Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s their first time in Kusa. As long as the Third War has drug on, Konoha’s still not desperate enough to send gennin teams too close to the thick of the fighting. Their experience of the war’s been from in-village: sugar rations, curfews, and hospital rotations. But Team 7’s an unusual team, with an unusual skew of rankings and designations. The Sandaime’s decided he can no longer allow Namikaze Minato to ride the sidelines training a team instead of ending the war for him.

The rescue/capture team is in Kusa, dodging around giant mushrooms that saturate the air with musty spores. Its humid enough to induce sweat despite the late season. The gennin are taking it well enough; the jounin are both long accustomed.

Sabotage is generally ANBU prerogative; Minato’s spent enough years behind a mask to guess at what’s keeping ANBU so tied up that they’re unavailable to blow a bridge supporting Iwa’s supply lines. They’re five years into the Third War and facing a gridlock as the winter months approach. Black Ops are increasingly desperate, and so are the atrocities that despair leads them to commit.

With two jounin on the team, one newly minted as he is, Sarutobi Hiruzen decides that even with two green gennin tagging along, Team 7 could handle the mission to sabotage the bridge. The mission is twofold: Minato clears the way messily enough to discourage any further encroachment into Konoha’s hard won battle lines while the others destroy the bridge itself.

“Are we close?” Uchiha Obito asks, wiping dirt off his orange goggles, tapping at a mushroom with a foot so it releases another dense cloud of spores. He makes a face at it.

“Quiet, we’re in enemy territory.” Hatake Kakashi says. He’s been promoted as part of Konoha’s wartime effort to pad the ranks and while he knows its not based on his own merit, its just made him more intractable, more determined to prove himself. He’s skilled, but the village isn’t generally in the habit of awarding jounin rank to children. The Hatake prodigy is intelligent enough to recognize that, and young enough that the acknowledgement makes him even more rigid, more desperate.

Obito makes a face at him instead in response, switching to clumsy Konoha Standard Sign, which he’s only just started to memorize after Minato’s insistence that if they’re in the field, they’re undetectable. He has to spell it out like a beginner, exaggerated for sarcastic emphasis: yes, Captain Buttface

The night before, Minato had told him the truth of the White Fang, about why Kakashi is the way that he is, in an effort to foster goodwill between the rival boys. But Obito’s just as stubborn as any of his clansmen and years into the habit of needling him. The jabs come easier than understanding. They’re all still so young.

Rin smacks him upside the head when she sees and he yelps, rubbing at his scalp with a frown. Out of all of them, she’s the most stubborn, the most desperate to prove herself. She’s got a kunoichi’s rage, heightened by her civilian born background. There isn’t anything she wouldn’t do to prove her worth to a world that devalues her at every turn.

Before Obito can open his mouth to complain, Minato puts a finger to his lips. He’s been scouting ahead, removing teams of Iwa shinobi as he finds them. This area was supposedly clear of Earth’s influence; on paper, it made the C rank read like an easy in-and-out. The amount of resistance they’re butting up against puts a bad taste in his mouth. Its always the C ranks.

He signs but it’s too quick for anyone but Kakashi to read. At the gennin’s blank looks, he speaks with a low tone, “We’re coming up on Kanabi Bridge. We should split up soon.”

Rin shivers. “The Valley that the Gods Have Abandoned.”

Kakashi dismisses, “civilian superstition.”

Obito objects, loudly, and Minato runs their perimeter again, fast as thought. He’s civilian born, like Rin, but unlike her, he’s rather agnostic about the kami faith the civilian population favors. But even he must admit: there’s something ominous about the name of the bridge they’re here to destroy.

Minato finishes his loop and separates the boys before they start an all-out brawl. Jounin or not, Kakashi is only 12. Its easy to pick him up by the straps of his uniform and deposit him on the other side of the clearing before Rin gets involved. The boys might squabble but Rin’s prickly about her civilian born status and she usually ends squabbling with kunai.

Obito pales when Minato reminds him that this mission has the potential to shave months off the war. With Iwa’s supply lines disrupted, they won’t be able to wage an effective winter campaign and Konoha can retake all the lands they’ve lost in the center of the continent instead of the war dragging on into another spring.

Kakashi’s eyes are hard when he rejoins the team. There’s the faint sense of ozone in the air, sharp and snapping. He resents being manhandled but Minato can’t help but think of him as a child still. It’s been two years since his inclusion on Team 7 as a stunted chuunin; Hiruzen’d washed his hands of him after he imploded yet another team assignment. Minato remembers standing in Hiruzen’s office, flipping through his earmarked file as the Sandaime says: you’re his last chance

As close as his other two students are, almost attached at the hip, it would’ve been awkward for anyone to seamlessly fit into their team dynamic. But Kakashi never even tried. Knowing his history, it makes a tired sort of sense. Its thanks to a bunch of ninken that the boy’s even willing to be on a team.

Minato was a child prodigy. He knows how it isolates you, but there’s only so much team building he can sanction while there’s a war on.

Even after two years, the team still naturally divides into two. Kakashi positions himself across from Obito and Rin, arms crossed, the hilt of a tanto peeking over his shoulder.

Obito and Rin have closed ranks in the face of Minato’s imminent departure, where leadership will revert to Kakashi in his absence. Its his first important mission without Minato there and the legacy of his father's leadership weighs heavy on his narrow shoulders.

“Behave,” Minato says, and the Uchiha rolls his eyes, already fidgeting. “I’ll meet you at the outpost.”

He mentally reaches for the jutsu formula inscribed on the calfskin handle of a custom three-pronged kunai, each marker like pinpoints of light in his subconscious, scattered all across Fire, the closest pinging from the kunai he’d given to Kakashi as a promotion gift, half present half disaster relief measure.

With a last look, he vanishes into Hiraishin, just a flash of yellow in the dim funk beneath the mushrooms.

Obito snorts. “Show off.”

Kakashi says, “He’s only going alone because you would slow him down.”

Rin says, reasonably, “Anyone would slow him down.”

They bicker back and forth before Kakashi pulls rank. Its not his first time, but it feels different to be doing it as a fully realized jounin, as a new captain.

He leads, because he’s the tracker, with Obito in the middle as a budding trap specialist and Rin following up as the support medic. Even though they’re both older by two years, they do fall into formation with minimal grumbling. Gennin or not, they’re trained shinobi with a job to do.

It doesn’t take long for the Kanabi Bridge mission to go pear shaped. The Rock nin team hits them quick and hits them hard. They’ve pegged Rin as the easy target; even under her shinobi-affective face paint, there’s something about her that reads civilian. She’s young, female, with no discernible clan markings or sigils, running in a support position behind a dead ringer for an Uchiha even without the wide uchiwa stitched onto his gear.

They take Rin.

In the aftermath of the short battle, Kakashi writes her off. He’s still got a mission to complete, and the mission comes first. It’s simply protocol, and easier to face than grief.

Obito is so furious he’s breathing in little pants, the air around him hot and blistering. He’s got an orphan’s greedy heart and his clan’s stubborn pride: an outcast’s unreasonable loyalty to anyone who’s ever shown him any kindness. He won’t let her go. “People who abandon their comrades are worse than scum.”

It’s the exact wrong thing to say. Team 7 fractures even more. Obito goes one way. Kakashi goes another.

Kakashi heads for the bridge. He’s certain he’s made the right call. Any jounin would prioritize the mission. Any competent shinobi wouldn’t let teammates distract him from what needs to be done, especially to prevent more war.

Obito’s words echo in him on a loop. Its antithesis of everything he refused to inherit from the White Fang. Wasn’t that failure why they were even in this mess of a Third War?

Regardless, the words don’t fade. Neither does his teammate's determination as he says it, his disgust at Kakashi for abandoning her.

Minato wouldn’t have balked at leaving a teammate behind. Its moot to consider; Minato would not have allowed Rin to be taken. He’d already kept Kakashi safe from his overeager takedown of an Earth team the day before. Even now, Kakashi’s sure he’s slaughtering his way through any Rock nin he can get his hands on this very second, and he also knows it won’t bother him none. Even the civilians are starting to pick up on it, on the ways that their up-and-coming contender for the hat is just a little off.

Kakashi emulates his sensei’s impassivity now. He’s got a bridge to blow up.

Obito tracks Rin to a cave in the backwaters of Kusa, doton rendered and a lighter stone than what was found around Konoha. He’s not the best tracker, but he’s got a trapper’s eye for hiding places. He’s fuming, but mostly, he’s terrified.

He finds the second Rock nin before he finds Rin. A duo then, one to interrogate, one to guard, maybe a hidden scout in a support position somewhere close by. He’s determined and he palms a kunai despite his fear. All his righteous anger isn’t enough to outmatch a brick shithouse of a Iwa jounin, laughing at the untried gennin from the safety of a camouflage jutsu.

He’s failed Rin. He doesn’t have the power to save her. He’s helpless and furious about how unfair it is that she's gone and he remains. He’s simply not strong enough. There’s nothing he can do.

Before the jounin can kill him, something intervenes. A gray blur appears out of a hasty shunshin in the path of the kunai, right between Obito and the Iwa shinobi.

Kakashi takes the blade meant for Obito. Outnumbered now, the Iwa jounin backs off to recalculate.

Obito gapes at Kakashi, at the blood running down his face. He’s a little sick at the sight of his missing eye. Its instinctual in him, the revulsion. Its every Uchiha’s fear.

Kakashi saved him. Kakashi came back. Kakashi sacrificed an eye for him.

“Behind you!” Kakashi ignores the blood streaming down his face, ignores the pain, and hauls Obito off the branch before another kunai can skewer him. The Rock nin’s back, thinking Kakashi’s too injured to be much of a threat, too tiny to be a ranked jounin.

He’s wrong. Kakashi’s a live wire; he earned his promotion, and if he can just figure out where the man is, he can prove it. But he’s dizzy from blood loss and its all he can smell, bright and tinny in his nose.

Obito’s got his own kunai out, clutching at it with white knuckles. He's not crying anymore. They’re back-to-back. Even now, Kakashi can’t ask for help, but Obito’s a true Leaf ninja; he’s got teamwork in his bones. He doesn’t make Kakashi ask.

He’s terrified, circling on the branch, trying to hear past the whiplash of Kakashi’s unsheathed chakra blade. Any second now, the enemy will realize Rin’s naturally resistant to genjutsu and Iwa doesn’t take prisoners it can’t ransom back. They’ll kill her. They’ll kill her, then they’ll kill Kakashi, then they’ll kill Obito and the mission will fail.

The terror’s building in him and every circle brings him to the bloodstain on the wood grain where Kakashi lost his eye. Its altogether too much. Too much sick, helpless anger, too much battered, desperate grief. He’s heading to some sort of eruption.

The camouflaged jounin sneaks up on Kakashi’s blind side, taking ruthless advantage of the opening he’d made.

Something clicks in Obito. Something vital shifts. There’s nowhere for this feeling to go, and then there is.

The anger and the loss ignite. Everything around him sharpens into terrible clarity. He catches the movement of a footprint in the moss, such a small depression, he’d never noticed it earlier, but now it’s all he can see.

It tells him everything he needs to know.

He spins and stabs with his kunai, knocking Kakashi out of the way. His chakra’s high and thready, eyes spinning and spinning, everything gone cherry red and crystalized. He can’t help but follow the blood when it spurts, the motion of it the single most compelling thing he’s ever seen.

Its hard to read Kakashi’s expression under the mask, but he’s pale from the blood loss and his single eye is wide in shock. “Your eyes.”

There are two black tomoe in each of his teammate’s eyes, spinning fast enough to make him dizzy. Two. He didn’t even know that could happen.

The sharingan.

Obito blinks, trying to calm down, almost lost in the incredible detail, the movement of dust motes and spore clouds and biting gnats, feeling his chakra draining away rapidly. The sharingan pulls from his reserves steadily, almost tipping him into depletion. Even then, the feedback is almost too much to ignore. Too much information, overwhelming in its minutiae.

But even the sharingan can’t distract him from Rin.

“No time,” he pants. “Let’s go.”

The wounded Iwa jounin retreats and they race him back to the cave. Kakashi takes down the distracted interrogator holding Rin under sustained genjutsu attack, but she’s fighting like a lion against it. They’ll get nothing from her.

When the technique shatters, she blinks back to reality. “Obito, your eyes!”

Kakashi pulls her up and she goes even paler when she sees him, the empty socket weeping red. “No time, move!”

Rin springs up but outside, the last jounin’s reached the cave and he’s pissed. He’s not as slow as they’d hoped. His hand seals, when he starts forming them, aren’t slow either.

Doton rumbles underfoot as the technique activates. Rin’s already far enough away, but Kakashi’s woozy, his reaction time slower than it should be.

Overhead, the roof crumbles, breaking into massive chunks of pale stone. It’s all Obito can see.

Obito’s panicking, but he’s bigger than Kakashi by over a head. Its easy to pick him up by the straps of his uniform like Minato had earlier, to pick him up and throw him bodily out of the cave.

The cave-in comes thundering down. Rin’s shrieking but she retaliates, driving the injured jounin into a retreat, but its Kakashi with the secondary in doton. His hands are shaking when he forms the signs to clear the rubble.

Rin skids to Obito’s side, her hands lighting up with a green glow. Kakashi’s no medic, but he’s seen enough people die to know the truth of it.

Obito’s a goner. It’s a miracle he’s even conscious, but shock is a hell of a drug. Half of his body is smashed under a boulder too big to move. There’s no sense of his chakra at all. He’s already going cold.

Rin’s more stubborn than all of them put together, but she can barely heal scrapes and bruises. She’s just started her iroyonin training, but even a seasoned medic couldn’t fix this. The damage is too severe. He’s going to die.

Even dying, Obito’s too kind. Too forgiving. Somehow, he finds the words he hadn’t had earlier, when he didn’t recognize all the ways Kakashi didn’t know how to express his grief.

Rin cries when he asks. Kakashi can’t say anything at all. There’s no objection that survives in the face of Obito’s sacrifice. It’s his dying wish. He can only accept.

Rin’s crying, but her hands are steady. She’s singing to him as a distraction, some civilian hymn neither of the clan born know but it’s easy to recognize the cadence of prayer.

Obito’s fading fast. It won’t be long now.

Kakashi doesn’t want to see it. Everything’s limned in red in a way he knows he’ll never be able to forget. He drags Rin out once Obito stops responding to her increasingly desperate verbal prompts. They leave him blind to bleed out in the rubble.

Minato meets them at the rendezvous. He takes one look at them and his expression doesn’t change. Rin’s crying a steady constant. Kakashi’s swaying on his feet.

Minato only unties his hitai ate and reties it over Kakashi’s face in a slanted eyepatch. “Don’t let anyone see,” he says, then picks him up. They run back to Konoha with only Rin’s misery keeping time with the beat of Minato’s feet over in the canopy, a steady tempo that’s all Kakashi can feel as he’s carried back.

It never gets any better.

A month later, Uchiha Obito wakes up to giggling singsong ghosting through his thoughts. There’s something thick and white covering him. When he tries to escape, dragging himself by his chin when his legs won’t hold him, that mingling of an Uchiha’s potent anger and a gennin’s helpless fear makes a third tomoe swirl to life in his single eye sunken into a nest of deep scars.

In Konoha, the memorial is quick and precise. They’ve got mourning down to a science. This is the fourth funeral they’ve had today; the lack of a body is only a small hiccup in the proceedings, but its one that make the Uchiha titter and frown.

Rin dresses all in black, hugging her parents and avoiding the Uchiha in the crowd who’ve only shown up out of obligation. They never acknowledged Obito before. Up behind the podium, Minato tells a small anecdote about when Team 7 first got together. Its short, devoid of personality, and at the end, Minato tells a joke, as if to lighten the mood.

There’re a few halfhearted laughs, just as obligatory as most of the audience in attendance. Rin is suddenly full of so much rage; rage matched in intensity only by her misery. She knows, as only civilians can, how dreadfully swift and terribly pointless death can be. Shinobi are convinced people die for missions, for measurable goals. But civilians know people just die. There’s rarely any sense in the wars between Daimyo.

From the distance, where he’s hiding from the Uchiha Clan, Kakashi watches his sensei make light of Obito’s sacrifice and the hurt in him is suddenly so urgent and desperate that under his new headband, his sharingan, Obito’s sharingan, spins with three tomoe.

Chapter Text

Chapter 1: Human Sacrifice

The sun’s going down, stretching shadows long and dark through the trees. Rin shoulders her pack tighter on her shoulders and continues to tree walk high over the ground, flying through the massive Hashirama trees. Its not a hard pace, but if it gets dark enough that she can no longer aim through the branches properly, she’ll have to finish her run on the ground. She doesn’t mind traveling overground, but she feels safer in the canopy.

She’s still in Fire Country, but she’s close enough to the border to be wary. Its peacetime, the Third War over a few scant months, but Rin was born in the Second War and graduated into another. There’s been enough border skirmishes in the wake of the war that she approaches the outpost with caution. Yu’s recently demilitarized, in the process of reorganizing into a tourism-based economy, and it’s left the Hot Water shinobi turning nukenin in droves. The ex-Steam ninja should know better than to pick a fight with Fire, should turn north and head through Shimo to Kumo, but a fair enough number have turned bounty hunter or mercenary or pirate that if she’s going to run into trouble out here, so far from Konoha, it should have been them to blame.

She checks the sinking sun for the time. She’s right on track; they’ll be expecting her within the next few hours. Most chuunin spend a few months at outpost deployments or on patrol units, but as a medic, Rin’s a bit of an exception. Medics are support positions, too valuable to risk on a battlefield, too vulnerable to send on solo missions, with one of the highest rates of being nabbed by enemy villages among all the specializations. Easy targets, unused to combat as they tend to be, with a bad rap among the combat squads for costing lives in their defense.

Rin’s an exception to this because she’s no regular medic. She’s a battlefield iroyonin, or at least, she’s going to be.

Still, even with a different concentration than most medic specializations, she wouldn’t usually be granted a solo mission like this. She wouldn’t have been, during the war. Maybe Konoha’s testing the peace, seeing what they can expect, and besides, even though she’s a chuunin, this is a simple enough C rank. She’s not leaving Fire. She should be safe enough.

The medical equipment she’s carrying to resupply the border outposts is delicate. She’s more suited to transporting it than some chuunin corps ninja, who’d just cram it in a storage seal and run it ragged between Konoha and Yu. Its more efficient to have a medic deliver the supplies, since she’s well familiar with its handling.

It gets dark enough she can’t see well enough to continue in the trees. Traveling at night doesn’t faze her but the second after she drops to the ground, she waits in silence for the night to settle around her. Nightjars. Owls. Bugs. Little skittering things in the brush. When nothing feels amiss, she continues towards the border on foot.

It’s been a wet spring and under the leaflitter its just mud. Its early enough in the season that once the sun goes down and the wind picks up, its chilly. She’d be cold if she were standing still but the steady pace she sets keeps her warm enough.

It’s a clear night, a nearly full moon providing enough light for her to stay on course. There’s not a path to follow; the locations of the outposts are secret, but obvious enough to any shinobi looking. Fire’s border is ringed with them, a few every hundred miles, small enough to be unobtrusive but large and strategic enough to house small garrisons for easy deployment during wartime. They should be mostly abandoned now, depopulated by the withdrawals back to the Leaf, but the rotating chuunin receive biweekly supply drops of food and gear. Messenger hawks maintain the communication lines in a vast web, all leading back to Konoha. Patrols supposedly rotate around from one outpost to the next, but this outpost’s team has been wounded in a skirmish with bandits and need medical supplies. Poison is suspected, and the antidotes she’s carrying are delicate, unstable enough to have the components separate under stress, rendering them useless, or even harmful.

There are other curriers, but Rin volunteered for this mission. As much as she loves her apprenticeship, hospital training only does so much to convince her she’s improving. Two years ago, she left her teammate to die in a cave because she wasn’t good enough. Never again.

Her mother always said there was more to chakra than killing. Kakashi always said her family’s faith was illogical, but Rin grew up with the ghost of a kunoichi aunt her civilian mother remembers in prayers every day. It’s a responsibility that’s haunted her all her life. Her team carries their loss differently, but sometimes, they can’t help but remind each other of the wound they share.

And maybe she needs to get out of the Leaf Village for a few days. Minato frowned at her for taking the mission, but he never did anything to stop Kakashi, so he doesn’t stop her either. Kakashi does solo missions all the time; she really only ever sees him now-a-days at the hospital, after he’s pushed himself into chakra exhaustion.

Stupid boys. Geniuses, the both of them, but they never learned how to talk to each other. They’ve been skittering around each other since the official end of the war. Whenever Minato forces them together for some team bonding, driven more by Kushina’s indominable will than any desire on their parts for awkward reconciliation, it just reminds her of who isn’t there.

In her mind is Minato laughing at Obito’s funeral. Kakashi wasn’t even there.

She knows it’s the war to blame and not either of them, but once Minato took the hat, there’s no where else for the blame to easily lie. Minato ended the Third War. Kakashi vanished into missions. Her dad said everyone copes differently. It doesn’t feel like coping, what she’s been doing, but she’s helping people. And that feels good, to use her skills and training to help people instead of hurt people. She’s hurt enough. She swore she’d never be the type of shinobi to bait a gennin team. She won’t be cruel, even if she learned all the best ways cruelty can move in a person, how efficient, how easy it can be, if she lets it.

She keeps traveling through the night. Yu’s Capitol, where the Hot Water Daimyo lives, isn’t far from the border they share with Fire. Its usual for the buffer countries between the Elemental Nations to throw their lot one way or the other and Yu crammed itself as far from Kumo as it could. The nation of Shimo was passable by foot only during the warmer months, but Lightning had a bad habit of killing civilians to lower morale during the war and the reputation lingers.

All these factors keep the area she’s in more active than the southern stretch of the border with Yu. There should be patrols all through this area, both from Yu and Konoha. In the Capitol, the Shogun’s even got a number of samurai to protect his various Daimyo from the militaries of the continent, supposedly because samurai are honorable and not prone to accepting bribes or selling out their contracts for a raise. These are just rumors: she’s never met a samurai, even in the war. She can’t imagine one in a trench. There’s no honor in the war she’s seen.

But she’s on the lookout for shinobi activity. The Fire chuunin patrol should be in the area, and on the lookout for her. There should be cicadas and other night sounds.

There aren’t.

The second the unusual silence around her registers, there’s only the barest sliver of moonlight reflecting off a pale mask before something hits her from behind and everything goes dark.

She comes too groggily, slow and confused enough her mind immediately thinks she’s been drugged. Everything feels different, feels off, some unknown unease radiating from her center. She keeps her eyes closed and her breathing light. She’s been stripped, and the floor under her is pebbly and uneven. She’s cold enough not to notice the liquid touch of the ink at first but when she does, the instinctual fear is enough to kickstart her heart in her chest.

Minato taught her enough about fuuinjutsu for her to know how very badly this could go. It scares her more than her nakedness.

The fear shortens her breath. She can’t feel her chakra at all: they must have a suppression tag on her somewhere. She can’t feel any weapons nearby and her hands are bound. She’s got a few ideas regardless. She opens her eyes, giving up on pretending unconsciousness.

She’s in a fucking cave. Figures: it’s always caves when she’s taken. This one looks natural: there’s mildew growing over the walls and its old enough to be weatherworn. The limestone’s pitted with the whorls of tiny shells, common enough in the low country of Hot Water, especially if she’s by the coast.

When she turns her head, its not Yu nukenin blocking her view of the exit, each one toeing the line of a massive sealing matrix spanning the length and breadth of the cave, kanji inked up and down the walls around her.

Any shinobi worth her salt can identify the look of Black Ops. Konoha’s ANBU wore stylized animal masks on the rare times she’s gotten a glimpse of them. But these aren’t Konoha’s ANBU, or even ex Black Ops from Yugakure. There’s 16 of them, multiple squads, each wearing a blank white ceramic mask with an identical wave pattern across the chin. The only variation is in the colors of the markings, grey and green, the stage colors of ghosts and the dead.

Each of the mask ninja wears four lines on their forehead. Kiri.

She knows the least about Kiri. Water’s famously isolationist, gleefully butchering anyone who gets close. But she knows enough to know she should be on the wrong side of Fire to tangle with ninja from the Hidden Mist. Kiri wasn’t even in the past wars, preferring to be opportunistic about destroying entire nations via 7 overpowered Swordsmen, but they’ve been quiet since a Leaf ninja took out 4 of the 7 Swordsmen in the Third War. These ninja don’t have swords, which is weird. She thought kenjutsu and Kiri was fairly ubiquitous.

She doesn’t move, even to cover herself. The matrix around her doesn’t feel active, but that can change in an instant, with the barest snap of chakra. And she knows enough about sealing to know that disrupting the matrix will most likely make it explode, something she can only hope will kill the Kiri ninja and not just herself.

She’s not formally trained for information gathering, but most kunoichi have their tricks. There’s something wrong with this whole scene. She’s not sure if it’s the lack of pinstripes or cowprint or bandages around necks, the absurd number of ninja in the cave, or the fuuinjutsu, but she tries to fish anyway.

“If you plan to ransom me, it won’t work. Yondaime sama doesn’t negotiate.”

Its maybe a lie. She can never be sure how far her sensei is willing to go for her, especially now that he’s responsible for an entire village and not just her team. But it’s a good policy to assume. No one’s ever tried to use her against Minato before, its not like Kakashi ever got kidnaped, but it’s a safe enough bet that in the eyes of the village at large, she’s fairly worthless.

“Shut up,” one says from behind a mask and cuts through the wire binding her hands. Clothes fly at her face, and she catches them reflexively. “Get dressed.”

The second the flak jacket crosses the calligraphy, she bolts. She’s smaller than most, and fast, and when she darts for the door of the cave, it surprises them. She’s unarmed but one hand scrambles over herself, searching for the suppression tag. If she can get it off, she’ll have her scalpels, and in the hands of a medic, that’s better than any kunai.

But she’s still one girl against 16 Black Ops. She doesn’t get far. She bucks and kicks, biting when she can, but they drag her back by her long hair and throw her down on the rocks. Before she can try again, there’s the feeling of chakra moving, water natured like her own, but choppier, waves over water instead of deep pools.

