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Of all the things that Sakura doesn't expect after the war and the chakra tree and Naruto and Sasuke managing to not kill each other, it is the children that are most surprising.
Specifically that anyone trusts Kakashi with theirs.
"You're telling me," Kakashi tells her, his voice a little strained as he watches three-year-old Mirai totter curiously across the living room, his fingers flexing nervously. In what now seems like another life, Kakashi could have crushed a boulder with that single motion but instead he rocks some stranger's baby gently in his hands while another toddler strapped to his back peers over his shoulder to look curiously at Sakura.
When she had dropped by for a visit, she'd expected to steal an extra bento that Kakashi always happens to have on hand. She has a twelve-hour shift lined up, but she's honestly considering starving. It's unnerving to see Kakashi like this, domestic and a little harried, scrunching his face up at the baby to make it laugh. Apparently the person who was supposed to look after the children originally unexpectedly couldn't do it and now Kakashi has to do it instead.
If the baby has concerns about this strange man with his face half covered and one scarred eye closed out of habit rather than need, it does not convey them to Sakura, at least. It burbles and hiccups. Kakashi's furrowed brow smooths out and he looks pleased.
"I think she likes me," he tells Sakura.
Sakura says, "Sure, keep telling yourself that." She reaches past him to open the fridge without asking, plucks out the bento wrapped neatly in a shuriken patterned black-and-white cloth. "Thanks for the food."
"Thanks for dropping by," Kakashi says, but she's already halfway out the window and pretends she doesn't hear it.
On her way, she sees Lee, who waves furiously at her even as he rapidly draws close at a run.
"Sakura-chan!" he cries, delighted. "You look lovely today, as usual! Are you on your way to the hospital?" He has fallen in step with her easily, despite the vast difference in their initial velocities. Lee hasn't even broken a sweat even though Sakura knows he's on at least his fourth or fifth circuit of the village.
"I am," she says, smiling at him. He blushes, which is ridiculously sweet. "How is—"
There's no reason to finish her question because the subject of it comes tearing down the road, running on his hands.
"Oho!" Gai-sensei crows. "Underestimated me, did you, my precious student? I thought you knew better!"
"I'm sorry, Gai-sensei!" Lee shouts after Gai-sensei's trail of dust, throwing up a salute. He ducks, brushes his lips across Sakura's cheek, not quite a kiss. "See you later, Sakura-chan!"
Sakura doesn't get the chance to answer, but she waves after him. There is a strange, bemused smile that she can't quite rid herself of, so she doesn't bother to try.
The rest of her journey to the hospital is disappointingly uneventful, but Tenten comes to eat lunch with her in the afternoon. There is some issue with her application to open up a weapons shop on main street and she complains about it effusively, her hands gesturing in way that manages to combine a certain gracefulness with an expansive depth of feeling that cannot quite be contained.
Sakura likes watching Tenten's cheeks go pink with the force of her emotions. A younger Sakura might have thought half-enviously, half-derisively that it was not befitting of a proper shinobi to give away so much feeling, but Sakura is no longer the girl she once was. She knows better what strength looks like and how to value expressions of love and trust given freely.
(She makes a mental note to visit Ino at the flower shop soon and track down Naruto the next time he is in the village to treat him to ramen. There is never enough time to do everything, but Sakura is figuring out how to make time when it is important.)
They are eating in the park, in public, so Tenten doesn't give her a kiss when she takes her leave to go back to fighting with the leaders of the civilian business bureau, but she laces their fingers together before she goes, squeezes, and winks salaciously to make Sakura blush.
"See you later, beautiful," Tenten says, and then she's off, faster than Sakura will probably ever be, slower than she might have been back when she had two energetically competitive genin teammates to chase around. She tells Sakura stories about that time sometimes, voice full of warm and tremulous affection, banked grief melting into fond nostalgia.
Lee has a harder time talking about it, but when he listens to those stories, he is always smiling. His long lashes will flutter like a flinch if a story hits too closely to a sore spot, but sometimes he'll contribute to Tenten's stories or even contradict some random point or another and they will bicker like an old married couple, sometimes even coming to playful blows about it.
Sakura likes the easy physical intimacy they share with one another, but she likes it best when they share it with her, which they always do. They hold a space together for Neji still, but for Sakura now too.
Sasuke is…somewhere. Sakura never knows when he's in the village until he drops in unexpectedly at the hospital, usually to get some under-the-table medical care. It doesn't bother her, exactly. She knows that he avoids her because he feels guilty or ashamed or maybe undeserving and she is glad that at least he has worked through some of it enough to let her take care of him when he needs it, but she wishes he would talk to her. She wishes she knew the right way to talk to him.
Naruto doesn't have that problem. He's always been good at talking and somehow he has become someone who knows when to let silence do the talking for him. It's a little creepy. Sakura almost wishes he were as annoying as he was when he was twelve years old and had that cloying crush on her.
Team Seven has a standing appointment for ramen on the third of every month. It used to be the first, but the beginning and end of every month is a shitshow at the hospital for bureaucracy reasons and Sakura kept getting too caught up in it to remember to show up. So it got changed to the third, which is generally slightly less of a paperwork-strewn hellscape.
Their regular Team Seven ramen appointment has gotten significantly more awkward since Sasuke returned. There used to be a lot more chatting and yelling and punching, but now all six of them generally just eat in silence until Sai says something inappropriate and Yamato winces and drags him off.
Then Kakashi and Sasuke will silently not meet each other's gazes and Naruto and Sakura will make strained small talk about recent events. Once they've run out of that, they will usually make Kakashi pay the bill and all make their separate ways home.
