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The Copy Ninja.
The Man with a Thousand Jutsu.
The Son of the White Fang.
Kakashi Hatake accumulated titles like walls accumulating cracks, until the structure beneath them was harder to see than the damage on the surface. Genin at five. Chunin at six. Jonin at twelve. ANBU Captain at thirteen. The man who cut through lightning. The last living student of the Fourth Hokage.
That was the legend everyone else saw.
But when he looked at his own reflection. All Kakashi saw was a man defined by his failures. He had looked away, many times over the years. The reflectio never changed.
Cursed Kakashi.
He called himself that sometimes as an inside joke with no punchline.
Except it felt like he was truly cursed.
Everyone he had cared about had died. His father. Obito. Rin. Minato-sensei. A procession of ghosts that had settled into the permanent geography of his life. This was why he had stopped letting people stay close.
Then there was Guy.
Loud, relentless and constitutionally incapable of accepting a closed door. That man had spent years refusing to let Kakashi's walls work. He was exhausting, absurd and somehow the most consistent presence in Kakashi's adult life. Which said something about his state of life that the jomin preferred not to examine too closely. Guy's persistence worn him down enough to consider the jonin instructor position. Not that he would be good at it. Kakashi expected to fail at it. But in a moment of something that might generously be called weak optimism, he had agreed to try.
He had not passed a single genin team ever since.
This year he had been assigned Team Seven.
Team... Seven.
That was the same number as his old squad. With a civilian girl, a traumatized prodigy, and a loudmouth deadlast. The resemblance to his past felt like the universe was either warning him or mocking him.
Kakashi wasn't a religious man but this felt like a sign.
Flip!
The young adult let the doubt settle somewhere and turned his attention back to the page.
The new Icha-Icha novel was a masterpiece. Whatever else could be said about Jiraiya, the man had not lost his touch.
"Enjoying the new release, I see."
"The love triangle in the third act was a little dry," Kakashi said. "Please tell Master Jiraiya, he needs to find new ways to complicate the saga. The tension isn't landing the way it used to."
Hiruzen smiled despite the exhaustion sitting behind his eyes. "Do you think this year you'll finally pass a team?"
"Only time will tell."
"Sometimes, I wonder if you even want one."
"To be honest, I don't know," Kakashi said, from his peripheral vision he registered the disapproving look from the Hokage's secretary.
He couldn't blame her.
No reasonable woman approved of a man openly reading Jiraiya's cultural masterpieces. Well, Anko might but she was Anko.
Kakashi genuinely enjoyed these books. They were a distraction, something to fill the spaces that would otherwise fill themselves with less manageable things. A better addiction than alcohol, which was where most shinobi eventually arrived at. He had chosen art on a page instead.
"Kakashi, have you ever considered the balance between what is right and what is necessary?"
"Of course. It gets harder to see the line the more you walk it."
"Today I intend to find it." Hiruzen gestured toward the office. "Come inside."
The door closed.
The hokage sat down behind his desk and said it plainly. "Kakashi, I want you to pass Team Seven."
Kakashi considered why the hokage would be issuing this as a direct order rather than leaving it to the usual process.
"Lord Third, this is too much bias towards Sasuke Uchiha."
It was the logical conclusion. Kakashi was the only shinobi equipped to teach the boy how to use the Sharingan properly. While the copy ninja was ever grateful to Fugaku for allowing him to keep Obito's eye despite the clan's objections. And he was willing to give Sasuke a fair chance on those terms.
But passing a team for one kid wasn't his style.
"This isn't about Sasuke Uchiha. This is about Naruto Uzumaki."
Kakashi's heart skipped a beat.
Naruto Uzumaki.
He had a thorough file on the boy. The Ex-Anbu Captain had files on most people worth keeping track of.
Academic performance, behavioral incidents, pranks and physical development. The unofficial record of every time a civilian had pushed too far and someone quiet had pushed back on Naruto's behalf without leaving a name.
That last category had mostly been Kakashi.
He had never made his presence known. The closest he had come was a rooftop in Naruto's seventh year, watching the boy eat alone at a festival. While the people moved around him like he was a cursed object rather than a person. He had told himself that being unseen was a form of protection.
Naruto would remain safe away from cursed Kakashi. That was the excuse he returned to whenever the thought of sensei's son came.
And yet here he was with that excuse running out of room.
Kakashi found that part of him was not entirely opposed to this. Even if the boy had inherited nothing of Minato's talent as his academy record suggested. The hatake could give him the thing Minato had given to him.
But first...
"Lord Hokage, what exactly happened?"
Hiruzen held up one hand and formed a single seal with the other, extending one finger toward Kakashi's temple.
Ninja Art: Memory Transfer Jutsu!
