Chapter Text
Sakura does not know how love is supposed to feel.
Too much time has passed since her early childhood, where memories of her parents glisten like colorful mosaics projected onto smoke, intangible and always shifting, losing form and context as time goes on; they are transient; they disperse the second she sticks her hand in the cloud and tries to grasp one.
She does not know love.
But when Sakura is fourteen, she learns to hate.
It keeps her warm, when she is huddled up next to Sai in the bed of a wagon under a tarp, the gravel road vibrating up the slow, lumbering wheels into the boards under their backs. Her lips are chapped and bitten through, her breath stale from hunger, having only had soldier pills to eat for the last twelve hours. Her palms sweat, her body trembles, and she thinks she’s afraid because her heart is racing and her stomach wants to turn itself inside out. In the shadows under their tarp, she asks Sai what he thinks she is feeling, describes the symptoms, signs the question in Anbu Standard as best she can against the skin of his throat, and he signs back against her jaw, calluses brushing her cheek intimately as he spells out the word: ‘a-d-r-e-n-a-l-i-n-e.’
She mouths the word between them, airless, silent, and decides he is right. They’ve started checking these things with each other, comparing notes, like a secret game no one else can know about, with Sai learning to feel, and Sakura trying not to forget what her feelings mean.
The next time the wagons stop, they cover their faces, draw their knives, and leave their hiding place.
They do not fight like shinobi. They wear scarves over their mouths and hair and use serrated long blades inexpertly sharpened to cut down men, women, children. They stain barrels of rice vibrant red. They steal gold bracelets and brown leather pouches of pocket money they will discreetly pawn and spend in places that ensure the stolen goods will be marked and noticed, reinforcing the narrative of the vicious bandits they are playing. They leave footprints with sandals associated with Iwa at the scene.
When it is over, Sakura looks into the verdant eyes of a teenage boy with rabbit-brown hair saturated in the same blood that is dripping down her blade into the gravel on the road, his body several feet from his head, and she keens like a wounded animal.
It is the only reason Sai is alert and ready to grab her knife by the blade and overpower her, wrapping his hands around her wrists and wrestling her to the ground, kicking up rocks and dirt in the struggle to keep her from turning the jagged blade on herself. He kicks the knife away, locks his legs around her hips, and wraps his arm around her windpipe as she flinches and writhes, until she forgets the reason she breathes at all.
At fourteen, Sakura learns to hate, and no longer knows where to point the end of her blade.
Sai is there to guide her hand.
…
Sakura had forgotten aimlessness.
She has been idle, sure; idle in the way one is while laying stomach down in the tall grass for four days straight, pissing and popping soldier pills in the same place, cycling chakra into her eyes and staring at a tent flap Sai marked with chakra far in the distance, waiting, waiting, waiting, for their chance to strike. Idle in the way one is while lying on their back in their bunk in the barracks, staring at the metal poles of the structure she’s trying to sleep in, counting nuts and bolts, counting down days until the rusting frame gives out, collapsing in on itself, crushing them all in the process.
She has been still, bathing in the waist-high shallows of a natural hot spring in the land of Hot Water, returning from executing a village leader and his sleeping wife and children in Frost; still as one is when stripped down to their skin and refusing to shiver from the heat of the water or the chill of the air, fighting nature, watching Sai grab handfuls of small yellow rocks from the shore of the spring and use them to break up dried blood on his arms, his muscles rippling under his black seals when he moves; still as one is when the person they are watching begins to watch them back, pitch black eyes assessing the dirt in old wounds that have yet to heal, assessing how open she’s left herself to him, gaining certainty that she would let him do anything, crawl inside her, displace her; there is no part of her she would keep from him. Still as she is when he sees this, knows this, and tucks the thought away for further study, turning his back to her and continuing to bathe.
But this.
This is aimlessness, she thinks, staring into Hound’s steel gray eye from her place crouched less than four feet away from him, mirroring his position on the other side of the circle he drew into the damp soil with a stick, followed by a smaller circle inside that, and then another, and another.
She cradles the black marble in the crook of her index finger, hands no longer concealed by gloves. She keeps catching him looking at the unique storage seals on her palms, intricate interlocking lines, each one representing hours of Sai’s work with a needle and ink. His gaze keeps drifting to the left one, where the lines are raised and warped from scarring. She closes her hand, hiding the healed burns and retouched seal from view.
