Always You

four

14 years old - Kakashi
ANBU

Since a year ago, when Obito forced Kakashi to make that promise, he couldn't deny that there were growing... feelings inside of him for their teammate. It made him extremely uncomfortable since now he couldn't deny them any longer and they decided to take up all his thoughts outside of missions.

For the first few months Kakashi had been in ANBU, he'd lost himself in it. It was the only way he knew how to deal with the immense guilt he felt. Obito was the one who snapped him out of it with a ferocious punch to his jaw that Kakashi had not expected. After that, Minato-sensei assigned him to watch over Kushina, who was pregnant with their first child. When he wasn't watching Kushina, and he wasn't with Obito, Kakashi spent his time with Sakura. The first time he saw her after the incident, he'd tried and failed to say anything. She spoke, then grew annoyed at his silence and threw him out. But Obito's promise hung over his head, and Kakashi kept coming back, silent and unable to speak until it reached a point where Sakura stopped trying to force him to speak and just begrudgingly accepted him being there.

Kakashi was ashamed of himself. He saw the hurt in her eyes, the disappointment in her slumped shoulders. It was an odd change of circumstance, because now Sakura wasn't the one studying him: he was studying her. It was the only good thing about his self-imposed and ridiculous silence around her. Kakashi was able to really see her for the first time, which made forgetting those annoying things like feelings, impossible.

He really liked the way she bit her lip when she was thinking, and the little hum she unconsciously broke into when she'd figured out a problem. When she was concentrating particularly hard, there was a little crease between her brows, almost like a scowl. Sometimes she would look at the picture of their team on her desk with a wistful smile, and he knew that she missed it as much as he did.

She'd never suit life in ANBU because she didn't know how to sit still. She was always fidgeting, her leg bounced when she was impatient, her fingers tapped across the table when she was annoying, she cracked her knuckles when he was trying to get herself motivated. He liked the way her voice became impassioned when she was discussing medical ninjutsu, and the way her eyes lit up at the mention of Lady Tsunade or Minato-sensei. He didn't like it when she fell into a sad mood, blaming herself for not being good enough to save Obito's leg, or find a way to help him more. She was the only one who blamed her, Obito was grateful for his life although he still struggled to accept the loss of his leg.

Most of all, Kakashi liked the way she would sometimes look at him and then look away, unaware that she was blushing. It made his heart clench painfully and his stomach flip, and gave him a small, small hope that maybe, just maybe, she thought about him the way he thought about her.

*

15 years old - Sakura
Chunin

The day Obito took his first step on his new leg, Sakura broke down in tears. She hadn't meant to, and she didn't think she would, but she did. Her sobs quickly became hysterical, and she fell to her knees in front of Minato-sensei, Tsunade-shishou, Obito, and Kakashi. For a while, no one touched her. They knew she needed to let it all out. It was the first time she'd cried in a long, long time. All her worry, all her fear, all her exhaustive research, and hard work had paid off. Sakura had come up with the idea months earlier to infuse the First Hokage's regenerative cells to create a prosthetic that would grow and adapt to Obito's body.

The entire process of research and development had been named an S-class secret. No one outside of Sakura, Tsunade and Minato were aware of the details. Even Obito was not even aware of what had been happening. He was a test subject, in a sense. If everything went well with him, and after careful study of his results, Sakura's research could become a highly sought-after and revolutionary idea. It would take years before Tsunade-shishou felt comfortable with the results and conclusions from Obito as Subject Zero, but Sakura felt like she'd actually managed to make up for her failures.