Chapter Text
She blinks slowly at the sight above her, one she hasn’t seen for years, her rickety little apartment. The sun is out and there are birds chirping is her first thought. There’s no ash in the air is the next one. Uzumaki Mitsuki stares at the boards of her ceiling as she takes in a breath that doesn’t rattle, it doesn’t taste of copper, and she can’t feel her lungs burning in pain. Every time, every time she comes to after dying she revels in being able to breathe again.
She has lost count how many times she has started over. At one point she had found it old and draining, when she still counted, and she had become apathetic and maybe that’s when she stopped keeping track. There had been a few cycles where she was just so tired of trying to figure out why her living through so many horrors is so important. This last time she got pretty close, she thinks, to breaking out of this looping and it involved a war with a revived Uchiha Madara. Dying by having Kurama ripped out of her hadn’t been fun, but she supposed she did get a bit too close to that stupid statue. In her defense, her and Killer B had come up with a wild plan that they were seventy-five percent certain would work. It would have, if Sasuke hadn’t freaked out over her recklessness and thus distracted her, which allowed that freaky statue to steal Kurama. Mitsuki feels for her fellow jinchuuriki who fell to that abomination. That had been an agonizing death.
Well, she can’t do much about what could have been. She can only move forward and learn.
Now that she has reset, Mitsuki works through her routine of checking in with every part of her body. She works her way up from her toes to the top of her head. The burning on her palm is new. She lifts her hand up to study the mark of Asura, a small thin line making a circle, or was it the mark of the Sage of the Six Paths?
“Asura’s power,” Kurama murmurs, his voice is laced with exhaustion and he shifts about trying to get comfortable in a too tight space again. They had been burning through a lot of his chakra before she died. “Let me rest a bit before you mess around with it.”
The newest piece, of a sun on her palm, is added to her ever growing puzzle on why she might be stuck in this looping. Maybe this time she can talk with the Sage of Six Paths to learn more on why she has Asura’s power and what exactly it does. He had seemed like he wanted to talk more, based on his air of subtle superiority as if he had blessed them with his presence and how he kept hedging at things, she kind of gets why Indra grew to hate the old man if he just can’t get to the point, but her and Sasuke had been pretty desperate to get back to the fighting. Sakura had been wounded and she had been busy healing Kakashi. Mitsuki and Sasuke needed to be there for their team, their family, and she feels they couldn’t be blamed for being stressed about the two people they considered theirs.
Mitsuki takes a moment to enjoy the quiet before she finally gets up. It doesn’t take long for her as she doesn’t own a lot, both in her closet and in her fridge. Absently, she thinks about using a henge to buy at least some onigiri from the corner market. Then she slips out of her lonely little apartment, what little money that is in her possession is tucked in the inner pocket of her jacket and the frog wallet sits abandoned on her kitchen table—she can’t remember anymore if Kakashi or Jiraiya gave it to her, and if it had been Kakashi he won’t mind as he’d just get her a dog-shaped wallet then—as she calculates her next steps.
No one is really awake yet in the village that’s not Anbu or any of the jounin and chunin patrols. It’s nice when it is this quiet. There are no masks she has to wear when it is just her.
Her feet carry her towards the Memorial Stone. There’s a lot to think over after this latest loop. Maybe talking to her parents, emulating Kakashi and his habit of communing with the dead, will give her insight on what to do this time around.
***
The first time she looped she had thought it was a fever dream. She had fallen for Mizuki’s trap, mentally older and maturer she can she how she easily walked right into the middle of it, and he had killed her, before she could even master a single jutsu in that Forbidden Scroll. Her last moments had been spent desperately trying to breathe, all while she heard the man’s poisoned words tell her that she is the Kyuubi and that’s why she is hated by the entire village. She had woken up in her apartment gasping for air, the phantom pains of strong hands around her throat pulsing, as if the man was still looming over her, and Mitsuki had convinced herself it had all been a nightmare. But then the day of the graduation exam played out exactly the same and the vile man approached her once more about the ‘secret’ exam.
