Ok, here's the last chapter of BaH – thank you all so much! I love you guys, especially after your kind words about the last chapter.

I really thought you'd all hate that twist because it's basically a classic Mary-Sue. As a big, fat thank you I've included a tiny not-quite-extra at the end.

'The little tragedies of the Uchiha complex' – let's see if you found them all in the last chapter. Also, stay tuned for the sequel; it should be up next week at the latest and will be called Of Cutting Cords and Forging Chains.

Kakashi-shishou has many weird habits and strange idiosyncrasies. It's a condition that afflicts all outstanding ninjas – though some more than others – and usually the Konoha Hospital is equipped and inventive enough to deal with all of them. Yuuhi Kurenai doesn't like windows – let's put her in the basement. Maito Gai gets restless – put him in the children's ward, they'll tire him out. Yamanaka Inori hates the noise – fine, make space for her with the coma patients.

But Hatake Kakashi is famous for two things in equal measure: His Sharingan and his peerless paranoia. Every time he comes back from a mission injured enough to conk right out, which is luckily not too often, the entire hospital goes into overdrive, preparing for him to flip the hell out as soon as he wakes up. As it's Kakashi we're speaking about 'flipping out' mostly means he'll rip the drip out of his arm, sneak out of the window and point blank refuse to return as long as his own two legs can still carry him. He doesn't give two shits if said legs are broken and he may have internal bleeding. Like so many ninjas before him, he has still not quite understood that bleeding inside his body takes priority over bleeding on the outside of his body.

And so Hisana finds him fighting off three nurses and a doctor, trying to convince them that they only nicked his kidney a little, and really he woke up by himself, he can walk it off.

"You. Are. Hemorrhaging!" one of them cries in desperation, his voice much louder than Kakashi-shishou's comparatively calm ranting, but he is still talked over effortlessly.

"And you are exaggerating. I feel fine. Nothing that a little exercise won't cure."

Kakashi sways a little, until one of the younger nurses steadies him by the shoulder. He brushes her off almost incidentally. He looks ragged, with bags under his eyes and his hair matted to his forehead. There's a small pile of bloodied bandages on the floor, trampled on when the medic-nins tried to restrain him.

"You cannot walk off chakra exhaustion!" the doctor insists. "Do I have to inform the Hokage?!"

They struggle against each other, her injured teacher only just keeping the upper hand.

"Shishou," Hisana finally announces herself, startling everyone in the room. "You're late. I've been back for almost a week and you weren't there to congratulate me."

Kakashi seems flummoxed by her appearance as well as the completely unexpected topic, and it's enough for the medics to finally wrestle him back onto the bed. He still stoutly refuses to lie down, but at least he's sitting now. The nurses cast her suspicious looks but appear to count their blessings. She ignores them, eyes fixed on Kakashi-shishou and trying to assess the extent of his injuries.

"Hisana-chan," he greets, still hazy, after he's pulled himself together a little. "You. Here. … Don't tell me you were worried for your old teacher. Or are you here to bust me out?" He looks so hopeful. It's absurd that a ninja of his caliber should be frightened of his own employer's medics, but Hisana vividly remembers the apprehension she felt in Suna's hospital. All these strangers prodding and poking at her – it certainly set her teeth on edge then. Because they are strangers, no matter how familiar their hitai-ate may be.

"Originally, yes," she lies, "but I think it's much more fun seeing you act like a brat. So maybe I'll just stay and watch." She crosses her arms in challenge while the hospital staff gawks at her.

Kakashi actually seems to take offense at that.

"I'm not acting like a brat," he informs her delicately, strategically ignoring the doctor hissing, 'Yes you are!' "I simply can't stand their fussing. Every time the same thing."

Of course, you idiot, she thinks. Because you're always coming in with the same thing – half dead and low on chakra. But instead of scolding him Hisana rolls her eyes and taps her imaginary watch.

"Seriously?" she asks, taking care to let a tad of impatience leak into her voice. "I thought we could get this done quickly so that we can go back to training. My team's been split up, in case you hadn't guessed" – she plucks at her chuunin vest – "and I'm bored and underutilized."

Her nonchalant tone seems to distract him from the medic-nins hurriedly taking his vitals. "So can we get on with it please?"

"He needs bed-rest," the doctor insists, even as he releases the mystical palm technique and pats down Kakashi's now healed side. "We can't fix chakra exhaustion."

"He'll have to sleep it off, yes I know," she replies. "But he can do that at home, right? Like I said, I have a lot free time right now. I can make sure he doesn't do anything stupid."

