A shinobi is a high school student like another  Beta by Awyr, thanks again for your great job

The daily life of your not-average high school student.

Some explanations: Kakashi, Zabuza, Kurenai, Asuma, Itachi and the people in the same class are in the last year of high school ( must be the equivalent of a 12th grade in the US. Here in France we call it the ‘terminale’ ‘cause it’s THE crucial year; we got a big exam at the end that says if we can go to the schools or universities we choose. ). So they are all around 18. Haku is 18 too, but he isn’t in school ‘cause he works already.

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The hand came fast, too fast to be avoided. A tiny move, just a call for chakra, and the blow would be deflected – hardly. And the sinisterly crackling hand, instead of encasing itself through the skull, hits the mask, stops, rebounds with a spurt of blood following.

The pain - unbearable, unendurable to the point that no scream comes out. Sight flickers, becomes black on the edges – a void calling. The hand that hit took the eye.

What follows is blurred, too fast to be understandable, too fuzzy. Stained with blood, interrupted with faceless corpses, with gun shots, with screams of death and alarm.

The squealing of tires.

The shout.  

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Oh hell. Alarms clocks be blessed.

I woke up with a start, sitting very straight, covered in a cold sweat, a clenched hand on my face.

At least this time, I didn’t had to see his face. And have to complete the awakening, by screaming before the dashing-madly-to-puke-my-guts-out-into-the-toilet-that-never-asked-for-anything. I put shaking hands to my face, before silencing the screaming clock with a fist and falling back flat on my back on the battle-field bed.

I caught my breath slowly, calming down the erratic pounding of my heart. I was appreciating the fact I wasn’t having this -- this what? This nightmare, this dream, this reminiscence, this memory…? -- as often as at the beginning… I would have gone insane. Not that I’m not already, we’ll talk again of the insanity level of a guy who spends his free-time killing people since he was big enough to walk, but that’s another problem.

I was thinking about it enough already, I didn’t need to feel it anew every night… to live it again… It was coming back to haunt me often though, when someone talked about it, when something made me think about it in ‘a bit too insistent’ way. Yesterday’s conversation with Tsunade was definitely labeled under the last category. 

The ache in the left side of my face eased away. Even if I knew this was just phantom pain, the memory of a pain, it hurt like hell. I know of better ways to wake up. I turned my head on the side, just enough to decipher the numbers on my alarm clock. I had ten minutes left to catch my ride two streets away from here.

This day looked promising.

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By an inexplicable stroke of luck, I managed to catch my bus in time--fully clothed and still munching on some left-over bread--and, while I was at it, I also managed to made it to the high school on time for once.

Umino cast me a glance from behind his hair, and without saying anything, handed me a folder covered in a sharp, black handwriting before the first hour of class rang - it was the summary of the classes and work I’ve missed. A nod exchanged with Zabuza as a salute, a scornful ‘tsk’ from Itachi when he saw me ; without any doubt, he would have wished for me to disappear from his landscape. A lazy lump of a teacher and zou, there we go again for the thrilling life of student Kakashi.

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At the ten o’clock break, Asuma -cancer stick in place and flanked by red-eyed Kurenai- came toward us to where we crashed, almost sheltered from the cold; we being Momochi with some homework he forgot to do and me with a book - another one.

“Hey guys, Anko’s throwing a party at her place Friday night, you in?”

“Anko?” I lifted my head up from my book. “ As in Anko ‘ I’m driving a convertible and living in a manor’ Mitarashi?” I stopped there in Anko’s description. The rest, at least the rest known by your servant, was classified.

“Herself,” confirmed Kurenai. “So, you’re coming?”

Zabuza moved -- like only mountains should move – before speaking up.

“You know who’s going already?”

“You can count on the majority of the school and a good part of the campus – at least the local guys. Anko’s parties are always very popular.”
“Maa, seems enough already… I’ll go I think,” I answered, going back to my reading.

 Asuma and Kurenai left, surely to count the people they knew would go. Once they where out of ear shot, the real discussion began.

“Yondaime’s gonna jump with joy.”

“Yep”, I agreed.

It was true. It was not everyday that we could get, without any problems, into the house of one of the families we knew had a lot of very close connections with the Konoha’s underworld. And we would try not to get caught red-handed at it.

The bell rang, calling us all back to class; the smokers, the nerds, the clusters of too-scantily-clothed-for-the-season girls, the guys with skull caps glued on their heads, the ones with a hat instead of a cap, the couples – just hetero ones -, in brief, all the high school wildlife. Zabuza got up, making his spine crack.

“I’m rusting. You on for a sparring match tonight?”

“I’m your man,” I deadpanned, sliding in the crowded corridors to accede to our next class.

“Haku would kill me,” he answered back in the same tone. Private joke.

“Would he come Friday?” 

