Archive of Our Own

Kakashi is born with one soulmark. His father tells him that his second came a few bare months later, bright and prominent and likely uncomfortable, judging by an infant Kakashi’s screeching disconcertion. The marks are impossible to mistake for anything but. The Hatake bear no clan markings, and Kakashi’s soulmarks are vivid ink-smears on his pale skin; a circle of red set between his shoulder blades, a curl of violet right over his pulse point.

When Kakashi is small, he regards his soulmarks with a fierce open joy. He riggs up mirror systems around the house that allow him to see the red dot without constant twisting, he rubs his thumb over the violet smudge under his jaw to the point that it becomes a habit. It tingles, when he touches it, a tickling pins and needles feeling. Kakashi traces his soulmarks and thinks pack and family. He is wolf-blood and Hatake-lineage, and in his father’s tradition these are what his marks represent. The people that left them are the other pieces of Kakashi’s soul and spirit means as much as blood.

(Mother’s mark is on father’s left shoulder. It trails all the way to his elbow, silvery blue but faded in a way that says the other half of the connection has passed. It is a bird. It is turned so that only one eye is visible. Its long sweeping tail curls over Sakumo’s bicep and all across its body a pattern of triangles and circles overlap in delicate feathers.)

Kakashi checks his soulmarks every morning and every night. He looks for changes: any sign of shimmer, colour difference, expansion. Soulmarks change as their instigators do, shifting to reflect their growth and personality. At five, the circle on Kakashi’s back graduates to a round blob, which tells him exactly nothing. Progress on the other one is noted down more carefully: it is a crescent these days, all sharp, defined edges, curving up to bite his jaw.

They don’t look like much. Probably, they’re not supposed to. One of Kakashi’s soulmates is younger than him, but not by much. One of Kakashi’s soulmates is older than him, but, judging by the state of the soulmark, also not by much. People’s personalities are not so set at Kakashi’s age for their marks to advance beyond weird geometric shapes.

Still, Kakashi makes lists. In between training, dogs, and reading titles on Spatial Relativity and inertia, he thinks of his soulmates and makes list of what they might be like. They are short things, despite their frequency, and use jot-note one-word descriptions only. At the back of his shelves, he tucks them away into the womb of a hollowed out textbook, paperbacks stacked in front like a barricade.

Sometimes, Kakashi wonders what his soulmates will think of him. Obviously, evidently, they’ll like him, because Kakashi is a genius and because they’re the other halves of his soul. But the other things, the smaller habits, what will they think? He mentions this to his father, apropos of nothing, and Sakumo ruffles his hair and smiles down fondly in a way that makes Kakashi squirm away. Honestly dad. He’s not three anymore.

“They’ll love you,” Sakumo says, which is not what Kakashi asked—Kakashi knows that already. Then he tries to cajole Kakashi into eating more vegetables, and Kakashi bats his chopsticks away.

Soulmates are special. They can slide into a variety of categories: a lover or a friend or a sibling or a parent, but they mean someone who understands, someone who will love you unconditionally, someone that will know the core of you.

When Kakashi is small, five and barely two feet tall, that is not nearly as frightening as it should be.

Kakashi enters the Academy two months after his fifth birthday. He starts his first day as a student with a mask over the lower half of his face. The fabric is black and porous, a snug fit that goes from his nose to his collar bone and itches a little when he sneezes. It’s a new development; he has an entire stock of them in the back of his closet now. Partially, its purpose is to help regulate his sense of smell, but mostly, it’s to cover his soulmark. The violet one has grown to the point that high collars don’t manage anymore, up his jaw and onto his cheek, swirled itself into a tight snail’s shell over his pulse. Different clans have different traditions in regards to their soulmarks, but for the Hatake they’ve always been an intensely private affair.

With his early admission, he’s the youngest among his peers. He thinks about maybe skipping a few grades and graduating early.

His father tells his to make friends.

Kakashi does not make friends.

This is because, frankly, his classmates are kind of terrible.

Their conversation topics are inane and senseless; their humour is stupid; a lot of things about them are, in fact, stupid. They struggle with basic writing and arithmetic that Kakashi had internalized before he could toddle, and they either seem to covet the entirety of his attention or loathe him on some unknown principle. They also whine, a lot. And their actions are immature and irrational. It’s baffling. Kakashi knows he hasn’t frequently interacted with children of his age cohort, but surely they can’t all be this bad?

Apparently, they are. Apparently, they’re all stupid.

He comes back home bewildered and frustrated in equal measure. He does not understand. Kakashi’s genius extends to many areas, but social interactions of pre-adolescents does not seem to be included.

“They’re just kids,” his father tells him, after choking back his laughter when Kakashi voices his complaints over his homework. He grins at Kakashi’s unimpressed expression and adds, “they’ll get better when they get older.”

Kakashi squints at him. That should in no way be an excuse.

In the long run though, it doesn’t matter. Kakashi breezes through his classes and makes genin in nine months. He doesn’t make friends, barely makes acquaintances, but he does meet Gai, who is irrational and baffling in a completely different sense all together. His academy instructor says he’s set the record for earliest graduation. After school, Kakashi’s father picks him up and swings him up onto his shoulders, and he smiles a wolf’s smile and laughs a laugh that rumbles low in chest.

“I,” he says, “am so proud of you.”

Kakashi’s father is strong and fierce and the best in every way. Kakashi’s father is always proud of him. “I know,” he says, rolling his eyes. Then: “What are we having for dinner?”

They get takeout from the Akimichi place, because neither of them can cook, and that night Sakumo has Kakashi sign the Dog’s summoning contract.

Namikaze Minato is, among other things, seventeen, blonde, a Seals Master and a genius. He and Kakashi get along spectacularly, on the accounts of Minato being as much of a research freak as Kakashi is and having an answer to ninety percent of the questions Kakashi poses. They spend half their time holed up in the library. Rice paper sheets on the table, ink on their fingers, anything from obscure chakra theory to Land of Birds geography to carefully preserved volumes of Uzumaki Sealing techniques in between. It’s quiet, and it’s nice, and Minato explains things in a way that is both extremely efficient and makes Kakashi think. To be truthful they are alike in a lot of ways: they both, very often, forget the purpose of food and social interaction in favour of a particularly brilliant piece of jutsu, and as long as the presence of books and paper and a few good pens is assured they can also be locked into a room and oblivious to the outside world for days at a time.

Kakashi turns six. Minato comes over to the Hatake compound to eat dinner every Thursdays like clockwork. Kakashi does D-ranks up to his ears and the occasional C-rank outside the village walls, as escorts or message bearers or protection for merchants against bandits, which is riveting in comparison but not by much. He checks his soulmarks, every morning and night. They haven’t exactly progressed. The red on his back looks like a misshapen puddle, and the violet on his cheek is still stretching, a thin tendril up and up like green shoots yearning for sun.

Eight months after he makes genin, Minato takes him to Kumogakure for the bi-annual Chunin exams. They stay for two weeks, and when they leave Kakashi has a promotion and another record set.

Konohagakure is in an uproar when they get back. Not a noticeable one, not the jutsu-fire and brimstone of an invasion or the gleeful gossip of a noble scandal, but tension, blade-edge sharp, hostile and shimmering under a thin veneer of restraint. Through the markets, through the streets, the men and women look at Kakashi and turn away with narrowed eyes and tugging frowns. They are whispering things, terrible, stupid things. Things like “war” and “disgrace” and “White Fang.”

From there on, things are a downward spiral.

Sakumo does not discount any of the village rumours, even when Kakashi raises his voice to a decibel level he didn’t know he could previously produce. He is haggard, and tired, and very quiet. There are bruises under his eyes. He says, “Kakashi,” in a way that is terrible and weary and nothing like Kakashi has ever heard from him, and it makes Kakashi frightened to his bones.

Kakashi has to nag his father to wake up in the mornings. When they go out into the marketplace, there is always empty space around them, empty street, the crackling whispers and hard eyes like a Raiton barrier in between the last Hatakes and the world. Civilians chuck rotten fruit, gone soft and flecked in mold, and Sakumo lets them. Every day, it’s like Sakumo slips away a little more. He is gaunt, he does not speak very much, when Kakashi raises his hand to hurl back the stupid shopkeeper’s bruised apples in retaliation he puts a hand on Kakashi’s shoulder and steers them away.

