Don't be defeated by DNA.

-

Naruto had just had the ward placed on him, so he was still too woozy to stay on his feet and was lying on the couch. Kakashi was left to stand while Tsunade spoke to him.

"Allowing the fox demon's tainted vessel and a missingnin sought by one of our worst enemies to live in the same apartment would create a riot, and I don't want to leave that boy alone. Besides, I doubt anyone in Konoha is willing to rent a place to him," Tsunade had said, before going on to inform Kakashi that she was placing Sasuke under his watch until further notice.

Kakashi reminded her that he'd been selected to train another genin team this year and asked if he was expected to keep guard over the teenager while dealing with them. Tsunade said that he was going to fail them anyway, so it shouldn't be that much of a trouble.

He had thought about it for a moment, and then said that he doubted his own landlord would look too favorably on him keeping a missingnin sought by one of their worst enemies in the building. Tsunade said that she would speak to him about it. Kakashi had refrained from raising an eyebrow and asked if she could get his rent lowered while she was at it.

Tsunade told him not to push his luck and go find the Uchiha brat.

When they were walking down the hallway to the outside door, however, she said in a voice low enough it was possible Naruto didn't overhear it through his dizziness: "Make it clear to him that he cannot leave the village unattended, not even to the training grounds. The anbu will have orders to kill him if he does."

Kakashi looked at her from the corner of his eye. "Is that necessary? I know Sasuke."

"And I know Orochimaru," she replied flatly. "Until he's dead, it is necessary. I've made enough exceptions for him; the rule is for missingnins to be killed."

Kakashi remembered the time when he had insisted on living by rules. But he had been young then, and too stupid to see what was most important.

That was not a wise thing to tell a Hokage nearly twice his age, so Kakashi only nodded and said, "Yes, Tsunade-sama."

If Sasuke was irritated when Kakashi warned him, he didn't say anything either; and there was no change in the sullen, distant expression that was the teenager's de facto mien. Kakashi took that as a sign that Sasuke would obey the rule, even if he didn't like it, and left things at that.

-

Kakashi had lived on his own ever since he moved out of his house at fourteen, the year he'd traded an eye for a sharingan, but living with Sasuke wasn't a drastic change. He was quiet, clean, and aside from the floor space that Kakashi lost to his futon, left as much of a mark on the place as a ghost.

He'd told Sasuke that he didn't have to sleep on the floor - as long as the teenager slept on the side of the bed that wasn't against the wall so he would be the one to fall off, Kakashi didn't care - but Sasuke said he preferred it.

As Kakashi found out the first night, this was because Sasuke had nightmares.

He also found out that trying to rouse Sasuke from those nightmares would be hazardous to his health. When he moved to shake the teenager awake, Kakashi had only touched his arm before Sasuke was up and flung a pair of shurikan at him.

Kakashi was mildly grateful that he hadn't had his sharingan covered.

The teenager was staring at him blankly, dark eyes wide and muscles so tense that he was almost shaking, so Kakashi reached up and ruffled his hair. He watched a few strands fall to the ground, and noted that he hadn't moved aside fast enough.

"I keep meaning to get a haircut, but I never seem to get around to it when they're open . . ." he commented.

Sasuke, now that instinct was no longer overriding his thoughts, had the civility to look abashed. "Sorry," he muttered, looking away. ". . . It's a reflex." His hands tightened around the blanket for a moment, before he abruptly turned around and lay back down, facing the wall.

To anyone else, the gesture would have seemed rude - but Kakashi could guess how much effort it took for Sasuke to leave his back vulnerable like that. It was a sign of trust more than an apology, but it made the point.

Kakashi sighed inaudibly, worked one of the shurikans out of the wall and the other out of the doorframe, and set them beside Sasuke's pillow before going back to bed.

When he looked over a quarter of an hour later, the shurikans were hidden and Sasuke was sleeping with his back against the wall again.

-

He'd noticed the scars while putting the second seal on him - two long lines, parallel to Sasuke's spine, each over four inches wide and looking as though they had been reopened several times. When he'd asked Sasuke about them, the teenager only said they were a result of the curse seal. Kakashi never learned more until one of the days he was monitoring Sasuke and Naruto's sparring.

