Chapter Text
Rin’s face is close to Kakashi’s; enough that when she coughs up blood, it splatters on his face.
His eyes widen, and the sharingan - Obito’s sharingan - replays her pained expression; forcing him to relive the moment his hand went through her chest like it wants to punish him.
You swore. You promised your dying comrade that you’d protect her, and instead her blood coats your fingers. You broke an oath.
She looks past him, her eyes settling on a point somewhere behind his back, above his shoulder. He sees her expression change to the one of surprise, and she mouths a name they’ve been mourning together for the past year and a half.
His fingers twitch and he pulls his hand out, shaking with his whole body.
He collapses. The enemy surrounds them; Rin is on her knees, soon to follow after him to land on the ground, and she’s still staring into the distance in disbelief.
And he’s all out of chakra.
He killed her.
He feels his last reserves of chakra pull at Obito’s sharingan, and then he doesn’t feel anything.
When he wakes up, he finds himself in a hospital bed. His hands are shaking, and he forces his eyes to close, because as soon as he opens them, he can see the faint memory of his fist stuck in Rin’s body.
He covers the sharingan, grimacing under his mask.
Then, he freezes. Because there were at least a dozen of Kiri’s jounins, and yet somehow he’s back in Konoha. And unless the Pure Lands look like the village’s main hospital, he’s alive.
He looks to the side and sees Kushina. She’s staring off into the distance, a strange look on her face. Her hair is tied into a loose braid, the kind Obito would do for her after every training session she agreed to help him with.
They had a similar fighting style. Both were good with chains, even if Obito’s footwork could use some work.
She had confided in Rin, once, that she considered taking Obito as hers, but feared the consequences this decision would have on him from the Uchiha, as they already had ostracised him.
The sky was blue, and Rin had told him that story after she found him standing in front of the Memorial Stone for four hours, stubbornly waiting for dusk.
“She thought he might get offended, because his clan would’ve hated for him to get out of it. But I will tell you a secret,” she leaned in, a smile on her face. It was soft, melancholic. “He would’ve loved that. Both living with her and driving Lord Fugaku crazy.”
Kakashi snorted then, taken aback. He could’ve easily imagined it; both of them fighting every day over whenever they should have dango or ramen for breakfast. Obito, busy collecting blackmail on their sensei.
Kushina was his older sister, in all but blood, after all.
She hums to herself, lost in thought. Then, when he stirs, the movement draws her attention to him.
The smile she gives him is forced, but not unpleasant. It’s almost like she isn’t looking at a friend-killer.
“Kakashi, that took you some time.” He’s been taking over some of Obito’s habits. It was an infuriating discovery, how many of his stories about older women needing assistance proved to be true. Being late was something his team - first short one person, and now hardly a team with the second down and only him remaining, he supposes - had grown to expect from him this past year. “You should know better than to drain yourself of chakra, you know? That’s a dumb way to die, if I’ve ever seen one.”
He doesn’t speak; his chest feels hollow.
“Come on, your vocal cords weren’t damaged, were they?”
“Did I miss the funeral?” He dares to look up at her. She’s surprised. Maybe he shouldn’t have spoken. He has no right to be there.
It’s childish.
By some miracle, someone had retrieved them and - presumably - taken care of the Kiri shinobi. Did they take Rin’s body to Konoha? Or was it rotting away in mud on that clearing?
“She’s alive,” Kushina says. Kakashi’s heart drops.
“What?”
“Her liver and intestines are damaged. So is her spine. But she will live. You missed- it missed vital spots. She’s alive.”
Kakashi blinks, and then Obito’s sharingan starts leaking just like it usually does when he’s passing a store with something orange in display, or seeing dango shops, or-
Rin. Rin is alive.
Rin is alive and Kakashi is crying.
His shoulders start to shake and he curls into himself, sobbing quietly. His whole body is trembling, and there’s both relief and guilt. He doesn’t make a sound, and he can still feel Rin’s blood on his hands despite the fact that they’re pristine clean.
Kushina looks like she wants to add to it - he takes notice of the scrolls upon scrolls on sealing that litter the room.
She closes her mouth.
“You’ve been out for almost a week. Seriously, kid, we all had bets going on whether you’ll make it. If you died out of chakra exhaustion, I would’ve personally made sure you get remembered for your stupidity.”