She hadn’t known what to do.
No one really listened to her. Iruka-sensei tried, but he tried in a way that always felt like he was forcing himself to be nice to her. But beggars cannot be choosers when they have limited cards in their hands, and Iruka was the only one she could go to with decent enough odds that he would hear her out. That might have been the first time someone had listened to her and heard her words. Maybe that was the start of her realizing her words had power.
She learned the next day Mizuki had been apprehended, and the Hokage thought she deserved being promoted to genin for seeing through the trap.
If only Mitsuki had known she would always become a genin. She had to be the village weapon after all. But why did she have to be humiliated in the exams? She will never know nor understand. The Sandaime was a man who twisted his thoughts around to justify his negligence when it came to her, his own family, and how he handled protecting Konoha.
After she had received her hitai-ate, she had written off the weird repeat of the day as a very convincing nightmare, and she learned under Kakashi and she tried to make heads and tails of her two teammates. There was slow, steady progress. Sakura began to help her with learning the basics after Mitsuki asked her for help, really buying into Kakashi’s words about teamwork and leaving no one behind. Sasuke started to come around to some awkward rivalry. But then, in a dome of ice, Mitsuki had died to poison senbon after shoving Sasuke out of the way because the village would care more if he died.
She woke back up in her bed on the day of the graduation exam.
During the third loop she tried to think about what was going on. But her education was limited. The silent guard she wasn’t supposed to know about had done their best to teach her reading and writing, but their help could only do so much when even they were monitored to ensure they never got too close to her. The school sensei ignored her. The library didn’t let her in to check books out. Monsters didn’t need books they had told her once when she had been eight, and she hadn’t tried to go back after hearing those poisoned words. There were probably seven year olds who could read and write better than her in her early looping. In the fourteenth loop, Kakashi and Sakura caught on to the fact that she could barely read and write kanji. Sakura had made it her mission to tutor Mitsuki and get her up to the level she should have been at with her peers. Kakashi’s anger had been palpable that day. It had smelled like when a storm would begin to roll in with thunder and lightning rumbling in the distance. Shimura Danzo had died in his sleep that night, and it wasn’t until six loops later Mitsuki realized the Elder hadn’t died peacefully in his sleep, like everyone thought he had.
At least she learned on her third loop that she isn’t the Kyuubi. She had decided to just try and master that one clone jutsu she had seen in the Forbidden Scroll before Mizuki had killed her in the first loop. On one hand, she could finally make clones and these clones were far better as they could actually do things. But on the other hand, she finally saw further into the rot and anger that surrounded her. She had the Kyuubi sealed in her, the Sandaime later clarified after she had recounted everything to him because she still trusted and loved him, and people thought she was the Kyuubi in human form. Which always made her wonder, in the next ten loops, why no one bothered to explain to anyone in the village that she wasn’t the Kyuubi. Surely the shinobi would have understood in layman’s terms she was the sealing scroll that held the kunai? If she, the dead last, could figure it out, then the others could understand too, right?
Now, though, wiser and far more jaded, she knows it is because the Sandaime has lost his Will of Fire and he doesn’t even know it. He is too complacent keeping to the status quo, to keeping things as they are with what he believes to be peace, and his complacency has them on a path leading to a war that threatens the entire world.
***
Mitsuki comes to a stop in front of the Memorial Stone. She traces her dad’s name and then her mom’s. She silently talks to them about what she has been through, and how she is trying to break free of this never ending cycle. Mitsuki assures them she still nurtures hope for a future where she doesn’t keep resetting, and that she hasn’t been consumed by the abyss of anger, despair, and more due to the resetting for a few loops now.
She doesn’t talk to Nohara or Obito. Kakashi’s former kunoichi teammate is someone Mitsuki can’t really forgive, and it’s not a matter of she doesn’t know how to, it is more of a matter that she refuses to after she learned the dark, tragic history of her genin sensei.