The medic-nins release him into her dubious care with a mixture of worry and relief. Hisana understands their scruples; no one can keep Kakashi-shishou from doing something stupid if he truly sets his mind on it. But if there's someone who can give a valiant try, it's her. He point blank refuses to get a tetanus shot, but after twenty minutes Hisana manages to maneuver the jounin out of the hospital, the staff only mildly apprehensive.

It's a good thing, she muses, that her teacher is currently really only half present or she wouldn't have managed to pull one over him so easily. Hisana strongly suspects that the same thing will occur to him after he's slept a little. Chances are he'll make her regret trying to manipulate him afterwards; he's too devious not to. But right now Kakashi only cracks his back and sighs in relief. "So you are worth all that trouble," he assesses mildly. "I was wondering."

"Thank you so much," she snipes resisting the urge to reach out and lead her wobbly companion by the elbow. "I did you and the medics both a huge ass favor. Don't think I'll forget."

It's the first time that Hisana is anywhere near her shishou's personal space. She's never visited him at home – even though she would have loved to drag his late ass out of there often enough – and she has no idea where he spends his free time. They meet regularly on training ground 14, and every once in a while she sees him wandering around near the Hokage Tower, but that's basically it. If they need to meet up outside of training he comes to find her; it's never been the other way around. She's never questioned it – after all he's important and probably has things to do.

But in last few weeks before the Chuunin Exams she's come to wonder if it isn't an entirely personal choice on his part not to include her in his private life.

Thinking about it more closely, Hisana isn't sure if that is because Kakashi really is sort of damaged after Obito and Rin, and so he tries to keep everyone at a distance, or if it's just one of his little games again that she just hasn't realized they've been playing.

The truth is hard to discern with Kakashi, because it usually lies somewhere in the middle. Secretly she hopes he'll stop messing with her if she just appears disinterested enough. It's a tactic that works with most children, she finds. At the very beginning he'd tried engaging her in a game of 'What's under the mask?', probably to … assert dominance or something equally silly.

When Hisana baldly shot him down the topic ceased to be an issue. She's never seen under it, but he's never made an overt effort again to really conceal his face from her either. Mutual indifference. She'd call it 'respecting boundaries', but that would be a lie.

She hopes it'll be the same with his apartment now, because now that the topic has come up she would really feel safer knowing where to find him if she needs to. For both their sakes.

To Hisana's mild surprise he doesn't live anywhere notable. It's a nice area – respectable even – but not too nice. Most of his neighbors appear to be civilians but there are also a few academy students running around, judging by their ninja sandals.

"Just a moment," he says politely before disappearing into his apartment, not quite closing the door behind him. There's the sound of traps snapping shut, an exasperated sigh and a few more suspicious noises before he lets her in. "Excuse the mess," he drones and it sounds more like a reflex than anything genuine. Hisana doesn't know what impresses her more: That someone taught Kakashi manners at some point, or that he's actually bothered to remember them.

"Don't mind me," she replies equally flatly. Her teacher's apartment is surprisingly neat. Hisana doesn't know what she expected; Kakashi isn't the type to do things half-assed, so of course he would be neat. But she expected … something. Something equally quirky as he. But his apartment is just an apartment. He doesn't have any pictures in his small, drab looking living room and no plants either. There are a few dog bowls in his kitchen and a knife block, but that's basically it.

She shoos him towards the couch and he lets her. "You can leave, you know," he offers. "I don't really need someone to look after me. This isn't my first rodeo."

"I am aware," she says tartly. "And apparently you still haven't learned anything – which is what really concerns me."

He chuckles, affecting embarrassment, before all emotion neatly slides off his face. "You are dangerously close to overstepping your bounds, love."

"Yes," she agrees. "I love doing that, just ask literally anyone. I'm not here to corner you on … whatever hang-ups you have about the hospital. But you're sort of the closest thing I have to a proper team right now, so I look out for you even if it pisses you off."

That was severely below the belt, and she knows it. But if there's something that gets to Kakashi it's the team angle, and Hisana can see his resolve crumple even as he gets angry.

"Fine," he relents prosaically. "Do what you like. But if you want to talk about training you will have to come back tomorrow."

Kakashi's kitchen says a lot about him, Hisana thinks.
She absolutely refused to go home right away, to let his pettiness chase her out. Instead she left him to read his stupid book and now snoops through the apartment for anything interesting. She deliberately stays out of the bedroom – he'd probably let the traps kill her if she dared to try – but everything else is fair game. The bathroom yielded nothing interesting apart from the fact that he keeps a bottle of flowery woman's shower gel under the sink, which she tries not to think about.

