Kakashi's first impression of Uzumaki Kanna is…
Hm.
She's a lot.
Kakashi doesn't meet her through someone else, or in a controlled environment. Meeting Sakura had been pretty simple, after all; he'd just shown up at her house with the Hokage's instructions, and she'd talked to him. Easy-peasy.
Kanna accidentally(?) shoulder-checks him in the depths of T&I with murder in her eyes, thankfully focused on someone that isn't him, and the only reason he knows it's her is because he remembers the photo from the house.
Well, he'd have guessed based on the hair, but the photo helped.
Kakashi, for his part, isn't actually busy. He's already finished dropping off the report that Intel needed, and was on his way out. He tucks his hands into his pockets and ambles after the little bundle of rage that is apparently the village's A-rank Uzumaki.
'A holy terror,' Tsume had called her. He wonders how accurate that is.
Nobody stops Kakashi as he walked around. He's not technically part of T&I, and doesn't have any plans in that direction, but the department is connected to several other buildings. It's not uncommon for high-level shinobi to duck from one to the other for whatever reason. Kakashi gets an odd look or two, but he's unhindered as he follows Uzumaki Kanna from T&I over to R&D.
He's not sure when he was in here last. He doesn't frequent the science guys much.
Kanna is flipping through papers when he arrives, and the way she does it is just as angry as the way she walks. There's a seemingly permanent frown on her face, lip curled in irritation. The side of her head is shaved, and the hair is not the red that Kakashi expected. After having seen little Karin, he probably should have, but for some reason he was still expecting the deep scarlet he'd gotten used to from Kushina. Instead, Kanna's hair is like Karin's, vibrantly red in a way that shades towards pink, and…
Okay, he doesn't want to say it, is a little uncomfortable even thinking it, but it's the kind of hot pink he usually only sees in sex shops selling novelty toys.
"Either get over here or fuck off, Hatake."
Huh. She hadn't even looked up at him. "Maa, is that any way to treat an old friend, Kanna-chan?"
She looks up at that, glares at him, and spits, "We are not friends. You wanna call my wife 'Sakura-chan?' Fine, she considers you a friend and finds you amusing, whatever, but don't pretend we're anything more than acquaintances."
"Sorry, sorry," Kakashi says, hands up. "Should I just stick to Kanna-san, then? Only, there's far more Uzumaki here than when I left. Wouldn't do to get confused, ne?"
"If you must," she says, and turns her eyes back to the file of charts and graphs that Kakashi's sure he could understand, but not without at least a few hours or days of study up first. "The fuck do you want, anyway? I could feel you following me since T&I."
"Couldn't just swing by to see an old friend?"
"I will gut you like a fish and feed you your own intestines," Kanna responds, and her voice is exactly the kind of flat and unamused that Kakashi gets from Ibiki when he's being particularly aggravating.
"Sure you shouldn't be in T&I?"
"Sure you shouldn't be somewhere that isn't here?"
"I don't have anywhere better to be," Kakashi says, walking over to stand next to her. "What are you working on?"
"None of your business," she growls, closing the folder with a snap. She turns and faces him, and he's glad that he's taller than her. She's not as short as Sakura, but she's still half a head shorter than Kakashi.
Huh. Her eyes are red. No pupils, either. He can't remember if that's odd for an Uzumaki or not.
"So, how's motherhood treating you?"
Her chakra spikes for a moment, dark and angry, and she bares her teeth. He can see her fists clench at her sides. "Get. Fucked."
"You know, I think Sakura-chan would be very disappointed that we've never put in the effort to get to know each other," Kakashi says, hoping she catches on. He needs to know enough about her to pass off having been at least some degree of acquainted before she moved to Konoha, but there's a handful of lab assistants around that he can tell are eavesdropping. "Maybe we should get some dango!"
She closes her eyes, and forces herself to relax, and it's… well, it's not impressive, considering how shinobi are supposed to keep their emotions in check, but he appreciates the effort. "Fine. I'm done at six. Swing by then."