“Now you throw one,” he says, and looks away from her briefly to pick what looks like dog hair off the forest green shoulder of his jōnin vest, then finds another on the dark sleeve of his black shirt. It’s early morning. Sakura is wearing the same kit sans vest, only smaller, along with matching pants, bound at the shin with black strips of fabric that coil down into soft black training shoes. She has never felt so clean. Her hair has never before fallen like silk around her face, tickling her shoulders.
Skeptical, Sakura examines the seven marbles in play, three on outer rings, five in the center. Her eyes drift back up to Hound’s, uncertain, but his stare is…steadying. Firm. She lifts her wrist, preparing to shoot, and he clicks his tongue against his teeth softly.
“Hand outside the ring,” he corrects, and Sakura pulls her elbow back toward her ribs, making sure she’s outside the lines before choosing her target and flicking her marble into one of the ones in the center, knocking it into the outer ring of the circle.
Humming under his breath, the sound somewhat muffled by his ever-present face mask, he picks up a slightly misshapen marble from his pile and rolls it between his fingers, sunlight curling over and reflecting off its shiny surface as he rotates it around, around, and around.
“You seem calm today.”
She hums in agreement, listening to the birdsong filtering through the woods that make up the Hatake clan’s all-but-abandoned lands, smelling the moss on the trees, tasting the soil and fungi and fallen leaves on the back of every inhale.
She is calm.
The past week and a half she’s roamed freely around Hound’s overgrown heritage, walked the trails, rested in the highest branches, swam in the coldest rivers. She continues to cultivate her body, tearing and healing muscles, stretching while her sweat cools her skin. She sleeps and wakes with the sun. Some days she wakes on a dry futon pushed as close to the unpainted wall as she could get it to the sound of tea boiling. Others, she wakes to the sound of her own heartbeat accelerating, and only comes to her senses when she smells animal fat cooking down into oil.
The sprawling traditional house is old and unlived-in, the kitchen decaying, so Hound cooks all of their meals outside over a campfire unless it rains, which lends itself to simple selections of sautéed vegetables, wild game and fish in oil, but he makes soups as well, in a cast iron pot. He aims for variety, she can tell, but he favors salt-broiled saury and miso soup with eggplant. He hasn’t asked her what she likes to eat, and she’s thankful for the small consideration. He is full of such gestures. He peels oranges for himself and offers her a few segments of fruit to sample, tart and foreign on her tongue. He picks small brown jujubes from the trees in the garden while they walk, making idle commentary about how he has to hand-pollinate the blossoms or they’ll stop producing fruit, and hands her a few to pocket and gnaw on in private, marveling at their sour-crunchy texture. He gives her hot water in the mornings and evenings and cold water during the day, and Sakura finds she prefers this to the lukewarm water at all hours she’s used to.
Half of the days are like this.
The other half are days she can’t stomach the walks or the company or the food and demands silence and space and more familiar rations. Sometimes he’ll give her sticks of dry meat, tough and flavorless, but he is tight-fisted with the soldier pills. He says she’s had them too often, that she needs to be weaned slowly. They are for missions, he says. They are not supposed to replace food, he says. It makes her angry. So angry it’s hard to breathe.
Some days she wakes up too early, hyperventilating on her back to the echoes of suzu bells and a carmine sky, and Hound covers her eyes with his hand until she stops trying to break a genjutsu she is not in, like throwing a blanket over a bird cage.
Some days she can feel her blood moving and unused chakra itching under her skin, and Hound takes her out to his clan’s training grounds, unwilling to spar but offering up a forest of trees to skin and gut.
Some days all it takes is a wrong word from him and she finds herself reaching for kunai and knives and rocks and anything else in arm’s reach, lashing out mindlessly. One minute he’s trying to teach her how to play checkers, the next he’s bleeding from a shallow cut on his neck as he disarms her with an ease she hasn’t been met with in years, grabbing her by the hair at the nape of the neck in a hold that doesn’t hurt but commands her attention, her lips nearly brushing the fabric of his mask over his jaw as he lowers them both back down to kneel on the floor, hushing her, like soothing a child.
A marble snaps into the center and scatters three others simultaneously, knocking them out of the dirt ring. Sakura haltingly drags her eyes back to his, catching on the black fabric of his forehead protector where he’s concealing a Sharingan she has not asked about, then focusing on the safer eye. He’s studying her.
