Chapter Text
The medic-nin looks at Kakashi like he’s a bit dim. “It’s a soulmark.”
Kakashi stares down at the human bite mark on his arm, red like a fresh bite but smooth and free of indentations or scabbing or bleeding. A soulmark, huh? That’s new.
“It’s uncommon but not strange to gain a soulmate as an adult,” the medic-nin continues. “You’ll feel the marks forming, but it shouldn’t hurt unless severe…”
The medic-nin lapses into a prepared speech that Kakashi is sure they’re more used to giving to young teenagers. Any mark on his skin Kakashi gets from now on, his soulmate will also get, and vice versa. He will feel the soulmark form, and the amount of sensation he’ll get is less than but proportional to how much his soulmate feels. The soulmark will last as long as the other person has them on their body.
Kakashi slowly rotates his arm as the medic-nin drones, taking in the details of the mark. It’s a single bite mark on his forearm, the size and shape of an adult human’s. It had felt like a bad mosquito bite when it had formed. What on earth was his soulmate doing?
The medic-nin digs out a pamphlet, and Kakashi obligingly shoves it into his flak jacket. He doesn’t intend to read it. Navigating soulmates is a nightmare when you’re in ANBU, and he’s intimately familiar with all the convoluted regulations on them and what to expect from years of fielding policy regarding his subordinates. It had been considered a boon he didn’t have one. At least the marks aren’t retroactive; his soulmate hasn’t suddenly gained an ANBU tattoo or a new eye scar.
It’s annoying, though. Kakashi trudges home via the streets rather than take a faster route over rooftops. He’s going to have to fill out so many forms and take so many trainings. Any wound he gets now, another unknown person will instantly know about, and now he has to join the hundreds of shinobi who have to worry about what information that could leak.
He hits a busy street full of shops and slows down even further. He could buy something to write on his arm, try and figure out if he can meet his soulmate in person. If they’re another Konoha shinobi— or even better, a Konoha civilian that they can ban from travel out of the village for safety— that will simplify a lot of things.
He stops in front of a random store front, staring at his reflection in the window. They do indeed have a case of SoulMarkers on display, special pens that write smoothly on skin and rub off easily.
A soulmate, huh? he thinks. He’d assumed he’d just been one of those people who never got one. He hasn’t allowed himself fantasies of what meeting his might be like since he was a child.
Does he want to meet his soulmate?
He goes home.
xXx
Kakashi was in the village on a mandatory leave after taking too many back-to-back missions. His leave is extended by two weeks so various people can stamp forms about his new soulmate and he can go to the world’s most boring seminars about it. He has no idea if his soulmate even knows about him yet. He certainly hadn’t felt the bond itself forming, and he hasn’t gotten any new marks on his body in a couple days for them to notice.
Another mark appears, further up his arm this time, with the same tiny pinprick of pain. He feels it while stretched out on his couch with his favorite book and awkwardly yanks his sleeve up to look. It’s another circular bite.
Kakashi had thought the first one a bit out of the ordinary, but not that strange. Human bites aren’t exactly common amongst shinobi, but they’re not unheard of. Every cohort has at least one ninja everyone makes fun of for being too quick to resort to biting in a spar. And, well, in Konoha the stereotype is that it's usually an Inuzuka, but Kakashi has been bitten by an enemy ninja before, so…
Two bites two days in a row is a bit weird though. Kakashi sets Icha Icha down on his coffee table and rolls his sleeve up further, contorting his arm to stare down at it more. Maybe his soulmate is indeed a Konoha ninja, and they have a bitey Inuzuka training partner. Kakashi hopes that’s what it is, because that would be a very mundane and safe situation that would make a lot of things easier. But if that’s true, it’s strange that there’s no additional bruising or cuts to indicate a fight.
Gai is due back from a mission today, and it’s his turn to pick their next challenge. Kakashi is definitely going to end up in a spar, or climbing Hokage Mountain with one arm tied behind his back, or racing through the Forest of Death backwards. He’s going to bang up his knee or end up with a bunch of cuts from being thrown out of a tree, and his soulmate will notice.
He rolls down his sleeve and eyes the pile of writing supplies for mission reports that lives on his coffee table.
He thinks his soulmate protocol training classes will tell him to make the first move, to take control of their communications until he can verify if his soulmate is safe to contact in person or not.
He hasn’t had that seminar yet. He picks up Icha Icha and flops back down on his couch.
