Archive of Our Own

A breezy fall morning marks the last memory that he has of his father. On that day, he’s roused awake by a nudge to the shoulder. He groans and curls in on himself, pulling the heavy woollen blanket over his shoulders and squeezing his eyes shut tightly in protest. The rasp of his father’s amusement reverberates through the air, warm fingers brushing his bangs away from his face.

“You don’t have to get up.”

To spite the words, he blinks his eyes open to stare blearily out at the darkness. His father is there, little more than a silhouette against the light of the still-rising dawn, crouched beside his futon. It’s cold, the bite of winter seeping in through the edges of the window pane, and he can’t bring himself to move.

“I’ll be heading out now, Pup. Breakfast is on the table.”

“Mhmm,” he groans, rubbing his eyes. He watches his father gather a rucksack of supplies by the door, going through the motions of mission prep before sun-up, and slings the strap over his shoulder.

He doesn’t think anything of it. This is their everyday. Dad leaves for a few weeks, maybe a few months. He comes back, they cook dinner together. They catch up. Then, after a brief reprieve, Dad’s gone again. And Kakashi is left alone.

So when his father looks back at him with a smile, the open door casting a rim of golden light around him, all Kakashi can do is yawn and wave him off. When it shuts and he’s left alone, he closes his eyes and finds sleep once more.

When his father comes back to him, it’s not as a corpse or casualty. Dad’s tantō is heavy in his hands, its blade blunt with age, untouched and untreated for as long as it’s been gone. The hilt is stained a rusty, dull brown and the sheath is worn and damaged. Dad always kept it in pristine condition, polished and shining as a symbol of his pride. Kakashi watched once, not too long before Dad left, as the old cord wrap was replaced. The tantō was older than Kakashi’s years but never neglected. It was a gift from an old friend, his father used to say, and he cared for it justly.

The search party returned today and this tantō is all that came back with them.

Kakashi stares at the tantō and he fiddles with it in its sheath as meaningless words pass from one mouth to another. The funeral is a small affair in which he acts as the lone mourner, sitting by an empty casket and bowing to those who come to pay their respects. Members of the search party are here, too, offering words of meaningless comfort.

“That day, he left to map out the forest,” one of Dad’s old teammates tells him. “It’s dangerous, you know? But if we can’t secure safe travel routes, we’re as good as dead. We can’t go back into the mountains after the—well. After they were taken. So our only choice is to move forward.”

Kakashi looks up at the mountain range beyond the village walls, stretching on into the heavens, their peaks faded with a thick white fog that swallows them whole. The sky is an angry, twisting grey, foreboding in its turbulence. The blight is spreading and if luck is not on their side, the village will be taken, too, one day. That’s why they’ve started branching out, why they’re looking for a place to escape to.

A few of the villagers pay their respects to the son of Konoha’s hero, a boy too small to be carrying the weight of his clan on his shoulders alone. They send well-wishes and condolences and it’s all so meaningless, so contrived. Why bother holding a funeral for a body too mangled to return with them? What are they sending off if Dad is not here?

The empty wooden casket sinks into its new grave. Kakashi sits by the headstone, smoothing his fingers along the fresh engraving of his father’s name. The stone is cool to the touch like a corpse left to rot and all he can see is the father that he loved abandoned and breaking down in the blighted forests of a faraway land.

Kakashi’s weak. He’s weak and helpless and useless and small. He cries tears that he doesn’t deserve over an empty grave meant as an end to Sakumo Hatake’s brief, meaningless existence.

He fought hard, they say.

He protected the village, they insist.

Your father was a hero and you should be proud.

Heroes don’t get happy endings. Cowards do. Cowards get to live.

And heroes die.

No one is there to offer comfort as Kakashi pours his heart out before the meaningless sentiment of the village and he understands, for the first time in his brief existence, what is expected of him.

Kakashi will be a hero. He will brandish his father’s tantō and venture beyond Konoha’s walls to protect these people who will do nothing for him in return.

One day, Kakashi will die like his father, cold and alone in a world that will just as soon forget he was ever here.

Weeks turn to months and months to years and the boy once left behind is no longer there to feel bitter. He can’t afford to. With their top hunter gone, the village turns to him as a replacement. Kakashi has his father’s blood and his clan’s nose and surely he as the last remaining Hatake can carry their village to a brave new world.

He’s thirteen when the village elders come to him with nice-sounding words about seeing his father’s vision through to the end. They need to expand their reach into the forests. The lands of Fire are vast and impossible to quantify in any meaningful way and it takes months to safely traverse them. There are no maps that reach beyond their little valley. Only the hunters know this land well enough to escape it, and only they can offer protection to merchants passing from one land to the next. Trade to Water and Sand isn’t safe between the blight, the bandits, and the cursed beings that wander around looking for ways to infect and harm and kill. Only the brave few who take those risks know what the world really looks like, and only the ones that return can share their stories with Konoha.

Sakumo Hatake was one of them.

Kakashi is chosen to join the new exploration team into the wilds. They need land, they need resources, and they need maps that they can trust, ones that are up-to-date with the status of the blight and the settlements that have cropped up or been devoured in the time since the last. When they set out, all they’re given is half a dozen men and a single caravan. Their rations are small and tasteless and miserable, but he expects nothing else.

It’s not long before they have to hunt for their meals. Laying traps and waiting hours for them to go off means the mission will drag on and he’s none too pleased to note that their two-month venture will be much longer because of this. Kakashi and one of the veteran hunters are left to this while the rest go on ahead to look for signs of blight or bandits before they build their campsite. Kakashi’s a Hatake and tracking is in his blood. It only stands to reason that this is what they brought him for.

He wonders if they made Dad do these menial tasks, too.

At the end of the day, it just means a lot of waiting.

It's during the hunter's poor attempts at smalltalk that they hear the frantic screeches of wild game in their trap and dash through the trees to meet it. Kakashi has his tantō drawn and ready to cut the ropes when he sets eyes on the squirming, squealing thing in their net. He stops and stares, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. It's a rabbit.

At least, he thinks it's a rabbit.

When the hunter catches up, he sighs and scratches his head. "No good. We'll have to set another."

"What is it?"

"A curse."

The thing fighting for freedom in their trap is black in the most literal of terms, like a shadow in the night or a pot of ink. Charcoal black. It's like all that it is and everything that touches it absorbs light until nothing is left but a colourless, ill-defined silhouette. He can't see any eyes or make out its nose. It may not even have one. If this curse is or was a rabbit then it can only be called so in the loosest of terms. Long, upright ears protrude from the top of its head. But the outline of its face is all wrong, a grotesque contortion of shapes that could never make up the round blunt snout of the average hare. The limbs are knobby and long, sharp claws hooking around each toe, and that's all he can make out. Just the outline and the way that light seems to bend with it.

"We can't eat it," the hunter continues. "Let's try again a little south of here."

Kakashi wouldn't begin to know how to eat it in the first place; he can't skin it if the skin isn't visible and the shape of its body is more than a little unsettling. "Should I cut it free, then?"

"The curse? No. Don't even think about it. Curses spread through touch," he says, tapping a finger to his palm in a very on-the-nose sort of way. "It's best to leave it here. We don't need something like that running around while we're camped out. If there's one then there are normally others, though. Keep your eyes peeled."

"Right."

It's his first time seeing a curse and he eyes it as it thrashes helplessly within their net. His mind tells him that it needs eyes that it does not have and a mouth that he can't see.

It's as haunting as it is unnatural and, like a slow-forming tragedy, he can't look away.

When Kakashi dies, there are many factors at play.

The caravan’s broken wheel causes it to lurch to the right. It's raining so the earth is wet and pliable. Visibility is practically non-existent as the heavy downpour separates them from the world and leaves them unaware. And to get to the next leg of their journey, they have to travel along a cliffside. It's only a matter of time before disaster strikes and something gives, and that something is Kakashi.

The caravan leans until one of its wheels swerves off the cliff face. As his teammates try to wrangle it, the carriage presses him to the very edge and boxes him in, with nowhere to go and not enough time to think.

When the caravan goes over the side, he goes with it.

The world is black and all he can feel is white-hot pain through his back and legs. The skies open up and thunder shakes the earth as he writhes and chokes on a sob, trying to see when his eyes fail him, trying to move when there’s not a bone in his body that can.

Something presses against his leg, then his arm. His back. It moves along his skin, unfamiliar and strange, but he’s only awake long enough to feel it fade away into nothingness.

Kakashi wakes to a burning, white-hot pain in his leg. He grits his teeth and clenches his fists, biting back a curse. Don’t make noise, he tells himself. You don’t know where you are. The wave passes just as quickly as it hits and Kakashi releases a long, steadying breath as he opens his eyes.

He expects to find himself bleeding out on a valley floor with mud caked onto his skin, bruised and dying in a forest that he doesn’t know. Instead, he finds a roof where there should be none and a blanket heavy on his shoulders. The room is dark, lit only by a sole candle on the desk against the far wall. The bed beneath him is hard and uncomfortable, but it’s nothing of the unbending earth that he expects it to be. It sinks beneath his weight just enough to be tolerable.

It looks like a room in a cabin or cottage; there’s no glass in the windows, but there’s netting to catch bugs. Beyond the mesh he can see trees, so he may still be in the forest yet. It’s small and it’s warm and none of this makes sense.

No one should have been in the forests where he fell. There shouldn’t be a cottage in the woods or a kind stranger here to help. Did his teammates come back for him?

No. That still wouldn’t explain the cottage.

Kakashi lifts his aching arms and sees them bandaged. The visible skin is discoloured and miserable and he makes a face, wondering just how extensive the damage beneath really is. He looks down at himself and is confused to find all of his gear gone, leaving nothing but more bandages around his torso. It so happens that everything from his flak jacket to his kunai pouch and gloves hangs on the hooks by the door. His shirt is folded neatly on the bedside table, waiting there for him.

He pushes himself up with his palms and instantly regrets it. Every muscle in his body screams at him as he props himself up against the headboard and reaches to lift the shirt over his head with shaking limbs.

Something nags at him to lift the blanket off of his legs and so he does, unsurprised to find one splinted. It would have been surprising if he got through that fall without so much as a broken bone. Like this, he probably won’t be able to get very far, but if he waits then he won’t be able to regroup with his team and then he’ll be left behind. And if he’s left behind, he’ll never find his way back.

Kakashi will die out here like his father and the village won’t even come back for his corpse.

With newfound anxiety burning through him, he tries to swing his legs off the bed anyway. If he can hobble his way up the mountainside, then—

“I wouldn’t.”

Kakashi tenses, the voice behind his ear a low rumble, and he twists around to the netted window at his bedside but he can make out nothing through the dark but the impression of trees in the distance.

“If you try to walk on that leg now, it won’t heal properly,” the voice continues, and it’s right there but he can’t see anything. “Rest for now. You’re badly hurt.”

Kakashi stiffly pushes himself fully onto the mattress and heeds this stranger’s words because, at this moment, he’s not sure how well he can protect himself. He hears the softest of exhales, the proof that something living and breathing is on the other side of that window, and shudders.

