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Chapter Text

Before Konoha was broken down to rubble and piles of corpses, there'd been an old saying—an old piece of propaganda—which Kakashi finds to still be true: Once an enemy is defeated, the terror of having survived can only be endured in the company of an old comrade. It's from an essay the Shodaime wrote, an essay that even Kakashi read during his short stint at the Academy.

For Kakashi, his old comrade at the end of the world is an ANBU agent, Crow. The man sitting next to him at the fire isn't wearing the crow mask anymore, of course, just as Kakashi has long lost his hound mask, but it's hard to think of him by any name other than Crow. He grimaces whenever anyone calls him by his given name, Amano, and looks outright murderous when called Hyūga-san. And, anyway, Kakashi met him as Crow first.

Crow-taichō, his first ANBU captain, handpicked by Minato when Kakashi had requested an assignment into ANBU. And now they sit together, both shivering lightly because it's not worth the chakra to warm themselves.

After considering their shared situation, their shared history, and the likelihood of getting stabbed for the better part of an hour, Kakashi decides he's probably still too valuable for Crow to aim for anything vital if it does come to stabbing. Therefore, he cautiously slumps and twists against the ruined wall he and Crow are both sitting against so that he and Crow are eventually pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, the length of their biceps touching. They're both equally chilled, so there's no warmth shared between them, but what was it that Gai used to say about gifts?

Right. It's the thought that counts.

In response to the contact, Crow's whole body shudders. A more seismic movement than his shivering had been, it seems to rattle through his whole body and shake something loose. He turns to look at Kakashi, really look at him. Eye contact and everything.

And then, even more surprising, Crow speaks. In a voice that practically creaks from disuse, Crow says: "There's a question I've always wanted to ask you."

"Go ahead."

Crow doesn't ask yet, though. "It's personal."

"That's fine."

"It's about the Uchiha," Crow adds, and now Kakashi is beginning to wonder if Crow actually wants to ask or not.

Kakashi says, "They're all dead, so I don't see who it could hurt." Then he immediately wishes he'd said something else, because maybe he's just proving Crow's point about Kakashi's ability to handle questions related to the Uchiha.

Silence settles between them again. The world is too quiet, not even the shake of leaves in the wind to provide background noise. It's oppressive.

Kakashi says, "You can ask."

Crow asks, "Why did you keep your eye?"

As old as this hurt is, it hasn't yet had its sharp edges eroded. Obito's eye is already closed, but Kakashi closes his other eye now. He turns his face away from Crow. But he answers: "It's Obito's."

"It's yours," Crow says, with a strange intensity.

Such a strange intensity that Kakashi has to look back at him. Crow's face is just as desperate as his voice, and it's almost bizarre to see such strong emotion on it. Like whatever barrier Crow usually keeps up between himself and the world has been dropped. Like Crow has never in his life had a more important conversation than this one.

"It was given to me." Kakashi speaks his words slowly, watching Crow's face as he says it.

Crow's face doesn't get less intense. If anything, it gets more intense. "The Sharingan makes the Uchiha."

It's a familiar phrase, something people repeat to each other idly like all idioms. Or at least they did before the Uchiha Massacre. Kakashi's never thought very deeply about it before. But surely Crow can't be saying—

But Crow goes on, "They added you to the clan registry in the Naka Shrine. The same day Nohara Rin's transplant was ruled lawful, the same day Obito's eye was ruled to be lawfully yours. I was there."

Kakashi remembers, abruptly, that Crow had a General Forces career before ANBU. That he'd seen Crow, sometimes—Hyūga Amano, really—standing in a crowd with an Uchiha woman. At the market, during festivals, in the crowd at Chūnin Exams held in Konoha. She'd had wild curly hair swept up into a long ponytail. Uzume-ba, Obito had called her. His clan teacher. Obito's grandmother had been half-blind and not shinobi-trained besides, so it had been Uchiha Uzume who would show up to collect Obito from the hospital when he couldn't make it home under his own power.

"When I was your captain, I thought you just weren't ready," Crow confesses, apparently not deterred by Kakashi's horrified and bewildered silence. "And it wasn't really my place to say anything. Then you were removed from my team, and I thought...but you didn't return to General Forces. The Yondaime must have reassigned you. I always wondered why. I always wondered if I should have said something. If you would have wanted me to say something. Because the Uchiha aren't dead, even now, even if you never did sign the registry." Crow's voice has wrapped back around to being too calm, too even. Like he's held these words in, perfectly formed but unspoken, for years. He asks, "No one ever told you, did they?"

Kakashi is exposed to the elements and most of the way through starving, but the chill that crawls up and down Kakashi's skin has nothing to do with his less-than-ideal circumstances. "No," he says. His throat closes up with emotions he refuses to name, and he doesn't say anything else.

"Hound was a dependable teammate. A good captain, when he was promoted. I never could square that circle. That I could trust you so much with your mask on a hundred miles deep in enemy territory, but you'd turn the other way on the street if an Uchiha looked at you too long. You never went on missions with them. You wouldn't even turn up to meetings where Uchiha were also in attendance. Did you think no one would notice?"

Kakashi can't say anything. Before the world ended, Kakashi hadn't seen Crow around the village with his mask off in about a decade. Since the Uchiha Massacre.

"Sometimes I blame you," Crow says, relentless but still far, far too calm. "Not that that's fair. Most of the time, I blame myself. I guess it barely matters anymore. The last Uchiha will die soon."

Crow falls silent. He finally, finally runs out of things to say.

Kakashi stands. He fishes around in his pockets and drops nearly everything he has left on the ground next to Crow. Slightly too-dull kunai, a few scraps of ninja wire, a handful of explosive tags which Kakashi had made himself. That kind of thing. Mostly useless, reassuringly familiar. He keeps only his ink stick, his ink stone, and his sealing brush. He walks away.

For a few hours he stalks, restless, around Konoha's ruins. Like a caged animal, he can't leave and he also can't go on. While they had been fighting, he had entertained some vague thoughts about how he and the survivors would recover, but was there any point? Kakashi couldn't have put a name to any of the survivors besides Crow before everything went to shit, and what even is there to recover? What would they spend their days doing?

Weeks or months or years of creating mass graves, when they're not eating tree bark and stepping over corpses in their hunt for old canned goods and ration bars. Years or decades or centuries of war and suffering as society starts to recover and begins to form city-states and countries and kingdoms again, and that's assuming the far-flung countries like Land of Snow won't show up soon with their paltry but well-supplied militaries.

Dying of starvation or exposure almost sounds comforting, compared to that.

It is not, however, in Kakashi's nature to sit and wait for death to take him. If he's going to die, he's going to try to make it useful. He waits until there's enough light to see by and then uses an earth jutsu to smooth a section of bare ground into an acceptable sealing surface. He draws his own blood, mixes it with ink, and begins to lay the seal.

The survivors gather around him. They have a lot of questions, but Kakashi doesn't answer. He doesn't even look at them. He only bleeds, and grinds ink, and draws the sweeping, curling spiraling lines of the seal. Then, when it's finished and still without saying anything to anyone, he pours all of his chakra into the seal. The seal flashes with light, pours out heat, makes an indescribable sound so loud that blood drips from Kakashi's ears, and then probably destroys what's left of the world to fling Kakashi back in time.

He hopes he killed everyone he left behind, and he hopes they considered it a mercy. Even Crow. Especially Crow.

Chapter Text

The thing about drastic, last-resort time travel seals is that you can't test them. Especially one that fuels itself by collapsing space-time around you to gather enough energy to slingshot you back. "I think the theory is sound, but you'd have to be insane to use it," Uzumaki Kushina had told Minato-sensei about the seal Kakashi had used in the hopefully-destroyed future.

She'd laughed as she said it, and leaned against Minato-sensei's shoulder. They'd developed the seal together, over countless nights in the apartment that Kakashi had shared with Minato-sensei. At the time he had been annoyed that they wouldn't go somewhere else to flirt and come up with math equations to kill a whole Iwa squad at once, a whole outpost at once, a whole platoon at once, a whole country at once, a whole universe at once.

In retrospect, years later and long after they were dead, he'd understood that Minato-sensei hadn't wanted to leave Kakashi alone.

Kakashi is on a mission. With Yamato. Tenzō. ANBU Cat, if you want to be really specific about it. He comes into the moment like this: Tenzō at his back, the press of the porcelain ANBU mask against his face, the smell of blood, the snapping of Mokuton limbs, the harsh bite of the wind, the kunai in his right hand, the way his left hand has just finished flicking ANBU hand signs against Tenzō's arm to coordinate their next move.

Obito's Sharingan—Kakashi's Sharingan, maybe, according to Crow—is open behind his mask, and it's only the Sharingan's perfect recall that lets Kakashi remember this mission, this fight, and know exactly what he and Tenzō are about to do.

Kakashi jumps. His back slides against Tenzō's as Kakashi goes high and Tenzō goes low. The slide of Mokuton branches under Kakashi's feet is familiar—the Mokuton is the tail end of Tenzō's latest attack, and it's providing enough cover for Kakashi to flip over Tenzō so they can switch opponents. Tenzō needs to be fighting the taijutsu specialist, and Kakashi is better suited for the long-ranged weapon mistresses with a preference for earth jutsu.

The reason they're in Land of Earth comes immediately to mind. The fact that they must not be caught, likewise. Kakashi is 17 and this ANBU mission is routine. He's also 32, and he knows the taijutsu master he's just let Tenzō attack is going to break Tenzō's leg.

Kakashi kills his opponent quickly. He throws his kunai at her and deliberately misses, then replaces with the kunai just as she steps neatly aside and begins a jutsu. The first time he'd fought her, he'd copied the jutsu and trusted Tenzō to deal with the taijutsu user. This time he appears behind her in a cloud of chakra smoke and slams a chakra-reinforced fist into her neck, killing her instantly.

Tsunade would have laughed herself sick, in the future that will never exist, to see him so clumsily mimic her strength technique. But it works, even if his fingers will be bruised to hell later. They're already sore when he turns from her body towards Tenzō's fight.

Tenzō's fight is going better than Kakashi's had been going, but it's still not going well. The taijutsu specialist has revealed he has the ability to release some kind of short-ranged chakra burst, and it's working far too well on Tenzō's Mokuton. The ground is already littered with splinters and Tenzō has been forced to retreat, retreat, retreat.

Despite how quickly Kakashi dispatched his own opponent, it wasn't quick enough. "Jump!" Kakashi barks as he closes the distance between himself and the taijutsu specialist.

He can see Tenzō jump out of the corner of his eye. He jumps automatically, immediately, with no hesitation.

Kakashi reaches the taijutsu specialist, sword drawn.

An earth clone, hidden under the ground at the start of the fight, bursts out of the ground. It reaches for Tenzō with a twisting motion that, in another version of this fight, had yanked Tenzō's leg down into the stone almost up to the knee and broken it.

This time it seems to miss Tenzō's foot just barely and Tenzō, already with his attention on the ground below him, nails the clone with a kick in the face from his other foot that knocks a plume of dirt into the air.

Kakashi's sword strike against the taijutsu user is unsuccessful, blocked by another one of those chakra bursts. Kakashi's other hand comes up with a kunai, but the taijutsu user is fast. Not, in the grand scheme of things, faster than is reasonable. Even the 17-year-old Gai back in Konoha is probably faster.

But Kakashi isn't fighting this ninja using his 32-year-old body. It had been this mission, all those years ago, that had convinced Kakashi that he should look Gai up next time he was in the village long enough to consider a spar. The body he's fighting with right now can't keep up with the taijutsu user, and in the most annoying turn of events yet, the fucking earth clone is just as fast.

Tenzō is having a slightly better time against the clone because it can't produce those Mokuton-breaking chakra bursts, but the actual taijutsu user and his clone retreat towards each other just like Tenzō and Kakashi had not five minutes before.

The Iwa ninja and his clone trade places. In Kakashi's opinion their quick swap lacks the seamless grace of his and Tenzō's well-practiced maneuver, but unfortunately it's still a successful maneuver that leaves Tenzō fighting the real enemy again while Kakashi confronts the earth clone. It takes Kakashi a precious few seconds to flip through the seals for a lightning jutsu strong enough to completely destabilize the clone's chakra matrix when Kakashi darts forward recklessly and slams the jutsu's full charge into the clone at point-blank range, using a modified version of the chakra molding he uses to protect his hands during the Chidori.

Bursting through the clone as it destabilizes leaves him filthy with dirt, but it saves time that Kakashi desperately needs to save. The taijutsu specialist has pressed Tenzō to the breaking point, gotten inside his guard, and pulled a short, thin knife.

Kakashi is seconds too late. The taijutsu specialist shoves the knife hilt-deep into Tenzō's abdomen, sneaking it around the edge of the chest plate in Tenzō's ANBU armor. It hits right at the bottom of Tenzō's ribcage, on his left, and must slide between the ribs to get as deep as it goes.

Tenzō gives a quiet, wounded grunt.

The Sharingan lets Kakashi track and predict the movement of opponents based on minute flexes of their muscles and tiny flares of chakra across their tertiary coils. His stomach drops out as he watches the twist and pull of the taijustu specialist's arm muscles and realizes that the taijutsu specialist is about to twist his knife and drag it across Tenzō's ribcage to worsen what's already a deadly wound.

Kakashi pushes his 17-year-old body to its absolute limits and darts into the taijutsu's guard. It's extremely stupid to rush in so close to a taijutsu user, especially given his chakra bursts. Those look like they could break bone even if they don't touch you, given what they were doing to Tenzō's Mokuton. But despite the weight of the duty he's picked up by traveling back in time from the end of the world, Kakashi doesn't think about his own safety. He moves forward recklessly, thoughtlessly, mute from terror and rage and the knowledge that he might be about to watch Tenzō die for a second time. Kakashi's sword strike is an artless, vicious thing designed to kill the taijutsu user and damn everything else, even Kakashi's open guard.

Beyond the taijutsu specialist, Tenzō is looking at him. With his Sharingan, Kakashi can see beyond the deep genjutsu blackness of the ANBU cat mask Tenzō is wearing and see his terrified, pained eyes. And he can also see Tenzō let go of the taijutsu specialist's arm, abandoning his attempts to stabilize or remove the knife in his stomach to instead perform a clumsy grapple on the taijustu specialist's other arm, holding him back from an attack on Kakashi's unprotected flank.

It's extremely satisfying when Kakashi's sword strikes true, cutting deep into the taijutsu specialist's throat. But there's no time to linger on the accomplishment; Kakashi carelessly heaves the corpse out of the way and catches Tenzō as Tenzō sways and then drops.

"I'm going to lay you down," Kakashi says, because it's been a long time since Tenzō was this young, but he knows that Tenzō is easily distressed by medical attention, that he doesn't enjoy being helped. It can't be avoided for an injury like this, but Kakashi can help by explaining what he's going to do before he does it. He guides Tenzō to the ground and is glad that Tenzō's hands have automatically come up to grasp the hilt of the knife, keeping it where it is for now. The damage has already been done. Pulling it out too soon will only cause new problems that they aren't yet prepared for.

"Taichō," Tenzō says, voice soft with pain and a detached panic.

"I'm here," Kakashi says.

"Taichō, I jumped," Tenzō says.

"You did, you did." Kakashi tugs and slides Tenzō on the barren, rocky soil of Land of Earth until he's flat on his back, explaining as he does what position he's moving Tenzō into. They're terribly exposed here, because Land of Earth's mountains lack even the wind-twisted pines of Land of Lightning or the tenacious ugly bushes of northern Land of Wind. But Kakashi had forced Tenzō to stay awake long enough to grow his own splints for his broken leg and they hadn't been set upon by any new enemies, so they can linger here for a while longer without risk.

Besides, if he takes the time to move Tenzō then Tenzō's life is certainly forfeit and that's unacceptable.

Digging in his pockets, Kakashi comes up with his sharpest utility knife. With the addition of chakra pushed over the blade to enhance the sharpness of one side and completely dull the other, Kakashi is able to cut the fabric of Tenzō's armor down from Tenzō's armpit and then up the side. With each movement of his knife, he explains carefully what he's about to do, and Tenzō trembles but holds still underneath him, trusting. Because the knife had slipped in just around the edge, its hilt rests on the edge of the chest plate. Kakashi cuts across the fabric of Tenzō's armor at the shoulders, then slides his blade up Tenzō's other side to cut the last of the fabric connecting the chestplate of the armor to the backplate. At last, Kakashi can carefully slide the chestplate off of Tenzō and put it to the side. The fingers of the hand Kakashi had used to kill the other Iwa shinobi are already starting to stiffen and ache, but Kakashi pushes chakra through them and forces them to cooperate.

Tenzō is staring at him when Kakashi finishes cutting the fabric of his ANBU blacks away. It's soaked in blood, and discarded next to the chestplate.

"I'm going to use a healing jutsu. Pull the blade out when I tell you to," Kakashi instructs. Tenzō is good at following orders, even very hard ones, and Kakashi doesn't have the chakra to spare on a clone to play nurse.

Kakashi considers mentioning that he has no formal certification for using any healing jutsu, but gut wounds in the Land of Earth mountains aren't really a time for informed consent.

"Yes, taichō," Tenzō says, voice more faint than it was before and almost breathless. He's been breathing shallowly to keep from jostling the blade and maybe hasn't gotten enough air.

Kakashi has many, many more combat techniques copied with his Sharingan than he does medical techniques. Before the world ended, he never would have even attempted anything like this. But at the end of the world, anyone who knows anything about medical jutsu becomes a medic ninja. He flips through all the seals of the Mystic Palm technique. He focuses on the memory of watching Tsunade teach it to bedraggled survivors, all of them eager to find a way to help. He focuses on all the times he's seen Tsunade or Sakura or a different medic actually use the technique.

His hands light up with the perfect blue-green glow of medical chakra, expertly balanced. Kakashi has good chakra control, but not really as good as a medic requires; he had never specifically trained his chakra control, only accidentally honed it while fighting against the unending tide of chakra exhaustion as he earned his reputation as Sharingan no Kakashi. But as long as Kakashi has both the chakra to spend on the technique and the chakra to push into his Sharingan, Kakashi's own chakra control almost doesn't matter.

Bringing his hands to where the blade enters Tenzō's side, Kakashi pushes the medical chakra deep into Tenzō's wrecked body. The Mystic Palm jutsu isn't a true diagnostic tool, but Kakashi can feel what his chakra can touch and it's an incredible, detailed amount of information. The break in the skin, the severed blood vessels, the way the knife scrapes along the ribs, the organ that the knife has pierced. It's not the lungs, the heart, the stomach. Kakashi is pretty sure it's not the liver, either. it's roughly fist-sized, tucked behind Tenzō's ribs. The ribs above the stab wound are broken from the force of the taijutsu specialist's blow. Kakashi has never watched a medic heal someone's broken ribs.

He needs to get the blood loss under control first. He threads the chakra of the Mystic Palm through the broken vessels and blocks them. He has to pull hard on a Sharingan memory of a medic nin sealing a blood vessel in nearly the same shape. His blood vessel, a teammate's blood vessel, their own blood vessel...Kakashi has seen a lot of healing. None of the memories are an exact match to what he's doing inside of Tenzō's body, but they're close enough to guide his technique by rote.

Once he's done that there's the problem of the ruptured organ. Whatever Kakashi does, it's going to be clumsy and bad. But he only needs it to last a few days. Just until they're back at the village. Tsunade won't be there, but even without her the hospital can perform medical interventions that feel like miracles.

Speaking in his sharpest tone yet, Kakashi orders: "Pull it."

Almost instantly, Tenzō's hands yank the blade out.

Kakashi briefly turns his gaze from Tenzō's wound and the medical chakra infusing it to the blade on the ground to check for signs of poison. It lacks the indents and grooves that indicate a purpose-crafted poison blade. Nor can the Sharingan pick up any residue when Kakashi turns his head far enough to see the blade with both eyes. That doesn't mean that the blade wasn't poisoned, but it means that if it was, the blade won't be helpful with solving that when they get back to Konoha. Kakashi doesn't actually know anything about treating poisons except that having a sample of the poison is usually helpful.

Probably noticing where he's looking, Tenzō manages to speak again: "Taichō, I didn't mean to." He cranes his neck, and pants with the effort, looking at the blade where it's landed. The blade has landed relatively far away from him, but close enough for his left hand to scramble in the dirt and gravel for it.

"I can hold it," Tenzō promises.

There is a certain desperation in his tone that Kakashi really doesn't like.

The 17-year-old that should be here, the 17-year-old who had splinted Tenzō's broken leg in Kakashi's past, would have ordered Tenzō to hold still and stop talking. The 32-year-old Kakashi that's here now, trying to hastily patch up a hole in Tenzō's gut with medical chakra he has no business using, knows better. Holding still and shutting up is what Kakashi needs Tenzō to do, and if Kakashi orders him to do that, Tenzō will obey. It will be quick and efficient and it will let Kakashi turn his attention fully to Tenzō's wound. What it won't do is ease Tenzō's anxiety and let him relax. He'll be waiting for the next order. To jump, to wait, to pull the blade, to suffer quietly.

If Kakashi has learned anything, he's at least learned this: it isn't wasting time to give your subordinates more than just orders.

So Kakashi struggles to soften his voice and speak calmly, almost softly. "You don't have to," he says. "You can rest."

Of course, Tenzō is currently dying and Kakashi doesn't know any numbing jutsu. He's not going to fall asleep, and Kakashi thinks he's done a good enough job with the blood loss so far that he won't pass out either. But he puts his head down and stops reaching for the blade, and that's good enough for Kakashi to turn back to his wound.

Over the course of his long and extremely unlucky career, Kakashi has probably watched Sakura and Tsunade and two dozen other medic nin staunch blood loss and heal flesh with the Mystic Palms technique hundreds of times. He'd have more confidence if it were an arm or leg under his hands rather than an abdomen, but the knowledge will transfer. What Kakashi lacks significant experience in is seeing the Mystic Palm technique used to fix holes in organs, not to mention the need to somehow, probably, clean the abdominal cavity.

Kakashi knows this: it's actually great that Tenzō hasn't been stabbed in the stomach or intestines, because that's the worst case scenario, but whatever organ this is that's been stabbed is definitely not meant for stabbing. Sealing everything back up isn't actually a solution to the problem.

In terms of sanitization, Kakashi is more used to flashing chakra quick and hard over knives and swords to clean them, rather than working inside someone's body, but he knows it's possible. He's seen countless medical ninja burn out potential infection in all kinds of wounds. The problem is that it's a very careful adjustment of power level, between really preventing infection (which is good) and giving someone chakra burns (which is bad, especially on the inside of their bodies). Kakashi reasons that his ANBU first aid pack and Tenzō's as well contain antibiotics and the trip back to Konoha isn't that long, so he'll err on the side of caution and go light on the power and intensity.

"I'm going to sanitize the wound," Kakashi warns, for all the good it will do. Good medic nin, well-trained medic nin, people who got actual medical training—they learn to isolate their patient's nerves when they're using Mystic Palm, because even the parts of healing that don't hurt feel weird.

Again, Kakashi is no kind of medic nin, so Tenzō gasps and twitches underneath Kakashi's hands from his clumsy flash of chakra.

"I'm going to mend the organ," Kakashi says, as soon as he's finished sweeping chakra across Tenzō's insides.

He uses a light, light touch. He reminds himself: whatever he does, they're going to probably have to undo in the surgical bay. Mystic Palm is the simplest medical jutsu, the one medic nin learn first, and not really delicate enough for this kind of work. It stimulates regrowth and forces bodily processes not to stall, substituting carefully applied chakra for flesh and blood and time, but it's not a cure-all....especially in the hands of someone like Kakashi. Kakashi pushes the absolute smallest amount of chakra into the technique that he can and focuses on the outside of the organ like he would focus on broken flesh, until it's sealed back up. He doesn't try to heal the inside of the organ; forcing parts of the body you don't understand to heal with Mystic Palm is a great way to give your patient tumors.

Can't close Tenzō up yet, but Kakashi is getting close. He drops Mystic Hands and instead folds his chakra into a technique that doesn't have any real name. It's a little ridiculous to even call it a technique. It's more like the beginning stage of any water jutsu, truncated and tortured nearly beyond recognition.

With an even lighter touch than he used to seal up Tenzō's organs or attempt to sanitize Tenzō's insides, Kakashi folds his chakra around everything in Tenzō's abdominal cavity that's liquid and draws it out through Tenzō's wound before flinging it far away. It's mostly blood, slightly flash-fried.

This is definitely the worst hack job anyone capable of performing Mystic Palms has ever been forced to see through, and Kakashi promises himself he'll actually read some medical texts at the very least when he's back in Konoha. At minimum because whatever the proper medical procedure is for what he did, it must be more chakra-efficient than the trick Kakashi just used, which took more of his chakra than anything else he's done since he traveled back in time.

Finally, Kakashi brings his hands to Tenzō's side, connecting severed blood vessels and knitting the flesh back together. This, at least, is relatively easy. This, at least, Kakashi can be confident that he's doing right.

And then it's over, because there's nothing Kakashi can do for Tenzō's ribs. He releases Mystic Palm and looks at Tenzō's face.

He's still conscious, and looking back at Kakashi.

"Stay here," Kakashi says, and stands up to deal with the corpses and the other evidence of their fight.

He carries several body scrolls for exactly this purpose, disappearing the corpses into his pockets. Then he uses a minor earth jutsu to turn all the earth over on itself, until the blood from the fight and the remains of the Mokuton are hidden deep underground. It's not absolutely foolproof—ideally Kakashi would seal up or burn the Mokuton wood, too—but it will do. Land of Earth is so barren in places like this that there's practically no difference between untouched earth and earth that's been molded in a jutsu. It's actually harder to do this kind of work in pretty much every other country.

When he turns back, Tenzō is still lying flat on his back, unmoving and silent but awake. Obedient, too obedient. Kakashi has almost always worked with people who take orders well, of course, but it's been many years since Tenzō was like...this.

Kakashi remembers thinking, when he was really 17, around this time, that Tenzō had come so far from how he was when he was in ROOT. But now Kakashi can see clearly that that was a lie he told himself, made plausible by the professional distance and forced anonymity of ANBU and its masks and regulations.

He looks down at Tenzō. "Are you able to stand?" he asks, and does his best to soften the question, to emphasize with his tone that he's genuinely asking and isn't just giving a veiled order. With the help of chakra reinforcement, ninja can run at speed for days with all kinds of injuries, and Kakashi has to rely on Tenzō's own assessment of how much the mostly-healed stab wound will or won't impact his ability to cover the distance necessary to return to the village.

Tenzō says, "Yes, Hound-taichō, I'm ready," and struggles to his feet. It would be fast for a civilian, but it's achingly slow for a ninja of Tenzō's caliber. He sways a little once he's on his feet, but he doesn't fall.

Kakashi stoops to collect Tenzō's discarded chest plate, the scraps of Tenzō's shirt, the taijutsu specialist's blade, his own sword, and Tenzō's backplate, which fell off Tenzō as he stood. Tenzō hadn't even tried to grab for any of it, a maneuver that would have been trivially easy under normal circumstances. Understandable, given that Tenzō isn't feeling well, but it's still disquieting.

Kakashi pulls out the general purpose sealing scroll he takes on missions for exactly this kind of purpose and seals away Tenzō's ruined equipment and the blade. His sword he sweeps quickly with chakra to clean it, and then sheaths. Finally, he turns over the last of the dirt with a smaller earth jutsu.

They have a hard run down this mountain ahead of them, over the next mountain range over, then through Land of Grass and most of Land of Fire. Kakashi begins to lead Tenzō down the slope, but after a few hundred yards he has to stop them again. Tenzō is keeping up just fine with the relatively relaxed pace that Kakashi had set, but there's something off about the way he's been moving in Kakashi's peripheral vision.