They’re keeping her away from Sai on purpose, she knows. At first she saw him every day. Then every other day. Now it’s been four. They want to see if she snaps. They want to see if Hound can be her new handler; if he can control her the way Sai does. It makes her blood simmer, but she is getting better at hiding it.
She can see words churning behind his gaze as he sifts through topics, curating his phrasing, calculating all of the ways she will interpret his intent and narrowing his language until there is only one meaning to his words; one that he can control.
“Your turn.”
It seems there are not many safe topics between them.
Her lips twitch up at the corner involuntarily, and she finds herself reaching for another black marble out of the small pile next to her, like obsidian eggs nestled in the speckled soil.
She does not hate Hound.
Yesterday, he gave her a honing rod and a wet stone and let her straighten and sharpen his cooking knives. It was rhythmic and familiar. She enjoyed it. He’s not once tried to defang her during her stay; not once discouraged her from sliding hunting knives into the holsters at her thighs or arming herself with kunai and shuriken, tucking senbon into the braces on her forearms. She’s left her tantō in its sheath beside her futon; hasn't felt the need to wear it. She left a trap seal in its handle to see if he would try to touch it, but he seems uninterested in her few belongings. He is either overconfident he can handle her in a fight, or certain she won’t fight hard enough for it to matter.
He doesn’t ask many questions. He shepherds her around with the kind of quiet authority Sakura struggles not to fall in line for. She doesn’t know how to move through space untethered, and despite her best efforts she is beginning to appreciate the man holding the end of her lead. He lacks cruelty, but he is capable of it. Of that she is certain.
She settles the marble in the bend of her index finger, setting her eyes on the marble she sacrificed to the outer ring on her last throw. She flicks it, and it strikes in a black blur, knocking the other marble out with ease.
“This isn’t very difficult,” she says, and reluctantly meets Hound’s cool stare once more.
He picks up another marble, tossing it up, catching it. “Well. It’s a game for civilians.”
She watches the marble as he throws it up once more, this time higher, level with his eye, and then catches it.
Up.
And catch.
Up.
“Then why play it?”
He catches it, closes his fingers around the marble. He seems to be considering the question, tilting his head a few degrees to the right. It’s becoming a familiar gesture. It reminds her of Sai, which she finds comforting and disquieting in the same breath.
“Not everything is done because it’s difficult, yeah?”
“But why do it at all?”
A grouse flutters its wings thirty feet to the east, and she shifts her weight in her crouched position to relieve the tension in her right hip. Hound watches her thoughtfully, either consciously or subconsciously mirroring her body language, but she can’t interpret his expression through the mask. One eye really isn’t much to work with.
“If you never had to kill again, would you never throw another kunai?”
It’s not something she’s ever considered. She thumbs a marble in the dirt, feels its glossy chill against the calluses on her fingers.
“I would,” she says, picks up the marble and pulls her wrist back, behind the outside of the circle he drew in the ground.
“Throw a kunai?” he asks.
“Kill,” she says, and strikes her target out of the ring.
…
She senses Sai’s arrival before Hound does.
Standing up a beat faster than him, she ignores his muttering about her ‘never finishing games’ and heads up the deer trail that winds between ferns and leads to the main house at a light jog, not wanting to cause a collision when Sai inevitably flickers into view.
She closes the remaining distance in three large steps, training shoes leaving deep prints in the soil, and hooks her arms around the back of his neck, pressing her nose to the skin below his jaw and breathing deeply, inhaling pine and sweat and the faint musk she associates with him. Hound’s chakra signature grows slightly agitated as Sai, accustomed to her desire for touch and predictably quick to turn the situation productive, slides his palm under the back of her shirt, stopping directly over the replenishing seal between her shoulder blades hidden beneath her white chest bindings and topping up her chakra reserves, making her nerves sing and her senses grow sharper.
“She’s ready to meet you,” Sai says, in his unaffected way, and Sakura pulls back enough to look in his eyes, hard, but attentive.
“Then we should go now,” she says. She is eager to meet this Hokage. She is thirsty for purpose. The days have dissolved into a continuous string, numb with peace; she is ready to erupt from the soil Hound has been carefully turning and sprout fields of violence.
She feels a steady hand come down on her right shoulder, pulling her back and putting distance between her and Sai’s bodies.
His one eye is smiling, but it’s a tense, uneasy thing.
“Not before eating breakfast.”