The deluge hits her, hosing her down, smearing the ink over her into illegibility. Its unseasonably freezing, like its mixed with ice. Her teeth chatter and she convulses but it tells her what she needs to know.

Her fingers ghost over the suppression seal and its brutal, carved deep in the blade of her shoulder. She hisses. That’s high level fuuinjutsu, to carve seals onto a living person instead of just painting them with ink and her fear ratchets up another notch. What kind of shinobi are these? There can’t be more than a handful of people on the entire continent skilled enough in sealing for this.

It’ll be almost impossible to break. Its stable, dug into the meat of her shoulder. She’ll need to score it through to disrupt it and her nails aren’t nearly sharp enough.

She shivers and puts her clothes on, thinking fast. They haven’t given her back her kunai pouch or any weapons. The bundle of clothes consists of just her gear: sandals, shorts, shirt and apron. Her face paint is waterproof; it should be fine and that’s a small comfort. She not completely naked with her paint. They’ve withheld her mesh armor and her chuunin vest, but the kunoichi wear is reinforced in itself and she’s made further modifications.

There’s no chance that all of them will look away simultaneously so she has to be fast over sneaky. Once she settles the clothes over herself and tugs them into place, her head turns to the side, gnawing on the seams of her shirt, where she’s sewn hidden senbon. She gets one free and spits it at a mask, grinding her shoulder into the limestone to try to break the seal.

The Kiri nin easily dodges. She meets a fist for her effort.

They give her back her emptied kunai pouch, just to be insulting. They’ve confiscated the three-pronged kunai: she can see it shoved blade first into the wall of the cave, over by her trashed medical equipment, the antidote pooling on the ground. The poisoned chuunin in the outpost is dead and doesn’t know it yet.

They’ve destroyed the jutsu formula on the handle of the kunai and it’s damning enough evidence. Minato may not be able to jump right to her, but he’d know the second his kunai went offline. He tracks them all, she’s not sure how, but he’ll notice this. She can’t be sure how long she’s been captive, but he doesn’t waste time. Minato will already be moving to retrieve her.

It’s a terrifying realization. Her captors aren’t expecting to survive. Her sensei’s vengeance is legendary. There might not even be a Kiri after he’s done. As a shinobi, he can end wars, but as a Hokage, he can start them just as well. She’s looking at shinobi with nothing to lose.

She redoes her leg wraps with shaking fingers. It still doesn’t make any sense. Kiri was neutral in the wars of the continent. Why would they provoke Fire? She can’t for the life of her figure out what they gain by pissing off the new Yondaime Hokage of the Leaf by kidnapping his student. Hell, Kushina will go on the warpath herself; she hates Water and Whirlpool’s vengeance is her own.

Her brain stutters a bit at the thought. Kushina. Uzu.

Rough hands shove her out the cave. “Get moving. We don’t have all night.”

She stumbles in the blackness, playing up her helplessness. Since when have masks talked? ANBU are famously silent. It’s another thing that feels wrong here. Her eyes check the stars, check her surroundings, check her internal clock. She doesn’t think they’re in Fire, or Yu. The unincorporated lands to the north are vast, with the grasslands of Taki in the west. The trees here are smaller and scrubbier than those in Fire, stubby; most look like they can’t hold the weight of a single shinobi.

She’s got a pretty good idea of where she is. They can’t have taken her far and she was already close to the border. South, she thinks. Straight south to Fire, to Konoha. To allies, to safety.

To home.

She’s marched west and that makes less sense than anything so far. Her eyes pick out the shape of the kami in the stars. She says a quick prayer.

She rolls, a small, quick target, then springs up on her feet and takes off through the trees, seeking the darkest, most cramped parts of the forest like any Konoha ninja. There’s simply too many to shake for long, and all jounin at that, ANBU level, and without her chakra they’ll think she’s just a civilian girl running blind.

But she can fix that easily enough. She gnaws out the senbon sewed into the seam of her other shoulder and its easy enough to twist to stab it deep into her shoulder, and then rip it straight up. The pain tears through her and she shakes her blood on the ground; Kiri’s not the only shinobi after her and Konoha has better trackers, she’s pretty sure. At least, she’s never seen anyone hide from Kakashi’s pack for long.

The second the suppression seal breaks her chakra returns to her in a flood but something’s wrong. It doesn’t feel like her chakra. Rin’s water is a still, deep pool, a well she draws from with clear focus and intent. This chakra is an ocean, a riptide, and it burns.

Its too much to bear. She falls to her knees, panting, the weight of an ocean crushing her to the forest floor. It burns, it burns, and it shouldn’t.

But Rin’s got a medic’s chakra control. She wrestles herself out from under it, trying to locate her own reservoir. Her shoulder’s healing. She doesn’t think she did that.

But she compartmentalizes. It’s one of the handiest skills she learned from her sensei. Problems for later. Future Rin can deal. It’s her own mask, familiar as the paint on her face.

That chakra flare alerts every shinobi in miles, she has seconds to move and move fast. She squashes her signature down as much as she can, keeping a death grip on that burning cauldron, that corrosive ocean that doesn’t feel like her.

Senbon gripped in a white knuckled hand, she runs. She’s no jounin but she earned her vest, earned her wartime promotion in the trenches of Iwa elbow deep in the intestines of some poor Leaf tokubetsu who didn’t have the good sense to duck when the bombs came. Her time in the war was all Blast Corps and kekkei genkai, Iwa’s nastiest massacres and stone mazes that led to kill boxes. This isn’t the first meatgrinder she’s been caught in. She’s small, and she’s fast, and she’s got sneaky in spades.

She doesn’t have to beat 16 Kiri shinobi. She just has to race them to the border. And if there’s one thing she learned from Minato, it’s speed.

It’s not easy. Cold as she is, she rolls through a small creek, a tributary to the eventual river border. She doesn’t think any of the Kiri nin are tracking her by smell, but she doesn’t have time to search her clothes for trackers in an elegant way. This should be sufficient. They must not have any sensors with them either, which is a stroke of luck she doesn’t expect but will happily exploit.

She stays close to the creek, following it roughly south when she can. Up ahead, she hears movement through the trees and is forced to veer west to avoid the searchers. She keeps the handy source of water nearby; if she’s cornered, suiton is her only elemental offense. It won’t do much against Kiri shinobi but its all she has.

She runs and she dodges Black Ops and she doesn’t think about why she’s even seeing masked ninja in the trees ahead of her, until she does. When has she ever been skillful enough to see masked shinobi? Or ANBU level ninja sloppy enough to be seen?

She runs south and is continually forced more and more west by shinobi that feel more like burning than drowning. The Killing Intent is familiar, but it shouldn’t be. Why do so many Kiri ninja have so few water natures?

Its only then she realizes she’s being herded.

She could kick herself for falling into the trap. Of course she didn’t really get the drop on 16 masked ninja. But why the charade? Nothing makes any sense, and she’s always prided herself on being intelligent. She’s not the genius prodigy of her other teammates, but she works hard and studies just as hard. She hasn’t thought she’s panicking, but to have fallen for this means that the sealing must have thrown her more than she realized.

Her subconscious turns over the problem. The sealing. The terror of the ink on her skin. Someone skilled enough in fuuinjutsu to carve a suppression onto a living person. Kanji scrawling over the walls.

She stumbles, unease roiling through her, the wrongness pulling at her like a storm. Se bites down on the panic and lifts her shirt, channeling what little chakra she dares.

A busted seal rises to the surface of her skin like ink through deep water. Its….wonky. The lines are jagged and broken, the kanji nearly illegible. Minato and Kushina’s seals are always so neat, like art. This looks sloppy, like a field rendered surgery. Barely sufficient. Temporary.

She yanks her shirt back down. She didn’t know much about Water, and she knows little about Bijuu, but every Konohan has the cultural memory of Uchiha Madara riding atop the Kyuubi’s head in his last battle against Senju Hashirama, who’d won, then sealed all 9 Tailed Beasts away, selling each to a village in some sort of mutual-assured-destruction-leveraged-as-a-deterrent bid.

That means Kiri has one.

And they put it in her.

She staggers forward. Jinchuuriki. Vessel. Weapon of war. Human sacrifice.

Ahead of her is a river, wide enough to make an open space, a clearing. The border. Fire. Safety.

Burning, burning. In her is a war and it’s spilling over, washing out the continent in its wake.

She can’t go home. She spent enough time in Iwa and Kusa to recognize a bomb.

What a brutal plan. Konoha won’t survive a Bijuu rampage. Her family is in Konoha, with untold other civilians, innocents with nothing to do with the wars of shinobi. This is war, the epitome of all fighting, and it’s directed by people who don’t care about the killing. That craves the death. She swears. She swears. She’s a medic. War took enough from her already. It can’t take anything else. She won’t let it.

She staggers into the clearing by the river, shining bright in the full moon. She’ll make them kill her first. If they want the Leaf, they can have her instead, and choke on it.

The Kiri nin flicker along the edges of the clearing, hemming her in, driving her west. She throws her chakra wide and unstable, bubbling and roiling like the end of the world. There’s a bark, and an answering whiplash of Killing Intent, crackling and bright.

She’d know that chakra signature anywhere. Kakashi.

There isn’t time to warn him before the fight begins. Her watchers are content to let her be, but Kakashi is already an accomplished jounin, in the Bingo Book with a sizeable bounty. He switched his specialization from tracking over to assassination after Obito died and, as much as she hates it, it’s a trade that suites him more and more as the years go by.

He joins the fight with lightning crackling and snapping around him. The jounin wisely scatter and regroup. Kakashi controls battlefields, even outnumbered as he is, just by being there. He makes a beeline for her, headband pushed up to show an eye cherry red and spinning. The sharingan. Obito’s eye, staring at her in horror.

Inside her, something opens a single slitted, blazing scarlet eye and the rage is enough to drown the world.

The seal unravels. There’s the sound of one thousand birds.

She’s going to kill them all.

There’s never enough time: for her and Obito, for Kakashi, for the entire shinobi world just barely out of war. Maybe someone else would have known how to bear this burden, but Rin is civilian born. She knows what it means to be a casualty to incomprehensible power. There is something inside her that will make the Third War start all over again and she can’t let it.

She’s only been a jinchuuriki for a few hours, but she knows what it means to be a human sacrifice.

The Chidori arcs in front of her, bright enough that the afterimage sears itself against the darkness and the incoming enemy shinobi. She throws herself with all the speed she learned from the Yellow Flash of the Leaf himself and Kakashi’s hand punches through her chest, in through her ribs, her lung, out through her shoulder blade.

Something is screaming, a roar loud enough to shake the ground around her. Blood sheets down in an ocean of red.

“Kakashi—” she can’t explain. There is no forgiveness.

The last thing she sees is Kakashi’s mismatched eyes, Obito’s eye, wide and dilated in horror, the pattern in it twisting and warping in a rage she feels every day, in a grief she’s lived with for years.

Kakashi pulls his arm back through her, gloved to the elbow in her blood.

She falls.

Chapter Text

Chapter 2: Obito: Another Cave

It’s night out but hard to prove it. The only sign’s the return of one of the White Zetsu clones oozing through the cave wall with their report. It’s disgusting to see, and the swirly-faced clone calls out a sing-song tone in awful counterpoint to the creepy gross zetsu slithering down the wall like some weird cave mold.

And you call him a down a down
And then you say a down a
My friend come home for night is long
A down a down a down a

It’s like the worst lullaby. But Obito’s gotten used to these types of rude awakenings, and the swirly-faced zetsu’s sing-song voice haunts his dreams quite frequently. There was a time when most of his body was attached to the clone, folded closed over his crushed right side, and that silly/menacing voice whispered into every dream and waking thought he had for two solid years.

He squashes a pillow over his face in protest but sits up in his cot. Swirly loves pulling his leg but if he ignores the clone, then Spikey will get involved and the spikey clone is his own personal drill sergeant. He’s already sore enough from the clone’s strongarmed training today; he doesn’t need extra pushups this late into the night. Besides, the reconnaissance reports are the only glimpses he gets at the outside world. He tries not to be too eager.

He rises, groaning. There’s the general unease he feels at being trapped underground, the sight of raw rock face arching over him, the memory of being crushed in a cave-in years ago, but he ignores it as best he can. There’s the lingering pain in the right side of his body: most of his thigh, his entire arm, the right side of his chest and shoulder, in parts up to his neck and warped face where the grafts still don’t sit right with him. His balance is getting better and he’s training with Spikey every day to get stronger but there’s something in the cells of the white flesh, something about its chakra that doesn’t mesh well with his natural body.

Swirly is suddenly right there, draped over his good arm, still babbling some childish tune, an expected call-and-response Obito’s long since grown tired of, and he grimaces and shakes them off like they’ll stain. There’s a tingle in the artificial parts of his patchwork body when one of the clones touches him and he’s starting to question that feeling.

The field clone plops to the ground of the cave and gives their report. Peely appears up through the floor; they’ve been in the main chamber ignoring him but it’s like Swirly’s song summons them. They glance at Obito like something slippery.

Something in him sharpens at that look. He’s known these particular clones for years: he knows their mannerisms and tells. As weird and alien as they can be, there’s a certain intelligence to them. Peely’s never looked at him like that before, like this has suddenly turned into a test, and he’s already behind. This is the clone that cheered the first time he walked on his own, did endurance training by sitting on his back as he did one-armed pushups under the old man’s watchful eye. This clone has supported him in a weird way for years and never once have they looked at Obito like he’s failed in some fundamental way.

It’s a look he recognizes enough from his clansmen. Obito’s restless fidgeting stills. “What is it?”

Peely ignores him. The field zetsu says, “Rin and Bakashi have been spotted by the scouts nearby. They’re surrounded by Kiri nin.” They pause before finishing, while Swirly titters. “It doesn’t look good.”

Its hits Obito in heavy chunks. Rin and Kakashi, here in the Mountain’s Graveyard, and his spirits soar at the thought of his team so close by. Then, Kiri nin, surrounded, and it plummets hard, like the ceiling giving way on him. The silence before Spikey repeats, oddly serious: it doesn’t look good.

He’s up on his feet, ramrod straight, chakra gathering like sparks inside him, his remaining eye spinning into a bloody red. He’s in a chamber off the main cavern but he exits his room with the cot and medical equipment into the big space to better hear the zetsu. He’s not supposed to be in the main room unless explicitly invited but for this, he’ll risk the wrath of Spikey.

The cave slots into a memorized relief: the high ceilings, the patterns of granite, the movement of the White Zetsu clones milling about, that weird statue thing that Madara leeches his lifeforce from, the one with the creepy, closed eyes that always seems to watch him.

The old Uchiha himself is motionless on his wooden throne and Obito’s single sharingan skips over him to take in everything else, burning hot with the knowledge that he’s surely trapped here still. There’s no way Madera will let him leave, and he’s not strong enough to escape by himself. He’s never been strong enough to resist the rock fall.

This is the man who saved his life and Obito hates him so much in this moment that his eye burns with it. He’s going to immolate. He’s going to burn down the world. He can’t sit back and leave his team to die, or he’ll hate himself so much he’ll want to die of it.

Zetsu’s here too, the Original one that all the white clones come from. Obito thinks they grow them like weeds but he’s not sure. Madara’s stump has some affinity for the Wood Release of all the fucking things and Zetsu has some proficiency with the mokuton; Obito’s seen them at it, calling rotten roots to their bidding, fronds like a flytrap around their bifurcated face. Or maybe it’s something else; fuck if he knows what plants are, and double fuck him if he knows anything about the bloodline of the fucking Senju. The clones can’t seem to do it. That’s been a migraine of a mystery for over two years; Spikey broke his jaw once under the guise of training for asking too many what-the-actual-fuck type questions about it.

But there’s few enough zetsu between him and the sealed exit. Madara’s stuck to the stump. Zetsu’s at his side. Spikey’s behind him in the medical chamber and he thinks he can take Peely and Swirly in a fight. The noncombatant zetsu are easy enough targets. Its Spikey and Zetsu he has to watch out for.

He’s tried to escape before, dragged himself by his chin even, pleading, but he’s never been strong enough. If he had been, maybe the cave-in wouldn’t have happened like it did. But with the new training, he’s gotten faster at least, and before anyone can stop him, he’s sprinting at the wall of the cave, the one Madera sealed shut with a huge bolder. He’s gathering speed, gathering chakra in his fist, and he brings his dominant arm back to smash through the bolder and escape.

His right arm, the grafted arm, the one composed of cultured Hashirama cells, collapses in on itself, pulps against the unforgiving rock face, falls completely off of his body to land with a sick slap at his feet. He can’t feel the pain of it through the building rage, the familiar anger he lives with and finds himself reaching for more and more every day, but he feels the sensation of his arm just liquifying: fingers smashing into ulna, palm going flat and smeary. The sight is saved forever by his sharingan, and the recoil sends him staggering, his balance destroyed by the loss of his arm.

“Fuck!”

Swirly catches him before he can hit the ground and his empty shoulder socket creaks at the touch. He howls and bucks but the clone is speaking to him, saying words that filter slowly through the roaring in his ears, his sharingan reading the movement of those weird spiral arms on their face more than his ears pick up on. He should be better at lip reading, but it’s not like Swirly really has lips to read.

“Your body’s not strong enough to break through on its own,” they’re saying, and their face is splitting open, the swirls that spiral up to make their body unraveling into separate branching arms. It’s disturbing enough to see that for a moment Obito stops fighting. In his second of stillness those waving arms touch him, reach out and start to bind themselves to his body again, wrapping up his leg, covering his body with the clone’s own. It’s horribly reminiscent of Obito’s first full year in the cave, when he lived only by having the clone’s body grafted to him to keep him from rejecting the artificial cells.

Swirly winds around him and Obito is frozen in terror. Before he can even try to pry them off, there’s that sing-song voice, close enough to be coming from his bones, and he shudders as the clone wraps their dead white arms in a spiral over his face, making a mask with just one eye hole.

“Wear my body,” the clone says, tightening around him, “and you can break free from this cave.”

Over by Madara, the original Zetsu just watches. They’re the Zetsu who’s not a clone, who only speaks to Madara, who is loyal to Madara in the way that all the clones inherited. Something is wrong with everything, but Obito can’t focus on it past the knowledge that Rin and Kakashi are trapped and facing enemy shinobi. He can’t question why Swirly is betraying Madara, why the other zetsu let them, not when they’re offering Obito a way out.

His chakra cringes away from the contact, but he clenches the clone’s fist, pulling on chakra from the stumpy statue itself to augment his hit. Obito rears back and punches the wall hard enough that it shatters under his knuckles. It shards and skitters on the floor of the cave, the falling rocks thrilling through his blood. The only thing that keeps the memory at bay is his activated sharingan, already peering through the dust to look down the long dark hallway beyond, slanting upward. For the first time in years, Obito feels a slight breeze on his face, blowing through the hole in his mask.

It's not everything he thought it would be, but its close enough. He reaches back and finds the tether that holds the mutated zetsu clone to the husk and yanks it away before Swirly can stop him. They don’t try to stop him, and that just adds to the alarm bells ringing a clamor in Obito’s head.

Uchiha Madara doesn’t stop him either; he can’t survive without the lifeforce of the weird statue, the whispering from Zetsu whenever they think Obito’s unconscious. He’s heard more over the course of these two years than he’s willing to consider right now, but he knows that while Madara himself can’t stop him, not like this, not as an old blind man stuck to a stump to stay alive, the zetsu can.

He’s grateful in a way, he really is; there is no doubt in his mind that Madara saved his life. And he’s Uchiha, that’s complicated, its so complicated, that history, but its really not. He doesn’t regret it happening, but it’s not enough to stay. Relieved acceptance aside, his loyalty has always been to his team over the old man. Madara may have saved his life, replaced his ruined body, but he’s been trapped here against his will for years. His greatest oath has always been to his team, to his sensei, to the Village Hidden in the Leaves.

He understands why Madara’s is not.

Its not enough for him to stay.

“Thank you,” Obito says, some of his Uchiha upbringing leeching through. This is his clansmen sitting on his throne, old as shit and possibly evil but Obito’s always had a soft spot for the elderly. He supposes that Madara counts well enough. “I’m grateful, but I’m leaving now.”

It’s not quite a lie; Obito’s gratitude is complicated, all tangled up with needles and surgeries and experiments, with the way he can’t look at his body without wanting to puke, the way he never asked for any of this, not even once.

Madara might have paid him more mind than most of his clansmen, but Obito has family who cared more for him and first. Maybe they weren’t Uchiha, but his primary bonds have never been blood.

Madara tilts his head, says lowly, in that slow way of his, the way that reminds him of logs moving in a fire, of boulders clashing against each other, as dangerous and unavoidable as gravity. His clan still doesn’t talk about him where people can hear.

“You’ll be back,” Madara says and the certainty of it makes Obito’s skin crawl. He’s never known the geezer to lie and the shrieking in his head just gets louder, but maybe that’s just Swirly.

At his feet the broken tether withers, limp, and writhes like a dead snake. He turns away, waiting for the other zetsu to strike but they don’t, not even Spikey, who’s close enough to take him down if they want. Obito says to Swirly, fit into his pulse, in his ears, white flesh merging with the Hashirama cells covering the right side of his body, says, “lead me to them,” and feels the agreement splintering in him like kindling, greenstick and dark with promise.

It feels good to run. Up and up the long dark hallway, his bare feet against the worn rock floor, following the hint of breeze against his face. In his ear, Swirly giggles, “they’re not too far, but the Kiri nin are close. Our scouts say at least a dozen, all Black Ops jounin.”

“Where’s Minato sensei?” Obito asks, bursting through the hidden doorway to the cave system and out into the night. It’s a mineshaft. The bone skeleton of some huge summons gleams bright in the moonlight. He throws himself into the thin tree line, scrabbling into a messy treewalk through the small branches like Minato taught him back when he first made gennin.

Swirly doesn’t like that. “Who?” they ask cheekily, tapping feelers into Obito’s hair, prickling across his scalp.

“The Yellow Flash of the Leaf! Where is he?” Obito demands, throwing himself through the trees.

“Hmmmmm…..” the clone sings and Obito’s blood begins to boil. “It appears he’s on a different mission.”

That must be information passed along from a different clone. Obito knows they can communicate between them, but it doesn’t sit right with him. Why would their team leader not be with them? And why are Kiri nin even on the mainland in force like this? Obito knows the Third War is months over; he’s heard the clones talking about it when they think he’s too busy training to listen. There is no good reason for them to be here, no good reason for this to be happening.

But Obito keeps his mouth shut, the feeling of the clone squeezing around his ribs making the words dry up in his throat, his fear and anger big enough inside him to block everything else out. In his mind, blood arcs red off a kunai in Kusa. He doesn’t focus on the suspicion, but a part of his hindbrain files it away, cataloging it with everything else that feels off about today and he pushes it down so he can push himself faster and faster, veritably flying through the scraggly trees in his haste to reach his team in time.

He feels the rain on his face and almost stumbles when he registers that it can’t be rain; it shouldn’t be rain; it’s a clear night under a full moon. In the distance is a roaring, the rushing of a great deal of water, waves cresting up over the canopy of trees, glinting in the dimness, shivering and flashing at him, a threat that seeps to his core.

“That,” the zetsu says, “is their location.”

He can feel the chakra buffeting him, high caliber suiton, A rank ninjutsu from several jounin level shinobi. And underneath it all: the white staticky crackling of raiton.

The chakra in his feet surges, throwing him forward at blinding speed. Even dead, he’d know that signature.

He erupts through the treeline into the clearing by the river at unreal speed, just in time to see Kakashi put his Chidori through Rin’s chest.

Everything loud inside of him suddenly goes very quiet.

Chidori is an assassination technique. It’s Kakashi’s specialty. His arm is completely through her, gloved in her blood up past his elbow, palm stuck through the other side. Obito’s sharingan captures it all. Kakashi’s hitai ate is shoved up into his hairline, exposing his implanted sharingan, spun red with the activation he can’t turn off. Kakashi’s face is as horrified as Obito feels, and Rin coughs blood all down her chin, dark in the moonlight. She doesn’t look afraid, she might even whisper his name, but she slumps forward and instead of catching her, Kakashi yanks his arm back through her and she topples over like trash, like he can’t stand touching her.

Kakashi killed Rin. Rin is dead.

The pain that’s always coiled tightly inside him swells into something so big and fierce the world aches with it. The anger is in him; the loss is all he can feel; it’s all he can see, in his head, his heart. It’s going to tear him apart.

There’s a horrible burning in his eye. His orbital chakra pathways blow wide, and he feels blood sheet down his face like tears, the pressure building until it simply can’t anymore.

Something in him snaps. He can see his three tomoe pattern in Kakashi’s gifted eye twist into a three-pointed pinwheel, like a shuriken falling in on itself. He thinks his might mirror it.

Kakashi isn’t an Uchiha; he can’t take the drain on his already low chakra, and he passes out, falling forward into unconsciousness to land right next to Rin.

The second Kakashi hits the ground, Obito’s mangekyo activates and the pressure inside him snaps again. Long sharp spikes of wood shoot out from his right side, impaling the clone wrapped around him. His chakra twists through the white grafts of the Hashirama cells implanted in him, the parts of him that never quite felt right until now.

He’s feverish. He’s coming apart at the seams.

Distantly, he can hear Swirly screeching but it doesn’t matter. Only one thing does.

Rin is dead. Kakashi is down and he killed her. Rin is dead. She’s dead.

“I don’t accept this!” Obito screams and shunshins through the Kiri nin over to his teammate’s side, slicing through their forces like a hot knife through butter. They can’t touch him. He doesn’t bother dodging. None of their hits land. Tanto and kunai and shuriken all strike the dirt through him. But that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is Rin: Rin on the ground, how wrong that is, and he has to get to her, he has to, it’s the only thing that matters.

The distance between them twists nauseatingly and he falls beside his teammates with no idea how he got there. Space warps around him, his chakra scorching and blistering any Kiri nin that comes too close.

