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Chapter Text

Kakashi was twenty-four years old, freshly back from a mission, his hand numb from using Chidori against a ninja with an acid bloodline limit. Tenzou was waiting on his roof. They hadn't spoken in over a year.

He had half a mind to just ignore him and go straight to bed, except he was tired and aching and knew he wouldn't be able to fall asleep until this was dealt with.

He entered his apartment. Five minutes passed, then ten, then an hour. Tenzou's presence continued to hover over his head, unmoving. And if he was willing to just stand there and wait, that had to mean he actually needed something.

More importantly, if he was willing to wait for Kakashi to make the first move, then that 'something' couldn't be an officially sanctioned mission. That gave him pause, because what else was left for them at this point?

He came up to the roof silently.

"Tenzou! My favorite kouhai!" he said, book in hand. "Fancy seeing you here."

Tenzou still didn't budge. He was standing with his back to him, overlooking the usual late-evening civilian traffic.

Maybe to him, it wasn't usual. The closest he's ever come to living in a normal apartment were ANBU barracks. Or maybe he just really didn't want to look Kakashi in the eye.

He wasn't wearing his uniform but a chuunin flak jacket over generic shinobi blues. That much made sense, if he was showing himself in public. It took Kakashi a moment to figure out what else seemed different about him until it clicked that he wasn't scent-blocking or suppressing his chakra at all. He hadn't just lowered his stealth techniques slightly, the way you usually would in order to signal your presence. He had dropped them entirely.

"He got another one," he finally said.

Kakashi tried to parse the statement. Who was 'he'? With no other context, his first assumption was-

Root was supposed to be disbanded.

"Another one like me," Tenzou clarified.

So he'd been right. He really did need something from him.

"From the same source?" he asked, curious despite himself.

"That's unlikely. She would have probably been too young when the... 'supplier' departed," Tenzou said, just as oblique. There was nobody in their immediate vicinity listening in, but that was no guarantee of anything.

"Probably? You aren't sure?"

"I've never met her in person. I've only seen the aftermath of her abilities."

Say what you will about the Mokuton, but a jutsu that could grow trees out of nothing was not subtle. A lightning jutsu, no matter how flashy, would only linger as long as it took to execute. A tree stayed - and it had taken Tenzou years to learn how to minimize the amount of chakra in his creations so that they didn't act as a beacon for every sensory type within range.

"So you saw a tree somewhere," Kakashi said, not impressed just yet. "You've got to have more than that."

"I do." Tenzou finally, finally turned around. His chin was exposed without his usual shirt, which looked weird. There was something in his eyes that looked a little like hope. He took a stack of papers out of his kunai pouch - not even a file folder, just papers folded twice over. "I've found evidence of her infiltrating the genin corps five months ago. She was almost certainly under a transformation at the time, though."

Kakashi swiped the papers out of his hand and skimmed through them. There was a fabricated identity, almost airtight save for the fact that the kunoichi in question hadn't actually attended the academy. A blurry picture - likely a frame from a security feed - of a girl with long dark hair. A contingent of genin corps members deployed on a mission to aid Konoha's second-largest weapons manufacturer with expanding infrastructure, and then, on the next page, a letter suggesting they'd been planning to start supplying Hacho Village on the side.

Stopping them from doing that... well, it didn't have to involve Root at all. The village proper was hardly in the habit of letting other factions amass power within the Land of Fire either.

"How do you know it was the same person?" he asked.

"Her chakra signature," Tenzou said. "Senpai... I know you're angry with me, but-"

"But what?" Kakashi asked. He felt like he was staring down a cliff, knowing it was high enough to hurt but unable to stop himself from jumping. It was a terrible analogy. If there was anything he knew how to do, it was how to take a fall. "What do you expect me to do about it?"

"Never mind. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come here."

"Oh? That's what you're sorry for?"

Tenzou eyed him for a moment, then turned around to leave. Kakashi imagined telling him to wait. Promising to help him with this despite everything. He knew before he'd even opened his mouth that the words weren't going to come out.

Left alone on the roof with a stack of crumpled papers still in his hand, he decided to look into it himself instead.

