Kakashi allowed himself some pride in the fact he remained unfazed even in the deadliest of situations.

Such as now, face to face with the blonde wrecking ball (such a collection of mass destruction could never be called human) that had just almost certainly guaranteed that Kakashi's premiums would be through the roof.

"I am so sorry."

Kakashi nodded and surveyed the damage. The front half of his car was well... gone.

They stood in the middle of an empty street, just three blocks from Kakashi's apartment. Snow was pressed into the pavement and piled on the sidewalks. The cold had turned bitter. He could feel the sting of the winter air on his nose and pulled up his scarf.

His old, beat up Toyota Corolla sat awkward and broken, half on the sidewalk. The other car, a large, squared, cotton candy pink Land Rover, looked for all the world like it hadn't hit a thing, save a small dent in the front right hand side. The man to whom the car belonged was a bouncing, blonde haired, blue eyed disaster with a bright orange parka.

"...I can't believe- Wait no. I can believe it. Sakura is going to kill me." Blondie suddenly switched into a horrendous falsetto "You're going to hit someone driving recklessly like that you idiot. Uhg. She told me not to take the night shift."

Kakashi just watched, numb to it all as the blonde bounced with every word in the cold winter air. It was three in the morning. No one was even supposed to be out.

He needed a damn coffee.

"Anyways, you should give me your info, you know?" The man grinned.

Kakashi heaved a sigh, and adjusted his scarf a little more so that it wouldn't slip. His nose was going to freeze off at this rate. He wondered idly if he could get a rental for the next few weeks. Hopefully it would be an "office" type week and he could take the bus. He hated the bus.

"Eh, hey, there, look, sorry I..." the blonde held out his phone.

"No need to apologize," Kakashi said with practiced ease, typing in his number and name, "Let me grab my insurance card-"

"Ah, no need, no need!" The man scrambled to get back his phone, texting rapidly. Kakashi felt his phone buzz in his back pocket.

"I'm Naruto Uzumaki!" the man held his fist out with a winning grin. When Kakashi eyed proffered fist a bit oddly, Naruto hesitantly opened his hand. Sighing, Kakashi accepted the handshake.

"Kakashi. Hatake."

"Great. And don't you worry about a thing. This is my fault and I'm going to fix it. Tell you what. I'll call a tow, and get you home. And don't worry about repairs. I'll foot the bill."

"Actually, I'm pretty sure we're supposed to call the cops and then our insurance company."

Naruto paled noticeably at that, even in the sickly yellow street light, and leaned in.

"I would really, really, appreciate it if we didn't do that."

"What, not driving without insurance are we?" And Kakashi had to bite his tongue before he said anything more.

Naruto winced, reaching his hand up to the back of his head. "Ah, well, funny story about that actually…"

Kakashi sighed and turned towards his car to get get his insurance card.

"Wait, please!" A hand grabbed him by the arm, halting stopping him in the middle of the street.

Kakashi wasn't sure why this time he stopped. It was probably his weakness for people who liked the color orange too much. A weakness that had definitely bit him in the ass more than once.

"Look, I appreciate you wanting to take care of this, but-"

"I can do it! Look, just, let me call you a cab or a tow or something, but I promise, just let me take this into my mechanic and I'll have it taken care of. Then neither of us have to worry about insurance, yeah?"

Kakashi studied the blonde seriously. Big blue eyes stared up in earnest. This close he could see whisker like markings adorned the man's cheeks. He jerked back. He felt a bitter laugh bubbling up. So this is what his life had come to? Someone up there really hated him.

"Hey, wait-Hey! HEY!"

He tore away from the blonde, despite protest and stalked into the darkness of the winter night. He was quick to make himself disappear, leaving not a footprint for the other man to follow.

Kakashi wasn't a coward per say. He simply had a sense of self preservation. So when he had seen the blonde up close, seen those markings, he had turned and hightailed it out of there because if there was one thing he had learned in his short miserable life, people who were marked were bad, bad news. And Naruto was marked like some ass backwards demon was hanging a neon sign over his head screaming "disaster, do not interact".

And Kakashi knew how to follow the signs.

The upside of being cursed, and also probably of working in the industry, was being so accustomed to misery that the pain and evil of the world merely seemed a passing footnote in his life. That, and you could spot people in similar predicaments a mile away so as to avoid them, lest the combined power of two people similarly marked cause some kind of...double curse?

Kakashi wasn't sure on how the whole algebra of curses and marks worked or what not (though he knew for sure if a parent was cursed, the child was too by being an extension of the parent), but even with one bad eye he could tell it probably did him no good to be hanging out with anyone like Naruto.

