Chapter Text
Rin was seven and she was going to marry Hatake Kakashi and Obito was going to be her best man. She’d drawn a picture of their wedding and everything. Kakashi kept his mask on but he put a bow on it because he was dressing up for her. He was wearing a pretty dress and Rin was wearing a pretty dress and Obito had a pretty dress too. Obito had his Sharingan, too, so he’d be happy. Everyone was smiling, though she’d had to draw a smile over Kakashi’s mask. Maybe they could tape a paper smile on him for the wedding picture.
Rin’s mother wanted to hang the drawing on the fridge. Rin refused. “I’m gonna give it to Kakashi,” she said. She needed excuses to go visit him. He had graduated to chunin last year and he was already getting assigned to missions! With adults! It was amazing. Rin missed him, though. Sometimes he came and played with them at the park and that was fun, but it had been nice to see him in class. He always had such a cool way of doing things. The teachers would tell them how to throw shuriken and then Rin would shuffle closer to Kakashi and he’d tell her how his dad taught him to throw shuriken. Mister Hatake was good at teaching. It was probably why Kakashi had made it to chunin so fast. Rin was practicing really, really hard so she could join him.
She trotted over to the Hatake house but no one was home. She folded up her drawing carefully and wrote Kakashi’s name on it, then added the little face that he sometimes doodled next to his name. Rin slid the drawing between the door screens and went home.
The next time she saw Kakashi, she was so excited she ran up and asked, “Did you see my picture of our wedding? I left it at your house, but—”
Kakashi looked at her and Rin realized that he looked… Faces weren’t supposed to look like that. Only really old ninjas looked like that, with their eyes all blank and their faces so still.
“What’s wrong?” Rin asked.
“I don’t live there anymore.”
“Oh.” Rin tried not to pout. She’d worked really hard on that drawing. She could make another, though. “Where do you live now? Can I come over and see it?”
Kakashi squinted at her suspiciously. “Why?”
“Because we’re friends,” Rin said. “And I’m gonna marry you later, so I should see your house and see if you have any crayons.”
“Oh. Sure, I guess.” He turned and started walking.
Rin clasped her hands behind her back and bobbed along beside him. He wasn’t wearing his scarf today. Ninja fashion was more often dictated by image rather than weather, but it was barely spring. It was still scarf weather. Rin was wearing her favorite sweater over a skirt and leggings and leg warmers and ankle boots and she was still kind of cold. She didn’t ask, though.
“Here,” Kakashi said. He stepped out of his shoes on the doorstep and slumped through the door. Rin hadn’t realized his posture was getting bad.
“My rival!” someone yelled.
Might Guy skidded down the hall in stocking feet and underwear and nothing else. He locked eyes with Rin, let out the girliest shriek she had ever heard in her life, and pedaled his legs like mad to get behind the nearest door.
“You live with Guy?” Rin said slowly.
“Yeah. Until they find me an apartment. I sent in a request.”
Rin looked over at him. Kakashi was giving her a side-eyed look that dared her to ask.
“Why does his underwear have turtles on it?” she said.
Kakashi blinked, then said, “Family reasons.”
“Oh. And why are you here now?”
Kakashi’s eyes slid away. “My dad died.”
“Oh.” Rin thought for a moment, then stepped over and carefully put her arms around him. She telegraphed every move, just like she used to do with her dad. Experienced ninjas didn’t like people touching them without warning, and Kakashi was a ninja. She felt him stiffen anyway under her touch, and he didn’t return the hug. She let him go.
He was watching her. “Thanks.”
Rin nodded, smiling at him as best she could. “I’m sorry, Kakashi.”
“It’s…” He shook his head. “You want to see my room?”
“Yeah!”
He waved at her to follow and shuffled down the hall. As they passed an open doorway, Rin peeked in. Guy was staring at them, but he shrieked again as her eyes dipped to his turtle boxers. He fled.
Kakashi gave her an odd look when she started laughing, but she couldn’t help herself.
_______________________________________________________________________
Rin was eleven and her best friend, her teammate, he was dead. It was a war and now it hurt more than ever.
Kakashi kept twitching himself awake on the battlefield, hands shaking and breath coming in gasps. Whenever Rin heard him start trembling in the night, she’d drag her blanket over and sleep beside him, on top of his blanket and under hers. Minato-sensei didn’t say anything about it on the mornings he woke them up. Kakashi didn’t say anything about it either.