Whatever additional damage Orochimaru had done to Sasuke's already unstable mentality, Kakashi had to acknowledge that he trained the teenager well. It had been a while since he'd seen someone who could keep up with Naruto for extended periods of time, and Sasuke was fighting with much more detachment than before.

The two spent most of their days yelling at and fighting with each other and calling it training for lack of anything else to do. Kakashi had been returning from the third series of tests that his genin team was failing, and found them while crossing one of the training grounds. He'd sent the team back home, convinced the anbu guard that he could handle watching the two for a few hours, and settled on one of the posts to keep a vague eye out so neither of them would try to throw the other into a tree.

When he made them break apart for lunch, Kakashi thought there would be no harm in reading - the worst he expected was a food fight. That was why he hadn't been paying attention to what they were saying right until Naruto snapped, "Well, claws are better than wings!"

That made no damn sense, and thus attracted Kakashi's attention. There was a long silence, and finally Sasuke replied, "Yeah, right. Wings are more useful."

Kakashi raised the eyebrow hidden behind his forehead protector and turned a page.

"They are not! I bet you can't even fly with those things!"

"At least I can hide mine," Sasuke snapped.

Naruto bristled and stood up. "At least mine don't hurt!"

Kakashi closed his book.

Sasuke was glaring. "At least I wasn't stupid enough to !"

Naruto put his hands on his hips, and his smile was curled up just enough that his incisors were visible. "To what, Sasuke? Huh?"

"To completely fuck up my dreams and then talk about them like they're still possible!" Sasuke burst out, shoving himself onto his feet as well. "You who still keeps going on and on about being Hokage! Open your eyes - you and I are going to be genin for the rest of our lives!"

Kakashi jumped off the post.

Naruto laughed.

"You think I don't know that?" the blond said, folding his arms behind his head. "But if a guy like Lee can become a jounin, then I can still be Hokage."

"It's not the same thing," Sasuke said lowly, staring at him.

"So what?" Naruto snarled. His arms fell to his sides, the hands clenched into fists. "I said I'd be Hokage even if I was a genin all my life! Let everyone underestimate my control over it, I don't care! It's not gonna stop me, dammit!"

It was very quiet. Kakashi was watching their body language carefully and ready to move at the first sign of a fight, Naruto was glaring at Sasuke, and Sasuke was staring back.

Naruto finally glanced away first, looking over Sasuke's shoulder. He scratched the side of his head. "Besides, I'll be the first genin to be Hokage. No one's ever done that before. Think how cool it'll be."

Sasuke's lips thinned slightly, before he closed his eyes and snorted. "You're the stupidest person I've ever met."

He took a step back, finally putting some space between him and the blond, and sat down next to his food again.

"And you're the biggest !"

"Shut up and eat, Naruto," Sasuke interrupted. "You're wasting time."

Naruto blinked at him a few times. Then he glanced over his shoulder at Kakashi, who was still standing; and finally he sat down and started eating the food that was now a little more dusty than before.

Kakashi moved back to his seat on the post and reopened his book, but didn't consider reading.

A few more minutes passed in silence, until Naruto muttered around a mouthful of cold rice: "Claws are still cooler than wings."

"Whatever," Sasuke replied.

-

That evening, Sasuke asked "Fight me with the sharingan."

Kakashi thought that was a spectacularly bad idea and told him so. Sasuke was silent for the rest of the night.

He was quiet all of the next day, too, speaking only when necessary, and for the beginning of the day after that as well.

Kakashi didn't give in because of the quiet - he'd lived alone for half his life, he was used to it; and Sasuke hadn't been the chattiest of roommates in the first place - but because he knew what was hiding behind the irritation the quiet was supposed to convey.

Even though Sasuke now slept with the blanket pulled over his head due to the weather and the fact that the floor was colder than the bed, Kakashi could tell that his nightmares had become worse. The first night, the same one that Sasuke had made his request, Kakashi sat up in his bed and listened to the hitched sound of the teenager's breathing as he cried in his sleep. The sound was very faint, nearly imperceptible, and muffled even further due to the blanket, but it was still there.

