Work Text:
Kakashi will remember their last true conversation in vivid detail. He only sees Rin because they both happen to be in the same convenience store at 2 AM, both of them in dirty post-mission clothes and mechanically wandering the aisles. He will obsess over this moment for the rest of his life.
“I never get to see you,” Rin complains. Her lips are pursed. The store lighting puts her face into harsh contrasts, and the bags under her eyes seem deeper than ever. “You said you’d get lunch with me, and then you stood me up.”
“I had a mission,” Kakashi replies lamely.
“Me too,” she tells him, tone clipped and annoyed. Clearly she doesn’t see this as an excuse. “Everyone has missions, Kakashi.”
Kakashi could have at least sent her a message. Their sensei is Hokage now. It would have taken five seconds to mention it to Minato-sensei when the mission was assigned, and Minato-sensei would have passed the message along. Kakashi could have sent a dog. He could have slipped a note under her door on his way out.
Obito would have thought to send a message, is the thought that lingers in the air, unspoken by both of them. Obito was a mess and perpetually tardy, but for Rin, he would have sent a message. He would have hit Kakashi for standing her up, and then he’d have the words to make Rin laugh and forgive both of them. Kakashi is, unfortunately, not Obito.
“How was your mission?” Kakashi tries, and Rin briefly looks more annoyed than he’s ever seen her.
Then she sighs, and the frown melts off her face. “It was alright. No major injuries. Sensei is shipping me off again tomorrow.”
“That’s a fast turn around,” Kakashi observes.
“There’s a medic shortage, and it’s important,” Rin replies. “He promised me a whole month of leave after.”
“Then I’ll take you out for lunch when you get back,” Kakashi says. “My treat.”
“You better follow through this time,” Rin says. She smiles, and Kakashi will forever remember just how tired she’d looked in that moment.
Kakashi will not remember, years later, if he’d actually intended to follow through or not. He will hope that he did, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. On her next mission, Rin is kidnapped. A reptilian summons from one of her teammates miraculously makes it back to report that everyone else on her team is dead, that the little grass lizard had only managed to escape by chance. Kakashi is pulled from his own leave and dispatched.
“They don’t kill medical ninja,” Minato-sensei tells him at the mission assignment, his hands in white-knuckled fists on his desk.
Kakashi nods once. Konoha medic-nin are the best in the world. They are rarely killed when the enemy thinks they can be coerced into healing for them. They both have to believe this, because the alternative is unthinkable.
Minato-sensei then says, “Bring her home.”
Minato-sensei’s eyes are hard, his body language twitchy and restless. Kakashi thinks this means that Minato wants to go himself, that of course their sensei would have jumped into action too, if he weren’t needed in Konoha. Konoha is still at war and chronically low on man-power, meaning Minato is constantly organizing and reorganizing missions with too few people. Kakashi is the only shinobi Minato can immediately spare for the rescue.
Kakashi does not remember the run over. He’ll reread the mission report exactly once, months later, with the desperate thought of figuring out where it went wrong. How he could have stopped it. Secretly wishing, perhaps, that he will discover there was no way he could have stopped it.
His report will read that he proceeds without delay to Rin’s mission location and discovers the fallen bodies of the rest of her team. He will write about using two dogs to track her through the swamps of Water Country. He will report that the spindly trees of the swamp, covered in moss and lichens, are good cover. The sulfurous smell of the swamp would usually be a hindrance, overwhelming all other scents, but he has no problems.
Kakashi will write in his report: She must have been actively bleeding. I concluded she was incapacitated such that she was prevented from healing herself.
What he later will decide he should have thought is: Something here doesn’t add up.
The only thing he remembers actually thinking is: I promised Obito.
Rin is being held in a prison camp just outside of Kirigakure proper. Kakashi banishes his dogs and slips into the camp easily under the light of a half-moon, pulling his headband up to use Obito’s sharingan. From this point onward, with the aid of Obito’s final gift, Kakashi has a crystal clear memory of events.