Kakashi kept his forehead protector over his left eye at all times now. She caught him clawing at it in his sleep. She changed his bandages every day and monitored the chakra drain. It was bad. She’d done a good job with the tear duct, though. He could cry out of that eye if he wanted to. She hadn’t caught him testing it yet.
Rin cried. She did it quietly and efficiently. She’d learned that everything could be done quietly and efficiently in a war, from throwing up to making new friends to dispensing death. So Rin cried when they were near enough to clean water that she wouldn’t risk dehydration.
“Stop that,” Kakashi told her.
Rin blew her nose and blinked at him until he was no longer a blur but her teammate. “Why?”
Kakashi shifted his weight from foot to foot. “It’s not… A ninja does not show tears.”
“So don’t watch,” she said. She waved at where their teacher was speaking to the Tactical Infiltration team. “Minato-sensei doesn’t look.”
“You still shouldn’t show weakness,” Kakashi said.
“I don’t see why it’s weak,” Rin said. She blew her nose again.
“Controlling emotions is strength,” Kakashi said.
“Obito’s dead,” Rin said.
Kakashi blinked. “Y-yeah.”
“I wish he wasn’t,” Rin said.
Kakashi turned away from her.
“I can check your eye again if it’s hurting,” Rin said.
“It’s fine,” Kakashi said.
Rin sighed. “All right.” She wiped her eyes. “Come on, Sensei’s almost done.”
Kakashi looked back to where Minato-sensei was speaking quietly with one of the other ninjas, a woman with painfully red hair. “How can you tell?”
“He always talks with her last,” Rin said. “They’re in love.”
The red-haired woman smacked their teacher on the shoulder and laughed loudly at something he said, then bounded off in the opposite direction of the rest of the team.
“How can you tell?” Kakashi said again.
“Minato-sensei’s easy to read.”
Minato-sensei watched the red-haired ninja go with one of his faint smiles, then turned towards his students.
“But how can you tell?” Kakashi asked for a third time.
Rin looked at him. He was squinting at their teacher with his lone dark eye. His hands were fists by his side, empty of all weapons, lightning, soldier pills… He looked so lost.
Kakashi was a genius ninja. Everyone talked about how strong he was at such a young age. He was already a jonin and he’d made a new jutsu and he was barely in his teens. Yet somehow he couldn’t see the way Minato-sensei and that red-haired jonin circled each other, never quite touching but coming very close on occasion. How Minato-sensei always turned towards her. How she turned her back but kept him in her peripherals. The way their voices sounded together, where hers got louder and his got quieter until they were the only ones left talking to each other after every other assignment had been handed out. They were in love, it was simple as that.
“Women’s intuition,” Rin said. The way Kakashi’s hands uncurled and his brow smoothed to indifference was her reward for such a lie. Kakashi couldn’t see what was right in front of his face when it came to people caring. Maybe he’d learn.
_______________________________________________________________________
Rin was fifteen and she was afraid her teammate was going to die, in spite of how good he seemed to be at surviving.
Minato-sensei was gone so she couldn’t drop by his place for dinner to talk things over with him and his secret girlfriend that no one was supposed to know about, Uzumaki Kushina (the red-headed kunoichi—Rin was still infinitely smug that she’d known before Kakashi). She didn’t want to bring it up with Guy, either, because Guy was terrible at feelings. The Sandaime was preoccupied and it was unlikely he’d even really do anything. He didn’t seem to pay attention to ANBU and what they were getting up to.
Rin stayed long past the end of her hospital shift, treating for shock when Kakashi came in with chakra exhaustion. She held his cold hands through the shakes, kept his core temperature up, cleaned his scrapes as best she could. She fixed his eye when her old field transplant got infected (twice). She also dealt with all the strange personal problems that started arriving with alarming regularity once Kakashi hit puberty: odd rashes under his clothes, a few mild STIs and urinary tract infections, marks around his throat and wrists that he didn’t explain.
“You could just masturbate like the average teen boy does,” she suggested. "With porn and your hand and some tissues."
He gave Rin a long, blank look. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Kakashi wasn’t like a brother to her. She wouldn’t want to know a brother this well.
