Chapter Text
“How would you like a job?” Kakashi says one fine afternoon in lieu of a greeting.
It's not a bad opener for all that it makes Kisame smile, sharp-toothed, and measure the relative benefits of shoving him from the windowsill with a water spike. It'd be easy. These days, Kisame doesn't always have the glut of chakra required to casually create his own material for jutsu, but Kakashi did come while he was washing the dishes, water still running in the sink.
Though he supposes that's also a peace offering. Kakashi could have waited a few minutes until Kisame left the sink again.
“Good afternoon to you, too,” says Kisame pleasantly, switching off the faucet.
“It's legal,” says Kakashi.
“I believe you.”
Kakashi names a number – it's not a lot, but it's still a surprisingly respectable amount by Kisame's low standards – and adds, “Biweekly, for the foreseeable future.”
Technically – officially – Kisame is an active jounin of Konohagakure's shinobi forces. He has access to training grounds and other shinobi services, permission to buy from ninja supply stores and invoice the village for certain mission preparations expenses, and clearance for claiming missions up to A-rank, with all of the associated pay.
Those come with caveats, however, thanks to the probation he's been on since he arrived almost seven years ago. He cannot leave the village, take work from sources besides the shinobi missions desk, join specialized divisions like ANBU or T&I, go on jobs without a chaperone of at least tokubetsu rank, or apply for loans. He also, on a somewhat unrelated note, loses his military status and provisionary citizenship if he gets caught committing a crime of any scale or “acts in manners unbefitting of a Konoha shinobi either on or off duty”.
Sometimes he takes in-village D-ranks with Gai's genin team and claims a one-fifth cut. He's saved up enough over his years working for Konoha that he could, if he wanted to badly enough, buy a pancake or two from breakfast kiosks on special occasions.
It's almost as if Konoha's leadership wants him to violate terms and become a missing-nin. Really, now.
Kakashi's offer is too good to be true, but Kisame hasn't agreed to it yet. He can hear it out. “Come in,” he says, stepping back, and Kakashi visibly weighs the decision before shuffling out of his sandals and hopping down into the kitchen.
The apartment isn't technically Kisame's to invite guests into, but what Sasuke doesn't know won't hurt anyone.
“Just you in here?”
“It's team assignment day at the Academy.”
“Ah, he passed graduation?” says Kakashi, as if it could have gone otherwise. “That's good.” He looks around the room, taking in such riveting features as the half-filled dishwasher and the off-white ceiling that's identical to the last dozen times he saw it. “How old is he?”
The graduation age hasn't featured an exception since the Uchiha district got emptied out, as Kakashi has no reason not to know. “You had better ask him.”
Kakashi nods absently. “You get along, don't you? He listens to you?”
“Kakashi,” says Kisame patiently.
“I spoke with Hokage-sama this morning,” Kakashi continues, wandering over to lean against a dining chair. “Hey, you don't keep spoiled milk, right?”
Kisame stares at him.
Kakashi's eye closes in a smile. “Milk always goes bad for me before I can finish it, so I don't buy it in the first place.”
“Is this an attempt at small talk?” Kakashi's not actually asking for milk. Kisame has heard that he mooches off of subordinates and acquaintances, but he's never tried as much with Kisame. He does have standards, much as he likes to pretend otherwise.
“You,” says Kakashi, “are responsible around smaller things.”
He's probably going somewhere with this.
“As opposed to me,” he continues.
A far and lonely somewhere. “Is this about your dogs?” Kisame tries, knowing it's almost certainly not.
“My dogs aren't – small....” Kakashi glances down at where approximately his dogs might stand. He stares at the floorboards for a second, then waves it off and looks back up to Kisame. “Right, but they can take care of themselves. They're not small and self-destructive.” From Kisame's vantage, those traits encompass most ninja, most likely including the one in front of him. “Look, he drank half a carton of milk a week past its expiration date. It smelled solid and it was green. He drank half a carton. Has Sasuke ever done that under this roof? You'd stop him if he tried, wouldn't you?”
A kid. Someone saddled Kakashi with a kid, and then he came here with a job for Kisame....
It's team assignment day.
What, one of the prospective genin ended up sick with food poisoning before Kakashi could even test them? “Is there a reason you can't fail this one?” Kisame asks.