He knew that Sasuke would be shamed if he was revealed to be crying. That was the reason Kakashi stayed in the bed, despite the insistent voice that told him Sasuke had been left alone before and it had resulted in this.

Eventually Sasuke's breathing shifted to the slightly choked tone that signaled an attempt to breathe normally through tears, and Kakashi silently laid back down and closed his eyes.

After a few minutes, there was a rustle from the futon. He heard Sasuke pad across the floor, the click of a lock, and the soft splashing of water through the bathroom door.

Sasuke remained in the bathroom a long time after he'd shut the water off. When he did leave, he walked quickly across the room and slid back under his covers, pulling them over his head once more.

Kakashi remained awake until he was certain Sasuke was sleeping quietly.

He said nothing the next day - he was sure Sasuke had guessed that he'd been awake, but there was no reason to wound the teenager's pride further by confirming it. But over breakfast the morning after that, Kakashi asked: "Are you ready to go training?"

Sasuke paused. Then he looked up and said, "Don't you have a meeting with your team today?"

Kakashi frowned. "Do I? . . . Huh."

Sasuke snorted and took another drink of tea.

-

Kakashi was sure that the fight was going to leave him with a headache tomorrow. When Sasuke moved, he could see the motions the teenager was going to make and was able to block them; but Sasuke could see the motions he was going to block with and then shifted his attack, rendering them useless. Kakashi spent several minutes on the defense and avoided using any chakra until he got used to the rapidly altering images. It took him that long because it was compounded by the strangeness that always came when he had to see out of one normal eye and one eye that saw nothing but faint and vivid reds.

The first time they broke apart long enough to breathe and reassess their attacks, Sasuke said, "You know there's another form of the sharingan."

It was a way to bring up the topic rather than an actual question; Sasuke knew that Kakashi had been incapacitated the same way as him.

"The mangekyou," Kakashi agreed.

"Do you know how to attain it?"

Kakashi raised his eyebrow before remembering that it was no longer hidden by the forehead protector. "The Uchiha family guards their secrets almost as well as the Hyuuga," he replied. "I only know of it."

"I do," Sasuke replied, and attacked again.

Twenty minutes later, they broke apart again, and Kakashi could feel the pressure building behind his left temple. Hints of strain were beginning to show in Sasuke's face as well; but he was clearly just taking a break and not ready to end the fight, and Kakashi wanted to get this over with today rather than spend the next few weeks with migraines.

He was holding his own, but it wouldn't last: Sasuke had two eyes, and he had one. Sasuke had the Uchiha blood that the eye answered to, and Kakashi only had in himself the few drops that had come with the eye. And Sasuke simply cared more.

Kakashi watched the teenager regain his breath while still holding a defensive posture and checking for any offensive movements from himself, and wondered what it was like to fight in nothing but shades of red. He wondered what kind of effect it had on your mind.

"It takes special circumstances. You have to kill your closest friend," Sasuke said abruptly, and that took a moment to sink in.

Kakashi's eyes widened. "Kill your closest. . . . Who told you that?"

The answer was obvious before he even finished the question. Sasuke's eyes flicked away for less than a second before refocusing on just Kakashi's sharingan.

He watched Sasuke's features go blank and calculating for the fight, revealing nothing else.

"Itachi lied to you," Kakashi said flatly.

The teenager narrowed his eyes, but before he could say anything, Kakashi smiled cheerfully, tapped the scar over his cheekbone, and continued. "I've never attained it."

When he opened his eyes again, Sasuke was staring at him with an expression that was almost painful to see.

Kakashi didn't look away. He'd always looked straight back when people were disappointed by his father's death, by Rin's death, by the news of what had happened to Obito. If he stared long enough, he'd found that he could make them look aside first.

Sasuke was no different, and after a minute he glanced away.

