Crouching on a branch with the help of just the barest touch of chakra, Kakashi remained perfectly still to listen to the trees. He felt Pakkun shift on his shoulder, stubby pug nose in the air to sniff for any trace of their quarry. Minato-sensei was nearby, they could be sure of that.

But where nearby was the question.

Kakashi slowly turned his head, tracking sounds and smells relative to himself to paint a mental image of his surroundings. Navigating through the trees while blindfolded was proving to be very difficult.

Tracking, even more so.

There was a soft shush—grass and leaves being moved out of the way—as something quietly padded across the forested ground directly below him. Kakashi nearly threw a slew of shuriken at the source before his mind caught up to inform him that the quality of the sound suggested greenery against fur, not fabric.

Pakkun shifted his weight on his paws in a specific movement, confirming that it was a non-threat.

He took a long breath, keeping it carefully slow and steadily silent. It smelled like lush greenery, sunlight through leaves, dirt, the animals that lived in the area, and running water. He could hear the last, faintly; a small creek snaked between the trees nearby. Wind ghosted through the branches.

A jutsu kept his own trail from muddling up what he could smell, though Minato-sensei was likely using a similar technique on himself—

Whisper sharp and nearly inaudible, a kunai thunked into the wood where his feet had been moments before. Kakashi was already leaping away, unsure if that weapon had three prongs and unwilling to risk proximity if it did.

He also loosed a kunai behind him, a paper flash-seal attached to its hilt. Just in case.

After all, given the cloth tied over his eyes, it's not as though he'd be disadvantaged by a blindingly bright burst of light. The knife hit wood, though he thought it sounded like it had hit the trunk rather than the branch he had been aiming for.

Pakkun stiffened, which definitely meant that—

"A flash-seal? Kakashi, what if I hadn't already known where you were?"

An instant later he felt a sort of click and, even through the blindfold, the surge of light was quite visible. His teacher had a good point, though. If he hadn't already been found out, a beacon like that wouldn't exactly help with the whole sneak-and-find aspect of this exercise.

Too late now, he needed to make himself scarce.

And fast.

Dashing through the trees that he couldn't see, Kakashi flipped through the hand signs for the most basic clone technique. Two clones with their own pug companions puffed into existence, and he tossed them a pair of alarm seals. The first ran ahead, then phased through the ground: becoming the bait for a trapped pit he had prepared ahead of time. When Kakashi passed, he primed the triggers and pulsed his chakra, hopefully giving the impression that he had just performed a jutsu to hide underground.

The second clone darted off to his right, jumping along the lower branches of the trees. He had run along those particular trees earlier, so the fact that the immaterial clone left no trail should be harder to detect.

Kakashi himself continued on a straight path, careful to keep his chakra signature suppressed and leave as little trace as possible. The sound of water grew louder, meaning he was definitely heading in the right direction. Jumping out of the foliage—he could feel the warmth of the sun on his skin—Kakashi landed on the surface of the creek.

Water walking was much trickier when blind, apparently. He slid across the surface for a few steps, adjusting to standing on a changing surface he couldn't even see.

The alarm seal from his trapped pit tweaked his chakra, informing him that his first false trail had been caught and disarmed. He flicked out another clone, passed it a seal, and this one continued his straight trajectory back into the forest on the other side of the creek.

Disguising a trail over water is easier than over land, just needing a twist to the chakra in his steps to help the energy disperse into the water more quickly after he moved on. It would have been the ideal route to send a non-solid clone on.

Which is precisely why he didn't.

Not that Kakashi really thought his teacher was actually falling for any of his false leads; they would probably be good enough to reliably fool unwary chunin, but certainly not jonin.

And certainly not jonin like Minato-sensei.

Sensors can be so tricky to deal with.

Still, he was probably going to follow each trail anyway. This was training, after all, and he would want to see what sort of plan his student was setting up.