In one cycle she broke into the records room to read up everything she could on Kakashi, which later she thought about how that was a major violation of his privacy. But she had wondered about the names she had had heard the man be called behind his back when she was a kid. And no one had raised her to understand boundaries anyways—Shikamaru had been the one to do it somewhere in the loops where she started learning she was a small, but important, player in a larger plot to destroy the world due to her heritage and for being Kurama’s jinchuuriki.
As the man is one of the few loyal to her, unflinchingly loyal really seeing he has abandoned the villager for her in more than one loop, she is a little feral in her protection of him. So Mitsuki refuses to forgive certain people out of sheer principal for Kakashi who thinks he deserves the terrible things that have happened to him. It might also be because the kindness in Mitsuki has been tempered over the years, and her forgiveness is not so freely given anymore.
Obito, while a piece of work, had gone through a series of traumatic events that broke him and made him malleable for Madara to corrupt. She can forgive him that because he, a child, got played by people with far more experience in manipulating their victims, and she gets that because she too has been manipulated and deceived as a child. But in some loops, before they can bring the Uchiha to their side, he kills Kakashi. So she can’t bring herself to talk to him because all she can see is Kakashi taking the killing blow meant for her or for one of her teammates.
In the distance, the bell rings to tell the Academy students that school will be starting soon. Mitsuki sighs. One day she’ll stop reliving this life over and over again. She must be missing something, but at this point she feels like she has all of the pieces. Mitsuki knows who she is, who her parents were, the legacy she inherited, and now she knows a bit more about the forgotten history of Asura and Indra.
Maybe the last piece is that she needs to find out why she is the only one stuck in a time loop.
***
The graduation exam is something Mitsuki makes a game out of now. She has to find her entertainment somewhere in this madness as she lives life on repeat. At one point, when she was finally learning what had been robbed from her by the awful Academy sensei, she had actually tried her best without making it seem like she had defied the odds. Book smart she may not be, Mitsuki at least has the street smarts to know that suddenly becoming a genius overnight is the fastest way to get her hauled into TI or, as she now knows, into Danzo’s Root caves.
Somewhere in loops thirty through forty she learned Shikamaru puts in the bare minimum, because he isn’t challenged in a traditional school setting, so why bother is his thought process. It gave her the inspiration to do what she does now with the test, and she writes the answers she gets ‘wrong’ in the Uzushio code used during the first two shinobi wars that even Konoha’s cyphers couldn’t decipher.
She learned all of this in one of her loops where she studied everything she could in Uzushio. Mitsuki had just decided to abandon Konoha pretty early on in a reset after a turbulent time trying to befriend her fellow genin again, without revealing she knows a lot about them. No one ever takes it well that she already knows her friends’ likes, dislikes, and their little quirks. It’s weird and off-putting because she shouldn’t know these things yet. She knows from one loop it made her look desperate for anyone to like her, when she had felt so lonely and she had just wanted her friends back, and she might have cracked a bit from that and Mitsuki might have gone rogue for a few loops to just grieve and rage at the unending loss she felt.
Mitsuki glances at her friends. Ino and Sakura bicker and toss insults at each other. Shikamaru naps next to Chouji who nervously eats his fifth power bar. Hinata sits alone, posture ever perfect but her gaze, flickering here and there, belies her nerves. Kiba bickers with civilian students while Akamaru keeps watch atop his head. Sasuke broods in his corner, ignoring the girls who whisper and giggle near him. And Shino observes everyone from his spot, wanting to interact and yet not sure how to so he waits and waits.
Iruka-sensei enters and gets everyone to go to their seats. Everyone shuffles about, tossing final wishes of good luck, and then the expectant silence fills the room. No one sits next to her and she isn’t sure if she’s okay with that or not.
It is a bit lonely living through these loops. She has built up bonds with the Konoha Twelve over the years in each loop, she has made inside jokes with them, and she has helped them get stronger to face the oncoming challenges. But each time she resets she is left with a clean slate and an aching emptiness.
