Work Text:
Rin wakes up with a slowly-healing hole in her chest and the rush of water in her ears, Minato-sensei leaning over her.
"You're alive," he says, naked relief in his voice. "God. Right. Rin, I know it's hard, but I need you to flare your chakra enough so I can see your seal."
Rin is proud of her chakra control – almost perfect, the medics at the hospital had said, when she was still training in field medicine. She's sure that's the only thing that allows her to focus through the pain in her chest and the noise in her head and the screaming beast resting in her stomach enough to flare her chakra as Minato-sensei asks. Minato rests a hand on her arm in comfort when she winces, and then leans over to look at the seal growing clearer on her stomach.
She can't think clearly – the pain of her chest is overpowering every thought, matched only by the roaring of the ocean, both real and in her head. The monster sealed in her rages and roars to be released, and Minato-sensei with his brushes and chakra ink paints lines of fuuinjutsu over her skin to keep it contained.
"This is a mess," Minato mutters, a note of urgent panic in his voice. "I need Kushina here."
The seal-marks burn hot. Rin sinks back, for a second, and then she can see the beast – giant, grey-skinned, one gleaming yellow eye fixed on her. It's held down by ropes, like the kind you'd see on a ship – but the ropes are fraying and splintering as she watches. LITTLE GIRL, the monster says, booming and echoing. The waves crash, and the ocean water swirling around her feet rises to soak the bottom of her leggings. LET ME OUT.
And then she's back awake and Minato-sensei is shaking her, scared. "Hang on, Rin, just a little longer, you can do it." He paints something more on her stomach, and then lights up his fingers with chakra and twists. The seal locks. In her mindscape, iron chains come over the fraying ropes and lock the beast down. The ocean in her head stills, the wind dying down, the waves quieting. The beast, chained down, looks her in the eye and howls in rage and pain.
Minato-sensei collapses back, gasping, his eyes filled with relief. "That should hold until we get to Konoha. You've been so strong, Rin."
Rin feels achy and sore. The chest wound is mostly closed, no longer a gaping, charred hole, but the beast's healing seems to end there, and the remaining layers of skin weep. She's a medic, a field medic – she specialises in stabilising people for further treatment. She already knows she's going to die of blood loss before she even gets to Konoha.
Now her head is no longer bursting at the seams and she can think semi-clearly, she can see the devastation around them – all the Kiri-nin are dead, torn apart by strange, dry-looking branches that have broken through the ground and the water to reach, twisting, towards the sky. She has no idea who could have done that, because last she remembers before passing out with Kakashi's hand through her chest is Kakashi also falling backwards, and he's still unconscious and half-submerged in the water besides Minato-sensei. Did she do this? Was the beast inside of her so desperate to escape that he'd called driftwood up through the ground to tear through the people that had sealed it in the first place? She thinks she'd know if she accidentally killed a whole team of Kiri ANBU. She thinks she'd remember.
And Kakashi – there's the remains of blood-tracks down the cheek of Obito's sharingan eye, washed off by the waves lapping gently at his face. Minato stands, moving beside him to gently lift his head from the water and check his breathing. "Chakra exhaustion," he murmurs. Kakashi, in his arms, stirs – eyes fluttering open, and Minato moves his hand to cover his sharingan eye before it can knock him right back out again. Kakashi looks at Minato-sensei with an empty, hollow expression, and Rin hears his voice hitch, before his eye widens and fills with tears.
"Sensei-" Kakashi says, voice choked. "Sensei, Rin, she moved before I could stop – she – she-"
"Kakashi," Minato says soothingly. "Rin's alive. She's okay."
Rin doesn't have the energy to speak, to console Kakashi, but Kakashi's head turns, his one wide, tear-filled eye looking directly at her. "Rin," he says, and cries harder. Rin, propped up against a piece of spiked driftwood, with no energy and almost no chakra to speak of, just watches, and bleeds steadily.
-
She passes out again, and wakes up in Minato-sensei's arms as he runs. Someone's bandaged her chest wound, and it feels a little more closed – she guesses the monster had healed it more, or maybe Minato had, but either way she's no longer in danger of bleeding out. She inhales – and that seems to be enough to draw attention to her because Minato-sensei looks down. She can feel his gasp of relief more than hear it. "You're awake," he says, and there's another gasp beside her – Kakashi, she guesses. "Try not to move – you're not out of danger yet. We need to get you to a medic."