…
Senju Tsunade—Sannin, Fifth Hokage, descendant of the Senju and Uzumaki Clans, master of yin, yang, fire, earth, water, and lightning—pours herself her third saucer of saké in so many minutes and looks like she’d rather cut that ominous purple diamond off her forehead than look into Sakura’s eyes for more than thirty seconds at a time.
This is fine with Sakura. She keeps her head bowed to make it easier. The hardwood is a grounding pressure against her knee and fist as she maintains her kneel, Sai holding the same position beside her. There is a wall clock on the far side of the Hokage’s office that ticks very quietly but persistently, and a secretary-type with short black hair and black robes that tuts almost as often.
She was introduced as ‘Shizune’ and as a jōnin, but Sakura has a very strong sense that Tsunade's apprentice is the type of leaf that will fall at the first shake of the branch, which doesn’t sit well with what she knows of discipleship. In Root, the strongest received the most instruction; it’s a waste of time to teach a calf before it’s culled.
From the corners of her eyes, she can see Sai’s gaze getting caught repeatedly on how the Hokage’s long blonde hair, tied into two strands, spills down between her partially exposed sizable breasts. The confusion that radiates from him is making it hard not to smirk. He is thinking: Don’t they get in the way? Sakura would have cut them off—the hair and the breasts—if it were her.
“And you think she’s ready for,” Tsunade tastes the words, swishing them around her tongue before swallowing them, “reintegration?”
Hound is a solid presence at her left, standing straight with his hands clasped behind him in his full jōnin uniform, green vest and all, but his posture is that of Anbu. He is purposefully appearing unyielding, she thinks, preparing for a coming argument. So he is someone who can argue with the Hokage. Interesting. She feels sweat beginning to dampen the hair at the nape of her neck. It’s warmer in the Hokage’s office than it was outside; Sakura finds herself glad she switched her long sleeves for her black training tank before leaving Hound’s territory, even if he forced her to wrap her blue Root flame with white bandages before exiting the compound.
“Not at all,” Hound says, and Sakura can’t stop her eyes from twitching up to assess his expressionless, masked face. “But she could use a mission.”
A mission. The words send tiny sparks of euphoria through her bloodstream, after so many days withering away in the tranquil woods on the Hatake grounds.
The Hokage’s chair creaks when she settles back into it, blue robes sliding off her wrists and spilling over the wooden arms of her seat like waterfalls, her chest rising and falling with a deep, weighted breath as she looks down her straight nose at the two strays on her floor.
“I don’t like the look in your eyes, girl,” she says, and Sakura stares down at the knots in the wood floor in front of the Hokage’s desk, trying not to breathe too noticeably. “Mission request denied.”
Sakura does not react, but something vile shifts under her skin. Perhaps the Hokage has a point, not letting her out of the village just yet. Perhaps Danzō was right. Perhaps Sakura only takes orders well when they come from a mouth that has its teeth around the neck of what she values. These people are not willing to kill Sai to hurt her. It makes them difficult to follow.
“The council is adamant she be introduced to the ranks,” Shizune adds, “News of her return is beginning to spread, and you’ll be expected to let her make an appearance sooner rather than later.”
“Let her patrol the walls.” Hound is an ally, today. “As a responsible pet owner, it’s my obligation to take her on walks.” Never mind. “Let her sniff the other dogs before arranging a playdate. She’s unsocialized.”
The Hokage sips her saké, balancing the saucer with her thumb and index finger delicately, and Sakura watches the liquid swirl and glimmer as the angle of the saucer tips toward the Sannin’s mouth. She places the dish on the wooden desk soundlessly, allowing the silence of the dust-filled room to press down on their shoulders, heavy as the stacks of unaddressed paperwork crowding the corners of the room. She is surprised by the dust. The paper apprentice looks like the type to clean.
“Come here, girl.”
“I’d advise against that,” Hound says, as Sakura obediently rises from her kneel, and Tsunade’s amber eyes snap to him with suppressed ire. She’s got a temper. It’s useful information.
“You think I can’t handle one of Danzō’s brats?” She leaves no room for comment. “Come here,” she repeats, motioning Sakura forward with two of her elegant fingers, gold rings reflecting the light phasing through the open window. It must be sealed elaborately, to warrant enough confidence to leave the shutters open; to have a window in the office of the Hokage at all.
Sakura feels every fiber of her jōnin pants shift against her legs as she approaches the desk, leaving a respectful three feet of space as she grabs her wrist behind her back, squaring her exposed shoulders and meeting the Hokage’s eyes.
