Title: Are You Ready?
Chapter: 4 – The definition of insanity is…
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 3206
Summary: AU. Sakura gives up on Kakashi as a teacher after Team 7 falls apart. Too bad fate, enemy ninja, and sheer bad luck have other plans.
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it. Part 4 of ? Unbeta'd.
She leads him to the Uchiha district.
Before they ever enter it, he can tell there's something wrong. The paint has faded and the gates are shut. Sakura doesn't stop, just turns sideways and wriggles through the gaps between the wooden slats, with the ease of long practice.
Kakashi winces at the thought of doing the same. There were some things that had been easier when he'd been younger, even if there are upsides to being older. Instead he forms a few seals and reappears on the other side of the gate.
He looks around and realizes they're in a ghost town.
Shutters creak and hang off their hinges. Silence has an almost physical weight to it. On once brightly-coloured signs there's dirt and grit and everything has faded from the sun.
"Welcome," Sakura says, with a twisted grimace, "to the Uchiha District."
She starts walking purposefully down the eerily empty street-eerie for him, because two days ago, this was a bustling, thriving community, but for her, it's clearly been this empty for years-and he follows, horrified, wondering what happened to reduce a Clan of the Uchiha's strength to this.
What enemy could do such a thing?
"Why was I given an Uchiha to train?" he asks again. This time, he thinks he knows the answer.
"You're the only one that could," she says, without looking back. "No one else has the Sharingan in the village."
He thinks about all the people he knows, even just on sight, who have it and shudders inwardly. "What about Konoha's Military Police?"
"Disbanded."
Kakashi stops abruptly. Haruno keeps going for a few steps before turning back to look at him inquiringly.
He's… pretty aghast, to be honest. "You can't just disband the internal police force."
"Most of the force was Uchiha," Haruno points out, like she's reciting a history lesson and he has the uncomfortable feeling that she is. "After the Uchiha Massacre," he can hear the caps in that, "the Sandaime Hokage did not have the personnel, or the volunteers, to staff it. Those who were members but non-Uchiha were absorbed into the general forces, a portion of which was then given the mission of regulating the village."
"A portion," Kakashi says blankly, then takes a few steps to keep up with Haruno who has started walking again. His long stride eats the distance between them easily. "How can we afford that?"
Haruno gives a bit of a shrug. "I don't know about the expense side," she says, "but it's been working fairly well from what I can tell."
"With all your vast experience?"
She ignores that.
On reflection, Kakashi thinks, she's probably right to. "Where are we going?"
"To Sasuke's apartment," she says, which horrifies him all the more.
"He lived here even after-"
"Yes."
"But why wasn't he placed with…" he falters as he realizes that he's unsure who the child could've been placed with. Another Clan wouldn't've been able to raise him-there are too many strictures and familial secrets and skills for any Clan to feel comfortable about taking in another Clan's child. And a civilian family would be unprepared for the trauma that he'd undergone.
He can just imagine the political quagmire it would've caused to try and find the child a shinobi family that wasn't a clan but that the clans approved of to raise a Clan child.
But to just leave him alone…?
Surely a better solution could have been found.
"It's funny," she says, "that you say that. No one said that about Naruto."
A pit of ice settles in his stomach, along with churning guilt. He's not sure what she knows but it's clear that she knows something. "He was provided for."
He had been, right?
Truthfully, Kakashi had put as much distance between himself and his sensei's child as possible in an attempt to forget what had happened and never bothered to think about what the child's life would be like. He'd just wanted to forget.
Watching the narrow shoulders of his third Genin, Kakashi finds himself without anything to say in his defense as she snorts her disbelief.
"This," she says, stopping outside an imposing looking apartment block, "this Sasuke's place."
He surveys it. It looks just as broken down as the rest of the district, dusty and dirty. He tries to imagine living in the silence of this place and cannot.
Kakashi knows what a silent house feels like, he remembers that clearly.