Kakashi is unconscious from chakra exhaustion, his new mangekyo active and draining him. He’s going to die, and Rin is…..Rin is--

Rin is down, a hole blown straight through her chest. There’s blood on her face, a pool of blood spreading dark underneath her, pouring into lacy patters in the water on the ground from whatever water jutsu the Kiri shinobi had been throwing around before he got there.

Too late. Obito is too late.

He reaches a shaky hand down to her face, but it passes right through her like he’s a ghost. He can’t touch her.

He can’t accept this. Rin can’t be dead. If this world is real, is anything other than a nightmare, she has to be alive. If Rin is dead, then this is hell.

He’s tangible suddenly, and he can touch her. His hands are on her, his right one sprouting tiny green leaves and shoots and he can’t think about that, not right now, not when under his left hand he can feel a faint thumping, just the slightest hint of a pulse.

She’s alive.

Rin’s still alive, and that cements everything in him. He’s got to get her away, get her to safety, get her to help, but some dark foreign chakra is curling through her, reacting to the touch of his borrowed right hand. His mangekyo sees all this, and it’s just a chance, but Obito’s willing to take a chance, any chance, just to get her back.

Kakashi is laying crumpled at his feet. He can’t carry them both, and Swirly is chattering excitedly in his ear, some gibberish he can’t focus on. Kakashi used a Chidori on Rin; he had to know what that would have done: nobody survived a technique like that. But if Obito leaves him here the Kiri nin will kill him. He’s got to get Rin out of here, but there’s enemy shinobi blocking his way, and they’ve shook off their initial shock long enough to make their move.

Obito’s barefoot, with no weapon, but there’s wooden spears growing sharp from his body and he splinters one off, rolls it in his palm and it’s a club, a staff, a spear: its whatever weapon he needs it to be to take the Kiri nin down.

There’s ten of them left after his initial blitz, all jounin, but they can’t land a hit on him. His vision has narrowed down in a tunnel of rage and grim determination, and it’s over all too soon. He’s never killed before this night. It should feel significant, but it doesn’t.

It’s still too late for Rin on the ground: Rin, who’s heartbeat is sluggish and slowing…..slowing…..

It’s a massacre. Blood everywhere. Swirly in his ear, jabbering away more excitedly than they ever have before. Something has splintered inside him. Something dark and quiet has replaced all his rage and he kneels down to gently scoop up Rin’s body. He holds her to his chest.

Blood everywhere. Rin’s blood. Slick on his hands, slippery on the wet grass under his bare feet. His silhouette against the ground is some horror-thing, thorny and spikey, more like a zetsu than anything Obito’s been in his life.

He doesn’t look at Kakashi. He isn’t sure how he feels about that. With the Kiri shinobi dead, he should be fine until backup arrives. Minato will know how to fix him, he always does, even when his teammate was a newly minted jounin with a stick so far up his ass about the rules that Obito couldn’t help but hate him just a little.

But his arms aren’t working quite right now. The fleshy covering is suddenly restricting, not moving with him at all. Swirly yammers, sing-song, “the Senju and the Uchiha, oh my, I see now what Madara sees in you. We’ll have to get you back, he’ll be most pleased.”

That something dark in him ripples. He needs to save Rin, not go back to that cave, not trap them both in there again. He won’t let the old man keep her alive by attaching her to the husk, to turn her into something like him.

When he tries to move his arm, Swirly doesn’t let him.

Obito can feel how the clone’s stitched themselves to him, not just to cover his missing arm, but everywhere suddenly: coating his throat, in his hair, his blood, his bones brittle with the weight of them, gooey in the places between his fingerprints.

They’re taking control from Obito, manipulating him, and he’s wasting time, time that Rin doesn’t have.

It’s not even a conscious decision. His chakra flares so hot that it burns. He’s an Uchiha and that has always meant fire. He burns the clone from inside him, lighting them up, and the smoke pours out the hole in his mask.

Swirly shrieks and the mask splits open, spilling sparks. The grass would catch on fire from the heat of it if not already coated in blood. Obito rips them away, pulls them out, and it hurts, it hurts so much he wants to die of it, but he can’t, because Rin is here; Rin with embers smoldering on her shirt, cauterizing the wound on her chest, fizzling with an alien red chakra that grates against the new green chakra emanating from his right side.

Swirly scrambles away from him and this is the zetsu that helped him escape, that held him together for years; his medic, his company, but also his tormentor, the zetsu with the needles and charts and jars. The clone that keeps him away from Rin.

Its Zetsu’s yellow eyes looking out at him.

Obito sets them on fire, burning Swirly down to ash. The clones are more plant than person and they burn slow, dredging away the last remnants of them in Obito.

Once the clone is soot, Obito somehow gets the weird spikes protruding from him to retract, or maybe they burn off too. He’s not sure. He’s not paying attention. He slaps Kakashi’s headband down over his eye so it won’t kill him and he gently scoops Rin up and cradles her, his mangekyo burning in his head and he’s blinking through blood even as the world twists drunkenly around him. His only thought is to get her to safety, as far away as possible.

The moonlit night sky turns to blackness, and he tumbles out nauseous and staggering, Rin heavy against him, his single arm wrapped carefully around her. There’s…. sand, yes, sand under his feet, shushing and unstable, but that’s not what feels right, or safe, and then the world tilts again.

He blinks at the unfamiliar trees above him. They turn and lean down around him, building a barrier of thorns and branches that interlock in a dome. The trees make a shelter for him.

He’s exhausted and in pain and he can’t question it. Nothing matters but the agony of Rin in his grip, of Rin leaking a foreign red chakra that doesn’t feel like her at all.

But her pulse is….stabilizing? The bleeding is slowing and it shouldn’t be possible; she had an A rank raiton shoved completely through her chest: her ribs are caved in, her lung shredded, even if it missed her heart. But Kakashi never misses.

Her breath rattles and burbles with blood, but she’s breathing. Her good lung is inflating dutifully, her heart thumping on stubbornly.

He needs to get her to a hospital, to real iroyonin, but he’s drained. Are they even in Fire Country? He’s not sure. The trees above him seem smaller and feel…different, in some ineffable way.

Since when can he feel trees? The shock is shuddering through him still, blurring everything. His vision is a wash of blood from the mangekyo.

The mangekyo. Obito focuses, tries to shut it down, feels it swirl back into his regular activated sharingan, still too busy with his chakra to turn off completely. Its pulling steadily from his reserves and he can’t make it stop. He can’t make any of it stop.

The mangekyo. Obito has the mangekyo, and Kakashi does too. The only Uchiha he knows to have activated it is his Clan Head, Uchiha Fugaku, and he supposes Madara back in the day, but the geezer in the cave has been blind for years, his eyes vanished in a way that Obito instinctively knows he’s not supposed to question.

The mangekyo. He keeps coming back to it. He knows about the Curse of Hatred, about how it festers and twists. His clan told him enough to recognize it when it happened, and Madara’d filled in the blanks during his reeducation.

Swirly’s last words filter down to him as if from a great distance.

Obito feels numb. And unforgivably stupid.

He pulls mercilessly on his hair, tacky and textured with blood, gnawing on his tongue with his molars. He’s sure suddenly. Madara did this.

It’s in Swirly’s betrayal, in the way none of the other zetsu tried to stop him. Madara’s assurance that he’d be back. The wood spikes that shunted from his right side when he’d activated the mangekyo, from the half of him made up of Hashirama’s cells. Senju Hashirama, the Shodaime Hokage, known for his kekkei genkai.

With a shaking hand, he reaches out and plucks a leaf off the ground. There, on his palm, it unfurls with the green of new growth.

The mokuton.

He throws the leaf, the death sentence, as far away as he can. He’s overcome with a violent sickness and he chokes on bile, gagging and spitting. The leaf sits innocuous off to the side. Above him, the canopy creaks. He wipes his mouth on the back of his shaking hand. The numbness drags at him. He’s a monster.

He’s a fool.

But he’d gotten Rin out of there. That had to be the mangekyo; he doesn’t know of any other time/space techniques aside from the Hiraishin, and that definitely wasn’t his teacher’s Flying Thunder God. He wasn’t aware that this was an ability his dojutsu could unlock. Fugaku’s was Amaterasu, the Black Flames, but that wasn’t what Kakashi’s eye had looked like, what he infers his own to look like.

He shoves the crisis into the back of his mind. Rin can’t have him falling apart now. Fugaku will keep the mangekyo from killing Kakashi, but she needs help now. Obito isn’t sure he can move them again. Whatever hysterical strength let him move them to Suna and back has drained away. He doesn’t know where they are, how far from Konoha they are. But he has to get her back to the Leaf Village. They have the best iroyonin in the Elemental Nations, unless Senju Tsunade herself just so happens to appear in front of him, drawn by his heinous crime.

Regardless of what Konoha will rightfully do to him, he’s got to get her back.

But Rin is a medic nin, and a talented one. He has no supplies of his own, just a black ankle length hooded robe, but in Rin’s kunai pouch he finds empty sealing scrolls and med kits, bandages and soldier pills, blood replenishers and rations.

There’s not a single weapon.

He breathes a sigh of relief at the color-coded pills and sets to work, giving her a blood replenishing pill and one for pain, and one to combat infection. He isn’t sure what the others are for, so he doesn’t risk it. He knows the basics of field dressing so he binds her ribs as best he can one-handed, but the wound itself is still fizzling with that odd red chakra that make the hairs on the back of his neck rise, and his hand is shaking so bad he doesn’t want to risk trying to stitch her up himself. The bandages are unforgivably sloppy. If only he knew some medical ninjutsu he could do more, but his team always relied on Rin for that, to their detriment now.

He’ll have to find some water once the sun rises. Maybe after a night of rest he can try to move them again, get them back to Konoha. For now, he settles on cleaning them both up, now that Rin doesn’t seem in danger of dying any second. He doesn’t understand it, but she is stabilizing, the wound sealing itself closed with no outside prompting, ringed with chakra that doesn’t read like her signature. But it isn’t hurting her and doesn’t feel like a genjutsu either, so he leaves it as a problem for tomorrow. It tugs at him, but he leaves it be.

The trees around them have fashioned a shelter of themselves seemingly on their own. He doesn’t think about it. Obito pulls a thin blanket from a storage scroll and drapes it over Rin. He doesn’t risk a fire. For all he knows, they are deep in enemy territory. He sets himself up to keep watch, both for enemy shinobi and zetsu, but also on Rin’s condition, in case she takes a turn for the worst.

It’s a long night. He counts her heartbeats, each breath she pulls in and wheezes painfully out through her shredded lung. He jumps at each cracking twig, his anxiety leaking Killing Intent before he manages to put a lid on it, suppressing his own signature as best he can. He isn’t a sensor type, but he does get a rudimentary feeling from the plant life around him, which is distressing in new and creative ways that make him sick to think about. This is the longest he’s ever kept his sharingan active and the orbital chakra pathways around his eye burn with the strain.

He is exhausted and tacky with dried blood, both Rin’s and the Kiri shinobi he’d inelegantly bludgeoned to death. Blood crusts on his face, under his eye. He picks the flakes of it off himself, but his simple robe is a loss. He has blood between his toes and slight burns from where he’d charred Swirly away, but even these are healing faster than he thinks they should be. Senju Hashirama’s cells at work again, he thinks, bitterly. Just another side effect of the mokuton.

The morning dawns a bloody red and the night animals that had been snuffling around at the scent of blood quiet as the light grows. He checks that Rin is still secure and then he tries to convince the trees to stop doing whatever it is they are doing and let him go. It kills him that he has to leave her, but he can’t make a bunshin work right now; his chakra control is wild and overpowered and the clone he tries to make just explodes. Loudly. Spikey’d kick his ass for the failure. But Minato’s not here to show him how to do it right; Minato with his carefully neutral expression that never showed disappointment whenever Obito fucked up a jutsu. Kakashi’s not here for him to copy.

“Great,” he grumbles, kicking at the wall of thorns when they don’t let him pass. “Just fucking great.” Rin would laugh if she saw his weak attempts at chakra control.

He manages to force his way through the barrier the trees have made around them and goes to look for a good source of water, and maybe also find out where the hell they are, and how far it is to Konoha.

There’s a creek nearby that he finds by unhappily following the slight whispers of the trees that grow along its bank, leaking cooling green chakra that washes over him. It feels both natural and grating, his fire natured chakra prickling at the Senju bloodline that Madara somehow stitched onto him. Stolen, maybe from the Shodaime’s corpse, and then stuffed inside him.

Fuck. He is not thinking about the mokuton right now, or he’ll start screaming and then never stop, just at the sheer fucking taboo of it.

The creek’s slow and calm and if he is still, he can get a glimpse of his reflection.

Obito looks like a nightmare. His hair has grown out to look like Madara’s, its darkness drying in stiff spikes crusted with rust. The scars are as bad as they always are. His empty eye socket is sunken and squishy. The patches of white that make up most of his right side are alien and splotchy with blood, the seams between them overly sensitive and numb in no pattern he can discern. His empty shoulder socket is sprouting gross white nubbly bits that make him sick to look at. When he focuses his chakra through his eye it twists into a black three-pointed pinwheel, just like he spied on Kakashi before he passed out.

He looks away. His patchwork body’s gross and the addition of mangekyo and mokuton just make it harder to bear. He’s never been particularly vain, but he has an Uchiha’s pride, and it rankles at him now.

He bathes as best he can and awkwardly scrubs what he can from the black cloak before clumsily wrapping his shoulder in bandages to hide his unintentional theft from view. The cloak hides the rest of him, but his sleeve hangs empty. His hair’s too distinctive, too much like the portraits of Uchiha Madara he’d seen in his youth. His eye is a dead giveaway. There’s nothing he can do for the scars on his face.

He tugs the hood up, but it’s not deep enough to truly conceal the worst parts of his face: the smashed nose, the map of scars that bisect his skull, lumpy and oddly rippled, the corner of his mouth set in a permanent scowl. He’s only 16, and he looks like he was dragged ass backwards through a meat grinder.

He tries to shrug it off and fills as many empty storage scrolls as Rin was carrying with water before heading back to the makeshift campsite. Rin’s still breathing fine, and the relief fills him so suddenly that it’s like his stomach drops.

He uses a simple katon to start a campfire. He’s been able to start fires one-handed since he was 12. It’s a point of pride with him, and dead useful now.

He uses the water purification drops Rin has on her to clean the water before he starts trying to clean her up a bit. She’s still firmly unconscious but he wipes the blood from her face, the purple rectangle markings on her cheeks smearing as well, which Obito knows she’ll hate when she wakes up. It makes her look younger, more vulnerable. He hasn’t seen her without her paint since before their academy days.

Her clothes are shredded but there’s nothing decent to be done about it now, so he leaves them be. Her wounds look a little better and at the nasty touch of the foreign chakra he folds his single hand into a half tora and pushes back with his own chakra, “Kai!”

No genjutsu releases. He hadn’t expected any to; it’s too simple to wish this is all illusion, but at the touch of his chakra something else happens.

Black lines rise to the surface of her skin, forming a wonky looking design on her stomach. Seals, and powerful ones, but wonky is the right word for it.

There’s something wrong with the design.

Obito’s blood chills.

He doesn’t know any fuuinjutsu past the basics, but he knows suddenly what this is. He’s heard enough about it over the past few months to know it when he sees it. As the massive seal fades back into obscurity, the foreign chakra makes sense to him in the worst possible way.

He doesn’t know all of Madara’s batshit plan, but he knows enough about Bijuu to recognize one now. He even knows the word for it, when there’s one sealed inside a living vessel.

Jinchuuriki.

Rin is a jinchuuriki.

He paces around the fire. It’s glowing hotter and brighter with his agitation, the trees creaking ominously overhead. A jinchuuriki.

It would have almost been better if she’d died.

He instantly cringes from that thought; the pain of it’s too much to handle. That isn’t right, of course it isn’t. There’s no world without Rin in it. If she isn’t alive then nothing else makes any sense.

Obito’s pieced together enough of Madara’s grand plan to know that he was going to break the world and he was going to use the Bijuu to do it. One of which is somehow sealed in Rin, the girl he’s loved since he was a child, his very first friend, the reason he clawed his way back to sanity after the cave-in, never giving in to Madara’s will.

Did Konoha do this? As far as he knows, the Leaf Village only has one Bijuu, the Kyuubi that Madara rode to battle against Senju Hashirama. If anything happened to the Nine Tails, he’s sure he’d have heard the zetsu talking about it. Is this the Nine Tails? Konoha doesn’t have any other Bijuu, unless they’d won one as a concession in the war, which is unlikely. How many Bijuu do Iwa and Kumo have? Is this one of theirs? Why is Kiri involved?

Why Rin? Nohara Rin is civilian born, a loyal Konoha shinobi sure, but aren’t jinchuuriki chosen younger? Rin’s the same age as Obito, and she sure as fuck hadn’t been a jinchuuriki back when he was still with Team 7.

And the seal looked…..wonky. Almost as busted up as his face. Red chakra’s leaking from her even now, and he’s sure it’s not supposed to be. If it comes undone, the Bijuu is set loose. Rin dies.

His brain stutters over that last thought. Rin dies. If the seal breaks, she dies. If Madara or one of the zetsu gets their hands on a vulnerable jinchuuriki outside the protection of a major village, she dies. If Konoha did this to her, they’ve sentenced her to death.

Minato wouldn’t dare, would he? Obito’d heard what he’d done to Iwa. Surely Rin is different to him? Could he even expect his sensei to put his students over the village now that he’s Hokage?

He pulls at his hair, gripping it tight at the roots in his hand. He can’t take her back to Konoha, not if they’re the ones who turned her into a jinchuuriki. He can’t trust them. Obligated as they are to kill him, her life is paramount. If there’s even a chance, he won’t risk it.

Obito has never changed his allegiance; he’s always been loyal to the Leaf, but if they’ve done this…..he isn’t sure his Will of Fire can survive.

That’s jumping to conclusions, he knows. There’re too many questions surrounding last night, and he’s not discounting that this is still somehow Madara’s fault, trying to manipulate him again. The suspicion feels right, but that might just be his paranoia.

Obito takes a few deep breaths, forcing the fire to settle, the trees to still. The problem right in front of him is Rin with a hole in her. That’s what he focuses on. Not the fact that they’ve stuffed a demon inside her.

A demon that’s keeping her alive. Keeping itself alive?

He lets his breath out, feeling his sharingan finally turn off for the first time in almost 12 hours. It’s healing her. He can work with that.

Basics first: change her bandages, clean the wound, force water down her throat with another blood replenishing pill. All that he can do.

He details and organizes their supplies a few more times, keeping note of the number of rations at their disposal. There aren’t any weapons for him to clean and sharpen, no kunai, no shuriken, no senbon, no wire to oil. It’s bizarre.

He counts the rations one more time, just to be sure. Packs it all away to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. Improvises a club out of a big stick just in case he needs to defend against enemy shinobi, missing nin, or bandits.

Training has always been grounding, a habit beaten into him since he was old enough to hold a kunai, and in the limited space around the campfire he runs through kata, his balance frustratingly off with the loss of his arm.

Then he takes the extra bandages and booby traps the hell out of the area around the camp. It’s not ninja wire, but it’ll have to do. During the war, he was being trained as a trap specialist; he can make a few cloth snares work. The trees are younger here, not as grand as Fire Country’s forests, not grown by Senju Hashirama himself at the founding of the village. They’re smaller, sparser. He knows that the Mountain’s Graveyard borders both Fire and Hot Water, and maybe Waterfall. But last night he swears they landed in sand: hot, arid, even at night, like he imagines Suna to be. And he’d tried to instinctively move them to Konoha from Suna, which left a few smaller countries between them.

Maybe… “Kusa?” he looks around, uneasy. He fucking hates Kusa.

Fuck him, but it could be Kusa. Maybe the mushroom forests are only in the south. Kusa has a ninja village somewhere and he supposes a hospital as well. Can he risk it? Even civilians in fucking Birds know the laws on bloodline theft. Samurai would be honor bound to rip his fucking head off. More importantly, could they recognize the improbable brand of illegal that Rin is? Can he afford not to try?

If Kusagakure shinobi haven’t found them yet, it’s only a matter of time. It’s a small country, and a patrol will get them sooner rather than later. Even barring everything else, they’ll be executed as Konoha trespassers or spies.

He doesn’t want to try to see if he can consciously control his mangekyo, not when there’s the chance he might get stuck somewhere and leave Rin behind. But the intangibility quirk is new and he can’t control that either. It was super useful during the battle; none of his enemies could touch him. If he can control that technique…

He’s distracted from his practice of trying to see if he can get a stick to fall through his hand by a change in Rin’s breathing.

Obito kneels at her side immediately, so fast he can’t be sure he hasn’t warped space again, his mangekyo fading away as he checks her over.

Rin’s eyes are screwed shut and she makes a high pained sound that tears at Obito’s stomach. Her fingers twitch, like she’s trying to wake up, and red chakra flares, the heavy, oppressive chakra from the Bijuu, and something in Obito instinctively flares his right back. But it’s not his own fire nature: it’s the new nature transformation chakra, the mokuton suppressing the stream of red until it cuts off almost entirely, retreating back into the seal.

She sighs and her eyes flutter open, unfocused and glassy. They pass over him without a hint of recognition and it’s another low blow to his kicked spirit. Just as soon as they slide away, her eyes drift shut, lapsing into unconsciousness once more.

He stares at his hand and shakes it out, like he can get rid of the chakra in his tenketsu. That’s certainly something to think about, if he was in the mood to think about the fucking mokuton.

He keeps fortifying the camp, sure that a patrol of Kusa nin or a zetsu is about to descend on them at any second. He wraps bandages around his head so they obscure most of his face like a mask, leaving only his mouth, nose and eye showing. It might be even more hideous than his bare scars; he has to hold the roll between his teeth to get it tight enough it won’t unravel whenever he turns his head.

Rin wakes up a few more times, short little gasps before the injuries pull her under again. But Rin’s stubborn, more stubborn than Obito’s ever been, and she’s fighting hard. If anyone can pull through a point-blank raiton assassination technique, it’s her. She’ll wake up, he’s sure of it. He has to be.

What will he say when she does? Hey, it’s me Obito! Guess what, I’m not dead. Also, why are you a jinchuuriki?

He presses the heel of his hand into his eye with a groan. She’s going to kill him herself and he’ll probably let her.

It takes a few more false-starts before she wakes up enough to be aware of her surroundings. It’s edging towards evening; soon, it will be a full day since Obito’d first heard that his old team was close and in trouble.

When she finally wakes up, she wakes up like a shinobi, eyes still firmly closed to feign sleep, one hand creeping slowly for her kunai pouch, all her senses cataloging her surroundings. But Obito’s been watching her closely for the better part of a day; he’s tracked her breathing patterns; he knows she’s awake this time.

He clears his throat to warn her, flaring his chakra a bit so she can mark him. He says, softly, “hey.”

She lunges at him with a rock, eyes flying open as she bashes at him, aiming for his throat with a medic’s precision. He dodges, keeping his hand up and open, the universal signal that he means no harm. When she lunges at him again, he says quickly, “hey, hey, Rin, it’s me.”

Rin freezes, her dark eyes going wide. Even with his face mostly hidden, his hair under the wide hood of the cloak, his voice deeper than it was two years ago, she knows him. Rin would recognize him anywhere.

The hand holding the rock doesn’t shake but it doesn’t lower either. Obito figures he deserves that. He has been dead for years.

“Obito?” She asks, and he can’t read her tone. It’s as flat as Minato’s, as Kakashi’s on a bad day.

“Yeah, Rin, it’s me.” Forcing down his revulsion at the idea, he slowly raises his hand to pull his hood back so she can see more of him.

Her eyes go even wider at the sight of him.

He lowers his arm back to his side and says, “I, uh, I didn’t die in the cave-in,” and then he mentally kicks himself for being such a loser.

“Obito,” Rin whispers, and he thinks she reaches for him, but then the pain of her wounds catches up to her and she hisses through her teeth, the feel of the angry red chakra rising.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Obito says, “you’re hurt pretty bad but you’re getting better.”

Her teeth are gritted, and her eyes are wide. For the first time since she woke up, she’s afraid. “No, Obito, you’ve got to get away, get far away, go now!”

“No, it’s, I understand, I think.” He’s trying to calm her down, feeling the waves of rage buffet him like a storm. “It’s the Bijuu, right?”

The fear turns into confusion, but she doesn’t ask how he knows. She just says, “it’s not sealed right. They made me a bomb. I was going to destroy the Hidden Leaf Village.”

A bomb. It makes a twisted kind of sense. Slap a busted seal on a new made jinchuuriki and stand back to watch it blow. Rage curls through him like thorns. “I think, maybe I can help. I can’t fix your seal, but it seems that this can calm it down, suppress it somewhat.”

He won’t hide this from her. If she’s going to reject him, as every social convention demands she rightfully should, he needs to know before he gets his hopes up.

He holds out his hand, feeling the nature transformation chakra rinse through him, green with new growth and nerves. “Do you trust me?”

She should question him, question this, but she doesn’t. Rin nods, wide-eyed, and it fixes something in the world.

Obito uses his left hand and her free hand to form a complete snake seal, then he lets the mokuton focus through him, chasing the Bijuu chakra back into its incomplete seal. The trees around the camp shiver, their leaves flashing silver undersides almost like there’s a breeze on a still day. With the hand seal he can control it better, he thinks. At least, it suppresses the Bijuu like he meant it to.

The angry red fades and Rin stares at him in shock. “What was that? It didn’t feel like…”

Obito looks sheepish to keep from wanting to burn it all out of him, burn it all away. She doesn’t deserve this from him. “The mokuton.”

Rin mouths the words the mokuton silently to herself, like it’s not sinking in. But she doesn’t lunge at him with the rock to brain him for the crime of it all.

“It’s, uh,” Obito tries, “been a long two years.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 4: Rin: The Plan

Right before she was born, her mother’s shinobi sister vanished mid-mission. There was never anything to be done. This was during the build up to the Second War, and neither side was willing to claim any bodies at the risk of further provoking the already increasingly angry military powers. It was a time, she was told, that people simply went missing. Left and never came home. No way of knowing what happened, but Rin never felt the need to know the details. The Academy was already fairly explicit about what captured shinobi can expect, and even as a child, Rin knew that her aunt was not the kind of ninja Konoha would bother ransoming back. A single civilian born kunoichi would never be worth starting a war over.