Kakashi sticks to the shadows cast by the tarp tents, eerily still and silent in the night. That most of the tents are empty does not immediately strike him as suspicious. Kirigakure is rapidly descending into their own civil war in addition to the international conflict, and Konoha has reports of them setting up camps like this all over Water Country as their need to hold more and more captive shinobi suddenly explodes. Kakashi assumes this camp is simply new. The tarps are a blinding, perfect white under the sickly glow of the moon. The sulfur stench of the swamp is gone, replaced by the salty smell of the sea and the sharp, heavy scent of oncoming rain.
Rin only has a single guard in her tent. Kakashi slits the Kiri-nin’s throat before he even processes the scene: the tent is a wide open space, carpeted by straw to fend off the perpetual dampness of Water Country ground. The only objects in the tent are a cot upon which Rin is laid on her back, an IV drip attached to her, and the corpse of her guard.
Kakashi peers over her, and Rin’s eyes are glassy and unfocused as she stares blankly upwards. Kakashi suddenly has a vision of Rin sitting against the wall of a cave, her mind lost under the interrogation genjutsu of an Iwa-nin. He remembers Obito describing her chakra to him, the wash of relief that genjutsu is easily broken and Kakashi hasn’t actually fucked up so bad he got one of his very few friends killed by his own negligence, and then the sickening panic at the deafening sound of crashing rocks—
Kakashi blinks rapidly, pushing all these thoughts down. Obito is here with him, in his gifted eye. Kakashi will save her. He promised.
“Rin,” Kakashi whispers. He cups her cheek in one hand to turn her face towards him. “Rin, it’s me. Can you hear me?”
I never get to see you, Rin had said. You stood me up.
Her chakra is sedated, flowing slowly but in its normal pattern. Not genjutsu, then. Drugs, probably. Kakashi remembers that Rin had once said the reason she often talks through her medical treatments is that it helps calm the patient.
“Can you see me?” Kakashi asks, moving to pull the IV from her inner arm. “I’m here, Rin. You’re safe.”
Rin doesn’t reply. Her heart beat is sluggish, but her chakra is as strong as ever. Kakashi hitches her into a rescue carry on his back and moves out.
Getting out of the camp is easy, and Kakashi’s suspicions finally rise. With his recent growth spurt, Kakashi is finally bigger than Rin, and her weight on his back barely slows him down as he dodges through the trees of the Kirigakure jungle. The warmth of her living body and slow, steady thump of her heartbeat are a comfort even as his body tenses. He doesn’t slow his run, but he pushes out his senses. Surely someone is following. Surely this could not have been that easy.
The first shuriken comes, and Kakashi leaps to avoid it. It spins under his feet, and Obito’s sharingan perfectly tracks how it falls and then shreds through the moss on the soft ground.
Just one? Kakashi wonders, automatically moving Rin to the front of his body even as he runs. This carry is more awkward, but she’ll be easier to protect from pursuers.
“Ka… kashi…?” Rin murmurs. Her eyes move to his face, although she can’t quite seem to focus. “No. Leave me.”
You better follow through this time, Rin had said. Look after Rin for me, Obito had said.
“What are you talking about?” Kakashi asks, ducking to avoid a volley of kunai and then zigzagging, sharingan darting around to triangulate where the enemy is. “You have to be in Konoha for me to treat you to lunch.”
Rin’s hand balls in the front of his shirt. Her brown eyes finally focus. “There’s something wrong,” she says.
Kakashi has no idea what she’s talking about. Aftereffects of the sedatives she had in her, maybe. He doesn’t have time to ponder it. The enemy is rapidly approaching them, and the number of projectiles being hurled their way is increasing.
It’s not a problem. It can’t be a problem. Rin can break up the drugs in her system herself and then nothing will be wrong. She’s a brilliant medical ninja. That was why she was on this mission in the first place, why she was kidnapped. There’s a medic shortage, she’d said. It’s important.
“You need to heal yourself,” he says. “Can you run at the same time?”
Rin seems out of it, her head bobbing in a motion that neither confirms nor denies. But her grip on him is strong, and she easily leaps from his arms and falls into a run besides him. When there’s another barrage of kunai and shuriken, she automatically speeds up to let Kakashi get between her and the enemy, the proper medical ninja response to such a circumstance.