“Good,” they say. “Try to get some sleep.”

He’s tired, sure, but he’s too on edge to sleep. Yet after those words, he finds his eyes fluttering closed and his head falling forward, and he doesn’t know why. As he drifts off, he hears the door at the front of the cottage creak open.

The familiar crackle of a lit fireplace is a distant, fond memory to him. The room is warm and cozy as Kakashi stirs. All at once the pain is back, reminding him of how thoroughly screwed he is, and he peeks an eye out into the room. It’s morning, meaning he slept through the night. The air is still damp with the fallen rain, humid and heavy as he breathes it in. This time, there are distinct sounds of rustling in the room.

He’s not alone.

Kakashi bolts up only to hiss against his injuries, a hand on his chest gently guiding him back down onto the mattress as someone shushes him.

“You’re okay,” they assure, their words gentle. “You’re just a little banged up right now. Give yourself time to heal.”

‘A little banged up’ is an understatement, but Kakashi settles back down nonetheless. He draw his eyes up to the body looming overhead.

He goes very, very still.

Staring down at him is the hard outline of something that is not there, a shadow black as night that absorbs any light that reaches it. Kakashi’s mind finds that rabbit, the curse, and he thinks he knows what this is but he can’t be sure. Unlike the rabbit, he can make out two sharp yellow eyes floating in the black pool of ink that makes up this creature’s body.

It spreads through touch.

Kakashi hurriedly pulls his hands up to his face but they’re still pale and warm and plush, with no signs of blight to be found, and his shoulders slope as the stress leaves him. But this still isn’t okay; this thing, the monster, the curse, it touched him, it—

Kakashi finds the monster’s hands and sees that they’re gloved. Thick leather gardening gloves cover them from fingertip to forearm, the sleeves of a white shirt hidden beneath.

This curse wears clothing. It speaks, too.

It’s holding a bowl out to him, and a spoon.

“Eat,” the monster urges. “It won’t infect you. You have my word.”

Kakashi numbly takes the offered meal, staring down at his lap and into it. Stew. The smell is pleasant, like a homecooked meal, and it reminds him of how weak he’s feeling right now. Should he trust it? Can he? If he doesn’t eat now, his strength will wane before long. The curse must have treated his wounds, too, and so at this point, he…

It should be fine, shouldn’t it?

Kakashi takes a cautious bite, watching his skin, expecting black to burst forth across it like an oozing infection, but nothing happens. So, he takes another. As he eats, he watches the curse move about the room. There’s a tray with soiled bandages and medical instruments on the nightstand that is taken away, out of the cottage, and Kakashi’s left alone for only a moment before the curse returns.

It’s cleaning. Rather domestically. Disinfecting the nightstand, pouring the leftover stew into containers, and looking everything like an ordinary human doing chores. But the silhouette of its face is anything but human with jagged protrusions coming out of its head that can’t be distinguished. From the neck down it’s clothed, though, and this is the extent of its features that Kakashi can see. No mouth. No ears. No claws or hands or feet. But like the rabbit, he can imagine how sharp and mangled the limbs that lay hidden away behind fabric are.

“Take your time,” it says. “I’ll come back for your bowl when you’re done.”

Like that, it’s gone again. Kakashi is left alone.

Outside the bedside window is a little vegetable garden. Kakashi knows this because he’s ignored his injuries to shift across the mattress and peer out there, watching the curse work. It’s tending to the plants. A curse is, he means. A curse, which must have been human at some point or another judging by its shape and voice.

Kakashi feels like he should be more anxious than he is, but if it wanted to spread the blight, it could have done so several times over by now. It actually seems to be taking extra measures not to do that, which is nice. And it’s—it’s fascinating, isn’t it? That it can still speak despite the curse, that it has free will and is living here all on its own in the middle of the forest?

Their eyes meet through the netting and Kakashi tenses.

“You shouldn’t move around so much,” it chastises. “You’re not doing yourself any favours. Are you hungry?”

Kakashi nods.

Within thirty minutes, there’s a reheated bowl of stew on his lap.

“I’m sorry,” it says, dragging over the chair from the desk until it’s right up next to the bed. “I don’t have much variety to work with here, I’m afraid.”

“No, it’s—” It’s weird talking to a curse is what it is. “I like it.”

“I’m glad.” No expression can make it through the black silhouette of its face, but the voice is calm and soft, and Kakashi can almost imagine a smile. “I can’t go into town these days, so I have to make do with what can be found nearby.”

Kakashi tries to imagine this calm-natured, lanky curse trying to shop in a village market and shudders. He’s tall, taller than most humans, and thin and wiry. The black outline of a tail curls around his feet like a demon. Sunlight doesn’t escape him. No matter where he went, he would draw eyes and fear and screams. It’s not unfounded, either; if he touches something, he’ll spread the curse. By day’s end, the whole village could be infected, couldn’t it?

“It must be hard,” Kakashi says. “To feed yourself, I mean.”

“I no longer need to eat,” it says. Its eyes close and Kakashi wants to think it’s a smile, but when they do its face becomes nothing but a formless shadow. “And I’m sorry if it tastes off. I can’t sample it as I am. I’m going off memory.”

So all of this prep is for Kakashi’s sake. The stew, the pot, the medical supplies. The curse went out of its way to forage for food all to treat the wounded human it brought back to its cottage. And it must have built this place, too, all by hand. No one lives in the forest, after all.

“No, really,” Kakashi insists. He appreciates the effort and he wants this creature to know as much. “It’s good. Thank you.”

The curse reaches out and Kakashi tenses briefly. A gloved hand cards through his hair, gentle and cautious, and any tension left between them is gone.

It’s a little awkward, though.

“Eat,” it says again. “Let’s get that leg of yours healed sooner, rather than later. I want you walking before snowfall.”

Kakashi keeps still as the bandages are very carefully unravelled around his arm. The movements of the curse’s hands are deft and it’s like watching a medic work. Beneath the wrappings is endless bruising—expected—and dozens upon dozens of abrasions. The curse takes a warm washcloth in one hand, guiding Kakashi’s arm closer with the other. It must not be pleasant to wear damp gloves like that (or hygienic) but he doesn’t seem to have a spare set to switch into, and if there’s skin-to-skin contact then Kakashi’s fate is sealed.

Oh, the curse—it’s a man. Kakashi guessed as much by the voice, but he didn’t want to make assumptions. When he was fumbling with a gender-neutral word for ‘Sir,’ the curse laughed at him and clarified. He was a little embarrassed.

The curse carefully wipes Kakashi’s arm clean of old salve and bodily fluids that have built up since the last bandage change. It feels nice and Kakashi closes his eyes. The skin beneath the bandages is usually itchy and irritated by sweat and movement, so he likes feeling clean. This man is meticulous, too, careful not to miss any small areas, even the spaces between Kakashi’s fingers. His touch is featherlight and gentle, just like the rest of his demeanour.

Kakashi’s heart breaks for this man who’s lost his humanity. He doesn’t know what being cursed entirely means, having only seen his first curse after leaving the village, but he’s always been told that it’s a fate worse than death. People don’t talk about it, though.

“Do you know medical ninjutsu?” Kakashi finds himself asking through the silence.

“I’m not too sure,” the curse answers vaguely. “Unfortunately, I can’t manipulate chakra in this body. Do you?”

Kakashi shakes his head. “There’s a medic on our team, though. Rin. She’s fresh out of training.”

“If only she’d come down the mountain to find you,” he sighs. “You might have been back home already.”

Kakashi doubts that. Only extremely skilled medics can heal such extensive damage. Rin is good for her age, but she’s new. It’ll take time for her to reach that level of medical ninjutsu. She shows a lot of promise, though; one of the other men got his foot caught in a spiked snare and she had all but the worst it fully healed over in less than an hour.

“What’s your name?” Kakashi asks. It’s sudden. He’s not sure why he asks, but it feels right. They’ve been together for two days now and they haven’t even done introductions.

The curse hums as he readies the salve. It’s been ground via mortar and pestle because there’s no going into town for that, either, and it has to be made by hand with what the forest provides. Kakashi wonders why he has medical tools at all, then, but he could have snuck them away from a passing traveller, or maybe he had them on him when he was cursed. “I don’t know.”

“No?”

With a featherlight touch, he applies the salve to every patch of broken skin one by one. “The blight fogs the mind,” he says vaguely. “When I first woke up, there was nothing in my head. Well, I’ve gotten some of it back now. That’s how I’m treating you like this.”

“Is that so?”

“I saw you fall,” he says with a shuddering breath. “I watched you hit the ground and I hurried over. It started coming back to me then, I think. My medical knowledge.”

“But not your name?”

The curse nods. “You’re welcome to call me whatever works best for you.” There’s a smile in his voice again, kind and soft and pleasant against the ears.

Kakashi thinks about it for a moment as he lifts his arm to give the curse better access to the backside of his bicep. “Doctor?” he tries sheepishly.

The curse laughs. “If you’d like.”

As the bandages are reapplied, Kakashi laments the fact that he can’t wear his mask at the moment, attached as it is to the rest of his shirt. He can feel how red his face is and he doesn’t like that between the two of them, he’s the only one whose emotions are bare to the world. Soon, strong arms tuck under his and lift him up to turn him around, keeping the weight off his leg. They start the process over with the bandages on his chest. Every time the curse sees the white scars beneath the bruising and cuts, he always pauses and goes quiet. Just like the arm, he gently washes away all of the grime, sitting on the side of the bed to reach Kakashi’s back, and it’s a little, well.

It’s a strange sort of intimacy that reminds him of his father. Long ago, it was Kakashi here, treating his father's newfound battle scars after a mission. Wiping away dirt and mud, disinfecting, and seeing another scar leave its mark on his father’s skin.

“My name is Kakashi,” he says unprompted. “That’s what you can call me.”

The curse pauses its ministrations to pull back, searching Kakashi’s face with untold thoughts. “I like it,” he says simply. “It’s a good name.”

Every three days, the doctor leaves to forage. Kakashi has decided that these days are the worst of all of them because, a shock to no one, being alone in a cottage in the middle of the forest is not a pleasant experience. When the hours pass with no idle chat, no one to watch from the window or help change his bandages, it’s crushing. It feels no different than being bedridden in a hospital except for the fact that if he were in the hospital, his teammates may at least visit.

How does the doctor do it, then, living out here all by his lonesome? How do any of the curses—the human ones, the ones who must crave company in the same way that he does? Kakashi is no stranger to loneliness but even he wishes for a warm body by his and someone to offer companionship, be it a friend or family. For all that they’ve spoken together, the doctor seems well-adjusted to this lifestyle. He’s calm and easygoing no matter the situation.

Or is that an effect of the curse, too? Muted emotions.

When the doctor returns, it’s with a backpack filled with herbs and fruits and mushrooms from the forest—all sorts of things. He lays it all out on the desk and starts sorting herbs to be dried from fruit to be stored, taking a seat on the chair and rubbing the back of his neck with a gloved hand.