He also remembers having his team around him, from a very young age. Uchiha Sasuke, he knows, did not make Genin at six, the way he did.
Very few did.
"Are we going in?" he asks.
Haruno stares up at the building. "If you want to," she says and doesn't move.
"Who killed the Uchiha?"
Her green eyes are as cold as stone when she looks at him. In a few years, he thinks, she'll be formidable. Not yet, but it will happen. "An Uchiha."
Kakashi stares up at the apartment. "And left Sasuke alive."
She makes a noise of dismay in the back of her throat. "He wants Sasuke to kill him," she says, "and to do that, Sasuke feels he must live with hatred only. He's gone from the village."
He hears what she doesn't say: Team Seven failed. They hadn't been enough of a family to keep Uchiha Sasuke grounded and protected and a part of the village. Haruno, quite clearly, blames him.
Does his older self, the one with all his memories, blame himself?
"Who killed the Uchiha, Haruno?"
"Uchiha Itachi."
Sakura wraps her arms around her waist as they walk through the abandoned sector, Kakashi-sensei's silence a compliment to her own. After she'd told him about Uchiha Itachi he'd fallen silent. She peers at him, knowing he'll notice, but hoping he won't take her to task for her lack of subtlety, as she gauges the depth of his frown.
… It's a pretty big frown, she decides.
She hasn't tried too hard to get him to talk. It's weird enough that she's wandering around here with her first sensei, already without adding extra strangeness.
The Kakashi-sensei that she and Ino had been imagining had been like her lazy, always late sensei only without the last year.
This Kakashi-sensei is different, more focused. When he asks her a question, she knows he expects a serious answer because there's none of the other Kakashi-sensei's bland amusement at life in his tone.
This Kakashi-sensei is all business.
Sakura likes this one better, she decides.
"Where did Uzumaki Naruto go?" Kakashi-sensei asks, breaking the silence. "And why?"
"Jiraiya-sama took him as his student," Sakura answers. "He wanted training to become strong enough to go after Sasuke and bring him back. He promised."
Already she feels guilty for that promise. Like she's swallowed a live goldfish.
Sakura says nothing about the fact that some people are after Naruto. It doesn't really matter now, not when he's safe, away with Jiraiya-sama. Even Tsunade-shishou believes that Naruto is safer this way.
"And you chose Tsunade-sama to study with."
"The training," she says, "was better."
He's silent for a few moments. "Tell me about Team Seven."
Wind tugs at her hair, tied back with her hitae-ite, and Sakura seriously gives thought to not answering him at all. It's an ugly can of worms and she doesn't want to relive it. If she could, she'd go back and erase it from her mind.
In the end, though, she tells him because this Kakashi-sensei is different from the one she knows and if she doesn't tell him, someone else will.
At least this way, he'll know what it was like to be on the team.
At least this way, she'll finally get to tell her side to it all and be listened to.
Sakura likes this strange, different Kakashi-sensei even more for that.
Kakashi lays back on his bed, in his room, in his apartment—none of which he'd been aware of owning before the morning—and tries to think. Haruno has gone home, wrung out and tired and grumpy, with a promise to pick him up bright and early tomorrow morning.
He's, truth be told, glad she's gone for the night.
He needs time to adjust.
And to try something that's been itching at him for days now, but that he hadn't had the time to try. First, there'd been the mission and he hadn't the time or the chakra to spend on trying to summon his dogs. Then there'd been the return to the village, ANBU, Tsunade, the hospital, Yamanaka Inoichi poking around in his mind…
He hadn't been left alone long enough to feel up to trying to summon his dogs. He desperately wants their comfort and this, all alone in a place that smells almost familiar but isn't his and isn't known, he finally has the time.
Kakashi tries not to get his hopes up.
Leaving his bedroom, he takes a cautious seat on his couch, and after a second's hesitation (he tells himself not to be a ninny) and bites his thumb and runs through a familiar set of seals, molding the chakra with the ease of long practice.
