Should I be writing for my other fics? Yeah. Am I going to start a new one despite that? Absolutely.

To be honest, I just like the idea of Kakashi being the one messed with lol

If it feels a little ooc is because we're pretty early in canon and he is still transitioning from 'stick in the mud' to the goof we all love, but we'll get there, don't worry

EDITED some typos and also changed Naruto's age to seven

Yuugen Ibara was as much of an entity as she was a woman. She had manifested in Konoha one day and, the next thing anyone knew, the jinchuriki had started following her around like a duckling. Not a bad comparison, given his bright yellow hair and propensity for orange. In contrast to his brightness, she had ink-black hair and eyes, and usually wore dark colored furisodes. Her clothes were elegant in their simplicity, though they also gave her the appeareance of someone in mourning. Some speculated that she was a widow who had moved to Konoha after her husband's death, and gossiped about why or how she had come to be at the village hidden in the leaves. The wildest theories circulating around had her killing her husband in a convoluted plot to take his money and elope with her ninja lover, only to find her lover already with another woman, or dead on a mission. The rumour mill was always spinning in Konohagakure, and they always found new and interesting stories to feed it.

No one had dared ask her about it, however. She had a strict demeanor; a mix of noblewoman attitude and the disapproval of a specially old-fashioned grandmother, who had judged you and found you disappointing, but whom you still – deep down – wanted the approval of. Her long hair was collected in a low bun so perfect that some thought it to be a genjutsu, and nobody, to this day, had ever seen her smile.

Except for Naruto, who would swear up and down that Ibara-nee was the nicest person ever, followed only by the old man and Ichiraku. Needless to say, nobody actually believed him.

"I think she might be part yuki-onna," Genma, who had been quietly watching her walk by, said. It was hard to tell when he was joking or not, and Raidō had given up at some point during the past six years.

"And you are not saying this because she has completely ignored all of your attempts at flirting, are you?" he drawled, aware that it would, at the very least, annoy Genma a little. The chunin had been deliberately 'encountering' her in the market every time she went grocery shopping, offering to carry her bags and making light conversation. The woman hadn't been displeased by it, but then again, she hadn't looked specially pleased either. Genma only did it out of curiosity, wanting to know more about the mysterious character that had appeared one day in the village and became a fixture of it, but Raidō knew that it still hurt his pride to be incapable of seeing through her veneer of politeness. Raidō himself wasn't sure it was a veneer at all, or if it was just her having the rather bland personality of a civilian housewife paired with a bad case of resting bitch face. It wasn't a crime to like her own privacy, and in his own opinion, if she was indeed mourning, it was her own damn business.

Genma didn't share his opinion at all.

"She keeps deflecting all of my questions! I'm sure there's something she's hiding. How come nobody knows anything about her past?"

Raidō had to acknowledge that, in a ninja village, where everyone and their mother knew each other by hearsay, that was rather odd. However, "maybe she isn't hiding, maybe she's just a private person, Genma. Not every girl likes being accosted on the market every week. Speaking of which, you should stop before she requests a D-rank to keep you away."

"You hurt my feelings, Raidō," Genma answered in mock hurt, managing to make his voice break towards the end. Raidō wasn't fooled.

"Besides," he continued, as if Genma had never spoken, "not to be mean or anything, but she isn't that pretty. I mean, no offense, it's just a fact." And it was, indeed, the truth. For all that she was imposing in her severity, Yuugen Ibara wasn't pretty or beautiful in the way one would notice walking down the street. She had a subtle kind of beauty, true, the kind you would see only if you took your time to observe her closely. The lines of her neck, the shape of her eyes, the way the light caught on her skin- all subtle things that contributed to make a beautiful picture, the same way a landscape would appear beautiful when one was made aware of all its parts and stopped to take it in as a whole. Still, not the kind of beautiful that attracted looks, and definitely not the kind that attracted Genma. At least, not the playboy image of himself he projected to the world.