The next morning, Gai does hunt him down, loud as ever, and Kakashi manages to have enough fun that he forgets about his soulmate problems for all of thirty minutes, right up until Gai dumps him in a lake and a turtle bites him.
Afterwards, scrubbing down in his bathroom, Kakashi stares down at the chunk now missing from his ankle. His soulmate definitely noticed that. He wonders if a turtle bite hurts more than a human bite or not.
He could write, We match now. Would that be an insane thing to write?
The wound doesn’t really look like a bite, though, just an ugly gash. He’s sure his soulmate would not guess it’s a turtle bite, and he doesn’t really feel like telling them.
A good medic could fix up the bite in a couple minutes, but Kakashi now has the red tape of someone needing to decide medical procedures for him until his soulmate case has been reviewed entirely. A magically healing wound would scream ninja to his soulmate, after all. Both he and his soulmate are stuck with this for now.
(Usually they let people tell their soulmate that they are a ninja, simply because it’s hard to cover up. But Kakashi has made zero moves to progress his case, and doesn’t want to have to go through the entire red-tape process for such a minor injury.)
He rinses the soap suds off his body and then climbs into his tub, propping his injured foot up on tub’s side so it can dry. He also has some minor scrapes and bruises which feel much better in the hot water. His soulmate has a lot to notice.
Leaning back in the tub, Kakashi lets his eyes slip shut and spends a few minutes pondering his soulmate. He’d been trying to ignore these thoughts, but now that he’s gone and gotten bitten by a turtle, it’s only a matter of time before his soulmate writes to him or Konoha pressures him into writing to them.
A soulmate is someone who’s supposed to be his perfect match, the other half of his soul, someone to match and complement him in every way. Kakashi has no idea what kind of person that would be. He’d assumed he wasn’t getting one and given up contemplating it entirely.
The thing about soulmates is… no one really knows what causes them, what cosmic force decides who’s whose soulmate and why and when the bond forms. But there’s patterns, documented across generations and seeped into the general cultural knowledge. Soulmate bonds usually form in young teens because that’s when something about your personality, who you are as a person, solidifies. Sometimes it happens with normal growth and development, and sometimes it happens with life-changing events. For ninja, it’s incredibly common to come out of your first major mission with a soulmate bond. It’s actually in most protocols to check teammates for new bonds after missions go especially wrong, even older team members.
Kakashi is twenty-two and he’s already had about every type of fucked up tragedy happen to him. He hadn’t been doing anything especially personality forging when the bond had formed, putzing around Konoha on his leave. Whatever happened, it happened on his soulmate’s end.
He glances down at the bites on his arm. Sometimes you do hear about people even older than Kakashi suddenly getting a soulmate, because their soulmate is younger.
Oh god, he thinks, what if they’re an obnoxious teenager?
He shoves further thought about this aside and gets out of the tub to apply ointment and a bandage to his turtle bite. He has half a month until they might start giving him missions again and he risks giving his soulmate a puncture wound through their abdomen to wonder about. He doesn’t have to say anything until then.
Later, when he’s getting ready for bed, a bite appears on the calf of his uninjured leg.
xXx
Kakashi goes to his seminars and sits in the back, slouching in his desk and trying to play it cool. Everyone else for the sessions he’s been assigned are tiny genin and one younger chunin.
I’m a shinobi of Konoha, is what they’re supposed to say to their soulmates. The instructor passes out generic-brand SoulMarkers.
“Um,” the poor chunin woman says, standing over Kakashi. He has a lot more going on than accidentally leaking that he’s a genin or his family name to an unknown party.
Kakashi eye-crinkles up at her. “I’m special,” he says.
“R-right,” she replies. “Um, well, at your discretion, Kakashi-san.”
She leaves the SoulMarker on his desk. He spins it between his fingers while he watches his classmates write excitedly on their arms. The majority of soulbonds end up romantic, especially when they form at this age, so Kakashi can see why a thirteen year old would be excited.
Not all soulbonds are romantic, though, not even all the ones where the soulmates are the same age. If Kakashi’s soulmate is a teenager, he supposes they’ll be more like…
His brain stutters to a stop as he considers their bond. He doesn’t want to think about what they’ll be like. Instead he focuses on the girl two seats up from him squealing in delight when she immediately gets a message back.
“Oh, that's good!” the instructor says, eyes lighting up. “That’s a response code that your soulmate is also a Konoha-nin.”