He doesn't understand Konoha's graduation system. The Academy exam is impossible to fail, and Kakashi's exam is impossible to pass, and for some reason neither has been discontinued despite both of them wasting manpower on foregone conclusions.
“Yes,” Kakashi sighs, and proceeds to not elaborate. “So. I guess. How d'you feel about training a genin team?”
---
Later, when Kakashi tells them and they finally realize he doesn't intend it as a joke, Asuma will choke on his cigarette, and Kurenai will say dubiously, “Is that allowed?”
“Yeah.” He really did get permission.
“But Hoshigaki?” Kurenai will murmur. “I mean, he's not... exactly qualified.”
If that's going to be her argument, then Kakashi won't lower himself to pointing out the elephant in the room either. “You think I'm qualified to teach genin?”
Granted, he and Kurenai haven't been acquainted with each other for long, Asuma their only real point of connection, but Kakashi will turn a page in his erotica and do his best to project that he hasn't shaved in three days, he's gotten away with avoiding laundry for a week and a half because his entire wardrobe consists of four copies of the same standard uniform, the last meal he ate was old rice and a raw egg five hours ago, and he followed the smell of blood to walk in on his dad's gutted corpse when he was six.
Asuma will say, having largely recovered from the coughing fit, “You're the only person who thinks you're not. It's not as hard as all that. You can leave them be and they'll work things out on their own most days.”
Kurenai will side-eye Asuma, frowning, while Kakashi nods and gazes off into the middle distance. “See,” he'll say, “that doesn't sound too bad. It works for your three?”
“I've only had them for a day and a half, but I can't see a reason why it wouldn't.”
Kurenai will side-eye him with slightly more conviction. Kakashi will reply, “Team 7 is not as well-behaved as your trio. I think I'd need to adapt your strategy before I could use it. And at that point I might as well not. Kisame can handle it. He's good with genin.”
Either of those statements might or might not be true, but what is true is that Kisame is flat broke and therefore the only person Kakashi can bribe into taking on such a long-term and painful job as sensei duty on negative notice.
“When did you two start knowing each other?”
“Oh... you know....”
“Kakashi is his probation officer,” Kurenai will snitch.
Asuma will spend a moment absorbing that, then take a drag from his cigarette and breathe out smoke. “Guess that makes as much sense as anything. You don't act like it, though.”
Kakashi will shrug. Six years is a long time to get to know someone in. “Kurenai, what about your team?” he'll ask, and they'll let him change the subject.
---
Twenty minutes later, Kisame arrives to the Academy what turns out to be four hours late and finds that the genin have chosen to retaliate by rigging a chalkboard eraser over the door.
Kisame dislikes children. Sasuke is tolerable because he's practically an unusually pacifistic Kiri genin and Kisame can treat him like a confused adult, but most kids alternately unsettle and irritate him.
He doesn't care for school buildings, either, or school teachers. The smell of the place and the width of the hallways dredge up memories he didn't realize he still had.
Kisame enjoyed a breezy Academy experience by any measure. He had no trouble with combat lessons, being who he is, and none with the teachers either, being a member of the reigning Mizukage's household. The non-combat classes didn't matter, but he made it through them without issue, too. History interests him enough that he would study it even without incentive, and he bears no great hatred for math or literature.
Then, as the cherry on top, he graduated in the first class after Zabuza's incident and therefore the first class not to kill a classmate as the final exam.
There was no fairness to the graduation exam. The top half of a class got matched against the bottom half, and for the last three years of schooling you understood which of your classmates were shinobi and which were walking corpses. The teachers did, too. They tried not to waste effort on failures.
Up until the girl Kisame would have killed joined the border guard and he never saw her again, each time he passed her on the street or sensed her chakra out of sight made him feel a step out of line with reality, like he was encountering a ghost, and she shuddered as if he had walked over her grave. By now, more than a third of Kiri's active shinobi forces owe Zabuza their lives, and the last time Kisame met him that fact still irritated Zabuza to no end.
Back to the present: Kisame slides the door open, casually dissociating, and ignores the eraser landing on the floorboards. No murder or maiming in the Konoha Academy, no matter how much character it would build.
“You're late!” two of the graduates shriek in greeting.
