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Not long before the First Shinobi War reared its head, Tobirama took Kagami Uchiha aside to give a bag of baby teeth inside a rather small Senju flowerpot, along with the order to surrender it to Hatake shinobi clan head Daizu. Unfortunately, a few wires got crossed, and Kagami refused to let go of the bag to hand over to the clan of silver-haired farmers and swordsmen, who seem to suffer from a serious case of male plague and nearly non-existing mothers.
Sure, many of the men are more pretty than handsome, to the point the boy once thought the Hatake disguised most of their women.
Until Hoshi-san snidely told him otherwise while within hearing distance of Kama. The Hatake elder had suddenly worn a look that, for a split second, so resembled the wolves that came with his half-wild clan, and Kagami thought they were either going to suffer a most humiliating death or get really bad crops that year.
(He still had nightmares about Nasu Hatake and Yosa Aburame's silent retribution of big, fat, nose-crawling root maggots in the daikon and carrot patches, and absolutely refused to take any more D-rank gardening missions. Those two are pure evil.)
Hoshi Hyuuga is so dumb. Doesn't he know when not to cross with predators?
Even clan head Izuna resembled a jittery rabbit after talking (just harmless talking!) with the Hatake matriarch, Shiroki-sama-sama.
(Danzo had told him adding the extra honorific sounded stupid. Kagami argued back that Shiroki-sama was still too scary and adding an extra honorific may just save him from her unnervingly unreadable, sleepy-eyed stare and her kenka kiseru or tessen, depending on the mood.)
They said she was the very first Hatake, a self-made foundling—a samurai from the Land of Iron—who impressed the Senju Clan Head at the time (the Shodaime's great-grandfather) so much they had to take her bloodline as vassals. She must be so old, possibly the oldest elder in the whole of Konohagakure. Maybe, even the entire Hi no Kuni!
The Uchiha remembered how his teammate Danzo and his friend Hiruzen had debated on how the matriarch lived for so long. That she may have been predisposed to a long lifespan like the Uzumaki, or that she may be living in spite of the gods themselves.
Kagami personally thought it was the latter, and secretly waited for Danzo to overcome his shy admiration any day now, and to kneel before Shiroki-sama-sama and ask: "Elder, you live to be so old and feared and crusty. I beg of you, teach me your ways!"
The image of Danzo emulating the matriarch down to the pretty kimono, bangs covering an eye, a veil or scarf-covered lower face, tessen in sleeve and the ever-bored countenance never failed to make him laugh.
That didn't answer the question, though. Why do the Hatake have so few women?
Maybe...Hoshi-san was right, and their women become ghosts and wolves that disappear into the night!
So Kagami did not relent at all, Uchiha stubbornness winning. He promised Tobirama-sensei that he will keep the teeth safe, even if he will have to fend off ghosts and wolves, and mysterious and pretty masked farmers.
And he petulantly told Kama and Daizu-sama so.
The Hatake elder, Kama, seemed to have found the boy's devotion absolutely adorable, because he pounced on the hapless chunin, literally, while crowing in a sing-song "Mine now..."
(Said chunin will tell you that he was a very brave ninja and he absolutely did not scream like a girl, topple backwards over air and faint like a civilian. Which left Kama free to nonchalantly carry the boy over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes while Daizo berated him about kidnapping and ruffled Uchiha feathers.)
And for the second time, an outsider (under an oath of secrecy and threat of worse-than-death) learned something of the Hatake clan beyond their dense white chakra, wolves and lightning.
The curly-haired Uchiha had witnessed some very strange and admittedly amazing feats shinobi are capable of, but—Tobirama-sensei, Madara-sama's 'crush' (Izuna had once explained before that 'crush' means that Madara-sama is very possessive of Tobirama-sensei, as his person he loves to dislike and to crush and just could not get enough of, which is very confusing) and ANBU Commander, came from an itty bitty potted plant.
How cool (and cute) is that?
The boy nearly swooned at the images his imagination provided, and spent the entire day occasionally blushing and giggling, which frightened and disturbed his clansmen immensely.
Izuna-sama completely misunderstood the situation and spent the day crying about puberty and Kagami's lost innocence.
(Ugh, his entire clan is so dramatic.)
It was sometime after Madara fell into a healing coma due to a near-fatal injury and Tobirama succumbed to multiple fatal wounds after single-handedly destroying the Kinkaku Force, that he finally figured out what Izuna-sama was talking about between the Nidaime and the late ANBU Commander. And Kagami eventually assisted in bringing the two's "unfulfilled romantic dream" to life by planting one of Tobirama-sensei's unusually sharp and blood-stained baby cuspids which had been laced with some of the Senju's chakra, and bloodied when Madara-sama once stole the bag out of curiosity, only to cry out in pain AND get punched for his trouble.
He tried to visit the growing plant every time the opportunity arose, which was hard because he had to evade not only his parents but also Izuna-sama, all his nosy relatives AND Danzo (when Hiruzen failed to distract him with his crazy ideas) until the baby was 'born'.
At this point Izuna was very convinced that he was seeing someone, even though Kagami denied it every single time.
(He once made the mistake of comparing the clan head to the late Shodaime in ridiculousness, and had to flee. Izuna-sama looked like he was going erupt into a conniption and Kagami did not want to be there when it happened.)
Daizu Hatake merely took one look at the puppy-pouting chunin and gave him a place to hide in until the Uchiha clan head cooled off. It also gave him the opportunity of assigning a lot of D-rank babysitting missions which gave Kagami the excuse to occasionally babysit Sakumo-chan.
(Kama-jisan butted in during one of his visits and told him it would be very good practice when he becomes his own head of house and marries.)
Get married? How could he say that? Girls are scary!
