes that's also a peace offering. Kakashi could have waited a few minutes until Kisame left the sink again.

“Good afternoon to you, too,” says Kisame pleasantly, switching off the faucet.

“It's legal,” says Kakashi.

“I believe you.”

Kakashi names a number – it's not a lot, but it's still a surprisingly respectable amount by Kisame's low standards – and adds, “Biweekly, for the foreseeable future.”

Technically – officially – Kisame is an active jounin of Konohagakure's shinobi forces. He has access to training grounds and other shinobi services, permission to buy from ninja supply stores and invoice the village for certain mission preparations expenses, and clearance for claiming missions up to A-rank, with all of the associated pay.

Those come with caveats, however, thanks to the probation he's been on since he arrived almost seven years ago. He cannot leave the village, take work from sources besides the shinobi missions desk, join specialized divisions like ANBU or T&I, go on jobs without a chaperone of at least tokubetsu rank, or apply for loans. He also, on a somewhat unrelated note, loses his military status and provisionary citizenship if he gets caught committing a crime of any scale or “acts in manners unbefitting of a Konoha shinobi either on or off duty”.

Sometimes he takes in-village D-ranks with Gai's genin team and claims a one-fifth cut. He's saved up enough over his years working for Konoha that he could, if he wanted to badly enough, buy a pancake or two from breakfast kiosks on special occasions.

It's almost as if Konoha's leadership wants him to violate terms and become a missing-nin. Really, now.

Kakashi's offer is too good to be true, but Kisame hasn't agreed to it yet. He can hear it out. “Come in,” he says, stepping back, and Kakashi visibly weighs the decision before shuffling out of his sandals and hopping down into the kitchen.

The apartment isn't technically Kisame's to invite guests into, but what Sasuke doesn't know won't hurt anyone.

“Just you in here?”

“It's team assignment day at the Academy.”

“Ah, he passed graduation?” says Kakashi, as if it could have gone otherwise. “That's good.” He looks around the room, taking in such riveting features as the half-filled dishwasher and the off-white ceiling that's identical to the last dozen times he saw it. “How old is he?”

The graduation age hasn't featured an exception since the Uchiha district got emptied out, as Kakashi has no reason not to know. “You had better ask him.”

Kakashi nods absently. “You get along, don't you? He listens to you?”

“Kakashi,” says Kisame patiently.

“I spoke with Hokage-sama this morning,” Kakashi continues, wandering over to lean against a dining chair. “Hey, you don't keep spoiled milk, right?”

Kisame stares at him.

Kakashi's eye closes in a smile. “Milk always goes bad for me before I can finish it, so I don't buy it in the first place.”

“Is this an attempt at small talk?” Kakashi's not actually asking for milk. Kisame has heard that he mooches off of subordinates and acquaintances, but he's never tried as much with Kisame. He does have standards, much as he likes to pretend otherwise.

“You,” says Kakashi, “are responsible around smaller things.”

He's probably going somewhere with this.

“As opposed to me,” he continues.

A far and lonely somewhere. “Is this about your dogs?” Kisame tries, knowing it's almost certainly not.

“My dogs aren't – small....” Kakashi glances down at where approximately his dogs might stand. He stares at the floorboards for a second, then waves it off and looks back up to Kisame. “Right, but they can take care of themselves. They're not small and self-destructive.” From Kisame's vantage, those traits encompass most ninja, most likely including the one in front of him. “Look, he drank half a carton of milk a week past its expiration date. It smelled solid and it was green. He drank half a carton. Has Sasuke ever done that under this roof? You'd stop him if he tried, wouldn't you?”

A kid. Someone saddled Kakashi with a kid, and then he came here with a job for Kisame....

It's team assignment day.

What, one of the prospective genin ended up sick with food poisoning before Kakashi could even test them? “Is there a reason you can't fail this one?” Kisame asks.

He doesn't understand Konoha's graduation system. The Academy exam is impossible to fail, and Kakashi's exam is impossible to pass, and for some reason neither has been discontinued despite both of them wasting manpower on foregone conclusions.

“Yes,” Kakashi sighs, and proceeds to not elaborate. “So. I guess. How d'you feel about training a genin team?”

---

Later, when Kakashi tells them and they finally realize he doesn't intend it as a joke, Asuma will choke on his cigarette, and Kurenai will say dubiously, “Is that allowed?”

“Yeah.” He really did get permission.

“But Hoshigaki?” Kurenai will murmur. “I mean, he's not... exactly qualified.”

If that's going to be her argument, then Kakashi won't lower himself to pointing out the elephant in the room either. “You think I'm qualified to teach genin?”

Granted, he and Kurenai haven't been acquainted with each other for long, Asuma their only real point of connection, but Kakashi will turn a page in his erotica and do his best to project that he hasn't shaved in three days, he's gotten away with avoiding laundry for a week and a half because his entire wardrobe consists of four copies of the same standard uniform, the last meal he ate was old rice and a raw egg five hours ago, and he followed the smell of blood to walk in on his dad's gutted corpse when he was six.

Asuma will say, having largely recovered from the coughing fit, “You're the only person who thinks you're not. It's not as hard as all that. You can leave them be and they'll work things out on their own most days.”

Kurenai will side-eye Asuma, frowning, while Kakashi nods and gazes off into the middle distance. “See,” he'll say, “that doesn't sound too bad. It works for your three?”

“I've only had them for a day and a half, but I can't see a reason why it wouldn't.”

Kurenai will side-eye him with slightly more conviction. Kakashi will reply, “Team 7 is not as well-behaved as your trio. I think I'd need to adapt your strategy before I could use it. And at that point I might as well not. Kisame can handle it. He's good with genin.”

Either of those statements might or might not be true, but what is true is that Kisame is flat broke and therefore the only person Kakashi can bribe into taking on such a long-term and painful job as sensei duty on negative notice.

“When did you two start knowing each other?”

“Oh... you know....”

“Kakashi is his probation officer,” Kurenai will snitch.

Asuma will spend a moment absorbing that, then take a drag from his cigarette and breathe out smoke. “Guess that makes as much sense as anything. You don't act like it, though.”

Kakashi will shrug. Six years is a long time to get to know someone in. “Kurenai, what about your team?” he'll ask, and they'll let him change the subject.

---

Twenty minutes later, Kisame arrives to the Academy what turns out to be four hours late and finds that the genin have chosen to retaliate by rigging a chalkboard eraser over the door.

Kisame dislikes children. Sasuke is tolerable because he's practically an unusually pacifistic Kiri genin and Kisame can treat him like a confused adult, but most kids alternately unsettle and irritate him.

He doesn't care for school buildings, either, or school teachers. The smell of the place and the width of the hallways dredge up memories he didn't realize he still had.

Kisame enjoyed a breezy Academy experience by any measure. He had no trouble with combat lessons, being who he is, and none with the teachers either, being a member of the reigning Mizukage's household. The non-combat classes didn't matter, but he made it through them without issue, too. History interests him enough that he would study it even without incentive, and he bears no great hatred for math or literature.

Then, as the cherry on top, he graduated in the first class after Zabuza's incident and therefore the first class not to kill a classmate as the final exam.

There was no fairness to the graduation exam. The top half of a class got matched against the bottom half, and for the last three years of schooling you understood which of your classmates were shinobi and which were walking corpses. The teachers did, too. They tried not to waste effort on failures.

Up until the girl Kisame would have killed joined the border guard and he never saw her again, each time he passed her on the street or sensed her chakra out of sight made him feel a step out of line with reality, like he was encountering a ghost, and she shuddered as if he had walked over her grave. By now, more than a third of Kiri's active shinobi forces owe Zabuza their lives, and the last time Kisame met him that fact still irritated Zabuza to no end.

Back to the present: Kisame slides the door open, casually dissociating, and ignores the eraser landing on the floorboards. No murder or maiming in the Konoha Academy, no matter how much character it would build.

“You're late!” two of the graduates shriek in greeting.

The third, who is Sasuke, silently cycles through a series of expressions before ending on heroically borne long-suffering.

They're not genin until they pass a jounin's exam, but Kakashi agreed to back Kisame's decisions, within reason. And Kisame doesn't get paid if they fail the exam.

Congratulations! He was testing for initiative and suicidal lack of judgement. They passed. Sasuke wasn't involved with the decision other than not stopping it from happening, and by their reactions the girl wasn't either, but Konoha is all about genin teams passing and failing together. Or something.

At an angle that doesn't get chalk on his shoe he kicks the eraser out of the doorway and under a desk. “We're going to the roof,” he says, because if Kakashi thought to reserve a training ground he failed to mention it.

The Academy is harder to mistake for its Kiri version from outside. All of that sunlight and clear air, and all of those brightly colored and mold-susceptible buildings across the cityscape. “Hoshigaki Kisame,” he says once the baby ninja have caught up. “Let's get along.”

Kakashi has pawned off to him: a clan heir, the Kyuubi jinchuuriki (which Kisame shouldn't know about, but Samehada has a particular preference for bijuu chakra and the kid's seal isn't completely leakproof), and some other kid. Nightmare team. No wonder Kakashi didn't want them; this feels like a punishment for all that it likely isn't.

“Why're you blue, 'ttebayo?” the jinchuuriki demands. The girl cringes, but something else overrides the rudeness for Kisame. That speech quirk....

“Bloodline limit,” Kisame lies. In Konoha, people tend to buy it. In Kiri, people tended to buy it with the extreme wariness and suspicion due to exceptions to Yagura's edict. “Are you going to tell me your name or am I going to call you Chalkboard Eraser from now on?”

“I'm Uzumaki Naruto!” he announces. “What's a bloodline limit?”

What's a –

Neither Sasuke nor the girl seems surprised, though both of them look to be nearly in physical pain.

Naruto slept through his entire life and coasted a passing grade through the Academy thanks to the Academy's softness and his own status, in that case. Maybe it's good that he established that immediately.

“You're related to Uzumaki Kushina?” Kisame asks.

Naruto's face slackens, bravado and brashness draining away between one blink and the next to leave behind someone who doesn't know what they are if they can't be loud.

Kisame misstepped. He signed on to keep three genin alive and maybe teach them a jutsu or two, not to get involved in whatever messy emotional development this belongs to.

“Uzumaki...?” Naruto says as if he's hearing the word for the first time. “Who's that? Hey, who's that? Ku-shi-na. Uzumaki Kushina. Same-sensei, you know someone with my family name?”

“No,” says Kisame. He shifts his attention to the last kid he doesn't know. “What's your name?”

“Haruno Sakura," she says with a stiff, careful bow. “Please take care of me.” Mirroring the level of politeness Kisame used in his introduction. What is she, a teacher's pet?

“You do,” Naruto shouts.

“I have met Uzumaki Kushina once, and she has been dead for twelve years,” says Kisame.

Konoha apparently used to call her their Red-Hot Habanero, which makes Kisame feel some sort of way if he stops to think about it. He suspects he'd get a similar reaction from a Konoha-nin who remembers the war if he told them that Water Country called Kuriarare of the Seven Swordsmen “The Dango Sticker”. (They did not, because that would be just as absurd as calling Uzumaki Kushina the Red-Hot Habanero.)

Kiri during the war called Kushina the Red Devil. She tore the Sandaime Mizukage limb from broken limb with a ninjutsu that looked like chains. And then the Kyuubi killed her, because there's always a bigger fish.

“I'm twelve, 'ttebayo,” says Naruto, stricken.

What's Kisame actually allowed to do, here? In Kiri, jounin have near-total discretion over their treatment of their students and apprentices, but if that's the case in Konoha then it still doesn't apply with Kisame, who isn't their instructor on paper.

Maybe he'll just... maintain at least half a meter of distance between them at all times.

“You'll receive word about the meeting and training schedules,” he says, ignoring Naruto. Kisame is nearly thirty. He's ancient. He hasn't had a reasonable fight since he defected. He's allowed to be hard of hearing if he wants. “Keep up what you usually do until then.”

Sakura says tentatively, “You're not going to ask for Sasuke-kun's name...?”

Kisame needs to track Kakashi down before Kakashi escapes on an out-of-village mission, and he can't do that if these three keep him here for much longer. “Sasuke can introduce himself if he wants.”

Sasuke rolls his eyes and doesn't introduce himself.

“Adjourned.”

Kisame flash-steps away before Sakura or Naruto start asking him questions he doesn't have the answers to.

---

“Yo. How're the genin?”

If Kakashi genuinely wanted to know, he wouldn't have passed said genin to Kisame, and Kisame wouldn't have needed to flag him down on a roof halfway across Konoha from the Academy.

“What do jounin do with their genin?” Kisame asks.

Kakashi mulls it over. “Teach them. Teamwork, jutsu... paperwork and bureaucracy. How to apply for missions, how to specialize into a division if that's what they want.”

Kisame raises an eyebrow. They can both see how some of those might become an issue for this team in the current circumstances, yes?

Kakashi sighs faintly. “If there's something that'll be hard for you to do, let me know. I'll take responsibility for it.”

“If you would.”

“You're their commander as much as you are their teacher,” Kakashi adds, pulling advice blindly out of thin air. “I think you can lean into that role if it's easier.”

Kisame somehow doubts Naruto has heard of a command structure in his life, any respect Sakura has for him outside of his role as her teacher is a play-act on her part whether she realizes it or not, and Sasuke has long since independently come to the conclusion that Kisame is either inept or washed-out or both.

Normally Kisame's physical appearance on its own carries an implicit threat of violence, but Konoha genin evidently assume their allies won't harm them unless proven otherwise. Inconvenient, if accurate.

Being allies doesn't take a certain degree of emotional violence off the table, but he can't tell yet what that would accomplish and, in any case, it would feel like cheating at least as far as Sasuke is concerned. Sasuke lives in a fantasy world and Kisame knows all of the fracture points to press to break suspension of disbelief.

Maybe he should tell them he's from the Bloody Mist.

But Sasuke won't care, Naruto might not know what Kiri is (he doesn't know what bloodline limits are after living in Konoha and sharing a class with a clan heir who exclusively wears clothes that have his clan's emblem prominently displayed), and who can guess for Sakura's response?

“Did you do something to earn this team?” Kisame asks. “Maim someone you weren't supposed to?”

If Kisame doesn't ask Kakashi how many people he blackmailed to get out of training Team 7, he can honestly say I wasn't involved if trouble sparks out of it. Not that claiming ignorance ever helps, but Kisame still finds the notion entertaining.

Kakashi looks haunted. “They can't be that bad.”

“Oh? Then you should take them back – ”

Kakashi makes a sign to ward off evil.

“Is it the genin,” Kisame asks, “or is it one genin in particular? Is it Sasuke? Or Naruto? Does Sakura have a debt to collect from you?”

“Who?” says Kakashi, possibly genuinely. “No, no, just.... I'll see you around – ”

“Could I get a rundown on them?” Kisame interrupts. “At the very least? Two of the brats I only have a name and a face for.”

Kakashi relaxes at the softball question. “Naruto lives on his own, scraped through the Academy by the skin of his teeth, no particular specializations, but he got into schoolyard brawls all the time and heals quickly from surface-level injuries. No... positive relationships with classmates. Sakura – ”

“Any relation to Uzumaki Kushina?” Kisame asks.

No mention of the fact that Naruto is a jinchuuriki, which is... well, Kisame understands the information security concern, but it's still a little rude that whoever authorized Kakashi to fob off his teaching duties didn't authorize him to tell his substitute that one of the genin is the Kyuubi jinchuuriki. What was Kisame supposed to do if the seal broke when he didn't have a single countermeasure planned? Die, and let Sasuke and Sakura die?

Kisame doesn't have many friends in this village, and particularly none in administration. Nobody trusts a defector.

Kakashi waves the question off, though his attention sharpens. “Not directly. Is his clan name a problem?”

“Why would a Konoha-nin hold a grudge against a Mizukage's killer?” Kisame shakes his head. “No. Relative of a dead woman, I don't have any interest in that. He seemed to, though. I asked him the same question.”

Kakashi grimaces. “He's an orphan, so maybe any mention of his family....”

Kisame made trouble for himself when he told Naruto her name. His mistake.

Kakashi mutters, “But wouldn't the Academy curriculum have brought up the Uzumaki?”

Kisame wouldn't be able to confirm either way about that, but: “He didn't know what bloodline limits are.”

Kakashi squints up at him. “What?”

“It's true.”

“He didn't... know what....”

He did not.

“Seven clan heirs graduated this year, in his class.”

“That's a fair number, isn't it?”

Kakashi says, “You've got your work cut out for you.”

“I have your work cut out for me,” Kisame agrees. “How much is wrong with Haruno Sakura?”

“No known specializations,” Kakashi recites. “Excellent academic performance for her age, though her instructors made a note of her lacking aggression and adaptability. No positive relationships with any classmates.” Which makes three for three. Sasuke doesn't, either. “Has a demonstrated tendency to cave to popular opinion at the expense of her own self-interest.”

“Is that a remarkable trait?”

“When it's to her degree, yes. She broke a close friendship with a well-known military clan's heir in favor of blending in with the majority of the girls in her class.”

Evidently the answer to how much is wrong with Haruno Sakura is Kisame was happier when he didn't know.

There can't be anything overly interesting about her family, at least, if Kakashi prioritized every other piece of information about her over them, and Kakashi's following summary confirms that: two career chuunin for parents, no further notes.

Kakashi's eye curves in a smile. “I'm handing them off to you because I honestly believe you'll make a better teacher for them than I would.”

That might work better as flattery if Kisame wasn't confident Kakashi would say the same line to an unusually coherent barnacle if it would agree to take this team from him.

---

“Since when have you been a jounin?”

“This afternoon,” says Kisame. “We're out of milk. Do you still drink that?”

Sasuke scowls. “It's fine,” he says, playing the pronoun game. Does it refer to the milk or the lack? Kisame picks a carton off of the shelf anyway; if Sasuke's decided to extend the past few milkless mornings into a pattern, Kisame can finish it himself.

Sasuke asks, “Is that why you were four hours late?”

Kisame was four hours late because Kakashi, as a privilege of being one of the most competent ninja in the village, can get away with a stunning amount of incompetence.

“I was told about Team 7 half an hour before my arrival at the Academy,” Kisame says, and snorts. “Administration attracts a personality type.” Which is unrelated, but the sooner Sasuke develops a dislike of the bureaucracy, the better. Say what you will about field shinobi, but at least they need to do more than misplace a sheet of paper to ruin a life.

“Do you know how to teach?”

Kisame drops dried seaweed into the basket. “You should hope I do.”

“I don't understand. Why would you be my teacher? Who decided to assign this team this way?” Sasuke's mouth twists, and then he says with barely toned-down incredulity, “There's a tradition that the highest-placed girl and boy in a class get stuck together with each other and the dead last.”

Kisame stalls for a second, caught flat-footed by the gleeful, overblown cruelty of a tradition like that.

But no – this is Konoha. They probably don't intend it as the execution that it sounds like.

“You know,” he says, pitching his voice low under the humming of the store's refrigeration, “if you kill him, you might get a better teammate assigned.”

Sasuke considers the idea, bless him. But: “No,” he says after a moment. “No. That's – that would be bad.”

Kisame pats him on the head, then ducks down to grab a box of toothpaste.

The bell over the shop's door tinkles. Kisame recognizes the stride and chakra signature of the arrival, and judging by Sasuke's grimace he's not the only one. He tosses the toothpaste into the basket and rises just before Naruto skids to a stop at the other end of the aisle.

Naruto jabs a finger in his direction. “Who is Uzumaki Kushina?!”

The store stands three by five meters across and is not nearly large enough to fit Naruto's volume on top of Kisame's and Samehada's mass. The cashier says, strained, “Please don't speak so loudly – ”

“This is important!” Naruto declares. “I need to know!”

“If I don't tell you,” says Kisame, “where would you plan to go next?”

“I'll make you tell me, 'ttebayo!”

Destined for intelligence work this ninja is not. Cemeteries, old bingo books, asking around with people who might remember her, even filing an official request to access the few publically available parts of a shinobi's profile – he has plenty of methods at his disposal if he wants to find a person who isn't trying to hide from him. Kisame meant the question as a question, not a challenge.

Morbidly fascinated, Kisame tries, “Can it wait until I finish paying for this?”

“No!”

Kiri would have let him resolve this with murder. Alas.

Kisame says to Sasuke, “Can you get him outside?”

Sasuke frowns up at him. “Are you a jounin or not?”

Kiri would have even let him resolve this with two murders.

“Sasuke,” Kisame says, because Sasuke is perfectly aware of the relevant terms of the probation. If Kisame touches a Fire Country citizen, it's Kisame's head on the line. Or his place in Konoha, anyway.

Sasuke finally growls and stomps off to wrestle the other ankle-biter out of the shop.

“Sorry for that,” Kisame says to the cashier, his lips pulled back to show teeth.

The cashier smiles queasily and starts adding up the prices on the notepad. Kisame pays, bags the groceries, then exits the store into the middle of an argument.

“ – secret lessons?” Naruto is shouting in what might just be his speaking voice.

Sasuke shakes him by the collar. “You idiot. He's my cousin.”

If an artist drew Kisame while removing the sharpened teeth and the blue and the gills and about fifty centimeters' worth of height, his portrait wouldn't look out of place as the son or grandson or great-grandson of any number of farmers in central Water Country. This is because his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all rice farmers in central Water Country.

Kisame is not Sasuke's cousin. Kisame does not share a single drop of blood with the Uchiha clan. As Naruto looks between the two of them, Kisame watches the lone cog turn behind his eyes to stop at the same conclusion.

“You're not blue,” Naruto informs Sasuke, selecting nearly the only physical difference between them that doesn't stem from lineage.

“Distant cousin,” Sasuke elaborates, disdainful that Naruto should require even so much explanation.

Sasuke's child self came up with this dreamscape reality on his own, and he's been living safely inside of it ever since. His implacable, unassailable, screaming insistence after Itachi's little rampage that Kisame is his last surviving relative is what initially got Kisame out of T&I's holding cells, so Kisame has never felt a need to argue the point. He's been adopted into families for less convenient reasons.

“I asked around,” Kisame tells Naruto. “Kushina came from the same clan as you, but you aren't related to her by more than that.”

Naruto stares at him. “The... clan? The same clan?”

“The Uzumaki clan.”

“I – ” Naruto's lip wobbles. Kisame should have pushed Kakashi out the window. “A clan? I have a...?”

Not so much anymore after the events of the Second War. The natural whirlpools protecting Uzushio had spent the years prior steadily weakening for no known reason, and during the war they finally gave up the ghost entirely. Kiri and Kumo promptly went on to pillage Uzushio and crumble the island into the sea.

“You should be one of the only ones left with that name,” Kisame says, sinking Naruto's hopes as thoroughly as Kiri sank Uzushio.

Sasuke makes an odd face. “Dead last... you idiot. You didn't know?”

“Shut up!” Naruto yells, crying in earnest now. Kisame tries not to let it show how much he feels like he's observing some new and bizarre species of insect.

The tears don't concern him too much – Sasuke did enough of that after Itachi killed their clan to desensitize anyone. It's only that Naruto has no justification whatsoever for being alive.

Konoha doesn't put its students through Kiri's old graduation exam, but do the teachers never occasionally let their aim slip on a knife or a ninjutsu, either? Never send a student out to clean a training field still covered in unsprung traps or assign Konoha's equivalent of overnight water-walking in the harbor as a punishment during box jellyfish season?

Kisame needs to ask Kakashi to get him access to Naruto's school records and final exam results. He cannot believe any village's standards are so lenient that a student who doesn't know what a bloodline limit is and doesn't know that his own surname comes from a storied clan could pass its Academy's curriculum. Even being a jinchuuriki couldn't have earned him this much leeway on its own.

Sasuke takes a few awkward, halting steps forward. That expression... is that sympathy?

If Sasuke is volunteering to deal with this, Kisame will hardly object. “I'll get these back,” Kisame says, hefting the bag. He sighs quietly. “You can find anything about the Uzumaki in the library. It's a starting point.”

“I don't know where that is,” Naruto sniffles.

Sasuke does. The pair of them can work things out on their own. Kisame has dinner to make.

Chapter Text

For the team's first meeting, Kakashi books a training ground for a full day at Kisame's request, and Kisame makes the tiny people show him what he's working with by running through every skill they know.

Sasuke establishes that he's fine, if cocky for a genin who's average by clan kids' standards. He's going to take it personally the first time he loses a spar to anyone his own age. And the second time, too, most likely. The third. Possibly the fourth.

Itachi giving him a nice speech before leaving him and him alone alive taught a very different lesson than five-year old Zabuza silently slashing an entire graduating class's throats in their sleep. Zabuza's own brother was one of the people in the year. If that slowed him down at all, the rest of the class sure didn't notice.

Haruno Sakura, likewise, is technically fine. She's the only one out of the three genin who can recite Konoha's shinobi rules verbatim, which seems like it should be the bare minimum requirement for graduation.

On the other hand, she has no specialization. That isn't unusual in and of itself, but she's apparently never tried even once to acquire a specialization. She hasn't dabbled in a single skill outside of the Academy's curriculum simply to see if she might have an interest or affinity towards it. Which speaks more towards the Academy's curriculum than any major fault on her part. Her grades stand out as high enough that she likely put real effort into achieving them, so if there's something she doesn't perform well at it's because her teachers never made it a part of their expectations towards her.

She might have done better in Kiri than Konoha, to be honest. A ninja who goes above and beyond in following orders but has no personal drive to make something interesting of herself? Any commanding officer would have loved her.

However, this is Konoha, and her commanding officer is Kakashi. Tough luck.

And Uzumaki Naruto is....

Naruto went to school once or twice a week, spent his time there disrupting class and picking fights at lunch, and almost always snuck out early. In the past three years, one of the Academy teachers seems to have started putting in extra effort to try to keep him on track, but realistically there's only so much a lone teacher with dozens of other students can do about a delinquent who they never see in class.

Unsurprisingly, Naruto failed the graduation exam each time he took it, including this past year.

The reason Kisame still has to deal with him despite that is because, presumably as a cruel joke, Naruto was told that if he learned the mass shadow clone technique entirely on his own over the course of half a night then he could substitute that impossible feat for a passing grade, and he proceeded to pull it off.

As far as what Naruto did with all of his free time over the years, he mostly used it to make a menace of himself. Kisame's heard of his activities here and there over the years, usually in the context of passing pedestrians gossiping about what that kid did a few days ago. Naruto's the one who painted graffiti over the Hokage monument earlier that week. Impressive that he managed to do it, though it's fascinating that he reportedly suffered no consequences for it aside from needing to help clean the paint back off.

Kakashi's three specialest little genin: the one who doesn't know how to be second to anyone except Itachi, the one who's never been yelled at by a teacher for misbehaving or failing to live up to expectations, and the one who's only been yelled at and nothing else by a teacher for misbehaving and failing to live up to expectations.

