Written: 11/2/23
Word Count: 2,054

"You're in the Anbu black ops now, right?"

Kakashi's brows flattened. "I am."

It was clear from his unmoved expression that I hadn't impressed him much. I suppose he was justified. He was a pretty famous black ops member, so anyone in his world ought to know that.

"Your—your father died when you were young. When he...killed himself after his comrades turned on him."

That caused a reaction.

Kakashi's entire being froze, and I cursed the lack of nicer details about Kakashi's young life.

It's not like I could tell him I knew he was a prodigy and one of the youngest shinobi in history to become a jonin. It's not like I could say his sensei was Minato. Kakashi of the Sharingan, or Kakashi the Copy Ninja, was known by all for his prodigious history.

There were really only three pieces of information that might get him to take me seriously.

Should I have chosen Obito's death or Rin's sacrifice, instead? Was the knowledge of his father enough, or did he still need to be convinced?

"Um...and I know you don't sleep very well. Nightmares of Rin...impaling herself on your lightning blade...keep plaguing you, don't they?"

My voice had mellowed, turning lower and lower under the weight of that frozen, silent gaze.

I dared a glance upward, meeting that hollow look for an instant. What I saw nearly made me fall off my stool.

In the anime, the darkness of Kakashi's past was usually portrayed through shadows and glimpses of melancholy, all wrapped up in the stoic figure of our hero.

In flesh and blood, the stuttering pulse visibly moving through the prominent vein in his neck took my attention first. But then I looked into the face of a character I loved dearly, and I never hated myself more than in that moment.

I'd purposefully brought up the worst moments of Kakashi's existence and dared spit them in his face.

Whitened shock belied the venom roiling in his eyes. I'd never feared Kakashi, ever, in all my time watching Naruto.

Is he going to kill me?

My momentum tipped on the stool, nearly sending me crashing to the ground, when one of Kakashi's gloved hands struck out, holding onto my collar. Slowly, my body righted itself, my eyes turning dizzy from where they peered at the hand gripping my collar.

"How...do you..." Kakashi's face loomed close, and those shadows that seemed to cloak the man found their way to me, gripping me within their invisible, icy tendrils. "How do you know all that?"

Like a mouse, all I could do was squeak as I turned to putty beneath his fierce grip. "I watched it. In an anime. You're a character from it."

"An anime?" Kakashi asked, dangerously. "What is that?"

Curse you, Masashi Kishimoto, for your half-hearted world-building. Naruto's timelessness worked against me now, as my mind raced to a comparison from the show I could make.

They'd had movies before Boruto's time, hadn't they? Were those moments just plugs for the Naruto movies that weren't canon to the actual story? Would that distinction even matter right now?

"It's a—a show, but animated with pictures instead of people. It's—It's supposed to be fictional."

"But I'm real," Kakashi declared, and I nodded.

"Yeah," I agreed, our faces half a foot apart, "you sure are."

Carelessly releasing my collar, Kakashi demanded. "Show me."

I skittered around on the stool, scrabbling for purchase against the foam leaking from the plush seat.

"If...if you're sure," I slid past him, nearly tripping on the metal footrest of the stool and splaying out on my linoleum kitchen floor.

The rambling commenced.

Aiming for the table beside my green couch, where my charging iPad lay wedged behind a lamp and a box of Kleenex, I couldn't shut my mouth if I tried.

"I can show you some episodes, of course. The story takes place later than now. I mean, it starts when you're a little older, maybe a couple of years? Anyway, it probably won't make any sense since you don't know Naruto, but...you'll see yourself. Just try not to freak out, alright? Haha, what am I saying? You're Kakashi Hatake! You won't freak out over seeing a smaller version of you living out a story on a tiny screen. No..hah...ha..ha..."

"Get on with it."

Kakashi's deep voice, so different from the affable, friendly English dub voice, straightened my spine with its intensity.

"Sir, yes, sir," I turned, sitting on the cushion beside the kittens. Since this was a hand-me-down couch, the outer two cushions were slightly lower than the middle one from all the use over the years.

The kittens, meanwhile, were raised atop the nearly-untouched middle one like a throne.

"You can..." I looked around my nearly-bare living area. It wasn't a big room by any means, but having only a couch and table in a single space left few options for seating. "Here, I'll move them."

Dethroning the kittens for Kakashi's sake made me feel like a terrible mother, but when the need arises...or, something like that.

The kittens were placed on the sky-blue carpet near my ankles, their mewling raised in a slightly-indignant pitch, almost as if they could feel their dethronement taking place without having to open their eyes.

Kakashi, ever the scarecrow, stood looking down at me. His head crooked to the side—all that hair that usually looked so goofy moved in such a way that produced shivers down my spine. Without realizing it, my legs turned in toward one another, my knees pressing tight to hide their slight trembling.

"You can sit—"

"Why do you have a box of infant kittens in your living room?" Kakashi asked, his expression unreadable.

I could have sighed. This mounting tension had to abate soon, right? He couldn't just keep glaring at me forever, could he? Should I try to plead my innocence one more time, or would that only piss him off? Anbu-era Kakashi was a lot more prickly than I'd originally thought...

"They're mine," I shrugged.

"Oh?" Kakashi's visible brow rose into a nearly-perfect arch shape. "And where's their mother?"

