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What You Knead

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It started, as most things did in Kakashi’s life, with a mission gone wrong. The information on their target had been bad, and no one on Kakashi’s ANBU squad had made it back to Konoha unscathed.  One hadn’t made it back at all.  Kakashi, for his part, had returned on a squad mate’s back, semi-conscious after getting his leg caught in a particularly nasty earth jutsu.  His leg had required surgery to fix properly, and now Kakashi was out of the hospital on crutches and a month of enforced medical leave.

Kakashi’s first stop after leaving the hospital was the library.  He had a grace period of maybe two hours before that last shot of painkiller they had given him wore off, and Kakashi planned to take full advantage of it.  Once it wore off completely, it would be a couple of days at least before he’d be able to leave his apartment.  He hated being stuck in his apartment without anything new to read. (Icha Icha was great, but there were only so many times in a row that you could read the same book without it getting tedious.)

Kakashi hobbled through the library grabbing books of shelves more or less at random.  He was generally willing to read pretty much anything, and he didn’t have time to browse titles today.  He managed to fit eight books into the bag the librarian had lent him (since he didn’t exactly have any free hands), and didn’t bother looking more closely at any of them than that before he made it home.

Later, lying on his bed as the last of the pain medicine wore off, Kakashi sorted through his haul.  A historical romance, a book on philosophy, two volumes about Fire Country myths and lore, a political history of Kiri, a fictionalized account of a silk trader’s life during the First Great Shinobi War, a book about blacksmithing, and-

Kakashi blinked at the last book in his hands.  The Art and Science of Bread?  He’d actually managed to grab a cookbook?!  Kakashi tossed it aside with a frustrated sigh.  Well, that was a bust – he had no interest in reading recipes.

Seven out of eight wasn’t so bad.  Kakashi picked up one of the books of myths and lore and settled back with a wince to read.

 

A week and a half later, Kakashi stood gloomily in the grocery store.  He was down to one crutch, but his leg still hadn’t healed enough for him to start training again.  (The med-nin had told him with a wide and terrifying smile that Kakashi could either wait the appropriate amount of time to heal or be permanently crippled – the choice was entirely up to him.)  Kakashi had just about finished off his stack of books and was starting to go stir crazy.  It didn’t help that the nightmares were picking up again without the full body exhaustion of training and missions to keep them at bay.  If he stood still too long, the darkness of his own thoughts always caught up with him.  Limping around the grocery store was at least marginally better than staying cooped up in his apartment.  He needed something that he could do-

Blue and white packaging caught Kakashi’s eye.  He stared at the bag of flour.  Well… he had ended up with that cookbook, hadn’t he?  Bread was just flour, water, salt, and yeast, right?  What the hell, why not?  Kakashi grabbed the bag of all-purpose flour and one of the brown jars of instant yeast (because ‘dry active’ yeast sounded vaguely suspicious) and headed to the front of the store.

It couldn’t hurt.  It had to be better than being left alone with his own thoughts.

Kakashi may have overlooked a few key pieces of information – like the fact that he didn’t own any measuring cups.  Or a baking tray.  Or a mixing bowl.  He did have some spoons, though, so he improvised.  A pot he usually used to reheat soup was repurposed into a mixing bowl, and Kakashi more or less guessed at ingredient amounts by using a drinking glass to measure the flour and water.  A soup spoon was used to guess amounts of yeast and salt.

By the time Kakashi was done, what he mostly had was a mess, but sitting in the middle of it all was something vaguely recognizable as a lump of dough.  As far as light arm workouts went, Kakashi hadn’t minded the kneading part too much even if he had ended up wearing a liberal amount of flour.

He abandoned the dough to its own devices in another pot greased with the last dregs of a bottle of vegetable oil that he hadn’t even realized he owned and threw a clean shirt over top of it because that was the closest thing to plastic wrap and a dish towel that he had.  Five chapters of historical romance later, the dough ball had puffed up a bit.  The dough mostly stuck to his hands when Kakashi tried to reshape it like the recipe told him to.  By the time Kakashi dumped the lump into the semi-greased frying pan that he was using in place of a baking tray, probably half the amount of dough the recipe called for remained.  Kakashi just shrugged, read a few more chapters of his book (because you were apparently supposed to leave the dough alone a second time), and then threw the whole lot in his oven.  Then the plot of the historical romance picked up, and he sort of forgot about the bread until his nose picked up the faint scent of burning.

The lump of dough hadn’t so much turned into a loaf as simply gotten even more misshapen and slightly burnt.  It was semi-stuck to the bottom of the frying pan, and when Kakashi cut it open for curiosity’s sake, it had slightly less aeration than cheese.  It was completely inedible.  

Kakashi stared down at the pathetic loaf.  He’d completely and utterly fucked it up beyond a shadow of a doubt and-

And-

It was okay.

Nobody was hurt.  Nobody was dead or dying.

He’d completely screwed up, and the only thing left on his hands was flour.

Kakashi had failed at something, and it was okay.  That had never happened before.

The pathetic not-really-bread went in the garbage, the frying pan was left in the sink to soak, and the historical romance was abandoned in favor of the “science of bread” section of the cookbook.  Kakashi left his apartment the next morning with a comprehensive list of all the supplies he needed.

 

Kakashi had never come across anything that he wasn’t good at with little effort before.  Baking did not come effortlessly to him.  It should have been frustrating, but it wasn’t.  It was a relief.  It was just a loaf of bread.  It didn’t have to be perfect, because nobody’s life was at stake.  Village safety wasn’t on the line.  So what if Kakashi over-proofed his dough or added way too much flour?  Nobody cared.

By the end of his enforced medical leave, Kakashi could bake a passible loaf of basic bread, the med-nin was practically giddy with how well Kakashi’s leg had healed, and there was a mountain of misshapen bread loaves in the ANBU base kitchen that nobody knew the source of.  (It was the cause of much paranoia.)  Kakashi returned seven of his eight books to the library, handed the librarian a fistful of ryo, and told her that The Art and Science of Bread had gotten lost on the road of life.  Then he asked if the library had a baking section.