Chapter Text
Kakashi was silent as you leapt through the trees, but his panic was palpable.
Rin suddenly stumbled and you grabbed her hand, pulling her forward before she collided with the tree trunk ahead of her.
“Are you okay?” you asked her, keeping your grip twisted in the back of her shirt.
“I think so,” Rin replied. You could feel her shaking. “I think – I feel like –” She coughed, forcing you to stop on one of the larger branches as she shuddered. “I think something’s wrong,” she said, bent at the waist. She was covered in dirt and debris from where the Kiri-nin had been holding her.
“Rin! (Y/N)!” Kakashi called back. “Keep going!”
Rin grabbed your arm with an alarming strength, her eyes widened with terror. “I can’t go back to the village,” she breathed. “(Y/N), I can’t go back to the village.”
“Now!” Kakashi ordered, doubling back. The Kiri-nin were catching up.
“Rin,” you tried, sparing a glance back at the incoming shinobi, “let’s just get back, and then we can ask Minato-sensei to make sure that you’re okay.”
“No!” Rin argued, pulling against you. “I can’t go back to the village!”
“What are you talking about?” Kakashi demanded, his face and mask splattered with mud. You had been dead asleep when Kakashi had yanked you out of your bed by the arm, shouting at you to get dressed and bring every weapon you had. You’d cursed him to Kami and back as he threw your gear at you, plunging kunai into the holster on your thigh as you pulled on your ANBU vest.
“It’s Rin!” he’d shouted at you when you’d tried to fight him. “She was taken from her post – we need to go now!” You’d already been halfway out your window as soon as he’d finished your former teammate’s name.
Rin – she had been crying the day that you had been assigned to fill in the hole that Obito Uchiha left in Minato-sensei’s Team Seven. She’d smiled regardless, offering you a small medical bag to keep in your waist pouch, but you’d seen through the tears immediately: she wanted Obito there, not you. Kakashi had greeted you with a dip of his chin and it took two weeks before he spoke to you directly.
“We’re not arguing about this right now!” Kakashi snapped. He grabbed Rin around the waist and lifted her into his arms, taking off from the tree branch.
“Kakashi!” Rin protested, writhing in his arms as you followed close behind, slipping shuriken from your belt between your knuckles. It was unusually difficult to sense the chakra of the Mist shinobi as they chased your team down, but when Kakashi burst through the tree line onto the shore of a lake, you briefly felt the surge of power that followed the kunai hurtling in your direction.
You hit the sand rolling, the kunai’s explosive tag hardly more than a hair’s width from your neck as it passed. You leapt as far as you could before it ignited and pulled your wakaizashi blade from its sheath at the small of your back, deflecting the barrage of shuriken aimed for Kakashi’s back.
“Here!” Kakashi called and you dove through the sand, avoiding kunai as the Mist shinobi melted out of the forest to surround your squad. Rin was still trembling when you shoved a kunai into her hands and pressed your back to Kakashi’s. “My count is twenty,” Kakashi reported.
You couldn’t make out all the chakra signatures – a brief thought flickered to how easy it had been to locate Rin because of the amount of chakra she had been surrounded by. You’d assumed it was the Mist-nins that were guarding her that were putting off that much power, but…
You pushed the thought away; you’d deal with it later.
“I have twenty-two,” you replied, eyes darting across the enemy nin. “Hard to tell though – I might be wrong.”
“You’re never wrong,” Kakashi said shortly.
“There’s too much chakra,” you said, tilting your wakaizashi towards the nin that was edging closer. “We need to hold this ground – we’re close enough to the ANBU outpost to alert them once we start fighting.”
Revealing the location of an outpost, even just a vicinity, was an infringement of your oath as a special ops ninja, but you couldn’t find yourself to give a damn as you watched the Mist-nin continue to circle.
“Now!” Kakashi shouted.
“No!” Rin cried.
You cut through the nearest shinobi, his blood splattering across your face as you brought your blade back and threw shuriken from your pouch. The distraction bought you enough time to summon a water dragon jutsu that slammed into the sand with a force that shook the shore. You’d killed three shinobi, their chakra winking out instantaneously, and their comrades were quick to replace them.
The scent of ozone suddenly filled your nose and you backed up in the direction you heard the Chidori. Kakashi’s back was his blind spot when he used that jutsu, and you’d earned his respect the first time you’d guarded his spine from a Rain shinobi while on a mission.