Sometimes, when his head hit her shoulder and he started snoring in her ear, Rin would finish healing his bruises and then dig through his pack for the porn he always had with him. Pen in hand, she’d doodle the various improbable positions that the author described (and wasn’t that Minato-sensei’s old teacher, one of the Sannin, on the dust jacket?). She questioned the physical descriptions in little notes, too.
Kash, no way this works unless he’s got a 20cm prehensile dick. I know you’d be interested but it’s super improbable.
There was no way he’d talk to her about his problems. There was no way he’d discuss his feelings, either. She knew this about Kakashi, the same way she knew Guy would always bounce back from Kakashi’s rejections. Normally it didn’t worry her too much—she could keep things light, she could tease him and watch him deadpan his way out of tricky emotional ground. They were friends, after all. Rin liked his company.
Now, though, she wished he had someone he could go to when he felt sad, and yet she knew he didn’t have anyone. His friend group consisted of her and Guy. No one else even came close.
How do you tell a friend that they need help when there’s nowhere you can send them to get help?
Rin’s mother had been out of the ninja game after losing most of her left arm and a significant portion of her face to an explosive tag in the second war. Rin’s father had survived that war (Rin was proof of this) but vanished one day, which usually meant he’d been ANBU and he’d died somewhere sensitive. His records would become public in twenty years. Rin wasn’t expecting her mother to last that long.
As the only Nohara ninja in her generation, Rin was feeling the pressure to keep doing fieldwork. Her family wasn’t established or prestigious enough to have a clan jutsu the way the Hatake did. They didn’t have kekkei genkai like the Hyuugas. They had their clan tattoos, though, and all the adults had plenty of pride. They wanted her to keep taking missions so she could make jonin just like her teammate. She really didn’t want to. The idea of leaving the village, venturing out into that wide and violent world, made her feel a kind of emptiness in her stomach. Her hands tingled at the memory of summoning chakra to heal life-or-death wounds. She remembered her teammates’ backs to her, protecting her but never quite enough to make her feel safe. Outside Konoha was not safe.
“Is there somewhere for ninjas to talk to people?” Rin asked her mother as she helped make dinner.
“What do you mean, Dimples?” her mother said.
Rin rolled her eyes at the old nickname but let it go. “Like if you feel weird after missions or something, I don’t know. Talking about being a ninja with people who get it.”
“I think that Torture and Interrogation has something for reporting out-of-the ordinary events, and the Yamanaka clan can help reorder your mind after a genjutsu if it was a complex illusion, but—”
“Nothing that’s so ninja related,” Rin sighed. “I mean just, like, um.” She tried to think of what she wanted. “Like a complaints box but in person.”
“The Sandime’s busy, you know,” her mother said.
“Not him, just someone,” Rin said.
Her mother frowned at her. “No need to be snippy.”
“Sorry. But is there—?”
“Not that I know of,” her mother said. “Could you get the dishes out for me? Your aunt is coming over, so set another place. I think she’s bringing you some new kunai.”
“Sure,” Rin said, pasting on a smile. “Great.”
And that was it. Kakashi was on his own, just as Rin was on her own. They were within the Will of Fire but sometimes it actually felt like they were dealing with a fire—something remote and uncaring, ignoring them to crackle away merrily. Until it suddenly flared up. Fire could take a life. Their ideology had taken lives.
Rin scribbled a furious poem about how the Will of Fire was dying coals fed by the terrors and deaths of shinobi. She lit a match and burned that poem up once it was written. If any of the Noharas had found it, she would have been in so much trouble.
_______________________________________________________________________
Rin was eighteen and she was seeing a ghost.
“Sensei?” she whispered before she even realized she’d spoken aloud.
The fuzzy blonde head turned and it was far too small to her her teacher. It was a little boy, bewhiskered cheeks smudged with dirt. He was bruised, too; she could see the purple swells around his eyes from here. They were eyes like her teacher’s.
When he spoke, he was as loud as Kushina. “I’m Uzumaki Naruto, yanno!”
Rin took a shaky breath. “All right, kiddo. What’s the matter?”
“Broke m’toe,” he said, holding out his bare foot. He had to be close to five years old by now…
“I don’t see. Um.” Rin wiped her eyes and shook her head. “Does it hurt?”
