Click click.

Kakashi lowers the lens and resumes walking. There's only one more block before he reaches his house. The streets are empty, but Kakashi faithfully stops when the red stop sign flickers on. "Be careful when you cross the street, my little scarecrow," Sakumo had told him earlier in the morning while flipping pancakes, and Kakashi listens because rules are rules and the ones his father makes are carved on the walls of Kakashi's heart. Kakashi likes rules, especially the ones that his father tells him to follow because they make him feel safe, even if Sakumo himself isn't a superhero.

There's always a big fuss about superheroes, especially the newer trio that has been spotted around this area. Superheroes nowadays almost never work alone, like they did during the Golden Age of super-dom; they're now required to work in teams of two to four people. They can thank Mr. Incredible, former Golden Boy and middle-aged has-been, for that particular regulation that the Super Association enforced shortly after the fiasco with the botched suicide a decade ago. The current generation might find the system a little restricting of course, but it's not without benefits. There's more camaraderie and less competition between supers, which also leads to better communication between them, the upper echelons, the police, and most importantly, the public. Well, it hasn't completely stopped the stupid dick-measuring, but even the supers with over-inflated egos (and small hands) have to grudgingly admit that the Terrible Three are the rising stars of this current generation of superheroes. Kakashi isn't really a fan of supers in general but even he knows about them: Beast Boy, The Avenger and Cherry Bomb. Rin, who sits between him and the class idiot (she's a nice girl, even if she does sigh a lot whenever she's around him—does she have a respiratory problem?), has pictures and news clippings of Cherry Bomb plastered all over her desk. It's not just Rin either-a lot of girls in his school have done the same. Kakashi really doesn't see her appeal. Sure she's one of the strongest female supers out there and she's basically the poster girl for girl power (there're billboards out there with her posing with Elastigirl and a caption that reads "Girls are strong—Like US" in bold black letters) but objectively speaking, she's the weakest of her squad. When Beast Boy and Avenger aren't squabbling, they each neutralize more enemies in a battle than she can. Besides, who needs superhuman strength when they have someone who already has that power, anyway? Mr. Incredible may not be as young as he used to be and his beer gut is pretty impressive but he can probably still benchpress more cars with his little finger than Cherry Bomb can with her whole body.

Not that it really matters to Kakashi. No one, not even Cherry Bomb, not even Mr. Incredible, can quite measure up to his father. Sakumo's just a small town cop and he may not be a superhero but he's Kakashi's hero, and that's all that really matters in a world that solely revolves around his father and himself. With someone as reliable as his father around in this sleepy little suburban commuter town, everything is in its rightful place— tidy, organized, compartmentalized. It's a little like how his toys are neatly arranged by color or how his books on his shelf are organized by alphabetical order.

It's perfect even without the help of supers, and Kakashi likes it this way.

It's a beautiful summer day in the suburbs but there's absolutely no one outside. It's summer break after all; everyone on the block is either already vacationing in Hawaii or melting quietly on their sofas with the air conditioners on full blast. So he's surprised when the door to the house right next to theirs suddenly slams open and the lady from next door stalks out, dragging something behind her. Well, he's more taken back at the ease with which she drags the thing behind her with one hand. With her paper-white skin and pink hair, she looks like a porcelain doll that should be housed in a case with a sign affixed to it that reads "Fragile. Handle with care."

Nothing about her screams delicate now.

"Sakura-chan," the vaguely humanoid lump on the ground groans, and Kakashi realizes with horror that it's not a something, it's a someone—a masked blond man with facial scars that look like whiskers from where Kakashi is standing. It's nearly a hundred degrees outside but the man is wearing a neon orange spandex suit and a cape that would have been whiter if it wasn't for the dirt and blood stains. He looks really familiar, but Kakashi doesn't get why. Maybe the man worked at the costume pop-up shop downtown? It was a little too early for Halloween but hey, he wasn't about to judge. The woman pauses and lifts the man by the collar of his cape. The man whimpers. There's a puff of smoke, and a fox wearing bright orange spandex leaps out of the woman's arms. The woman growls and makes a swipe at the fox, but the animal easily evades her hands and scampers down the street.