The instructor projects a decision tree of approved responses to possible messages from their soulmates on the wall. Things are much simpler in peacetime than during war, Kakashi notes. He remembers Rin showing up to a training session with a disgruntled look on her face and the most convoluted diagram of approved responses.
“That looks worse than sensei’s fuinjutsu,” Obito had said. It had taken Rin weeks just to figure out her soulmate was another kunoichi who worked at the hospital and who she already knew.
Statistically, soulmates are usually people you will meet naturally in your hometown, Kakashi reminds himself. Kakashi’s soulmate probably is just an Inuzuka kid with a bitey sibling or cousin that they roughhouse with. That would make sense, right? His perfect person for him is someone who’s also a loyal Konoha-nin who likes dogs.
Then again, Obito’s soulmate seemed to be an insane old man who wrote exclusively in ancient script, when he did bother writing at all. Despite Sensei coaching any and all communication like a nervous parent, they never figured out where he was besides perhaps alone in the woods like a hermit, so…
Don’t think about that, Kakashi decides as his heart speeds up. Why wouldn’t your perfect person be Konoha?
Towards the end of class, his soulmate absolutely ruins his cool guy persona by painting their nails.
“Huh,” he says, when the instructor awkwardly stops to stare at him and a couple of the other students turn around. Kakashi’s finger tips, now tickling as new marks form, are one of the few places where his normal clothes allow bare skin to be seen. He watches as another nail slowly turns bubblegum pink. “I didn’t know it worked on nails…”
“Y-yes,” the instructor says. “It’s not something that’s regulated, so, um… Ah, Kakashi-san, do you mind…”
Kakashi nods vaguely and makes a show of stretching out his hand lazily to watch his nails. ANBU-issue gloves aren’t fingerless like the Jounin ones, so he supposes this just hasn’t come up in front of him before. If there’s no regulation, he didn’t have to know before.
“What are we learning about Kakashi-san’s soulmate?” the instructor asks the class.
Someone raises their hand. “They’re a girl!”
“They’re more likely to be a girl,” the instructor corrects. She launches into a speech about assumptions people can and will make about you, based on what marks appear on your soulmate, and how an enemy shinobi could use those assumptions to track you down or trick you into believing false things about them.
“There’s no rules against painting your nails,” the instructor says, “but you see how your soulmate will conclude things?”
When the class is over, Kakashi pockets the SoulMarker. He ignores the girl in front of him hypothesizing in loud whispers to her friend that his soulmate is probably some beautiful jounin lady, like cool jounin women paint their nails bright pink and then get polish all over their cuticles.
It’s an Inuzuka girl who likes dogs and playing rough with her cousins, but has a soft feminine side, Kakashi tells himself, trying not to feel hysterical. Loyal Konoha-nin dog-lover with a complicated side. That’s him. That’s his soulmate.
At home, he pulls off his gloves and stares at his hands. His soulmate appears to be trying to clean up the mess of pink on their cuticles, and flecks of pink fade away. His hands are shaking.
Right, okay. He takes a deep breath. He needs to be cool. If he has fucked up handwriting because of nerves, then his soulmate will think he’s also some thirteen year old.
Unless he wants them to think that…? No, that’s insane.
He tosses his stolen SoulMarker onto the office supplies on his coffee table, grabs his sword and ANBU uniform with its full-length gloves, and runs off to ANBU barracks to see if anyone wants to run kenjutsu drills with him.
xXx
After a glass of sake at dinner to calm his nerves, Kakashi writes on the back of his hand:
Purple next time?
He draws an arrow all the way up his middle finger to point at the nail.
He then stands dead still in the middle of his living room, heart thudding in his chest as he stares at his hands, waiting for a response. When one doesn’t come, he has to go pour himself a second glass of sake.
Hours pass. He washes his hands and the ink comes off easily and leaves no trace, as it was designed. He goes to bed and isn’t sure if he hopes his soulmate saw his message or not.
xXx
He gets a response in the middle of the night and sleeps through it. He finds it on his skin in the morning, along with two new bites on his arm, which did wake him up briefly. (He’d gone back to sleep. He was getting to used that.)
His soulmate has drawn their own arrow to point at his still healing turtle bite.
I’ll paint my nails purple when this heals, she’d written. Please please please don’t write on my hand. I can’t cover it up.
Does his soulmate not know about gloves? Ah, well, maybe she’s not a weirdo who covers everything…
He squints down at the message. Yes, almost definitely a she, he thinks, and maybe even younger than he assumed. Her handwriting is cutesy but a little unpracticed. He’s sure someone in Intelligence could do a full handwriting analysis and come up with approximations for age, where she grew up, and even guesses at her hobbies. Just the thought of it makes anxiety spike in him for some reason.