“I tried hunting but I’m no good at it, I’m afraid.” His confession is very honest; he has Kakashi’s sympathies. “I’d like to get some meat for you if I can, but…”

Kakashi smiles behind his mask and scoots a little closer to the edge of the bed to watch. “I could teach you how to set traps,” he says. “I should have some stowed away in my inventory scroll.”

“A scroll, is it?”

The doctor gets up, his tail flicking as he rummages through Kakashi’s personal effects still hanging on the hooks by the door. Eventually, he pulls the scroll free with a little noise of triumph and presents it to the boy on the bed.

Kakashi passes chakra through the seals inked across the scroll and soon everything inside bursts across the mattress at his feet, from unprepared traps to ration bars and clothing. There’s a signal flare in here, too, but it’s a bit late to use it and his team wouldn’t have come down the mountain for him, anyway.

Kakashi picks up each trap one by one and explains their uses, how to set them up and also how to get wild game out once caught.

“They all seem very cruel,” the doctor observes, hanging his head and sighing as he prods one of the net traps. “I think maybe this I could do.”

Admittedly, yes, a lot of them are rather violent. Konoha’s trap designs have been in circulation for over forty years without much change to them, but the village as a whole is a bit stuck in its ways so that’s to be expected. “You don’t need to,” he assures. “I’m fine with whatever I get. I have ration bars, too.”

The doctor takes one of the bars between the fingers of his gloves and shakes his head. “This is no meal for a growing boy,” he says, sounding so much like Dad used to. It’s been years since Kakashi received a lecture like this. “While I can’t offer much, I will try.”

His devotion is weirdly sweet. It’s been six days now and Kakashi’s already warmed up to this strange victim of the blight.

“Where do you store your food, by the way?” Kakashi asks offhandedly. He always thought that a cold storage scroll was the easiest solution to keeping food fresh this far out in the middle of nowhere, but the doctor can’t use chakra, so he wouldn’t be able to open one.

“Do you want to see?”

Before he can answer, he’s being lifted up by a pair of strong arms and he makes a quiet noise of alarm, automatically wrapping his arms around the doctor’s neck. He’s lucky the shirt is high-collared, else he may have just damned himself.

“Careful,” the doctor cautions. “A little higher and you would have been infected.”

“Right—sorry.”

“Now, while I do quite enjoy your company,” he says as he carries Kakashi across the cottage, “I’m not equipped to deal with a freshly-turned curse at the moment.”

“What do you mean?”

The door opens and Kakashi squints against the evening sun. It’s his first time out in the open air in almost a week and he’s shocked by how accustomed his eyes are to the dim indoor light. The cottage is in a little clearing in the middle of an endless sea of trees and far in the distance is the mountain where he fell. There are all sorts of sounds around them and Kakashi tenses, wondering just what might lie beyond the shade of the tree cover. It’s a bit silly to fear the unknown when he’s being carried princess-style by a carrier of the blight, though.

“They’re a bit unpredictable,” the doctor says. He turns around the side of the house and continues on into the back. “After first turn, they’ll go after anything that moves. I’ve seen it happen. The blight tries to spread as quickly and efficiently as it can before its victims adjust. It’s all rather scary business.”

“Were you like that, too?”

The doctor stills, his eyes fixed ahead as his mind falls back on something that Kakashi can’t see. “I—” He stops at the back of the cottage and Kakashi can make out a smaller building a few feet away, wooden and just as crude looking as the first. It was clearly made by one person. But for all that it’s not pretty, it’s sturdy. The cottage is well-insulated, too, and it functions well.

“I think that I was,” the doctor confesses. “I don’t remember much of it. But if I was with anyone, I must have turned on them, too.”

The doctor’s voice is quiet and small. Kakashi doesn’t need to see a face to know that this man is ashamed of himself for not being able to fight against something that he simply couldn’t control. That’s not fair to him, is it? But, well. Kakashi doesn’t know. This curse business has nothing to do with him.

Inside the little shed out back is shelving filled with odds and ends. Some of it looks like hand-crafted tools, but a lot of this must have been filched from passersby. Kakashi can picture travellers ballsy enough to traverse Fire Country taking one look at the doctor and bolting in the other direction, leaving behind all sorts of things, and the doctor shrugging and deciding that he may as well make the most of it. For all that he has sad, quiet moments to him, he’s pretty optimistic as a whole.

In the back corner, there’s a trap door. Kakashi’s set down on a wooden crate filled with who-knows-what—mindful of his leg, of course—and the doctor opens it. Inside, there’s a ladder descending into the dark and cold air rises up from the hole beneath the shed.

“It’s primitive,” the doctor confesses, “but it works well enough. I haven’t had much use for it until you came, I just—it felt like something I should have.”

Something he should have, huh?

Despite not needing to eat.

Kakashi smiles at him. “Thank you,” he says again because, without this man, he would have died. “I owe you my life.”

The doctor rubs the back of his neck. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he says. “Someone would have come for you.”

That’s a lie, though, even if the doctor doesn’t know. Kakashi’s already seen what happens to people in need. He sees it in an empty casket and a carefully-etched name carved into cold, uncaring stone.

The world doesn’t wait for you if you fall behind.

It watches you die and calls you a ‘hero.’

Kakashi sits on the bed with his mask and shirt tossed onto the pillow by his arm as once more the bandages are unravelled across his body. This time, the doctor analyzes him with a critical eye. The assessment is a quiet, awkward affair where Kakashi sits board-straight, feeling like if he slouches or twists he’ll get the sort of scolding that he gets from the medic-nin back home.

“How do you speak?” Kakashi asks out of nowhere, drawing the doctor’s eyes up to him.

“I—” The doctor blinks. “I just do.”

“But you have no mouth,” he continues.

“I do. You just can’t see it.”

Hm. Well, it seems fair enough—with no light reaching it, maybe it’s just hard to notice. After all, the doctor never said he couldn’t eat; he doesn’t need to and can’t taste, so he just doesn’t see the point.

After another full silence and some poking and prodding at aching wounds, the doctor pulls back, arms crossed over his chest, and nods. “I think we can let your wounds air out now,” he says, as though he’s simply hanging laundry to dry. “There’s no sign of infection and they look to be comfortably sealed. The fresh air will do them some good. Try not to tear any open, though.”

“So I don’t get them infected?”

“So you don’t bleed,” he corrects, something teasing in his voice. “These are the only sheets I have, I’m afraid.”

It’s a joke, Kakashi knows, but he’s still sulking over it. The doctor doesn’t sleep, courtesy of the blight, so he’s never once missed the bed. That’s what he said when Kakashi apologized for imposing for so long. That he’s not wanting for the bed, and that he’s grateful for the company.

Kakashi gingerly tries pulling his shirt over his head, but the doctor pulls it away.

“It’s too tight,” he says. “It’ll rub against your wounds. I don’t think you’ll be very comfortable like that.”

Kakashi makes a face. “Then should I sleep shirtless?”

Instead, the doctor hurries over to his collection of goods gathered during his forage earlier in the day and retrieves a scroll.

An inventory scroll.

He presents it before Kakashi, returning to the chair beside the bed. “Try this? I found it during my search. It seemed to be abandoned.”

Well, anything dropped in the Forest of Death is not likely to be missed, so Kakashi ignores any moral qualms that he has and unseals the scroll with a push of chakra.

The smell that fills the air when clothes, tools, medical supplies and ration bars spill out across the bed hits him like a brick wall. He stares wide-eyed down at Konoha blues, the air caught in his throat, and he’s trying to breathe but he can’t.

All he can smell is his father’s scent, preserved by the scroll for as many years as Sakumo Hatake has been gone.

These are his father’s clothes. Sweaters and uniforms, long-sleeved shirts thick for winter. Kakashi remembers the last time his father packed this scroll and tears burn in his eyes, the image of a silver-haired man sitting cross-legged on the floor with all of these things scattered around him one that he could never forget. He takes one of the uniform shirts between his shaking fingers, watching his tears sink into darkening stains across the fabric as he crumples it up and holds it to his chest.

“Kakashi?”

He stills. There’s a hand on his shoulder, a voice so soft and scared by his ear. It’s the first time he’s heard the doctor say his name in all his time here. With a shuddering breath, he looks up to see the man crouched at his side, eyes staring at him from the black hole of his body.

“What’s wrong?”

Kakashi scrubs at his eyes with the back of his hand and tries to compose himself through his panic. His mind is a war of embarrassment and dread. It’s been years. It shouldn’t affect him like this. But the scent of his father is so perfectly preserved and it’s been so, so long since he last smelled it that it brings him a surge of emotions he can’t ignore. Still, he finds his breath.

“This was my father’s,” he says numbly. “I  was told that he died protecting the caravan, but really, his teammates abandoned him.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor says. “Why do you think they did that?”

“Because they're cowards,” he bites out. “They only care about themselves. My father wasn’t like that. He protected the pack at any cost. If they were attacked, then…”

“Then maybe he stayed behind.”

Kakashi’s mouth twitches. He wants to deny that. He wants to say that his father wouldn’t leave him behind like this by choice, but he’s not sure. Instead, he settles the doctor with a narrow-eyed glare.

The doctor raises placating hands. “I don’t mean to offend. It was only a thought.”

The bratty part of Kakashi wants to tell the doctor to keep his thoughts to himself, but he doesn’t have it in him. This man has been much too kind for him to behave that way without feeling guilty. Instead, he holds the fabric of Dad’s uniform shirt up to his nose and breathes it in, knowing that this scent is only temporary. When it’s gone, he’ll never get it back.

Once his nerves are calmed, he pulls one of Dad’s looser sweaters over his shoulders. He’s drowning in it a bit, the sleeves falling over his hands, but it’s soft and warm and the scent makes him feel safe.

“Sorry,” he says, a quiet mutter, “and thank you.”

“No trouble at all.”

Foraging days are always long, but today it’s gone on long enough that Kakashi starts to worry. The sun is down but the doctor is still not home. The latest he stays out is usually sunset. For all that Kakashi wants to go and scent him out, curses are scentless and Kakashi is in no state to be out on his own in the Forest of Death at night. Curses are more active after dark, after all. The doctor is a dear, sweet man beneath the blight, sure, but Kakashi has been told time and again that curses are dangerous. With his leg still healing, he won’t get far if one tries to pursue him, even if he can try to fend it off with his weapons. Kakashi specializes in close-ranged combat, too, which isn’t ideal with a broken leg.

It’s long into the night when the door finally opens and Kakashi sits up in bed, leaning forward, eager to greet the doctor. What he finds is a man with heavy steps and pitch-black skin, arrows sticking out of his back and through his chest, and Kakashi’s stomach lurches as he scrambles off the bed—

“Don’t,” the doctor cautions, holding a hand up in pause. “You’re still hurt, remember?”

“Me?” Kakashi blanches. “Doctor, you—you’re—”

The man rubs the back of his neck a little sheepishly. “It’s nothing much,” he says. “I ran into some locals and they didn’t take to me well.” His sigh is long-suffering.

“There are arrows…” Kakashi can’t finish as the doctor pulls one arrow from where it’s lodged in his stomach. It comes out with a sickening squelch , black ooze dripping onto the floorboards at his feet.