Sometimes Mitsuki thinks it’s best if she doesn’t make any bonds with these people. The time loop doesn’t seem to like that though. She tends to die faster when she remains distant from the Konoha Twelve. So she slowly rebuilds what she has lost each reset, and she tries not to cry over how it always hurts in the beginning. The distrust, the disinterest, the nervousness, and the contempt that she faces from the other rookie genin is never easy. Every single time she sees it in all of their eyes and Mitsuki knows it pays off in the end, but it hurts.
She’s still human.
She still bleeds.
She still feels.
Iruka-sensei hands her the exam, gracing her with a small encouraging smile that she returns, and then she stares out the window for a moment. The familiar chakra of her comrades hums around her. She twirls her pencil around her fingers, much like how her dad twirled his special kunai around, while she thinks of a future where that chakra stays whole and doesn’t flicker out due to war. Hope tastes better on the tongue than the staleness of apathy.
***
During the cycles where she couldn’t even fake her fake smiles, she learned more about who her parents had been. That sent her into a depression the following loop, but she had learned there are people who have wanted to be there for her since she had been a child, and they still want to be there for her in the present. But the Sandaime had backed them all into a corner by making her identity and heritage known worthy of treason, and with Danzo and his Root lurking in the shadows there wasn’t much the clan heads could do for fear of retribution. Mitsuki had tasted hatred on her tongue for someone she had loved, and it was the moment she began to see the Sandaime and all of his flaws.
“You’re my dad?” Mitsuki asked the Yondaime breathlessly, after punching him in the gut for sealing Kurama in her. She had tried to tear it off early into a cycle when she had struggled to bond with anyone. Her anger and frustration towards Konoha and the Sandaime had been palpable that time as she kept getting hauled into therapy sessions with Inoichi.
Her dad frowned, staring at her with anger burning in his eyes that turned his summer blue eyes into a stormy night sky. “Yes, how has no one told you? It’s kind of avoidable if you have my coloring and my last name.”
“No, I’m Uzumaki Mitsuki,” she corrected him.
His hands on her shoulders flexed before gripping her tighter. “They gave you Kushina’s clan name?” He murmured, a bit distracted, before he focused on her again. “Kushina was your mother, one of the last Uzumaki left in the world and the second jinchuuriki of Konoha. How do you not know us? Why did no one tell you? Hiruzen promised he would take care of you. He promised us as we died to save you and the village.”
She got her answer later that night. Shikaku had found her curled up in front of the Memorial Stone during a heavy storm. The memory of Shikaku’s haunted gaze as he took in her swollen eyes, from crying after she had realized the Sandaime most likely had never cared for her, still lingers on days when it rains in Konoha. He had taken her back to his home, and then he had knelt in front of her with his forehead pressed to the floor as he apologized for failing her and her parents. He had been the one to tell her more about the politics and manipulations that had gone on from the moment she lost her parents. He had been the one to assure her, her parents had loved her, and if they hadn’t been faced with such an impossible choice that they would have done everything in their power to stay alive for her. It had been her lowest moment at the time, but his words had saved her. Him bringing Kakashi later, who held her while he cried into her hair as he apologized over and over, also helped her hold on and keep moving forward. In that loop, all she had learned helped her realize while the Will of Fire in most of Konoha had been lost a long time ago, there were still embers flickering waiting for a chance to grow.
***
When Iruka-sensei collects their tests, she avoids his concerned gaze and keeps her eyes on her desk. He knows everyone expects her to fail in the next portion and for her to be denied for the final time to become a shinobi.
Bitterness fills her mouth as she thinks of how Hashirama damned her to this miserable fate. She once blamed her dad. But then she imagined being in his spot having to make the call on what to do to save his daughter and his village, and she realized he had been faced with an impossible decision. Whereas Hashirama had been the one to create the era of jinchuuriki with Uzumaki Mito, and he had been the one to hunt down the other bijuu, who had done nothing wrong, to auction them off as if they aren’t sentient beings. Maybe Asura or the Sage of Six Paths cursed his line to die out as retribution.
