Chapter Thirty Five: Unmasked (or not)

Kakashi received a variety of responses from his students when he casually announced that he was cutting their training session short.

Annoyance from Sasuke because it had only been less than an hour into their training session. To be fair, if Kakashi had it his way, he wouldn't have shown up in the first place, but a small part of him still understood what being responsible means. And well, if the responsible side of him took over, then Kakashi would have been much earlier. Alas, he arrived three hours late like usual, leading to only forty five minutes of training before noon.

Fury from Naruto because Kakashi had just begun explaining the process to learning the Rasenshuriken and the boy had absolutely no patience. He could only imagine how Naruto would fare, if he was told that he might have to spend over a decade to figure out the jutsu, just like Kakashi had done. And it was still incomplete. Well, the fury wasn't really a result of the frustration although Kakashi liked to think it was, but rather that Kakashi had declared he was leaving after a brief explanation.

Sakura was the only one with a relatively normal reaction. Or at least, normal by Team Seven's standards.

"It's your anniversary, isn't it?" That had been enough to cut Naruto off mid-rant as the blonde leaned closer to hear Kakashi's response. Even the scowl on Sasuke's face disappeared and he looked remotely interested, even though he tried to not show it.

Kakashi saw right through him.

"Maa, how did you know?"

As far as Kakashi was aware, the date wasn't common knowledge. Or at least, it wasn't supposed to be. Not when everyone already thought that the two of them were dating, even long before they made it official, so when it became official, nothing really changed.

Rin must have mentioned it to Sakura, Kakashi concluded.

The real question was in what context.

"Hospital gossip," Sakura replied. Upon Kakashi's mortified look, or what Sakura presumed was her sensei's version of a mortified look, Sakura added, "You didn't know? Your relationship has been a hot topic ever since I began training at the hospital. There's even an exaggerated story about how you risked your career to save Rin sensei from being stripped of her medic status."

Had he? It all seemed so long ago and he had only done what he thought was right.

"I don't get what is so interesting to gossip about," Kakashi grumbled. "They don't know the truth anyways."

"Then what is the truth?" Sakura prodded, leaning closer to him.

"That," Kakashi said, jamming a finger against Sakura's forehead to push her out of his face. "Is none of your business."

"Ah! Maybe the whole thing is a ruse so that you have an excuse to leave training early," Naruto accused, leaping right in front of Kakashi. "You don't want to tell the story because it's not real. Give it up sensei and train us."

Kakashi shot Naruto a wry look. "You are all chunins now. I am confident that you should have the ability to train on your own. If not, I guess I'll have to take it up to Tsunade sama to have you demoted…"

"Anyways, keep training hard. I'll be here to check up on your progress tomorrow. And Sakura? Don't listen to the nonsense at the hospital." With that, Kakashi disappeared in a puff of smoke back to the safety of his own apartment. Rin was already in the kitchen, making lunch for the both of them.

"So, tell me about this hospital gossip."

Throwing her head back from the laughter, Rin eventually did, detailing all of the absurd theories that the hospital staff had come up over the years.

Something about how Kakashi always snuck out of the hospital as a form of protest if Rin wasn't the one treating him.

The debate of how long they have been dating was a popular discussion. Some guesses even dated back to the days of the Third Shinobi War, while others believed that their relationship was fake, simply a ploy to deter annoying suitors. It certainly sounded like something Kakashi would do; he knew firsthand exactly how annoying fangirls could be.

The nature of their relationship was another popular debate. Whether they were just strictly friends, actually dating, or perhaps even friends with benefits. There was also a rumor that flew around speculating that the two of them were secretly married.

Then there were crazy theories about how it was actually a threesome between him, Rin, and Izumi. Or sometimes Gai would be thrown into the mix.

Rin's favorite one had been the one that speculated Kakashi often entered the hospital due to chakra exhaustion simply as an excuse to see her, much to Kakashi's annoyance. It wasn't his fault that his younger self was prone to chakra exhaustion, especially with Obito's Sharingan.

"Do they not have anything better to do besides gossip?"

Rin shrugged. "Apparently not, but it's all your fault. A lot of them say a lot of nasty things about me because they have a crush on you."

Kakashi sighed. "Why does it feel like the Academy all over again?"

Her only response was laughter.

Sakura grabbed Naruto's arm, yanking him back towards them as the blonde boy attempted to follow Kakashi, even though he didn't have a clue as to where he went.

"Let it go, Naruto," Sakura told him. "Sensei is allowed to have a life outside of missions and training."

"I know," Naruto insisted. "But he was explaining a really cool jutsu to me and then he just leaves like that."

Sasuke scoffed. "Dobe. Kakashi wants you to figure it out on your own. No one is going to hold your hand through every step of the process."

"Oi teme, like you have done better. I haven't seen you creating any new jutsus."

