A/N: Continues to not belong to me.
My apologies if any of you were actually waiting for this update. I was run over by a CNG on the highway of life. Honest. Though what the hell an auto rickshaw was doing on the highway, I'll never know.
It also occurs to me that I may have promised a few of you porn in this chapter. Well, I lied. But it will be there in the next one. Consider that fair warning. Also, this chapter is relatively useless, but I liked it. And there may be some spoilers for the manga, but hopefully they're so interwoven with my lies, you won't be able to tell what they are unless you've actually read the manga and then… who really cares if they're spoilers.
And lastly, there are some bad words. I think that's about it.
***
It turned out that the plan, or rather plans with an s, involved a lot of hard work. But that was okay because Sakura had three of the hardest working girls in Konoha to back her up.
Normally, when Sakura had her sights set on a potential bedfellow, her tactics ran toward the extremely straightforward. This time, however, she was not convinced that sauntering up to Kakashi-sensei and asking him if he wanted to have sex was a wise idea. For one, there was really no telling what might come out of the man's mouth. For two, one of the things that could potentially come out of his mouth was laughter. In which case, she would most probably have to murder him, incurring Tsunade's horrible and terrible wrath.
Another tried and true method, that of walking up to a man in the bar and planting a searing kiss on his happily shocked mouth, was out as well since the jackass just had to wear a mask. Sakura doubted highly that her kisses would be quite so effective through a layer of gritty cotton.
Yet another obstacle to her seduction was the fact she had no idea what he even liked. Sure, he carried Icha Icha around like it was glued to his fingers – which really wasn't the best of thoughts – but that didn't mean the man lusted after girls half his age. Hell, he could even lust after boys half his age since getting one's jollies from reading porn was generally a female thing.
In all honesty, she knew next to nothing about him,other than the fact he was an irritating ass and he made being a near cripple look good. Damn good.
That's where Plan A came into play.
Plan A, otherwise known as Digging Up Dirt on Hatake, was a three-pronged information gathering mission with each of her friends assigned to a different aspect of Kakashi's life. Not only would this information help Sakura in deciding if her teacher would make a suitable bed warmer, it would also give her loads of blackmail material should their relationship progress into something more serious – and knowing whether a potential lover was a psychotic killer never hurt, either. Well, she knew he was a killer, but she felt a bit of clarification about the psychotic part was in order.
The girls had spent the better part of the afternoon deciding which aspects of Hatake's life were the most pertinent and easily researched. Finally, they had settled on his family, his time in ANBU, and, of course, the infamous eye. Hinata had volunteered to ask her father what he knew about the Hatake family as he was currently the Village's top authority in all things familial and clan related. Ino had argued that her own mother was way more informed about the goings-on of the families of Konoha but was summarily shouted down when it was pointed out that they were interested in fact, not fiction.
Ino's sulking quickly gave way when she found out that she would be given the green light to snoop into Kakashi's medical records. Okay, perhaps no one in the room actually had the authority to give her the go-ahead. But at least someone else had told her to do it, and she could blame them entirely if she were caught. Being caught, however, was highly unlikely given the fact that she knew the workings of the hospital backwards and forwards. Sometimes it seemed that she was there more often than even Shizune, and Shizune had a rollaway and a microwave and mini-fridge combo and about five changes of clothes in her office incase she got real busy.
It was supremely disturbing, but Ino actually enjoyed working at the hospital – privately, Sakura believed it was because of the requirement that all male shinobi have annual physicals, complete with hernia checks – and no one would question why she needed to see a particular patient's file, even if it were the Copy Nin's. Her relative impunity when it came to protected health information would allow her to dig up any info the hospital had on when and where and how Kakashi had lost and then regained an eye.
On a similar note, Tenten was almost equally filled with glee over the thought of breaking into Kakashi's ANBU records, tracking down any of his team members that were still alive, and asking them a few friendly questions about the extent of the Copy Nin's derangement. If anyone knew how freaking messed up you were, it was your ANBU team. This was something that Tenten could attest to personally having been a card-carrying member for the past couple years. It seemed like ever since she'd begun sporting the whorled tattoo, her love for being sneaky had increased a hundred-fold.