He turns and studies Tenzō. He observes, "You're favoring one leg. Why?"

Tenzō says nothing.

Kakashi is perhaps the world champion of hiding injuries, but they don't have time for this and Kakashi can't let Tenzō run all the way back to the village on an injured leg. Surely it's not broken again this time—that had been really hard to miss last time, and Tenzō wouldn't be standing much less running—but there's still other things that could be wrong without an obvious answer.

He could order Tenzō to tell him, but an even more direct approach is probably better. Kakashi keeps his shoulders relaxed and his hands empty as he approaches Tenzō and then crouches. He can't make proper eye contact through their ANBU masks, but he moves not just slowly but with easily predictable, well-telegraphed movements as he reaches for one of Tenzō's hands and rests it on his shoulder, so that Tenzō can lean on him. Then, when he takes his hand away and Tenzō's hand stays (close to his face, close to his neck, but it doesn't make Kakashi tense like it would have when he was really 17 because it's Tenzō's hand), finally Kakashi feels that he can reach out and gently lift Tenzō's injured leg to inspect it.

It's nothing as bad as he had feared. A twisted ankle, probably from the earth clone bursting out of the ground and trying to break Tenzō's leg. Tenzō had jumped, but not quite high enough. The ligaments have started to swell. Tenzō could probably still keep running on it for days if they were, say, being pursued. But they aren't.

Kakashi doesn't trust himself to use Mystic Palm on this. It's not a common battlefield injury, and ligaments are a complete bitch. He says to Tenzō, "I can't repair this with Mystic Palm," and looks up at him.

With the Sharingan, he can see how hard Tenzō swallows. But he doesn't even need that additional sensory input because Tenzō's hand on his shoulder tightens, too, almost painfully.

Kakashi says, "Cat—" but gets interrupted.

"I can run on it," Tenzō says.

He can't, though.

"No," Kakashi says.

Tenzō insists: "Taichō, I can keep going." Rare emotion is slipping into his voice. "I've done it before. I can do it, I can do it."

He sounds young, and desperate. He looks young, younger than he ever has before. He's only 13 or 14, not the youngest teammate Kakashi has had, but the contrast between the Tenzō before him and the man who had been one of Kakashi's closest friends in the future is staggering. This Tenzō hasn't shot up to his adult height, and the hand clasped on Kakashi's shoulder is so small when Kakashi covers it with his own gloved hands to keep Tenzō close.

Kakashi never knew Tenzō as a child because Tenzō did not have a childhood and because no one under Kakashi's command could be considered anything but a soldier. But that doesn't mean that the Tenzō in front of him is an adult, and Kakashi needs to remember that.

"Tell me why you're scared," Kakashi says, and his tone is gentle but the words are an order and he makes frank eye contact with Tenzō.

Tenzō breathes in a shallow breath, lets it out with a soft little stutter, and then breathes in again. "Hound-taichō, I can remain fit for duty. You healed me, so I can travel under my own power. Even with...even with my ankle."

It's not the direct answer that Kakashi wanted, but he doesn't want to push too hard when Tenzō sounds so close to hyperventilating about this. So Kakashi puzzles it out. He's scared because....he feels he needs to tell Kakashi that he can travel, that he's not unfit for duty. Alright.

What does Tenzō think the consequences are for being unfit for duty? What does he think will happen if he can't travel under his own power?

Tenzō had been scared when he broke his leg, Kakashi realizes suddenly. The 17-year-old that he had been then had just assumed it was a normal fear of being crippled deep in enemy territory, or a natural reaction to pain, but Tenzō has the highest pain tolerance of anyone Kakashi has ever met aside from possibly Naruto. Kakashi pictures, perfectly, the white-lipped grim expression that Tenzō had made as he forced himself to focus on Kakashi's orders and shape his Mokuton precisely enough to provide splints for his own broken leg.

That determined expression, that refusal to give in, that well-concealed fear. There are hints of it on Tenzō's face now, but where else has Kakashi seen it?

And then.

And then, flicking through hundreds of Sharingan-perfect memories of Tenzō, Kakashi finds it. Unmistakably, the same expression. Right before Tenzō had died. Right before Yamato had died.

"Are you," Kakashi says very, very slowly, "afraid I'm going to kill you, Tenzō?" The name slips out, but Kakashi wouldn't take it back if he could. They're alone here, and Tenzō deserves to hear his name. What currently passes for his name.

Tenzō gives a single, jerky nod. "I don't want to go back in a scroll, taichō," he says, confessing like the words are being ripped out of him. "I'm fit for duty. I can move under my own power. It's not bad. You healed me." The words are like a mantra, like by repeating them Tenzō will make it true, and make Kakashi agree, and make it so that they can both go home on their own two feet.

Kakashi's whole body is flashing hot and cold, his chest tight, his heart hammering in his chest. Hearing this from Tenzō. An attack by a member of the Akatsuki would be less panic-inducing, less terrifying. Shouldn't Tenzō know that Kakashi would never leave him behind? Where had Kakashi gone wrong, that Tenzō doesn't know?

Some people call him Friend-Killer Kakashi, and the 17-year-old that had started this mission had never had a very warm relationship with anyone. But Tenzō doesn't exactly have anyone to gossip with about Kakashi's masks-off identity. Maybe Tenzō's original ROOT briefing had included that kind of information, but Tenzō has had years to observe him by this point so why—

It would be easy to think that it's just because Tenzō was raised in Orochimaru's lab and then in ROOT. And that has to be part of it, the part that makes Tenzō specify that he's fit for duty, that he can travel. Kakashi has to acknowledge, however, that some blame must fall with him. The 17-year-old who Kakashi had, in fact, once been.

As gently as he can, more gently than he's ever spoken to Tenzō before, Kakashi says, "I'm going to carry you, Tenzō. I won't leave you behind."

He can't promise to never leave Tenzō behind. He'd left Yamato behind, in the end, focused as they had been on trying to salvage something out of the end of the world. It had let Kakashi live long enough to come back in time, so it had probably been worth it and he would probably do it again if he had to.

"I don't understand, taichō," Tenzō says, very quietly.

"That's alright, that's alright." Kakashi gently squeezes Tenzō's hand where it rests against his shoulder. "Just let me pick you up. We'll go back together."

"Yes, taichō," says Tenzō. Not in the tone of someone obeying an order, but instead in the tone of a teammate agreeing to a course of action.

Before he rises from his crouch, Kakashi takes out the storage scroll that contains his mission pack and bedroll. They very rarely have the time and security to make camp on ANBU missions, but it pays to be prepared. Kakashi takes his bedroll out and seals the mission pack back in its scroll.

"You have several broken ribs," Kakashi says, and holds the bedroll out to Tenzō. "Hug this to your chest as I pick you up."

Tenzō takes the bedroll and cautiously clutches it to his chest. He starts breathing a little easier.

Kakashi rises, just as slowly as he was moving before, and scoops Tenzō up into his arms. It's not the best carrying position, but the fireman's carry or piggy-back that Kakashi usually prefers—to keep at least one hand free, and reduce the chances that he'll have to drop the injured teammate he's carrying—won't work here. He managed the same run with the same carry when Tenzō was unconscious with a broken leg, so this will practically be easy.

Down the slope they go, both of them tucking their chakra in tight and engaging the usual visual distortion jutsu and light genjutsu that make ANBU so hard to find. At the speed Kakashi is moving it won't hide them from anyone specifically looking for two Konoha ninja fleeing for the border, but since they very definitely killed their two opponents no one will be looking for them until they're trying to cross into Land of Grass. And even then...

Well. Land of Earth's southern border is an inhospitable mountain range, remote and complicated to navigate, which makes it a nightmare for Iwagakure to patrol. Just like the rest of its borders, really. Kakashi slows his pace down just slightly and feels Tenzō tuck his chakra in even tighter, suppressing it down to almost nothing, but they cross the border into Land of Grass just as easily as they'd gone from Grass to Earth at the beginning of their mission.

Land of Grass is much easier terrain, but they stop for a break in the high prairie grass soon after passing the border. Or rather, Kakashi sets Tenzō down in some tall grass, goes a short distance to refill their water canteens, and then returns to sit with Tenzō.

"I don't think you should eat anything," Kakashi says as he passes Tenzō his canteen.

Tenzō nods lightly. "Yes, taichō." His voice is hushed.

They don't speak more. Kakashi doesn't know what to say. He can't remember what he and Tenzō talked about, last time he was 17. Maybe just work, and nothing else. That seems like something a younger, stupider, harsher version of himself would accidentally do.

Kakashi scarfs down his ANBU-issued ration bar, which is densely packed with nutrients and absolutely disgusting in both taste and texture. It's the first food that Kakashi can remember eating in almost a week, although the body he's currently living inside surely last ate less than 24 hours ago.

Kakashi tucks his wrapper away when he's finished and looks over at Tenzō. "We've got to keep going."

Tenzō probably doesn't have enough time left for them to make camp and rest, and Kakashi knows he can make this run without stopping.

He picks Tenzō up again and sets off at an even more brutal pace than he'd used in Land of Earth, because Land of Grass is flat and terribly exposed in all directions. The best way to keep your visit there secret is to move through as quickly as possible, so that's two reasons Kakashi has to hustle. At the border for Land of Fire, Kakashi briefly lingers on the thought of turning west and hitting up the nearest border outpost, but ultimately decides against it.

If Tsunade were Hokage, he would do it. Not only would she approve of Kakashi breaking the absolute secrecy of this mission to seek medical attention, but she also would have seen to it that every border outpost was staffed with a competent surgeon. Unfortunately, the Sandaime is in control and that means that Shimura Danzō is whispering in his ear, so Kakashi would probably only find a nurse or two, and perhaps one of them would have an alright ability with Mystic Palms. It would help Tenzō more than Kakashi's healing has, but then Kakashi and Tenzō both would have to feign off inquiry from the Sandaime and perhaps take a demerit each.

Kakashi could probably shrug that off, but Tenzō maybe couldn't. So Kakashi keeps running.

Chapter Text

Thirty miles outside of Konoha, as Kakashi is passing the outermost ring of sentries and guard posts, his hands start to shake and cramp. It's not the first sign of chakra exhaustion, but it's the first one that he can't ignore.

A day and a half into their sprint towards the village, Tenzō had developed a fever and then lost the ability to perform the ANBU-standard mesh of genjutsu and ninjutsu that hides agents from observation. Kakashi had been forced to fold his stealth technique over the both of them, and when combined with all the chakra he'd burned healing Tenzō...Kakashi is working on less than dregs.

He could have saved chakra by slowing down, or staved it off by actually stopping to rest for longer than a few minutes, but by the second time he'd stopped to refill his canteen Tenzō's side had been flushed, tender, and slightly swollen. He'd had Tenzō take their ANBU-issue antibiotics, but if they'd helped they hadn't helped enough. Kakashi had pushed for speed.

Now that he's inside closely controlled Konoha territory, Kakashi finally drops his ANBU stealth because being seen running full-speed through Konoha territory is preferable to being found there after collapsing from chakra exhaustion. But despite the much reduced pull on his chakra, the exhaustion continues to worsen at an acute rate until Kakashi drops down from the trees to run the last ten miles without chakra. It lets him conserve enough chakra to slip back into ANBU stealth as he reaches the northern ANBU entrance and perform the sequence of hand seals that unlocks the hatch.

The world has gone a little blurred at the edges from scraping the bottom of his reserves. If he passes other ANBU agents on his way to medical, they're fully stealthed because he doesn't notice them.

The ANBU medical suite is staffed only by ANBU Spider when Kakashi arrives, but that's worth a staff of three normal medic nin because she's the head of ANBU medical and has been for about as long as Kakashi has been able to hold a kunai. As always, there's a prepped gurney in the intake lobby, which Kakashi puts Tenzō down on. Spider hurries over to help arrange him, probably guessing from the bedroll in Tenzō's arms that he has broken ribs.

Kakashi gives Spider a quick description of how Tenzō has been hurt and what Kakashi has done to keep him alive long enough to make it back to Konoha.

It's a credit to Spider's long career, professionalism, and general unflappable personality that she stays completely silent while Kakashi gives his report. Only when he's done talking does she say, "Hound, that's fucking insane. But good job getting him this far." She looks Kakashi over quickly and then, probably because Kakashi is just generally covered in blood, she asks, "Are you dying right now? Otherwise wait out here."

Kakashi waves her off and collapses onto the short bench in the intake room. "I'm just tired."

Spider looks at him for a moment longer like she thinks he's lying through his teeth (which, if Kakashi were injured, he would absolutely be doing) and then nods sharply once and pushes Tenzō's gurney out of the intake room and into the exam room.

Kakashi is so tired that he'd lie down on the bench and go to sleep if it were long enough, but not so tired that the floor is tempting.

Sitting on the bench, waiting for Spider to come back, Kakashi can finally spend some time thinking about what he's going to do. There is a mountain of problems in front of him, and not all of them can be solved with simple, efficient violence. Killing Orochimaru, Kabuto, the Akatsuki, and so on—that won't be easy, but killing is straightforward. Kakashi will get there, with enough training and allies. It's the problems closer to home that have higher stakes, more complex win conditions, and dozens of complications. He needs to do something about Danzō, something about the Sandaime's lax governance, something about the Uchiha, something about Naruto, something about Tenzō. Each move on any of these problems will influence the others, and overturn new problems that Kakashi either hadn't known about last time or has inadvertently created.

On its surface, time travel's main advantage seems to be foreknowledge, but Kakashi has his doubts. He certainly knows more things now than he did when he was really 17, but intel needs to be concrete. If it can't be backed up by multiple sources, if you aren't sure your intel is true, then it's worthless.

It won't be worth it to step lightly, attempting to make as few changes as possible. Instead, Kakashi will need to be decisive. So. What does he know for certain? What parts were validated in the future, and won't change no matter what he does? What problems, set in motion already even 15 years in the past, can Kakashi prepare for or divert?

Possibly, it would have been a good idea to slow down and talk through this with some of the other survivors. They would have had different perspectives on the events of the past 15 years. Some of them might have even had closely-held secrets they were finally ready to part with, just like Crow.

Kakashi couldn't possibly have stayed a second longer in that doomed future than he had. Another conversation like the one he'd had with Crow would have destroyed him.

As if summoned by the mere thought of that conversation at the end of the world, the door to the medical suite opens and Crow walks in. He's dressed in ANBU blacks without the armor—not unusual for Crow, who lives out of the ANBU barracks almost as much as Kakashi does.

"Hound," he says when he sees Kakashi, like he'd come here looking for him. Kakashi hadn't seen anyone on his way to the ANBU medical unit, but that doesn't mean no one had seen him. The ANBU gossip ring works extremely fast. He twitches his head to indicate a glance towards the exam room.

"I'm waiting for Cat," Kakashi says. "Spider has him."

"I see," Crow says. He steps farther into the intake room and sits down next to Kakashi, on his right. Like he intends to wait, too. This is where General Forces acquaintances might ask what happened, or where the mission was, or how Tenzō was injured. But they're in ANBU, so Crow just asks, "Was it bad?"

Kakashi takes a careful, silent breath through his nose. He feels unaccountably nervous about talking to Crow. At this age, talking to Crow should be easy. It had been easy. With Minato-sensei gone...Crow had never been anything more than Kakashi's commanding officer, and not for very long, and it wasn't like Kakashi had been running his own ANBU team while secretly longing to not be in charge.

But there was something about having a commanding officer like Crow. Something about knowing it was someone's job to keep track of you. Something about knowing that there was someone obligated to pick up the burdens too heavy for you to carry. That something had scared Kakashi last time he was this age. Now it scares him even more, but for different reasons.

The night before he'd traveled back in time, Kakashi had thought he and Crow were on good terms right up until it became apparent that they really weren't. That the relationship had soured, years ago, when Kakashi wasn't looking. Kakashi isn't a very good judge of his own relationships, which he probably should have known already. There's plenty of evidence, strewn across Kakashi's personal life. Even his relationship with Tenzō isn't as good as he'd thought it was.

Kakashi looks down at the intake room's tiles and takes a careful, silent breath. He hides it as much as he can; it's too obviously a tell of his emotional state. "I had to heal him," Kakashi says.

Crow says, "I wasn't aware that you'd..." and then trails off and thinks for a moment. Then he says instead, "You haven't had time for medic training."

There's no helping the way Kakashi suddenly looks up at Crow; he's as good as admitted that he's been keeping close track of Kakashi's mission cadence and public appearances both in and out of ANBU. Which is against ANBU regulations in a pretty serious manner, but also...was a level of investment Kakashi just didn't expect.

Has Crow already begun to think that Kakashi is ungrateful? Or did their relationship only deteriorate after the Uchiha Massacre?

If there's any relationship to salvage with Crow, Kakashi would prefer to do so. He'll need to temper his expectations, but even aside from Kakashi's fond feelings for Crow...he was right about the blame Kakashi shoulders for the demise of the Uchiha. Kakashi needs to do what he can for them.

Quietly, Kakashi admits to Crow: "I've watched medics heal, so I..." and trails off. In the future, Crow had been very clear that Obito's eye is his now. But calling it his out loud is a difficult prospect, and probably too extreme a personality change to justify. Anyway, it's better not to say anything out loud that would give away his masks-off identity. Crow, Spider, and Tenzō already know who he is for various reasons, but anyone could be passing by outside the intake room's door. Also, it's a social faux pas in ANBU to be too blunt about your real identity when you've got your mask on.

Crow says, "I didn't even know that was possible."

"Neither did I," Kakashi lies. While he lies he thinks about how close Tenzō was to dying. How he could have died on the trip back. How terrified he was, running day and night through Grass and then Land of Fire just to make it back as quickly as possible. It makes his lie come out with the right emotion: he had known that using Mystic Palm by drawing on Sharingan memories was possible, but he hadn't known he could save Tenzō.

He still, in fact, doesn't know if he's saved Tenzō. Maybe he's just provided an extra-slow death.

Crow's hand moves; Kakashi can see it out of his peripheral vision despite his ANBU mask because of the specialized seals worked into the porcelain. It moves slowly enough not to startle Kakashi (which, given Kakashi's heightened state and recent mission, is very slow indeed) and comes to rest on Kakashi's shoulder.

Kakashi slumps back against the wall. "I did what I could," he tells himself and Crow.

Crow doesn't offer any reassurances, or even speak again. He's never been especially chatty. But he leaves his hand on Kakashi's shoulder as they wait.

Spider comes back in. There's something about the way she moves that tells Kakashi she's angry. A certain sharpness to the way she closes the door, although she doesn't slam it. She's carrying a medical file in her hands when she exits the room—presumably Tenzō's—and after she closes the door she throws it down onto the intake desk with the air of someone who wishes she could throw it in the garbage instead.

"Unbelievable!" she snaps, and then turns sharply to look at Kakashi. "I've done what I can, but we're not equipped for what he needs. Did you know that we're forbidden from transferring Cat to the hospital? Because no one saw fit to tell me, they just snuck the note into his file."

Kakashi glances at the file and then back at Spider. He can imagine who "they" is, even if Spider can't. "What does it say to do with him instead?" Kakashi asks.

Spider crosses her arms over her chest and leans back against the desk. "We're supposed to transfer him to the Reserve Trauma Unit. I don't even know what the hell that is. The directions point to the emergency shelter under the Academy."

Reserve Trauma Unit a perfectly bland name, but even if Kakashi didn't know about ROOT he still wouldn't let anyone take Tenzō to a medical facility that Spider has never heard of. Kakashi says, "There's a clinic in that shelter. But..."

Spider finishes his thought: "It's definitely not staffed with the medical team and supplies needed to do what Cat needs done, and I'm not convinced there'd be time to pull everything together. He's got a high fever. I did what I could, but what I could do wasn't much because I'm not equipped for complex surgery."

Crow asks, "There's no way to countermand the order? An exception clause?" Crow doesn't, to Kakashi's knowledge, know about Tenzō's Mokuton at this point in time. But Tenzō is obviously a high-value ANBU agent nonetheless.

Spider turns to look at Crow for the first time, and lingers on him for a moment like she's trying to figure out why he's here. Then she eventually says, "Sandaime-sama can override it, but how quick do you think that would go?" She shakes her head. "I can't do anything for him here, so I guess there's no choice. I'll have to go arrange transport over to the shelter, since those are my orders." She turns to Kakashi. "I know you need to clean up and report in, but can you watch over him? I'm going to go wake up Trout so he can help carry the stretcher. I won't be gone more than a few minutes."

With her body blocking Crow's view of her hands, Spider uses ANBU sign to ask Kakashi a hidden question: Intercept intruder and kite?

She's asking if she should draw Crow off so that Kakashi can act freely. But Crow has never been untrustworthy, and he's not hanging around in the intake room to spy on them.

"Of course," Kakashi says, bobbing his head in a respectful nod. Out of sight of Crow, he flicks a simple sign at Spider: Negative. Then he dips a hand into his thigh pouch and pulls out the two body scrolls with the Iwa nin inside them. "These need to go to autopsy. That's on your way, isn't it?"

It's not, but Spider nods, takes the body scrolls, and leaves. She leaves immediately and she doesn't take Tenzō's file with her and doesn't even look at Crow again. That's alright. She's doing enough just by leaving.

"I don't like this," Crow says.

Kakashi doesn't say anything, and only wanders into the exam room to look at Tenzō. He's got his mask and what armor he had left off, lying on a table to the side of the room. Spider has cut his shirt off and cleaned Tenzō's chest, revealing a truly bizarre bruising pattern and swollen flesh where the wound was. It looks worse in the light of the exam room than it had out in the field. Or maybe it's just gotten that much worse.

"Hound?" Crow says.

Kakashi turns back to him. "I need your help," he says. And then he reaches for the stretcher hung on the wall just inside the door. They'll have to move quickly for Spider's deniability to be anything close to plausible. The hand he'd used to perform a bastardized version of Tsunade's strength technique days ago in Land of Earth has been in constant use since then, but the wall mount for the stretcher is designed to be easy to use in a hurry, even with hands that are slick with blood or holding other items, so Kakashi gets the stretcher down without a problem.

Crow straightens, just slightly. "I'm not saying no," Crow says, and actually moves to help transfer Tenzō into the stretcher even as he speaks carefully, "but how much trouble is this likely to get us into?"

Kakashi shrugs. "I don't know." He's silent for a moment, rearranging Tenzō's limbs. Then, as he grips the two handles on his side of the stretcher and lifts, he tells Crow: "I actually don't care. I'm not letting anyone disappear him. If we get him to the hospital, they'll heal him first and worry about the politics later." The hospital is still run by people hand-picked by Tsunade, so they have their priorities straight.

Crow lifts at the same time he does and doesn't comment on Kakashi's careless attitude towards countermanding what amount to direct orders.

They both engage the standard ANBU stealth techniques and, with some extra effort, fold that stealth over Tenzō and the stretcher as well. Then, they hustle down the corridor towards the exit that's closest to the hospital. This corridor is frequently traveled and therefore is populated by a handful of masked ANBU agents who aren't using any notable stealth techniques. Every ANBU agent they pass absolutely knows that Crow and Kakashi are there, because stretching the standard ANBU stealth techniques over the stretcher held between them makes for an imperfect concealment. But Crow, Kakashi, and Tenzō all have the ANBU seals that mark them as belonging in the headquarters, so everyone very helpfully assumes that they're a squad on their way to some kind of especially covert mission, being polite enough to indicate that they're in the corridor so that everyone can step out of the way of each other without needing to wall walk.

They reach the antechamber before the exit and have to put Tenzō on the ground. They do urgently need to get him to the hospital, but they can't go out in their full ANBU uniforms for anything less than an S-Rank threat to the village or a direct order, not even while illicitly taking Tenzō to the hospital. Especially not then, even.

The antechamber is prepared for this kind of problem, however. There are lockers for storage. There are also chūnin and jōnin uniforms provided.

Kakashi removes his armor and gloves and dumps them into the bin for the quartermaster to inspect. This gives him his first look at his hand, which definitely has several sprained fingers. Nothing to do about that. Kakashi is wearing a set of ANBU blacks with long sleeves because Land of Earth is always cold, so he doesn't need to swap his blacks for blues. Anyway, the jōnin blues on offer don't have a built in face mask. He tucks his hound mask and sword away in a locker, forgoes a jōnin vest because his ANBU blacks are covered in blood and dirt and it would look too out of place, and fishes an eyepatch out of his thigh pouch.

Crow throws on one of the long sleeved shirts that comes with the jōnin blues over his sleeveless ANBU shirt and then a vest over that. Crow stows his mask in one of the lockers and Kakashi tries not to feel disquieted about seeing his face again.

Anyone who's familiar with ANBU blacks will take one look at them and know where they came from, but that's fine.

They pick Tenzō's stretcher back up, and Kakashi has awkwardly cradle one of the handles in the palm of his injured hand, sticking it there with a little chakra, because he doesn't think he'll be able to hold his hand closed around the stretcher handle all the way to the ER.

The antechamber exits into an alleyway behind a commercial building with a bakery and an accounting office in it. ANBU exiting from HQ's many hidden doors and tunnels always keep their stealth up for a while after they leave to make infiltration of Headquarters harder for enemy agents and traitors looking for a chink in Konoha's armor, but as Crow and Kakashi wrap the stealth technique back around themselves and Tenzō, Kakashi mutters, "We should sneak as close to the hospital as we can."

Crow gives a short nod and they set off.

It's harder on the streets of Konoha than it was in the relatively sparsely populated ANBU corridors. It's mid-afternoon and the streets are busy with pedestrians and carts making deliveries. Carrying an unconscious body on a stretcher across the rooftops is a challenging idea in most circumstances, but doing it when Kakashi is only aware of Crow and what Crow is doing because of the resonance of their seals is pretty much a non-starter. Also, it would attract attention.

They get perhaps a quarter of the way to the hospital before Kakashi realizes that they're not going to make it anywhere near close enough because his hands have started having a hard time actually gripping the stretcher, and the edges of his peripheral vision are blurring in a rather alarming manner. His heart is pounding in his chest like he's in a fight or running across the country again, rather than carrying a teammate across the village at a sedate pace.

He'd sat in the intake room for a little under half an hour...and he hadn't forgotten that he was so close to chakra exhaustion, it was just that he hadn't taken into account his younger body. It will bounce back much quicker from chakra exhaustion once he has a chance to rest, but it wasn't as used to running on almost empty. The amount of chakra Kakashi has left now...

To his 32 year old body, it would be a sign that he should finish the fight immediately, but it wouldn't be alarming. It had been normal. He'd once told Tsunade that he'd trained hard for his chakra control, and she'd laughed at him and told him that almost dying of chakra exhaustion every other month wasn't training.

To his 17 year old body, this level of chakra seems more like a sign of impending death.

Kakashi breaks his stealth technique before it can fail, since breaking it suddenly himself is at least a little more subtle.

Crow follows immediately after and then twists to look at Kakashi and check why they've just done that.

Unfortunately, Kakashi can't explain because he's swaying on his feet and focusing all of his energy on remaining upright and not dropping the stretcher. He can't continue sticking the stretcher handle to his injured hand, but he'd foolishly picked up the end closest to Tenzō's head. If he drops it Tenzō might take a serious fall.

"Kakashi!" Crow says, his voice raised with alarm.

Kakashi must look really, really bad to make Crow sound like that. He does feel really bad. He loses his grip on the stretcher and his knees go weak but—

A pair of hands catches Kakashi and the stretcher at the same time, grabbing each in an awkward grip—one hand grabs the stretcher between the two handles, just above Tenzō's head, and the other hand wraps tightly around Kakashi's upper arm. These are hands Kakashi would recognize anywhere, although significantly less scarred than last Kakashi saw them.

