Posted: August 20, 2017

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

A/N: You maybe got the impression that I was funny from the last chapter. I'm actually not great at writing humor, but I'm doing my best. This chapter isn't as funny as the last one, and it gets a little dark. You have been warned.

If you think Sakura's acting out of character in this chapter, don't worry. All will be explained. She's just a little different from canon Sakura...

And in case you were wondering, no, Kakashi will not always be the POV character. That's just how it worked out for the first two chapters.

IMPORTANT: I will be going back to school in just a few days, so I don't know when the next chapter will be out.

"Don't worry," Kakashi assures his cute little genin. "There won't be any shinobi combat on a C-rank mission." He keeps smiling as Tazuna shifts uncomfortably.

"Then... then we won't come into contact with any foreign shinobi?" the girl asks. Kakashi can't resist the urge to pat her on the head.

"Of course not!" he laughs, eyeing the puddle at the corner of his vision.

He has to fight down his giggles as the foreign shinobi rise from the water. They must not recognize him. Somehow. Kami, chuunin are a riot.

He has to consciously restrain himself as the chuunin brothers manipulate their chain to trap him. "What?" Kakashi gasps for dramatic effect. The genin play along with shocked exclamations of their own. For a moment he's proud.

...Oh, wait, no. They're genuinely shocked. Kakashi sighs, discouraged.

"One down..." the first chuunin growls.

A kawarimi, a light genjutsu, and Kakashi's munching on a rice ball as he watches the two brothers tear him apart. He shifts to a more comfortable position with his back against the tree, one leg hanging down from the limb.

The kids scream. "Ka... KAKASHI-SENSEI!"

Aww. They miss him already.

The chuunin go for his blonde brat next, apparently identifying him as the next strongest link. Kakashi nods in approval. He also flicks out a kunai, pinning their chain against a tree so his cute student doesn't get slaughtered.

The chuunin tug ineffectually at the chain, eventually abandoning it in favor of their claws. Kakashi sighs and brushes rice crumbs off his fingers as he stands. The brothers go for yet another pincer maneuver, heading straight for Tazuna.

Ah-ha.

Kakashi shunshins from one chuunin to the next, catching each under one arm. He finally takes a moment to do a cursory examination of his genin. Naruto, collapsed on the ground in shock. Sakura, standing in front of Tazuna with a kunai. Good girl.

And Sasuke, frozen in place but grinning like an idiot.

"You are a fashion disaster."

Kakashi tries hard. He really does. But he can't help the little squeak that escapes through his nose.

Zabuza just stares down at the kid, looking murderous. The Uchiha continues blithely.

"It's the pants, I think. The camo socks don't help, but it's mostly the pants."

"S–Sasuke-kun..." the girl stammers.

"And why is your face bandaged? You look like Kakashi on a budget," he continues, completely deadpan.

Okay, that's probably enough. Zabuza's gone a bit too still for comfort. Kakashi quietly raises his headband, exposing his Sharingan eye. "Surround and protect Tazuna-san," he says, shutting the kid up. "Do not enter the fight. That's the teamwork here."

His heartbeat remains steady through willpower alone. Three inept genin, all depending on him, their lives in his hands. Why did he take a team, again?

"Zabuza," he addresses the fashion disaster. "First... you fight me."

"Hey, Sasu–"

The blonde cuts himself off, hesitating.

"...Sakura-chan! Listen!"

"Wh–What is it?"

"I have a plan."

Kakashi watches from his water prison, disbelieving. He'd been under the impression only one of his students was suicidal... an impression he's now beginning to doubt.

"A lot of arrogance," Zabuza drawls, "but do you really stand a chance?"

This is bad...

"What are you doing?" Kakashi burbles loudly, hoping his words can be understood through the water. "Run away! This fight was over the moment I got caught! Our duty is to protect Tazuna-san! Have you forgotten?"

His students look at him like he's... well, gargling water. Damn. Looks like they couldn't understand him. And now, yay, he's run out of air.

Zabuza begins to laugh. "You brats will never grow up. You're just playing ninja." He stops laughing. Kakashi senses a monologue coming. "When I... When I was your age..."

Aaand he's off.