Again, the doctor sighs. “What a mess… Maybe I should do this outside.”

“It doesn’t…” Kakashi blinks, some of the tension easing off his shoulders. “It doesn’t hurt?”

“I’m effectively immortal as I am,” the doctor confesses. “No need to worry. I’ll be fine in a few hours. But that,” and he points at the puddle, “can still infect you. Please don’t touch it until I have a chance to clean up a bit.”

Kakashi nods, watching the very tall, very tired-seeming demon silhouette place his things on the desk and step outside. When he leans over a bit, Kakashi can make out the white of the shirt through the darkness as one by one the arrows are ripped from the doctor’s body and tossed—a bit angrily—to the ground. It really doesn’t seem to hurt. He doesn’t make a sound at all as he gets rid of them, but he grimaces at the sorry state of his shirt all torn to bits like it is. It’s all that he has.

When the doctor returns, Kakashi’s already pulled one of Dad’s sweaters from the scroll and is holding it up. “Use this.”

The doctor stares at it for a long, long time, silent and still in a way so unlike himself. “Are you sure?”

Kakashi nods. “Dad wouldn’t want it to go to waste.”

“Well then, thank you.” There’s a smile in his voice. “But if you could hold onto it until I clean up this mess, I would greatly appreciate that.”

“Right. Of course.”

Kakashi watches with vague amusement as his caretaker stares awkwardly over his own—blood? Could that be considered blood? He’s not sure—while scratching the back of his neck, unsure of where to start. Kakashi knows exactly what’s going through his mind because they’re the same questions that Kakashi has, too: if he scrubs at it with water, will the water then become infectious? If he dumps that water outside, will it blight the land or anything that happens to come into contact with it? How deep does the curse run? “Hm.”

Kakashi shifts off the bed, leaning on the furniture to keep the weight on his good leg. He maneuvers over to the wall and uses it as support as he makes his way across the room. It’s a bit funny the way the doctor holds up a hand in pause to keep him from getting too close, but Kakashi’s not stupid.

“We use fire in my village,” he says. “It kills remnants of the curse. You’ll need to replace the floorboards, though.”

The doctor thinks about it for a second before nodding. “What do you have in mind?”

Kakashi makes a quick hand sign and lights the puddle with a torrent of flames. He should probably have given a little more warning as the doctor pinwheels back and away from effectively the only thing that could ever kill him, keeping his distance. But, well, by the time the fire burns out, there’s no more cursed blood.

There’s still a mess, though.

As an extra precaution, the doctor pulls up the charred floorboards and tosses them outside, leaving nothing but the foundation beneath it. It’s definitely a tripping hazard.

“I’ll deal with that,” he assures. “Eventually. For now: don’t trip.”

Kakashi laughs. It’s been a long, long time since he’s felt this light. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

The doctor disposes of his shirt as well as there’s some staining on it, too, and happily sweeps up the ashes after Kakashi chars it. He looks really cozy in Dad’s sweater. It fills him out more than the loose-hanging buttondown that just accentuated his sharp, spindly limbs. He looks softer like this. The main issue is that there’s more space around the collar where his body is uncovered, but Dad’s uniform shirts are more fitted and don’t account for his long arms, so it’s the lesser evil.

It’s while dinner is cooking over the fire that Kakashi dares to ask, “What happened?”

The doctor sighs, his whole body sags, and he rubs the back of his head. “I got a bit close to a settlement, I confess. It’s my fault for being careless.”

“So they attacked you? Without reason?”

“No,” the doctor defends. Then, after a lot more staring and a little thought, “Maybe. There was a child out beyond the border. I ushered her towards the settlement and told her it was dangerous to play so close to the woods, but her people didn’t take kindly to my presence. These things happen.”

Kakashi knows as much. Any time an infected animal gets close to Konoha’s territory, it’s chased away. He’s never actually seen one because the guard stations are decently far from the village, giving them a wide berth where animals can still live and be hunted for food. They try to keep their section of forest clear after the mountainside was overtaken by blight, leaving them without a safe way to travel through to Lightning. As much as he understands that level of caution, Kakashi’s never imagined meeting a humanoid curse like the doctor. Logically he knew that they had to exist—the fear of the curse was mostly based around the idea of people getting infected—but with nothing to base their image off of, he never thought about it.

The idea that someone would attack this friendly, gentle man is infuriating.

“I’ll be careful,” the doctor assures. Apparently, Kakashi’s thoughts are written on his face. “I took a detour on my way back to get them heading in a different direction. We should be safe for the moment.”

“Implying that they tried to follow you here?”

The man shrugs, stirring the pot of boiling soup. “They want to keep their village free of blight. I would, too. So long as there’s a curse living in these parts, they’re never truly safe.”

No matter how true it is, it turns his stomach.

“Why do you keep a garden?” he asks, crouched behind the curse at the side of the house. Against Doctor’s orders. The leg is doing a lot better, though, and he was careful when he bent down, so he’s not worried.

The doctor jumps a bit. He’s so focused on tending to the plants that he doesn’t hear Kakashi’s approach and it’s quite funny when he shares these rare moments of surprise. They’re very human. “Kakashi,” he chides, using that stern parental voice he’s recently adopted, “you know you shouldn’t be out here right now.”

Kakashi rolls his eyes and doesn’t move. “It’s boring inside. Let me get sunlight. I’ll soak it up like a plant. Maybe I’ll heal faster, who knows? Neither of us is a medic.”

Sighing, the doctor sets down his spade and brushes the dust off his gloves. He’s crouched in much the same way as Kakashi and the scent of his father is still just barely clinging to the doctor’s sweater, so it almost feels like Kakashi’s gone back in time. “I’m not sure,” he confesses. “I think I may have kept one before I was cursed. It feels right.”

“My mother used to keep one,” Kakashi says absently. “After she passed, Dad cared for it. But I think it’s dead now.”

“That’s too bad.”

Kakashi sighs, too, just imagining his father’s disappointed face if he ever knew. After Dad died, he didn’t have the heart to go back to that big, empty home. There were too many memories. It would be a miracle if anything was still left of it after so many years of neglect.

“But it was their choice to keep it,” the doctor says, “not yours. You don’t need to tether yourself to their memories. It’s your life, Kakashi, and I doubt your parents are anything but proud.”

After six weeks, Kakashi’s well enough to walk on his leg. Mostly. The doctor was kind enough to fashion a walking stick out of wood for him, leaving him feeling like a feeble old man, and he can’t stress the injury too much, but Kakashi can walk.

It’s a little bittersweet.

He has his stuff on his back, his father’s scroll on his hip, and a lot of produce in the second scroll where he’s been keeping all of his food. The doctor stands over him, a towering shadow of a figure, his arms crossed over his front and his tail flicking as he considers the boy.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks softly.

Kakashi smiles. “Better than ever. But…” He looks around the cottage and it’s become quite a familiar sight. The thought of leaving makes him feel… odd. “I was wondering if you could show me where you found my father’s scroll.”

“Why?”

Kakashi stiffs the air and his father’s scent is no longer there. It’s a hollow moment, but he has the memory of it to carry with him and that’s enough. “My father’s corpse was left behind,” he says. “If possible… I want to bring him home.”

The doctor considers him, ruffling his hair with a gloved hand. “I understand.”

Kakashi’s led up one of the hillsides beyond the forest, his bag slung over the doctor’s shoulder. It’s a little embarrassing, being coddled like this, but he’s come to expect it by now. There’s another bundle of trees at the top of this hill and a stream that flows down it, and it’s not long before they find the tattered remains of a campsite. What’s left behind is old and overgrown, clearly abandoned years ago by people in a rush to escape. There are tattered strips of cloth hanging off the tips of sharp-edged branches, some tangled within shrubs underfoot like something feral snapped its jaws at the people who once rested here.

The doctor leans against a tree and lets Kakashi work. The first thing he does is check for lingering scents, but he doesn’t expect anything to come of it. Far too many years have passed out here in the open forest and he knows going into it that his efforts won’t be worth much. The likelihood of getting anywhere is slim, but Kakashi will try so that he doesn’t have regrets.

All the while, the doctor watches on silently.

Kakashi checks for tracks, but all he can find are deer prints—fresh ones—and the doctor’s… hoofprint… things. Kakashi doesn’t know; they don’t talk about it. A curse’s weird anatomy is not his to question. Other than that, there’s nothing here.

He fans out his search into the nearby area, spending all of his time here and expending all of his efforts, but there’s nothing to follow. By nightfall, he accepts its failure for what it is.

In this time, the doctor sets a fire. Kakashi sets up his sleeping bag and unravels it, and they share a one-sided dinner.

By the end of it, Kakashi’s bundled up and surrounded by warmth with the sounds of the forest unsteady against his ears. All he can imagine is a curse bursting through the brush and touching his skin.

“Sleep,” the doctor says, nudging him with a knee. “I’ll keep you safe, Pup. I promise.”

But Kakashi is already dreaming.

“Would you like a guide?”

Kakashi stills. They’re dismantling the camp and covering their tracks. It’s standard procedure out here in the wilds because not all curses are mindless and some can very easily follow a trail, and catching the attention of a powerful curse is practically a death sentence. If the doctor weren’t as gentle as he is, he could easily take out Kakashi’s entire exploration team. The level of awareness victims of the blight regain vary between them, and ones with no awareness at all operate solely on the urge to infect and spread.

He wipes the dirt on his hands off as he rises up from the ground. The doctor is still crouched by Kakashi’s bag, putting away the last of their things. More or less, their work here is done. “Would you?”

“It’s no trouble,” the doctor assures as he climbs to his full height, swinging the bag over his shoulder. “I’m not sure if you noticed, but I don’t have a lot going on.”

The dry sense of humour is growing on Kakashi. The hint of sarcasm, even more so.

“Have you heard of Konoha?” Kakashi asks. He scents the air one more time and is pleased to note that while his own scent lingers, it should fade quickly. They’ve made quick work of this place and it should be safe to move now.

“It sounds familiar, though I’m not too sure where it is,” the doctor confesses. “But I’m well-travelled. If you can figure out the general direction, I can get you there safely.”

Kakashi stares at the mountain, looking a little closer than it did from the cottage. If they can make it to the other side then he should be able to figure it out by himself; he’s from a family of trackers, after all. It’s been weeks since his fall but there hasn’t been any rain so the chance of his team’s tracks leaving an imprint is very real. The rest of the group would have turned back, too, with the caravan gone. It held most of their supplies and trying to make it to the border of Sand without it would be akin to courting death.

Kakashi could use a night watch, though. He could use the extra protection since he’s still recovering. This is what he tells himself as he nods. “Thank you, then.”

Beneath that, he doesn’t want to lose this new connection he’s made.

The doctor steers them away from the rocky, jagged cliffside with lectures on his tongue and leads Kakashi instead down one of the paths through the mountain. It’s ten times quicker and incredibly efficient, but this path isn’t on the maps that Konoha has. This is one of the reasons they set out in the first place—to find routes like this.

