“I’m scared,” a commenter wrote. “He’s too wholesome.”
“Yeah, milkshake duck rule. Whatever is wrong with him must be SO bad.”
“SHUT YOUR MOUTH,” Tenten typed back, teeth gritted in a feral display of aggression. “Gai-sensei is the perfect mentor and he has no skeletons in his closet.” She hit send aggressively and huffed her bangs off of her face. How dare they insinuate that! Gai-sensei had never done anything wrong or held a bad opinion. She fumed about it. Her face burnt red with rage.
Her male teammates were all looking at her.
“Tenten-chan,” Gai-sensei said gingerly. He pressed his hands together in a prayer gesture. “Perhaps you are overly stressed. While I appreciate your management and participation in my mentorship of the world’s youth, it may be time to refocus our energies to personal betterment.”
That was crazy talk. She was fine! Tenten made eye contact with her teammates behind Gai-sensei, looking for commiseration.
Lee was grimacing and avoided eye contact. Neji looked right at her with a challenge and nodded.
…Hmm. “You’re right,” Tenten said apologetically. She put the Propaganda Department-funded-phone in her hip pouch and tried to have a normal day. She needed a healthy outlet for her aggression and competitiveness, didn’t she? “...You wanna find Kakashi-sensei?” Tenten suggested. She had loved watching Sakura look vaguely ill with envy when she made content for their public relations initiative. It was a little mean to be pleased that her team was by far superior, but hell, she had eyes.
‘He needs to know how terribly he’s losing at this. Gai-sensei is way more famous than he’ll ever be.’
Neji hid a mean little smile behind his hair.
“An excellent idea!” Gai-sensei rocketed up. “We could enjoy a nice run! Or we could clean the river!”
What they did, exactly, was not as important as the fact that Tenten was going to find an opening to let Kakashi-sensei know what an uninspiring and unpopular worm he was. She rubbed her hands together with glee on the way.
“Tenten-chan?” Lee whispered, in his usual Outside Voice. “You are once again imitating an evil insect.”
She stopped rubbing her hands together and huffed. “Whatever. Let’s find Kakashi-sensei.”
It took them nearly an hour to track the man down. Team 9 held back and let Gai-sensei bulldoze his beloved Eternal Rival down. He tackled the other jounin and had him flailing like a sock in a storm.
Hmm. Tenten lifted her phone and recorded the tail end of the dramatic skid down a sidestreet. The dust trail was pretty photogenic. Gai-sensei was huge and powerful. Kakashi-sensei looked weedy in comparison.
“No,” Neji said in an undertone. She looked at him quizzically. “To manage Gai-sensei’s image, it is important to consider the civilian perspective. They may misconstrue his enthusiasm as aggression.”
“...Good point.” Tenten deleted it with a faint regret. “But do you think recording a Challenge would be a good idea?”
Neji considered it. “You must establish significant context, and explicit consent of the pathetic loser involved.”
“Hey,” said Kakashi-sensei. He suddenly had an arm over both kids’ shoulders. “What pathetic loser would that be?”
Tenten eeped and eeled away, laughing nervously. She hid her phone behind her back.
“You,” Neji said. He raised a disdainful eyebrow. "That should have been apparent."
'I love how diplomatic he is. His best quality.'
Kakashi rubbed his chin through his mask. “I see. That’s what I suspected.” He gave them a saccharine smile. “Perhaps we ought to have some sort of team-on-team competition-”
“Nonsense!” said Gai-sensei. He chuckled darkly. “I would never put you at such a disadvantage in our competitions. My team is, after all, staffed by 3 talented and brilliant chuunin who shine with the power of the very sun.”
Tenten was already recording.
“Sakura-chan is indeed a worthy competitor, but 4 against 2 is simply not sporting!” Gai flexed rapidly, arms alternating up and down. He ended by kissing his left bicep in a cloud of sparkles. “I instead propose that you and I test our mettle against each other.”
Kakashi-sensei put a hand up in her direction when Tenten swung the phone in his direction. “Gai,” he said, “I have to go wash my hair, so-”
He disappeared in a puff of stinky air.
Tenten choked on dog breath. Lee wheezed, face turning violently red. Neji crouched on the ground 10 feet back, hair blown fully out with the force of the speed he had used to evade the stank of Kakashi's wake.
“Rival!” Gai-sensei bellowed. He shook a fist at the sky. “Your irrepressible cool nature has once again taken me by surprise!”
Tenten zoomed in. Kakashi was barely visible as a silhouette sprinting away across red tiled rooftops.
“I am not convinced that he is cool,” Lee said resentfully. "Gai-sensei is much cooler." He didn’t get scolded because Gai-sensei was already running after his rival.
“What the shit is this fuck?” Tsunade put her chin in both hands and wished for death to hurry the hell up already. “He’s viral on the phones?” She knew about phones, had used them herself to call in prescriptions. “Are they running up long distance call bills?” That shit was outrageously expensive. She knew all about that. Jiraiya and that goddamn phone sex line in Iron Country had merited a 3 hour major council meeting about misuse of public assets.
