It's cold the day Sakumo shows up thirty minutes late for training with his jaw set and a bruise around his eye, the look on his face too blank for any real attempt at neutrality. Chie appreciates that he's trying to look neutral, though, even as Gai and Ibiki exchange looks and then nudge her forward when Sakumo remains silent, arms crossed, and gaze far away.

"Sensei," she says, drawing a sharp look from the man. It doesn't ruffle her. She's dealt with worse. "Is today the day?"

"Today is a day, Chie-chan," Sakumo counters, clearly not intent on making this easy.

Chie bites back a sigh. "Every day is a day, sensei, except maybe solar eclipses. I think. Technically, they'd classify—whatever. We don't get a C-rank every day, sensei."

Sakumo looks the three of them over, finally seeming to realize that Gai and Ibiki are present and watching him with the kind of quiet concern they think they're good at hiding.

"No," he says finally, uncrossing his arms and rolling them. One of his shoulder joints pops; which one is impossible to tell, but the way he is, either he's dislocated it recently or he'd slept on it wrong the night before and is only now getting around to warming up. Considering the bruise, Chie's willing to bet on the former. "Not today. Something came up, and we'll be done early today. But I will be running you through some exercises and getting you started on specializations, so why don't we get to it? Start with your legs."

"Got it."

The usual warmups start off silent and tense, but Chie manages to get Gai going on about the virtues of stylized lunchboxes as he and Ibiki complete their final set of push-ups and begin to move on to an exercise that's more of a game than anything—hopping across a series of posts set up in their clearing, dodging the posts that taper into spikes. She's only just ahead of that, taking a breath and getting ready to channel chakra to her feet to try walking up a tree, when Sakumo taps her on the shoulder and nods to the other side of the clearing.

A tad bemused, but nonetheless willing given that Konoha is a military dictatorship and he's her direct authority, Chie follows him over and stands at ease as he stares off into the distance, gathering his thoughts.

If she said she wasn't curious about this, she would be lying. Sakumo hardly speaks one-on-one to them on a good day beyond the necessary instruction—on a bad day, they mostly finish their warmups and end up sparring until he disappears off somewhere and they are dismissed for the day.

"Chie-chan," he says finally, and Chie keeps her expression smooth. "Is there a reason Yamanaka-sama sent me a permission form to allow one of my genin to join the T&I interns on their rotation for 'special observation and instruction'?"

Chie bites her tongue on her initial response, something along the lines of it's highly possible, Sensei, if only you would look at the name on the form to confirm things for yourself, and instead she meets his eyes squarely. "Yes, Sensei. Yamanaka-sama graciously offered the opportunity at a chance meeting, and I didn't think it prudent to refuse him. He said it could be useful to my team—"

"—and useful on your sensei," Sakumo says wryly. His eyes flicker from the piece of paper he fished out of his pocket while she was talking to her face, searching for clues. And weakness too, probably. Ninjas.

Chie says nothing.

He sighs, for a moment looking far more exhausted than a man his age really should. "I'll allow it." There's a but that hangs in the air after it, so she waits, and the faintest hints of what could be a smile curl about his mouth in approval. It fades too quickly, but that doesn't bother her like it would Gai if Gai could really see his face at the moment. "On one condition, Chie-chan."

"Of course, Sensei."

"No observing torture sessions until you've gone through the official training for it in the pre-chunin preparatory period. There's a reason nobody tells the younger genin that T&I is a department." His eyes begin to get that glassy look again, sliding into the far-off and the unknown, sights no man should have to see, and when he shakes himself to see her watching he only looks tired, as he did before.

"Thank you for your concern, Sensei," Chie says after a moment, feeling the awkwardness of the protracted silence a little more than is probably strictly necessary.

Sakumo just shakes his head. "Get back to work. I know you've been pretending to be worse at the tree-walking exercise than you really are—show me your best work, and we'll see how you can improve from there."

Somewhat chastened, Chie nods and makes her way back to the trees that Gai and Ibiki have begun running up. Ibiki gives her the side-eye, but otherwise says nothing.

Gai smiles at her. "Chie-chan! Let us give it our best effort!"

"I was thinking of taking a nap, myself." She surveys the skies and then the clearing. Ibiki sighs.

Unfathomably, Gai laughs.

Daytime is busy enough to keep her occupied, with hard physical work at practically all hours only being further accompanied by the grueling mental practice of calculating and re-calculating the effects she's having on her current environment. Despite all that Chie has said and done already, the world still feels half-unreal to her—a waking dream, a passing shadow, one filled with sights and sounds and scents dulled out by the grey edges of something that simply can't be reality, no matter which way one cuts it.