"Looking forward to—"
"Get out of my lab, Hatake."
#
Kanna raises an eyebrow when he meets her at the building entrance later, but doesn't seem at all surprised. He falls into step with her, going for a few blocks, and then asks, "Do you know where we're going?"
"No, but you do."
"Hm. Microexpressions?" She's not looking at him, but it's the usual way people manage that.
"Chakra twitches."
"Huh."
He tries to stifle his chakra as much as possible, watching to see if she'll get lost once he's hidden it completely. She makes the next few turns without a hitch, apparently still somehow noticing which 'chakra twitch' means she's about to go the wrong way and which one means she's going the right way.
He tries the opposite gambit, flaring it up and down in a mostly-random pattern. She still doesn't get lost. She's smirking, actually.
The key is probably to not pay attention to her, so he can't see her tells for which way she's going to turn, but that loses the fun of it.
"Hatake, just what did you think happened to my sensor skills?" she drawls, once they make it to the dango shop he had in mind.
"I mean, I'm one of the best scent trackers in the village, and I can still get at least a little stymied if someone spills an entire bottle of perfume on my mask," he says as lightly as he can.
She rolls her eyes as she opens the door to duck into the shop. "Unless you're trying to drown me out using an entire bijuu…"
He's not going to touch that comment.
The dango shop isn't a little stand, like so many places. It's a sit-down café, with booths that offer privacy for the discerning, and even a room or two for larger or wealthier parties. It's not explicitly for shinobi looking to have a quiet conversation, but it's certainly a step in the right direction for anyone that knows a jutsu or seal to block off sound.
With how Kanna immediately slaps down a seal, she knows this.
"Should have expected that," he muses.
"No, you shouldn't have," she says. When he blinks at her, she shrugs. It's not a self-conscious or embarrassed shrug, but the kind of shrug that asks what he was expecting. "I didn't start learning sealing until I was in my late teens. I learned a lot from some old Uzumaki scrolls, but most of what I learned was from an independent, unaffiliated teacher."
"Ah. And the identity of that teacher is classified, I'm guessing?"
She shrugs again, looking out the window.
Kakashi's impressed, mostly by how bored she seems. "So, the seal is going to keep this actually private, yes?"
"As private as anything else could," Kanna says. She glances down at her own seal, mouth twisting into an expression he can't quite place. "Sound is going to be overwritten by a buzzing noise, and the visual aspect is blurred to a degree that's impossible to get through without a Sharingan. Unless there's an Uchiha in the building, we're good."
"And if there is?"
"I'd know."
There's a hint of pride, but it's still more matter-of-fact than anything. She's not bragging, or exaggerating, or—anything. It's just that she'd know.
It's kind of like asking Gai to kick a tree down. He'd agree, enthusiastically and maybe with a bit of pride, but he'd also be able to do it.
He waits for a moment to see if she has something else to say, but a waitress comes by a moment later. Kanna touches and deactivates the seal just long enough for them to place their orders, and then it's back.
"So," Kakashi says, grappling for a moment with the thoughts he can't quite put together. There's a lot he could say, but most of it would be inane and, he's guessing, have her looking at him like a complete dumbass. She's exactly the type, he can tell already. "Is there a dynamic you have in mind for our supposed acquaintanceship, or is the earlier friendly antagonism workable with what you and Sakura-san established?"
"You can call her Sakura-chan," Kanna snorts. "She's not going to object, trust me. As for me… yeah, friendly antagonism works. Kind of reminds me of the dynamic I had with one of my old teammates, except I'm not expecting you to insult me enough to punch a hole in your head."
He blinks at her. "You call that friendly?"
"Hozuki."
"Ah. That would explain it."
She grins at him. It's not a nice grin. "Sure does. He kept cockblocking, and we were all violent little shits anyway, so it was kind of inevitable."
"Between you and Sakura?"