Team Seven is still just a work in progress. For some reason, they're all better with each other outside of their one regular pre-arranged meeting time. Sakura knows that Sasuke, Sai, and Yamato work with each other regularly, well enough that sometimes they almost seem like actual friends; Naruto is, well, Naruto, and continues to be everyone's favorite obnoxious loud friend; all of them drop by to visit Sakura regularly for medical checkups and tea; and Kakashi has figured out that he can bribe people into visiting him by always having a homecooked meal available to feed people with. He has an apron. He wears it a lot. He's strangely proud of it.
Today as she is leaving the hospital, Lee is waiting with a bunch of flowers that she suspects he picked while training outside the village. She resists the urge to interrogate him about whether Gai-sensei was with him. Gai-sensei is an adult who makes his own choices and knows his own body. If he hasn't come to her on his own, then she should leave the matter be.
"They're beautiful, thank you," Sakura says.
"Not as beautiful as you are!" Lee replies very earnestly, and leans down to give her a proper kiss this time.
The first time he kissed her was long after the first time Tenten kissed her. Gai-sensei was burning from the inside out and Kakashi was pale and frightened in a way she'd never seen. Sakura had been awake for days, maybe weeks, and she sometimes felt like the sound of Gai-sensei's screams as they tried frantically to keep him from dying were imprinted on the inside of her eardrums.
But he was going to live. Tsunade had just given her the order to take a break and while you're at it, tell those idiots out there that this idiot is going to be fine, Sakura—
She doesn't remember exactly what she said, she'd been so tired. She just remembers Kakashi slumping down in his seat, face in his hands, and Lee and Tenten weeping. Tenten had grabbed Sakura by the shoulders and said fiercely, "Of course he's going to live, he's Gai-sensei," and then she was cupping Sakura's face with her hands and planting a firm but chaste kiss on her lips.
"Thank you," Tenten had said then, so sincerely that Sakura could only nod mutely, her entire face on fire and her soul singing, her body flushed with warmth, but Tenten had already turned back to Lee and they were hugging each other tightly, crying into each other's shoulders. Kakashi had curled up into a little ball, his face pressed into his knees. Sakura had gone to a call room for some badly-needed sleep and been woken up by Naruto attempting to break through the door.
"I have to bring my bento box back to Kakashi or he'll complain," she tells Lee. She used to wash them at home and bring them to Kakashi the next day, but he'd fussed about it and told her that she didn't clean all the food particles out and that it was unsanitary, so she'd better just bring it to him to clean properly. Kakashi is so annoying.
"Gai-sensei invited me for dinner!" Lee says cheerfully. "I invited Tenten, but she said she thinks she won't be able to make it."
"The business bureau is making this much more difficult than I expected," Sakura comments, twining her fingers with his as they begin walking. Energy thrums in his body. She knows if she gave the slightest indication she'd let him, he would pick her up and race to Gai and Kakashi's house on some kind of self-challenge. It's fun. Sometimes she lets him, sometimes she even encourages it.
But most of the time she enjoys going slow. Life moves so fast. It's nice to take the time to enjoy just being together.
When they get to the house, Sakura and Lee let themselves in.
"Lee!" Gai-sensei exclaims upon seeing them, beaming. Lee leans down give his teacher an affectionate kiss to his temple and in return Gai-sensei pulls him down for a smacking kiss on the cheek before he takes Sakura's hand and beams up at her. "It is always a delight to see you, Sakura!" he says, even though he sees Sakura every day. His eyes flicker past her. "Tenten couldn't make it?"
"No, sadly," she tells him with a smile. Despite herself, she finds herself scanning Gai-sensei for any signs of pain from overstraining himself. She tries to convince herself it is just professional due diligence, but she knows also that she will never quite shake the memories of Lee in tears and clutching her wrist, telling her that something was wrong, that she needed to check on Gai-sensei right away; the wreckage of the room when she arrived, the hole in the wall marked with Chidori burns and Kakashi suspiciously absent; Gai-sensei's tired, wan face and the quiet rasp of his voice as he told her it was his fault.
"Ah well!" he says now, cheerfully but looking a little disappointed. "Next time, then. Just as well. I'm sorry to say that we're not having curry today as I promised."
Kakashi comes suddenly into view, arms crossed over his chest. He is wearing the stupid apron. "We can't eat curry every day," he says sternly.
"Yes, yes," Gai-sensei says, rolling his eyes. "Don't nag, Rival."
"I don't nag," Kakashi says, which is a lie. It might have been true once, back when it might have mattered, back when Sakura might have needed him to be more concerned with her welfare and her well-being, but Kakashi in his semi-retirement has become a more overbearing nag than Sakura's own mother, which is really saying a lot.
Gai-sensei is rolling his eyes, but Sakura has seen this scene enough times to know how to cut it short. She hands Kakashi the empty bento box and tells him, "You really outdid yourself today. It was delicious."
Kakashi perks up. "I tried a new marinade," he says. "Sasuke liked it too. I think I'm going to try it again, maybe tinker with it a little next time."
"What did you do to the vegetables to make them so fragrant?" Sakura asks, honestly curious. She's not a huge fan of cooking, but she knows enough about it to talk about it.
She doesn't have to engage like this. She usually doesn't, but sometime between the morning and now it occurred to her that maybe she'd lashed out a little about the fact that Kakashi can be gentle too late for it to do her any good, but Kakashi doesn't deserve it. He can't help who he used to be any more than she can.
Lee and Gai-sensei have already wandered off to plot about how to help Tenten if the business bureau keeps putting it off. A possible petition to the Hokage herself is being discussed loudly.
Kakashi smiles at her, both eyes open and crinkling at the corners.
"Come on," he says. "Let me show you."