Most of all, though, she blames the Sandaime for being a spineless coward. A man who lets his old friends get away with their plotting, for doing the bare minimum in damage control to how the village viewed her and the Uchiha, and she can easily see why Asuma avoids his own father.
Mitsuki files out and into the hall to wait for her turn of the practical portion of the test. She watches her classmates go in and out when their names are called. Shino walks out and his kikaichu hum and buzz with pleasure. Chouji steps out and gives Shikamaru a shy smile, and the Nara gives his best friend a smirk. Sakura skips out looking smug, flashing a peace sign in Ino’s face. Hinata leaves with a set to her shoulders that Mitsuki can’t really read. Kiba struts out crowing about how he’s the best. Shikamaru lopes off with his hands tucked into his pockets, and despite his tired facade he looks pleased. Sasuke leaves looking like he is one step closer to his revenge. And then her name is called.
Five minutes later she leaves the academy building with her hitai-ate wrapped around her neck. Sometimes she will wear it like her dad and she will style her hair to just be like his. It’s worth seeing people panic when they see the ghost of the Yondaime stare back at them all with disappointment. Even the Sandaime can’t do anything about her style change, because Mitsuki will always lay it on thick about how she just looks up to the Yondaime and how he is her hero.
***
Her dad is her hero, but so is her mom after she learned more about Uzumaki Kushina. She keeps the latter close to the chest every loop because her mom’s memory has been erased from the village, her files hidden and locked up tight. It wouldn’t do for the village weapon to know she was wanted and that her parents are actual heroes. A pity that with each loop Mitsuki went through the more she lost her love for this village, and then it vanished when she finally confronted what she had avoided for a long time. She had been kept isolated and alone, with the lie her legacy had been hidden to protect her from her parents’ enemies, and then she had been left dependent on the Sandaime to keep her loyal to the only home she had ever known.
Kurama had made her confront her anger and hurt the first time she truly abandoned the village, and then he asked her the hard hitting question of why she kept trying to save Konoha. She had gone for five loops without an answer before realizing she did it because her precious people still held onto their Will of Fire, that they had goals and dreams to protect the future generations and to make the village a better place. And the small, unbroken part of her that remained from the Mitsuki right before the looping began wanted to believe Konoha could be better.
***
“Mitsuki-chan! I see you have a hitai-ate,” Teuchi-san crows out in delight when she ducks into his shop. “First bowl on the house for completing the first step in becoming a fearsome kunoichi.”
“Thanks,” she murmurs with a tired smile as she takes a seat at the counter.
Teuchi-san and Ayame-nee will always be her favorites in every loop, even when she had been at her lowest. They have remained constants who have always accepted her. If this looping hadn’t started, she imagines they would have been one of the few reasons to keep her in Konoha. But even people who genuinely care for her, few as they are in her life, are not enough to keep someone grounded and tied to a home, and sometimes Mitsuki wanted to taste what it was like to live outside of her cage.
She has gone nukenin for the hell of it in quite a few loops now. She had wanted to see what the fuss was all about after Sasuke had done it. That had been fun, in a twisted way, when she had run ins with Konoha shinobi who stared at her with fear and confusion. No one could figure out why cheerful Uzumaki Mitsuki would betray her home after she spent her childhood desperately trying to have someone acknowledge her. It must have felt like up had become down for them, especially after years of hearing her shouting out at the top her lungs that’d she be the Hokage one day and declaring as much she could that she loved the village as if to assure everyone she was harmless.
Kakashi, Sasuke, and Shikamaru were the only ones who seemed to understand why she chose to abandon Konoha. Her genin sensei usually joined her as a nukenin. Shikamaru never joined her, but he did stare at her with a dark understanding in his eyes when they crossed paths. She always wondered what he had found after she left and what he had then done to deal with the problems of their village. Mitsuki has yet to find out because all she would learn was she’d receive a message at some point letting her know it was okay to come back. If she did make her way back to the village she’d get a crumb of insight. All she knew was that once the Nara got properly motivated the rot in Konoha usually got burned out within months. And as for Sasuke, well, when he learned the truth of what happened to his clan and his brother he always joined her and Kakashi as nukenins.