The path is carved straight through the rock. Kakashi can only stare in awe as they dip into the shadows of a man-made tunnel that marks a narrow, straight road with branching caverns to the sides, leading deeper into the mountain’s core. The people who did this must have used incredibly powerful Doton to manage it. There are sconces on the right side walls, lit with ever-burning flames that fight back the darkness. Without those, the doctor would be completely invisible here.

“What is this place?”

“It’s an Earth Country trade route,” the doctor explains. He keeps a hand on Kakashi’s back at all times, gently guiding the boy through the dark, as though if he lets go, Kakashi will disappear around a bend. “They exchange food for weapons with Sand, but there’s a lot of blight along the borders of their countries. It’s safer to cut through Fire than it is to fend off curses, so they’ve made a series of tunnels through the mountains to make the long trip more reasonable.”

Kakashi’s only ever heard Earth Country mentioned in passing; it has no relation to Konoha and it’s much too far a journey for their little village of farmers and hunters to make. Even a trip to Kiri, their closest ally, brings with it the risk of death.

“How do you know all of this?”

“Hm?” The doctor looks down at him, pinprick yellow dots in an ocean of black. “Oh. I’m not too sure. It must be an old memory coming free.”

“You’re remembering more, then?”

“Here and there,” the man says. He pauses and grips Kakashi’s shoulders, guiding the boy around a pile of fallen rubble. “It’s more that I’m noticing these things now. I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything, really, but it’s hidden by the fog. Sometimes it takes a little bit of sifting to find what I’m looking for.”

“And your name?” Kakashi asks. “Did you find it?”

“Maybe,” he teases, “maybe not. I’m a bit fond of thinking myself a doctor now, so thank you for that.”

Kakashi rolls his eyes.

Beyond the Earth Country tunnels lies, unsurprisingly, more forest. Over two-thirds of Fire Country is covered in trees, everywhere except the coast, so trying to find your way on your own off the main roads is a challenge. Everything always looks exactly the same no matter what direction you head in. The compass Kakashi has is a saving grace; he knows his village is northern. It’s something, at least.

Before long, the doctor is sharing stories as they continue through a tangle of heavy brush. There’s a settlement nearby, he says, and so they’re veering off the road mapped out by Earth and heading deeper into the thicket. While their supplies aren’t low, the option to replenish what they’ve used is always nice. Kakashi will have to go in alone, though. He hates that.

But when they reach the stream, something feels off. Small houses dot the little valley past the trees, quiet and unmoving on the other side of the water. Kakashi presses on first, walking along the shore until he spots a wooden bridge broken and splintered further upstream. He stares at it, eyes narrowed, scenting the air for people. The village is odourless save for the musk of grass and rot. When he scans the houses for signs of life, he finds nothing.

Kakashi waves the doctor over and together they maneuver around the hole in the bridge. The streets are bare as they wander on through, homes left with doors ajar like their inhabitants fled in a rush. There’s old laundry hanging on clotheslines, filthy and beaten down from exposure to the elements. Kakashi pokes his head inside one of the homes and finds rotten food on the table, mugs dried out and crusty with the remnants of whatever was inside. There’s no blood, though. No sign of struggle.

He thinks that he knows what happened here but it’s the first time he’s seen it in person.

“Oh dear,” the doctor sighs as he peeks in through the doorway, steadying himself with a hand on the frame. He has to duck his head a little to see inside. “Well, best make the most of it. Let’s see what we can salvage.”

Kakashi covers his nose against the putrid smell of decaying food. It can’t have been too long if the smell is still this bad. “Is this from the blight?”

“Most likely. There’s no telling whether the villagers fled or turned, though, so stay vigilant.”

“Right.”

The doctor’s first stop is the bedroom. He pulls open drawers one by one, dumping clothes onto the unmade bed, then moves onto the closet. Every now and then he’ll tilt his head, considering a shirt or jacket, and hold it up against his frame. There’s a sigh each time when he realizes it won’t meet his needs, tossing it carelessly to the floor.

Kakashi follows him in, arms crossed as he leans in the doorway with amusement. “Nothing fits?”

“Nothing fits.”

It’s no surprise; he’s just too long for most sizes. Even most of Dad’s clothes don’t quite reach the length that he needs.

While the doctor busies himself in the bedroom, Kakashi wanders around the rest of the house. There are paintings on the walls, the kind that can only be bought from local artists, never to make it out of the village. There’s a kid’s bedroom, too. He doesn’t touch that. Out back, he finds a sunroom with big windows and a cute little reading nook that reminds him of his family home, but dwelling on it will do no good.

There’s a shed outside. In it, he finds three pairs of gardening gloves and smiles as he packs them into Dad’s inventory scroll. It’s not much, but it gives their search a little meaning. He’s sure that the doctor will be pleased to note that he no longer has to wash that same pair of gloves several times a day.

Kakashi doesn’t give himself time to think about where they are and what happened here. He can see it in the perfect image of a ghost town this place paints, the overgrown gardens and the untouched food stalls still stocked with oozing, maggot-covered produce. Everyone just up and left one day, all at once. The story of this place is the sort that kids tell in the dead of night under the blankets of a sleepover. The kind that parents scare their children with as a cautionary tale.

Dad must have crossed so many villages like this in his travels. He’s been everywhere and seen everything, and maybe he would have grown numb to them. But Kakashi doesn’t know. He thinks they were close, but Sakumo Hatake was not one to discuss his missions with his family. All Kakashi knows is that his father was a professional guide to merchants crossing over the borders and to the expedition teams sent out by Konoha. If the sight of a dead village is so commonplace that the doctor doesn’t even blink, then how many times must Dad have seen them?

While heading back into the house, Kakashi stills. There’s a wash basin out by the shore still, muddied and brown with displaced soil and a pool of water in its bowl. Beyond that, there’s the stream. And further still, there’s a person.

A curse.

Kakashi’s hand finds the tantō he wears on his back, braced and steady, and he waits. Its eyes find him, yellow lights amongst an inky black, and he hates how much it reminds him of the doctor. It makes him hesitate. The curse’s tail flicks at its feet, its body a still, unnatural thing.

When Kakashi draws his blade, he feels a hand on his shoulder and looks up. The doctor stands beside him, staring out at the very same curse that he is.

“Easy there,” he cautions. “They’ve no business with us. Don’t antagonize.”

Everything in his body and mind is telling him not to let go and it makes him a hypocrite. He’s out here condemning the people who shot arrows at his friend, yet he’ll do the same to another curse unprovoked.

Even as his fear screams at him not to, Kakashi lowers his hand, encouraged by the smooth circles rubbed into his back through a thick gardening glove. Seconds pass, then a minute, and the curse loses interest. It walks along the stream and away from them, and Kakashi runs a hand through his hair.

The doctor must be so disappointed.

“They’re probably a local,” the doctor says, watching the curse go. “One that couldn’t escape on time. If they’re in their right mind then they’re no threat to us.”

“Sorry.”

“Sage, Boy, don’t be.” There’s a little nudge against Kakashi’s arm. “It pays to be cautious. But don’t go looking for a fight where there’s none to be had—that’s how people get cursed in the first place.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

The doctor hums, rubbing at his chin—where his chin might be, anyway—as he thinks. “Mmm… I’m not too sure. I don’t think so. I may have encroached on blighted lands, though, and raised alarms that way.”

The image of this strangely optimistic man calmly walking into cursed territory and leading himself to his doom is far too believable.

They take their search to some of the other homes on the street and manage to find the doctor some more high-collared shirts. Kakashi filches a change of clothes for himself, too, just because he can. Other than that, there are medical supplies that will be of better use in their hands than sitting out here collecting dust. They find some ryō, too, that won't be missed. But overall, there's nothing too grand here. It's a little place only a fraction of the size of Konoha and its people didn't have much.

With night approaching, the doctor suggests they stay until dawn. They find a comfortable house to bunk in, one with a well-kept fireplace and very little rotting food. The doors all lock, the windows snap shut, and it's a million times safer than spending the night in the woods.

The doctor makes dinner even though Kakashi insists that he knows how to cook. "I find it fun," he confesses. "I only started cooking after bringing you home, so it's all fresh and new. Humour me."

Kakashi hates burdening the man. He just smiles, though. Far be it for Kakashi to take away this small happiness.

Kakashi's plate sits empty on the table and sleep is heavy in his eyes. "Say, Doctor?"

"Hm?"

"What do you think that curse was doing earlier?"

The doctor taps his foot against the ground as he thinks. He's nestled before the fireplace with a book on his lap, cozy in the corner of a plush sofa. His hands are covered with one of the new, thinner pairs of gloves that they found and it fills Kakashi with warmth. "Looking for their home, I would imagine."

"They can't find it?"

"The blight's fog can be quite thick," he says. "You could get so lost that you can't find your house when you're already inside it, or recognize the face of someone you love. It's hard in the beginning. In time, they may regain their sense of self, but for now…"

"They're lost," Kakashi finishes.

"Right. Exactly."

"But they won't always be. They can find their home, and you can find your name."

"You're stuck on that, are you?"

"A little," he confesses. Kakashi doesn’t want to give this man a new name. Maybe the doctor doesn’t mind, but Kakashi does. A name is the one lasting piece of identity that a curse has, one final tie to their humanity as the blight strips them of their taste and sleep and pain, blackening their bodies into lightless shadows and deforming their silhouettes.

Before he falls asleep where he sits, Kakashi fetches sealing paper out of his bag and draws simple sigils across the pages one by one at the coffee table. The doctor looms over him, watching on with curious eyes as he painstakingly counts the strokes on each sheet of paper. A part of him likes showing his companion new things, broadening the scope of his knowledge in the hopes that one day it will prod at memories still buried beneath the fog.

“What’s this your making?”

“Wards,” Kakashi answers simply. “They’ll form a barrier around the house. It should keep curses out for the night.”

“You didn’t use those while camping,” the doctor observes.

“They only really work when placed on walls or fences. There needs to be a physical barrier for them to reinforce.”

He goes to each corner of the house, sticking them to the walls with small bursts of chakra. When he steps back and finds none of them peeling off, he supposes that’s good enough. With that done, he takes the last few and pastes them to the windows—the weakest points in those physical barriers. The sigils used for these will reinforce the glass. As he presses the final one to the living room window, he sees a black shadow bending the moonlight around it somewhere near the stream. That same curse, with its same clothes, continues on lost and confused as it treads across the water and onto the dirt paths of the village roads.

It doesn’t scare him this time. Kakashi observes from the window as it carries on, back hunched and eyes glowing through the night, and all he can see is the doctor. A lost, cursed thing. A creature with no recollection of who and what they are, blackened skin that bends the light and claw-tipped hands that bleed infection.

Kakashi doesn’t take the bed. He settles down next to the doctor on the sofa and leans his weight against the man’s side, his attention on a crudely painted family portrait on the wall. The body against his tenses and shifts, yellow eyes falling onto his silver hair from above. Soon, an arm wraps around his shoulders.

“Rest up,” the doctor says. “We have a long day ahead of us.”

It’s strange, but every time his companion asks this of him, sleep is never too far away.