Purposefully casting the blonde from his mind, with perhaps more force than necessary, Kakashi prepared for bed with a scalding bath that promised to remove all worries from his mind.

By the time he laid his head down on crisp white pillows, he had pushed the blonde from his mind entirely, and thoughts of paperwork, public transit, and old women nagging him about his manners lulled him to sleep.

The office building Kakashi worked in belonged to several companies, one of which was possibly a bank. Kakashi had never cared enough to check. Grey carpet, grey desks, glass doors, and the building was just like any other Kakashi had worked in over the course of his his thirty six years on earth..

"Kakashi! Oh what a glorious day, don't you think?"

"Good morning Guy."

Kakashi ducked out of the way of the overly loud, overly vibrant man. Might Guy, dressed in a garish and unforgiving sickly green suit, tumbled, caught himself, and managed to throw his arm over Kakashi's shoulder anyways as Kakashi tried to make his way to his desk in peace. From the corner of his eye he saw Genma duck into the break room, which, understandable.

"You're surprisingly early today. Late night last night?"

Kakashi wanted to point out that the entire question was peculiar, but knew better by this point.

"You could say that."

Guy laughed and pounded him on the back.

When Kakashi managed to escape from Guy (which had not happened until Guy had gone through several retellings of his MMA tournament last night, invited Kakashi out for lunch three times, invited himself to Kakashi's next coffee run, and had bemoaned Kakashi's complete lack of fiery spirit at least twice) he found himself in the break room.

No car meant bus.

Bus meant googling bus schedules at three in the morning.

Which mean getting up at six only to get get to the office half past nine.

It also meant he had passed by the intersection in which he had had his fateful encounter the night before. It had been empty. Snow untouched. He pushed it from his mind.

Frankly, Kakashi had run on less sleep and more problems before, but even he had his limits.

Genma was unsurprisingly already there, hair drab, toothpick dangling out of his mouth. Kakashi was almost amused.

"I think Guy's acting up because you finished that case yesterday. Puts you like, fifty for fifty I think."

"Fifty to fifty-one, actually, my lead."

"Really?"

"Sushi eating contest last month at the place by Taco Bell."

Genma made an "oh" and Kakashi finished pouring his coffee. Instead of leaving immediately, he paused.

Genma arched an eyebrow.

"So…" Kakashi said.

After some time, when it became apparent Kakashi was not skilled enough in the art of human conversation to keep going, Genma grinned.

"Yes, Kakashi?"

Kakashi spared some mild irritation at the tone, but continued "Where do you think the cheapest place to get a car would be around here?"

"Finally replacing that piece of junk? What is it, like, from 1995?"

Kakashi's mild irritation turned to a halfhearted glare. "Something like that. I'm afraid it's on it's last legs."

"Well, there's a storm supposedly coming in, like, sleet, no school, the whole nine yards. May want to get that new car sooner rather than later."

"I'll keep that in mind."

Storms meant property damage, and property damage meant Kakashi was going to be busy. He had just closed off a hectic week of travel because someone somewhere out there hated him, and assigned him three cases so far up north it was bordering on inhuman. He'd been on his way back from a long day of travel when…

He shook his head.

The work was already piling up. Kakashi actually shared his desk with another adjuster, but he seemed to be out, and it was a good thing too. His deskmate was rather disapproving of Kakashi's taste in literature and after taking a look at the list of new cases he'd just been assigned, he greatly needed the break.

He flipped through the small orange book, eyes just passing over without reading as he made a mental checklist of everything he was going to have to do and tried to sort out how he was going to handle transportation and his apparently stolen car.

Despite the trouble he was sure he was about to incur, he couldn't find it in himself to wholly regret having run the night before. Frankly, he would be surprised if staying wouldn't have been equally as bad.

Hatakes, after all, had very bad luck.

A shadow fell over his book, and Kakashi gave Genma his best, nonchalant, I'm obviously a busy man, stare.

"So...I don't know how to tell you this but," Genma jerked a thumb over his shoulder, "There's some kid in the parking lot who says he has your car."

Kakashi stared. His phone buzzed.

Hi there. This is naruto from yesterday. I think I'm outside your office building? I'm the guy who totalled your car, btw.

He grabbed his scarf and coat off the back of his chair.

It took him no time at all to jump down four flights of stairs, bolt out the front door, and collide straight into an unfortunately familiar blonde in an orange coat.