It’s a math she learned as a girl with shinobi-affective face paint on her cheeks and no recognizable clan name. Obito was the only classmate of hers to bother, and even then, her mother was nervous at her hanging around the Uchiha, nervous in a way she wasn’t about Rin’s other civilian born classmates.

Even in the two years of technical peace between the end of the Second War and the beginning of the Third, her mother looked at her only friend and said, “Uchiha are built for war, love. More so than regular shinobi.”

She was 6 years old and named after a ghost who's laughter rang like a bell through the house. Rin had just made the decision to enter the Academy, had heard the malcontented whispering in the market about the so-called peace, knew even then that deadlocking a man such as Hanzo in a country Fire wasn’t even at war with did little to solve the issues that brought about the Second. War was coming to the continent again.

Her mother thought it was Obito’s influence that made her want to be a shinobi, that by joining the Academy, she was just following along behind him.

But Rin grew up on stories of her aunt, of all the good she did for their family. Rin thinks all shinobi are built for war, not just Obito, but that’s not all they were. She was sure of it. To her, shinobi could look like her, could be interested in the things she was interested in, could be beloved by a family so much that their absence aches to this day.

Rin was always going to be a shinobi. Obito had little to do with it.

She graduated at 12 into fifth year of the Third War. She thought she knew what to expect. She thought she knew what war was. She thought she knew what loss was.

When Obito died, she thought it would be like her aunt, just another haunting. Another picture on the shrine. Another name tacked on to the end of the family prayer.

It wasn’t like that. It shifted everything, brought a war that at times felt quite distant from her, and invaded her very home. It was more personal than sugar rations, closer than obituaries of strangers, more devastating than every name on the memorial stone before it.

This, she realized, was war. Something so big and so terrible it ruins everything it touches. Something even Minato could not save her from.

She wasn’t prepared. War is a power that enacts change across whole continents. One that, before now, she’d never been able to stop.

She feels the Bijuu move in her, and it’s the epitome of all war.

She’s been taught her worth, but here’s a thing she can do. It’s not suicide; it’s shinobi math. It’s Minato’s altruism, it’s Kakashi’s recklessness, it’s her Baa chan, it’s Obito, it’s the ghosts of all the shinobi before her who died in a war she suddenly realizes she can prevent.

She hadn’t thought to wake up; waking up defeats the whole point, actually. So she’s scared, but she’s also a little pissed. But when she grabs a rock to bash her attacker’s brains in, its Obito.

Its Obito.

Alive.

Alive, and with the fucking mokuton.

Of all the impossible things.

Kami help me she prays.

The fire crackles in the silence that spreads between them. She settles warily back in place, one arm curling around her stomach like she’s holding something in. The Bijuu. Maybe her sanity.

“Talk.” She says.

He rubs at the back of his neck. He’s only got the one arm and what little she can make out of his right side is a wreck. She sees him dying all the time, dreams of rocks falling, has nightmares of taking out his eye.

He says, “I didn’t die two years ago. I was rescued by a zetsu, a, uh.” He blanks suddenly, steels himself, and continues, “a plant clone thing. Not human. They took me to a cave in the north, kept me alive using Senju Hashirama’s cultured cells. I guess that’s where the mokuton comes from, but its never done anything until last night, when I saw Kakashi put a Chidori through you.”

That is too much to unpack so she latches onto the end, the obvious mistake: “That wasn’t, Kakashi didn’t—”

But that’s what it must have looked like. She remembers the blinding whiplash of chakra, brilliant in the night, and the sound of One Thousand Birds, the horror on Kakashi’s face. How can she make them understand, either of them?

“I realized that they made me a weapon. We had—the war just ended. I wasn’t going to destroy Konoha. Kakashi’s Chidori was for an enemy, but I threw myself onto it instead.”

That stalls him. He’s always been so easy for her to read; even older, and half mummified, she knows him. She can almost watch the memory quickly refit itself in his head, in a sharingan’s perfect recall. “You…on purpose?”

It’s a bitter thing, but she’s got pride for it, a steel inside her tempered by the war. She's still reeling from it: Obito, alive, when she was willing to die. “I did. I won’t let them use me to destroy the ones I love.”

“Oh,” Obito says, and oddly enough, he looks relieved.

The silence stretches between them. She’s known him as a silly child, a hopeful student, a struggling gennin. But she’s never seen him like this: grim and wary. He’s afraid, and he carries it close to the surface. With his hair long and spikey, he looks just like his clansmen.

She’s distracted, but the initial shock is wearing off. A shinobi’s suspicion is rising in her, as insidious as the Tailed Beast chakra. He’s telling this all out of order. “How did you know where we were?”

“Hn…” he stares into the fire, not meeting her eye. “I was trapped in that cave with the zetsu. I was…sick, for a long time. Weak. I couldn’t leave, and I tried, several times, dragging myself by my chin. It was a year before I could even sit up on my own.”

She doesn’t interrupt him, letting him explain as he’s able but noting the self-censure. He’s never been good with words but its never bothered her. Now, there’s obviously things he’s hiding from her. She’s not sure how to feel about that.

After a pause, he says, “Last night, one of the zetsu, there’s a bunch of them running around, came back and said that you were close and in trouble. I couldn’t escape on my own, there was a boulder blocking the exit. I was still trapped, but another zetsu helped me escape. I got there just in time to see Kakashi—I thought he killed you.”

There’s an intensity to his tone, like he’s wanting her to understand something about that, about him thinking Kakashi killed her. When she just looks at him quizzically, he lets his sharingan spin to life.

She stares at it, unafraid. She’s never avoided eye contact with him; that won’t change just because he’s finally awakened his dojutsu. The three tomoe spin and spin, and then twist suddenly into a new pattern, like a three-pointed shuriken.

Everything feels fuzzy, like static, and she blinks. “Whoa. What is that?”

His eye goes dark and he looks conflicted. He takes a deep breath, letting it all go in a whoosh. “Okay, clan secret time. Don’t tell anybody, ever, okay? Like, I’m serious. People have been disappeared for less.”

She believes him. The dojutsu clans were fiercely protective of their secrets, and she’s pretty sure the only reason Kakashi got to keep his gifted eye has less to do with Obito’s dying wish and more with a kunai-wielding Minato. “Why tell me then?”

“You deserve to know.”

Civilian born or not, she knows what a huge trust this is. She says, “on my life, then.”

“No! Just, like, be reasonable, okay?”

“Okay, then. Within reason.”

He pulls at his hair, frustrated. “It’s called the mangekyo sharingan. Its super powerful, but its rare, like really rare. I only think one other Uchiha has it. Well, apart from Kakashi. He got his last night too, same time I did.”

He continues, “I used it to escape and bring you with me. I was trying to take us back to Konoha, but I missed. I think we’re in Kusa, maybe? I overshot it to the desert a little bit, then undershot it trying to make it back. But then I saw the seal on your stomach. I realized they’d made you a jinchuuriki, and I wasn’t sure Konoha was the best place to take you anymore.”

He looks so conflicted. Rin says, quietly, “I’m glad you didn’t take me to Konoha, but they didn’t do this to me. I was captured by Kiri nin on a courier mission. They made me a jinchuuriki and were trying to ferry me back to Konoha to get me to destroy the village. I was on the run when we ran into Kakashi at the border.”

“Kiri?” Obito questions. “Why them?”

Hadn’t he seen them last night? The wave patterns on the masks, the Kiri sigil on the forehead? She’s got her own suspicions, but the Water markings weren’t exactly hidden.

Rin shrugs. “We didn’t do much talking, but they didn’t look like Kiri nin to me. I mean, they were wearing Kiri masks, but something was off about them.”

“What do you mean? What do Kiri nin look like to you?”

Rin feeds whatever hunch he's gnawing on, “Cowprint? Pinstripes? Big ass swords?”

He looks like he’s eaten something sour. Rin says, “I’d pieced together their plan, and by the time Kakashi found me, I could…feel it, inside me. The Bijuu. When I saw the chance to neutralize the threat, I took it. I don’t remember anything else.”

Obito is looking angrier and angrier. He’s got a temper and the fire crackles with it. Its part of the reason she retreated a little at the end. Its such clinical language, the easy distance of a mission report. Neutralize the threat. She hadn’t meant it as suicide, but it had that effect.

This would destroy Kakashi.

Rin asks, “Kakashi, is he—”

“I had to leave him behind.”

They stare at each other through the smoke from the fire. It’s such a stark reversal of their last mission together that she’s not sure how to make it reconcile in her mind: the Obito who’d never abandon anyone and the Obito who left Kakashi behind to die.

“But the Kiri nin—”

“Eliminated. I didn’t just…” he’s red with the shame and she looks away. She could easier look into his active dojutsu than see that shame on him.

“He was unconscious, but I don’t think he was injured. The mangekyo requires an enormous amount of chakra and he must have been running on empty.”

They don’t look at each other. There had been a dozen enemy shinobi and they both know it.

She breathes a prayer and moves to touch his hand but there’s a blaze of heat and her hand goes right through him, resting on the ground below him, like he’s a ghost, like he really had died two years ago and this is just an echo of the teammate she’d known.

He looks spooked and immediately says, “sorry, it’s the mangekyo, I think.” His eyes goes dark and inactive but he doesn’t move his hand back into reach for her to try again.

She bites her lip. That’s an incredible technique. “I thought it was the…time/space? It’s a time/space, right?”

“I don’t—I don’t fucking know. Its just, gah!” There’s weeds growing up around his bare feet and he kicks at them. “Fuck!”

The mokuton. The fact of it won’t stick in her mind. If anything’s out of context on him, it’s the Senju’s famed bloodline.

A bloodline. Her blood freezes, the truth of it staring her in the face as Obito wrestles with weeds that move on their own. He would never, she know this, but she also knows how little his willingness is going to matter to anyone on the continent who sees an Uchiha with a Senju’s kekkei genkai.

He curses, stomping on the burrs, and the fire flares higher and hotter every second.

The last time Rin saw him, Obito was a 14-year-old gennin who had mastered the katon his clan expected of him and little else. Loud, clumsy, a little spoiled. Ignorant about the realities of shinobi life, of war. Like she used to be. He’d just awakened the basic sharingan only to immediately get crushed in a cave-in. And now he’s manifested both the mangekyo and the mokuton and is strong enough to defeat multiple jounin level opponents.

She’s left reeling from it all, and she didn’t even have the memories seared into her brain forever. He finishes his mild breakdown and tugs his hood back up, retreating into the wide folds. It shadows the deep crevasses on his face, throwing his scars into harsh relief. It’s not a face she remembers, but the hesitance of the movement, the self-doubt, that’s all Obito.

Rin asks quietly, “So what now?”

He grumbles so she gets ready to push. Obito is stubborn, but he didn’t fight in the Third War, not really. Not like she did. He likely hasn’t realized what her being a jinchuuriki means, especially being a busted one. He’d spent the war with his head under a rock. She’d spent it in a trench.

Rin says, “We can’t go back to Konoha.” Not when she’s got the literal embodiment of war in her gut just bursting at the seams and he’s got a bloodline he shouldn’t.

It won’t matter that she hadn’t wanted it. It’ll matter even less for him.

She sees him all the time, in her dreams. Hale and whole, or halved. She’s a medic. She knows in excruciating detail the extent of his injuries, what it might have taken for him to survive. It would have to be no less than divine intervention from the kami themselves.

From how he’s got his head wrapped down to his neck, she suspects he’s hiding the extent of it all. What had he said? Cultured Hashirama cells? Like grafts? That’s not something that can be undone, especially after years. If it were as simple as an eyeball, he’d have removed it from himself with extreme prejudice by now. It’s likely fully integrated: a part of him now. Knowing how his clan views bloodline theft, it will kill him just a surely to leave it be.

“We need a plan. If we go back, I could inadvertently destroy the Leaf Village and Kiri will declare war to get their Bijuu back. Maybe the other nations will declare war as well; Konoha was never meant to have 2. It upsets the balance of power between the nations. Kuma and Iwa will take advantage, and Suna’s always been opportunistic. We just got out of the Third War; we can’t afford another one so soon.”

She doesn’t say anything about how he’s facing death if he returns. This is a better problem for him to chew on, both political and wide reaching, both units he failed back in the Academy. She subtly tries to readjust her chuunin vest, drawing his attention to it.

He lights up, “you got promoted!”

“Battlefield,” she says, “Iwa front.”

He stills, “I heard things about that campaign. What was it like?”

What can she say to a sheltered clan kid about the realities of war? She certainly can’t tell him that the only reason she’d specialized as a battlefield iroyonin was because she’d lost him and never forgave herself for it.

“Rocky,” she says. “Earth has an entire Corps of shinobi with Blast kekkei genkai.”

He winces and maybe he has matured, if he thinks its bombs are dreadful instead of cool. After a while, he says, “I never planned not to go home. That was always my goal: escape and go back home. I thought everyone would be so happy that I wasn’t dead, they’d forgive me for being gone.”

She says, delicately, “they already think you’re dead. They probably think I am, too. Nobody will be looking for us.”

He stares, face hard. “You want to fake our deaths to be missing nin?”

She’s a little pissed at that. He’s being unfair; it’s not like she sees another choice. Even with Minato as Yondaime, his hands will be tied by the various Clan Heads and council members. If he pardons them, the village will riot. And that’s only if the chakra construct sealed inside her doesn’t stomp them to death first.

She's thinking of her family, who have lost enough to the wars of shinobi. She can't take anything more from them, even if it means she stays dead.

She says, “I am a loyal Konoha shinobi. Loyal enough not to risk destroying my home, either by Bijuu rampage or by starting another war.”

He shakes his head. “They’d just yank it out and put it in someone else, to ship back to Kiri. That would kill you, and it might make the war thing worse, but I don’t think Minato sensei would let a Bijuu destroy the Hidden Leaf.”

New spring grass is greening under his feet. He stares at it dully. “They’ll kill me, too. For this.”

Rin doesn’t answer. If it was just him, she doesn’t know what he’d do, what he’d be willing to risk. She’s never known an Obito with an unwanted kekkei genkai in the same way she’s never know an Obito who wanted to die. She’d be the worst hypocrite if she dared confront him now. As many similarities as she sees between them in this moment, her with a Bijuu sealed inside her and him growing grass under his bare feet, she cannot know the weight on his shoulders from this. Bloodline theft will always mean more, be more personal a crime, to him than it will ever be to her.

It’s not the only problem. She won’t kid herself into thinking she knows Minato well enough to predict his actions. Kushina would fight for them, but Minato is Hokage now. Worse, Minato is a Hokage she’d seen come up in war, and unaffected as he can appear, he ended it in such a brutal way that it couldn’t have just been efficient. Not when his actions were always those of a man who just wanted it all to stop. Minato is sick of war. He won’t risk another. Even for her.

He shouldn’t. She can’t ask him to.

Neither can Obito, who Minato’s already mourned and let go. It wouldn’t be fair to bring him back up just to go through the whole loss again, but worse this time, because he’d be complicit. Rin’s always known Obito’s clan treated him poorly; she even thinks she’d recognized it before he did. It would be nothing for the Uchiha, to throw him away.

She lets it slowly sink in, that they’d lost their safety, their home. They can’t go back. The trees overhead seem to react to the feeling as well, shuddering through their branches, flashing the pale undersides of new leaves. It only upsets Obito more.

Where would they go? What would they do? She’s a timebomb, and it doesn’t look like Obito can control the Wood Release at all. There’s not anywhere on the continent they’ll be safe. All it would take is someone seeing the trees creaking around him, the grass under his feet, and it would get back to Konoha. The mokuton’s synonymous with the Senju, with the Shodaime. Its too legendary; even vagrant peasants know what it means.

And she could go off any minute. Destroy everything around her. She might already have, if it wasn’t for Obito. Senju Hashirama used the mokuton to capture the Bijuu originally. It’s just impossible coincidence she’s with the one person on the continent, raised from the dead, that can stop that from happening.

“We’ll be missing nin,” Obito says, troubled.

“Unaffiliated nin,” Rin says. “We don’t need hunter nin after us. Or bounty hunters.”

“Or sensei, if he finds out.”

Rin shudders. If word gets back to Minato, there is nowhere in the world they can hide from him. “We’ll make new names. Aliases. Backstory. We can’t be Fire citizens.”

“No,” Obito says sadly, “We’ll still be nukenin.”

Only in the barest, most technical sense. Obito and Rin will be nukenin. But who they’ll turn into will just be unaffiliated nin, like the droves of shinobi fleeing Yu. With Hot Water’s demilitarization, there’s more unaffiliated nin on the continent than ever before, at least since the hidden village system was popularized. It shouldn’t be too hard to establish themselves in the crowd.

Rin says, “We can still be loyal, just not in Fire. Like Tsunade sama.”

Obito snorts, stirring the fire. “Senju privilege. The Sandaime’s a coward.”

Rin blinks. The iroyonin Sannin may be her hero, but she doesn’t disagree. Regardless, its bold to voice such opinions aloud. Its treason actually, even if Sarutobi Hiruzen wasn’t Hokage anymore. From an Uchiha, she guesses it’s understandable enough, but still, it’s a little concerning to hear from him. He was merely naïve before; what’s turned him cynic?

She’s not sure what she can say to that. She does say, “Minato sensei’s the Yondaime now. He’s only just been sworn in. His students turning rogue will damage him politically. Kumo already sent him an assassin as a congratulation present.”

“I heard, about his promotion, not the assassin thing. That’s a shitty thing to do. Fucking Cloud nin. What happened to him?”

“Kushina tore him apart.”

He grins and it pulls at the scars around his mouth. He can’t have much feeling in that half of his face. “Good for her.”

She grins back, sharp and fierce. The joy’s starting to rise in her, the realization that Obito is alive breeching the shock of seeing him again. “Yeah, they’ve got an Honor Guard appointed to keep him safe, but he keeps leaving them behind. Drives them crazy. One of them’s Genma.”

Obito chokes, “Shirunai? No way he’s a jounin already.”

“Tokubetsu. Specialized guard.”

“Shit, you mean assassin, don’t you? His poison shit?”

Rin shrugs. That’s two halves of the same coin, guards and assassins. “Sensei’s been trying to teach them some kind of collaborative Hiraishin, just so they can keep up, but last I heard it almost turned Raido inside out and disarticulated the joint’s in Iwashi’s arms.”

“Shit,” he repeats. “Guess I got used to it, with him using it all the time.”

She knows exactly what he means. She got desensitized after a while, having a kage level shinobi as a teacher. And then something comes along to remind her exactly how and why he earned that hat. He used that jutsu to kill 1000 shinobi in a single battle.

There’s so much she wants to tell him about back home, so much she’s sure he wants to know, but that might just make the pain worse.

She says, “We’ll need to leave the continent. Go to the islands. Benisu, maybe, or one of the other large, unincorporated lands.”

Obito picks up a stick and pokes at the fire. She lets him consider. His eye’s narrowed, like he’s thinking it over. He says, “you want to still be loyal, but run away. But a loyal Leaf nin wouldn’t abandon Fire. They’d stay and fight.”

“Fight what? The war’s over.” If he’s suggesting they poke a stick at the Elemental Nations on behalf of Fire, that’s a good way to die and baffle everyone with their corpses.

He shoves the stick into the fire and causes a cascade of embers. “Its all connected. The people who sealed you. The zetsu that saved me. There’s a plan to take over the world, headed by a madman. The Moon Eye plan. I’ve heard them talking about it, in the cave.”

Rin repeats it, because it sounds like he’s named it. He’s as bad at naming things as Minato. “The Moon Eye plan? Take over the world?”

“It’s a genjutsu, an Infinite Tsukuyomi, reflected off the moon, powered by the chakra of all nine Tailed Beasts. I think they were training me to do it, actually. It’s an Uchiha technique. One you need a mangekyo for.”

He’s bitter and angry and the fire flares bright and hot. Rin takes it in, reads what he’s implying and sits with it for a bare second before the rage reignites. Someone did this to her, to do it to him. How far back did this go? To the cave-in? Even earlier?

“Oh hell no. Screw running. We need to fuck that shit up.”

He grins and its like a knife blade. “They miscalculated, thinking I’d go along with that bullshit. Especially after trying to kill you. Fuck, but that’s not like him. He’s older than shit. You’d think he knew better.”

She files away that particular worry away to autopsy later. “Who’s our target?”

He grimaces, almost apologetic, “Uchiha Madara.” After a second of disbelieving silence, he adds, “He’s, uh, still alive too. Old as all fuck, but its him.”

Uchiha fucking Madara. The real Ghost of the Uchiha. The most famous nukenin in existence. Someone who could go toe to toe against the fucking Shodaime. If anything, she has to admit that the mokuton makes slightly more sense with that context. “Anyone else still alive that I need to know about?”

He laughs, humorless. “I don’t think so. But the zetsu are sneaky as shit, and I think the big one might be a demon. And a cannibal.”

Rin says a fast prayer and spits into the fire. For once, Obito doesn’t tease her for her civilian superstition. She says, “You’re serious.”

“Yeah, they’re nasty stuff. There’s really two of them, a Black Half and a White Half, but they’re conjoined most of the time. I’ve seen them separate, though, so they can operate independently. The clones are of the White Half. They, um, have the mokuton too. The big one, not the clones. And not like, a lot. But enough. There’s a big statue thing, the Gedo Mazo. Its got something to do with it.”

Rin repeats, “The Demonic Statue of the Outer Paths. What the fuck.”

“I don’t even know. Its not like they ever really filled me in. I just picked up a few things over the years.”

“Okay,” Rin compartmentalizes. She can freak out later. “We need a plan then. How do we stop them?”

He tells her everything he knows. The more he speaks, the more she realizes how fucked they are. This will be a massive operation. It would take a village backed team, with all the resources in the world, to support them for literal years. Its impossible. Its suicide to try.

But the more he talks, the more she watches the flames crackle in response to his chakra, watches the trees bend around them, feels a sliver of Bijuu chakra escape her like water trickling from a leaky dam. Impossible as it might be, maybe they were the only ones who could even try. Didn’t everyone say that you needed a sharingan to counter a sharingan?

She tries to fit herself into the mindset of her teacher, notorious for his hyper-efficiency. In her mind, between the lines, underneath the underneath, Obito says they were going to use me to do it. The easiest solution is also the most heinous. If the plan requires an Uchiha, go to Konoha and wipe out all the Uchiha.

If anyone else was Hokage, that was the simplest solution, the one she could see Hiruzen, see Tobirama, making in their sleep. She’d like to think Minato would never, but he took out an entire platoon. There might not be anything he wouldn’t do, especially if the world was at stake.

She very carefully does not internalize that. Next up is to kill the old man. But he’s sealed underground, protected by a personal army that Obito estimates is in the hundreds. That’s okay, he’s just the figurehead. He’s an end goal.

Think smaller. Every plan was a recipe, and her mother taught to cook from the time she was old enough to reach the stove. The goal was only reached through a series of carefully completed steps. Disrupt one, and the recipe can fall apart. Too many substitutions make it unwieldy. If all else fails, you can simply burn the batch and start all over.

That’s all this was. A recipe. What are the ingredients? What does she need to do to ensure Madara never gets his hands on what he needs? Break it down. Step by step. Surgical precision. Stay calm.

“The jinchuuriki,” she says. “That’s his power source. That’s the first thing he’ll do. He’ll go after them.”

“He’s got minions, the zetsu, but also shinobi like the ones that grabbed you. There’s a whole group of them, I think based out of Ame, probably. That’s who he’ll send.”

“So we get to them first. I’d like to see them kidnap a jinchuuriki with prep time.”

“How the fuck are we going to do that?”

How the fuck indeed. She was blindsided. She needs the others to not be. She bites her lip, not sure about airing her new status in this way but wanting to reciprocate, “I’m a jinchuuriki. Maybe they’ll speak to me.”

He looks doubtful, likely knowing how jinchuuriki are treated in the Elemental Nations, but they can’t afford to be poking holes through their plan right now. “What else?”

“Jinchuuriki first. Then we deal with his minions, in Rain, the zetsu. You said they were everywhere, we draw them out, kill as many as we can. Deplete the army around him before we take the cave. Bust up the statue. Kill Zetsu. Then kill him.”

He doesn’t look happy but she can’t question it. This is someone who he’s spent years with by now, a clansmen, an ancestor even. But this is nonnegotiable. He has to die.

Even with his reluctant agreement, she can make it work. “Okay, jinchuuriki. What do we know?”

“Nine of them,” he says. “One for each Tailed Beast, which also has 1 through 9 tails.”

“Five Elemental Nations,” Rin says. “The Shodaime sold them as deterrents to war.”

“Much as that plan worked out for him.”

She always thought it was the wish as a happy optimist, much as it ended up backfiring and starting the First War. “So that’s all on continental countries, plus Kiri. We can check at least one off, the one inside of me.”

“And we don’t know who any of them are.”

Rin is hit with a thought that she has tamped down for years, a bit of information she’d gleaned and then made the immediate decision to never consciously acknowledge ever again.

Here goes nothing. “Well…I think we can cross off Konoha too.”

“What?”

She says, awkwardly, “The Kyuubi. Its Konoha’s only Bijuu. And I think I know its jinchuuriki.”

“Who?”

“Well, its Kushina, isn’t it?”

“What!”

She defends herself, “I’m not supposed to know! But Sarutobi Biwako’s her only medic, even though she’s retired. No one else is allowed to heal her. I saw her medical files at the hospital. And she’s an Uzumaki, Mito sama’s relation, and she was the first jinchuuriki. It just, it makes sense.”

Obito looks around fearfully. “You are definitely not supposed to know that. Shit, sensei’ll kill us for even thinking it. Wait! Does he know?”

“He’s Yondaime! And they’re engaged!”

She’s not quite shrieking, but it’s been a long day, she’s regrowing a lung or a spleen or both with the help of a Tailed Beast, Obito’s alive, Madara’s trying to take over the world via worldwide genjutsu, but Obito’s fearful face feels like the last straw.

“Quiet!” he whisper-yells as the trees rustle and creak around them. There’s no wind at all. “We are in hiding in fucking Kusa.”

