Runner

XVIII.

He was sitting sipping a cup of sake when the memories hit.

It was a little odd that they were coming so early. He shrugged after a moment. His clone had probably met its end at the hands of a lovely lady who it had gotten a bit fresh with. (The risk was always worth the loss of a clone.) A moment was needed to sort through the incoming barrage. At first, he'd been hoping that his kagebunshin had at least provided him with some juicy research material. And of course, that's how it had started with a detour to the bathhouses. There had been a couple of shapely goddesses his clone had taken interest in, until it had realized that someone was trying to cast a genjutsu on it.

That was where things in the memories got strange.

.

The kagebunshin quickly manipulated its small chakra to allow the invasion of foreign chakra to latch on, making it appear as if the genjutsu had successfully ensnared the real him instead of a clone.A waiting game, to see when the caster would make their move. It didn't take long. He sensed movement behind him and forcefully quelled movements that would give away his anticipation. The caster was there at his shoulder, their arm pushing away his haori and reaching into the pocket of his hakama.

In a flash, one of his hands clamped down on the caster's wrist while the other gripped their throat and swung them around so they were pressed against the wall of the bathhouse. To his surprise, the identity of his supposed assailant was already known to him. Hoping he hid his recognition well, he eased his grip on the girl and let an arrogant grin curl his lips.

"Pretty brave of you tadpole-chan, to think you could mess with someone like me."

She didn't dignify his comment with a response, instead staring back unimpressed, and reminding him too much of both Tsunade-hime and Orochi-teme with one look to be natural.

"Ha! Do you even know who I am?"

More staring and silence.

"Oh come on!" he pouted, "You must know who I am?"

Of course, he wasn't deluded for a second in believing that she didn't. It was all part of the act, letting them think him a fool and a pervert. That got them talking, thinking that they needed to explain everything to him because he were too damn clueless to understand their genius. Of course, that wasn't working out too well for him now. He checked off that tactic on his list and moved onto the next, retightening the fingers he had around her neck just a tad.

(If he bruised her too badly and this encounter got back to her teacher, there would be hell to pay.)

"Whether you know who I am or not, using a jutsu on and attempting to steal from a fellow shinobi is a punishable offence," he informed her, his voice hard, "Maybe I should turn you over to the Military Police. Unless you convince me not to?"

Still no reaction. Damn this one's cold, he thought to himself and he frowned internally. Indulging his curiosity, he pulled the hand holding whatever it was she had been trying to take from him up so he could see what she'd been interested in. It was interesting to see that it was nothing that had already been in his pocket before this had happened. Just an innocuous scrap of paper.

He eyed her. Had she been trying to leave that in his pocket?

Moving the hand on her neck down to her shoulder, he used the other to take the paper and look it over. No seals. No writing either. Maybe invisible ink. There was a drawing on it however, once he unfolded it. At first he wasn't sure what it was, but as he looked at it longer, it seemed to be a tree. Except, not like any tree he'd seen. It seemed as if there were two, growing out of each other. One tree inked in bold, thick strokes. The other looked like a shadow, an imprint. Like the first tree had been drawn with too much ink and when the paper was folded over, the blank side had leeched the excess to create a faded mirror image.

"Is this supposed to mean something?" he asked, figuring it was worth trying the direct approach of figuring it out.

She gave him a nod and nothing more.

"Give me a hint?"

"That is your hint," the girl said, speaking for the first time since this confrontation began, "Can you help me?"

"And why should I do anything with this? With you?" he asked, waving the paper carelessly in her face. "Can't you give me anything else?"

"I cannot."

He was ready for her to give him a string of arguments to justify her silence. He wasn't ready for her to open her mouth wide and stick her tongue out. The minute he saw the seal on her tongue, it felt like fireworks shooting off in his synapses, connecting dots to dots to dots. And where the realizations ended left him intrigued and aghast, and still several steps away from having all the information.

But that was okay. He wasn't a spymaster for no reason.

"I suppose I'll be helping you then, tadpole-chan."

Another first, he got a smile once her mouth clicked closed. He would've rather he never saw it, though. He hated those kinds of smiles.

(The grey haired man set down a picture frame containing a smiling man, a wan looking woman in a bed holding a baby, then took another long pull from the sake bottle. Hopelessness lingered at the upturned corners of his lips.

"I fail everyone.")

"I am glad to have your aid, Jiraiya-sama." Her eyes shifted to gaze just past his shoulder, seeming faraway. "Until we meet next time."

And then the girl exploded into smoke.

Jiraiya huffed, holding back a sneeze. Kagebunshin? Not completely unexpected, just a little annoying. With a quick fire jutsu to burn the paper, the kagebunshin dismissed itself as well.

.

Taking another sip of sake, Jiraiya stole a glance over the rim at his student, who as usual at their occasional "family dinners" was being disgustingly adorable with his girlfriend and irritating his own little student with the PDA. It was a comforting scene to come back to. It also answered why he was so willing to stick his neck out for a girl who was virtually a stranger. Things were always more complicated when you cared about people. Orochimaru was right about him. His heart bled, and bled, and he wondered if he would be left dry in the end.