"At least I didn't need anyone to hold my hand through the process of learning the Chidori. You must have been a pain in the ass to teach the Rasengan too."

Naturally, Naruto was going to respond; he wasn't the type to let those insults slide, but Sakura interjected, telling both of them to calm down. "Let's just get back to training, yeah?"

Sasuke complied to her suggestion, returning to running through his katas, but Naruto just stood there. Sakura had been on her way to do some endurance training when she noticed that Naruto didn't follow her.

"Naruto?" Sakura prompted.

"Ah enough of training!" Naruto exclaimed, a sly grin forming on his face. "I have a better idea."

Sakura was the one to entertain his declaration. "What?"

Sasuke stopped running through his katas, shifting himself so that he was positioned closer to his two teammates, but not close enough that it seemed like he was in the conversation.

"We can try to see Kakashi sensei unmasked," Naruto suggested.

Sakura rolled her eyes. "We already tried that before, remember? Twice already and it failed both times. It's like there's some force that's working against us to make us not see his face. This time won't be any different."

"Aha!" Naruto shouted. "That's where you are wrong, Sakura chan. Kakashi sensei will be with Rin sensei, so his guard will definitely be down."

"No," Sakura protested. "We are not spying on Kakashi sensei on his anniversary. That's an invasion of their privacy!"

"Like Kakashi sensei doesn't pop into our apartments at random times to drag us out for training," Naruto argued. "Besides, don't tell me you aren't curious as to what he does outside of training? It seems like he doesn't have a life."

"It's called a private life for a reason, Naruto," Sakura chided. "Private meaning that we don't know about it. Spying on him just seems inappropriate."

"But it's not fair that Kakashi sensei has access to every detail about our life and after being his students for so many years, we know virtually nothing about him."

Sakura sighed, throwing her hands up in the air, the universal sign that she gave up arguing with Naruto. Instead, Sakura turned towards Sasuke, hoping that he would be the voice of reason here.

Except Sasuke wasn't. "Izumi told me that only Rin has ever seen Kakashi's face."

"What does that have to do with anything?" was Sakura's response, while Naruto latched on to Sasuke's statement, pointing out that their chances of seeing Kakashi sensei's face were increased.

"See Sakura chan. If Kakashi sensei is with Rin sensei and he's comfortable with not having his mask on, we can get a peek from afar. They won't even notice us!"

Sakura didn't even get the opportunity to inform him that they would definitely notice, Rin was an even better sensory ninja than herself for crying out loud, but Naruto was already dragging her and Sasuke in the direction of Kakashi's apartment.

Much to her surprise, Sasuke was willingly allowing Naruto to drag him along despite his verbal protests to not touch him.

For the tenth time in the last hour, Rin emitted a sigh as her hands moved to sift through the pages of the new trade agreement with Kumo. Across from her, Kakashi's eye flickered to her briefly, then to her paper, before back onto his own set of papers, featuring an updated peace treaty with Kiri.

"Remind me why we volunteered to act as Konoha's envoys again?"

"We didn't. Tsunade sama practically coerced us," Kakashi gently corrected, as his lone eye scanned through the contents of the treaty. "Something about it being her retribution since we didn't want to take Hokage, so it fell to her."

"Can Naruto grow up faster? Then we can pawn off the paperwork to him as a rite of passage to becoming Hokage."

"We'll be waiting for quite a while," Kakashi responded wryly. "He was angry at me because I ditched training. I much rather be training those brats than doing this."

"Why didn't you just cancel it yesterday?"

Kakashi shrugged. "Well, it slipped my mind."

Rin shook her head. "How typical. You wouldn't have happened to invite those brats of yours over, would you?"

"No, why would I do that?"

"Don't look, but they're on the adjacent rooftop. Probably spying on us through the window."

Meanwhile on the rooftop, Naruto was complaining about how boring Kakashi sensei was. Even at home, Kakashi sensei was just reading boring documents, while talking to Rin. Sakura constantly elbowed him as a warning to hush, while Sasuke attempted to read their lips to figure out the nature of the conversation. But he was too far away, and it was hard to read Kakashi's lips when it was obscured by his mask.

And Sasuke would be damned if he used his Sharingan on such a trivial matter.

"Did you figure it out, Sasuke kun?" Sakura questioned, slapping a hand over Naruto's mouth. For once, Naruto fell silent.

Sasuke shook his head.

"See Naruto," Sakura hissed. "Kakashi sensei had a good reason to leave training early. It's probably some mission reports that he forgot to submit. Now, let's go bac-"

Naruto pried her hand off of his mouth, pointing in the direction of the window. Sakura's green eyes followed his line of sight to Kakashi's kitchen window where Kakashi had just undid his forehead protector and was moving to shrug off his flak jacket. Rin had stood up, rounding the kitchen table to collect the scattered documents and placing it in a neat stack.