Kakashi can't quite stop his brain from filtering the voice so it sounds like an eighty-year-old Zabuza telling stories to his grandkids. "Why, when I was your age, these hands were already dyed red with blood!" He would probably laugh if he weren't, you know, suffocating.

"That sure was fun," Zabuza concludes a minute later, referring to the murders of his fellow students. Yeesh. Kakashi knows he has problems of his own, but this? This guy makes Kakashi seem positively well-adjusted.

The atmosphere outside his prison grows thicker. "Now..." Zabuza says.

Kakashi sees him move, but there's no time to shout a warning even if he had the breath. Zabuza's elbow catches his student in the chest, sending the Uchiha flying. The Mist shinobi follows up, throwing him to the ground and pinning him there with a foot. The kid coughs up blood.

"SASUKE-KUN!" the girl shrieks.

Something strange is happening inside Kakashi's head. Maybe it's the lack of oxygen, or the prolonged use of the Sharingan, but amidst the spinning and the panic a new feeling creeps up like a plant through cracked stone. It builds and grows and twists itself around the three children fighting for their lives on the shore.

Sasuke. Sakura. Naruto.

Mine, it says. That's mine.

That's where his memory from inside the water prison cuts off. The rest, Kakashi reconstructs at a later time, from his own hazy impressions and the stories of his students.

Naruto, disguising his actions with a barrage of Shadow Clones, had transformed himself into a large shuriken. A clone threw him to Sakura, who in turn sent the shuriken spinning toward Zabuza, followed up by a kunai. Her aim was imperfect by her own admission, but close enough that Zabuza had to leap over the first projectile while catching the second. Naruto then canceled his transformation and threw a kunai of his own, forcing Zabuza to abandon his post holding Kakashi's water prison.

From there, things went downhill for Zabuza.

Until his ally had stepped in and fooled them all into thinking him dead.

Now Kakashi lies on a mattress in Tazuna's house, recovering under the care of the bridge builder's daughter, Tsunami. His students sit around him, struggling to process the revelation that Zabuza may well be alive.

Everyone except for Naruto, who's practically vibrating with excitement.

Weird kid.

"You guys will receive training," Kakashi tells them, saying it like it's something special instead of what he should have been doing all along.

"Training?" Sakura asks. "But our enemy is a shinobi even you struggled to defeat! What's a little training going to do against a guy like that?"

Kakashi just eyes his students seriously. "And who saved me when I was struggling? You guys are stronger than you think." He glances at Sasuke, sitting with arms propped on knees. The kid looks pensive. Good. Perhaps he's starting to understand that his quest for mediocrity is endangering the members of his team.

"You did well," he says, glancing away from Sasuke. "You've all grown a lot. Especially you, Naruto."

The expression on the boy's face makes Kakashi's heart ache. Has no one ever complimented the kid before? What kind of childhood did he have, anyway?

Then a wide grin stretches Naruto's cheeks. He raises his arm, ruffling the hair at the back of his head in happy embarrassment. Kakashi stares. The scene is so reminiscent of Minato that for a moment, all of the old doubts and regrets come roaring to the surface. It's all he can do to keep his expression bland. His covered eye stings.

"Before we start the training, I want to talk to you about chakra."

Naruto looks confused. "Um... what's chakra?"

Kakashi very nearly lets gravity take him down. He leans heavily on his crutches while Sakura berates her teammate. How does this even happen? What the hell were the Academy instructors doing for four years?

"I used to sleep through the hard classes," he hears Naruto confess.

Well... damn. This is bad.

But like hell he's going to fix it himself. He has a reputation to uphold. "Sakura?" he sighs.

The girl beams at the chance to show off her knowledge, and promptly pulls out a scroll on chakra. While Sakura explains chakra to a befuddled Naruto, Kakashi contemplates the mystery of why the girl was carrying that particular scroll in the first place.

When the noise stops, Kakashi nods like he's been listening. "Exactly," he says.

Naruto fidgets and tilts his head. "Um, I didn't really understand all that, but isn't that something you learn with your body?"

"Naruto's right," Sasuke pipes up from his position sitting against a tree. "We already know how to use jutsu. Isn't that enough?"

"Nope!" Kakashi responds cheerfully. The black-haired kid slouches in disappointment. "You guys aren't using chakra properly."