Kakashi does not understand.

Home is stifling, all of a sudden. Kakashi is angry, at himself, at the world, at his father, and it’s a huge, swelling rage he has never felt before. He spends more and more time at Minato-sensei’s. Five days out of seven he sleeps on the jounin’s couch and reads Sensei’s fuinjutsu scrolls and eats his meals in Minato’s tiny, cramped kitchen. Thankfully, Sensei doesn’t say anything of it. He buys Kakashi a dresser to store his amenities and drags him out to ramen every Friday.

Training and studying overcomes his schedule, quite by design, so that Kakashi doesn’t have time to think about things. It’s a wasted effort at best, though. That’s the curse of genius—Kakashi cannot not think about things. He spins the pieces around and around, quick silver strings sliding events up and down and backwards. Here is the dilemma: Sakumo saved his team, and his team is pack. Sakumo saved his team and failed his mission. In doing so he failed his village.

Across his back, over his cheek, Kakashi’s soulmarks grow. The people whom these belong to are pack and family.

Some days Kakashi doesn’t think he wants to meet them.

Then when he’s eight Kakashi’s father kills himself. Kakashi forces himself to attend the funeral but almost doesn’t. He thinks about pack and family and war, and folds the knowledge of his soulmarks down into tiny little parcels, locks it away two steps left to the place he’s locked his (deadfoolishstupidtraitor) father. He is numb inside. He is stone. Metal encases him. He feels looks at Sakumo’s grave and feels nothing, because anything he does feel can be ruthlessly, efficiently squashed.

The war is officially announced two months later.

A whirlwind of missions take up all his time. Kakashi goes on long, winding routes hugging Fire country’s borders to help restock the troops. He siphons information. He helps drag back the dead.

He and Minato are somewhere are at an outpost near the wind border, when he asks, in a moment of aberrant curiosity, “Ne, Sensei, do you have a soulmate?”

The night is dark beyond the leaf canopy. Long shadows flicker on the walls from the lamp light. Kakashi is sharpening his weapons, listening to the soft scchk of the kunai edge on whetstone. He doesn’t know why he asked.

If he has a soulmark, Kakashi’s never seen it. Sensei rarely gets injured enough to show any skin. Sensei’s too fast to get injured, most of the time, and when he does it’s less front-line injured and more because Uzumaki Kushina kicked him through a wall or chucked a teapot at his head.

“Hmm? No,” says Minato. He looks up from the sealwork sprawled across his lap. Blue eyes study Kakashi, then Minato breaths out a puff of breath that might be a sigh. “It’s not bad to have soul mates, Kakashi.”

“It’s inconvenient,” Kakashi states flatly.

Minato’s seen Kakashi’s soulmarks. Likely, he’s seen them more than Kakashi has over the course of the past year. This is because Minato is in charge of Kakashi’s emergency first aid and Kakashi, for his part, pretends his soulmarks exist but only in a land far far away, where they don’t actually exist.

“They can be good for you,” Minato says, one part of his mouth ticking up in a bit of a rueful smile. Minato worries a lot about Kakashi. It’s a bit of a waste in emotional resources.

Shinobi have no need for soulmates. They are a compromise in loyalty that should never occur because duty binds them to their village first and foremost. Besides, people are messy and irritating and take an energy that can better utilize for Kakashi’s training instead.

He doesn’t say any of this, because Sensei’s face has a high likelihood of getting a pained, pinched look. “They can be an enemy-nin,” he relays blandly instead.

It’s likely. The statistical probability is high. Soulmates are usually inside one-another’s spheres of influence, drawn together like orbiting moons stuck in the gravitational pull of their connection. Nine out of ten ninja find their matching in the same profession. Well, as long as the other isn’t dead, that is. Ninjas live fast and short lives. Soulmarks have a tendency of going faded.

And at this point, pretty much all the ninja not originating from Konoha can be slotted under the category of "enemy."

Sensei’s face still gets a pained, pinched look.

“Yes. Well.”

He doesn’t deny it.

Then the alarms downstairs are triggered— likely a raid squad trying to get into the outpost—and that topic of discussion is promptly put to a halt.

Nohara Rin and Uchiha Obito are soulmates.

Scrawled across the bottom of their dossiers, the information is printed in neat, tight writing, a footnote to the more important observations. Kakashi eyes it judgmentally. That’s… rare. For varyingly different reasons.

But they were still put on the same team in spite of it.

Academically, and affinity wise, the match up makes sense. Nohara is top of her class in pretty much everything but taijutsu, with the edge-fine chakra control from a long lineage of genjutsu specialists and a field medic mother, and Uchiha’s higher marks in close-quarters combat and his fire-nature balances her out. Unfortunately, Uchiha seems to be middling in pretty much everything other than taijutsu and ninjutsu. That’s basically terrible for what should be a major clan child.

Kakashi eyes it even more judgmentally.

He’d been hoping he could make it to jounin before Sensei got himself an actual genin team. Kakashi knew he would—between his aptitude for teaching and his ability to maneuver from the front-lines to the village in a split second burst of Hirashin—he was an excellent candidate for the job. But well, it seemed that jounin at nine was pushing it, even for Kakashi.

For their own sake, Kakashi clinically hopes that two have sorted out their relationship. Either that, or they’ll be very dead, very quickly.

The war isn’t nice.

Sensei, of course, is completely excited over this. He’s even wearing the “Team Dad” T-shirt that Kushina-san had bought him a few months ago for the the team introductions. Sometimes Kakashi has very specific doubts about Minato’s survival instincts, especially considering his completely besotted romance with Uzumaki Akai Chisio no Habanero Kushina. That arrangement involves being thrown out an average of three windows a week, and the property damage is really the least of Sensei’s problems when contested with being kidnapped for bi-monthly tea by the equally S-ranked, equally terrifying matriarch of the Uchiha clan, who is in fact Kushina-san’s soulmate.

Kakashi can’t really parse why, but at least Sensei’s happy.

Uchiha is completely infatuated with Nohara. Nohara is completely oblivious, or at least pretending. Uchiha is also late. He is always late, all the time, by two minutes or fifteen and on one memorable occasion stinking of garbage and with cat-scratches on both hands. It stirs up some prickling irritation Kakashi had though he’d lost. Obito is annoying by nature.

They take a lot of D-ranks.

Bomb disposal, body retrieval, rebuilding, fortifying the village walls, they’re all essential but tedious tasks that need to be done. “I,” says Obito, from an air of someone grimly determined, “am going to beat you this time.”

They’re maybe sixty kilometers from the village itself. The Iwa-nin have retreated from this particular stronghold, but a lot of explosives remain.

“You can try,” Kakashi says dismissively, ink and kunai already at hand.

Obito scowls at him and goes to start from the southern end, as Kakashi works on the eastern half, efficiently, methodically, breaking apart the seal-arrays into something useless and non-threatening. For the most part the variations are the same, although the pattern they’re put in means that some of the paper-seals have more complicated designs and triggers. Kakashi is halfway through what looks like a paralysis seal, a variation he’s only semi familiar with but the base concepts look simple enough, when it begins sizzling at the edges.

Kakashi stops mid-stroke.

The first rule concerning seals is this: all of them have some measure of capacity to explode, no matter what their original function.

He has his kunai pinned through the tag in an instant, propelling himself up with a body flicker. He needs—distance. The entire area is rigged, not only with seals but also shrapnel grenades and such, which are in no way allowed to detonate. Kakashi hurtles the tag and the kunai up.

From above, a heat-flash and a moment of deafening noise, and then he’s hitting the ground at a roll that ends with him flat on his back.

It takes a second for his head to stop pounding, and when it does, both Nohara and Sensei are already bobbing over him, Obito’s chakra a buzzing frenzy to his left. “How many fingers?” Nohara asks.

“Three,” says Kakashi.

He sits up. The sky only spins a little from vertigo, and Kakashi has no urge to vomit. Not terrible.

His left arm throbs.