If he were his own underling, he’d tell himself to make a copy of all messages for handwriting analysis, just in case. If she turns out not to be in Konoha, it would be safer to suck up the intrusion of privacy and get it analyzed. Even if she writes like a young girl, young girls can still be enemy ninja or full grown adults trying to trick you.
But… but, oh god, this is his soulmate. His person. He’s not selling her out to Intelligence unless he absolutely has to. Maybe he should draw a moustache on his own face and run over to the Inuzuka compound to see if he can identify her. He’s sure all this anxiety will fizzle once he’s confirmed she’s a perfectly safe and respectable young… Konoha Academy student….
He finds his SoulMarker and writes on his inner forearm, close to his elbow. Is this good?
He gets a response twenty minutes later, after he’s spent a while freaking out and brushing his teeth.
Yeah! She writes back. I’m wearing my ruffle blouse today so there’s sleeves.
Uh… what? What kind of response is that? Her “ruffle blouse”?
Children, Kakashi thinks in horror.
She doesn’t write anything after that, and he spends a while studying his arm. This one has two bite marks, and his message would have bumped into one if it had been any longer. His soulmate had written her reply lower and at a weird angle, to avoid going over the mark. He wonders if it’s still healing.
He also notes that wearing long sleeves and the bite marks across both arms might be related… Probably he can write near the marks, and she’ll have them covered in public.
Kakashi, of course, covers all but a quarter of his face and his fingers and toes in public. He doesn’t really care where his soulmate writes back, at least while he’s in the village. Of course, that will change once he starts taking missions again….
He’ll think about that later. Maybe when they go over it in his horrible class for children, and then he won’t have an excuse not to double-check ANBU policy.
His soulmate’s reply semi-disappears around midday. There’s no sensation when things disappear, so Kakashi isn’t sure of the exact timing. He only notices because he’s been checking every hour or so. The mark isn’t removed cleanly, and the smudged ghost of her message still remains. She probably used a regular pen or marker.
Kakashi is currently in the porn section of a bookshop, debating the merits of purchasing a special edition Icha Icha or not. He doesn’t really care about the fold out pin-up posters of cosplayers in revealing clothing, but the higher quality binding will hold up better next him he decides to read mid-fight…
He excuses himself to the shop’s bathroom and draws a big lopsided rectangle over the inside of his forearm. In small lettering across the top, he labels it The Safe Zone.
Inside the rectangle, he writes, Do you know about SoulMarkers?
A few hours later she writes back, I don’t have one. :(
Kakashi frowns slightly. That statement might mean nothing, but it could also be implying a lot. He didn’t own a SoulMarker until he’d gotten a soulmate, but they're not unusual for most people to have just lying around. Surely both her parents aren’t soulmate-less and there would be some around her house, or maybe she’d have an older sibling or an auntie, or perhaps a classmate would have one after an early bond or just as a toy. Even if she were, for example, living with a single parent with no living soulmate, she’s known about him for days now. Someone should have gotten her a proper writing tool by now.
Kakashi’s ever-present anxiety clenches like a fist around his heart. There’s lots of very mundane reasons his soulmate wouldn’t have a SoulMarker. But also… given she begged him not to write where she couldn’t cover it up, that she seemed interested in the ankle wound healing…
Was she hiding him?
xXx
A week passes. Four new bites appear on Kakashi, and four times he considers asking his soulmate what’s up with them and then doesn’t.
One evening, Kakashi gets a soul mark over his mostly-healed turtle bite. It’s a different pain than the bite, a prickling, burning sensation. He stares down at it, flummoxed. It’s long and wide and uneven, a tear of new red right over his ankle. Ten minutes later, a bite forms on his calf. Five minutes after that, his soulmate writes to him on the front of her poor calf.
Sorry, she writes. I had to cover it up before they saw. But there was a SoulMarker in the recovery room!
Kakashi stares down at the message and thinks, Uh… what?
Should he ask if she’s okay? Why does she have to hide things?
Instead, he writes, Make sure you still paint our toe nails purple.
Her previous writing disappears slowly, one finger swipe at a time, as if she’s testing how the SoulMarker works. Then she draws a tiny heart.
