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Kakashi was not homeless.
He owned a house. It had been his father’s house before, but his father was…gone, now. So the house was Kakashi’s. It was a big house, with seven rooms and a front yard, and a backyard with a pond, and a decently sized vegetable garden beside that. It was all Kakashi’s, so therefore, he was not homeless.
The house was, admittedly, a very big house. Kakashi’s tiny pattering footsteps on old floorboards would echo for days, in a way that made the house seem bigger, and emptier. He could sleep in a different room for every day of the week, except one, but only because the blood stains wouldn’t come out of the wood.
So his house was big, and very empty.
Oh, it was empty, but it was full too. It was full of dust, because there just wasn’t enough time between training and missions to clean the place often. It was full of old furniture, and ceremonial weapons and mildewed scrolls. It was full of something that was never quite there, but still there all the same, like ghosts that only turned visible in his peripheral vision, and vanished when he tried to pick them out.
It made the house seem haunted, in a funny way, even if Kakashi knew that ghosts weren’t real.
The front yard was mostly weeds, and bits of broken fences, and trash that people still threw, because the house reminded them of the previous owner, whom they had despised. There weren’t a lot of things Kakashi could do about that. They were mostly civilians, you see, because shinobi took out their anger in a different way, and Kakashi was a chuunin, which made it illegal for him to raise a finger in retaliation. So he did what he could, and cleaned up what he saw, but mostly, he avoided the front yard.
He would steal away towards the backyard instead, past the withered plants in the garden, past the koi pond with the dead floating fish, and into the forest beyond that.
And he’d train there on non-mission days, among trees and liminal stillness, until it was dinnertime. Then he’d catch a couple of fish from the nearby river, return to the empty kitchen to prepare a meal, and set the table for one.
And because the house was full and messy and, though he might never admit it, lonely, Kakashi didn’t sleep there much.
There were nightmares, often, or his room, whichever one he’d chosen to sleep in that night, would get too still, or quiet, or full, or empty, or bright, if the moon peeped through the window.
It was not because he was scared, he decided in the end, or because he felt anything, but on those nights, he’d know somehow that Tsukiyomi-no-mikoto was lonely, and very tired, and sad in a way that he shouldn’t be. And so Kakashi would creep out of his house, and climb a tree in the forest behind the yard, and fall asleep in the hard embrace of its branches as he kept the moon company.
Kakashi was seven, and then he was eight.
He learned things about sleeping in trees that you’d never know until you did them, or until someone who did them told you about it. He learned how to sleep in a way that wouldn’t cramp his arms or legs, and in a way that made sure he didn’t fall off the branches mid-dose, and in a way that kept him hidden.
He learned that sleeping on benches in the park was okay in the summer, but much less so in winter, when his hands and feet would get numb and itchy, and everything took on a funny sluggish consistency, and so he’d slink back into the warmth of his house but not sleep a wink.
He learned that sleeping in sewers meant hidden and out of the cold and, because the smell lasted for days and lingered around him like an fangirl, a lot of baths. It seeped through his mask and clung to his clothes, and absolutely compromised his sense of smell and hiding position. He never slept there again.
He was eight, and even at eight, Kakashi was a chuunin, and so he was allowed into part of the library that most eight-year-olds were not. Parts which held scrolls and books on ninjutsu after ninjutsu.
“Up to B-ranked techniques only,” the librarian told him, “unless you’ve got a permission slip from a guardian, instructor, or commanding officer.”
Kakashi was a chuunin, and he didn't have a legal guardian anymore, unless you counted the Sandaime Hokage, who was probably legal guardian to every other orphaned minor as well; chuunin, and genin, and academy student. Distantly, he wondered what the librarian's face might look like if Kakashi handed him a handwritten note from the Hokage. The thought was entertained for about all of half a second, then buried deeply in the back of his mind and never brought up again.
Real shinobi didn’t need permission slips anyway.
It was in the section of C-ranked medical ninjutsu that he found a simple technique to circulate heat and maintain his body temperature regardless of the surroundings. He checked the book out, along with two others on chakra theory for a bit of ‘light reading’, and read them cover to cover on a bench outside the Academy which was less stuffy than his house. Then he returned the books the next day with yet another jutsu under his belt.
People didn’t call him a genius for nothing.
They did call him homeless, though, now that with the temperature-regulating jutsu, he was spending even winter months between alleyways or branches.
Kakashi owned a house. He was not homeless.
He was eight, and then he was nine.
Konoha welcomed a new batch of genin into their ranks that year, even as two hundred and fifty more chuunin and jounin lost their lives on the front lines. The war of attrition was starting to take its toll, even on Kakashi’s populous village, eating away at their forces, and it was soon, he knew, before he’d be fighting for his village, and dying.
Maybe not that soon.
“Beg pardon, Hokage-sama?”
“You’ll be part of Namikaze-san’s genin team, starting tomorrow. He wants to meet you at Training Ground Three. Oh nine hundred hours.”
He was eight, then he was nine, and a chuunin of three years, and he found that he’d somehow managed to worm his way onto a team with Konoha’s Yellow Flash and two useless children.