Mitsuki wonders if Sakura chose to stay behind, to help make Konoha better, so she could welcome them all back home. She feels bad, knowing what she now knows about her teammate, her insecurities and how she had once begged Sasuke to take her with him, on how in those loops they really did leave Sakura behind with no hopes of really catching up to them.
“Eat up, young kunoichi need all the energy they can get to become strong,” Teuchi-san tells her while he sets a bowl down in front of her.
Mitsuki grins at him, thanking him for the food, and then she begins to eat slowly. She always savors her first proper meal when she resets. After the loop where the Fourth Shinobi War kicked off for the first time, she had inhaled the ramen on her reset and then made herself sick from eating way too much too quickly. Ever since then she made the decision to savor her first true meal and to never take food for granted again. She also isn’t used to having rich foods again as food had become scarce about four months into the war. The careful savoring of the broth warms her up, like this one bowl is welcoming her home, and it almost brings her to tears.
A soft thump to her right signals a newcomer, it’s usually Iruka-sensei who is ready to reward her for pulling off a miracle. But Mitsuki blinks to see Kakashi in the seat next to her. His usual book is out and he greets Teuchi-san in his lazy voice, and the hairs on her arms stand up.
A lazy sounding Kakashi is a dangerous Kakashi. It’s how he lulls people into a false sense of security. She would know as she’s been one of his victims to that laidback nature.
“Congratulations on the headband,” he tells her, peering at her over the pages of his book.
“Thank you, shinobi-san,” Mitsuki whispers. She ducks her head to focus on her ramen. She will not let her sensei ruin her first good meal after living off of rations. “Any advice for me?”
“Maa, just do your best, and believe in your Will of Fire,” Kakashi replies blithely as he eats, the book covers his face and she doesn’t look. She has never tried to look once she learned why he started wearing his mask. If he ever shows her, she wants it to be because he wants to let her see.
Mitsuki makes a show of nodding slowly, pretending to look thoughtful. “I think I can do that.”
Sometimes she thinks it’s amazing she still has a will to keep moving forward. Especially when she is no longer naive and optimistic that she can take on the world. Over time she lost her loud, boisterous personality, and one day she had stopped and realized the quiet she exudes now has become part of her nature.
She orders a second bowl. Her chopsticks swirl through the broth and noodles making random fuuinjutsu patterns. Nausea bubbles in her. She swallows. This happens sometimes, when she has to wait for her mind to catch up that her body in the here and now can handle rich and hearty foods. But the mind is a delicate and powerful thing she has learned from being friends with Ino. She also knows it is the nerves of having Kakashi near her, and his mannerisms have her on edge, that makes it hard to keep eating.
It’s a bit mechanical, but Mitsuki is able to finish her second bowl and she pays for it as she stands up to leave. Teuchi-san stares at her in concern knowing she hasn’t eaten close to her usual fill.
“I think the nerves from actually passing are catching up,” Mitsuki tells him with a smile that is too stiff and fragile. “I’ll be back again to eat my usual amount.”
“Of course, take care and we’ll see you soon,” he responds, leaning on the counter with a fond smile as he watches her duck off into the night.
The walk back home is exhausting. She gets lost at one point. Mitsuki struggles to remember the way back because in this last loop she hasn’t been back to this apartment in about six years. She hates relearning things to fit back in, to not get any suspicion cast her way. The last time she was lazy about hiding her changes she had ended up in Danzo’s Root dungeons. She had died in Kakashi’s arms. She didn’t sleep for weeks after that loop. His devastated look and his begging for her to hold on had stuck with her for a long time.