Kakashi wondered if he would believe it. There were plenty of ways Sasuke could ignore his statement; he wasn't a part of the bloodline, and it had taken him two years of intense use and training just to move beyond the state that Obito had reached. Besides, he had very little understanding of the mangekyou, and no idea what Itachi had told Sasuke - it might have been the truth.

He hadn't killed Obito with his own hands, after all. He'd just been responsible for his death. It could be that the sharingan didn't acknowledge those as the same thing.

Kakashi waited for a while before taking a step to the side. When he did, Sasuke's gaze snapped back to him and he slid into a defensive stance. Kakashi accepted that the fight wasn't over and echoed the movements, waiting for Sasuke to attack first.

Sasuke was distracted for the first few minutes, so much so that Kakashi managed to land a solid kick to his stomach and send the teenager skidding along the ground. Sasuke quickly converted the motion into a roll, got back on his feet, crouched, and watched him.

Kakashi checked that he hadn't caused any real damage, and gave Sasuke a disapproving look for enabling him to get a hit.

When Sasuke attacked next, he was finally concentrating on the fight again, and deflected all Kakashi's blows while nearly landing a few of his own. Kakashi was glad - if he was going to have a migraine from this fight, it had better be for a good reason.

It quickly became obvious that Sasuke was fighting someone other than him. Kakashi finally teleported to avoid a flame and shurikan combination, and ducked to avoid the kunai that Sasuke had spun around and flung.

"I think that's enough training for today," Kakashi commented, straightening. "I'd like to see tomorrow. And I'm sure I'm expected meet my team at some point on the same day we have practice."

Sasuke was silent for several moments, pretending that he was catching his breath. He laughed shortly.

"You never showed up this late for us," he said. "Are they that bad?"

"There's no one as scathing as Sakura on this team," Kakashi replied. "They all actually have patience, unlike you three."

"'Patience,'" Sasuke repeated disbelievingly. "You're not passing them, are you?"

"Not if they fail the fourth tests," Kakashi replied.

He began the walk back to Konoha, and Sasuke fell in step beside him.

It would have been quicker to teleport, and easier on his already-taxed muscles, but the only times that Sasuke was able to leave Konoha's walls was when he went to the training grounds. So Kakashi - and Naruto, in his far-less-than-subtle way - walked, to give him more time outside.

The risk of being attacked by the Sound was very high, he knew; but if the protective measures laid on Sasuke became too smothering for the teenager to bear, Kakashi was sure that he would flee again. And this time coming back wouldn't be an option. Kakashi preferred the risk, since it countered the certainty.

Watching out for Sasuke was a headache in its own right, but Kakashi had known that three years ago, and it hadn't stopped him then, either.

Besides, Sasuke echoed enough of his own past that it wasn't difficult to navigate the boundaries and walls the teenager surrounded himself with. It wasn't easy, it was never easy to deal with a young genius, let alone one who had a great deal of inner strength resting on a prop that could easily be kicked away by the wrong name; but Kakashi had a vague comparison to draw on, so it wasn't difficult.

Even if there had been someone else capable of seeing past Sasuke's façade back then, or willing to look out for him now, they would make a fatal mistake from their lack of understanding. Kakashi was aware of this, and didn't allow the headache to stop him.

-'-

Despite the fights that they never apologized for, Sasuke and Naruto still spent a considerable amount of time together. Whenever they weren't training, they were usually with Sakura - and by default, Lee.

No matter what happened or what the rest of Konoha thought, Sasuke had realized that he would always be welcome at Sakura's. It wasn't something that he would allow himself to take advantage of, because that would admit too much, but he liked knowing it. It wasn't hard to let himself be dragged over there again and again by Naruto.

Besides, Lee's cooking was much better than Kakashi's. Kakashi lived off instant food, coffee, and toast. Sasuke would almost be willing to go to Sakura's even if she didn't want him, just to get vegetables.

He always thought of the apartment as "Sakura's," but in reality, it was Lee's. It was just easy to think it of it as hers, since she all but slept there.

One night, after nearly three weeks had passed and while they were walking back from escorting Sakura to her house (she had been given a curfew for non-mission nights, since she was the first of her family in two generations to be a ninja and her parents still insisted on a certain level of civilian respectability), Sasuke asked Naruto how long she and Lee had been together.