“That needs to be dressed,” says Sensei.

Nohara reaches out. One hand is green lit, and the other reaches to remove Kakashi’s arm guards. Kakashi almost jerks away—don't touch—but Minato looks at him with his disapproving face and so instead Kakashi settles for making his body language as much indignant cat as possible. Gently, Nohara peels away the arm guards. Her fingers land on his wrist.

And it’s like Kakashi’s entire nervous system lights up.

It’s huge, the feeling. It prickles down his spine and pounds blood through his ears and he can deduce the contact point with a startling clarity. It’s overwhelming. Nohara's fingers burn where they touch, and there's a sudden tingle where his soulmark is, on his neck and coming up to wrap around his jaw, skittering up to the base of his ear, up to his cheek, over and around like ivy plants in summer. 

Kakashi is thinking statistics, probability, gravitational pulls and soulmarks. He is thinking: Nohara Is Obito’s soulmate. He is thinking, how did this not happen before and why is this happening now. His pulse is thumping in his ears. Soulmarks activate on skin contact, so somehow Kakashi has avoided that despite being on the same team as his soulmates  for three weeks. He thinks: Nohara practices taijutsu with Sensei. He thinks: Obito is easy enough that Kakashi’s been literally sparring him with both hands behind his back.

Blinking up, Nohara’s eyes are huge. Her mouth is parted in a silent o, her posture frozen where she’s crouched.

“Rin?” comes Obito’s voice, tone concerned, and then Nohara’s hand snaps out, grabs Obito’s wrist, and the high is still rushing through Kakashi’s brain enough that he doesn’t flip Obito onto his ass when he hesitantly closes a hand over Kakashi’s elbow.

A shock wave. Kakashi's feels it from his hair tips to his teeth. The mark on his back flares.

Everything is buzzing. It feels warm and a little fuzzy, some mix of painkillers and adrenaline. “Oh,” says Obito, strangled at first. “Oh Sage, seriously?”

“That’s my line, you crybaby loser.”

Kakashi in no way wanted to meet his soulmates, he realizes now, and with more certainty than ever.

A look of hurt crosses Obito’s face. Just as quickly, it disappears to indignant scowling. “Oi now you bastard,” he starts, but is cut off at Nohara’s sigh and her knee knocking quick and neat into his. He rounds at her with a protesting gaze. “Rin!”

“Obito,” says Nohara, soft but pointed.

Subsiding, Obito makes a noise like a cough-growl at the back of his throat before closing his mouth. His glare at Kakashi continues.

Well,” Nohara says, with a small, quirked smile at both of them. “There’s no need for introductions?”

Stonily, Kakashi looks at them; they look back. Nohara’s smile falters a little at the edges.

It is very awkward.

Then Sensei clears his throat, and Kakashi abruptly remembers to jerk away. A twist, and his arm is his own again, but the moment he does the loss is acute and uncomfortable. He wants it back. It’s—unnerving. Unnerving and irrational on many levels. He looks at Nohara and Obito, both who look fine, if a little grumpy and contemplating respectively.

He wonders if it’s supposed to be that intense. He doesn’t think it is.

Rising to his feet, and Kakashi shakes the dust from his hair and brushes his uniform. His hands are trembling. That’s also unnerving. Kakashi has no time for soulmates in his life schedule and meeting them isn’t going to change anything.

“We still have to clear this field,” he says sharply, flatly. His voice comes out clear. He’s almost surprised it did.

“You are such a bastard,” sighs Obito.

None of them push the issue.

Sensei doesn’t, although afterwards he takes everyone out to Ichiraku ramen to celebrate. Nohara (call me Rin, Kakashi-kun) doesn’t, but Nohara’s good at recognizing boundaries. Obito doesn’t. Rumours are the Uchiha clan are… delicate concerning soulmates, and apart from a week of slightly sloppier taijutsu and slightly wilder katons, the issue is dropped.

This is followed by a great litany of more D-ranks. They are boring. Kakashi acknowledges that they need to be done, but they’re still boring.

In between though, Minato slowly but surely upgrades their training regime, until all three of them, even Kakashi, is going home sweat-streaked and exhausted. He puts in a cheerfully mandatory order of “Team bonding!” two times a week, which basically translates to “Team dinner,” which translates to ramen or that one Akimichi place whenever it’s Minato or Kakashi’s turn to host. With Obito, they visit the Uchiha district. Obito’s grandmother puts out sweet stuffed buns and shows them the vast array of baby photos she hoards on her shelves. They meet Rin’s father on a Thursday evening and by the time they leave the house, every single person on the team has a personal mug in Rin’s kitchen pantry.

Kakashi learns things, through repetition and peripheral and shared time. He categorizes Obito’s scowls and the minute twitches of Obito’s habits, muscle memory, the way he drags his fingers down the side of his goggles as a nervous tick. Learns the different pitches of Rin’s voice and the way she thinks, spinning situations and people and outliers into coherent pictures, ingenuous. He internalizes the information in the same way he always has, three or five or nine years old, Kakashi is genius. Makes them into neat lists, clinical mission format, and tucks them away to the back of mind.

Rin turns ten in November, and Kakashi buys her a birthday present because she’s an efficient, intelligent teammate, even though the best option is still no team, period. Sensei gives her a scroll of medical ninjutsu, Obito gives her fingerless gloves, Kakashi gives her a spool of new ninja wire in chakra conductive metal, because those are Rin’s weapon of choice, and with her deft control they can slice straight through solid rock.

Sensei looks mistily proud at them all.

Still, the war is raging, and Konoha doesn’t have enough forces that sensei can keep them in reserve forever.

Courier missions are a staple. They do escorts as well, B-ranks for merchants trying to navigate through the hostile war zones. When they’re eleven and two of them newly promoted, there’s a memorably awful five-month stint spent in the trenches in the front lines of Iwa. Sometime through the middle of it all Obito discovers the advantages of combining Kushina-san’s explosive seals with his clan’s signature Katons, and the opposition goes up in mass, fiery graves. Kakashi’s sense of smell closes shop after two days. He sees Rin after each wave—whether Konoha advances or not—picking through dead bodies with blood and thicker things smeared on her skin and hair, searching for survivors.

Three months in, the Konoha regiment finally breaks through and into the stronghold just past the ridge of Kiyoshi, and after looting supplies and disposing the freshly dead bodies, (and checking for the hopeful activation of his Sharingan, which still has not happened) the first thing Obito does, unfortunately but predictably, is make a beeline for the hot springs.

“Oh my god,” he says, staring over the edge of the water. It’s all indoors, underground, and Obito makes a small, enraptured noise. “Oh my God hot water.” He shucks off his chuunin vest—which is a write off anyways, at this point, and Kakashi flicks a kunai at him even as Obito divests himself of the rest of his clothes and prepares to dive.

He shoots a look of pique over one shoulder. “What?”

“The base isn’t secured yet,” Kakashi says, in an I-am-tired-of-your-stupid tone.

Obito dives anyways.

He emerges from under the surface a good thirty seconds later, shaking water out of his hair like a bedraggled dog. He looks cleaner just from that—although, to be fair, that isn’t a difficult task—and splashes his hand in Kakashi’s general direction. “Come on, you reek even more than me, Bakashi. It’s as secured as it’s gonna get. We killed, like all three of their high command and most of their jounin. And Nara-san already swept the whole place.”

Kakashi remembers having once, stupidly, thinking a base was secured and then having nearly an entire regiment wiped out because of a gas-trap two hours in. Obito rates a ten on the idiot scale, but having him killed because his need for a hot bath overcame his survival instincts is just—no. No.

There’s a pointed pause.

Obito follows with: “You reek, by the way.” He sniffs, and makes a face.

“We all reek,” says Kakashi, which is the reality of the situation.

Rin comes in half an hour later, after Obito has swan the length of the pool eight times and is currently debating how to drag Kakashi in with him, preferably by the ankle. In terms of smell, she’s the worst off of all of them. Something hot and pulpy red drips chunkily off the front of her vest. Sludge and rock dust is settled in her hair. She smells as if she has been wading through the eviscerated, and it’s more than likely what happened.

“Please tell me there’s soap,” is the first thing she says.