Chapter Text

In the end, it took Kakashi seven months to find out who the Mokuton user was and another eight to actually find her.

There were a few false starts. He'd assumed, at first, that if she wasn't a result of Orochimaru's experiments, then she must be a descendant of the First Hokage or at least the Senju clan as a whole. And maybe she still was, but if so, then the evidence for it was buried deep.

Kakashi... didn't do this. He listened to orders and gave them to others. He killed or captured or protected depending on what the mission parameters demanded of him, but he very rarely had cause to do investigative work. Even when he did, it was never anything as involved as attempting to hunt down a person he knew nothing about. No name. No face, or at least none that was confirmed to be real. Even her gender was technically up in the air. But if nothing else, he trusted Tenzou to be competent. He couldn't have made this up wholecloth.

Which meant that this was a challenge. A challenge that didn't involve bleeding or killing or struggling to stay awake as his chakra dwindled, which was a new type.

With no other leads, he started to look into children's disappearances instead. He found some, most of them unrelated to Root.

"The mission was completed successfully. Also, I found a human trafficking ring on my way back. They were picking off kids from the orphanages to the North," he explained to a baffled Third Hokage, handing in his report on the matter.

Danzo's involvement - and foul play - was much harder to prove. The man knew how to cover his tracks, except in the cases when he hadn't, technically speaking, done anything wrong. Root had still been a legitimate organization four years ago.

"Yes," the head of Konoha's biggest orphanage said. "Mira-chan was accepted into some kind of special training program. A member of the village council personally signed off on it. Do you think we're in the business of handing off Konoha's orphans to anyone who asks?"

"I didn't mean any offense," he said, hands raised, voice pitched higher than usual. He was disguised as a nondescript genin corps member, here under the pretense of looking for a relative. "I'm sorry. It's just that my aunt - you know, she's never come to terms with losing her daughter during 'that incident'. It probably won't amount to much, but I already promised I'd help her look."

"Ah," she said, mollified. "Kyuubi attack babies. We got a lot of those back then. Young children who were rescued from the rubble and such. We had to give them new names and birthdays. The only ones we've managed to reunite with their parents were the ones with obvious clan traits - you know, somebody brings in a Hyuuga toddler, they swoop in and scoop him up before we can blink."

"I see. We're not descended from a clan or anything like that, but my aunt's husband had this really distinctive mint-colored hair. She's convinced one day she'll see an eleven-year-old with the exact same color and just know."

The matron sighed sadly and poured him tea into a plastic cup that looked slightly chewed. "Mira-chan's hair was more of a dark green, if that helps. It looked almost black from the right angle."

"I'll tell her that. So do you get a lot of kids with... what do you call 'em, bloodline limits or whatever?" he asked.

"Not a lot, no. Even most clans don't have anything like that. Most of them look normal, like you and me," she explained, with the air of an elder imparting great wisdom. "Well. I, uh, probably shouldn't talk about it, but..."

He quirked up an eyebrow in curiosity. Or the chakra shell of his transformation did.

"You see," she said, leaning in. "A while back - hell, it's been five years already - one of our kids suddenly unlocked the Sharingan. It was very hush-hush, you understand. The Uchiha clan head came by personally to pick him up and we haven't heard a word of it since. And then... well."

"That's too bad. If only it had come in a few years later..."

The matron made a sound of agreement, her own cup of tea steaming between her hands. Hers was made of actual ceramic, but had pictures of little cats on it.

"I guess the only thing you're missing now is a child with Wood Release," he prompted. The woman had already proven that she was willing to volunteer information. A bit too willing.

"I don't think that's heritable. Only the First Hokage had it. Did you know I met him once? But oh - we did have a boy here who we were pretty sure had Inuzuka blood! He had the fangs, at least. And the sense of smell. Little rascal. Now that I think about it, he was recruited into the same training program as Mira-chan."

The orphanage idea turned out to be a dead end. It did raise a few questions, but they were questions he had no business trying to answer. The closest thing to a lead he could think to pursue after that was Orochimaru; maybe Tenzou was wrong about the timeline and the Mokuton user was an artificial creation after all.

He never got to go down that rabbit hole, because in the course of looking into missing children, he found some unsavory details about the previous Jounin commander's 'suicide'.