"What about it-"

"Hush," Naruto said.

Sakura's eyes widened as her brain registered the fact that Kakashi had just grabbed Rin by the waist, spinning her around and pressing her against the wall. Rin was smiling as her hands pressed against Kakashi's navy shirt, feeling the hard planes of his body, before trailing upwards to his shoulder. Her left hand snaked up to his neck, across his cheek. Two fingers hooked in the fabric of his mask, moving to tug it downward…

All three of their mouths fell open from the anticipation. This was their moment. There wouldn't be annoying classmates to get in the way this time. There wouldn't be a second mask under his first mask. There wouldn't be anything in their way of seeing Kakashi's face…

And right when Rin pulled down his mask, Kakashi spun the both of them so that the back of his head was facing the window. And then the two of them promptly disappeared out of sight.

Naruto almost fell off of the rooftop from the shock, if it wasn't for Sasuke who grabbed onto the collar of his jacket in time. Disappointment was written all over Sakura's face; even if she felt guilty about spying on her senseis, they had been so, so close to seeing Kakashi sensei's face.

Sasuke was just convinced that the divine intervention was still working against them.

Perched on two rooftops away, Kakashi chortled in amusement at his students' reactions to the crafty genjutsu that he had planted before he and Rin slipped out of the apartment.

"Maa, some things never change, does it?" Kakashi commented. "I thought they would have gotten over their curiosity when they became chunin but I guess not."

"Well your face is one of Konoha's most well kept secrets," Rin pointed out, teasingly. "That's not to mention that you have Naruto on your team; you know the kid doesn't give up."

Sakura felt like an utter idiot when it finally crossed her mind that the entire scene had been a genjutsu. She felt so stupid, so foolish to have been so enraptured in the mystery of Kakashi sensei's face that she failed to notice that it had been a damn trick all along.

When she finally revealed her findings to her teammates, Naruto, as expected, was sent into a fit of rage. What was expected was Naruto to propose that they needed to track down their sensei, so that they could extract their revenge. Sakura highly doubted that anything the three of them could do would even touch Kakashi sensei, but willingly followed Naruto around the village.

Sasuke, on the other hand, looked disturbed. Most likely with the same train of thought as Sakura; how could he have been so stupid to not have seen through a basic genjutsu? Hardly a B ranked genjutsu, planted by someone who wasn't even a genjutsu specialist. It was those self deprecating thoughts that fueled Sasuke's determination even further; he'd be damned if he was caught in one of Kakashi's tricks again.

Too bad Kakashi had an entire book full of tricks; its sheer number more than enough to rival Naruto's amount. Being a genius had its perks, sometimes.

It wasn't long before Rin felt the familiar chakra signatures of Kakashi's three chunin students. It must have been Sakura's doing, Rin mused. That, and Kakashi deliberately didn't bother to suppress his chakra, almost like he was baiting his students to come find him.

The only indication that tipped Rin off that Kakashi knew his students were near was his slight body movement, angling himself so that his back faced his students. She shook her head in amusement before she went back to scouring through the documents.

Meanwhile, Kakashi was playing a game with his students in the form of casting various genjutsus, while Sasuke and Sakura saw straight through them immediately. He could only lament the fact that his students weren't fun anymore, not when they didn't fall for his same tricks again. Then again, they weren't the clueless genins they once were when they first met.

For the sake of maintaining a healthy level of chakra, Kakashi stopped with the genjutsu. Instead, he quickly swapped his real body with a clone - Rin definitely noticed but didn't comment - before he used shunshin to appear right behind his cute students, who were currently hiding in a bush a good ways away from him.

Sasuke was the first to react to his presence, spinning around with such a speed that he almost nicked Kakashi, if Kakashi hadn't anticipated Sasuke's reaction and made sure he was out of the reach of the dark haired boy.

Both Sakura and Naruto were five seconds slower to react and by then, were fully aware of his identity. They made no move to attack Kakashi; instead, they tucked their kunais back into their weapons pouch.

"Oi, mind explaining to me why you three are stalking me?"

All three of them had the deer caught in the headlights look. Not so subtly, Sakura and Sasuke turned towards Naruto for an answer.

Naruto gulped. "Ah, well you see, we are training? Working on our stealth, yeah!"

"And you thought you weren't going to be noticed by two Anbu operatives?"

"Yeah well who else?" Sakura attempted to salvage, with a nervous chuckle. "I mean it's either the people in our age group or you and tailing you would give us more of a challenge."

Kakashi amended his previous statement. They were still his cute students, just a bit older, but still the same foolishness. That, and they had somehow picked up his habit for telling terrible lies.

"Yeah right," Kakashi scoffed. "What is your real purpose? To come beg me to train you three?"

Naruto let out a loud "yeah!" while Sasuke hmphed in annoyance, jerking his head to the side while uttering a "no." Sakura's eyes darted back and forth between her teammates, clearly at a loss.