Sakura was a bit taken aback by the pure joy that radiated from her friend over the thought of breaking into her organization's top-secret files. Ino, she could understand. Ino was a hopeless degenerate, but Tenten? She supposed she should enjoy it while it lasted – and continued to benefit her.
While her devious little friends collected the details of her potential lover's life, it was Sakura's mission to begin the preliminary stages of Plan B, and perhaps gather a little intel of her own. This required another visit to the Hokage Tower.
Hopefully, her larcenous mentor had 'forgotten' that she owed Kakashi his book back. If not, Sakura was going to have to shell out a lot of cash for what she considered cheap porn. Apparently, since his death, Jiraiya's masterpieces had gone considerably up in value.
Unfortunately, she had a shift at the hospital that morning. But, wanting to get this over with as soon as possible, she set her alarm a few hours ahead so that she could obtain her typical early morning peace offerings. Sakura's prerequisite gifts for arriving at such an ungodly hour – seven a.m. – were extra large mochas and a box full of the best éclairs the Village had to offer.
As she crested the stairs, she found that Shizune was once again covering for her, and, recalling her previous treatment of the put-upon gate guard, she magnanimously bestowed a cup and pastry onto Izumo's desk as she passed by. She was even careful not to set her offerings on anything that might be important, which was no easy feat as the entire desk was littered with papers and folders and scrolls in various states of completion. She really needed to get back on the duty roster or nothing was going to get signed and stamped ever again.
Izumo waved her in absently, his eyes focused greedily on the steaming paper cup and luscious chocolate éclair. Sakura smiled to herself. If she had known it was that easy to bypass security… Oh, who the hell was she kidding? She still would have taken the opportunity to make Izumo squirm just for the entertainment value alone.
As she entered the Hokage's office, she realized she needn't have worried about Tsunade returning the book. An entire shelf – one that Sakura was certain had contained the minutes of the past twenty-five years of Council meetings – had been dedicated to what she assumed where the complete works of the Ero Sennin.
Sakura smirked. Apparently her shishou's taste in porn ran the same way as her taste in sake – overly expensive swill. She wondered who she had gotten to 'donate' the collection. They were too shiny and new to be Kakashi's. Knowing her mentor, she had probably gotten Izumo to pilfer them from the nearest naughty book vendor. She was kinda glad she'd decided to be nice to him today.
"Wake up, my beloved leader. I've brought breakfast," Sakura chimed, causing Tsunade's head to jerk up sharply from its formerly inclined position against the top of her desk. She gazed at her student with bleary, bloodshot eyes.
"Is it alcoholic?" she croaked.
"Nope."
"Is it at least unhealthy?" she whined.
"Yep."
"That'll do. Bring it here."
Smiling, Sakura deposited the cup carrier and box on the side of her shishou's desk and plopped down into a nearby chair. This was their normal morning routine. There would be no more speaking until the coffee and at least half the box of sweets had disappeared.
Once the serious business of breaking their fasts was out of the way, Sakura thought it prudent to get straight to the point of her visit.
"I need one of those books," she stated bluntly, gesturing toward the newly refilled bookshelf.
Tsunade gave her a hard glare, "I think not."
"Besides, they aren't Hatake's. I already gave his back," she continued, still frowning. "I thought I told you that you weren't allowed to kill him?"
"I'm not trying to kill him. I just need one of those books." She pointed to one with a bright green cover, "That one. I want that one."
"Well, you can't have it," Tsunade stated imperiously.
"Wait," Sakura blinked, "You already gave him his book back, and he's still helping me?"
"So it would seem."
"And you never asked him to?" Sakura asked mistrustfully.
"Never."
"And you haven't been assigning him shorter missions so that he would have more time to help me train?" she continued her interrogation.