The third, who is Sasuke, silently cycles through a series of expressions before ending on heroically borne long-suffering.
They're not genin until they pass a jounin's exam, but Kakashi agreed to back Kisame's decisions, within reason. And Kisame doesn't get paid if they fail the exam.
Congratulations! He was testing for initiative and suicidal lack of judgement. They passed. Sasuke wasn't involved with the decision other than not stopping it from happening, and by their reactions the girl wasn't either, but Konoha is all about genin teams passing and failing together. Or something.
At an angle that doesn't get chalk on his shoe he kicks the eraser out of the doorway and under a desk. “We're going to the roof,” he says, because if Kakashi thought to reserve a training ground he failed to mention it.
The Academy is harder to mistake for its Kiri version from outside. All of that sunlight and clear air, and all of those brightly colored and mold-susceptible buildings across the cityscape. “Hoshigaki Kisame,” he says once the baby ninja have caught up. “Let's get along.”
Kakashi has pawned off to him: a clan heir, the Kyuubi jinchuuriki (which Kisame shouldn't know about, but Samehada has a particular preference for bijuu chakra and the kid's seal isn't completely leakproof), and some other kid. Nightmare team. No wonder Kakashi didn't want them; this feels like a punishment for all that it likely isn't.
“Why're you blue, 'ttebayo?” the jinchuuriki demands. The girl cringes, but something else overrides the rudeness for Kisame. That speech quirk....
“Bloodline limit,” Kisame lies. In Konoha, people tend to buy it. In Kiri, people tended to buy it with the extreme wariness and suspicion due to exceptions to Yagura's edict. “Are you going to tell me your name or am I going to call you Chalkboard Eraser from now on?”
“I'm Uzumaki Naruto!” he announces. “What's a bloodline limit?”
What's a –
Neither Sasuke nor the girl seems surprised, though both of them look to be nearly in physical pain.
Naruto slept through his entire life and coasted a passing grade through the Academy thanks to the Academy's softness and his own status, in that case. Maybe it's good that he established that immediately.
“You're related to Uzumaki Kushina?” Kisame asks.
Naruto's face slackens, bravado and brashness draining away between one blink and the next to leave behind someone who doesn't know what they are if they can't be loud.
Kisame misstepped. He signed on to keep three genin alive and maybe teach them a jutsu or two, not to get involved in whatever messy emotional development this belongs to.
“Uzumaki...?” Naruto says as if he's hearing the word for the first time. “Who's that? Hey, who's that? Ku-shi-na. Uzumaki Kushina. Same-sensei, you know someone with my family name?”
“No,” says Kisame. He shifts his attention to the last kid he doesn't know. “What's your name?”
“Haruno Sakura," she says with a stiff, careful bow. “Please take care of me.” Mirroring the level of politeness Kisame used in his introduction. What is she, a teacher's pet?
“You do,” Naruto shouts.
“I have met Uzumaki Kushina once, and she has been dead for twelve years,” says Kisame.
Konoha apparently used to call her their Red-Hot Habanero, which makes Kisame feel some sort of way if he stops to think about it. He suspects he'd get a similar reaction from a Konoha-nin who remembers the war if he told them that Water Country called Kuriarare of the Seven Swordsmen “The Dango Sticker”. (They did not, because that would be just as absurd as calling Uzumaki Kushina the Red-Hot Habanero.)
Kiri during the war called Kushina the Red Devil. She tore the Sandaime Mizukage limb from broken limb with a ninjutsu that looked like chains. And then the Kyuubi killed her, because there's always a bigger fish.
“I'm twelve, 'ttebayo,” says Naruto, stricken.
What's Kisame actually allowed to do, here? In Kiri, jounin have near-total discretion over their treatment of their students and apprentices, but if that's the case in Konoha then it still doesn't apply with Kisame, who isn't their instructor on paper.
Maybe he'll just... maintain at least half a meter of distance between them at all times.
“You'll receive word about the meeting and training schedules,” he says, ignoring Naruto. Kisame is nearly thirty. He's ancient. He hasn't had a reasonable fight since he defected. He's allowed to be hard of hearing if he wants. “Keep up what you usually do until then.”