The dilapidated apartment building greets her after she finally gets her bearings. Mitsuki forces herself to walk up the stairs. She ignores the fact she is the only one who lives in this building. She ignores the dust, the quiet, and the graffiti. The only reason she has running water and electricity is that the landlord left everything connected. What better way to make an easy paycheck from the stipend he receives by giving the village weapon a subpar apartment? The lack of tenants, though, makes her wonder if Sarutobi has realized he hands her money that doesn’t go to rent. It’s something she has never been able to ask him, if he knows how far the neglect of her care runs. What tenuous respect she has left for him would snap like rice paper if she found out.
Her key slides into the little lock, that can’t keep much out and she’ll have to add security seals soon, at this point it’s to protect idiots from her, then she opens the door and she flicks on the light. She takes in what is her home and she tries to not think about how her parents hate that she is alone in this awful apartment. Their chakra impressions, in one loop, had had the luxury and time to talk to her about her looping and her life. They had been enraged to hear how she had been treated. Her parents had taken turns cursing out the Sandaime and Jiraiya before holding her in their arms assuring her that they had not wanted this for her.
Mitsuki starts up the kettle and wanders around while she waits for the water to boil. Her mind begins to set up a routine to follow, so she doesn’t stick out and that it isn’t too odd she isn’t loud anymore. Then she’ll worry about building up a plan for how she can live longer, be smarter, and finally, maybe, break free of the looping.
***
Kakashi watches his sensei’s child lean against her window looking far too exhausted for a twelve year old, and he wonders. He had seen her stood before the Memorial Stone this morning before the rest of the village had woken up. He himself had been up early to visit it because he knew today was the last chance Mitsuki had to become a shinobi. So he hid from her, and he watched her with his sharingan, tracking her movements as she traced names on it. When she had headed off to the Academy he had flickered over. Based on her height he recalled where her fingers had touched with Obito’s eye.
His breath had caught in his throat as his fingers ghosted along his sensei and Kushina-nee’s names. He could understand touching her dad’s name, because he knew she admired him as her hero, which was both sweet and heartbreaking all at once. But Kushina’s name had been a mystery to him, because her clan name had not been included. Kakashi never really forgave the Sandaime for doing that to Kushina-nee, to remove her name and the ties it held to her fallen village in an effort to hide who Mitsuki’s parents had been.
For the rest of the day, he had watched her from a safe distance. Mitsuki had barely written on her test, and he wondered what she had even put down for answers, maybe he’d be able to steal her exam later because she hadn’t look stressed while writing, just over it really.
When she came in for her practical he had watched with his heart in his throat. She was good at the first two, but he knew she had far too much chakra for the clone jutsu. Kakashi knew Iruka tested fairly and he would be forced to fail her even if he didn’t want to, and the other two sensei wouldn’t give her the pass because they saw her as the Kyuubi. It made him wonder why the Sandaime didn’t do anything about her graduation exam when he let Gai’s protege pass when the kid couldn’t even use jutsu. How was it fair to her to subject her to such humiliation, with no one allowed to be near her and to explain to her, her clone jutsu fails because she has too much chakra?
But to his delight and relief she performed her three jutsu with ease, and then she had accepted her hitai-ate with a polite smile.
The smile on her face felt wrong to him.
It reminded him distantly of sensei’s political smile when he had to listen to the simpering and bickering of the council.
She didn’t look excited about it he realized a second later, and maybe that’s why her polite smile had set an alarm bell off in his head. Kakashi had been watching her from afar for twelve years. Mitsuki had been looking forward to becoming a shinobi as she tended to shout to the world she will be the Hokage one day.
That look spoke otherwise.
So he continued to follow her and he watched as she ignored everyone staring at her and talking about her. He noted the dark looks at seeing her with her hitai-ate, all civilian parents who didn’t know they scorned their beloved Yondaime Hokage’s own child. He at least spotted the pleased looks on the clan heads’ faces. Shikaku looked especially happy seeing the hitai-ate around her neck. He had noticed Kakashi, giving him a small nod, before he followed his son and wife out of the Academy grounds.
