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One morning, Kakashi wakes up and realizes he’s not strong enough.
The realization had been brewing under the surface of his mind for a while, now. Slowly growing until it’s become all he can think about.
It’s the only logical explanation for what happened to his team. Sasuke betrayed the village because Kakashi wasn’t strong enough to stop him. Naruto and Sakura left him for other teachers because he wasn’t strong enough to teach them what they needed to know.
His team fell apart because he wasn’t strong enough to keep it together. And now, he’s all alone. The sole member of Team Seven until his students return.
--
After this realization, he decides two things.
One: by the time his students come back, Kakashi will have become strong enough to lead them. Strong enough to teach them – strong enough, even, to teach them new things after Tsunade and Jiraiya have made his little genin into chuunin, or jounin, or gods. Strong enough to convince Sasuke to come home when the time arrives.
Two: because of this, he has to make training his number one priority.
--
The Third Training Ground is empty; no new team has been appointed yet to train here in Team Seven’s stead. Even the village itself hasn’t gotten used to Team Seven’s absence yet, it seems.
Kakashi arrives with a far-fetched excuse already on his lips, realizing too late that there’s no one to apologize to. There’s no one here to yell at him for being late.
The excuse dies a bitter death on his tongue. Kakashi grimaces. He’s brought breakfast, but he’s no longer hungry.
He drops the bag of food on the ground. Time to get to work.
--
Rock-climbing. Running laps around the village. Push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups from a treebranch. Water-walking. Throwing kunai. Using his Sharingan until his head hurts.
He forgets about lunch. That’s okay. His stamina sucks anyway. Going without food for a while should help build endurance.
With that in mind, he only eats a few bites of his dinner.
--
He returns the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. Sometimes, he trains in the middle of the night. It’s better than lying in bed and waiting for his thoughts to swallow him whole. Who’s going to stop him from training at this hour, anyway? He’s all alone.
In such moments, in the complete silence of late night and early morning, the loneliness is enough to fill his stomach.
--
Sakura was supposed to meet him for lunch on Fridays, but she’s too busy training with Tsunade. This is the second week in a row that she can’t make it.
Kakashi considers getting lunch by himself, but decides against it. Sitting at a table for one would just make him feel sad. Not that he’d be able to get anything past the lump in his throat.
He continues training. The loneliness is enough to fill his stomach.
--
If Team Seven were a lunchbox, then Naruto, Sakura and Sasuke were three riceballs, made with love and with the tastiest fillings. The riceballs fit in the lunchbox like the kids fit in the team – as though it was their only rightful place in the world.
Sasuke was the first to be ripped from the lunchbox, leaving nothing but the empty spot where he used to be. Naruto followed, and so did Sakura. And the lunchbox was left empty. All that remained of the riceballs was some squashed rice grains sticking to the bottom.
If Team Seven were a lunchbox, then Kakashi is the sad rice grains left at the bottom. Unwanted and insignificant without his teammates.
--
If Kakashi wants to be wanted by his teammates, if he wants to be significant to his teammates, then he needs to become enough to fill the gap that Sasuke left behind. He needs to turn his existence of sad rice grains into that of a riceball.
If he fails, then this lunchbox will remain empty forever.
Kakashi makes training his number one priority.
--
He signs up for every available S-rank mission. He’s got all the time in the world, after all. Every moment that he can spend away from the village is another moment that he won’t have to see all the places where he used to be alongside his team. Every moment that he spends in the adrenaline rush that comes with a mission, is another moment that he won’t have to miss his students.
Normally, he’d bring a pack with food and a bedroll with him – but these days, he barely sleeps, and he’s been getting better at not eating while he’s training. It’s not that unusual for him to finish missions on scarce rations or without any food at all, but his new training helps him ignore his hunger more easily. It’s a good thing.
He goes on missions without bringing any supplies apart from what he needs for combat. The lack of extra weight makes him faster. It becomes a habit.
--
“Don’t you need to eat more?” Tenzou asks him over ramen one day, during a rare moment when they’re both in the village instead of on missions. “You’re training really hard these days, aren’t you? Don’t you need energy?”
There is pride in the headshake that Kakashi gives in response.
--
His muscles are sore, Kakashi notices the next morning when he gets out of bed. That’s good. It means he’s getting stronger.
Tenzou lectured him yesterday, lectured him on nutrients and energy as if Kakashi doesn’t know. But Tenzou’s wrong. The evidence is right here. Kakashi is getting stronger.
He leaves for the training grounds without breakfast. The empty lunchbox sitting on his kitchen counter hasn’t been used in weeks.
--
Another Friday goes by where Sakura can’t find the time to meet Kakashi. Tenzou offers to have lunch with Kakashi instead, but Kakashi declines. He’d rather spend the time training.
Tenzou seeks him out on the training grounds. He’s brought a lunchbox filled with rice and vegetables.
“Training hard is one thing,” he says, “but you’re being much too hard on yourself. When is the last time you properly ate? Or slept?”
If Kakashi answered truthfully, Tenzou would never leave him alone again. “This morning.”
Tenzou shakes his head. “I don’t think that’s true.”