"Ero-sensei!" a voice called, snapping him out of his thoughts. He saw Kushina-chan giving him a rather stern look, "Don't hog all the sake!"

"Maa, maa Kushina-chan, don't worry, there's plenty for you, too."

XIX.

Why exactly was he here again?

A sideways peek at Minato-sensei and Kushina-san reminded him. Those terrible smiles, promising something painful, humiliating, and worst of all: cuddly. Since the moment he'd arrived, he'd made a tactical retreat to the least crowded corner of Kushina-san's apartment next to her houseplant.

Exactly who thought it would be a good idea to invite him to his teammates' birthday party? Didn't he make it clear on a regular basis that he didn't care a bit about them as long as they didn't get in his or sensei's way?

"Useless," he muttered.

Something niggled at him, at the words, at the thoughts.

And he did have to admit, useless wasn't completely true.

Kakashi had grudgingly been impressed that for entering the chunin exams as first time rookies, they'd actually both managed to pass. Well, he'd been more surprised about the dobe making it. There were days he wondered how the boy had even made it out of the Academy with his gaps in knowledge, inability to keep his emotions in check, and his perpetual tardiness. He could care less if the boy was telling the truth about what held him up so much, he made them waste all of their time they could be spending on missions or training waiting on him. It had been a surprise that he had only been five minutes late the day of the test, and actually managed to defeat his opponents during the one-on-one's.

As for the girl, he actually had expected her to pass.

If there was one compliment he would pay his female teammate, she seemed to embody what a true shinobi was. No emotion, adequate skills, professional attitude towards missions, kept to herself, and she even came with the added ability of curbing some of the dobe's bad habits. If he were feeling even more generous, he would admit she was the perfect teammate and the perfect counterbalance to their more flawed team member.

Still, as not-useless and tolerable as his teammates were slowly becoming, that didn't mean he actually wanted to celebrate the fact they had been born. They both apparently had birthdays within days of each other, and the girl had been strong armed into having a joint birthday with the dobe. One thing Kakashi had to be thankful for was that it was only one birthday and not two. He was sure he would've been forced to attend both.

Sighing, he scanned the room. Sensei and his girlfriend were talking to the Uchiha clan head's wife. His male teammate seemed like he was telling some animated tale to the Nohara girl and his little brat cousin, both of whom he had invited. Another look and he realized that his other teammate was nowhere to be found.

She escaped! he thought with no small amount of envy.

Soon, he corrected himself, because he could still sense her somewhere in the apartment. As inconspicuously as he could, he slipped out of his corner and down the hall to investigate where she had gone. As it anticlimactically turned out, she was just in what seemed to be her room. He nodded to himself in approval at the simple set up of her room, forgiving the little things that gave away that this room belonged to her. The larger than standard shelves of books and scrolls, or the potted plants that lined her window, or startling number of fully stocked senbon cases covering half of her desk.

His eyes were eventually drawn to her, sitting on her bed, reading a scroll on pressure points.

He almost jumped when he saw her staring back at him, having caught him standing at her open door watching her. Glad his face mask would hide most of his shock, he quickly quirked an eyebrow at her and her book to turn the situation back around on her.

In response, she stood, went to her bookcase, and grabbed a book.

"If you would like to join me, Hatake-san," she said, and then held out the book.

Call it temporary insanity, or anything else that meant that he wasn't of right mind or in control of himself at the time, but he took one step forward and then another. Finally, he was standing in front of her and the book's cover was facing up at him. Maybe he might've left to return to his corner once he'd satisfied his curiosity about what she'd thought could interest him out of her library. But the title read Manipulating Elemental Chakra, and the table of contents said there were chapters on how to channel elemental chakra into weapons and use it to create a new technique.

Before he realized it, he was leaning against a piece of wall, already several pages in.

And he could've left then, too.

He could've left even when the dobe, his cousin, and the Nohara girl came to his teammate's room to see what they were up to.

Could have left when, after the girl silenced all of them with a finger to her lips, pulled some more things from her shelves - an advanced taijutsu scroll with illustrations, a book on ninja basics, and a book on poisons and how to counter them, and then handed them to each of them with an offer to join them.

He didn't though.

Even when the adults, finally noticing the lack of noise, came to investigate as well and he caught the bewildered but pleased looks on their faces as they took in the scene. All of them, sitting on the bed, strewn across the floor, leaning against the wall, reading.

"Glad you're enjoying your present Hakka-chan," he could hear Kushina-san say, "Whenever all of you are hungry, there's food in the kitchen for all of you."

She received five grunts of absent acknowledgement in response.

XX.

"S-sensei?" he finally said, hating how his voice wavered like it had.

"Yes Obito-kun?"

"I messed up today, right?" When sensei didn't answer immediately, he pushed on. "I know I did. I messed up. A-And Hakka-chan and Kakashi, they got-" He took a breath. "Sensei, why haven't you yelled at me yet?"

