Seiko comes home from a long shift in the tower one day to a tiny, bristly little dog with an attitude. Oh, and she also met Pakkun.
"He's adorable," Seiko says, absolutely delighted. "Look-- he looks like he can fit on Biter's head!"
"Don't test that," Pakkun states, voice comically lower than what his little pug body should be able to produce. "Kakashi, tell her to leave me alone."
"Dad says he'll grow bigger," Kakashi says, hand gestures growing sweepingly large as he demonstrates Pakkun's potential size to her. Bigger than Biter, with sharp teeth and a heavy weight to him. A dog for ripping throats and guts and viscera.
"Uh huh," Seiko says.
Biter has consented to a modified harness, a simple one with a strap that she can grab on to. He hadn't wanted it-- something like that is a terrible weakness in a battlefield, a handhold your enemy will use against you.
But he loved her more than he loved battle, so she wrapped her shaky hands around a harness.
"He will."
Her little brother is so defensive. What's he got to prove to anyone?
"Okay," Seiko says. "Sure. He'll be big and tall. Taller than me."
Pakkun looks between the two of them, lost and slightly confused.
"Kakashi..." he says. "I.. that's not..."
"He's going to be perfect," Kakashi says, scooping the little pug up and holding it in his arms.
Seiko smiles at him.
"It's not enough that he's a genius?" She says, voice gentle. "That he can talk? Most ninken can't do that."
That only makes Kakashi angrier.
"I bet Biter can talk," he mutters, shaping his fingers against Pakkun's back. "He just doesn't do it when I'm around."
She doesn't recognize the sound of her own laughter until Biter joins in with her, both of them shaking with it.
"Don't worry, genius," she says. "Everything Biter says about you, he says to your face."
Genin aren't allowed to sit at the main desk and hand out missions, owing to issues of life-or-death responsibility, classified information, and the ability to abuse your position to unfairly inconvenience anyone you don't like.
"D-Rank Mission: Clean Training Grounds 14-17," Seiko says, indifferently shoving the scroll in question towards the waiting band of genin corps staring down at her from the other side of the table.
"That's the ranged target areas!" The man shouts at her. "That's going to take ages."
"Have a nice day," Seiko says, and goes back to attempting to find whatever arcane system of a bygone era her 'supervisor' had used to organize the scrolls. So far she's managed to eliminate the idea that he had done it by rank, and now she was almost certain that it also hadn't been alphabetized, or color coded.
"Don't tell me to have a nice day, little girl--" The man pauses, perhaps realizing the terrible end that comes from yelling at someone who could not more clearly not want to hear it.
But that dim hope quickly fades.
"You're a genin," he says, managing to sound both deeply betrayed and smug at attaining the higher ground. "You've got less seniority than I do! Why don't you run along and clean the training grounds, and I take a look at those missions, hm?"
Seiko hears a vague growl from below the desk.
"The form to transfer from the genin corps to working in the tower is around her somewhere," Seiko says, eyes not even shifting from where she'd been scanning through the filing system below the desk. "We're very short staffed at the moment. I was ditched-- sorry, I was offered an emergency momentary promotion-- because the coffee machine exploded upstairs and took several files with it. But the transfer form was not in that file, I promise...."
Strangely, there's no response-- the man in question appears to have taken his mission and left while she wasn't paying attention.
"Biter," Seiko says, voice mild.
Biter's tail thumbs back and forth as it wags.
"Good boy."
"Good job, Hatake." Ensui Nara's hand claps her shoulder as the man stares down over her with unbelievably stereotypical Nara arrogance and laziness, for all the world a ninja unaware that he'd left his newest and least experienced recruit to handle the front lines for over 5 hours while he sat and contemplated the pros and cons of attempting to requisition a new coffee maker. "I knew you could handle it."
"I signed your name on all the forms," Seiko says. "Hope your handwriting is illegibly bad."
Her hands still shake, after all.
"Oh, it is." The jounin rummages around in one of his many pockets until he finds a new pack of bubblegum to pop into his mouth and blow out an obnoxiously large pink bubble. "You know, if you went and got a chunin promotion, you wouldn't need to put up with all this blowback."
This guy.
"I wouldn't have any blowback if I wasn't doing chunin jobs."
The bubble pops.