"Mm. No." She doesn't elaborate, just turns to watch their waitress come back with some drinks and food. They get their dango, and Kanna suddenly seems a little more human, fiddling with the metal straw in her drink.
(Most food establishments know better than to offer shinobi something plastic. It's too easy to break, and too much lasting trash is bad for village security. Everything that can be composted or reused is.)
"You're a strange one," Kakashi says.
"Look who's talking."
Well, she's not wrong.
"Hokage-sama said that you… are particularly strong." Kakashi tries to pick his words carefully. "And that it was part of why he was so quick to grant you custody of Naruto."
She blinks at him, slow and even. "You want to know my rank?"
"If it's no trouble."
She snorts. "I can stand up to one of the Sannin. Maybe not win, but I'd live to see another day."
"…have you?"
She makes a face and wiggles a hand in a so-so motion. "I took Tsunade's word for it."
Ah, right. That.
He takes a bite of the dango when she glances away, and she rolls her eyes when she notices what he's done. He tries to figure out which question is the logical next step, but what actually comes out of his mouth is, "Thank you."
She looks at him, eyes half-lidded behind the glasses, and if Kakashi didn't have many of the same mannerisms, he'd have maybe mistaken the look for bedroom eyes.
But Kanna is married and barely knows him, and he knows better anyway. She looks at him like that because she's learned how to be a predator. He's not entirely sure what kind—her teacher in a formative year might have had an influential summons, or she'd spent time with a clan that had strong ties to a given animal—but it's a common mammalian action. To blink slow and keep the eyes half-lidded is a sign of comfort and safety and, with Kanna's statements just now, confidence. He's not sure if it's quite arrogance, but the Hokage is vouching and he wants to believe her.
It comes down to this: Kanna is unimpressed, unintimidated, and unwavering. She's probably exactly what Naruto needs right now.
"You knew them," she says. "It's public knowledge."
"The connection isn't."
She shrugs. "That's why we lie."
"And that you're willing to do that says a lot."
Kanna snorts. "Thank Sakura, then. It was her idea."
"And your cousin."
Kanna's face twitches, and she doesn't meet his eyes. He isn't sure why. "The kid needs more people in his life. I'm not good with… well, not just kids, I'm not good with people in general."
"You do seem a bit grumpy."
She laughs at him, short and harsh. "I'm a bitch, Hatake. Grumpy doesn't even begin to cover it."
Well.
She said it, not him.
Kakashi smiles at her, and she rolls her eyes again, taking another bite of dango.
When she speaks again, it's slow and measured, careful in a way that Kakashi isn't sure what to make of. "I was a high B-rank, before. Low A, maybe. Mostly by virtue of my tracking skills and how bad I am at dying."
He chuckles, and she gives him a grim smile.
"Kushina was the same way," he offers.
"We usually are," Kanna says. She sighs. "The main reason I got to even an A-rank was that I woke my chakra chains when I was seventeen. I'm sure you saw Kushina using them."
He had. He remembers. He can suddenly grasp exactly what degree of dangerous this woman is likely to be. "And to make it to S-rank? To gain the respect of Tsunade?"
Kanna grimaces. "Well, that's the part where things get classified. It's what pushed me to be able to take on Sakura in a fair fight, instead of her going easy on me when we spar."
"She's better than you, then."
"In a fight, absolutely," Kanna says. There's no hint of shame or jealousy or, well, anything in her voice. "That girl was a low A-rank by the time she was, what, sixteen? She didn't even have that much chakra, just some absolutely wicked control."
It's a lot of information. Kakashi's not sure how much he can share. "So why are you in R&D instead of, say, in ANBU tracking down nukenin?"
She grins, sudden and sharp. "Konoha has trackers and fighters aplenty. Anything I can legally do, you can too. Doesn't matter that I can find a ninja on the other side of the continent if I can't cross the border, does it? But the discoveries? Orochimaru was a monster, but you lost a great mind when he turned on you. I'm not on his level, but I'm also willing to listen when the Hokage says it's time to pay attention to the fucking ethics committee."