Kakashi knows better than to jinx things, but they haven’t encountered anything more than a wild boar on their travels so far—the village curse aside—and he wonders why everyone in Konoha is so terrified of leaving the village border. This trip is his first across Fire Country; before now, he stuck to the local strip of forest kept secure by the guard towers. The main challenge his team faced on their way through was bad weather, the sort that had him and the caravan careening over a cliff face.

It’s when they look for a place to camp out the night that a rustling in the trees makes him regret ever thinking this. Kakashi braces himself, his stance wide and his hand on the hilt of his tantō as warning growls drag up from the tall grasses surrounding the clearing. He takes an involuntary step back, scenting the air for wolves, but all he can smell is the forest.

And curses are scentless.

A shape he can barely discern launches at him from the brush and he swings his arm forward, but the tantō doesn’t come with it. His stomach lurches, dread pooling in his gut.

The doctor calmly places himself between Kakashi and their attacker, catching shadow-black teeth with the blade of Dad’s weapon and throwing it back. He took the tantō. The curse hits the dirt with a hollow thud and Kakashi is ushered close by a claw-tipped hand.

The gloves are gone. Moments ago, the doctor was washing them in the river. His sleeves are rolled up, laying bare his wiry black arms, and if Kakashi gets too close there’s a real chance of infection. He listens despite this and draws a kunai out of the pouch on his leg, his back to his companion and eyes trained on the shadows barely visible beyond their campsite. How many are there?

“Don’t engage,” the doctor cautions. “Let me handle this. Just make sure they don’t touch you.”

Kakashi can handle himself. He’s a Hatake and a hunter, at that. But he relents, the eyeless things shifting and bending in the black silhouette of the forest, and bites his lip. He can’t see them. The campfire is unlit in the centre of the clearing, the moonlight the only hope he has of catching their shapes. He doesn’t know any long-range Katon, but he can light the fire if he gets close enough.

That means leaving the doctor’s protection, though.

A squalling cry draws his eyes around. Thick black ooze taints the blade of his father’s tantō. The doctor’s form is careful and controlled, his body a smooth line of force. He knows katas—the same ones that Kakashi knows, the ones taught to the swordsmen and hunters of Konoha. Fluid strikes mark his advance, the grip on the hilt steady and practiced, and sweeps through the ebbing shadows. While the curses’ cuts spray blackened blood across the clearing, the doctor pivots away and keeps his distance, determined not to get any on his shirt.

It’s ridiculous that he’s concerned about that right now.

Kakashi hurries over to the campfire, running through several hand signs to draw a torrent of flames from his palm. The fire burns bright along dry logs and leaves, chasing away the shadows. It’s instant—the curses hiss against the light. They shrivel back, their numbers falling, and across the ground, he can see splatters of inky blood. It coats the grasses and the dirt and he shrinks away from it.

The light doesn’t scare all of them, though, and two lunge for his throat. Flames burst out across their skin, carried from the campfire with chakra, and they hit the dirt with strangled cries. Kakashi watches on as their black skin bleeds away to a burning-hot core, like lava in their guts, cooling and hardening and crumbling into ash.

They die and all he can see is the doctor in their place. It turns his stomach.

So. Infected animals seem a bit violent. He’ll take note of that.

The doctor flicks his wrist and the ooze on Dad’s tantō splatters against the earth. He cleans the last of it off with his fingers as he heads over, staring blankly down at the piles of ash, and then he turns to Kakashi.

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” Kakashi says. He sinks down beside the fire and runs a hand through his hair. There’s something in his head—a thought that won’t leave. “You know how to fight.”

“A bit,” the doctor confesses. His skills are too practiced for such an off-handed dismissal. “I worked as a guide in my human years.”

That explains it. Guides would be at high-risk for infection, too. But it doesn’t ease the nagging feeling that he saw something he shouldn’t have.

“Is it safe to stay here?” Kakashi asks.

“Safe enough,” the doctor sighs. “We’d be in more danger moving after sundown. I’ll keep watch. Oh, and—sorry.”

He offers up Dad’s tantō, its blade wiped clean, and Kakashi stares numbly, firelight glinting off the metal. It’s bothering him. He hates it. The image won’t leave his mind of the doctor—of Dad —

“You’re hurt.” Kakashi reaches out to the burning-bright patch on the doctor’s wrist but it’s pulled away. The sparks must have caught it.

“Careful,” the doctor cautions. “You can’t touch, remember?”

“But your arm—”

“Is fine,” he assures. “It will heal. Give it time.”

Behind the doctor’s back, bits of blackened skin crumble and crack.

No. Screw this. He’s not just going to sit here and watch his friend hurt. With a scowl, Kakashi pulls Dad’s inventory scroll from his belt loop and presses chakra through it. Its contents spill out across the ground, narrowly missing the pools of infectious black ink left behind in their encounter, and he locates the thinnest pair of gloves they have. They’re leather, found shoved at the back of a workshop in the village. He pulls them on and rifles around for his medkit, beckoning the doctor over.

“Give me your arm,” he orders, but the curse doesn’t move. 

“It’s nothing to worry about.”

“Give me your arm,” he repeats, his voice fraying with a short spike of rage. “I’m not asking, Doctor.”

“Really, Pup, it’s fine, it—”

Kakashi clenches his jaw. He tightens his fist around the tube of burn cream in his hand, the other shaking on the lid of the med kit, and he tries to breathe through it.

It’s not like he hasn’t noticed. Like a slow-rolling storm, this revelation has been a steady wave at the back of his head for a long, long time, lying just beneath the surface. He told himself that it wasn’t possible. Dad was dead, after all. The villagers—his teammates —that’s what they saw. That’s what he was told. They brought Dad’s tantō back with them, sullied by murk and mud, the cord wrap frayed and loose. That was the only closure he got. Then this man was here, leaning over his bedside with stew and bandages and gently scolding words, the ones he always used to hear, and it couldn’t be so. Dad was dead and Kakashi was alone. Dad wouldn’t leave him, he wouldn’t abandon —

“Kakashi? What’s wrong, Pup? Why the tears?”

Shit.

Kakashi looks pointedly away and scrubs at his face with the back of his sleeve, holding an arm out towards the curse. When nothing happens, he wiggles his fingers in demand. Eventually, a hand slides into his. He wraps his fingers tightly around the black, claw-tipped arm and yanks it closer, dragging the body attached right down with it. The yelp the curse makes is worth it. It makes him feel better.

He forces back his tears and stares down at the yellow burn of missing skin. Before today, Kakashi thought that curses were black all the way through, like a shadow taking solid form. He didn’t expect this magma-like light beneath the surface. There was none of this when arrows were pulled from Dad’s—

Shit. Kakashi curses, biting his lip and forcing it all back, now is not the time.

Kakashi breathes. He recollects. Hesitantly, he touches the exposed inner core and finds it warm to the touch even through the leather glove. It’s not the hot magma he expects it to be. There’s give, but it has a solid base beneath it. Despite how it looks, this is a burn and he’ll treat it as such.

The first thing he does is clean the area. Their supplies are bountiful after their village trip, so he doesn’t hesitate to use what he has. After cooling the burn, he applies a liberal amount of cream across it, gentle in his ministrations to keep from irritating the open wound.

“How does this feel?” he asks numbly.

“It helps.”

Alright, good. Maybe it’s possible to treat a curse’s injuries, after all. Before long, he’s wrapping bandages around Dad’s forearm. He keeps them loose to avoid putting pressure on the skin. They just want it to stay clean. This isn’t the first time he’s had to treat a burn; one of his teammates is an Uchiha. With how extensive and potent the clan’s Katon are, the Uchiha are kept to the frontlines of cross-country expeditions and head the guard towers around the village; they’re experts at killing curses. But Obito is a bit terrible with his chakra control and has turned his own jutsu against himself time and again during practice. It’s always Kakashi and Rin patching him up afterwards.

“Kakashi,” Dad calls, his voice as soft as it always is, “talk to me.”

The boy closes his eyes and grounds himself as he secures the bandage in place. His fingers find Dad’s blackened skin, the texture soft like feathers or fur beneath the thin fabric separating them, and he tries to remember what it looked like when it was human. He remembers scars, these thin pale lines from combat Kakashi doesn’t know. Dad would always return with another injury. He was a veteran warrior, sure, a guide for longer than Kakashi was alive, but that didn’t make him impenetrable. Those scars are gone. The wide forearm he remembers, thick with muscle, is a spindly, boney thing. His father's blunt fingers are jagged and skeletal now. But the strangest part is how he stares down at this bandaged arm and none of that bothers him. He can’t bring himself to care.

“Pup,” Dad tries again, his voice strained. Even if their eyes meet, there’s no expression to read. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Kakashi sniffs, wiping at his face again. His eyes are puffy and red, burning. He keeps his head down. Dad doesn’t need to see. “Did you find your name yet, Doctor?”

There’s silence. The black hand twists to wrap its fingers around his, squeezing him tightly.

“You seem to have found it for me.”

Kakashi twitches. “You knew.”

Dad exhales, his whole body sagging as he scratches at the base of one of the protrusions from his head. He rubs Kakashi’s knuckles with the pad of his thumb, drawing patterns against the leather glove. “It’s in the fog,” he says. “But I pieced it together.”

“When?”

“You opened my scroll,” he whispers. “It was on me when I turned. You smelled my scent and called me your father.”

His whole body is shaking but he won’t let it show. Every muscle that he tenses brings him closer to breaking down, so he breathes and relaxes, finally meeting his father’s eyes.

Pinprick yellow light staring out from a formless black face.

“Sage, Kakashi…”

Dad pulls Kakashi tight against his chest, ever so careful that his exposed forearms never meet his son’s skin. Kakashi is boneless against this cursed body that still gives off heat. If he closes his eyes, he sees a warm bedroom and a futon, his father’s large frame blocking out the lamplight as he tucks his boy in. Like this, their long years apart wither and die.

The village called his father a hero for his selfless love of his people. But they never said what that selfless love really looked like.

It’s an hour later when Kakashi’s tears have all dried and sleep drags him down that they finally talk. Dad’s resting against a tree, his son pulled onto his lap and in his arms like a much smaller child, rolled-down sleeves and gardening gloves acting as a barrier.

“There was a swarm,” Dad tells him. “It happened at night, so none of us could see them. The caravan was our top priority. It was a return trip and the wares we carried were vital to the village, so I gave the order to take it and run. Shikaku stayed behind, you know. Against my command. You’ve no idea how mad I was at him.”

Kakashi watches the crackle and pop of the campfire as he thinks back to the day Dad’s tantō became his and the hands that passed it from one generation to the next. It’s not something he bothered to remember. But as a man his father’s junior knelt before him, a beaten-up sheath resting in gloved palms, he can almost see a face.

“Be proud, Kid. Your father’s a hero.”

“Shikaku thought that he could freeze them in place with his shadow imitation technique. But curses can’t be controlled with chakra. He was only a boy and it was his first expedition, so he didn’t know. He just wanted to help.”

Kakashi presses his lips together and fists his father’s shirt.

“I couldn’t watch him turn,” Dad says, “so I blocked them with my body. Told him to run. By then it was too late for me, but the boy was still trying to claw them off my arms, poor thing.”

