PF

by Lazydaily

F

4. Chapter 8

It has been three days since the prisoner exchange, and Kakashi is sitting at Sakura's beside, staring down at her comatose form.

Ino left fifteen minutes ago. Her parents, several hours ago.

The last time she was here, they thanked him for saving their daughter's life. This time—this time they were under no such illusions. Their daughter got hurt saving his life.

He has burned one of his fangs into the underside of the chair he's sitting on, and he's practicing the Hiraishin. Every three seconds, teleporting to the same spot.

Too slow.

Again.

He was so proud of himself.

The Flying Thunder God.

It was useless.

Worse than useless, probably. Those seconds he spent on its seals, time spent considering it as an option—it's time he might have spent running away.

It wasn't useful for anything but fucking coordination. Nothing more than an S-class fucking radio.

He didn't want to be too slow?

How the fuck has the Hiraishin helped him with that.

Kakashi clenches his eyes closed.

"Kakashi, go home."

Kakashi opens his eyes to see Tsunade standing on the other side of Sakura's bed. He's been cleared for jutsu. By her, yesterday.

"She won't wake up for another week, at least, Kakashi. Go home."

He knows that. He just—can't believe it.

He's been chakra exhausted before. It's kind of his M.O., what with spending a decade with a chakra-sucking jutsu forever implanted in his left eye socket. However, the longest he'd ever been unconscious was three days.

Tsunade sighs, running a hand through her hair and setting the other on Sakura's temple, an unconscious gesture he doubts she even knows she's doing.

"I could be playing Mahjong right now," she mutters under her breath before she turns her gaze on him. "Kakashi. What do you know about chakra exhaustion?" Once she finishes speaking, she seems to realize where her hand is, and looks down at Sakura. In a well-if-I'm-already-here sort of motion, she runs a green hand down the length of Sakura's body.

Kakashi raises an eyebrow.

"Answer the damn question, or I'll give you a real reason to be in this damn hospital."

"Chakra exhaustion occurs when the patient's chakra reserves drop below the self-preservation threshold," he says, reading back a dictionary definition he read in his genin days in his mind's eye.

"Wrong, try again."

Kakashi blinks.

"I'm sorry?"

"If that was true, then people suffering from Chakra Exhaustion would never recover. Try again."

"It was the definition in the Konoha medic training manual."

"Story of my fucking life," Tsunade says, resting her hands on the railing of Sakura's bed and putting her full weight against it. It puts her uh—assets—on greater display, but Kakashi likes not dying, so he keeps his eyes on her face.

"I don't know," he says.

"Good boy," she says, and despite the condescension in her words, her face and tone are warm. "Not enough ninja go around saying that." She sighs a little, before turning back to him. "Chakra begets more chakra. The more you have, the faster it recovers, every unit of chakra you have regenerating a fixed amount of chakra. The actual numbers aren't interesting, but as a ballpark, someone with a healthy chakra system can regenerate from 10% of their chakra to full in about eight hours. Considering how varied chakra reserves are between ninja, you'd expect variation, but all we see in experiments is on the order of tens of minutes. In comparison, that same individual would regenerate from 90% of their chakra in thirty minutes. 99% in one minute. 99.9% in seconds. That same 0.1% costs from seconds to minutes, the less of your chakra reserves you have. It's why people with massive chakra reserves like Jiraiya are fucking cheating."

Kakashi tries not to snort, but he doesn't succeed.

Tsunade, however, laughs with him.

"Your body takes chakra to operate. Your organs and cells require a steady stream of chakra, or they start to shut down. If you drop below a certain point, your body will start to drain more chakra from your reserves than your reserves can generate. This would kill you, so your body compensates by shutting down non-essential systems. There are several you can see in people with minor chakra exhaustion. They're pale, cold, they stop being hungry, stop passing bowel movements."

Kakashi has to admit, he has never noticed that last one.

"Oh, shut up," Tsunade says, reading his thoughts from his face. "You always notice in the hospital, I'll tell you that. That's at 7% chakra reserves. If you reach 4%, then your consciousness goes. Your brain is big, and expensive."

Kakashi kind of feels like the dictionary definition was basically correct, but he doesn't say that.

"Kakashi, when you come to the hospital with chakra exhaustion, what percent of chakra do you think you have?"

"Two, three percent?"

Tsunade shakes her head. "You have solid chakra control, Kakashi. Solidly above average for Leaf jounin, meaning it's fairly extraordinary, broadly speaking. So you can stave off chakra exhaustion by 0.2%, all the way down to 3.8%. Congratulations. It adds an extra day to your comas, because the math is a bitch."

He looks down at Sakura, dread knotting in his stomach.

"How much did she have when she came in?"

"The actual self-preservation point for ordinary humans is a little under two percent," Tsunade says. "Less than that, and if they do not receive medical attention, they will eventually die."

"How much chakra did she have left when she came in?" he repeats himself.

Tsunade looks him dead in the eyes. "Zero point five percent. She had twenty hours to live."

Kakashi can feel his blood drain out of his face. "What?"

"Ninja with excellent chakra control are capable of going deep into chakra exhaustion, by redirecting their chakra to their brain and the other areas that need it, despite the fact that their body can't keep up with the drain. The better their control, the longer they can hold out. If their chakra control is extraordinary, they can sentence themselves to death in the process. Congratulations, Kakashi, your student is quite extraordinary."

Tsunade does not flinch at Kakashi's glare.

"During the third war," she says instead, "I held a position for three days straight. On the last day, when help was finally in sight, I came up empty. Not a single drop of chakra left. If help had come five minutes later, I would have been dead. As it was, Orochimaru restarted my heart, sacrificed a couple dozen rock ninja to give me a chakra infusion that totally destroyed my ability to regenerate chakra until I went and learned to regenerate it the old-fashioned way."

Kakashi turns to Sakura, hand drifting towards her before falling impotently on the railing beside her.

"How long will it be before she wakes up?"

"Seven days."

"Can her body support itself?"

"Not yet. If nothing goes wrong, that will happen tomorrow."

"How are you supporting her? None of the doctors ever come in here."

Tsunade beckons to him, and crouches below the hospital bed. Kakashi follows suit, and then looks up at the seal array inscribed on its underside.

"Giving a chakra infusion to someone suffering from chakra exhaustion will trick their body into thinking it can regenerate chakra at a reduced rate. The more severe the chakra exhaustion, the more severe and longer-lasting the effect. However, with creative use of seals, we can provide their body with the chakra it needs directly, allowing their chakra reserves to regenerate unimpeded."

She stands with a grunt.

"She'll still have some after effects. When a chakra system receives a shock like this, it'll be a little more possessive with its chakra than usual, which can make things like walking hard."

"That explains my crutches."

"Exactly. It will be a bit longer for her, and longer still before her body will let her do jutsu. Toumi is good at treating this, but I've never been able to figure out how, and the woman won't share because she has no integrity as a medic." Tsunade hisses out the last part, and Kakashi decides to not touch that with a ten foot pole.

He does not succeed, because she glares balefully at him. "Laugh it up," she says.

Kakashi raises his hands in surrender.

"Now, are you satisfied that your student is not going to wither away and die while you're not watching?"

Kakashi opens his mouth to protest, but Tsunade isn't actually looking for an answer, because she is in front of him way faster than a body-flicker could get her there, and picks him up by the front of his flak jacket. She smiles sweetly at him, which Jiraiya has told him never means anything good.

Her actual smile is like a demon's. If it's pretty, you should probably run.

Still holding him up with one hand, like he weighs nothing more than a folding chair, she walks over to the window, throws it open, and then tosses him out of it. "Go home, Kakashi."

He lands on the tree outside the window, and does his best to look injured.

Unconvinced, she jabs a finger at him. "And if you use Hiraishin to come back, I'll break both of your legs and give you a reason to mope in that damn chair. Minato thought it meant he didn't have to listen to me, too, and I'm pretty sure you saw the results of that."

Kakashi flinches, which is a mistake because that's clearly what Tsunade is going for. She grins triumphantly, and then slams the window closed behind her.

Just to be safe, he goes to his apartment, and actually sleeps in his own bed for the first time since he got back from the prisoner exchange.