"So which is it?"

"Okay fine," Naruto conceded. "We wanted to see what you were up to and maybe get a chance to see under your mask since it's your anniversary and all. Speaking of, you ditched us to do paperwork?!"

What a typical Naruto reaction.

"Rin and I are preparing for a mission," Kakashi explained. Shooting all three of them a scathing glare, he added, "No thanks to the three of you hindering our progress." Even if Kakashi did enjoy trolling his students, the two of them were due to leave the village in the next hour.

His students had the audacity to look guilty.

"A mission?" Sakura repeated. "We're not going?"

"It's a mission that requires stealth. WIth your performance today, it is evident that you all would fail the mission, miserably if I might add."

Technically, it was a diplomat mission, but in Kakashi's defense, there was a certain amount of stealth and tactic required in the art of diplomacy. While Sasuke had the former, he simply lacked the patience for it. Naruto had neither. Sakura was the only one with the potential of being a diplomat, but perhaps not for another five years when she grew up. When she actually had a fearsome reputation to back her name. When people would actually take a pink haired girl seriously.

"But we haven't had a mission in such a long time," Naruto whined.

Kakashi opened his mouth to point out they went on an errand for the Hokage just three days ago, but Naruto was quick to interject.

"Not some stupid mission," Naruto clarified. "A real mission. Like the one in Suna."

"Then I suggest you get training so you can pass the jonin exams," Kakashi said. "That way you won't be stuck doing grunt work."

If only that was true for Kakashi himself. Nevermind the fact that he made jonin at the age of twelve, the youngest in Konoha's history. Nevermind the fact that he was a seasoned Anbu operative, with ten years under his belt. Nevermind the fact that he was the infamous Copy ninja, Kakashi of the Sharingan, in the bingo books across all major nations.

Yes, forget all of that because under Tsunade's reign, Kakashi would merely be treated as one of her assistants and consequently was subjected to all types of grunt work. Need someone on the rescue team? Call Kakashi. Need someone to travel to Suna for a diplomatic meeting? Call Kakashi. Need someone to file paperwork? Call Kakashi.

It was Sakura's hesitant words that jolted Kakashi out of his reverie. "Ne sensei? I heard rumors that you became a jonin at twelve and that your first mission was a bust. Is it true?"

A bust? That mission was a whole fucking disaster.

"I suppose," was Kakashi's cryptic response. "I was young and stupid back then and I made decisions that I still regret to this day."

"And I heard-"

Kakashi cut her off before Sakura could continue. "Don't believe everything that you hear. Perhaps I will tell you the truth one day, but not now."

Needless to say, that fueled the three of their curiosities even further. They knew little of what kind of person their sensei was, prior to being their sensei. There were a few whispers here and there, but all they really found out was that he had been in the Anbu Black Ops. And everything he practically did was classified.

It was from Gai sensei that they learned that Kakashi had led another team prior to Team Seven, a team called Team Ro. According to the overly enthusiastic man, that team was one of Konoha's best, but had broken up due to unknown circumstances.

Or rather, those circumstances were unknown until Sasuke stumbled upon a bingo book and managed to piece together two of the members of Team Ro. Itachi and Shisui Uchiha.

From there, it wasn't hard for Sasuke to realize exactly who composed Team Ro. His distant childhood memory often featured him staying over at Rin's apartment when his brother was busy. And if Team Ro was based off of the typical four man cell format, then: Kakashi, Rin, Shisui, and Itachi.

Still, that didn't explain anything. That didn't explain why Sasuke found old documents in the Uchiha compound demanding that Kakashi be killed. That didn't explain why Sakura heard rumors at the hospital that Kakashi wasn't mentally sane and hadn't been since he was four years old. That didn't explain why Naruto had to suffer a long two years of Kakashi's absence during his childhood. That didn't explain the offhand remarks that Kakashi often made about him looking like his father, or acting like his mother.

Rivalling their curiosity of their sensei's face underneath his mask, the three students wanted to know about their sensei's past.

If only they knew exactly what they were asking for.

A/N: Hi again!

Can't have a Naruto story without a Team Seven arc trying to see under Kakashi's mask, right? Haha. Sorry that it kind of turned dark at the end, but from here on out, we're quickly approaching the end! Honestly, writing this story made me realize how odd it is to have Sasuke still in Konoha - have to keep reminding myself to include him lol.

I suppose that I'm going to get questions why Naruto still doesn't know who his parents are (see last line, third to last paragraph) since he's grown up now, but to be honest, that part just slipped my mind with all of the changes I was making. Ideally if I could redo the story, I would slip it in after the chunin exam invasion, but since we are beyond that part now, I promise they'll have that conversation at a later date.

Next chapter is called Bounty Hunting.

Thank you for reading and until next time!

-MM