Raidō sighed, and both of them watched as the woman bought some fruit from a stall with the jinchuriki in tow like a rambunctious puppy. The elders hadn't been pleased with that. Ibara Yuugen was, in their words, a threat to the village. Not a direct threat like an enemy shinobi would pose – and they had already discarded that possibility, she was most definitely a civilian – but one to their jinchuriki's loyalty. Raidō himself had no doubt that, were the woman turn against the village, the container of the nine tailed fox would follow suit. She still was under surveillance in case she had been sent by another village to lure their tailed beast away.

To be honest, if that happened, Raidō wouldn't be too cross with her. The villagers had treated the boy so poorly that it wasn't a surprise that he would latch on to the first person that treated him like a normal kid. He had to admit that the boy did feel a bit unnerving to him, he couldn't feel the fox's chakra, but the ghost of its presence was still fresh in his mind after seven years. He felt a bit guilty for not trying to do more for the fourth's son besides making sure the civilians didn't get too hostile towards the boy. However, as his therapist had said after a particularly bad mission; he couldn't help other people before he helped himself. He, like many other shinobi, still hadn't gotten over the trauma of the kyuubi attack, and until that ugly wound healed fully, he didn't think that interacting with the kid would do him any good. Selfish, maybe, but his mental and emotional health came before anyone else.

Still, he felt better knowing that someone was taking care of the kid now, and if she was an enemy... well, they would burn that bridge once it had been crossed. He wasn't the only one that thought this way, not all of konoha's shinobi kept an eye on the kid, but those that did, those who had been closer to his parents, were pleased to see him happier. All except one.

Kakashi Hatake, usually the most laid back jōnin around, was suspicious of her to the point of requesting to do the surveillance himself. The guy was hellbent on discovering her horrible secert, and seemed to expect her to be some sort of child-eating demon. He would most likely have reacted differently to Genma's yuki-onna joke. Kakashi was distrustful bordering on paranoid, and in fact was one of the ones that insisted that she must have been sent from an enemy village. Given his personal collection of tragedies, Raidō couldn't hold his wariness against him. If it had been him, he too would be sure that everyone was out to kill his loved ones in terrible ways.

Oh, it's not that he hated the woman, per se – though he was secretly a bit bitter about how much the kid loved her while he couldn't bring himself past the guilt enough to even introduce himself to the boy – but he clearly didn't like her either. This, more than anything, was very amusing to the ones who knew him and remembered his days at the academy. He had been very driven then, too, and he seemed to have regained some of that determination – or more accurately, stubbornness – back. Though it must have been jarring for the people that had only ever known him as the laid back guy who kept a stash of porn books hidden, to others it had felt nostalgic. Gai had cried tears of youth, seeing his rival so driven to reach a goal, even if he felt conflicted that Kakashi's goal was to shadow a beautiful flower of Konoha, which wasn't very manly, in Gai's opinion. The man felt conflicted about it. Maybe. Raidō wasn't very sure of what went on in Gai's head, to be honest.

The thing was that the woman had caused quite a stirrup, and Raidō was sick of hearing about her all the time. He just wanted to have some time with his partner, dammit.

He vindictively flung an ice cube from his drink into Genma's flack jacket, and managed to throw it right inside the back of his neck. The other ninja let out an undignified yelp as it made its way down his back, shimmying in a very odd dance to get it out.

Genma glared at him, but Raidō just grinned back; he had distracted him enough to lose track of the woman.

Kakashi wasn't tired of following her around. He wasn't getting bored, or anything, even though all she had done for a month now was follow the same routine every week. She must have come from a daimyo's court, he thought, as she kept receiving letters from noble houses that he hadn't yet been able to recognize. That didn't bode well, as that meant that they didn't belong to the Land of Fire. However, he had read through the letters – and had, admittedly, felt a bit stalkerish – and they merely asked for advice on various fields. Love, wealth, politics... Whoever these nobles were, it seemed like she acted as a sort of advisor to them, which explained how she could afford to support herself and Naruto without an apparent job. She received periodical payments in her bank account, all perfectly legal, and they were usually paid about five days later of her sending her answers. From that, he gleamed that it must be to some place five days away from Konoha... which wasn't much to go by.