"WHAT?" Naruto bellows unnecessarily. If most kids are trains, Naruto's coaches are packed with explosives.

Well, never let it be said that Kakashi passed up the chance to mock his students. He smiles and delves into a long explanation of precisely why they suck.

"Damn!" Naruto complains, rubbing his head from the latest fall. The kid looks up at the marks on his tree, overlapping in a crisscrossed mess. He appears to deliberate for a moment before turning around and moving toward Sakura.

"Hey. Um..." He speaks in a harsh whisper that carries to Kakashi's ears. "Can you give me some tips?"

"Huh?" The girl looks startled. Then she seems to realize someone's asking for her expertise, even if that someone is her self-proclaimed object of hatred. She blushes lightly in pleasure. "Oh," she says, flicking her shoulder-length hair out of her face. "Um. Okay. Well, first you need to..."

As Sakura explains things to Naruto, Kakashi watches from afar. He's going to get stronger and stronger, he thinks. But just how strong? His gaze switches to Sakura. And Sakura... She's showing a lot of promise. More than I expected.

Then he looks toward the Uchiha kid. Sasuke. He's sitting on the ground by his tree, which bears only a dozen or so marks as evidence of his meager efforts.

How am I supposed to motivate this kid? His previous comment questioning the worth of the Uchiha clan hadn't seemed to make so much as a dent in his attitude.

Kakashi sighs and reluctantly hobbles over. Normally he wouldn't bother, but he's becoming genuinely concerned the boy will get himself, or someone else, killed.

The Uchiha looks up at his approach. "Kakashi," he acknowledges. No honorific, as usual.

"Sasuke." Kakashi's eye curves in a smile. "How's it going?" Kami, small talk grates on his nerves.

"Fine."

Kakashi decides to go for shock value. "Are you trying to get your teammates killed?" he asks pleasantly, smile still in place.

The kid starts and looks at him wide-eyed. "What?"

"Are you," Kakashi repeats, "trying to get Naruto and Sakura killed?"

"No," the boy protests.

"Oh," he says, "my bad, then. I guess that's just what it looks like." Kakashi turns away, then says over his shoulder, "By the way, even the most mediocre shinobi can do this exercise."

He doesn't check the boy's expression. He just walks away, hoping it will be enough.

"WHAT DO YOU THINK?" Naruto bellows from the top of his tree. "LOOK HOW HIGH I CAN CLIMB NOW!"

The boy then proceeds to stand up on the branch, and slip.

"Whoa!" he yelps, falling backwards out of the tree.

Sakura screams and jerks forward. Kakashi freezes in impotent terror. Damn... By body's still–

...Ah.

"JUST KIDDING!" the boy shouts, now hanging upside-down, sandals stuck to the underside of the branch. "HA HA! YOU FELL FOR IT!"

Kakashi mentally adds another to his list of toilets to booby-trap.

"Narutooo! I'm going to KILL YOU!" Sakura bellows up at him.

Kakashi continues to watch, a kind of dreadful expectation filling his mind. And sure enough, a moment later, Naruto's shoes come un-stuck from the tree. "Ah!" the kid says.

A gasp from beside him, and Kakashi drops his crutches in preparation to do... something. Then a pink blur dashes past him and up the tree.

A mere second before Naruto hits the ground, a petite hand reaches out and grasps his ankle. Sakura yelps as Naruto's momentum drags her arm downward. She slides down the trunk a bit before bracing herself and managing to halt his descent.

"Naruto!" Sakura complains. "You're heavy!"

"Wha...?" Naruto flails unhelpfully.

Kakashi just stares as they bicker and slowly make their way toward the ground. The Uchiha emerges from whatever loner cave he'd been lurking in and helps catch Naruto when Sakura's arms finally give out. The three end up sitting on the grass, laughing breathlessly and squabbling over their near-miss.

Kakashi's eye curves into a smile. They're growing well...

"I'll fight him."

Everyone turns to look at Sasuke in surprise. Well, that's unexpected. Kakashi swells with pride and awards himself points for what was obviously an incredible pep talk.

Then logic catches up with him.

Right. Suicidal.

"Nope," he chirps.