She takes deep breaths, trying to calm down, but now that something cold and dark is rising in her like something from deep water. Killing Intent spikes around her, toxic Tailed Beast chakra unfurling like a war banner in the wind.

Obito lunges at her and she links hands with him. This time, she can feel that his chakra doesn’t quite feel like him. Obito is burning, is fire and light and heat. This chakra is cooler, steadier, with the presence of an old tree. It’s the perfect counter to her seal unraveling, the weight of the mokuton forcing the Bijuu chakra back behind the seal.

She’s panting slightly from the panic of it, but nothing mountain sized and full of hate bursts out of her.

“Okay,” Obito says, tone shaky. “Okay, we’re working on that. Maybe the other jinchuuriki can give you some tips.”

She agrees. Because that was about as subtle as an explosion. Any shinobi within miles of them would have felt that. She grits her teeth around the pain, “I don’t think I can move just yet.”

“That’s fine. I’ve got a, a fucking sensory thing. No one’s arounds us. I’ll get a heads up if that changes. You just rest, for now. I’ll uh, go grub up some food. I won’t go far, signal if you need me.”

She nods and he gets up, stretches lopsidedly. “Shit,” he shakes his head. “Shit.”

He goes. She wraps her arms around herself and directs a litany of prayer to the very center of her being, where she can feel something straining behind a seal three sizes too small to hold it. Her mom always told her that love can grow inside her to many times her size. Nobody warned her that the same could be said about sadness, or fear, or hate.

Obito’s gone for hours. He’s given her the space to fall apart in private but she can’t afford to, especially now. She calms down, meditates, deep breaths in, deep breaths out. She can’t afford panic. Nerves lead to mistakes. She needs steady hands and a clear mind. She needs all her medic training to scan her chakra over herself, wince, and then change her mind. She’ll try again when there’s not a hole through her. Let the Bijuu do its work.

It’s a little easier every time she calms. She’s emulating Minato, who’s calm is usually a prelude to acts of extreme violence. She learned that from him. In battle, berserkers are the first ones to die. She can be better than animal’s urgent violence, a thing that gnaws its own leg off to be free.

They’ve made her the trap, the vessel, the jailor. Jinchuuriki. Human sacrifice. Of course it wants out. But that’s not an option. It’s not right, and it’s not fair, but that’s how it is. She knows plenty about that.

Obito comes back with a rabbit.

He hadn’t taken anything with him. “How’d you get that?”

“Bandage snare. Not the greatest, but hey.”

Obito cleans it, then roasts it over the fire. Rin sips water from her unsealed canteen. Obito had been cataloguing her supplies while she was unconscious. They’d taken anything that could have been used as a weapon, including her syringes. But trust Obito to fashion a serviceable trap out of bandages.

She pulls off her hitai ate, her hair falling messy and tangled down her back. She hasn’t cut it since Obito died. It’s a tradition from her father’s family, who’d lost most everyone in the Second War. When she was little, she used to play with his beard, fascinated by it. None of her teachers at the Academy had one. Neither did any of the adult shinobi she saw around the village. As a kid, she thought that it meant that shinobi never had anything to lose.

She’d wanted to be like that, like her mother’s sister, someone important enough that they could protect a family boxed small by grief.

She runs her thumb over the stylized Leaf sigil. Obito asks, “Are you okay with them thinking you’re dead?”

Absolutely not. If she even thinks about it, she’ll fall apart. She deflects. “Are you?”

He shrugs. “They already think I’m dead. My Baa chan’s the only one who’ll care.”

Vitriol sings through her. His clan doesn’t deserve him. “I went to your funeral.”

He perks up. “Really? Was it big?”

“Your whole clan came.”

Now he just looks uncomfortable, maybe even a little confused. “Did anyone cry?”

She had. She still does. She says, “Sensei spoke. He told a joke.”

“Was it funny?”

“No.”

“Damn,” he says. “Is he any better, now?”

What she knows he means is, did Kushina ever teach him how to properly express his feelings? She shrugs. “You know how charming he can be.”

Their sensei’s all the big three that the Yamanaka pamphlets warn about: charming, focused, fucking ruthless. Obito shakes his head. “Now he’s Yondaime. Is he any good at it?”

“He’s excellent, actually.”

Obito laughs. “Course he is. I bet the clans all hate him. Any of the assassins secretly from the Hyuuga?”

“Kumo’s claiming credit for all of them, actually, even the ones that showed up wearing Iwa’s uniform.”

Obito laughs harder, turning the rabbit over to grill the other side. “Fucking Cloud ninja.”

She laughs with him, because the thought that someone thought they even could successfully assassinate their teacher is hilarious. She turns the hitai ate over and over in her hands. Minato will be okay. He got over Obito, maybe. He’ll get over her. And he’s still Kakashi to keep his hands full. Kakashi will blame himself forever, but he’s been doing that even while she was still alive. He’s already lost everyone. She doubts she’ll be the last straw for him.

But this would destroy her family. Its just her parents and her maternal grandmother in the house with almost as many ghosts as people. She has no siblings. No cousins. She’ll leave a hole even larger than her aunt.

She hands her hitai ate to Obito. “Burn it. We can’t be tracked back to Fire.”

His fingers curl defensively over it, like she’s asked him to burn a treasured friend. “I lost mine,” he says, looking at it. “I’ve only got this cloak.”

She wiggles painfully out of her chuunin vest. This one is almost harder to part with, after everything she went through to get it. “No tangible proof,” she says.

He swallows around a lump in his throat but does as she asks. “For love and loyalty,” he says. “Let’s leave the Leaf.”

Her flak jacket is fire resistant, but an Uchiha can burn anything. She watches him work the single hand seals with approval.

“Thank you,” she says when its over, quietly, like there was shame in it.

“Nobody can know,” Obito agrees, and it is just as quiet.

Somehow, the world has made enemies of them. They are going to be enemies of the world. They will have no allies. No help. They will be hated and hunted. Forced to work in the shadows, after a monster more myth than legend.

“Fuck him up,” she says, holding out her hand.

He fist bumps her. “Fuck him up.”

Everything has gone startlingly wrong, but somehow, this makes her feel insurmountably better about it. She hasn’t quite lost everything. She has Obito back. That counts more than anything.

Chapter Text

Chapter 5: Obito: Powercrawl

They stay at their camp in Kusa for almost a week, Rin sleeping most of the days away and Obito making more and more traps to cover them. Thankfully, they must be in a remote area of Kusa if no patrols have found them by now, but he’s living constantly with the anxiety that any second now a squad of jounin is about to bear down on them while Rin’s stuck in place. She’s recovering steadily, but it leaves her dizzy and exhausted. Her seal needs almost constant maintenance or the Bijuu threatens to rupture it and kill them both.

While Rin gets her strength back, or regrows her spleen or whatever, he doesn’t fucking know, Obito runs kata and trains in the clearing outside the camp. He keeps it simple, not wanting to throw too much chakra around and get them discovered. He struggles to get any technique to work with just his one hand capable of forming signs. He can do his basic katon, but that’s about it. He’s struggling with jutsu that he mastered at age 10. It’s beyond frustrating but he refrains from burning down the forest in retaliation because what if he could feel the trees dying too and wouldn’t that just add new creative layers of suck to his life. He wouldn’t put it past the world.

There are details, plans to be made, but Rin’s still so weak, and he’s off-balance and burning out fast. So they stay quiet, absorbing everything, relearning how to exist in the same small space after two years apart. Rin sleeps and Obito keeps everything ready to go at a moment’s notice. He’s not sure they should rely on his uncanny ability to transport them, but Rin is the iroyonin, and she says it’s best if she isn’t moved quite yet. While it gives Obito hives to stay put, Rin had taken a Chidori to the chest; she deserves a few days of rest to shake that off.

He wobbles through his forms. Fucking Madara. Manipulating him into awakening the mangekyo, maybe even the mokuton. Of course he hadn’t been saved out of pure goodwill. When has anyone ever shown him kindness without asking a price? But now he has a monster body and a bastardized version of their founder’s most prized kekkei genkai: a mangekyoed Uchiha with the mokuton. The clans would riot. They will not accept him. He is a bloodline thief. An abomination.

And Rin is an unwilling jinchuuriki: a weapon. Every village will be gunning for her, and Madara as well. Nowhere is safe for her, not anymore. They wouldn’t accept her either. Jinchuuriki are reviled unanimously, even when they have a working seal.

Not that that matters to him. He could never hate Rin.

But now he’s made them traitors. Nukenin. Missing nin. Like Madara, turning his back on the village he’d helped found. Madara, who would be after them as well after Obito’s betrayal. After Rin, after all the jinchuuriki, Kushina included, and wasn’t that another kick in the teeth? At least that’s a blow he understands; Kushina’s status is none of his business, but he’d like to believe that she knew it wouldn’t change anything between them. He’s an Uchiha: his love doesn’t work like that, in half measures, in conditions.

And now he’ll never see her again. All his dreams about going home, up in so much smoke.

His resolve solidifies inside him. Fuck Madara and fuck his plans. He’s always been angry, but as a sidelined clan kid, anger was the only thing he could do, in the face of everything he couldn’t. Sometimes being angry was the only action he could take, when other Uchiha pretended he wasn’t Uchiha enough, only half-clan, raised by an outsider civilian aunt, too loud, too clumsy, eyes too dark for their red.

That’s not how clan works. It had taken him awhile to see that. Maybe he shouldn’t be so fucking betrayed by Madara’s evil, especially when Madara is infamous for it. Why’d he ever think he was the exception? Surely, he wasn’t so starved for a clansmen’s approval that he latched onto fucking Madara of all people?

He groans and overbalances, landing on his ass. Not having an arm is a continual frustration, one that accrues new little zings and cuts about every five minutes. Rin doesn’t quite stare at it, but he’s not in the mood to explain why he’s not actually traumatized by losing it. Its not his first time being de-armed, but its not something he can point out without sounding like an ass.

Early in the day, while Obito’s stretching, he senses something at the edge of his range. He is by no means a sensor type, but his new mokuton ability gives him some scion’s use of the technique, in all that it pertains exclusively to plants. And the trees are telling him that there is something….off. Something that rankles in its strangeness, in its odd not-plant life, its chakra signature almost negative. Plant like, but definitely not a plant.

It hits him all at once: creepers around his bones, folded into his soul, an empty void that sucks at his chakra. A zetsu, or maybe even the Original.

He ducks into the campsite, finger to his lips, mangekyo whirling with his agitation. Rin looks up and her eyes narrow. She uses standard Konoha chuunin hand signals to ask enemy nin?

She has to spell it out for him, slow and letter by letter, because he doesn’t fucking know hand signs, Minato had just started teaching him before the cave-in. He makes a mental note to learn, and soon.

He shakes his head. Negative

They’ll have to fix that, the Konoha standard is a dead giveaway.

He focuses and the fire banks down to coals. Rin collects the storage scrolls with their supplies and sticks them in her kunai pouch. She’s a little stiff and cautious, but its more than he’s seen her move since.

“Be ready to leave,” he whispers, checking on how far out the zetsu is. He spares a minute to disarm and take down the traps surrounding the camp; they can’t spare the supplies and a good eye will be able to tell that they were Konoha-made.

The zetsu clones are primarily for infiltration and information gathering. They’re spies, and more likely to retreat than fight. Unless it’s Spikey. Spikey’d kick his ass. But if they’re a regular non-combat clone and he gets a chance, Obito can take them out.

He tracks the clone by the weird blank space they leave around themselves. It’s like looking at an impression of what’s not there, the exact opposite of how his dojutsu works, but he’s getting better at seeing through it, in working with the parts of him that don’t feel like him.

He holds out his hand in half a Snake seal and Rin completes it for him, letting him focus his mokuton into dispersing the wooden dome of briars around them, returning the camp to natural forest with an ease he’s trying not to get used to.

“Ready?” he whispers.

She nods determinedly and he helps her pull herself unsteadily to her feet, keeping one arm wrapped around her middle, focusing on her breathing, on the Bijuu inside her. He wraps his arm gingerly around her shoulders, cringing internally all the while. His teleportation is a mangekyo technique, and he hadn’t used any hand signs the first time, so he focuses on his chakra, on his orbital pathways, letting his chakra surge through it in a blaze of heat. He feels blood sheet down his cheek and then the world lurches nauseatingly around them.

They land in the middle of another forest, similar enough to where they had been, but the trees are smaller here, even sparser, more tangled undergrowth between the widely spaced trunks. Obito measures the drain on his chakra, trying to gauge the distance. Are they still in Kusa? Would he be able to tell?

Rin’s attention is aware and darting around the trees, trying to sense if they’d accidentally landed in danger. Obito listens to the wind through the trees for a minute, judging if it’s safe. He doesn’t feel anything around them. He doesn’t sense the zetsu anymore, at the very least.

“I think we’re still in Kusa. We didn’t jump as far as last time. The trees are similar, less oaks, more scrubland.”

“Maybe we’re closer to Suna?”

He shrugs. “Might as well be.”

They’d agreed that Wind is their first stop, because they hadn’t been in the war. Their borders will be looser. And they are close enough already that it makes sense to start with the Hidden Sand and then work their way around from there, up to Iwa, over to Taki, then Kumo, and Kiri last, because they both know Water will suck the most, for so many reasons. He’d been thinking about running around the continent like a chicken with its head cut off, staying ahead of Zetsu and fucking up what he can, when he can.

This is why Rin makes the plans. She thinks, where Obito just blunders. And because technically, she outranks him. He has little idea how war changed what he knows of the countries, but Rin’s got that hollow look to her sometimes, that veteran’s look. She knows more than he does about how everything’s changed.

Obito looks around, trying to blink through the blood trickling down his face, his mangekyo whirling as he takes in their surroundings. He’s not sensing any danger now. He’s tickled actually, because that was just as intuitive as he figured it would be. Easy as the mokuton is becoming, his mangekyo ability is a more acceptable way to excel.

This is as good a place as any for a base came, and Rin’s relying more and more on him to help hold her weight upright, her breathing growing strained. He eases her to the ground and together they make a Snake seal and the trees around them invert and twist, thorns and thick undergrowth forming an impenetrable dome around them. When the primary defense is in place, Obito traps the surrounding area, just in case something slips past his mokuton that he wouldn’t be able to feel, like an animal predator.

When he comes back, Rin’s pale, sitting upright, holding one green glowing hand to her ribs, nose scrunched in concentration. Her brown hair’s lank around her face, her cheeks bare of her purple markings. As much as Obito looks like an Uchiha, without the obvious shinobi affectations, Rin could be anyone, from anywhere, ninja or civilian. That’s the point, he knows, but he hasn’t seen her without it since she was a kid, determined to blend in with the louder clan kids at the academy, not knowing it wasn’t traditionally a quirk kunoichi adopt.

But Rin was just as stubborn as a kid as she is now, graduating top of the class while he lagged behind. Rin was always so talented; to see her pale and shaky on the forest floor of a minor nation, faint wisps of Bijuu chakra coming from the hole in her middle, a nukenin, is a reversal of how everything should have turned out. He wonders, was it the cave-in that had set them on this path? If he had died like he was supposed to, would Rin have been okay?

She frowns at him. “You’re bleeding.”

Obito rubs at the blood under his eye. “Yeah, I think it’s from the time/space.”

She has that look she used to get when he was injured and hiding it from her, the one that promises careful medical attention followed by chastisement about downplaying his wounds. Maybe even a swift kick if he thinks about complaining. That same stubbornness that makes her such a great medical ninja suddenly turns on him, her eyes going clinical. “Let me see.”

He knows it will just be worse if he fights her on this, but he squirms in place uncomfortably. “Should you be using chakra like that yet?”

She sees through him in a heartbeat. She always does. Her frown grows even more severe. “Get over here,” she commands, collecting medical ninjutsu chakra in her hand.

Sage, he hates this, but he doesn’t want to fight her. He can’t stand the thought of Rin angry at him. She’s so unforgiving. So hardheaded. But who knows what she’ll be able to tell from his slapdash chakra system. He tugs his hood down gingerly and leans into reach for her to run a green glowing hand over to his eye.

Her frown grows steadily more severe as she works her chakra into his system, blue and cooling, like water, so different from his cinder and flashpaper nature. She’s the only medic he’s ever been comfortable with. The touch of her chakra is as familiar as a hand. “You’ve overblown the chakra pathways to your eye. Your orbital tenketsu is shredding.”

That’s worse than he expected. He lets his eye slide closed, feeling her carefully thread through his overworked pathways. “The mangekyo sharingan is degenerative. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

Her hand pauses over his eye. “You’ll be blind?”

He can’t read her tone. He’s carefully not thinking about it, that one of his biggest instinctual fears will come true once again, that he’ll be left sightless underground while the darkness takes him over. “It’ll take years, decades even. But yes. Eventually.”

That stubbornness is back, “If I’m here to work on it, we can delay that indefinitely. I won’t let you lose your vision. But you’ve got to tell me. We can’t let the scar tissue build up.”

Obito’s touched, even if he personally thinks it’s futile. He’s not going to take her hope from her. He lets her work on his eye until some of the burning pressure’s relieved. He blinks it open at her. It does feel better, surprisingly so. “Thank you.”

“You said you had burns?”

His comfort evaporates like water on a hot skillet, sizzling. “They’ve healed.”

She can tell he’s tensed up, and her voice is gentle, not moving any closer, not touching him anywhere. “You might have other injuries, old ones. I should check them, to be sure.”

She means well; there’s no sneaky underhanded curiosity in her, but Obito knows he’s so much worse than she’s thinking. He’s hidden the worst of his science-experiment horror from her. He doesn’t want her to see, to know how fucked up he is.

She’s looking at his missing arm, at the empty sleeve he has tied back to not get in the way. She hasn’t asked yet, but he knows she’s curious. She probably assumed he lost it in the cave-in, which is true in a way. Thinking about how he’d smashed it to pulp against a boulder just a few days ago makes him itch.

He doesn’t answer but she looks him in the eye, steady, not flinching when it spins red in its socket. “Let me.”

He swallows. What’s he going to do, fight her? Fight Rin? Ridiculous. “Okay.”

She checks him over, starting at the top of his head and working her way down. Most of his scarring’s hidden under the bandages he’d wrapped around himself one-handed and sloppy. Rin’s been his medic since he was 10 and she’s seen all of him at one time or another, but he still tenses when he feels her cool chakra brush against him.

If she’s shocked at what she senses, she’s too professional to show it. If anything, she looks unimpressed as she runs her hand over the scarring on his face, his empty eye socket. Strictly clinical, an iroyonin at her most detached.

She only pauses a moment when she makes her way down to his shoulder, feels the first section of the dead white flesh grafted onto him. The Hashirama Cells, thrumming with awakened mokuton. It tingles under her hand, and he holds himself very still, almost holding his breath.

When she moves her hand to his missing arm she frowns, her demeanor crumpling. “This…. feels different, somehow.” She bites her lip. “Can I see it?”

It kills him inside, but she needs to know. He can’t hide himself from her. He nods his consent, and she unbinds his empty sleeve and rolls it up so she can see his stump.

Obito closes his eye. The air feels different on it, the breeze slipping over the smooth dead flesh like water over a round river stone, only flagging on the weird nubbly bits that sprout from the socket, alien and hideous. He knows it’s a dead white, corpse-color, identical to the clones, even if she doesn’t know what he fears it means.

“This is from the cave-in?”

He lets his breath out in a long slow stream, tasting smoke. “I lost my original arm in the accident, but it was replaced by a grafted arm of the Hashirama Cells. I lost that one a week ago, in the escape.”

Her tone is incredulous, and slightly pissed. “You lost your arm a few days ago and didn’t think to tell me?”

He shrugs and she tsks, studying it. “Senju Hashirama sama was renowned for his regenerative ability. Maybe it’s trying to grow back? It feels more…. active than the other grafts.”

That’s a weird thought, the mokuton trying to regrow his arm. But he doesn’t disagree. Fuck if he knows what the hell the mokuton is up to. Its not like it fucking listens to him. Not like it should. Fuck.

“Does it hurt?”

“Most sensation on my right side is muted,” he admits. “It doesn’t feel great, but it’s not as bad as it should be.”

Rin moves on, completing her checkup of him. The burns he sustained had vanished, and his chakra pathways are running normally. She doesn’t ask about the other scars, the intubation marks on his elbow, the scars from the port that was on his side. She never reacts to the badly-integrated halves of him and he’s more grateful than he can express. It would have been understandable if she puked, but Rin’s tough. Maybe she’s even seen worse, in the war, or wounds more recently gory, at least. Wasn’t she frontline? That had to be rough.

She finishes and says, “you should be fine. The mokuton has increased your healing factor. We’ll just have to be careful about overworking your orbital chakra pathways, keep your major tenketsu points from shutting down, or your supraorbital from getting blocked. But your coils and gates look fine and everything seems to be cycling normally. Regular check-ups will help preserve your vision.”

He nods, clumsily repining his sleeve back in place. That hadn’t been as bad as he feared. “Thank you.”

She smiles fondly. “Idiot. Don’t hide things from me.”

He sets up their new temporary camp while Rin rests, working on her own chakra control. Her focus is incredible: she just worked medical ninjutsu while keeping her leaky seal under wraps. She’s got an expiration date stamped on her stomach, but they keep resetting the timer. It must be exhausting, not being able to let up just for a second without risking the Bijuu breaking free and rampaging. He can’t even imagine it.

After Obito starts the fire to keep the animals away and prepares their daily rations, Rin says, “So, who were we running from? Kusa nin?”

“A zetsu, I think. It felt weird, like a…reverse-plant.”

“Tell me more about them?”

“Hn, espionage work, mostly. They’re tricky though. They can communicate between themselves somehow, and I think the Original can look through their eyes or some shit.” He flexes his hand, thinking of that night. “They’re weak to fire.”

“You said one helped you escape the cave?”

“Yeah, the one I’d nicknamed Swirly. They were one of the main ones in the cave with me, helped me recover, watched me for the Old Man. Like a medic. They can….pull you in? That’s not right. They can move through things; its why they’re such good spies.”

Its only as he’s saying it that he realizes its exactly like the attacks from the Kiri shinobi going right through him. They go through things. Things go through him.

But that’s a mangekyo ability. It doesn’t have anything to do with clone bullshit. He tugs at his hair, frowning, “Swirly kept me alive that first year by sticking their body over mine to keep me from rejecting the grafts. It’s…super gross actually and I hated every second of it. It’s like they’re in your brain, in your thoughts. But I used them to escape the cave, by letting them wrap around me again, like before. I don’t think I was stable, until I awakened it.”

It’s the only way he can make sense of it, how weak he was, and then how strong. He says, bitterly, “But it was all part of the Old Man’s plan. He let me escape. Swirly didn’t betray him at all, and after I’d saved you, they tried to force me to go back to him. I had to burn them out.”

She thinks this over. “The clone would have alerted him about us or tried to take you back.”

Obito snorts, “Take us both back, only he’d kill you to extract the Bijuu’s chakra. He thinks he can combine all the Tailed Beasts somehow, like a battery.” All he knows is that everyone is expendable to the Old Man, and he was always going to kill the jinchuuriki anyway. Its efficient for him, to target Rin to get to Obito. The rage is crawling up the back of his throat, hot like fire, but he chokes it down.

Rin hums thoughtfully, watching the fire. “He gave them out like candy, didn’t he? The Shodaime.”

It takes him a second to follow. “Yeah, some pact of mutual assured destruction.”

She shakes her head. He’s thinking its not any worse that what his old Clan Head wants to do with them.

That thought stops him. Shit, if Madara’s alive, is Fugaku really Clan Head? Is Madara’s excommunication valid if everyone thought he was dead? Can he legally show up in Konoha, dodge the panicked guards, and cast a vote in an election?

He's spiraling. Rin tosses a pebble at him.

They hang around Kusa a few more days while Rin regains her strength, jumping around the border, dodging increasingly nosey Kusa patrols. Obito practices his new mangekyo abilities. He’s getting a handle on the time/space thing, but his intangibility is sporadic, difficult to control, and makes his eye bleed with the amount of chakra he has to force through his orbital pathways, searing them shut if he’s not careful enough, which causes Rin to fuss and fiddle.

He contents himself with working on his left-handed weapons work and trying to teach himself to make seals one-handed. The best shinobi can circumvent entire sequences of hand seals; Senju Tobirama could do his famous Water Dragon with just one hand seal, instead of the required 44.

But Senju Tobirama, Obito is not. Stupid Senju, with their prodigious techniques.

His mokuton is…well, it does what it wants. It can’t really be directed, and only barely listens to his suggestions or pleas for cooperation. Wood is alive and it has its own agenda. It’s not usually willing to work with him and is most effective when he just ignores it or acts on instinct.

He doesn’t mind practicing. When he doesn’t think about it, the Wood Release is nice. It should be sickening, but he can’t deny that when flowers lean into his touch, he likes it. He likes it, and its getting easier and easier for him, as natural as calling on his dojutsu. It shouldn’t be, but everything about it that hadn’t felt natural in the cave clicks into place after the activation. As much as it shouldn’t be like this, it’s not this disparate thing from him. He can’t separate it from himself. Like Rin, entwined with the Tailed Beast. Shackled to their own death sentence.

But while Rin’s death sentence feels like dying and is the epitome of all war, his feels like spring. Its only ugly because its on him. He’s not even talking about the scars, the grafts. At its heart, the mokuton wasn’t meant to be a scion.

But it suppresses the Bijuu inside Rin. Obito figures this was how Senju Hashirama captured them in the first place, by using his mokuton to contain them. Obito can do just enough to keep the wonky seal from bombing out.

And have every plant within reach react to him and his emotions. Visibly. He could wear a sign saying "I Have the Mokuton" and it wouldn’t be as obvious as the trees trying to bodily kidnap him when he gets too close.

It’s a continuing problem. Not one he can do anything about.

Rin regains her strength, working on stretching, running through simple taijutsu kata to build herself back up from taking a Chidori to the lung. Jinchuuriki are supposed to be chakra tanks, unstoppable forces of destruction, but Rin was already 16 when she was sealed, and her chakra coils are already fully developed. She already has her adult chakra reserves, and her system’s unused to the amount of corrosive chakra that can pour through her if she isn’t careful.