Folding himself down, Kakashi goes through two ration bars and throws half of his third one at Obito’s waving hand.

The steam is thick and billowing, and Rin and Obito are both pale lithe figures in the water apart from the marks on their skins. Brown-green-violet on Obito’s shoulder, twisting around and around, vine and leaf interlocking into a bird of prey with its wings spread. Black-red-gold on Rin’s belly, a gunbai that goes around her torso and up to the middle of her back. Kakashi’s marks on both of them: the white streak of a blade with blue wrappings on Obito’s hip, the circle of lightning on Rin’s ankle, right over the delicate bone, twisting around and around until it stops mid-calf to the head of some canine creature with its fangs bared. They are very, very different from each other, the marks; it makes sense. Obito and Rin met each other young, and soulmarks are known to change in accordance to relationships.

They’ve seen Kakashi’s marks as well. It was inevitable. War is not the place for modesty.

When Captain Hyuuga finally, officially announces the base cleared, two more chuunin and a haggard, dark haired Inuzuka woman with her ninkin silently slink into the room and take one long blink at the water before diving in. Kakashi does too, but with less abandon. He folds his clothes carefully, even though half of it has to be burned. The water is warm. Rin tosses him the bar of chopped spice soap she’d found and then goes back to her diving contest with Obito.

(Rin is winning. Rin always wins the diving contests. Her record is thirty five minutes under, cycling the oxygen in her blood with ruthless efficiency. It’s ten minutes better than Kakashi can hold.)

Hot water is, admittedly, a godsend. Kakashi scrubs himself off until his skin is reddening but clean under the steam.

He’s working out a particularly stubborn stain on his arm (a result of an acid attack he’d taken prior) when Obito paddles to his side and peers, unabashedly, at his back.

Kakashi tries not to twitch.

“What?” he says flatly.

“Nothing. It looks different, t’s all.”

He peers closer. Etiquette is not apparently something Obito has ever learned.

“Yes,” Kakashi grunts, lathering soap in his hand and then rubbing it into his matted hair. “Soulmarks do that.”

“This is why I want to punch you in the face all the time,” says Obito at a mutter, and the next moment, there’s a hand on Kakashi’s back.

It’s a careful gesture. Almost hesitant. Fingers rest between the dip of Kakashi’s shoulder blades and this time he has to actually stamp down the reflexive urge to twitch and jerk away. Obito presses, drags his thumb in a swipe down, and all of a sudden Kakashi’s muscles are relaxing without his explicit permission and his spine is melting—less liquid fire, more cat blissed out in after a nap in the sun. The entirety of Obito’s mark tingles, pins-and-needles feeling, and Kakashi can feel it when it shifts under his skin.

That is strange and bewildering on many, many different levels. Not uncomfortable, exactly, but—strange.

So very reasonably, Kakashi lands a kick at Obito’s instep and jerks an elbow into his gut. Obito squawks, hits an impressive decibel range, and then he’s flailing backwards into the water.

“Boys,” calls Rin disapprovingly.

Because he’s feeling petty, the moment Obito resurfaces Kakashi moves the water currents with a dragon seal and watches as he’s immediately dragged down again. A barely screeched “YOU SUCK—“ cuts off to a gurgle, and the next time Obito comes up he’s a good five meters out of Kakashi’s range, sullen and glowering.

“Don’t do that,” Kakashi tells him, voice hard.

Obito scowls, in a way that says he thinks Kakashi is being mystifying on purpose, and also that Kakashi’s hair would look very lovely set on fire. Not that he ever does—well, he tries, but mainly it’s redirected so that Obits is the one actually on fire. “Well you didn’t exactly try to avoid it.”

“That’s—“

He stops.

What is it, even? People don’t touch Kakashi. It isn’t done. Kakashi does not let them. Never that close, never that intimate, not unless the reason is that he’s bleeding out in a medic’s field tent. Four people are allowed, and Obito is, somehow, one of them. It has nothing to do with the marks on their skin. Kakashi does not think of the marks—they represent unacceptable things. It’s just: a part of Kakashi feels safe in Obito’s presence. Too much shared time, too much shared space. Something in him whispers: backup, ally, trustworthy.

Eyeing Obito though, Kakashi decides he’s never telling the idiot that, ever.

“Let’s just—not,” he finishes lamely.

For a moment, Obito only looks at him. Kakashi stares back, stonily. He opens his mouth and Kakashi readies himself for the yelling, but then he stops. Clicks his teeth together. The tight curl of his shoulders forcibly lessen.

“Fine,” he says, in a tone that says things are decidedly not. “Whatever. But I swear if you do that thing if Rin tries to heal your stupid face—“

“I won’t.”

That situation has, in fact, already happened. One wayward katon jutsu and half of Kakashi had been one massive burn, hair charred and masked half-grafted into his mouth and airway. Rin had knelt by his side and cut away the fabric and the blistered, peeling flesh. Her hand on the mark had been cool, green-lit, and for a few, blissful moments afterwards Kakashi’s neurons were drowning in an endorphin rush of bliss and what had felt like high-quality painkillers instead of terrible screaming.

It hadn’t even left a scar. Rin was good at burns. She’d had practice. Fire affinity was pretty much the norm in Fire Country.

“You’d better not,” says Obito. He blows out a short breath, a muttered “whatever.” Then there’s a visible hesitation, before he rolls one shoulder back and changes the subject. “You think they have actual beds here?”

He doesn’t mention the soulmarks.

Kakashi is glad, but, well, apart from certain and specific anomalies, the Uchiha clan don’t exactly approve of soulmates.

Either that or he’s gotten as good at reading Kakashi as Kakashi has him. It’s not a thought Kakashi wants to contemplate, so instead he contemplates the walls and the memorized layout. “Likely.”

They do. Have beds, that is.

But the sheets smell like dirt and mud and none of them have actually slept on a mattress, even a lumpy one, for what feels like decades.

Team Seven takes the floor instead.

This is how they sleep: Obito on Rin’s left, Kakashi on Rin’s right, pressed back to back. Counting heartbeats and every soft, thin exhale in the darkness. Eight hundred twenty two before Obito’s breaths even out. A thousand five hundred before Rin’s does. Only then does Kakashi let himself doze, but lightly, always lightly. There are seals on the floor, paralyzing tags at the door handles, wire traps carefully rigged. Back to back, feeling the shift of Rin’s shoulder blades, the blanketing quiet of Obito’s chakra, and this is the closest Kakashi has to safety over a thousand miles from Konohagakure and in the middle of a war.

Kakashi turns eleven on the front. September in Iwa is harsh and cold, and Kakashi learns to mold chakra under his skin and circulate it to ward off the worst of the frostbite. Snowfall comes in August and piles into the trenches. When they’re not defending their position from vicious sieges, Kakashi huddles together with Rin and Obito in a mass of sleeping bags and extra blankets. They squash Obito in the middle between them, mainly because his natural affinity lets him give heat off like a furnace. Sometime before the fifteenth Rin manages to steal, barter, and magically conjure enough ingredients for three small meals of saury and eggplant miso soup.

How she managed the fish five hundred miles deep in Iwa territory, Kakashi doesn’t know. He drinks his soup (and steals Obito’s saury). Afterwards, Rin breaks out bottles of rice wine. The liquid goes smooth and hot down Kakashi’s throat. He lets Obito drop his head on his shoulder giggling, and doesn’t protest when Rin sprawls herself face down across his knee. It’s warm, and he’s full, and the air only smells vaguely of corpse rot.

There are worse places Kakashi could be.

The war stretches. Team seven comes back from the front with harder eyes and nights filled with the sound of demolitions and jutsu-fire. Sensei comes back from the Western lines and by then he is the Yellow Flash, the Scourge of Iwa. They are twelve and they are thirteen and too old for their bones, and the war stretches and stretches and stretches.

Kakashi is thirteen. The nations are tired. There is an end is in sight but it is murky, foggy, grim.

Thirty miles from Kannabi bridge is where things fall apart.

 “We need to get back Rin.”

