Flower in the Mirror [Hatake Kakashi] [1]

❄️ Chapter 15 ❄️

Yumetsuki sat in the company of her bedroom window, staring outside at the cloudy sky. It appeared as if it was going to rain today and she wondered if Kurenai would come by to take to the local sweet shop so they could have some Dango together. Or maybe they would go out to Yakiniku Q since it was winter and Kurenai liked to have hot, spicy food on rainy evenings.

It would be okay, Yumetsuki felt, once the rain started because she could be with Kurenai – and her stories would fill her empty air. At times, Kurenai worried that she spoke too much but Yumetsuki wished she had the words to impart to the older female that she was truly grateful for her.

There was a flutter and as she looked outside, Yumetsuki caught sight of a dove arriving on her windowsill. She knew without checking on it that there was an extra hospital shift waiting for her.

Hiruzen was not giving her many missions these days for some reason, and she also knew that she needed to meet the student that he had chosen for her. Yumetsuki felt oddly exhausted – thinking was too much for her. She wanted things to flow smoothly without any thinking.

The reason why she had been neglecting meeting up with the student was because Yumetsuki felt like she wouldn't have anything to teach anyone. And she was only twelve.

Now that she thought about it, as she looked around at the stack of books that she had bought to spend her free time, Yumetsuki realised why Hiruzen had given her time off – she had learnt a lot more. And in this pocket of time, she had become a teenager on 27th of November.

As she got up to leave her apartment for the hospital, Yumetsuki's eyes fell onto the book in the corner of her bedroom bookshelf: The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Shinobi.

That was the same book that she had borrowed from Minato so long ago. Or had it been that long? Yumetsuki didn't understand. She stopped in her pathway through the dark apartment. Her godson had turned one-year-old already, and she had not gotten to meet him yet.

It felt terrible and Yumetsuki's heart squeezed in a suffocating manner – she had missed his first birthday. Just one year and she was already a terrible godmother.

Birthdays had never made any sense to Yumetsuki, who had never celebrated them herself, and she struggled with the concept of mother in godmother. She had never had a mother, after all. But she had been adopted by Grandma Chi.

I need to do better like her.

With this smothering feeling, Yumetsuki had talked to Hiruzen about not being able to see Naruto and how much she felt like she was failing her late Sensei and his wife. It led down a spiralling path that got Yumetsuki to the doorstep where Naruto was being kept for his first year on this earth.

Yumetsuki took a deep breath as she was given the permission to enter the room where Naruto was, and as she reached to slide the door open, bracing herself for what she was going to see inside.

There was only one person inside, a child who turned his head around to look at her as she entered and Yumetsuki stilled at the sight of his sunny hair and crystal blue eyes.

Naruto looked like Minato, yet when the boy smiled at the sight of a new person, Yumetsuki was struck with the image of Kushina's vivacious grin – this was Minato Sensei and Kushina-San's son.

"... hello," Yumetsuki greeted the boy as she kneeled down on the tatami floor a few feet from him. "My name is Yuki Yumetsuki... it is nice to meet you, Uzumaki Naruto,"

Kneeling down a few feet away from him had been Yumetsuki's attempt of giving Naruto some space in case he did not like her or found her scary – there had been such cases when children at the hospital confused her with the terrifying stories of some sort of Yuki Onna.