...This'll be less of a horrible ordeal if Kisame learns to like Naruto and Sakura, or at least stops exclusively focusing on the buttons someone could press on to break them and Sasuke. Just because the last batch of Academy-age kids Kisame spent extended amounts of time around were his mortal enemies doesn’t mean all of them forever have to be.

“Do you know water-walking?” Kisame asks once the genin have worked through most of what they can do. They've established that Sakura is adequate all around, Sasuke is better than her at straightforward combat and somewhat worse at everything else, and Naruto has the skill set of a genin who's spent most of his time running around an urban center causing problems and picking losing fights with other schoolchildren. 

Oh, and he knows the mass shadow clone technique. Can't forget that.

“Tree-walking?” Kisame continues. They're Konoha shinobi, surely they have to – or not. “Temperature regulation? Air-cycling?”

The last one is a chakra exercise that acts on air inside of the lungs, converting used air into clean air. Most ninja don't have control good enough to keep it up for longer than about thirteen minutes, but being able to, say, spend thirteen minutes underwater without surfacing or spend thirteen minutes unaffected by an airborne poison is a useful skill on its own.

Sasuke already knows it: it's necessary for the grand fireball technique. But apparently neither of the other two have heard of it.

One of Konoha's quirks is that, while it outputs the most S-rank monsters, its rank-and-file tend to lose against ninja of equal rank and experience from any other major village. Sakura is adequate at everything she can do, but the list of things she can do is far narrower than Kisame would have expected from a just-graduated genin. So, Konoha's Academy teaches its trainees the bare-bones foundations, and only the strength of their jounin instructors post-graduation props up Konoha's military strength.

If a genin's teacher isn't up to par, though, then they'll never make up for the very late start their Academy years gave them. And, judging by the handful of Konoha-nin Kisame can remember fighting in the past, the vast majority of their teachers aren't up to par.

Cold.

Kisame can't deny the results Konoha has gotten through the system, but still: cold.

These genin have spent a good portion of their lives in (or avoiding, in Naruto's case) a school building, and the place didn't even have the decency to make that time worthwhile. It didn't teach them how to breathe.

Which is terrible for them, but Kisame mostly wishes it wasn't his problem.

“Can you swim?” he asks, at this point expecting a no.

“Obviously we can swim, 'ttebayo,” says the world's worst miracle child.

“Show me.”

“In these clothes?” Sakura asks.

“You heard me.”

They go into the training ground's pond. 

They do not know how to swim.

Kisame watches Naruto splash around like a drowning man trying to spite the ocean by getting eaten by sharks first. Then he calls the three of them, sodden and annoyed, back to land.

“So you know how to not sink,” Kisame says. A piece of driftwood could do that much and be quieter about it.

He raises a hand, and the water dripping from their hair and clothes peels off, streams in ribbons through the air, and gathers like a liquid glove over his skin. It's another drain on his strained chakra reserves, but, even so, using his chakra for water manipulation and ninjutsu is enjoyable. There'd be something off about him if it wasn't.

“Woah,” Naruto breathes, as if he's never seen anyone perform basic elemental manipulation.

Since Sakura seems similarly interested, it's probably not because Naruto never goes to class and more because Konoha doesn't have as many water-natured ninja as Kiri.

Kisame flicks his hand, sending the water flying in a loose ball to splash back into the pond. “You can start with air-cycling, all of you.”

“I – ” Sasuke begins.

“How long does it take for you to recover before you can use a second fireball?”

Sasuke purses his lips while Naruto, who can perform neither the fireball nor the chakra exercise, snickers. “Ten seconds.”

Which is nine and a half seconds too long.

Kisame shows them the method, then steps back and lets them go at it. Sasuke works on lengthening the amount of time he can hold it to longer than the exact duration of a fireball, Sakura somehow gets the hang of it on her first try and joins Sasuke in extending the period she can maintain it for, and Naruto works on giving himself organ damage, after Kisame first explains to him what chakra is.

Naruto recognizes what chakra is as soon as Kisame defines it, he just didn't know the common name for it. Which is still surreal, but... could be worse. Probably. Somehow.

Kisame stops him when he starts coughing. “You're molding too much chakra.” Among other things. “Do that a few more times and you'll blow out a lung. ...Do you know how to use less?”

“Yeah!” says Naruto, and tries again.

This time when he coughs, his spit comes out pink.

Sakura shrieks. “Sensei, you need to get him to the hospital!”

“I'm fine,” says Naruto hoarsely, squinting at her.

“He's more durable than you two,” Kisame agrees. This is probably true.

“Am I?” A thought visibly strikes Naruto, and he shouts, voice already back to its usual timbre, “Is it an Uzumaki thing – ”

“It's a you thing,” says Kisame, and Naruto subsides immediately, expression darkening. He sets a hand over his stomach. Does he have indigestion or is that where the Kyuubi's seal is? “How are you using less chakra? What are you trying to do, exactly?”

“Huh?” Naruto blinks up at him. “I'm making it smaller. Y'know?” He holds out his hands, one at head height and the other at his stomach, and squishes them towards each other to demonstrate.

Twelve years old and he doesn't know how to use less chakra for techniques.

Whatever. Kisame doesn't have emotional investment in two of these people. He doesn't care enough to feel frustration. Mild annoyance, maybe. Nothing real.

He grunts. “People from Fire Country do seem like they have smaller chakra stores.... Sakura” – she jumps to attention – “when your Academy teachers taught you chakra techniques, did they stress that you should avoid using more than the technique requires? That if you do, it's wasted completely?”

“Yes,” Sakura reports, “and if you need to use a technique but you don't have the chakra to spend on it, you should cut out every piece of the technique except for the core and the parts that're immediately useful. That's just good form.”

“For you, and Sasuke, and your teachers, it would be. Naruto,” he says, and then he stops, working his jaw.

“Yeah?” says Naruto, wary.

“I can't believe this,” Kisame sighs while Naruto bristles, and then he says, “Pretend your chakra is a loaf of bread.” It is a sunny evening in Konohagakure and Kisame is saying words that have meanings. “If you squeeze the loaf into a ball before you eat it, you'd be eating the same amount of bread as if you didn't do that first.”

Naruto gasps, as if that made sense. “Oh! So you cut it?”

“If that's what's easiest for you.” Kisame exhales. “It's why your normal clones fail, so you know. The bread that got squeezed... expands back to its usual size halfway through, so you lose the technique.”

“Balloon bread,” Naruto tries.

Sure. “Try it again.”

“Kisame-sensei,” Sakura says while Naruto works on slicing into the invisible balloon bread inside of him, “are you a sensor-nin?”

Kisame turns his attention away from Naruto. “What is this about?”

“I mean, you can tell exactly what Naruto is doing.”

Can any person honestly tell exactly what Naruto is doing? “No problem is ever a first,” says Kisame. “I've seen this happen before. To five year-olds, but everyone has to start somewhere, eh?” Naruto frowns deeply and grits his teeth and makes an interesting throat noise, and Kisame says, “Smaller slices, Naruto.”

Naruto demands, “So what do I do with this one?”

“Throw it out. You can afford to, with that capacity. The issue with this method is that you need to guess beforehand how much chakra you'll need for any technique you use, but do it long enough and you might grow a feel for it.”

The other, better way to perform a technique you don't need much chakra for, and the way that Sasuke and Sakura probably use, is to treat chakra like physical energy. You don't have to employ the same amount of force to close a door as you would to punch a hole through the door, even if you use the same arm.

But if Naruto hasn't figured that out after twelve years, then that visualization probably won't work for him anytime soon. Some people need longer to develop a fine sense of their own chakra. This can be his training wheel method until then.

By the time the training session ends, Naruto still hasn't made much progress on air-cycling. Perfect – Kisame has something to test.

“If you can't get it by tomorrow morning,” Kisame says, “you'll go back to the Academy.”

It takes a second for the words to sink in. 

Naruto gapes at him like a landed fish. Dramatic. Only in Kiri would that threat have carried weight. The worst that happens in Konoha is he wastes another year of his life. “Wha – ”

The other two don't look overly stricken about the possibility of ditching the class pariah and becoming a two-man team. They should both get off of their high horses; neither of them has friends who like them, either.

“If you can't learn something as basic as this, you shouldn't be here,” Kisame says. “Sakura got it on her first try, and” – wait, he's doing this wrong, Konoha's about working together and supporting each other or whatever unrealistic motto they've cooked up; oh, well – “Sasuke already knew it because he studied it on his own time without someone needing to tell him to.” 

Which is not remotely true. Sasuke doesn't have some of the benefits anymore that other clan progeny do, but he did when he learned the grand fireball.

“You can't do that!” Naruto yells. “Sakura-chan and Sasuke are the highest ranked in the – you can't – I earned it, 'ttebayo, Iruka-sensei said – ”

What sort of emotional journey is happening in there?

“ – I'll do it!” Naruto bellows, hand finding his headband and tightening around the steel. “I earned this fair and square, I'm a ninja, I'll show you! I'll do it better than Sasuke! Then you'll tell me about the Uzumaki clan!”

And how did that journey end there? “Aren't you getting ahead of yourself?”

Naruto's not listening. He's vibrating out of his skin, with anger or excitement or fear or whatever medley soup he's brewing. He's one of those people who thinks more with his heart than his head and has no qualms about showing it.

It's not a difficult personality type to interact with, though Kisame will admit to feeling more at home around people who would rather spontaneously combust than give a straight answer about what color they think the sky currently is. For given definitions of home.

“Tomorrow morning, right?” Naruto demands. “I'll definitely have it, 'ttebayo! Believe it!”

---

And Naruto does.

He remains overnight at the training ground until he can hold the technique for two minutes at a time. Kisame stays with him to make sure he doesn't kill himself and to offer help as needed, but Naruto takes the suggestion that he might need help as some kind of slight against his pride and doesn't ask Kisame a single question.

Sasuke sticks around to work on it, too. (Though he might just not want to go back to the apartment alone.) Sakura begs off, with the awkwardness of being the only person present with living parents, and leaves Sasuke and Naruto to spend the night practicing as one-man islands.

Kisame thought Naruto might manage it – learning the mass shadow clone technique in a single night without any outside guidance isn't something anyone can accomplish as a fluke – but...

...and Naruto has no idea how impressive what he accomplished is, not any more than Sakura did when she performed it competently on her first try.

Kisame really should have pushed Kakashi out of the window. Kakashi could have taught this team better himself, when at least two of its members might be prodigies on his level.

---

Come Thursday, Kisame says over breakfast, “I thought you took Naruto to the library.”

Sasuke scowls. He picks up another slice of omelette and swallows it before he answers, “We did go. I found books about his clan, there was a whole shelf of them. But I showed them to him and he just didn't read them.”

“He never went to class, right?”

“Yeah,” says Sasuke. He frowns. “No. I don't know. He was only in my class for a year. But the upperclassmen talked about him too when he was with them, so... yeah, I think so.” He eyes Kisame across the table. “The dead last knows how to read. There's no way he doesn't.”

Kisame grunts. “You're probably right.” However, knowing how to read and reading well enough to parse a history textbook describe two fairly different skill levels.

The morning ticks onwards. Kisame has finished his food and is, as usual, sitting waiting for Sasuke (partially out of an aversion to leaving a meal table early, but mostly because he has nothing better to do until his meet-up time with Naruto) when Sasuke speaks up again.

“If you're the team captain, does that mean Team 7 can't take missions outside of the village?”

“No. All that happens if you get a mission like that is you'll work under a different captain. Do you remember Kakashi?”

“That weirdo who visits you through the window.”

“My probation officer,” Kisame agrees. “He's your team's captain if you need to leave Konoha. You should be polite to him if you can. He doesn't deserve it, but it makes me look bad if you act too much like yourself.” Sasuke's brow creases faintly in the way Itachi's used to, and Kisame spares him from the possibility of picking out the wrong implication: “You know of him mostly through me. I wouldn't want someone assuming I'm the one who taught you to disrespect him.”

“You want me to talk like you?” says the genin who calls his teachers by their first names.

“You shouldn't strain yourself.”

Sasuke purses his lips. He finishes the last of the eggs before he says, “I still can't figure out why you're our teacher. The village doesn't let you do anything else, usually. And isn't having to contact another ninja when we start taking outside missions too complicated? Why isn't it the same person as the team's teacher?”

Kisame's been planning to tell the three of them together the truth at some later date... on second thought, half-heartedly protecting Kakashi's nonexistent dignity isn't very high on his priority list after all. “What makes you think it isn't the same person?”

Sasuke blinks.

“Kakashi is your teacher. I'll tell the same thing to the other two the next time we see them together.”

“...What made you wait until now?”

“I thought it might save him some face,” Kisame says absently. But that was probably unnecessary. Kakashi doesn't have much of a face to save, anyway, with the mask and headband doing so much work. “But you shouldn't notice a difference no matter who the team's leader is on paper. Officially, he's your teacher. Practically, you might want to consider pretending he doesn't exist. It would make your life easier. He asked me to take Team 7 in his place.”

“Is that allowed?”

Considering the current arrangement, it must be. “You'll need to ask him if you're interested in knowing his reasons. He didn't tell me any of what he was thinking.”

Not that Kisame doesn't have his suspicions. When he went to talk to Kakashi immediately following the team introduction, Kakashi had a general idea of how he would teach the team if someone held a knife to his neck and forced him to. He put thought into the possibility of keeping them as students before he dumped them on Kisame.

If it was the milk incident with Naruto that tipped him over the edge, then his most likely reason for abandoning them was that he didn't want to risk their getting hurt on his watch. As to why that might be a concern for him, Kisame has fewer guesses.

That's assuming he was telling the truth about the milk incident being his primary reason, though. Kakashi, like Kisame, has no tells whatsoever when he lies, though it's a rare skill even among shinobi.

“...You're saying,” says Sasuke after a second. He's clasped his hands together. For a civilian, it'd be an unremarkable grounding pose; for a ninja, it's both that and a position that allows for forming hand seals without delay. “That this team was set up to crash and burn.”

Set up implies a level of deliberateness that doesn't seem present in this case. “When did you get to be so dramatic? On paper, Hatake Kakashi makes sense as your teacher. So, on paper, someone assigned him as your teacher. Unless you can think of someone in this village with a reason to sabotage you specifically.”

“We got a teacher who flaked on us, and now our teacher is you.” Kisame: damsel in distress, live-in maid, washed-out failure ninja, and now Sasuke's jounin instructor because fate hates Sasuke personally. The world must look like such an interesting place through an Uchiha's eyes. “The other two genin on the team are the dead last and... Sakura.”

“What problem is there with Sakura?”

“Nothing, she's just annoying.”

Kisame needs to find a way to handle her crush eventually. A ninja can't have relationships with their teammates that might jeopardize a mission. That applies to Naruto's crush on her, too, as well as his rivalry with Sasuke. Sasuke's disdain for the both of them is acceptable at its current level, though.

“Then your team is universally terrible,” Kisame says idly. “What do you intend to do about it?”

Sasuke glowers at the table.

“You know, if you had friends, they could commiserate with you.”

“Those two?”

“Why not? You should be spending enough time with them for it.”

“That doesn't work when they're half the problem.”

“You might have the wrong idea, Sasuke. This team is stacked in your favor. The two highest ranked genin in the year, and – “

“ – and Naruto,” Sasuke interrupts.

Rude creature. Kisame continues after a pause, “ – and the most hard-headed genin in the village.” In every possible sense of the word. “Your teacher would have been one of the most proficient combat-specialized jounin Konoha has. You have me instead, which nobody should consider ideal, but” – Kirigakure's bingo books still mark me as S-rank – “I should be stronger than your Academy teachers, at the very least.”

Whether that translates to teaching is a different story, as Kakashi can attest. That isn't the point, though.

“Are you?” says Sasuke, eyebrow raised.

Itachi knocks you out with a genjutsu one time and his brother never, ever lets you live it down. 

“You'll need to take my word for it.”

“Spar with me,” Sasuke demands.

Ha. No. “You'll have to take a rain check.”

Sasuke can believe whatever he likes. The reason Kisame won't spar with him is because the next time Kisame gets into a fight, he'll kill his opponent or die trying.

Recovered alcoholics can fall into old habits after a single sip of a mild drink. Kisame is under no illusions about how his first experience with combat will affect him after years of no activity more exciting than chopping apart the occasional tree on a training ground.

Itachi should have remained in Konoha. Kisame could have killed the clan instead of him and then left to do what missing-nin do while Itachi stuck around with his brother.

Itachi doesn't even like fighting. He likes ending fights, preferably bloodlessly. Killing his family was wasted on him.

But the Uchiha are an old clan, prideful and powerful, and his honor wouldn't allow him to sully their story by letting it end at an outsider's hands. 

The weight of an entire hidden village placed on every single soul unlucky enough to call themselves a village-affiliated shinobi. You need to be honorable, and loyal, and effective despite the other concerns, to understand when your self-interest serves the village and when it doesn't, and to know on the spot in every mission whether the objective is more important than your life, and the difference between using your life well and throwing it away wastefully, and Konoha layers in yet another burden in the form of valuing your teammates beyond their immediate relevance.

If you take that unnavigable labyrinth out of the picture and flatten reality down to merely the physical, concrete events, if you cleave the meanings from the actions – what you get is what Sasuke knows happened: that Uchiha Itachi picked up a blade and with it killed his two hundred closest relatives, his own parents and all, in the span of a night. 

Itachi was about Sasuke's age when he did it.

Odd thought.

Sasuke sniffs. Kisame can't picture him as he is making any of the choices his brother did. “You're not a jounin.”

Sasuke probably thinks his mother was a housewife her whole life. Kisame doesn't take it personally.

In any case, it might be in fair portion Kisame's fault that Sasuke is like this. Kisame doesn't tell anyone anything if he can help it. Old habits. He looks enough like a thoughtlessly transparent brute, and is enough of one at heart, that it doesn't ring alarm bells when he acts the part. Even if he unfortunately doesn't get to play into the brute half of the image very much these days.

Kakashi doesn't fully buy it anymore, though.

Which is... somewhat concerning. But not enough yet to address.

“You might run into some trouble,” Kisame says, letting Sasuke's comment slide, “with a Kiri deserter as your teacher. The three of you will need to handle it on your own if anyone outside of the team takes issue with things.”

Sasuke grunts. “Is the reason we get today off because you couldn't get someone to let you book a training ground? Not because Naruto needed a break?”

“Can't it be both?” Naruto has spent forty of the past forty-eight hours awake.

So have Sasuke and Kisame, but watch Sasuke ever admit that he might benefit from the same considerations as the dead last.

“I guess,” Sasuke mutters. “This is a terrible team. Are you sure you can teach?”

“I can say yes if it would make you feel better,” says Kisame.

Chapter Text

Lunchtime. Kisame dismissed them for the hour, and Sakura hurriedly grabbed her lunch and scampered after Sasuke as he left to find a place to sit alone. Naruto, behind her, hurriedly grabbed his lunch and scampered after Sakura.

Sasuke flashed them both a look over his shoulder, but Sakura was long-practiced at ignoring those.

“Sasuke-kun, can I talk to you, please?” she asked. “And... Naruto. If you're here anyway.”

The second part caught Sasuke's attention, if not quite his interest.

“Sure, Sakura-chan!” Naruto crowed. Which was annoying, but... she didn't have anyone else to talk to, unless she figured out the names of the jounin teachers of her old classmates and tracked down where they were training and interrupted their team time. Having Naruto on her team apparently meant she was stuck with him for the foreseeable future.

At least the thing she wanted to talk about sort of concerned him, too, so his butting in wasn't as irritating as usual. As long as he didn't try to ask her out again, which was just obnoxious and all-around one of his stupidest jokes, she supposed he could stay.

Sasuke sat down in the center of a clearing nearby – it was a bad idea to try to sit somewhere truly secluded or out of sight while on a training ground – and Sakura primly followed.

Naruto plopped down way too close to her, enveloping her in the rich fragrance of someone only distantly aware of the concept of personal hygiene, and immediately opened his lunch box to reveal... oh, ew.

Sakura edged away as he poured oil and seasoning packets onto the slab of instant ramen, patted off the flecks of mold and slime that had transferred from the inside of the box onto the noodles, and started crunching away at his lunch, spraying flecks of dust-dry noodle across his lap and the surrounding grass.

Sasuke resolutely did not look at him at all.

On second thought, that lunch was... kind of sad. It was just like what Sasuke had said before the team assignments. Not having parents probably did explain a lot of what made Naruto Naruto.

Sakura's parents were both home this week because they'd taken time off for her graduation, but under normal circumstances she packed her own lunches, too. Her meals were balanced, if plain, only because her parents had long since taught her how to make them the right way.

But that wasn't the point of this meeting!

She tried to ignore the cacophonous chewing, mostly failed, and soldiered on anyway. She'd waited a full day in case someone else would think to mention it first, but nobody had and now it was up to her. “Um, I think... Kisame-sensei might be from Mist.”

Crunch. Crunch.

She looked slowly between the other two. Not a hint of surprise from either of them. “You knew?” Sakura had only found out because she'd told her parents about her team assignment and they'd recognized her new teacher's name.

“Yes,” said Sasuke.

“Nope,” said Naruto through a mouthful of abomination. “What d'you mean, he's from mist?”

On third thought, there were other orphans in their class and none of them were Naruto.

“Mist is a hidden village of ninja, just like the Hidden Leaf is,” said Sakura, and if Naruto made her explain what a ninja was she was going to kill him and make it look like an accident so she could get assigned a different teammate, “except we don't like the Hidden Mist.”

Naruto considered this. “So we don't like Same-sensei?” Sasuke went very still mid-way through opening his box. “Just 'cause he's from a bad place?”

Horribly, Sakura had only brought this topic up because she had the same question as Naruto. “He's okay, I think? He wouldn't be in the village if he wasn't. But it... might be a little weird that he's a jounin sensei.”

“He wouldn't be if the Hokage didn't trust him,” said Sasuke.

That struck Sakura as odd to hear from Sasuke, considering Sasuke had spent a notable portion of the past two days looking like he was trying to set Kisame on fire with his eyes.

But it was a good point, of course.

“Sasuke-kun, did you already know him?”

“They're cousins, 'ttebayo!”

What.

Sakura turned desperately to Sasuke, but Sasuke only rolled his eyes and did not deny Naruto's slander.

“But he's from Kiri...?”

He could've... married into Sasuke's family? Maybe? (She hoped not. If Sasuke's family's preferences ran in the direction of big, blue, and mean then it meant neither Sakura nor Ino had ever stood a chance.)

Sasuke sighed deeply, lips pursed. “Distant cousin.”

What.

“Hey, hey, Sasuke,” Naruto said, scooting towards him, “what's that thing on Same-sensei's back?”

Sasuke gave him a baleful look. “Samehada.”

“What, he's just carrying around fish skin?”

“It's the name of a sword, idiot.”

“Swords don't look like that,” Naruto said, frowning, before he perked up. “Oh! We're gonna learn swords!”

“I've never seen him use Samehada,” Sasuke said.

“But why would he walk around everywhere with a giant, super heavy sword he never uses?”

“Mind your own business,” Sasuke snapped.

Naruto jabbed a finger at him. “I bet you don't even know, 'ttebayo!”

“This is stupid – ”

“You don't!”

“As if.”

“Prove it!”

“Are you actually cousins?” Sakura ventured.

Sasuke sniffed and pointedly glanced down at his lunchbox instead. It had grilled shrimp and stir-fried eggs with vegetables and bite-sized rice balls shaped like fish. On some days he had rice ball turtles, or snails, or jellyfish with seaweed strip tentacles. This was normal information for Sakura to know about a boy who never talked to her and who ate his food alone away from the rest of the class.

He picked out a rice ball and chewed while gazing into the middle distance over Sakura's and Naruto's heads.

Naruto said, “Hey, don't ignore Sakura-chan!” He gestured emphatically at the Sakura-chan in question until she shoved him and sent him toppling.

“It wasn't important, Sasuke-kun, it's okay if you ignore me.”

“He doesn't need permission to be a jerk,” Naruto muttered, or at least spoke in what passed for muttering volume from him. He took another angry chomp of his awful, horrible instant noodles.

Kisame was... Sasuke's... cousin.

In that case, wasn't placing him as Sasuke's teacher nepotism? He hadn't shown favoritism yet, but it was Wednesday and they had only just received the team assignments on Monday. They had more than enough time to potentially see it show up in the future.

It still felt weird that they had a foreign teacher. Her parents had certainly thought so. I didn't know he was an active shinobi, her dad had said, which was already a great start, and then her mom had added, We don't argue with team assignments, but be careful around him, Sakura.

Kiri-nin apparently were off, though neither of her parents had clarified further on that point.

But they'd said almost the same things about Naruto. And Naruto at the end of the day was just gross and loud and stupid, and Kisame was obviously bored and annoyed and not particularly nice, and neither of those was great. But they weren't quite as bad as her parents had made them out to be, either.

So her parents were probably just being overprotective.

Plus, Sasuke was on the team, which balanced it out. Sasuke was handsome and cool and talented, and his condescension objectively made him dreamy and interesting. Nearly all of the girls in their class agreed on this.

“Sasuke-kun,” she said, “do you know what the Seven Swordsmen of the Hidden Mist are?”

Her mom had mentioned them off-handedly as the specific organization within Kiri that Kisame had defected from. Sakura hadn't asked further because the name seemed incredibly self-explanatory, but if Sasuke knew more then maybe getting him talking about it would convince him to let them revive the conversation Naruto had all but murdered in cold blood.

Sasuke swallowed his food before he spoke because he wasn't Naruto. “They're seven swordsmen. From Mist.”

No, really?

Sakura supposed it was on her for asking.

“In the Third War, four of them died to take down a genin.”

Sakura blinked. “Why?”

You'd think after two of them at most had died, the survivors would have regrouped to discuss a better strategy. Obviously Konoha was the strongest shinobi village, but, even so, if enemy ninja routinely lost en masse to Konoha genin then Konoha wouldn't have needed to fight three wars over the course of her history.

Sasuke thought for a moment, then said, “They're all dead, so you can't ask them anymore. I don't know.” He sounded like what he really meant by that was I don't care.

“I'm a genin now!” Naruto said. “That means I can beat four enemy ninja!”

“Nothing works like that,” said Sakura, at the same time as Sasuke said, “In your dreams, dead last.”

Chapter Text

Kisame has never gotten kicked out of a public library before, and he'd rather today not be the first. “Be quieter inside,” he says, and only pushes open the glass door after Naruto nods.

Kiri's infrastructure emphasizes privacy from both people and weather. This translates to plenty of stone because mold prefers organic materials and the earth element counters water ninjutsu, a dislike for corners where mold and ninja might hide, minimal openings and tightly sealed doorways to complicate assassinations and to keep the mist out so that it won't feed the mold, and candles and incense to cover the scent of what mold the smoke doesn't deter.