Obito is half turned towards the foliage, mouth a tight angry slash, eyes flickering rapidly in the direction the Iwa-nin had disappeared. The grip he has on his kunai is tight enough that it’s trembling. Kakashi does not look at him. Underneath their feet the water is still and green, a reflection of the bamboo canopy.

“Come on, Kakashi!”

Kakashi does not move.

Already, the signatures of the Iwa-nin are disappearing into the distance. Obito spins, eyes wild and shoulders wire tense, and before he can get out another word edgewise, Kakashi interjects quietly, “We need to complete the mission by ourselves.”

“What,” Obito says. There’s a second where he looks at Kakashi, like he’s searching for some sign of a joke, “Do you know what they could be doing to Rin?”

“We have a mission,” Kakashi repeats.

It’s a yes, of course. Kakashi knows. All of them know; they were given the pamphlet and received the experience through the long months out at the front. Kakashi is calculating: Ten minutes from Kannabi. Possibility of opposition, ninety five percent. Possibility of enemies discovering their mission priority: fifteen percent, rising for every hour. Rin is strong; the Iwa-nin won’t kill her as long as she doesn’t break.

Obito makes a noise of inarticulate rage.

“There’s no point of this mission if we don’t have Rin!"

Here is the thing:

It is not as if Kakashi does not want to go after Rin. Rin is a safe place. Rin is four years and soft hands and hamburger steak and the glint of ninja wire guarding Kakashi’s back, chakra scalpels helping slice down enemies. Rin is his teammate. Kakashi works well with Rin. But Kakashi has a mission and the mission is law and life and this mission is important.

When he was six, Kakashi’s father had failed in this choice once. He had chosen heart over the political and he’d doomed his village to a war. In doing so, Sakumo had spat on the sacrifices of his family and ancestors, all of the Hatake clan that had died for Konoha. It has been waged for four years, this war. Now Kakashi is given the task to take out Kannabi bridge and its success is a change that can drastically turn the tide to Konoha’s favour.

He will not make the same mistake as his father. He will not. Kakashi will listen to the ninja code; it is all he has.

They can go back for Rin. Ten minutes until Kannabi. Factor in half an hour to dispose of enemies. Destroy the bridge. Go back for Rin.

She’ll understand the reason for the delay; Rin is practical like that.

(Obito will not see it this way, of course. There is practically nothing Obito values above Rin. Obito carries groceries for old ladies outside of D-ranks and is always late and exists as an anomaly in his quiet, serious clan. Once, he had tried to help a civilian woman evacuate a warzone and cried when they later found her body after a gas attack. The experience didn’t prevent him from doing the same thing in the next town. Or the next.)

“We should be more worried about them discovering our tactics,” Kakashi says, because this is the time to be thinking logically and Obito has always been terrible at that.

Obito lunges for him.

He hauls Kakashi up by the collar and Kakashi doesn’t stop him. He is trembling all over, a fine, shimmering rage. They always fight, Kakashi reflects, in the detached calm before a storm. It takes Rin or Sensei to break them up, sometimes both, although these days the task mainly falls on Rin.

Smoke and spice and burning things: that is Obito. He shakes Kakashi by the collar and snarls: “Rin’s our teammate. You don’t abandon your teammates. If you want to finish this mission this bad, you can do it yourself.”

Then he drops Kakashi, spins, and with a chakra-enhanced leap goes for the trees.

The water is smooth under Kakashi’s feet, the light is green and bright filtering through the canopy. Kakashi watches Obito leave and does not move until the blur of dark blue is outside of his sightline. Then he turns mechanically and goes in the opposite direction. He counts steps, he counts miles. Stopping just outside the bamboo grove, he raises his head and locates the blaze that is Obito’s chakra, a fluctuating, angry ball in the distance.

He locates Rin’s, unconscious but uniform.

There is twenty eight miles before Kannabi bridge. There is likely to be opposition. Blowing up the entire thing alone may prove to be a problem, considering he doesn’t have Obito’s reserves or Rin’s backup. One of his teammates is in enemy hands. The other one is a dimwit that is doubtlessly going to swing into said enemy with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball.

Kakashi takes a breath in and his blood is pounding in his ears too loud and there is something huge and crawling in his chest. He has a mission. He has to finish his mission. He will not make the same mistakes.

There are four people in the world Kakashi feels safe with. Three people he can fall asleep beside without going awake at a hair-trigger notice. One of them is two hundred miles away. The other two are forty, forty five, and gaining.

Kakashi takes a breath in and a breath out.

He counts to five.

A turn of a heel, and he’s following Obito.

As expected, Obito’s first course of action is frontal assault, because he’s an idiot. He is also loosing badly, because there are three jounin-level opponents and five chuunin level backups, and not even a newly awakened Sharingan can give him an edge in that situation. Kakashi sneaks up on the chuunin on cat-light feet and slits two throats before the third one notices and launches an earth jutsu that nearly spikes him through.

Towards the side, heat blooms. Kakashi rolls out of the way just as a fireball barrels through the last Chuunin and cleaves a thick scar into the ground. A moment later, Obito is sent flying. Kakashi redirects his momentum with a hand at his back before touching down beside him.

“You came,” says Obito, pushing hair out of his goggles. His eyes are red and spinning with his clan’s signature, mouth split in a grin. “Bastard.”

“It would be very rude of me,” says Kakashi dryly, “to not watch while you get yourself killed.”

They rescue Rin (and Kakashi runs a quick diagnostic jutsu. No real injuries, but chakra bindings on her wrists, rope marks on her arms. Rin looks up at them as Obito unravels her blind fold and smiles sharp and mean. The opposition had used primarily genjutsu torture, then. It’s not the smartest tactic against a team who all have a background in the subject.)

Her expression changes when she looks at Kakashi’s eye.

But there’s no time to remark upon it, really. Iwa-reinforcements are present. There’s the flash of seals, the ominous rumbling of stone overhead. In his ears: a deafening crash, the sound of the cave collapsing. A rock smacks Kakashi’s blind-spot and he goes down hard, head smacking rock. "Kakashi!" screams Rin. “Come on!” shouts Obito, and the next moment Kakashi is flying through the air, shoulder biting the hard ground as he rolls, once, twice.

He gulps in a great deep breath and—

He can’t move. Everything on his right side is suddenly in brutal, crushing pain.

There is something is on him. It is caving in his skull and pinning him down on the eye that works, something huge, immovable. He feels like an insect trapped on the wrong end of a blade. He can’t breathe. There is dust in his trachea and one side of his body is useless and the mark on his back burns likes a fresh branding, all bursting pain.

From the side, Rin’s voice comes out raw and terrible.

“OBITO!”

Kakashi opens his eyes.

The sky is blue and dust-ridden. He can see.

He clenches his hand and finds that it responds. Strange. He gets up, levers himself up to a sit. Half of his ribcage feels as if it’s collapsing under invisible weight. His breath rattles out in a gasp.

Kakashi is okay. Kakashi can move.

Obito is… not okay.

Half of Obito is trapped under the rock slide of the cave entrance. There is pressure on his skull, blood in his mouth, internal bleeding, arm and leg crushed and useless. Kakashi feels it, all of it. Obito’s mark on his back throbs in sporadic, pain-hot jolts. Scrambling to the entrance, Kakashi kneels next to Rin. She is gripping Obito’s hand in a tight, tight hold, white faced and lips pressed into a thin, terse line and Kakashi can feel that as well, the pressure.

Rin too, he thinks. Rin can feel all of it, because Rin is Obito’s soulmate just as she is Kakashi’s soulmate. Team seven does not talk of their marks, but Obito is dying, they can feel the reverberations, and it is impossible to ignore.

Obito is Kakashi’s soulmate. Obito is one third of Kakashi’s soul. Of course he is.

Obito is Kakashi’s teammate (four years, a hundred dinners, ten months of trenches, two years of missions) and Obito is dying.

Kakashi wants to strangle him. “You idiot.” He gets out, and it sounds like his body is still convinced he has a crushed lung.

“Hey,” rasps Obito.