Kakashi is there when Sakura wakes up.

It is eleven days after the prisoner exchange and therefore one day late, but Tsunade left two days ago, muttering about Mahjong withdrawal, so the best answer anyone can give him is a shrugged "It happens sometimes?" He's pretty sure the IQ level of the hospital dropped by an average of fifty points the moment Tsunade walked out the door.

He is a day away from going to drag Tsunade right back to Konoha. He's pretty sure she'd beat him into a paste if he tried, so it's good for everyone Sakura wakes up when she does.

He has to say, though—even after she told him this was all expected, if not waiting thing—he doesn't like it. He can almost understand why everyone seems to give him so much crap every time he pulls this kind of shit.

When she wakes, she tries to follow her training. Pretend to still be asleep.

Considering she opened her eyes when she woke up, it's not very effective.

"It's me, Sakura," Kakashi says, and her eyes open fully.

She looks at him, and she must read something past the relief on his face, because her gaze dances away.

"Hi, Sensei." Yeah, he's not going to let her calling him Sensei distract him. "I'm glad you're okay," she says after a hesitant moment, and Kakashi closes his eyes with a sigh.

"You could have died, Sakura."

Sakura doesn't look at him.

"Sakura. We talked about this, before we left. You almost died, Sakura."

Sakura looks at him, looks away.

"You said that almost no mission is worth dying for."

"I said this mission wasn't worth dying for."

She shakes her head.

"You said I'd know. If a mission was worth dying for, you said I'd know." She looks at him, green eyes brilliant. "I knew this was a mission worth dying for."

Kakashi drops his head into his hands.

"You were against three jounin," he says.

"I followed them for a day and a half, and they never noticed me. I could get away. If I thought I couldn't win, I would have run."

Kakashi slowly lifts his head to face her, and finds her green eyes boring into him.

"At the end, I was scared. The blue-haired lady, she was so strong, but I knew you'd think of something," she says. "If I could delay her just a little longer, I knew you would think of something." The thing he thought of was stupid, and had no right to actually work. "You did, and we won."

May you be cursed with a brilliant student, huh?

What about a student that believes in you.

That's what he'll tell Sakura, when she's a jounin.

May you be cursed with a student who believes in you.

"The man," Sakura says, interrupting his thoughts. "He died, didn't he." Slowly, Kakashi raises his gaze to his student. She's biting her lip, looking down at her hands. "I was—I was trying to kill him. I wanted to kill him. He hurt you. I wanted him to die." Her green gaze darts back to him. "He died, didn't he? I killed him."

And then she starts to cry.

Kakashi reaches forward, and closes his hand around both of hers, and she clutches at it tightly as the tears spill down her cheek.

"The two women," he says, when her tears begin to subside, "Akai and Kanashii, they're okay."

Tell Sakura to watch out.

In a manner of speaking.

Sakura looks back up at him, eyes red-rimmed. "But—But we cut off the blue one's head."

Don't laugh.

Blue one.

Don't laugh.

"That's the ninja world, Sakura. Some people are"—fucking monsters, straight down to the bone—"really strong."

Sakura considers this and then nods. "I guess that makes sense," she says even though it really, really doesn't—everything about Kanashii was hot fucking bullshit—before pulling her hand out of his with a half-hearted gross and wipes her gross, nasty face with her hands, and wipes them on her sheets.

A little too late, he hands her some tissues, and she switches to those.

As she cleans herself up, she says, "You're welcome."

He blinks.

"What?"

"I saved your life. You're welcome."

He raises his eyebrows at her sheer audacity. She looks at him, with a twitch of a smile at her lips.

"It was really dangerous, but I did it anyways." Then, leaning towards him, in case he missed what was expected of him. "You're welcome."

"I'm not thanking you for almost getting yourself killed."

She makes a farting noise.

"We're going to go over what you did and I'm going to tell you everything you did wrong."

She makes another fart noise.

"So that the next time you decide someone needs saving even though no one pays you to do it, you'll do it right."

She makes an aborted fart noise, and then turns to him, green eyes wide.

"You'll do it right, and you won't almost get killed in the process."

She grins at him, a smile like the sun.

May you be cursed with a brilliant student, indeed.

It's ten days after Sakura wakes before she can stand again. Another twelve days after that before she is cleared for duty. Twenty-two days. It's never taken more than seven days to clear him. And everyone knows that the seventh day is always retaliation for running away on the third.

(If they keep punishing him for it, why does he keep doing it?)

(If you're asking that question, you really don't understand what it means to be a ninja.)

He's standing by her side when she's allowed out of the hospital, when a very nice and very competent medic named Ishida Komi who is about one hundred times less competent than Tsunade gives her the okay to use jutsu again. Her reaction is… not as jubilant as he'd been hoping. She just nods.

He sends her on ahead of him, to the third training ground, and tells her he'll be right behind her, don't you worry.

The glare she gives him is more like it.

He beats her there, because excuse you, Kakashi is a fucking jounin, but he stays in the trees and waits.

She gets there five minutes after him, and then she doesn't yell after him. She just lies down in the middle of the third training ground with a sigh, staring up at the sky.

A minute or so later, pink rings circle her limbs, and then Gamami appears with a poof by her side.

Gamami's a little bigger, and hops up on Sakura's stomach, and they talk, in low tones.

"I missed you," Sakura says.

"I was worried," Gamami replies.

"Me too," Sakura responds, because she still doesn't really have the whole "empathy" thing down.

Gamami slaps at Sakura's belly frustratedly, and Sakura giggles.

It takes Gamami a good ten minutes to drive it through Sakura's head that she had no idea if Sakura was alive or dead, while Sakura knew for a fact she was alive.

"Next time, I'll ask Jiraiya to get a message through."

"Jiriaya was here and you didn't ask him?"

"Ow ow ow," Sakura says, laughing lightly, wiggling away as Gamami hits her with the sheath of her knife. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Their wrestling ends with them in front of the pond, and Gamami hops from Sakura to the pond with a little splash, because not everyone can be Sakura.

"Did you save him?"

Sakura nods. "Yeah, he's okay."

Gamami nods, like she doesn't care, but her lips wobble a little.

Huh. It's nice to know she cares.

Sakura summons what has to be every last flower petal she has into a massive cloud of pink petals around her, lies back, and stares up at the sky through her flower petals that dance and twirl on the wind but never seem to fall.

Gamami leaps from the pond, and Sakura catches her before dropping her on her chest. Gamami lies there, head tucked under Sakura's.

"This is a good jutsu," Gamami says.

"Right?" Sakura says. "I can't wait to show Ino. She'll be so jealous."

She blows up, and the petals billow up from the cloud around her in a plume that slowly spreads across the clearing.

Finally, she turns her head up, and her eyes focus on the branch hiding him from view.

"Sensei," she says, "I know you're there."

He body-flickers across the clearing, only to be greeted by a Sakura clone crouched on the limb a moment later.

"I followed your chakra for almost a day, Sensei," she says. (Sakura hadn't been fast enough to follow Kanashii's team directly, so she followed his chakra signature, through the chakra-suppressing cuffs.) "I know it's you."

He drops from the branch, and walks into her cloud of petals, which flutter and dance just away from him, parting before him.

He reaches her, and crouches down beside her head.

"Have you always done this? Showed up early, and then pretended to be late?"

Kakashi shakes his head. "Of course not. Why would I do that? I just wanted to make sure you didn't hurt yourself today. Imagine how bad that would look for me, if you hurt yourself right after you got cleared to use jutsu again."

Sakura snorts, then blows a stream of flower petals straight at his face.

Out of the corners of his eyes, he sees flower petals poof out of existence so she can re-summon them to blow them directly into his face.

"You're such a loser," she says. That's a new insult. "What are we doing today?"

Kakashi shifts, and sits down. His father's leaf contract was a full contract. Two feet tall, a good ten, fifteen feet wide. He wanted to pass it down the generations, a Hatake legacy.

Kakashi hadn't wanted it. His student had wanted her own contract.

Two nights ago, Kakashi signed his name into that contract.

Kakashi spins through the sixteen hand seals for the hidden in the leaves technique before opening one of his hands before his mouth, and blows his father's leaves out into the flower cloud around them.