Depending on the building, it might be expected as a matter of course for a ninja to, on leaving, collect some humidity from the air indoors to take outside with them; there's a long-running urban legend of a murderer who got caught immediately when they gathered not just the water from the air but also their victim's blood from the floor and walked out the door without thinking.

Konoha's library would send a Kiri architect into fits: wooden shelves and walls and furniture, dust visible in the air and swirled together with the smell of old paper and glue (and a hint of mold), windows that shine sunlight across a few clusters of reading tables, carpeting....

Naruto isn't a Kiri architect, but he eyes the books and reading tables with a similar level of suspicion. He follows Kisame to the history section like a foreign delegate on guard for assassination attempts, and Kisame spares a moment to be impressed with Sasuke for not murdering him at all. There are so many shelves to hide a small body behind. It'd take half an hour before someone noticed.

Kisame tips a book about the clans that joined Konoha at the village's founding off the shelf, flips it open to more or less where he remembers the Uzumaki chapter began – a few pages off, it was a little further ahead – there: Senju Hashirama recognized the value of the Uzumaki, a powerful and secretive clan famed for their proficiency in the difficult and esoteric art of fuuinjutsu, and was determined to gain their allegiance....

Each book in this building that mentions the Uzumaki is...

...well, is what it is.

This book, for all that it spends so many words getting creative about interpreting its sources, is one of the few that doesn't actively revise major aspects of the Uzumaki's history and reputation. It just omits them instead.

A lie of this scale still doesn't sit right with him, but there's a time and a place for letting a person learn that kind of thing about their family, and that time isn't right after the person discovered the family in question existed at all. Kisame's a monster, not a butcher.

He closes the interesting perspective on historical events and passes it down to Naruto, thumb marking the page. “Can you read it?”

“How'd you find it this fast?” Naruto demands.

“I come around here more often than you do.”

Naruto frowns. “How'd Sasuke find it so fast?”

“You had better ask him.”

Naruto opens the book and stares at the words for a bit. His finger inches along the first line of the page.

The finger stalls on a word.

Naruto doesn't say anything – doesn't mention that he doesn't recognize the kanji, doesn't ask for help, doesn't leave to look for a dictionary. Kisame can't see his expression, just his hair, but it probably wouldn't give Kisame any new information if he could.

Kisame wonders, not for the first time and not for the last, how he got through the Academy, and why he got through.

Naruto enrolled several years early and was allowed to attempt graduation with his class instead of his age group, meaning someone high up – probably the Hokage, honestly – sanctioned the special circumstances of his attendance. However, that person did nothing further for him aside from stopping him from getting expelled no matter how much he deserved it. Some of his grades were single-digit, and he practically never went to class.

Naruto would have failed the graduation exam this year, too, if someone didn't throw him a bone via the awful alternate exam. He might have stayed in the Academy forever, never competent enough to pass but never allowed to fail out. What a way to raise a jinchuuriki.

“‘Value',” Kisame says. Naruto startles and whips his head up. “That word reads ‘value'.”

Naruto blinks at him, then, after a second of visible thought, jabs the next non-name character that contains more than three strokes and half-yells, “What's this one?”

“‘Secretive', but let's head outside first.” There's something about the shadowed indoor space that makes the genin look more solid than he does on a training field. Better for both of their health if they go somewhere where that thought won't lurk as persistently. It's been a long time since Kisame was allowed to make anyone bleed.

Shinobi ID cards double as library cards, which makes Naruto's first time checking out a book less painful than it could have been. Naruto shoves the book up at Kisame the instant they step outside and says, “This one!”

What were dictionaries invented for. “‘Famed'. Copying words down makes it easier to remember them.” Yeah, if they'd stayed much longer in there Kisame would have killed him, and it honestly would haven't been Naruto's fault at all. 

“Hmm.” Naruto, without looking away from the pages, rummages through various bright orange pockets, comes out with nothing, and then makes an annoyed sound and shows Kisame the book again.

“‘Proficiency'.”

“That's... how good you are at something, right?”

Naruto did not ask him nearly this many questions during training even though it would have helped him. Kisame's not sure where the change of heart today came from, but he's mildly interested in whether it'll continue as a trend. Mocking Naruto would end the experiment early and with a boringly straightforward result.

So he says, “It sure is.”

He should leave Naruto here. Teachers who spend more time with their students than necessary annoy him on principle. Except that he knows for a fact that Naruto will not read the book if Kisame lets him go off on his own, and then Naruto will make a whole running pattern out of pestering Kisame about Kushina at every opportunity. Might be less stressful to head that off while he can.

Anyway, Kisame can't come up with a problem, exactly, with carting around a tag-along while he runs errands. He hardly does sensitive work. He was going to prepare what they need for dinner, since they have enough leftovers to not worry about lunch, and then meander his way through the rest of the day – read a book, clean Samehada, rearrange his terrible DIY figurines to reenact a Warring Clans-era battle, deliver lunch to Sasuke (who always says he'll take a break around noon to come back for food and avoid the midday heat but inevitably decides to ignore the time and keep training anyway), do the bare minimum to maintain his physical conditioning because if he exerts himself any more than that while spending chakra at his current rate then he won't be able to move tomorrow. 

Naruto settles in beside Kisame, skipping after every few steps to keep up, as Kisame starts down the street. He neither asks for permission nor gives indication that he expects Kisame not to humor him. Maybe he's learned that if he gives people a chance to back out from spending time with him, they'll always take it.

Naruto's reputation around here really is terrible. It's one thing for passers-by's attention to linger on Kisame, but the genin who's never committed any particularly egregious atrocities that Kisame knows of is attracting similar looks.

“What's this say?”

Naruto doesn't seem to care about the attention, though. Accustomed enough to it that he doesn't consider it worth reacting to or acknowledging.

“‘Esoteric'. It means ‘secret'. Don't bend the spine like that unless you're trying to damage the book.”

“‘The Uzumaki clan was a secret clan famous for their secret arts.'”

“Finish the sentence before you summarize it” – not that Naruto was wrong about it – “or else you'll miss information.”

“What's fuuinjutsu?”

Ah. That. “It's a type of chakra technique, like ninjutsu or genjutsu. It works by... writing, on paper.”

He's never considered how awkward it would be for a former Kiri-nin in Konoha to talk about the Uzumaki clan to an Uzumaki descendant who has a jinchuuriki seal marked on his skin. To be fair to past him, why would he?

Naruto's hand drifts towards his stomach. “...Does it have to be on paper?”

“I'm not any good at it. I couldn't say.”

The Uzumaki were...

...they didn't specialize in fuuinjutsu, not exactly. Commonly-used modern seals – storage seals, barriers, so on – have either had their inventors lost to time or are associated with names other than Uzumaki.

The Uzumaki were known for their fuuinjutsu based around the manipulation of human souls.

The truth is that the clan was universally reviled outside of Fire Country. The Second War was waged, and the Kiri-Kumo-Iwa alliance was forged during it, for the primary purpose of ending them. 

Seals attributed to them or to their surviving research include the death god summoning pact, Senju Tsunade's advancements in medical fuuinjutsu, various legends of immortality and longevity seals, scattered but credible stories of necromancy, seals that fused multiple people's souls or bodies together, chakra suppression seals, storage seals on humans – the jinchuuriki seals that store bijuu, along with ones that store information to prevent the sealed person from revealing it without permission, or that store actions that the sealed person can never again perform or can be forced to perform on command, or that store emotions that the sealer can make the sealed person experience at will, or that store people or souls or chakra or techniques in similar manners.

Which would have been fine. Orochimaru of the Sannin purportedly gets up to similar practices, if to a lesser extent, and no major alliance has joined together to put him in the ground for it. 

Yes, the Uzumaki trained their genin on humans; yes, the Uzumaki trained their genin on their own branch clans when they couldn't source from outside; yes, there were creatures living in the whirlpools surrounding Uzushio that did not look like humans, did not look like any animal, that made sounds almost like words and scored scratches in the pattern of human fingers along the sides of boats that ventured too close; but the crime the Uzumaki died for was doing and being all of those while also having a close alliance with Konoha that gave Konoha a monopoly on stable jinchuuriki seals.

Konoha's history books assert that the Second War began when Lightning, Water, and Earth Countries grew jealous of Fire's fertile farmland and encroached on its allied minor countries in preparation to steal territory from it. Fire went on to win the war, as evidenced by the fact that no one managed to claim land from it.

None of those histories quite succeed at coherently explaining why the war ended the night Uzushio sank.

“Is fuu-in-jutsu hard? To learn?” potentially the last bearer of the Uzumaki name asks.

“I don't know anything about it.”

“Nothing?”

“I can tell a storage seal from an explosive tag,” Kisame says. “Most of the time.”

Naruto frowns up at him, then makes a noise and turns back to the book.

He's nearly made it all the way through the first sentence. They grow up so fast.

By the time the apartment comes into view, Kisame has newly-acquired groceries dangling loosely from his hand and Naruto has one paragraph and half of a second under his belt. Naruto has also realized that they have actually been heading somewhere and that Kisame has not been aimlessly wandering.

“You can come up if you want,” says Kisame. “Or don't.”

Naruto has followed Kisame across a quarter of Konoha and evidently does not intend to allow a measly three flights of stairs to deter him from continuing to make perilous decisions. Any Kiri genin would rather pull out a tooth than walk into a teacher's home, but Konoha genin are built differently. Invincibly. Idiotically.

Sasuke wouldn't, would he? Obviously he has to follow Kisame home, that's unavoidable, but Kakashi would burn his own apartment down before he let any of the genin discover his address, and Sasuke no longer has any other teachers, and if he hypothetically acquired any, then he... Kisame's actually not sure what Sasuke would do. He'll ask him.

“This is where you live?” Naruto says, poking his head through the door after Kisame. A flare of nostrils; a quiet sniff. “And Sasuke too?”

Kisame halfway expected him to dart in and immediately make a mess of things, but he loiters by the door instead after Kisame closes it behind them without locking it.

It looks like he's trying to move as little as possible. Taking the place in without turning his head too obviously, finding a comfortable position to stand in without shifting on his feet. It certainly contrasts with his usual habit of expanding to fill whatever space he's entered.

No family, no friends.... “You can sit down at the table,” Kisame says. “But take your shoes off first.”

Naruto shuffles over to a chair, gawking at the apartment and trying to be subtle about it, while Kisame deals with the food situation and largely ignores him.

“Oh!” Naruto grabs the tea on reflex when it appears in front of him. Kisame fully intends to be a terrible host, but some things you still have to do.

The tea is one step away from soup, the green so deep it edges near opaque. Kisame let it oversteep in too-hot water under the suspicion that Naruto might not have the ability to taste it otherwise, what with his usual diet apparently consisting of instant ramen and spoiled milk.

Kisame's already blanched a bunch of spinach, set wood ears to soak, and made progress chopping up the other vegetables when Naruto speaks up again. “Hey hey, Same-sensei,” Naruto says, recovering his normal volume as he spins the book around on the table to face up for Kisame, “what's this word?”

Kisame glances over. “‘Clan leader'.”

Naruto bulls his way through the rest of the sentence, then shouts, “The clan leader's daughter was married to the Shodaime Hokage!”

“Uzumaki Mito,” says Kisame, sweeping the sliced bell peppers into a plastic container.

“Someone in my family was married to the Shodaime Hokage!” Is he vibrating? “I'm definitely gonna be the Hokage, 'ttebayo! I'm gonna be the first Uzumaki Hokage!” Does green tea contain that much caffeine? A jinchuuriki should have a better constitution than most. “Do you think – maybe she was my grandmother? Uzumaki Mito.”

This is apparently not a rhetorical question. “Who knows?” says Kisame, instead of no. Even if she's his direct ancestor, she wouldn't be his grandmother. Human lifespans don't work that way.

Kakashi sounded confident enough about Kushina and Naruto's lack of relation that he might have a definite answer for how Naruto fits into the clan, but if Kisame tells Naruto as much then Naruto will pull this routine on Kakashi. The unstoppable force would meet the immovable object. Kakashi would never tell Naruto, Naruto would never give up, Kakashi would embarrass himself by disappearing from Konoha on infinite back-to-back missions to avoid conversations with a twelve-year old he is the direct commanding officer of, Naruto would go AWOL hunting him down, and Kisame both wouldn't get paid anymore and also would have wasted an incredible threat against Kakashi for no good reason. Unless sadism counts for a good reason.

It might.

“What was Uzumaki Kushina like?” Naruto asks, sprawled halfway across the table towards Kisame with the chair tipped precariously beneath him. “You met her once. You said so! What was she like? Was she cool? I bet she was so cool.”

Twelve years old with a Konoha headband tied proudly around his forehead, a chakra beast in his gut, a patron who remembers him just often enough to pressure the Academy into not throwing him into the gutter, and a city filled with people who look at him with as much distrust as they look at a Kiri defector. No family, no friends, only one Academy teacher who left halfway thoughtful notes in his profile. Konoha is all he knows, and no one in it has ever told him a single thing that he didn't have to pry out of them.

Far be it from Kisame to become the first to break the pattern. “It was a while ago, and during a battle. I don't remember much of it. There was more happening than just her. ”

“It was during a battle,” Naruto echoes, eyes bright.

Kisame mixes trout slices into a bowl of cornstarch instead of giving him more to work with.

“She beat up lots of bad guys, didn't she?”

Kisame pauses.

Does this kid...?

“...Yes,” says Kisame. “You should get back to reading. That thing has more to tell you than I do.”

The remainder of the chapter covers Senju Hashirama's wooing of the Uzumaki and Mito, the terms of their alliance, Uchiha Madara's confused and confusing attempts to sabotage the marriage, the culmination of those attempts in the form of Madara controlling the Kyuubi with his Sharingan to attack the wedding, Hashirama and Mito's sealing of the Kyuubi into a nameless volunteer, and Hashirama's forgiveness of Madara.

By the time Kisame's stacked tonight's preparations into the refrigerator and heated half of yesterday's leftovers for his own lunch, Naruto still hasn't reached Madara. At the rate of one page every thirty to forty minutes, Naruto won't finish until evening, assuming he doesn't take breaks or give up.

Teaching him about the wonders of dictionaries would free Kisame, but it would also give Naruto the ability to dig for his own sources and risk him finding out about the Second War. Nothing wrong with that, except that the resulting discussion would make Kisame reconsider staying in Konoha. Kirigakure has committed so much mass murder for dubious reasons that inventing a fictional new instance of it to get mad about rubs him a bit the wrong way. They did not sink Uzushio out of spite over a failed land grab.

He should have spent the first meeting at the Academy pretending he didn't speak Common and forced Sasuke to handle the introductions instead. That would have solved his current problems and certainly not created any new ones.

Well, it's just a one-time occasion, this arrangement. Annoying, but nothing more than that.

A loud, long gurgle interrupts Naruto's question about what a particular expression means. “Ugh,” Naruto mutters. His hand strays towards his stomach, which is such a consistent tell of his that Kisame briefly, half-heartedly, wonders if the noise came from the Kyuubi.

Obviously it did not. Kisame leans against the counter and has another bite of rice.

A minute later, Naruto's stomach growls a second time. The person attached to it makes a face. “It always does this.”

“When did you eat last?” Kisame asks, more out of reflex than because he cares or intends to act on the answer. He's Naruto's jounin teacher. No good reason exists for food to get involved in this relationship.

Naruto looks at the clock on the wall, scrunches his brow, works out some calculations, and answers, “I've got barbeque ramen for lunch, 'ttebayo, and I'm gonna eat miso ramen for dinner. The barbeque's hard to find! It's stupid, it only shows up a few weeks and only like three stores have it, and I've been saving this bowl since fall – ”

He continues on in that vein for a while. Kisame eats some more rice.

Every ninja has their quirks, he supposes. Immunity to scurvy is an interesting one. He never expected such a powerful regenerative ability from an untransformed jinchuuriki.

Once Naruto winds down, Kisame says, “Sounds edible. You didn't have breakfast, then?”

Naruto gives him a baffled look. “I'd die,” he says. “Who skips breakfast? I had milk.” His lips thin into a scowl. “Iruka-sensei says you get sick if you don't eat something green every week.”

Huh.

If Kakashi wasn't running a mission, Kisame would pause this conversation to drag him over before resuming it.

“The milk was green,” he says, just to have the words out there.

When he called Naruto's diet exclusively spoiled milk and instant ramen, he didn't intend it to be literal. Normally he would expect to have smelled traces of that sort of thing pretty quickly, but Naruto's scent profile has so much going on with it that the rancid notes seem to have just gotten muddled indistinctly in with the rest of him.

“That's weird, isn't it?” Naruto says. “I told Iruka-sensei that vegetables feel bad, but he says you have to eat them anyway.”

“Milk is a vegetable,” Kisame says. 

“Only when it's green!”

Calling mold a vegetable is a bold move. That's the strength of character that separates ninja who aspire to become Kage from ninja who aspire not to die of food poisoning before thirteen.

Naruto does get sick from it, though. Not severely, and hopefully not even every time (the nearest bathroom is the one Kisame has to clean), but he's resistant rather than immune. That's what started the mess in the first place with Kakashi passing off the team. Naruto might have avoided dropping dead so far of malnutrition and whatever else, but the gradient between perfectly healthy and dead spans a wide and colorful array of possibilities.

Which means it probably impacts Naruto's job performance. Which makes it the jounin teacher's problem.

Which doesn't mean the jounin teacher needs to address the problem.

Kisame kind of doesn't...

...oh, whatever. If Naruto takes this the wrong way, Kisame can always wipe his hands of the team and send them back to Kakashi. That'll teach them not to expect too much emotional investment from a team leader.

He sets his cleaned-out bowl in the sink. “You wouldn't happen to be – ” allergic to anything, he almost says, before he remembers who he's talking to. “Never mind.”

“What?” says Naruto suspiciously.

Kisame opens the refrigerator. “I was going to ask if there's anything that makes you sick when you eat it.”

“A lot of stuff,” says Naruto, before he rattles off a long, long, long list of perishables. He does like talking about food. Instant ramen alone has never betrayed him, and also the ramen from a noodle stand whose owner didn't grow up a badly-socialized orphan with regeneration so effective that it spared him from suffering any major consequences for never learning about expiration dates and why refrigeration matters.

Nothing Kisame's setting out on the counter will kill him, in other words. That's all that's relevant.

Chapter Text

For her first three years in the Academy, Sakura was the top student in her grade level. She claimed the position by such a wide margin that the rest of her year resigned themselves to competing for second place.

She submitted her exams before her slowest classmates finished reading through the questions, and no taijutsu kata took her more than ten repetitions to perfect to the point that her teachers couldn't find flaws to correct anymore, and ninjutsu and chakra exercises she tended to get on the first try after spending a few minutes mentally mapping out the steps. Adults started calling her genius, even if only some of them, and only sometimes, because genius sounds weird to call a girl.

No one had any idea what to do with her, since the Academy doesn't allow early graduation anymore (unless you're Naruto, because no one likes him and everyone wanted him gone). She finished her assignments, and then she polished them until they shone, and then her teachers said “good job” in the distracted tones of adults with no time to waste on the kid who didn't need them when they had twenty other children holding sharp objects screaming for their attention, and then they told her to keep practicing or studying on her own off to the side where they wouldn't have to remember she existed.

Ino thought Sakura was amazing. But the other girls called her a show-off teachers' pet trying too hard to impress the boys despite her ugly forehead, and the boys stopped talking to her because she was boring and intimidating, and the teachers stopped looking at her because they knew she didn't need help and wouldn't cause trouble, and Sasuke made such a horrible closed-off expression the few times Sakura managed to beat him in a spar, and Naruto screeched about how smart she was and badgered her to walk him through assignments whenever he showed up at the Academy once every other blue moon despite not even officially being in her class, and why did Sakura have to choose between Ino thinking she was cool and every non-Ino person in her world thinking she was worth acknowledging at all?

She didn't want that.

One best friend wasn't worth that.

Being good at schoolwork doesn't even matter. Kunoichi stop running missions once they get married and settle down and become mothers, and Sakura doesn't want to be one of the exceptions who do keep working because her own mom does and Sakura sees her about as often as she sees her dad, which is about as often as Naruto went to class.

So, when she was nine, Sakura made herself normal.

Then she lived happily ever after and was never weird again.

The end.

---

Ino catches up to Sakura at the wet market, shoves in front of her, and steals the vegetable seller's attention. Sakura squawks in disbelief, but the seller's already recovered from the surprise and is collecting bundles of garlic chives and scallions and cucumbers at Ino's request to bundle them into bags to weigh.

“A good ninja pays attention to their surroundings,” Ino declares obnoxiously.

“A good ninja has grace,” Sakura fumes, “and manners.” Ino doesn't even do the grocery shopping for her family! Her mom does! Why is she here! Wait – “How is your mom doing?”

“She's fine,” says Ino, and Sakura's brief burst of worry eases. “Actually, she wanted me to ask you if she should start making food for you, since you probably have less time to cook now than you did in the Academy, but I told her you didn't need it. You're welcome. You don't need it, do you?”

Sakura turns her nose up with a sniff. “I don't need to eat as much as you do, Ino-pig,” she says, setting Ino to bristling while counting out her payment. “Shouldn't you be training?”

“Shouldn't you?”

“This is my lunch break.” On days the team meets (which is only about half the week, weirdly, and in no regular pattern), training starts before most produce vendors set up shop and ends after most of them have begun packing their wares away, so the long lunch breaks are the only reliable time Sakura has for buying food. She didn't have to worry about meals during the week her parents were home, but, now that they've both disappeared back to their long-term assignments, her reprieve has gone with them.

She knows she doesn't have to buy raw produce. She could survive just as well off of restaurants, instant and prepackaged meals from corner stores, and desperation food. There'd be nothing strange in that choice. Lots of people who live alone do similar. Like Naruto.

Sakura refuses to be Naruto.

“It's my break, too,” Ino says. She hands over the coins and takes her bags in exchange. “But why're you spending yours here instead of with your team? And you even have Sasuke-kun on your team.” Ino lets out a deep, deep sigh, and Sakura tries not to gloat too visibly over winning the competition. “I'm just here because one of my mom's friends had something come up suddenly, so my mom asked me to handle this today. But you're not here because of that.”

Before Sakura can respond, Ino continues, “Who's your teacher? Obviously I know who your teammates are, but your team leader showed up after Team 10's, so I never got to see who it was.”

My mom's too busy, Ino said with a straight face. Yeah, right. Sakura followed Ino around for years, so she recognizes this pattern of conversation. Ino hunted her down deliberately to fish for gossip. 

Sakura frowns as she lists out what she needs to the vendor. “Your teacher's... Sarutobi Asuma-san, right?”

“Ino-Shika-Chou, and our teacher is always from the Sarutobi clan. You may have stolen Sasuke-kun, but my teacher is Hokage-sama's son.”

Ino sounds so unbearably, unreasonably smug about that fact that Sakura's mouth has already snapped out, “Well my teacher's – ” before her brain can catch up and throttle it silent because she has no idea how to end the sentence when her choice is between a foreign defector and a jounin I've never met.

Luckily her mouth has a solution for that, too.

“ – Sasuke-kun's cousin!”

Is Kisame actually Sasuke's cousin, though? Is he actually?

But for a second Ino looks genuinely startled. Any considerations of truthfulness evaporate from Sakura's mind under the warm glow of a battle won.

At least until Ino says, “You mean, like, nepotism?”

“From Yamanaka Ino,” Sakura says, voice high with disbelief.

“When we do it it's called ‘tradition'. I've never heard Sasuke-kun mention his family.”

Neither has Sakura. If not for Naruto's lack of filter and Kisame's obvious familiarity with Sasuke, she wouldn't have been able to tell that Sasuke already knows Kisame at all. “Well,” she says, “I guess he wouldn't talk about that kind of thing with you.”

And now Sakura literally cannot say a single thing about her teacher to Ino. What's Sasuke's cousin like? Uh. Hm. He's blue. His name is Ghost Shark. (Konoha picks normal, non-threatening names for their kids, like Red Bean Jam or Dolphin or Cherry Blossom. Ghost Shark is blatantly foreign.) He looks like someone took every stereotype about Kiri ninja's appearances and marital preferences regarding fish and personified them. Sakura has a niggling suspicion that he appeared one day out of the ether fully-formed because no other explanation for his existence seems as likely. And Sasuke looks surprised and offended whenever he comes across a reminder that the village officially considers their team's jounin teacher a ninja.

Terribly, he's not even a bad teacher. Whether he's good is a separate question, but he's not bad. Sakura's learning useful skills. She can walk on water as of this morning, which is objectively incredibly cool but subjectively pretty upsetting. Kisame doesn't care that Sakura learns faster than the rest of the team; once she's performed a technique successfully and practiced it for a bit, he just gives her the next thing to work on with no regard for how far Sasuke and Naruto have gotten in comparison.

Even progressing as slowly as she can bring herself to, she's four techniques ahead of Sasuke and, though she tries to avoid thinking too hard about this, only three ahead of Naruto.

Sasuke is meaner during spars these days.

“What about Shikamaru and Chouji?” Sakura asks, scrabbling to change the subject. “Still just as lazy?”

Ino groans. “Let's not talk about them. Tell me about Sasuke-kun's cousin!”

The vendor somehow still hasn't finished arranging her purchase yet. Sakura's cucumbers are being held hostage.

“I don't need to tell you anything,” Sakura tries. She struggles to stand firm against Ino's unimpressed eyebrow raise. Why does Ino even care about Sakura's team! Okay, so it does have Sasuke as a member, and now Kisame, but that's not a good enough reason to interrupt Sakura's day about it! “Oh, fine. He's tall, and he uses a sword.”

He does not use a sword. He has a sword, though (for certain definitions of sword), and that's basically the same thing for the purposes of this horrible conversation.

“Is he blue?” says the vegetable seller.

Sakura's heart stops beating.

Ino turns a brilliant smile on the woman. “Does Haru-basan know him?”

“He sounds familiar,” the vegetable seller muses, heedless of Sakura's life flashing before her eyes. The woman flags down the attention of the root vegetable vendor the next stall over. “Doesn't he sound familiar, Aki-san?”

“Blue, was it?” The root vegetable vendor is not even going to pretend she didn't listen in to the entire conversation. “And he's your teacher, Sakura-chan? That's strange.”

“Is – is it.”

Ino makes an innocently questioning noise. “Strange?” she echoes, wide-eyed and guileless. “How is it strange?”

“Wow,” says Sakura, “look at the hour! Can you hold onto all of that for me, Haru-basan? I can come by to pick it up before you close.”

She has no idea how she'll make the time to keep that promise, but that's a Future Sakura problem. Present Sakura's only responsibility is to escape the market intact and survive long enough for Future Sakura to exist.

---

“He's making your lunches?” Iruka repeats.