“Nah,” Naruto said. “Hey, you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay,” Rin said, and then a blubbery sob burst out of her and she hiccuped. “I’m sorry. Um. I’ll look at it, just…” Her voice was getting choked off and high but she finished, “give me a moment.” She ducked out of the room and wept into her hands for twenty seconds, then shut off the wellspring with control she hadn’t needed since the Third War. She marched back in and healed Uzumaki Naruto’s broken toe in a flash, softened his bruises, and sent him away with an orange lollipop that he gazed at with wonder and delight.
Rin did not pat his head as he left. She did not try to hold him. She did have to take another minute to herself after the consultation was done to weep. The rest of her shift was uneventful—accidental self-inflicted shuriken wounds and a few training-related accidents.
She went back to her shoebox apartment in the chunin/jonin barracks. Since she’d taken herself off the active duty register years ago there was some debate about whether she should be able to live there. The Sandaime seemed to conveniently lose any complaints her family lodged against her for moving out and pursing medicine instead of furthering the ninja reputation of her clan. Rin’s jonin friends dealt with anyone who complained about her within the building itself.
She sat down at her kitchen table with a stack of reports that needed reading and a mug of tea with a bit of liquor in it. The reports got read and annotated because she wasn’t Kakashi, she was capable of completing all her assigned tasks in a timely fashion. The tea disappeared rather quickly, though, and it was replaced by another mug with substantially more liquor in it.
Well past dinnertime, she knocked on Kakashi’s door. The hold-your-breath silence inside indicated he was definitely home.
She yelled, “Stop jerking off, you jerk-off! I’m coming in!” and slipped through Kakashi’s various security measures to find him buttoning his pants sulkily.
“Mood ruined,” he said.
“Yeah yeah yeah, come get food with me,” Rin said.
“No.”
“I’ll buy.”
“Okay.”
Kakashi slumped a few steps behind her all the way to the corner store and back to her room with protein-filled vanilla yogurt and salted snacks in hand. He sat at the foot of her bed and she propped her feet on his lap as they ate in silence.
“I saw the pariah today,” Rin said.
“Hm?”
“The Jinchuriki.”
Kakashi gave her a sharp look. “Mm.”
“He’s Sensei’s kid for sure.”
Kakashi stuffed more food in his face.
“He may be turning six soon, I don’t know. He’s little. And loud. More like Kushina than Sensei. But he’s got these whiskers on his face… Kushina never had those. I had to heal him up a bit, he wouldn’t say why. I think people are hurting him.” Rin wiped at her eyes for the third time today.
Kakashi wasn’t looking at her. He had that tension to him that meant she was making him incredibly uncomfortable, but Rin didn’t take her feet from his lap. He was going to have to sit there and listen to her talk about this.
“He’s so little,” Rin continued. “And he’s got no idea, thanks to the Sandaime. Don’t you think that’s fucked up, keeping something like that from him? He doesn’t know why everyone’s so uncomfortable when he’s around. How is that fair?”
Kakashi was actually twisting all the way around so she could onlly the back of his head. He wasn’t using Substitution Technique to get away, though. Rin cut him a break.
“When are you leaving next?” she asked.
Kakashi shrugged, still not looking at her.
“You can turn around, you know. I won’t make it weird anymore.”
“You already made it weird,” Kakashi said, but he did return to his food so at least she got to see half his face. She’d arranged it so that he had to show her the exposed right eye. His gaze was unfocused, zoned out and dead-looking.
“Fuck anyone hot lately?” she asked, since it was one of his favorite topics.
“Just myself,” Kakashi said. He didn’t sound happy about it.
Rin frowned and shuffled around until she was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with him. “You okay?”
Kakashi shrugged.
“Were you down by the Memorial Stone?”
Kakashi nodded, a tight jerk of his head.
“That time of year?”
Another nod.
“We must be like ships passing in the night, huh?” Rin offered. “I never see you there and you never see me there.”
“It’s been a while,” Kakashi said quietly.
“For some.”
Kakashi blinked at her. “Oh. Right. Your mom.”
“Yes, Kakashi, my mom. Almost three months now.”
“My condolences.”
Rin flapped a hand. “She was so pissed off at me for not taking your route and going for jonin.”