Sakura looks up at him in surprise.

"I thought you didn't know that technique," she says. She narrows her eyes, spinning up into a sitting position to glare at him properly, catching Gamami in her hands before she can tumble to the ground. "Did you lie?"

"I'm a ninja," he says, ignoring Sakura's mutter of you're not a real ninja. "I lie all the time."

Sakura's glare does not abate.

"Today," he says, in answer to her question, blowing some more leaves into the air, "I want to tell you a story."

From the storage seal beside his porn storage seal, he draws out three scrolls and sets them, one by one, between them.

Sakura looks at them and then up at him. All around them, his father's leaves spin with Sakura's flower petals.

"It's a story of a ninja who had almost no chakra. From a civilian family. Who was a genin for twenty years, but rose to be held in esteem equal to the Sannin."

Sakura turns her head, looks at the leaves and the petals falling all around them.

"This technique. This is his technique?"

Kakashi nods.

"The White Fang," Kakashi says. "AKA—" he takes a deep breath. "Hatake Sakumo. My father."

Sakura stares at him, and then stares at the scrolls, and then stares at the cloud around them.

"You gave me—" she stops, swallows. "You gave me your dad's jutsu?"

"I couldn't be the heir he wanted," Kakashi says honestly. "We're too different. But I think he would have been proud to call you his heir."

Sakura stares at Kakashi, eyes shining, and then sniffles and wipes her snot away on her arm. Kakashi resists the urge to wince. One day, he hopes, Sakura will grow up, and stop being so gross.

She looks back up at him. "I want to be your heir, too."

"You are," Kakashi assures her. "But we're very different. His techniques are better suited to you."

She makes a face. "When you're older, and you have more chakra, I'll teach you mine, but Sakura—"

Sakura looks up at him.

"—my father was stronger than me."

Sakura's face goes slack with shock. It takes her a second to remember that in fact, he is not a real ninja.

"I guess it's not a surprise, you're not even a real ninja," she mumbles, but her heart's not really in it.

Finally, Sakura nods. "Tell me about him?"

Kakashi smiles.

He tells her what his father told him of his childhood. A happy life, of a sort, the son of civilian textile merchants. How he was orphaned by the second war in an attack that left his parents' shop and caravan nothing but smoking ruins. How he was rescued and then taken in by one Nara Shikarou, who had rescued him from the attack.

He tells her of his father's academy years. How he went to the academy with Shikarou's daughter, Shikano—Kakashi's mother. How they graduated at the bottom of the same class. How she retired after her first C mission, which had been a secret A, and taken her left arm and left eye with it, while he kept going, kept trying, despite never being anything more than mediocre. How they married and she shed her name to build a new clan with him.

He tells her of how his father developed his Hidden in the Leaves jutsu at thirty, finally reached chuunin, and from there, leapt to jounin a year after. How nine months after he turned jounin, Kakashi was born, and his mother died in childbirth.

He tells her of his father's rising star. Of the impossible missions he completed. Of when he was sent as backup for the Sannin, when they needed an extra hand. How he was heralded as genius by the village that had told him he was an embarrassment only years before.

He tells her of his father's last, disastrous mission. How he chose to save his comrades instead of completing it. How that failed mission was one of the ten, twenty dominoes that led to the third shinobi war. How the village turned against him, how his comrades turned against him. How they had said—just a genin, what do you expect.

He does not tell her that he had been one of those who had turned their back.

He tells her of his father's last days.

He tells her of finding his father's dead body, his own prided White Blade Chakra Sabre buried in his gut.

Sakura, who has been silent for duration of his story, starts to cry.

He doesn't. He's too old to cry. He's failed to cry for his father enough already.

"He—" she hiccups, "he shouldn't have killed himself. He didn't do anything wrong."

"No? The ninja handbook—"

"The ninja handbook is just paper," Sakura hisses. "Ninjas are people."

Kakashi smiles behind his mask.

"That's why you said that almost no missions are worth dying for. You think your dad did the right thing."

Slowly, Kakashi nods. "I didn't always, but then I met someone who taught me that ninja who break the ninja rules may be trash, but ninja who abandon their comrades are worse than trash."

Sakura looks up at him. "Is he—"

"He died." Kakashi taps the skin under Obito's eye. "He left me this."

Sakura reaches up to him and sets her fingers on his scar, and he winces. "I guess I shouldn't call it gross, then, huh?" she says, sounding a little sheepish.

Kakashi laughs, and pulls his face away. "I don't think he'd mind."

Sakura says, in a small voice, "He sounds like a good teammate."

"He was."

"I'm sorry he died."

"Thank you."

Silence falls between them.

Kakashi takes a deep breath, and then turns to the scrolls he has lain out between them.

"These scrolls are his," he says, pushing them towards her. "I think he would want you to have them."

Her eyes fall to them, but she doesn't scoop them up.

"What are they?"

"They are the Sakumo three. You probably know them better as the Academy three."

Sakura's eyes widen.

"He made them?"

Kakashi shook his head.

"No, he just showed how powerful they could be when used properly and used together."

She touches them each of them lightly, before picking them up and stacking them in her lap.

"I can already use them, though?"

"Not like he could," Kakashi says, and her green eyes brighten.

She breaks open the first seal, and squawks as it unrolls into a mess all around her.

She looks at Kakashi, then looks back at the scroll.

"Why are all of your dad's scrolls so long?"

"I guess he just had a lot to say."

Someday, Sakura will write scrolls of her own, and Kakashi is sure they will be just as preposterously long.

He sits there in the cloud of flower petals and leaves as Sakura reads through his father's scrolls.

They are, if he is honest, totally beyond him.

As far as Kakashi knows, Sakumo was not born with flawless chakra control. He just worked and trained tirelessly for the better part of three decades, honing the few jutsu he did know into weapons of unparalleled sharpness. A ninja with ordinary chakra control, below-average chakra reserves, and above-average physical prowess had become one of the greatest ninja of his age. Kakashi is not his equal, and he has had every advantage.

Or well, he is missing one advantage.

Kakashi is lazy, and he's not convinced his father ever rested a day in his life.

Sakura has chakra control his father could only dream of. She will have his chakra reserves by the time she's eighteen. The only thing she's lacking is physical prowess, and he has some ideas about how to fix that, although he doubts Sakura is going to like them.

Sakura finishes the scroll in her hands, and then rolls it back up to the top to start from the beginning again. Kakashi smiles.

Hidden in the Leaves is flashy, looks complicated. All of the work, however, has already been done. Any jounin could master it in a day.

The White Light Chakra Sabre is just as flashy and looks even more complicated. All of the work is in preparation, but the jutsu itself is trivial. An academy student could do it, which Kakashi knows because hedid it as an academy student.

Sakumo's bread and butter, however, were in his Clone, Replacement, and Transformation techniques. Kakashi knows of no foreign ninja who ever understood how he did what he did.

It's the first time he's seen Sakura have to read a scroll twice, and for good reason.

Here are the changes Sakumo made to the academy three:

He twisted the chakra of the sealless patterns into themselves, merging them into a single static pattern—something which could be fired in a burst, instead of needing to be moulded into several shapes in series. It was the same principle that Minato used to reduce the Hiraishin's one hundred twenty-three seals into something that could be performed in a moment.

He created the same static patterns for each combination of the three jutsu—including the most critical transform-replacement-transform, to allow him to perform them in an instant.

By making all of the intermediate shapes taken by the transformation jutsu conscious, he became able to transform to objects anywhere within a couple feet of his center of mass, instead of his center of mass always remaining stationary.

By manually throwing the chakra strings required for the replacement technique, he became able to throw his chakra strings around obstacles, and swap with objects that would otherwise be unreachable.

And finally, by creating his clones with perfect chakra systems, he was able to have them appear to mould chakra, have them appear to perform jutsu.

His father may have started ordinary, but by the time of his death, his abilities were truly unreasonable in the way ninja of a certain level always are. How could anyone have understood he used nothing but the academy three, when he performed them instantaneously, performed jutsu from two places at once, and vanished into a leaf five feet away?

If Sakura ever masters the contents of these three scrolls, she'll be stronger than he is.

