Of pranks and the insane

Beta'd by Black Sparrow

Sarutobi Hiruzen stared at the most recent encounter of one of his teams with Hatake Kakashi and suppressed the urge to sigh or at least bury his head in his arms. What had he done to deserve this? Really, did the S-Rank missing nin really have nothing else to do then play pranks on his shinobi?

A weary sigh escaped the old Hokage while his thoughts wandered to the former ANBU captain. Like always he felt a bone deep sense of guilt when he thought about Minato's last living student. Maybe if he had insisted stronger on delaying Kakashi's indoctrination into the ANBU forces or pulled him out after a certain time, Kakashi would have not turned his back onto the village.

The whole debacle had happened shortly before the Uchiha crisis and Sarutobi had never been able to fully investigate what had truly turned the silver haired prodigy against Konoha. And now this was coming back to bite him in the ass.

No one in the Intelligence division, not even Inoichi had the slightest clue what these strange communications with Konoha teams meant, though like always the most outrageous theories ran rampant throughout the ninja corps. And as far as Hiruzen had last been updated they contained everything from Kakashi finally losing the last of his mind, a personality altering gen or ninjutsu, to him just setting up an elaborate trap for Konoha.

The Sandaime himself was careful not to read too much into these… communications. For a painful moment he had felt himself reminded of Kushina when she dealt with grief and anger. Even Naruto was just the same and for a brief second hope had bloomed inside of him that Kakashi was just dealing with whatever had driven him off in the Uzumaki way before his logic had crushed the thought before he could form completely. What utter nonsense Kakashi was much too serious a ninja for that, there had to be another reason.

It also worried Hiruzen somewhat that Konoha apparently gained a reputation of driving their prodigies into insanity and missing nin status, no matter that Uchiha Itachi was ironclad loyal to Konoha. But oh well, there was nothing that he could do about THAT now.

Somewhat tired Hiruzen looked out of the glass front of the Hokage office and stared at the orange/ red glowing roofs, another day over and again he had still too much paperwork left. At times like this the longing for his deceased wife became near unbearable. She had always been the one person that could calm him down and force him to relax no matter the circumstances.