Chapter Text
Prologue
Kakashi wasn’t a fan of D-rank missions. He had picked 'catch the cat' because he was naïve and thought that surely, if his students used their single shared braincell to work together, they would be done within the hour.
“I got it! I got— waahh!” Naruto yelled, angry red scratches now accompanying the whisker marks on his cheeks.
“Goddamnit Naruto, it escaped again!”
“You’re useless.”
“Hey, I did more than you two!”
But no, Kakashi had been chaperoning this mess of a team for the last two hours, and by the looks of it he would continue to do so for another three. Not even Icha Icha could remove this level of second-hand embarrassment and boredom.
“Do you want to go out on a C-rank mission, hmm?” Kakashi asked, hands in his pockets. The three genin finally stopped screaming each other’s ears off and looked at him with hope.
“Yeah! Kakashi-sensei, I knew you were the best—”
“Because we won’t. Ever. Not when you can’t even complete a D-rank.”
“—sensei, what!? You’re the worst, dattebayo!” Easy come, easy go. Rest in peace, Kakashi who was considered the best sensei for all of two seconds. You will be missed.
“Ugh, let’s just get this over with,” Sasuke sighed, already body-flickering away.
“Hey, don’t leave me behind!” Naruto ran right after him.
“Naruto, stop yelling, you’ll scare the cat again!” Sakura, your high-pitched shouting is worse.
Besides, the cat had run East, not West.
“Wrong way,” Kakashi called with a defeated sigh.
His genin team halted, yelled and pointed fingers at each other again for a good while before disappearing from sight, this time running in the right direction, at least.
This was going to be a long, long day. When he first accepted to teach the three brats he hadn’t known it was going to be this hopeless. Was it too late to return them to the Academy? It had only been a week, maybe Iruka would still take them back.
An hour after the thought first crossed his mind, his team was still running in circles, no cat in sight. Kakashi pointedly didn’t slump against the nearest tree, no, he merely rested his weight on it with casual, not-disillusioned aloofness.
...
He stayed like that for another hour.
How much time from this point until the end of his existence? The new Icha Icha volume better be worth it—
There was a familiar rush of wind, the sound of a small object approaching at impossible speeds, and Kakashi ducked, avoiding the attack and getting a hair trim in the process. Who—
CRACK. Something round and small got impaled in the trunk, at the right height to have gone through his head if he hadn’t moved. Ah, the tortoise that hated his guts.
Kakashi had told Gai a hundred times that the little thing wanted him dead. Gai had laughed like it was a joke and not a very offended complaint, saying something along the lines of “my precious Fusku would never!”
Yeah, tell that to his hair. The little reptile was the reason it looked like it did.
“Kukuku,” the creature was stuck, but obviously gleeful for the silver strands he had gotten in the exchange.
“Why, fuck you too,” he greeted.
Small legs flailed for a minute, wiggling in an energetic, ridiculous, entertaining way that was only natural for the creatures that had accepted a contract with Gai, because the only tortoise sane was Ningame. No one ever believed Kakashi when he said it, but he was certain of it.
After a minute of struggling the shell was finally released, and the tortoise fell to the roots with a soft thud, yellow stomach facing up and rocking as its little legs twitched uselessly.
Kakashi snickered in the most patronizing way possible.
Compared to his ninken, the tortoises didn't really have the means to express emotion very well; their leathery face just wasn't designed for it, but strong emotions still managed to come across in their gaze.
“Go die,” and across their words and assassination attempts, he supposed.
“Believe me, I’m trying my best,” Kakashi reassured, crouching down so he could receive the message and get this over with.
“Why did it have to be you?” the squeaky voice complained, little beetle eyes squinting hatefully at him for a long moment. “I like Genma and Asuma better.”
Kakashi shrugged and gave his fakest eye smile. “Lucky us, eh?”
The little tortoise huffed and hid inside, rolling over its own shell like one of those toys civilians liked, spinning tops, for a few seconds before it finally righted itself, head getting out the shell with a scroll in its jaws that was easily three times bigger than the tortoise was.
Kakashi didn’t want to know how that worked, so he just took the scroll, hand moving fast enough to save his fingers from a bite attempt.
“Received,” and then, when the little thing didn’t immediately leave. “Shoo, shoo.”
“How Gai stands you is beyond me,” the tortoise grunted. “I hope he never comes back to this blood-stinky terrain.”
…that phrase was odd. Gai loved Konoha, and he was very, very loud about everything he loved, which meant all his summons were well aware of it.
“Why do you mean by—”
A rush of air, and the tortoise was no more.
“—that, little, shit.” Not even his dogs gave him this much bite.
He looked down at the scroll, considering. The messenger hadn’t stated the urgency of this delivery.
“Kakashi-sensei! Kakashi-sensei, we caught it! We finally AHHH!”
“NARUTO NO!”
“Idiot, don’t release it!”
But it couldn’t be worse than this D-rank. Nothing could be worse than this D-rank.
“I’ll leave neko-chan in your very capable hands.”
“Eh? So you’re abandoning us!?” Naruto whined with empty arms and new scratch marks. Of course the cat had escaped again.
“I won’t always be there to support you in the battlefield, if you want to be good shinobi you need to learn to improvise and get the mission completed, even without your jounin sensei around,” he explained seriously.
Sasuke scoffed disbelievingly.
“Yeah right, you’re just saying that because you want to leave,” Sakura accused, crossing her arms.
“Yeah!” Naruto screamed.
“Yeah,” Kakashi admitted with an eye smile. “See you tomorrow at seven sharp. I expect this mission to be complete by then.”
“Do you mean seven in the morning, or NOON!?” Naruto screeched just as Kakashi body-flickered away. They were good kids.
They were all going to die if they kept this up. Were all genin this difficult to train, or had he just gotten the short end of the stick? A whole week training under him and they still couldn’t manage to catch a cat; he couldn’t be that useless of a sensei, right?
He looked down at the scroll again. Hmm, maybe Team Seven would benefit from a training exercise against Gai’s students. And if not, eh, at least it wouldn’t be worse than today’s D-rank, that was downright pitiful.
Entering his apartment via the window — doors were overrated either way — he gave a small flare of chakra until the seal pried open to reveal a paper filled with nothing but numbers, and a book.
Kakashi tensed, all thoughts of training genin flying off the window as he studied the contents. Gai never wrote in code; he was terrible at it. What anyone else could write in minutes took him several hours, and the book…
“Japan’s History: Quirks throughout the ages,” he read out loud, a single eye narrowing. For an object so innocent-looking there was something obviously wrong with it.
He pulled at his mask uneasily. Even the paper smelt weird. All paper — scrolls, books, magazines, napkins, newspapers, explosive tags, all of it — had the same scent at the core, because all trees had chakra flowing in them, but this…
He brought it closer to his face, sniffing again.
This thing didn’t smell right. It was too plain, too delicate, and in any case: “Why is there a tome about quirky people?”
What the hell are you doing, Gai?