But her chakra control has always been superior; it’s part of the reason she makes such a phenomenal medic nin. She can circumvent the leaky seal and rely solely on her own natural chakra. If she tries to pull from the Bijuu, she runs the risk of it breaking free.

They dodge enemy shinobi on foot, relying on Obito’s new mokuton sensing to alert them when Kusa patrols come close. Rin’s sneaky and has a good instinct for finding hiding places. She can read geography better than him, steering them away from ambush sites and into defensible positions. Like any Leaf nin, she prefers the high ground, but there’s not much of that in Kusa. She’s as skittish about valleys as he is about the underground. He doesn’t ask, because he can guess why a shinobi from the Iwa front might avoid clefts, and it’s an ugly a thought as his time in a cave somewhere to the east of here.

Fucking Kusa.

They can both suppress their chakra signatures enough to be virtually nonexistent and it seems none of the shinobi guarding the border are sensor types. They’ve been lucky. Extraordinarily lucky, but they’ve both long since overstayed their welcome here.

Rin’s up and about most of the day. She gets tired easily but is getting stronger every day. One night, while watching him fiddle with an overly friendly tree branch, she says, “I’m glad we’re hitting Suna first.”

Obito grimaces around the fern trying to give him a hug. The very thought of the Vast Desert of Solitude depresses him. “Unless that’s the Bijuu you got,” he points out.

Rin cocks her head at him, birdlike. “I think mine’s originally Kiri’s.” Her arms wrap around her stomach, a habit he’s noticing more and more. “Also, it feels…like water? Underneath all the Bijuu-ness, the chakra’s like mine. Instead of still water, it’s more like a storm, a flood. I think it’s tied to water, to Kiri.”

She says, “And I’ve been thinking: if the Kyuubi takes the form of a fox, maybe this Bijuu’s a water natured animal?”

Obito stares at her in shock, “you can tell that much about it?”

“It’s hard not to glean some things from it, with its chakra bursting out of its seal like it is. But I can’t really engage with it. If I try, the seal just destabilizes.” She makes a boom gesture with her hands to emphasize why the seal destabilizing is the opposite of what they want.

Obito thinks about it. They want to take a busted water Bijuu from Kiri into a desert nation with little to no plant life, a thought which is making him increasingly uncomfortable, aggravating as the current plant life is. Stupid Wood Release.

“We’ll need supplies. Lots of them. We’ll never survive the desert like we are now.”

“You don’t even have shoes,” Rin points out. “And we’re limited on how much water we can carry.”

Thanks to Obito’s obsessive configuring of their supplies, he knows they don’t have anywhere close to the funds to support that. They won’t find any shinobi work while in Kusa since they have their own ninja village and Obito doesn’t want to go anywhere near Ame quite yet. The small country’s name had popped up in conversation between the zetsu too often for him to risk it. Obito is hoping they can just skip it entirely. Teleport right over it.

Rin’s thinking along the same lines as he is. “We’re surrounded by nations with strong shinobi presences. It’ll be difficult to find paid work.”

Obito says, only half joking, “we could always steal. I’m pretty sure I could rob a bank.”

She doesn’t laugh. “I bet you could, but that’s not the kind of attention we need right now. Bounty hunting would help us set up our identities. New names, new records. It’ll make it easier to move around the continent, and since Konoha thinks we’re both dead, we won’t have to worry about hunter nin after us for the money either.”

Bounty hunting makes Obito nervous, for no reason he can discern. Maybe its because he hadn’t killed anyone until a few days ago, and he’d done it in a blind rage he only half remembers and the memory he does have he’s been too terrified to touch ever since. “Where are we going to find a bounty around here? I haven’t seen a Bingo Book in years.”

“Kusagakure, or another big city. There’re merchant cities here as well. Small rural villages. Isn’t that big shinobi prison in Kusa as well?”

He wants to argue, but he doesn’t have a better plan. Bounties mean money changing hands, records, a paper trail. Nukenin can’t go anywhere without someone on their ass, but bounty hunting is a career. As unaffiliated nin they could go anywhere, hired mercenaries taking out the trash of the shinobi world.

And they need supplies if they’re going to try to make it through Suna. And Suna is the first step in taking Madara down. Even if it is into a fucking desert, he’ll follow Rin anywhere.

The next day they pack up camp and Obito finds them a main road to travel down. They’ve been avoiding crowded thoroughfares so far, but now they have nothing to hide except everything they can’t tell. To any other traveler, the pair is just a rag-tag couple of unaffiliated shinobi, suspicious but not illegal.

Rin’s not about to run any marathons yet, but she can travel on foot just fine. He almost can’t believe it. He’s seen the aftermath of Kakashi’s Chidori before. Tailed Beast chakra must be on a whole other level.

The road leads to a village made up of a few dozen buildings. Obito can’t sense any chakra signatures so it’s either a civilian community or the resident ninja on mission here are wisely hiding themselves.

Rin takes the lead, smiling brightly at the people walking around while Obito tries to fade into the background as much as a hooded barefoot shinobi wearing nothing but bandages and a bloodstained cloak can.

“Excuse me, traveler san, could you point me in the direction of your market? My friend and I have been ambushed by bandits on the road and need to resupply.” Rin lies smoothly but Obito’s not sure that the suspicious civilian’s buying it.

“Don’t have a market,” The man says, chewing at his mouth as he speaks, squinting at Obito’s bare feet. “Are y’all shinobi? We could always scrounge up some supplies for weary travelers, if you’re able to help us out some.”

Rin brightens at the unexpected mention of shinobi work. “What did you have in mind, traveler san?”

Obito discovers that the smaller civilian villages usually can’t afford to send for hired shinobi teams from their own ninja village but are willing to trade clothes and rations in exchange for a string of menial tasks, none of which would qualify above a D rank. He walks up walls to clean debris from rooftops. Rin reveals that she knows medical ninjutsu and the civilian whisks her away, which makes Obito’s skin crawl. He knows talented medical ninja are rare, especially in the smaller nations, and it’s likely there’s never been anyone specializing in iroyo ninjutsu in this village before.

Rin turns out to be more valuable than he is, as she heals all manner of small ailments and advises on others. While she works, Obito weeds a garden who’s weeds pop back up supernaturally quickly around him. It’s a good thing he looks scary enough that they’ve left him alone.

The civilian’s attitude brightens towards them after Rin administers several rounds of healing to the village elders. They don’t quite smile at Obito, but Rin has them wrapped around her fingers by nightfall. They’re given clothes, a hot meal, a room in a house with running water, and a backpack of supplies: mostly beans, carrots, potatoes, and corn, even a spare blanket that Obito quickly fashions into a kunai pouch for himself so he can help carry everything.

Rin transfers the supplies into storage scrolls, and they reflect on their day, sitting in a room with a double futon and tatami mats on the floor. Through the door is a working shower.

“I think,” Rin says, “that it might be easier to get supplies than I thought. These people have never even seen a medic before.”

“What did you tell them?”

“My name’s Sachira, and we’re going to Iwa to look for shinobi work.”

“Bet they didn’t like that.”

“They tried to convince me to go to Kusagakure instead. I think they’re in need of trained medics.”

They talk a bit more and Obito waits while Rin showers, trying to see how far his sensing range is. It’s been hovering anywhere from 5-7 miles, which is minutes to shinobi, but with his time/space, it’s all the early warning they need.

Rin comes out in fresh clothes, civilian rough-spun dyed a nonobtrusive brown. Then it’s his turn.

His body in the mirror is gross but damn it if he didn’t look like an Uchiha, with his pale skin, black eye, and long hair. He’s limited by what he can do even as a missing nin. He has one of the most famous and easily recognizable dojutsu on the continent. Even foreign civilians will recognize the sharingan. His best jutsu are all clan katon, his taijutsu style is distinctively Uchiha as well. Even his henge and genjutsu are influenced by his clan. With his scars, he’ll never pass as a civilian.

He’ll have to change his whole fighting style, or make sure that none of his opponents survive to spread rumors. The mokuton will throw them off, but it’s still the most renowned kekkei genkai ever, and intrinsically tied to Konoha. Better for no one to know about the Wood Release at all. He’ll have to fake the way plants react to him. Somehow.

It’s a whole mess. He tugs at his long black hair. Maybe he’ll ask Rin to cut it for him. He’d worn it short as a kid and it was only in the cave that it grew out into inky spikes like Madara’s.

His new clothes fit him well enough, and damn him it if his arm isn’t trying to grow itself back. The stump’s gotten longer by a good few inches. It makes pinning his sleeve in place a hassle, but he is getting better at wrapping the bandages one-handed.

He comes out to find Rin busy modifying her new clothes to fit her better. No idea where she got the needle from. The clothes are civilian cut, but she wants them tight enough to fight in, just in case. They’re loose patterns, in neutral colors, made for blending in. As he watches, she lines the seam of the collar with the needle itself, like a senbon.

He leaves his new clothes alone and throws the ugly cloak on over it all. Good enough for him.

They work in companionable silence. Then Obito asks if she can cut his hair.

Rin frowns. “Sure, but it won’t look good. Maybe we can ask someone in the village tomorrow? They’d do a better job.”

She reads his reluctance and sighs, “I’ll have to borrow some shears. I’ll be right back.”

She goes to politely bother the owner of the house. When she returns, she says, “Come here, then. You’ll look like a scalped cat when I’m through with you.”

Obito gladly sits on the floor in front of her. When she’s done sawing and hacking at his hair with dull kitchen shears, he checks the result in the mirror. She was right: it does look awful, but awful in the way no self-respecting Uchiha would be caught dead with. He’s quite pleased with the result. His skull’s misshapen and the scars are only highlighted by the severe style, with nothing to hide behind. But he looks less like one of his clansmen.

He feels more like himself than he has in years, joking around with Rin, his hair short again and wearing new, clean clothes that don’t smell like that musty cave. A good pair of broken in sandals helps improve his outlook on life considerably. He feels lighter, and its not just the missing weight of his hair.

He keeps watch that night while Rin sleeps on the futon. He’s finding he doesn’t seem to need as much sleep since escaping the cave. Probably yet another effect of awakening the mokuton. He doesn’t get hungry as often either and he’d started sneaking portions of his daily rations back into the storage scrolls for Rin.

The zetsu never eat anything. Except for the Black Half; he is certain he heard them heavily imply they ate someone once.

Rin tosses and turns under the thin blanket, twitching her way through nightmares.

In the late hours, it feels like they might be his fault.

The restlessness is sinking in, and he fiddles with the shears, nicking the skin between his thumb and forefinger on accident trying to twirl it around his hand like a shuriken. He’s trying to get his dexterity up with his remaining non-dominant hand. A good shinobi is ambidextrous, but Obito always favored his right hand and the transition to using only his left isn’t as smooth as he would have liked. He asks himself what training regime Minato sensei would have produced to help him master this, and comes up with the conclusion that his teacher would just throw enough sharp objects at him until he learned to block correctly, and then he smiles at the thought of Minato in the stupid Hokage hat launching his custom three-pronged kunai at his head.

Minato, who thinks they’re both dead. Does he think he failed as a teacher, first on the Kanabi Bridge mission, and then again with Rin? Is that his fault too?

The shears thunk into the window frame and stick. He moves a flowerpot from the sill to cover up the dent in the wood.

Towards the morning, Rin has another nightmare, a worse one. It’s common for them both, sadly. But Rin starts leaking Killing Intent, alarmingly fast and strong. The Bijuu’s trying to break free again. The seal’s gonna blow.

The architecture of the house starts to warp in agitation as Obito immediately calls up his mokuton to suppress the Tailed Beast chakra. Rin wakes with sharp eyes and her hand flashes to his to form a Snake seal, his mangekyo spinning with his chakra. The red retreats reluctantly into the seal and the house groans around them.

Rin’s sweating. “Think any of them felt that?”

They’d have to be dead not to feel the malevolence of a giant demonic chakra monster, but Obito says, “We can blame it on me. They already don’t like me.”

Rin laughs, high and stressed. “Good think they like Sachira san then.”

“Of course they do, you’re lovable. How do you feel? Any notions of destroying this village?”

Rin says, “I think we can reschedule the imminent death-by-Bijuu, at least for now.” Her brow’s furrowed. “It’s harder to contain him when I’m sleeping. It may become a problem.”

Obito ignores that. Not while he’s around. “Him?”

Now she blushes. Its alarming to see. “The Bijuu.”

First it was water natured, possible a giant fish monster, and now it has a gender. Obito’s worry racks up a few more levels. An S ranked enemy only because the scale doesn’t go above S, and Rin talks about it like it has feelings or something. Gigantic chakra constructs don’t have a gender. Maybe it has an elemental nature, and maybe it takes the form of an animal, but it’s just pure energy, just a manifestation. Mindless destruction. A natural disaster in a cracked bottle.

“That’s—it’s not,” He breaks off at the stubborn look on Rin’s face, her arm going around her middle. Is he really going to argue with her over this? She’s the victim here. He sighs, “Okay, it’s a bouncing baby boy. What now? Still want to go to Kusagakure?”

They need ninja supplies: wire, weapons, shinobi gear, mesh, sealing paper, explosive tags, things that would be difficult to get at civilian settlements. This was a safe experiment, but Kusa is still enemy territory to him, and the thought of walking into another ninja village makes smoke curl up the back of his throat.

“No,” she says firmly, surprising him. “It’s a long way to Sunagakure. They’ll be places along the way to resupply, especially if medical ninja are in as high a demand as I suspect they might be. They’ll be opportunities on the road. I think Wind’s Daimyo has his palace in the outskirts of the desert, while Sunagakure is somewhere in the middle of the sand. We could buy supplies there, or trade for them. And there’s Ame as well.”

“Not Ame,” Obito says quickly. “Something’s going on there and it’s not just Hanzo of the Salamander being a bastard. The Old Man sent the original Zetsu there, so it’s got to be big. I think it’s a hotspot for him.”

“To Suna, then?”

“To Suna.”

They take advantage of indoor plumbing again and are packed and ready to go by dawn. The owner of the house is hand-shy after feeling the Killing Intent from her boarders, but she presents them with a breakfast of rice and roasted eggplant, which Rin thanks her profusely for while Obito tries to look less obviously like a ninja who’d lost a fight with a cheese grater.

Obito’s trying to sense the trees as far out as he can and is distracted when the same villager who had put them to work comes to see them off. “Thank you again, Sachira san and….” He trails off, waiting for a name.

Obito’s somehow focused enough not to say Uchiha, but his mouth still says, “Obi…to-bi. Tobi. No clan name.”

He’s cringing inside. Rin’s going to kill him and he’s going to deserve it. Tobi is the dumbest alias he could have come up with; it’s too close to his real name and also, he’d inadvertently named himself after another founding member of the Leaf Village, another fucking Senju Hokage. Damn it.

Rin continues the conversation smoothly enough that maybe his slip up hadn’t registered. The villager says, “your skills are most welcome, Sachira san, Tobi san. Good luck on your travels.”

They thank each other again and then they take their leave. Once they’re back on the road surrounded by trees, Rin asks with false sweetness, “Tobi san? A shinobi trained by the Yondaime Hokage of the Leaf, and that was the best you could come up with?”

“Hey, Minato sensei would think it was hilarious.”

“Minato sensei would see through it in half a second, Tobi, and that’s the problem.”

Obito deflates. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

And he’s stuck with the stupid name. It’ll be more suspicious to change it now. Skilled shinobi passing through on their way to Iwa will get reported to Kusa for sure. Even a small village like that one’s on the shinobi’s radar, and they will remember the names of the unaffiliated nin who healed them and then bombarded them with Killing Intent in the wee hours of the morning.

Before she can really work herself up into a good scold, Obito says, “Hey, speaking of Minato sensei, can you do me a favor?”

Curiosity derails her ire. “What is it?”

“Could you train with me? I need to get used to fighting with one arm and fighting in a way that won’t out my identity. Taijutsu, ninjutsu, it’s all got to change.”

“Hmmmmm….” Rin hums thoughtfully, and then stabs at his blindside with a blue chakra scalpel. Obito dodges with a yelp of offense, more instinct than technique, and his footwork’s sloppy. “Minato sensei would just try to stab you until you tightened up.”

“Yeah, well, I figured that already.” Obito sulks. There was a time when they were gennin, before their disastrous Chuunin Exams, where Minato had attempted bodily harm as a way of saying hello. “But I need to rework everything. I fight too much like an Uchiha.”

She considers this. “Let me plan a good training regime. We can train on the way to Suna, since we’re traveling on foot. I need to work on chakra control and using ninjutsu without waking up the Bijuu. I can only do simple techniques right now, and it limits my effectiveness as a medic and as a fighter. But I can’t risk straining the seal. We’ll have to work around it.”

Obito grins and concentrates hard with his mokuton, holding out his hand until a green leaf drifts out from a tree overhead and flutters to his palm. He presents the leaf to Rin triumphantly and she sulks at having her skill confronted by the fucking leaf test, but after sighing she accepts the leaf from Obito and sticks it carefully to her forehead, affixing it in place with chakra. After fixing it how she wants, she sticks her tongue out at him.

“You can start by doing dexterity maneuvers with your hand and arm. The 8 most common attack and defense patterns, in order. Open fist, closed fist, knife hand. Then kunai blocking. Use a stick. After that, do the patterns in reverse. And don’t get distracted, or I’ll stab you. The healing will be good practice for me.”

Her smile is sweet. It terrifies him.

As they walk, Obito practices left-handed attack and defense patterns against imaginary opponents. Rin affixes leaves all over herself, trying to see how many she can hold before one falls off, and for how long. Minato sensei used a dummy with the 8 step points of contact painted on it to teach him this the first time, but now that he only uses one hand it takes twice as long, which his sensei would find unacceptable.

It’s just muscle memory, and that comes with time. He’ll just have to keep at it until he can use his left hand just as he would his right. The left-handed attacks would be an advantage in battle, since most opponents are only used to defending against right-handed shinobi. The familiarity will follow once he can do the sequences forwards and backwards in his sleep.

Soon, he’s sweating, but he doesn’t feel bad. He checks on Rin to see her chewing in her lip in concentration, a crown of half a dozen leaves on her forehead like a tiara. The second he looks over, she strikes at him and he dodges using the textbook reverse position 4 to 5 sequence and taunts her when her sudden movement makes her leaves slide down and fall.

When they make camp that night, Rin runs through the standard academy kata and some simple taijutsu sequences for Obito to memorize. He’s a sharingan, so copying her movements is simple enough, but when he tries to run through them, his balance is all off. Konoha’s taijutsu style tends to be more acrobatic than other nations; they rely on launching themselves off of huge trees, throwing themselves around and dodging with flips and twists. It’s a style that doesn’t suit him; he’s grown a full foot since he was fourteen and gained a good amount of bulk in the chest and shoulders, and his missing arm makes it hard to land the movements accurately. He wobbles. He’s slow.

Rin watches for a while, thinking hard, before she says, “You’re more suited to ground fighting. Taijutsu and close range ninjutsu. Your mangekyo will allow all enemy attacks to pass right through you while you take them down. Dodging is less useful to you. Try to stand your ground more, plant your feet, the torque should come from your hips.”

He runs through the kata again and feels the difference immediately. He’s more stable, less likely to fall over. Sturdier. The stretches are still awkward, he’s overcompensating for his arm, but this feels more natural to him than flipping around off of tree trunks.

Rin practices molding chakra without overloading the seal or losing her concentration. She can form her chakra scalpels and do small healing sessions but if she pushes too hard, reaches for too much, then her chakra floods red and heavy as a wave and Obito has to call on his mokuton to quickly suppress it back.

Obito says, “We need to find your limit, steady it, and work at increasing it by increments.”

Rin’s sweating, “That’s assuming that eventually I won’t reach a plateau. I might not be able to do any ninjutsu above a C rank without risking the seal.”

Obito says, “what we really need to do is find a better way to suppress it for longer periods of time, safely. Reseal it maybe or figure out how to fix it all together.”

Since Uzushio fell, fuuinjutsu masters have become rare and scattered. It’s unlikely they’ll run into one with the experience to help, or one even willing once they find out they’re sealing a jinchuuriki.

He frowns. “Every village has to have someone able to seal Bijuu, or they can’t replace the jinchuuriki as the generations pass.”

Rin reasons, “True, but it may be that this seal can’t be fixed without redoing it entirely, which would kill me.”

He bets Minato could do it, and Kushina could do it better. She’s even better at seals than him, and a jinchuuriki to boot. What about Minato’s Sannin sensei? Wasn’t that pervert running around here somewhere?

“Even if you eventually hit a plateau, it would be useful to know. You can work around limits. You’ve got the fine chakra control to direct your system around the seal and Bijuu, without entirely shutting down the tenketsu points.”

It’s an out of the box solution. She’s staring at him like she never would have considered trying on her own. “You want me to bend my chakra around the seal?”

He shrugs. “Why not?”

While Rin contemplates, Obito traps the surrounding area and they settle in for the night, far enough off the road that enemy shinobi or civilian travelers shouldn’t bother them.

They start shooting the shit around the fire, quickly devolving into bickering kids. He feels better than he has in a while, it finally feels like they’re starting something here. Something worthy. Something good.

“I was helping them plan the wedding!”

“Just more incentive to make sure the Old Man never even gets close to Konoha, so they can be spared your atrocious event planning skills.”

She shoves at him playfully and he throws a leaf at her, the fire crackling merrily. They’re scheming to take down a man who has a century’s head start, but for a moment, they are 12 again, before everything got overly complicated, before they were a part of Team 7, before they were gennin sent off to war.

Rin laughs, “I was going to be in the wedding! Uchiha Mikoto was helping me plan everything.”

“I’ll bet! Just like that time you planned to throw Kakashi a surprise birthday party when he turned 11?” Obito snickers. It had been a disaster. They’d had to break in only to find that he’d left fatal traps around his room and like a dozen ninken summons. When they’d jumped out to yell surprise, Kakashi’d lobbed a double handful of shuriken at them. They’d both needed stitches and Kakashi was unrepentant and Minato sensei only sighed when he’d heard why his team was in the hospital.

Rin laughs at the memory. They’d been such brats as kids, Obito always late and doting on the elderly, Rin stern and silly according to her whim, Kakashi two years younger than them but a mini-terror, the Hatake prodigy well on his way to being a jounin by the age his teammates had graduated the academy at, a certifiable genius but emotionally stunted by it. It was a miracle that Minato had kept a handle on them, trio of hellions that they were.

They stay up late into the night, sharing stories, swapping memories, Rin catching Obito up on everything he’d missed. They haven’t been talking like this, home complicated by the knowledge that they can never go back. Kakashi is a jounin, and there are rumors that ANBU has eyes for him, but Minato sensei refuses to let him join. Rin doesn’t go into detail, but Obito knows that he’d been fucked up by Obito’s accident on the Kanabi Bridge mission. He’d finally grown a personality, but it’s a depressing, self-flagellating one. His younger teammate is growing into an angry teen, too smart by far and using it against himself, torn up by guilt.

Its undoubtedly Obito’s fault, even if Rin won’t say it.

But Minato sensei is watching out for him, and he’s the Yondaime Hokage now. He won’t let Kakashi do anything too stupid. They have to believe that. They have to.

They don’t talk about Kakashi much. They carry the same wound.

Obito needs sleep after keeping watch the previous night and then training for multiple hours, but the very thought makes him paranoid, and the trees are a hostile architecture around them.

It’s a restless night for him. He keeps dreaming of the Old Man in the cave, the zetsu, the feeling of Swirly folding closed over him, in his every heartbeat. He keeps waking up to the fire flaring and he has to clamp down on his chakra signature before he alerts every shinobi in the area.

There are seals for this, but damned if he knows them. But he’s always been bad at meditating, too twitchy, never able to stop long enough to get the knack of it, but he tries it now, tries to slow his racing heartbeat, ease the images of a cave-in out of his mind, but the frustration just builds into anger. He has a lot of reasons to be angry, fucking good ones, but Minato’s voice is in his ear, telling him that anger is understandable, but rarely productive. Rage is a detriment to battle. The best shinobi, the legends like the Nidaime, all the epic poems and literature always speak of the battle calm, the crystal-clear headspace you can fight from, and he knows his teacher can access this, can meditate for days on end. The Yellow Flash, the fastest shinobi on the continent, could slow down enough to become a Toad Sage. Obito is determined to learn his calm, too scared that his anger will blind him forever.

Rin puts him on a tight training schedule. She wakes him at dawn, and they run 5 miles full speed, using chakra to enhance their steps, looping a perimeter around the camp, and then they sprint back under their own power. Rin keeps up with him fine, and if her breathing’s heavier than his that’s okay, she’s still recovering and stubborn enough not to let it slow her down any. Then they take turns bathing in one of the valley pools that are scattered throughout Kusa and share rations. They break up camp and continue their walk to Suna, following the road from a distance so as not to lose their way, but far enough away that they can train as they go along.

Rin works on chakra control, seeing if she can direct her chakra around the seal. It’s slow going, and about every 8 hours the Bijuu needs to be suppressed, more if she’s straining the seal by using ninjutsu. Kiri had never meant the seal to last more than a few hours at most, just long enough for her to reach Konoha. Thankfully, while the near constant vigilance and maintenance wears on them both, it doesn’t destabilize the seal any further. Theoretically, as long as Obito is conscious, he can reset the seal’s expiration date indefinitely. It’s not an elegant solution, but it’s a doable one.

But it helps Obito work on his mokuton. He has a better sense of the wood and nature energy around him, how it moves, how it reacts to his own chakra and his attempts to manipulate it. The mokuton is as stubborn as Rin, but Obito bulldozes over its resistance when it comes to the Bijuu. It’s easier than trying to get it do anything else he asks of it. It’s almost as if the Wood Release wants to suppress the Bijuu’s chakra.

He comments this to Rin and after some thought she says, “Well, if the Bijuu’s water natured like me, and isn’t the mokuton a nature transformation of water and earth? That’s why it didn’t exactly mesh with your fire nature. But if the mokuton is half-water already, like me, like the Bijuu, then its nullifier is earth. It makes sense, that it works so well.”