He knocked on the threshold of the academy's staff room. The teacher of the kunoichi class turned her head, curly hair bouncing off her shoulders. At the desk behind her was a crate of utensils for formal tea ceremonies. They smelled like they'd been used within the past hour.

"Suzume-sensei. May I speak to you?" he asked. That was the worst part of this entire affair. Before this, he couldn't remember the last time he'd held a full conversation with a stranger outside of a mission - clients, one-off mission partners, marks. But then again, wasn't this almost like a mission?

He very determinedly didn't think about any other reason why he might be doing this.

"Kakashi-san?!" she exclaimed, looking frazzled. "Yes. Of course. Please come in- Is there a problem?"

He took a single step into the room. He hadn't stepped foot here in almost two decades. Everything was much smaller than he remembered.

"I was hoping to discuss this," he said, showing her a photocopy of a handwritten note inviting Yamanaka Inoichi to a meeting to discuss his daughter's performance in her class.

It could be nothing. She had booked other such appointments around the same time, though they were all, as far as he was able to determine, with the parents of subpar students - one known troublemaker and two girls who had since dropped out of the academy. That in itself didn't mean anything. There could be any number of reasons why a teacher might want to talk to the parent of their star pupil.

But it was a meeting booked with the head of the Intelligence Division, a known ally of the late Jounin Commander, by a teacher who had once taught the man's missing daughter.

The way the woman paled the moment her eyes caught the page, before she'd ever had time to read the words, was confirmation enough.

"That's-" she started, then caught herself. "Isn't it a bit early for you to worry about next year's graduates? Or have you already decided to fail this year's bunch?"

With a shaking hand, she signed 'classified'. She was looking him straight in the eye, urging him to play along.

"I'll pass them if they pass my test," he said, signing 'information request: by whose authority?' at the same time. It was a more complex question than Konoha's signs were designed for, leaving him to spell half of it syllable-by-syllable.

"I wouldn't presume to tell someone like you what to do," she said, inclining her head respectfully, "but have you considered there might be more to all those kids than what you can glean in one test? It took me years to get some of my students to come out of their shells."

'Classified,' she signed again, and then continued. 'Information request: why are you asking?'

"Maa, most genin teams get failed, you know," he said, and then, with his hands, 'person of interest'.

"That's because most years, the teams are structured in such a way as to funnel promising graduates into the general forces and everyone else into the genin corps. I'm sure you're well aware of that," she said. 'Is this about the Nara twins?'

Nearly caught off guard by the fact that she was bringing it up off her own volition, he rattled off some generic verbal response. 'Location not secure,' he signed, the actual conversation they were having. 'Meeting time: tomorrow, 0200 hours. Meeting place: 123:735. Full disguise.' If nothing else, he knew he wasn't going to be on a mission then. He still had three more days of sick leave after his latest bout of chakra exhaustion.

She offered him tea. He declined.

He didn't actually expect Suzume the kunoichi class teacher to meet him out in the middle of the forest at night to discuss classified information, but she did. The reason became clear soon enough.

She wasn't hidden under the standard transformation jutsu; instead, she had gone the mundane route of straightening her hair and completely modifying her face shape with makeup. Her glasses were gone. Even her scent seemed different on the surface. He supposed she must have done some sort of infiltration work before her current occupation.

"Can you," she said, "prove that you're really Hatake Kakashi?"

He removed his headband to show her the Sharingan. "Is this good enough?"

"I suppose it'll have to do. So is there a reason why you were asking about my former student?"

"Her brother and her disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Their father, the Jounin Commander, died a couple of years later. This could have bad implications for the security of this village."

"I know that. The Hokage knows that. He's known it for over two years, which is how I know you're not investigating on his behalf. So why do you care about this?"

At that, he was stumped. Why did he care about this? "I don't. I've agreed to look into it as a favour for somebody."

"Well, you can tell your friend that this matter is classified."

He's not my friend, Kakashi wanted to say, but that was hardly a point he wanted to argue with a complete stranger. "Are you sure that's how you want to play it? She could be in a lot of danger, you know."

