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Kakashi had definitely tried to be there.
After Naruto had left her as one of the last two remaining members of Team 7 Kakashi had reentered as ANBU - something he had not had the courtesy of telling her herself. His way out of her life was quick and silent and frustratingly he even had a suitable explanation. As one of the most elite ninja in Konoha’s history, he would always be eagerly awaited back.
All those years ago at the very beginning of her apprenticeship under Tsunade, they usually met up once a week to catch lunch at Ichiraku’s. Sakura would happily babble on about this and that while Kakashi was seemingly content to sit and offer an indefinite amount of Ohs and Aahs all the while wolfing down his ramen in a manner defying all universal laws of time, space and temperature. After particularly hard missions that would normally require at least a checkup at the hospital – Sakura swore this man alone owned a particular talent to turn half of all normal escort or assassination missions into bloodbath escalations – Kakashi would knock softly on her window instead and entrust her with even his worst injuries.
Thanks to him she had learned how deep a kunai could actually penetrate the human body within her first 6 months of apprenticeship.
This was until Kakashi started to withdraw back inside his haven of loneliness.
When he cancelled the first time she understood.
When she heard her colleague complain about a heavily injured ANBU with a dog mask in the ICU instead of bleeding out on rug, she had frozen for the fracture of a second.
When a mission required him to leave the village for a whooping 6 months she had smiled and wished him a safe return.
So, when those months finally passed and she waited for more than 4 hours at the gate, then another at Ichiraku’s and stayed up the entire night just in case, Sakura had lost it.
During her apprenticeship she had additionally invested a lot of her time into honing her sensor capabilities. Her nose would never be as good as Kakashi’s or Kiba’s, her hiding skills were advanced but nothing in comparison to any Anbu, but even with all of that in mind there was one glaring advantage.
Despite all his odd quirks, deep sealed mysteries and slouching aloofness Kakashi was for all intents and purposes a creature of habit.
It took her only the better part of an hour until she spotted his lanky figure and unruly mop of hair in front of the memorial stone the next morning.
She stood there, watching his back, the weight of months of silence pressing down on her ribs. For a moment, she almost turned away—almost let him have his ghosts. But Kakashi was all she had left from the team that once felt like a home, and she was tired of waiting for pieces to fall back together on their own. She approached quietly, but intently crunching the gravel beneath her sandals. He didn’t turn, but she knew he’d heard her. Kakashi always noticed everything, even when he pretended not to.
She wanted to scream at him, lung at him, shake some sense into him. Maybe even see if he would let her hit him. The solid tension in his shoulders told her he expected something similar.
“You don’t get to just disappear,” she said, every word clipped, trembling with everything she’d held back. “You’re the only one who still comes back and I can’t keep being the only one trying."
For a moment, Kakashi didn’t move. Then his head turned just a fraction. The tired lines beneath his visible eye could not conceal the hollow haunting in his gaze.
“I know,” he said, the words barely above a whisper. Not casual, not evasive—just raw, stripped down, afraid. Because now she’d said it out loud. There was no more letting himself fade into shadows, no more hiding behind missions and masks. She wasn’t going to let him disappear.
That morning, as the village slowly woke around them, something shifted.
Kakashi, the infamous copy ninja with a flight-on-sight order and famed for both his particularity and almost comical tardiness was never late again.