"Naruto you idiot, COME BACK THIS INSTANT," the woman shrieks. She grabs the postbox with one hand, wrenches it from the ground and punts the thing like a football. The mailbox soars in the air—and narrowly misses the fox, instead crashing into the asphalt with a sickening thud. The fox pauses to flirt its tail in an unmistakably taunting gesture, eliciting a growl from the woman, before vanishing into thin air. The woman screams in frustration—it's a wonder that no one has come out to complain about the racket she's making—and starts throwing everything around her. Including the oak saplings that the Neighborhood Association had planted a few years ago. Kakashi silently watches her from a distance.

She's just torn down the neat cul-de-sac foundations of his cookie cutter life with her bare hands (AND destroyed public property, to top it off), but Kakashi's too shocked to muster any anger. He doesn't know why his heart is pounding so erratically in a staccato beat—thumpthumpthump—but when the woman straightens her back, the sun illuminates her profile so that she looks like the painting of the victorious valkyrie hanging in the foyer at home. Something catches in his throat and he can't help but lift the camera to his face.

...Click click.

She freezes, and then slowly turns to look at him. Their eyes meet, and he nearly drops the camera. The woman narrows her green eyes at him. "You're that scarecrow kid from next door, right?" Kakashi, still in shock, barely manages a stiff little nod and she groans and buries her face in her hands. "My handler is going to kill me if he finds out about this," she mutters to herself. "You didn't take any pictures, did you?" She asks and he shakes his head vigorously. "Oh, good."

Then she winks at him. "Let's keep this a secret, okay?" she says. There's still something stuck in the back of his throat so Kakashi can't do anything but nod dumbly before running back home as fast as he can on his short legs. He doesn't say a word to his father, but as soon as he gets back home, he prints out the picture of Sakura that he took earlier that day and puts next to a picture of his father on his nightstand.


The older superheroes never really hang up their suits after they cede the limelight to the new generation of heroes. Some choose to branch out in different fields—medicine, biology, physics, politics—but most of them prefer to help the Super Association from the shadows. The White Fang is no exception. Sakumo Hatake hasn't lost his edge yet, not even after spending long quiet years in semi-retirement in the suburbs. After tucking Kakashi into bed, he quietly shuts the front door and goes into town. He lopes into a dimly lit bar and slides into one of the corner booths. It's already occupied; the woman sitting there raises her head in greeting before slumping down. "Rough day?" He asks. The woman opens one bloodshot green eye.

"You could say that, yeah," she sighs, tucking one greasy strand of pink hair behind one ear. "Naruto did something stupid again, so I had to go deal with that, plus I'm covering the night shift at the hospital since Shizune's sick with the flu. What's up?"

"Petty larceny, same motive," Sakumo says succinctly and his companion groans. "I thought the one from two weeks ago was the last of the lot," she grumbles. "Seriously, do these idiots actually think that saying "I'm lonely and single" is a valid excuse to terrorize women in their own homes and steal their underwear from their balconies? Ugh." The man just chuckles and slides a manila envelope over the table that disappears somewhere in the folds of the woman's trench coat.

"If that's all, I'll be heading out now," the woman says. She rises from her seat but finds her way blocked by Sakumo's leg. "Not so fast, Cherry." Sakumo crinkles his eyes at the woman. "Care to explain why my son has a picture of you destroying federal property, my dear?"


A/N: I ripped Sakura's super name from NCT127's Cherry Bomb. If it wasn't clear enough, Cherry Bomb is Sakura, Beast Boy is Naruto, White Fang is Sakumo (semi-retired ex-super) and The Avenger is Sasuke. Hope you all enjoyed this story! If you can, please let me know what you think about it. I'll probably come up with something if enough people are interested. Or tell me about how excited you are about the new Incredibles movie coming out this summer. Anyone excited for Incredibles 2? BECAUSE I AM.

Also, so much kudos to those writers (probably most of you here, really) who can write up a 3000 word story in 2 hours like BAM! I've tinkered with this idea for the better part of two weeks and man it was like shitting bricks and it's not even 2000 words. Ugh ugh ugh.