He didn’t know that, but trust Rin to have more knowledge of nature transformation than him. Konoha isn’t known for its transformations; their claim to fame has always been the dojutsu clans. “Do you know any other nature transformations we need to be aware of? Doesn’t the Kazekage have something to do with, uh, wind?”

Rin grimaces, “The technique is Gold Dust, and it’s got to be a kind of Magnet Release. I don’t know the specific natures involved, but fuuton is a good guess. Maybe wind and earth?”

Obito shares her grim look. “Great, just the two elemental releases we’re least prepared to deal with.”

“We are not fighting the Kazekage. Under no circumstances are we fighting any kage.”

He nods fervently. Minato is bad enough, and he’s sure all the other kage are sure to have some bizarre kekkei genkai backing them. He vaguely remembers the briefings on Iwa and Kumo specialties, but he never got the chance to face Blast Release. Not like he knows Rin has.

He thinks more about chakra nature, and how the mokuton works. “So, theoretically, I should be able to use doton and suiton? Could you teach me some suiton techniques?”

“Technically? Depends how it reacts to your natural fire nature. I can teach you some simple suiton techniques this evening, see if you can pick them up. You’ll have to mitigate the hand seals.”

Obito’s getting better at one-handed katon; he can reliably start the campfire with just his chakra and the seal of confrontation. His goal is to eventually get all his favorite katon down to one-handed seals, ideally just the one, but that might take literally forever, and he already has an Uchiha’s mastery of katon. Suiton might just kick his ass.

They walk all day, as long as it’s light out. The weather holds and Obito’s sensing range with his mokuton has stabilized; he is aware, to varying extents, of almost everything within 7 miles of him. It’s not a lot if an enemy shinobi blitzed them, but hopefully it’s enough time to grab Rin and activate his mangekyo.

He’s getting used to relying on the mokuton, better at filtering all his information through it before he processes anything. It’s not unlike his sharingan in that manner, casually inundating him with a thousand thousand minutia too dense to sort through. He’s got to filter most of it out, just to function. But other than that, the mokuton does what it wants regardless of how he feels about it. It seems to react to his emotions more than anything. He remembers the wooden spikes shooting out of the right side of his body when he awakened it, remembers breaking one off to use as a weapon against the enemy shinobi. It’s an ability he hasn’t been able to replicate, but since it was so gross, he doesn’t feel too bad about that.

After they make camp, it’s ninjutsu practice. Obito works on getting his katon back under control while Rin works on using advanced suiton and iroyo ninjutsu without the Bijuu going haywire.

That evening, Rin leads him to one of the winding creeks that crossed the land and she tries to teach him a simple C ranked suiton, the Takitsubo no Jutsu. He has the hand seals memorized on the first run through, and Rin lends him a hand for him to try after she demonstrates the Waterfall Basic technique, which creates a big wave that rises out of the creek and washes across the far bank where she directs it.

When Obito tries to get the feel of the chakra right, he gets pushback from fire, but water is stronger than fire and he eventually manages something like a smallish splash. But hey, that’s technically a suiton technique. And he is a sharingan. Once he sees it, he never forgets. He’ll have this mastered by the end of the night.

After that Rin shows him the hand seals for a B rank, the Suijinheki, but she doesn’t attempt the Water Wall herself. She has Obito stand on the water and try to raise it around him in a barrier. The sheer amount of water he has to move is difficult but not impossible. He’ll get this down too.

A B rank suiton jutsu. Kakashi’d be so jealous if he knew. If Kakashi was here, maybe he could teach him some doton moves. Then he’d have three different chakra natures when most jounin level shinobi only have two elemental masteries. 3 nature releases, and the mokuton and mangekyo to boot.

It hadn’t even been hard.

The potential is just now hitting him, but from the glint in Rin’s eye she has already considered this long ago. With his dojutsu and his kekkei genkai, Obito would be nigh unstoppable. A highly skilled shinobi. The fighter that took out two dozen enemies using only taijutsu. It’s difficult to wrap his mind around how strong he is becoming. Team 7 had always been meant to be a team of heavy hitters, with the Hatake prodigy, an Uchiha, and the most talented Kunoichi in their graduating class, trained under the wing of the man who would become Hokage. They were always meant to be beasts, but while Obito never had any trouble seeing that future for Kakashi and Rin, he struggled to visualize it for himself. As determined to be Hokage as he was when he was younger, that had been mostly his Uchiha pride boasting.

Only Rin believed in him back then. Minato was the one to truly teach him his potential, but its only now that he’s seeing it.

After ninjutsu training, they spar, taijutsu and weapons training, improvised kunai and chakra scalpels. Obito works on getting his control over his intangibility down, getting a feel for what he can block and what he can simply take and allow to pass through him.

Attempting to mix his teleporting into the mix exposes a glaring flaw: switching between the two mangekyo techniques leaves an easily exploitable gap, an opening of three long seconds. He learns this after he chooses not to dodge a blow from Rin’s blades and to his shock, he catches a glancing blow off a chakra scalpel that snaps a tendon in his hand. She’d felt the resistance and checked her swing so it wasn’t too bad, but the healing session left her chakra shaky and the Bijuu roaring and bucking.

To make it worse, his arm is indeed trying to grow back which is pretty generally unpleasant and highly disturbing, like he’s some kind of lizard, and the mokuton he uses to suppress the seal keeps trying to channel through his weird, elongated stump, which Rin says is a sign that his chakra network is trying to establish proper tenketsu points.

Afterwards they sit around the fire, Obito warping around the campsite and practicing covering for the time delay in a way that hopefully won’t make it obvious what he’s compensating for.

Rin says, “You should name it.”

Obito thinks about it. “Mangekyo abilities are traditionally named after the gods. Tsusanoo, Amaterasu, Kotoamatsukami.”

“What about Kamui?” Rin suggests.

Obito’s surprised. Isn’t she a heathen? How does she know his gods? But he likes it. He likes it a lot. He can’t help his pleased smile. “Kamui it is.”

By the time they make it to the border Kusa shares with Ame, Rin has him working on the Water Bullet, and she can attach leaves all the way down her arms like living sleeves, trying to train herself to direct her chakra through certain tenketsu points and ignore others.

“Ready to try and Kamui us across the length of an entire nation?” Rin asks. The geography of Ame is thinner here; this is the closest part of the border to Suna, and they’ll have to try to move from further in Kusa because their actual border is so heavily patrolled.

Obito’s gotten better at using Kamui to transport himself, but this isn’t just hopping around the camp. This is miles and miles, and he’ll have Rin along for the ride. It might take a few separate trips, but hopefully if he can just keep aiming in a straight line, he’ll eventually hit sand.

“Willing to find out?” he holds out his arm and Rin ducks under it, wrapping her arms firmly around him. He grins as he tries to fix his destination in his mind and lets his mangekyo blaze into being.

“Kamui!”

The technique sucks them in and spit them out on flat, open ground. It’s raining a miserable drizzle. Not a good sign, but at least the rain’s not hard enough to render his visual prowess useless, uneasy as it makes him.

His mokuton spreads out through the shrubs and small trees, but the countryside has been absolutely devastated at some point during the war and nothing here has more than a year’s growth. The country is a crater of mud.

Bloody tears leak from his eye from the jump. He doesn’t feel any chakra signatures nearby. This is a wasteland, probably an old battleground, something Hanzo of the Salamander plowed through on his way to be a tyrant warlord. “We’re alone.”

Rin considers the landscape as the rain sheets down, washing away the blood from his eye. “Ame?”

“Most likely. Lot of rain for the desert,” Obito jokes.

Rin studies his eye. “Can you use Kamui again so soon?”

But Obito’s distracted, his focus pulling towards an odd sense of negative space, an area in the mud hole where it doesn’t feel like any new plants are growing.

It clicks.

“There’s a zetsu, 5 miles east, moving east.”

Not towards them. But this is the second clone he’s sensed.

Rin reasons, “Amegakure is near the border with Tani to the southeast. This might just be one lone spy. This might be an opportunity to remove it from the board.”

Obito reminds her, “The white zetsu clones are linked. If they see us coming, the others will know and last I heard, Zetsu was creeping around Rain.”

“It’d have to be nearly instantaneous for it to work,” she muses. “But we need to learn how to eliminate the clones eventually. It might be worth it to try. In the case of a failed attempt, could you get us safely away?”

Obito can do whatever it takes to protect Rin. “Yes.”

“Madara would know we were after him?”

Something dark curls through him. “Yes.”

She looks at him wiping the pink from his face. “Want to try?”

The weather will put a literal damper on his fire, but that’s for the best, since a Great Fireball jutsu or other clan katon might give him away even if visual confirmation doesn’t. They’d never expect him to try to hit them with a suiton.

“Think I could pull off a Water Bullet strong enough to knock them down before they can escape? They’ll just shrug off any non-lethal injuries.”

They strategize. The timing will have to be perfect for it to work as well as they plan. Rin holds on as he Kamuis them within range, and then he henges himself into…. A tree? That isn’t supposed to happen. Fucking mokuton.

Rin rolls with it, dropping a simple redirection genjutsu over herself and releasing a billow of chakra, trying to lure the clone closer.

The action and chakra catch the zetsu’s attention, and they start sneaking around to check them out. Trying to gather intel. Rin winks at him and runs off to take her place.
Obito keeps his eyes peeled for a glimpse of the clone once they come within range. The zetsu’s playing it safe, staying partially merged with the short stubby trees in the area. The dampness is a buzzing distraction, but Obito’s good at filtering out unwanted noise.

He sees yellow eye peeking out from within a hollow in a cedar. Not a zetsu he recognizes, not one of the ones with him in the cave.

That makes it easier, to focus on molding water chakra inside him, to not think about the cave, or the Old Man. Rin used water chakra as bait, so Obito lets a bit of his leak out, to draw it just a little closer, giving Rin time to get in position.

The drizzle makes it easier to pull water from the air to strengthen his suiton. He makes the seals one handed: seal of confrontation, circle his mouth like a Phoenix Flame jutsu, go back down to his side again with fingers twisted, a deep breath before expelling a torrent of water in a rushing beam directed right at the clone.

“Suiton: Suidan no Jutsu!”

It’s too quick for them to dodge, too difficult to sense coming in the rain. It swamps them, immediately driving them back with the force, tumbling them around in the water, preventing them from retreating into the ground, right to the spot where Rin waits with her hand slicing down in a chakra scalpel aiming right at their spinal vertebrae to remove their head, which she’d theorized would be enough to take it down. If not, Obito will char them to ash.

Rin darts forward and their head rolls.

Obito rushes forward with his hood up, just in case, as Rin kicks the body away. The body is limp, and the yellow eyes are flat and dull.

Obito keeps his sensing up, making sure no other curious clones came to investigate and get revenge, or no Ame nin felt the chakra and Killing Intent they discharged and come out to see.

“I think we got him!” Rin pokes at the clone’s, wait, Obito has to do a double take. That is so wrong.

“Brainstem.” He says, incredulous and grossed out.

“Lame,” Rin pronounces and studies the corpse, inspecting the weird mokuton protrusions, the dead white flesh of the Hashirama Cells. The weird way the flesh has almost liquified under her hit, much like his arm had against the boulder, which makes him wince at the memory.

“Do they all look like this?”

He knows what she’s really asking. Why does it look like him, why does he look like it, why does his right side exactly match the dead white of its corpse?

“Like ugly ass motherfuckers? Hn, the pattern of spikes and textures change, but yeah, generally.”

“Fascinating.” She bends closer, wiping the rain out of her eyes. She touches its weird green hair stuff, which he knows feels like sawgrass, serrated and tough. If she sees the similarities between the clone and the alien patches on his upper thigh, hip, side, chest and shoulder, grossly lumpy arm, isolated pockets on his neck and face, she doesn’t comment on it. She does say, “I wish we had a storage scroll big enough for the body. We could experiment on the best ways to take them down, besides fire and decapitation.”

“They’ll send another one to retrieve it. We should destroy it.”

Rin nods and steps back. Its bleeding a thick white lymph, like sap. Obito does a seal of confrontation and lights the corpse on fire. It burns like a damp plant, smoke heavy and cloying, but he scorches it into the ground till it’s soot washes away with the rain.

“Victory,” Rin says, and smears her sandal through the mud. “One down. Who knows how many to go?”

“One less now.” Obito says, checking his chakra levels while rain sluices off his hood. “Let’s get out of here before the scout gets here.”

“We might be able to bait them like that later on,” Rin comments, casually. There’s a bloodthirsty streak in her that has nothing at all to do with the Tailed Beast. It makes him very grateful that they are on the same side.

But she hugs him and Obito Kamuis them away again.

This time, when he blinks to clear his eye, he sees clear skies, a bright sun. The plant life around him is still scraggly, but in a scrubland-type-way instead of a devastated-by-war-type-way. And…he tightens his grip on Rin and Kamuis them again, further into the interior of Suna, away from the border outpost he’d inadvertently jumped them next to.

They land in sand, loose and shifty underfoot, spooking a lizard sunning itself on a rock, which scrambles into a cleft and disappears. Rin almost skewers it when it suddenly flashes into movement.

Obito snickers meanly, “nice reflexes, protecting us from a lizard.”

“Nice henge,” she counters smartly. “Next time, try to pick a tree a little less conspicuous. You were the tallest thing around.”

Obito is offended. “I make a nice tree.” He hadn’t meant to be a tree at all, but he’s not telling her that. The mokuton hijacked his jutsu and he’s taking it to the grave.

Rin eyes his mangekyo as he deactivates it, frowning. “Does it only bleed when you move long distances? Or was it from carrying me too?”

Obito shrugs, wincing at the pressure in his ocular pathway. “Both?”

“We’re clear?” she checks.

“Border outpost.” He clarifies. “We should be far enough away from it now. We’re just inside the Suna border.” He didn’t want to jump them too far; they’d lose the road and end up wandering around the desert to thirst to death. Sunagakure has never been taken; the harsh landscape is a more effective defense than any garrison.

Water will become their biggest concern, but this road should eventually wind past the Daimyo of the Land of Wind’s palace, and then join the major roads heading for Sunagakure herself. They won’t have the luxury of traveling remotely, not when the only available water is at carefully monitored checkpoints along the way.

“Let me see,” Rin says and Obito lays down on the sand so she can check his eye for damage. He uses his hood as a pillow while she carefully threads cool green healing chakra through his system, reconstructing the chakra pathways he overloaded. As she heals him, Obito focuses on his mokuton with a sinking feeling. The plant life is few and far between: twisted, scraggly trees and dry underbrush, faded brown grass scorched by the sun. There are huge gaps in his perception, like he’s surrounded by an army of zetsu. It prickles something restless inside him; he hasn’t realized how comfortable he’d gotten with his new sensing abilities, how much he’s begun to truly rely on it, until the desert sand blows it full of holes. And it will only get worse the further into the desert they go.

It’s already uncomfortably warm, a dry heat completely unlike a Konoha summer. This is, he is realizing, going to suck ass.

“Finished,” Rin announces and Obito opens his eye to find most of the pressure has receded. It still twinges but it’s much more manageable.

He sits up, rubbing gingerly at it. “Thank you.”

Rin’s looking out at the wide expanse of space around them. It’s more sky than he’s ever even seen before, the exact opposite of being underground. A light breeze skitters over the sand, shimmering with heat. “Where’s the road?”

Obito hesitates, hating that he’s suddenly not sure. Then he points to where he’s fairly certain the road tracks.

Rin’s eyes narrow. “Your mokuton won’t be as useful out here, will it?”

He already misses it. “’fraid not.”

“Damn,” she says. “We’ll just have to rely on our plethora of other aces.”

His mouth twists at that and he raises his hood. Their clothes are already drying from the rain in Ame, steaming in the air around them just to evaporate and leave them bone dry.

They get to trekking. It’s quickly becoming miserable. Their every step slides and shushes, loud and noticeable, the trail of their footprints painfully obvious. There’s no way to hide their tracks without using something that would even be more noticeable. Wind shinobi probably used fuuton and fans for this, but wind release is a rare chakra nature; Minato’s a bit of a freak for it in Fire, but its common enough among Suna shinobi. A brilliant offensive weapon, but weak to fire. Technically. Minato’s Rasengan can counter Obito’s Great Fireball jutsu any day of the week.

The road has the most plant cover, studded with fat little cactuses on hard packed earth, like they’d been planted as windbreaks and sand gates. He….he likes the cactuses. They feel neat. Like chubby little trees, short and squat. Utterly delightful.

“I’m going to befriend the cactuses,” Obito announces, squatting down to poke at one that has a bright little flower crown.

Rin rolls her eyes so hard her pupils vanish entirely. He’s a little offended, because he’s trying really hard not to hate his new unexpected ability, in much the same way she is determined not to hate hers.

“You want to befriend the fuckin Bijuu,” he complains. “This is a lot more reasonable.”

She sniffs, sweating, her hair laying plastered to her forehead. “I don’t see how.”

“Look how cheerful it looks,” he says. “It’s got a little yellow flower crown. It couldn’t kill us if it tried.”

“That’s just what it wants you to think,” Rin says ominously. “It’s probably super poisonous. Just touching it is deadly.”

Obito studies it and admits, “I’m probably immune.”

The zetsu tested numerous poisons on him in the cave, and his mokuton is probably capable of nullifying anything to which he didn’t already have an immunity built. Mithridatism sucked so much ass. He’s glad he was unconscious for most of that particular bullshit.

He gives the cactus a little pat on the head, like it’s a dog, and he swears it perks up at him. “Maybe I’ll be a cactus for my next henge,” he jokes, “grow a nice little flower.”

Rin laughs and kicks sand at him. “Okay, flower boy, let get this shitshow on the road. The Daimyo awaits.”

They cut out the obvious training. It’s safer to travel as civilians, especially if they’re forced to stick to the main thoroughfares. They walk along, ironically playing a game of eye spy, where every answer is, to some extent, just more sand.

“It’s so open,” Rin says, raising her arms and spinning around in the breeze. “I’ve never seen so much sky before.”

Obito’s knocking his heels against each other, trying to dislodge the sand rudely chafing between his toes in his ill-fitting sandals. The wind keeps trying to tug his hood back and he’s having to use chakra to stick it in place. “Imagine all the stars we’ll be able to see at night.”

Rin wipes sweat from her face and grins at him. They’ll travel at night as much as possible to spare themselves the heat of midday and late afternoon, seeing by moonlight.

They ration their water throughout the day, to see how much they can afford to lose between checkpoints. A map will make their estimation more accurate, but maps are dangerous to leave lying around, and it would be suspicious for two random nin to find one. They’ll just have to follow the road and trust Suna not to have left their civilians out here to parch.

The heat becomes more bearable as night falls and their speed picks up once it feels like every step isn’t an uphill battle against the sun. His sandals are rubbing blisters into him that Rin heals for him. As the sunset blazes a deep red in the cloudless sky, the pair walk their way towards the village that has sprung up around the Daimyo’s Palace in the Political Capitol of Wind. They need gear and money, water and rations, and it’s the most likely place to get them.

The stars come blinking out, more than Obito’s ever seen, as if the sky’s trying to make up for his years of missed sightseeing. A bright swath, like a handful of sand scattered across the sky like salt in a skillet.

“It’s beautiful,” Rin says, and they spare a few moments to take it all in.

It’s cooled off enough to bring out a new problem, a different threat from the heat. Snakes. A lot of them, darting around; snakes and poisonous scorpions that scuttle over the tumbledown rocks and slip through crevices.

“I could extract the venom,” Rin says, “but it will hurt, and the side effects are nasty.”

Obito doesn’t like snakes. They dart and wound around and some even bury themselves in the sand. Since they don’t have noticeable chakra, he can’t sense them, and that’s just a kick in the anxiety. He feels blind without the mokuton, like he’s suddenly lost a sense. It’s comparable to losing his arm, but he doesn’t tell Rin, a little guilty about how quickly its become a part of him.

As uncomfortable as Obito is, Rin has to be worse. At least his hood and cloak keep the sun off him. Rin has to periodically heal her own sunburn. And her water nature rebels against the heat and wind. When the Bijuu becomes more active under the moonlight, it’s more difficult for them to subdue him, Obito’s mokuton weaker than usual, Rin shriveling around the seal. It’s more like a fight, with the Bijuu actively pushing pack against them. The seal stretches and wavers before Obito forces the red chakra to dissipate through sheer force of will.

Rin pants in the sand, “well, that was fun.”

Obito’s distressed, “We can handle this. Maybe I should start carrying plants with me? Acorns or something, keep a source of wood for easy use. And we could dunk you in the next oasis, or I could learn to pull a suiton from pure chakra.”

Rin gasps a tired laugh, “you’ll exhaust yourself trying that. That’s an A rank technique. But the acorns might be useful. You should pick some up at the next tree.”

It’s been miles since they’ve seen anything resembling a tree. It’s all just thorn bushes and cactus, tufts of dry grass. Herbaceous and half-dead. No proper wood.

In the morning, with the temperature soaring, and him gnawing on gross dried carrots, Rin watches him eat breakfast against the backdrop of the desert with an unreadable look on her face. Before he can ask, she pulls out the pair of shears and cuts her own hair short at her chin, letting the severed brown strands scatter in the wind. Obito wonders briefly if he’d recognize her now, if he met her like this: bare faced, sun burned and short haired, but that’s a ridiculous thought. He’d know Rin anywhere.

“How do I look?” she spins for him, and the wind whips through her bob. Its shorter than her usual style, but before this, it’d been longer than he’d ever seen it. The wind lifts it as she spins.

“Did you fuck mine up on purpose?”

Rin laughs, light and carefree. “It’s easier on mine since I didn’t go too short. You wanted to be scalped like a cat.”

“Vicious slander. I’m obviously more suited to the crows,” he claims, which is a bald-faced lie. He’s always gotten along better with his clan’s cat summons than the crows. Once he reached chuunin, he’d been looking forward to being offered a summoning contract. The look on Minato’s face when he found out his student was a cat-inclined Uchiha rather than a crow one is a cherished memory of his. Imagining the epic rivalry between the Hatake’s ninken and Nekomata’s tribe of ninneko summons used to bring him wild entertainment.

“That’s a lie!” Rin points a condemning finger at him. “You had a hat with cat ears in your room back in our Academy days!”

Obito holds his palm over his heart. “I’d look much cooler with feathers.”

He’ll never sign his name to his clan’s summoning contract now. He mopes, until Rin throws a rock at his head. Then it’s war.

They spar in the vastness of the desert, chakra scalpels glinting in Rin’s hands, Obito transparent in the dawn, not bothering to dodge properly in favor of trying to clobber her with taijutsu. She matches his blows, twisting away and feinting, just to jab at his eye. It startles him, that’s his only eye, and he yelps and Kamuis away, sulking.

“Enemies will aim for your eye!” Rin calls cheerfully after him, whirling towards him again with medical chakra sharp along her knuckles, before his three second delay’s over and he’s still vulnerable to attack. “Besides, I can fix it!”

“You’ll have to hit me first,” Obito taunts and passes right through her to get at her back. But she’s getting better at predicting his attacks. Eventually, she’ll know his attack patterns enough to counter them.

They strife across the sand until they were breathing heavy and laughing, just kicking the crap out of each other. Rin skims a chakra scalpel close enough to his head that it kills a stripe of hair follicles down the crown of his head and then howls with laughter at somehow fucking his haircut up even worse.

Obito runs his hand over the veritable bald spot in disbelief, tiny hairs just dusting away. That’ll sunburn.

“Yield!” Rin points a glowing hand at him threateningly. “While you’ve still got hair left.”

Obito holds his hand up, “I yield, okay, I yield, fuck, you can put down the scalpel. I don’t want to be bald.”

Rin laughs, “We’ll have to stop training when we get around populated areas. It’s wild how empty most of Wind is.”

“It’s the damn desert. I’d say its vast, and, dare I say….solitudinous.”

Rin shrieks, “Did you forget that solitary was already a word?”

He had. “No! It was part of the joke!”

They sleep during the hottest parts of the day, digging out a shelter next to a cleft of rocks for shade, which Rin then genjutsus to look like just more sand. Even though, as a mangekyo wielder, Obito supposedly has an inborn aptitude for genjutsu, he’s never developed the ability. Rin’s a natural at genjutsu. Even at 14, when she’d been captured on the disastrous Kanabi Bridge mission, she’d been able to resist an A rank Iwa genjutsu and protect sensitive information about who exactly it was that’d been sent to sabotage the bridge. Sometimes, Obito thinks his teacher’s reputation hurt them more than it protected them, but its an unfair thought, and not one that matters a single whit now.

They take turns keeping watch. Obito needs less sleep than Rin, so he bears the brunt of it, sitting up melting as the temperature turns sweltering. His sun-starved skin burns within a minute of direct exposure, and the windburn tears at the mangled shell of his ear, funneling oddly and painfully. Their water’s running low and their hands and lips are chapped. Licking them just makes it worse, but Obito’s destructive fiddling has latched onto it, and he worries at them until they bleed.

When it’s his turn to sleep, he tosses and turns. He keeps feeling like scorpions are crawling on him. After a few scant hours of restless twitching he scowls and sits up. “Well, if the rations run low, we can always eat all these fucking things.” He flings another scorpion off his cloak. “I bet they wouldn’t taste too bad roasted.”

Rin looks tired. “We’re pushing ourselves too hard. Using too much water. A Suna mile is a lot different than a Konoha mile. We might need to adjust our daily goals.”

His mouth tastes like sand. “How far can we be from the next waterhole? Civilians with carts make this journey. We’re shinobi. It should not be kicking our ass this bad.”

“We’ll slow down.” Rin decides. “It should get more crowded the closer we get to the palace. We’ll need to blend in.”

Rin won’t have a problem blending in, but no one would ever mistake Obito for a civilian. And if he used a henge any shinobi in the area would peg him as a ninja, a suspicious one, potentially even a spy if he’s disguising himself.

“Would anyone believe you were a civilian if you didn’t hide your scars? Like, maybe you got them when a stable roof fell in, or a farming accident.” Rin suggests and his stomach turns over. “It’s a shinobi affectation, to use bandage wraps, and accidents happen to anyone.”