Kakashi bats kunai out of the air with his short sword. There’s not more kunai, but they’re coming from more directions now. Either their purser is using clones or has received back up or both.
The quickest way back to Konoha is along the coast, where there are no trees and they can go at a flat run. But if they’re being pursued by multiple enemies, this route gives them the least amount of cover, and if Minato-sensei manages to rally a back-up team, they'll probably follow Kakashi’s original route through the swamp. It’s a safer bet to retreat back through the swamp, even if it will take longer.
“Rin,” Kakashi calls, and she turns her head to eye him grimly over her shoulder. He makes the headsign to tell her to veer in a new direction.
“We need to get to a safe place,” Rin calls, even as she follows his orders. Her hand presses over her stomach and Kakashi doesn’t even think twice about this in the moment. “I need to talk to Minato-sensei, outside of Konoha.”
“Minato-sensei is in Konoha,” Kakashi replies. Has Rin forgotten he’s Hokage now? You can’t just summon a Kage out of his village. “He has other missions.”
Rin opens her mouth to say more, only to suddenly duck into a roll as a ninja leaps at them from the foliage on the squat Water Country trees around them, from a different direction than their pursuers. Kakashi hurdles forward, sword drawn to engage the shinobi. The shinobi is clearly skilled, nearly as fast as Kakashi himself, and Kakashi manages only a superficial slice to the outside of the shinobi’s arm. The shinobi retreats immediately, only to be replaced by three more, all in Kiri ANBU uniforms, and Kakashi could maybe incapacitate them with some luck and quick thinking, but he definitely can’t fight them and defend Rin and then fight whoever is throwing kunai at them all at the same time—
He grabs Rin’s arm and bolts in the opposite direction, the two groups of Kiri ninja herding them towards the coast.
The threat of rain finally breaks, and thunder fills the air as it begins to pour. The jungle here provides some protection from the deluge, but the raindrops throw up scent particles and enhance Kakashi’s senses. This isn’t a comfort; he’s now acutely aware that they are being closed in on all sides. Something about Rin smells wrong and her chakra is turning violent, churning faster and stronger in her than it ever has, and Kakashi chalks this up to whatever drugs they pumped into her, but she slows down despite everything, her hand over her stomach and a pained look on her face and and and…
This is a trap, Kakashi thinks, mind kaleidoscoping with all the ways they’re been carefully directed to this outcome and yet providing him no solution. The miraculous escape of the summon, to tell Minato-sensei where to go. The scent trail. The lack of guards. The ninja already strategically placed to push them towards the coast, where their backs will be towards the sea and Kiri will be at an advantage.
You better follow through this time, Rin had said.
“When we get to the coast,” Kakashi says, voice low under the roll of thunder above them. “I’ll use raikiri to break through them. Then you have to run as fast as you can to Konoha. I’ll cover you.”
Rin isn’t spending up. She’s still slowing down. Her face looks panicked, and then collapses into a hard, resigned look he’s never seen on her.
“No,” she says, voice hard. “Kakashi, kill me right now. I’m being used. At this rate, I might end up attacking Konoha.”
Kakashi stares back at her.
Her hand is over her stomach again. Her chakra is raging, dangerous and inhuman. It’s not drugs. It’s part of the trap. None of the Kiri ninja have actually made an attempt to seriously injure them. They’re not herding them to the coast to block them in. They want them to use the faster route to Konoha. Rin is correct.
But.
Look after Rin for me.
No, he can’t.
Those that abandon their friends are worse than scum.
“I promised Obito I’d protect you,” Kakashi says, voice cracking as they break through the treeline. “I can’t kill you! There’s got to be some other way…”
The ground below them is flat planes of rock, slick with rain and seawater as waves crash against the stones. The ocean is an angry gray-blue with the storm.
Kakashi wants to tell her: No, we can find solution, as long as we can get away from these enemy ninja. He wants to say: There’s sensei and Kushina and Jiraiya and Sandaime-sama and all of them can help you. If we break through, I can send a dog. If we break through, if we find somewhere calm, if I can remember my fuinjutsu lessons, I can try a few containment seals. If we, if we, if we—
He doesn’t know how he can make this happen, not with what feels like the entire Kirigakure ANBU breathing down their neck. Rin stares back at him, and he knows she’s already made her decision.