“I had to rescue Rin,” and what a failure it was, the whole ordeal turning into a blade of a sword that she was placed on. Endangered in the enemy’s hands and endangered in Kakashi’s. He echoed the mantra he kept with him since Kannabi. “Those who leave their friends behind-“
“I get that. But next time don’t be an idiot and summon my loser of a fiancé to help.”
Kakashi nods, once.
He’s still stunned. Rin lives. He does, too, even if he failed at fulfilling the one promise he made.
He looks to the other side, once he stops feeling like vomiting. There’s an eggplant salad on a bedside table, with a little note attached to it.
The note itself doesn’t say much. Just a simple “don’t be an idiot” with a crude doodle of a dog pissing under the text.
He frowns; his head is blank as to who could’ve left it. Kushina is already focused on her scrolls, writing down symbols with her special ink. Gai’s notes would never sound this… lacklustre, for the lack of a better word.
He doesn’t eat the salad until his hunger makes him nauseous enough it’s threatening his stomach to vomit whatever he has left from his last meal.
It tastes good.
Kushina seems tired; her shoulders are tense and she’s slouched over. There’s something in her eyes that Kakashi can’t quite place; an exhaustion that wasn’t there before they left Konoha for that cursed mission.
He saw her like this, in her worst moments - or, at the very least, similar to how she looks now - grieving.
When they came back from Kannabi, she took notice of Obito’s gift to Kakashi before Minato could register that there was one kid less in his team.
She didn't speak then, but later on Kakashi heard her screaming in Obito’s empty room, swearing at him for not coming home.
“Shouldn’t you be with Rin? I’m fine-“ she turns to look at him, like she wants to argue. You’re obviously not.
“Rin doesn’t need me right now,” he must look judgemental, because she shifts in her chair and forces a smile. “Rin needs to rest, right now.”
Kakashi will accept this, only because if Rin wasn’t, then maybe they would force him to see her and confront him with his failure to protect her.
It’s better to be stuck with Kushina.
“Who left the salad?”
She tenses visibly, but just for a moment.
“It’s been a long week,” she offers instead. Kakashi squints; her avoidance of his question is obvious, but he lets it slide.
“What will happen?” To me, a selfish part of him wants to know. He jeopardised his mission; abandoned it, really, for the sake of rescuing his teammate, only to then injure her, almost fatally.
Kushina looks exhausted.
“Lucky for you, Rin had woken up yesterday and explained most of what happened. And I met…“ she hesitates, “someone who had cleared some things up.”
Kakashi lets himself doze off, tired from this whole interaction that leaves more secrets and unknowns than actual responses to his questions.
He hears Kushina open the window and whisper something as his breathing evens out. She sounds sad.
He doesn’t hear a response.
Kakashi isn’t surprised when they let him out of the hospital - he should’ve been waiting for it with a restless kind of anticipation. He always found any kind of prolonged stay there, being fussed over by doctors and nurses, a nuisance.
But now when he knows a cold apartment awaits him, he can’t bring himself to stumble over there just yet.
He lingers outside, on the courtyard, his eyes stinging. He’s still getting used to having a blind spot; it drives him into anxiety, sometimes.
The floor above him has been cleared out, only one patient remaining, guarded closely on Hokage’s orders.
“They sealed something in her,” Minato explained to him when he decided to drop by. Kakashi saw the long lines on his face; the eye bags. The ink on his fingers.
He saw a faint scar on Kushina’s forearm; it was just a glimpse, but with her Uzumaki heritage, it wasn’t hard to deduce that whatever was sealed inside Rin required all the skill they could offer. If they were drawing the seal with Kushina’s blood, it must've been bad.
They hadn’t said more - Kakashi doesn’t blame either of them; Minato was very obviously placed on handling-Rin’s-situation duty. Kushina’s insistence to stay around was also pretty telling.
As the only seriously considered candidate for the hat, Minato was proving his capability of handling an unconventionally difficult situation.
Kakashi looks at the building. If not for how low his chakra still is, he would’ve used the sharingan to look for Rin; only to see her.
His hands seem dirty, all of the sudden.
He turns to leave, and walks through the streets of Konoha hearing every nasty gossip. Whispers swim in the air, and both civilians and shinobi glance his way, leaning closer to their groups.
Their lips are moving, but Kakashi can’t make out the words; it’s like he’s walking through mud, his limbs heavy and hard to move.
“Friend-killer,” a shinobi whispers, and a civilian nods, adding: “as much of a failure as the White Fang was.”