Maito Gai, looking unusually serious, says, "Genma, could you—ah, thank you." Then he lets go of the stretcher as Shiranui Genma steps up to grab the handles. Gai immediately uses his free hand to check Kakashi for injuries.

Kakashi reaches up and tries to swat Gai's hands away, but it mostly comes off as a reassuring pat. Ah, that's alright too. "Not my blood," Kakashi says. "Just chakra exhaustion."

Gai is taking Kakashi's pulse now, eyes wide. "I'll run you ahead," Gai says, now lifting Kakashi in his arms.

Yeah, most ninja don't get as chakra exhausted as Kakashi is now without passing out or dropping dead. Even at 17, Kakashi was already an overachiever in this department. But. He can't be separated from Tenzō. And he's really not in that much danger of dying since he's stopped using chakra now and he's still breathing.

"Tenzō, too," Kakashi insists, trusting that context will communicate that Tenzō is the unconscious one, on the stretcher, and not Crow.

"Yeah, him too," Genma says. He's staring at where Tenzō's chest is bared.

Gai leads them all down the street, having better maneuverability than Crow, Genma, and the stretcher between them. This street, Tea Street, has long been a major thoroughfare. It has many busy cross-streets packed with businesses and terminates at the plaza in front of the hospital. Before the Kyūbi, it had a set of gentle curves around prominent buildings and was lined with mature Hashirama trees. If two carts were careful, it was possible for them to maneuver past each other at a very slow pace.

These days, the buildings are new and set farther back, leaving ample room for two carts to pass each other along with all the foot traffic. There are even some spaces wide enough for three carts abreast, so that carts can unload right on the street instead of having to wind their way down narrow back alleys. Their progress is better with Gai at the lead than it was when Kakashi and Crow were traveling in full ANBU stealth, but still nowhere near the full speed they could go even on the old street, because there's always carts and wagons turning on and off the road, stopping where they shouldn't, awkwardly edging around normal street obstacles, and generally making a mess of what was once a nice, mostly pedestrian street.

Kakashi is just about to suggest they risk the rooftops—ditch the stretcher and just have one of them carry Tenzō the way Kakashi had carried him back from Land of Earth—when a young, teenaged Uchiha genin in line at a dango stall turns to look at them as they wait for their turn in this significantly narrowed section of the street, flicks his eyes across the procession, and then abandons his spot in line to dart up to Gai. "Jōnin-san, you're headed for the hospital, right?" he asks. "I'll go ahead!"

There's probably not much a genin can do that Gai isn't already doing by taking the lead, but Gai has much better manners than Kakashi so he beams at the Uchiha. "Thank you, Uchiha-kun!"

But the Uchiha is already gone, his determined face fading into a pile of shunshin leaves that will soon also dissipate. Kakashi can't help but stare at them, realizing that the Uchiha genin was Uchiha Shisui. Alive, young, even faster than Kakashi had heard. A genin able to perform the shunshin technique without head seals was impressive enough without being so fast he leaves an afterimage. Kakashi wonders if his execution of the technique was really as subtle as it had seemed, or if that's the chakra exhaustion speaking.

Probably the chakra exhaustion, but maybe not.

As they make their way towards the hospital, the traffic slowly begins to clear up. At the first major intersection there's a Konoha Military Police officer stopping carts from the side-streets from turning onto Tea Street. Halfway down the next block there's two wagons parked next to each other, both unloading produce, and a thick press of traffic trying to squeeze through the remaining space. An Akimichi sticks her head out of the shop the produce is being loaded into and shouts something to the men unloading as a KMP officer emerges at speed from the shop and jumps over the first wagon into the driver's seat of the second, driving it forward and then out of the way to the side so that it's out of the way just in time for Gai, Amano, and Genma to pass by. Then at the next intersection there's two more KMP officers, and then more after that. Crowds are parted, traffic stopped.

Gradually, Gai picks up his pace as a path clears before them all the way down Tea Street. By the time they reach the end of Tea Street, Gai is able to break into a full sprint across the plaza. He takes a straight line to the emergency intake room for ninja in the east wing of the hospital, and only has to break his easy, long strides three times: once for a park bench (thankfully unoccupied) and twice for low, manicured hedges.

The emergency room doors are open and there are two gurneys waiting. The boy who must be Uchiha Shisui is there, too. He's bent over, hands on his knees, breathing hard, but he smiles when he sees them. Kakashi hopes he treats himself to extra dango after this.

Gai hadn't accounted for Crow and Genma's need to go around instead of over obstacles, so Kakashi and Gai have reached the waiting gurneys ahead of Tenzō's stretcher—as Gai sets Kakashi down on one of the gurneys, Kakashi can see that the medical team grouped around the gurney for Tenzō are still looking back into the plaza, likely tracking Crow and Genma's slightly slower process.

"He's chakra exhausted, collapsed on the way here," Gai says to the medical nin hovering by Kakashi's gurney. "He says the blood isn't his. Something's wrong with his hand."

Kakashi doesn't feel that his need for medical attention is all that urgent, so he cuts in: "My teammate is unconscious. I need to brief his medical team."

Kakashi's medical nin turns to the other team. "Kaneko, Hatake-san has information for you."

The medical nin on the other team turns to look at him, and Kakashi finally recognizes her. She'll become a staple of Konoha's emergency room in years to come.

Kakashi briefly describes the wound's location and depth, the broken ribs he hadn't been able to treat, the infection, and the long transport time.

"You're not a medic," Kaneko says, about Kakashi's usage of the Mystic Palm technique. She's not wrong.

"I healed him badly," Kakashi clarifies. He gives her a basic timeline of when Tenzō was injured and when he received which medical interventions, though Kakashi can't be detailed about exactly where or when Tenzō was injured or by who.

"Lie down, we'll take it from here," Kaneko says, in a tone kind enough to offset her brusque nature as she turns her back on Kakashi and starts snapping orders to Tenzō's medical team. By this time Genma and Crow have arrived, so the nurses get to work transferring Tenzō to his gurney.

"I'm going to start a diagnostic jutsu," Kakashi's medic nin says, and at Kakashi's nod his hands glow with medical ninjutsu. He takes Kakashi's injured hand, the chakra sinking deep into Kakashi, threading through his veins and coils almost imperceptibly.

There's a sparse crowd around the edges of the emergency intake room, Kakashi is realizing now, just people who've paused to figure out what's going on. Through it comes a kunoichi in a rust colored haori, patterned with black feathers. Her long, curled hair is swept up in a high ponytail, a riot of bangs escaping it, and she's sporting a fierce scowl as she harasses the crowd out of her way, snapping at them to go mind their own business.

"Amano!" the kunoichi calls when she's finally in a position to see Crow lowering the stretcher now that Tenzō has been transferred.

It's been a long time since Kakashi has seen her. This is Uchiha Uzume.

Crow looks at her immediately. His face immediately smooths out, his posture relaxes. Maybe it's the impaired thinking from chakra exhaustion, but Kakashi thinks Crow might even be letting his lips curl up into the start of a smile.

Uzume says, "I heard you were on your way here from the patrol units, but you don't look hurt."

"I was just helping with transport," Crow says. Then he glances at Kakashi, that particular twitch and tilt of the head that ANBU and Hyūga both use to indicate the changing direction of their gaze for the benefit of others.

Uchiha Uzume turns and looks right at Kakashi.

It freezes Kakashi's blood in his veins, it makes his already rabbiting heart rate jump up. But he doesn't look away immediately. He owes it to Crow and to all of the Uchiha to do better. He gives her a slow, careful nod of acknowledgement.

"We should sedate you," Kakashi's medic says, his voice a little alarmed.

"I'm fine," Kakashi lies.

He lets himself finally slide his eyes away from Uzume to make eye contact with Crow, who steps around Tenzō's medical team to come within easy speaking distance. Genma ambles after him, but then diverts to go hand Uchiha Shisui his water canteen.

"Will you stay with Tenzō?" Kakashi asks Crow. "Just in case."

"I will," Crow promises, and when Tenzō's medical team starts to wheel the gurney away Crow follows. This exchange garners them confused and concerned glances from everyone who overhears, but no one asks for clarification and Kakashi doesn't offer any.

Uzume glances after Crow and then turns back to look at Kakashi again. She starts towards him, but is thankfully intercepted by Shisui, who begins chattering at her a mile a minute. She reaches out and pats his head, tells him he did a good job.

"Please lie down," Kakashi's medic nin begs. Kakashi's pulse must have jumped again when it looked like he might have to actually speak to Uzume.

On the one hand, Kakashi does not want to go into the hospital, and there's nothing wrong with him that being unconscious in the ANBU barracks wouldn't solve just as well. On the other hand, chakra exhaustion feels really, really bad in this 17 year old body, so Kakashi probably wouldn't make it even halfway back to ANBU HQ before collapsing. And that's even assuming that Gai would let him leave, which he probably would not.

So Kakashi lays down on the gurney, but he pins his medic with a sharp look. "No sedatives."

"You got it," the medic nin says. "We'll put you in a room with space for your teammate's bed, too."

Chapter Text

When Kakashi had been removed from ANBU, Gai hadn't exactly been sympathetic. Of course, they hadn't talked about the removal from ANBU directly. Kakashi had said something like, "Ah, Gai, the Hokage is making me switch to a daytime shift. It's cruel and unusual punishment."

Gai, who had spent years almost exclusively seeing Kakashi when it got out that Kakashi was in the hospital again, had said cheerfully, "Ah, my eternal rival, the Sandaime simply knows that it's hard for your eternal youth to shine through your cool, aloof persona if you don't get enough sunshine!" and then he'd bullied and goaded Kakashi to joining his sunrise training sessions four times a week.

He'd been even less sympathetic when Kakashi had been saddled with what was, perhaps, the world's least harmonious genin team. Maybe because Gai had been saddled with the world's second least harmonious genin team the year before. "You can take this as a learning opportunity," Gai had suggested.

"What could I possibly learn from them?" Kakashi had asked, face down on their izakaya table.

"Patience," Gai had said cheerfully, and the others at the table had all laughed. But later, when he and Kakashi had been stumbling towards the jōnin barracks together, Gai had been a little more serious. "Genin need to know their sensei is invested in them," he'd said, "so maybe you can learn to show them that, Kakashi." He'd patted Kakashi on his chest, right above his heart. "My rival is a genius, you know, so I think he could learn that before his genin squad could learn to see underneath the underneath."

Despite the intimacy of the gesture—Gai could punch through a man's chest, and Kakashi had seen him do it before—and despite his respect for Gai, Kakashi hadn't really taken the advice to heart.

Not until it was much, much too late.

When Kakashi wakes up, it's early the next morning. Tenzō is in a bed across the room, alive and looking much better. Kakashi lies obediently in bed long enough for a nurse to come in and catch him up on his own status and more importantly on Tenzō's status. Tenzō has had his spleen removed completely. Kakashi doesn't ask if the splenectomy was a foregone conclusion from the moment Tenzō was stabbed or if it was a result of Kakashi's haphazard use of Mystic Palm, but he does ask about when Tenzō will be released and how long he'll be off duty.

The nurse says, "They had to go with open surgery, so he'll be here for a little less than a week. Six weeks until he can return to normal activities."

Longer than that until he can return to active duty, even with the occasional visit back to the hospital to maintain muscle mass. Under normal circumstances Kakashi would feel bad, but this is pretty perfect. Tenzō could really use some time off. All Kakashi has to do is find Tenzō a good place to sit around for a month or two, since the ANBU barracks won't cut it.

After the nurse leaves, Kakashi sits up. There's a fresh pair of jōnin blues on the table beside his bed, a fresh face mask, and a hitae-ate. Kakashi hauls himself out of bed, pleased to note that the world doesn't spin and his hands don't shake, and swaps out his clothes. Then he skirts around his bed and shimmies the hospital window open. There's a tree outside, which will make descending with minimal chakra much easier.

Kakashi puts a foot on the window sill.

Out of nowhere, Crow's voice says, "Get back in bed."

Kakashi whips his head around, sees no one, and then looks again but more carefully. A branch on the tree outside the window shifts a little as Crow stands and reveals himself. Despite the ANBU-level concealment, Crow is wearing a full set of standard jōnin blues now, including his vest. He looks like he's probably been out there all night.

It had seemed like he and Tenzō were alone when Kakashi woke up, but evidently not. Crow had been extremely serious about his promise to stand guard.

"I have things to do."

"You need to recover."

"I'm recovered."

Crow gives him a look that communicates that Crow is seriously thinking about making Kakashi get back in bed. He apparently missed that Kakashi only wanted Tenzō guarded. From possible Danzō-ordered kidnapping. Kakashi sighs.

"I won't use any chakra. But I need to report in, and...arrange some things. For Tenzō."

At last, Crow's seemingly implacable expression breaks a little. "It can't wait?"

"No."

"And you're not leaving out the door because...?"

"The nurses will stop me," Kakashi grumbles. Not physically, but in some ways that's worse. Kakashi can deal just fine with being grappled, it's the emotional manipulation that really does him in if a nurse, doctor, or medic catches him trying to escape his hospital bed early.

Crow laughs, and Kakashi carefully doesn't stare at him. Then Crow springs off the tree branch and holds his arms out. "I'll take you down, but you'd better come back when you're finished," he warns.

Ah, so much more convenient than lunging for the nearest tree branch and scrambling down to the ground with just one working hand. "Deal."

He only makes it a handful of blocks from the hospital towards the clan district before he has to sit down on the edge of a raised planter and have regrets about not staying in bed a day longer before doing this. Time really is imperative, though. The hospital staff will go to absolutely, literally murderous lengths to keep Tenzō in the hospital for his post-surgery recovery, but the farther out Tenzō gets from his surgery the easier it will be for the Hokage or Shimura Danzō to override medical best-practices and have Tenzō officially transferred. Even if Crow can stay on guard 24/7 until Tenzō is released, Crow wouldn't be able to stop a transfer to alternate medical accommodations.

Eventually, Kakashi sits on the bench long enough for his luck to turn around: Gai, leaping across rooftops above the street with a small stack of books in hand, glances down and happens to spot him. He drops down to street level immediately and hurries over to Kakashi. He'd been coming from the direction of the jōnin barracks and headed straight towards the hospital. If he'd kept going, he probably would have arrived just in time for visiting hours to open.

Kakashi has been sitting long enough that he can stand again, so he does. He also gives Gai a wave. "Yo."

Gai says, "Sit back down!"

For a moment Kakashi considers staying on his feet just to make Gai reach out and push him down to sit on the bench. But that kind of casual manhandling isn't actually something this version of Gai would do, so Kakashi sits back down. It definitely takes less energy than standing.

Kakashi gestures to the books Gai is holding. It's quite a spread: nonfiction about flora in the Land of Birds, a philosophy book, a romance novel, and a mystery novel. "Were you going to read by my bedside?"

"No," Gai says, in a tone that means he probably was. The books are relatively slim volumes, the kind printed for ninja to take on long missions, so Gai manages to tuck them away in his vest. Then he folds his arms across his chest. "You should go back to the hospital," he says.

This is a classic opening move from Gai, starting with something he knows Kakashi absolutely won't do and making Kakashi argue him down to something acceptable but not ideal for both of them.

Kakashi considers for a moment, and then decides to just skip to the end of their negotiations. "I have something I need to do. Can you go with me?"

Gai blinks at him, but he nods quite seriously. Minutes later, Kakashi is perched on Gai's back in an arrangement that's comfortable and familiar for him but clearly new for Gai, and they're bouncing along on one of the rooftop paths across the village. Kakashi directs Gai where to go, across the old Uchiha district that's now full of new municipal buildings and village-owned housing, then dropping to the ground to brush past the first, thin ring of training grounds.

There, pressed against the base of the Hokage mountain and huddled up against the First Ring Training Path (which, due to population growth, is more of a street curving around Konoha's core at this point) are the Hatake clan grounds. The Naka cuts through, its soft rushing audible though its banks are out of sight.

Something in Kakashi's chest is so unbearably tight that he almost wants to go back to the hospital.

Gai walks along the First Ring Training Path towards the Hatake estate, a small portion of the grounds encircled by a wall which holds the Hatake main house and maybe a few outlying buildings.As he walks, Kakashi studies the Hatake grounds, which he hasn't seen since he was a child.

Before the Hatake had joined the village, the whole of their grounds had been undeveloped land used as training grounds by the Uchiha. There had been dozens of other potential clan grounds to pick from, most of them flatter, more regularly shaped, and not cut off from the village by the Uchiha grounds, which were at that time walled off against visitors. But the Hatake had been mountain farmers before they'd been ninja, and they'd insisted that this land was perfect. The land is steeply sloped on the south end, with a creek running down from a spring in the Hokage Mountain down to the Naka. This is where the main house and its estate are located, as close to the First Ring Training Path as it was appropriate to build at the time.

The north end of the grounds, across the river, is flat enough that they probably would have become the Hatake Ward if Kakashi's clan had ever built anything besides the estate. Some older villagers had the habit of referring to that section of the ground as the Hatake Market, although Kakashi's father hadn't been able to keep up with both a shinobi career and taking produce to market as the clan had dwindled down and down in numbers over the years.

The Hatake Ward, had it been built, would have been well-situated. The walls around the Uchiha clan grounds had eventually come down, the first ring training grounds had gradually shrunk, and what serves as a street grid in Konoha's center had been extended right through the training ground to join with the First Ring Training Path, which had been Konoha's outside wall at the very beginning of the village, before even the Akimichi-Nara-Yamanaka alliance had joined.

Of course, there are no streets through the unimproved Hatake grounds; the village simply stops at the edge of their ground, and then picks up again off in the distance with a civilian district. In theory, that means that anyone who lives off in that civilian district should have to go around the Hatake clan grounds. By law, as well as by etiquette. But in practice, of course, it would probably double the commute to the center of the village to go around. Kakashi counts three or four desire paths winding into the Hatake grounds in the direction of the civilian district before he and Gai reach the main house's front gates.

Here, finally, it becomes very obvious why he and Gai are in this obscure corner of the village in the shadow of the mountain. The Hatake clan mon is worked into the front gate; the simple diamond shape is split down the middle. Kakashi is surprised to find that he'd forgotten the gates were made like that, the details blurred by time and grief.

"Kakashi..." Gai starts, and then trails off. He lets Kakashi down from his back so that Kakashi can approach the gate.

There's a seal on the gate, yellowed and fragile with age. Kakashi hasn't been back to the Hatake clan grounds since he left with Minato-sensei as a child, directly after his father's death. It's been a little over a decade for the body he's in, but almost three decades in truth—he'd been barely five years old. Even before Kakashi is close enough to see the sealwork in detail he knows that it must have been Minato who sealed the estate, but it's still a little surprising to see the familiar brushwork just because it's so familiar. The decisive linework and the hasty brush strokes. Minato-sensei had been a seal master who produced seals like his brain was at risk of outrunning his hands. It's been a very long time since Kakashi has seen one of his seals, and he's never seen this seal before—he hadn't known it was here.

After Pein's assault on the village, he'd been ready to come back here. But it had been gone by then.

Kakashi studies the seal for a moment and then sighs. He holds a thumb out to Gai. "Cut this, would you?"

Gai looks down at his thumb, face full of doubt and something else.

There's a long pause, while Gai considers and Kakashi ponders what that something else is.

When Gai finds words, he says: "I appreciate your vigor and determination, Kakashi, but you're not cleared for summoning or sealwork."

In retaliation, Kakashi gives Gai his best pathetic look. "It won't take any chakra to release the seal. I just can't sanitize my own kunai or anything."

He and Gai are cut out of the same irresponsible cloth, so Gai does in fact draw out a small blade, sweep enough chakra over it to produce a visible light effect, and then after a moment of sustained eye contact with Kakashi poke the smallest wound imaginable into the well-scarred bed of Kakashi's thumb. It feels like nothing, but a few droplets of blood well up.

It's only when Kakashi turns back to the seal and starts squeezing his thumb to get enough blood to release Minato-sensei's seal that he finally realizes that he and Gai aren't actually close friends yet. Actually, they might not be friends at all? Gai's friendship had snuck up on him like a sabotage squad, dismantling and arranging things perfectly when he wasn't looking until one day his defenses had fallen and his strategic reserves were compromised and he had, somehow, gained the very best friend anyone could ask for.

He and Gai are definitely rivals, and certainly Gai has been pursuing his friendship in some form or another for their entire acquaintance, but as Kakashi thinks over things he concludes that he's several years too early to be doing things like asking Gai to stab him.

Nothing to be done about it now.

Kakashi finally gets enough blood on the seal. It flashes, unspools, and dissolves. Kakashi pushes open the Hatake gates.

The stone courtyard inside is overgrown, with enterprising plants creeping up between the stone pavers. There's one tree as thick around as Gai's thigh that's pushed up through the pavers to shoot up into the sky, sending the stone tumbling into disarray. Smaller trees cluster here and there. The house has some kind of trellising vine climbing up to the roof, wrapping around the gutters. A moldering broom lies in one of the corners of the courtyard, its straw practically disintegrated into the leafy riot of the courtyard. Everything is all strangled and held tight by nature, nothing like the clean and orderly place that Kakashi remembers from his childhood.

"Should I wait out here?" Gai asks. Kakashi has unthinkingly wandered into the middle of the courtyard, but Gai is still lingering on the other side of the gate, eyes wide. It's against village law to enter a clan's grounds without permission except in an emergency...and sometimes not even then, depending on the emergency.

Kakashi takes a moment to ponder the question. Does he want to go look around the house alone, in private?

"No. Please come in."

Kakashi isn't interested in investigating the house alone, in private. Anyway, there's no point in treating Gai like a stranger. He's not. If Kakashi didn't manage to drive him off the first time around when he was genuinely trying, there's not much point in worrying about whether or not they'll become close again.

Even after he's entered, Gai still hangs back. Out of arm's reach. In fact, although Gai feels bizarrely close compared to what Kakashi is used to, Gai is staying as far back as he can without being so far away that he wouldn't be able to dart forward and catch Kakashi before he hits the ground if he collapses again. It's a position which Kakashi has observed Gai taking often over the years; the distance will grow as Gai gets both faster and more practiced at catching him.

The door sticks in its track, and Kakashi forces it open with sheer muscle until it's slid open enough that Kakashi can squeeze in, which he does before he can hesitate and have an emotion about it. The genkan is completely empty, the tile clear even of the trace hints of mud or dust it had always held when the house was inhabited by ninja. Kakashi steps up into the house proper, and looks into the darkness of the entry hall. He tries the lights, flicking the switch up and down a few times, but that doesn't do anything.

Gai comes in after him. He opens the door fully, and without the horrible sound of wood-against-wood. If Kakashi weren't still teetering on the edge of chakra exhaustion, he probably would have accomplished that with a very thin layer of chakra on the bottom of the door. Gai might have done that, but more likely he just found exactly the right way to lift and move the door in its track. He's great like that. Kakashi should have asked him to open the door in the first place.

With the door fully open, light pours into the genkan and beyond, lighting up the small hallway beyond the genkan. There's a small recess in the hallway wall, directly across from the door. It has an empty vase.

To the right are the private areas of the house. To the left are the public areas. Kakashi goes left first.

There's a formal reception room, full of tatami that will need to be replaced and displayed items that Kakashi will need to put in storage. There's a large living room, flooded with light from the front windows. Kakashi walks through to the back of the house, looking out the windows there, and in the dim light sees only the engawa's wood shutters.

They'd been in storage, last Kakashi had been in the house.

The last section of the main house is the kitchen and associated store rooms. Kakashi sticks his head into each of the store rooms to make sure that they haven't had a roof fall in or a window break—they haven't—and then turns back the way he came.

Gai is still in the living room, studying the slightly faded paintings on the sliding partitions. The room doesn't have any tatami, but can be split up in a few different ways to create additional rooms if need be. Looking at the paintings himself makes Kakashi feel like he's seeing some mishmash of every landscape painting he's ever had a passing appreciation for distilled down into something bizarrely unfamiliar, so he doesn't let his own gaze linger on them for too long.

Back down the entrance hall. Kakashi skips the first room, the one that mirrors the position of the reception room on the other side, and checks the bedrooms and bathrooms first. Most of the bedrooms are empty or full of appropriately anonymous furniture, as they had been when Kakashi lived here last. Kakashi's room still has a child-sized bed, which Kakashi had apparently been small enough to fit into at some point, but feels especially empty because Minato had retrieved most of Kakashi's things from it years ago.

The last and largest bedroom in the main house had belonged to Kakashi's father. It's the only room in the house that feels full instead of empty. It's absolutely overflowing with detail: pictures, a sword stand, a chest of drawers, a bed still neatly made, a wardrobe that no doubt is still full of Hatake Sakumo's things. Kakashi pauses at the door, surveys the room for problems with a deliberately slow turn of his head, and then closes the door back as it was. He closes his eyes.

"Do you need to do this today?" Gai asks from halfway back down the hall.

If he just says yes, Gai won't ask follow-up questions.

If Kakashi says something like If I don't do it now, I'll never do it, then Gai won't ask follow-up questions and also will feel bad for asking.

Kakashi says, "It's for Tenzō."

He can feel Gai's gaze on his back. "Why does he need your clan's main house?" Gai asks.

Kakashi wishes that this were his Gai, somehow, behind him in the hall. The Gai from the future. The one who was lost to him well before he went back in time.

Talking to the door is getting weird, actually. Kakashi turns back around and starts down the hall to check in on the bathroom.

"Tenzō and I will both be switching to the day shift, even after he's recovered," he says as he confirms that, yep, there's still a toilet and a sink and a bath and everything. The old hand towel is still lingering on the wall. "He'll need a place to stay when he gets out of the hospital and I happen to own property, so..." He trails off.

Gai is silent.

Kakashi heads back in the direction of the entry hall, to the very last room he needs to check.

"He must be very important to you." Gai uses that very specific tone that ninja use when they want to know more about something but think they might get stabbed or court-martialed for prying.

It's not a hardship to stop and talk a little more in the hall.

"I feel responsible for him."

"Admirable as always, Kakashi, and so cool. But the village would take care of him if you couldn't." He glances over Kakashi's shoulder, and then adds a little hesitantly: "If you need more time."

Kakashi has had so much time already.

"Tenzō wouldn't be allowed an apartment in the General Forces barracks, and he wouldn't be able to secure rental housing either. Not even a boarding house."

"Surely—"

"No."

Gai just looks at him. Stares, if Kakashi is being honest. Is it because Kakashi has made what Gai considers to be a bizarre claim about Tenzō's housing situation, or is it because Kakashi is acting bizarre?

Maybe both.

Kakashi says. "I can't explain why. It wouldn't be my place to tell you even if I could."

"Well, if my rival says it then it must be true," Gai declares. Usually that turn of phrase is his way of saying that Kakashi had been deliberately and wildly rude when he was younger, but in this case it's probably sincere. "I'll look forward to getting to know someone who's impressed you."

"You'll like him." Or at least enjoy having someone to commiserate with about Kakashi.

Finally, it's time for the last room. His father's office. He can't move anyone into the house, including himself, until his father's office is seen to. It must be ruined from the careless neglect of Kakashi's childhood. He hadn't come back to clean the blood himself and he hadn't sought someone else to do it either—doing it himself had been literally unthinkable, and hiring someone else had felt both shameful and potentially impossible. Even if someone had agreed to do it, chances were high he'd soon have to suffer through hearing people gossip about it all over the village. He wouldn't have just been the White Fang's son—he would have been the White Fang's son who wouldn't even clean his own house, who wouldn't even clean up his father's mess.