There’s a hand on his back, rubbing circles between his shoulder blades. Dad used to do this on nights when he had trouble sleeping. They would sit like this, the room soft with the glow of the lantern, until Kakashi could no longer keep his eyes open. Even now, his father spilling his heart out, it’s hard to stay awake. “He led my team,” Kakashi says. “Shikaku Nara.”

Dad laughs. It’s this small, throaty chuckle that reverberates in his chest, and it’s so nostalgic. “So he lived. I’m glad.”

Glad, huh?

Glad that the person who ruined his life survived.

That’s such a Dad way of looking at this, isn’t it?

“Will you tell me now, Pup?” Dad asks.

“Hm?”

“My name.”

As sleep pulls him under, the steady motions of his father rocking him to sleep, he comes to a decision: it doesn’t matter what the village wants or what the rules say. He doesn’t care that heroes die and cowards live, that they say his life should be freely given for the sake of his people or that this is his purpose. To hell with the village. To hell with the rules. If what’s expected of him is to abandon those that fall behind then they can keep their loyalty and shove it up their asses. All that matters is the one here with him now, solid and real against his skin, and the words shared between them. This is his mission and he’ll protect it with his life.

“Sakumo Hatake,” he answers.

Kakashi will bring his father home.

The bramble lining the roadside path is a charred husk, the victim of an angry blaze. It’s violent and messy and the leaves are burnt up, leaving behind a skeletal visage. They stop to admire the damage. Dad’s scratching his chin, wracking his brain for some logical explanation for this, but Kakashi only sighs.

Obito.

They’re on the right track, anyway, and Kakashi is catching the faintest whiff of his teammates from the path. There are tracks, a bit run down but still fresh enough to follow, and he’s starting to recognize the area. And honestly? Good. It’s about time. He’s reached his limits out here in the sticks and all he wants is a hot bath and a warm bed. Even the cottage would be nicer than this. There’s dirt in his hair that Dad keeps brushing away, their supplies are running low, and if Dad weren’t a self-fuelling monster then they wouldn’t have enough food to make the trip. And swarms? Well, swarms are common. They’re everywhere and Kakashi can’t, in good conscience, blame Obito for scorching the fuck out of the forest when just yesterday he had to draw up a ring of fire around himself to stop the onslaught of twenty-seven rabbit-based curses. Rabbits! The weakest, simplest of creatures and yet—and yet there were so many of them. He had no choice but to fight long-range while Dad picked them off with his tantō. It was a nightmare.

To his horror, Dad only laughed. “It’s a rite of passage in this field,” he’d said. With every memory pulled up from the fog, he’s gaining more confidence. Every day he feels more like the teasing old man that Kakashi remembers.

Dad’s memories are spotty and unreliable. There’s no telling what will return to his conscious mind and when, so there are some days when he proudly marches on, knowing exactly which way to go, and others when he’s entirely lost. But between his patchy recollection and Kakashi’s tracking, it’s enough. They’ll find Konoha soon.

Dad picks a blackened leaf from the bramble and watches it crumble to dust with the slightest bit of pressure. “Friend of yours?”

Kakashi rolls his eyes. “That’s a way to word it, yes.”

The old man laughs, clapping him on the back. “Well, good! We’ve almost got you home, then.”

“It’s your home, too.”

It gets awkward every time he brings it up. Kakashi’s not stupid; he knows that the village will take one look at his father and line up the Uchiha for a full onslaught to stop the curse from breaching their borders, but he’s going to figure it out. He can’t make Dad go back to that cottage alone. If it comes to that then he’ll leave, too.

It doesn’t matter how. He’ll make this work.

Sakumo Hatake is Konoha’s hero. He deserves this much, at least.

They don’t make it to Konoha’s borders before they’re stopped. Konoha has a ring of guard stations surrounding its land and there’s a checkpoint at every major road. The pay is good, but not good enough to entice people into what is essentially a death sentence, so the only ones brave enough to take on the position are the Uchiha. Sure enough, standing in the small fortress that is the guard tower is a man with dark hair and warm skin, a scar crossing his face. He looks entirely bored as he sits beyond the wall, his arms resting on the ledge that separates him from the rest of the world. He doesn’t notice them at first, his eyes glazing over, barely registering that there’s anyone down the road.

Then he sees the tall, lanky shadow of the man that is Sakumo Hatake and that sleepy look falls off his face.

Before Kakashi ever reaches the station, the Uchiha swings up out of the fortress, his arms going to the pouch on his belt. He takes six paper bombs between his fingers and halts their advance.

If any of those hit Dad, he’s dead.

Kakashi raises placating hands to show that he’s unarmed and glances back at his father. The gesture is meaningless, though, because he can’t tell what Dad is thinking.

The Uchiha squints at him. “The Hatake boy?”

Good— great —this guy recognizes him. That’s something. He nods, watching the man waver. “I’m returning from a mission.”

“Your group?”

“We got separated,” he answers vaguely. “And this—”

“It’s a curse.”

“It’s my father. ”

The Uchiha nearly drops his bombs. Everyone in the village is intimately familiar with the name Sakumo Hatake and the weight that it carries. Kakashi’s hope is for that name to be well-respected enough for this man to let him pass through with a carrier of the blight, but it’s unlikely. They’re not being attacked, though—that’s a start.

“I—” The man pales. “You can’t tell me you believe that, Kid. These things’ll say anything to get into the village. Konoha’s a fucking buffet.”

“He’s not lying. He didn’t even tell me—” Kakashi sucks in a breath when he feels his father’s hand on his shoulder and reels back his anger. It’s fine, he tells himself. They expected this. No one will trust Dad’s words, so Kakashi will handle it. “He’s fully lucid. My dad is, I mean. I’ve spent two months with him and he still hasn’t infected me.” To push his point, Kakashi closes the distance between them, rolls up his sleeves, takes off his gloves, and even dares to pull down his mask. His skin is pale and free of blight, much to the Uchiha’s confusion.

The man remains unconvinced. “Nah. That’s not enough, Kid,” he says. “The curse takes twelve hours to form.”

Kakashi groans. Of course it does. That would have been great information to know before now—he glares at his father briefly to push that point. Dad hasn’t taken a single step forward. He’s standing there casually, a few feet back with his hands in his pockets.

“Then quarantine me,” Kakashi says. “Twelve hours. Then let me pass. I’ll inform the rest of the village of the situation and we’ll go from there. Sound good?”

The Uchiha nods his head at Dad. “And him? What, you expect me to just sit out here with a humanoid curse? Alone ?”

“Oh, I won’t cross the line,” Dad assures, raising placating hands. “One paper bomb and you’ve killed me, Crow. I’m cursed, not stupid.”

The guard flinches beneath the name. Do they… know each other? Kakashi hadn’t even thought. There’s something new in this man’s eyes now, something soft and hard and sharp and strange. With a lingering gaze, he pockets the bombs and slinks back into his post.

“Fine,” he spits. “Twelve hours, you go on ahead. If the curse makes a pass, I’ll kill it. Final offer.”

All of the tension leaves his shoulders and Kakashi sighs. “I’ll take it.”

Their twelve hours are up before long, mostly spent making idle banter amongst themselves with the Uchiha, Crow (or Karasu, Kakashi doesn’t know because Dad’s been using the names interchangeably) quietly eyeing them from his little barrier. Once they’re over, Kakashi strips off his shirt and rolls his eyes as every piece of his exposed skin is checked for blight, but he’s as clean as he’s been since before he left Konoha and there isn’t a speck of taint on him. Dad’s level of caution is too high for that sort of oversight.

Kakashi is allowed to pass.

The next three days are a long, painful test of his patience. First, he makes his report to the Hokage. Then he gets to repeat the whole story to the village elders. He gets a twenty-four-hour trip to Konoha Hospital where several of the medics there take tissue and blood samples, do full-body chakra exams and send him through another questionnaire.

And then he meets Tsunade.

She leans against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest and nothing showing on her face, his chart discarded onto the bedside table. “You said you spent two months together?” she asks. “He didn’t try to infect you?”

“No,” Kakashi repeats for what has to be the eightieth time. “Never. He went out of his way to avoid it.”

“And this curse—”

“He has a name.”

“Sakumo,” she relents with a sigh. “And Sakumo is fully lucid, even now that you’re gone?”

“I—” Kakashi blinks. What a weird question. “I would think so.”

“Some curses are able to act normally in familiar settings,” she shrugs. “If you’re around, he may act like himself. But once you leave, he could very well turn on anyone else in the vicinity. We have to be cautious of that.”

This isn’t the case, though. Dad’s been himself—at least in part—for years before they met in the valley. He built a cottage, a shed, a storage room. There was a well-cared-for vegetable garden and all sorts of supplies filched from abandoned settlements and campgrounds. And every time he foraged for food, he did so alone. There were so many endless moments when Dad remained perfectly in control and aware despite his solitude that her theory isn’t even in the realm of possibility.

But when Tsunade agrees to meet with Dad outside of the village, Kakashi finds himself scared. Because what if he’s wrong? And what if they take measures against his father?

Kakashi walks with Lady Tsunade and her assistant back to Crow’s guard station. When they arrive, they don’t know what to think. Dad and Crow have pulled a table and chairs out of the tower and are halfway through a game of cards. There’s sake between them—even Dad has a cup and Kakashi hasn’t even seen him drink water in all their time together—and there’s laughter in the evening air.

What was he even worried about, honestly?

After Tsunade reams out their guardsman for drinking on the job, she guides the father and son to the second floor of the fortress. It’s a bunker. Crow sees them off with demands that they don’t infect his bedroom and Dad takes a seat on the mattress there. The medic wears gloves as she checks him over, taking all the precautions to investigate blight. Just like with Kakashi, she starts with questions. But they’re a little different than the ones he was asked.

“What’s your name?”

“Sakumo Hatake,” Dad replies, looking past Tsunade to his son. He’s remembered on his own now. The name has been pulled up through the fog with time.

“And how old are you, Sakumo?”

“I would like to say that I’m thirty-five,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck, “but that was before the curse. I’m not quite sure how many years have passed since then. A fair few, I imagine.”

He winks at his son. All Kakashi can do is roll his eyes and hide his smile. It’s nice to see Dad’s still in good humour. Kakashi does the math in his head and if Dad still aged like a human, he would be forty-one. The curse halts the aging process, though, so yeah, he may as well be thirty-five.

“Your occupation?”

“A guide,” he answers simply. “Though I played the role of a hunter and tracker, too, when needed. My family is from Kumo. It was during one of my missions between villages that the blight made it into the mountains and I settled in Konoha. At the time, I wasn’t experienced enough to make the return trip.”

Tsunade’s jotting it all down, creating a mental map of Sakumo Hatake’s mindscape. There’s a little crease in her brow, the only show that she’s bothered by her findings, and that uncertainty gives Kakashi hope. Whenever there’s a question that Dad can’t answer, like his son’s age or his parents’ names, it’s also recorded. He can recount entire missions with the utmost certainty from beginning to end but not remember something as simple as his favourite book or food.