By the time Kakashi goes to bed, the soulmark over his turtle bite has shrunk noticeably, and it’s gone by morning. It had faded slowly and steadily. He had been sure his soulmate had injured herself somehow, but the way the mark had faded is too quick to be natural healing, but not quick enough to be medical ninjutsu. He’s not sure what other method she might have used to cover the mark up, that would both feel and fade like that.
He decides not to worry about it.
xXx
To get cleared for ANBU missions, Kakashi is supposed to do an interview where he proves he’s cleared his soulmate as either being identified in-person as a Konoha resident, or go through a horrible ordeal where he takes photographic evidence of conversations with his soulmate to prove they’re unlikely to be an enemy, or else he has to go through more training where someone monitors every he does and tells him what to write to her.
Supposed to is the key phrase here. Kakashi is too good at his job to keep on leave very long, and some lunatic Taki missing-nin with hyper violent tendencies has escaped from T&I.
“You know who your soulmate is yet?” Ibiki asks from across his desk, voice tight and to the point.
“Not really,” Kakashi replies. He fans his hands out, backs toward Ibiki. “But she promised me she’d paint my nails purple, and as you can see, she came through. Very trustworthy.”
Ibiki stares at his hands. His only reaction is a single twitch of his eye, and then a grunt of acknowledgement.
“She’s a child?”
“I believe so,” Kakashi says.
“Good enough for me,” Ibiki says, then tosses a file across his desk and at Kakashi. “Our first retrieval team fucked up, but we think he’s moving towards Grass. He’d been buddying up to Kusa before we grabbed him.”
Kakashi nods. Post-war, the smaller shinobi villages became more likely to accept missing-nin into their ranks. Large villages like Konoha tended to avoid taking foreign shinobi unless they came from allied villages, as Kushina had, or had an especially compelling story for why they could be loyal Konoha shinobi, like having a Konoha soulmate and a squeaky clean track record. Missing-nin rarely could offer up such a compelling story, as they were already known traitors, but the smaller shinobi villages had lost a lot of shinobi during the war. They were less picky now. Taki allowed Konoha to keep their missing-nin jailed and would not take him back, but Kusa would evidently risk hiring and supporting him out of desperation for more manpower.
The initial Konoha team had engaged the Taki-nin briefly, and he’d bled all over ANBU Hare before successfully fleeing them. The blood on Hare’s uniform is more than enough for Kakashi to track. He leads two other ANBU agents on a mad dash across Fire Country, only to discover that yes, this guy has lots of buddies in Kusa.
“He’s our legal prisoner,” Kakashi tries, staring down the Taki-nin and five Kusa-nin just over the border into Grass Country. “There’s no reason for us to fight, as long as you turn him over. That man is a traitor and–”
“Oh, fuck you and your Konoha bullshit,” one of the Kusa-nin says. “You’d think the son of Konoha’s most famous traitor wouldn’t have such a superiority complex.”
Hello, what the fuck? Kakashi thinks, and he will blame this comment for what puts him off his game for the proceeding fight.
They inflict several injuries to the Kusa-nin before someone dumps one of Kusa’s famous poison clouds into the field. Team Kakashi retreats, and the Kusa-nin keep moving in the direction of their village.
“Thirty minute break,” Kakashi commands.
“But if they get to Kusa–” ANBU Monkey starts. This is a fair worry, as they cannot actually move into Grass Country very far without risking their tenuous peace treaty, but Kakashi puts up a hand.
“The effects of inhaling that poison aren’t immediate, but they can be deadly. We need to wait and make sure no one got hit. We do not need anyone keeling over mid-run.”
Kakashi summons three dogs to keep on the heels of their target. While they fled in the direction of Kusa proper, Kakashi wouldn’t be surprised if Kusa didn’t actually want violent maniac like the Taki-nin in their village, just as their well-maintained fighting tool in a convenient place. They might bring him to some Kusa outpost instead, where he could be cared for but couldn’t randomly decide to murder a genin, like he’d supposedly done in Taki.
“Hey,” ANBU Moth starts, “what did that guy mean, about your–”
ANBU Monkey gestures wildly for him to stop talking, and Moth goes silent mid-sentence. Kakashi grits his teeth.
Pakkun returns just at the thirty minute mark, to report that the five Kusa-nin had moved towards Kusa proper, while the Taki-nin had veered off towards the west. ANBU Moth, who’d been stationed at the Grass border for a year, confirms there is indeed an outpost in that direction.
“That’s good for us,” Kakashi decides. Protocol prevents them from getting within so many kilometers of a shinobi village, but outposts are a grey area. “We’ll pursue.”