Gai trails him a little closer as Kakashi approaches the door. It takes a lot of concentration for Kakashi to move slowly down the hall, reach out for the door, and slide it open without any unusual pause or hesitation.

The room is clean, except for the layer of dust that's common throughout the whole house.

Kakashi stares down at the floor. The wood is pristine in the morning light. There isn't even the slightest trace of blood in the thin gaps between floorboards. It feels, for a moment, like Kakashi might be going insane. But he looks closer. He traces his eye from the floor directly under his feet, at the threshold of the room, to the middle of the room.

There's a very slight difference in the tone of the floorboards in the hallway compared to the floorboards in the office.

Minato-sensei is the only person who's had access to the Hatake estate since Kakashi left it. For years Kakashi has known he'd stopped by at least once after Kakashi found his father's body because Minato had retrieved his extra clothes, his spare masks, his books, his whet stone, and so on. Kakashi had assumed for years—for almost three decades—that Minato had done nothing more than arrange his father's burial and collect Kakashi's personal items. It had been a surprise to see the gate sealed and the engawa shutters installed and closed, but this is the most shocking of all. Minato-sensei had arranged for someone to replace the floorboards, and he'd done it so quietly that Kakashi had never even heard a rumor about it. The desk and its chair have even been returned to their normal places.

Kakashi steps into the room and, having taken the better part of an hour to linger over the other parts of the room, collapses into the desk chair.

"Ah, Kakashi," Gai says behind him, with clear concern, but Kakashi waves a hand to dismiss it.

"I need to check the desk. Then we can go."

Of course, the desk will be empty. Minato was a jōnin already when Hatake Sakumo died, so he would have cleared the desk of any potentially important paperwork at the same time he was arranging the burial. But Kakashi is a jōnin now, and he's going to have strangers in the house doing repairs and maintenance; he needs to be sure.

Methodically, Kakashi opens every drawer, even the secret ones. The desk is just as empty as it should be, containing only a blank stationary and a handful of other, impersonal supplies. The room has been sitting here, ready for Kakashi to return, all this time. Minato-sensei had never even mentioned it.

Kakashi slides the last desk drawer shut, and leans on the desk, exhausted.

"Back to the hospital?" Gai suggests hopefully.

That almost sounds like a great plan, which is a real marker of how hard Kakashi had pushed his 17-year-old body the day before. "No, the Hokage Tower." Kakashi needs to stop by the mission desk and then go see the Hokage.

Gai agrees to take him, of course, but insists that they stop for breakfast on the way. Kakashi's not actually hungry, but that's a symptom of chakra exhaustion.

Sitting in a restaurant in Konoha is so far the most disconcerting part of being back in time. It feels so normal, and lively. Nothing like this would have been possible in that doomed future. There hadn't been enough people left for it.

He drinks twice as much tea as he actually wants and lets Gai talk him into a light meal of mostly miso and rice. Kakashi savors the softness of the rice and the flavor of the miso even as his stomach rebels. Eventually his body will remember how much it needs food if it wants to produce chakra, so eating roughly normal meals will help with Kakashi's recovery. He should have eaten before he left the hospital, but sticking around until breakfast would have made it harder to break out and Kakashi had needed all the help he could get to escape his room without the use of chakra.

The restaurant is within sight of the Hokage Tower, and Kakashi convinces Gai to wait for him there. As convenient as it would be to have Gai carry him up to the Hokage's office, it would probably undermine what Kakashi is about to do.

It only winds him a little to climb up all those stairs, anyway. It's fine. He catches his breath in the stairwell before he enters into the Hokage's waiting room.

The receptionist is clearly surprised to see him, but has clearly been told that Kakashi might stop by because she subtly activates the alert seal under her desk and then waves Kakashi through to the Hokage's office immediately.

Sarutobi Hiruzen is alive, well, surrounded by paperwork, and smoking his pipe. "Ah, Kakashi. A little later than I expected, considering when the runner from the hospital arrived to tell me you'd disappeared." He gestures with his pipe to the rarely used guest chair. "Sit, sit. The missive from your primary medic made it quite clear that you shouldn't be walking around."

"Ah, I had something to do," Kakashi says. He settles into the chair because although he might prefer to stand for the confidence it would project, the stairs have taken more out of him than he'd expected and collapsing while talking to the Hokage won't help anything.

"Hm, I do wonder what was so important that you had to leave the hospital and do it before coming here," the Sandaime says mildly, his tone deliberately placed in that ambiguous zone where he might be scolding or he might be genuinely curious.

Kakashi isn't exactly sorry to have kept the Sandaime waiting, but the Hokage doesn't need to know that. "I have a request I'd like to make after my report, and I needed to check on something related to that request.” Kakashi twists his face into a smile. "I didn't think I'd be able to do the stairs twice today."

The Sandaime nods, and then makes a gesture with his pipe meant to convey that Kakashi should get on with reporting.

It's not a hard mission report, in truth, because Kakashi had used his Sharingan for most of it and the mission had gone well right up until that fight at the end. And although the fight had obviously gone poorly for Tenzō, killing both of the Iwa ninja and packing them away into body scrolls had kept the mission uncompromised.

While Kakashi talks, the Sandaime puffs away on his pipe. When Kakashi falls silent after mostly glossing over his hapless medical attention and the ensuing sprint back to Konoha, the Sandaime says, "Not the disaster I feared, then. And you did well to bring...Tenzō home." There is a particular pause in the Hokage's words, and a wry twist in his tone.

Tenzō's never gone by Tenzō with anyone but Kakashi, really. The Hokage probably didn't even know he had a name outside his ANBU sign and ROOT identification number. Kakashi itches to pick at that, to ask the Sandaime why it is that that seemed acceptable to him—Kakashi has always wondered—but that wouldn't be productive. His goal isn't to investigate Sarutobi Hiruzen's every motivation and belief. Kakashi just needs to make sure that the Sandaime won't be a major obstacle.

"Now," the Hokage says after a few more seconds of puffing away on his pipe, "what was this request of yours?" He chuckles. "Is it medical training? I'm not sure the village could afford to lose you to the Medical Corps, but perhaps something could be arranged." He sucks on the stem of his pipe again, then exhales a cloud of tobacco smoke. Tsunade would punch him through the bay of windows behind the Hokage desk for smoking so much around a chakra exhausted jōnin who should still be in the hospital, but at least the room is well ventilated.

"I wouldn't turn down a chance to improve my skill with the Mystic Palm jutsu, but no." Kakashi lingers over his potential angles of attack and then decides to just be blunt about it: "I'd like to be reassigned to the General Forces on a permanent basis. Tenzō has decided that he'll follow me."

The Sandaime's eyebrows lift in genuine shock, his pipe lowered, his attention on Kakashi. "Well, of course, if you're ready to take missions as Hatake Kakashi again, the village would be happy to have your service. But as for the matter of Tenzō..."

"He has months of recovery ahead of him."

"That is true, that is true, of course, we've already started making arrangements for when the Hospital's Chief of Surgery will sign off on having him moved—"

Kakashi interrupts. "Hokage-sama, I'm sure it was hard enough to straighten out his hospital stay before anyone could raise a red flag over it. You're a busy man, and the paperwork for establishing a new ninja of Tenzō's capabilities would necessarily take some time. I understand. That's why I spent an hour this morning at the Hatake clan grounds. When we're done here, I can go down to the mission desk and make arrangements for the main house."

The Sandaime actually snuffs his pipe with a quick flash of chakra. "If you open your clan grounds again..."

Kakashi inclines his head slightly. "Only the clan head can approve work on the grounds, and only the clan head can approve a long term guest." A clan of one, a clan Kakashi doesn't actually plan to revive, but in Konoha law a clan is a clan regardless of size.

"Then, it seems you've reconsidered that last conversation we had, on the subject of attending the Konoha Council." The Sandaime leans back in his chair and looks at Kakashi with misplaced pride and satisfaction. "I'm glad you'll be taking an interest in politics, Kakashi. I'll have the agenda for the meeting next week sent over to you at the hospital this afternoon."

"It will be an honor to serve," Kakashi says blandly. He rises from his chair and bows. "Hokage-sama, if that's all, I have arrangements to make with the mission desk."

"Yes, of course." The Sandaime makes a few notes on a piece of paper, probably about the Konoha Council meeting that Kakashi is now doomed to attend. "Here, hand this over on your way out."

Kakashi takes the note, bows again, and leaves the room. He hands the note to the secretary and makes his way back down the stairs, which at least don't wind him on the way down. The mission desk lobby is as busy as ever, full of ninja taking and receiving assignments as well as civilian clients coming and going. Kakashi goes, for the first time, to the client side of the lobby. Clients get to sit down while they work out their mission orders with the chūnin on duty, which is extremely convenient because Kakashi needs to sit down before he falls down. Again.

The first necessary step to the mission Kakashi wants to commission is legally proving he has the right to order it. "I obviously know you have a right to the Hatake clan grounds," the chūnin who's helping him says carefully. "But there can be no exceptions. By village law, you must be registered as the current head of the clan with the Konoha Clan Law Archive on the fourth floor."

Kakashi does not want to climb any more stairs. "I should still be in the hospital, you know," Kakashi tells the chūnin, and then just looks at the chūnin with open expectation on his face.

The chūnin is easy to bully. His shoulders slump. "Write a note for them, I'll run it up there and see if it counts."

Kakashi confiscates a pen and a spare mission intake form and scrawls a note declaring that he's taking up the mantle of Hatake clan head, effective immediately. The tiny wound Gai had left on his thumb comes in handy again; Kakashi picks at it enough to get a little more blood and presses his thumb to the note as a signature. The chūnin darts off with the note—up a different stairwell than the one Kakashi had just descended, the stairs up to the Hokage's office go to the Hokage's office and the roof and nowhere else—and when he returns he has a note from the archivist on duty declaring provisional acceptance of the note, so long as Kakashi presents himself in front of an archivist within two weeks to complete the formal process.

By "formal process" they mean "more paperwork," unfortunately.

But that's good enough for today. Kakashi arranges the details and payment to have a chūnin and a team of genin clean up the main house on his clan grounds, as well as the courtyards immediately adjacent. He authorizes the chūnin commander, whoever it ends up being, to hire village-approved, properly vetted civilian contractors for anything that requires skilled labor—something is sure to be wrong with the house, probably multiple complex somethings, so having a chūnin in charge will make sure things go smoothly. The genin will handle things like taming the plants, cleaning all the dust off of everything, and transporting materials.

"Do you have a preference for which chūnin?" the chūnin taking Kakashi's mission details down asks.

Most clients don't get asked this, Kakashi is sure. But he does have someone in mind. "Ebisu, if he's available."

"Ah, I knew he seems...but he isn't really a paper ninja," the mission desk ninja stutters.

"I know." No one who spent his genin years with Genma and Gai as teammates could be unprepared for combat, and although Ebisu probably hasn't started teaching yet, he'd had impressive technique in just about everything even before he'd been promoted to chūnin. As an incredibly well-rounded ninja, Ebisu is surely taking a great deal of combat missions. "If he turns it down just assign someone else," Kakashi says with a wave of the hand. "Is that all?"

It is, and Kakashi turns away from the Mission Desk towards the exit onto the street, from which he can slog across the Tower Square and find Gai inside the restaurant where they'd had breakfast.

"Kakashi?" someone calls incredulously when he's halfway towards the exit.

Kakashi turns and looks at Genma, who's lingering by the Mission Desk with a handful of other people in a manner that gives the impression that they're waiting extremely patiently for a client or an Intel bundle. Genma is looking mission-ready and incredulous. Kakashi waves at him, a casual and lazy movement.

Genma breaks away from the ninja who must be his team to join Kakashi. "I was sure you'd still be in the hospital," Genma says, looking Kakashi up and down."I'm out the gates soon for a week or two. I was looking for Gai earlier to send well-wishes along to the hospital for me, but, uh..." He's too observant for his own good, so he definitely picks up that Kakashi shouldn't be on his feet just yet, but he only frowns over it and doesn't say anything.

Shiranui Genma hates the hospital just as much as Kakashi.

"Gai was helping me with something," Kakashi says.

"Really?" Genma asks. "And you let him do that on purpose, for once?"

Kakashi sighs. He was really a terrible child. "Yeah," he says. "I'm trying new things."

"Never thought I'd see the day." Genma looks him up and down one more time. "Well, congratulations on not being dead. That kid okay?"

It takes a moment for Kakashi to realize that "kid" here refers to Tenzō. He nods. "He'll recover."

"Good, good," Genma says. He glances behind him, at his team. "Looks like we're up. Stay safe, Kakashi. Or at least alive."

Chapter Text

"Ah, they came in handy after all," Kakashi says.

Gai looks up from the book he's flipping through. It's the one about Land of Birds. It has colored images. Gai frowns at him. "Do you need to sit before we go back to the hospital?"

"No, let's just go."

He would love to say that he doesn't need to go back to the hospital, but being horizontal does sound great. Also, he's not willing to leave Tenzō alone in the hospital overnight. Might as well make it now so that he can sneak in a nap before the Sandaime sends him any paperwork to read.

Gai pays for the pot of tea he's been working on and they exit together. It's back to piggybacking once they're out on the street, and Kakashi slumps comfortably and with great satisfaction over Gai's back. It's a very good back. Familiar and strong. Kakashi barely has the strength to actually hold on for the short trip to the hospital, but he doesn't have to worry about Gai dropping him.

They enter Kakashi and Tenzō's shared hospital room through the window—Kakashi has to point it out to Gai—and find Tenzō still unconscious. Crow is sitting in Tenzō's visitor chair, though.

"Ah," Crow says. "Kaneko will be glad you're back. After she finishes yelling at you."

"Yelling at me would be poor bedside manners," Kakashi complains as Gai dumps him in bed.

"That won't stop anyone who works here."

"It might wake Tenzō."

Crow shrugs. "You can try that line of reasoning." Then he looks at Gai. "I don't think we had time for introductions yesterday. I'm Amano."

Gai introduces himself and then he and Crow spend a few minutes egging each other on as they complain about certain people irresponsibly leaving the hospital without even telling anyone.

Kakashi takes that time to crawl under the covers and get comfortable, in the hopes that he can be unconscious before any of the medics or nurses realize he's back in the building. "Hey," he says. "I'm right here, you know."

"Oh, I thought you might have slipped out again," Crow says. No, not Crow. Crow-taichō had been a very serious commanding officer, and wouldn't tease Kakashi. And the Crow in the future, who had spent years successfully leaving his daylight identity behind, he probably hadn't cracked a joke since the Uchiha Massacre, when he'd retreated entirely into ANBU.

"I had things to do," Kakashi grumbles to Amano, but he can't help the slight, pleased way his eye crinkles as he looks over at Amano.

Amano shakes his head and stands. "I'm going to go get whoever's on duty now. In case you scrambled your brains running around the village." He glances at Gai—turns his head just slightly so that the glance is clearly communicated—and says: "Tackle him if he tries to get out of bed again."

Gai agrees, and laughs as Amano leaves the room. Then he digs through his vest for his books. "These are actually for you," he confesses.

Kakashi can't help but raise his eyebrows, but of course he accepts the books. "Why?" he asks, slightly bewildered.

"You mentioned you were thinking about getting into reading as a hobby," Gai says. "I thought you might finally have time to start while you were in the hospital."

"That...was a while ago," Kakashi says. Before the Kyūbi attack. He also hadn't really meant it, at the time.

"I was starting to think I'd never have a chance to give them to you," Gai says. He says it cheerfully, almost like a joke between the two of them about how long Kakashi had been gone, buried in ANBU duties where Gai couldn't reach them.

But it's not a joke. It's something Gai had really worried about. And at some point in Kakashi's past, Kakashi's original Gai had given up hope and gotten rid of the books before he ever had a chance to give them to Kakashi.

Gai goes on, "I've already read them, so now you'll have to study them closely to keep up with me, my rival!" and breaks the tension that was building in Kakashi's shoulders.

That version of Gai is gone, and wouldn't be impressed by Kakashi dwelling on their relationship. Kakashi chuckles, snuggles down into the comforter, and closes his eyes. He says, "Then I'll have to let you know when I've finished them. We can quiz each other."

"So cool and casual!" Gai exclaims, although quietly because they are in the hospital. He puts the books down on the table beside Kakashi's hospital bed, but soon picks the Land of Birds book back up and starts to study it closely.

Kakashi will have to read the books without the Sharingan so that the challenge is a fair fight.

Kaneko comes into the room and chases Gai out so that she can talk to Kakashi about his own recovery alone. She tells him a bunch of things he already knows about chakra exhaustion, and informs him that he'll need to spend at least another two nights in the hospital before he'll be discharged. She tells him, "Ideally, you won't return to any kind of chakra-intensive activities for two or three weeks after your discharge, but as a jōnin you should be able to gauge your own chakra levels by the end of the week. Please don't wind up back here with chakra exhaustion any time soon, though."

Kakashi very carefully doesn't promise anything of the sort. He switches topics to ask about his hand, instead. it hadn't been healed while he was out.

"There's a small risk of chakra poisoning if medical ninjutsu is used on a chakra-exhausted patient," Kaneko explains. "We were going to heal it first thing this morning, but when we arrived to do so your bed was empty."

Kakashi scratches his cheek through his mask. "I have a very busy social life."

"I'm sure," Kaneko says. The way she drawls it makes clear that she's aware that there have been persistent rumors of Kakashi's untimely demise for years because of how little he's been seen around the village.

When Kaneko leaves, she sends Amano back in, who reveals Gai has left. Disappointing, but understandable. Amano picks up the romance novel that Gai had left behind, and just as Kakashi is about to select one of the other books, a chūnin comes from the village archives with information about the Konoha Council to review. Kakashi was expecting some kind of documentation laying out background information for topics of discussion at the next meeting, but it's not that. It's not even a summary of what will be discussed at the next meeting. It's a short treatise on the expected etiquette and protocol of the Konoha Council, and a complete copy of its bylaws.

Kakashi is too weak to reliably win a fight against a civilian child right now, but sealing scrolls can be made secure with wards that have to be unlocked with hand seals. He wasn't expecting full meeting minutes, which would be torture to slog through anyway, but Kakashi distinctly remembers that Minato-sensei had directed staff in the Tower to produce briefings for the Konoha Council.

Apparently, the Sandaime doesn't care to keep the Council informed.

Kakashi's study of the Konoha Council bylaws and procedures is interrupted later that afternoon by Tenzō waking up. Kaneko comes in with two nurses and Tenzō immediately panics. Any medical patient panicking is bad, of course, but Tenzō is an incredibly dangerous shinobi. The air in the hospital room sharpens with Tenzō's unfocused killing intent as he scrambles for a weapon he'll never find.

Kaneko waves the two nurses back and tries to talk Tenzō down, but that's never going to work. She's in scrubs, cornering Tenzō in a hospital bed.

It's a lot of effort to get out of bed, but Kakashi puts his booklet down and crosses the room, ducking around Kaneko to sit down on Tenzō's bed. "I'm here, Tenzō."

Tenzō goes completely, perfectly still.

Kakashi picks up the hand Tenzō had been trying to rip his IV line out of. He fumbles for a moment to push up his own sleeve and then wraps Tenzō's hand around his bare wrist, so Tenzō will be able to feel Kakashi's pulse and the familiar roughness of a scar there, a scar Tenzō had given him years ago.

"Taichō," Tenzō mutters, and relaxes finally. Mostly. As Kakashi lingers on his bed, Tenzō's hand tightens around his wrist until it's tight enough to bruise, like all of his tension has been transferred into this slight connection with Kakashi. Gradually, as his adrenaline fades, Tenzō fades out of consciousness and his grip slackens until his hand falls back onto the bed.

Kaneko checks his vitals, then runs a quick diagnostic jutsu. "He's ready for his next round of healing," she says to Kakashi, "but we'll need a change of plans, given that reaction."

Kakashi guesses, "You'll need two medic nin."

She nods.

Tenzō's reaction honestly hadn't been as bad as it could have been (he hadn't, say, started flinging jutsu) but it would still be dangerous for Kaneko to do any kind of medical procedure on Tenzō without making absolutely sure that Tenzō was sedated first. Because of the role of chakra in shinobi metabolisms it's impossible to fully depend on pharmaceuticals in situations like this, so it's standard protocol to have two medic nin: one to keep the patient asleep, and the other to actually give medical attention.

"I'll have to take him down to the ER because the other medic on duty can't leave their post there," Kaneko says. She releases her medic jutsu and starts fussing with the IV stand, getting it ready for transport.

Kakashi's not really thrilled with Tenzō leaving the room, but it won't be the only time he has to leave for tests and things are probably mostly settled with the Sandaime. Anyway, Kaneko will maul anyone who tries to take Tenzō out of the hospital.

The nurses duck out of the room to fetch a gurney, and Kakashi does his part by getting out of their way and going back to bed. Kaneko keeps Tenzō asleep while the nurses transfer him carefully to the gurney, and then they sweep out of the room.

Amano, lingering in the room and reading the romance novel Gai had left behind, looks at him from across the room and says: "You've really earned his trust."

All hospital rooms are well-sealed against eavesdropping because of the amount of mission debriefs that happen inside them. So Kakashi lets his mouth run away from him and admits, "No. He's just obedient."

Amano marks his place in the novel with a finger and closes the book. "What makes you say that?"

It's terrible to consider telling Amano, but even worse to imagine not telling anyone about it. Since Kakashi isn't actually 17 at the moment, he has, unfortunately, already learned that he does need to talk about his feelings sometimes. Especially feelings that might impede his ability to do his job like, say, his sudden not-entirely-irrational fear that actually, no one has ever trusted him and no one ever will.

So Kakashi tells Amano. He lays out the basic situation with Tenzō's wound and about Tenzō lurching to his feet, favoring a sprained ankle he hadn't even told Kakashi about, practically begging Kakashi not to murder him in cold blood. Crow, at the end of the world, had claimed that Kakashi could at least be trusted out in the field. Tenzō apparently felt differently.

"Pain can make people do and say some strange things," Amano says carefully when Kakashi is done.

"But you don't think it's just that."

"Well..." Amano hesitates. "It's obvious he didn't have a good team before you became his captain. But he prefers your command to anyone else's, which counts for a lot. Maybe he doesn't trust anyone, but distrusts you the least? That's not nothing."

"You can't know he prefers my command," Kakashi points out. Not that preferring Kakashi's command over Shimura Danzō's would even say much.

"He asked me once what I thought he should do to ensure you didn't have him reassigned. It was a while ago. Actually, it was how I heard you'd been promoted."

So probably almost right after Kakashi had dragged Tenzō out of ROOT.

Amano adds, "He thought you didn't like him. But I think you've probably cleared that up."

"Maybe," Kakashi says doubtfully. He'll have to keep working on it until he's sure. But it should probably be time to stop talking about feelings now, and he does have news to give Amano now that they're alone. He tells Amano about the conversation he had with the Sandaime.

Amano's eyebrows rise. He thankfully doesn't ask anything about the Hatake clan grounds or the politics that Kakashi is soon to be embroiled in, and instead sticks to the practical concern at hand: "Does that mean Tenzō won't need guarding anymore?"

Kakashi shrugs a shoulder, uncomfortably aware that he's already asked more of Amano than could reasonably be expected of a man who barely knows him. Who'd been his captain for a few months years ago. "There are still...other parties to be wary of, besides the Sandaime," Kakashi admits, hedging carefully around the details. "But at least you can be sure it won't be a mark in your file."

"It would have been worth a dozen marks against me," Amano says. But he does, nevertheless, look relieved.

Around dinner time, there's the soft thunk of a ninja politely landing on a wall and sticking to it without hiding that they've arrived, so as not to be considered inappropriately sneaky. Then Uchiha Shisui's face appears in the window. He doesn't enter, but he sticks his arm into the room, holding out a paper bag towards Amano.

"Uzume-ba said that if we didn't feed you, no one would," Shisui explains. He glances over at Kakashi, "Hi! They wouldn't give me your room number."

"That does sound like hospital policy," Kakashi says, but doesn't try to hide how amusing he thinks this genin breaking into his hospital room is.

Out of the corner of his eye, Amano's shoulders relax slightly.

Shisui climbs inside and rifles though his pockets. "Uzume-ba said I should give this to you." He holds out a folded note to Kakashi.

Kakashi takes it and opens it. It's an address for a street he doesn't recognize the name of. He looks back up at Shisui.

"She says you should come for dinner," Shisui says. "If you want. You can pick the day, whenever you're out of the hospital and will have time."

There's something hesitant about it, like he doesn't expect Kakashi to accept—and to be fair, Kakashi has been avoiding being seen in public by anyone for years at this point, even if he hasn't started publicly avoiding Uchiha in the streets—but Kakashi knows he has to.

Who else will tell him what keeping the eye means, if not Uzume? And if she wants to tell him not to sign the registry, that he doesn't deserve it, then that would be fine too. Kakashi owes her his time. More than she even knows.

"Thank you," Kakashi says carefully. "Please tell her I'll be there in five days. Around now?" It's the common dinner hour for people who don't work coverage-based shifts.

Shisui bobs his head. "I'll be there too!" he reveals, and sounds genuinely excited.

To eat dinner with Kakashi.

"Well, if I'm going to be eating with Shunshin no Shisui then I'll have to look forward to it," Kakashi says.

Shisui gasps. "You know my name?" He turns and looks at Amano. "He knows my name! Did you tell him?"

Amano shakes his head. He also looks surprised.

Shisui whirls back to look at Kakashi. "And you gave me a cool nickname! I have to tell Itachi. Nice to meet you!" He ducks into a quick bow that lasts a little too long. Then the after image fades and Kakashi realizes he still hasn't recovered enough chakra to feel jutsu that use as little chakra as Shisui's perfectly executed shunshin.

"How did you know his name?" Amano asks.

Yeah, oops, apparently Shisui isn't famous yet and Kakashi has just coined his nickname at least a couple months early. Is there any good excuse for knowing the name of a random Uchiha genin?

"I hear things," Kakashi says with a shrug. Maybe Amano will decide that Kakashi had asked around about Shisui while he was out today, or maybe he'll suspect that Kakashi had some reason to keep an eye on genin in the village.

A nurse comes by soon after with food for Kakashi. Tenzō is still hooked up to an IV and sleeps through the nurse's visit and through Amano leaving when visiting hours end. He does wake up once, late in the evening, and whisper into the dark room: "Taichō?"

Kakashi rolls over to stare at Tenzō's bed instead of at the wall. "I'm here."

Tenzō asks, "Am I allowed food here?"

"Not yet, but I can give you some ice chips. They said you can probably start eating tomorrow, if the medic nin on duty clears you for it."

There's the sound of the tree outside shaking its leaves, and muffled voices talking in quiet tones as they wheel a cart or gurney out in the hall.

"I'm fine." Tenzō's voice is very quiet, and very careful.

"You don't have to be."

Tenzō sucks in a breath. It stutters a little, but Kakashi isn't sure if that's from emotion or from the broken ribs. "I'm just glad you're here, taichō."

"I'm not going anywhere," Kakashi promises. By the time Tenzō has falling asleep again, Kakashi has realized he's doomed himself to breaking into the hospital every night until Tenzō is released.

The next morning, the medic nin on staff is Kaneko. She turns the dosage down on Tenzō's painkiller even farther, so that he'll be lucid during the medical check up to see whether he can handle food, and gives Kakashi a quick checkup as well. "You're recovering quickly," she says, begrudgingly. "But I'm still not releasing you until tomorrow at the earliest. Stay in bed."

"Of course, of course," Kakashi says, as if he never would have even considered leaving his hospital bed without permission.

"Jōnin," Kaneko mutters to herself, and then she leaves the room to attend to other duties. Tsunade would like her, Kakashi decides. He'll have to introduce them.