She also received poems, paintings or even books, sometimes, and though he felt rather uncomfortable reading those, he argued – more for the sake of his conscience than anything else – that they might contain a secret code. So far he had found none.

It wouldn't be far from the truth to state that he was getting a bit frustrated.

The worst part was her little notebook. She spent the mornings writing in it, engrossed in its small pages, and once she was done she would put it back in her obi. It stayed there the whole day, and at night, when she went to sleep, she put it under her pillow. Kakashi had considered trying to get it while she slept, but even if he was stealthy, she would surely notice the pillow under her head being moved.

Once she was done with her little notebook and had answered all her letters, she would do menial chores around the house and, once a week, go to the market to buy groceries. After that she would cook lunch, read one of her books until around six or so, and take Naruto to the park to play. Not that the kid had many friends, but if he was to look at the silver lining, at least he had made a few. Shikamaru Nara and Choji Akimichi were the two boys with whom Naruto spent most of his time with, sometimes adding Inuzuka Kiba to the mix. Some days, Yamanaka Ino would join them and bring her friend Haruno Sakura with her too, which wold elicit groans from the Nara and Inuzuka while Naruto was utterly thrilled. The first day he had met them, the girls had shown him how to make flower crowns, and he had been ecstatic when he had received the one they made to teach him as a present. He had worn it the rest of the day, uncaring of the looks he got from the civilians or the snickers coming from other boys his age. His smile had grown even brighter when Ibara had complimented him for it, and he had gone out again just to gather flowers and make her one. She had looked so stupidly happy with her stupid flower crown – it's not like he would have wanted one from the kid too, he wouldn't have worn it, she looked ridiculous with it anyways.

That was another thing about her: Naruto had been right. Sort of.

It had surprised him to find that she did, indeed, have a wider range of expressions other than 'disappointed in your performance'. She wasn't overly expressive, though, just a small smile here, a slight furrow of her brows there. You had to look for the changes to see them, but then again, the kid had always been very perceptive, like his parents. He tried not to think too much about it.

He was starting to waver in his conviction that she wasn't what she wanted them to believe. He still didn't know what was in her little notebook, yes, but for all he knew it might just be a diary. She seemed like a private person, it made sense that she wouldn't leave it just laying around in a ninja village. Not to say that ninja tended to come snooping in civilian houses but, well, you never knew.

Kakashi's hand twitched as he made an aborted movement to get his new book from his pocket. He could be reading it right now – just to see what everyone is talking about, mind you, he was a loyal Icha Icha fan – but no, he was staring through a window like a creepy stalker at a woman that was most definitely a well-meaning civilian. He hadn't been able to take care of his sensei's son, and now he wanted to drive away the only caretaker Naruto had ever known. What was wrong with him?

In the end, he had decided to give it one more week. At the end of the week he would have been keeping an eye on her for exactly one month, and if nothing had happened in that time, then he doubted anything would at this point. Either she was one hell of an infiltrator... or she really was just a widow that had taken Naruto under her care, probably to fill the void of the son she could've had. Well maybe not that, exactly, but someone that wanted to care for Naruto, in any case, and Kakashi couldn't bring himself to sepparate her from the boy just because of his paranoia. He wasn't that cruel.

He was so convinced that he had wasted almost a month watching a civilian, that when she left the house – it was a nice house with one floor and a back garden – he almost missed it. Almost.

Tonight had been the only time she had deviated from her routine. Usually, after Naruto was done playing in the park, they would come back to the house, she would cook dinner – sometimes Naruto helped – and they would eat it together. Finally she would tuck the boy in and, after doing some night reading, she would fall asleep herself. Tonight though, after tucking him in, she had gone into her room and changed clothes. Kakashi had looked away like he always did, not wanting to feel even creepier, and when he looked back he almost didn't recognize her. It was as if a completely different person had replaced her. She hadn't even changed anything other than her clothes and her hairstyle but as he looked, he realized that her posture was off. This new persona was slouching in comparison to Yuugen's perfectly straight posture from before, one of her hands slung loosely by her side, while the other rested on her waist as she examined herself in the mirror.