Suddenly feeling defensive, I looked away from the ninja's piercing gaze, rubbing my arms. Even though it was only late summer, there was still a chill in the morning air harkening one's mind to the frost that would soon be upon us.

"The mother is with my sister," I explained. "I had to take these two before they got eaten by the other males on the farm."

Kakashi tilted his head the other way, his lanky body somehow folding in on itself as he mirrored my position on the couch, replacing the kittens on the throne. Perching, just like me, on the very edge of the cushions, he nodded.

"So, you're a farm girl, then?"

Gah—that voice!

Heat instantly flamed my cheeks. Why did his voice have to sound so much sexier than the Kakashi I knew? Even the most innocent thing said was like a beacon for dirty thoughts...well, luckily I'm not some thirsting girl in her twenties who's just trying to get a headstart on the family-making business before the maternal clock starts ticking.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't born with a maternal clock at all, but of course, I can't say for sure until I hit my thirties.

Thirties...

I sighed, leaning back against the couch. The cushions enveloped me in their enticing embrace, and my sigh turned satisfied.

"I am not a farm girl," I sniffed. "Not that there's anything wrong with that. My sister married into the small-town culture I left behind. That's all."

"Uh-huh." Kakashi seemed to take pleasure in making me uncomfortable. He'd relaxed somewhat, though that could be because of the miracle drug called a couch.

Couches are magic, it's true. Even battle-hardened, battle-scarred Anbu black ops fall to pieces when faced with their sheer level of comfort.

"You don't want to kick your feet up? Relax a little?" At Kakashi's blank-eyed stare, I rolled right on. "I don't have a TV. I watch everything on my iPad, so apologies for the small screen."

Quickly accessing my iPad through my fingerprint, I skimmed to my Amazon Prime account. Scrolling through the purchased volumes of the entire Shippuden series, I quickly clicked one at random, scrolling down to find an appropriately-titled episode.

Kakashi Hatake, the Hokage...

Prophecy of the Great Lord Elder...

Ah. Without meaning to, I'd clicked the volume showing Obito's face covered in that old, swirled mask. This was the volume right before the Fourth Great Shinobi War began, when Naruto was lied to and sent to the island for "training."

"Ah, um, let me go back a few..." With Kakashi's eyes peering at the screen with Sharingan-like intensity, I wondered if he recognized any of the faces on the volume covers. He surely wouldn't recognize Obito...certainly not as a Madara Uchiha imposter.

Quickly scrolling away from the picture of his old friend who was still quite alive without him knowing it, I scrolled to the end of the list, picking one of the earlier volumes at random. With Hinata on the cover, the content couldn't be that bad, could it?

Scrolling through the episodes, I saw that one had been watched part-way through. I must have rewatched it recently, though I couldn't quite remember what this particular episode entailed. Details like individual episodes began to fade away once you watched hundreds of them.

I clicked on it, thinking it was better to start in the middle of an episode and bypass the intros and recaps, when, blaring on the screen in front of me, Hinata confesses her love to Naruto, who was stabbed in the ground by Pain's iron rods.

"Is that girl...a Hyuga?"

I tense as Hinata goes flying. Then, the screen narrows in on Naruto's shock-stricken face, and Kakashi tenses as tightly as a spring beside me.

I can tell he's recognized the prominent features of the boy on the screen.

"Who...is...that?" Kakashi asked, his head looming closer to mine as his intense focus lasered in on my iPad.

I cleared my throat, feeling dumb for picking a Shippuden episode. The kid show was still on Netflix for a little while longer, so I should have just started at the beginning, despite the terribly slow and fuzzy animation.

Grating, annoying voices were better than life-or-death battle scenes.

"That's...Naruto Uzumaki... He's the main character of this show, which is actually named after him."

"This is a...show?" Kakashi shook his head. "This boy has to be the child of my master, Great Lord Fourth. But he couldn't possibly be this old...how did the creators of this show even learn about him? Where is this battle taking place?"

Oh, boy. Kakashi really was too smart for his own good.

"That's the Hidden Leaf Village."

Kakashi's neck snapped toward me, disbelief etched in every single one of his visible features. Beneath his mask, I was sure his lips were twisted in derision.

"Impossible."

I shook my head, finding it hard to concentrate with the man leaning so close to me. He smelled of wood shavings like he'd just finished a job where he had to help out on a construction project. The smell wasn't overwhelming, but it was potent enough that his heat, his warmth, and the slightly metallic scent of his kunai...flooded my senses.

"It is. At the very end of the Akatsuki Members arc, Naruto faces off against Pain and Konan. In the process of the fight, Pain...destroys the Hidden Leaf to ashes. They have to rebuild, but then the war starts, and..."

"A war?" Kakashi's voice hardened. "What war?"

I swallowed. "The Fourth Great Shinobi War."

"The Fourth Great Shinobi War?"

"Yeah," I wet my lips, my fingers leaving Amazon Prime of their own accord and clicking on the familiar red N where the slightly less intense part of Naruto's story was waiting for me to end this awkward conversation. "It's when the five main Hidden Villages come together with the samurai and try to defeat Madara and Obit—"

I stopped, suddenly, at the spoiler that almost left my mouth. Here I am, trying to be as forthcoming as I can, so he'll believe me.

And almost stepped right onto a landmine.

"Who?" Kakashi's mind was too sharp for my good.