“Did you really expect anything else from a jounin who stole a kekkei-genkai?” Someone says, loud enough that the words pierce through Kakashi’s skin. “He probably killed that Uchiha kid to get his hands on the sharingan, and now decided to get rid of the only witness.”
“It’s obvious. They promoted him so young. There must be something wrong with him. Better to have him as a weapon than as an enemy, though.”
He curls into himself, his fingernails digging into his skin.
“YOUTHFUL RIVAL-!”
He blinks, and is greeted by the green spandex. Gai wraps his arms around him, then points at himself.
“I’VE HEARD ABOUT YOUR RELEASE AND NOW WE SHALL SEE WHO MIGHT BE THE WINNER OF OUR ANNUAL RACE TO THE HOKAGE’S HEADS”
“It’s monthly, not annual,” Kakashi corrects, then sinks back into his despair. “You shouldn’t be talking to me- why are you here?”
Because Gai is supposed to be on a mission, a few weeks of travel away. Something about his team being sent to the edges of the Land of Fire, to see if any of the smaller villages surrounding Konoha don’t need help in renovations after the war.
The peace treaties are still under negotiation, but it’s obvious the whole conflict is coming to an end - was, because Kiri’s attack might be interpreted as an act of war, and start yet another one even before this one is finished.
“Why wouldn’t I be talking to you?” Gai’s voice gets a bit quieter; he tilts his head and frowns. Then, almost like it doesn’t matter that Kakashi just looked away instead of explaining, he points at the sky. “I was given a message from the spirits of youth! They’ve told me you need a friend! And then I was probably kidnapped, but I was probably kidnapped to Konoha, so it doesn’t matter!” He nods, like it all makes sense. “We finished the mission last Friday, my dear rival! We were merely on our way back! Now, I am all yours!”
“The- the spirits. Of youth. They told you that I was lonely?”
Gai nods furiously, and he might sprain his neck if he keeps at it.
Then, he reaches into his uniform and pulls out a single note. It’s crumbled and definitely covered in sweat.
Kakashi unfurls it and his mind is blank, because all it contains is a very simple drawing of what must be him, with a frowny sad face, and an arrow pointing to it from the description calling him “sad and super lonely. Might be stupid now”.
“I’m not stupid.”
“I WOULD NEVER ACCUSE YOU OF SUCH THING!”
Gai’s energy is too much for him, but he seems insistent on listening to whoever gave him the note, and Kakashi is too tired to try to get rid of him.
And it’s better than coming to that empty apartment and facing his thoughts.
“I was planning on dropping by Obito’s, to clean around his house,” the Uchiha’s hate this peculiar coping mechanism of his. He stops by the compound once every week, to bring fresh flowers on the porch of Obito’s house, and to clean his room.
Rin actually did it with him; she joked, once, that they’re just making sure the house is ready for when Obito returns. They cried for an hour after that.
He told her about busting Obito on his attempts to kiss her picture; she blushed and laughed it away, and then proceeded to confess she used to do the same with Kakashi.
The Uchihas stare when they enter; their compound is normally off-limits, but Fugaku’s wife, Mikoto, is best friends with Kushina, thus rendering him lenient towards Kakashi and his way of dealing with grief.
Gai looks around, scaring people off by his proclaims of the power of eternal youth.
Kakashi pauses, his hand hovering above the handle. He can still see and feel Rin’s blood clinging to his skin.
He has no right to be here; he failed. He couldn’t even do this one last thing for him.
Obito saved his life, and he repaid it by failing at every thing he promised not to.
Gai pushes him forward.
The house is quiet; as it usually is. There are wilted flowers left on the desk; most likely a gift from Rin, from before they went on that damned mission.
His hand shakes, and he has to bring it to his mouth because he can taste copper on his tongue. His saliva gets watery and he starts dry-heaving.
“I didn’t know Obito had a cloak like this,” Gai’s voice gets him out of his - whatever it is.
He looks to where he’s standing, examining a torn fabric hung uncaringly across the chair.
It reeks of death, and the fabric is stiff from dried blood, each centimetre of it. The right sleeve is torn open, with splinters twisted between the stitches.
“That’s not Obito’s.”
Obito only wore things with that awful shade of orange. This- this is new, and it doesn’t fit in.
He decides to risk it, and removes his hitai-ate to look around the room with the sharingan.
“Dear eternal rival, have you spotted something suspicious?”
Kakashi frowns, slowly making his way to the desk. There are traces of chakra, somewhat familiar but covered in a weird scent of bark and wood.