Rin could have probably told him that herself, but she says nothing. The monster in her head has quietened, and all she can hear is the ocean, and her own thoughts.
Minato-sensei doesn't say anything more, only refocuses on running. Kakashi is keeping pace, somehow, although his breath is heavy and panting. She guesses he must have taken a chakra pill or something because he'd been barely able to sit up when Minato-sensei had first woken him. The medic in her feels nervous – Kakashi needs a hospital just as much as Rin does, if not more – all her major wounds are mostly clotted over, and what she needs most is rest, and someone more knowledgable about major wounds to check that it's all healed correctly. Kakashi needs a chakra infusion at least, and someone to look over his sharingan and check that he hasn't fucked up the nerve connections from the transplant.
The trees are familiar, though, finally, so at least they're in Fire again. The Kiri-nin won't chase them here.
Minato-sensei's grip shifts, and she gets a better look at Kakashi. He's still got blood on his hand where it had gone through her chest, and she remembers, suddenly, his look of pure horror as she'd jumped in front of his strike. "Kakashi." Her voice is weak, reedy. Kakashi stumbles at the sound of it. "I'm sorry."
"Why," Kakashi says, anguished, between shuddering breaths. "Why would you make me do that?"
Rin doesn't have an answer for him that doesn't sound empty, so she doesn't say anything at all. She tucks her head in tighter to Minato-sensei's chest, and closes her eyes.
-
They make it to a Konoha camp, and Rin survives. She passes out again as soon as they get there, and doesn't wake for two weeks. Kakashi follows her into unconciousness, slipping dangerously close to critical levels of chakra exhaustion, but wakes three days before she does.
When she sleeps, she finds herself back with the beast.
She can see it clearer now. It's a turtle, large and gray and spiked, its unarmored underbelly sinewy red like a muscle, its three tails swishing slowly in the water behind it. Its one eye is gleaming yellow, the sclera a bright, bloody red, and it blinks down at her slowly. It is trapped within her, but she still feels tiny.
"Little girl," it says, and its voice no longer feels as cavernous as it did when she was dying. It echoes, still, but not as much. "I kept you alive so I would not die with you. Let me out."
"I can't do that," Rin replies. Her voice is not as weak here, which is a relief. "If I do, you'll attack my village. That's why they put you in me."
The beast laughs. "You think I had a choice in that, little shinobi? Humans use me as they always have. I'm free of that accursed mist, finally, only to be trapped within you. So it goes, since that Hashirama trapped us in the first place."
Its tails swing, and water rushes up around her. Rin braces her feet so she doesn't get knocked over. "Who are you?"
The beast's anger cools, and he looks down at her. "I am the Sanbi," it says. "The three-tailed turtle. And you, little girl, are my Jinchuuriki."
"Oh," Rin says. "Like Kushina-san."
The Sanbi looks shocked for a second, in a way she thought a turtle could never look, and then it laughs and laughs and laughs. "What are the chances," it says. Rin imagines if it was a human it would be shaking its head.
Days pass, but it doesn't feel like it. Rin tells the Sanbi her name, and then asks if it has a name, and the Sanbi laughs at her. Rin talks about the war, and how she came to have the Sanbi sealed in her in the first place, and when she tells it about trying to kill herself on Kakashi's chidori it laughs at her. She doesn't tell it about Obito, because she's unbalanced already – if the Sanbi laughs at Obito dying alone crushed under a rock without an eye she thinks she might do something drastic, which would probably be bad. She wonders, though – the Sanbi is sealed within her. She wonders if it can feel the empty space where Obito was. If it looked at her and Kakashi running desperate from the Kiri ANBU and noticed the gap they left for him.
The Sanbi pulls on the chains, but they don't break. It swings its tails out at her but they always just avoid her, never close enough to hit. It roars, and thrashes in the waves, and she gets swept up underwater and against the cliff walls of the mindscape, but never long enough to drown. The sandbank shifts under her feet and the waves crash against her shins and the Sanbi roars – at her, at the landscape around them, at something beyond both her and the seal-space they both sit.
Then she wakes, in the real world, and Kushina is there, talking quietly with Minato-sensei over a complicated diagram she presumes is of the seal. She lies there, watching them talk and argue and notate things down on the paper around the seal until Kushina looks up and notices she's awake.
"Rin," she says, relieved. Kushina smiles at her, and hands the seal and her ink-brush over to Minato-sensei. "How are you feeling?"