Tenzō finally begins to stir again late that morning, when Kakashi and Ebisu are finishing up a quick meeting.

Ebisu has, in fact, accepted the mission to oversee the work on the Hatake main house, and he's come to go over some of the finer refurbishment details. It was, Kakashi had realized somewhat belatedly, something of a big deal for Ebisu to be specially selected for working on anyone's clan grounds, even the Hatake clan grounds. He thanked Kakashi with sincerity that struck Kakashi as strange but...well, this is actually probably Ebisu's first conversation with Kakashi, or at least the first since some time around Minato-sensei's inauguration. Maybe Ebisu doesn't dislike him yet.

"Do you have enough to move forward?" Kakashi asks, and flicks his visible eye in the direction of Tenzō's bed.

Always quick on the uptake, Ebisu nods. "If I have further questions I'll come find you, but we should be done on the timeline discussed." He stands, nods to Tenzō when he sees that Tenzō is already looking at him, and leaves with his extremely detailed notes.

"Taichō." Tenzō's eyes slide from the door to the window, where a leafy tree branch is tapping and waving against the window.

"You can just call me Kakashi when we're off duty, you know," Kakashi says. He leans back on his bed, draping himself over it in a deliberate show of just how relaxed they can be. "So, good news, you'll make a complete recovery despite my lack of training in medical ninjutsu."

"That implies the existence of bad news."

Kakashi doesn't think it actually does, but he also can't think of a time he's had absolutely no bad news to share. He tells Tenzō briefly about the splenectomy and recovery time, but Kaneko will come do a better, more detailed job later. Then Tenzō asks why Kakashi is in the hospital.

"Oh, unrelated," Kakashi says casually. He's disinclined to share that he'd nearly run himself to death getting Tenzō back to Konoha on time. That might make things awkward. "I'll be discharged before you."

"I see." Tenzō is silent for a short while. "Do you know why I'm here?"

Kakashi studies him. "They usually put teammates in the same room, post-mission. But if you want a room to yourself I could ask the nurses about one of us moving." He gives Tenzō his best wounded puppy look, exaggerates it both because Tenzō hasn't actually seen him outside of his Hound mask very much at this point and because he's only working with one quarter of his face, so he really needs to make that quarter do some heavy lifting.

"What, no, taichō, that's not what I—" Tenzō realizes Kakashi is teasing him and breaks off, groaning and scrubbing his hands over his face. "What I meant was, why am I at the hospital instead of...elsewhere?"

Kakashi's not sure if Tenzō means the ANBU medical suite or some ROOT shithole, but at least the answer is the same either way: "I wanted you to get the very best medical attention, so I brought you directly to the hospital." When they're out of the hospital and can speak somewhere more secure, Kakashi will tell him about stopping at ANBU medical first and being sent back off by Spider. Tenzō deserves to know that Spider is on his side, but while the hospital is secure enough for Kakashi to mention some bare details about his mission to Amano, it's not secure enough to mention ANBU HQ even in vague terms.

"Oh," Tenzō says. "And...while I recover...does that mean six weeks here?"

"No, the hospital will discharge you by the end of the week." Kakashi sucks in a careful breath. "As to where you'll go after you discharge...there isn't enough support for you at our usual accommodations. So I've been making alternate arrangements."

"Oh," Tenzō says again, but this time his eyes are wide. "Am I going back to—?"

"No," says Kakashi. "Never. I'm having my clan's main house spruced up so it will be ready when you're discharged."

"Your clan house?" Tenzō repeats. He's more or less aware of Kakashi's various personal tragedies from his original ROOT briefing when he and Kakashi had begun to work together. But of course it wouldn't have included any information about the assets or former social status of the Hatake. "Am I even allowed?"

"I already spoke to the Hokage," Kakashi reassures him. "Ebisu was here because he's overseeing the work that's being done." Kakashi recalls that Tenzō has probably never even heard of Ebisu. "You'll meet Ebisu properly soon. And other people."

By this point, Tenzō has noticed the riot of flowers on the table beside his bed, addressed to him with a turtle-shaped card. He reaches out to touch one of the petals gently, like he fears it will break. It doesn't though, not even when Tenzō briefly rubs it between his fingers.

"Those are from Maito Gai," Kakashi says. "He'll be by later to check that I haven't broken out of the hospital again. You'll like him."

Kaneko enters, then, probably alerted by Ebisu. She gives Tenzō more detailed information about the surgery that has been performed on him and what his recovery roadmap will look like. Then she checks Kakashi's recovery and actually kicks him out of the room. "Go sit in the waiting area," she says. "Don't go any farther than that," she adds as Kakashi slouches out of the room to give Tenzō some medical privacy.

Kakashi heads to the waiting room. Amano is there, eating breakfast. He'd probably seen Ebisu enter the room as soon as visiting hours started and figured it was safe to go get food. Kakashi raises a hand to wave at him, but proceeds past him without stopping into the bathroom. It has a small window that Kakashi can just fit out of at the moment, and he even has enough chakra to spare to cautiously slide down the wall with an extremely weak application of the wall-walking technique, so that he doesn't have to jump and trust his chakra reserves will stand up to the stress of trying to reinforce his body enough to stick the landing.

A whole 24 hours straight inside the hospital when he's not even on any sedatives is just too much, especially when Kakashi's 17-year-old body is so quick to spring back. His chakra reserves aren't recovered and he could still accidentally kill himself with a C-rank jutsu performed a little too enthusiastically, but he's more than well enough for a sedate walk across the village.

This time Kakashi heads towards the Inuzuka Ward. It's not a very formal clan ground. Around the edges there's a block of buildings indistinguishable from the surrounding village with a veterinary clinic, shops, and some housing, none of which Kakashi needs special permission to enter. Around the back of that block, though, in the middle of the Inuzuka Ward, a thicket of forest rises up like a too-enthusiastic park. The dense wall of foliage somewhat dampens the sound of dozens of dogs barking and has several different pathways leading into it. Kakashi lingers outside the most formal of them—it has flagstones instead of just dirt, and there's a branch arcing over the path with an INUZUKA sign nailed to it.

After a few minutes, a man pokes his head out of the woods to look at Kakashi. "Need something?"

A bench, honestly, but that's not worth asking for. "I'm looking for Tsume."

"Oh, sure, she's here," the guy says. "Yuzu, take him to Tsume."

A little dog busts out from under a bush. Yuzu is filthy with leaf litter, and Kakashi instantly loves her. The Inuzuka man disappears back into the forest with a shake of the bushes and Yuzu trots up to Kakashi, who indulges in a few seconds of getting to pet a dog. Then Kakashi gets to follow Yuzu down various winding paths in the Inuzuka woods until they reach a long, traditionally built house that overlooks a lawn full of screaming children. Inuzuka Tsume is lounging on the engawa while her dog, Kuromaru, herds the children. Yuzu darts towards Tsume, yapping the whole while.

Tsume says to Yuzu, "Yeah, you did a good job!"

Yuzu barks one more time and then disappears back into the little forest. Kakashi looks after her, wishing he'd gotten to give more pets, but it seems like Yuzu is one half of what serves as the Inuzuka's gate duty.

Tsume waves him up onto the engawa when he looks back. "Don't bother with your shoes," she says, which Kakashi supposes makes the engawa just a porch.

Works for him.

He steps up to join her. "I apologize for coming without an appointment," he says once he's sat down.

"You kidding me?" Tsume asks. "Pretty sure you should still be in the hospital, I'm just glad to see you upright. Or at all. It's been awhile." She glances at him, probably clocks that his shoulders have tensed. "Aw, don't worry about it, kid, you don't owe me anything. I'm just glad to see you. What'd you need?"

A huge dog seems to materialize out of thin air, although realistically he just scrambled up onto the porch behind Kakashi very quietly. Wherever he came from, he flops the front end of his body down onto Kakashi's lap and sprawls there like he believes all laps were made for just this purpose.

If he'd known this would happen, Kakashi would have come to visit just to pet this dog. But he did unfortunately come here to have a conversation.

Kakashi says, "It's a little presumptuous of me. I'm going to be joining the Konoha Council meetings going forward. I was hoping for some advice."

"I didn't think I'd ever see the day." Tsume grins at him, toothsome and exuberant.

"Neither did I."

"I have to admit I don't really go in for the politics, and you'd probably be better off going to someone else for that," Tsume admits. "But I don't mind giving you whatever advice I can give. I'm a little flattered, Kakashi. I thought you'd go to Shikaku."

"He's a very busy man," Kakashi says. He'd love to pick Shikaku's brain, actually, but he's not convinced he could do so without giving away things he doesn't want to. He adds, "Also, you have dogs."

The dog in Kakashi's lap woofs in agreement, as if to demonstrate that there is definitely a dog here.

"You've always had great taste. Alright, hit me with your questions."

Kakashi asks her many, many questions and listens intently to her answers. She has to skirt around sensitive information that can't be spoken about in the open, of course, but she can tell him who sits next to who, and which people almost never speak, and who runs the meetings when the Hokage's not there.

"Councilman Shimura usually moves us through the agenda," Tsume says. There's a faint curl to her lips when she says Danzō's name.

"I don't mean to pry, but..."

"No, I don't like him," Tsume says bluntly. "That's not even a secret. He runs the meetings so quickly we usually end early, and the Hokage usually takes his side in any disagreement. Worse, we're all tired from fighting him about a bunch of crap like widening and straightening the roads or doubling import and export fees that hardly anyone bothers to disagree with him on smaller things anymore."

Interesting.

"What kind of smaller things has he been bringing up lately?"

"Economic development, curriculum for civilian schools, orphanage budgets, zoning variances..." Tsume thinks for a moment. "He tried to bring up something about needing more space in the village for administrative departments at the last meeting, but we were out of time because Sandaime-sama ran that meeting, so it was tabled for this next meeting."

Extremely interesting. It might be a routine problem to solve. Tsume certainly doesn't seem to think it's out of the ordinary for Danzō to bring it up, and Kakashi can think of a good half dozen times across the years when this or that department has swapped floors with another department or been shuffled off to a more remote location.

But Kakashi knows that it was around this time that the Konoha Military Police were moved from their centrally located, purpose-built headquarters into a refurbished warehouse closer to the Uchiha's new clan grounds out past the second ring of training grounds, near the Naka. It had severely impacted the KMP's ability to patrol the village and respond to disturbances, and Kakashi had always wondered what the rationale behind the move had been. The Uchiha certainly hadn't seemed happy about it.

He can't ask Tsume directly about a KMP move that hasn't actually been announced yet, but he can ask, "If Danzō is doing such a bad job, why doesn't the Council just veto his plans instead of arguing about it?"

Tsume says, "The Konoha Council doesn't have veto powers, but I wish."

Kakashi can't help but stare at her a little. Yes, he knew that that would probably be the answer. He'd been told by Tsunade that the Council turnover had been so steep between the second and third war that by the time Minato-sensei took office about 85% of the clan heads currently serving on the Council had been heading their clan for less than ten years. After the Kyūbi attack, that number had risen to 100%—Tsume herself had taken control of the Inuzuka because her predecessor had died of chakra poisoning.

"The veto power of the Konoha Council was established when the Akimichi, Nara, and Yamanka joined the village," Kakashi says. "The exact method of exercising a veto changed a little as the village grew, but it's not a right that can be revoked. The Shodaime and Uchiha Madara both cosigned it into the charter as an amendment."

Tsume is staring back at him now. Probably because she'd assumed Kakashi didn't spend long enough in the Academy to learn that the village has a charter. Which, to be fair, he hadn't - Minato-sensei had forced him to learn a lot of things he'd been allowed to skip over in the Academy once it became clear he was a prodigious talent at murder.

Tsume says, "The right to veto was withdrawn at the beginning of the second war."

Kakashi says, "The Wartime Decision Efficiency Act temporarily suspended the Council's veto power, but it was...for war time. Minato-sensei ended it during his term."

Technically Kakashi only knows this because he'd been one of the ANBU crouched on the ceiling watching Minato sign the official documents and tell Danzō and the other elders about it. And he'd only realized the significance of the knowledge when talking to Tsunade after she'd taken the hat. But there's no one alive who can contradict Kakashi if he says that Minato-sensei told him about it when he was out of his Hound mask.

Tsunade never had found that signed document. She'd been forced to sign a new declaration, and then she'd had to call a mandatory council meeting with all clan heads to announce it herself.

The dog on Kakashi's lap whines as Tsume's face darkens. Kakashi redoubles his petting efforts.

"You'll have to excuse me," Tsume says. "I've just remembered something that I need to do."

"Of course, thank you for letting me take up some of your time." Kakashi tries to extract himself from under the dog. And fails.

It's an Inuzuka ninken, after all.

Kakashi looks pathetically down at the dog. "You're bullying a hospital in-patient, you know."

"You're outside," the dog points out.

Kakashi sighs. "You've got me there."

"Taro, go with him to the hospital," Tsume says. "If he collapses just drag him to the ER."

"You got it, boss," Taro says, and finally stands up.

Walking back through the village with Taro is way better than walking alone. They don't talk, which is fine. Great, even—one of the best things about dogs is that even the ones that can talk don't feel a need to do so all the time.

When they reach the hospital, Taro says, "Okay, now you owe me more pets. Or a treat."

Kakashi crouches to pet him and admits, "If I had any treats, you'd get both. Thanks for the escort."

"Canines gotta stick together, pup," Taro says. And then he bounds away, back towards the Inuzuka clan grounds.

Kakashi slips back into the hospital via the staff entrance and meanders his way towards his and Tenzō's shared room. Halfway there, Kaneko appears around a corner and points at him.

"You!" she spits.

Kakashi looks behind him, then turns back and points to himself. "Me?"

"I wish it wasn't against hospital regulations to chain you to your bed," Kaneko says.

"I needed enrichment."

"You need to get back in bed before I push your discharge back another couple days."

Kakashi gets back in bed and tries not to look sulky about it. Tenzō is asleep, but Amano is perched on his usual chair, still making his way through that romance novel. He watches with amusement as Kaneko scolds Kakashi under her breath and checks all of his vitals twice.

"Teenagers," she says to Amano with disgust on her way out of the room. "They think they can't die and they bounce back too quickly to learn their lesson. Watch him, would you?"

"No promises," Amano had said, and he shoots Kakashi an amused glance when Kaneko throws her hands up and leaves the room. "Why did you even come back?" he asks. "I'm fine to stay here watching Tenzō. I took leave until his discharge date."

Kakashi tucks himself in under the blankets. The hospital bed is unreasonably comfortable, probably because Kakashi's sedate walk to and from the Inuzuka Ward has left him feeling like a wrung out dish towel.

He hadn't known that Amano had taken himself off the ANBU ready list, but at least that explains how he can be here literally day and night. Kakashi has some emotions about Amano's dedication to guarding Tenzō, but he's disinclined to unpack them. He tells Amano: "This was the closest bed. I'm infirm, you know."

Amano laughs at him. "Sure," he agrees. "You're absolutely helpless."

Chapter Text

On the same afternoon that he's discharged, Kakashi goes to see how the Hatake main house is coming along. There are civilian men on the roof—he can tell they're civilian because they're wearing safety harnesses—and Ebisu is overseeing the genin team as they pull up every paver in the front courtyard.

"Ah, Kakashi," Ebisu says, "I'm glad you stopped by, I need your input on a few things." He shoots a look at the genin so that they keep working on the pavers.

Kakashi doesn't miss D-ranks. He picks out a basic selection of bedroom furniture to fill two of the empty rooms from the things sitting around the house, although he skips even going into his father's room. Ebisu tries to ask him for opinions on linens, guest slippers, soap, and table settings, but Kakashi just waves that level of detail off.

"Whatever you pick will be fine," he says. "It doesn't need to be anything fancy, just functional."

Ebisu doesn't seem thrilled by that response, but the 17-year-old that Kakashi should be wouldn't know anything about flatware or thread count, and the 32-year-old actually piloting this body is just glad the village isn't a pile of splinters and corpses. Ebisu seems like he has pretty utilitarian tastes, anyway.

They take a loop around the property while Ebisu asks for input on landscaping and goes down a checklist of items. Does Kakashi want Ebisu to hire any servants? No. Does Kakashi want the engawa shutters put away? Yes. Does Kakashi want Ebisu to send the genin shopping for kitchen staples? Sure, why not, saves Kakashi the trip.

On one side of the house there's a tree that had been modest when Kakashi was a kid but has now grown to hang heavy branches over the house in an almost threatening manner; Ebisu wants permission to call in an arborist to get a professional opinion on whether they should prune or even remove the tree.

"Sure," Kakashi says carelessly. "Bring in whatever experts you need, you don't have to ask permission." Kakashi has been running back to back missions for most of his life, plus the Hatake clan itself has money. In the future, he'd never figured out what to do with all of it. Might as well blow it on the house.

"I'll provide a binder with a full accounting of the project, as well as receipts and invoices," Ebisu vows, even though Kakashi hasn't asked for that and probably won't look at the binder.

In the back of the estate, still inside the walls, there are a few simple training yards that need to be refurbished and a set of four dilapidated houses, which Kakashi tells Ebisu not to worry about for now—there's no one to live in them, after all. When they get back to the incredibly overgrown garden that drapes around the back and sides of the main house, they find the genin squabbling about which plants back here count as weeds and which don't.

One of them says, "But it's a tree," and crosses their arms over their chest like they think that solves everything.

Another of them gestures to a slim tree growing out of a raised bed with its roots pushing through the bed's stone wall: "It's clearly not supposed to be there."

The third one says, without any real confidence, "Maybe we can just get the stones out from between the roots...?"

Kakashi glances over at Ebisu out of the corner of his eye. He looks mortified.

"The proper thing to do is to ask the client!" Ebisu snaps out. "What have your jōnin instructors been teaching you?"

The three genin share a sheepish look and then turn to look at Kakashi.

"Ah, I don't really care, as long as people can walk around the garden," Kakashi says. He runs his eye over the riot of plants. "Maybe dig out the koi pond, though."

"There's a koi pond?" Ebisu demands. He starts scanning the garden in earnest, looking for it.

"I already found it, I think," one of the genin says glumly. One of his legs is filthy half way up his shin. As if he's stepped into an incredibly swampy section of the garden...like, say, a koi pond that's been slowly filling in with plant matter for years.

Ebisu starts scribbling extra notes onto the bottom of his checklist.

"You seem to have this well in hand," Kakashi says, and leaves.

He tries to find Gai for dinner and fails, either because Gai was sent on a mission or because Gai just doesn't spend time in the same places he will (would have?) a decade or more into the future. So he ducks into Ichiraku. It makes his chest hurt, but the food is warm and good and the stall is just as full of people as always. How long has it been since he was last at Ichiraku? It's been around four years for the body he's in.

Out of the corner of his eye he looks for Naruto, and again fails. It's too early for him to be wandering around the village.

As the sun sets, it's about time for the hospital's visiting hours to end. Kakashi meanders over to the hospital and ducks up into the tree where Amano has been standing guard since he and Tenzō were admitted. He uses the barest hint of chakra to stick to the tree and walk up, and doesn't even try to hide it. It's probably not really a secret that Amano is posted up in this tree and standing guard inside the room all day. Trying to absolutely hide yourself from everyone, up to and including the ANBU team in charge of the hospital's security, would be unwise; eventually you would be found, and the more surprised ANBU are the harder they try to kill you. Danzō probably knows, even. In truth, an obvious guard is almost better. Amano can't exactly assassinate anyone who tries to relocate Tenzō, so he's really best as a deterrent.

"Hey," Kakashi says to empty air, standing halfway up the tree, where he'll be just hidden from passing observers unless they walk right under the tree.

The empty air ripples just slightly, and Amano appears, leaning against the tree's trunk, one leg stretched out on his branch and the other dangling. "Hey."

Kakashi leans his elbows on the branch right in front of him, which is three or so feet below where Amano's foot is dangling, and gazes up. "You look like shit."

"I always look like shit, that's why I wear a mask professionally."

"I meant more shit than usual."

Amano isn't ugly, in truth. He does have some features that are unusual for a Hyūga, like lighter hair (which is usually some kind of mess) and a sturdier build (equally capable of jyuuken and punching someone's lights out) but he's not bad to look at. Or wouldn't be, if he'd take better care of himself. Kakashi had only ever noticed Amano so often with his mask off because he has a striking look to him, especially when he's standing next to Uchiha Uzume and actually having a great time.

"Is this your way of telling me I'm off duty?" Amano asks.

Kakashi nods. "I'm cleared for normal activities."

"Only you think this is normal." Amano shifts so both of his legs are hanging off the branch, looking down on Kakashi more directly. "I don't mind the all nighters. You could get some real sleep tonight."

It's true that Kakashi doesn't sleep great in the hospital, and never has. But chakra exhaustion had made sleeping much, much easier at the start of his hospital stay, so he's technically slept much more recently than Amano.

Kakashi wonders why Amano is doing this. Why he's so committed. Because of Kakashi's tentative connection to the Uchiha clan, a connection Kakashi shouldn't know about? Because of the dregs of responsibility he feels from being Kakashi's first ANBU captain? Because of old loyalty to the Yondaime? The questions burn in his chest and throat, and Kakashi swallows them.

"I wouldn't be able to sleep," Kakashi says. "I'd be kept up all night, worried about you spending yet another consecutive night in a tree. Then neither of us would sleep, which is some kind of criminal waste of village resources."

"Well, I'm not sure I can argue for wasting village resources, so I guess you win." Amano casts a quick, critical eye on the way Kakashi is half-hanging off the tree branch, saving chakra by not supporting 100% of his own weight with chakra when muscle can sub in just as well. He adds, "But I don't think you should spend longer than the length of this conversation up in this tree. Otherwise I won't be able to sleep for fear of you running out of chakra again."

"I'm just going to break back into Tenzō's room to keep him company," Kakashi says cheerfully.

"The nurses will throw you out."

"They can try to throw me out."

Amano laughs. It's such an unusual sound, Kakashi is convinced that before traveling back in time he'd heard Amano sneeze more than he'd heard him laugh. Kakashi does his best not to stare.

"Shoo," Kakashi urges, and adds some shooing motions for good measure as he lets himself slowly slide down the trunk of the tree to the ground.

"Fine, fine," says Amano, in the tone of someone reluctantly doing someone else a favor. He steps off the branch, drops for a couple feet, and then performs a shunshin without hand seals that whisks him away without even rustling any of the leaves.

Kakashi walks up the side of the hospital to Tenzō's room, and enters by popping the window's seal lock open with the access jutsu all ANBU are taught and then wiggling the window open. Using as little chakra as possible means he's not very stealthy. Kaneko is leaning into the room from the hall by the time Kakashi is climbing into the window.

"I told you to go home," Kaneko says.

Kakashi says, "I didn't want Tenzō to get lonely." Then he looks over at Tenzō, widens his eye, looks pathetic.

"Um," Tenzō says, suddenly finding himself roped into Kakashi's excuse. "Yes?" He looks over at Kaneko. "Yes. I was alone."

"Don't get in the way of the nurses," Kaneko says to Kakashi.

Kakashi points to Tenzō's right, which is helpfully the side that wasn't stabbed and is also the opposite side of the bed from Tenzō's IV. "I'll sit right there. They'll barely notice me."

Kaneko sighs and snaps the door shut. Kakashi climbs the rest of the way into the room and snaps the window after himself, waiting for a few moments to ensure that the window's seal refreshes and engages again.

Then Kakashi, as promised, sits on Tenzō's bed, leaning back against the wall.

"Taichō," Tenzō starts, but when Kakashi gives him a pointed look he corrects himself: "Kakashi," he says, with a little wince like the informality is scalding his tongue as he forces it out. "I, um..."

"I could actually sit across the room," Kakashi prompts gently, waving a hand widely enough to indicate both the visitor's chairs and the floor next to them. Kakashi's bed is already gone from the room. "I just thought, since we usually keep watch like this—"

Tenzō bobs his head. "It's fine," he says quietly.

The bed really isn't big enough for the two of them, but Tenzō relaxes first into his usual incredibly light mission sleep and then into the deeper, true sleep he usually only catches in the ANBU barracks as the stress and sleep deprivation catch up with his body.

When the nurses come into the room on their regular rounds, they stare at Kakashi but don't say anything. In the morning, Amano shows up with breakfast for himself and Kakashi and looks like he actually went somewhere to sleep and shower overnight. Kakashi briefly considers waiting to eat until the nurses come around with Tenzō's sad hospital breakfast...but he needs to find Gai. He eats with the efficiency and speed that only ANBU teaches and then heads out to look for Gai.

Kakashi skips past the first ring of training grounds entirely; most of them are reserved for genin teams and it's considered impolite to use the training grounds in the first ring to engage in the type of training Gai prefers. Instead, Kakashi wanders out past the civilian and clan districts that roughly make up the second ring of Konoha's urban landscape to look around the second ring of training grounds. The second ring training grounds are larger, more varied, and often more secluded. Kakashi narrows down his search and only stops by the relatively featureless training grounds that are either set well-back behind several other training grounds or are directly adjacent to industrial districts. Nearing his sixth potential training ground, Kakashi strolls past a blacksmith already stoking their fire for the day and hears a familiar, rhythmic thump in the distance.

Perfect.

He turns down the alley around the back of the blacksmith, cuts through a storage yard full of coal, and picks up the path to Training Ground 71.

Gai is standing in front of one of the wooden logs that most people use for target practice, kicking the side of the log over and over again by precisely tilting his weight back on one leg, and then twisting his body and throwing his other leg forward to slam his kick into exactly the same part of the log each time. He's practicing not just his form but also his precision, because he's clearly been at this a while but the log isn't even beginning to splinter.

Kakashi politely kicks some gravel down the path as he approaches, and when Gai turns to look he waves cheerfully.

"My rival!" Gai says. "I regret that I missed your discharge yesterday, I was sent on a short courier run."

Must have been something fairly important to send Gai somewhere and then back in a day, but Kakashi only lifts his eyebrow to indicate his general interest—in case Gai can talk about it—before waving off Gai's apology: "I should apologize to you for being discharged at an inconvenient time."

Gai bursts into a short gust of laughter, and then says, "I see you've been improving your sense of humor, Kakashi. I would love to see how else you've continued your admirable path of self-improvement, but I don't think you've been cleared for spars yet!"

Kakashi had started trying to be funny to stave off boredom and apathy, but he'd started being funny out loud to make Gai laugh. Nice to see he's still got it.

"Technically I could do a taijutsu spar, if I thought I could keep it to muscles only." Not that Kakashi thinks he could. "I just came to ask a favor."

"Well, I can't say yes until you ask!"

Kakashi smiles under his mask. "Can I nap on your couch?"

Gai blinks at him.

"Roughly now until..." Kakashi thinks. "Well, all day."

"Of course," Gai says, almost by rote. Then Kakashi can practically see him turning over all the possible reasons why Kakashi might need to sleep all day, and deciding not to ask.

Gai only has the training ground for five more minutes, so he abandons his training to walk Kakashi halfway across the village to his apartment. It's not the apartment Kakashi had expected him to live in, so it turns out it's good that Kakashi was pretending not to know where Gai lives. Gai unlocks the door, disarms the traps, and lets Kakashi in. Then they take an extremely short tour of the one-room apartment and Gai heaps an armful of blankets and pillows into Kakashi's arms before leaving to the next training ground he's reserved for the day.

Kakashi borrows Gai's shower—there's a towel included in the mess of blankets—and then arranges himself comfortably on the couch to sleep off the day. When he wakes up, Gai is cooking something that includes an eye-watering amount of spice. From the look Gai casts him over his shoulder, Kakashi can tell that he's about to be guilted into staying for dinner. To preempt this baldfaced manipulation, Kakashi happily parks himself comfortably at the kitchen table and waits for his curry.