"Would it help?"

"I-I, don't know? Maybe?"

A hand landed on his head.

"I don't know if it would help you either, but I know it won't help me, so I won't be yelling. To be honest, I'd had doubts about this mission from the start. I took the mission even though I wasn't sure if the three of you would be ready, and then I left all of you alone. It was my fault."

"No sensei! It wasn't your fault, it-"

It was my fault! My fault! My fault!

As if to save him from his thoughts, the hand on his head gave his spikes a ruffle and pushed his goggles down over his eyes.

"I know you think it's your fault Obito-kun. Mistakes were made, but not all of them were yours. You just wanted to help your teammate."

"Yeah, and I got both of them hurt, instead."

His mind wandered back to their mission. To the moment that man had laid his hands on his teammate. And he'd known, known that the purpose of their mission was espionage, that Hakka-chan was doing her part to extract information from the target. But the scene had looked a little too real. She was a little too good at looking defenseless and scared, and when that man had slapped her hard enough for her head to snap jarringly to one side and blood to leak from the corner of her mouth, he just lost it.

Obito wasn't exactly a stranger to seeing people hurt. Once a member of the Uchiha clan joined the Academy, they were brought along for patrols with the Military Police for some experience protecting the village. Seeing the civilians preyed upon by ninja and other predators had always made him sick. He'd never be in the Military Police; it wasn't in him to work alongside his stuffy clansmen like that. However, he did believe in using his strength to protect the weak. On those patrols, he'd been held back by the adults from helping those people out.

This time, he'd thought, he wasn't going to let anyone hold him back.

Without much more than glancing at where Bakashi was supposed to be, he'd rushed in to defend Hakka-chan.

For a moment, it had been exhilarating standing over the jerk who thought he could hurt his teammate and grinning winningly at her.

Then everything descended into chaos as the man leapt right back up and called for his ninja guard to seize them. Kakashi had jumped in at some point to help them out, but there were just too many enemies and all of them had been chunin, too.

They had been lucky, so lucky that Minato-sensei had come back right then to save them. Obito had thought everything was okay until he looked his team over and realized what his reckless move had caused. Their target was dying and both Hakka-chan and Kakashi were hurt, Hakka-chan moving with a limp and Kakashi trying to play off a non-fatal but still significant stab wound as fine and failing.

And of course, Obito had come out of the entire thing with nothing worse than just a cut on his cheek.

The mission was still partially successful because Hakka-chan had managed to extract information they'd needed from the man. However, with the secrecy of the mission compromised and two team members injured, they had gotten a pay dock and a lecture from the Hokage himself.

Well, only he and Minato-sensei had been there to hear it when they turned in their mission report. Hakka-chan had been forced to take a woozy-from-blood-loss-but-ready-to-flee Kakashi to the hospital as soon as they got to the village so both of them could be treated.

(God, he could still see Kakashi's blood on the metal protector of sensei's gloves when he'd had to stitch him up once they'd gotten somewhere safe. His blood, his fault, his-)

"Obito-kun." And suddenly he was sitting and Minato was crouched in front of him. "Please listen to me Obito-kun."

Because he said please, the boy swallowed his apologies and tried to listen.

"This was not a mission that the three of you were ready to handle as a team and that's not your fault. I can't go back and change my decision to take the mission just like you can't take back attacking the target when you did. What we can do is make sure that if this ever happens again, we can try to make better decisions next time. I will not accept an espionage mission again until I think I've trained the three of you enough to handle one. What can you do next time so this doesn't happen again?"

"I'll train more. Get stronger so I can protect them?" he asked more than said, hoping this was the answer sensei was looking for.

Based on the look sensei gave him, it wasn't.

"That's good, but there's something else. Think about why you felt like you needed to act when you did."

He did. Thought about how great it had been in the moment to be the hero and shove it in Bakashi's face that he was the one saving Hakka-chan. How great it had been that he knew better than both of them.

It was galling to come to the realization that he didn't trust either of them enough to gauge the situation and handle themselves. He'd yelled at Bakashi a couple of times now for taking down the guy Obito was supposed to be fighting, though he knew he may not have been able to handle them himself. And Hakka-chan had KO'd him enough times in spars to prove that if she were in trouble, she would've just put a senbon in the guy's neck and called it a day. Both of them would've known better than he would if Hakka-chan had really been in danger.

"Trust," he murmured.

"Yes, Obito-kun." And then sensei's hand was on his head again. "Getting stronger is good, but you have to learn when it's less about strength and more about trust, too. You may not always get along, but when you have teammates, trust and teamwork are the most important things to remember."

Minato-sensei's words sounded wise. They probably were. He was a smart guy, and that's half the reason why he respected him so much. However wise they were, they were still a little hard to swallow. Sensei promised he would do better, though, so Obito could promise too.

He nodded like he understood, and made the effort to stop drowning in tears of self-pity behind his goggles.