Naruto throws his arms out wide, barely noticing when Iruka grabs the elbow blocking his face and pushes it away. “Right? Sasuke can cook?! Since when? Where does he get the time? Cooking takes forever, right? And Sasuke's always training, so it doesn't make sense, ‘ttebayo!” Is it black magic? Is it clones? Is Sasuke just that much better than Naruto at everything he tries? No way he is. Naruto refuses to believe it.

“I'm not sure Sasuke-kun packs his own lunches,” Iruka says with a little cough.

Naruto blinks at him. “He does. He said so.”

Naruto did accuse Sasuke of lying, but Sasuke responded by doubling down and Kisame didn't act like he was listening to someone else steal credit for his work. Weird thing to lie about, if he was.

“I wasn't gonna take it,” Naruto continues, “because who does he think he is, but then he's like ‘nobody's gonna eat it if you don't’ and I tell him I've got my own lunch and I don't want his gross leftovers! And then he dumped it all in a pond.”

Which really cemented that Sasuke had made the food, because Kisame looked nearly entertained while Sasuke stood there glaring at Naruto with the empty box held upside-down over the water.

“That sounds about right,” says Iruka thoughtfully. Iruka gets his students the way no other teacher at the Academy does. He's not surprised by how petty and stupid Sasuke is.

“Didn't even give it to Sakura-chan. Just – in a pond!”

“And now you eat the bento he brings.”

Naruto scowls down at his feet, fingers wrapping around one of the wooden slats of the bench seat. “Ramen's better.”

Iruka cuffs him lightly on the head, and Naruto hisses and ducks away. “Hey, no. You're not supposed to insult gifts, Naruto.”

“But it's from Sasuke!”

“Sasuke-kun and Sakura-kun are your teammates now. You have to learn to get along.” Iruka's expression does something interesting and ominous. “Especially because there's no one else on your team for you to rely on. I'll admit it's not Kakashi-san's fault – it's only fifty percent his fault – but still....”

Since graduating, Naruto hasn't spotted Iruka around much. You'd think a teacher would have more free time with the school year over, but Iruka actually signs on to work for a boring department in the Tower every summer.

Iruka spends more hours there than he usually does at the Academy. Sometimes there are people, he told Naruto once, who need to keep themselves busy like they need to breathe, because if they ever stop feeling like they're making themselves useful enough to justify their existence then they'll remember that life is meaningless and the grave worms won't care how little the corpse they're decomposing accomplished before it became a piece of meat.

Obviously he was talking about a character from a popular serial, not a real person. But Naruto still used to save his biggest pranks, the ones that can free Iruka from his boring desk and boring papers and send him chasing Naruto down to yell at him, for the summer months, just in case.

Harder to do now that Naruto also has less free time. Maybe he should skip training someday.

“So!” says Iruka, pasting on a cheerful face. “What else have you been doing? Learned anything interesting since graduation?”

“I can breathe water!” Naruto stops breathing to demonstrate.

Iruka's eyes widen. “Really?” He holds two fingers under Naruto's nose to check. A few seconds later, he withdraws them. “That's pretty advanced.”

Naruto starts to respond and chokes. He flails, scrambling to remember where he put the bread slice, before he finds it again somewhere around his face and lets it go so that it can puff back up to uselessness.

He takes a deep, noisy breath. Iruka stops frantically patting his back and says, “What happened?”

“Can't talk while you're doing it.” Or you can, but it's super hard or something, or maybe a completely different trick.

“Now you know,” says Iruka, with that amused fondness Naruto always ignores because what else is he supposed to do with it. Then, more sharply: “Your team captain didn't tell you about that?”

Naruto bristles a little to meet the accusation. “It was days ago, ‘ttebayo!” He can't remember every tiny thing that ever happens around him!

Iruka blinks. “Ah, I didn't mean to make it sound like it was your fault. It's great to hear that you're learning things and paying attention. And Sasuke-kun is talking to you now! That's definitely an improvement. What do you think of your captain?”

Iruka stays with Naruto at the park for a bit longer, but then one of his coworkers shows up to ask him if he still wanted to come drink with them.

Naruto migrates to Ichiraku once the twilight sky gets darker, the streetlamps start coming on, and he figures everyone who stopped by the ramen stand for after-work dinner has left. He doesn't exactly like watching people speed-eat their noodles and pay with their bowls still half full as soon as he sits down.

“Already?” Teuchi says, looking suitably impressed when Naruto shows off the breathing trick. “I don't usually hear ninja talk about knowing techniques like that until they've been genin for a while.”

“What do they do before, then?”

“Teamwork exercises, I think.”

Naruto frowns. “The weird spars? Is that what they are?” The ones where Naruto has to reach a goal without Sasuke and Sakura stopping him, or Sasuke has to fight Naruto and Sakura as a pair, or Sakura has to try to lead Naruto and Sasuke into a trap. “But we do those.”

“I don't know any more than that.” Teuchi lifts noodles into a bowl of soup, arranges the toppings in no time at all, and sets the bowl on Naruto's side of the counter.

There's extra fishcake! “Ojisan's the best!” Naruto cheers, nearly knocking the chopstick tin by the napkins over as he grabs for a pair.

Naruto doesn't wonder much about his name. Of course his name is Uzumaki Naruto: that's who he is, and who he's always been, and who he will be. But now, suddenly, Uzumaki means something else, too. Uzumaki Naruto means Naruto of the Uzumaki, and it means Naruto who came from somewhere and Naruto who's never been alone. When he speaks his new name out loud, it tastes like sparks in his mouth, warm and soft and brilliant and burning.

Does Naruto on its own mean something more, too?

“Ojisan,” says Naruto around a mouthful of noodles, “did my parents eat here?”

Teuchi freezes.

Naruto squints up at him. “Did you know them?”

“I... can't say I did.”

“Hmm.” Naruto swallows hurriedly, lifts more noodles, and goes to take another bite, but midway through the action a different thought strikes him. “What about Uzumaki Kushina?”

Teuchi freezes for a longer second.

She did come here! Naruto sticks his chopsticks in the bowl and leans in, propping his forearms on the counter. “What was her favorite?!”

“Shio ramen,” Teuchi says quietly. Naruto explodes a little. “So someone told you about her?”

“Yeah! She was a super cool ninja who fought in a huge battle! You knew her too?” And never mentioned her?!

Teuchi doesn't answer immediately. He visibly thinks through the reply, sorting out what to say and how to say it. Naruto vibrates on his seat and fights the urge to rush him.

“It wouldn't have been right,” Teuchi says finally, “for you to blame yourself after finding out.” Before Naruto can demand to know what that means, Teuchi finishes, with a strange sense of weight, “She passed away defending the village from the Kyuubi.”

He might as well have stabbed Naruto.

“But I can give you a little bit more about her. She came around more than just once. And she looked after Ayame for us sometimes. Do you want to hear it?”

Does Naruto want to hear about her.

Teuchi tells him (and, although Naruto doesn't know it, Teuchi tells him with the depth and detail of someone who rehearsed the answer a long time ago but kept it inside of him waiting for the right person to ask; and if the day comes when Naruto asks him about Namikaze Minato, he will do the same thing): Kushina was the village's Red-Hot Habanero, with fire-red hair and a personality that filled the whole room. Naruto looks a lot like her, hair aside. She spoke loudly and moved loudly. She didn't want to let the world forget the space her family should have filled. When she was Naruto's age, she wanted to be Hokage, too.

If she had ever met Naruto, she would have loved him.

Chapter Text

Sasuke doesn't normally eavesdrop when Kakashi comes around. If he overhears the occasional snatch, it's by accident. Kisame and Kakashi's conversations are incredibly uninteresting – Kakashi's a mess and also uninformative, Kisame indulges him too much, rinse and repeat. Sasuke has better things to do.

But that night he hears Kisame's voice flatten, the irritation in it audible even with the words lost behind distance and walls. Sasuke sets his jutsu scroll on the bed covers, heads to the window, and quietly slides it open.

“ – sure. Okay.” Kakashi's voice drifts faintly down from the roof. “Later, then.”

“You couldn't pass them on that way,” Kisame says, annoyed like Sasuke hasn't heard in a while. “You wouldn't stand a chance even if the overseeing division wasn't led by Morino.”

“Shelving it,” says Kakashi, placating.

A pause; if Kisame responds, Sasuke doesn't catch it. Sasuke frowns at the sky and sets his hands on the wall outside, on either side of the window, to feel the texture of the paint. He only has experience walking up tree bark and boulders.

Sakura could do this, though. Wouldn't so much as hesitate.

Scowling, he sets his foot on the windowsill.

“I do need a progress report,” Kakashi says. “Can't actually put that off. I'm late on it.”

“One more night won't make a difference.”

They're standing a couple of meters away, closer to the balcony than to Sasuke's window, when Sasuke climbs up. Kakashi doesn't acknowledge his arrival, but Kisame tips his head Sasuke's way and then smiles when Sasuke pulls up short at the taint in the air.

Sasuke lifts an eyebrow. “Killing intent.”

The malice is faint, and already old enough to have faded into a generic, flavorless haze of unease with no personality remaining to identify who produced it. Even so, it left a stain. Killing intent disappears neither quickly nor cleanly.

The Uchiha compound is mired in it.

There are pockets in Konoha, too, corners and shadows the residents have learned to avoid, where the Kyuubi's residue lingers. Not its chakra, which has been collected and purified. Only its hatred, polluting the world around it like a corpse rotting in a well pollutes the water.

Sasuke asks, moving closer, “What were you talking about?”

“His latest attempt to avoid teaching.” Directed more at Kakashi: “I seem to have strong opinions on people overestimating their own survivability.”

Kakashi sighs, long-suffering, as if he didn't do something so insufferable that his conversation partner released killing intent in response. “Alright, alright. Tomorrow.” He makes to leave, but stops after one step and finally glances Sasuke's way. “Did you walk up here? Could he do that before?”

“He's right there,” Kisame says, mild as the weather. “You could ask him.”

Kakashi waves the suggestion off. He disappears, a swirl of dust from around his feet to mark his passing, and Kisame snorts with very little humor.

“Why is he trying to get out of teaching?” Sasuke says, staring at the vacated space and trying to ignore that a fully grown jounin might have fled solely because he didn't want to interact with Sasuke. “He already isn't teaching.”

“The possibility haunts him.”

What.

“Nice work getting up here,” Kisame says. “I'm not helping you paint over the crack you left, though.”

The – “I didn't leave a crack.”

“You used too much force.” A little amused: “It happens. You've been practicing on sturdier surfaces than apartment walls.”

Did Sasuke actually damage the paint? He opens his mouth to respond – he's not sure with what, maybe something along the lines of “how would you know” – but it doesn't matter what he meant to say, because what comes out in the end is: “Sakura wouldn't have.”

Sakura would have gotten it right on her first try. 

He doesn't know if she suddenly, absurdly, became this skilled out of nowhere one day or if she was always this good but he didn't notice because they were in a class of fifteen instead of a team of three. He trains more than her. He knows he trains more than her. And he beats her in standard spars every time, and his basic foundations in taijutsu and ninjutsu and shurikenjutsu are better than hers, and none of the silly tricks Kisame's giving to them to learn matter at all, but –

And then there's the dead last. Sakura's – fine. Sakura's acceptable. She was the second highest scoring student in their grade. If she keeps doing well after receiving her headband, that's just... maintaining a standard.

But Naruto?

“No,” Kisame agrees. “Probably not.”

Kisame can't do anything about the circumstances. It's not his fault that their original teacher didn't want this team and forced him to pick up the slack, any more than it's his fault that this is the only job the village's restrictions have let him take or that he's not equipped for it. Sasuke doesn't blame his cousin. Sasuke doesn't even blame Sakura and Naruto for... whatever. For whatever.

He doesn't.

Anyway, he doesn't have to see them tomorrow. Whether they have team meet-ups on a given day depends on whether Kisame can book a training ground. Kisame usually can – even if the training grounds in question are small or far from the town center or haven't been properly cleaned or have inconvenient terrain, and even if he has to reserve them in shorter increments so that the team cycles between multiple grounds every few hours – but usually doesn't mean always.

Sasuke, as a lone genin, somehow has an easier time getting access to part of a field than Kisame, as a team leader, does. A ninja on shift at the desk had the temerity to comment on it when Sasuke went alone the other day, with the implication that his jounin teacher must be slacking if he needs to reserve so many hours on his own.

The ninja's shoe spontaneously caught fire right before Sasuke left. Must have been karma.

“What are you going to be doing?” Sasuke asks the next morning while checking his knives. He's sat on a stool by the little round coffee table with his kunai and shuriken arranged across the wooden surface in front of him.

Kisame's on the sofa next to him with a history book, the bandaged hulk of Samehada propped against his knee and shoulder. Sasuke has never seen the sword out of contact with its owner.

Kisame looks over at him at the question. “Today?”

Sasuke doesn't normally ask. He has an idea already of how Kisame spends his time. Some combination of housework, resupplying, going on walks.... Nothing interesting, or worrying.

But too much has been off kilter lately. Kisame's inexplicably his jounin teacher, and two of his classmates have acquired a leasehold on Kisame's time. And Kisame acts differently when the whole team is gathered. Tireder. Meaner.

Which Sasuke wouldn't mind, for reasons he won't examine, except that the behavior... feels too deliberate.

He's gotten enough of an answer out of Kisame to piece together that Kisame might be acting the way he does because he thinks the ideal teacher should be unlikable. Sasuke hasn't yet managed to figure out how to ask the obvious follow-up question of why he believes that.

Especially because it's already too late to make sure Naruto, at the very least, doesn't like Kisame. It hasn't happened again and Kisame doesn't seem inclined to let it, but he didn't stop Naruto from following him back to the apartment one time, apparently because he wanted to see if Naruto would actually do it, and there's no taking that gesture back.

It was short-sighted of him. Of course Naruto followed. It's Naruto. Sasuke accidentally apologized to Naruto once when Naruto ran into him and immediately he became one of the most important figures in the dead last's life. Sasuke doesn't apologize anymore for anything (when someone runs into him now, he tells them they're a pathetic loser who'll never become a real ninja), but the damage is done. The damage is long done.

“I might look for Kakashi,” Kisame answers, not sounding particularly fussed about needing to. “He is late on the report. That's less of a problem for him than it is for me.”

Sasuke frowns. “Didn't he say he would show up again today?”

“He did. He was lying.”

Why.

“I can help you look for him.”

Sasuke might have made the offer more intensely than he meant to, because Kisame's eyebrow lifts a fraction. “Is that what you want to do? Well, I wouldn't stop you.” That's not much of an agreement. “Are you alright, though, with cutting into your training time like that?”

Sasuke was planning to hone his tree-walking on the most breakable vertical surface he could find – maybe he could set a tree on fire to practice on the charcoal skeleton. But -

“I,” says Sasuke, “don't like the way he acts with you.”

Kisame's second eyebrow rises to join the first.

“He doesn't answer you when you ask him questions. He doesn't keep promises, and he always makes you look for him – ” Sasuke cuts off at the sudden bark of laughter. He scowls up at Kisame, who watches him with an expression too heavy to call amusement and too hard to call fondness. “You just put up with it. Somebody has to care.”

“I've put up with worse than Hatake Kakashi's personality,” Kisame says, and he sounds entertained even though he doesn't quite look it.

Sasuke doesn't understand what's funny. This is important. Sasuke is the clan heir, and that position comes with a duty to safeguard the people under him. “That's not a standard.”

“It isn't? Well.” Kisame shuts the book, and his full focus shifts to Sasuke. “Did you know why he was assigned to this role?”

What, there's a reason? Sasuke assumed that either it was inconsequential or that Kakashi was chosen completely at random. Checking in every once in a while to confirm that Kisame is still doing Kisame things doesn't seem like an assignment that requires particularly specific qualifications.

“Tell me if you know any of this already. After Konoha defeated Kiri in the last war, Kiri responded... questionably. The Sandaime Mizukage-sama had appointed a successor before his death, but they were assassinated before they could take office; and then there were several different ninja either claiming credit for the assassination or claiming to have heard the successor use their last words to appoint them successor. So there was a period when it was difficult to say for certain what anyone else in the village was doing.”

Sasuke furrows his brow. “If someone heard their last words, wouldn't that make that person the assassin?”

Kisame's smile shows fangs. “It would, wouldn't it? In any case, while the other sharks were swarming back home, a faction decided to make a name for themselves not by accomplishing any significant deeds in Kiri, but by blowing up Konoha.”

“What?”

A nod. “Kirigakure had surrendered. Konoha wasn't expecting any attack. Obviously the bomb didn't go off where it was intended to, but Konoha took casualties while they were defending from it. Someone Kakashi knew was among them.”

Sasuke blinks. Stares. Lets that sink in.

Doesn't touch the flicker of sympathy, neither to fan it nor to extinguish it. To lose someone to an attack so sudden and unjustifiable, at a time that should have been safe...

...but how is that relevant to his being Kisame's probation officer? “They assigned him to this even after Kiri killed his friend?” (He doesn't ask if Kisame personally was involved in what happened. Of course Kisame wasn't. He's barely a ninja.)

“Because he lost someone to Kiri.”

Oh. It's like that.

Sasuke's lips thin. “And that's why he acts like this?”

“This is how he is with anyone. Whoever picked him probably hoped he'd be more dedicated, actually.”

Sasuke takes a second to translate that out of Kisame's turn into overly polite indirectness. “So he could be worse,” he says finally, parceling the words out one by one so that each carries its own weight. “He could invent an excuse to run you out because he has history with Kiri-nin. And you're okay with him because he's not worse, and he hasn't done that.”

Kisame continues to look annoyingly unconcerned.

Sasuke didn't realize that even the choice of overseer was another slight in an unending litany of them.

Konoha doesn't have a single other foreign ninja in its ranks. Civilians born outside of Fire Country aren't allowed to enlist, either. It's not an unusual policy for a hidden village – Iwa has similar, and Suna is stricter in its requirements than either of them – even if it's not universal. Kiri, Kumo, and a host of minor shinobi villages will all take in defectors at various levels of welcome, though the minor villages rarely accept ninja from the Great Five.

There's no precedent in Konoha for Kisame's position. Judging by all available evidence, they want to ensure there will be no subsequent examples, either.

Chapter Text

At some point Kakashi says, “There's no way to turn that sword off?”

“Turn Samehada off,” Kisame repeats.

“Is it going to keep draining more?”

“I guess we'll see.”

Kisame doesn't have a concrete idea of what she will or won't do. No one before him has managed to carry Samehada for so long without using her. He only has hopes for what she'll do.

There's an old story that goes that, a long time ago, a boy who hatched from a turtle's egg did many things and caused many problems, but one of his exploits involved the shark king of the eastern sea. Kametou heard that the shark king kept an impenetrable treasure vault no thief had returned alive from, decided to correct that statistic, and snuck in and stole from the vault the first scale that the king had shed in his youth. He tried to bring it home to show it off, but the scale came to life as soon as it tasted shallow waters, escaped from him, and ate every fish along the eastern coast of the land that would become Water Country, causing a year-long famine that killed thousands.

Speed was always Kametou's weakness, so he couldn't catch up to the scale. Eventually, after a year of devastation, he found its newly bloated form sleeping off the meal, at which point he did what any reasonable person would have: he picked it up and used its appetite as a weapon against his vast and varied assortment of enemies.

Difficult to say how much of the tale is true. The shark king exists, of course – villages on Water's eastern coast pay tithes for the usage of his territory, much as settlements bordering the other three seas do to their respective rulers. Since the Yondaime began cracking down on the practice as paying tribute to foreign powers, the fish harvests have turned poor and the weather temperamental.

(Kisame was already out of Kiri by the time of that development, so he remembers Kakashi sidling up to him with a newspaper and going, “You have a contract with one of them so I'm hoping this isn't too offensive to ask, but” – with accompanying vague hand gestures – “why doesn't Water Country just kill the sea monarchs if they're causing problems?”

No concerns about the logistics of assassinating four gods, each with a long line of succession prepared, who rarely if ever leave their heavily guarded palaces on the seafloor and who have a history of immediately banding together against mutual threats no matter how much they quibble with each other usually. Sometimes Kakashi is... very Konoha. Kiri-nin tend to understand that killing people doesn't solve problems so much as it replaces them with newer and more interesting ones, but Konoha-nin have a fascinatingly final interpretation of death.)

Theoretically, Kisame can summon the king. In practice, if Kisame calls on him or on a member of the inner court, then Kisame will fail the summoning attempt, lose the shark contract, and get himself and anyone who shares his surname barred from the king's stretch of the seas for four generations.

None of the sharks Kisame has summoned have reacted particularly to Samehada, however, so he doubts she's actually one of their court's stolen treasures. She strikes him as too powerful to be simply one of the king's cast-off body parts, either.

But at least one piece of the story has proven useful: since the Uchiha clan died, Kisame has kept Samehada lulled into a comfortable food coma by feeding her excessive amounts of his chakra.

He thinks she needed less in the beginning – eight percent of his stores? ten? – but currently she consumes... somewhat more than that.

He can't fault her the gluttony. She doesn't normally care for eating exclusively from a single source. She agrees to it with him because he's one bijuu away from being a jinchuuriki, and only in the face of that sort of quantity and quality will she be satisfied with not nibbling on snacks on the side.

Still, assuming her appetite doesn't stop increasing, then they have maybe two or three years before he can no longer perform physical enhancements and other smaller tricks. Once she exhausts even that supply, she'll reach for the trickle of energy that every creature needs simply to live.

He doesn't intend to let her arrive at that point.

“The seven swords aren't related to each other,” he says. Before the Shodaime and Sandaime Mizukage gathered them in Kiri, the weapons' stories existed separately across Water Country. “It's a coincidence that each of them devours their opponents. Kubikiribocho with blood. Hiramekarei with chakra coils. Shibuki with skin. Samehada with chakra.” Outsiders haven't nailed down yet what the other three consume, so he doesn't expand on the list: bones for Kabutowari, living tendons for Nuibari, and nerves for Kiba. “Since they don't share origins, they all respond differently to going hungry. No one has let it happen to Samehada before. So: we'll see.”

“Right. ...Right. This counts as going hungry for it?”

Kisame grins, unfriendly and humorless. “Ah, don't worry about it.”

No use, after all, in asking Kakashi to do the improbable. Getting permission to shove a genin team at Kisame is one thing – one bizarre, rather impressive thing – but clearance to leave the village is another altogether.

Maybe if Kisame came from any hidden village other than Kiri. As events in Water Country stand, however, the chances of him stumbling over a former Kiri-nin as soon as he walks out the gate are higher than anyone in Konoha is comfortable with. Kisame's desertion was the first in a wave of them.

Konoha's trust extends as far as having him babysit Uchiha Sasuke. Not a step further.

It's an interesting place to draw the line.

---

Each year for the first weeks after graduation, the Hokage frequents the missions desk. Kisame rarely has cause to pass through that section of the building, but he visits the Tower for other reasons and can notice the direction the Hokage's chakra lies in.

If anyone asks, that's not why he puts off taking the team on a mission until Naruto starts openly complaining about the price of instant ramen.

Naruto perks up the instant they step into the room. “Iruka-sensei!”

Kisame doesn't prevent him from darting up to the long desk and trying to leap over it to tackle one of the chuunin seated behind it. The chuunin hurriedly leans forward with his hand out at Naruto's head height, and Naruto hits his palm forehead protector first and stops cold before both feet can leave the ground.

“Naruto! Is this how you behave in the Hokage Tower?” The chuunin looks past Naruto, and his tone softens and the frown shifts into a smile. “Sasuke-kun, Sakura-kun, hello.” Upwards to Kisame, and the smile turns fixed. “...Kisame-san.”

“Umino Iruka-kun, isn't it?” Kisame says pleasantly as he trails in Naruto's path up to the desk.

The chuunin jolts at the sound of his name, even though Kisame's worked so hard to learn this custom of Konoha's. In Kiri, one really only uses names and honorifics for equals and superiors. Underlings get less specific terms of address until they earn otherwise.

“Naruto's mentioned you on occasion. I suppose I should thank you for looking after these genin until now.”

Umino's gaze flicks to Sasuke before returning to Kisame. It's a little strange, after all, for Kisame to use Naruto in this context when he's known Sasuke for longer and presumably had more chances to hear Umino brought up by him.

Kisame has nothing against Umino. The only ninja who become Academy teachers in Kiri are those assigned there on punishment shifts and those who, upon passing the graduation exam where they killed a child in the lower half of the class rankings who stood little chance against them, decided they'd like to spend the rest of their career reliving that moment. But Konoha's Academy shares no similar feature. Naruto likes Umino well enough, and Sasuke has never mentioned him in the context of any particularly interesting gossip.

That Umino has, for no immediately identifiable reason, gone out of his way to focus extra effort onto a student with no family, no friends, and no one else who pays him close attention; who avoided class so habitually that if he had simply died at home no one might have noticed for days; who Umino frequently had to hunt down outside of the schoolhouse to locations without many witnesses; who responds to any scrap of regard the way a spark does to tinder; who no other teacher looked at for long enough to write more than the barest, blandest derogatory note into his file...

...it speaks well of Umino, doesn't it?

But it's none of Kisame's business. The Academy is the students' battleground. If outsiders intervene, it should only be on the side of the faculty. There are lessons to be taught. Naruto will learn, or he won't.

Or he won't need to. Wouldn't that be something.

“Ah,” Umino begins. He isn't the teacher who gave his class's only failing student the not-quite-impossible shadow clone exam. Maybe that should matter. “Not at all, it was my job. I – hope they haven't made trouble for you? This... I know this is your first genin team, Kisame-san,” he says, and he's trying so hard to act civil that Kisame, amused, peels his upper lip back on one side in what might be called a smile, baring just enough teeth to make life harder for Umino, “and all of the other teams have already started taking on missions....”

Sasuke and Sakura both side-eye Kisame for that. Naruto squawks, “What? No fair, 'ttebayo! Hey, hey, Same-sensei, why're we starting late?”

“Why are you starting late,” Kisame says.

Same-sensei, Umino mouths.

Naruto, who can always be counted on to interpret a statement with any ambiguity to it as an insult, puffs up in preparation to yell.

“Listen to Iruka-kun, Naruto. There are times and places to be yourself.” To Umino he says, “It's at the team leader's discretion when to take missions, isn't it?”

“It is,” says Umino stiffly. Schoolteacher who works at the missions desk during summer, where he can catch glimpses of his old students and their new teachers... does it annoy him that Team 7's jounin won't explain himself to him, or does it annoy him that Team 7's jounin who is Kisame won't explain himself to him? Two rather different questions.

Umino unrolls the D-rank mission scroll. “The missions available for Team 7 are....”

The three genin's excitement wanes with each offering. Babysitting, tidying training grounds, shopping for the elderly, hauling construction materials, searching for lost pets, gathering data on river levels....

“Quite a number,” Kisame says when he finishes. “I don't believe I was expecting options.”

