If you haven't read Silver Queen's Dreaming of Sunshine, this most likely won't make much sense. I highly recommend you go read it...it's excellent.
Authors's Note: Silver Queen has graciously allowed me to write a side story series of her work, Dreaming of Sunshine. I do hope it doesn't disappoint even though this is less than perfect. Have some neurotic sensei first~
Hatake Kakashi worries. Recently, more than ever.
Oh, he can hide it with irritating sarcasm and lame excuses, but he is as paranoid as any ninja can be packed into one very irritating façade. He supposes he should have just called it quits when the Third Hokage offered an extended time of leave instead of being a jounin sensei.
(He knows that would have never worked out. Not with the permanent thrum for action twitching his mind a mile a second.)
There had been a time, before he was retired from ANBU and living the life of exact measures, where the most he had to worry about was the components of a successful mission and whether he was going to make it back alive to greet Obito and Rin again.
Now he has to worry about three itty bitty genin that hurtled themselves in supposedly adventurous danger with or without their own volition. He really does try and pin them for the blame of his heightened senses, but the excuse falls flat. Like always.
He doesn't know what started the sudden protective instinct that came from more than just duty. Perhaps it had been Shikako who feared for the Nine Tailed Fox inside Naruto and remembered chakra signatures from when she was a baby. Or maybe it was Sasuke who was branded with the curse mark and blindly drove himself into training when something happened. It could have even started way back, when Minato passed away and left behind a tiny baby with the hopes of the future.
Or maybe Kakashi's mind just called bullshit and decided to shove three more lives he had to be responsible for into his life while saying 'You-better-take-care-of-these-brats-because-Obito-would-so-want-this-for-you-so-shut-up-and-do-it-or-I'll-kick-your-ass-so-there'.
Well. That probably sums it up the best. His mind does sound an awful lot like Obito though.
It doesn't make him feel any more prepared for the feelings that come with caring.
Fondness is something he is not familiar with, but he tries his very best to respond back to the cuddles he suddenly receives from, in his opinion, too touchy team.
(It doesn't mean he doesn't like it, though.)
Fear is a nauseating rush that he hasn't felt in a long, long time, and it doesn't feel any better when he nearly drops everything to rush to the hospital in a blur of speed when he hears that Shikako is dead on the hospital bed.
(It has been a while since he had decided to fuck protocols so heavily to make sure that yes, Tsunade-sama knew what she was doing, your student should be fine within days. Then he decides to sneak in again after the surgery just to make sure that his student was okay.)
Shikako, of course, just has to be snarky and comment on how he is late of all things instead of worrying about how she almost died. At that moment, he wonders where her priorities were. Not that he can talk.
It is likely at that point when Kakashi snaps.
He grows better at hiding his thoughts while he watches over his eager to learn students, making sure to look a tad more diligent while ensuring that the porn comes out a bit more often. Even bright and suspicious Shikako doesn't suspect that he pushes them into better skills because he's so freaking tense about what will happen next.
When he signs up as a guard in the next Chunin Exams, Kakashi prefers to think that he is contributing to the rather fearsome image of Konoha instead of being too unhealthily neurotic about his students. Tsunade seems to doubt that with one raised brow and a lot of heavy sighing.
(Who could blame him? Orochimaru had a way of ruining everything Kakashi thought about Chunin Exams and Team Seven.)
His students perform well, their level of power sitting comfortably within the Chunin range, and he feels pride well up into the tiny cracks of his heart a bit too quickly. The feeling is somewhat suffocating and awkward, but the warmth was unusually comforting. Familiar, in a way.
Even as he watches in almost baffled amusement at the amount of destruction Shikako builds up in the arena, Hatake Kakashi still worries.
Because of three itty bitty genin.