Time is of the essence and Kakashi is fastest on his team, so he breaks off to move ahead, Bull at his side as back-up. While he runs, he can feel his soulmate doing something, writing all over herself or something. It’s not a painful activity and Kakashi easily ignores it. He’s sure he’s been annoying her more than she’s annoying him, with all his few new battle scrapes.
Kakashi does catch up with the Taki-nin and engages him. The man is not as skilled a fighter as Kakashi, but he’s definitely more desperate and prone to all-out attacks.
The first harpoon covered in flaming oil that the Taki obtained from his Kusa-nin buddies is easy to dodge. What the hell? Why would you give a missing-nin something like that?
“Heard you were the White Fang’s son!” the Taki-nin heckles, likely because it had obviously worked before. “Not mad your village killed your old pa? Even we heard about it in Taki!”
Kakashi doesn’t say anything, just moves around the Taki-nin, tossing the occasional kunai to distract him from Bull circling the other way. Their goal is to capture him alive, which means Kakashi has to be more delicate than he would in a fight to the death.
“Maybe you’re happy he killed himself,” the Taki-nin jeers, and Kakashi has to concentrate to prevent a physical reaction.
Focus on Bull’s position, Kakashi reminds himself.
“That wouldn’t make sense, wouldn’t it!” the Taki-nin yells. He pulls another oil-soaked harpoon off his back. “If you were mad, you’d be like me! A free missing-nin who knows villages are all bullshit ready to kill their ninja!”
“By that logic,” Kakashi says, drawing his sword. “You’re an idiot for siding with Kusa. Or do you know, deep down inside, that the problem with Taki was people like you?”
The Taki-nin shrieks, and Kakshi feels satisfied he’s successfully goaded him into attacking blind. The harpoon alights with a small fire jutsu, and Kakashi gets his sword up to deflect and dodge—
Five soul marks, all on different parts of his limbs, light up his skin with the tell-tale pain of new bites. He’s distracted, and his sword slips, and he barely flash-steps out of the way in time. The Taki-nin turns to his new location, eyes wide and crazy, the burning harpoon still in his hand setting his sleeve on fire.
Bull tackles the Taki-nin, his jaw digging into his dominant arm.
“Nice, Bull!” Kakashi calls, then throws himself forward. His earth jutsu is crude, but he pulls up soil to dump on the man’s burning weapon and quell the flames. A sword slash takes out the Taki-nin’s calcaneal tendons to prevent him from running, and Kakashi and Bull jointly wrestle him down.
“FUCK YOU!” the Taki-nin bellows, and Kakashi’s teammates finally show up to help restrain him.
“Those Kusa-nin just left you, huh,” ANBU Monkey observes.
“Idiot,” the Taki-nin spits. “They’re regrouping.”
Kakashi dismisses this. Those ninja had been pretty beat-up, a couple of them on death’s downstep. The more logical conclusion is that they’d just cut their losses and sent the Taki-nin off on his own with some weapons. If he got away from Team Kakashi, great. If he didn’t, then at least the Kusa-nin at least had all lived.
To Kakashi’s surprise, several hours later, the very same Kusa-nin reappear, completely healed.
“Rumor is Kusa has some Tsunade-level healer,” ANBU Moth says as they jointly drag the Taki-nin out of the way of a shower of undoubtedly poison senbon.
“You could have mentioned that,” Kakashi grunts. He’d unsummoned all his dogs but Bull, and he watches as Bull and ANBU Monkey dodge around kunai to engage the Kusa-nin.
“It’s just a rumor,” Moth replies. “All my old COs hated when we brought it up. But if Kusa-nin could get back to their village, even really fucked up ones, they’d show up again the next day perfectly fine–”
If it’s true, the weird actions so far make sense. They abandoned the Taki-nin knowing Konoha wouldn’t kill him. Now they’re back, and Team Kakashi is tired, and they’re fresh as daisies.
“Watch him,” Kakashi decides, because they don’t need two people on a restrained man with no working legs. “I’m going in.”
Kakashi slams a raikiri into an unsuspecting Kusa-nin’s chest, which is enough of a distraction that ANBU Monkey finishes off the one he’d been fighting. Bull wimpers, and Kakashi leaps over the Kusa-nin’s corpse to help him, ignoring sudden shouts from ANBU Moth—
Something very sharp and very on fire rips into Kakashi’s side.
“CAPTAIN,” Moth yells.