This was a technique the professor had developed from the foundational principles of the Yamanaka clan's mind transfer work. The jutsu transferred preselected memories letting Kakashi witness the events.
The silver haired jonin sat with the information for a few minutes.
"Hokage-sama." Kakashi kept his voice calm with some effort. "I have been informally monitoring Naruto for years. My time in ANBU made constant surveillance impossible but I maintained what I could. How does a child acquire so many unknowns without a single flag being raised before now."
"I know," Hiruzen said, with the tone of a man who had been sitting with that same question for several sleepless nights. "But the jutsu are real. The equipment is real. The emotional state is real. Whatever happened to that boy happened somewhere... somehow we cannot currently explain. And it changed him in ways that are going to require careful handling."
"When you say careful handling..."
"I am not asking you to do anything we would both regret, Kakashi."
The tension across the young shinobi's shoulders came down by a visible degree.
"Then what're you asking?"
"I want you to pass Team Seven," Hiruzen said. "And I want you to be their sensei."
The statement was technically redundant. Passing a team and becoming their jonin instructor were the same action. Which meant the emphasis was not on the passing. It was on the last word.
Sensei.
"If I pass Team Seven... I would be their instructor," Kakashi said. "So, I assume the distinction you are drawing has more specificity to it than the standard arrangement. What does the role entail given the circumstances?"
"A teacher is someone a child can go to when everything else is done… yet something still weighs on them. Someone whose presence alone tells them they matter. Iruka has been that for Naruto. But he cannot remain so forever. The boy is stepping into a different life now."
Kakashi absorbed that.
"According to Inoichi, the greatest risk Naruto poses is not the power he has acquired. It is the conclusion he may reach about whether Konoha is worthy of his loyalty."
The room held its breath for a moment.
"Can a honest relationship be built on an operational mandate?"
"We all wear masks, Kakashi." Hiruzen's voice was not unkind. "You understand that more than most. The mask does not make what is behind it false. What makes a relationship genuine is the consistency of what you offer across the easy and difficult moment. Whether you show up the same way when it costs you something as when it does not." He tilted his head slightly. "You watched over that boy for years with no mandate or recognition. I think the relationship already exists. The assignment simply requires you to stop conducting it from a rooftop."
"I will need more information before I can approach this with any real competence."
"You weren't planning on being competent sensei?!"
"I wasn't planning on passing a genin team at all," Kakashi said. "And my instinct is to treat them the way I treated capable ANBU subordinates. Clear expectations, direct feedback and, high standards applied consistently over teamwork drills."
Hiruzen gave his jonin a long look. "Kakashi, they are not operatives. They are twelve years old learning what it means to be a shinobi. What you do in the next year... will have more influence on how it closes than almost anything else."
"Yes, Sir."
"Sasuke needs someone who can see him clearly without being consumed by what happened to his family. Sakura needs someone who respects her enough to be honest rather than careful with her. And Naruto..."
The oldman set his hat down.
"Naruto needs someone who stays. Whatever else you do with that team, do not leave him."
"My primary task is to create an environment where the kids can grow and learn to trust each other."
Which was, more or less, the standard expectation for a jonin instructor.
"And my secondary objective is to keep note of anything suspicious related to Naruto's… mysteries."
Hiruzen nodded.
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Author's Note:
Q: Isn't it unrealistic for the Shinobi world to just ignore or accept what is happening with Naruto? Wouldn't he have most likely been mind read from day one if things played out anything like the show?
Answer: This is something I got asked last time so I felt the need to address it properly.
The Yamanaka Mind Transfer is absolutely an option that Konoha would logically reach for in a scenario where they don't know what's happening with Naruto. It's their go-to intelligence gathering technique and Naruto is walking around with abilities nobody can explain. Of course it's on the table.
Now why doesn't Konoha in my story use it?
It's been a while since I reread the earlier chapters so I can't point to a specific scene where I addressed this directly.
But the answer is the Kyuubi.
The Yamanaka agents on Konoha's side and Danzo's side, specifically Fu, don't want to attempt a Mind Transfer because they're scared of what happens if the Kyuubi pushes back.
This kind of thing happens in Canon btw: When Fukasaku was training Naruto in Sage Mode and tried to merge with him, the Kyuubi retaliated immediately. Didn't hesitate. Another chakra entering Naruto's body is treated as an intrusion and the Kyuubi responds accordingly.
The risk is the Yamanaka agent not coming back out in one piece mentally. Hence why Naruto doesn't get mind read.
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That's It… For Now.
I want to thank you all for taking the time to read, comment, and follow along with this story. Your feedback means more than you know, and it helps push me to make each chapter bigger, sharper, and more true to the worlds of Naruto and Dark Souls.
Until next time,
Praise the Sun.
\-Adam-/