Kakashi nodded slowly. It seemed he was back to not holding up his side of the conversation.
“Everyone was mad, actually,” Rin continued. “There was yelling.”
“I remember,” Kakashi said. “I helped you move out.”
“Yeah,” Rin said. “Not my point, though.”
“You had a point?”
Rin smacked him on the shoulder. “Dick. Yes I had a point. And the point was, you saw what a shitshow that was, right? Me quitting the ninja way?”
“You didn’t quit,” Kakashi said. “You’re a medic now.”
“I am never leaving this village again,” Rin told him. “I haven’t left since our last mission together. I’m not a kunoichi anymore.”
There was a silence filled with all the protests Kakashi could have made and all the yelling Rin could have done. They knew each other better than that.
“Anyway,” Rin said, “you’ve seen the worst possible response to leaving the ninja life, so if you wanted to quit you can be sure it would be easier than—”
“Why didn’t you ask one of your other friends over for dinner?” Kakashi asked her. “If you were going to bitch at me about my life choices you could have saved yourself a food bill.”
“I’m just saying it’s an option.”
Kakashi shuffled himself off her bed. “No. It’s not.”
“Kakashi—”
“I’m on a mission tomorrow, probably for a few weeks,” Kakashi said.
“Hey!” Rin called as he ducked out the door. “You better come say hi when you get back!”
Alone, she settled back against the wall. He would come back. He had to. She was waiting for him, after all. He wouldn’t disappoint her.
_______________________________________________________________________
Rin was twenty-one and she gave Kakashi the same old arguments about how he needed to quit being an ANBU operative. He gave her that long, blank stare that ANBU had taught him. He didn’t stop leaning on her, though. He was too chakra-drained. There was a reason she’d chosen this moment to yell at him; he was stuck with her.
“Nothing good has ever come out of you joining ANBU,” Rin snarled as her final argument.
“Untrue,” Kakashi said calmly.
Rin blinked. “What?”
Kakashi smirked. She had his mask down to repair his broken nose so she got to see his thin, mobile mouth twist up with a secret.
“Talk, fucker,” she snapped, smacking his shoulder. Her other hand never wavered from where it was gently cupping cartilage.
He actually winked at her, a twitch of the scarred eyelid over his Sharingan. Rin honestly didn’t know why he kept covering his face up. He was so expressive. His reactions were hilarious, why would he ever want to hide that?
“I’ll get it out of you eventually,” Rin vowed.
“Sure,” Kakashi said. His mouth twisted even more, this time with disbelief.
Rin smacked him on the shoulder again but kept up her healing, rebuilding bridges and reopening air passages.
_______________________________________________________________________
Rin was twenty-five and Kakashi finally left ANBU. She took him out drinking with Guy, Yugau, Yugau’s new girlfriend, Asuma and Kurenai, Genma, Kotetsu and his boyfriend, Anko… It was a big group.
“Are you punishing me?” Kakashi asked her when he saw the mob of people waiting for them, taking up four booths and still overflowing to nearby tables.
“A little,” Rin admitted. “You choice to quit was way overdue and I’m still mad you left because the Sandaime asked you to, not because of all the valid points I’ve been making for the past ten years.”
Kakashi sighed, shoulders slumping even more than usual. “You’re so evil.”
Rin pressed a kiss to the skin beside his uncovered eye. “Love you.”
He swatted her off. “Hey, don’t give people the wrong idea about us. I want to get lucky tonight.”
“Yugau’s dating someone now,” Rin reminded him.
“Yeah, I know, she introduced me. I don’t like her.”
Rin laughed. “You don’t like anyone your friends date!”
Kakashi slid into one of the precarious, rickety stools that required ninja training to perch upon comfortably. “All of you could do better.”
Rin smiled and perched herself on the stool across from him. “No being a dick to the people who care about you, got it?”
Kakashi gave her a supremely bored look. Then Guy darted up with shots and loudly proclaimed that this was a test of their drinking skills (again). Kakashi chose to drink through his mask, much to everyone’s delight. Rin smiled privately into her hand—she was probably the only person here to see him without a mask.