When she arrived at Ichiraku he had waited a few minutes before following her in. The first thing he noticed was that she tensed slightly when he sat next to her. That was interesting. She smelled a bit nervous too, and Kakashi decided to be friendly to try and ease her nerves. After all, he was going to be her sensei for the foreseeable future.
The brief look she had given him showed him her fire still burned inside her. It looked tempered, though. For once, he didn’t think she’d burn herself out too fiercely and too quickly. But he worried, seeing that look in her eyes. That was not a look twelve year olds had. Shinobi who had survived years of their work carried that look with them, not genin. If he trusted the Sandaime he’d take his concerns to the man. He didn’t though. He never liked the man’s reasons for not allowing anyone, who had been close to her parents, to get to know her. He had also not liked the man’s damage control over the leaking of her status as the jinchuuriki. There was also the severe neglect too.
Kakashi might be jaded towards the man who casually dealt with Danzo’s machinations to have him assassinated. There’s also the dark suspicion that Itachi, pacifist little Itachi, had not really snapped like the Sandaime claimed. Danzo had looked far too pleased at the demise of one of their founding clans.
Sarutobi’s non-existent spine aside, the man’s bans to prevent any interaction with his sensei’s daughter before she became a genin didn’t stop Kakashi from promising Minato-sensei and Kushina-nee to do his best to protect Mitsuki from the shadows. After all, most of the newer Anbu saw her as the Kyuubi and didn’t notice that with her coloring is a dead ringer for their late Yondaime. It sometimes amazed him how so many people could be willfully ignorant of the obvious staring them in the face.
At least the friends of Minato-sensei and Kushina-nee haven’t forgotten the connection Mitsuki has to them. At least he, Genma, and Raidou have been able to haggle out a schedule between the three of them to make sure one of them was watching her at all times.
Soon, though, soon he’ll be able to protect her in the open. Hopefully the last Uchiha in Konoha won’t be an absolute nightmare to teach, but from the way the village has made him out to be a prince he is a little worried. He already knows the other girl assigned to his team is a fangirl. His work will be cut out for him. He tries to reassure himself that he will at least have Mitsuki.
Speaking of the girl, Kakashi watches her carve into her windowsill ledge with a kunai. He feels his fingers twitch to lift up his hitai-ate to let his sharingan track and memorize what she is doing. He hesitates before caving. To his surprise he thinks she’s actually carving something like a seal, not something nonsensical. It’s a pity he never really took to sealing because he only knows the basics, and whatever she is doing looks complicated. He sits there wondering what has caused this sudden change in her, because something big must have happened to cause the cheerful girl, masking her hurt with painfully wide smiles, to look so tired. Kakashi renews his promise to her and her parents to try and do better by her while keeping watch until she turns in for the night.
Then he heads off to the Academy. Kakashi has had time to start compiling questions in his head, and he’s actually looking forward to having to pass this little disaster team. Sensei’s daughter has caught his attention, he’ll figure out if it’s good or bad later. But it has been a while for anyone to catch his interest like this and he feels a bit giddy. There are test answers he’d like to see and he’s wondering if they’ve all missed the fact that Mitsuki has been wearing a very good mask this entire time.
To his frustration he gets delayed because a chunin, that creepy Academy sensei he realizes darkly, tried to steal the Forbidden Scroll by tricking a civilian pre-genin to steal it for him. He might have cut the man’s legs off so he couldn’t run away. He thoughtfully cauterized the wounds so the idiot didn’t bleed out, because he knows that TI would be upset with him. Inoichi and Morino always bitch at him if he kills a person of interest before they can interrogate them. Kakashi might have left him for Anbu to deal with, not waiting for their arrival, and wow, they’re moving slow and he should let the Anbu Commander know to run her people into the ground for sloppy behavior.
The alarm of the Hokage Tower wails into the night as he strolls away. He’s hunting right now. Kakashi will not let easy prey deter him from tracking down what he wants to know.