He opens a drawer and hears Gai shriek behind him.
He’s greeted by the sight of two sharingans, seemingly tossed carelessly inside. There’s blood around them, and he can definitely see that they were taken by force.
He slams the drawer shut.
“Are they fake?” Gai leans in. There’s a moment of silence; Kakashi opens the drawer again and reaches inside to examine the eyes, but is greeted by a sight of a hand suddenly appearing and snatching them before he can get his hands on them; it goes through the drawer and the desk like a ghost.
Gai looks at him, mouthing the word “haunted”.
Kakashi sighs, resigned. He knows he’s not welcome in the compound; they’re only allowing him in out of obligation.
“We weren’t careful. Someone had to put us under genjutsu to scare us off.”
Gai frowns, but doesn’t argue. Within seconds, he’s back to his energetic self.
When they finish cleaning - Gai somehow makes it a race - Kakashi’s chest feels just a bit lighter. His hands still shake, and he avoids even coming close to a mirror hanging in the hallway, but somehow, he manages to get through the day without breaking apart.
Gai races him to his apartment - they jump on the rooftops, partly for challenge; mostly to avoid the whispers and glaces directed towards Kakashi.
He’s out of breath by the time they get to his house - it doesn’t happen often, but he is freshly out of a hospital, so he decides to not beat himself over it.
His friend is rambling, screaming about how he will beat him next time he’s up for a challenge; Gai pays no attention to the harsh glares of Kakashi’s neighbours, instead opting to wave at them with so much enthusiasm it almost seems unnatural.
A clink of the key turning, the faint creak of the hinges of Kakashi’s front door.
“Gai-“ he hesitates, seeing him stop his descent down the staircase. Gai turns his head, his eyes wide open. “Thanks for today.”
He receives a bright smile and double thumbs-up as a response.
And as soon as Kakashi locks the door and makes his way inside, he ends up stumbling into the bathroom and barely making it in time to kneel in front of the toilet.
He grasps at the mask and pulls it down, choking on vomit. There’s blood everywhere, and despite the sharingan being closed, Rin is in front of him, his hand stuck in her body.
He pulls, pulls and pulls, his breath hitching when his wrist gets stuck between the ribs; shattered, he can feel the bone scraping his skin.
There’s a loud clutter and Kakashi sees the bathroom floor, his nose bleeding from the impact with it. His head throbs in pain; a headache close to a migraine that comes with overusing chakra.
The lights of his bathroom are shining through the entire night, and he scrubs every centimetre of it; the tiles shine by the time the bucket is emptied outside.
He still feels Rin’s blood under his fingernails.
Sunshine hits his face; a memory of a cleaning frenzy is the first thing on his mind when he wakes up.
There’s breakfast on his table - yet another meal containing eggplant, cut into thin slices. It doesn’t smell of poison - then again, Kakashi can’t find it in himself to care too much about the possibility.
The world might be a better place if he keels over and dies.
He doesn’t.
The meal is good - surprisingly so. The spices taste foreign, and they must be from another village entirely, because he can’t remember smelling anything close to them in Konoha.
He searches for a note; maybe a bit hopefully.
There’s a crude drawing of him, passed out on what appears to be a not-very-good portrayal of his bathroom tiles. Kakashi didn’t even register that at some point someone had to sneak in and drop a blanket around him.
His muscles ache from sleeping on the ground, but when he dares to glance towards the bathroom - door left open because of the haze he was in when he woke up - there’s a thick blanket on the floor, one he doesn’t remember owning.
He turns the page and finds a note on the other side.
“Your apartment is pathetic. If rooms mirror a personality of the person who lives in them, then you don’t have any.”
An insult.
So, the note definitely wasn’t left by Minato-sensei, Kakashi concludes, finishing his breakfast.
He takes a pen - he owns exactly one, and the insult about his house being bare now starts feeling both a bit personal and embarrassingly on point - and writes down a simple thank you.
There’s a chance the person doesn’t want to be found out, perhaps because of Kakashi’s current reputation - not that it was any better ever since Obito passed. Thief, everyone said, and Rin lashed out every time, her voice breaking as she screamed it was a gift.
The stranger’s kindness is unbecoming for a shinobi, so it might be one of Kakashi’s neighbours; or a medic who has taken pity on him.
Where are the spices from? He adds to his note, a blush of embarrassment doting his face.
He leaves it out in the open, cleans up after the meal and goes to wander through the village.
Suna, he finds a response when he comes back.