She reaches the end of the her first scroll, and starts from the beginning again, her teeth digging into her bottom lip and her eyes shining.

He can't just let his student get stronger than him, though. He sets a three pronged kunai in the ground between them, and sets himself to it. If she's moving, then he'd better start moving, too.

Here's Kakashi's problem.

Sakura is weak. Like, physically. Just so very, very weak. She's a child sure, but still. Good for a child, maybe, but that's not enough.

Her taijutsu is bad, and it's not improving.

For some ninja, this is fine.

Kakashi is, to be frank, not very good at taijutsu. He makes up for it with a sharingan, the chidori, and a truly insane repertoire of ninjutsu. He can engage an enemy at whatever distance is most inconvenient for them, with whatever technique they hate the most. It's why he's best in one-on-one, when he can control the distance to his opponent the most easily.

He fought Itachi in spitting distance because Itachi likes shuriken and katon and genjutsu. He does not like being in punching range.

He should have fought Akai from half a mile away, but he had to neutralize her without killing her or cutting off any bits of her, so he had to compromise.

He put a chidori through Kanashii's chest because the Sharingan is cheat mode.

Sakura is not like him.

The Hidden in the Leaves technique requires getting up close and personal with your enemies. Dangerous long-range ninjutsu are expensive. For people who don't have much chakra, their only choice is being point-blank. (Thrown weapons stop being effective when you reach jounin—air makes it impossible to throw things hard enough, fast enough, to hit anyone.) The White Chakra Sabre, which he's not sure is even the right choice for her, is at best an arm's reach technique.

Ideally, he wants to teach her Tsunade's taijutsu style. But as slipshod as that technique looks, it requires a basic mastery of taijutsu Sakura doesn't have and reflexes she definitely lacks.

So.

Kakashi has a problem. He can drill her himself. He might be bad at taijutsu, but he is so much better than her it doesn't matter. He could also pass her off on Guy, who will be a much better teacher, at the cost of a couple dozen challenges.

However—Sakura hates taijutsu.

She will read scrolls for hours on end. (She sat there reading his father's scrolls on the academy three all day, which was not how Kakashi had been expecting spend that day.) She'll practice the same ninjutsu until she knuckles under from chakra exhaustion, and will meditate from sunup to sunset. She's very dutiful—he's blessed.

She hates taijutsu.

He can make her practice it, but her hatred interferes with her ability to get anything out of it. If he forces her for long enough, she'll eventually hate him, and find someone else to train her. He doesn't like the idea of sending her into the chuunin exam in her current state, because a strong genin who understood her gimmick or got lucky could do serious damage to her.

So—how does he deal with this?

Well, conveniently, Sakura hates losing. He's hoping she hates losing more than she hates taijutsu. If she trains with him or Guy, she doesn't feel the sting, because obviously they're going to beat her. But if he can find, say, an academy student of about her age?

Ideally someone brilliant, to really give her something to strive for.

Well, that would be just perfect.

Rather conveniently, the Hyuuga owe him a favor.

Kimiko greets Kakashi at the gate of the Hyuuga compound, bowing faintly. "The Head of the Clan will see you," she says.

He's on time, because he's asking for a favor, and Hiashi is exactly the kind of petty bastard who would refuse a favor because he showed up late.

"Kakashi," Hiashi says from behind his desk, which is quite a bit messier than Kakashi remembers it being the one time he's been here before.

Kakashi inclines his head the required amount, and no more, while Kimiko closes the door behind her as she leaves. Kakashi can feel the buzz of the blood room closing in around them, that too-quiet pressure around his ears.

"Hiashi," Kakashi returns, because they've been comrades in the field, which gives him at least a reasonable defense for dropping the sama, and also he just likes being obnoxious.

Hiashi rolls his eyes. "Sit down, Kakashi."

Kakashi sits down.

"What do you want?"

So rude. Here Kakashi was, ready to ask Hiashi about his day, how his daughter's doing, how his nephew is feeling, and Hiashi just wants to get right to the point. Honestly—

"My student's taijutsu is… lacking. I was hoping to find her a training partner."

Hiashi's eyebrow raises in an elegant and intensely unimpressed quirk.

"You want her to train with Neji."

"I want her to train with Neji," Kakashi confirms.

"Well, considering you were instrumental in retrieving one of my clan's children from the Cloud, I can't really say no."

Kakashi gives Hiashi his best aw, shucks face.

"But why do you want him?"

Kakashi considers Hiashi for a moment, mentally going through the pros and cons of telling him the truth.

"He's around Sakura's age, brilliant with taijutsu, and is conveniently lower rank than her. It'll rankle her pretty bad to lose to him." Kakashi smiles, imagining Sakura losing to an academy student. "Over, and over, and over again."

It makes him a bit misty-eyed to think about it.

"I don't understand why they let you around children," Hiashi says, because he can be a pretty funny guy when's no one's around to see it.

"I don't understand why they let any jounin around children," Kakashi tells him honestly, and Hiashi gives him a huffed laugh of agreement. "Hiashi," Kakashi says, more seriously. "You're hardly without options, and even if you were, I wouldn't be interested in forcing it on you. With his father gone, you are the boy's guardian."

Hiashi ponders this, tapping his fingers contemplatively on his chin.

"Neji is… troubled," Hiashi finally says. "My brother's death weighs heavily upon him still." There is a pause, as Hiashi seems to mull over whether to tell Kakashi more. "I wish for you to oversee them… off site."

Kakashi swallows any surprise, because they are not friends. He puts forward his best accepting but bewildered expression.

"Cute," Hiashi comments shortly. "Neji is dangerous. He has on several occasions gone too far with his training partners. He needs supervision, to ensure he does not injure your student too severely."

"And you wish for none of his kin to see him if he loses control?" Kakashi says, as innocently as he can.

Hiashi frowns at him.

"I wish for him to be free to lose to an outsider without shame."

Kakashi gives his best oh, of course expression, like it had never occurred to him.

Hiashi takes a deep, steadying breath, because Kakashi has that kind of effect on people, before continuing.

"I'm going to be honest with you, Kakashi. And in return, I ask that you care for my nephew as you would your own student."

Kakashi considers this, and then nods. "It would be my honor," he says, and he isn't lying.

"Neji does not believe that my brother gave his life for me of his own free will, rather justifiably. My brother hated me, and insofar as someone is capable of giving his life in spite, he did so. This has festered in Neji's mind, and he has become preoccupied with fate." Hiashi glances down at the messy state of his desk with a sigh, then back up at Kakashi. "He believes that his father was fated to die for me, and that he is fated to die for whoever follows in my place. As much as you wish for your student to fall to Neji, I wish for Neji to fall to your student. Civilian born, with a chakra pool to match. He has all of our pride, and it has twisted up with his self-loathing into something that is tearing him apart and threatens to make him a danger to everyone around him as well. If your student can beat him, then maybe he will understand that there is something more to his life, as well."

Kakashi sits in silence for an appropriate amount of time to have appeared to have deeply considered and then inclines his head in understanding.

He has been in that place. He is not so hopeful that getting punched by a civilian-born ninja will fix it. But—he lost his two best friends before getting his head out of his ass. He's willing to try a kinder approach.

"I will support him as I support Sakura," Kakashi says. "If he falls to her, then I will be there to help him pick the pieces, just as I will help Sakura pick up the pieces, if she falls to him in turn."

He's actually going to laugh at Sakura every time she loses. But that doesn't sound as nice, and he will support Neji as best he can, if he loses to Sakura.

"You honor me," Hiashi says, but he doesn't meet Kakashi's eyes, his eyes on the mess around him. Then—"Kakashi, you were at the prisoner exchange, were you not?"

"I was."

"I have heard of A's words. They are whispered in low tones in my compound, and whispered quite a bit louder outside of it. Tell me, Kakashi, what do you think of them?"

Well—

Shit.

The InoShikaChou coalition has been trying to reform the Hyuuga for generations. Partially for altruistic reasons, and partially to reduce the cohesion of the Hyuuga, to dissolve some of their political power. They are almost definitely the source of the whispers outside of the Hyuuga compound. The fact that a man who condones ripping people's eyes out finds the Hyuuga's practice morally repugnant is a rather exquisite piece of theatre—if Kakashi didn't know better, he'd suspect they planned it this way.