“Stay on the prisoner!” Kakashi yells back, and now Bull has to save him again from a Kusa-nin. Blood splatters into Kakashi’s face. So that’s… uh… three Kusa-nin down. Or maybe four?
His world goes sideways, and there’s yelling. He sees the spiked ball of Moth’s morning star fly over his head, and then Moth is kneeling on top on him, on top of his bleeding side, applying pressure.
“I think it’s partially cauterized,” Moth is saying, although not to Kakashi. Monkey is looming over them with Bull.
“Oh goodie,” Kakashi says. He blinks rapidly. “Why aren’t you obeying orders?”
Kakashi absolutely does not understand Moth’s answer, but as he passes out, he does hear Obito’s ringing in his ears: Those who break the rules are trash. But those who abandon their friends are worse than trash.
xXx
ANBU Moth had abandoned his post because the lunatic Taki-nin had ripped off his own arm, grabbed one of his harpoons that Moth had confiscated, launched it at Kakashi, and then promptly passed out from blood loss.
Moth and Monkey had carted him and the Taki-nin to the nearest Konoha outposting. The Taki-nin was transported back to Konoha immediately because they only care that he lives and can speak, not that he ever regains proper function in his legs or if they have a shot at reattaching his arm. But they treat Kakashi with more caution, because it would really suck for Konoha if he didn’t make a full recovery as quickly as possible. As a result, he’s stuck in an awful cot in the outpost’s infirmary for a week or so until he’s stable enough to transport.
There’s five total cots in a line, and some of them are literally accumulating dust, the infirmary here gets so little action. Bull stays by his side the first few hours, his giant head a familiar weight over Kakashi’s less injured leg, warm and heavy. Kakashi is on an IV diet until the outpost medic figures out what’s up with his insides, but he convinces the medic to bring Bull some treats for being the best boy.
Bull can’t stay forever, and eventually he de-summons himself to go report back to the rest of the dogs. Kakashi is left with no roommates and the single magazine he’s offered as entertainment is two years old. He doesn’t have Icha Icha on him to calm his mind, or Gai to show up and swear to run around the village on his hands every day until Kakashi recovers.
Kakashi does discover that, in addition to five new bite-shaped soulmarks, his soulmate has drawn a bunch of stars and hearts and flowers in various colors, all over his numerous cuts and bruises on his arms and legs. She’s scribbled them in, so they cover his wounds completely.
“That’s cute,” the outpost’s medic says, and Kakashi honestly can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not. He’s sure this will go in his medical files for someone to yell at him about later.
You good? Kakashi’s soulmate eventually writes in The Safe Zone.
The cuts and bruises are high in number but not that bad for an ANBU mission. He’s sure she has some questions about the giant hole and surrounding half-melted flesh that now takes up the right side of her torso. Maybe he should assure her that some A-rank ninja surgeon will eventually show up and clear it all up.
Kakashi thinks replying to her while slightly high on pain medications is probably unwise. But he also has nothing else to do. He convinces the medic to give him a SoulMarker. They’re normal things, to have laying around an infirmary. Lots of people want to tell their soulmate not to worry about that horrible new cut or whatever.
Absolutely not, he replies. Lived tho.
Are you a ninja? His soulmates write, quickly and with a jittery quality that he interprets as either very eager or very nervous.
I got into a fight with a bear, Kakashi writes back. It had a flaming sword that could summon ghosts.
What? His soulmate writes, then immediately erases it.
I looked it up, she writes instead. I’m allowed to tell you I’m training to be a ninja. My name is Karin.
Kakashi stares down at his arm. Technically… technically this is all the sort of stuff his definitely-a-nice-Inuzuka-girl-with-a-mean-bitey-cousin soulmate would say. Inuzuka Karin. Yep. That could be his person.
Kakashi does not ask her which village she’s in.
What’s your name? Karin writes.
My parents forgot to give me one, Kakashi replies.
Karin draws a giant angry face and Kakashi actually laughs. It’s a weak laugh that makes the injury in his side flare with pain.
He draws the henohenomohenji next to her frowny face. Karin crosses it out.
That’s not fair! she writes. Tell me your name!
My family name is a secret, Kakashi writes slowly and clearly. He imagines Karin staring down at her arm with bated breath. But my personal name is….
He waits for a full minute.
Mohenji.
Karin scribbles violently over the entire sentence.
Kakashi both does and doesn’t want to confirm what village Karin is in. If she’s in Konoha, then everything is good and fine. Statistically, his soulmate should be in Konoha. But if she’s not…
If she’s not, Kakashi isn’t sure he wants to know.