"…we have an ethics committee?"
"Technically."
"Huh."
Kanna waits to see if he's going to say anything else, and then continues. "I also will be taking some tracking missions. A few will even be on personal time; I have a few friends I lost contact with for… reasons beyond my control, really, and I'm going to try to get to them when I have the time. The one I'm most worried about is in a country that doesn't even have a hidden village, so borders shouldn't be an issue there, at least."
She frowns. "And beyond that, there's just… things that need doing. Sakura can handle a lot, but she's needed at the hospital, and her fuuinjutsu is very specifically for medical work, not…"
Kanna trails off, glaring off to the side, and Kakashi's getting to know that expression well now.
"Anything I can help with?" He asks. He's not expecting much. She's clearly competent, and even if she does need help, she doesn't seem to need it.
Her frown deepens, and then her head snaps up to gaze at him with wide eyes. She leans forward, so close that he's suddenly terrified of just what she's looking for, and then sits down with a thump. "Oh my gosh."
"…should I take that as a yes?"
"You still have the Root seal."
Kakashi's heart stops.
#
Okay, so it doesn't stop literally.
Kakashi finds himself following Kanna home as soon as she's done eating, and he barely manages to catch the sight of her Shadow Clone heading off in the direction of the Hokage Tower. Something is twisting in his stomach, but Kanna is marching a warpath towards her house, and people scatter. At least one person mutters to their partner that they thought it was the Habanero, and Kakashi's heart twists in a way that isn't connected to his strange, complicated fear right now.
Kanna is fresh to the village, and knows what Root is anyway. That's not great.
Her house is too close for comfort. Of course, anything would be too close for comfort.
"Sit the fuck down."
"Do I get a choice in thi—"
"No."
Kakashi considers using a shunshin to get out of this mess. He feels like a house with kids, sitting on a comfy loveseat while an angry kunoichi stomps through the rooms looking for something is like… entirely the wrong place to be doing something like this. It should be a shadowy secret room in the depths of ANBU, or a locked cell in T&I, or even her lab.
Not five feet away from a stuffed frog plushie that someone forgot to put away because half the house is still packed in storage scrolls.
The Hokage shows up in a swirl of leaves. He's still in his official robes, so Kakashi calms down a bit, because that means none of this is actually an emergency. The old man looks pretty grave, though, and that's still a bad sign.
"This is a serious accusation, Uzumaki-san."
"Yeah, I know."
Kakashi feels his visible eye bug out, and the Hokage sighs and turns to him. "I feel as though I should apologize for putting you in her… range."
There's a slamming door and a crow of victory as Kanna apparently finds whatever it is that she was looking for.
"She reminds me of Anko," Kakashi admits.
The Sandaime… flinches. "More like some awful mix of Kushina and Orochimaru, I've found."
"That is… somehow much worse."
Sure, Anko herself could be described the same way, maybe, but the gleam in Kanna's eye is scary when she enters the room with various sealing supplies. The specific scary is much, much closer to Kushina than anything Anko has shown off.
"I must insist that you wait," the Hokage says.
Kanna frowns, and crosses her arms. "For what?"
"Sakura, as I believe our previous conversations indicate she'll have… insight."
Kanna frowns harder, and then glances at Kakashi. "Turns out we'll need to blindfold you for this."
"What?"
"Blame Hokage-sama," she says, jabbing a paintbrush in the air in his general direction. The man in question looks aggrieved.
"You've been here for two weeks," Kakashi says. "How are you…"
"Getting away with this?" Kanna finishes for him. "That's classified."
Kakashi looks between them both for a moment, and then quickly lifts his headband.
No genjutsu. Kanna is unpleasantly bright, actually, but Kakashi has yet to meet an Uzumaki that isn't overflowing with truly unnecessary amounts of chakra, so that's actually a point in her favor. The Hokage is the Hokage, though, unless there's mind control or walking corpses involved, and Kakashi would have smelled the latter.