The fact that Hiashi is asking Kakashi this here, in possibly the best sealed room in Konoha, says something. Kakashi, who referred to him as Hiashi when he entered, and has only ever shown him the minimum required amount of respect. He wants an equal, or at least the closest thing he'll allow to one.

"Are all clan members not slaves to their clan heads? All of us but slaves to the Hokage?" Kakashi asks him, citing the party line back at him.

Hiashi's face twists.

"They say Itachi killed his parents, but spared his brother. That Madara went mad with grief when his brother died. Tobirama succeeded his brother, supported him, and did his best to lead this village where he left off. When Tsukasa was rescued, he ran to the arms of his older sister as a source of solace."

Kakashi is pretty sure Itachi spared his brother for horrible Uchiha reasons, but doesn't say so.

"My brother was my slave, and hated me for it. He was right to—I treated him like one. All of the main branch treated him the same. I will enslave one of my daughters to the other. Hanabi stopped smiling when she learned of the seal. We have had this seal for as long as our records last, and we have never had a civil war that has torn us apart like the other clans. But Hyuugas have killed more of our brothers than anyone. Killed them, tortured them, forced them into debasements unspeakable."

Hiashi looks at his hands.

"It doesn't even protect us. Cloud ripped Tsukasa's eyes out and threw him in a hole. We rescued him, but how many of our members died, eyeless? Alive just so that our seal would not seal their eyes?"

Hiashi bows his head.

"Tell me, Kakashi," he says. "What do you think of our seal?"

Kakashi looks down at the top of Hiashi's head, and tells him the truth.

"It is an abomination. It is a stain on Konoha."

Hiashi takes a breath, and lets it out. He lifts his head to Kakashi.

"There is no counterseal."

Kakashi feels sick to his stomach.

"Passed down, father to son and mother to daughter, for as long as our records run."

Kakashi thinks of Toumi, and her faded seal.

"Would you break it, if you could?" Kakashi asks.

Hiashi is silent. His silence is deafening.

"I will care for your nephew as my own student," Kakashi says. "Thank you for granting my student permission to spar with him."

He stands, and leaves Hiashi to his silence.

Neji, when Kakashi comes to meet him, is simultaneously obedient and defiant. It is a peculiar combination. He bows his head to Kakashi as Kakashi leads him out of the compound, but his eyes burn with hatred.

Hiashi does not come out to greet him. Kimiko leads Kakashi in and then leads him back out with Neji on his heels.

Kimiko bids them farewell, and Neji looks upon her with contempt.

Kakashi can see Hiashi's concern.

"So Neji," Kakashi chats idly as they walk. "What do you do for fun?"

"I train," Neji says.

Kakashi hums.

"That sounds fun. I think you'd get along great with Guy. I'm sure you'd look great in green."

Neji frowns and there is a moment of true bewilderment on his face before he dismisses it as beneath his notice. What an incredibly contemptuous ten-year-old.

He could have given post-Sakumo's death pre-Obito's death Kakashi a run for his money, which is really saying something. Kakashi kind of thought he was undisputed King of Contemptuous Child Hill.

"Whenever he meets someone, he dyes their clothes green. Carries around these big buckets of green paint sealed in shoes. I'll introduce you."

Neji vibrates with visceral distaste, but says nothing. Maybe he should book one of the muddy training grounds. He wonders when this crosses from helpful ribbing to abusing a traumatized child. Interacting with kids is hard.

He arrives at the third training ground almost exactly an hour after he told Sakura he'd be there. Now that she caught him arriving early once, he needs to actually arrive late to keep up his image. Color rises in her cheeks when she sees him approach and he can see her yell in her throat when she notices Neji, but it's already too late, so she says something like—

"YOU'RE late?"

It's a thing of beauty, he's really quite proud to have been a part of it.

"I had to pick up Neji-kun, here, and he had to spend an hour on his hair."

There's that furious shake again.

"I did not," he corrects, now that he has someone to defend himself to.

Kakashi places a comforting hand on his back.

"It's okay. Mine takes two."

Neji twists his head to glare up at him, and he can see as the kid starts to visibly consider going back to the Hyuuga compound and telling Hiashi that he won't do it.

"Hi, I'm Sakura!" Sakura says, moving forward, and extending her hand. Neji doesn't take it.

"I'm aware," he says. "I've been ordered to assist you."

"Spar," Kakashi corrects.

"This will not be a spar. That would require her to be my equal. She's just a civilian."

He can see fury build through Sakura. This is not the kind of fury that she directs at him, this is full-bodied and hateful.

"Spar," Kakashi repeats, and Neji lips tighten.

"Come then, civilian." He makes the symbol for the Byakugan in the center of his chest, and then spreads his hands into the wide, loose stance of the gentle fist.

Flower petals bloom from behind Sakura, swirling around her and spreading across the training ground. Neji doesn't twitch.

Sakura takes Gamami from her head, and tosses her gently to the pond, where she lands with a ripple and a splash. Sakura vanishes, and Neji's eyes follow her as she becomes a petal, then the chakra string to the petal behind him, and then strikes her in the chest when she reforms before him.

Sakura goes down with a gasp, breaths stuttered.

Neji de-activates his Byakugan, and turns to Kakashi. "It will take her several hours to recover. Can I return to the Hyuuga compound for the day?"

Kakashi just turns his head to where Sakura is pushing herself up from the ground, stretching her neck as pink flares from the tenketsu Neji blocked. Neji slowly turns as well, and his eyes widen when he sees Sakura glaring at him.

"What was that, Neji?" Sakura asks.

"Have fun, kids!" Kakashi offers cheerily, and then crosses the clearing to lean against a tree, and pull a volume of Icha-Icha from a seal. He's still working on replacing some of the volumes he had lost in that cave in Cloud.

Truly, that was a hard mission for everyone.

Neji re-activates his Byakugan.

"What did you do?" he asks.

"I re-opened the tenketsu you closed," she says, smiling an unpleasant smile. "What's wrong? Can't you do that?" She touches her forehead protector ponderingly. "Or is that something they only teach real ninja?"

He surges towards her, and she vanishes into a flower petal. He snatches it out of the air, but immediately tosses it away and spins to face the cloud of flower petals Sakura is (apparently) hiding in.

He watches as Neji's head swivels to follow Sakura's movements. She pops back into existence behind him, but he does not turn away from the cloud before him.

She pops out of the cloud halfway across the clearing to pout.

"You can see me," she says.

"The Byakugan sees all," he says shortly.

"That seems unfair."

Neji lips tighten, and settles in to wait.

"Hmm," Sakura says ponderingly, and he spins to face her clone, which she apparently swapped with, catching her with a full Eight Trigrams Thirty-Two palms before she can vanish.

Sakura falls to her knees, and coughs, a little blood coloring her spit.

"Ow," she says.

Neji stands over her, hands moving again, and—

"Do not strike Sakura while she's down," Kakashi orders. "This is a spar, not a fight to the death."

Neji doesn't stop, so Kakashi body-flickers between them and tosses Neji into the pond. Neji hits the pond at an odd angle, and, because he's not Sakura, he goes under.

Behind him Sakura grunts as she returns to her feet.

He turns back to face her, and finds a bit of anger in her gaze. It's not the full force of what's directed at Neji, but there is a fraction of real, honest anger there.

He clasps her shoulder.

"Trust me?" he asks, and, after a moment, she nods.

Neji drags himself out of the water on the shore and pulls himself to his feet, face hard.

"Of course you need to be protected, Civilian," he says, and takes an oil spitball to the side of the face.

His stunned expression is priceless. He turns to see Gamami squatted on the shore beside him. He lifts his foot to stomp her, and she reveals her knife.

He steps away from her. The motion puts him off balance, and he can't spin fast enough to meet Sakura when she appears behind him, catching a glancing blow to the back before catching her with the first four hits of a Eight Trigrams Thirty-Two palms before Sakura vanishes and reappears behind him to tag him again while he is still mid-technique.

He catches her with the full technique this time, and she falls back onto the pond, back tenketsu still intact and keeping her afloat.