Suzume's eyes widened. "Wait. Do you actually know something? Is Shikako-"

Oh, he realized. The reason she agreed to come is that she feels guilty.

"I have no idea where she is right now. But if you told me what you know, maybe I could find out."

"Maybe," Suzume said, and told him the story of how a second-year academy student unlocked the Mokuton during one of her classes. She had reported it to the Hokage immediately. The girl and her brother had been gone ever since.

Chapter Text

A week after his conversation with Suzume, Kakashi was called into the Hokage's study.

The old man sat with his back to him. He slowly swirled his calligraphy brush in ink, making no move to acknowledge that Kakashi was three hours late. Kakashi realized that he was unused to being the one who waited.

"I've heard troubling reports," the man spoke, back still turned, "that somebody was meddling with Konoha's children. Imagine my relief when it turned out to be you."

"Not 'children'," Kakashi said easily. "Just the one child."

Or two. He had no idea if the boy had the Mokuton as well. He supposed that as twins, they were a package deal either way.

It wasn't that he'd expected to be able to conduct unsanctioned investigations at the heart of the village without anyone noticing anything. The intelligence division noticed things all the time. It was more that he hadn't expected Sarutobi to care - not unless he mistook this for enemy action. As Hokage, he surely had more important things on his plate than one of his jounin poking their nose where it didn't belong. Kakashi hadn't even approached any children directly. Because that would be weird.

"I'm well aware of your interest in people with... certain abilities," he said. Kakashi watched as he traced the first line of a kanji on the paper in front of him. He didn't give a damn about their abilities, but that wasn't something he could say without implicating Tenzou.

Tenzou was already implicated, simply by virtue of who he was.

"Are you going to order me to stop?"

The single stroke became two and then three. It was going to be 'nin', Kakashi realized. It was just missing the heart.

The silence stretched on

"No," the Hokage finally said. "I just hope you know what you're doing."

With the benefit of hindsight, Kakashi thought it ought to have been obvious from the start that figuring out where the Root member with wood release had come from would be easier than physically tracking her down. Children left paper trails. Had birth certificates and families and people who bore witness to their existences. Black ops members were meant to be like smoke in the wind. Of course, Root had to have barracks or lodgings of some kind, but without more information on their current makeup and numbers, he didn't know where to start looking. For all he knew, she could be the only one left.

Still, Nara Shikako was a twelve-year-old up against one of the village's most elite trackers. For all her gifts and the training she must have received, she was no Itachi. It was obvious in the way her presence froze when she spotted him.

"Yo," he said in her general direction. He couldn't sense her chakra signature at all. Her scent masking, on the other hand, was ANBU-standard. Was that the best Danzo could do? "What a coincidence. I didn't expect to meet another Konoha nin all the way out here."

There was a moment of hesitation - no, a moment during which she used a transformation jutsu, because there was a faint stirring of chakra and she flickered out of the shadows looking like a nondescript kunoichi a few years older than her actual age.

Her actual age was, in fact, exactly twelve years. Danzou had sent her out on a solo mission on her birthday.

"Hatake Kakashi," she said, voice as even as an industrially produced metal beam. "Perhaps you should readjust your expectations. This is the capital of the Land of Fire."

"Sure is, sure is," he said condescendingly. They were on the outskirts of the city, out in the woods, but he could hear civilians milling about even from here. Merchants. Guards. Peasants on their way to the market. The location made it difficult to figure out who or what her target was. There were simply too many possibilities.

"If someone such as yourself is here, there must be an important mission. There is no need for you to concern yourself with a mere chunin," she said. Coming from anyone else, he'd assume the brown-nosing was a deliberate attempt to throw him off the scent. Maybe it still was, but the utter lack of tone made it difficult to tell. "Nothing to be gleaned from the look on her face, on account of the fact that it wasn't really her face. He suspected she would be expressionless either way.

Are you scared to be caught? he wondered. Or have they stamped that out of you too?

"A chunin on a solo mission," he said idly. "How irregular. Go ahead, undo the transformation. It's not fooling anyone."

She didn't. "Am I to understand that you wish to interfere with my mission?"

"Hmm. I wonder," he said. Smiled. There was only one way to speak to a cornered animal. "Let's say I do."