She still wore civilian clothes, though these were definitely less modest than her usual furisode. Her pants were loose over her legs, with splits on the sides, but clung tightly past her hips, ending just above her navel and accentuating her waist. The form fitting shirt she had chosen was translucent, and as such, left little to the imagination, even if she wore a small, black top with aspirations to become a real bra one day underneath it. To top it all off, she was now putting on make up. Not too much, just lipstic and eyeliner, and combed her eyelashes with something that Kakashi thought looked like a torture device. Still, given that he had only ever seen her with a clean face, the effect threatened to cross the line into uncanny valley.

Once she was satisfied with the results and had made sure that Naruto was safely sleeping in bed, she stepped out into the street, and Kakashi followed, puzzled. Maybe she had a date? No, he hadn't seen her flirt with anybody. Maybe Genma had finally gotten lucky? No, that couldn't be it; she had been nothing sort of uninterested everytime she had encountered him, which had been very amusing to watch. But then... who?

Perhaps he had been right after all, and she was an infiltrator going to meet with someone to pass on information. But then why would she change her appeareance? It would have been safer for her to look like her normal self, but instead she had gone through the effort to look like the complete opposite. It didn't make any sense at all. He was so busy puzzling over this that he almost lost her in the crowd, which had been growing thicker as she walked. He had panicked for a total of twelve milliseconds, when he finally spotted the back of her head – harder to recognize now that she had let her hair down – going into... into... Oh. Oh, dear.

He had been so lost in his head that he hadn't noticed it when she had walked into the red district, and straight towards the most expensive brothel in it. Oh, dear, indeed.

This was just bizarre. She was Yuugen Ibara, the most boring civilian he'd had the misfortune of following around – nevermind that he had requested the mission personally – and had the same taste for clothes and mannerisms of an old lady. An old lady who belonged to a clan, or a part of nobility, at least. The civilians had dubbed her The Governess because of the way she kept berating people about proper manners, she couldn't just- She couldn't just waltz her way into a brothel.

Should he- should he go... inside too? On one hand, he was supposed to be shadowing her, but on the other... well. That was just too much, it was too much for him. See? This was why he never took these kinds of missions. Being a hunter nin was much better, just beat someone up or get rid of them and congratulations, you were done and you didn't have to watch your target do the sideways sparring match.

He tried getting in, his wish to fullfill his orders temporarily overcoming his inhibitions, but the loud moans coming from everywhere inside the building kept him outside better than any barrier ever could. In the end, he couldn't bring himself to it, so he settled for waiting until she came out, trying to will his face to be less red and failing miserably.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity but had in actuality only been two hours – two whole hours, what the shit – she emerged from the brothel. Her still wet hair and the faint scent of roses that wafted off of her indicated that she had taken a bath, a fact in which Kakashi didn't want to dwell more than necessary.

After that she spent the rest of the night going from one bar to another, and by the end of the night, Kakashi was fuming. How could she leave Naruto alone like that to go and- And- What kind of responsible adult did that? And he had trusted her enough to allow the kid to move in with her without a peep. The Hokage had asked him, him, and he had been okay with it as long as he got to keep an eye on her. Thank the will of fire he had decided to do so, who knew what this woman planned. Obviously, Ibara Yuugen was only a facade, a pretense so she would be trusted with the boy. Why else would she show these two vastly different behaviours then, if one of them wasn't false? By the time they arrived at the house, he had talked himself into such a state of righteous anger on behalf of his sensei's son that he didn't even stop to think before he decided to confront her.

It was late, with not a soul in sight, so he jumped down into the street when she was about to insert the key into the door – that is, if she could, after all he had seen her drink. She tensed at his presence behind her, and Kakashi felt a twinge of vindictive pleasure upon seeing it. Slowly, she turned to look at him... and promptly relaxed when she saw him, letting her shoulders drop with a huff.

"Oh," she slurred, "'s just you."

Just him? What did that even mean? They had never met before, so how could she recognize who he was?

He must have been standing there, confused and silent, for too long, because she fidgeted under his gaze uncomfortably – good – before speaking again. "Ssooo... want somethin'?"

