~Missed Mark: Kakashi meets Nina (oc)~
(Konoha’s Training Ground Three>Post sparring session between Nina & Genma)
A projectile—a star shuriken—whizzed through the air, narrowly missing Kakashi’s right ear and thunked into the tree trunk behind him. The swishing sound of metal cutting through the leaves alerted him to the wayward incoming weapon, just in time for him to dodge it. Kakashi looked around, meeting the disgruntled stare of a girl. He knew her—Nina Sarutobi. Asuma’s younger sister and the Professor’s daughter. From memory, she was two years younger than himself. How long had she been out here?
“You’re terrible at this,” Kakashi remarked, dislodging the shuriken and tossing it down to the base of the tree that he was perched in.
Nina recognised him immediately—Kakashi Hatake. Easily identified by his bird’s-nest of silver hair, a mask covering his face from the bridge of his nose down and his hitai-ate slanted over his left eye.
Irritated by his unsolicited comment, Nina squawked, “Why don’t you come down here and show me how it’s done then?”
“Not a chance,” Kakashi bluntly rejected.
Pouting and ignoring the lost shuriken for the moment, Nina noticed the small book Kakashi was reading. A week ago, the book had caught her eye when passing by the village’s book store. Unfortunately, the store owner refused to sell it to her. The elderly man stated that he couldn’t be seen selling a book of that nature to the Third Hokage’s daughter. Heh. But apparently, he had no issues selling it to an emotionally unstable teenager.
“Is it any good?” Nina asked, padding over to the tree to search for her missing weapon.
“Hmm?” Kakashi flicked his eye down to her.
“The book,"—she pointed to it with one hand, the other on her cocked left hip—"is it any good?”
Kakashi twisted his wrist to look at the book’s cover—‘How a shinobi should die’. He’d picked it up a few days ago—his subconscious made the decision for him. Guy had frowned on his choice in literature. As had some of the others, no doubt. Like I care.
Shuffling back against the trunk of the tree, Kakashi pillowed his head with one arm and resumed reading. Nina hadn’t moved, her eyes focussed up to him, awaiting a response. Heh. The girl’s question seemed more than just a shallow attempt at conversation. “It’s alright… I suppose.”
Based on what Nina had heard from others—namely Konoha’s rumour mill—she expected fewer spoken words or none from Kakashi. All the same, she wasn’t about to race out and purchase the book based on his sad excuse of a review.
Nina combed through the overgrown grass shoots where she thought Kakashi had discarded her weapon but found nothing. Grumbling to herself, she stood up, unable to keep herself from glancing up to him before turning around.
“Where’s your team?” Kakashi asked.
Startled by his voice, Nina’s feet scuffed to a stop. Team? She noted her shaking hands. Fucking Genma. Just the thought of his stupid, senbon-chewing face had her grinding her teeth together. She couldn’t begin to imagine being on a team with someone like that. “Teammates are overrated."
Watching and listening from above, Kakashi’s interest piqued a little more with the kunoichi’s matter-of-fact reply. He laid his book on top of his straightened out legs—his index finger pinched between the covers keeping his place.
He observed Nina facing up to the line of three cylindrical wooden targets, pulling out three shuriken from the pouch on her right hip. "They’re loud,” she began, throwing the first three. “Annoying,"—throwing a second lot—"and….” Nina trailed off. “They mess with your stuff,” she finished saying as the third set of shuriken left her fingertips.
Unlike the first two rounds, the third lot didn’t imbed perfectly centred into the third target. In fact, two of the three stars missed the mark entirely. Hmpf. Admittedly, Kakashi had expected more from the Hokage’s daughter.
From the corner of his right eye, he saw Nina’s right foot coming up and back down in a fit of impulsive anger. The expended force created a sizeable crater and almost caused Kakashi to drop his book due to the vibrations. Correcting his posture again, he looked down to her to try and piece together what had just happened. If that was purposeful, her strength is… His thoughts fell silent as he grappled with believing what he was saw. Unbalanced by her childlike tantrum, Nina was seated on her backside in the middle of the crater.
He no longer wondered how the young kunoichi had come to be in the state she was in—dirty, bruised and dried blood down one side of her face. Nonetheless, something compelled him to put away his book and leap out of the tree.
Stepping lightly over the broken ground, he approached Nina as she retrieved her shuriken out of the targets. Holding the shuriken she’d lost earlier in his upturned palm, he let slip yet another question he’d meant to keep to himself, “Are you going to give up?”