"No," Tsunade replied with a gleam in her eye, "He's been requesting them."
"Requesting them," Sakura repeated. She slumped back into her chair, shell-shocked. Perhaps her plan had a chance of success after all.
"Sakura, why are you asking me all of these questions?"
"Don't give me that. You know very well why," she snapped peevishly, and then added hesitantly, "Do you approve?"
"Of Hatake? Never," Tsunade replied derisively. But as she spoke, she stood and retrieved the green-jacketed book from its shelf. "But… you could do much worse."
Sakura rose from her chair and moved to accept the book held in her teacher's hands. Without warning, because that's the only way these sorts of things could be done, she gave Tsunade a great big hug. "Thanks, Shishou," she whispered before bounding out the door, her prize carefully clutched to her chest. Now all she had to do was find time to read the horrid thing.
***
Sakura met with the girls three days later to go over their finds.
Hinata was first up. She had couched her questions to her father in the guise of wanting to know more about the current ninja lineages in anticipation of her eventual rise to head of house. She had been awarded with hours of mind-numbing boredom as her father recounted every little detail he could recall about all the surviving ninja clans.
Good old Hinata. She really knew how to take one for the team.
But, it turned out that there was no 'Hatake clan' to speak of. There really wasn't even a family. There was just Kakashi's foundling father, Sakumo, and his delicate civilian bride, Chizuko, though she had not lived even long enough to see the second summer of her little son's life. Some blood disease that the medics of Konoha could not cure had taken her in the spring. It was definitely something to worry about if she ever wanted to have a child with the man, but otherwise inconsequential. Plus, there was always the added bonus of no mother-in-law.
Sakumo was another matter entirely. Kakashi's father had been the White Fang of Konoha. Reportedly raised by wolves until he was found wandering in the woods by a returning team of Leaf-nin at the tender age of three, he had become a ward of the Village and enrolled in the Academy as soon as it was apparent he possessed an incredibly enormous amount of chakra for a toddler – for anyone, really. He had swiftly risen through the shinobi ranks, becoming jonin by the age of thirteen. He was rumored to be even stronger than the first Hokage.
His downfall had come when he had chosen his team over his mission. The mission had failed, though his team had survived. Unfortunately, it had cost the Village greatly, in lives as well as face. One didn't fail to assassinate the Kazekage of Sand without some serious repercussions. Spurned by the Village for his disastrous decision, Sakumo had slowly slipped into a deep depression, eventually taking his own life. It was believed that Kakashi had been the first to find him. That had to fuck a person up real bad.
Apparently it had been bad enough to turn him into an anal-retentive neat freak, according to Tenten. She had taken the liberty of breaking into his Academy files after exhausting her own part of the mission and syncing up her info with the other two girls. He had been a punctilious and by all accounts punctual little ninja, following every rule and turning in his classmates that did not. Sakura was rather glad he had grown out of those habits, because if she wanted to kill him now, she could only imagine the homicidal urges that would have assailed her had her sensei still been such an overwhelmingly Type-A personality. There was a collective shudder around the room at the very thought.
The next piece of information Tenten had to offer didn't win Kakashi any points, either. Hatake Kakashi's genin trainer had been none other than Namikaze Minato, the Fourth Hokage. But, more importantly, Minato was Naruto's father. Naruto's dad had taught Kakashi. Like life wasn't ironic enough. Though, everyone agreed, this did explain a lot – like why Kakashi was such a perverted idiot at times. The other members of his team had been an Uchiha boy and a female medic from the Inuzuka clan. Kakashi had also been elevated to jonin at the age of thirteen like his father before him, and that's where the Academy records stopped.
Luckily, Ino was there to pick up the tale. According to his medical records, it was on his first mission as a jonin that Kakashi lost his eye. It was on that same mission that his teammate, Uchiha Obito, had lost his life.
"Yeah, I guess on his first mission, he royally fucked up," Ino quipped cheerfully.
"You don't have to sound so happy about it, Pig," Sakura admonished.