"My head hurts," Rin says. Kushina shuffles her chair closer, helping Rin sit up against the bedframe.
"Do you want water?" Kushina asks. Rin nods her assent, and Kushina helps her drink from a glass beside the bed. When she finishes, Kushina puts the glass back, and then leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "I bet you're still exhausted," she muses. "Having a Bijuu sealed in you is exhausting anyway, let alone everything else..." She trails off. "Well. After I got the Kyuubi sealed in me I was asleep for a week. It's a lot for your body to get used to."
Minato brings his chair over, next to Kushina's. "Here, look at this, I think I've isolated the parts that the Kiri-nin omitted on the seal." He hands Kushina back the diagram, and she scans over it, and then smiles at Rin. "Hey, Rin. Glad you're awake."
Kushina shook her head. "Whoever did this seal sucks at fuuinjutsu, honestly. What a mess."
Minato-sensei hummed in agreement. "I know they meant for it to fail, but you could have done better when you were seven." He turns back to Rin. "We need to fix up the seal before we get you back to Konoha, just in case something goes wrong. Less people to be hurt if we make a mistake."
Kushina shoots him a cautious look, and digs an elbow into Minato-sensei's side. "We're not going to, of course. Don't worry. This seal is just – just – a complete and utter mess, so it'll take a bit of time to find exactly what it is we have to fix." She looks down at the diagram again. "Still think there's something wrong with the chakra stabilisers, here – see, look at that symbol above that third point." Minato leans over, looking at the spot Kushina indicates, brow furrowed. Kushina hands it off to him again, sighing. "It's so hard to tell if what's intentional and what's just sloppy work. God, I hope Kiri's other Jinchuuriki has a better seal than this, you know."
Minato hums in agreement. "Kushina, I want to go test something. Are you right to stay here with Rin? Rin, you okay if I go?"
"I'm okay, Minato-sensei." Rin does her best to smile up at Minato-sensei, but she's not sure it quite turns out. Minato-sensei smiles back at her, regardless, and gently ruffles her hair.
"Yeah, it's fine," Kushina says, resting a hand on Minato's arm. "I wanted to talk with her, anyway." Minato-sensei stands, collecting the diagram and all his inks. "Wait – can you look at moving the anchor points? That might do something for the chakra flow around the seal."
"Oh, yeah, good idea!" Minato-sensei pauses in the doorway to look down at the diagram. "I'll look into it. See you later, Rin, Kushina."
Kushina watches him leave, before turning back to Rin. "So. It's loud, huh?"
Rin knows she's talking about the Sanbi. "It keeps roaring."
"Yeah." Kushina's smile softens. "The Kyuubi quietened down a bit after the first couple of weeks. It's just... angry at being trapped again, I think. I was pretty angry myself."
"It kept asking me to let it out," Rin says. "It was all I could... I tried so hard to hold it back. I was so close to-"
"You did well," Kushina says. "Sealing a bijuu takes a lot of energy out of the Jinchuuriki. It's amazing that you held it back for so long, with your seal the way it was."
"I didn't know what else to do," Rin whispers. She's shaking, she realises. Kushina reaches out and catches Rin's hands in hers. "Kakashi – he – is he okay? I – his chidori-"
"Kakashi's okay," Kushina says gently. "He's gone back to Konoha. You might have to give him a bit of time, though."
"Yeah," Rin breathes. "Yeah. I'm sorry."
"Don't be," Kushina reassures. "You did your best in a bad situation, both of you, and you're both alive at the other side of it. We can deal with everything that comes after."
"Yeah," Rin says again, and shakes.
There's something from the Sanbi – a rush of amusement. It's laughing at her again. Rin frowns, and does her best to shove the Sanbi's amusement away. This makes her tip back into the seal-space again, briefly, and she catches sight of waves and thrashing tails and a gleaming eye before Kushina's hand on her shoulder brings her back out.
"You alright?" Kushina asks, and Rin nods.
"The Sanbi. It's laughing at me." She curls in on herself. "It keeps laughing at me."
Kushina rubs her shoulder comfortingly. Rin, to her own horror, feels tears forming in her eyes. She hasn't cried at all yet. She feels like if she starts, she won't ever stop, and she doesn't want to cry – she has enough saltwater swelling in her mind, enough of an ocean swirling in the space the Sanbi sits.
She hiccoughs back a sob. Kushina hums sympathetically, and draws Rin's head to her chest, hugging her. Rin can't hold the tears back anymore, and cries.