The kitchen though is not as abandoned as she first suspected. In fact his pantry is stocked to the point where he could probably survive a famine and feed half of his district too.

And when it hits eight p.m. and she starts to look for food to force onto him, Hisana stumbles upon the expected quirkiness in a very strange place.

Kakashi's fridge is full of Tupperware.

Hisana opens one of the plastic containers, finding a jumble of neatly chopped raw vegetables, boiled meat, and quartered fruit, as well as a small container of cheap yoghurt.

A bit bemused she looks through the rest of them, but they all look the same. Veggies, fruit, meat, yoghurt. The containers appear to be color-coded but she really doesn't understand how. What in the world do you cook with something like this? "Shishou," she calls a bit apprehensively, "What's wrong with your fridge? … I'm not getting take out for you."

Kakashi waddles into the kitchen, still every bit as unenthused as an hour prior.

"Did it go bad?" he asks, "There's more in the freezer." Hisana musters the veggies; they look a bit dry but still edible. "Looks ok to me," he offers.

"Yeah, but what is this? What do I … do with it now?"

"Nothing," he answers. "I'm eating it." And then he grabs the container and takes it back to the living room. "Close the fridge, will you."

She stares at his back.

… Oh, ew.

"What?" she calls after him, hurriedly putting everything back where it belongs. "How can you live like that?"

This isn't a one-time thing – there are at least ten more of those, packed and ready, not counting whatever is in the freezer. It rubs her the wrong way how blasé he is about this. This apartment is obviously where he lives; it's not like Genma's place, just something where he goes to sleep. He live here, spends time here, and yet there's absolutely nothing apart from his couch that appears well-loved. No pictures, no trace of hobbies, no joy anywhere. Not even a food preference is discernible from the contents of his fridge, because he eats like he's fueling a machine.

For one frightening moment Hisana considers if Kakashi simply doesn't have a personality to display except for the cheery mask her wears, but then she remembers that the manga absolutely said differently. But then what is this?

"I'll have you know this is very nutritious," he tells her, apparently re-gaining a bit of his good humor at her apprehension. "I calculated exactly what I need to keep my current level of muscle mass and vitality. I have a rotational schedule – it's served me well for years."

"How … sad," she finally settles on. "You really know how to suck the joy out of everything."

He rudely points his chopsticks at her.

"You should consider it too. After all, you're here because you want me to train you properly, aren't you?" His eye gleams at her mischievously. "Now that Kohaku-chan is going back to his regular schedule I'm supposed to pick up the slack. We can do that, but then a few things are going to change for you."

"Oh yeah?" she forces out, now actually a bit worried. He nods absentmindedly, as if already thinking up potentially painful things for her. "Well, fine then. I can take it. As long as you can make me tokubetsu jounin before the year is up." That would still give her about seven months before Sasuke graduates. Kakashi-shishou makes a non-commitical noise. A few moments pass in tense silence; she just knows he's doing this on purpose.

"I think I can swing that," he finally agrees. "It won't be pretty and it won't be easy, but you asked for it."

Half way across the village an ANBU sneezes into his mask.

"Someone's thinking about you," his partner says, before planting his foot into the other man's stomach with enough force to send him flying.

"Oh be quiet," Anbu Cat grumbles and picks himself up from the floor.

As promised, you little extras - more info about the small things. Even though you may have puzzled out a few of them yourself.

The little tragedies of the Uchiha complex

1. Sasuke and Hisana's great-grandfather, Uchiha Isamu, was married twice. His first marriage ended childless when his wife died on duty. His second wife was their common great-grandmother, Uchiha Aine.

2. The reason Itachi didn't need to break the lock in Hisana's house was that since Shisui's death their father had become despondent and temporarily unable to take care of his daughter. Neighbors and close family therefore came and went at all hours of the day to cook and clean. Nobody bothered to close the door after themselves.

3. Three pairs of slippers remain in Sasuke's childhood home. Those of his parents and Itachi's.

4. The stubborn stains in the Uchiha dojo were where Sasuke's parents died.

5. The silly tiger slippers in Hisana's house were Shisui's.

6. If Hisana had looked a little closer at the vase in the kitchen she would have seen that it was actually inscribed 'For mommy and Hisana, by Shisui'.

7. Sasuke left his toy kunai deliberately behind. The day his clan died was the day his childhood ended. He decided he had no use for toys anymore – he'd get the real thing soon enough.

8. Itachi left the photo of his family behind, because looking at family photos is something ninja do who have something to come home to. He couldn't fool himself into thinking they were still alive and that his mission would end one day.