They both eat quickly, and Gai passes on a handful of village gossip. Kakashi leaves Gai's apartment with his mouth still burning and spends another night perched on Tenzō's bed, giving him the peace of mind to actually sleep.

It's not exactly a thrilling guard duty, but Kakashi has plenty of things to think about. Ebisu's work on the house. The upcoming Konoha Council meeting. The dinner he's promised to attend at Uchiha Uzume's home. What to say to Tenzō about ending his ANBU career, at least for now.

He's doing what he can. If it's not enough, he can always destroy the world again for a third chance, he tells himself, mostly joking.

Amano returns again in the morning, and this time Kakashi lingers to eat breakfast with Tenzō, though he and Tenzō both use the same ingrained ANBU trick to eat without anyone seeing, which Kakashi has been told somewhat ruins the point of eating together because they both finish very quickly. Still. The thought counts, like Gai would say.

On his way out, he notices that Tenzō is reaching the end of the Land of Birds book. Tenzō has always been reading nonfiction every time Kakashi has caught him at it, and he doubts that Tenzō will appreciate the philosophy book that Gai brought. Kakashi certainly hasn't. And there are, now that Kakashi thinks about it, some things that Tenzō will need and definitely doesn't have.

Kakashi really doesn't enjoy shopping, so he stops by the ANBU barracks first, with a detour to the Tea Street entrance to get his Hound mask.

He and Tenzō had been between teammates when they'd been assigned the mission to Land of Earth, so two of the beds in their shared room are already empty, stripped of even sheets or privacy curtains. Kakashi first clears out his few personal items. They're almost entirely work equipment and spare jōnin blues; he'd put most of the sentimental objects he couldn't bear to trash in a secure storage locker before he went into ANBU full time. Tenzō's bunk is even worse. There isn't anything there that hadn't been issued by ANBU except for things presumably issued by ROOT.

It's tempting to leave everything in Tenzō's bunk behind, but Kakashi doesn't want to make that choice for Tenzō. He packs up everything that doesn't strictly have to be returned to the ANBU quartermaster. Then he officially clocks himself and Tenzō out of ANBU by turning in his mask, and letting the quartermaster know that Tenzō's Cat mask is with Spider. Everything remaining in their room in the barracks can be processed for re-issue.

The quartermaster, a stooped old man with a beetle mask, seems kind of judgmental about Kakashi and Tenzō calling it quits. But old men are pretty much always like that, and Kakashi doesn't care what he thinks.

He borrows a featureless trainee mask from the quartermaster, dumps it off in an unlocked locker at his exit, and then heads off to one of the more popular shopping streets. He'll take Tenzō shopping for more things once Tenzō can walk around, he decides, but for now Tenzō needs...stuff. Sweatpants. Socks. Underwear. Shirts and a sweater. House slippers. A leafy, potted plant of indeterminate origin. All the important things in life. Kakashi also grudgingly spends some money on himself to get a pair of house slippers and a bath robe, and then, while he's thinking about it, picks up an assortment of toiletries.

And some dog shampoo, because pretty soon Kakashi will be medically cleared to summon his pack and there's no way Pakkun and the rest will choose to stay clean and dry while exploring the Hatake grounds.

And some dog treats, because Kakashi's pack deserves the best.

All of these things Kakashi brings to the Hatake main house, where he confirms things are on track and then stows away his purchases wherever seems to make sense.

It's nearly noon by this point. Kakashi picks up takeout on his way to the hospital for himself and Amano, and on a whim ducks into a bookshop while his order is being prepared. The first nonfiction book he sees is about civilian wildfire management in the southern regions of Land of Fire and the ecology of the forest in that area, which seems close enough to the book about the plants in Land of Birds. Kakashi buys it.

He enters Tenzō's hospital room through the door because it's just not worth it to wall walk while carrying takeout (he learned that the hard way) and takes great satisfaction in the bewildered, surprised looks he gets from both Tenzō and Amano for the book and the food respectively. When Tenzō's lunch is brought around they all eat together again, and then Kakashi wanders off to break into Gai's apartment and lie down on the couch, which still has the blankets and pillows from the previous night laid out on it.

He sleeps through Gai preparing dinner and going back out for his evening training (presumably—possibly he's getting drinks with Genma and Ebisu) but when he cracks open Gai's fridge there's a bowl of stir fry waiting there with RIVAL written on the saran wrap.

Kakashi eats it, enjoys it thoroughly, and decides he needs to stop back into that bookshop to buy a cookbook. He doesn't need a cookbook, but it will be important for plausible deniability. No one is going to believe he learned to cook in ANBU.

Tenzō jerks awake very early the next morning, when the birds have only just started chirping and the sky is still dark. He lies completely still for about 20 minutes afterwards as his breathing slowly evens out. He eventually asks Kakashi, "Are we going to do a mission down south soon?"

Kakashi looks down at him. They make eye contact. Tenzō's face is carefully neutral, completely composed, his body relaxed.

"No," Kakashi says. "I just thought you'd like the book."

Tenzō gives a little nod.

"Do you?" Kakashi asks.

Tenzō gives another little nod.

"Good."

Amano comes in. They all eat breakfast. Since Tenzō is done with the Land of Birds book, Kakashi picks it up so he can take it with him to read on Gai's couch.

As Kakashi is about to drop out of the window, Amano says: "Don't forget about dinner tonight."

Kakashi shudders and tries not to think about it. He goes straight to Gai's, flops down on the couch, and starts to read. He means to read just until he's tired, but it's impossible.

He's expected at Uchiha Uzume's house for dinner tonight, after the council meeting. He's going to have to walk through the Uchiha District looking for her house. He might have to ask directions from kindly old Uchiha folks on the street. He's going to have to look at their settlement and remember what it looked like when it was full of corpses. Children, old people, civilians, even many of the animals—understanding why it happened doesn't make the memory any easier. And then Kakashi is going to have to sit down at Uchiha Uzume's table and...

Let her talk to him.

Who knows what she'll say.

Kakashi wastes most of the morning in this way, trying not to think about it as he reads, and finishes the whole book. Knowing now that sleep won't come, he flips back to the front of the book and starts reading again, slower this time, trying to guess what information Gai will want to quiz him about and what information Gai will expect Kakashi to ask about.

Maybe he can suggest they stage their challenge somewhere they can get trashed, one shot for any wrong answer. Gai had stopped drinking almost completely in solidarity with Rock Lee after his genin's natural inclination to drunken fist styles was discovered, so Kakashi has a limited number of years remaining to stumble home comfortably drunk with Gai. And now Kakashi's place could have a guest room, which just seems too convenient to let go to waste.

Just before noon, Kakashi hauls himself off of Gai's couch, folds all the blankets up neatly, and heads for the Hokage Tower.

The Konoha Council meeting room is sparsely populated when Kakashi slips in. The glut of empty seats probably isn't because being late is in fashion with Konoha's major and founding clans. Rather, it seems like Danzō has been winning this battle of attrition so well that more than half the clan heads who have a right to attend haven't shown up. Mostly the smaller clans, which makes sense. Given the way Danzō has been running the meetings...for the clans with less than a couple dozen people, it probably makes more sense to spend this time doing basically anything else.

On this particular afternoon, the Hokage and Uchiha Fugaku are both missing, too. Kakashi is definitely late—he gets a few looks from people near the door when he slips in—but he's not so late that he's missed the chance to raise his hand and declare himself present when the Hatake clan is read off of the attendance sheet by the Council's stenographer.

Everyone turns to stare at him. Kakashi waves. The stenographer marks him present and moves on with the precision and grace of a career desk ninja.

Danzō is the one to call the meeting to attention. He reads off a few notices about security alerts, upcoming diplomatic actions, and the village's ongoing efforts to aide the Daimyo in responding to a landslide that took out an important town and adjacent iron mine on the border of Land of Rivers several days ago. No one has any comments about those (although Kakashi does privately think to himself that that's probably what Gai's courier mission was about) so Danzō says, "Before we move onto new items, we have some business from the last meeting to get through. As I stated last month, several of our departments have outgrown their space in the Tower and its outlying buildings. We've been sourcing buildings close to our village's administrative sector, and we've selected—"

Kakashi interrupts, very politely, by standing up.

Danzō, forced to acknowledge that Kakashi wants to speak by the procedures of the Council, nods at him.

"This is my first meeting, so I apologize if I'm asking for information already provided. As many of you probably know, I was only recently released from the hospital, so I haven't had time to access the secure archive with full meeting minutes. Councilman Shimura, could you go over which departments need more space." Kakashi then sits back down and leans back in his chair.

"Of course," Danzō says. He manages not to sound grudging. "Primarily, the Information Tracking department needs more space for analysts to perform their duties, including records processing. The Mission Desk is hiring more analysts and they can't do their work outside of the tower, so half of the Logistics & Strategic Reserve department must find new accommodations. The Diplomatic Corps has requested and been approved for additional office space as they prepare for inter-village Chūnin Exams to begin next year. Finally, as I'll be going over later in this meeting, we're expecting to double the number of auditors in the Health Department, as well as assign the department several new duties. They'll need three or four times as much space as they currently have to run their new programming. Is that of satisfactory detail?"

Kakashi nods from his seat.

"Now, the building we've selected—"

Kakashi stands up and, when begrudgingly acknowledged again, he asks, "Councilman Shimura, could you walk us through your selection process for the building? What were the criteria, and which other buildings did the village consider?" He sits back down.

Danzō's nostrils flare as he sucks in what Kakashi supposes is a calming breath before he launches into the requested details. Most of the buildings in the target area were village-owed housing that couldn't simply be converted. Several buildings that already contained office space or which would be easily converted were owned by various clans and other private entities, and the village didn't wish to purchase or attempt to seize new land for low level administrative needs. "This left either the hospital and its labs...or the Konoha Military Police building, which already has ample space for storage and offices. I think we can all agree that the choice here is obvious."

To be fair, Kakashi would decide to get rid of the police before he'd get rid of the hospital. Multiple other people in the room seem to be thinking along the same lines. But Kakashi stands again.

"Surely you're not going to argue we dismantle the hospital," Danzō says.

Kakashi says, "I want to know where the KMP will be stationed if you'll be moving low-level administrators into their space."

He does not sit back down.

Danzō says, "We've sourced a warehouse that can be easily retrofitted for the Konoha Military Police's needs."

"And where is the warehouse, please?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Kakashi sees several minor clan heads exchange looks with each other. He also see Tsume break into a sharp grin.

Face completely neutral, Danzō lists off a ward, then a street inside that ward. It's even further from the center of the village than the training field that Kakashi had tracked Gai down in several days before.

"As esteemed elders of the village, I'm sure you keep abreast of what goes on in the village and are therefore aware that I was brought to the hospital nearly a week ago along with a severely injured teammate," Kakashi says. Then he removes his gaze from the three elders sitting at the head of the room and looks across the clan heads, all of whom are watching him with interest. "What I'm afraid gossip may have refrained from passing on is the important role that the Konoha Military Police played in saving my teammate's life. He was being transported via stretcher down Tea Street, which has become a main thoroughfare for cart traffic since its reconfiguration last year. KMP officers were able to quickly halt traffic and clear obstacles so that my teammate could reach the hospital in time, and because the police station is so close to Tea Street they were able to call in back up extremely quickly to the intersections that didn't already have KMP officers stationed at them. It wasn't the first time I've admired the KMP's ability to quickly deploy and organize additional officers, but in this particular case they enabled my teammate to receive life-saving, career-saving medical attention."

Nohara Heiichirō stands.

The Nohara are probably the only clan that Kakashi has avoided more than the Uchiha, but he nods politely to cede the floor to Heiichirō.

Heiichirō says, "I've worked at the hospital for fifteen years. KMP officers are frequently integral to getting people to the hospital fast enough for treatment to be effective. Injured teams coming through the gates, training accidents, heart failure, unexpected labor—whatever it is, everyone's going to eventually need to be rushed to the hospital, and you should hope you're standing right next to an Uchiha when it happens." He nods and sits down.

Kakashi, still standing, gives Heiichirō a nod that Heiichirō ignores. Fair enough.

"The Konoha Military Police already have a perfectly functional station, and I don't see a benefit in moving them, especially if this new warehouse you've sourced would need to be refurbished for them," Kakashi says. "If the administrators that need more space don't need the high security of the Tower, the Tower sub-basements, or the facilities hidden under the mountain, then they're clearly not handling anything so time-sensitive or important that a refurbished warehouse out past the second ring of training fields would impact their work much. The KMP, meanwhile, should remain centrally located for the safety of our village's population."

Finally, Kakashi sits down.

Aburame Shibi stands up. "I agree," he says. He sits down.

Inuzuka Tsume and three more people stand up, then look at each other awkwardly. Nara Shikaku stands up, and they all nod to him and sit back down.

"Raise your hand if you also agree," Shikaku says.

Hands go up all over. It's not unanimous, but it's...pretty good. Kakashi is pretty sure.

Shikaku sits down and Danzō finally takes back control of the floor. "We'll take your comments into consideration," he says, and then makes a pointed gesture with the piece of paper he's got with his notes for the session. "We have much more to get through, so I'll have to move on to the next point on our agenda."

A room full of shinobi clan heads isn't going to break into the obvious whispering and restlessness that a civilian council might at having a topic of concern so thoroughly shut down without resolution. And it probably helps, for some definition of helping, that the clan heads in the room are used to Danzō running the meetings this way. Still, there rises a certain tang to the air. A sharpness. Not quite intent, but a pressure pushed down onto the room by the attention of a room half-full with jōnin-level shinobi who are now watching Danzō and Kakashi both very carefully.

Danzō starts in on the next agenda item, this time the orphanage budget, which has been expanded.

Kakashi stands and asks if there's been a notable increase in orphans since the budget was last expanded six months ago, and if so what's being done to investigate. Around the room, more glances are being exchanged. He sees the head of the Yokkaichi clan lean over to whisper in the ear of the Shiga clan head. Shikaku is leaning forward in his seat, elbows on his desk, hands folding in front of his mouth.

Danzō says, "We simply performed an audit and discovered that there were some errors in our previous budget."

"I see, I see," Kakashi says. "Councilman Shimura, is there any way for us to review the two budgets? It's important for us to understand how mistakes like this have happened."

Danzō's face winces into a smile that's not a smile. "Individuals who are interested in any of the village's budgets must apply directly to the Hokage for access."

Uninterested in letting Danzō get the final word, Kakashi sits down but comments idly to himself—loud enough to carry across much of the room—"Wasn't there something in the bylaws requiring we be provided with documentation of budgetary adjustments before the meeting?"

No one responds directly, but this time there is a genuine rustle of movement and whispers through the room, so unsubtle that it has to be pointed. Danzō presses forward to his next topic. It's a new set of policies, regulations, and laws that would restrict and regulate street food vendors. The Sandaime is due to sign it into law this evening, so that the new law and regulations can go into effect just after the new year, which doesn't leave a lot of time for the assembled clan members to go over the proposal or lodge complaints.

The new regulations that Danzō lays out would require street vendors to obtain permits to stay in business, permits that they'll only be able to get if they've taken food safety classes that get them certified by the Health Department. There will be a limited number of permits available, a far smaller number than the number of food stalls currently set up on Konoha's streets, and none of the current food stalls will be grandfathered into the new system. "The number of permits available per year are based on the number of individuals the Health Department believes they'll be able to pass through the certification program," Danzō says. "Of course, the greatly reduced number of food stalls will improve the order and harmony of our streets, as well as ease the problems we've had with crowding and traffic flow on some streets popular with food stall proprietors."

Akimichi Chōza stands. He tells Danzō, "I don't see how restricting street vendors will improve the economy. They're an important part of how commerce functions in the city. Also, many of us have clan members who derive their income from such businesses."

There's an unsubtle murmur of agreement from around the room. Nothing about how the clan heads around the room are sitting has obviously changed, but Kakashi has to keep deliberately relaxing tense muscles, and up at the front of the room Danzō's stance has shifted to a more combat-ready stance from the casual posture he'd started with. Mitokado Homura and Utatane Koharu, sitting behind Danzō, have both tucked their hands into pockets or under their table, closer to weapons.

Danzō manages to sound entirely unconcerned when he says, "Understandable concerns, as always. But we have to look after the health of our citizens, don't we? You know we've had several health code violations recently."

Shikaku stands. At Chōza's nod, he says, "There's a balance to be struck between safeguarding our citizens and restricting their personal freedom. Killing an entire business sector because there's an occasional crowd on the street doesn't make any sense. The Akimichi-Nara-Yamanaka alliance is opposed."

Chōza remains standing. Yamanaka Inoichi slowly rises to his feet, although he doesn't indicate he has anything to add to what Chōza and Shikaku have already said.

"I'm afraid you've misunderstood me, Nara-sama. Improving the efficiency of our streets is a welcome side effect, but our primary concern is the health of our populace, and we've specifically crafted this proposal to ensure the Health Department will be able to regularly inspect all food stands," Danzō says smoothly. He outlines several recent examples of people getting sick after eating at various food stalls.

Shikaku, Chōza, and Inoichi don't look particularly moved by this rhetoric. They do not sit down. One of Inoichi's hands is lingering near his thigh pouch, although not so closely as to be obviously threatening.

Kakashi stands. "Councilman Shimura, thank you for providing this information. You've been very focused on the physical health benefits of this plan, which of course is admirable. But you haven't mentioned anything about the potential impact to the social health of the village."

"The social health of the village?" Danzō asks, and sounds as if this is the stupidest phrase he's ever heard.

"The social health of the village?" Shikaku asks, and sounds as if Kakashi has given him an unexpected foothold.

Kakashi says, "You know, the Akimichi would be a lot more intimidating if they didn't have a squadron of grannies slipping us a little extra every time you stop by one of their food carts."

About half the room chuckles, and most of the clan heads watching nod. The moment of levity does nothing to cut the tension in the room.

"Konoha's street food is an important part of the village's cultural exchange, and was fundamental to the successful integration of new ninja in the early days of our founding," Kakashi continues.

"Who are you to talk about the early days of our founding?" Mitokado Homura asks. He doesn't stand or wait to be acknowledged.

Kakashi shrugs at him. "I heard it from Minato-sensei, who must have learned it from Jiraiya-sama, who must have learned it from Sandaime-sama. Of course, we could ask the Sandaime, but he's...busy, I suppose?"

Other than the village elders, everyone in the room straightens up just a little when Kakashi mentions Minato. Good.

Utatane Koharu says, "Unfortunately, Hiruzen is busy going over the Uchiha's newest dispute over the Konoha Military Police's budget and reimbursement." She doesn't stand either.

Well, that probably explains where Uchiha Fugaku is.

Danzō says, "The Hokage has final say on whether or not to sign this document. You're welcome to bring your concerns to him after this meeting, Kakashi."

Kakashi does not usually care to be addressed respectfully, but that doesn't mean he's going to let Danzō address him like he's a child. Kakashi says, "Ah, Danzō, I hadn't realized that we were so close. Or is it that our esteemed elders need a refresher on the etiquette and procedures of this Council?"

There are clear, audible mutters of support from the clan heads. Kakashi hears Tsume say, "Yeah, those fuckers never stand."

Danzō's face twitches.

Koharu and Homura finally stand. "We," Koharu says in a slow and measured tone, "have been on this Council for longer than you've—"

"There's nothing in the bylaws that says longstanding members are exempt from its procedures," Kakashi breaks in, with his most bored and dismissive tone. Out of the corner of his eye he sees that a good dozen clan heads have stood up, but none of them are trying to catch his eye. In fact, they're all keeping their eyes on the village elders. "I cede the floor to Nara Shikaku."

Shikaku leans over the desk in front of him. "I'm happy to relocate to the Hokage's office if our esteemed elders feel it's necessary," he says slowly.

"It's not necessary," Danzō snaps. "You can visit him in your own time to whine about the work we've put in to—"

"Don't be so hasty," Shikaku says, in a sharper tone than Danzō's. A dangerous tone. "The Konoha Charter ensures the Clan Council has the right to veto proposals brought forward by the Hokage if we reach a certain threshold of dissidence. Later agreements settled on a 30% minority for reconsideration of any motion, and a 70% threshold to veto."

Mitokado Homura jumps in: "This Council ceded that right at the beginning of the second war. We've discussed this—"

Chōza slams a fist down on his desk. It cracks neatly in two, which might as well have been a bomb going off in the chamber. Very quietly, Chōza says: "Councilman Mitokado, it is not your turn to speak."

As if he'd never been interrupted, Shikaku continues: "The Wartime Decision Efficiency Act, which was the agreement that suspended the veto power of this Council, was only meant to be implemented during actual wartime. As the head of the Nara Clan, I am formally requesting that Councilman Shimura Danzō acknowledge that not only are we currently at peace, but furthermore that the Yondaime signed the required document to end the suspension of veto power—"

Shikaku is interrupted again. This time by Danzō, who says, "No such document exists, and you're being impossibly naïve if you think we're not constantly at war."

Kakashi stands, finally. He says, "Minato-sensei showed me the document ending the Wartime Decision Efficiency Act after he signed it during a meeting with Danzō."

Every clan head in the room is suddenly on their feet, and no one is waiting for acknowledgement before speaking. They speak to each other and they shout at Shikaku, Kakashi, and Danzō. Everyone here is too well-trained to leak killing intent into the room, but not everyone has iron clad control of their emotions and their chakra, so that slight pressure to the room now cracks open and erupts into an almost physical threat of danger hanging in the air. No one pulls weapons or starts flinging jutsu, but it's the most dangerous situation Kakashi has ever witnessed inside a room comprised only of loyal Konoha ninja.

"We'll be unable to continue while the members of this council are committed to letting their emotions overwhelm their common sense and sense of civic duty, so as the Chair of the Konoha Council, I officially call this meeting to an end," Danzō announces, loudly, throwing his voice over the noise of the crowd.

The room falls suddenly, almost deadly quiet.

"You are welcome to leave," Aburame Shibi says, "but it is foolish to believe you can end the meeting before we would like it to be ended."

This...is not really what Kakashi thought he'd be kicking off by mentioning the Wartime Decision Efficiency Act to Tsume. In a lot of ways it's better, because it kind of seems like the clan members he's surrounded by are about to gang up and kill Danzō. That would solve so many problems, although Kakashi is undoubtedly witnessing the birth of new problems to replace those that would be solved.

For example, the doors at the front of the chamber, behind the Village Elders, bang open and Sarutobi Hiruzen comes striding in. Uchiha Fugaku trails behind. The tension in the room doesn't break, and no one greets the Hokage respectfully. They do turn to look at him, however.

After eyeing the room with everyone on their feet and Chōza's broken desk for a few seconds, the Sandaime demands, "Tell me what's happened."

But he makes a mistake.

A very crucial mistake.

He says this to Danzō.

Danzō says, "We were having a disagreement about the new food stall restrictions that became..." Danzō casts a glance over at Chōza's destroyed desk. "Heated. I've just ended the meeting so that we can all return with cooler heads for the next session."

The clan heads are well-trained shinobi, and they don't start talking over Danzō or really react in any obvious way to the Sandaime looking to him for answers. It isn't, on the face of things, inappropriate or even unreasonable. Danzō is the Chair of the Council, and acts in the Hokage's place to deliver information and receive input from the clan heads. It's only right that the Hokage look to Danzō to figure out what's upset the Konoha Council so severely. But the Sandaime barely glances at the rest of the room to look for a second opinion. He only glances at the desk and his lips quirk with humor.

"I see. I understand of course that it can be hard when changes are implemented, especially so suddenly. I suppose there wouldn't be any harm in pushing the dates back so we can have until the next session to think it over."

Shikaku says, "Hokage-sama, I believe you should push back everything that was on the agenda today. Our disagreement was about more than just the food stall regulations."

"I always value your opinion, Shikaku," the Sandaime says carefully, possibly because he's beginning to see that Kakashi has destabilized Konoha's government. "Would you and Chōza—and Inoichi, of course—like to retire to my office to talk it over?"

Hyūga Hiashi speaks for the first time: "Hokage-sama, it is not only the Akimichi-Nara-Yamanaka alliance who are troubled by the meeting we've just had." He turns his head so that it's clear his pupiless eyes are focused on Uchiha Fugaku. "Tell me, are you aware that the village has decided to move the Konoha Military Police into a warehouse in a ward on the cusp of the third ring?"

Fugaku was clearly not aware, because he asks, "They're what?"

Danzō says, "If you had been at the meeting, you would have found out at the same time as everyone else."

Tsume says, "Nah, being here wouldn't have helped because we haven't fucking got our veto power back because someone has subverted the will and orders of the Yondaime."

Fugaku is clearly gearing up to yell, but the Sandaime breaks in. "This sounds like a very complicated matter, and I would hate to spoil it by rushing into debate when tempers are clearly high. Let us disperse for the day. I'll clear my schedule for tomorrow."

"Alright," Shikaku says. "And will you agree not to implement anything we discussed or should have discussed here today until after the Council's next meeting?"

"I have always valued your opinion, Shikaku," the Sandaime says again, but this time he sounds somewhere between exhausted and disappointed. "Yes, if you believe it's necessary, then I'll agree to that. Now, everyone go home."

People begin to filter out. Kakashi finds himself exiting the Tower alongside Tsume. "I would have agreed to attend these council meetings much earlier if I knew how fascinating they could be," Kakashi tells her.

She eyes him. "Who was trying to get you to attend?"

"Oh, the Sandaime has been encouraging it for several years now."

That startles a laugh out of her, an unrestrained cackle that makes people on the street turn and stare. "I'll be glad to have you around," she says, and pats him on the shoulder. "Forget what was wrong with you, are you fit to drink? My treat."

"I have dinner plans," Kakashi says with a sigh. He would love to get drunk. It's been so long. And it wouldn't involve talking to any Uchiha, probably. And maybe he'd get to pet more dogs. But no. He'd promised Crow, sort of. He'd promised himself, in Crow's memory.

"Next time then!" Tsume says cheerfully.

She claps him on the shoulder once and then fades into the crowd just as Nohara Heiichirō is fading out of it, a frown on his face. Great. Kakashi braces himself.

But Heiichirō just says, "Hatake, you're going to attend the so-called optional hospital classes that the Sandaime promised to send you information on, and if he doesn't send you any information you're going to stop by the hospital and ask about them." Then he eyes Kakashi suspiciously and adds, "If you don't take them, I'll make sure your hospital rooms are always right above the Children's Clinic."

Kakashi shivers, but feels the need to protest. "I really don't have chakra control good enough to—"

"Shut the hell up," Heiichirō demands. "It's clearly good enough to do some healing, so you're going to take the classes and learn enough not to fuck it up. You did a good job healing that boy, considering the circumstances, but it was clumsy as shit. Do you go out on missions with weapons you don't know how to use, Hatake? Say you'll come to the classes!"

There's no defense against that. And anyway, Kakashi has suddenly realized what Tsunade would do if she ever got wind that he performed clumsy abdominal surgery and then refused to take any real lessons at the hospital. She'd punch him so hard he'd wind up 15 more years in the past.

"Alright, alright," Kakashi relents, and gives Heiichirō his word.

Chapter Text

When he and Rin and Minato-sensei had finally returned to Konoha from the frontlines, the news about Rin transplanting Obito's eye into Kakashi had preceded them by more than a week. By the time they'd made their way through the extra security implemented during wartime, there was a small crowd of Uchiha waiting there, as many as could fit in the plaza in front of Konoha's main gate without impeding traffic or military operations.

Uchiha Uzume had been at the front. Her hair rumpled, her eyes rimmed red, her Sharingan spinning. "What happened?" she'd asked.