Keeping a mental tally of everything she's noticed, despite her hopes, hasn't really helped matters at night. When it's not wondering whether or not some unfriendly ninja will break into her unfeasibly-trapped apartment (it's hard to get quality with the kind of budget she's on) despite the unlikelihood of it all, it's the dreams she has of the world she can never return to.

Not full memories, not now—those have begun to fade, and she wrote them all down when her hand was shakier and her time was mostly free. She'll always have those in some form. No, what devastates more than anything is the vague fractals of location and light and the feel of the air that coalesce together and form places she had been to before the end, all mashed up in ways that cast strange shadows on the ground where there ought to be nothing but sunlight reflected off blue waves and white sand.

"For a ninja, you're not very good at hearing people in your own house."

Very carefully, Chie does not jump out of her skin. Instead, she peers into the darkness only to see the sullen eyes of Hatake Kakashi watching her from a corner—not his face, no, because the mask covers most of it.

She remains silent for a few moments. Then— "What the fuck?"

"Pardon?" He looks shocked, but at least half of it is affectation.

Chie stares right back at him staring at her. "Do you know what time it is?"

"Yes," he says without missing a beat. "It's two twenty-three AM."

"Is there a reason you're in my apartment at two twenty-three AM, Hatake-kun?"

Kakashi shrugs. "Your traps aren't very good."

"That's an explanation of how you got in, not a reason."

"You know I could kill you where you sit, right now?" he asks instead of responding to her comment. "It'd be really easy. And I have a million options. All I'd have to do is pick one of them and you'd be dead."

Chie pinches the bridge of her nose. "Yes, Hatake-kun. Then the Uchiha Police Force would find my body, an investigation would ensue, and given that there's probably a patrolman who noticed you enter, you'd be a prime suspect for the case. Do you have a point?"

"You're mad." He sounds surprised.

"Hatake-kun, it's two twenty-three AM."

"Two twenty-six AM."

"Sure. If you have a point, get to it. I'd like to go back to not sleeping well in peace." This is really just her luck—the snotty-nosed genius ninja boy got offended by the stars aligning against her and decided to hound her constantly, she ended up here instead of, oh, somewhere else, anywhere else, she was made to enroll in military service against her will...

Kakashi looks at her like she's an idiot, which might be fair at this point, really. "You need to guard yourself better. I could've killed you."

"You're you," Chie points out. "You're unreasonably skilled. I'm a genin in training and the enemy is nowhere near my doorstep yet. They won't deploy me unless they're reasonably certain I won't be a risk in the field, and they don't assess that until the pre-chunin preparatory period, which you skipped by getting a field promotion. And as far as I know, no one in Konoha except you has threatened to kill me in my sleep yet."

"So you know you're badly-defended, but you choose not to do anything about it?"

Chie can feel the urge for violence rising up inside her. Instead of submitting to it, she grits her teeth. "I choose to believe, based on my assessment of my station and my surroundings, that it's very unlikely that another nin will decide to break into a lowly genin's home and kill me."

"But I could've."

"You seem to have an issue with the concept of my unimportance to the grand scheme of things," she drawls, trying very hard not to go for the kunai under her pillow like part of her dearly wants to.

The fact that the conditioning is working on her and violence is beginning to seem normal is something she'll have to contemplate later; right now, her top priority is getting Kakashi to fuck off into the great unknown outside of her window. And possibly to look into whether or not T&I offers basement apartments near their location.

Kakashi twitches. "You're my father's apprentice!" he squawks, finally, and Chie gives him a very unimpressed look.

"I wasn't aware that Gai and Ibiki were not a part of my initial genin team," she says.

He glares at her, suddenly next to her bedside, and she leans away from him. Whatever mission he's been out on, he definitely forgot to take a shower.

Some things never change, she thinks, her expression flat as the smell reminds her of the time Gai had decided to skip a shower after the hardest day of their routine and showed up bright and early for the next one without considering what that might do to his teammates and his very olfactorily sensitive teacher.

"You're different." Whatever else he was about to say, he instead falls silent, and that is a trait the Hatake family seems to share.

Chie tries several times to construct a response to this and ultimately ends up sighing again, feeling a very particular headache somewhere behind her temples. "I'm very flattered that you think so, Hatake-kun."

"Not like that," he clarifies, his eyes going wide in a hilarious moment of uncharacteristic earnestness. "I mean... I've seen it. He treats you differently. He's teaching Gai and Morino-kun, but he's assessing you."

"Hatake-kun," she starts, then stops, thinking better of further taunting. This whole thing is exhausting. "That might be true, but why does it matter to you?"

"I..."