“Kakashi,” she says, pleading.
“I’m going to take you to lunch,” he replies, and then the ANBU are breaking through the treeline.
Kakashi’s jabs his short sword up, Obito’s sharingan easily making out where the gaps in the shinobi’s ribcage are. The Kiri-nin press down on them, and Rin has given up defending herself, but Kakashi will not let her. He will break through, will get her to Konoha and figure out a way to summon help, and then he won’t be betraying Obito, he won’t be putting Konoha and everyone he loves in danger, and he will save Rin.
Kakashi is injured but he can barely feel it, and it’s fine anyway; Rin will be okay and then she can heal him, and he sees a gap in the wall of enemies, and he thinks that if only he can drag Rin through it and put some distance between them, he can fix this, he can save them both, and he grabs Rin and drags her forward— he has the thought that the gap is on purpose, to trick him into taking Rin home as quickly as possible, but surely now that they see the trap, they can avoid triggering it, they can use this to their advantage—
An ANBU appears in front of them. Kakashi, desperate and panicking, drops Rin’s arm and charges a raikiri.
The ANBU leaps back. It’s too late for him. Raikiri is too fast to dodge like that.
Kakashi plunges forward. He’s going to save her.
Rin is in front of him.
xXx
“They said when they arrived,” Minato-sensei says, “you were screaming, ‘Who took down the enemy?’ They found no survivors. Do you really not know what happened?”
Kakashi stares down at his sandals. His official diagnosis is chakra exhaustion from overusing his sharingan. The condition is dangerous, but he’s been allowed a home recovery, which means he’s reporting in the Hokage’s office instead of from a hospital bed.
“I don’t know,” Kakashi says. “I passed out.”
He doesn’t remember waking up. Obito’s sharingan means Kakashi will forever remember the look on Rin’s face as he plunged his hand into her chest, but he doesn’t remember what Rin’s dead body looks like. He doesn’t want to.
Kakashi hears Minato-sensei shift in his chair, and Kakashi looks up. His head feels heavy. Minato-sensei is slumped back, his palms over his eyes. Kakashi remembers waking up after the Kannabi bridge mission, to find Minato sitting next to him, grim but unaffected.
“What was her mission?” Kakashi asks.
She’d said it was important. He wants to hear that it was world-changingly important, that Rin saved lives. Otherwise, why would Minato-sensei have allowed her to die?
Minato-sensei pulls his hands back and peers over his desk at Kakashi. He does look exhausted, but maliciously, Kakashi wonders if it’s just from overworking himself, and not because his student is dead.
“Rin was a hero,” Minato-sensei says, point blank. “Over her tenure as a medical ninja, she saved tens of lives. She saved thousands with her sacrifice.”
Kakashi looks down at his hand. He doesn’t remember waking up, but he remembers washing the blood off his hand.
It would be easier to remember her as a hero, Kakashi thinks. Just like Obito, just like my father.
He doesn’t ask if Minato-sensei could have saved her, if Kakashi had gotten her out. He doesn’t ask if her mission was worth it, or if Minato-sensei should have given them both Hiraishin markers just in case, or if Minato-sensei had sensed it was a trap at any point, or how much Obito would hate him in this moment. He doesn’t ask if Minato-sensei has ever felt sick, sending shinobi off like pawns to die uselessly, watching his comrades fall for no good reason. He doesn’t tell Minato-sensei that he’d promised Rin lunch when she got back.
Kakashi has to believe in Konoha, or else nothing anyone has sacrificed makes sense.
So Kakashi sits up in his chair, straightening his back. His body is sore from exhaustion, but he can do this. He shoves his miserable feelings down, and mechanically reviews the facts of his mission.
“I proceeded without delay to Rin’s mission location…”
It’s soothing, to turn off his brain and go back into mission mode, to analyze the situation with the callous view of a shinobi. All he has to do is state facts with no emotion attached to them.
I had a mission, he’d told Rin.
Me too, she’d replied in understanding. Everyone has missions.