He couldn't help but wonder if her speech was being affected by the alcohol, or if this was just the way her other persona usually spoke. The so-called Governess wouldn't have let herself caught dead speaking like that.

"Maa, maa," he said, forcing a smile. No use in being too hostile early on, that only served to make targets close off, and then you could only get answers with, ah, creative methods. "Can't a jōnin of Konoha worry about its citizens? My, I saw you making a beeline while walking and thought to make sure you got home safe. You shouldn't drink too much, kunoichi-san, you never know when you might need to fight an enemy."

The thinly-veiled threat seemed to zoom right past her head, and she snorted, the action jostling her whole body. "'M not a kunoichi."

Ah, well, it had been worth a try. Not that he had expected someone who hadn't broken character in a month to slip just because of that, but hey, it could have worked. Ah, well, time to bring out the big guns.

Kakashi was aware of many things, things that people usually thought he didn't know about. Like his inability to understand social cues. It wasn't something he had ever been good at, then again, he couldn't be good at everything. He had been blessed with the mind and body of a genius, but he'd had to relinquish something in eschange, and that had been his social awareness, the ability to read people's bodies and expressions to gleam what they were feeling. The sharingan, however, bypassed any lack of social skills to let him know exactly when a person was lying, which was just what he needed right now. It would be chakra consuming, yes, but without it to translate her reactions, as minuscule as they may be, he might as well be blind.

She didn't seem to react when he pulled his hitai-ate up and felt how his eye activated, she just frowned as if confused and, motioning to the right side of her face, said, "you have, uh, somethin' in your eye."

"I'm going to ask you a few questions now," he said conversationally, ignoring her previous comment, "and I want you to answer them truthfully. If you don't, I will know."

He left the implication of what would happen if she lied hanging in the air between them and, when she made no attempt to answer besides the lifting of one eyebrow, he started his improvised interrogation. He should have done this from the beginning, he would have finished the book by now, at least.

"First question." He rose a finger to illustrate his point, not having dropped the friendly act yet and still standing in the middle of the road. "Why did you come to Konoha?"

"Becausse," she drawled, pausing mid sentence as if she actually needed to think about it. "Well, the other ninja villages ssuck. Suna is too sandy, and I. Hate. Sand. Ame is always wet, Kiri too. I mean, I love rain, but not all the time. Then Iwa is like, no, y'know? Kumo seem'd nice, but it was faaar away-"

She ennumerated like that each and every hidden village, complaining about this or that thing that made them unfit for residence, as he listened with the creeping revelation that he might have been, after all, wasting his time interrogating a civilian woman. Albeit a weird one at that. How did she even know about so many hidden villages? She even knew what they looked like, had she been there herself? Was she a traveler?

"Also you have universal healthcare," she finished, very serious despite her slow swaying from side to side. She was drunker than he had thought.

He decided to go on to the next question though, desperately hoping that she wouldn't pick her previous tirade where she left it. "Why did you choose to pose as Yuugen Ibara?"

She was silent for a moment, eyes narrowed and still swaying. "That's m' name, dude," she answered after a few seconds, looking at him like he was making no sense, when she was the one with a double personality. He should have been the one looking at her like that, in any case. He rephrased his question, trying for a more direct approach.

"Why have you been acting, and dressing, like a boring old widow for two months?"

Her face lit up like she had finally understood what he was asking her. At least, he hoped she had, he didn't know if he could stand this mind-numbing interrogation for much longer. "Ooooh, that. Well, gettin' inside the vill'ge after the Kyuubi attack's a bitch, so, yeah."

Kakashi's eye twitched, he would very much like to know how she had learned about the Kyuubi, especially given that it had been a secret kept within the village – an S-class secret, no less. When Kakashi made no move to keep talking, she lifted one shoulder in what he supposed was a lazy shrug. "T'was just easier to get in lookin' like that, and then I liked it?"

"Liked it," he prompted, cocking his head to the side, still fake-smiling. He was actively trying to keep his left eye from twitching.

She made a sound of assentment. "Yeah, 's comfotab- combot- Look it'sss comfy, k'? Pe'ple leave me alone and n'body has tried to grab m' ass yet. 'Sides, they woulda- wouldn've let me take in t'brat like this, right? Iss not- 'S not a 'mom' look."