--
Kakashi doesn’t anger easily, nor quickly. But Tenzou’s words, his blatant dismissal of the truth that Kakashi is getting stronger, his insistence that Kakashi is doing everything wrong – it awakens a fury inside him that he’s never felt before.
When he opens his mouth to reply, all of that rage comes pouring out.
--
“I don’t want to be the weakest member of my team when my students come back. I’m their leader. I’m supposed to be the strongest. If I’m not, then I shouldn’t be their leader at all. If I’m not the strongest, I could lose them. So I’m trying to work on my endurance. Trying to become stronger, and it’s working, and I don’t need you to tell me that I’m wrong about this. Why can’t you get off my back?”
--
“I understand your reasoning, Kakashi, but please take a good look at yourself. You’re pale, you have shadows under your eyes, and I’m pretty sure you’re losing weight. You look like you’re sick. I get that training is important to you right now, more important than anything else, but you have to eat and sleep. You’re going to destroy your body if you don’t, and I can’t let you do that to yourself. I won’t leave until you eat the food that I brought you.”
--
In an angry lapse of judgement, Kakashi scarfs down the rice and vegetables, just to make Tenzou leave. The large portion of food is an unfamiliar weight in his stomach. It makes him nauseous for the rest of the day.
Kakashi decides not to talk to Tenzou anymore.
--
Tenzou leaves on a mission the day after that. His mission description says he’ll be gone for a week or more. Kakashi has the brief and bitter thought that he wouldn’t mind if Tenzou would be gone for good.
There’s no missions for Kakashi to take, so he heads for the training grounds. His legs are sore, he notices as he walks, and his hands are shaking a little. It’s nothing he can’t handle. He’s finished missions with stab wounds and broken bones. Compared to that, it’ll be easy to push through this.
Fifty laps around the village should be enough to make him forget about this temporary tiredness.
--
But by the next morning, the soreness in his legs has escalated to a steady ache. On top of that, his shoulders start acting up, and he has a headache that doesn’t go away. And his hands are shaking, still shaking.
He takes a painkiller and hopes that the pain will disappear if he ignores it.
--
The pain does not disappear.
Kakashi goes out of his way to sleep a little longer, but he only wakes up with stiff limbs and piercing headaches. Getting more rest clearly doesn’t work, so he tries to sleep less. This doesn’t work either.
One morning, overtaken by frustration, he punches the wall of his apartment so hard that his knuckles start to bleed. He hates this – he hates this. He’s trying so hard. He should be getting stronger. He thought he was getting stronger.
Instead, it seems that he’s only getting weaker, and he doesn’t know why.
The bloody handprint stays on the wall, as a reminder: he’s so pathetic that he can’t even throw a punch correctly anymore.
--
Rock-climbing. Running laps around the village. Push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups from a treebranch. Water-walking. Throwing kunai. Using his Sharingan until his head hurts. All of these are followed by throbbing muscles and dizziness.
Once, when he gets up after doing sit-ups, his vision goes almost entirely black. As he sits there on his knees in the dirt, waiting for the ringing in his ears to subside, he finds himself overwhelmed by despair. Maybe all of his effort was for nothing. Maybe he’s not meant to be strong.
And if that’s true, then maybe he’s not meant to be Team Seven’s leader.
But he’s not willing to let himself lose his team. Not again.
Despite his tiredness, he keeps training.
--
He keeps training, until his body finally decides that it’s had enough.
His muscles are breaking down. His brain is exhausted. His stomach is empty.
Finally, Kakashi collapses.
--
He wakes up to white walls and a white ceiling, and to someone in ANBU uniform sitting next to his bed. Kakashi’s vision won’t focus on the figure’s face, but he knows who it is.
“What do you want, Tenzou?” he asks. His voice is hoarse.
Tenzou sighs. “I want you to realize what you’ve been doing to yourself,” he says. Harsh words in a quiet tone. “You ended up in the hospital. They’ve got you hooked up to an IV because your body wasn’t getting the nutrients it needed. Please listen to me, Kakashi. They say that if you’d kept going like this, you would’ve risked permanent damage to your muscles. You could’ve destroyed your stomach.”
And Kakashi’s system responds, once again, with rage.
--
It responds with rage, but not towards Tenzou. It responds with the kind of rage that has him gritting his teeth and cursing himself.
Simply not being strong enough to lead his team is one thing. But losing his duty as a jounin-sensei because he destroyed his own body…
That’s too much to imagine.
--
When Kakashi breaks down, it’s Tenzou who stays with him and tries to comfort him. For the first time, Kakashi realizes that he was never entirely alone after all.
--
It’s a slow process; reminding himself to eat and sleep, getting over the guilt of not spending every possible moment training. Tenzou helps remind him. It’s a conscious effort not to get defensive at first, because Kakashi still feels vulnerable and cornered like a wounded wild animal, but deep down he knows that Tenzou is right. And when food and rest start to help him regain his strength and energy, it only confirms that fact.
It’s a slow process, because Kakashi’s fears about losing his team remain. But a new realization, a better realization, now lives inside his mind: he can’t take care of his students if he doesn’t take care of himself first. It’s a truth he tries his best to accept every day.
--
And one morning, Kakashi wakes up and realizes that he has become stronger than he ever was before – and that has nothing to do with physical strength.
-END-