He assumed the ninja on desk duty would automatically assign them poop-scooping for a local farmer's pigs or scrubbing the dried blood from a resolved crime scene. This is almost disappointing.

If Umino expects to wrangle a debt or favor out of the genin for this, that won't do.

His hand comes to rest on the edge of the table. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

Umino stares up at him. He's gradually been displacing backwards in his seat from the moment the interaction began, because Kisame is two meters tall and sharp-boned and sharp-fanged and inhuman and looming and carting around a weapon the size of a grown man. There are ways to turn your existence itself a threat, and Kisame has access to more of them than most.

Sasuke knows what he's doing and is ignoring it as a mundanity. Naruto is ignoring it for different reasons. Sakura's giving every indication of having picked up on something off, though Kisame will be pleasantly surprised if she can guess his motives.

He has no real power in Konoha. It's important to ensure people forget that.

Umino sets his expression, steels himself, sits up straighter. Kisame tracks the motion, unblinking. “These are the missions offered to every Konoha team of Team 7's experience level.”

Nothing more than an unyielding stance on protocol, then?

No, not when he's gone above and beyond any reasonable expectation of a teacher's duty to his students with Naruto.

“And the missions you skipped on that scroll?”

Umino skipped the least appealing ones, to be clear. Kisame caught a glimpse of the list while he unfurled it. Umino's mouth opens, and then he creases his brow and lays the roster he was holding towards himself flat on the table between them instead. “Those aren't for a team's first mission.”

Kisame watches him and waits.

After only a few seconds, Umino cracks. “The first assignment should always be something lighter. It's – I mean....”

Goodness, Naruto's almost starting to look suspicious.

Kisame lets the silence bear down for another moment. Then, quiet and unhurried still: “How often will it be you in that chair? Once the school year begins, will you have time for this at all?” Umino clenches his jaw, so evidently not. “Do you think you're helping them? Setting an expectation like this is a bit cruel, isn't it, when this team is not one that will ever find themselves with easy assignments.”

Kisame could, admittedly, change that. Go through the song and dance, the careful balance of intimidation and cajoling. Apply the pressure necessary to make the desk ninja reweigh the benefits of pettiness.

But condescending them these little victories distracts them from trying for larger inconveniences, so he won't. Not every time. Besides, he's had nearly half of Sasuke's life to play this game, long enough for it to have lost the shine of novelty and taken on the quality of a chore instead. He can't always think of a compelling enough reason to muster the effort.

That's less comfortable to admit to, though.

Umino inhales. “I don't understand what you mean.”

“No?” Kisame murmurs.

“They'll be able to take the missions that suit their strengths, no matter what those are. They're ninja of Konoha just as much as anyone else with this headband is.”

Ah. Blood in the water.

“Am I a ninja of Konoha?” Kisame asks.

Sharpened teeth (natural, not intentionally filed, but let them believe what they like), amber shark's eyes, functional gills, a Water heirloom on his back, hardly a mission in Konoha to his name. He wears the headband and the vest, but his shoulders are bared and the color of the shallows in Kiri's harbors on rainy days, and he would kill anyone in this room besides Sasuke without a taint of regret if only they'll give him a good enough reason.

Is he a ninja of Konoha?

Umino hesitates.

A fraction of a second, but the silence speaks louder than words. Kisame lets his smile drag his teeth into the open.

“Don't bother, Iruka-kun,” he says before Umino can course correct. Fascinating of him to try, though. Or offensive of him to try. One of those. “You're clever enough. You understand the situation. Whatever those three's circumstances, they are not the ones negotiating with you. They will not be the ones talking to the person who takes that seat after you, either.”

His next words aren't spoken as a request. “Read the assignments you left out, please.”

Which is how Team 7's first ever ninja mission ends up being combing the sewers for a stud earring dropped down a drain. (Team 7, not Kisame. It's as appropriate a time as any to teach them that superiors will always try to push the worst work onto subordinates to keep their own hands clean, more literally on some occasions than others.) Nobody's happy about it, which is just as well.

---

“You know you can toss them around a bit, right? Obviously don't maim them, or whatever, but if it's something they can bounce back from in a couple of days you can go for it.”

In spars, Kisame has restricted Naruto to creating either four or fewer shadow clones or at least eighty shadow clones at once. More than four and they get in his way because he produced them without specific goals in mind for each; more than eighty and they still get in his way, but they get in his opponents' ways marginally more.

Kisame thinning out the herd with shuriken when Naruto forgets to count is the closest the team comes to physical interaction with him.

“That's new information.” Which is only true because he deliberately didn't ask. He spares a glance for the wall by the table – fascinating wall, very wooden, very extant. When he looks back, another peanut has vanished from the dish between them. “I don't believe I'll do it, either. Unless you could spare the time to supervise.”

Kakashi makes a quarter of a face. “You're not going to go overboard.” Kisame can't tell if Kakashi is making excuses to avoid the team yet again or if he's filled with misplaced confidence in Kisame's ability to refrain from killing genin.

Entertained despite himself, Kisame says, “You don't know that.”

“Just use a solid clone if you're worried.”

As of very recently, Kisame no longer has the chakra available to create a water clone. “And disabuse Sasuke of the idea that his cousin barely knows a ninjutsu? How cruel of you.”

“...Does he know you're a jounin?”

“The entire rank has been weakened by association.”

Kakashi's hardly given himself a second of rest since team formation day, but he's normally better about hiding it than he is in that moment. He'll have to take the team out on a C-rank eventually, and then Sasuke will be his problem, too. Kisame's halfway looking forward to the mess.

“Twelve-year olds,” says Kakashi in the tone of someone talking about the plague. That's a little unfair. Every ninja has quirks; being delusional about a particular person isn't even an unusual one. His chopsticks inch towards the peanut bowl. “Right.”

Kisame takes an interest in the bar. Average levels of crowded for this time of evening on a weekday, and a small handful of patrons very quickly find other things to do besides staring at Kisame. A peanut disappears from the table, unaccompanied by the sound of chewing. Presumably Kakashi must have swallowed it whole.

“And what's the rest of the team like? Naruto's obsessed with Sakura and hates Sasuke, and Sakura's fixated on Sasuke but mostly hangs around Naruto?”

...Kakashi's first team's dynamic? “Something like that,” says Kisame, and empties his cup. Kakashi absently reaches for the sake bottle to refill it with. If that comparison is for Kakashi's old team, then what did the member who maps onto Sasuke believe that was on par with Sasuke's worldview? “The boys think Sakura's a prodigy, Sasuke and Sakura keep expecting Naruto to be a burden and don't know what to do with themselves when he's not, and Sakura and Naruto think of Sasuke as the goalpost they should measure themselves by. But Sakura does have a crush on Sasuke, and Naruto has a crush on Sakura.”

A strangely performative crush from Sakura's end, which tracks with her Academy history of latching onto whatever's popular to avoid alienating herself.

She called Naruto's repeated demands for a date a joke the other day. A blind spot regarding herself, a blind spot regarding Naruto, or does she not recognize what real attraction looks like, and does Kisame care enough about the love triangles of twelve-year olds to wonder about it beyond how to keep it from becoming even more of an inconvenience than it currently is...?

No, not really.

“A crush?” says Kakashi after a beat.

“Is that unusual?”

“They're twelve.”

If Kisame didn't know better, he'd be tempted to use Kakashi as an example of what happens when someone becomes a ninja too young. Unfortunately, Zabuza became a genin at the same age and is one of the most reasonable, self-aware shinobi Kiri has produced, so that's not the cause.

“Is that too old or too young? How old does someone need to be before they realize what traits they're attracted to?”

Kakashi considers the peanuts with the air of a monk considering the mysteries of the universe. He is not drunk. He ordered hot water and has not stolen a drop of alcohol from Kisame's cup.

(Because Kakashi has an image to maintain, Kisame pays on these excursions, and therefore Kisame orders whatever he wants with no regard to Kakashi's interests. Because Kakashi is either capable of guilt or unwilling to destroy the possibility of future outings, Kisame will mysteriously find the same amount of money, smelling of dog saliva, stacked outside the balcony door when he returns to the apartment.)

“...Fourteen? ...Twenty?”

Patiently, Kisame says, “I think people generally have an idea of it before they reach twenty.”

“But twelve?” Kakashi mutters.

Fascinating as this is, there is still a problem that needs addressing. Kisame sighs. “Are you leaving on another mission in the morning? Or tonight even, like last time?” A little embarrassing of Kisame not to have expected that after Kakashi vacated the rooftop.

Kakashi abandons the peanuts to look up at Kisame. “I'll have to consult my horoscopes first.”

No one would call a ninja out for using killing intent in Kiri. People, and not only shinobi, produce it so frequently as a part of everyday interactions that it's long since saturated the entire village the way it has the Uchiha district in Konoha. There's nowhere to go to escape the constant, low-level prickle of threat.

Where it gathers in force, it churns new shapes into the fog, tints sake a metallic flavor.... Some places bear the scars of it more noticeably, too. The Academy's atmosphere is black and viscous with it; the crematorium where the corpses of bloodline possessors are burned and their ashes thrown by the bucketload into the sea; the Mizukage's office since the Yondaime's ascension.

On his better days, the Yondaime sometimes mentions ghosts in the walls in the tone of voice one might use to talk about a pet in the home. Are you worried about them? You shouldn't be. They can't touch you. You should be worried about me.

Konoha has different opinions on killing intent's acceptability as a conversational tool. Employing it on an almost empty rooftop didn't qualify as a public disturbance, but a civilian bar would be a different matter. Kisame refrains.

“You do understand why this is annoying, don't you?” he says instead.

It's one thing to behave like this in Konoha, but if Kakashi dies on a mission because lack of downtime made him sloppy then a different ninja will get assigned to Kisame's case. Kisame worked internal enforcement in Kiri. He knows how that goes when the assigned watcher isn't Kakashi, who's an unprecedented combination of decent at his job, allergic to responsibility, and high enough in the hierarchy to get away with almost anything so long as the Hokage himself doesn't take issue.

You find something even if there's little to find. Kiri's administration has a shorthand for when they've caught wind of a disturbance but need a field operative to determine the specifics – subversive sentiments is the catch-all for reasons ranging from “he didn't kill those civilians with a bloodline limit that lets them see three extra colors as quickly as he should have” to “she spooked and fled the room when her captain offered her a promotion with certain strings attached” to “he goes out for drinks with a group of civilian sailors whenever they pull into dock” to “she won't give up a position that a higher-up wants one of their lackeys to hold instead”.

(None of which was Kisame's concern. He did his job, even if his job was frequently...

...every ninja has their function to perform.

Kisame was a remnant of the previous administration in a city whose leader preferred to imagine that the history of the village had begun with himself. That position came with compromises. For most ninja, loyalty to the Mizukage was assumed, the Yondaime's lapses into paranoia aside; but Hoshigaki Kisame, ward and student of the Sandaime, had a responsibility to prove his own more frequently.)

Is selling your countrymen out to their fellows on orders better or worse than selling them out to foreigners for money? Academic question to pose to Itachi sometime.

“It makes no difference to me who you decide to avoid, but when is the last time you slept?”

“Oh, I'll end up on enforced leave sooner or later,” Kakashi says.

Kisame asked, the other night, whether Kakashi thought dying would let him get out of teaching. No straight answer to that question, either.

“The team is the issue, isn't it? Which would mean you're staying away from anyone who wants you to interact with them.” Kakashi so badly wants nothing to do with teaching genin that his repeated dereliction of duty almost loops back around to charming instead. Or it would, if it wasn't such an inconvenience. “That's... who is that?”

“Let's talk about something else,” Kakashi says quickly. “So I was in Naruto's apartment the other day and – have you seen that place?”

“There is no security and it's filled with trash; if he wasn't on the top storey, he'd have cockroaches and centipedes dueling on the floor. Did you know he didn't know hot dogs are made of animals? He's only seen the packaged convenience store ones sold on the snack shelf, so he thought they were some kind of savory cake.” Kisame continues before Kakashi can process the blow, “Who are you running from other than Gai?” Or is it only Gai?

“He thought what?”

“I'm struggling to come up with anyone who would care this much about your not teaching.” There are a number of people who care about Kakashi handing the team off to Kisame, to be sure, but not wanting Kakashi to give his team to the Water expatriate is a different concern from not wanting Kakashi to shirk his teaching duties.

“Seriously, it doesn't matter. But go back to the cake thing. He – what?”

“Let's talk about something else,” Kisame says sedately. Kakashi mutters something under his breath that Kisame abstains from hearing. “How will you handle the situation once you can't leave the village?”

“Getting banned from missions doesn't mean you can't take vacations.”

“You'll need to have scrip exchanged for currency and the itinerary approved. The records for those will be less inaccessible than the records for high-ranked missions. This isn't sustainable.”

“It's not about being sustainable, it's about putting it off one more day.”

What a mortifying level of honesty.

Kakashi seems to catch on after a delay. “...Ah. Have I – said anything else out of character, lately?“

Not anything else I shouldn't have. Not anything else embarrassing.

Anything else out of character.

Kisame sips his drink and doesn't reply with the full list of vulnerabilities Kakashi has come out with over the course of this conversation and the last. Kisame is safe to talk to because he's an island with neither the authority nor the inclination to hold Kakashi to accountability. Even so.

Chopsticks near the peanut bowl. Kisame weighs the possibility that Kakashi will take advantage of the inattention to shunshin out the door, then he decides he doesn't care quite enough.

The wall, now – he does care about that.

A peanut disappears. Kakashi does not.

“I probably shouldn't push things this late again,” Kakashi muses. “Oh, the Hokage did say that if it happens again you can just give the report to him directly instead of waiting for me as the intermediary. I'm mostly here because, you know” – a wave of a hand – “he... knows you don't like talking to him.”

“He finds reasons to meet with you because he's the one person you listen to. Let's not pretend I'm meant to be more than an afterthought.”

A hum. Kakashi's head tips slightly back towards the ceiling. “I guess he would still want to talk about those three to me even if you did go.”

Kisame pauses with his fingers around the sake cup. “Are you...?”

Is Kakashi trying to reinforce that he's too useful as a field ninja to be benched for sensei duty? Is that what this has been about?

Kisame thinks he knows Kakashi's reasons for giving up the team, but he doesn't know enough about why the Hokage agreed to it. (The Hokage did personally agree, or else it wouldn't have happened. Sarutobi micromanages his ninja.) He's not sure why the Hokage would have allowed Kakashi to find a substitute, much less have that substitute be Kisame, while still pushing Kakashi to consider taking on the team. A handful more weeks or months won't put a dent in Kakashi's years-long refusal to touch jounin sensei duty.

Making it an order at any point would have settled the issue. But that's unlikely to happen. The Hokage prefers for his underlings to think of their actions as their own ideas.

“Am I,” Kakashi sighs, and drinks his water through his mask.

---

Kisame's been given to understand that Konoha ninja rarely deliberately specialize in a skill. They fall into a specialized department by accident long after graduation, or prefer a technique enough to practice it to the exclusion of others, or discover a natural talent. Or they come from a clan.

But those are the exceptions. For the most part, Konoha rank-and-file are jacks of all trades.

“Sasuke is the closest on this team to having any specializations,” Kisame says. “Sakura, one example of a skill your field team would have access to if Sasuke was on it.”

Sakura flails for a second. “Um – ninjutsu?”

Kisame throws her a bone because he doesn't want to spend too long on this. “Water ninjutsu?”

“Fire ninjutsu!”

“Sasuke.”

“Shurikenjutsu.”

“Naruto.”

“Being a jerk!”

On a solely objective level, if they were in Kiri then Kisame could have killed Naruto at any point, and the only inquiry into it would be to question how his Academy teachers didn't do it sooner. “Eight laps. Go.”

Naruto's a faster runner than Sakura and has infinitely better endurance, but Sakura scrounges together the energy to catch up to him anyway so she can try to beat him into the ground. Kisame sort of wants to kill them both, in the same dull, nagging way he wants the weather more humid. Sasuke jogs around the screaming confusion of orange and pink and laps them.

“How about you try that again,” Kisame says once they've gotten back together.

Naruto starts to answer.

Sasuke and Sakura tackle him in perfect sync. Sasuke shoves a hand over his mouth, and Sakura holds down his arms.

“Taijutsu,” Sasuke hisses into his ear, quietly enough he might think Kisame can't hear. “Just say taijutsu.”

Naruto yells something muffled that might be three syllables long. The three syllables could charitably be reinterpreted to sound like a sentiment that Kisame at that age wouldn't have had his mouth scrubbed out for expressing.

“Naruto, you can do this all day,” Kisame says, “but do you think you can survive Sakura all day? Count of three, and then you let him go, Sasuke.”

When Sasuke removes his hand, Naruto says, sullen, “Taijutsu.”

Good enough.

“Same question, but for someone different. Naruto, what is a skill your team has access to if Sakura is in it?”

Naruto's face scrunches. “Hmm....” He peers at Sakura, who looks alarmed and, buried deeper, faintly annoyed at getting called out. “Sakura-chan... she's really smart, 'ttebayo!”

“How would you use that on a mission?”

“‘Use'?” Like a foreign word Naruto's sounding out for the first time while trying to figure out whether it's a swear.

“If you went on a mission,” Kisame says, “how would Sakura being smart help you complete it?”

There are reasonable answers, to be sure, but Naruto doesn't give any. She can solve puzzles – is this mission taking place in a heist movie?

“Water-walking,” Sasuke says stiffly when it arrives at his turn.

“Let's make this a chuunin team, why don't we. Everyone in it can walk on water.”

Kisame is asking leading questions to make a point with such a lack of subtlety that it's insulting. He trusts Sasuke to keep playing along, though, both because Sasuke underestimates the depth of the insult and because the topic – the comparative uselessness of his teammates – is one he enjoys expressing his opinions on.

Sasuke thinks for a while. Sakura wilts a little more with each second that passes without a word, while Sasuke feels a little better about himself because none of Sakura's achievements over him are terribly impressive after all. She learned how to walk on water on her first try, but, past a certain point, everyone can water-walk. It's not a special talent.

Whatever lets him live with himself, Kisame supposes. Kisame's doing this largely for his benefit.

“...Taijutsu.”

“Academy basic forms,” Kisame says. “Your team has a better taijutsu user on it.”

“If Sakura and I need to split up,” Sasuke snaps, because he'll defend a point to the death after he's decided on it no matter how little he wants to or how little it lines up with reality or how much Sakura lights up at hearing it, “it won't matter which one of us is better.”

“If you knew before the mission began that you would need two skilled taijutsu users, would you have picked Sakura for your team, or someone else?” Before Sasuke can answer, Kisame continues, “No. That's alright. Let's go with your way. Your team of three splits up. Sasuke is the team leader, but you've never worked with the other two before. Sakura is a stranger to you. You only have your teammates' reputations to judge them by, along with any talents they introduced themselves with. Neither of them is from a bloodline clan. How simple is it for you to decide what roles to assign them to?”

Konoha's method of getting around the issue is to simply not reassign ninja. An entire team will share a specialization, so that the individual members will retain only limited ability to perform that specialization well if they lose access to their usual teammates. The ninja who comprise a team remain largely static unless one of them dies, or retires, or transfers out, or gets pulled temporarily to supplement a different squad. There aren't many instances of a captain finding himself leading two underlings he knows nothing about.

Kisame does not mention this. He doesn't understand the framework well enough to have any hope of teaching it, and he wouldn't try to even if he did. The concept puts a little too much control into the hands of outsiders.

He wasn't familiar with the Uchiha clan for long, and his memories of those months are fuzzy in any case. Itachi's genjutsu ripped them apart thoroughly enough that, for nearly a year afterwards, he didn't remember the reason for the massacre.

But he's aware that one of the conflicts the clan had with the village was that Uchiha shinobi tended to end up either in the police force or on teams with other Uchiha.

Team assignments have had no impact throughout the bloodline cleansings in Water. But Konoha emphasizes unity, teamwork, cooperation, becoming a selfless component of the whole, and, even if that mostly sounds daft and counterintuitive, it makes a difference. In a city where one's status and safety depend on who they know, rather than on their personal strength and how the Mizukage feels about them on a given day, the Uchiha were barred from the most basic unit of connection.

There's a saying among Konoha ninja that you know someone by the graves they visit. It was another of their issues with the Uchiha: Uchiha ninja visited Uchiha graves because they rarely had close enough friends outside of the clan.

Not that that matters so much anymore.

Kisame tasks the genin with picking specializations. “Ninja don't live long enough to respecialize,” he tells them. Near enough to true. “You're best off getting it right the first time.”

“When is this due?” Sakura asks tentatively.

“Now.”

Sasuke and Naruto give predictable responses. Sasuke wants to keep working on what he's good at. Naruto wants to be Hokage.

Kisame lets the non-answer slide and looks to Sakura. Sakura, who is frozen stiff because she has been told to settle on a career path on the spot when she has no goals, no motivations, and no interests and has never attempted to learn a skill outside of the Konoha Academy's narrow curriculum.

“If you're thinking of genjutsu, you shouldn't say it,” Kisame advises. Someone's surely told her before that she has the chakra control for it, as if chakra control is all that's necessary. “You would have trouble with it for the same reasons I do.”

Sakura makes a dying mouse noise.

“Oh, oh! Sakura-chan can be a teacher, like Iruka-sensei!”

If Sakura decides to become a schoolteacher, Kisame's washing his hands of this team.

“Wait,” said Sasuke, leaning forwards, “what do you mean, for the same reasons as you?”

Ninja typically know at least one small illusion that works briefly against unprepared or civilian targets, but the only way Kisame can mess with anyone's head is by giving them a concussion. He couldn't genjutsu his way out of a wet paper bag. You need a decent imagination in order to have a talent for it.

Sasuke has the potential to become a menace with it if he develops an interest.

Sakura... strikes Kisame as too grounded.

Rather than drag himself through the ordeal of explaining the nuances, he lies, “You would need more chakra.” Genjutsu on the whole requires less chakra than ninjutsu does; Sakura certainly has enough. But none of the genin are sensors. They can't call him on it.

“Oh, oh, what about a ramen chef? Like Ayame-neechan!”

If Sakura decides to become a ninja specializing in ramen cooking, Kisame is also washing his hands of this team.

“Ten seconds,” Kisame says dryly, and Sakura jerks in her seat and stares wide-eyed up at him like a spooked rabbit, “or we'll go with Naruto's last suggestion. Whatever it might turn out to be.”

“How is that fair!” Sakura squeaks.

“Nine seconds. Would you like to be a ramen chef?”

“Naruto just said he wanted to be Hokage!”

She hasn't lost her temper at Kisame since he arrived four hours late to the team assignment meeting. He's been remiss; it's better to get these things out of the way earlier so he'll have a baseline to reference for how she'll act when she's upset with a superior. Though just being yelled at isn't very interesting. He half-heartedly covers a fake yawn.

“I'm gonna be Hokage, 'ttebayo!”

“This is Sakura's time, Naruto,” Kisame says. “If you want to help her, try giving her another suggestion.”

“No! Do not – ”

“Hokage,” Naruto proclaims with all the gravitas his tiny orange twelve-year old form can project.

Sakura stares at Naruto, struck briefly silent. Sasuke chokes on nothing.

“Five seconds, Sakura.”

“Hokage?” Sakura repeats, shrill. “You want to be Hokage! What kind of – if I'm Hokage then you can't be! There's only one!”

“Who says?” Naruto snaps back, and Kisame gives a quiet snort. The Root commander qualifies as Konoha's second Kage. “And also you're super strong and smart and pretty and you could totally be Hokage! Let's work for it together! And – and Sasuke, too!” Sasuke visibly considers substituting with a pile of gravel on the other side of the field. “So we can beat him!”

“I don't want to be Hokage! I want to” – she darts a glance at Sasuke – “I want to work hard and then retire! I'm a girl, you idiot! How many older girl ninja do you see!”

She would be atrocious at genjutsu. Kisame's almost impressed.

Naruto frowns as he tries to think of a kunoichi still alive and working past their teens. Konoha does have a few, Sakura's mother among them, though Sakura's not wrong that on the whole the culture seems to discourage it.

“But you can't retire, Sakura-chan! You're a ninja!”

“One second,” Kisame drawls, and Sakura shrieks.

Her gaze flicks rapidly across him, and as Kisame opens his mouth again her attention stalls on Samehada's hilt over his shoulder.

“Kenjutsu!"

“Ooh,” says Naruto.

Kisame rests his cheek on his knuckles and cocks his head faintly to consider her. Does she understand what she's asking for? Presumably not, but on the off chance she did her research....

The silence stretches until she starts fidgeting. “That's – that's okay, right?”

Kisame smiles. Sakura balks. “That's fine,” he says. “Well, I'll ask the same question again a week from now. If you haven't decided on other preferences, these will be your fallbacks.”

Sakura does her most convincing tea kettle impression. “What!”

“Naruto, if you don't come up with a more specific skillset, I'll choose for you.” Naruto blinks at him, clearly not understanding the problem. “Sakura... do you know what it means to ask one of the Seven to teach you kenjutsu?”

“No,” Sakura fumes, “because you don't tell us anything – my parents had to let me know you're from outside of Konoha – ”

“It might be useful to do some reading before next week, then,” Kisame says breezily. Unless she truly means to abandon her retirement plans in favor of apprenticing under him, claiming Samehada upon his death, and having to deal with feeding the sword for the rest of her life. She doesn't have much chakra to spare, so she would need to find opponents to fight at a somewhat more frequent rate than what he gets away with.

---

Kirigakure has collectively done enough damage to kenjutsu's reputation that, on the mainland, kenjutsu is considered a subset of assassination outside of Iron Country. Which might go some ways towards explaining why Sakura comes back later with assassination as her answer and a three-page justification essay.

Chapter Text

(He had never quite been sure if it was a memory or a dream, and he couldn't very well have asked his mother about it afterwards. But he remembers a night, when he was still in school and Sasuke not yet weaned (when he was only a son and a brother and an heir and a student, when his father was only his father and his clan only his clan and Konoha only a single power united beneath the Hokage, before the rifts widened into unbridgeable chasms – when his family's problems were only problems any family might deal with), that he had gone downstairs for water and seen the silhouette of his mother standing in the living room, Sasuke cradled and swaying gently in her arms.

His father's shoes had been absent from the genkan. “Tou-san is working late,” he had said.

“Your father has very many commitments.”

“Have you been waiting all night?”

His mother had smiled, ghostly in the dark. “Did you come to get water?”

He had refilled his mug from the kettle in the kitchen. There might have been some cat or other lounging on the windowsill, and he might have paused to climb onto the counter and say hello; that sort of thing had happened often enough that it hadn't preserved very well in his memories. Then he'd returned to his mother with mug in hand and said, “I'll wait with you and Sasuke.”

“No.”

That had been all. No explanation and no room for argument. The directness had stopped him in his tracks.