"Can I opt out of this?" Kakashi asks, just a touch desperate as he pulls his headband back down.
"Not yet," the Hokage says. He's eyeing Kanna with something that reeks of disapproval and irritation. She's looking back with an expression that can be described, at best, as mulish.
Kakashi's pretty sure that Kanna's already made herself a pain in the ass, but for some reason, she's indispensable right now. He's pretty sure it's not the R&D or the tracking, not even the connection to Naruto. He's not sure what it is, but it's not great.
Sakura bursts into the house, looking almost frenzied. Her eyes dart from Hokage to Kanna to Kakashi, and then she dashes over to her wife and whispers something harsh and sharp. Kanna's expression hardens, and she just says, "Sai."
Sakura winces. "I know."
"I wasn't exactly planning this, babe."
With a groan, Sakura sits down on the nearest couch. "Fine. Cool. We'll just move up the timetable. Sure, why not. Are we waiting on anyone else?"
"Yamanaka Inoichi, Morino Ibiki, Nara Shikaku," the Hokage says. "I'm sure you can guess why."
It's a reprimand as much as it is a divulgence of information.
He's not happy with anyone right now, but Kakashi's pretty sure Kanna's at the top of the shit list.
Kakashi's actually trying very hard not to have a panic attack about the seal being gone. He feels like there's probably something that's going to kill him if the person removing the seal doesn't know exactly what they're doing.
"I need to check him over before they get here," Sakura grinds out. "If that is, in fact, what you called me here for."
"Your accusations," the Hokage says, but does not continue.
"Not accusing anyone of jackshit yet," Kanna says flatly. Kakashi twitches. She hasn't been here nearly long enough to get away with talking to the Hokage like that. The expression on the old man's face confirms it. Kakashi isn't sure what the repercussions are going to be, but he's imagining budget cuts in R&D's future. Sakura's burying her face in her hands. "All I know is that one of your top Jounin has a seal on his tongue that's twisted as hell and I can probably remove it, or at least untangle it enough to get a start on something."
"You're performing experimental fuuinjutsu removal on one of my Top Jounin," the Hokage corrects.
"You know why."
"It's a risk," the Hokage tells her. "It's always a risk and I'm not sure this one is worth it."
"It's too late to stop Pein," Sakura mutters. "That ship sailed. But we can save some things locally. That's got to be something, right?"
"You asked for transparency," Kanna says, voice flat. "You said you'd take all our information under consideration."
"Not when it could kill my shinobi."
Sakura stands up and comes over to Kakashi. "Pull down your mask and stick out your tongue. Also, I'm going to need you to pull down your headband until you're blindfolded."
Wait, what? Kakashi looks at the Hokage, who nods grimly. "Unfortunately, the particular kind of assessment Sakura-san is about to perform involves an S-rank secret."
Oh, that is so not fair.
He pulls the headband down, and tries to control his breathing. Women he barely knows are asking him to… to blindfold himself and show them his face. This isn't normal. This is why they needed the Hokage, isn't it? Not just the experimental jutsu bit, but to get Kakashi to cooperate.
He can feel the bile coming up.
"Thank you, Kakashi-kun," Sakura says, and her voice is soft and calming and he stiffens in response. He knows it's just good bedside manner, he knows it, but this is a stranger being kind about him putting himself in, if not the most vulnerable position possible, something that feels like a violation of the self, and—
"Why can't Jiraiya do this?" Kakashi asks, desperate.
"He's in Earth Country," the Hokage says. There's regret in his voice.
It's not enough to quell the panic in Kakashi's chest.
"Breathe," Sakura says, putting a hand on his shoulder. "I promise, this will be over quick. You may need to keep the mask down for longer, but you can pull your headband up as soon as I'm done with that part of the assessment, and that's going to be very quick."