This younger Kakashi is so unlike anything she had expected—getting distracted by petty taunts, finding himself at a loss for words... or maybe not, she thinks, finally noticing the way he's watching her. Are you stupid is a pretty common attitude from him anyways, if Obito was anything to judge by, but the expression on his face is the closest to genuine, hurt offense she's seen yet.

"Is there a reason it affects you?" she asks, feeling rather lost and unsure of what to do about it. "Is there something I'm—not getting, here?"

Kakashi is silent for a long, long period of time. "...He's my father," he says, so quietly she has to strain to hear it.

Ah, she thinks. And maybe it's that she's had one father already, but she doesn't quite think she needs another.

"If you want," she says, just as softly as he spoke, feeling just as ridiculous with her small body and small hands as she did the first time around, "I can help you talk to him again. Gai and Ibiki and I, we just want to help him. Like I told you—the Hokage knows what he's doing when he gives the final say on which units are assigned to which teacher—"

But Kakashi is already shaking his head. "Not yet," he's whispering. "Not yet."

What a sad, strange child, this genius boy, growing up in a war with all the people who should be watching him fighting somewhere on the front lines. Even the ones at home.

"I won't force you," she tells him, drawing the blankets around herself. A cover if she needs to do some hand-signing for emergency jutsus, yes, but primarily a small comfort for herself.

Kakashi just nods. He doesn't move or stop looking somewhere past her shoulder into the darkness, but he does blink.

Chie shuffles her blankets around, taking the opportunity to kick the thin undersheet to the foot of the bed and only keep the top one near her. "I'd like to get back to sleep sometime tonight..."

"...Oh." He blinks again. "Right, uh, I... bye!"

The window shades flutter in the wake of his hasty exit. Chie sits back in her bed and runs a weary hand over her face. I don't get paid enough for this, she gripes to herself. I don't even really get paid to manage ninja emotions! I volunteered!

Still somewhat preoccupied by the strangeness of her night visitor, Chie meanders through the village in the early evening of the next day. Her pace is slow and unhurried. Her body hums, the whole of it a contented sigh in her mind, her skin singing under the sun. Training today had been a blur of motion, keeping her and teammates on their guard as Sakumo taught them the ins and outs of dodging—the number one skill to keep them alive.

A ninja that gets hit in a warzone is a dead ninja, Nakamura-sensei had told them in the Academy.

He had been right. Her own mother in this place had, after all, died saving Sakumo from getting hit—taking the hit for him instead.

In another time and place, that didn't happen.

She could be bitter about it, she supposes. Certainly Sakumo had seemed to expect it from her at first, and the Third Hokage had found her professional curiosity about the Hatake family wildly amusing instead and wasted no time in exposing him to the truth. Izumi Keiko had been a rock-solid teammate and colleague, or so she's heard, and as a mother to Chie... she had certainly known how to encourage her daughter's intellect.

A part of her does wonder what her life might look like now if Keiko had survived.

But the dead are the dead, gone to their eternal rest, and the only way to honor their memory is to let them be. Carry their memory with you, but let them be.

Yes. That is one of the only ways to function in a world past the worlds, in a time past time, when everything but yourself feels removed from the green of the trees and the fierce blue of the sky—

Chie blinks and shakes her head a little, averting her eyes from where they had gotten stuck on a little sun-dappled patch of shade next to one of the public benches. She hadn't really noticed herself stopping, and thankfully no one is staring at her—one of the few benefits of living in a military village is that everyone has their demons—so she nods to herself and continues on her way to the T&I department.

"Alright, everyone. Starting today, we're going to ramp things up a bit."

There's something different about Sakumo today, something in his face and his eyes that looks a little less dead, and it leaves Chie nonplussed but delightfully surprised. She, Gai, and Ibiki are lined up in front of him, all of them at attention, and Sakumo's arms are crossed. Ibiki nudges her. She ignores it.

Sakumo eyes them sternly. Ibiki moves his arms back into position.

"The war is not over yet," Sakumo says after another moment. "But someday soon, it will be. None of you will be seeing the front lines before you make chunin. Even with the mandatory preparation period being shortened, it's very likely that you won't be seeing them at all."

Chie does exchange a glance with Ibiki and Gai this time. "The war is ending, sensei?"

"I didn't say that." Sakumo's voice is mild.

"But you know something," Ibiki pipes up. Looking at the glint in his eye, Chie is reminded again that he will one day be hell to contend with. "Something is—or will—be happening soon. You want to prepare us for it."

"We should celebrate with a lunch of celebration!"

A beat.

"That's a fun idea, Gai," Chie volunteers when it looks like neither Sakumo or Ibiki are going to respond. Gai beams proudly at her.