Nina’s outstretched fingers flinched, pulling back empty-handed to her sides into clenched fists. The leather of her gloves squeaked with each tensed flex, filling the beats of silence between them. Kakashi studied Nina’s side-on expression. Astonishingly, in the few passing seconds, all of the heat had dissipated, leaving her face inscrutable to him. Her lips—dry and cracked—were sealed, holding in whatever she wasn’t saying. Her deep-brown eyes snapped from fixedly riveting on the third target to him.
Emotions had no place in the life of shinobi. However, at that moment, Kakashi knew it’d be improbable he’d forget how he felt right then. He likened it to a simultaneous onslaught of multiple emotions. The stark contrast of them all being too much for him to pick an appropriate strategy. Nina was an anomaly who was giving nothing away.
“No, but I’m done for today,” Nina replied, calmly taking back the shuriken from Kakashi. It was medically senseless to continue training with the painful headache and her blurred vision. Both were indicative of a mild concussion. Which was a shame because she would have liked to see for herself if Kakashi Hatake was the prodigy many in the village claimed him to be.
As Nina was about to say her farewell, her attention was drawn to Kakashi’s brow. The faint knitting of his brow line would have been passed off as nothing more than a grimace or completely overlooked to the untrained eye. To her, it signalled his body’s response to pain.
To take a closer inspection and given that Kakashi was much taller than Nina, she grabbed hold of his crossed bracing on his chest. Disliking the invasion to his personal space, he awkwardly bowed back away from her, forcing her to tug him upright rather unapologetically.
“Take off your hitai-ate,” Nina sternly cut in. Releasing Kakashi, she knelt to the ground and fossicked around in the pouch strapped to the back of her right hip.
It’d barely been a month since the Kannabi Bridge incident, and some were still unaware that Kakashi had both lost and gained something from that failed mission. The sharingan eye was an ocular kekkei genkai belonging to the Uchiha Clan. As thoughtful as it may have been, Kakashi was not of Uchiha blood, and the transplanted eye from the late Obito was said to have considerable drawbacks for him.
Laying out the few medical bits and pieces, she saw Kakashi retreating and quickly stood up. “I know you want to be alone."
Standing askew, the girl’s words halted Kakashi. For the first time in a month, someone had acknowledged his wants. Instinctively, Kakashi’s left hand lifted to his—not his, but—eye. He was still adjusting to the foreign organ and its hefty toll on his chakra. Covering it with his hitai-ate saved questions and his chakra reserves. Today, the band aid-solution just wasn’t enough, and the typical noise of the village had thrown him into a sensory overload and exacerbated the relentless thrumming from his left eye socket.
Rin had mentioned Nina a few times when telling Kakashi about the happenings in her medic classes while waiting for Obito to finally arrive. Trained under the firm guidance of her mother—Biwako Sarutobi—Nina was apparently quite a reasonably skilled medical ninja.
Others had poked and prodded him—none of which made any significant difference. Annoyingly, some of the medical staff had used it as an opportunity to try and unmask him. Would Nina?
Nina thanked Kakashi for sitting down—and without being asked to. "I won’t take long,” Nina softly said, reaching up to remove his hitai-ate. On her knees, she raised her hands to his left eye socket—one at the brow and one at his left temple—filtering a steady stream of chakra into the area. “Then, you can go back to rea—” Nina stopped herself. Kakashi wasn’t just reading. Not out here by himself, with that type of book, and definitely not a month since his teammate’s death.
Curiosity got the best of Kakashi, and he squinted his right eye open to take a peep at the kunoichi. Nina appeared to have her total concentration on his left eye. To avoid the green glow of her chakra, he shut his eye.
As though Nina sensed his sneaky check, words flowed smoothly from her mouth, unaffecting her healing. “When I’m done, then you can go back to brooding.”
Kakashi cracked his right eye open again to glare at Nina. Her eyes made a quick dart in his direction, filled with impish confidence. Caught in a position where he was at her mercy, all he could do was scoff.
Little by little, the pain that hadn’t shifted since first attaining the new left eye was lessened by Nina. Regardless, after that comment, he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction to know he thought she was the most capable medic to work on it thus far.
By LadyMoo20
germansingergirl
2087
gracieabrams
amandla
stormborns
blakekathryn
snowghoul
gamechangershow