Another alarm seal meant that Minato-sensei had just caught the second clone, confirming his speculation. It also meant that his teacher was as far away as he was going to get; his range as a sensor is, frankly, annoyingly large, but any distance should help to dampen the ability.

Kakashi jumped and flipped his hands through a weak suiton jutsu, and when he landed on the surface of the creek again, the water folded under his feet. He sank all the way down, completely enclosed in a thin bubble of air. With a quick henge, he looked like nothing more than a collection of rocks at the bottom of the creek.

Then he got to work on the second purpose for this training exercise: chakra suppression.

On his shoulder, Pakkun kept watch on the surface of the water. Smell wouldn't be much help underwater, and sound tended to do strange things, so it was up to the pug to keep an eye out.

The third clone was dispelled, its seal sending the alert back to Kakashi.

Not much longer now, and he'd find out if his ruse would hold. A minute passed.

Pakkun tensed.

"Well done," came the muffled voice of his teacher, likely standing on the surface with a big grin. "I almost missed you down there."

Well, that answered that question: he was caught. Kakashi scowled and pulled off the blindfold while still underwater, taking that remark to signal the end of this attempt. As he had expected, the blurry image of Minato-sensei through the water was still unmistakably smiling.

Not wanting to bother with the hassle of getting from treading water to standing on it—no point wasting chakra unnecessarily—Kakashi swam to shore.

Pakkun jumped from his shoulder and onto dry land at the earliest opportunity. "Maybe make the bubble a bit bigger next time, Boss," he quipped, shaking off some water that had apparently gotten on the top of his head.

Carding a hand through his damp silvery hair, Kakashi had to agree with his canine companion. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Also keep in mind that it's tricky trying to hide chakra being used in a jutsu," Minato-sensei added, joining him on shore with a proud smile. "You did well, but we'll definitely need to practice that."

"It's hard." It was a frank agreement, no hint of whining or complaint.

His teacher nodded, contemplatively flipping through a few hand signs and presumably feeling how his chakra shifted. "That'll be for the future, I suppose," Minato-sensei hummed at last, after a moment spent thinking. "I'll see what I can come up with. For now we should head back."

"What?" Kakashi glanced toward the creek, gauging the time based on how the shadows of the trees played across the water. "But it's barely past noon."

"I have some teamwork exercises planned for the afternoon," he said, with a sunny smile and his usual cheery tone.

Kakashi was suddenly very suspicious.

"'Teamwork exercises'?" asked Kakashi cautiously.

Minato-sensei just grinned, and switched the topic non-too-subtly back to the exercise.

As they walked back toward the entrance of the training ground, his teacher went over some of the other points he had noticed: tracking, situational awareness, trap laying, and so on. Mainly that the false trails were less effective than the pit trap, but that they will work better once he learns solid clones. Still, even with limited techniques, Kakashi found it reassuring to hear that his teacher had been impressed.

He could go without that sneaky-pleased smile he caught on his teacher's face between topics, though.

"Sensei," Kakashi said, when the blond stepped over a root with a bit too much spring in his step. "What, exactly, did you mean by a teamwork exercise?"

It was a little concerning that Minato-sensei didn't answer right away, though he also didn't switch the conversation again. Instead he looked like he was carefully trying to find just the right words, and his smile, though still undeniably excited, was slightly worried.

"Ah, well... I have good news!"

Kakashi trusted his teacher implicitly, but he wasn't sure how he felt about that happy-nervous tone.

"We're getting a genin team!"

"What."

"Or, well, they haven't graduated yet," Minato-sensei continued. "It's sort of a special arrangement, all things considered."

He was still walking, but that was mostly auto-pilot. His teacher was still talking, and while he was still listening and categorizing everything being said, Kakashi wasn't processing it at the moment.

It was a given that he would be added to a team eventually, and probably sooner rather than later: just an unfortunate fact of life.

Still, Minato-sensei had seemed perfectly willing to wait a few years. Kakashi suspected that his teacher was hoping that team members around Kakashi's own age—if not skill—would help him to 'make friends' with them. As if teammates needed to be friends.