Another second had passed before his mother continued, “You'll have to wake up early tomorrow for classes. You should get some rest.”

Even then, he had thought the excuse strange. The house was large enough that they hired a branch family member to help clean twice a week, but his mother otherwise handled the chores alone. She would wake up even earlier than him and his father in order to make breakfast and pack lunch. If anyone should have needed sleep more, it was her.

He had told her so, and she had let out a laugh, quiet so as not to wake Sasuke. Then she had kneeled at the living room table and beckoned him to come sit beside her.

Once he had settled on the cushion next to hers, she had murmured, “Your father and your Kushina-obasan never learned to see eye to eye.”

He had startled. His mother had not spoken Kushina's name since the memorial service after the Kyuubi's attack.

“I wonder what she would have done...,” his mother had said in the tone of someone who knew exactly what Kushina would have done. She had let out a pale sigh, and he had nursed his mug and frowned up at her shape in the dark.

“It's difficult for an Uchiha to make a place for themselves out in the village. We have all the space we could want already; it's not right for us to take what other people might need more.” She'd smiled down at Sasuke in her arms. Sasuke was very cute; he had understood and empathized with her distraction. “And it would cut us away from our clan, too. Though perhaps it's like that for any family. We make the most we can of what we have.”

“Did something happen?” he had asked, wondering if someone in the clan had been trying to move out of the district and if that had anything to do with why his father hadn't come back from the police station yet.

He hadn't been sure why they would be related, admittedly. If someone had wanted to leave, that would have involved his father only in his role as clan head, not as chief of police, because the clan head would have needed to negotiate with the city for permission (and, likely, fail to acquire it, unless the petitioner was an Uchiha woman wishing to join her non-Uchiha husband outside). And it wouldn't have explained the way his mother had been talking around the topic, as if it was something shameful and unapproachable.

But his mother hadn't said his father was at the station.

“No. Nothing.” She had shifted Sasuke's weight onto one arm and reached out with the other to loop it around her older son's shoulders.

He had let out a noise approaching a squeak as she pulled him against her. That still remained the event that most made him think he could have imagined the whole night: the warm soft body holding up his weight, and Sasuke's wet snores and his mother's heartbeat in his ears, so that in that moment it felt like there was no one else in his world but the three of them. His family really didn't touch each other very often. He had outgrown hugs by then.

“Family is all you have in the end. There's nothing more important,” his mother had murmured. Pressed against her, he had heard her voice as much from her chest as her throat.

“I know that.”

“Of course you do, my son.”

“Did nothing really happen?”

“Nothing for you to worry about.” He had puffed up his cheek doubtfully. Whatever the issue was, his mother could have just told him. He had been six whole years old, more than developed enough to handle it. “Itachi... are you happy with being a ninja?”

What an odd, unanswerable question. “I'm good at it.” Becoming a ninja was the only way he'd acquire enough power to create peace. Whether it made him happy had never factored in.

Another sigh. The hand around his shoulder had squeezed gently, and he'd thought, for a drifting, silent spark of an instant, that he would have been happy to have lived forever in that place and in that second. “You'll be better than your father someday. Stronger.” Probably. His father was amazing, but he was very good.

“If you become a field ninja like your father wants you to, you'll get sent out on lots of high-ranked missions. Most of them will be dangerous. You'll have to work hard to complete them. But you also have to remember to come home every night. Sasuke needs his big brother. He'll miss you if you don't.”

“I want to. But don't some missions take a long time?”

“...That's true. I forgot.”

He had been pretty sure that was a lie. But his mother hadn't said anything more, just kept rubbing his shoulder.

At some point he must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he remembered was waking up in his own bed as the sun rose. He hadn't stayed awake long enough to meet his father coming home.)

---

The meeting with his parents went better than he expected.

That might not have been saying much, since Itachi had walked into it halfway expecting bloodshed or disownment or, worse, a shouting match and then bloodshed or disownment. But his parents actually took it jarringly well. In turn, the Kiri missing-nin he'd...

...invited?

Invited, sure.

The foreign criminal he'd invited home was polite to his parents, almost soft-spoken, and courteous, and complimented them where he could, and answered their questions vaguely but without fuss, and let them know when they'd asked a question he couldn't answer.

They had to speak in the garden instead of the house because Kisame wouldn't leave the bandage-wrapped sword at the door. Itachi's parents seemed inexplicably more reassured than offended by their guest's refusal to disarm himself on their property.

Itachi's mother made tea and excused herself. Itachi explained the situation, such as it was, to his father on the veranda, with a Kiri missing-nin and a little tray of snacks beside him; and his father absorbed his words in contemplative, stone-faced calm; and Kisame avoided the crumblier pastries because some Kiri-nin actually filed their teeth into points and this came with the practical consideration that they couldn't eat certain foods without making a mess; and Itachi spoke and Itachi listened and Itachi came to the inescapable conclusion that reality was a strange joke played at his expense and Itachi got up and left.

He went to his mother in the kitchen. He could generally count on her to be sensible, even if she put those sensibilities aside once his father expressed a dissenting opinion. Especially if she put those sensibilities aside once his father expressed a dissenting opinion.

“Kaa-san,” he said, and then didn't know where to go from there. He stood in the doorway, adrift and unmoored.

“Is something the matter?”

He apparently had never known his parents at all. That was the matter.

“You look pale,” said his mother. “Here, come sit. Are you feeling alright?”

Itachi kneeled at the dining table. His mother took the seat beside him. The Uchiha weren't much of a family for dramatic displays of physical affection, as ninja clans generally weren't, so he jumped a little when she rested her fingertips lightly over his on the table and ghosted the back of her other hand against his forehead to check his temperature.

She hummed and withdrew the latter. “Itachi,” she murmured, prompting.

Itachi's mouth opened. Closed.

Said, with very little input from his brain, “I expected Tou-san to respond differently.”

His mother blinked. “How should he have responded to your bringing a friend home? You do things like that so rarely. Of course he's happy to see you share more of yourself with your family.”

Had Kisame put a genjutsu on his parents.

“Kisame,” Itachi said, “is a jounin of Kirigakure.”

“Was,” she corrected gently, “a jounin of Kirigakure. Didn't you say he's unaffiliated now?”

Had Itachi put a genjutsu on his parents and forgotten.

“He's killed all of his teammates,” Itachi said.

“Ah.” Surprised but not particularly alarmed. “Well, yes. You did say he was a ninja of Kiri.”

“Why are you alright with this,” said Itachi, who had come home prepared for the worst fight with his parents to date and instead had gotten tea and biscuits and his mother watching him like he was her eleven-year old son instead of like he was an ANBU member and heir to the clan.

His mother considered the matter. “Did you bring someone dangerous into the house?”

“He's a member of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen. Kaa-san may have noticed the sword.”

Like she was talking to Sasuke: “Did you bring someone dangerous to us into the house?”

Obviously not. How was that even related to the issue. “I don't think so.”

“He's your guest,” his mother said, “so you'll take responsibility for his behavior. He's been very well-mannered so far, though. I didn't expect that. I suppose he must be from a bloodline clan, with that appearance?”

“He said he wasn't.” Hadn't elaborated further. The picture Itachi had pieced together of his history continued to be sparse on details.

Kisame was buried in the back of Konoha's bingo book as a textual description with no photo, no known abilities, no relations besides the previous Mizukage who he'd been a ward of, a tentative kenjutsu specialty, a B+ danger rating subject to change, and a note that he was a teammate killer who was ruthless in completing his missions.

Kiri's latest edition of their bingo book, which would be their first to include him, hadn't reached Konoha yet, so Itachi couldn't compare them.

Not that it mattered much. Itachi had decided not to wonder about Kisame's backstory beyond the generalities, which he already had a fair idea of. And now, apparently, he didn't need to worry about putting together arguments in case of his parents finding out anything untoward, either, because they were completely fine with this.

His mother nodded thoughtfully. Then: “Do you remember your Kushina-obasan?”

Itachi finally looked away from her hand on his and up to her face instead.

“Your grandparents weren't pleased when I told them who I'd made friends with,” she continued, and Itachi realized, with a jolt of cold terror he could not show, that his mother was about to try to compare the Kiri missing-nin sitting outside to a respectable Konoha jounin (of course, Kushina had been an Uzumaki, a member of the clan that had stolen the Shodai Hokage from the Uchiha, but Itachi had a point to make and that fact didn't fit into it) as if they were in any way similar.

He couldn't even stop her. He'd asked why his parents were taking Kisame's arrival so calmly, so she was telling him.

“Kushina-obasan was an Uzumaki of the main house. I don't expect you know what that means?”

Itachi did not, but it could not possibly mean worse than a literal Kiri missing-nin.

She smiled a little, faintly. “Well, it... meant something, for certain. That clan held a certain reputation once. Kushina-obasan came to Konoha when she was very young, but she'd spent enough of her childhood in Uzushio that she was unmistakably Uzumaki at heart.”

A soft pause.

“Kisame-kun,” she went on, in the air of someone who'd laid out her argument and was merely summarizing it again one final time as a wrap-up, “seems a perfectly decent young man.”

Itachi stared at her. Surreptitiously, he darted a look out the window. The sunlight hadn't changed; the shadows hadn't shifted. He hadn't blacked out and lost time and missed the part where his mother properly explained herself.

“He's from Kirigakure.”

“Yes. You've mentioned,” his mother agreed. “Do you know if he'll be staying long?”

Itachi was beginning to realize he knew absolutely nothing about anything, actually.

“It might be best to find a place for him in the district,” his mother mused. “There's no rule that missing-nin can't be in the village, but it can't be called safe for them, either. They are still outlaws. Someone could attack him without suffering repercussions. No one in the district should do that, though, not once your father explains the situation.” What was the situation, exactly.

“You're really not worried at all?” Itachi said. “Kiri is – Kiri's not Konoha. They have an eye thief in Kiri.”

They did not have an eye thief in Kiri. The eye thief was a missing-nin, whereabouts unknown, even if the defection was a recent development.

His mother pursed her lips. Itachi understood that he had overstepped – bloodline limit theft wasn't such a light subject that it could be dropped willy-nilly into any conversation – but his mother didn't call him out on it.

“Is that a concern with Kisame-kun?” she said instead, rhetorically. “His eyes seem a little too special to be replaced.”

“I... guess not.”

“Then it sounds like everything is fine.”

Ever since he'd signed on as a double (triple? quadruple?) agent, home had become enemy territory, its own sort of battleground. Except enemies weren't supposed to pull the knife out of his hand and tell him that he was being silly and that the other, very different kind of enemy he'd brought along with him wasn't half as menacing as Itachi thought he was.

He'd won this fight. Technically. He'd gotten the outcome he'd wanted but hadn't dared hope for, and then considerably more besides.

He didn't know why it didn't feel like a victory. It felt almost like a loss.

It objectively wasn't a loss.

Why had he thought this was a good idea.

(He had never thought this was a good idea. He hadn't thought at all. He'd been out on a mission, spotted a slightly lost-looking missing-nin, gotten possessed or something by his five-year old self who'd still believed in peace and friendship and good outcomes if only people tried harder to talk to each other, because his village was telling him to kill his family and his family was telling him to destroy his village and Danzo wanted Itachi to fill his heart with darkness and Madara was offering to help with killing whoever Itachi decided to kill and Sasuke couldn't know any of it was happening and Shisui was so close to the breaking point that he was considering actions they couldn't take back and his father was angry about things he was right to be angry about but which no one could change so his anger was a problem actually and his mother always sided with his father and Itachi got out of bed never feeling like more than a half-real shadow of a person and there was no one he could talk to without bringing everything crumbling down around him and it had been a long mission and a long day and a long life, and he wanted....

And then he was at home and the missing-nin was sitting on the veranda with his father while his mother informed Itachi of how Kisame was a perfectly decent young man.

He couldn't even try to convince his mother that Kisame was dangerous on the basis that the Hokage might find it suspicious that the Uchiha clan had begun courting random missing-nin. Itachi had brought Kisame back, so the Hokage wouldn't believe this was some esoteric Uchiha plot unless Itachi lied and told him so.)

“Kisame-kun doesn't worry me,” his mother said, and Itachi straightened to attention because the atmosphere had shifted.

His mother had been a chuunin on the way to jounin before she became pregnant with Itachi, had weathered enough conflict in her career to have earned the third stage of their bloodline limit in both eyes, and Itachi tried not to forget that, but... she made it easy to.

Usually.

“Our clan,” she began, and for a moment she stopped, visibly adjusting the phrasing of what she was about to say. When she spoke again, Itachi had the unshakable feeling that she wasn't only talking about Kisame anymore, and maybe not even about Itachi: “They tell a lot of stories about our family outside of the district. You know some of them can't be true. ...But it's hard to say, sometimes, with these things. It's easy for a story to become true, if you let it.”

Like the coup, Itachi did not accuse her of. He didn't think she was talking about that, anyway, even if he couldn't tell for sure what she was talking about.

“Take care of the people who matter to you, Itachi.”

She withdrew then. Her hand on Itachi's drifted back to her side, and the focus in her gaze softened. She smiled, distant, the expression suddenly a little ill-fitting. “Your father must be wondering where you've gone,” she said, correctly assuming that Itachi had used a bathroom break as his excuse, and Itachi sighed and took the cue.

---

On a secluded, unmonitored cliffside overlooking the river, Itachi stood still while Shisui, in a frenzy, paced a circle around him to check for injuries. Shisui normally spoke easily and smiled easily; Itachi had never seen him with the expression he wore then, deathly pale and drawn tight, and his throat working but no sound coming out.

Shisui understood the severity of what Itachi had done. Itachi had felt he was going mad with how easily the Uchiha clan took to him bringing back a Kiri missing-nin he'd spilled village secrets to unprompted. (He hadn't mentioned that part in the official report, admittedly. No one knew. But the knowledge hung like an albatross around his neck, and at any moment someone could have noticed the rotting reek of it.) This response made much more sense.

“The Hokage told me when I went to report in,” Shisui said finally. His mission had been a simple border patrol run, but he had special dispensation to hand his reports directly to the Hokage no matter how significant or trivial the mission. He stopped walking in front of Itachi and set his hand on Itachi's shoulder. Itachi breathed. “But I didn't believe it. I didn't want to believe it. I needed to hear it from you. Itachi, what happened?”

“I don't know,” Itachi said, and the words burned on his tongue, and Shisui's hand burned on his shoulder. He didn't deserve this companionship. He'd nearly ruined everything, years' worth of effort by so many people, and he couldn't fully articulate why he'd done it. Something broke – something in me, or something in the world – and I saw the way to fix it... but then I came home, and I realized all I'd done was try to catch the wind.

Shisui stared at him, eyes red as hawthorn berries in the evening gloom.

He didn't need to say it. Itachi knew what he was thinking of: the jounin Itachi and Shisui had killed for Itachi's ANBU initiation. A Konoha-nin who'd sold information to Kirigakure in exchange for money to treat his son's illness with.

Itachi didn't even have that excuse.

Quietly, Shisui said, “Did he threaten you?”

Itachi began to reply no, then stopped.

Kisame had threatened him. Once. Somewhat. By certain definitions. At the end of their last interaction, after Itachi had lost his composure and scared a cat into scratching him, Kisame had told him to leave and to return once he'd staunched his bleeding. Killing intent had risen in the air between them, and it hadn't come from Itachi.

Itachi-san, I am a guest in your home, and this would bring me no benefit... but you're making it difficult for me not to do something I might regret after.

At Itachi's hesitation, Shisui's expression shuttered. “I'll solve this for you.”

He let go of Itachi. He was going to fix it right that second, Itachi realized; he must have already been shaping the chakra for a shunshin. He was going to fight Kisame, and if he called in reinforcements he would have no trouble winning because no one would be allowed to help the missing-nin against the Konoha ninja doing their jobs.

Itachi hadn't brought Kisame into Konoha to get him killed. He would arrange it if Kisame became a larger problem, but this didn't qualify.

In retrospect, Itachi could have said anything else that would have been more useful; but somehow, in the moment, all he could think of to blurt out was, “He'll kill you.”

Shisui stalled in his tracks, brow furrowing. “I've never heard of him.”

Shisui was an A-rank threat in most bingo books, infamous enough to have earned a title. Meanwhile, Kisame didn't even have his own page in the Konoha bingo book; he was bundled into the last few pages alongside the other ninja Konoha had no photos or concrete details for, with his danger rating marked down as unknown but at least a B.

“He's one of the Seven Swordsmen,” Itachi said, instead of admitting that he didn't know Kisame's combat aptitude either.

That was enough, luckily, for Shisui to slow down to a point where he looked less like he was actively planning a murder. “And you let him into the village? Itachi.”

“I don't know,” Itachi repeated. It wasn't enough. It was all he could give.

“You can't meet with him again. It's not safe.” Shisui dragged a hand through his hair and looked away, mouth tight. For an instant, Itachi considered leaving rather than facing the rest; but it was Shisui, and, besides, his feet felt rooted to the ground. “I know my mission was extended for longer than it should have been, but... I thought I knew you better than this.”

The pain in Shisui's voice became Itachi's own. “You do.”

Shisui was the only person who understood Itachi at all, the one other Uchiha who genuinely wanted peace between the clan and the village. Itachi having acquired another person to talk to didn't change that. Kisame had come from Kiri, so he couldn't have known anything of the intricacies of Konoha's politics beyond what Itachi had told him, and he wouldn't share Itachi's opinions on how to bridge the gap between the Uchiha and Konoha. There was no comparing him to Shisui.

“I don't know,” Itachi said again. “I thought – I didn't want to kill him. He's a missing-nin, so he would definitely hurt people in the future if I didn't do something, but I didn't want to kill him.”

“And that meant bringing him here?”

Apparently.

A smile twisted Shisui's mouth, small and wry and distant, as he turned back to Itachi. “You're too self-sacrificing. You always try to take the weight of the world onto yourself to spare the people around you. You can't do all of it alone, Itachi; you're brilliant, but not even you can hold up the sky on your own. Share your burdens with me.”

Itachi let out the breath he'd been holding since Shisui had first left on his mission weeks ago.

“I understand why you did it. But you can't save everyone. You can't save people who don't want to be saved.” Itachi blinked, and Shisui made a little ah sound. “The seven swords of Kiri are man-eaters. Their wielders have to fight opponents, or the swords will turn on them and consume them instead.”

Itachi jolted. “But Kisame hasn't....”

He had no real argument to offer. Kisame had made it abundantly clear that he expected to fight Itachi eventually. He'd agreed to briefly settle down in Konoha, but that hardly meant he had abandoned a ninja's natural desire for bloodshed.

Even so, Shisui humored Itachi. “Maybe his weapon doesn't need to do that as much as the others do,” he allowed. “But it will happen. If he's still carrying that sword, then he's accepted what he has to do to keep it.”

“Until he acts, though....”

“If you could do that,” Shisui said, “if you could wait for the people working against Konoha to act before countering them, we wouldn't be here.” He meant the two of them, tasked by the village to do what they could to mitigate the threat the Uchiha posed. “Best to stay away from him, yeah?”

Itachi nodded slowly, but he couldn't quite stop himself from saying, “I could take you to meet him. He's – from Kiri” – he was very obviously from Kiri, and not just in terms of physical appearance – “but if you look past that, he's...”

Itachi faltered; Shisui was already beginning to look uncomfortable. Of course he was. Itachi should have learned by now not to pressure Shisui on these matters. Shisui was an outgoing sort, but he preferred to meet new acquaintances on his own terms instead of others'.

The habit made Itachi's life easier, too. Itachi had the people he knew in his professional time, the people he knew in his personal time, and Shisui occupying the isolated liminal space between them. The clear divisions made them less complicated to navigate. He didn't understand why he was trying to muddle them.

“...not the worst....”

“You're always finding the best in people,” Shisui said as Itachi's voice faded. “You're kind, but you have to understand that not everyone else is. There are people who will try to use that kindness of yours without giving anything back. You know that. You don't need to think about him again, alright? We'll sort it out.”

That wasn't... exactly how it had happened.

Kisame was the one person Itachi could name who didn't want or expect anything of him, aside from a fight someday in the murky future. He'd used nothing and taken nothing. Itachi had imposed on him, not the other way around.

But he didn't know how to explain that.

“We'll deal with it later. For now, though... the Hokage wanted to see you.” Itachi startled, but Shisui shook his head. “Don't look like that! It's nothing bad. Well, it's....” Shisui let a breath hiss out between his teeth. “You're getting a promotion.”

“A promotion?” It sounded like a word from a foreign language. “After this?”

“You're worth so much more than one mistake,” Shisui said. Still, his smile was strained, and the look in his eyes was far away. “But it's... yeah. The timing is a little... and you'll have more responsibilities to manage.”

“What promotion is it? I haven't taken any assessments lately.”

“ANBU captain,” Shisui said, and by his tone he understood perfectly well the implications of the sentence he'd just handed down.

The only reason for the Hokage to take Itachi out from under someone else's command and give him his own squad was to give him more freedom to act without scrutiny. It meant Itachi wasn't doing his job effectively enough from the position he was currently in, and that the Hokage had needed to look into more forceful paths forward.

Even so, there should have been limits. “How? You have to be at least thirteen to be a captain.”

“Your birthday in the public records is going to be changed.”

Itachi could say nothing for a moment.

He... supposed he was thirteen, then.

It felt a little too similar to being eleven.

Shisui's hand came down in Itachi's hair, and Itachi ducked away with a yelp, thoroughly distracted from the revelation. He wasn't actually a kid. Shisui didn't have to treat him like one.

“It's going to be hard on you,” Shisui said. “It's going to be really hard on you. But if anyone can rise up to the challenge, it's you, our once-in-a-generation genius. And I'll always look out for you, so don't ever think you're alone.”

What about the times when you're not here?

The thought flickered through Itachi's mind without lingering, and in the end he only nodded.

---

But that was after Shisui returned.

On a day before Shisui had come back, Itachi settled beside Kisame from a shunshin, and Kisame turned to look down at him.

“Itachi-san. Ah... could you hold onto this?”

Itachi took the half-grown cat. The cat tried to bite him, failed against his ANBU arm guards, and took to growling at the ceramic instead. “Who is this?”

“It's been following me around for the past fifteen minutes. I had to pick it up for it to stop trying to trip me.” Kisame had held her the wrong way, Itachi noted. Not uncomfortably for her, but not the way you held a cat you wanted to stay put or a cat with unknown stances on the morality of scratching grabby strangers. Upright, all four paws flat on his arm, other hand whisper-light on her shoulder as if a touch might send her bolting or break her. “The strays here are friendly, aren't they?”

The strays in the district were closer to communal pets. An elderly couple on the west end kept a written log of births and deaths that spanned decades.

Itachi scratched his burden behind the ears, earning a surprised mrrrr, and persisted until the growling stopped and the cat started wriggling to get away instead.

Itachi didn't let her go, but he walked until he left the shade of the one-room shack Kisame had been temporarily given on the outskirts.

The storm had passed. In its wake it had left a clear, cloudless day with pleasant temperatures by summer's standards and a mild wind that smelled of the river and growing things. Itachi stepped into sunlight, and the cat forgot to keep squirming and melted into a furry puddle in his arms.

For the first three years after the Kyuubi attack, summer and autumn storms in the region had struck with unusual intensity, as if the gods hadn't quite finished with Konoha yet. But they'd begun growing lighter again over the past years. The latest had been one of the increasingly rare breaks in the pattern of weakening storms.

The river had flooded, fences had toppled, tree limbs cluttered the streets, power had flickered for several districts, and a few taller buildings had taken structural damage. Itachi had spent the morning helping in town, since ANBU had been drafted to locate and clear hard-to-reach debris.

But no deaths, and only a handful of minor injuries. Structures could be salvaged. Konoha had grown practiced at rebuilding.

Kisame had apparently offered to help with water damage in the district and had spent the past hours carefully draining excess water out of buildings and foundations and streets to toss into the swollen river. This was a new type of post-flood service and a much appreciated one. The current compound, allotted to the Uchiha after the Kyuubi's attack destroyed multiple clans' districts and forced a restructuring of the village's layout, bordered the river and occupied a portion of the city especially prone to floods during heavy rains. He'd made himself popular today.

Not that he'd been unpopular before. When he'd arrived last week, the clan as a whole had reacted...

...not how Itachi had predicted they might.

The men and ninja who regularly participated in clan policy meetings hadn't been happy with Kisame, but they hadn't been happy with him because Itachi had introduced him. Kisame himself, who nobody knew and who had wronged no one present, was a secondary concern.

The rest of the clan had mostly just been confused. Wary, yes; cautious, yes; but not distressed, not even suspicious.

Without realizing it, Itachi had spent long enough in Konoha's general forces and in ANBU that a cultural divide had emerged between him and the clan. The clan truly wasn't a real part of the village.

“Only the strays?” Itachi asked.

The river burbled a few blocks away, storm-gorged and louder for it. Further down the same street Kisame's temporary housing was located on, two old men sat around a table in the shade playing shougi while a third made loud exclamations at every poor move. A sunburnt man on a roof across the street was eating a bento and teasing a cat as a break from repairing the damage a fallen tree limb had done to the building.

At a different house, two people were taking down a torn window, gluing new paper to the frame, and getting upset at each other for how lopsided the attempts were. It was a jarringly childish interaction from people twice Itachi's age. His genin team had spoken to each other like that. No one he spent time with now did.

A passing mother and daughter waved in Kisame's direction, shouting a thanks for earlier, and Kisame sort of twitched a smile that was half a grimace and called back that it had been no problem.

They offered a greeting to the clan heir, too, less confident about it. Itachi couldn't respond in kind. He didn't know their names.

Kisame didn't speak again until they'd turned down a side road and disappeared. “No. Not only the strays. The people, too.”

He was watching Itachi with a strange degree of consideration. Itachi wasn't concerned, though. ANBU kept 24/7 surveillance over the clan, cameras and monitors trained on the Uchiha district from the ANBU outpost atop the Hokage mountain, so Itachi had long since ensured that nothing about him could be gleaned simply by observing the district.

No one here knew more about him than ANBU and Root already did. Kisame couldn't have learned much of interest.

Itachi had outright told Kisame a horrifying amount of information the first time they'd met, of course, but Itachi was trying to forget about that.

The issue was that Shisui had been on a long-term mission for a while, and still was. It was an unusual development. Itachi and Shisui were important assets against the Uchiha, and their work should have kept them in the village. Two weeks was too long for one of them to remain away for, but Itachi had been assured that Shisui wasn't overdue for his return.

Itachi felt... fractured, a little, without Shisui's steady, driven implacability to lean on.

And a fracture had widened at a bad time, and a piece had broken off, and he'd cut a nearby missing-nin with it.

