"Thanks for doing this." Tetsuo said to Kakashi as the group minus one sat down to dinner, thanking him once more for going along with this insane situation and not turning around and running back to Konoha after the first night, which was something that would have been well within the man's rights to do since he'd volunteered for this.

"You're welcome." Kakashi replied.

As far as Kakashi was concerned, things weren't ideal, but they were reasonably good at the moment. Sasuke, who had started attacking the apple tree again the instant the team was done with the fence, was too tired to yell at Naruto the way he did the day before, and Sakura was off trying her hand at catching one of the wild rabbits that lived nearby for dinner, meaning that the meal was reasonably quiet and not as tense as Lunch had been. He wasn't Naruto's sensei, like he had promised Minato-sensei he would be, but he had been allowed to teach the boy by Naruto's sensei. Considering how territorial Jounin tended to be about their students, this in and of itself was quite remarkable.

That morning, he'd had a rather enjoyable lesson with the boy, and had gotten to know him a bit better. The morning lesson was bittersweet however because, as he'd noticed every time he'd encountered him, Naruto was a cross between both of his parents, and not just in the looks department. One minute, Naruto would be like Minato-sensei, and the next, he'd be like Kushina-san. And, sometimes, he'd somehow be like both of them at the same time. Seeing Naruto up close and interacting with him was painful because there were any number of reminders of what he'd lost in any given time span.

As he ate one of his stored pre-cooked meals which he was probably going to run out of long before they got to the missions during which food would be provided, he thought he heard sobbing coming from the nearby trees of the forest which grew right up to the property line of the farm they were camped at the edges of. A camping situation that was somewhat unusual considering the mission he was currently on.

Normally, if a mission like the one they'd been assigned to was going to last more than a day, the people who they were working for would offer them a place to sleep indoors, be it in their house, or the barn. Here however, no invite had come, and he suspected that it was because the farm was being used for more than farming, and that whatever was going on here was beyond Genin-level clearance. Either that, or they'd been invited inside, and Shimura had refused in order to toughen the Haruno girl up and get her used to sleeping outdoors before the cold weather really set in.

Noticing that, perhaps beside him, only Naruto, who had senses that rivaled those of an Inuzuka, had heard the crying, he decided to get up and go investigate in case the Haruno girl had gotten herself injured and couldn't deal with her wound or drag herself back to the camp, and was currently bleeding to death or something. When he reached the source of the crying, it was to find that the Haruno girl was sitting in front of a snare in which a rabbit had been caught, holding the kunai Sasuke had loaned her and crying. Rather than being dead as the case usually was when a Genin cried over their first kill, the rabbit was alive and struggling to escape.

Great, unless he wanted to completely waste the time it took to get out here, and walk back to camp to ask Shimura to deal with this, it was up to him to give the lesson on the difference between pets and food. He still remembered the lecture that Minato-sensei had given Obito the first time the boy had been forced to hunt for their dinner...

Obito, despite being good enough to make Chunin, hadn't entirely been suited to the shinobi lifestyle. He'd been far too kind and gentle, and had far too much respect for living things, much like that Chunin who'd taken a teaching position at the Academy after he'd accidentally gotten a teammate killed because he'd had a little too much sympathy for the enemy. That wasn't to say that Obito had never killed anyone however. It had been a time of war back then, and their team, like just about every other team that was active at the time, had fought. Obito hadn't liked killing one bit though, and had been upset every time he'd been forced to do it.

Pulling himself out of his introspection, he deliberately stepped on a twig that was lying on the ground in order to gain the Haruno girl's attention, since she hadn't already noticed his presence.

"What's wrong?" he asked the girl when she whirled around to see who was there.

"I can't..." the girl choked out, tears streaming down her face as she gestured to the rabbit which was still feebly trying to escape.

"Why not?" he asked.

"It's a poor defenseless creature!" the girl exclaimed, shocked that he couldn't see what to her, with her still all too innocent eyes, was self-evident.

"Sometimes you'll have to." he replied, meaning more than the rabbit, oh so much more. There had been missions that had left him puking his guts out afterwards, missions no sane man would want to take, missions he'd been forced to complete despite these facts. Not all of the assassination missions that he had been assigned to over the years were for adults, and not all of the adults he'd killed had been guilty of anything. Konoha didn't generally accept such missions but, sometimes...There was more than one reason that ANBU was called the "Dark Side".

"But..." the girl started, probably about to reiterate her point about the rabbit being a defenseless woodland creature. That's what you got when you raised children on cutesy stories about talking magic rabbits and such. He'd seen those stupid brightly colored books that were so popular amongst the civilian children and some ninja children as well, books that Obito and Rin had been raised reading, every time he'd wandered into the bookstore to pick up a new copy of Icha Icha Paradise.