All part of the plan, she reminds herself. Going along with Gai doesn't make her feel any worse about anything—in fact, given the right situation, it can be a very profitable venture—but the fact that in any other dynamic she would have left dealing with the awkward bits to someone else... a part of her dearly misses that.

"Let's not celebrate right away, or leap to any conclusions," Sakumo says, a hint of wryness leaking through into his tone. "I said someday. Today, I test you on your dodging skills."

"Scatter!" Chie yells as Sakumo kindly takes his time pulling out his kunai, which for a ninja amounts to making the motion visible to the human eye, and proceeds to do his level best to bury them in a storm of whistling metal.

By the time they finish, they all have more than a few new surface-level cuts decorating their skin. The only semi-serious injuries end up being one laceration on Chie's upper arm and Ibiki's shoulder, where the friction of the handle of one kunai had made a well-aimed hit a significantly more painful one by virtue of also skimming the surface layer of his skin. Gai had done the best of the three of them at dodging serious injury, the raw control over his own body already beginning to display itself in their daily life, and she makes a mental note to study a few taijutsu scrolls soon to see if there's anything he'll find useful in them.

"I'll just get this treated at home," Ibiki tells them, looking at his bloody shoulder and torn sleeve with no real emotion on his face. Sakumo had staunched the flow with what he had on hand, which had ended up being some old supplies in the travel-sized medkit he kept in some secret pocket, but the wound itself looks like it hurts; there's a just-barely-too-stubborn set to Ibiki's jaw that helps show it, too. He may be a bastard already, but he's young and pint-sized yet.

Sakumo nods. "Take care on your way home."

That's new.

Gai and Chie exchange glances.

"Sensei! I'll accompany Ibiki to his home!" Gai exclaims, latching onto Ibiki's uninjured arm with all the earnestness he can muster. "Come, Ibiki! Let us go!"

"Yeah, yeah, alright..."

"Sensei." Chie waits until Ibiki has begrudgingly allowed Gai to drag him off in the direction of the southern markets. Sakumo has lost some of the liveliness he had at the start, but thankfully he doesn't just disappear, like an older Kakashi might have. "Would you mind taking me to the clinic around here? I don't have suitable medical supplies at my apartment."

"You don't?" He frowns at her.

Chie coughs politely. "I'm on something of a budget."

"Ah." Sakumo puts his hands in his pockets, something she hasn't seen him do before, and nods to the other path out of the clearing in the field. "I'll take you. I haven't been to the one around here, but I know where it is."

"Thank you, Sensei." She trots along behind him, waiting until they're a comfortable distance away from the narrow path and a ways back into the village proper to walk slightly to the left and behind of him, as is expected of a student.

She thinks. She isn't actually sure whether the stuffy old etiquette book on the cultural customs of the Warring Clans still applies in the present day, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

Even so, she completely dashes antiquated propriety when she opens her mouth again. "Sensei, is something different?"

"What do you mean, Chie-chan?"

"You look different." She waits a beat. "And you told Ibiki to be careful on his way home."

Sakumo hums. "Maybe I'm a teacher who's just looking out for his students. That's normal, isn't it?"

"But you aren't just any teacher," she says.

He laughs a little, a short, unhappy thing that dies before it really gets going. The forever-distracted part of her wants to yank on his hair, which was long to start with and has grown longer since he started teaching them, but he's far from being as easy pickings as Inoki is. She'd be gone in a split second. "No, I suppose I'm not."

"Did something happen?"

"Are you snooping?" Sakumo asks her, turning and raising an eyebrow at her as pedestrians pass them by, going to and from their workplaces for the lunch hour in this district. Chie, for her part, does recognize the look he's giving her—ninja to ninja, it's a silent why are you being so brazen instead of seeking out that information on your own?—but this man is her sensei, and she figures that teamwork is all about trust, right?

So Chie shrugs. "I don't mean to pry into your personal life, Sensei." Unsaid, but hopefully heard: I do care about you, though.

He gives her a long look. When she doesn't waver, he sighs. "An old friend paid me a visit, that's all. Come on, the clinic should be just around this corner."

Hello, everyone! I'd like to assure you all that In Triplicate is not dead. I've had a lot going on in my personal life that hasn't left me with a lot of time to work on live updates, but I'm building up a significant backlog so that when the time comes, I'll only have to send it through a few rounds of editing before I can post it. :) Hopefully I'll be able to put out another update before nearly a year has passed!

At any rate, let me know what you think in the reviews—note that this story is planned out and does have a projected end point that I don't plan on changing just yet, and that it includes the possibility of side stories should anyone be interested. Here's a question for you all: what do you think of Tobirama? Was he the God of Paperwork in paper-nin legend?