He lifted his headband. She formed a hand seal. Vines sprung out of the ground, not thick and sturdy like Tenzou's, but quick. There it was - confirmation. 

"Now, now. There's no need to be hasty," he said. Leapt away, and before she could react, stepped behind her and shattered the transformation.

Her hair was long and braided. She whipped around to attack. He knocked the mask off her face. She looked nothing like the late Nara Shikaku, but did bear a great resemblance to his widow.

"A word of advice," he said, friendly. "If you're trying to keep your identity a secret, don't open fights with your unique signature technique."

"This would imply you did not already know who I was when you approached me," she said. Clever girl. And yet, her eyes were dead. She unsheathed her tanto in what was probably supposed to be a quick-draw move. He disarmed her and pressed a kunai to her neck.

There was only one way to speak to a cornered animal.

She didn't resist, simply waiting for him to finish doing whatever he was doing. 

"That wasn't very polite, Shikako-chan," he said.

"That," she said, throat moving against his kunai, "is not my name."

"Then what is your name?"

"I don't have one."

She had been an academy student when she was inducted into Root. There was no way she had forgotten. Not unless somebody had locked her memories away on purpose, or... or she had repressed them so thoroughly she could not recall her own name. He'd heard of cases like that, but had never seen one in the flesh. He doubted that was the case here.

"And what would you say," he started, "if I told you you could be Shikako again?"

"Why? Because I have Wood Release? There are others, you know." She didn't sound angry at that. Didn't sound much of anything. But that didn't change the meaning behind her words - that he should rescue the others first, before he should rescue her. That only firmed his resolve to get her out.

"Are you talking about your twin brother?" he asked.

"No. I've never had a brother," she said. "If you're talking about Nara Shikamaru, he's already dead. Please either kill me now or allow me to proceed with my mission. I'm behind schedule."

He ended up choosing the latter option. Skulked around just long enough to make sure she didn't do anything too morally abhorrent or get herself hurt. It turned out she was here to assassinate a court official who was planning to suggest negotiating lower mission prices for the Daimyo. A normal mission. The kind the regular ANBU could easily handle.

He was back in Konoha by sunfall.

Chapter Text

"This is an S-rank mission," Kakashi told his newest squad. It could have easily been an A-rank if not for petty politics, but the three chunin under his command stood at attention like they were being graded on their posture specifically. They were good, reliable shinobi. He let them have their fun.

They returned to the village late at night. The lone ninja at the mission desk hemmed and hawed until the jounin commander - Aburame Shibi, now that Shikaku's first replacement had passed away of old age - showed up and ordered him to send a courier to wake the Hokage. Kakashi thought this could easily wait until morning. He considered arriving at the upstairs meeting room late just out of principle. Decided against it this time.

They finally reached a lull in the debriefing over an hour later.

"The academy graduation is coming up again," he said, changing the subject.

"Indeed. My son is in this year's graduating class," said Shibi.

"Let's hope the captain doesn't get his grubby fingers on him, then," a member of his squad said, sensing that the formal portion of the debriefing had come to an end. "He fails every genin team he gets. How many is it now, eight? Nine?"

It was nowhere near eight or nine, but Kakashi was glad to hear his reputation preceded him.

The Hokage chuckled. "I wouldn't be too worried. There are quite a few promising students this year."

Kakashi could hazard a guess. Minato-sensei's son, definitely. The Uchiha boy, maybe. And while there were several kids from major clans in their year - he refused to call any one of them promising just on that basis - the only female one he'd even heard of was Inoichi's daughter. Who was, of course, going to be part of the Ino-Shika-Cho.

Inoichi's daughter had been Shikako's friend at the academy, he remembered.

"Actually," he said faux-casually, "I've been meaning to turn in a request."

His entire squad perked up in interest. "For Uchiha Sasuke, right?" one of them asked. A Hyuuga clan member.

"Hmm. Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea," the Hokage said, contemplative like he hadn't considered all this already. "As the last Sharingan user in the village, I'm sure you would have a lot to teach him, Kakashi."