Zabuza shrugged.  “Depends on the present fauna. I‘ll see tonight what Yondaime will say about all that.”

And we were in again for more uninteresting and boring hours.

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Yondaime really did jump with joy -even if he was a bit suspicious. We could hardly blame him for that. We also learned from him that Anko’s parents weren’t in town… so Friday, between two dances, we would be allowed to slip away discreetly, eavesdrop a bit, go through rooms and papers -- to make a long story short, to do our work and come back with the maximum of information.

We were okay with that. Hey, picture that: a bit of spying in music, lots of people hardly in state to notice anything so we wouldn't have to conceal our business, and drinks and fun for free. Yep, it was more than fine by our standards.

Sensei assigned Haku to this mission too, saying that some things would maybe be easier to tell to a girl. Zabuza only snorted hearing that. Personally I had trouble keeping a smile off my face – but, as we were in the HQ, my face was safely hidden behind my mask.

After the ‘friendly spar’ that evening with Zabuza, and the agreement that we would need a fifth match to decide which one of us was the best in hand-to-hand combat, I was feeling much better than I was that morning. Even if the memory, fresh again, had followed me all day long.
The prospect of the party Friday night helped to lift a substantial part of my gloomy mood too.

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The following night, from Tuesday to Wednesday, I had the nightmare again. Unfortunately for me, the alarm didn’t scream at the right time.
I arrived at the school an hour late, the consequence of not having been able to dress and catch my ride in the five minutes of respite my guts left me – or rather, the absence of said guts. They had been drained away in the toilets, swept away in the process of sobs and silent screaming, leaving me hollow, as if I was on the outside of my body.

I paid even less attention than usual to what happened during the day; it pushed Zabuza to ask me what was wrong with me and if I was feeling up for Friday. I can’t recall what I told him… certainly not the truth about the first part, that’s for sure. As soon as the final drill rang, I was out. Direction: the only place where I had the right to be under the weather.

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In the seedy districts of Konoha -‘cause, yeah, dear Konoha has some, and, yeah, she doesn’t give a damn about it- there’s a place where you can be at peace, have a warm meal and a roof over your head for the night. And where, for any kind of information, you’ll be paid.

The three-stories-high building doesn’t have a name, only a grey façade, flaking more with each year that pass. People come in and out all day long, without it attracting any questions. For the most part these people, the building, the dormitories and the food are paid by private funds -which deserve beatification, along with the staff, and the boss-lady is already a saint. What most people ignore, is that the building is paid with the money from by our operations, that most of the staff constitutes of retired/active members of our ranks and that the patron saint has been one of my teammates until… close to three years now. This isn’t enough to cancel the fact that this place is useful and needed by Konoha and that Rin is a saint.

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I entered the building without anyone taking exceptional notice of me, and I walked in until the place I knew Rin would be at this time of the day, the kitchen-canteen-like that took most of half of the first-floor. The floor was mostly deserted, save for two people on the chairs of the entrance hall and the receptionist who waved at me from behind her desk, the chairs in the canteen still up on the tables. Rin called the late afternoon the ‘slack hour’, and took advantage of the quiet to begin making the meals for the evening by herself.

She was leaning on the worktops when I found her, her neatly cut hair hiding her face. She didn’t move when I stepped into the room, but I knew she knew I was there, having heard or felt me. I would never, even with ten more years of training, surprise her like that. I stopped an arms length from her, and she lifted her head from her task.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” she answered, with one of her gentle and warm smiles that always consoled and warmed me up. She crossed the space separating us, hugging me; and I hugged her back. She moved back just enough to see my face. “You don’t look so well Kakashi.”

“ ‘Got troubles sleeping.”

What’s great with her, it’s that with the minimum of words, Rin understands all the mechanisms at work behind my silver-grey locks. She gave me a knife and an apron, and I took the place next to her, peeling, cutting, letting my hands take the controls while Rin, at the same time she was surveying her cooking, was relating me details of every single thing that happened since the last time I saw her.

She knew the best way to make me think about something else than my bad nights, was to keep me busy – she had to know, after all, we picked each other up when we fell …. And it was always towards her that I turned when I was under the weather or when I needed a bit of human warmth.

Don’t you dare believe we raise our spirits in bed. Rin is just like my sister, sometimes she’s even the closest thing of a mother I ever have. After Tsunade, she was the first woman I met that I let close to me. And in return for that, I’m a mix between the annoying little bro and the best friend to her.

When I left, after I shared the meal I helped to prepare with the forgotten inhabitants of Konoha, Rin walked me to the door like every time I came, kissed me on both cheek and didn’t forget to whisper in my ear “If you need anything, my window is always unlocked”.

How could I forget?… I stopped keeping count of the number of nights I ended up in her small apartment on the third story, when the missions were leaving me hollow and my mind torn in pieces.

If this night, the nightmare came back again, tomorrow night I’m sleeping at her place.

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