For a moment, all goes well, and he thinks it might actually work—and then the chakra slams up against what he can only envision is a wall, sloshes back at him, leaving him reeling back into the cushions of his couch, and he's left with a jutsu that he's known for what feels like forever having fizzled and backfired on him.
Kakashi stares grimly at where his dogs should've appeared.
Right. He doesn't know how the jutsu that put him into this position worked but he suddenly wishes he'd taken a little more time to make the offending ninja's death more painful… and lingering.
He clamps down on yearning for his dogs. He doesn't have time to wallow. Especially not if he's got to adjust to their loss as well as… everything else.
(And though it pains him deeply, the loss of his dogs only impacts him. Everything else impacts more people, more savagely.)
Unfortunately, adjusting means dealing with the clusterfuck of a team the Hokage has dropped in his lap, and he's pretty sure there's no way to put the team back together because it's already shattered beyond repair.
Haruno blames him. Uchiha Sasuke isn't spared her blame either and even she even lays some of it on Uzumaki Naruto. Though, admittedly, Uzumaki gets rather less of it. From what she said (and his nose knows she wasn't lying) she's right.
If he takes her word for it, for the year and change another him had control of Team Seven, Kakashi has to agree with her scathing assessment:
He really didn't try to train them. Didn't try to make them a team. Failed them all dismally.
There's worse teachers out there, he can think of a few, but Haruno's pointed and detailed run-down of Team Seven under his command definitely earns him a ranking position on that list.
Which is uncomfortable.
More than that, it's nearly impossible to comprehend. Kakashi looks at his hands. They look like his hands still, the ones he woke up with that morning. The ones he'd woken up with last week.
They're not the hands that failed to steer properly. He's the wrong Kakashi. This is some bizarre, messed up future that he wants out of. How the hell did he mess up responsibility so badly?
Teaching—especially Genin, who are breakable and fragile and naïve and think they aren't any of that-isn't something he sees himself doing, if he's honest with himself. In his timeline, he's not a teacher.
He kills things. Saves things, sometimes. But mostly he kills things while wearing the black and white and scarlet spiral of ANBU.
Kakashi closes his eyes and rubs at his face. In this world (the future, supposedly) he's a Genin sensei. A really awful Genin sensei.
He wonders what Tsunade-sama (who is Hokage now, which hurts his head to think about too hard; the Sandaime took over and Haruno mentioned he'd died but…) was thinking, to place him in the hands of someone who held a grudge.
Was it punishment?
Was it encouragement to do better?
Could he do better? That's the million ryo question and he knows the answer to it.
"Yes," he says, letting the word come out as a sigh.
He knows how to be a good sensei. Minato-sensei had been one of the best and everything his sensei had done, he remembers. He can apply the lessons learnt there to a team. It's one of the ways he gets through being an ANBU captain and leading missions there.
Clearly, in this future, he hadn't bothered to put forth the effort when it came to a bunch of Genin who needed him. It's an ugly realization.
I don't want to teach, he thinks, and that's true.
Kakashi wonders if that was his older-self's justification for fucking up the lives of three children who'd depended on him for guidance. That's ugly. Worse than ugly, it's criminal. Can he hate himself for actions he hasn't even done yet?
(He suspects the answer is yes.)
A knock on his door, his front door, not one of the… alternative entrances, gets his attention. It's less a knock and more of a steady pounding and the chakra signature isn't one he recognizes. It's not Haruno's, though from the training level, it's probably one of her contemporaries.
Kakashi drags himself off the couch to go an answer it.
He suspects, with some dread, that the person on the other side of the door (who is trying to break the door down) is the person who is the biggest reason that Haruno is not a worse mess than she is.
He's read Haruno's file, and her records, and after talking to her all day has a grasp of her personality.
Tsunade-sama is an excellent teacher but even she could not possibly have shored up the wreck the past year should have, would have, made of Haruno's self-esteem and confidence in herself. That would have had to come from a friend.