"We're understaffed, you know," the guy who does no work says. "No one works here all the time. Not Tonbo, not Chobee--This is just what you do while you wait to do something else."
Seiko glares at him.
"You run the whole tower," she says. "What are you waiting for?"
He fakes looking hurt.
"Now, Hatake. The Hokage runs the--"
Alarm bells erupt through the building.
Asuma Sarutobi is almost two years older than Kakashi, but what he lacks in her little brother's natural talent at being irritating, he makes up for in practice at being snotty, angry, and extremely petulant. His spiky brown hair both sticks straight up and manages to fall into place to form a sort of mullet, which is the sort of look that should make him very glad indeed that photography is a rare commodity not to be wasted on keeping funny pictures of your children.
Which is a shame, because Seiko has seen Kakashi do some truly humiliating things to his hair.
"All I did was take one thing from dad's office," Asuma mutters, scuffing his foot as he stares at his new entourage of several ANBU, all three of the current mission desk staff members who'd been working today, and the very displeased glare of the Yamanaka head of T&I, since they sometimes used the upper offices. "What's the big deal?"
Seiko's grip tightens on Biter's harness as she sways slightly, the stairs she'd needed to climb to get up here now making it feel like someone had jammed a whole new set of poisoned needles through her knee. She looks at Ensui in the vague hope that he'll take charge so everyone can go home, but he'd just gone right back to loudly chewing gum the minute he realized they were in no real danger.
The ANBU, too, seem more than content to just stand there, blank faced behind white masks. Bastards.
"Oh, only a matter of security that will involve me manually resetting all the seals specifically designed to warn me of thievery in the office," The T&I person says, airy voice not at all gentling the irritated cadence of his delivery. "Please, young master. Don't pay any consideration to the effort of protecting our precious village's secrets."
"What secrets?" Asuma demands, crossing his arms. "There's nothing interesting in here! Just a bunch of boring old junk! See!?"
He tosses an old kunai at the ground, causing both ANBU agents to quite suddenly dive for it, one closing their fingers over its handle seconds before it hits the ground.
Ah.
Seiko distantly notices she's shifted back into a sword stance only when her hands close around nothing, not having brought her weapons to the tower. She blinks, awkwardly slinking a little further backward out of embarrassment that she'd been the only one to have such a noticeable flinch.
"I'll head back downstairs," she says, voice flat. "We left the desk unattended."
"Oh, no..." Ensui drawls, and she suddenly realizes that the shadows itself in the room have curled uncomfortably close to young Sarutobi, with one of the ANBU not moving to grab the kunai but instead, possibly, protect the kid from the edge of a startled jounin or two. "I couldn't possibly leave you to do that. Shouldn't kids be able to talk to each other? No, I think... I'm going to go head down there with Chobee. Have fun, all of you!"
She hopes he swallows his gum and it clogs his intestines and gives him constipation for the rest of his life. Chobee's half apologetic glance behind his tiny spectacles just makes her wish the same fate on him as they both escape, leaving her behind.
"I'm not a kid," Asuma says, voice sullen. "And who are you, anyway!? I thought 'kids weren't allowed in the Hokage's tower'" The sing-song tone of his voice as he looks back at his ANBU certainly conveys a well-tread argument.
"I'm not a kid," Seiko says. "I'm a ninja."
Did she remember to wear her... ah, yeah.
She points at the head piece slung casually over Biter's head, watching both the ANBU and T&I inspector's gaze latch onto the scars on the back of her wrists and not the forehead protector. They should guess what her elbows look like.
"See?"
"That looks like the dog's the ninja, not you," Asuma says, not at all convinced. "I bet that's your dad's ninken. Okay, you two. You can kick her out of the tower as well!"
Now that the only people left are his guards, her, and the now mostly silent T&I guy, he's a lot more courageous, huh.
Biter growls a little, a low, unhappy sound.
"I'm glad it wasn't an emergency after all," Seiko says politely. "Looks like I'll also be heading back down. I have... files. Letters. Numbers, even."
"Hey!" Asuma's voice raises sharply. "Why aren't you guys kicking her out!"
The ANBU on the left-- she's never bothered looking at one for this long. Is her mask supposed to be a.. Lizard? Clears her throat.
"You're... Sakumo's eldest, right?"