Sakura says tentatively, “You're not going to ask for Sasuke-kun's name...?”
Kisame needs to track Kakashi down before Kakashi escapes on an out-of-village mission, and he can't do that if these three keep him here for much longer. “Sasuke can introduce himself if he wants.”
Sasuke rolls his eyes and doesn't introduce himself.
“Adjourned.”
Kisame flash-steps away before Sakura or Naruto start asking him questions he doesn't have the answers to.
---
“Yo. How're the genin?”
If Kakashi genuinely wanted to know, he wouldn't have passed said genin to Kisame, and Kisame wouldn't have needed to flag him down on a roof halfway across Konoha from the Academy.
“What do jounin do with their genin?” Kisame asks.
Kakashi mulls it over. “Teach them. Teamwork, jutsu... paperwork and bureaucracy. How to apply for missions, how to specialize into a division if that's what they want.”
Kisame raises an eyebrow. They can both see how some of those might become an issue for this team in the current circumstances, yes?
Kakashi sighs faintly. “If there's something that'll be hard for you to do, let me know. I'll take responsibility for it.”
“If you would.”
“You're their commander as much as you are their teacher,” Kakashi adds, pulling advice blindly out of thin air. “I think you can lean into that role if it's easier.”
Kisame somehow doubts Naruto has heard of a command structure in his life, any respect Sakura has for him outside of his role as her teacher is a play-act on her part whether she realizes it or not, and Sasuke has long since independently come to the conclusion that Kisame is either inept or washed-out or both.
Normally Kisame's physical appearance on its own carries an implicit threat of violence, but Konoha genin evidently assume their allies won't harm them unless proven otherwise. Inconvenient, if accurate.
Being allies doesn't take a certain degree of emotional violence off the table, but he can't tell yet what that would accomplish and, in any case, it would feel like cheating at least as far as Sasuke is concerned. Sasuke lives in a fantasy world and Kisame knows all of the fracture points to press to break suspension of disbelief.
Maybe he should tell them he's from the Bloody Mist.
But Sasuke won't care, Naruto might not know what Kiri is (he doesn't know what bloodline limits are after living in Konoha and sharing a class with a clan heir who exclusively wears clothes that have his clan's emblem prominently displayed), and who can guess for Sakura's response?
“Did you do something to earn this team?” Kisame asks. “Maim someone you weren't supposed to?”
If Kisame doesn't ask Kakashi how many people he blackmailed to get out of training Team 7, he can honestly say I wasn't involved if trouble sparks out of it. Not that claiming ignorance ever helps, but Kisame still finds the notion entertaining.
Kakashi looks haunted. “They can't be that bad.”
“Oh? Then you should take them back – ”
Kakashi makes a sign to ward off evil.
“Is it the genin,” Kisame asks, “or is it one genin in particular? Is it Sasuke? Or Naruto? Does Sakura have a debt to collect from you?”
“Who?” says Kakashi, possibly genuinely. “No, no, just.... I'll see you around – ”
“Could I get a rundown on them?” Kisame interrupts. “At the very least? Two of the brats I only have a name and a face for.”
Kakashi relaxes at the softball question. “Naruto lives on his own, scraped through the Academy by the skin of his teeth, no particular specializations, but he got into schoolyard brawls all the time and heals quickly from surface-level injuries. No... positive relationships with classmates. Sakura – ”
“Any relation to Uzumaki Kushina?” Kisame asks.
No mention of the fact that Naruto is a jinchuuriki, which is... well, Kisame understands the information security concern, but it's still a little rude that whoever authorized Kakashi to fob off his teaching duties didn't authorize him to tell his substitute that one of the genin is the Kyuubi jinchuuriki. What was Kisame supposed to do if the seal broke when he didn't have a single countermeasure planned? Die, and let Sasuke and Sakura die?
Kisame doesn't have many friends in this village, and particularly none in administration. Nobody trusts a defector.
Kakashi waves the question off, though his attention sharpens. “Not directly. Is his clan name a problem?”
“Why would a Konoha-nin hold a grudge against a Mizukage's killer?” Kisame shakes his head. “No. Relative of a dead woman, I don't have any interest in that. He seemed to, though. I asked him the same question.”
Kakashi grimaces. “He's an orphan, so maybe any mention of his family....”