"Yes, I do. It's nice to know that even the great Copy-nin can make horrible and terrible mistakes." Ino's eyes took on a nasty glint, "It should give you some hope, too, Forehead, that he might actually decide to sleep with you."
"Can you, for five minutes, stop being a cunt and get on with the story," Sakura responded sweetly.
"Fine, fine. So, on his first mission as team leader, Kakashi lost his eye to an Iwa-nin, and then later, this Obito kid got crushed to death when they were trying to rescue their medic, Inuzuka Rin. After the Uchiha bit it – or at least I hope he was dead because if not, it had to have hurt really, really bad – Rin did a quick and dirty transplant of one of his eyes. I don't know how the hell they made it home, and the report doesn't say. But, lucky for Kakashi, they got back to Konoha before the optic nerve had a chance to burrow completely into his brain. See, the eye had been in its Sharingan mode and was apparently intent on digging its way through your beloved sensei's grey matter. The medics at the hospital had a hell of a time stopping the thing, according to their notes. He was confined to a hospital bed for nearly two months while they tried to figure out what to do. They couldn't remove it. It had intertwined itself too deeply into his nerves and brain tissue, but they couldn't just let it continue to eat its way through his skull, either. Well, I guess they could have, but then none of us would be having this discussion right now, because he would be dead."
A polite cough from Tenten and a cold glare from Sakura prompted Ino to just get on with it already. Hinata just sat in the corner wringing her hands like she didn't know how the story would end.
"Anyway, a few medics nearly burnt themselves out placing stasis fields around the thing, and a few more nearly went insane when they inadvertently got themselves trapped in genjutsus created by the distraught little oculus. They never did manage to fix the problem. If the stasis fields are allowed to completely degenerate, it'd crawl right into his brain in like five seconds. That's why he's supposed to be seen every six months by an ocular medic. I bet you all can guess how often he actually does get seen."
The unhappy frowns sported by every other occupant of the room seemed to satisfy Ino enough for her to continue.
"So, he's basically held together with tape and spit. And, that's why he can't turn the Sharingan off and on like an Uchiha. I guess they had different brain connections for their eyes. But… we'll never know since they're all officially dead. Ah well, it would have made a great paper," Ino ended wistfully.
"Oh," she felt compelled to add, "Sakura, you will be pleased to note that as of his last physical, he was STD free. Of course, his last physical was conducted a little over three years ago, so you might want to get him into the hospital as soon as possible," she finished with a leer.
"I'm not offering my sensei up to the tender mercies of your cold and grasping hands, Yamanaka Ino, so you can just forget about it," Sakura challenged.
The two girls glared hotly across the room at each other before bursting out into gales of unrestrained laughter. The other two occupants of the room just rolled there eyes being used to such random displays of insanity from the pair.
When she finally recovered enough to speak, Sakura began counting off on her fingers, "So, we know that Minato-san is dead and this Uchiha Obito… What about the Inuzuka girl? Are all his former teammates gone?"
"Y-yes, Sakura-chan," Hinata stumbled. It was plain to see she was upset by all the talk of death and despair. "I-I… When I found out that one of his teammates was an Inuzuka, I went to Kiba. Rin was his mother's cousin. She was killed during a mission to Cloud when she was sixteen. B-by all accounts, Kakashi and she were more than just teammates," Hinata blushed profusely.
"Yeah," Tenten picked up, "After that's when he joined ANBU. Really threw himself into his work, I guess. He was already in all the bingo books, so it wasn't like an additional mask actually helped to hide who he was. In some of his mission reports, targets actually turned tail and ran when they caught sight of him – made it easier to pick them off from the back, I guess. But still, can you imagine what it would feel like to have enemy ninja run screaming in terror just from the very sight of you?" Tenten sighed in what appeared to be ecstasy from the thought. Sakura supposed she'd have to watch her a little more closely. All this ANBU crap had gone to her friend's brain.
"What was his time like in ANBU, and why did he leave?" Sakura prompted. Tenten's eyes had become a bit glazed.