Kakashi hadn't been able to look at her after that first quick glance. He hadn't been able to look at any of them. He'd even been resentful of Minato-sensei's hand on his shoulder. He shouldn't be supported. He should have died in that cave, and Obito should be the one walking into the village. There would have been no one waiting by the gates to demand answers from Obito, after all.

"What happened?" Uzume had asked again. "Tell me!" she had demanded, her voice rising. She'd stepped forward, and continued to shout: "What happened? What happened? Hatake Kakashi! Why do you have his eye?"

It's hard to remember what had happened next. Had Kakashi spoken? Or had his breath just hitched? Had he looked up and seen tears in Uzume's eyes as her clanmates held her back, or had he just imagined that?

What Kakashi does know is that Minato-sensei's chakra had wrapped around him and Rin, whisking them off to the hospital, and for years he hadn't been able to so much as look at an Uchiha without his hands shaking.

Amano finds him at the Memorial Stone. "You'll be late," he says.

Kakashi hums noncommittally. Maybe he wants to be late. Maybe he should go buy an Icha Icha novel, since the first couple have already been published. The really good thing about becoming a weird guy who's late for everything and annoys the shit out of everyone is that people stop expecting anything from you.

The list on the Memorial Stone is much, much shorter than it had been the last time Kakashi had seen it. Doesn't make Kakashi feel any better about standing here, though. The worst thing about coming back in time is that there's not a place to memorialize all of Kakashi's dead, people who will now never exist because he'll change the future too much. So many of the people whose names he'd like to see inscribed on a stone weren't even Konoha ninja. Of course, at the end, there hadn't even been a Konoha to be a ninja of.

Amano stands there with him for a few moments, content not to rush him because he has no idea that Kakashi could stay here for hours. Days, under the right circumstances.

"Gai is with Tenzō," Amano says eventually. "I tracked him down last night to ask if he'd cover."

Kakashi is going to have to give Gai some kind of explanation for why Tenzō needs to be watched. Not because Gai will demand an explanation, not because Gai wouldn't happily do it without one, but because Kakashi wants Gai and Tenzō to get along. It would be hard for anyone to leap to the truth when ROOT is so secret and Tenzō himself is such an unknown, which means Gai will fill in the next best explanation: that Tenzō needs to be watched because of something about Tenzō. Kakashi is already upending his entire life to give Tenzō a place to live, and he hadn't elaborated on why Tenzō couldn't just get a village-issued apartment. He can't have Gai thinking that it's not safe to leave Tenzō alone.

But that's not Amano's problem, and it's a problem that will keep.

Kakashi asks, "Are you coming to dinner, then?"

"Uzume wanted me to come to dinner." Amano pauses. "She thought you'd be more comfortable with me there."

At last, Kakashi looks away from the Memorial Stone. He will be, Kakashi realizes. Like going into enemy territory. Like leaning against rubble at the end of the world. It's better to have Amano next to him than to not. "Well," Kakashi says. "At least I won't have to ask anyone for directions."

A little smile sneaks onto Amano's face. They leave the Memorial Stone together and head across the village. They start out on the rooftops, to avoid the early evening traffic down on the streets, but run into an unexpected problem: when they hit the edge of the Aburame Ward, there's a barrier set up across the designated roof path through the ward.

An Aburame sitting on the roof tells them, "We've unfortunately discovered a structural inefficiency in our buildings that makes them unsafe for roof hopping. Please descend to the street for an alternate path."

The only thing less likely than the Aburame building one building wrong is them building all of their buildings wrong, but the Aburame Ward counts as their clan grounds, embedded into the fabric of the village just like the Uchiha used to be and the Akimichi currently are. Amano and Kakashi shrug, descend to the streets, and then meet an Aburame who tells them that the street is actually closed for repairs. They have to detour around the entire Aburame Ward. Kakashi overhears several chūnin in Intelligence Division jackets complaining that the Akimichi district was the same way.

Kakashi says to Amano, "Let's cut through Training Ground 6, then the civilian ward right behind it, and follow the Second Ring Training Path. It doesn't cut through any clan grounds."

Amano nods. "And let's avoid any Hyūga," he mutters. "Otherwise I'll probably end up guarding some alley in the Hyūga Ward."

Off they go. Roof hopping in the civilian residential districts is strictly forbidden, so they have to share the streets with everyone else who's been massively inconvenienced by the closing of various clan grounds. It's easy to forget how much of the village is actually owned by this or that clan as part of their clan grounds, but the village is really a patchwork. Kakashi wouldn't be surprised if there are a few smaller civilian districts near the center of the village that are entirely penned in by clan grounds.

It takes them twice as long to get to the Uchiha clan grounds as it normally would, and they only make such good time because they switch to tree hopping when they hit the Second Ring Training Path. Amano must have planned on it taking more time to find Kakashi or more time to convince him to actually go to dinner, though, because they're almost not late at all once they make it past the Uchiha on gate duty. The Uchiha on gate duty who doesn't even stop them on their way into the District, only waves casually to Amano.

"I visit Uzume a lot," Amano admits as they wind their way through Uchiha streets and Amano has to wave and nod to various Uchiha who pass by.

The clan grounds are obviously new, and feel...unfinished. The clan grounds were put up about three years ago, after a majority of the Uchiha's traditional clan grounds in the village were destroyed by a bijū ball, a larger one than the one that hit Tea Street. Kakashi had never frequented the Uchiha's residential streets before they'd moved, but he'd certainly roof hopped over them enough times to know that the Uchiha style involves complex adornment and messy, dense vegetable gardens in both the front and the back. They'd had one of the only wards in the city that allowed chickens. The residential streets that Kakashi is wandering through now lack the detailed decorations, the attention to detail, even the densely planted gardens.

Uzume's house has a training yard out back called The Pit. Kakashi can't actually see it from their angle of approach, but Amano assures him that it's there. She also has a cat—Kakashi confirms that he's got nothing against cats—and then they're at Uchiha Uzume's front door. Amano doesn't even knock. He just walks in and starts taking off his shoes in the genkan. He puts on a pair of house slippers with feathers hand-embroidered into them, slippers clearly meant for him although the pattern of feathers matches the pattern on Uzume's haori.

Kakashi adjusts his estimate of exactly how much time Amano spends here up another twenty or thirty percent. In fact, this is probably where Amano went when Kakashi took over the night shift.

There are normal guest slippers for Kakashi. He changes into them while Amano calls out into the house that they've arrived. Uzume appears from down the hall soon after. A huge orange cat trots along at her heels, meowing conversationally.

"You're late," Uzume says to Amano.

Amano says, "Half the clans in Konoha are going into lockdown or something," as he and Kakashi step up into the hall and follow Uzume into the kitchen.

There's an old woman who Kakashi doesn't recognize sitting at the kitchen table, with Shisui chattering away at her a mile a minute. Shisui clams up when he spots Kakashi coming down the hall at the end of the little procession from the front door, though, which gives the old woman the space to tell Amano, "Mikoto-sama sent people around to let everyone know that we're not to go to work tomorrow unless our village duties are essential to the village. Other clans are doing the same. And some are closing their land to outsiders, of course."

"Huh," Amano says. He looks over at Kakashi. "You were in the clan head meeting this afternoon, weren't you?"

Kakashi stares back at him, feeling a little put on the spot by having a question directly addressed to him.

Uzume, who's hovering over the stove poking at something in a pot, says: "Sit down, both of you. Oh. Also, this is my mom, Tokimi," She gestures at Tokimi with her non-spoon hand. "Technically this is her house, but we're always here. I don't know why I even have that apartment."

"You said the village owes it to you, and every Uchiha should requisition an apartment in the new General Forces housing until it becomes de facto clan grounds again," Amano provides helpfully.

"I guess I did say that. But it's kind of a shithole. No one should live there."

Feeling comfortably forgotten, Kakashi slides into a chair. He picks the one next to Shisui. Shisui is pretty young, which would have been a downside for Kakashi if he were really 17, but he's 32. He knows that a genin like Shisui can be impressed and distracted with jutsu if things get really dire.

Quietly, to fly under the radar of the comedic bickering that Uzume and Amano have fallen into across the kitchen, Shisui asks: "Were you really at that meeting? Mikoto-sama said they tried to take the police station away, too."

Kakashi winces. You know things are bad when even genin are worried about the politics. He says, "I was there. A lot of people weren't happy with the plan. I think it will be fine?"

Being optimistic is hard. But assuming this doesn't all explore into a civil war, the Uchiha are almost certainly going to be better positioned than they were last time Kakashi had been 17. Also, if Kakashi can't get Nara Shikaku and the rest of the clan heads to defang Danzō for him...well, there's always the more direct, less legal route.

"I hope so," Shisui says glumly.

Yeah, Kakashi is fucking this conversation up. "I've been very impressed with your shunshin," he says. "Are you planning to participate in the next Chūnin Exam?"

"Oh!" Shisui nods enthusiastically. "Yes. I need to find a team and a jōnin sponsor, though. Uzume-ba is going to ask around. There aren't any other Uchiha ready to take it, and we're...um, really light on jōnin."

Uzume is only a special jōnin, so she can't sponsor. Amano is a jōnin, but he's so deep in ANBU that Kakashi doesn't think he actually has the kind of General Forces footprint it would take to sponsor. "I hope she can find someone to sponsor you," Kakashi says, unwilling to get Shisui's hopes up. He'll talk to Gai so that Gai will ask around on Shisui's behalf. Maybe Genma and Ebisu, too. Thinking of Ebisu, Kakashi asks, "Do you have a training plan to prepare for the exams?"

"Yes, Uzume helped me with it!" Shisui says. Then he stares at Kakashi. "But," he says, "I could always use more pointers."

"Oh, I see how it is," Uzume says. "A jōnin walks into the room and you forget all about your poor auntie." She's carrying the whole pot over to the table. It's full of some kind of stew. Amano trails behind her carrying the rice while the stupidly fluffy cat does its best to trip him.

Tokimi says, "Shisui is just being opportunistic. Anyway, think of all the free time you'd get back."

"I'd probably just find some new brat to throw in the Pit," Uzume grouses.

It doesn't escape Kakashi's attention that Uzume and Tokimi have perfectly deflected Shisui's question for him. But he breaks into Shisui's protests that he's the only student Uzume needs right now to say, "I don't think I have any particular skill in teaching. But I could try."

Everyone looks at him, and Kakashi's skin itches.

Kakashi adds: "But I'm still under medical restrictions, so not...any time soon. A week or two, maybe."

"I can wait," Shisui assures him, the very picture of mature patience.

Uzume starts dishing out the stew and then they eat. The Council meeting comes back up again, and Kakashi gives a sparse description of events that downplays his own contributions to ratcheting the tension of the meeting up to the boiling point. Everyone at the table is almost as appalled to hear about the potential food stall regulations as they are about the police station.

"Bad enough that all of our shops were lost to the Kyūbi and never rebuilt," Tokimi says with disgust. "Now this? What are people supposed to do? We can't support them all inside the clan grounds, we don't get any kind of through traffic."

Well, that lends some insight into why the hell Danzō had been trying to press the regulations through. It had been hard to believe that Danzō really felt that strongly about the dangers of food poisoning.

Uzume says, "Enough about clan problems, there will be time for that later." She waves her hand, as if to clear away the looming miasma of potential economic ruin.

Shisui tells Kakashi about a funny C-rank he'd taken the month before that had shamefully, dangerously bungled information. Then he tells Kakashi about another funny C-rank where his commanding officer had broken five or six of Konoha's rules for conduct in the field. Kakashi begins to feel really, honestly panicked on this kid's behalf, and is almost grateful when they finish eating and Uzume turns to him with a serious face.

"Kakashi," she says. "I owe you an apology."

Kakashi's throat is suddenly dry. "I should be the one to apologize to you," he says. "Obito—"

He can't continue.

"Obito would have wanted me to give you the benefit of the doubt," Uzume says, more gently than he's ever heard her speak. "If you don't want to talk about it, and if you don't want an apology, then that's fine. Is that what you want?"

Kakashi nods.

"Well, that's a hell of a lot easier on me and my ego," Uzume admits. "But there are some things we do need to talk about. Did anyone tell you what having a Sharingan means?"

Eventually, yes. Fifteen years from now. About a decade too late. Kakashi shakes his head. "I wasn't really up for...discussion," he says.

Tokimi says, "You've been damn hard to find, that's for sure."

"Well, you're here now," Uzume says. "Kakashi, when Obito gave you his Sharingan, he made you a member of our clan. The Sharingan makes the Uchiha."

Kakashi takes a careful breath in. He says, "I don't think I'd be a very good clanmate."

"You won't be the worst," Shisui says helpfully. "I've got some really annoying cousins."

"It's not about you being good for the clan," Uzume says bluntly. "Be a total resource suck, it's fine. You're our responsibility, and it was clearly Obito's dying wish. You don't have to stop being a Hatake or even stop being a clan head. But we want you to be ours too." She purses her lips. "Obito's grandmother passed from chakra poisoning, or she'd be here on her knees begging you. Please at least hear us out."

Kakashi doesn't want to, but he's fifteen years in his own past. Every waking moment has torn open new wounds, even as some things have seemingly begun to heal at last. "Alright," he says. "Alright."

They go over the clan structure, the clan dues, the rights and responsibilities that would be expected of him. There's a detour for Tokimi to go over where he'd go on the sprawling Uchiha family tree—he would in fact become Shisui's newest cousin—and then finally a passing mention about Sharingan training that's pretty clearly a reference to the Mangekyou.

It's overwhelming and uncomfortable, but it doesn't sound...bad. And it would tie Kakashi's fate to the Uchiha. If he somehow fails to stop the massacre, at least he'd be doomed with them and wouldn't have to look Amano in the eyes later.

"It's a convincing argument," Kakashi admits when Uzume and Tokimi are done. "I'm defeated by it. I'll sign the registry."

Uzume slumps back in her chair with relief. "We've gotta do it tonight, before you change your mind," she jokes.

Tokimi says, "Not to rush you, but since you're already here it's not a bad idea. Shisui, go up to the main house and ask Fugaku-sama to meet us at the shrine."

Shisui bounces out of his chair. "You got it, Tokimi-baa." Then he's gone, shunshining away. A few seconds later the door taps closed, a delay probably brought on by swapping his house slippers for sandals.

The rest of them move at a slightly more reasonable place, packing leftover stew and rice into the refrigerator and then heading down the Uchiha District's twisting roads towards the Naka river. Walking with Amano had been strange earlier, but walking now with Amano, Uzume, and Tokimi is downright unnerving. There are Uchiha sitting outside in the last of the evening light on the residential streets and Uchiha practicing in various training fields as they leave the residential streets behind and approach the river. Every Uchiha they pass stares at Kakashi like they're seeing something strange, or dangerous, or monumental. It feels like they want to follow Kakashi down to the shrine, and maybe it would feel better to be watched so intensely if they did, but they don't. They stay where they are and just watch.

Kakashi had forgotten, as the years passed, how unknowable the Uchiha had always felt. How close-knit and obscure their culture is. They clearly all know why Kakashi is here, and where he's going. He wonders what they think of it, but is glad he doesn't know.

At the Shrine, there's an Uchiha priestess waiting with Fugaku, Shisui, and Itachi. Itachi is tiny, but just as serious as always even as he looks at Kakashi with wide eyes and clutches Shisui's sleeve. He's a genin already, his forehead protector glinting in the warm light from the sunset.

"I'm glad you've decided to join us," the priestess says. She lets them into a locked area of the shrine, but doesn't herself enter. She only closes the door behind them.

The lighting is...bad. There is none, except the thin, slanting rays of sunset cutting stripes up the wall. Kakashi sighs and pulls his forehead protector up, exposing the Sharingan. His Sharingan. He's suddenly able to pick out the standing-height table at the center of the room. There's a scroll case sat on its top that shines faintly with unidentifiable seals, an ink stone, an ink stick, a brush, and a small vessel that presumably holds water.

Kakashi steps up to the desk, and Fugaku joins him there. He opens the scroll case for Kakashi, and unrolls the scroll.

"Sign here," Fugaku says, setting the scrolls down on the table and tapping his finger on Kakashi's entry.

His name is written there in, Kakashi recalls, Uzume's hand. She'd done it years ago.

There aren't a good deal of signed names on the registry. Most of them have a toddler-sized fingerprint. The names with signatures also have a mark by them indicating that they'd married in, and an extra column filled in to indicate their spouse. Kakashi's extra column has Obito's name, but of course not the mark indicating he'd been married in.

Kakashi takes his time preparing the ink. Minato-sensei had always been very particular about his ink. If it doesn't have the right consistency, it won't sit right on the page. If it doesn't sit right on the page, the seal might fail. Of course, Minato had usually mixed his sealing ink with a good deal of blood. And Kakashi is only signing his name, which isn't something he needs to put chakra into. But it's good to take the task seriously, even so.

He signs his name perfectly. He sets the brush down.

"It's an honor to welcome you into the clan," Fugaku says. "Tokimi, will you schedule him for..." Fugaku waves a hand. "All the things. Training. You know."

"We'll work it out," Tokimi asks. She says to Kakashi, "It won't take up much of your time."

"I'm at your disposal," Kakashi says. He should probably put in for some kind of official leave, though. He has a lot of clan business to see to for the Hatake as well.

They exit the shrine, and the priestess darts into the room they've just vacated, presumably to clean the ink stone and brush. Fugaku says, "Excuse me for rushing away, but there is...quite a bit to do." He glances at Kakashi. "I have a meeting with the Akimichi-Nara-Yamanaka alliance in the morning thanks to you, you know."

Kakashi demurs. "I just let my curiosity get ahead of me."

"I'm sure," Fugaku says dryly. "Be careful, Kakashi."

He leaves, and takes Itachi with him. The rest of them set out in a slightly different direction, towards the Uchiha District's gates.

"I meant to ask earlier, and tell me to fuck off if I'm prying, but is everything good with that kid?" Uzume asks.

Everyone is so focused on Tenzō looking like a child. Probably because none of them have seen Tenzō ram a dozen tree limbs the width of Kakashi's arm through a guy's torso.

"He'll be getting out of the hospital tomorrow," Kakashi says.

"Sure, sure," Uzume says. "Amano told me that—don't be mad at him, I was really annoying about it—but what I meant was..." She trails off, somewhat meaningfully.

Right. Kakashi had guessed that Amano was coming here between guard duty shifts at the hospital, so of course Uzume and her family would know that he and Amano had felt guard duty was necessary. "I think I've handled it," Kakashi says. "For now."

If Danzō had cared to fight or subvert the Hokage over Tenzō, he's had years to do it, so it should be settled. Not that Kakashi is going to leave Tenzō completely alone anytime soon.

"Good, good," Uzume says. "Let me know if you need help kicking anyone's ass, it's what I'm good for."

Kakashi promises to keep her in mind.

"You'd better," she threatens vaguely. "And next time, bring Tenzō-kun with you."

That Kakashi doesn't promise, because he has no idea if Tenzō will want to attend an Uchiha family dinner. Also because thinking about a next time is really hard. Kakashi prods Shisui into telling him more about his hopes for the Chūnin Exam and what he thinks he needs to work on ahead of it. Shisui talks a mile a minute.

"You could teach Itachi, too," Shisui says when the Uchiha District gate is in view. "He's really smart. He's good at everything. It would be so fun."

"I'll think about it," Kakashi says. He's going to need a while before he's ready to let Uchiha Itachi come at him with a knife, even a version as young as this. Kakashi reaches out and pats Shisui on the head. "I'll see you soon."

Then he nods to Amano, Uzume, and Tokimi and begins his long, round-about journey to the hospital. The roadblocks have gotten worse while Kakashi was with the Uchiha, but it's a pleasant evening walk anyway. Kakashi is unsurprised to discover that the Nara have blocked off the road that divides the land they use for their deer from the land they let the Yamanaka use for greenhouses and gardens, as inconvenient as that is for Kakashi, but as he strolls past on his way to yet another 15 minute detour, someone down the road calls his name.

Kakashi turns to look.

Shikaku is ambling down the road, with Inoichi and Chōza at his side. Shikaku raises his hand in greeting, then gestures back the way he'd come. "You going that way?"

"I'm trying," Kakashi says with good humor. "It's been a nice walk so far."

"Coming from the Uchiha?" he asks. Shikaku's gaze is sharp, like he's looking right through Kakashi. Despite recent evidence to the contrary, Kakashi suddenly feels that Shikaku knows everything.

Kakashi shrugs. "Had dinner."

"Congratulations," Shikaku says, in an almost shockingly warm tone of voice. "You can cut through this way, Kakashi."

Minato-sensei had worked closely with Shikaku before and after taking the hat, and in the future that would never be Kakashi had worked closely with Shikaku as well. Here, in this time, they don't know each other very well. But Kakashi will look forward to rebuilding their working relationship. Maybe this time he won't spend quite so much effort deliberately annoying the man. Maybe.

"That will save me a lot of time," Kakashi admits. He jumps over the rope stretched across the road. "Have a good evening."

"You too, you too," Shikaku says.

"Great meeting today," Inoichi says as Kakashi passes by.

Kakashi chuckles. "I think the next one will be even better."

Down the road he goes, past greenhouses on one side and the quiet, dark Nara forest on the other. He has to skirt around some of the Nara residential neighborhood at the other end of the road, then eventually leap over another rope barrier to return to public streets.

A quirk of Konoha's layout makes Kakashi eventually double back slightly to take the first ring training road, and once he's set his feet on it he can't help but walk all the way to the end, to the Hatake clan grounds, to check on the main house one last time before he brings Tenzō home.

It's not that he doubts Ebisu, only that Kakashi is starting to get the feeling that it's going to be really annoying to cross the village tomorrow morning. Best to make sure he won't have to turn around and bring Tenzō back to the hospital.

At the main house, the civilian roofers are gone and the tree that was hanging over the house has been removed, but Kakashi doesn't enter the main house's walled estate because on his approach he sees Ebisu and his three genin outside the walls. They're watching water flow out from an arched opening in the estate wall. It's a slow stream that flows down a shallow, newly-created trench that winds its way into a pond and from there into the river.

"I suppose this answers why they didn't build on the other side of the river," Ebisu is telling the genin as Kakashi approaches. "Well, that and all the fruit trees."

"And berry bushes," says one of the genin. It's the same one that found the koi pond by stepping into it. Now he's all scratched up, potentially from falling into a berry bush, but he sounds relatively pleased about it. Must have a sweet tooth.

Kakashi says, "All the land above the house used to be a farm."

All the genin jump and whirl to face him. Ebisu nods politely in greeting.

"A lot of those trees up there were really old," one of the genin says. "And like, planted close together. How could you farm between them?"

Kakashi shrugs. "The trees are part of the farm. The bushes and everything, too. You went up the slope?" He directs this last part at Ebisu.

Ebisu straightens. "Yes, in order to complete the koi pond. We deduced that it used to get its water from the stream that runs down the slope. There were pools and diversion ditches which had been established at one point to slow the water and spread it along the slope, but they eroded or filled with detritus over time. It was quite a complex network. I've done my best to recreate it, and the koi pond has just finished filling."

Kakashi prods gently at the trench carrying water out of the main estate. "Good jutsu work. Yours?"

"No, no, I called in an earth jutsu specialist. I don't know any earth jutsu, in truth, and I thought it would take too long to do with shovels."

"I would have been happy with a modern pond liner and a pump for the fish," Kakashi muses. "But this is really good, Ebisu." He cuts a considering look over at Ebisu. "Do you want to learn some earth jutsu? I'll teach you a few."

"Oh!" Ebisu looks genuinely startled, then distinctly flustered. "Well—I—If you have time, certainly—"

"Let me know when." Kakashi looks back at what he can see of the main house, peeking up over the wall. "Is it ready for tomorrow?"

"Yes, this was our last task of the day." Ebisu starts flipping through his memo pad, and then nods to himself. He must have all the checks filled in on his checklist. "We'll turn the mission in tomorrow morning, if that's alright. It's rather late to be stopping by the mission desk, even if they are open."

Kakashi doesn't care when they turn it in, and tells Ebisu so. Then, thinking about the mess of streets waiting for them out in the village, Kakashi asks, "Which wards do you live in?"

They all tell him, and Kakashi winces. "You know, you worked so hard to get the house ready, maybe you should enjoy sleeping here for the night."

The genin stare at him.

Ebisu says, "I take it there's something going on in the village? Not an emergency, or we'd have heard the alarm."

Whether it's an emergency or not probably depends on which side of it you're on. But Kakashi explains about the roadblocks, and then has to explain about the Konoha Council meeting to three wide-eyed genin and one worried Ebisu.

"I see," Ebisu says pensively. First, he turns to the genin and explains to them that staying isn't part of the mission, so it won't be compensated and isn't mandatory, but that he will be staying. Second, he eyes Kakashi carefully. "The Hatake grounds don't have any formal roads through them, but I have observed signs that people travel through the grounds with some frequency. I'm not sure how effectively I could arrange a barricade of the informal footpaths trespassers have worn into your land overnight, but if you'd like me to try...?"

There are layers here. A careful approach to the topic of trespassers, who Kakashi could bring serious charges against and who Ebisu hasn't admitted to directly seeing. And Ebisu has managed to skirt around asking directly if Kakashi would like show that he supports the other clans.

Kakahi looks down, across the river, to the other half of the Hatake grounds. In the rapidly fading light he can't see the slightly overgrown land there, the Hatake Market where his clan used to set up a farm stand three seasons of the year. His father had remembered the stalls fondly; they had been a real crossroads between the civilian district behind their clan grounds and the center of the village.

"I don't think it's worth it to put up barricades," Kakashi says. "But...if you're not busy tomorrow, I have another idea."

"I'll be between missions," Ebisu confirms wryly.

Kakashi almost tells Ebisu that he'll be compensated, that he'd be happy to stop by the mission desk tomorrow after getting Tenzō home to commission a new mission scroll. But then he thinks...Ebisu hasn't asked for that. Maybe he doesn't have to treat this as transactional.

So Kakashi gestures across the river and says, "Let's invite everyone to set up stalls over there. Along the paths people already take, and along the First Ring Training Path. There will be even less space on the streets that are open tomorrow. We might as well give people a place to bring their food carts."

Ebisu has flipped to a new page in his memo pad, already furiously taking notes. "Yes, yes I surveyed the land earlier this week, I think that will work nicely." A few more notes, and then he looks up. "Is there anyone in particular I should invite, if they can be found tomorrow?"

It's on the tip of Kakashi's tongue to say no, but then at the last moment he thinks of Tokimi's frustration earlier. Bad enough that all of our shops were lost to the Kyūbi and never rebuilt.

"The Uchiha," Kakashi says. "Make sure to tell them it doesn't have to be just food. Whatever they want to sell."

Ebisu's eyebrows shoot up, but he notes it down. "Fee per stall or cart?"

Kakashi shakes his head. Most of the vendors who show up will be there because they've been pressed out of crowded streets because of a fight that Kakashi more or less started.

"Right," Ebisu says, and nods. "It will be hard to have anything up in the morning, but by the afternoon at least."

That's plenty fast enough. The clans won't be finished making their point until the next Konoha Council meeting, at the very earliest.

"I'll leave it in your hands," Kakashi says. "Help yourself to—" Here he gestures at the house. "—whatever you stocked the place with."

He leaves while the genin are bickering with each other about staying or trying to get home. A circuitous route around various clan grounds eventually dumps Kakashi out on the far side of the hospital plaza.

It's past visiting hours and past dark, but Gai isn't lounging in the tree outside of Tenzō's window. Kakashi walks up the wall and peaks in through the window.