"Aaaah! Kakashi! You do work here. Thank goodness. I was worried for a minute or two there, didn't want to get the wrong Hatake, you know?"

"There are no other Hatakes."

Naruto threw him a seriously quizzical look but Kakashi was distracted by the bright, shiny, black Toyota sitting next to the pink Land Rover parked outside his building. The sun bounced off what was obviously a new, untested paintjob in the late afternoon snow.

"Heh. So. Um, about your car…"

Kakashi turned a disbelieving eye towards the blonde, whose hand had found its way into his hair in his nervous babbling.

"It was completely totalled. I took it to probably three mechanics and everyone said to give up. So I had to get you a new one. I wasn't really sure what you would want so... Toyota...Camry?"

Kakashi stared.

"I didn't think you were a prius kind of guy." Naruto shuffled around in the snow. By now Genma was standing in the doorway to the building looking way too amused.

Kakashi shakily put his hands in his pockets and tried to think of what he was going to do.

"Oh, um, right, so I got the paperwork and stuff out of your glove box. Not really sure what else you need me to do um. If you want we talk it out over ramen? There's a great place around the block from here by the Taco Bell."

Genma was turning red from repressed laughter.

"I'm really beginning to hate you," Kakashi said at long last.

Naruto turned red. "Excuse me?"

"I don't want your car-"

"He doesn't mean that," Genma broke in, "He just asked me today where he could get a new car, cheap."

Kakashi glared, and Genma quickly realized his life wasn't worth whatever amusement he could milk out of the situation, and retreated inside.

"I don't want your car."

"W-well too bad." Naruto dug around in his pockets and yanked out keys, before hurling them at Kakashi's face. Kakashi ducked with grace. "You're taking the damn car. And I'm not hearing anything about it."

The moment Kakashi opened his mouth to respond the blonde slammed his hands over his ears and started singing.

"TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR-"

Kakashi winced and stepped back. He watched as Naruto made it through two out of tune renditions of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, one Row Row Row Your Boat, and a weird song about colors he'd never heard. Naruto cracked his eyes open and realized Kakashi was not saying anything.

Warily, Naruto lowered his hands, eyes accusing.

"Is that how you solve all your problems?" Kakashi asked.

"Did it work?"

"No."

Kakashi grabbed the other man's wrists before there could be a repeat performance, and Naruto made a disgruntled noise. Kakashi started. The mans left hand was fake, and now he wondered how that had managed to completely slip past his notice. Shaking off his surprise, Kakashi held held Naruto's hands out to the side of his head so he would be forced to hear as Kakashi returned his thoughtful gift.

"I do not want your car. Take it back."

"I can't. It was a gift."

"You regifted a car?"

"No! Not exactly. Look. I felt really bad about the whole thing yesterday-this morning. And this way you don't have to call your insurance company. Win-win right?"

"Ah, so that's what this is about." He released Naruto, who flapped his hands aghast.

"No! I mean yes! But I also felt bad, ya know?"

"Right. Well. It's not that simple. And besides. I'm an insurance adjuster. I can't very well condone what I highly suspect is insurance fraud. Or you driving."

Naruto gaped. "You're a what?"

"That's really what you took away from the conversation." Kakashi deadpanned.

"You don't look like you work for State Farm. If I jingle will you show up at my house?"

"I don't. They're on the sixth floor-what?"

Naruto looked a bit pink, but plowed ahead. "Nevermind that, I'll get you to my house some other way. You know what's a great way to get to people's houses though? A car. Which I'm giving you."

"Why would I go to your house?"

"That's really what you took away from that conversation?"

Naruto's shameless grin earned him a one eyed glare. It wasn't Kakashi's best effort.

Naruto deflated a bit. He bent down to grab the keys off the icy pavement. He dusted them off a bit and held them out. Then he spoke in a softer voice than Kakashi thought possible from him.

"Look. Yesterday was my fault. I'm sorry. I can tell you've been through a lot." He tapped his own right eye, a mirror of where Kakashi's left eye bore a horrible scar, "I've been through a bit myself." He lowered his hand so it was pointing to the whisker like markings. "Different kind of thing, I guess. But still. We've gotta look out for each other. I promise this car cost me nothing but probably my pride and dignity in the face of my friends. At least use it until you get a new one. And if you never want to see me again, totally cool."

Kakashi felt a bit like the world might be wobbling. Did they get earthquakes this far east?

A warm hand placed cold keys in his own, and with a winning smile and a blue eyed wink, Naruto was jogging towards his own car.

Kakashi cursed.