"Do you want to starve?" he asked, as that was what it would eventually come down to if she kept letting the creatures she was hunting go.

"No!" the girl, who'd obviously never been hunting before in her entire life despite the fact that the Academy was supposed to cover these things, replied.

"It's not a pet Sakura." he said, telling the girl what she needed to hear rather than whatever trite platitude she had likely wanted to hear. "If you let this one go, you'll be more likely to let the next go, and the next, until you really do starve. In this situation, the best you can do is thank it for the sacrifice it made for your continued survival, and put it out of its misery."

"Misery?" she asked.

"You've got it stuck in the trap, and have had it stuck in the trap for an unnecessarily long time. It's frightened and in pain." he said, pointing out what was obvious to him, and should have been obvious to her. "If you'd ended it when you found it, it wouldn't have had to suffer while you sat there dithering over whether or not to kill it. Doing what you're doing right now is far crueler than killing it when you found it would have been."

The girl paled over the idea of having caused the rabbit unnecessary pain, much like Obito had when he'd caught his first kill aside from a bit of fishing, and Minato-sensei had told him something similar. For some reason, killing mammals was far worse in people's minds than killing fish, reptiles, and/or amphibians.

"Could you...?" the girl asked, moving to hand her borrowed kunai over to him.

"No." he replied, refusing the weapon. "This is something you have to do."

He wasn't going to coddle the girl like her civilian parents had. Doing so wouldn't do her any favors in the long run, and would more than likely get her killed at some point in the future. She had chosen to be a ninja, and it was best to have her face the realities of what it was to be one early on, and rid herself of her romantic illusions about life as a ninja before she found herself in an actual life-or-death situation. Those who got coddled because they were children, those whose sensei did all of the hunting and cleaning of game for them because they were squeamish about it, broke after their first experience with death out in the field more often than those who hadn't. She wouldn't learn if he or her other teammates did all the killing for her.

"I'm sure the Academy went over all of the vital points, including the best ones for ending things quickly." he said before standing back and waiting for the girl to get it over with.

The girl sobbed as she raised her kunai, and in seconds it was all over, and the rabbit's suffering was at an end. He gave the girl a few more minutes to cry, much as Minato-sensei had done for Obito. Taking a life, any life, for the first time was a hard thing to do. After a set amount of time however, he made the girl get up and head back to the team's campsite, bringing her kill with her. It wouldn't do to let the meat go to waste, otherwise the rabbit's death became pointless.

As it turned out, whoever taught Sakura how to prepare her game for cooking was a total idiot. After watching the girl fumble with the animal for several minutes, he sat down next to her and taught her the right way.

Sakura felt sick, but she forced herself to eat.

After the rabbit she'd caught and killed had been cooked, she had picked at it, taken a bite, and started to set it aside, unable to eat as the guilt of having killed the creature, and the disgust she'd felt as she'd skinned it and cleaned it had made her feel physically ill. She'd never been forced to do something like this before. During the survival class back at the Academy, one of the boys had tended to those tasks, and had passed out the meat after it had all been cooked.

When Kakashi had caught her setting the rabbit aside, he had scolded her and asked her what she'd killed it for if she hadn't intended on eating it. He then ordered her to start eating, and sat there to make sure she did so. He was still sitting there and watching her, as was the rest of the team.

When she'd set out to catch her dinner, she'd only had a vague idea as to how it would go. She knew intellectually that she would have to kill whatever animal she caught and cook it, but she hadn't realized what doing so was really like. The reason she'd been hunting had been because she had gotten sick of apples after lunch, had told her sensei as much, and her sensei had suggested that she go out and catch some dinner since the nearby woods were full of game. If she had known it would be like this, she would have happily stuck to the apples.

The snare had been textbook perfect, and she had been proud of it, much as she had been proud of the grade she had gotten when she'd made a similar snare in the Academy survival class. It had been when the snare had caught the small, defenseless rabbit and she'd realized what she had to do to it that the pride had gone out the window. She then found that she couldn't bring herself to kill the creature, and had cried at the thought of having to do so. She had sat there crying as the rabbit struggled in the snare unable to escape until Kakashi had found her and told her that because of her hesitation she had made the rabbit suffer far worse than it would have if she'd just ended it in the first place.

For some strange reason, she had a feeling that Kakashi hadn't just been talking about the rabbit earlier. She didn't know what else he could have been talking about or why though.

Edited 10-5-12