He sort of understood the logic - besides the fact that she couldn't have possibly kept up the charade forever, of course. Speaking of which. "And why break character now? Why risk being discovered?" He was, at this point, genuinely curious.

Ibara shrugged. She just- shrugged, as if that would convey the entirety of her thought process. Kakashi stared back at her, trying to not glare. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she scratched the back of her neck. "I jus' need'd a break, man."

Kakashi pinched the bridge of his nose, Sage help him, she was- She was so- Okay. It was fine. It was fine. She was just a well-meaning civilian, after all. A dumb, well-meaning civilian that had spent more than a month lying to every shinobi in Konoha successfully. Who apparently liked the red light district more than an Inuzuka liked dogs. Who was currently housing his sensei's son. Well, he couldn't let that stand. She would be a terrible role model, and more importantly, what kind of guardian left a child alone in an empty house?

"Alrighty," he said, his fake cheerfulness sounding more forced by the second. "You have two options, either you can have Naruto pack up tomorrow and send him back and I'll let this slide... or I'll have to report this to the Hokage and, as innocuous as your white lie has been, Naruto will be taken away and-"

His spiel was interrupted, and therefore, he was saved from feeling even more like an asshole – making Naruto go back to the orphanage would be very cruel, but at the same time, he couldn't let him live with someone that lied to everyone and then proceeded to hit every stop of the red light district. Which... sounded a bit familiar, but this was not the time to be dwelling on that, because the woman in question was currently laughing her ass off, uncaring of who might hear her.

She had thrown her head back , the elegant lines of her neck and shoulders more prominent now that they were exposed. It was a mean laugh, like she was laughing at him, rather than about something funny he had said. In her drunkenness she ended up losing her equilibrium, and he was forced to dash to her side and grab her by the shoulders in an effort to keep her steady. Ibara, on her part, seemed to still be finding something about the situation very funny, because she wouldn't stop laughing. Still shaking from her laughter, she grabbed the front of his vest and leaned her head against his chest, out of breath. When she finally calmed enough to look up at him there were tears at the corners of her eyes and she was smiling like the ninbyō that ate the crow.

"What," he finally asked, "is so funny?"

Ibara bit her lower lip to keep the chuckles in, still smiling and making absolutely no effort to get more space between them, seemingly perfectly at ease within reach of a trained shinobi. Her self-control wasn't all that good, as she ended up snorting and was overcame, once again, by another fit of laughter. "I just- It's just-" She struggled to speak, trying to catch her breath and wiping away tears of mirth with the hand that wasn't still holding onto his vest. Finally, she looked him in the eye and said, with a smile that was all teeth and without a hint of her previous drunken stupor, "and who's going to believe you?"

As he stood there, stunned by her words and change in demeanor, he realized with dawning horror that she was right. She had been here for months now, building her reputation as a respectable woman, albeit with a mysterious – and probably sad – backstory, while he had been making no effort to disguise his wariness of her. Additionally, he might not have been in the best of places after his sensei's death, and his image was still recovering from it. As things were now, if he tried telling the Hokage about her, trusted jōnin of Konoha or not, it would seem like he was making it up because he didn't trust her but couldn't find conclusive evidence either. All it would take for her to make him the bad guy of the story, was to shed a few tears in front of the Hokage to fool him – and she could, he knew, looking down at her, his hands still on her shoulders, that she could – and make Kakashi seem like a paranoid asshole who wanted to separate a poor widow from the lonely orphan in which she had found a family.

His expression must have been a work of art, because she collapsed against him when another wave of uncontrollable laughter hit her, and he was too numb to do anything else other than stand there, watching her laugh at him. When she looked up again, still too close for his comfort, she had the same smile as before, the one that had been a mimicry of an animal snarling. "You can't take him from me," she'd said, and pried herself from him to open the door to the house she shared with his sensei's son. "I'd invite you in for a coffee," she said conversationally, once she was inside, "but I don't do that in the first date."

And with that, she closed the door in his face.