There was no way to protest, and less time to complain. He showed up at the field two minutes before the scheduled reporting time and waited two hours for his last teammate to arrive.
Minato was not named the Yellow Flash for no reason. He had hair like the sun, and eyes like the sky, and swept Kakashi straight off his feet with a blazing smile and a D-rank fuuton jutsu. Obito and Rin were Deadlast and Girl Who Stood Too Close first before they were Uchiha and Nohara, then Obito and Rin. Team Minato was stolen sunlight and rough steel and spun sugar all in one, and Kakashi loved them and envied them and hated them in an instant.
They were a team, the four of them, so they did things together that Kakashi hadn’t done with teams in a long time. They trained together, and went on missions together, and ate together, because Minato said it was a team thing to do, even if Kakashi had never heard of such a thing. Minato was oddly fixated on teamwork for a genius jounin. It was funny, and sad, because Minato was supposed to be smarter than Kakashi, and so was Sakumo, and yet the teamwork rhetoric continued like a village-worth of ridicule meant nothing.
But they grew on him, much like rash grew on skin, in a way that was unnoticeable at first, and then caused unbearable discomfort, and then a funny sort of irritation-resignation-don’t-touch-it and submission to the professional that could remove it.
And so Team Minato was, and so Team Minato grew.
And Team Minato learnt things from each other, the way a proper team should, and built each other up by sharing knowledge.
Minato taught the most, because he was Sensei. He would teach them things a normal sensei would; how to survive, how to take a life, how to improve their strategy from textbook Academy knowledge. He’d teach Kakashi things that were far beyond chuunin-level, and esoteric ninjutsu theory that was tucked away in the dusty corners of the jounin-level library section, and Kakashi would drink everything in.
Sometimes, Minato would devolve into mad ramblings about fuinjutsu that even Kakashi couldn’t keep up, but mostly, he was intelligible and concise.
Rin and Obito taught Team Minato. Kakashi learned to forage and heal, more so than he’d already known, because Rin had spent a year before graduation training specifically to be a field medic, which was one more year of study than Kakashi had ever received. And he learned to tell when people were happy, or sad, or angry, and what to do or say in the circumstances, probably, because Rin was a far more sensitive person that he’d ever be, which was nine years more of emotional sensitivity than Kakashi ever had.
And so Kakashi learned from Minato, and Rin, and Obito.
Maybe not so much Obito.
But he learned.
And Kakashi taught them in return.
He didn’t have much to teach them. He didn’t know lots that Minato didn’t already know, and anything remotely related to ninjutsu theory was inapplicable to Rin and incomprehensible to Obito.
Kakashi taught them the C-rank temperature-regulating jutsu in the end, because he’d found it simple and useful, and he was sure they would too.
Minato gave him a funny look after that, but Kakashi had insisted it was a useful jutsu, and that was the end of it.
He was nine, and then he was ten on the fifteenth of September and he woke, yet again, in the fork of a branch under a curtain of leaves.
It was a Tuesday. It was a training day, and Minato had had the sense not to call it off, like he’d done with Rin and Obito’s. And Kakashi was grateful.
But training began at oh eight hundred, and it was a full two hours before that. So Kakashi did as he was used to, and went for a run. A half hour-long run, then another half going through katas, then breakfast and a quick trip to the library. Then he slipped back into his house, grabbed a set of newly oiled weapons and left for the training field.
Routine as usual.
“Where were you?” Obito howled, two minutes to eight.
Not routine as usual.
Kakashi tilted his head in confusion, because Obito was not late, and because he was acting as if something terrible had happened without Kakashi’s presence.
“Sleeping,” he told Obito, in an air that one might use to explain things to a very large and loud child, “then I went for a run, and trained, had breakfast, went to the library, and came here.”
“You did not,” Obito argued. “We went to your house at seven and Sensei took one look at your bed and said you hadn’t slept there in ages!”
“I haven’t,” he agreed, not quite understanding where the conversation was going. “The moon gets lonely sometimes, see, so I sleep outside to keep him company.”
Obito seemed…angry, perhaps, or confused, at something Kakashi couldn’t identify. He opened his mouth, “but—”
“That’s enough, Obito,” Minato cut in, firmly and gently like he always did, but with a very un-Minato-like look on his face. His eyebrows were all scrunched up, Kakashi noticed, and his smile wasn’t as wide as his usual smiles.
Rin stepped forward then, and placed a neatly wrapped box in his hands. “Happy birthday, Kakashi-kun,” she said, with her voice like birdsong, “we were going to surprise you this morning, but you weren’t at home and Obito ate all your cake.”
“Oh,” Kakashi mumbled, over the sounds of Obito’s indignant protests that he had not eaten all of Kakashi’s portion of the cake but shared it with Sensei, “thanks.”
Then Minato shooed them all into a five-lap warm up run, and any unease that Kakashi felt vanished.
Training was, for the most part, a successful and productive event. By which Kakashi meant that Rin somewhat mastered her C-rank suiton jutsu more than she had the previous day, and Obito managed not to stab himself with a kunai. Kakashi himself had practised the fourth strategy with a brand new raiton against Minato when the sun reached its zenith and Sensei called for a break.
