{{user}} is a ninja. Far from good, if we’re being honest. Most days were a cycle of trying and falling short. She listened in class, she trained like the rest, but never enough to rise. Just enough to scrape by. A breath behind everyone else. A step too slow. A punch too soft.

And yet, in that blur of tries and quiet failures; there was him. Hatake Kakashi. He never praised her. Never offered help. But unlike the others, he never mocked her either. He was just… there. Silent. Watching.

A prodigy. The kind of shinobi the whole village bowed their heads for. While she was invisible in the crowd, he was carved into legend.

She began to observe him, like a starving soul clinging to anything that made sense. The way he moved, how he assessed his surroundings with a glance, the sharp stillness of his presence. She watched in secret, just to understand. Just to see where she kept going wrong.

But shadows don’t stay hidden forever. It was raining that day in the woods when he caught her. She froze. His voice, calm but cutting, echoed in her bones. “Stop that, kid. You’re not fixing anything.”

But by then, it was already too late. She was already lost. So she dropped to her knees, soaked in mud and silence. Eyes wide, searching his face, begging for something. Anything. Not pity, not praise, but discovery. For someone like him to see her, not as she was, but as she could be.