He tells Kakashi to take his eye. There’s a knee-jerk refusal on Kakashi’s tongue, this is your heritage, but then Rin takes a shuddering breath and says: “Okay,” She closes her eyes. Her voice quivers, thick, at the edges. “Okay.” And Obito smiles, sweet but also sad, and Kakashi remembers: the mark like a worship on Rin’s skin, the fierce and beautiful bird on Obito’s, the note on their academy dossiers, how young they had been, practically living out of each other’s pockets since they had found one another. How much this must be hurting Rin.

She lies out all her equipment and sterilizes the scalpels in a careful burst of chakra. “I can’t deaden the reception of your nerves if—“ A pause. For a moment, her face is shadowed by the sweep of her hair, nothing but a bitten lip and the hunched curl of her shoulders, fragile, in a way Kakashi hasn’t seen Rin for a long time. They are war-children, all of them. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and Obito looks at her tenderly.

“Hey, hey Rin. It’s fine, okay? It’s fine Rin-chan.”

“It’s not,” whispers Rin.

She does the operation anyways.

Pain. Visceral pain, through his socket, through his cornea. Rin’s face is ash-pale and there is perspiration running down her neck but her hands are steady, and Kakashi grips Obito’s hand hard, feels the bones creek in his fingers, wonders whether it’s his own or Obito’s. When it is done and there is a Sharingan in place of Kakashi’s eye, Rin sets down the last of her scalpels and finally begins to shake. She presses her forehead to Obito’s, grips his arm tight, whispers, “You stupid idiot,” and her shoulders are trembling, her voice muted with the edge of tears.

“Rin-chan? Hey don’t cry, ‘kay Rin? Be strong for me? Kakashi’ll have to protect you now or, well, you’ll have to protect Kakashi, but you do that anyways so—Rin?” His voice rasps off momentarily. “Hey, Rin tell me a story?”

Obito says Rin’s name like a prayer. It feels almost like an intrusion, for Kakashi to watch them. Everything hurts. The reality of the situation is all at once startingly clear, but not. He knows it’s the shock.

When the Iwa-nin return, Kakashi explodes two of them with a vicious crackle of lightning even as Rin snarls and slices a third in half, shoulder to hip. Obito’s single exposed eye is a bloody, empty socket. Protect Rin, he’d said, and Kakashi will. Kakashi is not allowed to fail in this. A kunai goes through his leg and Kakashi doesn’t even register it—his head is ice and fire and shock and pain—and he tackles another nin down to stick the sharp edge of his tanto in their throat.

They leave Obito under the rock fall and destroy Kannabi bridge.

Kakashi goes home with his mark burning, his left side not-crushed, his lungs breathing air through a rib cage that is not dented, moving a leg and an arm that feel like they are under a dozen tonnes of rock even when they are not. At his side Rin’s breaths are equally heavy; her grip on his shoulder is tight enough to bruise. She has one hand on her belly where Kakashi knows Obito’s mark is.

They go back to Konoha feeling their soulmate die and Kakashi counts the miles. Thirty five and he still jolts with every step. Eighty five and the pain is dulling. One hundred fifty, and there’s a abrupt shift, fire-hot, like someone is peeling the skin off Kakashi’s back with a grater—

And—

At the back of her throat, Rin makes a soft, broken noise.

—Nothing.

Uchiha Obito is dead.

Kakashi has not purposefully looked at Obito’s mark since he was eight years old and Sakumo had killed himself. He’s seen Rin’s evolve, for the sole reason that it’s on his face and he can’t not. Kakashi doesn’t even know what Obito’s mark is. Now, though, he strips off his shirt and lets the mirror reflect it back to him.

Between his shoulder blades there is a sword. It is a sharp, curving thing, an Ajanta, drawn in what was formerly black and red, tinged in sunburst oranges like the crackle of fire, like the gunbai on Rin’s belly. Obito’s death has made it smear on itself. Some places still gleam with coal-shimmer, a glaze of pale tangerines and yellows in the fluorescent bathroom light, but mostly it is dull and faded, a flame gone out and smothered by its ashes.

Kakashi studies it carefully. Then he puts his shirt back on. He looks into the mirror. In his socket Obito’s eye is spinning, a lazy whirl. He breathes in and out.

Obito is dead.

Obito is dead.

He looks at Obito’s eye and thinks of Obito’s mark and in a way reality is only sinking in now, un-permeated by the blaze of pain and shock and grief and anger. Obito is dead. When Team seven returned to the village they did not go to Obito’s grandmother’s house to celebrate. Kakashi will never spar with Obito again. Obito will never be late again. He will never turn fourteen, or fifteen, or grow old or finally gather up enough courage to ask Rin on a date, because all that is left of Obito are the faded marks on his teammates’ skins and an eye Kakashi does not deserve to have. He will never scream at Kakashi, or make a fool of himself or have dinner in Kushina and Sensei’s warm little kitchen. This is what it means for Obito to be dead.

Kakashi has stared down death from more sides than he can count, but this—this gaping, hungry wound—he does know what to do with it. He has never known loss, not loss like this. Sakumo had died but not like this.

Obito is gone, and Kakashi grips the ledge of his sink with white hands and reminds himself to breathe.

Rin knows what to do; she always does.

Every day she makes two lunch boxes, one for herself, one for Kakashi, and watches, hawk-eyed to make sure he eats everything. She lets him put his head in her lap and runs careful, chakra tinged fingers across Obito’s eye to the dull angry throbbing of it. Sometimes she sings songs, soft and humming, and strokes Kakashi’s hair until he falls asleep. Obito said: Protect Rin; so every time they go on missions Kakashi throws himself headfirst into enemy lines as Rin watches his back. She picks off the stragglers. Her chakra scalpels gleam green and beautiful, slicing through bone and sinew. The one time a Kumo-nin pins Kakashi to a tree, Rin smacks his head with fingers lit in medical chakra and makes it explode in a fountain of blood and brain matter.

Obito said: Protect Rin, but in practice, it’s more the other way around. Then again, Rin has her own promises to Obito.

Obito said: Take care of Kakashi, and Rin barely lets Kakashi out of her sight.

Not that Kakashi is any better on that front. For the week after they return from Kannabi, he stations himself outside of Rin’s window every night and watches her until she falls asleep, a silent sentinel. Eventually though, Rin finds out. Then she sighs, drags Kakashi in by the elbow, and rolls out her extra sleeping bag. They sleep together in the same way they did in the frontlines, pressed back to back.

Kakashi reaches out for Rin instinctively and automatically. The war is over but war habits do not break just like that. Obito is gone now and Sensei is busy, so what’s left is Rin. Rin is safety. Rin is pack-teammate-trustworthy. When she’s not at his side Kakashi searches for her chakra every half an hour like clockwork, and relaxes marginally when he finds it bright and undisturbed.

Kakashi does not deserve Rin, not really. But she’s worked his way into his life and at this point Kakashi will not be able to get her out if he wanted to. He’ll try to keep her safe. By god, he will try.

For Obito’s fourteenth birthday, Kakashi and Rin spend the morning at the Memorial stone. It is snowing, light, spiraling flakes. Steel grey clouds. The ground muddy underneath their sandals. Their breaths fog into the air with the incense smoke. Afterwards, they retreat back to Kakashi’s tiny apartment, and Rin fills the empty space with the smell of hamburger steak and hot tea while Kakashi dutifully cuts up vegetables. Sensei and Kushina-san swing by at dinner, a blur of red and yellow energy. “We’re getting ramen!” declares Kushina-san. She bundles them up in homemade sweaters and herds them to Ichiraku’s place, and orders Obito’s favourites.

They tell stories. All the stupid things Kakashi and Obito had managed in their earlier years. That one time Obito had lost his lunch to a cat. That other time they pretended to forget Rin’s birthday, and how all of them, including Minato, nearly got slaughtered when Kushina found out.

“This is how we heal,” Sensei tells him, so Kakashi tries.

The mission hugging Fire Country’s East coasts is supposed to be a simple retrieval. A client had requested some ancient writings hidden in the crumbling temples near the temperate rainforests of the coast, and Kakashi and Rin travel the long miles from Konohagakure before deciding to split up in order to cover substantially more ground in their search. Rin turns south—towards the jagged peninsula and the port cities—while Kakashi scours through the ancient, towering cedars and hemlocks just a bit out of Wave. They start in the early morning beneath the forest canopy, and agree to meet up by nightfall.