Seiko freezes. Unfortunately, the Yamanaka also looks in her direction.
"Eldest and heir," Seiko says, voice dead. "If that's all--"
"I'll escort her downstairs," Lizard says. "Bullfrog, you take the kid for a bit."
"Hey!? Hey! I'm not--"
Seiko kind of wishes she was back in that room. A stairway with an overly interested ANBU is almost a downgrade in circumstances.
Almost.
"Heard your team went down fighting Chiyo Poisontongue and her team," Lizard says. "Most don't walk away from that."
Seiko snorts.
"Wasn't walked. Dragged." She gives Biter another scratch behind the ear, then clings even tighter to the halter strap as she takes the first of hundreds of steps.
"She probably targeted you because of the hair," Lizard says, voice casual. "Her son died last year to the White Fang."
Don't let Hoheto hear that, or he'll really kill her for getting Kiyomu killed and him crippled.
"It's not common knowledge who I was up against," Seiko says, eyes flickering from the dog to the stairs to anywhere except her new conversation partner. "Don't think dad knows."
"I'm something of a poison expert myself," Lizard muses, voice completely unchanged from her original mild cadence. "No one thought you were going to make it, due to Lady Tsunade not being available to counter the poison."
"Thanks."
Seiko doesn't know why this lady is so interested, and can think of absolutely no good reason.
"And yet here you are, whole and hearty."
"I'm not hearty. I take daily medicine."
"You're well enough to work," Lizard says.
"I'm sickly. I'm injured. I'm frail." Seiko is, in fact, about to lose her grip on the harness because her hands are shaking so badly. It works much less well as a balancing aid when going downstairs rather than upstairs, due to the cruel laws of gravity and all that.
"Yes, yes..." There's a strange, indulgent cadence to her tone. A mother speaking to a recalcitrant child. "If you ever tire of the doldrums of the tower, you could always visit the hospital. They're always on the lookout for people with poison resistance."
"I'm not poison resistant. I'm still poisoned."
Seiko closes her eyes for a second to resist a migraine spike that risks sending her tumbling into a neck breaking fall, and when she opens them, she's all alone in the stairwell.
Typical.
Sakumo means well.
She knows that. She does. That's why it's good, and not frustrating, that he's managed to be home for almost a month straight. She wants him to be home. But-- she and Kakashi had their little, terrible routine. It was never obviously an issue that neither of them were ever home during daylight hours because both of them were busy, him with his new Jounin-sensei and her with the mission desk.
But it makes their dad sad that his children don't play.
Even so--
Even so--
Seiko swallows an ugly swear word as the frisbee Biter had jumped for and missed hits her square in the face, knocking her on her ass as Biter runs up to her, tail wagging back and forth.
"Nice catch, Seiko!" Sakumo yells from the other side of their yard. It's late evening, the setting sun jealously dyeing all of their silver hair in its own brilliant gold light. On the side lines, Kakashi scoffs, too cool to play until it becomes something he can show off and beat her at.
"Let me do it instead," Kakashi says, right on schedule. "Pakkun can catch that."
"Hmm..." Sakumu says, the deep tiredness in his voice slightly lifted as he pretends equivalent indifference to Kakashi's little play. "I don't know... I think Biter and Seiko were just getting into the moment."
What moment? The moment of asking a 180 pound dog to jump after a frisbee?
Biter whines as he rubs against her knees, apologetic that he let her get hit.
"Me and Pakkun can do it," Kakashi says, loyally supporting his tiny dog. Honestly.. She thought he'd have tried summoning more by now, but he appears to think that if he summons more that would imply that he thinks that Pakkun is less awesome than Biter, which, while obviously true, is unpalatable.
Biter came with the agreement that as long as she had him, she'd never summon another. That she would spend the rest of her life permanently hosting in him enough chakra that he would never have to de-summon.
Pakkun, has, like, pack-mates back in the Spirit World. Hopefully he'd talk to Kakashi about it.
"Catch!" Pakkun does the yell instead of Kakashi, just in time for the frisbee to hurtle over Seiko's head and bury itself with a solid thunk several inches into a tree trunk.
"That could really hurt someone," Seiko observes, not getting up off the ground.
"Not if you'd caught it," Kakashi says. "You used to be good at this game."
