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These kids were impossible.
Kakashi groaned as he watched them fall to the grass complaining and bickering. Naruto was so like Obito that it pained Kakashi. It was cruel of Minato-Sensei to inflict his child on Kakashi like this. Why couldn’t Kakashi have been assigned the Ino-Shika-Cho team? It would’ve made more sense if Minato-sensei had at least given Obito the moody Uchiha kid. Obito could use a little attitude being given back to him. It would be good for him.
When Kakashi turned from his post hidden behind the oak tree several feet from his potential genin team, the bells rang softly in his pocket. They hadn’t rang in the hands of these three from the academy. As long as Kakashi had his way, they wouldn’t. These kids weren’t ready to be ninja. They were never going to work together as a team. The kunoichi was even more hopeless than the other two. She was too fixated on Sasuke. As Kakashi caught her fawning over her Uchiha teammate once again, thinking no one noticed, he rolled his eyes. She reminded him far too much of the way someone else was long ago, before she’d found her ninja way, before she’d grown up.
Watching Naruto tied to a post, begging the others to feed him, Kakashi growled under his breath. He could already see this was another team to send back to the academy. But then he saw—behind a tree a few yards off—
Kakashi scoffed.
He body-flickered to the spot. “Obito!”
Obito jumped and waved a nervous hand in Kakashi’s face. “H-hey, Kakashi!”
“What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you have a genin team of your own to train?”
“Yeah, unlike you,” Obito snorted, “because you’ve been failing them for too long! This is the one, Kakashi!”
“Yeah?” Kakashi raised an unamused eyebrow. “How would you know?”
“Look! Sensei’s kid is starving, alright? You’ve been working them all day. Just let him have some lunch, you jerk!”
“This is part of their test, Obito.” Kakashi shook his head, rolling his eyes. “I don’t even want to know what criteria you used when you passed the first group that fell in your lap.”
“Hey,” Obito said.
Kakashi was no longer paying attention to Obito’s affronted attitude, because past his shoulder, where Kakashi’s attention was supposed to be fixed, another intruder had stepped into the field.
“Rin!” Kakashi growled.
He wasn’t fast enough. By the time he flickered to her, she already had Naruto eating out of the palm of her hand. Kakashi’s two other potential students were laughing. With his fists curled by his sides, Kakashi shot a glare over his shoulder to Obito (the meddler) and then to Rin.
Obito laughed. “We got him, Rin!”
Rin turned from the genin squatting on the ground, whipping her shining brown hair over her shoulder to smile brilliantly at Kakashi. Her lashes fluttered coyly as a blossom of pink complimented the purple markings on her cheeks.
“Rin.” Kakashi shook his head.
“Are you angry?”
Kakashi peered down at the academy students, whose smiling faces melted away to nervous frowns. At least they had the decency to look guilty as they exchanged glances, trying to communicate wordlessly. They already had more decency than Kakashi’s team 7 had ever learned.
Kakashi sent each of his shamefaced childhood teammates a scathing look as he addressed his genin (not genin, they weren’t passing this test). “Should I be?”
“I would be,” Sasuke said.
“No way!” Naruto cried before taking a massive bite from the sandwich in his hands. “Obito-sensei and Rin-sensei are awesome, ya know!”
“Naruto, that’s no reason to defend them,” Sakura said as she smiled at Sasuke. “Sensei was trying to teach us something. Right, Sasuke?”
“And what’s that?” Kakashi asked the potential genin.
“Uh-h-huh?” Sakura cried, face turning red as she looked surreptitiously between her potential teammates. “Ummm…”
“This is stupid,” Sasuke huffed. “If we’re going to eat, we’re not watching Naruto starve.”
“Okay,” Kakashi drawled, careful not to call them genin yet, not to give anything away before nodding his head toward his two treacherous teammates. “And these two?”
Naruto hummed around the wad of food stuffed in his cheeks, looking up at Kakashi with squinted eyes. “You three were students of my dad’s, right? So you should be on the same side!”
Sakura gasped, meeting Kakashi’s gaze with stars in her green eyes. “You were taught by the Hokage, Sensei? So you’re not just some weirdo!”
“Thanks,” Kakashi grumbled while Obito and Rin snickered behind him.
“Teammates should stick together,” Sakura said, looking over her shoulder at Sasuke. “Right, Sasuke?”
“You really think that? Even if these two jonin just failed this test for you?” Kakashi said darkly.
Sasuke pulled his shoulders back, looking like a true ninja. “Yeah. You should give them a pass.”
“Well that’s good,” Kakashi said, dropping his threatening demeanor to smile behind his mask. “Because I’m giving you three a pass, too!”
“What?” Naruto cried, jumping up as food sprayed from his mouth to land on Obito.
“We’re genin?” Sakura thrust a fist in the air. “Yeah!”
“It’s about time you passed a team, Stupid Kakashi!” Obito said as he batted Naruto’s crumbs off his chest.
“So,” Rin breathed in Kakashi’s ear, curling her hands around his shoulders, “are we okay? You’re not mad anymore?”
“The only person I can be mad at now,” Kakashi said as he turned to narrow his eyes at Rin, “is you.”
“Huh?” Obito balked. “Kakashi, how can you say that?”
“Me?” Rin gulped.
“You should have been the decoy, Rin,” Kakashi said, smiling as he took in her pretty face, her sparkling brown eyes, her plump lips. “You know better than that. You distract me effortlessly. Meanwhile, you left me suffering with Obito. How could you?”
“Oh,” Rin laughed, blushing, kneading her hands together, darting her eyes between Kakashi and the genin standing behind him. “I–well, I–”
“Wanted to personally feed my students, I know,” Kakashi said, tilting his head.
Rin reached up to stroke Kakashi’s cheek. “Kakashi.”
“I guess I can make one allowance for my girlfriend, but this is your final warning.”
“Girlfriend?” Sakura yelped.
“Ew, Kakashi-sensei!” Naruto shouted. “Don’t do anything weird in front of us!”
“We don’t need to see that,” Sasuke added when Kakashi turned to face them, slinging an arm over Rin’s shoulder, thinking he should do more just to see their reactions.
He smiled behind his mask at the blushing kunoichi in his periphery, at the grimacing idiot in his other periphery, and at the sneering children in front of him.
“We’re really going to get along well together,” he decided aloud before pulling Icha Icha from his pack.
Because he knew they would. These genin would prove to be everything Kakashi, Rin, and Obito had been as a team—and more.