Rin doesn’t show up at the rendezvous point.

Kakashi waits half an hour, fire crackling bright and yellow through the wet air, calculates Rin’s speed in relation to the area needed to be searched. She’s not—dead. Kakashi would have felt it if she were, and Rin can take care of herself for the most part.

Another half an hour, and Kakashi breaks out the tracking dogs.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that something has gone grimly, terribly wrong. Rin’s chakra-signiture is non-existent, and her scent trail is gone through the wash of constant rain and mist. But there are other signs, distressing signs of, well not Rin, but markers of a distinctly large group of ninja in motion.

Sometime in the afternoon of the second day, an impossibly huge burst of chakra spikes in the west.

It’s overwhelming. Kakashi’s limbs lock mid-air and he nearly crashes into a hemlock branch. The chakra prickles down his spine like the fine edge of a tanto, alarm bells screeching, adrenaline pounding through his blood and hands. A moment of almost eerie silence as it dissipates, the whole forest gone quiet even as the presence lingers, and then Kakashi’s insides abruptly feel as if someone shot a katon down his throat.

They feel liquefied.

His soulmark burns, hot as a new brand. It’s hard to breathe. Half a year ago Obito's mark had done the same thing, and he knows, with a wild but terrible certainty, that Rin is dying.

Rin is dying.

That’s unacceptable. That’s intolerable. Kakashi needs to be moving, right now.

Rin finds Kakashi before he finds her, or maybe it’s easier to say that meet directly in the middle. There is a chakra signature—bubbling and violate and tasting distinctly like the explosion—and it heads for Kakashi as unerringly as Kakashi heads for it. When he reaches it, Rin is on the ground in a mad, stumbling dash across mud and tree roots. Obito’s eye spins and spins, and her chakra is—red. Red instead of soft green. Kushina-red. Jinchuuriki red and toxic.

What happened.

She looks up, eyes huge and mouth grim, and barely gets out a rattling, “Kakashi—“ before what looks like the entirety of Kirigakure’s Hunter corps descends upon them.

There’s a mess of motion. Kakashi hurtles down from his tree and lands cat-footed even as Rin puts one hand on a trunk for balance and dry-heaves over the sprawling roots. A barrage of kunai made slow-motion with Obito’s eye, and then Kakashi’s grabbing Rin’s elbow, and Rin is pasty and haggard and the minute trembling of her muscles is saying—

Something makes a battering ram for the surface in a surge of burning chakra, boiling insides, and Kakashi’s vision momentarily whites out at the edges with pain.

He catches Rin even as she collapses. Kakashi braces her arm over his shoulder and does his best not to stagger under the weight. It’s an endeavour. Then he takes to the trees, and is genuinely surprised that his knees don’t buckle. The branches are wet and slippery with torrential downpour, the forest shrouded in thick mist. Kakashi hasn’t slept more than four hours over the last two days, and the terrain isn’t favourable, not with all this mist and water in the air.

The Kiri-nin are fast and uniform. Kakashi needs to be faster.

They’re a hundred fifty miles from the nearest fortified Konoha outpost and he can feel Rin dying.

She burns. Her skin is feverish to the point it steams when moisture makes contact. Her pulse is too fast, her breaths are too shallow. Underneath his mask it feels as if someone is taking a hot kunai and carving out the twist of vines and leaf that is Rin’s mark. Rin is dying, and Kakashi can feel it; there is something trying to crawl its way out of her, some huge, swollen, burning thing, and it feels like it’s electrifying her blood, short circuiting her nerves, liquefying her bones down to the marrow.

Sailing through the forest, Kakashi grips her hand tight enough bruise and tries not to be terrified. He does not have time to be terrified. Obito’s eye is closed and for a fraction of a moment, Kakashi opens it, snapping his other eye shut to dissuade the nauseating double vision. Around Rin, chakra pulses, red and feverish. The currents of it ripple like the desert storms Kakashi has seen in Wind, gathering to a point.

The seal, Kakashi thinks. And clearly, it's not a very good seal, considering it's not at all doing it's job properly and killing Rin. Kakashi needs to check on that seal.

He slaps on a few hastily layered area genjutsu before he sets Rin down in a clearing. Over her belly and across her torso, the seal is sprawled in a way that says it’s just a chakra touch wrong from being unravelled. It’s—faulty. Kakashi’s sealing knowledge isn’t master-class but he can easily see this thing is faulty. Rigged.

Fury is abrupt and interspersed with vivid clarity of mind. They’d set Rin up to die.

He slaps on the strongest and simplest suppression seal he knows, inks it in blood and a few handseals. It won’t hold, of course, not for a Tailed Beast , but the throbbing in Kakashi’s ears does abate a little.

He’ll take it.

Apparently, it’s enough for Rin as well, because with a wet, rasping cough and a shudder, she blinks awake. Kakashi puts a hand on her shoulder to steady her as she leverages herself up.

She looks like a fright. Her hair is plastered to her forehead and there’s mud flaking off her cheek, rain sizzling as it hits her skin. It’s still better than the majority of war time, though, when she had blood up to her elbows and smeared across her clothes, but at least then Rin had never come this close to dying. Brown eyes dart, treeline, sky, Kakashi. She tilts her head in a way that knows means she’s trying to sense foreign signatures, and then turns to look at him.

Her eyes are very brown. Tree bark, wet earth. Flecks of gold in the trapped ember of her iris. “Kakashi,” she starts. Stops. A short hiss of an exhale. Her expression is equal parts steely and tired in a way Kakashi doesn’t ever want Rin to look, knows that Obito would never want Rin to look. “I—“ A cut off, and in the dark of her mouth there’s a flicker like shadow.

“Second seal?” Kakashi deduces grimly.

Rin grimaces.

This is an awful, awful day. “Three seals.” He drums a finger on his thigh, thinking, thinking: Rigged jinchuuriki. Time bomb. What would the other two bindings be? “Secrecy. Anti-suicide,” Kakashi says, and Rin doesn’t nod but her frown doesn’t edge down further either. He offers, “I stabilized the important one.”

Rin gives him an unimpressed look. Kakashi still feels the echo of most of his internal organs being lit on fire, so that’s probably fair.

“It’ll be stabilized until we reach Sensei,” he allows.

“Kakashi,” says Rin, quiet.

At his worst, and at his best, Rin has seen Kakashi in every state imaginable, and the same holds truth vice-versa. Kakashi can read Rin the same way he does his sealing textbooks, intuitively, easily.

He knows what she’s asking.

“I won’t,” says Kakashi, flat and hard. 

“Kakashi,” says Rin, wearily.

“No.”

Rin is practical. Rin is loyal. Rin will choose her duty. Once upon a time at Kannabi bridge Kakashi had told Obito: “we have a mission” because he knew Rin would understand. They are shinobi and their first commitment is their village. There are three choices here and if it were Kakashi he knows he would be making the same decision. But this isn’t Kakashi; he is dying but only as a reverberation. This is Rin.

Not even half a year ago and he’d felt the mark on his back go hot then cold, colours flaking off like ash from banked coals. Obito’s last words were: “Protect Rin.” Kakashi had made a promise and taken a dead boy’s eye. The thought of that grief doubled; the thought of drowning that much further—Kakashi hadn’t been prepared for that first death and he doesn’t think he’ll survive the second. Nine to eleven to fourteen, Rin and Kakashi shared the same space, shared the same air, the same mud-filled trenches and bloody battlefields. They shared the same dinner tables and time. There were three of them once, but Obito is gone now. Sensei and Rin are all that Kakashi has left. This is Rin: every time Kakashi screams himself awake she grips his hands tight. Rin, who dresses Kakashi’s wounds, year after year. Who soothes the angry throbbing of Obito’s eye, fingers pine-lit. Rin, who coaxes Kakashi out to buy groceries and eat food that isn’t ration bars. Who can smile at him, day after day. Who has a laugh like sparrows in summer.

Rin is Kakashi’s soulmate.

Rin is Kakashi’s teammate.