“How much do you remember about this village, outside of the Root compound?”
“I am familiar with most aspects of the Hidden Leaf, including its layout and guard rotations.”
This answer does not seem to satisfy her. Her eyes don’t narrow, but one of the muscles in her jaw twitches under deceptively youthful skin. She feels Hound shift his weight behind her, loud against Sai’s perfect stillness.
The secretary tuts again. Sakura considers cutting off her tongue, but discards the instinct as counterproductive to the goal.
“And the people?”
The people?
Sakura mentally stutters through an analysis of what answer the Hokage is looking for, but it’s difficult to determine when the question is so unclear. If she unfocuses her eyes, she can extend her senses a few miles beyond this room without straining herself. She pushes her awareness past the Anbu hovering nearby, into the village outside the tower. There are distinct clusters of larger-than-average chakra signatures she recognizes as clan compounds, and faint flickers of chakra she notes as civilians mulling about the unpaved gravel streets. If she does a rough estimate of known clans—about seventeen—and adds on the average civilian population per residential square mile:
“I’d estimate a population of roughly 80,000, including the main clans,” she says, confidently, and watches Tsunade’s stern posture wilt into something…odd. She holds eye-contact with Sakura for another ten seconds before she’s at her limit, leaning back in her chair and pinching the bridge of her nose with the index finger and thumb.
“Your dog-walking mission is approved,” she says, directing the words over Sakura’s shoulder. “Dismissed.”
Outside of the Hokage tower, Sakura squints against the sun. Hound has his hand around the nape of her neck in a firm hold, steering her straight down the wooden stairs that creak with every shift in weight, like he thinks she’s going to jump at the shadows of the Anbu stalking their heels where they think she doesn’t see them. Sai is lingering behind, taking his time, dragging his fingers over the handrail, looking for splinters.
“Her apprentice looked weak,” she says, and Hound tightens his hand on her neck, guiding her past the bottom step and taking a sharp left that displaces the dirt under his shoes, trying to cut back behind the building, opting for an empty alleyway between a soba shop with blue curtains in the windows and a stationary store that smells like paper and adhesive.
They are almost in the shadow of the tower when she feels them: two nin with unique chakra signatures—one pure like a crystal spring, the other like hot wind spiraling out of a cave, infinite in depth and difficult to control—approaching them cautiously from behind. Hound curses sharply beside her, albeit under his breath.
The girl’s voice is a timid, hopeful thing.
“Sensei?” And then, “Is that…?” Her voice wavers and wilts. Timid things should be put down, Sakura thinks, lest their weakness infect the ranks.
Before she can get a look at the girl, Hound wraps his arm around her shoulders and stops her from turning around. “How about we finish that game of marbles,” he says, with forced levity, and shunshins her away in a flicker.
…
“You found her.”
Choosing to ignore the undercurrent of accusation in the Uchiha’s tone, Kakashi slides out a stool and joins the five shinobi gathered around the long rustic table staring at him with varying degrees of trust and suspicion. It is testament to their intensity that they’ve skipped over any complaints regarding Kakashi’s late arrival. He wasn’t even late on purpose, this time. It just took a few hours to convince himself to step past the curtain into the fragrant steam of Ichiraku’s recently expanded restaurant, debating up until the last second how much is his to tell, how much of Sakura and her situation is necessary to share. The Hokage has left this to his discretion, within reason, and it feels like having work shoved off on him.
“I want to see her.”
Weighing her statement, Kakashi briefly observes the serious set of Ino’s feather light eyebrows over foggy blue eyes, her elbows braced on the table in front of her, a half-eaten bowl of pork-based ramen pushed to the side, forgotten disposable chopsticks sinking slowly to the bottom. There’s a broth stain on her left arm warmer, a ring of yellow on white. She was distracted while she ate. Or maybe she was waving noodles around between her chopsticks, gesturing emphatically while arguing with the Nara currently propping his head up with his hand and feigning apathy. He’s willing to assume Ino’s connections to T&I through her father have given her a decent idea of what they’re dealing with here, and by extension Shikamaru likely has drawn a few conclusions based on whatever Ino was able to share. That makes them both the most and the least difficult to deal with.
For now, he’s worried about the restless idiots sitting across from him on either side of a very pale Hinata, looking washed out in her gray chūnin fatigues even with her black hair pulled back in a pony, having just rotated off of guard duty before rushing to meet the others.
