Over the course of the next few weeks Kakashi spent more and more time with Naru. It wasn't that he had nothing better to do. The latest Itcha-Itcha book had come out a week ago and though Kakashi wanted to get it, he kept putting it off so that he could spend more time with Naru. The woman didn't seem to mind. So maybe it didn't puzzle her as much as it puzzled Kakashi.

What did puzzle him however was the fact that Naru kept coming up with these ridiculous lists of potential mates for him- well okay that didn't so much as puzzle him as it pissed him off. He couldn't understand why Naru seemed so damn eager to help the council and Tsunade marry him off.

Since it was his life he should have a say about who he ended up with, right? Well he'd thought things out and thought things out and kept coming back to Naru.

To him she was the only person in the village that was young enough to have children, she was single (or at least she better be since he didn't want to become a convicted murderer anytime soon) she had a wonderful personality and he'd already caught himself several times, about to try stealing a kiss from her.

Just as an experiment, mind you. To see how she would react to her pervy old former sensei swamping spit with her.

But he always caught himself before his lips could get close enough to touch hers. And Naru in her innocence didn't seem to know what he was doing. Though she did give him some peculiar looks from time to time while he was beating his head on something.

All she really knew was that he was agonizing over something that he refused to speak about.

Which made the situation just a mite more comical to her since she was always jokingly telling him while patting him on the back. "It's okay Wolfy. Don't hurt yourself. You should never forget that life is worth living."

To which Kakashi would always respond with a growl of annoyance that would cause Naru to giggle in amusement.

This went on for a while, sort of like some other things. Like Naru showing up on his door step every night or so to crash in his home rather than staying in her own. When he finally broke down and asked her why she didn't seem to want to stay at her apartment Naru got a strange look on her pretty face and thinned her lips and refused to speak.

To say that this was a mite alarming to him would be an understatement. He began to worry that maybe Naru was still being attacked by the villagers. It wasn't until one night almost three weeks after her return. At about three seventeen in the morning when he was woken up by someone or something scratching at his bedroom window, did he really seem to understand Naru's reluctance to go home.

He found her standing just outside of his bedroom, her hood pulled up in place and the jacket itself was smoldering and damaged from where it had been on fire at one point or another and what he could see of her face was smudged black with ashes while some of the skin on her delicate little hands was a horrific blistered red that was oozing blood.

He woke up pretty fast as soon as he realized that she was hurt and quickly grabbed her by the front of her jacket and pulled her into his apartment before peeking out the door to see an orange, red blaze in the direction of where Naru's home was.

"Please tell me that you didn't try cooking." Kakashi said in a slightly worried tone as he hurriedly stripped her of her jacket, trying hard not to hurt her further but couldn't avoid it when he peeled the sleeves off fo her arms, ripping some of her burned skin away.

Naru didn't even react to the pain, worrying him more since most people would be in tears by this point. He finished stripping her of her jacket and looked at her face and breathed a small sigh of relief when he saw that she was more or less intact. Her hair was sticking up in all directions like it would if she had been shocked by an electric current or something.

Her face was a little paler than he'd seen it in a while and she seemed to be in shock. He snapped his fingers in front of her face a few times after making sure that her wounds were nothing life threatening, she blinked and looked at him and opened her mouth as if to speak and nothing but thick black smoke wafted out before she rasped.

"Damn lightning." Kakashi blinked and started to ask her what she meant when outside the distinct crack of lightning sounded over head. What the- When did it start lightning? Wait, does this mean that Naru's apartment was hit by lightning? Kakashi wondered as he ran down the hall and grabbed a few things from his medicine cabinet to take care of Naru's wounds.

He grabbed some gauze, some aloe, some rubbing alcohol to disinfect the wounds on her hands and arms and also grabbed some pain medicine just in case she started feeling discomfort and then ran back to the living room and dropped everything on his coffee table then grabbed the corner and scooted it around to where he could grab things easier. As Naru sighed and quietly sank down to sit on his couch, looking tired.

He took his time to carefully clean her wounds, smeared enough Aloe on them to keep them nice and moisturized for a while and bandaged her hands and arms where ever he saw them burned then started to hand her the pain meds when she shook her head and said. "No good. Stuff doesn't work."

Understanding her meaning he set the medicine aside and stood up. Shoved the coffee table out of his way and sat down next to her and pulled her into his lap and just held her. He felt that she needed the contact as much as he did in that moment and didn't think or dwell on it any further.

He just held her and fell into his old pattern from when she was his student, the same pattern that he'd used to comfort himself late at night after he used to wake up form night terrors about the war or the Kyubbi.

He counted her heartbeats. Each breath she took.

He felt the warmth of her body curled up against his own and let himself feel relieved that she hadn't been taken from him by yet another close call.