There are three choices but there is only really one. The Kiri-nin will not take Rin. Rin will not die by Kakashi’s hand. There is only one choice, and that’s hauling Rin back to the village and getting the experts to fix this. Statistically, the chances of Kakashi dying are high, but at least he won’t be leaving Rin behind.

Obito loved Rin more than anything else. In a way, here and now, Kakashi thinks he does too. Kakashi has never been honest with his feelings. He has never known how to, instead bottling them up and up with a cork pulled tight over the glass. Too late, he’d realized he loved Obito. Fiercely, terribly, he’d loved Obito. Rin, too, he knows now, has long since been given one irrevocable piece of Kakashi’s heart. She is sister-teammate-best friend-partner, and Kakashi wants to see her happy, he wants to see her grow old. He wishes the world to not be harsher on her than it already is.

Sensei, Rin, Obito; for all that Kakashi didn’t want family, he has never truly been alone.

Rin scrubs a hand through her hair. “I won’t—there’s no way to get out. My chakra’s locked right now and I’ll only slow you down and I’m—“ dying. but they both know that already. “Please Kakashi.”

Kakashi doesn’t answer.

His genjutsus aren’t shattering yet. However, they can’t stay indefinitely, and the signitures of the Kiri-nin have spread out enough that he calculates the chances of staging a successful getaway isn’t in the negatives. Kakashi checks his reserves—decent. He offers Rin a ration bar. “We need to get going,” he agrees, and Rin makes a noise of aborted pique. “Piggyback?”

No is not actually an option.

It’s really, really not.

Fifteen miles out, a band of three hunter-nin finds them in a hail of kunai. Kakashi twists, flickers through the hand seals that heaves water up and around in a shield. White ceramic flashes; he slides out a tanto and blurs through a body-flicker. Uppercut sliding through the startled guard. Blade to the ninja’s throat.

Sword from his right. Step back, gather the sheet of rainwater from his previous Suiton. Kakashi goes for a short cut, three handseals, and shoots a water dragon at the second nin’s face.

There’s a surge of chakra, precise and blaring. “Reinforcements,” murmurs Rin. She taps her foot to his the outside of his knee. “Put me down. You can’t be fighting like this. And give me a kunai.”

From there on, it’s a blur of motion. The mist is thick and there are at least four four-man squads circling. Kakashi moves in a slash of a blade, Obito’s eye whirling. At his peripheral he sees Rin sidestep and plunge her kunai through a mask and into a kiri-nin’s eye. They’re not trying to kill her, which gives Kakashi and Rin an advantage, but that means they’re trying to take her, which is arguably worse.

Duck low and brace leg in chakra. Kick up. He slams through the seals for a Doton and manages to skewer two and send the other five scattering. Lean to the side, every tick of motion in hyperaware space. Three of them go for a joint attack. Obito’s eye reads their motions, and Kakashi pivots, break one man’s arm and slams his foot into another one’s armour hard enough to shatter it.

Then there’s hand at his shoulder shoving him down. Senbon rain. Kakashi rolls with it on automatic. “Your blind spot—“ Rin snarls, gets cut off, and Kakashi twists just to see—

A kunai slashes Rin’s throat.

For a terrible, horrible moment Kakashi can’t breathe, not least because his throat feels like it’s been cut. He is hot and then cold and his soulmark is flashing, and Obito’s eye captures the moment with horrible and absolute clarity. The Hunter nin freeze. Kakashi is cold water. Not meant for her, some clinical, detached voice is saying inside his skull. Wrong trajectory.

Someone screams, shrill and enraged and grief-struck. It might have been him. A voice is bellowing, “RIN!”

It’s bellowing, “BAKASHI! MOVE!”

Rin hits the ground at a thump muffled by the rain, and then something slams into Kakashi. He goes down with her, side and back aching, fingers scrabbling into mud-slick leaf and Rin’s hair as he jars against the ground. Obito’s eye is throbbing. Rin’s mark is fluctuating, hot cold, hot cold. There is a scream choking in Kakashi’s lungs and someone cut Rin’s throat and he could have stopped it, he could have stopped that kunai—

A hand hauls Kakashi up by the collar and physically flings him off Rin.

Kakashi sees: Black cloak, tangled hair, severe scarring on a familiar face. Obito’s eye—Obito’s other eye—the one Kakashi didn’t take, tomoe spinning and shrinking and splitting. A voice hitches, raw and edged in raw desperation. “Rin?”

“Obito?” croaks Kakashi.

How. Obito died and they’d felt it—they’d felt it. So how—

A hand reaches up and touches Obito’s cheek, and Kakashi’s attention goes right back to Rin. She makes a small noise, over the blood on her lips. “Ob’to?” she gurgles. Still alive, still awake. The cut didn’t touch her spinal cord, then. But how long before she suffocates or drowns on her own blood?

“Rin,” Obito says fiercely. “Rin, Rin-chan come on. Come on. You can’t die here okay? Okay?” he brushes Rin’s hair out of her forehead, touch soft. His hands are shaking. “You have to come home. And man do I have a tale to tell you, you won’t believe where I’ve been, but I barely believe where the hell I’ve been so it’s all fair, and—“ his voice cuts off, ugly. His Sharingan is spinning sickles in his eye. “You can’t die, Rin. You can’t. You have to live,” He croaks.

For a moment there is silence.

Then, chakra bubbles, foaming red, and Kakashi watches as it curls around Rin’s throat, sluggishly, sluggishly, until it recedes. In its wake where there was the ugly smile of a knife there is only pink scar tissue.

Rin breathes.

“Obito,” she says, hoarsely. “Kakashi?”

“Fine,” reports Kakashi, just as hoarsely, rolling himself up to a laborious crouch. He looks at Rin, drinks her in, the image of her almost-death still pinned to the back of his eyes—the blood on her mouth and the wide gape of her throat—but she’s alive and alive, and the wave of relief he feels is enough to stagger him. “You’re never allowed to do that again, by the way.”

“What he said,” says Obito. His voice is thick, and Kakashi can see the tracks on his cheeks not made by the rain. “Thank the Sage, Rin.” He makes a motion like he’s about to hug her, hug both of them, tight enough to never let go, but Rin redirects his arm and clasps his hands into hers.

"I don't want to hear that from you two." She cuts off into a shaky laugh. It sounds like how Kakashi feels, a little hysterical and joyous and almost disbelieving.

Obito grins weakly. "Yeah well, still. Never again."

Wind flings back Kakashi's hair and the rain leaks through his mask. He breathes in: blood and pine and rain and smoke-incense. Metal and water and sea-salt and ink. The Kiri-nin are still stationary. Kakashi scours the treeline.

Rin catches the motion. Of course she does. These days they are so in tune with one another's minute gestures it would be worrisome if she didn't.

"We need--" she starts, following Kakashi's line of vision, and just like that Obito too snaps to attention. "Plan seventeen?"

Obito squints through the trees. "That's like, way too nice."

"It'll get us through this alive, you mean," Kakashi states dryly, and throws in, "Idiot," just for old time's sake. His heartbeat flutters under his breastbone, a hymm of adrenaline and exaltation.

Kakashi feels it: the concentrated buzz of chakra signatures encircling them. The rain is falling, the sky is grey. They’re neck deep in enemy territory with no reinforcements. Rin cannot use her chakra; Kakashi’s reserves are half depleted. But Rin is alive, Obito is alive, and Kakashi had long since thought he’d lost one of them and that he would have to watch the other die. They are teammate-family-pack and they are here, solid beings of flesh and bones and smiles and voices, not the lingering ghosts of fading photographs, not the snow on the memorial on February tenth, not the splash of red blood and faces gone slack in death.

That’s more than Kakashi thought he’d ever have again.

Kakashi catches Obito’s eye. He watches him half smile, half scowl, watery but pure Obito. “Fine. Plan seventeen. Okay. Gotcha.” He loosens his fingers from Rin’s. He breathes in, and the hard look on his face when he turns to the circling Hunters is pure anger. “Ready Bakashi?”

“Yeah.”

They put Rin in between them, no words needed.

Come hell or high water, Kakashi thinks, readying his tanto, trusting Obito and Rin to guard his blind spots, Team seven is getting back to Konoha.