Sasuke’s knuckles are turning white, fingers interlaced on the table in front of him. His dark blue training fatigues have scorch marks on the sleeves and on the edge of the high collar that goes up to his chin, hiding the curse mark Ochimaru tried and failed to use to bring him to heel years ago. Naruto won’t look at anyone. He has his mouth pressed to steepled fingers, eyelids low over blue irises, a few specks of dirt in his short blonde hair. Based on the charred state of his orange utility jacket, he was sparring with Sasuke earlier.
“No one is permitted to see her.”
The silence that follows his words is poignant and unpleasant.
“Not yet,” he adds, but the mood does not improve.
Behind the counter, Ichiraku dabs at his tanned forehead with a faded blue towel and waves a hand at Kakashi in question, to which Kakashi shakes his head ‘no.’ He doesn’t have an appetite, at the moment.
“How did she look?” Shikamaru’s question is aimed at Naruto and Hinata, the latter wincing slightly, but the Nara’s narrow brown eyes are steady in their cataloging of Kakashi’s reaction.
“We only saw her back,” Hinata answers, but the muscles around her milky eyes are tight. She’s a Hyūga. She can see a hell of a lot with less of a glance than she apparently got.
Naruto is notably subdued, dragging his hand over his mouth as he exhales slowly. “Did you feel it?” He lifts his eyes to Kakashi, expression grim. Kakashi knows what he’s asking, but he can’t decide if airing this out to the group will lead to more trouble or less. “When Hinata spoke?”
He did. He spent a good part of this afternoon watching Sai deal with the brunt of it via the bloodthirsty spectacle they call sparring, getting it out of her system. Kakashi is under strict orders not to spar with his charge—needing to delay her from growing familiar with how to counter him in a fight while she’s adjusting—which has made burning off her energy a bit of a challenge. The only reason he felt he could sneak away for this pleasant little chat is because Sai tired her out to the point of no longer being able to move.
“Killing intent,” Naruto clarifies unhelpfully, and Hinata casts her eyes down to the empty bowl in front of her, pursing her lips, both nin avoiding acknowledging the way their spikey-haired teammate’s hackles rise, Sasuke straightening his back as his body language edges toward hostile.
Rather than let their imaginations run wild, Kakashi lets a hopefully-but-not-likely convincing smile show via his exposed eye and briefly misses the days when Naruto was a desperate optimist and Sasuke had his head too far up his own ass to care if his teammates were being threatened.
“It wasn’t personal,” he says, because it’s (probably) true, but it doesn’t seem to alleviate the tension.
Seemingly deep in thought, Shikamaru slowly tears open a salt packet, angles it down and taps his finger on the edge, once, twice, spilling it onto the table deliberately. Ino’s gaze is unchanged, not surprised. Kakashi wonders how much she actually knows.
“And you found her, what, a month ago?” Shikamaru taps the salt packet again, and Kakashi takes the opening with grace. This is going to piss them off, but at least the target of their ire will shift away from Sakura and onto him.
“We located her roughly four years after her disappearance,” he says, and watches the effect of his words ripple down the table as they do the math.
“Four years,” the Nara parrots. His finger stills; he’d begun drawing circles in the salt.
Someone breaks a glass in the kitchen, and the other patrons in the restaurant cheer.
“Correct,” Kakashi says, and Sasuke activates his Sharingan with all the subtlety of a fire alarm.
“She’s been missing for eight. ” Ino says the number through gritted teeth, gripping the wooden edge of the table, face turning purple enough to rival her cropped plum colored vest, and he guesses that marks the limitations of what she’s been told .
“Where?” Sasuke’s question breaks through the ambient noise of the restaurant, cutting through the smell of chives and starch, drawing the group’s attention down to a fine point. “Where has she been?”
And this is the part Kakashi has been trying to make a decision about. Her general state of being is too noticeable to not provide an explanation for. Two of his former students saw the back of her head for all of three seconds and already gathered that something drastic had changed. These types of observations will only get worse with more exposure. His initial thought was to tell them she was in black ops and say nothing more about it, but they will want to know how she got there in the first place; how an academy student ended up in an unlisted black site before becoming a f*cking genin. The illegal continuation of Root has not become public knowledge, let alone the long-standing atrocities behind its facade, but this group won’t buy anything he says short of the truth.
Kakashi has an imperfect solution to this:
“She got lost on the path of life,” he says, mildly.