Kids.
"Kids," Sakumo says, voice exasperated. "Let's try to get along for five minutes, alright?"
"Yes, Father,"
"Yes, dad."
"Excuse Me! Young Maiden of Valor!"
Oh, no.
Seiko blinks up from where she's been taking a short nap on the mission desk to see a true vision of green and black peering down at her.
"Yes...?" She says, scrambling to sit up straight. "Can I help you? Sir?"
There's a bit of an odd expression in his eyes, like he hadn't expected to get any sort of willing response at all.
"Sir?" Seiko repeats, trying to rub the sleep out of her eyes. It doesn't work.
"There Is No Need to Refer To Me as 'Sir', Young Maiden! After All, Are We Not the Same Rank?"
Oh, yeah. He's a genin.
"That's okay," Seiko says. "I don't use sir for higher ranks anyway. Can I help you?"
If people who work at the mission desk have baggage about how they're referred to, they don't last very long at the village's one and only place to receive complaints.
Another slight shift of his eyes underneath his very thick eyebrows. Is it.. What? Embarrassment?
"The Springtime of Youth is Eternal! Unfortunately, the Fleeting Nature of Meeting and Parting with My Fellow Man Has Lead Me To Constantly Be Searching For New Wonderful Training Partners!"
It's kind of him to pause long enough for her to parse out what on earth he's talking about.
"You... don't currently have some other genin working with you, and you need them because all D-ranks are team assignments," Seiko says, checking to make sure.
"Truly, Your--" he pauses, coughs. "Truly, the young maiden is both valiant and wise beyond her years."
"Thanks. Well..." Seiko rolls out the word as she shifts through various scrolls, pausing her and there for her fingers to quit twitching as she looks for what she needs. She doesn't envy whoever does this work when she's not in the office, because Ensui's organizational system based on time of arrival has now been thoroughly overlaid by her supplemental sort of rank qualification. Basically, where previously only Ensui could find things, now no one can.
"Got it." She slaps a couple of different scrolls onto the table, drama ruined by a twitch of her finger sending one to roll off the edge of the desk, which Might Duy scrambles to catch and put back on the table. "Let's start with that one."
Might Duy opens it and scans the contents, brows wrinkling.
"I've never seen this before..." he says. "Is this a brand new assignment!?"
"It's not." It's just usually not the first option. "This is an open ended list for qualified ninja with a certain number of years of seniority to volunteer to field test any new seal that Konoha's hospital or any other department would like to be put through its paces. Payment and rank scales according to danger, and as a genin you'd only be allowed to work with the relatively safe ones. It's not exactly what you were--"
If his taijutsu was normally as fast as the hand that reached out to put brush to paper, there was no reason at all for him to have not made chunin.
"Not a maiden, but an angel!" He says, staring at her with burning eyes. "Helping Konoha Learn and Grow Is The Greatest Honor Imaginable!"
Seiko just blinks.
"Yeah. So, if you'll open the next scroll--"
He nearly rips the parchment he opens it so fast, eyebrows flying up across his forehead.
"Again, this isn't exactly what you asked for. This is a C-rank mission that the client sent back to us as failed. Naturally, the team that failed the task should be the ones to properly apologize and restore Konoha's reputation, but since the team in question promptly went on to die, there needs to be someone else. One of the T&I guys came down and investigated whether it really was a C-rank and not a missclassed B; he said yes but Tonbo from tracking said no, and Ensui believes Tonbo. So an apology but no refund."
Seiko pauses for breath.
"Unpopular as that will be," she tacks on.
Really, a solo job is just a job that no one wants to do.
Might Duy takes her warning in stride, eagerly accepting that scroll as well.
"An important mission..." he breathes. "I shall venture to deeply apologize and give all possible consolations!"
"As long as you don't give them money. The third one is--"
She stops talking as Might Duy frantically shakes his head back and forth.
"This is... more than enough," he says, cradling the one mission scroll in his hand while earnestly bobbing his head up and down. "I have just one last question-- I need the name of my most gracious benefactor!"
All she's done is offer him unwanted tasks that didn't even fulfill what he'd wanted from her.
"I'm Seiko."
The pause stretches on. As if most people couldn't tell just from looking at her.
"Hatake."
His eyes round out until they could be mistaken for the bottom of exclamation points.