Are you in class right now? He asks when she rubs off her angry scribbles.
Yes, she says. I’m so bored. I don’t know why other kids can’t figure out fractions. What are you doing?
Studying fractions, actually, Kakashi writes. I don’t understand why ⅓ > ¼ if 4 > 3
There is a long pause before he gets a response. Unclear if this is because Karin is sick of him, or if she has to do something on her end.
So you’re bored too, she writes finally.
Kakashi draws a tic tac toe board. She fills in an X.
xXx
Karin is funny, Kakashi decides. This is good, because she’s his only source of entertainment for the foreseeable future.
I can get more nail polish today, she writes one afternoon, very seriously. There’s a lady at the market who sells them for 8 ryo. What color?
Green, Kakashi writes back, with pink sparkles.
Aren’t you a man?
All men secretly yearn for pink sparkles.
He doesn’t think the luminosity of sparkles will translate across the soul bond. He also has no experience with applying sparkles to anything, so he supposes they’ll find out. But, he is starting to realize why men painting their nails black is a bit of a thing. He might have to, if Karin decides to paint her toenails too. He doesn’t mind purple toenails in the village, but he’d rather his enemies not know his soulmate is a young girl.
He can tell when her most boring classes start and when she gets home from school, because she’ll get real chatty. He’s gotten her to mention a handful of names of classmates she gets along with (and a couple that she doesn’t), but she doesn’t appear to have any close friends. She gets bored and frustrated in lectures because she’s obviously a lot quicker on the uptake than her peers, which Kakashi finds sympathetic.
I’m jealous, he tells her. You still haven't explained to me how fractions work. I live in constant confusion.
Aren’t you a grown up????
Why on earth would you think that?
You write like my sensei
Rude
When he asks how she isn’t getting caught goofing off in class, she explains to Kakashi that she sits in the back and can cover up their conversations by pretending she’s put her head down to rest, which is probably why her handwriting got kind of smushed and vaguely sideways. Then she pulls what Kakashi is learning is a classic Karin move, where she just randomly says something bizarre or disturbing like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
I’m allowed to do that, she writes, and Kakashi has no sense of if she’s bragging or just stating a fact or sighing over her predicament. Because my other job makes me so tired.
Other job? Kakashi prompts. When there’s no response for a couple minutes, he writes, Do shinobi not have child labor laws?
(His jokes are funny, even if Karin doesn’t get them.)
Have you read Dusk? Karin asks, changing the subject.
Kakashi lets her, filing this new info away to ponder later. Her other job is dog training, he tells himself. A normal side hustle for a nice Konoha girl who is his soulmate.
What’s Dusk? He asks.
Dusk is a romance novel. Karin describes it in a tone that Kakashi would describe as gushing. It’s about a normal girl who falls in love with the heir to a ninja clan, but the entire clan has a ‘curse ninjutsu’ on them that gives them sparkling skin and sexy glowing eyes they have to hide from the general public for some reason. The story seems to be mostly about the main girl being randomly menaced by other ninja, only to be rescued by the clan heir, and there’s lots of drama about him being a dangerous bad boy.
There’s ♡ kissing ♡ !! Karin writes, complete with little hearts.
Kakashi squints down at the frankly feverish writing on his arm. That sounds fantastically stupid, but also, if you added some equally stupid porn, that could be an Icha Icha plot. Jiraiya would probably let his female lead get a few fights for herself, or at least give her some skill in addition to being a doe-eyed damsel, but this is about the level of mindless dumb fluff that Kakashi loves.
If the soul bond is based on a love for stupid romance and not, like, loyalty and an affinity for dogs… well, maybe that makes sense. Maybe this is just who he is as a person.
Aren’t you too young for ♡ kissing ♡ ? Kakashi asks. His hearts are lopsided.
I’m 9!
“Shit,” Kakashi breathes out loud.
That’s younger than he thought. He figured she was, like, eleven. Her vocabulary and kanji usage is pretty good, even if she’s obviously immature. He knew some of the subjects she was learning, but it’s not like he knows what gets taught in the Academy what years.
He can be horrified by this later, he decides. Karin is his nine-year-old soulmate, and that’s just something that’s happening right now.
There’s going to be a SEQUEL! Karin writes and adds happy little hearts and squiggles.
Kakashi cracks a grin. When they let him go back to Konoha, he decides, he’ll try this new book.