And because he’s practicing magnanimity, he body-flickers toward the outskirts of the restaurant’s interior before allowing his former student to grab him by the high collar of his vest and shove his back into the wall, sparing Ichiraku from having to replace any dishes that would have been knocked off the table had he not lured Sasuke to a safer location to throw a tantrum.
“What happened to ‘don’t be scum’?”
Kakashi never said not to be scum. He said ‘if you abandon your friends you will be scum.’ There’s a difference. One is prescriptive, the other descriptive. It was in the teaching manual he read when the council forced a handful of squabbling genin on him at the tender age of eighteen, either because one had scary eyes and the other had nine more tails than humans should have, or as a heavy-handed way to make him process his neglected grief. Both may be true. Both equally unwelcome.
“Sasuke.” Naruto drags the Uchiha off of him with a hand on his shoulder, but he casts a judging glare onto Kakashi before nudging his best friend back toward the table where the others are still steeping in disappointment from his unsatisfying explanation.
Sighing behind his mask quietly enough to fall beneath their notice, Kakashi leans his head back on the recycled wood of the wall he’s holding up with his back. He’s been away from his two newest pet projects for long enough. Any more and he’s testing his faith.
“Would you look at the time,” he drawls, already on his way to the doorway, “there’s a flash sale on Icha Icha posters in ten minutes. You kids don’t mind if I duck out early.”
There is a consensus of displeased muttering behind him, loud enough to be heard over the sounds of meat hissing over spits, tables being bussed, and ceramic bowls being stacked, but none of it follows him when he lifts the fabric partition up with his forearm and bows out beneath it, fresh air unsaturated by heat and seasoning clearing out his sinuses as he steps into the street of Konoha at sundown.
He makes it almost two blocks, weaving lethargically between peddlers and children making similar amounts of noise, before she works up the courage.
“Wait.”
After another deep breath, Kakashi halts his progress and angles his head to look behind him with his right eye, leaving his hands in the pants pockets of his jōnin uniform as Yamanaka Ino stops walking at the same time he does. Her eyes look ominous in the dying light, a hazy blue that reminds him of traveling through Mist over water. She has her purple training pants freshly wrapped at the shins, her fists tight at her sides, hiding the manicured nails she maintains religiously. Perfectionistic. Tense.
“I understand the others, but Shika and I need to see her.”
“What you need,” he echoes, before he can disguise his distaste, “has little bearing on my decision.”
“So it is your decision,” she says, and Kakashi narrows his eyes, even the one she can’t see. “‘No one’s permitted,’ my ass.”
“You’re out of line, Yamanaka.”
“And you’re full of sh*t.”
“She is not the girl you knew,” he says, and feels no satisfaction at the way she retreats a step when he starts toward her before she can quell her wiser instincts, his mask of affability slipping fast, as it has been often, since a certain pink-haired menace started spending most of her time pulling at the threads of his patience in hopes one will come loose. The proud Yamanaka lets him come within a foot of her, keeps her chin up and lets him look down his nose at her with disdain she needs to see. “She’ll eat you alive.”
Her confidence wavers; he can see it in the shift in her eyes, the furrowing of her brows. “We’re her friends. Whatever she’s been through, we want to be there. We need to be there.”
“She doesn’t have friends,” he says, and hopes he can impress this onto her now, before it costs her something more valuable than her pride. Like a hand. Or her life. “And until she is ready to make some, I’m not letting her thin down her list of candidates via decapitation. Understand?”
Two genin wearing their forehead protectors backwards race around them where they are blocking the path, kicking up a cloud of dust in their wake. The sound of metal shutters unfolding signals one of the merchants behind him closing up shop for the evening.
She holds his stare a moment longer, and she does not understand, but she sets her jaw and turns her cheek, and Kakashi’s thoughts skip and sputter over how naive she looks compared to Haruno in this moment, nineteen years having shaped them both so fundamentally differently.
“Give her time to adjust,” he says. Give me time to fix this, he does not.
Exhaling slowly, she nods her head once and pivots on the heel of her black training slippers, retreating down the street without fanfare, and Kakashi feels his shoulders uncoil, feeling like he fumbled through that altercation and barely came out of it with a passing grade.
His right hand is on the path to rub the tension from the back of his neck when his eye catches on the edge of his sleeve. A few black threads have come loose from the stitch.
The hem is starting to fray.