What an embarrassing accident. The other ANBU on his Uchiha surveillance shift kept boggling at him for it and still seemed to spend more time watching Kisame through the monitors than they did the people they were supposed to be observing. Kakashi had asked him if he needed help with the Kiri-nin – the killing and burying part was implied – and what could Itachi even say to that except I'll tell you if I do?

Someone in the outpost was definitely looking at them. He didn't need a coworker lip-reading whatever he and Kisame said. “Let's go inside,” he decided.

“Ah.” Itachi had already turned towards the door, but he stopped at the sound: Kisame had made no move to shift from his position by the wall. “Perhaps not.”

Itachi frowned up at him and petted the cat. The cat went mrp.

“The air is nicer out here.”

Danzo had exhausted Itachi's tolerance for conversation partners who wouldn't get to the point. Yet another infuriatingly pointed allegory about the necessity of darkness, this time couched in a riddle about whether it was better to save a child who only misbehaved out of anger at the way his elders projected their frustrations onto him, and who could still be guided with time and care to learn better, or an old man set in his ways who would destroy the future because he couldn't let go of past glories. (Konoha was the child. The Uchiha clan was the elder. Itachi was so tired.)

“Who cares?” he said. “Open a window.” The windows were already propped halfway up, even.

Kisame huffed even though it hadn't been funny. He stepped away from the wall and moved to follow Itachi. “Alright.”

The inside of the house looked identical to the way it had when Itachi had first shown Kisame to it. It had a rudimentary kitchen, an outhouse, and not a whole lot else; the small dining table with its two old stools occupied the majority of the room, and Itachi assumed Kisame pushed them to the side at night to make space to unroll the futon.

Kisame hadn't complained the last time Itachi had seen him after the clan meeting a few days ago, and Itachi knew from his surveillance shifts that Kisame spent all of his time outdoors anyway.

Outdoors. Exploring. Being talked to by people.

Itachi hadn't dragged him here to fraternize.

The house smelled like food, and lots of it, a thick blend of dumplings and miso soup and noodles and fried meats and sugar. The cookware didn't appear to have been touched, and the only dishes drying by the sink were a single bowl and a pair of chopsticks and a rice spatula.

“Have you been cooking?” Itachi asked, baffled.

He knew it was short-sighted of him, but when he thought of a kitchen he just couldn't picture anyone other than a mother or a diner chef minding the stove.

Kisame laughed. “Oh, no. No. I've been trying, but – no. If it smells like food in here, it's because everyone here seems to have a habit of gifting it. I've made multiple trips back to put it in the refrigerator. If I don't eat some of it, I'm going to run out of space.”

Itachi blinked up at him. “Why... because of the flooding help? They're paying you back?”

“It seems that way,” Kisame said, and he sounded a little bemused by it as well.

Itachi headed over to the mini fridge to snoop, but Kisame made a noise and overtook him with his much longer stride to reach it first. Itachi paused to watch as Kisame leaned down, set his hand against the door's rubber seal, and pulsed chakra through it.

“You booby trapped the refrigerator?” Itachi asked, staring.

Kisame glanced back at him. “...Someone came by, a few nights ago. It seemed... prudent, after that.”

Itachi kind of wanted to kill everyone.

He brought one thing home with him, for once in his life, and every horrible faction in this village immediately raced to sink their claws into it. His clan kept talking to Kisame – at Itachi's request, Kakashi had shown him the list of everyone they'd spotted interacting with Kisame, and Itachi had nearly seen red when he'd read Yashiro's name on it, one of the three spearheads of the clan's pro-rebel faction – and now finally someone else had come to butt in, too.

The cat tried to bite Itachi again. Itachi realized he was leaking killing intent and reined it in. “Who was it?”

“They had a white mask on.”

Of course they had. “Were they a pretentious jerk or a rude jerk?” Were they Root or ANBU?

“They used a lot of metaphors....”

Root.

“What did they want?” Itachi bit out, nudging Kisame aside and crouching so he could poke through the refrigerator. Kisame obliged, though he did it with the air of a man being harassed by a kitten who wanted to steal his seat.

The elevation change was the last straw for the cat. She fought her way out of Itachi's grip and onto the floor. Itachi couldn't entirely hold back a sigh at the loss of contact, the phantom sensation of her paws kicking off of his arms still lingering, but he tried to pay her no more mind.

“It won't use that as a bathroom, will it?”

“What?” Itachi looked over, and Kisame indicated the kitchen sink where the cat had taken up residence. “She might. I don't know.”

Back to the little refrigerator. Kisame must have helped a noodle stand's owner at some point, because there was a takeout box of udon neatly separated from its cup of soup. Other sundry savory foods filled that shelf, and then the bottom two shelves were entirely occupied by varieties of dango and a lonely packet of dried apple slices like the kind Itachi had enjoyed as a child.

Kisame was a twenty-something-year old man who looked like a murderous fish. Why had so many people bribed him with candy?

“Please take some.”

Itachi's fingers twitched. It was a lot of dango. Kisame would get by fine if Itachi claimed a stick or two out of the nine he had collected.

Except... it was a strange feeling.

He remembered the taste of dango. He knew he would like it if he ate it. But he could find no sense of want. The only sweet thing he'd eaten in... however long it must have been... was the rolled omelet his mother sometimes put into bento boxes, and even then the sugar was ash in his mouth. Food was nothing but an unfortunate necessity of survival and therefore the one soft link to his family he couldn't seem to break.

He should start getting his meals from convenience stores. But it would make Sasuke unhappy to stop seeing Itachi at the dinner table.

“What did they want?” he said again.

Instead of an answer, Kisame said, “A question for you, Itachi-san.” Itachi didn't spare thought to the honorific. Other people called Itachi by -san, too, mostly when he had the mask and armor on but occasionally when he didn't. The first time Kisame had used it, he'd pronounced it the way one might who do you even think you are, but he'd relaxed it into a normal address once Itachi had embarrassed himself sufficiently. “Were they ANBU?”

Itachi's mouth twisted. There was an incongruous color in the back of the refrigerator, buried under the dango's paper wrappings, so he shifted a few sticks of dessert out of the way to expose it.

A bento box, navy blue like the boxes his mother used for Itachi and for his father (Sasuke's box was smaller and cuter), of the same size and shape.

He brought it out and stared at it. Then he looked pointedly up at Kisame.

“That's from Mikoto-san,” Kisame said unhelpfully.

“...How?”

“How did she assemble it...?”

“How did you get her to do it?”

Kisame gave him a strange look Itachi refused to read into. “She insisted. She asks someone else to deliver it, which – makes it more difficult to refuse, since she doesn't come in person. I assumed having me return the empty box each day was her way of monitoring things.”

“Every day?”

“Is that unlike her?”

Apparently not. What did Itachi know. What had Itachi ever known. The criminal jounin from the Bloody Mist was volunteering to do house repairs. His mother ostensibly liked the criminal jounin from the Bloody Mist. His father -

- when Itachi had returned to the house that first day after getting Kisame settled, he had found his father feeding the koi in the garden pond and crying silently.

His father had startled upon spotting Itachi frozen stiff on the walkway. Then he had scrubbed the tears away with a thumb as best as he could and said, in a voice only a little hoarse, “I'm sorry. It must be shameful for you to see your father like this.”

Shame had not been among the emotions transfixing Itachi.

“It's... good. That you made another friend.” His father had cleared his throat and tilted his head a little up so that he was no longer looking Itachi in the eye.

No one had said anything. The wind had rustled the leaves. Fish had nosed at the surface of the pond. Itachi had surreptitiously disrupted his chakra to break a nonexistent genjutsu.

His father had swallowed. “I hope you can talk to him about the things you can't bring yourself to say to me.”

His father had rubbed a few new tears away and then, awkwardly, gone back to feeding the fish. Itachi had escaped and tried not to think about it since. No one had brought it up again, and Itachi hadn't hallucinated any more strange sentences or tear-bright eyes from his father. This was fine.

He shoved the box into the refrigerator and shut the door with more force than necessary. “Is anything in there from Yashiro's group?”

“Yashiro-san?” Kisame murmured. “It's no trouble to tell you, but I would like an answer first.”

Itachi made an irritated sound in his throat. “It's complicated. They weren't ANBU. What did Yashiro talk at you about?” Yashiro and his cronies had strong-armed Shisui into spying on Itachi, going behind Itachi's father's back to do it. That was the latest in an increasingly long line of reasons for why he was a miserable lowlife the world would have been better off without.

It really would have been so easy to....

Itachi needed a moment to place the low thrum in the room as the cat growling from the sink.

Killing intent again. He scrunched his eyes shut and tried to ground himself; but killing intent lingered, and when he opened his eyes he couldn't tell if the crimson weight in the air was a leftover from seconds earlier or if he was still producing it. There was always someone to want dead these days.

(More reasons to avoid the house. He couldn't stain Sasuke.)

Kisame didn't comment, so maybe Itachi had managed to leash it. Never mind that he was still imagining how much more manageable life would become with Yashiro six feet under. “He said he'd be keeping an eye on the situation. Then he ended with some unkind words about you.” With a thin patina of amusement: “He doesn't care much for children, does he?”

That sounded just like Yashiro. He hadn't tried to get involved with Kisame like the rest of the clan was evidently doing, Itachi supposed. Something almost like standards. Or maybe it was only a matter of time.

“He's the clan head's advisor,” Itachi muttered, “and one of the rebel ringleaders. You shouldn't talk to him.”

“I suppose I'll just leap into the river the next time I see him open his mouth, then.”

Itachi stood. “You should do that.”

“Anyone else I shouldn't speak to, while we're on the topic?”

Itachi turned to frown up at him. Kisame was smiling, teeth barely showing, and plainly had no intention of following through on whatever Itachi told him.

“You,” Itachi flatly informed him, “are an information leak.”

Like Kisame's voice, his laugh had an unexpectedly quiet, scratchy timbre for a person of his size. “Me?”

Frustrating. “Yes.” No, they weren't going to talk about how he had become an information leak.

“This is interesting for now,” Kisame said in the tone of a concession. “When it stops being so, I will take my leave. Is that agreeable to you, Itachi-san?”

Itachi let red bleed into his eyes.

It was a promise as much as it was a threat. People in Konoha tended to interpret it solely as the latter, though. Aside from Shisui, who had acclimated people to seeing him with the sharingan by keeping them active near-permanently outside of the district, it was a poor idea for an Uchiha to bring their bloodline limit to bear in the village. On the battlefield, too, enemy ninja knew to look away when an opponent's black eyes shifted to red.

Which made Kisame's reaction an anomaly. His grin ticked wider, and he met Itachi's gaze head-on.

In the sharingan's sight, he blazed like a star, and the bandage-wrapped hulk on his back became a black hole. His chakra overflowed from his body to lap at the air around him, depths of blue-green thick enough that it looked wrong that the sunlight slanting through the windows didn't need to refract through the layers to reach him.

The walls of the room lit up in his colors, too. The floor. The ceiling. The pipework under the sink. The door frame and the windows shone.

He had done something to the entire house, and Itachi had no idea what, whether it was an unsprung trap or an alarm or some sort of harmless territory marking. Only fuuinjutsu could have bound chakra to the environment without allowing it to dissipate or deform, but Itachi couldn't pick out where Kisame must have drawn the sealing arrays and so couldn't make any guesses towards their functions.

Some of the other clan members must have known. They might have even known exactly what it was. Setting chakra-based installations in the territory of a clan whose bloodline limit allowed its users to see chakra was either stupidity, nonchalance, or a deliberate invitation to notice.

Itachi's father, at the very least, must have been aware.

Itachi didn't intend to ask. If he needed to kill Kisame, he'd have to catch Kisame in a genjutsu before Kisame could trigger whatever he'd laid down.

“You drove a little genin from Kumo mad with those, didn't you?” In the Chuunin Exams Itachi had earned his promotion in, he had encouraged an opponent in the tournament round to reconsider their choice of career. Word must have spread. “How cruel of you. Showed him visions of his own death until he couldn't tell anymore if he was among the dead or the living.... In Kiri, everyone lives with their death hanging over them. I wonder if you could do worse. I'll look forward to your attempt to break me.”

The only valuable lesson Itachi's father had taught him about ninja was that to be a ninja was to exist forever on a battlefield. That this horror – the maimed and the bereft and the dead, the crows that had come to take the corpses – was what a ninja was.

That this was what Itachi must become to thrive in their broken world.

He'd known other people who thought that living as a ninja was the necessary method for them to achieve their goals, though they, unlike Itachi, believed it for the wrong reasons. And he'd known even more who hadn't thought about it at all – who were ninja simply because they'd never stopped to consider less brutish paths.

But he'd never met one who reveled in violence for violence's sake.

Kisame had nothing to gain by leaving. By his own admission, he had no intention of returning to Water Country, and, with his allegiance to his village severed, he no longer had a purpose to stake his life on. One place must have been the same as any other.

He'd taken nothing from Kiri but the clothes on his back. Once he abandoned Itachi's parents' inexplicable hospitality, he'd have to find some way to earn his own keep, and Itachi couldn't picture him tossing the sword into the sea and settling down as a fisherman or a rice farmer or something. He'd either take to banditry or the illicit missions missing-nin subsisted on.

What was the point? Was he just a thug happy to spend his time in this life making other people's existences miserable?

Or, worse, he'd sell the information he'd heard from Itachi about the Uchiha's growing discontent and Konoha's efforts to combat it.

If Kisame left or tried to leave, Itachi would need to kill him to protect Konoha.

But it was so unnecessary.

“I won't look forward to it. Why do you need to go? It's easier if you stay here. What would you do if you left?”

Kisame didn't reply for a moment. He was difficult to get a grasp on; his voice was expressive to such an extent that it had to be purposefully cultivated, but his body language rarely changed and his facial expressions were mostly teeth.

“Maybe I'll do nothing,” he said, and he sounded cheerful even as the smile slashed across his face lost none of its vicious edge.

Itach scowled. “That's stupid,” he said as Kisame stepped around him to reach for the refrigerator. “No, you won't.”

“Why wouldn't I?”

Another pulse of chakra before opening the door. This time, Itachi, sharingan active, caught the shape of it.

He might as well not have. He couldn't have duplicated it any more than he could have copied Tenzo's mokuton. Kisame obviously wielded a kinjutsu that affected his appearance, and it extended to his chakra, too, which looked almost more liquid than energy. Itachi could perform water-natured elemental manipulation, but he couldn't do that.

“Being a ninja is a duty, not a state of being,” Itachi said. “You can't stop doing things and still be a ninja.”

Kisame held something out to him.

Itachi blinked at it, reorienting; then, a little baffled, accepted the dango.

It smelled nice the way the sky looked gently blue and the cat had been warm, an objective observation without judgment.

Kisame shut the fridge and straightened. “I don't think I can eat it. You put more sugar into it in Konoha than I'm used to.”

Itachi peeled back some of the crinkly brown paper. “Why did that many people give you candy?”

“Ah, I didn't think to ask.”

Itachi sniffed the tri-color dango, then, experimentally, took a bite of the topmost pink ball.

Sugar and rice flour and cold air and the faintest hint of cherry blossom. It wasn't bad. It was good. The extra soft texture marked it as having come from the Uchiha shop that his father used to take him to (located in the district because they couldn't acquire business permits outside) and that he'd last gone to with Izumi years ago. What had they talked about then...?

He'd liked this once.

“Shisui still hasn't come back,” Itachi's mouth said around a glob of dango.

“That cousin of yours?”

He could have trusted Shisui to distract him from the petty trivialities and keep him focused on the greater goal. Stupid diversions like the smell of Danzo's breath and his mother's touch in the dark and the Hokage's never-ending, never-fulfilled promises and his father feeding the koi and his coworkers ribbing him about consorting with the enemy Uchiha and Izumi laughing as she shared dango with him on the pier at the lake – Shisui had a way of offering insights that would make all of those things distant from him. There was a cat in the sink who had run away from Itachi. He would go to bed remembering the impact of her feet against his arm guards.

He had sat up with Sasuke for part of the storm last night. He couldn't remember why he'd done it, just as he couldn't remember why he hadn't done it in years. Sasuke had been happy.

Shisui... wouldn't want Kisame around. The rest of their clan was the outlier for not caring that Itachi had told nearly everything to a foreign jounin with no loyalty binding him to keeping the village's secrets. It was kind of a wonder Itachi hadn't been put on court martial. He had killed Konoha ninja for less.

He really hadn't meant to tell Kisame.

At first, he'd meant to put a genjutsu on the random missing-nin and take one more ninja out of the world that way – he'd done it once, so it stood to reason he could do it again – but then he'd gotten angry for reasons he couldn't remember.

It was stupid. Kisame hadn't done anything except exist and be a ninja (which was its own sort of profanity, but Itachi usually possessed the self control not to attack people out of the blue for it); he'd been examining a fish seller's wares when Itachi had spotted him. Itachi had never ended up using a genjutsu at all, and Kisame hadn't said much of anything by that point other than did you need something, was I meant to understand any of that, and are you finished.

Then the first mention of the coup had slipped out, easy as breathing.

Itachi had stopped talking, the realization of what he'd just done hanging in the air between them, before he'd decided to keep going because he had already dug his hole and the hole was a grave so what did it matter how deep it got?

“He's not usually away for this long, you said?”

Itachi shook his head and finished the pink dango, then nibbled away the bits of color that clung to the white ball beneath. The cat was still in the sink. Itachi's feet carried him to the kitchen counter where he dragged out the footstool pushed into a corner and he climbed up and he petted the cat and she poked a wet nose to his finger and she licked her nose but she also licked his finger which was in the way of her nose and he petted her again and he ate the white dango.

His lunch break was nearly over. He'd go back to work soon. He hadn't opened the box his mother had packed. He'd only had two pieces of cold dessert that a clanmate had made and that Izumi had probably given to Kisame to pass on to Itachi.

He hadn't thought about it before, but in retrospect he must not spend enough time in the district, or even out and about in the main village, for her to easily find him whenever she might have wanted to.

“It's not impossible,” Kisame said casually, “that someone sent him out to see how you would act with him gone.”

That did sound like Danzo.

Or it sounded like the Hokage.

One of those.

Dully, Itachi said to the foreign criminal he'd brought home in a fit of delirium, “And how do I act with him gone?”

Aside from lose his temper at the first acceptable target and drop a diatribe on the (lack of) relationship between ninjahood and loyalty. Eventually he'd ended up in a convenience store walking a Kiri missing-nin through how ramune bottles worked. They didn't have ramune in Water Country, apparently, or sodas besides unflavored fizzy water. Kisame had been in the middle of figuring out how pricing and currency operated on the mainland when Itachi had accosted him. After the rest of the mess had wound down, Itachi had gotten sidetracked while showing him.

That was turning out to be a consistent problem. He petted the cat some more.

When the Kyuubi's attack had leveled the old district, the cats had followed the Uchiha into the new compound or settled into other homes they'd found welcome in. The Uchiha couple who maintained the cat records had each day returned to the old district to collect the holdouts hiding in the wreckage, before the village reclaimed the territory with new buildings, and other clan members had lured back the ones they'd spotted wandering Konoha.

Even so, the cats who ran in the district now were still mostly like the little one in the sink, born into the new district with no understanding of the disaster her parents or grandparents had survived to bring her into the world. She avoided by intuition the alleys and corners where the Kyuubi's uncleansed loathing festered and knew nothing of the cataclysm that had created those fallouts.

Usually the record keepers assumed a vanished cat had passed away once the cat reached an unlikely age, but they hadn't updated the entries for the ones who hadn't returned after the Kyuubi. The oldest of the lost had no death marked, even though that implied that they would have turned twenty-four this year.

How many people would Itachi need to kill to find peace among the corpses? He didn't know. Harvesting a pearl killed the oyster. Feeding a child killed the rice. Death needn't be a tragedy. He didn't possess the luxury to believe that treasures could be attained without sacrifice.

It seemed disrespectful to keep up the pretense for the cats instead of acknowledging that the Kyuubi had slaughtered them when it leveled the district. He didn't know why the couple did it.

“If his absence has been planned, they might have repeated it or lengthened the duration of the mission until you responded differently,” Kisame said.

“Barely a week,” Itachi murmured.

He stopped the chakra flow to his eyes and watched the cat fade out of impossibly crystal clarity. She was no less soft under his hand for it.

Kisame huffed. “It might be better to compromise earlier with these things if you aren't prepared for an escalation. Though that was quite a dramatic compromise, wasn't it?”

You killed the one to spare the many. You conceded in the short term to win in the long.

How many times could you do it before you'd killed everyone you'd meant to save?

How many times could Itachi crack before he'd made himself into someone he couldn't bear to go on as?

He needed to pull himself together. He was already eleven years old, a full-fledged chuunin and ANBU member, and his lunch break ended soon. His life had been a mistake and the world was a blood-soaked nightmare and he had a father who would stack up a mountain of corpses if it meant acquiring glory for this narrow-minded clan that still lived in the Warring States era. In a few minutes he'd need to head back to work, back to loving and protecting the people herding his family into a corner. He had to pull himself together.

He stroked his thumb between the cat's shoulder blades and remembered, without meaning to, his father feeding the fish.

Years ago, before he had graduated from the Academy, he'd overheard his father telling his mother that he was happy Itachi had made a friend in Shisui, but that he worried Itachi would grow up too quickly because he hadn't become close to anyone his own age. Itachi had only thought to reach out to Izumi because of those words.

What did he know.

What did any of it matter.

Itachi dropped the skewer into the sink with the green dango, the best-tasting one, uneaten. The cat startled at the clatter, clawed Itachi's hand away in a movement that drew blood, and vanished out the window over the sink.

---

Shortly before Itachi's twelfth birthday, Shisui asked Itachi to kill him.

Less than a month later, Itachi killed his clan with Madara's help, lost his right eye and a portion of his face to Samehada, and spent Kotoamatsukami on stopping Kisame from murdering Sasuke.

Chapter Text

“ – and we gotta write practice reports after, and we gotta read them back, and we've gotta remember them – ”

“Oh?”

Naruto nods and slurps another bunch of noodles from his second bowl, splattering flecks of salty broth across his face. “Yeah! He makes us memorize them!”

Specifically, Kisame will randomly stop them in the middle of training and make them recite the report back to him at any point up to a week after they've turned it in. They're not allowed to repeat what they wrote word-for-word, tell him new information, or give him all the stuff they included in the report, because he'll ask follow-up questions and they'll need to have kept bits in reserve to answer those. He's done it thrice to Naruto so far, and Naruto has never gotten it right.

(Naruto forgot completely about the assignment the first time and tried to bluff the test. Kisame watched him stumble through the recitation with a look in his eyes Naruto couldn't read – not disappointment or anger or total disinterest or any other expression a teacher has turned on him before – and then stuck Naruto with nothing but basic exercise reps for the remaining seven hours of the day.)

“You're complaining about a week?” Kisame said, mild, when Naruto eventually demanded to know what the point was. “Ah, this might not mean much to you... but I was once pulled in about a discrepancy – that would be something in the report that didn't match with what someone else said – for a mission I'd completed four years earlier.”

That stalled Naruto. “For real? Not homework?”

“Not homework.”

“And you remembered it?” After years?

“From that long ago? Well, I'm not much in the business of working miracles. No.”

“Ehh? But why? What's that got to do with being a ninja?”

“That's a question, certainly. Let me know if you can put together a reason. How are you trying to memorize these?”

Anyhow. Naruto brandishes his chopsticks.

“And! And, 'ttebayo! There need to be kanji! It was eleven last time and ten before that, so the next one's probably gonna need to have twelve.”

Which even Naruto isn't running into trouble with (numbers qualify as kanji, 一二三, and sensei is another easy two, 先生, though Naruto needs to be sparing with that because apparently you're supposed to write names into reports, not only titles, so if he wants to use sensei he has to put Kisame in front and that's complicated kanji instead of katakana like a normal name and Kisame got a little insistent when Naruto tried to use katakana for it anyway), but it's the principle of the matter. What's wrong with hiragana?

“Our missions are so dumb – if I have to find one more mouse nest, I swear - and I guess we're learning cool stuff in training – but our missions are dumb. I'm a ninja, 'ttebayo! Why do I have to look for papers in trash dumps because someone was so stupid they threw away the code to the unpickable safe with their grandma's natto recipe in it, or – or help Sakura-chan pretend to be a lady's dead dad for two hours! This can't be all that being a ninja means!”

“You're a genin, Naruto,” the Hokage lectures while Naruto chews angrily on his delicious salty ramen. Naruto doesn't see the old man often, so he doesn't want to spend this precious snatch of time entirely on complaining.

But there's just so much to complain about.

“I'm a ninja,” he grumbles.

“All ninja start from the genin rank. Every ninja you've ever seen has run those missions before. It's an important step in your journey.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Naruto could've stolen the Hokage hat on graduation night instead of the forbidden scroll.

The Hokage chuckles. He has a nice laugh. He never sounds like he's laughing at Naruto, and even when he does it still sounds like it's at something Naruto did instead of at Naruto as a whole. “Your team's missions are more interesting than most newly graduated teams' are,” he allows, which Naruto sits up straighter at.

“Only our team's?”

The Hokage dips a few strands of tsukemen into his soup. Once he's eaten, he says, "Has Kisame-kun told you where he came from?"

“He's from Kirigakure! That's also a ninja village, except it's not Konoha.”

“That's right. They do things very, very differently in Kiri than we do. As just one example, in Kiri, they don't count a person's age the way we do. By their country's reckoning, Naruto, you would be fourteen.” Naruto stops for a second mid-slurp. “I would be... goodness. Seventy.”

“Fourteen?”

“They think you count as one year old from the day you're born” – what? – “and your age goes up again on the first day of each new year. Your birthday doesn't matter.”

“Fourteen?” Naruto tries the number on for size again, still with no idea how the extra years happened. “Why do they do that? That's weird.”

“It's an unusual place. Even something as normal as that, they'll do differently.” Naruto hums suspiciously through a mouthful of noodles. (When he asks Kisame about it later, he'll get an answer of, “This is the mainland. You are not fourteen. Where did you learn about that from?”) “Kisame-kun might not have the same ideas for what makes a good mission as a jounin from Fire Country would.”

“Because he's from Kiri,” Naruto fills in.

A smile deepens the Hokage's laugh lines. “What do you think of your team so far?”

“Sakura-chan's amazing! She's super smart, she gets everything right on the first try, it's really cool even if she's bad at explaining how she did it. She talks to me now! She didn't used to do that before! And... Sasuke is...” Naruto's reflection scowls back up at him from the soup.

From the picked-clean soup.

“Ojisan! I'm out!”

“Coming up,” Teuchi calls from the stove.

“And more chicken, too!”

"You're a growing boy, after all,” the Hokage says. “Eat as much as you want, Naruto.”

Naruto cheers. He's mostly only had instant ramen since his orphan stipend got slashed two weeks after he earned his headband. The free lunches on training days help, which Sasuke is not ever allowed to find out, and finally getting to work missions is making up for some of the loss too, probably, theoretically – he doesn't actually want to say a single good thing about the missions – but it still feels like his toad wallet is always empty even though he can never remember what he spent the money on.