Her body flares briefly pink, and she pulls herself back to her feet, face twisted in the beginnings of a smirk. "Got you," she says.

He slicks his wet hair back away from his eyes with a faint frown.

"You barely touched me, and you had to use a frog."

Sakura holds her hand out to Gamami, who hops up into it, and smiles.

"She's a toad, actually. And her name—"

Gamami tumbles from Sakura's hand and Neji spins to catch Sakura's chest, but she's gone before he can follow through.

Sakura reappears on the pond, her chest lighting up faintly with pink as she straightens.

"—Is Gamami. We're a team." Ten clones of Sakura appear throughout the clearing. "And we're going to beat you."

Three weeks later, and Sakura is still lying on the ground, chest heaving, when the day is over. Ten spars. She can still get up.

She doesn't.

"Give up," Neji says, looking down upon her with disdain. "You can never win."

Neji has improved more in that last two weeks than Sakura has. Sakura has one gimmick, plain as day to the Byakugan, and while Neji has just had to learn that one trick, Sakura has had to learn taijutsu. She is making progress, but it is rendered invisible by Neji's own.

He has learned to center himself, control his attacks so that he never leaves an opening for Sakura to counter-attack. He has also, incidentally, learned not to ignore the frog, which, in Kakashi's opinion, is really the most challenging lesson of them all. He still hasn't really mastered it.

She is improving, though. She has learned to move her body just enough to knock his strikes off of her tenketsu. Her reflexes have improved substantially.

"Good job, today, Neji," Kakashi says. "You can go home."

Neji, with one last contemptuous glance at where Sakura lies on the ground, does just that.

"Do you really think I can beat him?" she asks him, once Neji is out of earshot, turning her face to nuzzle Gamami when she approaches from the pond.

Neji is a real piece of work. Not just in the sense that he fits so much contempt and disdain into such a tiny body, but also that his skill in taijutsu is totally unreasonable. He is a ten year old academy student, and his taijutsu skill level is clearly chuunin.

"There's no doubt in my mind," Kakashi tells her, and he can see some of the despair that been hardening in her face dissipate.

"How?" she asks him.

Kakashi considers this. "Sakura, what do you think the Byakugan is?"

Sakura frowns.

"It sees through everything, right?"

"No," Kakashi says. "It sees everything as it truly is."

Sakura's frown deepens.

"That's what I said."

"It's not."

Sakura glares at him.

Kakashi crouches down and picks up a rock. "I'm going to turn into this rock," Kakashi tells her. "And I want you to tell me which rock is the real me."

Sakura sits up and looks at him, irritation draining from her face.

"Turn around."

Sakura turns around, spinning on her butt and 100% getting even more grass stains on her dress. "You too," he says, pointing at Gamami.

Gamami scowls thunderously at him, and hops into Sakura's lap, notably not turning around. He swears he can feel her glare through Sakura's body.

"In five seconds, turn around," Kakashi instructs her, then switches the hand he's holding the rock in, sets it down, and transforms into the rock.

Sakura turns around and glares down at him.

It is a mildly disorientating experience. Kakashi does not enjoy being inanimate objects, seeing without eyes, his chakra system tucked away into some weird not-space.

Sakura looks at him. Looks at the rock. Looks at him. Looks at the rock.

She picks the rock up, then picks him up. She weighs them in her hands.

Kakashi is a fucking jounin, excuse you, that won't work.

She looks like she's about to throw him, and he makes a clone to hold up a sign that says, "if you throw me, I will never teach you anything ever again."

Sakura freezes, eyes boring into him. Him, and not the rock. Well, shoot, he might have just given up the gambit.

She waves his clone away, and then drops her head to peer at him. She moves to the rock, and then immediately back to him. She tosses the rock over her shoulder, and it falls into the pond with a splash.

A smile crawls across her face.

"Hi, Sensei," she says, eyes sparkling. Then she stands and flings him at a tree.

Kakashi sighs as he un-transforms mid-flight.

"That's it," he says, raising his hands. "I'm done. You're on your own. Forever."

"Your dad's scroll talks about this!"

His dad's scroll talks about literally every aspect of the transformation jutsu. This one included.

"He knows it's me because there's too much chakra, and it's all human-shaped!"

It's one of the reasons that the Hidden in the Leaves jutsu is so powerful. Because all of the leaves are touched with the user's chakra, they don't have to fully suppress their chakra when transformed, leaving them still able to perform jutsu.

Perhaps his father's most egregious technique was moulding the same jutsu in twenty leaves at once so that the one that was him wouldn't be obvious.

"And he sees my chakra strings! And my clones…" She pauses. "I don't put my chakra system in my clones?"

Kakashi taps his nose.

Sakura squeals and jumps into the air.

"I'm gonna beat him so bad. I'm gonna make him bleed. I'm gonna make him cry."

That's the spirit.

It's been two weeks, and Sakura still hasn't managed it. Neji has started frowning a bit more, but the days still end with Sakura, breathing ragged, back flat on the ground.

Now, however, she keeps getting back up, until Kakashi calls it for the day.

Sakura looks up at the sun, and pushes herself back up. Neji lunges forward at her, and she vanishes and reappears on the pond, leaving Neji striking a flower petal.

Whenever she needs to think, she stands in the center of the pond, because she's more sure-footed on the water than Neji is.

"Give up—" Neji starts, but Sakura isn't listening to him, chewing on her thumb.

"It's not quite right," she says, muttering to herself around her thumb, glaring at Neji. She glances down at Gamami, sitting with unnerving stillness on the pond beside her. "Am I getting closer?"

Gamami doesn't say anything, because she doesn't like talking and she can't nod while gathering natural energy. He can feel a little pulse of… something, though, and Sakura nods.

"Okay. Just a little more."

She vanishes into a cloud of petals. It's a neat trick she learned a week ago, without his help. Summoning jutsu layered on top of her transformation, hiding which petal she is in the cloud. A veritable petal clone, which his father detailed in his transformation and clone scrolls. Separately, because his father wouldn't just have one way to do the same thing.

He can see the moment in which Neji loses track of her before his attention snaps to one particular petal in the cloud.

He steps to the side, as Sakura sprays chakra strings across the clearing, to a point further from every possible point she could swap to, then snaps to his right, driving his palm into Sakura the moment she reappears. She doesn't fall, chest sparking with pink light, so he follows it up, but his hands catch nothing but more petals, and his attention snaps back to the pond a moment before Sakura re-appears upon it, hands resting on her legs as she breathes deeply, eyes on Neji.

"It's futile," he says.

Pink flares spiral out from Sakura's belly button, tracing all the way out to her fingers. Just doing one tenketsu at a time has apparently gotten too boring for her, so she does this now.

When she reaches her fingers, she restarts at her belly button again.

It's his first time seeing it, so Neji looks mildly discomfited. It's a totally reasonable reaction. Kakashi has seen her do it on several occasions, and he remains distinctly uncomfortable every time she does it.

Minato could do the "yellow trail", as he activated all of his tenketsu in sequence. Kakashi never saw him do this, and he's not convinced he was capable.

Finally, Sakura takes a deep breath and vanishes into a cloud of petals.

This time, he sees the moment when Neji loses track of her completely.

He staggers back, head jerking back and forth, like she's somehow vanished into his blind spot, and Gamami grins a bloodthirsty toad grin from her position on the pond.

Neji blinks as chakra strings spray across the clearing, but Sakura must be making a proper web of them, because his focus doesn't snap to a single petal.

When he looks right, Sakura appears behind him, and when he tries to turn to face her, he is too slow, and takes her fist straight to the face.

For the first time in five weeks, Neji goes down, and Sakura grins down at him.

"Stand up, Neji," she says. "I'm not done with you yet."

"It's just a fluke," Neji says under his breath, slowly pushing himself to his feet.

Sakura's eyes dance, and she vanishes again into a cloud of petals.

Neji tries to center himself, but he doesn't succeed, eyes anxiously roving the air around him, taking another fist to the face, sending him once again sprawling to the ground.

"What," he says, slowly pushing himself back up only to get punched to the ground once again. "What's happening?"