“Go for lunch,” he told them, barely out of breath in a way that none of his students were, “rest and meet me back here at three. Kakashi, come with me.”
So Kakashi went with him, even as Obito’s wild cackling and Rin’s burning gaze followed him to the edge of the field and beyond.
“So,” Minato said, as he entered the thick of the village square, driving a swift pace between civilians that had Kakashi scrambling to keep up, “where do you sleep, exactly?”
Kakashi shrugged, looked at his toes that peeked out from his sandals, then at Minato’s brilliantly blue eyes, then back at his toes. The tiny digits flickered in and out of his line of sight. Left toes, and right toes, and left… “Here and there,” he said in his best non-committal-casual-guilty-Obito impression.
And Minato, being Minato that had never fallen for Obito’s words, didn’t fall for Kakashi’s impression of Obito’s words either. His right eyebrow climbed, like it was searching for answers in the top shelf of his brain, then dropped back down because it clearly found nothing.
“I see,” Minato said, looking like he did not. His mouth paused, even if his feet kept moving forwards, then asked, “have you tried renting an apartment?”
Kakashi had, and told him so. He’d been seven at that time, in the early days of the aftermath of you-know-what, with less than satisfactory experience sleeping outdoors, but a need to do it all the same.
There hadn’t been much guidance involved the first, and last, time he’d tried to rent a flat. Kakashi had picked a flyer off the sidewalk, calculated the rent and, finding it appropriate, marched off to the house with the slip of paper clutched in his fist. The landlord had taken one look at him and refused. Seven-year-olds had no business renting flats, went the explanation, and Kakashi couldn’t argue with what was technically true.
“I see,” Minato said again. He still looked like he didn’t, but Rin had said that calling out people’s lies needed to be done tactfully, and Kakashi wasn’t sure if he knew tactful.
The village square and milling crowd petered out behind them, and for the first time, Kakashi actually looked at his surroundings, and found that he recognized the route Minato was taking.
“Why are we going to my house?”
“You’re going to take all the things you can’t live without,” Minato said briskly, “your clothes or books or weapons, and you’re moving in with me.”
“No,” Kakashi said, but trotted after him anyway.
“Why not?”
“I don’t need your charity.”
Kakashi caught the little twitch of Minato’s lips, a thing he did when he was trying not to smile, and found that he didn’t understand his teacher’s reaction.
“You’ll stay with me until you find your own place to live, then,” Minato said. “That dusty old house of yours doesn’t count,” he added, when Kakashi opened his mouth to protest, “you’re clearly not comfortable living in it, so you might as well find somewhere else. I’ll let you have my guest room until then.”
Kakashi took the suggestion, rolled it around in his head, poked it, and rolled it around again. “Okay,” he agreed, “but I’m paying rent.”
Kakashi was not homeless.
He owned a room. It had been Minato’s before, but Minato had rented it out to him. So the room was Kakashi’s. It was a small room, with a bed, and a desk, and a shelf and a closet. It was all Kakashi’s, and he was not homeless.
The room was, admittedly, a very small room. It was the only guest room in Minato’s house. Kakashi’s bed and bookshelf fit the entire length of the room, and if he walked, it would take him nine paces to get from one end of the room to the other. Eight, if he took really big steps.
So his room was small, and kind of empty.
Well it was empty, but it was full too.
It was full of books and scrolls crammed into shelves because Kakashi had finally bought his own set of texts on theory and history and fiction. It was full of brand new furniture, and sharpened weapons strewn across the floorboards, and and footsteps that never echoed. It was full of something that was always there, but not there all the same, like a warm fuzziness that blanketed everything but dimmed when he tried to pick it out.
It made this room seem comforting, in a way, even though Kakashi knew rooms were the same across the village.
Minato’s apartment didn’t have a front yard, or a back one, or a pond, but he kept plants in the windowsills, and cut flowers in vases. They were lively, and bright, and always matched Kushina’s hair when she came over to visit. There weren’t a lot of things Kakashi could do with plants, apart from staring at them, but he did what he could, and brought flowers back from the Yamanaka shop, and watered the plants when Minato forgot, or left for missions.
He would pick wildflowers too, from the clearing in the forest where he trained until dinnertime. Then he’d go home, twisting the stems into rings between his fingers, and return to Minato with flour in his hair and gravy on the kitchen table and Kushina in hysterical laughter, and a table set for three.
And because the apartment was warm and bright and, though he would never say it, happy, Kakashi stayed there often.
The nightmares came less frequently now, and his room, the only one he chose to sleep in, would be cool when he woke, and safe, and protected, when the moon peered through the window.
It was not because he was loved, he decided, or because he felt anything, but on those nights, he’d just know that Tsukiyomi-no-mikoto was happy, and content, and relaxed in a way that he should be. And so Kakashi would creep out of his room, and wake Minato with a quiet knock on his bedroom door, and tell him, in a very small voice like people do when sharing secrets, ‘thank you’.