"Hatake-san," he starts.
"Just Seiko."
"Seiko-san! What an honor to meet my son's rival's older sister!"
Is that.. Anything?
"I didn't know Kakashi had made any friends his age," Seiko says. She should probably have tried to encourage him more to hang out with the other kids, but she'd been gone a lot of the only year he'd been in school. "What's his name?"
Duy nearly explodes with pride.
"Guy! I named him Guy. He's such a hard worker that they allowed him to enter the academy as a substitute candidate on his taijutsu alone! I know he has it in him to graduate and become a genin-- no, become chunin-- no, jounin! That's what it means when you're willing to work hard and embrace your passion! When you're spurred on by your Rival!"
"He sounds like a good kid," Seiko says, unaware of how it looks for a nine year old to say that. "I'm glad that--"
A jounin plus her genin team enters the room. Two of the genin graduated the same year as she did, though both of the girls are a little older than her.
"Oi, Seiko!" One of them yells. "Quit talking to that loser, his lack of potential's gonna rub off on you. We need a new mission-- a hard one. Who knows, the next time you see us, it might be at our promotion ceremony!"
Seiko ignores them.
"I'm glad that he's doing so well in school," she says. "I'll look into if any genin groups have an available slot. Ensui's the one who has final say over teams, even if he lets everyone sort it out among themselves."
If Ensui cracks down on a group, they won't dare tell Duy he can't be part of their team just because he's a little clumsy and talentless. That's nothing short of defying the will of fire.
Duy bows so low he's perpendicular to the floor.
"You are the everblooming rose of victory!" He announces. "Truly my son has new heights to aspire to!"
"Kakashi's pretty short, though," Seiko says. "It's all hair." She finally turns to the next team, who's jounin watches with indulgent indifference as the genin fidget and twitch. "Hi. How can I help you?"
"A hard mission," repeats Iwana, voice rising a little in frustration. "I just told you, Seiko!"
"A C Rank," their jounin says. His hands tap out the parameters behind his student's back-- Land of Rivers, or Land of Hotsprings if that's available.
Land of Hotsprings is never available. You want those, you had better be best friends with Ensui himself. Hells, forget Ensui. You'd better be friends with the Hokage.
Seiko pulls up a mission scroll.
"Congrats," she says. "Someone's fish has just recently gone missing."
"Seikoooo...."
She should've taken it as the huge warning sign it was when Sakumo had started trying to connect with Kakashi through helping him summon. Even though the dog contract was from their mother, just the act of supporting Kakashi's tiny little chakra reserves enough to get a few more little puppies to bounce through the summoning circle and chew on the furniture was enough to really make their house echo with nostalgic, long forgotten noise.
That nostalgia--
If only it had prevented Sakumo from offering her a sword.
Seiko stares at him, trying not to feel ambushed after coming back from walking Biter at the crack of dawn.
"Hi, Seiko," he says.
"Hi, dad," Seiko says. "You're up early."
He smiles down at her, weary lines deepening below his eyes at her observation.
"I actually have a mission coming up later today," he says. "Biter keeping you in shape?"
"He likes this time of day," Seiko says, hoping that if she continues to ignore the sword, he'll eventually drop it. "It makes him frisky."
Biter nuzzles into her side.
"I see," Sakumo says. "I thought you hated it, when I woke you up to train."
Seiko smiles at him helplessly.
"You get used to it," she says. "It was fun."
Don't ask her, please don't--
He brightens up so fast.
"We should run through a couple drills," he says. "I notice your hand tremors have been getting better, lately!"
...
There are many ways she can be more subtle about her injuries. Instead of using a bandage the way she'd done against Hoheto, for example, she could manipulate chakra to 'stick' the sword to her hand, allowing for a certain level of leeway whenever her fingers convulse around the hilt and she'd otherwise drop the weapon.
She could modify her stances to give up some level of stability in favor of positioning her knee in a way that hurts less. She could use Biter as a distraction whenever she needs to fall back. She could--
Kakashi should still be asleep right now. Good.
Seiko grabs the sword out of his hand and then throws it through a window, listening to the glass shriek and crack as the sword hits the ground outside.
"Oops," she says, voice flat. "My hand slipped."