Kisame made trouble for himself when he told Naruto her name. His mistake.
Kakashi mutters, “But wouldn't the Academy curriculum have brought up the Uzumaki?”
Kisame wouldn't be able to confirm either way about that, but: “He didn't know what bloodline limits are.”
Kakashi squints up at him. “What?”
“It's true.”
“He didn't... know what....”
He did not.
“Seven clan heirs graduated this year, in his class.”
“That's a fair number, isn't it?”
Kakashi says, “You've got your work cut out for you.”
“I have your work cut out for me,” Kisame agrees. “How much is wrong with Haruno Sakura?”
“No known specializations,” Kakashi recites. “Excellent academic performance for her age, though her instructors made a note of her lacking aggression and adaptability. No positive relationships with any classmates.” Which makes three for three. Sasuke doesn't, either. “Has a demonstrated tendency to cave to popular opinion at the expense of her own self-interest.”
“Is that a remarkable trait?”
“When it's to her degree, yes. She broke a close friendship with a well-known military clan's heir in favor of blending in with the majority of the girls in her class.”
Evidently the answer to how much is wrong with Haruno Sakura is Kisame was happier when he didn't know.
There can't be anything overly interesting about her family, at least, if Kakashi prioritized every other piece of information about her over them, and Kakashi's following summary confirms that: two career chuunin for parents, no further notes.
Kakashi's eye curves in a smile. “I'm handing them off to you because I honestly believe you'll make a better teacher for them than I would.”
That might work better as flattery if Kisame wasn't confident Kakashi would say the same line to an unusually coherent barnacle if it would agree to take this team from him.
---
“Since when have you been a jounin?”
“This afternoon,” says Kisame. “We're out of milk. Do you still drink that?”
Sasuke scowls. “It's fine,” he says, playing the pronoun game. Does it refer to the milk or the lack? Kisame picks a carton off of the shelf anyway; if Sasuke's decided to extend the past few milkless mornings into a pattern, Kisame can finish it himself.
Sasuke asks, “Is that why you were four hours late?”
Kisame was four hours late because Kakashi, as a privilege of being one of the most competent ninja in the village, can get away with a stunning amount of incompetence.
“I was told about Team 7 half an hour before my arrival at the Academy,” Kisame says, and snorts. “Administration attracts a personality type.” Which is unrelated, but the sooner Sasuke develops a dislike of the bureaucracy, the better. Say what you will about field shinobi, but at least they need to do more than misplace a sheet of paper to ruin a life.
“Do you know how to teach?”
Kisame drops dried seaweed into the basket. “You should hope I do.”
“I don't understand. Why would you be my teacher? Who decided to assign this team this way?” Sasuke's mouth twists, and then he says with barely toned-down incredulity, “There's a tradition that the highest-placed girl and boy in a class get stuck together with each other and the dead last.”
Kisame stalls for a second, caught flat-footed by the gleeful, overblown cruelty of a tradition like that.
But no – this is Konoha. They probably don't intend it as the execution that it sounds like.
“You know,” he says, pitching his voice low under the humming of the store's refrigeration, “if you kill him, you might get a better teammate assigned.”
Sasuke considers the idea, bless him. But: “No,” he says after a moment. “No. That's – that would be bad.”
Kisame pats him on the head, then ducks down to grab a box of toothpaste.
The bell over the shop's door tinkles. Kisame recognizes the stride and chakra signature of the arrival, and judging by Sasuke's grimace he's not the only one. He tosses the toothpaste into the basket and rises just before Naruto skids to a stop at the other end of the aisle.
Naruto jabs a finger in his direction. “Who is Uzumaki Kushina?!”
The store stands three by five meters across and is not nearly large enough to fit Naruto's volume on top of Kisame's and Samehada's mass. The cashier says, strained, “Please don't speak so loudly – ”
“This is important!” Naruto declares. “I need to know!”
“If I don't tell you,” says Kisame, “where would you plan to go next?”
“I'll make you tell me, 'ttebayo!”
Destined for intelligence work this ninja is not. Cemeteries, old bingo books, asking around with people who might remember her, even filing an official request to access the few publically available parts of a shinobi's profile – he has plenty of methods at his disposal if he wants to find a person who isn't trying to hide from him. Kisame meant the question as a question, not a challenge.