"Two years," he replied. "And three months."

Sasuke paused to consider that. Then the corners of his mouth curled up. "How many weeks?"

". . . shut up," Naruto muttered.

They walked in silence down another street, and Naruto started swinging his arms at his sides, restless.

"But they're happy," he said. "I think they'll be happy. . . . Hinata told me that Ino said they were thinking about getting married, when Lee's old enough to propose. I bet they are, but he just blushes and she always changes the subject when I ask."

Sasuke's gaze focused on the ground in the distance while he contemplated. "Lee still only has taijutsu?"

"Yeah," Naruto said, dropping his voice slightly. ". . . And Tsunade usually keeps Sakura-chan on chuunin and jounin teams, but with all the recent shit with the Sound she's gone with some of the anbu. She's too good not to."

Sasuke's contemplating frown deepened just enough to become a faint glare. They walked several more blocks.

". . . They'll be happy," Naruto said.

Sasuke didn't disagree.

-

He left Naruto at his apartment and, since he technically wasn't allowed to walk the streets by himself, teleported back to Kakashi's.

Naruto sucked at the teleport jutsu now that he had to actually maintain chakra precisely, and Sasuke heard him yell "Showoff!" just before he disappeared.

-'-

Kakashi blinked when Sasuke appeared in the middle of the room, but didn't look up from his book. "Is it raining?"

"I didn't feel like being followed," Sasuke replied flatly as he walked back to the entrance.

The anbu would be knocking in several minutes, Kakashi noted.

While Sasuke was taking off his sandals and setting them by the door, he asked, "Are they sending Sakura out with anbu teams?"

Kakashi looked over at him. "Yes."

"Why?"

"Because we have a shortage of medical ninjas," he replied, stating the obvious. "And Tsunade-sama isn't the type to shelter people."

"And she and Lee are both fine with it."

"It's the life we've all chosen," Kakashi replied, looking back to his book.

Several moments later, he watched Sasuke's feet go past as he walked to the window ledge and sat down. The teenager stared out into the alley that led to the street.

"She's not annoying when she doesn't think she's in love with me," Sasuke told him, looking out the window. "She's . . . a good friend."

Kakashi's expression wasn't visible through the mask.

The apartment was quiet for a little while. An anbu started to walk down the alley, then saw Sasuke at the window and left again. Kakashi finished the book, but he could tell that Sasuke still had something to say, so he flipped back to his favorite section and waited for the teenager to figure out what it was.

"I never asked him to come after me," Sasuke said, so quietly that the violence in his tone almost wasn't audible. "It's stupid. I never pretended this place was anything but a way to learn. I never gave them . . . I never gave anyone a reason to think otherwise."

Kakashi closed the book and looked over. Sasuke was still glaring out the window, so Kakashi stared at his reflection until he finally turned to face him.

He wondered how long it was going to take the teenager to accept that he had people who cared about him again, and said: "That's the point of having comrades, Sasuke. You don't have to ask."

When Sasuke stared at him, the desperation to believe that was hidden so well behind those dark bangs made Kakashi suspect it would be years. At the least.

Sasuke looked away from him, looked at the two picture frames that sat on the shelf above his bed, and looked out the window again.

". . . Why did you kill him?" Sasuke finally asked.

He looked up at the picture frame. "Because I was a fool back then."

"And you're not anymore?"

The corner of Kakashi's mouth twitched upwards. "I'd like to think so. . . ."

Sasuke didn't reply, not even with a snort, and soon quiet settled in the apartment again.

It wasn't a peaceful quiet - it was permeated with nightmares and emotions that felt like they couldn't be changed and words that were painful to say. And headaches. Many, many headaches.

But Kakashi was getting used to the headaches again. He'd had a permanent one for two years and eight months, when every morning that he woke up and saw the sharingan in the mirror he would remember he'd failed Sasuke. The only difference between that headache and these was that he had a tangible source again. And he could actually do something about them.

Even if it took years, Kakashi would be there until the quiet was finally peaceful.

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