“No, they’re fans,” Sakura explained. “They are obsessed with him online. Can I show you the response?”
Tsunade reeled. “Gai is a phone celebrity? Kids are calling him or something?” She wrinkled her nose. “What, you want a mission to assassinate them? I don’t care.” She waved dismissively. “Kill them all, the hell do you need a meeting for? But he has to pay like anyone else.” Tsunade waggled a finger about it.
“No,” Sakura said, in that patient tone that meant the out-of-touch old woman was being managed. Tsunade glowered. “This is good, Tsunade-sama. It’s really good,” she stressed. She was holding one of those confangled contraptions in her hands and rotating it around like a stressball. “We don’t want to kill his fans. We want to use them to manipulate everyone’s opinion of Konoha.”
“Oh.” Tsunade blinked. “Why didn’t you just say that?” She tossed a pen at her apprentice. “Go to the department of propaganda, get a budget issued, have fun and go nuts.”
“Thank you Tsunade-sama!” Sakura squeaked her way out of the office in a way that usually meant something sketchy was afoot. “But, uh, the department of propaganda is sort of… inexperienced with the new tools. I was hoping that we could put together a social media team who is a bit younger as a liaison–”
“Ha!” Tsunade barked out a laugh. It sucked being old, but it was fun that the little shits 30 years younger than her were apparently now also old and out of touch. They were going to hate that so much. “Yes, you do that, take whatever budget propaganda gives you and I’ll get the council to match it.”
Sakura bowed repeatedly as she backed to the door, eyes creased in a smile. “We’ll need a few phones–”
Tsunade waved it off impatiently. That was, what, 1man en per? A piffle. “I don’t care,” she emphasized. “Do it, don’t tell me again unless it’s going very well or very badly.” She pushed an envelope across her desk and flipped it open with extreme prejudice. She had actual work to do.
She appeared over his bed with hollowed eyes and gritted yellow teeth.
‘Good lord,’ thought Kakashi, barely awake, ‘what a scary face.’
He had to run back what Sakura-chan said to parse it. He blinked at her meaning. “Ah, I don’t know that I want to become an international personality,” he demurred. He sat up in bed and scratched the back of his head. “I don’t have the uh… what do you call it…”
“The personality,” Sakura-chan said, with no care for his tender feelings. “I know. You’re atrocious and no one will be inspired by the real you. That’s why I wrote this plan.” She tossed a bulging binder on his gut.
Kakashi wheezed helplessly. When he clawed the hateful plastic up to his face and opened it, Kakashi felt his heart sink. “This, ah.” He cleared his throat. “It’s a lot, Sakura-chan,” he said delicately. He flipped a few pages. There were mood boards.
‘Not a chance, kid.’
“You have to.” She hissed the order at him. “You’re embarrassing me in front of the other nations.”
“Ah,” he said, not sure where that was coming from. “It can’t be the first time.” She’d get used to it or whatever.
Sakura dug into the zip pocket of her top and unfolded a shiny brochure emblazoned with Gai’s face, bulging and glistening upper body, and some words or whatever. He was busy looking at biceps and half heard - “turns out that feelings sell. So now you have to have them.” Kakashi looked at the fan print some more. Not the words, of course. The trapezius muscle.
‘Nice,’ he thought with feeling.
“It’s not nice!” Sakura reached a shriek. Kakashi clutched his covers in fear. “Team 9 is rubbing it in my face every time we meet.” Her face was actually quite ugly when she sneered, he thought. Like a storybook gremlin. “Lee said it’s statistically relevant proof that Gai-sensei is cooler than you.”
“Lee said that?” Kakashi wondered aloud. “I didn’t know the kid could, like, read. Much less do maths.” Then he suddenly paid full attention to Sakura because she had her hands wrapped in the collar of his nightshirt and was mildly strangling him.
“Sensei,” she said. She said it from very close. Her breath was minty.
“Yes?”
“I am going to record you performing impressive feats. And you are going to say some things that sound cool.” She shook him. “Inspirational, even.”
“And it doesn’t matter to you that this is entirely fake?” He checked. “You want me to construct a personality for the online? To make you look cooler in front of your friends?”
“Finally, he gets it.” Sakura muttered that and let him fall. “Read that,” she said. “It’s your storyline, new opinions, and recording plans. Post the first video today and I’ll repost it.” She tossed a phone on the bed next to him, made the “I’m watching you” gesture, and was gone with the flap of a curtain.
In the pleasant silence that followed her window departure, Kakashi flipped through the binder. “Is she well?” He wondered aloud. He scratched at the back of his head. “Maaa… The most important thing is that you believe in yourself,” he read flatly. Total crap. The most important thing was being born talented. Kakashi snorted and tossed the binder away. “She cribbed that from Naruto.”
Sakura-chan’s notes fell off the bed and landed in a mess on his floor boards. He kicked it under the bed on his way out of the room.
He did take the phone, though. He could do something with that and it was free.