To himself, and so quietly that even Pakkun couldn't hear, Kakashi asked, "Then... Why now?"

=X=X=X=

It was the perfect time. Morimoto had left a few days ago now, the store was closed at the moment, and Minato wasn't planning on coming by until dinner. Nobody would walk in on him, unless a ninja decided to jump through his bedroom window.

Which could happen, to be fair.

Axel leaned back in his desk chair, not quite looking at the login illuminating his laptop screen. He glanced to the window for a moment, briefly, just wondering if maybe he should close the curtains. It was a miracle of dead batteries and sheer dumb luck that had kept his computer from gaining attention thus far, and he didn't want to botch that good fortune. Anyone who had seen it before he had woken up had probably just thought it to be a crappy mirror or something.

A part of him distractedly wondered if they even had computers in this world. After all, he had yet to see anything like it, including when it had just been a show. The only tech he could remember from the anime that might count was that random name generator that paired off fighters during the Chunin Exam; not really much of a computer, all things considered.

Then again, having only personally watched up through said exam arc, there were a lot of episodes that he hadn't ever seen. There's no telling what sorts of things he had missed.

And so he was brought right back around to why he was sitting here in the first place.

The text cursor blinked at him, waiting for him to login.

Axel typed in his password, and the screen loaded up his familiar desktop background: a picture of a misty camp scene, white canvas tents with towels drying on the guylines. It was from the last trip he had gone on with his university club, just before his ill-fated trip to Japan.

Not that the away trip was the problem, obviously. The return was where things had gone sideways.

Smiling at the background, he then navigated his way to the folder reserved for all the random things his sister sent him; mostly story snippets she had written or fan art she'd drawn, but she sent other things as well. Adri—after dealing with one-too-many dead links or blocked content—tended to just download and send files over wholesale.

His sister's eccentric file habits meant Axel had copies of videos, images, memes, and more. Though some of the blame for that was the fact that he kept the files she sent him, renaming them and organizing them by topic.

There were a few different folders for different shows, which he maintained mostly in the hope that doing so would help him to follow along with her excited rambling. Though he had been considering just making a text file to keep track, rather than keeping all the videos and such.

He had never been more glad that he hadn't gotten around to cleaning out his computer.

Scrolling down the list of Naruto-related documents, Axel hesitated with his cursor hovering over the name of his best friend. It would seem there was an actual folder set aside for Minato, which was just a point in favor of that nagging feeling that his friend really was a more important character in the anime than he wanted to admit.

Axel decided that he'd come back to that later.

A little farther down, there was another name he recognized: 'Orochimaru'. That creepy snake guy who showed up in the Chunin Exam and killed the third Hokage.

He opened that folder, thinking that an evil mad-scientist type was as good a place to start as any. Ignoring the clips of fights, Axel opened a few of the text files. They were short fanfiction excerpts, mostly, with a few notes on possible continuations scattered here and there.

Apparently, or at least according to his sister's interpretation, Orochimaru had been kicked out of the village because he was caught performing unethical human experimentation. And there were discomfiting suggestions that he wasn't working alone; there was some guy in the village government that had enabled those tests.

Hopefully Adri had taken some creative liberty with that, but, pessimistically, he kind of doubted it.

Axel closed the documents, unsettled. He ignored a lot of the other files tagged with names he recognized, as most of those people probably hadn't even been born yet.

The folder labeled 'Akatsuki' didn't fit what he was looking for, given it seemed to be an organization based in another country. Probably unrelated to the local murder mystery. Plus, it might not even exist yet. Otherwise, that group seemed fairly important to the overall plot; at the very least, it looked like almost everybody could be connected back there somehow.

There was actually an image file that lined out some of the more twisty teacher-student-teammate relationships, though he doubted it would help him at the moment. He skimmed through some of the steps from the first Hokage, then, when he saw Minato included in the tree, decided it was too much to deal with right now. He'd come back to it later.