When he opens the door to find a tall-for-her-age kunoichi with blonde hair and fierce blue eyes staring up at him, he knows he's right. Yamanaka, he notes, with an inward shudder. As a Clan, they're known for being relentless once their attention is engaged.
"I'm coming in," she tells him, clearly uncaring of the difference in age, that people will talk, that he's apparently a Jounin sensei while she's only a Genin, that she's not even one of his Genin, and that all of the above matters in the village.
Kakashi strongly suspects that whomever her sensei is will be showing up within the hour, thanks to the gossip tree of Konoha. Either that or her parents. Unless she's here with parental approval, which is a frightening thought.
He lets her in anyway, and considers it to be his own way of making amends towards Haruno. If he's going to do anything to fix what his other, older-self wrought then he needs to understand what he's dealing with.
"Name?" he asks, as his security jutsu hum to life around the apartment and he sinks into a chair that is booby-trapped enough that even he feels secure in it.
The Yamanaka girl, with her hands planted on her hips, looks at him. Dirtily. "Yamanaka Ino," she says. "Haruno Sakura is mine."
He nods. He remembers her father (it must be her father, she's got Inoichi's eyebrows and scowl, though not his nose), saying something similar years back. "Before you start yelling," Kakashi says mildly, "I feel the need to point out that while I'm Hatake Kakashi, I'm not the Hatake Kakashi that you're pissed off at."
"Then you'll learn from his mistakes." Her voice is like the crack of a whip. It'd be impressive on anyone. On her, with her dainty features, he finds it entirely disturbing.
When the Yamanaka girl leaves three hours later, Kakashi's head hurts worse than it had when she'd shown up. No one else came knocking on his door, so now he's forced to assume that the girl had obtained parental permission (which has always seemed a bit silly to him, when she's technically an adult the moment she puts on her hitae-ite but he doesn't make the rules-he only follows them) before coming to give him the rundown.
She leaves with a smile that's lined with ice and sky blue eyes that burn and he thinks he understands a lot better what she meant when she'd stated that Sakura was hers.
Kakashi rubs his face then gets up and makes himself a coffee. It's a stupid thing to drink when he's got to be awake in a few hours, at most, and he thinks he's going to be pulling an all-nighter this time around. He needs the time to think before Sakura inflicts herself on him again.
What is he going to do?
The information, too much information, is jumbled around in his head and for a moment he wishes he were back in his time, back where things made sense and no one had lost their mind and made him a sensei of anything except, perhaps, how to murder people more efficiently while wearing the black and white of ANBU.
His coffee scalds his tongue and he grimaces.
He doesn't know how to fix this. He doesn't understand why he would have turned out to be such a bad sensei. Kakashi knows he doesn't want to teach but he's done a lot of things over the years that he hasn't wanted to do and he's done them well.
What the hell went wrong with him between his timeline and the one he's found himself in?
Is the other Kakashi, the right Kakashi for this timeline (though he's done everything wrong) back in his time? Kakashi thinks about that and decides, all things considered, that he would rather be in this time, in this situation, than in the other him's position.
ANBU headquarters is a bad place to be disoriented.
That's getting off the important things though. He admits that it's a stalling tactic. If he dedicates himself to fixing this, he's not sure he can also dedicate himself to finding a way to go, well, home.
Kakashi thinks about Sakura's green eyes, half-hurt, half-vicious, as she told him about what he'd done to train his team. He thinks about the Yamanaka girl who is all confidence and sparkling, strident determination to make things better for Sakura.
He thinks about the last Uchiha, Sasuke, who he failed so badly that he left the village.
He thinks about Uzumaki Naruto, who he's failed more times over this time around, and who has left the village as well.
Sakura is the only one he can make things better for. She's the only one in his reach right now.
Kakashi wonders, again, what the other him had been thinking.
As his coffee grows cold, he doesn't find an answer, and the lonely night offers no ideas either.
Well, shit.