"Sure. If his teammates and him pass my test," Kakashi said. "But, you know... Nara Shikaku's daughter was also due to graduate this year. She might make a good addition."

The female member of his squad scratched her head. "Shikaku-sama's daughter? Didn't he have twins?"

"I was under the impression that his children both died, and this is what led to him-" the Hyuuga cut himself off, glancing at Kakashi. As if he was old enough to remember the White Fang's suicide.

Shibi was wearing his sunglasses as always. It was hard to tell where he was looking.

The Hokage concluded the meeting.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked a few days later. Kakashi hadn't actually submitted any request, except in the sense that he had brought it up in a room full of witnesses. "Do you have a way to contact her? Does she even want to transfer to the General Forces?"

They were good, reasonable questions. It wasn't like Kakashi knew what to do with the girl once he got her. What to do with any genin, really. That didn't take away from the fact that the Hokage was too cavalier about having shinobi in his own village who he was unable to contact. Unless he was, and merely didn't wish to share.

"Yes," he lied - on both counts. "I already spoke to her. I think she will be a good fit."

Maybe it was the implicit promise to actually pass a team this time that convinced him, or maybe Kakashi had successfully twisted his arm by revealing to everybody that one of the Nara twins was still alive. Either way, the provisional genin team files he received in late February included Uzumaki Naruto, Uchiha Sasuke and Shikako Nara.

There was a slight hitch in his plan when Naruto failed the academy graduation exam. Not that receiving a passing score on the test was, strictly speaking, necessary to becoming a genin; you merely had to receive a headband from somebody with the authority to hand them out. Kakashi had no idea how Gai had managed to convince the head of the academy to let a kid who couldn't perform any ninjutsu graduate last year, but he strongly suspected it had involved him being Gai in their presence. Then again, if they hadn't kicked the boy out by then, it was possible that they simply didn't care one way or another.

People cared very much what Naruto got up to.

Regardless, Kakashi was out of the village at the time - one last mission with his current squad before he got tied down with a gaggle of twelve-year-olds - and only heard about the failed graduation and the level four emergency alert after the fact.

The more alarming fact was that the day he returned, Yamanaka Inoichi followed him out of the tower and invited him out for drinks. "You can bring Gai-kun with you, if he's in the village. Chouza will be there as well."

"I'm sorry. A new Icha Icha book just got released," Kakashi said, not sorry at all.

"Really? When?" Inoichi asked, politely interested.

"Two months ago."

Inoichi seemed completely at ease. "You must be excited. This will be your first time teaching, won't it?"

"That's assuming I pass this team."

"I see. I was surprised to hear that Shikako-chan will be one of your students. It was my understanding that she was part of a prestigious training program. A genin team seems like a bit of a downgrade, doesn't it?"

"Not really. Programs like that always leave certain... gaps in ones education."

Inoichi's eyes sharpened minutely. "They do, don't they? It must be difficult for clan ninja to develop their skills away from their clans."

Kakashi shrugged. It was probably true - Shikako might not even know the basics of the Nara shadow jutsu - but he had no idea why they were broadcasting this conversation to the entire village. Or why they were having it at all. He went along with it anyway; the former head of the Intelligence Division was hardly an idiot.

He waited for a beat. When Kakashi didn't say anything else, he spoke again. "Have you talked to Yoshino-san?"

"Who?"

"Shikaku's wife. I'm sure she'll be grateful to see her daughter again."

In truth, Kakashi had broken into her home once in the course of his investigation. He hadn't found anything, nor had he interacted with her in any way. The woman had disposed of her husbands belongings and moved downstairs at some point after his death. The children's old rooms had accumulated about three years worth of dust, as though she had continued to keep them clean in their absence before finally giving up. Maybe questioning her would have yielded the same results faster, but he'd had no desire to approach somebody who'd had everything taken from them and giving them false hope.

"She hasn't seen her this whole time? That's very interesting," he said vaguely.

"It is," Inoichi agreed. "I'm sure there are other jounin in this village who could benefit from subordinates who underwent such rigorous training."

Who else are you looking for? Kakashi didn't ask. Said something noncommittal instead. Inoichi sighed and wished him good luck.

On the annual team assignment day, Kakashi elected to be three hours late.