Actually, on the topic of teachers and students, for the past day or so Minato had been worrying about his own student a lot. Axel couldn't remember how the topic had first come up, but maybe he had been a bit too blunt with his opinion on children forgoing a peaceful childhood for training with knives.

He knew this world was different from his own—some of the characters in the show had been promoted at ridiculously young ages, when kids should just be figuring out crayons—but still. Clearly his points had hit a few chords with his friend.

Although at least Minato had seemed more hopeful than concerned when he stopped by this past morning.

His cursor moved back toward his friend's folder, tempted.

Axel wondered if it would count as an invasion of privacy, reading or watching through versions of his friend's life. He personally thought so, though the ninja mentality probably differed. They might even go so far as to think him crazy for even hesitating.

The thought made him smile slightly. He glanced toward the window again, imagining—

Minato was at the window.

"Was zur Hölle—?!" Axel exclaimed, startled and scrambling to close the laptop and get to the window. And, somewhere in there, kicking his foot into his desk in the process. Hard. He crouched, grabbing his foot with a low hiss of pain.

Honestly, part of Axel thought to himself in a detached sort of way, he should have expected something like this. Because ninjas.

"Oh, crap, uh... Sorry, Axel." Apparently Minato, being a ninja, had no issues opening the locked second floor window from the outside; Axel decided not to think about that too much. "I didn't mean to scare you like that."

At least he seemed a bit sheepish about the whole thing.

"Is fine," Axel said, giving his toes a wiggle just to be sure. "You're early."

Minato let himself in, lightly dropping from the windowsill. "I figured you might want some forewarning."

That's ominous. He would have said as much, if he knew the word.

Instead, Axel asked, "What about?"

"Well," and Minato looked very pleased about this, "I have two more students now."

There came a young, impatient voice from outside. "Minato-sensei?"

Glancing toward the window, Axel couldn't help but smirk a little. "You had a solid few seconds lead, there."

"It's the thought that counts."

The two of them headed downstairs, and Axel considered his dinner plan. There should be enough food for two more, as, luckily enough, the six pack of meat had been on sale. Assuming none of the students were members of that one clan—the Akimichi clan—he should have plenty. The main change would be how long it took to prepare five schnitzel rather than just three.

There came a few insistent knocks at the front door.

"We're coming, we're coming."

Axel opened the door, the little bell hanging off the frame giving a welcoming chime.

There were three kids, as expected. They all looked to be around seven or eight years old, which was less expected: after all, in the anime, the protagonists didn't graduate until they were already twelve. Two of them were largely unfamiliar, a girl with odd purple marks on her cheeks and a boy with orange goggles.

The third... Axel did recognize.

Because the third was a miniature, angsty-looking Hatake Kakashi, inexplicably standing at his doorstep with two other kid ninja.

And—honest to goodness—the first thing Axel felt about this was a vague sort of surprise that the ninja's hair was as silver and gravity defying as the show would have viewers believe. This was followed swiftly by the thought that this young Kakashi looked far less chill than his older counterpart.

"You're Axel?" said mini-Kakashi, looking between his teacher and the similarly colored adult that was staring at him in surprise.

The boy with goggles made a funny-sounding noise of confusion. "He's a-who-now?"

Minato stepped in with a smile. "Team, this is Brandt Axel. He's a friend of mine. Axel, these are my new students," he made sure to point out each student as he named them, "Nohara Rin, Uchiha Obito, and Hatake Kakashi."

Axel, for one, was realizing quite a lot of things. Most importantly, however, was that his best friend was apparently the teacher for the person who would grow up to become the teacher of the titular character. This was followed by the annoying-but-funny thought that he wouldn't be dealing with this surprise if only he had read a few more lines of that relationship chart.

Nothing for it now, though.

"Nice to meet you," Axel said, stepping back to let them inside. "No bother with your shoes."

The goggles kid—now known to be called Obito—gave him a curious look. "You talk weird."

"Yes."

Axel sighed, just a little. Dinner was going to be... interesting.