Sakura laughs, a mean, angry laugh from where she stands above him.

"What's wrong, Neji?" she asks. "Is your precious Byakugan not as perfect as you thought?"

Neji's nostrils flare and he surges up at her, drives his fist into the cloud of petals Sakura becomes. She appears behind him, but he doesn't react.

Her clone pouts before dispersing itself.

She comforts herself by punching Neji in the face once again.

"I am a Hyuuga," he says, taking to his feet again, the veins around his eyes deepening and lengthening as he pours altogether too much chakra into his Byakugan. "You're just—"

"I'm just a civilian?" Sakura asks, standing over Neji once again. She smiles, closing her hand into a fist. "I didn't know how fun punching someone in the face could be," she says. "Maybe—"

Then she looks at Kakashi.

"This is taijutsu training! You're trying to trick me into practicing my taijutsu!"

She vanishes as Neji tries and fails to take advantage of her distraction.

Kakashi would like to think that he's succeeding into tricking her into practicing her taijutsu. But also, the actual training hasn't started yet.

First, Neji was cheating. He knew where she'd be before she was even there. Now, Sakura is. Neji is taking constant psychic damage from his lack of perfect knowledge.

Kakashi waits and watches as Sakura does exactly what she promised she would do: she beats Neji into the ground, beats him bloody. She does not make him cry, because Neji is altogether too traumatized for that.

Finally, Neji falls, and he does not get back up.

"I—I can't win," he says, flat on his back.

Sakura smiles victoriously above him. She opens her mouth to pile on, but Kakashi cuts her off, tossing her into the pond.

"That's enough," he says, and she frowns at him from where she lays sprawled across the surface of the pond.

"I thought—" Neji says, sitting up, and grabbing his head. "I thought—how can she beat me? She's just… she's just a civilian."

Kakashi crouches next to Neji, and places a hand on his shoulder. He's not sure if it's actually as comforting as he's intending, but Neji doesn't shrug it off.

"My father was a civilian-born ninja, Neji." Neji flinches back, like he's expecting… well, nothing good. "You might have heard of him. Hatake Sakumo. The White Fang." Neji frowns faintly as he tries to go through his history, and then stiffens when he remembers who Kakashi's father was.

"Blood isn't everything, Neji. Being a Hyuuga doesn't make you better." Then, in a smaller voice. "And being a branch house member doesn't make you worse."

Neji turns his head away.

"Sakura didn't beat you because of her parents, or her blood. She beat you because, right now, she's stronger than you are. Every day for the last two weeks, when you've gone back to the Hyuuga compound, she's stayed here, learning how to transform into a flower petal so perfectly you wouldn't be able to tell the difference."

Sakura makes proud noises by the pond, and Neji doesn't turn back to Kakashi, his gaze on the grass to his side.

"But nothing is set in stone, Neji. You want me to tell you how to beat her?"

Sakura squawks, and Neji slowly looks up to meet Kakashi's eyes.

Kakashi gives him his best eye-smile. "It's easy."

Sakura squawks some more.

"Sensei! That's cheating, you're supposed to be—"

She falls silent when he turns his gaze on her, wilting back to the pond.

"Right now, you are my student as much as she is, Neji. You needed to learn to lose, but right now, Neji, I want to teach you how to win again."

Slowly, Neji nods.

"Good. Stand up."

Neji stands.

Kakashi leans down to Neji's ear and whispers, low enough that Sakura can't hear him. "Turn off your Byakugan."

Neji looks at him in surprise, and Kakashi straightens.

"Do not look, Neji. See. Do not see, Neji—know. That's the Hyuuga motto, right?"

Neji takes a deep breath, and the veins around his eyes fade away.

Sakura opens her mouth for a jab, then shuts it when Kakashi gives her a sharp look.

"Okay," she says, as Neji settles into a low gentle fist stance. "Let's go."

She vanishes, and this time, Neji doesn't go spinning looking for the petal, because he obviously would never find it.

Sakura appears directly behind him, but Neji is already spinning, slipping around her clumsy punch, and slamming both of his palms into her chest.

Sakura, mouth open in surprise, is physically lifted into the air and thrown several feet before she crashes into the ground.

Neji looks down at his hands and then up at Kakashi.

"Nothing is set in stone, Neji," Kakashi says to him, and slowly, hesitantly, Neji nods. Then, looking down at Sakura, he just as slowly, just as hesitantly. extends his hand to her. She takes it, and he pulls her easily to her feet.

"Ouch," she says, very eloquently, rubbing her chest, and Neji's face twitches in the suppressed remnants of what might just be a smile.

"And Sakura," Kakashi says from behind them. "Now, you're practicing taijutsu." He grins in the face of her shocked glare. "Have fun!"

It has been six weeks. Neji has been using Byakugan for five of those weeks. It does give him a decided advantage, when it doesn't make him panic about the fact that he can't see Sakura when she's a petal. He is still leagues and leagues better than Sakura at taijutsu. In a straight up taijutsu fight, he will win every time.

That's not the kind of fight Sakura has to fight, though. She can pick the direction and timing of their every interaction. She can attack whenever Neji is off balance, feint him one way and attack in another. She needs the knowledge of taijutsu to know when to pick her moment, the reflexes to retreat when she's miscalculated, and sheer speed. She needs to be able to hit her opponents before they know she's there.

She's improving nicely. Every week, he can see her improve, just a little bit. She loses by a little less every week. Neji is good, but he was already extraordinary. He has less room to improve, while Sakura is taking taijutsu seriously for the first time in her life.

As he watches Sakura dance between his strikes, feinting in and out of petals to try and lurch him into overbalancing himself, he can feel the tipping point coming. He is worried about what will happen when Sakura gets good enough to beat Neji every time they spar. It was good for Neji, to lose, and then win again. A good object lesson in Nothing is set in stone.

Sakura, however, will be stronger than him. Her rate of improvement outpaces his substantially, and for all that Kakashi has promised to teach Neji like he would his own student, Neji is already better than Kakashi at not only the gentle fist style in particular but also taijutsu in general, leaving him with very little knowledge to impart. To say nothing of Sakura's three years as an actual ninja, which really does count for something.

Sakura reappears, just barely out Neji's reach, and when he lunges for her on instinct, she swaps with a flower petal by his midsection and delivers a brutal kick to his stomach.

Neji goes down, wincing, hands on where she struck him.

"Sorry," Sakura says, with a matching wince.

To say they're friends would be… wrong. They're no longer enemies, though. Sakura no longer wants to make him bleed and no longer wants to make him cry.

"This is what training is," Neji says with a grunt, pushing himself to his feet. "It hurts."

"Ninjutsu training doesn't hurt," Sakura says, dancing back from him a few steps, because Neji has definitely taken advantage of her hesitation after putting him on the ground to return the favor. "Taijutsu really does suck."

Neji huffs out a laugh which sounds just—so much like his uncle's. He lunges towards her, and then drives his palm solidly into her chest when she tries to take advantage of his apparent and quite false opening.

Sakura goes down.

"You're predictable," Neji says, as her chest flares pink.

"That's cheating," Sakura grumbles.

"I'm sorry, what was that?"

"Nothing."

They clash, and Sakura goes down, then Neji, Neji, Sakura, Neji, Neji, Sakura, Neji, Sakura, Sakura, Sakura, Sakura.

Sakura lies on the ground, limbs splayed around her, and frowns at the sky.

"I got lucky," Neji says. "Time before last. I fell for your feint, I just slipped, and couldn't put my full weight into my strike."

Sakura smiles. "I'm fine."

"If you're fine, get up. It's barely noon."

Sakura laughs, and flips to her feet. "I'm gonna get you."

"Prove it," he says, and it takes her another two tries, but then she gets Neji three times in a row.

Kakashi yawns. This has gotten a lot less interesting since they lost interest in killing each other.

Sakura creates ten clones, scattered around the clearing, and Neji smirks.

"Nice try," he says. "Your chakra flow is still wrong."

All of Sakura's clones make faces and charge him. He ignores all but one, sending it to the ground with a juuken. She staggers back, and he follows up, but she slips into a petal before his blows can land. He spins, and Sakura blocks his strike with one hand while pushing in with the other.