"Where is she? If she's on our team, shouldn't she be here with us?" he heard one of the kids ask. There was a sound of rummaging and of furniture being dragged, as though somebody was looking for a hidden third person in the classroom.

"Stop making noise, idiot. She's not under the desk," a second voice said. It was probably Sasuke, though Kakashi didn't have much more than their ninja files and the respective states of their apartments to go off of.

"Then where is she?" probably-Naruto whined.

Kakashi tuned them out and flipped to the next page of his book. The girl was, in fact, hiding inside the classroom. He was pretty sure she had a book with her as well.

Precisely three hours after everybody else had finished picking up their genin, he opened the door.

"Yo!" he said.

"Hey! Who are you?! You're a funny looking guy!" Naruto yelled, pointing at him.

"Hmph," Sasuke said, taking one look at him and appearing unimpressed. Shikako body-flickered to the front of the classroom, ANBU-style, before finally dropping her camouflage.

"Sensei," she said, bowing down to one knee. "We are present, at your command."

Sasuke stiffened. Naruto fell out of the chair he'd been rocking on, but didn't let that stop him from yelling some more. "No way! You're not Shikako!" He climbed onto the desk, waving his hands animatedly. "Shikako was all nice and stuff! You're just a weirdo!"

"Alright," Kakashi interrupted, like this was all perfectly normal. "I've decided I don't like you. Meet me on the roof in five minutes. Don't be late."

Chapter Text

Sasuke introduced himself first. It was pretty much as Kakashi had expected, which was not a good thing.

Naruto's character, too, matched what Kakashi had pieced together from rumors, the state of his apartment, his academy scores and the repeated acts of vandalism around the village. That was to say that the boy was nothing Kakashi would expect Minato-sensei's son to be.

Except- "And my dream is to become Konoha's greatest Hokage!"

"Next," Kakashi said. "The girl."

Shikako looked him straight in the eye as she spoke her own name. No surname.

"A shinobi has no use for likes or dislikes," she said, tone so wooden she might as well have been reciting a grocery list. "A shinobi has no use for dreams. There is only Konoha, and the mission."

"And what about hobbies?" Kakashi asked.

She tilted her head, as though giving it thought. "Reading."

If he hadn't known Tenzou fresh out of Root, he'd assume she was fucking with him.

"Boring," said Naruto, arms crossed.

Kakashi had administered the bell test to every genin team he'd been assigned over the past few years. All of them had failed it. After knowing these three for all of ten minutes, he had no reason to believe they would do any better; Naruto didn't like either of the other two, Sasuke was the type to think a three-man team was beneath him, and Root may have preached putting mission directives above the interest of the individual but it most certainly didn't teach questioning orders. 

He'd agreed to pass them already. The most he could do was pretend he was testing them and reveal the truth in the end. Hm - would that be an effective lesson, or would it only teach them that failure didn't have consequences? 

"Meet me tomorrow at this time and place," he said, handing each of them a slip of paper. "Bring your usual weapons. We'll have our first training session as a team."

Shikako was looking at him. Kept looking well past the point when he ran out of things to say to these children, even as Naruto tried to question him about missions.

"And you!" Naruto yelled at her, finger in her face. "You have some explaining to-"

Shikako had stood up as soon as his attention had turned to her and was gone before he could finish his sentence. Sasuke had a look of utter shock on his face at her speed, which wasn't even that fast.

Team Seven's first training session went fine, except for the fact that Shikako and Sasuke outperformed Naruto in literally everything but stamina and he seemed to take this as a personal insult.

Oh, well. Failure was a good motivator.

Once the kids were sufficiently tired out, Kakashi didn't body flicker away but walked down to the street with them. Both boys turned right. Shikako turned left and he followed her.

"So?" he asked. "How are you settling in?"

"We didn't do anything. It was only training." She paused. "Are you going to do anything about Naruto's terrible chakra control?"

"Hm? I meant how you're settling in your new apartment," Kakashi said. It was in the same complex as his own, the only one-room vacancy, as though somebody was saying 'You want her? There, you can have her'.

"It's fine."

"Would you like to go visit your mother?"

"I don't have a mother."