It’s the little things that are the hardest.

Next, Tsunade draws his blood. Thick black ooze slogs its way through the needle like tar. But when she takes a second vial, she adds heat to it. The black warms up into a glowing, vibrant yellow, liquid and malleable in the tube, and it’s like half of the questions Kakashi had about his father’s new form suddenly make sense.

Well. He doesn’t know why it behaves this way. But having a bit of cause and effect makes everything seem more practical.

The physical exam is just as long as the questionnaire. Tsunade uses chakra to assess his body. While chakra can’t affect a curse’s actions, it can still be used like this. She’s at it for almost two hours, scribbling out lines upon lines of observations in her doctor’s scrawl.

By the end of it, Tsunade’s in a sour mood.

“I’ll take my findings to the Hokage and go from there,” she says. “Stay here for now. Kakashi, you’re free to return to the village.”

“I’m not leaving him,” Kakashi says flatly.

“Fine. Whatever. Just,” she makes vague hand motions. “Don’t get in the way, I guess.”

“Am I going to live?” Dad asks, trying to hide his amusement.

“You,” Tsunade points accusingly at him, “shut up. Stop teasing me. I’m not a little kid anymore.”

There’s a story here, Kakashi’s sure, but he doesn’t ask.

The next person to bug Crow during his watch (and by extension, the rest of them) is Orochimaru, another local expert. His fascination with Dad’s body is borderline disturbing, but he takes the information Tsunade gleaned from her exam and brings it to its next logical step: he experiments.

Kakashi hates the next three hours of his father getting various chakra pulses through the brain, all testing to see which one will make him snap . This strange, unsettling viper is doing whatever he can to make Dad act violently, like the average curse found in a swarm, but Dad isn’t making it easy for him.

“Chakra doesn’t affect us much,” he says simply. “Unless your use of it is combative, I’m afraid you’re wasting your time, Orochi. But I do appreciate your efforts.”

He sounds polite, but Kakashi knows his father well enough to hear the patronizing behind the perfectly kind words. He’s not fond of this, either. In fact, he’s offended. But no one else will ever notice, so the wink that Kakashi gets is entirely justified.

Dad used to spar with Tsunade and Orochimaru’s team regularly. He’s from the generation before them, so he helped out with a lot of their training, too. But apparently, he and they have always been difficult, stubborn personalities that refuse to give. At least in each other’s company.

Completing the trio, it’s Jiraiya who shows up the following day. His first reaction is to go in for a hug but, well. It’s aborted quickly. Kakashi actually knows Jiraiya; he and Dad were close. After his father passed, it was Jiraiya who would randomly show up at his doorstep to check in on him, and it was Jiraiya who showed him how to restore the tantō he’d received to its former glory.

“Look at you, all grown up,” Dad greets, a grin in the sound of his voice.

Jiraiya huffs. “I was twenty-eight when you left, you old bastard.”

They spend some time catching up before they actually do anything productive, and Kakashi’s half asleep at the desk when it finally starts sounding like they’re doing something. Jiraiya pulls a chair up to the bed and crosses his arms, this sour look suddenly crossing his face as he really gives Dad a thorough look-over, like he’s only just now noticing the cursed form that his old friend has taken.

“I’ve seen Tsunade’s results,” he says drumming his fingers along his sleeve. “As it stands, we can’t let you into the village. Even if it were entirely unintentional, all it would take is one little brush against you and the blight could spread through Konoha in as little as a day. We can’t take that risk.”

Kakashi clenches his fists and steels himself against the sage’s words. It’s fine, he tells himself. He knew this was always a possibility. With any luck, he can filch a few books from Konoha Library before they begin the long trek back to the cottage; if he learns more jutsu, he might be able to build new additions to their forest home—make it a little more comfortable for them.

“ However ,” Jiraiya continues, grinning, “my little protege and I happen to be seal masters.”

Dad tilts his head. After interacting with so many people and not being able to express himself with his face, he’s started using more body language. “Chakra won’t work on me. I’m a lost cause, I’m afraid.”

“But maybe it doesn’t have to. ” Jiraiya scoots forward, leaning in a little too close to the curse to be safe. He’s entirely, one-hundred-percent unbothered and it’s refreshing after all of the wariness they’ve received from everyone else. “I’m thinking we could seal an object to create a barrier, kind of like a ward. But rather than keep things out, it keeps the curse in—you following?”

Kakashi doesn’t need to see his face to know how skeptical Dad is right now.

“The curse operates a bit differently than chakra, which is why chakra doesn’t interact with it well. But if we use that difference, I think we could make it so the curse can’t leech off of you. Essentially, we’ll give you something to wear that’s embedded with a seal, and you’ll be able to make contact with people again.”

Kakashi’s eyes widen. It’s not something he’s ever thought about—being able to hold his father’s hand without a barrier between them. It… Would that even work? And if it did, couldn’t they form seals to keep out the curse, too—seals that could protect teams out on the road from getting infected in the first place?

In all of this, Kakashi’s goal has been a selfish one. He wants his family back. He wants his place back. He wants to be able to wake up in the morning and greet his peers without feeling like the measure of his worth is determined by his use to the village. But if this works, it would help more than just Dad.

He catches his father’s eyes across the room as the sage rambles animatedly about his theories, and receives a thumbs-up.

Kakashi rolls his eyes. Dad can ruin any moment, can’t he?

They’re on the roof of the guard tower. This place is practically a second home to them now because, until Jiraiya and Minato can magically produce results, they have nowhere to go. Fortunately, the station has a heated bath, a few spare beds and a lot of extra room. It’s equipped to house five guardsmen at once in case of an outbreak with the food stores to match, but there are usually only one or two people staying here in the colder months. For all that curses are more active in the winter with its longer nights and shorter days, they don’t tend to move around much. Swarms stick to the forests and blight spreads like a rolling sea from one area to the next. It’s predictable. So with all that extra space, they’ve gotten pretty cozy here, even if Dad has to stay outside while the humans sleep.

And, well, there’s the bonus that Dad and the Uchihas who take turns manning this place have become fast friends. That’s always nice.

It’s night and the sky is clear as Kakashi lies back on the roof tiles, cushions his head with his arms, and watches the stars. There’s big, angry cloud cover on the horizon. By morning, it might snow. For now, though, he watches his breath fog on the open air and tracks the constellations visible at this time of year. Beside him, Dad’s sitting down, propping himself up on his hands.

There’s a feeling of normalcy falling over them that he’s scared to lose.

“Do you think it’ll work?” Kakashi asks. Broaching the topic fills him with anxiety. Jiraiya might just be getting their hopes up and, after a long winter, they’ll have to leave. But stewing in his own thoughts is a worse option.

“Who knows?”

“You could humour me, at least.”

His father hums, tilting his head as his eyes fall to the road below. A caravan is dragging down the path with a broken wheel, the entourage surrounding it carrying torches. Lanterns are a better choice for light—less likely to set the forest ablaze—which means they’re probably being pursued. An open flame is more likely to scare a curse than a contained one. When travellers pass through, they’re inspected at the checkpoint before they can continue on and, like clockwork, Crow’s out of his little fortress and making his rounds.

Whenever people pass by, Dad stays out of sight. No one told him to. He just… does.

“It may,” Dad says with a shrug. “Or it may not. I don’t know enough about seals to make that call.”

Kakashi groans, loud and annoyed, sounding more like a child than he usually does. He wants his father to lie to him, tell him that it’ll all turn out okay, that Jiraiya and Minato are masters of their craft and that if anyone can do it, they can. But Dad’s always been a force of brutal honesty. He doesn’t mince words.

“If I have to leave, then so be it. But Kakashi, even if that’s the case, I’m glad to have made this journey with you.” Fingers card through his hair, thick with fabric. They brush away his bangs in gentle, soothing motions and his eyes fall closed. “At some point, I’d forgotten what happiness feels like.”

Kakashi’s lips twitch. Pressure builds behind his eyes and in his throat and he forces it down because he’s thirt— fourteen now and he’s too old for this, it’s silly, but—

But something broken inside him is trying to mend and he can’t fight it.

“Sage, Pup, why the tears?”

“I’m not crying,” he counters, choking on the words as he turns his back to the father who doesn’t need to see how weak he is. He’s the son of the White Fang. The head of his clan. The last of his bloodline in all of Konoha and the next hero of the village. The one who will die for his people, the next body to be discarded in the Forest of Death, the—

There’s a hand on his back, feeling the rise-and-fall of his breaths, and he forces them to even out. Dad doesn’t need to know. He has to be strong. He has to be brave. Kakashi is not a child anymore.

Konoha has lost so many. For every exploration team that ventures forth and every merchant that sets out, there’s another death, an empty grave and a meaningless ceremony to delude the people left behind into some false sense of closure. There’s a tombstone with his father’s name sitting at the back of Konoha cemetery. It doesn’t matter that Dad’s right here, that they’re so close that they could touch. Nobody cares that their hero spent seven long years wandering around the blighted lands in the fog of his own mind. Or that he was alone. Because Sakumo Hatake’s memory was buried with that empty casket and he was dead.

Konoha killed him.

Dad sighs. His breath trembles with his exhale as he draws patterns along his son’s back with his fingers. Kakashi can feel the tips of claws behind the fabric, pinpricks of pressure. “Kakashi,” he calls, quiet and soft as he tends to be. Kakashi’s never heard his father yell. Sometimes, he doesn’t think it’s possible. “I made the decision that I thought was right at the time. I protected the pack. That was my call. It wasn’t by order of the Hokage, the council, my teammates or the village.”

Kakashi swallows, curling his limbs as though to shield against his father’s words.

“I don’t regret my choice,” Dad continues. “But I regret leaving you alone. You’ve grown up so fast and I didn’t want that for you. I wanted you to have a childhood. Just for a little while. Just long enough. I wanted to protect you for as long as I could.”

He knows it’s silly. For seven years, Kakashi’s had a regret, too: that he didn’t see his father off. It’s always there in his head, the bleary-eyed image of Dad packing his rucksack and slinging it over his shoulder, taking one last look at his son. But Kakashi didn’t give him well wishes. He didn’t tell his father to be safe. He didn’t say goodbye.

It wasn’t the village. It wasn’t Konoha or the expedition team, the empty casket or the grave. If he was bigger, he told himself. If he was older. If he brandished a weapon and crossed those gates for himself. If he could be called a hero and if he could die then maybe his life would mean something. Maybe he wouldn’t lose anything else.

To Kakashi, there was never a tomorrow. Only today. Only now, here, in this moment.

For the tomorrow that he hoped for, he’d wait the rest of his life.

“I’m sorry it’s so late. I’m sorry that I’ve missed you. But I’m glad I can be here now, like this, and that I can watch you grow.”

Strong arms pull him up off the roof tiles and against a broad chest. They wrap around him, these spindly, unnatural things, and encase him in warmth. His chin rests on a thick woollen sweater that’s lost its scent, the shoulder beneath boney and sharp, and he buries his face against it to dry his tears.

Nothing lasts forever. One day, soon, the sun will rise and tomorrow will come.

“Thank you, Pup. For finding me.”