Gai is sitting by Tenzō's bed, telling him some story enthusiastically. He's facing away from the window, so Kakashi can't read his lips, but Kakashi waits and watches until Gai's story seems to end, and then he taps on the window.

Gai twists to look, and then leaps to his feet when he sees it's Kakashi. He opens the window so Kakashi can climb inside, saying, "At last! You missed visiting hours, you know, Kakashi."

"I did, I did," Kakashi acknowledges. "Because of the road closures."

"The road closures?" Gai asks.

Kakashi explains, briefly, about the blow up at the Konoha Council meeting that afternoon. He's a little more scathing about his assessment of Danzō's ability to run a meeting and critical thinking skills than he'd been in front of Ebisu and three genin. He's also more enthused about the resulting retaliation spilling out across the village. "It's incredibly inconvenient," Kakashi admits, voice warm with admiration. He really respects it.

"They're allowed to do that?" Tenzō asks, a frown creasing his forehead.

"Well, clans own their clan grounds and maintain ultimate control over them," Kakashi explains. Tenzō hasn't had much chance to learn about life in the village yet.

Gai says, "When the village was founded, most of the clan grounds were walled off!"

Yeah, it had taken a decade or so for everyone to relax and also realize that large settlements have connected street grids for a reason.

"It's a threat," Kakashi explains to Tenzō. "A show of power. If the clan shinobi don't go to work and don't allow outsiders to cross their clan grounds, it's like illustrating the likely results of a civil war." At Tenzō's alarmed look, Kakashi hastily adds, "Not that I think it will come to that. The clans do actually like the village."

"It will be humbling for the Hokage, I suppose," Gai muses. "Well, I had better go see it myself! Don't cause the nurses any trouble, Kakashi."

"No promises," Kakashi says.

Gai chuckles and climbs out the window.

Kakashi closes the window, checks that its seal lock has engaged, and then turns off the lights. He settles into his usual place on Tenzō's bed.

They don't talk further about the clan strike and road shut downs, but after a few moments Tenzō asks, "Am I really going to your clan estate tomorrow?"

"It's not much of an estate, but yes," Kakashi says into the dark of the room. "Gai's teammate Ebisu has set up a room for you."

"It sounds strange."

"It will be," Kakashi admits. Even he'd felt weird getting out of ANBU. It will be worse for Tenzō. He pulls his sleeve up, finds Tenzō's hand wrapped up in the sheets, and places it around his wrist.

Tenzō's finger traces the rough, shallow scar there, left by Tenzō's Mokuton, until he falls asleep. In Kakashi's past, they'd stopped doing this when Kakashi left ANBU. They'd grown a little distant from each other, in truth. But they won't, this time, and maybe Kakashi will even get around to asking Tenzō what the scar means to him. Is it proof of something, or just a sign to identify Kakashi by? They'd more or less been trying to kill each other during the fight where Tenzō had given it to him, and Tenzō's comfort with the scar has always been yet another small mystery that Kakashi hadn't had the heart to explore.

Chapter Text

Back when there was still a village, Kakashi had often found himself in Tsunade's office late into the evening, going over mission reports, supply trains, intel recently passed along from the Analysis squad. She could have had someone else do it—Shizune or Nara Shikaku or even Sakura—but she'd always foisted it onto Kakashi. Handing him a stack of paper and a cup of sake, so they could work in silence until they found something to commiserate on. Kakashi had always been tempted to skip these meetings, because he knew they were Tsunade's way of preparing him to take the hat from her, but in the end he respected her too much to actually dodge them. So it came to be that some nights, they'd sit there in her office and finish off the sake and talk about something besides work. Anything besides work.

One night Tsunade had asked him why Yamato had been so wary of her when she first took the hat.

Kakashi had hesitated, and then explained. Essentially, the Sandaime had thought Tsunade would consider Tenzō's Mokuton bloodline theft.

"Oh, Sensei," Tsunade said, in a tone that indicated it wasn't the first time she'd been disappointed in Sarutobi Hiruzen and she didn't think it'd be the last. "Honestly, if I could stand to have another Senju running around the village, I'd just write him into the registry." She started to fish in her desk for another sake bottle. "But I can't, you understand."

The nurse rounds that night are a little more harried than before, with nurses only popping their heads into the room and then immediately popping back out. Either that's because Tenzō is due to be discharged in the morning...or it's because not every clan is giving strike exceptions for jobs integral to the operation of the village. Either way, it's much less disruptive to Tenzō's light mission sleep for them to not come fully into the room, so Kakashi kind of appreciates it. Maybe he'd be able to sleep in the hospital if nurses would keep out of the room in the middle of the night.

In the morning, Amano enters at the same time as a harassed looking Kaneko pushing an empty wheelchair, with a file pinned under one arm.

"The whole kitchen staff is on strike because they're all Akimichi," Kaneko says, "so we can't provide breakfast. But I imagine you want to get out of here, anyway."

"We can pick breakfast up on our long meander through the village," Kakashi agrees.

Kaneko huffs a laugh, and taps the back of the wheelchair. "That's why I'm sending you with this, by the way." She looks at Tenzō. "I know you could walk across the village if the roads were in their usual state, but let's not take any chances. Anyway, maybe some of the more soft-hearted clans will take pity on you if you've obviously just been released."

Tenzō's lips curl up in a small smile.

"Alright, I cleared you for discharge last night, so you just need to sign here, Tenzō," Kaneko says, pulling out the file and a pen and indicating where the release needs to the signed.

Tenzō does, tentatively—he's probably never signed anything before—and then Kaneko helps him rise from the bed and get settled into the chair. He's already dressed in soft, hospital-issue clothes, so he doesn't have to change. She removes his IV and hands him the fire ecology book from the nightstand, which Tenzō clutches to his lap with tight, nervous hands.

They leave the hospital. Kakashi pushes Tenzō's wheelchair because Tenzō's ribs aren't quite up to the task of rolling himself along the street for as far as they're likely going to have to walk.

"Breakfast is my treat as long as we stop at a food stall for it," Amano says with a great deal of humor.

The path they have to take is just as meandering as Kakashi had assumed it would be—including needing to detour through one of the village's lowest security office buildings—but by far the most annoying detour is the one around the Akimichi Ward, which is a sprawling set of connected city blocks that actually entirely encircles the Yamanaka's much smaller clan grounds. The rounds around the Akimichi Ward are packed with ninja and civilians both, which at first Kakashi thinks is because of how central the clan grounds are...but then they see the first of the hastily assembled stalls built out across the length of one of the main roads leading into the Akimichi Ward.

They've barricaded themselves in with food stalls. And not just the usual Akimichi food stalls that are spread out across the village. These are new stalls, and many of them are selling things that aren't usually found in food stalls. There's a full bakery set up on the first street they pass. Another street is blocked off by a cabal of confectioners and chocolatiers. A third, smaller street has a small stage with seating set up in front of it. When they walk past, the seats are packed and an Akimichi man Kakashi recognizes from the Logistics division is demonstrating safe knife techniques. The culinary kind. He's absolutely destroying a pile of onions while explaining how to not lose your fingers in the process.

They pass a group of civilians holding soft serve ice cream cones with little Akimichi mon printed on the paper cone wraps. "This is inconvenient, but it's so delicious," one of them remarks.

When they've finally mostly completed their detour around the Akimichi grounds, they come across the best street barricade yet. It's manned by a dozen Akimichi jōnin and chūnin and they're selling a full traditional breakfast, complete with miso soup and grilled fish.

Amano laughs and buys three full breakfasts. They have to rush the rest of their way to the Hatake grounds before any of it can go cold.

Since Kakashi was here last, someone has cleaned the gate. In fact, looking at it more closely, Kakashi suspects that it wasn't just cleaned but also sanded and re-stained. The Hatake mon gleams in the morning sun, catching the light on newly-refurbished edges and recesses. Kakashi pushes the gates open and Tenzō stands from the wheelchair rather than waiting for Amano to juggle the takeout bags around and push him through.

Ebisu has done, if Kakashi is being honest, an incredible job with the courtyard. Each stone is more or less in the same place it had been before, and the gaps between them filled with sand, but where trees and other desirable plants had burst up through the pavers Ebisu has had the pavers turned on their side to create an edge for garden beds. The beds are even mulched.

If Kakashi didn't know already what a good ninja Ebisu is, he might think that Ebisu had missed his calling as a general contractor.

They leave the wheelchair out in the courtyard ("I'll take it back later," Amano offers.) and pile into the genkan. Kakashi had only gotten house slippers for himself and Tenzō, but Ebisu has followed through on his promise of guest slippers so there's a pair for Amano as well. Actually, there are a good dozen pairs waiting in the engawa. For guests that Kakashi never intends to invite over. Does Ebisu think he's going to be entertaining?

The takeout containers would be perfectly fine to eat out of usually, but it's Tenzō's first day in the house, so Kakashi fishes full place settings out of the kitchen. The dishes Ebisu has stocked the cupboards with are all marked with the Hatake pattern, clearly dug up from some dusty store room and then presumably washed by hand because the kitchen doesn't have a dishwasher. They divvy up the work of plating the meal, and then sit to eat.

Tenzō spends most of the meal staring out through the windows at the back of the house, where the engawa shutters have indeed been packed away and the back garden is visible. The koi pond is cleaned and full of water, and there are woodchip paths winding through the barely-pruned garden.

"I don't think there's any fish in it," Kakashi says.

Tenzō glances at him. "What?"

"The koi pond," Kakashi says. "It's meant for fish, but I don't think Ebisu got any. I mean, I assume he knows I can't be trusted to look after animals."

"You famously have dogs," Amano points out. He's poking at the last of his rice, sadly, because they're all basically done eating and it's always a small tragedy when the Akimichi-made food runs out.

"The pack looks after me," Kakashi says.

They clear up the dishes and the empty take out containers and Kakashi dumps it all off in the kitchen to deal with later. Tenzō relocates to the engawa while Kakashi sees Amano out of the gates.

"Do you want me to stop by later?" Amano asks over the gate's threshold.

This is, Kakashi understands, his way of asking if they need to continue their informal guard duty. They don't. Kakashi says, "It's not necessary." Then, a little tentatively, he adds: "But if you have time to stop by, I'm sure Tenzō would love to see you."

Amano laughs. "I'll have to come by often, then. See you, Kakashi."

Kakashi waves him off, closes the gates, and goes back through the house to join Tenzō on the engawa. It's several degrees cooler in the back of the house than in the front of the house because Ebisu had clearly taken Kakashi's extremely permissive instructions about the garden to mean that he shouldn't remove any of the trees. Tenzō has settled in at the back of the engawa, leaning up against the windows because he doesn't yet have the core strength to sit unsupported for a long time.

They sit in silence for awhile. Tenzō watches the branches bounce in the wind, birds flitting between them. Kakashi watches Tenzō.

Eventually, Kakashi says: "When you're recovered, you don't have to go back to ANBU."

Tenzō tears his eyes away from the garden. "What else would I do?" he asks.

Kakashi shrugs. "I'm returning to the General Forces. You could try that out. Or maybe working in the Tower, or maybe some kind of work study. You could just focus on your training. You could read a lot of books. You could just sit here all day, really."

"I should be useful," Tenzō protests.

"Ah, you'd be keeping our garden in line by making sure it doesn't get up to any mischief," Kakashi jokes. The joke doesn't really land, though. Tenzō mostly just looks confused. Kakashi adds, "If you want to be useful to the village, that's admirable and you can do that. I like doing that too. But you can do it in a lot of different ways. I hope you'll try some of them out before settling on anything. You can always go back to ANBU if you decide that that's what you like best."

Tenzō looks away, back out at the garden. Very softly, he admits: "I want to keep working with you. If I can."

"You can, you can," Kakashi assures him, and discovers that he's actually a little relieved to hear it. "I just want you to know you have options. Maybe you could take up a hobby. I'm going to try a bunch out. Cooking. Maybe embroidery. Apparently some police work."

"Police work?" Tenzō's brow furrows, and he looks back at Kakashi.

Ah, right. Kakashi explains the dinner he'd gone to the night before. Signing the registry. "Apparently, all Uchiha have to serve in the Konoha Military Police for at least one rotation. Sounds kind of fun, although I think it's mostly dumping genin and chūnin into a drunk tank and telling off civilians who are trying to host picnics and birthday parties in the first ring training grounds."

Tentatively, Tenzō asks: "Are only Uchiha allowed to be KMP officers?"

"Traditionally," Kakashi says. But that makes Tenzō's shoulders slump just slightly, so he presses his expression into a reassuring smile. "I'll talk to Fugaku about making an exception. Opening the MP to non-Uchiha is a great idea, and I think they might finally have the leverage to demand it."

A little smile returns to Tenzō's face. He goes back to watching the garden, but he soon turns back to Kakashi. "Can I meet your dogs?"

Kakashi stares at him for a few seconds, unable to believe that he's so far back that Tenzō hasn't met his pack yet.

Tenzō adds, "If you have the chakra for it, I meant."

"I do," Kakashi says. "Sure."

He's missed his pack. And they actually have something he needs.

Kakashi bites his thumb, flips through the seals of the summoning jutsu, pushes enough chakra to summon his whole pack, and then adds a careful twist of power that lets his dogs know exactly what kind of summoning this is.

They appear in a messy cloud of smoke, arranged in formation on the engawa, and instead of Pakkun standing on Bull's head he's up front, paws perched on a scroll almost bigger than him. "Boss," he says, "did you really want the—"

Pakkun cuts himself off as he looks around and realizes that they're not in an ANBU training ground or out in the field.

"Hey," Kakashi says. "So, I had the house fixed up. I thought you might like to see it."

Pakkun is too much of a professional to abandon the scroll he's brought Kakashi to bounce around the engawa like he clearly wants to, but his eyes are bright and his tail starts wagging. The pack behind him breaks formation and starts prancing around the engawa, peering into the windows and looking down into the garden. Ūhei trots immediately over to Tenzō and pushes his bandaged head into Tenzō's personal space, looking for pets.

"Boss, this is the best news ever." Pakkun looks over at Tenzō. "Or almost the best news. Is it gonna be the best news?"

"Maybe," Kakashi says. He takes the scroll from Pakkun, freeing Pakkun to run up and down the length of the engawa and then duck inside the house after Bisuke to inspect the interior. The rest of the pack besides Ūhei have scattered into the garden. "They'll come back for introductions when they've calmed down," he tells Tenzō. "This is Ūhei."

"It's nice to meet you," Tenzō says very seriously to the dog he's tentatively started patting on the head. The dogs will have him trained up into a champion petter in no time, Kakashi is sure.

"Here," Kakashi says, and hands the scroll to Tenzō.

It's not as ornate at the Uchiha scroll the night before had been. It's silk, though, and well-kept despite its age.

"A summoning scroll?" Tenzō asks, looking a little shocked.

"Yeah," Kakashi says. "But not just that. It's also the Hatake clan registry."

Tenzō actually drops the scroll and Kakashi has to catch it.

"I can't," Tenzō says.

"You can if you want to," says Kakashi. He sets the scroll down carefully, within Tenzō's reach.

Tenzō sucks in a shaky breath. "What would it mean."

"Whatever you want it to mean," Kakashi says. "There are some practical benefits. You'd have at least one dog summons. If I die, you'd inherit the Hatake clan grounds. If I were incapacitated, you'd make decisions for me with the help of a medic nin or doctor at the hospital." Kakashi smiles. "Most importantly, I would have the ability to deny anyone's attempt to draft you into military service that you weren't willing to enter."

The offer hangs in the air between them.

"And," Tenzō says tentatively, "we'd be..."

"Hatake, both of us, if you want to take the name."

Tenzō picks up the scroll, and looks down at it. He slowly unrolls it, his eyes crawling down the scroll as he reads the names. When he reaches the end, he looks up at Kakashi. "Yes," he says simply. "I want it."

Kakashi pulls out the little sealing kit he keeps on him in case of emergency. Grind the ink stick, pour in a little water. Then Kakashi puts some of his own blood into the ink stone, and holds the ink stone out to Tenzō so he can do the same. "Signing this clan registry is like making a seal between yourself and you eventual pack," Kakashi explains. It's bad form to ask someone for blood without explaining why.

Tenzō signs the scroll, carefully pushing chakra into his brush as he does so the way Kakashi instructs. When he lifts his brush from the last stroke, the name flashes a quick burst of light and then the scroll rolls itself up and de-summons itself.

"It will be awhile before there's a dog for you, but not as long as I had to wait," Kakashi says. He'd signed the scroll as soon as he had the chakra to do so, of course, but Pakkun hadn't been born for several years. Kakashi hadn't had the actual power for a summoning until then, anyway.

"I'll look forward to meeting them," Tenzō says politely.

"We can drop by the Inuzuka Ward once the streets are open again and get you some time with the ninken puppies so you're a little more prepared," Kakashi says.

Pakkun and Bisuke emerge from the house. The rest of the dogs bound back up to the engawa. Looks like it's time for introductions.

Kakashi points at each ninken and introduces them with a fun fact. Then he points at Tenzō. "Meet Hatake Tenzō," Kakashi says. The dogs go wild before Kakashi can tell them a fun fact.

"Please take care of me," Tenzō says politely into the cacophony of excited dogs barking and scrambling up onto the engawa.

Kakashi hooks an arm around Bull before he can tackle Tenzō in his excitement. "Please be careful with him," Kakashi says dryly. "He just got out of the hospital."

"The hospital!" one of the dogs gasps.

Pakkun says, "Kakashi, you have to take care of your pack, you know." He levels a very stern frown at Kakashi.

"I know," Kakashi says. And he will.

As morning slides into afternoon, Tenzō gets tired of sitting up and Kakshi gently harrasses him into bed before he can strain himself and get Kakashi yelled at when they go in for Tenzō's next check up. The room that Kakashi presents Tenzō with has a great view of the garden and a soft bed, and a smile lingers at the very corner of Tenzō's mouth when he looks at the room.

At his room.

As Kakashi slides the door to Tenzō's room behind him and thinks about going to take a nap himself, but it's not to be. There's a soft bird call from the front of the estate that has Kakashi hurrying down the hall and towards the gate. It's a non-emergency alert, the same one Crow-taichō had always preferred when he was looking for Kakashi's attention.

Kakashi pokes his head out the gate. Amano is there, and Shisui as well.

"Missed me?" Kakashi asks Amano.

"Yes!" Shisui says earnestly. "But you have to come see what happened!"

"I didn't even make it out of sight of your clan grounds before I knew I'd have to come back," Amano admits.

At least Shisui sounds too excited for it to be bad news. Kakashi steps out of the estate and lets the gate close behind him. His pack are still scrabbling around the house and garden, so Tenzō won't be alone.

They head down the First Ring Training Path, towards the northern part of the Hatake clan grounds. Kakashi hears and smells what they're headed for before he sees it: grease and spices in the air, the dull roar of a happy crowd.

The northern portion of the Hatake clan grounds, the area elder village residents sometimes refer to as Hatake Market, has food carts and make-shift vendor stalls lining the First Ring Training Path, except for where the village's roads meet the path on the east side. Ebisu—because Kakashi had asked Ebisu to arrange this, and who else would have done it so exactly?—has arranged the vendor stalls so that they form makeshift streets through the Hatake grounds, perfectly in line with the village's existing haphazard grid.

Kakashi turns down the first aisle of stalls. It's packed with people, all kinds of people, and all kinds of stalls. Food, sure. But also a civilian man selling books. A nervous chūnin selling hand thrown pottery. A stall three times as wide as the others, marked with uchiwa banners, selling an assortment of ninja tools.

He can't help it. Kakashi heads straight for the Uchiha stall. There's ninja wire laid out on the table, ninja wire like he hasn't seen in almost two decades, since before the Kyūbi.

"Hands off unless you're going to buy," snaps an older Uchiha woman from the other side of the table, but then she says, with incongruous warmth, "Oh! Kakashi-kun. You just take that. None of us had a chance to congratulate you last night."

Kakashi does his best not to stare at her like a genin caught in killing intent. "I don't mind paying," Kakashi says carefully. He doesn't want to offend her, he finds, although he doesn't know her name.

"Nonsense," she says. "You're family. And you set this up for us!" She gestures at the dense market that's sprung up on Kakashi's clan grounds.

"Ah," Kakashi says and ducks his head without thinking, embarrassed by everything she's just said.

"Allergic to praise, huh? If I'm not careful, I'll give you hives." She cackles. "Go on, go on, I'm sure there's other stalls you'll want to inspect!"

She waves him off and Kakashi goes, turning around to look at Amano and Shisui with a shell-shocked expression.

"All the aunties are so excited," Shisui tells him. "C'mon, the next aisle over as the coolest stall." He reaches out and grabs Kakashi's hand. It's the one Kakashi had nearly broken by way of poorly imitating Tsunade's strength technique, and it's been sore for the last week despite the healing he'd been given at the hospital.

Kakashi doesn't need to let Shisui grab his hand and pull him through the aisles of the new Hatake Market, but he does. Shisui's grip is careful, maybe remembering how Kakashi's hand had looked when Shisui had met them on their way to the hospital.

They go to look at a festival mask display, then a stall where a man is using a contraption to shave thin flakes of ice off of a huge block to make some kind of disgusting looking sweet treat, then an Uchiha-run stall advertising embroidery services for prices that look insanely cheap to Kakashi.

"Do you do bulk orders?" he asks the Uchiha manning the embroidery stall while Shisui abandons his hand to grab at Amano and start dragging him towards a nearby florist stall.

"If you want the uchiwa put on personal items, your clan dues will probably cover it," one of them says, a man perched on a stool and glancing down at his embroidery once in awhile with flash of spinning tomoes.

Ah, wearing the uchiwa. Well, Kakashi supposes that he should, now. However... "I also don't have anything with the Hatake mon on it." Tenzō will like it if they have a symbol that matches, Kakashi thinks.

"Ah, I see, I see. You'll have to stop by the District to work out the details, but we can do that." He tells Kakashi which street in the Uchiha District to find their main workshop on, and their hours.

Kakashi ambles off, away from the florist stall. It takes the better part of fifteen minutes to find Ebisu. He's directing a busker on where to stand at the crossroad of two aisles of stalls, entirely within his element. Kakashi waits until he's done and then catches his attention as the busker's music swells into the air around them.

"Kakashi!" Ebisu gasps. "I didn't even know you were here." He looks around, like he's suddenly realized how the market has sprawled through the grounds. Kakashi had gone all the way down one aisle just to see what the edges looked like, and the genin team that had worked on the main house were there, staking out new vendor plots almost as fast as they were being filled.

"You did good," Kakashi assures him. He went looking for Ebisu to ask about what kind of embroidered things he might have found in the depths of the main house's linen closets, thinking that it might be good to have an example to being to the Uchiha District whenever he gets around to it. But looking at Ebisu, he has plenty on his plate for now.

"Oh, good," Ebisu says. "It's an honor to assist you."

Kakashi puzzles over this strangely formal phrasing for a minute before the meaning slowly dawns over him. "Are you trying to join my clan?" he asks, a little incredulous.What ancient etiquette guide had Ebisu even dug that turn of phrase out of?

Ebisu draws himself up. "Well," he says primly. "When you put it like that, I sound—"

Whoops. Change the subject. Kind of. "Do you like dogs?" Kakashi asks.

Ebisu stares at him.

Kakashi nods to himself. "You look like a dog person."

"I suppose," Ebisu says tentatively. A little shyly.

"I'll get the paperwork from the Clan Law Archive...soon." The Tower isn't far and probably isn't blocked off by any clan compounds shutting down their streets, but Kakashi doesn't intend to leave the market just yet. "The probationary kind. In case you decide dogs aren't for you."

"Well," Ebisu says faintly. "I suppose it couldn't hurt to ease into it."

Kakashi inches forward and cautiously claps a hand on Ebisu's shoulder. "In case you get sick of me making you do all the work," Kakashi says, completely seriously. Then he smiles. "Now I'm going to look at the rest of the market."

And off he goes, before Ebisu can reply, so that the talking about their emotions part of things can be over.

Kakashi has soba for lunch and watches the crowd in the aisles slowly swell as people come down off the First Ring Training Path and discover the market. There are a handful of Akimichi stalls, which are endemic to any place where food can be sold, and Kakashi belatedly realizes that the florist that had caught Shisui's eye earlier is a Yamanaka outpost. There are Aburame selling honey and a pair of enterprising Inuzuka genin selling dog training lessons and a lemonade stand being manned by what looks like a genin team with one Hyūga and two teammates of indeterminate clan origin.

But by far the biggest clan representation is the Uchiha. There's a handful of Konoha Military Police lingering around, and in each aisle two or three stalls marked with uchiwa banners. Each Uchiha-run stall sells something different from all the others, and everywhere Kakashi turns he can hear the sound of this civilian housewife or that recently promoted civilian-born chūnin gasping in delight to see their favorite shop reborn in front of their eyes as a temporary vendor stall in the Hatake Market.

"Oh," says one customer browsing a selection of Uchiha-made soaps. "I tried to find you everywhere, honestly I thought you'd died. No one makes what you make. I should buy you out, since I've finally found you!"

Late in the afternoon, Kakashi catches sight of the genin team which, if he's being honest with himself, he's always going to think of as Ebisu's genin. They've started to string up cafe lights across each of the aisles. It isn't yet dark enough for the full effect, but it will be cozy when the sun goes down.

It's also about this time that Shisui and Amano find him again. This time they've got Uzume in tow. She's clutching a clumsy bundle of flowers as they come up to Kakashi, and she unceremoniously shoves it into Kakashi's arms.

"Here!" she says. "Don't think about the flower meanings, though. I got kicked out of kunoichi classes, you know." She says this last part like it's something to brag about. Maybe it is? Kakashi wouldn't know.

He pokes at the flowers. They're all kinds of shapes and sizes and colors. "It's nice," he offers. "But why?"

Uzume drapes an arm over one of Amano's shoulders and gestures at him. "Amano says you've just got an empty vase in your entry way. That's fucked. I mean sad. I mean, uh." She shrugs at him. "Anyway. Flowers. A great housewarming present, because you won't have to figure out where to store them!"

She looks extremely proud of herself. Kakashi shifts his hold on the flowers so that he's carrying them a little more gently. "My first housewarming present," he says. "Amano, you're falling behind."

"I'll find some kind of ugly statue for that disaster you're calling a garden."

"Hey, people worked hard on that garden," Kakashi complains. "Not me, but other people."

Sounding stricken, Shisui announces, "I didn't get you a housewarming gift!"

Oh. "I don't actually need anything," Kakashi pleads.

Shisui is gone already, his after-image fading away. He'll have fun shopping, at least.

"Amano said that Shisui took you around to introduce you to the aunties," Uzume says. "How many did he manage?"

Kakashi thinks. "Two and a half, maybe."

"I don't want to shock you, but there's way more aunties than that," Uzume moves into his space to take his arm without hesitation.

To Kakashi's surprise, he lets her. He's content to have Uchiha Uzume drag him around to every Uchiha stall. In fact, he has something he'd like to talk to all of the Uchiha stall owners about. After all, why have just one day or one week of a market when they could have it all the time? Kakashi's shopping trips would be so easy, for one. For another, everyone who needs special Uchiha soap or special Uchiha ninja wire will be able to find it. That's practically a community service.

Uzume says, "Come on, I'll do a better job."

"You will not," Amano says.

She whips her head to look back at him. "Slander. From my own teammate."

"It took you three years to tell me anyone's name besides your mom's name," Amano points out, and then they're off to the races bickering about events from their time together in the Academy as Amano falls into step on Kakashi's other side.

It's not a conversation that requires Kakashi's input or attention, and he lets it wash over him as they make their way down the market aisle to the nearest Uchiha stall to begin Kakashi's proper introductions.