Morbidly fascinated, Kisame tries, “Can it wait until I finish paying for this?”
“No!”
Kiri would have let him resolve this with murder. Alas.
Kisame says to Sasuke, “Can you get him outside?”
Sasuke frowns up at him. “Are you a jounin or not?”
Kiri would have even let him resolve this with two murders.
“Sasuke,” Kisame says, because Sasuke is perfectly aware of the relevant terms of the probation. If Kisame touches a Fire Country citizen, it's Kisame's head on the line. Or his place in Konoha, anyway.
Sasuke finally growls and stomps off to wrestle the other ankle-biter out of the shop.
“Sorry for that,” Kisame says to the cashier, his lips pulled back to show teeth.
The cashier smiles queasily and starts adding up the prices on the notepad. Kisame pays, bags the groceries, then exits the store into the middle of an argument.
“ – secret lessons?” Naruto is shouting in what might just be his speaking voice.
Sasuke shakes him by the collar. “You idiot. He's my cousin.”
If an artist drew Kisame while removing the sharpened teeth and the blue and the gills and about fifty centimeters' worth of height, his portrait wouldn't look out of place as the son or grandson or great-grandson of any number of farmers in central Water Country. This is because his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all rice farmers in central Water Country.
Kisame is not Sasuke's cousin. Kisame does not share a single drop of blood with the Uchiha clan. As Naruto looks between the two of them, Kisame watches the lone cog turn behind his eyes to stop at the same conclusion.
“You're not blue,” Naruto informs Sasuke, selecting nearly the only physical difference between them that doesn't stem from lineage.
“Distant cousin,” Sasuke elaborates, disdainful that Naruto should require even so much explanation.
Sasuke's child self came up with this dreamscape reality on his own, and he's been living safely inside of it ever since. His implacable, unassailable, screaming insistence after Itachi's little rampage that Kisame is his last surviving relative is what initially got Kisame out of T&I's holding cells, so Kisame has never felt a need to argue the point. He's been adopted into families for less convenient reasons.
“I asked around,” Kisame tells Naruto. “Kushina came from the same clan as you, but you aren't related to her by more than that.”
Naruto stares at him. “The... clan? The same clan?”
“The Uzumaki clan.”
“I – ” Naruto's lip wobbles. Kisame should have pushed Kakashi out the window. “A clan? I have a...?”
Not so much anymore after the events of the Second War. The natural whirlpools protecting Uzushio had spent the years prior steadily weakening for no known reason, and during the war they finally gave up the ghost entirely. Kiri and Kumo promptly went on to pillage Uzushio and crumble the island into the sea.
“You should be one of the only ones left with that name,” Kisame says, sinking Naruto's hopes as thoroughly as Kiri sank Uzushio.
Sasuke makes an odd face. “Dead last... you idiot. You didn't know?”
“Shut up!” Naruto yells, crying in earnest now. Kisame tries not to let it show how much he feels like he's observing some new and bizarre species of insect.
The tears don't concern him too much – Sasuke did enough of that after Itachi killed their clan to desensitize anyone. It's only that Naruto has no justification whatsoever for being alive.
Konoha doesn't put its students through Kiri's old graduation exam, but do the teachers never occasionally let their aim slip on a knife or a ninjutsu, either? Never send a student out to clean a training field still covered in unsprung traps or assign Konoha's equivalent of overnight water-walking in the harbor as a punishment during box jellyfish season?
Kisame needs to ask Kakashi to get him access to Naruto's school records and final exam results. He cannot believe any village's standards are so lenient that a student who doesn't know what a bloodline limit is and doesn't know that his own surname comes from a storied clan could pass its Academy's curriculum. Even being a jinchuuriki couldn't have earned him this much leeway on its own.
Sasuke takes a few awkward, halting steps forward. That expression... is that sympathy?
If Sasuke is volunteering to deal with this, Kisame will hardly object. “I'll get these back,” Kisame says, hefting the bag. He sighs quietly. “You can find anything about the Uzumaki in the library. It's a starting point.”
“I don't know where that is,” Naruto sniffles.
Sasuke does. The pair of them can work things out on their own. Kisame has dinner to make.