"Oh, it was pretty typical. I mean, recon, intel, guard duty, interrogations, assassinations… He did it all. Well, there were a lot more assassinations in his file than most other operatives can boast, but he is the Copy-nin," Tenten shrugged. "Um.. oh yeah. There were a lot more of his teammates left alive, too, than I had thought there were going to be. Apparently, he never let a single one die while on a mission with him. He has really excellent stats."
Ino started clicking her fingers together in front of Tenten's face as her eyes had once again taken on a far-away and dreamy look, "Focus, Warrior Maiden of Doom. Focus."
"Alright, alright," Tenten complied grumpily, "So, I talked to the ones I could find. Apparently, Kakashi isn't much different now than he was back then, except he used to read comic books instead of porn. He would sit with his little book all quiet and unassuming, then bust out with some witty insult and go back to his reading."
"In between killing and extorting people," Ino added dryly.
"Yeah," Tenten smiled fondly. "Sakura, if you don't want him, can I have him?"
"Tenten, you have totally got first dibs if this thing falls through," Sakura replied sincerely.
"Aww. Thanks, Sakura." Tenten beamed happily, "Anyway, he did have a few flings with his fellow operatives. All female, so at least that's one thing you don't have to worry about. And lastly, he left because he was getting bored – of ANBU. Can you believe that?"
"No," the other girls replied, each with passably straight faces.
"Me, either. Okay, that's all I found out. I think Ino's got a bit more for you, and then we can go eat some pizza. I'm dying."
"What else did you find out, Pig?" Sakura asked with some interest.
"Well, I talked to Genma…"
"Completely in the interest of the cause, I'm sure," Sakura grinned.
"Yeah, shut up." Ino frowned.
"I'm sorry. Please, do go on."
"So I talked to Genma about his stupid friend for my stupid friend, but not letting him know it was for my stupid friend, because I'm good like that."
"Thanks, Ino. Bunches. What did you ask him?"
"I asked him if Kakashi liked girls, because there was kind of a bet going on, and I wanted to put in. But I also wanted to make sure I won," she smirked.
All the girls agreed that, that was masterfully played.
"What did he say?"
"After he finished laughing his ass off, he told me that yes, Kakashi likes girls. But that it was difficult for the sorry bastard to pick up chicks what with never wanting to take his stupid – and I'm paraphrasing here – mask off. He said that apparently the novelty of having sex with a man in a mask wore off about the third or fourth go-round for most."
A tension-filled stillness suffused the room until it was broken by Hinata's tentative voice.
"But, Sakura," she offered unnecessarily, "He's already taken his mask off for you."
"I know." She proceeded to bang the back of her head softly against the wall. "I know."
"Quit your whining, Forehead. That's a good thing. Now, it's time for food. Come on."
As Ino grabbed her hand, dragging her up and out the door, Sakura wondered what she'd gotten herself into. Kakashi's life, like a lot of ninjas', had been a hard one. Having lost his mother so early and his father so tragically, and then his teammates, one by one, it was a wonder he wasn't as loony as poor Sasuke had been. Maybe he was, and this whole thing was a horrible, terrible idea. But, for some reason, she just couldn't shake the wanting.
Though, for his sake, she hoped he wasn't comparing her to this Rin person, and that's why he was helping her. Because so help her, he'd wish for death by the time she was through if that was the case. She was Haru no Sakura, damn it, the Spring Blossom, and just because she was a girl and a medic did not mean she was some replacement for his dead girlfriend.
But, the girls' searches had been thorough and productive. She now knew that she had no immediate competition, no disapproving parents to contend with – if she didn't count her own – and she had testimony that Kakashi did, in fact, like girls. All in all, Sakura was feeling pretty good about her chances. She was just lacking one tiny bit of information she felt vitally important to her decision, a piece of information that could only be obtained from the jackass himself. She was torn between wishing he would hurry home and bribing Izumo to bar him at the gates.