His stomach flips, but the Hokage approved this. The Hokage is in the room. The Hokage is asking about his Root seal and Kakashi was never deep in the organization, not with how high-profile he was, but… he was still there.
He pulls down his mask and sticks out his tongue, and he thinks he can hear the Hokage stiffen. His ears are about as good as an Inuzuka's, which aren't the best out there, but Kakashi thinks he's pretty good. Still, could just be imagining it.
Sakura keeps her hands on his cheeks for about thirty seconds, turning his head slowly from side to side, up and down, and stands again. "Stay where you are, please."
Another thirty seconds as she walks around him, and then, "Can you say something? Anything. It doesn't have to break the rules of the seal, just something vaguely relevant to what you did."
Er. "I was on a team with Tenzō."
As soon as he's done speaking, Sakura claps. "Great. I'm done. You can, ah, make yourself presentable again."
Kakashi rushes, and he's not ashamed to admit it. His heart is pounding in his ears, and his normal eye focuses on Sakura's sad, apologetic smile. She wanders over to the little counter that separates the kitchen from the living room, and starts sketching something out under Kanna's watchful gaze.
"I am sorry, Kakashi," the Hokage says, and the words get tangled on the way out of Kakashi's mouth. Sorry for what? For not stopping Danzō? For not stopping Kanna and Sakura? For not noticing the seal in the years he'd had it, when it had apparently taken Kanna a single lunch?
(She'd said 'still,' which implied that she'd already known, and Kakashi doesn't want to touch that thought until he's home and has had a chance to scrub his body clean of whatever the hell is going on.)
"That's a pain in the ass," Kanna says, and Kakashi snaps his head over to look at her. "Are you sure?"
"Do you have any other way to look at the minutiae?" Sakura asks her.
Kanna makes a face, and points at the paper between them. "This part is concerning me."
"I don't recognize it."
"Pretty sure it's meant to incite death in the wearer," Kanna says, grimacing. "Hokage-sama, could you take a look? You've been doing this longer and it's part of why I wanted your opinion."
The Hokage's face is stony. Kakashi's kind of grateful for that.
Really grateful, actually.
"Can I have a look at what's on my body?" Kakashi asks.
"After we're done," Kanna says. "We can't risk… well. There's bits in this that might be detrimental for you, if the seal catches wind that you're trying to reverse-engineer it."
"…so I'm fucked."
"I mean, no, you have the Hokage and an Uzumaki on your side," Kanna says. "Without Jiraiya in town, these are the best damn hands you're going to get."
He blinks at her. "I have… no actual evidence of your skills."
"I do," the Hokage says, and the words seem almost like they're being dragged out of him. Not literally, not mind control or coercion, just reluctance to support someone that's currently pissing him off as much as Kanna is. "Uzumaki-san has… shown me her work before."
"Thank you for the vote of confidence," Kanna says, still staring down Sakura's paper. "There's someone at the door, honey, can you…"
"The—"
"Yeah."
Kakashi hates everything about this, and as T&I's favorite interrogators and the Jounin Commander enter the room, he's pretty sure it's all about to get worse.
#
In the end, they don't get the seal off. Not that day, or even that week. It takes five weeks, in total, of Kanna refusing to meet his eyes and Sakura apologizing and the Hokage growing increasingly irate, of Kakashi only going to the Uzumaki house because he's that determined to see Naruto (and Sakura, at least, does seem to actually be sorry it was all necessary) and then one day Kanna just walks up to him in the T&I hallway and, chakra at her fingertips, rips it off.
It hurts and stings and his eyes swim, but Kanna stands in front of him, darkly triumphant. "Get yourself to Inoichi before Danzō finds out. I'm going to go hunt down anyone who has this thing."
And she does, and in the end, she is exactly what Tsume said she was:
A holy terror.
I forgot about the Root seal on Kakashi being a Thing until like two seconds before I wrote it. I was just going to have Kanna brush him off but NO. She had to REMEMBER IT.