You let fire spread down your arm, white flame licking up the wakaizashi blade.
One of the Mist-nin swung at you with a katana blade, to which you blocked.
It was that move of which that you would blame for why you didn’t notice her until it was too late.
The chakra that had been so powerful that it smothered all others was suddenly gone. The feeling was so intense that you stumbled, the katana slipping down to the hilt of your blade as the fire extinguished with your concentration. The blade cut across the top of your wrist and then the Mist-nin swung again, and you weren’t able to throw off their katana completely. You bit back the scream of pain and twisted, driving your wakaizashi blade backwards into the gut of the Mist-nin as you dropped to your knees.
The faux twittering of the Chidori was the only noise on the lake shore. All that you saw was Kakashi’s hand, dripping with blood and gore twisted between his knuckles. His arm was through Rin’s chest.
“Rin,” her name left you as an exhale. She choked on her own blood.
The light of the Chidori died and Kakashi collapsed with Rin into the sand. She grasped at the back of his head, fingers bloodstained and dragging through the strands of Kakashi’s loose hair. She whispered to Kakashi in a wet rasp, words that you would never hear, and then you felt the chakra that was Rin and her alone fade. Her body fell against Kakashi’s, her forehead hitting his shoulder. His hand was still through her chest. His Sharingan met your eyes over Rin’s head. There was true terror there.
“Kakashi,” his name was a whisper of your own. She was dead – Rin was dead.
The Mist-nin attacked and neither you nor Kakashi reacted.
A tachi blade drove through your back, severing your abdominal aorta and pinning you to the sand. You hardly felt it, the shock of your friend’s death too potent. Your blade fell the short distance from your slack grip into the sand.
The Mist-nin struck you in the back of the head and you fell forward, crying out. Kakashi’s body hit the ground beside Rin’s, his arm still through her chest.
This sight of her would be your last.
…
“Hey,” Rin smiled, sitting down beside you on the bench.
You raised a surprised eyebrow, “Hey. Did you need something?”
“Oh, no,” she shook her head, hands clasped in her lap. You had grown up a year ahead of her in Academy and knew a few of the other students, but, like Kakashi, kept to yourself. You hardly knew her outside of her association with Obito Uchiha, whose funeral was only held a week prior. “I just wanted to sit with you.”
You blinked and then nodded awkwardly. Your people skills weren’t that well-honed, but you were sure that what she had said wasn’t all too normal. “Okay,” you replied evenly.
A long silence passed between you as the breeze rustled the cherry blossoms above your head. You could just see the Hokage Monument through the branches, and smiled wanely to yourself.
“Obito wanted to be Hokage,” Rin suddenly said. You looked back at her, but she was looking at the Monument as well, eyes fixed on the face of Lord Third. “He told me that if I protected him, it was if I was protecting the future.”
She wasn’t crying, but you could hear the vulnerability in her voice. You let her keep talking.
“I thought he was strange when I first met him,” she admitted, blushing, “but he was so funny. He always made up the worst excuses to why he was late; it annoyed Kakashi so much, but I think he secretly enjoyed bickering with him.”
A ghost of a smile passed over your face as you remembered a distant memory. “Did he tell you the one about the cat in the tree?” you asked softly.
Rin turned in surprise, eyes wide. “You were friends with Obito too?”
“Yeah,” you said slowly, “I was, but we…grew apart before we started Academy.” There were regrets everywhere in that lie.
Rin’s brow furrowed, “I’m sorry.”
You raised an eyebrow at her again. “For what?”
“That you didn’t get to at least say goodbye to him,” she replied.
You regarded her for a long moment, watching the way the hair around her ears caught in the breeze and twisted against her chin. There was a gentleness about her that you realized was the kindness that she wore upon her sleeve. For a brief minute, you considered telling her the truth.
You held your tongue. “He knew that I thought of him every day.”
“And now?”
You shrugged, thinking about his awkward goggles and rambling excuses. “I still do.”
Rin smiled, and bumped shoulders with you. “Thank you,” she said, “for talking about him. This was our spot.”
You looked down at the bench and it was then that you noticed for the first time the kanji symbols etched into the stone beside your thigh.
Rin and Obito.