No hands left to block her strike, Neji spins into a ball of white chakra, sending Sakura spinning into a petal high above the clearing.

Neji pulled that one out of his ass two weeks ago. Seeing a ten year old branch member perform the Eight Trigrams Revolving Palms has not gotten any less egregious or outrageous with time. To think, this boy won't be clan head because of Hyuuga's clan bullshit. If he isn't the most brilliant Hyuuga in a century, Kakashi'll eat his damn forehead protector.

Neji gets a glancing blow on her shoulder when she reappears directly before him, spinning to cleanly slip under her strikes, but she breaks into nothing but a cloud of petals under the force of it. She reappears to take advantage of his open side, and he spins into her, driving his hand into her open side, and knocking her to the ground.

Pink flares over her body as her tenketsu re-open, but she doesn't get up, staring at the sky. Neji looks down at her for a long moment, studying her face, and then takes a seat next to her.

"Neji," she says once he's sitting beside her. "What's the thing on your forehead?"

Silence falls on the clearing.

Neji and Sakura aren't friends, but they've fought every other day for three months now.

"It's the Hyuuga curse seal," he says.

"The one Hyuuga puts on the branch members?"

Neji nods.

"My parents call it the slave seal." Neji flinches, and Sakura looks to him with a wince. "Sorry."

With what looks like a physical effort, Neji pushes the feelings away.

"Yeah," he says.

"I think it's wrong," she tells him.

"It—" Neji shakes his head. "It doesn't matter."

Sakura makes a fart noise to show what she thinks about that.

"It can't be removed," Neji says. "And even if it was, they would just—" his voice breaks. Sakura sits up, and puts a hand on his knee. "It's illegal to take it off. Anyone who helps could get thrown in jail."

Sakura raises her hand to the seal, and he flinches but doesn't push her hand away. She reaches to her side and then sets Gamami on his head.

"You look like you could use Gamami sitting on your head," she tells him.

Neji shakes his head, but Sakura grabs his face before he can toss Gamami off.

He stops and stares at her blankly.

"I feel better already."

Sakura looks up at Gamami.

"No, she hasn't done anything yet. You have to wait for it."

Neji raises a brow. "I have to wait for it."

She nods. "Also, you can't move." She looks at him meaningfully.

Neji subsides with a sigh. "Fine," he says. "But then you have to get up."

"Okay!" she says.

Five minutes later, she scoops Gamami from his head and jumps to her feet, tossing Gamami onto her own hair.

"Alright! Let's go!"

Neji frowns up at her in confusion before pushing himself to his feet as well, spreading his stance, slow and wide.

Sakura wins more than she loses that day, and Kakashi can feel the balance start to tip.

The balance collapses completely three weeks after that.

Sakura enters the training ground late, as Kakashi approaches with Neji.

Kakashi raises his eyebrow at her, and she grins.

"You're predictable," she says.

Well. He'll have to work on that.

Neji and Sakura bow to each other, and then ten Sakura clones pop into existence. Neji looks at them with a measured expression, and then settles lower into his stance, like he knew this was going to happen eventually.

All of Neji's techniques for fighting Sakura depend on her having to be there to feint. On him knowing exactly when she vanishes back into a petal.

He doesn't down Sakura a single time, and Sakura stops smiling the tenth time in a row she's knocked him down.

"Um," she says, standing over him, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

"Again," Neji says, in a concerningly flat tone.

"Okay."

Sakura vanishes into a cloud of petals. To Neji's right, a Sakura blooms from a petal, and takes a juuken strike to the chest, going down with an oof.

Neji glares at her, eyes ablaze.

"Don't patronize me."

Sakura flinches. "Sorry," she says. "But—"

"No buts, Sakura," he says, and she nods, disintegrating into a cloud of flower petals as two Sakuras appear behind him, and when he goes after one, the other's fist connects, staggering him. He spins the follow up attack away, but as soon as he has stopped spinning, there are three Sakuras around him. He parries two, his hands going through them, and takes the fist from the last straight to the solar plexus, sending him down to the ground, gasping for air.

"Again," Neji says, pushing himself back to his feet.

Four clones, leaving him with a glancing blow to the chin. He spins away the followup, catches the actual Sakura with a hit to the shoulder, but overextends into his own followup, taking a kick to the side, and he is on the ground again.

And around and around it goes. Hours in which Neji tries and fails to compensate for Sakura's clones. He recovers admirably, but it isn't enough.

As the sun starts to set, Neji falls to his knees, and bows his head.

"Neji—" Sakura starts.

"Don't."

"But, Neji—"

"You're just stronger than me," Neji says. "It's—"

"No!" Sakura says, before he can intervene. She grabs Neji with both of her hands, and shakes him. "Nothing is set in stone, right?"

Neji looks up at her. "Some things are," he says, and one of his hands goes to his seal.

Sakura flushes, chest heaving, and she turns to Kakashi.

"You can help him, right? You told him how to beat me before, come on!"

Kakashi puts his book away, and crosses the clearing towards them. He crouches beside them both.

He looks at Sakura's pleading eyes, and Neji's knowing ones.

"I can't," Kakashi says. "His taijutsu is already better than mine. I'm just seventeen years older than him. All I can tell him is to keep training."

"Then keep training with me!"

"Neji is good training for you," Kakashi says. "But you are bad training for him."

"What?" Sakura says, her voice in a whisper.

"Neji needs to fight better taijutsu users."

"I can just use taijutsu, then!"

"You're too weak."

"But—" Sakura's face falls, and her hands droop on Neji's shoulders.

Neji raises his hands to Sakura's and then brushes them away. He stands, with some trouble.

"Thank you, Sakura," Neji says flatly. "Training with you was very… illuminating."

Sakura looks up at him despairingly. "We're still friends, though, right?"

Neji inhales sharply. "Yes, fine."

It's not a ringing endorsement of friendship, but Sakura grabs onto it like it is. "I'll see you tomorrow then!" Neji sighs. "I'll bring Ino!" Then, in a smaller voice, "She'll know what to do."

Neji pushes past Sakura.

"Say it!" she shouts after his back. "Say you'll see me tomorrow!"

Neji pauses, and then nods. "I'll see you tomorrow, Sakura."

"Good," then, so quiet Kakashi isn't actually sure he hears it, "I'll make sure you won't regret it."

Kakashi walks Neji home, through the bustling streets of Konoha, which are coming alive for the evening.

Before Kakashi can open his mouth, Neji interrupts.

"Nothing is set in stone?" he asks.

"Sakura isn't invincible. Neither am I, neither is anyone. If you work hard, you can find a way out."

He has some ideas on how to break his father's techniques. Neji might even be able to use them. But Kakashi is not generous enough of a man to start handing out techniques that would let others kill his student to an outsider.

He promised to treat Neji as his own student, but that's far from the first promise he's broken, and it's far from the last promise he'll break.

"I believe you," Neji says, to Kakashi's surprise. "Not everything is set in stone. A civilian-born ninja can beat Hyuuga's genius son." Neji clenches his hands into fists. "But Kakashi-sensei, some things are. Can you take this seal from me, free me from my cage? Give me something to live for, other than choosing how I'll die?"

Kakashi takes in a breath in, and then lets it out. The seal can be broken. Toumi is living proof. He even has some ideas on how she might have done it. Change might be coming—but the whispers of A's words have faded with time, and this chance seems fated to die out, like all the others.

Maybe Kakashi could throw his weight behind it, and maybe that would make a difference, but it could also forever make him an enemy to the house of Hyuuga, which is a dangerous place to be. Hiashi's words are grand, but three branch members have died in the last three months under suspicious circumstances, so they are also hollow.

The odds just aren't in his favor.

It's a bad call, and the Anbu put too much ice in Kakashi's veins to let him make that call just because it looks like the right thing to do.

Kakashi's face has slipped into an expressionless mask without realizing it, and Neji's smile is brittle as he looks away.

"I guess that's the wrong question. Even if you could, Kakashi-sensei, you wouldn't. Just like everyone else." They reach the gates of Hyuuga compound, and Neji bows to him. "Thank you for everything," Neji says, and his eyes are clearer than they were, three months ago. "But some things really are set in stone."