Rin spent the rest of the evening talking with Anko and steadily working her way towards shitfaced. The trouble with inviting high-ranking shinobi out for drinks was that they were often in demand for missions; more than half the group had gone home by midnight to ensure that they would be prepared for the life-or-death job they had to perform tomorrow. The party only took up two booths soon, and by two in the morning it was down to a single booth.
Rin was pretty far gone at that point. She and Anko were trying to hash out a fuckbuddy schedule for the month but were having a hard time remembering the order of the days. Guy was asleep. Kakashi was talking to… someone…
“Who’s that?” Rin asked Anko in a loud whisper. “I thought I knew everyone I invited.”
Anko tilted her head and squinted. “Ummmmm. He’s ANBU. Kino? Taro? Something.”
Rin stared. Kakashi had his head propped up on one hand and he was saying something that was probably sarcastic to a rather nondescript looking man with mousy hair and wide eyes. The man smiled. It was the kind of smile Rin recognized because she wore it around Kakashi a lot—an indulgent smile. This guy had heard it all before.
“Holy shit,” Rin whispered.
_______________________________________________________________________
Rin was twenty-seven and met up with the man Kakashi had been living with for years. He had introduced himself as Kinoe, though Kakashi called him Tenzo with a cheerfulness that indicated there was some deep history behind that name. Rin couldn’t help but smile at the way Kinoe looked at Kakashi in moments like that—such a wounded expression, and yet so fond.
“Hey, thanks for meeting me,” she said, stretching her arms over her head and feeling the click of her vertebrae sliding into place.
“Not a problem,” Kinoe said. He was standing a few centimeters further away than politeness dictated. He was cautious of her.
“Kakashi doesn’t like sparring with anyone but Guy these days,” Rin continued. She took a wide stance and began side-bending. “Plus, I always feel like he’s being condescending. Everything’s a lesson now that he’s got a genin team.”
Kinoe nodded.
“Anyway, taijutsu only,” she said, stretching out her shoulders. “If we do ninjutsu it’s gonna be a mess.”
“Why?” Kinoe asked.
“I don’t do it,” Rin said. “I’m a medical specialist, I can’t do big and flashy anymore. And your technique is something we don’t normally see.”
“It’s nowhere near the First’s level,” Kinoe said.
Rin flapped a hand dismissively. “It’s good, don’t even try and deny it. You built us that new hospital wing in a day. Most of the nurses would suck your dick at this point. And they’d swallow.”
Kinoe cleared his throat. “Oh. I, uh. I see why you’re friends with Kakashi.”
Rin turned to face him and blinked. He was, of course, taller than she was. Brown hair, and he’d worn his ANBU uniform without the body armor to this informal sparring session. His eyes were wide and his face was mostly blank, but she could see a faint blush already fading. Sex jokes were apparently still enough to embarrass him.
“I’m friends with Kakashi because I decided we were going to get married when I was six years old and I don’t give up on decisions that serious,” Rin said.
Kinoe’s eyebrows rose.
“I know too much about his sex life now, though, so we are just platonically married,” Rin continued. “In my mind, at least. I’ve never brought it up with him.”
“What?” Kinoe said after a moment. He sounded as if he’d thought very carefully and this was the best word he had found to articulate his current state of mind.
Rin grinned. “You ever know too much about someone to let them go, but also you know too much about them to want to marry their weird ass?”
After another careful, thoughtful moment, Kinoe shook his head.
“Well, I know too much about Kakashi and all his baggage, so we’d never work,” Rin said. “And I don’t want to fuck him. Besides, he likes you.”
“You are his oldest friend, along with Might Guy,” Kinoe said.
Rin shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know if I’d say he likes us, though. More that he’s used to us.”
Kinoe cocked his head at her. “Of course he likes you, Medic Nohara. Why should you think otherwise? Kakashi mentions you often.”
“Oh?”
Kinoe nodded very firmly at her. “He values your friendship.”
“Doesn’t sound like Kakashi.”
“He’s been learning from the Jinchuriki,” Kinoe said.
“Has he?”
Kinoe’s smile was small and private as he said, “Yes.”
It hit Rin in the gut, that this man knew her best, oldest friend better than her. Not better, she told herself briskly. Just differently. She shook the thought away and said, “So, taijutsu only, yes?”
“Yes, Medic Nohara,” Kinoe said.
Rin grinned and crouched low. “Ready?”