The kid swings around to look at him. "What?" He actually looks angry, in a cute wet-kitten sort of way. Kakashi resists the urge to coo.

"I'll be doing the fighting. You two just sit tight and protect Tazuna-san." He smiles to soften the blow, eyes trained on Zabuza and his apprentice.

"No!" the boy protests. "I can do this!"

Kakashi feels the smile slide from his face. "No," he tells him seriously, "you can't."

Then he turns to face his enemies.

In the end, his refusal means nothing. Kakashi simply can't keep up with both Zabuza and his apprentice at the same time, even with the Sharingan. Sasuke takes advantage of a momentary lapse in Kakashi's attention to draw the apprentice away from the fight, toward the end of the bridge. When Kakashi next looks, his student is getting the crap kicked out of him, and there's nothing he can do.

Behind him, he can hear Sakura beginning to hyperventilate. Then the bridge-builder murmurs something too low to hear, and she's off like a shot, aiming for Sasuke at the end of the bridge.

Shit.

Then–

"Uzumaki Naruto has finally arrived!"

Kakashi almost closes his eyes in despair.

"Now that I'm here, everything will be fine!" Naruto brays. "The main character of a story usually shows up in these types of situations, and immediately kicks the enemy's ass!"

That idiot... Kakashi feels tired. What kind of loud entrance is that? He calls himself a shinobi?

"How are you even a ninja?" Sakura cries, echoing his sentiment from the end of the bridge, where she stands crouched over a fallen Sasuke.

The blonde idiot goes bounding toward his teammates, conveniently grouping them together in a single spot. Kakashi's eyes widen as Zabuza's apprentice shapes his hands into a seal.

The water on the bridge flows upward around the three genin. It freezes into slabs of ice, enclosing them in a dome.

Dammit!

Kakashi dashes forward, but is blocked as Zabuza shunshins in front of him.

"Hey," the man growls. "Your opponent is me."

Then he continues.

"Your brats don't stand a chance against Haku. Ever since he was a little kid, I've taught him all kinds of fighting skills. Even facing the greatest adversity, he has succeeded. Without a heart nor fear of..."

That's about where Kakashi zones out. He takes the opportunity to begin formulating a plan. Enemy shinobi should really stop giving him openings like this... At least the chuunin brothers hadn't bothered to regale them with tales of difficult childhoods or fashion tips or whatever it is these shinobi say while he's not listening.

There's a long pause. Kakashi waits politely.

"There's nothing as boring as a man's bragging," Kakashi complains when he's fairly certain the chatterbox is finished. Zabuza's eye twitches in a thoroughly satisfying manner.

Then they fight.

When the mist comes, he loses the ability to see or hear his students. The thought makes his stomach squirm in distress. He focuses on finishing his fight as quickly as possible.

Kakashi knows.

Two people on the bridge lie dead. One of them was under his protection.

See what good it did them.

He's known this, known it since he walked into his home and found his father lying in a pool of his own blood. Knew it when he stared down at one half of a face, missing an eye. Knew it as his hand sank into the chest of his last living teammate.

When he woke up on the morning after the Kyuubi attack and learned his sensei was dead, he knew.

So, no, he didn't take in the orphaned Naruto. No, he didn't accept a team of students.

Because of this. This thing he knows.

Blood drips down Zabuza's arms, disturbing the silence. He clenches a kunai in his teeth. The man kicks off, darting forward and tearing through the enemy ranks like a demon. He takes down dozens before he gets to Gato.

"You and I together," Kakashi hears him say, "are going to hell!"

See you there, Kakashi thinks.

Then Gato's head is flying into the crowd of goons, and Zabuza turns to face them. The goons shrink back from his terrifying aura, despite the multiple blades sticking out of his back.

Then he's collapsing.

That's three.

Naruto looks devastated. Kakashi opens his mouth to say something, and finds he has nothing to say. He closes it again.

And the silence goes on.

Kakashi knows. He knows this, and knows it to be the truth:

I will always lose them.

And, It will always be my fault.

Review ideas:

– An image or a scene that you liked

– Anything you didn't like

– What you think should happen next, because I don't have very many ideas

– Was the drama at the end of this chapter okay, or would you prefer this be a purely humor fic?