"Seiko--"
Her stomach feels curdled, and her throat and neck is hot. She hates upsetting him.
She walks back out of the house. There's nothing wrong with showing up to the mission desk a few hours ahead of her normal shift-- Chobee runs it at this hour, and he'll have brought breakfast.
He squints at her through his spectacles, warm red swirls on his cheeks highlighting his walrus handle mustache as he offers her a full bowl of rice, still warm.
"Seiko-chan, you're limping," he observes, pulling out a chair for her. "Waking up too early can impact the chakra balance of the young mind."
That sounds like complete nonsense.
"Hi, Chobee," Seiko says. "What do you even do at this hour, anyway?"
He looks awfully busy for someone working at a place that doesn't receive any major traffic for another few hours.
"Oh, you know..." Chobee says vaguely, before very obviously looking around and checking for evesdroppers. "You know we're understaffed, so this is actually supposed to be jounin only. And kept in the upper offices. Ahem. Anyway, we keep a record of every ninja who's been killed or gone missing in the line of duty on file, as well as what mission they died on, known family, all of that. Someone's requested a look through and record of age of academy graduation versus known age of death in the past 5 years, I think because there's some pushing back and forth on changing the academy graduation requirements again? Honestly, it feels like they change that thing every year."
"I can help," Seiko says.
Chobee does a big show of hemming and hawing, but in the end he pushes a huge stack of papers in her direction.
"All of these need to be back under lock and seal in an hour," he says. "Or Ensui's going to kill us both."
"Isn't this his job to begin with?" Seiko sighs, feeling the tremors in her hands start up immediately as soon as she tries to put ink to paper. It's fine, no one cares if the marks are illegible.
"Technically, either Tonbo or Yakumi are qualified as well...ah, have you met Yakumi yet, Seiko?"
"No, I haven't."
Raido Namiashi, graduated age 10, current rank: genin. Still Alive.
"I think you'd like her. But she's Uchiha, so she's not allowed to work here full time. So she's over in the Police right now. But she'll come back next month!"
Aoba Yamashiro, graduated age 8, current rank: genin. Still Alive.
"Oh, wait... I think she might've been the one on duty when I asked to transfer here."
Kiyomu Fukuda, graduated age 9, current rank: genin. Died age 9 on Rank C mission upgraded to Rank S mission.
"Oh, is that so? That's wonderful! She usually gets a ton of complaints from the desk about not being helpful enough."
Iwana Akame, graduated age 11, current rank: genin. Still Alive.
"It was Ensui who wasn't helpful at all," Seiko mutters, quietly inputting more and more of the data points while doing her best to keep her rice and chopsticks away from everything.
Hoheto Hyuga, graduated age 9, current rank: genin. Still Alive
"It's his job to make sure everyone who works here can be trusted," Chobee says, voice matter of fact. "The Hokage trusts Ensui-san completely, and that means Ensui takes responsibility for all of this."
Yoshino Nara, graduated age 10, current rank: chunin. Still Alive.
"Responsibility? Ensui?"
Tsume Inuzuka, graduated age 9, current rank: jounin. Still Alive.
"He's actually quite young for this position, you know," Chobee says. "He just seems so old to you because you're so young yourself."
Kakashi Hatake, graduated age 5, current rank: genin. Still Alive.
"Why'd he come here, then? Surely there's better places for an up and coming young jounin."
Chobee gives her a rather sad look.
"Surely there's better places for an up and coming young genin," he says, voice gentle.
Seiko gives him an ugly look in return.
"You've made your point," she says.
"What's this?" Ensui's voice floats down the hallway as he wanders into the room, summoned from some cushioned pit of hell by Chobee's defense of his character. "Gossip? So early in the morning?"
"Data analysis is boring work," Seiko says.
"Wow!" Ensui yawns. "Sure glad that you two are so on top of that, then. A great day for you to pitch in and come to work ahead of time." His own hair is halfway falling out of its own ponytail, looking a lot like he'd done it in a hurry, blindly, in a windstorm.
Seiko glowers at him, then looks down at the sheet. What was--
Ah.
Seiko Hatake, graduated age 9, current rank: genin. Still Alive.
A/N: It's a different kind of story than my other works, lol. But in the end, I don't really think of this story as angst. It's just slice of life, and sometimes the slice is bad.