He hasn't checked the wallet for holes, though. Gama-chan wouldn't betray him like that.

Furtively, the Hokage adds, “But leave room for dessert.”

Naruto whoops.

With a smile, the Hokage asks, “Why shio ramen today? That's unusual. Have you found another type of ramen you like?”

“It's good too.”

Miso's better, honestly. Shio tastes boring. He'll go back to his regular order next time. But...

...it doesn't happen often, but sometimes Naruto finds thoughts that really don't sound right if you try to say them out loud.

Teuchi told him last time, under deep interrogation, that Kushina would pick up chicken and noodles in the same chopstick-ful and eat them together, and she'd always order a double helping of bamboo in the topping, and she'd leave broth unfinished in the bowls so that she could pack the soup to take home afterwards, apparently to heat up and drink like water alongside breakfast or lunch the next day.

She tended to order shio, but, even when she didn't, she still liked the chicken- and pork- and sauce-based broths more than the fish-based ones, because she couldn't help comparing the fish in Konoha to the fish from the island village she'd come from. It never tasted right to her. Naruto doesn't get it, but that's what Teuchi said.

When Naruto's been quiet for a moment, the Hokage lifts another few strands of tsukemen and asks, "What were you saying about Sasuke-kun?”

“Oh. Sasuke. Right, 'ttebayo.” Naruto tips backwards, gripping the counter to keep from falling. He doesn't spring back upright on his seat until Teuchi drops another serving of noodles and meat into his bowl. “Sasuke.”

“H'oh? You had nothing but stories to tell about him in the Academy. What happened?”

What happened is that it's hard to muster righteous frustration at someone who puts little octopus-shaped sausages which are not cake into a lunchbox and then puts the lunchbox into Naruto's hands.

Not impossible to!

Just hard.

“Sasuke,” Naruto says. “Hmmm. Hm.”

Usually he comes to Ichiraku either around two or three in the afternoon or right before closing, less busy times, rather than at dinnertime like now. A ninja and a civilian are working their ways through their own bowls on the other end of the counter, having greeted the Hokage before they took their seats, and people wander along the street outside.

Naruto's squished between the wall and the Hokage on the stool at the very end of the bar, where he's mostly shielded from the sun, but even there in the corner sunlight slips through the ramen stall's curtains and lights up the counter where it falls. He drags a thumbnail along the edge of a warm amber line.  

“Naruto,” the Hokage says, amused, and Naruto blinks back into focus.

“Ehh....”

“I see what's happened. Have you made a friend?”

“No! Sasuke?” Naruto squawks. “No! A friend? What – no – how'd you -”

Ramen will save him! Ramen is his friend. Unlike Sasuke. He vacuums up most of the bowl to prove it.

“It's a precious thing, the meeting of a rival,” the Hokage says, and unhurriedly raises a napkin to catch the soup droplets that fly at his robes when Naruto jabs chopsticks his way. “The person who will last your life and his matching you in strength and challenging you in ideals. Every great ninja has one to their name.”

“Sasuke,” Naruto declares, “is stupid. I'm gonna make him eat my dust.”

“He's a genius. You'll have to work harder than you have if you want to catch up to him.”

“I work hard, 'ttebayo!” Naruto does! (These days, anyway.) “I do!”

“Oh. Oh, yes; I suppose you have been. Iruka-kun did mention. Good job, Naruto,” the Hokage says warmly, and Naruto glows. “I haven't asked yet. What are your feelings on your teacher so far? Iruka-kun had concerns about him, but it sounds as if you've been getting along fine on Team 7.”

Naruto chokes on his soup. “Iruka-sensei did?” Do he and Kisame even know each other, aside from the brief interactions at the missions desk? Why would he think Kisame would make trouble for Naruto?

Well, obviously there's the Kyuubi. But Naruto hasn't noticed dislike from that angle. He's good at noticing dislike from that angle.

Kisame pays more attention to Naruto than he does the other two, but it's mostly not bad attention. Naruto hasn't had a lot of teachers who've noticed him having trouble with a concept and then did something to help him.

Kisame does do the thing of punishing the entire class for stuff Naruto does wrong, though, which is irritating and what basically got Naruto kicked out of school for a while because the classmates he had that year under that teacher started banding together to physically block him from the classroom. But Kisame also does it for stuff Sakura and Sasuke get wrong, even if that doesn't happen as often, and Sakura and Sasuke don't blame Naruto for it as much as they blame their teacher, so it's not as frustrating.

It's still pretty frustrating, though.

And then the missions are garbage, and he is a jerk sometimes (which makes sense, since Sasuke is also the worst), and he doesn't bother to hide during training how much he'd rather be doing something else – Naruto's not sure what that would be, exactly, but definitely something. Sleeping, maybe? He seems tired.

(Naruto's pretty sure Sakura thinks the same. Except that Sasuke said Kisame would rather be at home instead, so Sakura immediately agreed with Sasuke without mentioning her own opinion.)

But one time Kisame let Naruto sit in his and Sasuke's apartment and made Naruto a kind of bland lunch and helped him read a long book about the other people who were named Uzumaki.

So it's complicated.

The Hokage looks contemplative. “Has Kisame-kun spoken to you about him at all?”

“No?” says Naruto. “What would he do that for?”

“How about the other way around?”

“Nnnnn... I guess Iruka-sensei asks about what we're learning a lot,” Naruto decides, “but that's normal. He's worried? Why's he worried?”

The Hokage hums. “I hear you've been asking around about Uzumaki Kushina?”

Naruto shoots up straight in his seat with so much force that he goes briefly airborne. He could hear that word a million more times and still not get over how pretty it sounds. It's gonna be his kid's name someday. “She was super cool!

“Did you know she was called the Red-Hot Jalapeño, and” – the Hokage holds up a hand to stop him, but Naruto pushes it down without particularly thinking about the motion; the old man's arm gets as low as the counter's height before it becomes just completely immovable – “she ate ojisan's ramen too except she liked shio ramen best and she had lucky hair because there was this book and it said the Uzumaki clan thought red hair was gifted from a god and – ”

“Naruto,” the Hokage says sharply.

Naruto raises his voice. “ – she fought tons of enemy ninja 'ttebayo and she beat all of them - ”

A hand on Naruto's head squashes him down, more startling than uncomfortable. “Kushina was certainly a spitfire” – the old man knew her? Did everyone know her except for Naruto? – “but do you know why I asked?”

“Nope!”

“In the Third War, Kushina was assigned to the Kiri front. You know that's where Kisame-kun is from.”

“Uh-huh,” says Naruto, who doesn't understand why the Hokage believes those facts relate to each other.

“One of the enemy ninja Kushina faced was Kisame-kun's adoptive father and clan head.”

“...Uh. Huh,” says Naruto.

The Hokage removes his hand and looks Naruto in the eye, no lightness in his expression. “Can you follow where this is going, Naruto?”

“Does it have to go somewhere?” Naruto asks, the words small between them. “Can't it stop?”

The Hokage sighs. A little of the intensity in his gaze relents.

“It was a war,” he says, “and Kushina was defending the country from an enemy soldier. In those circumstances, these conflicts are unavoidable.” What conflicts? What conflicts? “I don't believe Kisame-kun bears a grudge. He wouldn't have been allowed to become your substitute otherwise. But you should understand now where Iruka-kun's feelings come from. These pasts aren't easy to let go of.”

Weakly: “She fought Same-sensei's dad?”

“Fought, yes. She killed him.”

Bluntly, no punches pulled. The awesomest person Naruto knows cut Naruto's teacher's parent down on a battlefield.

Kisame himself doesn't outwardly care very much, as far as Naruto can remember, but -

But.

Adoptive father, too. He was already an orphan.

“She did a good thing by it,” the Hokage continues.

Naruto jerks upright in reflexive offense. “How? She....”

Naruto still loves her. Is it wrong that he still loves her?

“Kisame-kun's father was the enemy commander. By killing him, Kushina ended the battle, and even Kiri's continued involvement in the war. Kiri surrendered after his death, and neither Konoha ninja nor Kiri were hurt fighting each other for the remainder of the Third War. She was a hero. She embodied the Will of Fire. Nothing she did was something to feel shame or guilt for.”

Sure.

...Sure.

If it was something she had to do, then that... makes it okay? If she had to do it to protect people. And Kisame's dad was probably a pretty bad guy if Kisame decided he wanted to live in the same ninja village that his dad's killer had come from. So that makes it okay. Kushina only did the right thing.

Even so, it casts a shadow across the rest of the evening.

Naruto doesn't fully remember later what else they talked about, mind too crowded with big thoughts for the little thoughts to stick. About the only part he keeps is from when, towards the end, the Hokage mentions that if Naruto wants better missions then he needs to find some guy called Kakashi.

---

Sakura made a misstep.

The field they were at for the afternoon hadn't been cleaned since its last use, and she spotted the glint of a leftover shuriken in the grass her foot was about to come down on. She stumbled to avoid it, her toes rammed into a stray bit of wood shrapnel instead, and a torrent of pain lanced up her foot.

She still landed a hit on the Naruto clone she was after, though, so the probable stubbing took a backseat to the satisfaction of getting to punch Naruto into smoke.

She brought it up in the post-spar debrief as a mistake she'd made. Hadn't paid enough attention to her surroundings, and only managed to compensate for the error because Naruto had stopped defending to try to halt the match. The pain hadn't gotten better, but it'd pass eventually. She could work through it.

Except that, a couple of minutes later, Kisame said, “You look... you wouldn't be ill, would you?”

Her largest toe felt like she was broiling it beneath a very small fire. Otherwise: “No...? Is something wrong?”

His attention slid away. “Ah, well. If you think it's not anything. Feel free to sit the rest of the day out.”

Did she look sick?

She checked the pocket mirror she kept in her weapons pouch. Out of the glass peered an ashen-faced girl with lips the color of candle wax.

Her cry distracted Naruto and his clones enough that Sasuke wiped the mob of clones out with a fireball and swiped Naruto's feet out from under him. “Oh, that's not okay!” Those were not normal shades for her skin.

She really did feel fine, though. “Um – ” For lack of better ideas, she stood and wandered off for her water bottle. It wasn't far, luckily; walking hurt a little, but she could manage this distance without difficulty.

She downed half of the bottle's contents, gauged her physical state again, noticed no difference, and drank another quarter just in case before she headed back to watch the boys beat each other up.

Well, watch Sasuke beat Naruto up while Naruto refused to forfeit. Naruto held out noticeably longer against Sasuke these days than he ever had in the Academy – those matches had tended to last between half a second and two seconds, depending on how generous Sasuke had felt on a given day – but he was still a far cry from anything resembling standing on even footing.

Sasuke won, to no one's shock, grinding Naruto's face into the dirt in a grapple while Naruto tried to magically kick his way out of it. Kisame called the spar, Naruto yelled at Sasuke at a volume that made Sakura want to throttle him, and Sasuke turned away from Naruto with his nose in his air and did a double take upon spotting Sakura.

“What happened?” Sasuke asked, heading over at a slightly faster speed than his regular walking pace.

Sakura squirreled away the confirmation that Sasuke noticed her appearance often enough to realize when she looked different, another tally mark to bring to bear against Ino at the soonest opportunity. “Sasuke-kun! It's nothing, I might just not have had enough water. I just drank some, so it should clear up soon.”

“What's wrong?” Naruto piped up from behind Sasuke. Sakura's toe burned, and she was desperately not in the mood for Naruto or his horrible voice. “Sakura-chan, what were you yelling about?”

“Nothing. I'm fine.”

Naruto squinted at her, then shrugged. “Okay.”

“No, you're not,” said Sasuke blankly. “Is it your foot?”

“My foot? It shouldn't be.” Still, she glanced down on reflex, and – she wasn't supposed to look that color, either. Her toenail had tinted to an unpleasantly deep purple, the size and intensity of the bruise increasing at a snail's pace even as she watched. “That wasn't there before! When did that happen!”

Kisame said, “Were you taught how to identify breaks?”

She had been. She swallowed the pain, steeled herself, and, biting back tears, prodded the swollen toe until she confirmed the breakage point. “It's fractured. Who just leaves shuriken lying around for people to step on?”

“An enemy could,” Kisame said. Sakura scowled at the bruise: this time hadn't been because of enemies. “Well, there's not much to be done for it, is there.”

“She should go to the hospital,” Sasuke said, and Naruto made a confused noise that everyone ignored.

Kisame said, “For a superficial injury?”

“Is a fractured bone superficial?” Sakura wondered. Their Academy teachers had always sent students with that level of injury to the school nurse, doubly so if it affected the fingers. The students wouldn't return with the wound healed until a class period or two later.

Sasuke glanced at Kisame. Most of the time, Sasuke didn't act too much like he already knew Kisame, but the way he looked at their teacher then was with the casual, soul-deep familiarity of a family member. Or of a family member who lived together, anyway. Sakura's parents didn't look at each other or at her like that. “Kisame,” he said, and beneath the word lurked the history of a discussion long since held and resolved.

Kisame didn't answer immediately. He considered the state of Sakura's injury.

Finally, he said, “It might be best for you to go with her.”

Sasuke sighed through his nose, but Sakura brightened and leaped to her feet. “Sasuke-kun, you're escorting me to the hospital?” Maybe she should break her bones more often!

No, that was too much. She shouldn't do that.

“Can you walk?” Sasuke asked.

“Oh – no, I can't, it hurts too much. You might have to carry me – ”

“If you can't move,” Kisame said, “Naruto might make for a better escort. He does know the shadow clone technique.”

“ – actually it doesn't hurt that much, let's go!”

“Eh?” Naruto screeched in a near-perfect imitation of a rusty door hinge. Sakura wanted to maul him. “I wanna go with Sakura-chan! I'll be way better than Sasuke! Why does only he get to go – ”

“If that's what you want to do, don't let me stop you,” said Kisame.

Sasuke raised an eyebrow, and Sakura froze midway through drawing a shuriken to throw. Even Naruto shut up to stare.

“You might as well go together,” Kisame continued. “All three of you.”

“Really?” said Sasuke, though something about his tone made it sound like he was having a different conversation with Kisame than the rest of them were.

Dryly: “You would need to learn eventually how to complete a job without someone playing you against each other for it.”

“Without someone – ? Oh, you do do that,” Sakura realized. All of the time, even. Constantly. She'd kind of wondered how none of them had mutinied during a mission yet – not that she would, no matter how awful the task, but that Naruto or Sasuke hadn't – and now she supposed she had an explanation. Of a sort. “For some reason I didn't think you were doing it on purpose.”

It was... a little weird to think that he'd been doing it on purpose. Uncomfortable, although she couldn't put words to why. Sasuke was giving him a startled look, too, though she couldn't read it very well.

She raised a hand, forgetting it was the one holding a shuriken, and said, “Um, what happens if I kill Naruto?” Without an adult as a witness, the possibility rose to non-zero.

“Well, the first thing that should happen is that you don't tell me you were planning it.”

A completely useless answer to the question she'd been asking, but, still, he had a point.

Unfortunately.

Kisame had her bandage the injury first, wrapping her big toe and index toe together to turn the latter into a splint, and then they headed off. They were decently close to the city center for once, the hospital less than twenty minutes away even at a slow walk.

Except that they didn't even make it out of the training field before Naruto created shadow clones that she had to punch out of existence before they could try to carry her.

“I can walk!”

“Okay, okay! Sorry, Sakura-chan!” Naruto peered down at her injury. “Is it that bad? It looks like it'll go away in an hour max.”

“You're some – ” kind of freak of nature almost slipped out, but that felt too mean. Sasuke would have gotten mad at her for it. She pivoted to, “Not everyone's bruises go away in five minutes. If you don't get to a med-nin and just leave it on its own, a fractured bone takes... I think a couple of weeks to heal?”

“Weeks?”

“Stop talking,” said Sakura, aggrieved. She couldn't focus on overcoming the pain from her toe and the pain from Naruto's voice simultaneously. He didn't usually bother her so much, but right then every scratchy word grated like sandpaper across her eardrums.

“Let's just get it over with,” said Sasuke, striding ahead. Sakura yelped and hurried after him at a slight limp.

“If it takes weeks,” Naruto said from behind them, audibly stumbling over the concept, “why'd Same-sensei think it was okay?”

Sakura groaned. Why was that actually a good question?

Maybe... well, Sasuke seemed under the impression that the hundred-ninety centimeter jounin with a giant sword was a noncombatant, and Sakura hadn't encountered any evidence to disprove the claim.

Kisame had the same air to him that Ino's dad and some of their Academy teachers and various ninja who Sakura had passed on the street and her parents did – just something about the way he carried himself that she had learned to associate with ninja who had killed enemies before and wouldn't bat an eye at having to do it again – but maybe that wasn't relevant.

So it wasn't impossible that Kisame hadn't damaged a bone before and didn't know how long the recovery lasted. The same way it wasn't impossible that Sakura secretly had the rinnegan.

Sasuke's voice jolted her back to reality. “He gets weird about clinics.” He sighed and continued, sounding personally offended about it, “The ones in Kiri are bad. Somehow.”

“Kiri? This is Konoha, 'ttebayo!”

“Like the lines are long, or...?”

Sasuke glanced back for the first time, lips pursed. “I guess you've noticed this about him, but he doesn't explain things.” Kisame conjugated his verbs like he'd wandered out of a daimyo's court. Sakura suspected he thought giving straight answers was dishonorable or something. “He just tells you that no one in Kiri likes going to the doctor, and the hospital is the place you're most likely to die if you're a ninja who dies in a hidden village. And then he changes the subject.”

“He's like that with you, too?” Sakura asked, startled. She hadn't thought about it before, but the hospital being the location in the village with the highest mortality rate for ninja did make sense. Though why would someone phrase it like that? Correlation and causation were two different things.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Sakura backpedaled. “I mean, I thought he would act differently when we're not around. That's all I meant!”

Sasuke said, measured, “Is there something wrong with the way he acts now?”

Family was a fraught topic on Team 7. Ask Naruto about his and he'd go on at unstoppable length about not remembering his parents but did you know he had a grandma who'd gotten married to a Hokage (he'd found a comic book about her! she'd helped defeat the Kyuubi! she'd said some super cool things about Konoha and people and gods which he didn't actually remember but which he would have if he'd paid attention ever, because what Mito had said to Hashirama after he'd suppressed the Kyuubi with his wood techniques was her most famous quote and was regularly used as a shorthand in historical dramas to denote the end of the Warring States) and an aunt who'd been the best ninja ever who'd loved ramen and was almost Hokage?

Sakura treated her home situation as a landmine to tip-toe around because it was hard to gripe about your parents being nags on the few staggered weeks of the year they existed for you if the people you were trying to complain to responded with, “I wish I had parents.”

And Sasuke's family, of course, was off-limits.

“No!” said Sakura. “Nothing! Sensei's great!” Sensei was a humorless taskmaster who only stopped giving off the energy of a geriatric tiger who'd rather be watching paint dry if he was letting the genin dig themselves into holes or intimidating random strangers.

They'd had a client the other day who'd insisted on supervising their work from start to finish, except that when Sakura had glanced over thirty seconds into the job she'd seen Kisame talking to them, and then another minute later when she'd looked again the client had disappeared without a trace and never turned up again. Sakura wouldn't testify in court that Kisame hadn't eaten them.

“Does he – do you... live together, Sasuke-kun?”

She couldn't picture them interacting like Ino and her family, or even like Sakura and hers. She just couldn't.

Naruto inhaled in preparation to speak. Sakura was going to push him into a lake.

“He does!” he yelled, which opened the mystery of why Naruto of all people knew the answer.

“How's your foot?” Sasuke asked.

It didn't hurt more or less than earlier. Sakura was about to answer with as much and go along with the attempt to change the subject, but, before she could, a different voice piped up first.

She didn't immediately realize who the words belonged to. They didn't sound like they'd come from someone trying to establish himself as the most annoying presence in the room, or like they'd come from someone trying to pick a fight with the universe at large. They sounded wistful, almost.

“Bet it's nice to have a cousin.”

She hadn't realized Naruto had such a level of emotional range.

The words stopped Sasuke in his tracks.

Sakura had once made the mistake of complaining about her parents to Sasuke, and he'd looked at her like she was dirt under his shoe. He was making almost the same expression then while staring ahead down the narrow path that led away from the training field, but there was something stricken about it, too, cracks spider-webbing under the surface.

She recognized the reason for his silence: he was having to do the same calculations that she needed to before she could mention her own life to her teammates.

Sasuke could have gotten mad at her for not appreciating what she had, but Naruto beat them both out for lacking family members.

(Not that Sakura could actually have said for sure how many family members Sasuke had. All she knew was that he didn't have parents (he'd delivered a heated speech on the subject when she'd made fun of Naruto for being an orphan), he didn't reference other family members, Naruto had had to blab about their teacher being Sasuke's cousin for her to find out, and he was a member of one of Konoha's two founding clans even though other Uchiha didn't seem to exist.

Which wasn't particularly strange, since Senju didn't exist either, and that prestigious clan's name had faded out from plain bad luck rather than malice or tragedy.

The only odd part was that she hadn't heard of a single Uchiha-affiliated ninja besides Kisame, despite about a fifth of the village's ranks claiming alignment with the Senju as either branch clans who no longer bore the Senju name, former vassals, distant relations, or simply deep admirers of one or another of the first two Hokage.)

Naruto was halfway down the road before he realized he was alone, squawked, and sprinted back.

“What's wrong with your face, 'ttebayo!”

The thin thread holding Sakura's temper in check snapped.

“Naruto! Don't insult Sasuke-kun's handsome face!”

Naruto ducked her punch with a yelp, then popped upright none the worse for wear. Whenever other people shouted at him, he got mad and shouted back and threw hands, but he got bizarre around Sakura and it was annoying.

“But Sakura-chan, look at it! It's just Sasuke! It's all just Sasuke! What's good about it? His eyebrows are too low and he always looks like he's thinking about someone else – ow!”

“Sasuke-kun's atmosphere,” Sakura gritted out, “is brooding - ”

“There's something wrong with both of you.”

Sakura blinked and turned towards Sasuke – she'd halfway forgotten he was there – while Naruto wriggled out of the attempted headlock. “Sasuke-kun...?”

Sasuke glowered into the distance. “There's something seriously wrong with both of you.”

Sakura craned her neck around to check if he might have been talking to anyone else. There was no one but her in sight, though. And Naruto. Was she acting weird? She didn't think she was acting weird. You weren't supposed to brawl indoors or around civilians or during class or on missions, but getting into scuffles on your own time wasn't too unusual.

“Isn't that kinda mean?” said Naruto thoughtfully, as if he hadn't just accused Sasuke of having the eyebrows of a cheater.

“Where was this before?" said Sasuke. “Where was any of this? You're both the same way you were, except that Naruto shows up when he should. There's no reason for everything to be different.”

“Um?” said Sakura.

A long, deep breath.

“Never mind. Never. Mind. It's fine. Come on, hurry up.”

The rest of the journey passed without as much incident. At the hospital, the receptionist took Sakura down as number seventeen in line, which came out to over an hour of waiting. Naruto, of course, started fidgeting and raising his voice less than five minutes in, summarily got told to leave (which Sakura appreciated since it meant she didn't have to listen to him anymore, but, to be honest, he wasn't being that disruptive yet, so she didn't entirely understand why they'd moved to evict him already instead of waiting another five minutes), and tried to argue with the med-nin about it, as if getting kicked out of a public building wasn't mortifying enough on its own.

Sasuke watched the altercation briefly, grimacing, then looked at Sakura, visibly made some kind of calculation, said “You'll be fine”, and stood to go drag Naruto out of the building.

Eventually, the screen over the reception desk showed Sakura's turn, and she met the nurse who came out of the doors leading to the inner parts of the hospital.  

“Training injury?” the nurse asked as they headed down a hall.

“Yeah.”

The nurse made a sympathetic noise that didn't sound particularly surprised. “Did your team drop you off here?”

“Yes,” said Sakura firmly. Technically.

Once they'd reached the consultation room, the nurse asked the usual questions: is that your only major concern, how did it happen, how much does it hurt. She unwrapped the bandage while Sakura bit her lip and tightened her grip on the exam bed. After a cursory examination, the nurse said, with a careful lack of inflection, “Did you walk here on this?” Oh, no.

“Yeah.”

“Hmm. Who's your team leader?”

What was his name again – “Hatake Kakashi?” Answering with Hoshigaki Kisame always got her unpredictable reactions. It was easier to just avoid it.

“You don't sound very sure,” the nurse said. “Oh – no, wait, you're – Team 7?”

Apparently what Sakura needed to start doing was to invent a new fake, unrecognizable name each time.

“You poor girl,” the nurse said, for the first time regarding Sakura like she was perceiving Sakura instead of an anonymous patient. “The Kiri team?”

“The what?” said Sakura, who'd broken a bone and had to put up with Naruto's whinging and lost her teammates to the wilds and sat abandoned on a bench for an hour and was perhaps feeling less charitable than usual about people acting inexplicably weird at her for team assignments that had been outside of her control. She'd been completely okay with being an anonymous patient.

“You said this came from a spar against a teammate?” the nurse asked, glancing back down at the swelling. “Who was it with?”

How was that important in any way or relevant to anything ever. “I don't remember.”

“Uzumaki?” the nurse said quietly, as if Sakura had answered her.

“What?”

“Well, it's hard to fault your jounin sensei for not wanting to have this team. That boy is on it. But it must be difficult for you and your teammate.”

...It was one thing if Sakura called Naruto stupid and annoying, because he was and because she frequently had to deal with him for the whole day, and the same had applied to their Academy classmates and teachers. But an unfamiliar adult disparaging a genin to such an extent was wildly uncalled-for and excessive.

He wasn't even that bad. Sure, he was definitely pretty bad, but making it sound like he was so bad that a teacher would quit their job just to avoid him, when Iruka and Mizuki and presumably every other Academy teacher Naruto'd had before and Kisame had all handled teaching him without issue... where was that coming from? Had Naruto done something to this person?

“It's fine, I think,” said Sakura. “Actually.”

She hadn't lucked out onto a team with Sasuke, becoming a part of the trio with the highest grade total of their year even with the dead last trying to tank them, so that she could listen to people she'd never met tell her that her team was an unwanted leftover.

“Do you know Naruto?”

The nurse hummed noncommittally. “I'll get this fixed up.” Had she heard a word out of Sakura's mouth? “You'll have to try to be more careful during training. I can't imagine... and you had to walk here like this....”

“Were you ever a ninja, nurse-san?” Sakura asked.

“Hm? For a while.”

“Did anyone ever talk to you about your genin team like that?”

“Hm?”

Back to not listening.

Sakura breathed, slow, and counted the wall clock's ticking down the seconds until she got to leave.