Obito says, “I’d rather be nukenin. I think we could take any bounty hunters who might try to turn all hunter nin on us. And you’ll randomly leak a Bijuu’s Killing Intent enough to wake the dead.”

Rin hums. “We still need to find a way to hide your eye. The sharingan is a dead giveaway.”

Not to mention the taboo of the mokuton, but at least it’ll be easy to hide in the barrenness of the desert. Obito thinks he might like a mask, but that just screams Black Ops and would make him an even bigger target. Also, Swirly was the one to give him the idea of a mask, which is a thought that pinches like a rock in his shoe, and more practically, he’d like to leave his mouth free for ninjutsu attacks.

The only solution he has is to cut his cloak off at the knees and wrap the hem around his entire head like a bag, with an eyehole for him to see through, but that is such a dumb fucking idea he doesn’t bother voicing it. “Maybe I can pick something up in the next village. And if anyone sees my sharingan, we don’t let them escape.”

“We’ll be sharing the road with civilian trading caravans.”

“Why would I use my sharingan on civilians?”

He knows she’s just worrying, but that’s his job. They can’t both obsess over this.

That evening, Obito spots a structure in the distance. Short, made of smooth sandstone. The well. It has to be.

They made it.

The inside of the building has a long wall hung with Suna postings: wanted posters, information about caravans that had passed through, predictions about the next rain. And a green-painted chuunin guard, wearing the design of an unknown player, probably from Suna legend. Although she doesn’t wear the traditional puppet master’s hood, she has the eared hood of an apprentice draped down her back and storage scrolls strapped to her thigh, likely containing weaponized puppets. She eyes Obito’s smooth hood distrustfully.

“Identify yourselves, shinobi san.”

Rin answers the sand kunoichi, “Sachira and Tobi, travelers seeking to replenish our water supplies.”

“What business do you have in the Land of Wind?”

“We seek employment. I am a skilled medic looking to gain an apprenticeship in Sunagakure’s hospital.”

It’s a good cover. Unaffiliated nin could take oath under a ninja village with the approval of the kage, and people tend to overlook medic’s dangerousness in favor of their usefulness.

And it’s not like they can hide their movements. If they forsake the road, they’ll die in the desert. Suna is the largest country; there’s no way Obito can cross it with Kamui without collapsing from chakra exhaustion.

The kunoichi studies them. “A medic, huh? And the other one?”

“A stray I picked up along the way. Gave him food once and now he won’t leave me alone. We’ve been traveling together.”

The girl’s maybe a few years older than them, sandy hair in braids, wearing a chuunin’s flak jacket and an unfamiliar Kabuki sigil he thinks might signal affiliation to a puppet master. Obito keeps his eye on her hands, tracking her movement, ready to activate his sharingan at a moment’s notice.

The Suna nin smirks at them, “give them scraps and they’ll never leave.”

Rin shrugs. “He can be useful. I can run him off if I want.”

She finishes eyeing Obito and turns back to Rin. “You mean no harm to Wind or her citizens?”

“No, shinobi san. We’re just thirsty travelers.”

The Kunoichi says, “Call me Burondi. You don’t want to meet my puppets. You may help yourselves to the water from the well and try to update the news board if you can. If you’re heading to Sunagakure, you’ll need to watch out for sandstorms. It’s the windy season.”

Well, that doesn’t sound fun. Rin goes to pull up water from the cistern and Obito eyes the memo board. He’s out of date on current events, but this is just a list of the price of wheat, local obituaries, a calendar of expected caravans, and where he could go to trade for a camel. As he reads, the Suna nin asks, “Any news, Tobi san?”

To his credit, he shakes his head. “I’m unfamiliar with the area, Burondi san. I have nothing to add.”

The puppeteer shakes her head at him but it’s difficult to read her tone. “A pity.”

Rin fills their storage scrolls and hands him a jug filled with cool water that smells like stone, like it came from deep underground, but it’s clean and clear. Obito wants it; he wants it badly.

Instead of chugging it down, he forces himself to sip it slowly to rehydrate. Behind Burondi’s back, Rin flashes him several of the hand signs she’s taught him. Stay 1 hour Be ready

They’ll rest and rehydrate here an hour, then be on their way. There’s plenty of time in the night to travel. And they can’t risk the seal needing to be mokutoned into submission around a shinobi. That might just raise some questions.

Suna is so big and empty that it must be hard to station shinobi at every border checkpoint and outpost, as well as at the wells and oasis scattered throughout the desert. While they sit and drink their fill, Burondi chats casually with Rin, not quite probing enough to be rude or interrogative, but not quite friendly either. If she bought their story, then they might be future allies, but right now they are decidedly neutral and polite, so conversation’s a careful dance between not-quite-enemy and not-quite-ally.

At one point, Burondi cocks her head at Rin. “You sound like you’re from Konoha. Your accent is similar to the merchant caravans that come from Fire.”

It’s the closest she’s come to an outright interrogation, but Rin nips it in the bud with a smooth cover. “I’m originally from the Land of Tea, and when I decided I wanted to be a shinobi I found a local healer to train me. I’ve learned all I can outside of a ninja village.”

Tea Country didn’t have a military, and it shares a border with Fire, so it could potentially account for the regional variation in accent. It is, Obito believes, the perfect cover, if he doesn’t want to die of humiliation at having people think he was from motherfucking Tea Country. His clan helped found Konoha. This is painful.

But it’s a better cover than moonlighting as one of the new Yu deserters. He doesn’t know a thing about Hot Water other than that they routinely get in trouble for doing cult bullshit and his ignorance will be obvious to anyone knowledgeable. So he behaves and lets Rin spin her tale. It’s impossible to know if the Suna nin buys it, but regardless, she doesn’t ask anymore probing questions.

Once Obito finishes his second pitcher of water, Rin nods that it’s time to go. She stands up and makes a show of stretching. “Thank you for the hospitality, Burondi san. We’re traveling at night to beat the heat, and we should be on our way.”

The kunoichi says, “good luck on your journey, travelers. The next stop along this way is the Capitol.”

“We shall be glad to spend the night in an inn,” Rin says, and it’s no secret that the two of them stink to high hell, covered in sweat and dust with no water to spare on bathing. He’s found that stink reaches a critical mass, and then levels out. Or maybe he’s just noseblind. The kunoichi smirks knowingly and waves them on their way.

Obito’s silent until they leave the sandstone structure behind. “That didn’t go half bad. Think she was suspicious?”

Rin snort, “of course she was suspicious. But there’s no reason for her to suspect us. We haven’t done anything to Wind.”

“Yeah, we’re just here to get our grabby hands on their greatest, most secret weapon.”

“Jinchuuriki aren’t just weapons.”

“All shinobi are weapons.”

She scowls at him, “Cynic.”

“Better to be a cynic than to be from fucking Tea Country.”

“It’s not a bad cover.”

“It’s a great cover,” Obito says, “but I’m still offended.”

They make good time that night, refreshed and ready to go. It’s getting increasingly sandy the further into the interior of the desert they travel, but even then, the land has a unique beauty. The sand is a hundred different colors: ruddy reds and whites so pale they glowed under the moon, a beautiful brown like Rin’s eyes and yellows like saffron, little piles of spice in a market stall, the colors of gems in a velvet box.

And the thousand thousand stars turning above them, some familiar to Obito from his training but some not, more than he’s ever even guessed exist. It keeps hitting him, how big the world is. How small he is by comparison. He thinks, if the Old Man could see this, see this unbroken landscape, the peace and quiet of the night before anything rises to overcomplicate things, maybe he’d think something different needed to happen. Obito has no real interest in the thought project; he knows the Old Man’s batshit and blind as one to boot, but sometimes he wonders.

“Look,” Rin points at the sand. All tracks are instantly obliterated by the wind, but lumpy mounds are appearing. “Camel dung?”

“Must be,” he says. “No way a horse could survive out here.”

“We must be catching up to a caravan.”

Obito frowns. “There was no recent caravan logged on the memo board. Not within the last week.”

Rin’s eyes narrow. “Bandits?”

Obito licks at his bleeding lips. He won’t let Rin heal them, because he’d just tear them up again. Besides, it will look suspicious if they look too comfortable in the desert.

“They shouldn’t risk targeting us. We look like crap and we’re not carrying anything.”

Rin reasons, “these less well traveled roads would be the perfect spot for an ambush. You could just lie in wait. And the Daimyo’s got to be calling in all types of trade. Easy to predict, easy to target, easy to take.”

Obito says sourly, “Sunagakure should be better at controlling their bandit population.”

“Wind is over three times the size of Fire. We’ve seen less than 1% of the Land of Wind. They can’t watch everywhere. Besides, we’re lucky. They won’t attack us.”

Obito is instantly pissed off. “Now you’ve gone and jinxed us. When have we ever been lucky?”

“We’re both still alive, for one, despite numerous attempts of the contrary.”

“Ha! You don’t even have a second point!” Obito is seething. They’ll get ambushed for sure. “This will all be your fault, just you watch. Any second now we’re going to be ambushed by a dozen howling raiders. They’ll have war hammers and archers and a jinchuuriki of their own.”

“Oh, calm down,” Rin dismisses. “Suna only has the one Bijuu.”

But she does quiet down and lets him walk off his temper before his fuming chakra helps the bandits plan their ambush to an even greater degree.

They aren’t, of course, anything in the general vicinity of lucky. Towards morning the road curves sharply around some craggy cliffs: plenty of cover, bad lines of sight, a natural chokepoint, a textbook ambush set up.

He can’t sense anything with his mokuton. There is so very little plant life around. They could be suppressing their chakra signatures if they were shinobi, or they could just be civilian robbers, or the rock formation is empty and the camel signs belonged to any number of well-meaning travelers.

But Obito knows which option he’d put his nonexistent money on.

They strategize. They can potentially go around it, but the rock face looks loose and crumbly, dangerously unstable to try to climb, even using chakra, and it would just waste time as the temperature steadily begins to climb as the sun rises.

“Bad timing.” Rin scrunches her nose up. “We’ll have to go quite a ways to be safe to bed down.”

“If it’s a fight I can Kamui us away easily enough. If there’s a battle, nobody should notice the chakra from it.”

But that will only work if they won, and they knew it. Bandits work in mobs; they’ll likely be greatly outnumbered. Obito’s killed before but that was different: he’d been a little crazy at the time. But he knows he can’t afford to let anyone out his identity.

Worse still, he knows what his teacher would have them do. Minato’s problem solving is on the overwhelmingly effective side. “We’re not waltzing into an ambush. I’ll take us around.”

“Maybe its civilians?”

“What are the odds of that?” He says sarcastically.

“If anyone’s tracking us, our footprints can’t just disappear in the middle of the road. And we might just land smack dab in the middle of another ambush. A bigger one.”

He knows what she’s thinking. Rin’s thinking that if they were going to infiltrate the ninja villages and interact with jinchuuriki, they’d better know how to throw down. She’s thinking that maybe a nice group of bandits is a good baby step towards taking down Madara. She’s confident off their elimination of the zetsu, wanting to test her control over the seal in a combat situation.

Somewhere in her devious little mind, she’s thinking that Obito already took on over a dozen ANBU level enemies and made it look easy. But Obito’s not sure he wants her to see him like that. He’s not sure he wants to be like that. How did Minato sleep at night after the thousands he killed as the Yellow Flash of the Leaf? He hadn’t taught them that. Maybe he didn’t think they needed to know. Out of all of them, Obito understands his sensei the least.

“Intimidation,” Obito says. “Civilians and low-level shinobi will let us pass.”

“A bluff. They’ll be confident in their numbers.”

When he was a boy learning the clan jutsu, an elder had taken him aside one day to show him the memorial for all the Uchiha who’d fallen in the First and Second Wars. There is a shrine right in the middle of the compound, made of polished black stone. The names are inscribed in neat little rows, each beginning with Uchiha. He came to this stone often to look at the names of both of his parents, fallen in the Second Shinobi War. “Look, Obito,” he’d said. “Even a sharingan can be outnumbered.”

But he’d already known that. He wasn’t the only war orphan, far from it. He was lucky to be raised in a clan, instead of in an orphanage or on the streets. Or alone, like Kakashi.

Suna had been in that war, with their puppets, and their poison, and their wind scythes that could cut through anything.

They can’t go around, and they can’t skip it, but they can’t just go through it either. In his mind, his teacher is twirling a distinctive kunai through his hands in a showy flash, bright blond hair uncovered for all the world to see, bellowing the name of his jutsu for all the world to hear, the only shinobi in the war with a standing Flee on Sight order attached to his name.

Obito fixes that image in his mind and flares his mangekyo into blazing life, his chakra a blistering heat that rises through the night like the desert sun itself, hot and strong, unavoidable and certain as a wildfire, and he lets loose with a blast of withering Killing Intent aimed right at the crags.

There is a moments silence as all the night creatures, the snakes and scorpions and burrowing owls and lizards freeze in fear, before there’s an answering challenge from the turn in the road, not as strong as Obito’s, but wind natured, a blast of hot air right back, buffeting and shoving at them. But Obito routinely goes toe to toe with a Bijuu’s Killing Intent; he is unimpressed with a little hot air. Minato is straight-line gale-force winds. This is nothing.

If that’s their strongest shinobi, he might be mid chuunin level at best. A group of missing nin blindsiding caravans for cash in the wake of the war.

His Killing Intent would have cowed any civilian robbers or low-level shinobi. And now he has an idea what they’re up against. And the enemies know they’ve lost the element of surprise. A jounin of the Leaf wouldn’t have fallen for his stunt. A smart shinobi would have stood his ground and held his silence, would never have taken the bait like that.

Rin narrows her eyes at the short cliffs. “They’ll likely be undisciplined. Teamwork will be sloppy. Chuunin at best. Most likely using poison to capitalize on low numbers. No more than ten, I’d say, and only 3 or 4 worth much. And now we know exactly where they are.”

Minato sensei’s strategy when faced with a blind ambush? Make it not an ambush.

“How’s your unhappy tagalong?”

Rin pats her seal. “Let’s find out.”

They’ve been sparing together enough recently that they slipped back into their old team formations like an old shoe, comfortable and reassuring. Even handicapped by her seal, Rin’s still a solid chuunin and a wonderful medic. They put a monster in her and it only slowed her down, but Obito is a monster.

They don’t give the enemy time to reconfigure their blown ambush positions. They push chakra to their feet and take off over the sand with speed trained into them by the Yondaime Hokage of the Leaf, Rin with chakra scalpels in one hand and a sewing needle held like a senbon in the other, Obito with a single confrontation seal and his mangekyo bringing everything, every individual grain of sand, into sharp relief.

They fly around the turn to confront the enemy nin and find them already scrambling from their compromised cover, and Obito effortlessly and instantaneously tracks all of them simultaneously, seven ninja wearing brown camouflage and only three with flak jackets. Those three wear scratched through Suna hitai ate and the others must be a loose affiliation of bandits they massed together.

The closest one hurls a rain of poisoned senbon at him, accurately enough, he has some shinobi training, but Obito lets them pass harmlessly through him instead of dodging, just for the intimidation factor and one of the flak jackets swings a giant fan at Rin, slicing out with a wind scythe that she flips up and over and then the fight is on.

Obito charges at the two nearest him with his mangekyo whirling, hopefully deep enough in his dark hood to conceal it and avoids all their attacks. He’d been right in his estimation of them. Most aren’t even gennin level, just bodies for numbers. He tears right through them; they can’t touch him, and Rin uses his back to springboard from in midair to launch herself at the other two gennin, slicing with her chakra scalpels.

In seconds, the lower level nin are down, leaving just the three in flak jackets and struck through hitai ate. They group up like a team, maybe an old gennin team turned traitor, and their formation puts the wind user at the forefront while a white painted chuunin in an eared hood pulls out a puppet in the shape of a spider and a dark haired kunoichi stands in the back quietly, a long-range attacker, or a support medic.

Rin slides into position at his side. “Who’s the leader among you?”

The wind user swings his fan in reply, sending another wind scythe at them from close range. Obito pulls Rin along with him and they come out completely behind the other missing nin, nullifying their formation entirely. Rin covers him in the three second delay, when the puppet user flings a giant skittering spider at his face, legs tipped in spikes and every inch of it dripping poison. It’s eight rolling eyes are smoke bombs, a chakra string on each leg, two more on its head and body.

Obito’s never fought a puppet user before and it shocks him with how agile the puppet is. It’d be difficult to land a hit to smash it, so he flashes through two signs with his hand, ending with circling his mouth, and he spits a Fireball at it, only to have the spider spin itself into an armored ball while the wind user blows his katon out of range. No water nearby for suiton, and all his katons countered easily by fuuton. He didn’t know any doton, and his mokuton is useless out here as well. But he always has taijutsu.

Before he can engage the wind user, the kunoichi smiles at him and his ears ring, hand going numb as the sky suddenly reels around him. A genjutsu attack, and a powerful one, the foreign chakra invading his system, freezing him in place. He’s unable to make the sign to expel it, leaving Rin to cover him from the puppet user while he battles the genjutsu specialist, who must assume she has him dead to rights. He isn’t sure how she’s ensnared him, but it doesn’t matter. Obito is a sharingan. He can genjutsu right back.

The sky around them spins blood red and the girl’s eyes widen in fear, the sand writhing around their feet in flames, bursting into hot coals. His chakra’s a blistering, roaring fire and his illusions are likewise torched: the red of flame, the black of soot, the small lick of white in the very center. He shatters her jutsu and replaces it with his own, unsubtle and undisciplined but what it lacks in form it makes up for in sheer power.

The kunoichi collapses and Obito shakes off the last of her attack and rejoins Rin in the fight. She’s covered him well and also damaged the spider puppet, severing some of its many legs. Her face is very focused as she targets the giant fan, trying to tatter it. It ribbons and Obito knocks it out of the chuunin’s hands and crushes it under his heel. It’s unlikely he can manipulate wind on his own and the puppet is a limping mess. Rin smashes through the puppet’s hard shell with a kick just for it to release a poison gas that hisses out the cracks. Rin holds her breath and retreats out of the cloud, finally targeting the puppet user himself.

Obito fishes a kunai from the ground, from one of the downed ninja, and isn’t it good to have a blade again. He immediately closes on the wind user, drawing his kunai over the flak jacket, up to his armpit in an arc and then down and in, just as Rin finishes a short taijutsu match with the puppeteer, who’s predictably weak in hand-to-hand.

The former Suna nin crumple and Obito and Rin spin back-to-back, checking for hidden stragglers. Rin’s breathing heavy but he doesn’t think she’s injured. The seal’s holding and he can’t sense the Bijuu at all. Obito is similarly fine and after a long moment of silence, his sharingan not picking up any movement, he acknowledges that they have taken down all of the bandits.

Rin checks over the corpses, making sure they’re really down. “I’ve never fought a puppet user before. Are you poisoned? Even a scratch could do it.”

Obito is not freaking out. He’s doing a fair job of staying calm even with blood on his hand. Minato’d be proud of him for the excellent extent that he is not freaking out.

He shakes his head, “I’m fine. Are you?”

“Fine,” she picks up a shuriken from the ground. “Those three were former Suna nin. They might have bounties.”

Obito frowns, but Sage knows they need the money. “Nearest checkpoint would be at the Daimyo’s palace. We can’t carry them that far.”

Rin grimaces in distaste. “We’d just need the heads.”

Well then. Rin’s civilian religion prohibits her from looting the dead, and even Obito thinks its bad luck, but he doesn’t want to get stuck with head duty, so he volunteers to rifle through pockets and kunai pouches for anything they can use. He even takes a whole kunai pouch for himself, loaded with weapons and wire.

Rin removes the heads of the wind user and puppeteer. A piece of the spider puppet has a distinctive maker’s mark that could be useful for identification, so she seals it away in the storage scroll too.

When she kneels by the genjutsu specialist, Obito thanks her for covering him while he stood frozen from her attack, just a little queasy still. “I wasn’t expecting such a strong genjutsu attack. I still don’t know how she got me.”

Rin taps her ear, “she was humming.”

That would do it. “Damn it, I always forget to screen my hearing. She spun a nasty illusion, and I couldn’t dispel it.”

Rin comments, “pain might, in the future. Bite your tongue. I assume you fought back with a genjutsu of your own?”

Obito nods, “a sloppy one, unformed, but it worked.”

Rin inspects the damage a mangekyo genjutsu can do and whistles. “It sure did. Her chakra network broke down. Must be some technique.”

Obito’s uncomfortable. It wasn’t Tsukuyomi, the legendary mangekyo genjutsu he suspected the Old Man wanted him to reflect off the moon. He’s sure about that. It isn’t fair; the kunoichi would have won against a regular opponent. She just had the bad luck to face him.

The sharingan’s already an overpowering dojutsu, and the mangekyo takes that to a ridiculous degree. He thinks of the illusion he cast to replace hers, tinged with fire, a blood red sky, smoke thick enough to choke on. He’s vastly untrained in genjutsu, but his inborn aptitude overpowered a chuunin level specialist.

Rin cleans up the scrolls while Obito piles the bodies together. They’ll let the Suna nin deal with the aftermath of the battle once they alert the garrison at the Capitol. They survey the churned ground from the fight and Rin holds out her fist for a bump, her eyes checking that he is okay and not about to lose it. It’s their old team tradition and Obito can’t help the small smile that comes to his face at the gesture. They fought well together. The intervening years hasn’t diminished their teamwork at all. He’s sure the only bruise he has is from when Rin used him as a launch pad.

He fist-bumps her, and he is surprisingly okay. He’s not the veteran that Rin is, but he is a shinobi. This was always in his future. He’d accepted that easier than he thought, and that’s an ugly thought that’s harder to prevent himself from internalizing more so than killing was. Like with the mokuton, he’s swiftly learning to live with the disquiet of it.

At least no one else will get blindsided by a bunch of bandits. He’s protecting civilians, even if they’re not Fire citizens.

The road stays empty ahead of them. The sun’s climbing and so is the heat. Red starts oozing from Rin’s stomach and it’s just as much of a fight to shove it back inside as the skirmish against the bandits. They’re both a little tired and Rin sleeps fitfully while Obito keeps watch, sipping slowly at their already diminishing water supplies. They hadn’t trusted the nukenin not to have poisoned their own supply, potable only with an antidote that they don’t have. It’s not a trap he would think of, but Rin doesn’t underestimate anyone. During the hottest part of the day, he tries to get some sleep, but he’s still not used to sleeping on bare sand, covered only by a shallow lip of red dirt and a C rank genjutsu, the wind sandblasting him with stinging pellets. He likes the desert just fine at night, but it isn’t worth it, to live through the punishing heat of the day.

They go slower, still following the road, and the next day they can see far away black specks high in the sky. Obito squints at them. “Messenger hawks. For the Daimyo and the garrison.”

Rin brightens. “We must be getting close.”

Towards evening the road merges with another and Obito sees his first real life camel. They’re taller than he thought they’d be, kinda stupid looking in the face, with big liquid eyes fringed by long lashes. He’d assumed they just pulled carts, but these civilians are riding them like horses. Its a family traveling to the Capitol from a village on the outskirts, some unfamiliar merchant crest on their backs.

They keep some distance between them, a civilian’s distrust of unfamiliar shinobi, but Rin’s polite enough. The road gets more rutted and dustier the closer they get to the village, and they dodge the droppings from camels. More hawks float overhead, keeping an eye on the area. More and more roads merge to make a main thoroughfare. Traffic picks up, and the larger caravans have hired shinobi teams to escort them as protection. The Suna shinobi run over the sand without difficulty, in a way that has Obito’s sharingan itching with his want to try to copy the move. But he doesn’t even dare to use chakra to stick his hood more securely on his head, not with so many shinobi nearby. There’ll likely be a sensing team in the palace as well.

It’s getting close to noon when they’d usually bed down for the time being, but they don’t feel secure enough with all the people around, so they just follow the flow of travelers until Obito begins picking up on plants, actual plants, and trees, real fucking trees, from his mokuton, still miles out, but he sighs with the relief, like he’s gotten a sip of water after being thirsty for days. Rin looks at him oddly, but he can’t explain the elevation in his mood while he sweats his body weight and can be overheard by the Suna shinobi team a caravan away, who are keeping their eye on them already. He just smiles and whispers, “happy little cactus friends.”

Rin catches on and realizes they must be close enough to the Palace for Obito to sense the Daimyo’s pleasure gardens and landscaping. She grins back at him.

The walls of the village come into sight, not as tall as Konoha’s walls, but made of a smooth sandstone, studded with archer towers and platforms to launch jutsu attacks from. Obito considers the lack of cover and the accuracy and range that a fuuton backed arrow could achieve and thinks it’s an effective defense.

A team of chuunin guards are checking people in at the gates and it forces a bottleneck. Time to see if their cover holds up.

The Suna nin eye the pair of them. “Name yourselves and your business at the Palace of the Daimyo of the Land of Wind.”

Rin says, “I’m Sachira, no clan name, an unaffiliated nin on my way to Sunagakure seeking an apprenticeship in the medical field.”

It’s possible that Burondi has already reported them and it’s arrived by hawk before them. If the foreign nin knows, she gives no indication. “And you?” she looks at Obito.

“Tobi, no clan name, an unaffiliated nin going to Sunagakure looking for shinobi work.” No one would believe he’s a medic.

“Country of origin?”

“The Land of Tea,” Rin says and the chuunin scribbles something down on a scroll.

“Anything to declare?”

“We were attacked by bandits along the way, halfway between here and a water outpost manned by a chuunin named Burondi. We left a battlefield and have brought identification for three missing nin formerly of Suna.” Rin gives no mention of the size of the force, no details but the approximate location and the unspoken request for a bounty location.

The Suna nin raises her eyebrow at them. Missing nin are enemies of their home country, so it’s unlikely she will disapprove. “There’s a bounty outpost on the outskirts of the village. You can check there. There’s a police force, equipped to deal with shinobi.”

It tells them everything they need to know. Behave, or Suna will bury them. “Understood, shinobi san.”

She stamps the papers and waves them through the thick sandstone gates and into the village and Obito’s treated to his first view of a Daimyo’s palace.

Chapter Text

Chapter 6: Rin: Training

Rin is tired and sunburned. She stinks to holy hell and her mouth is a sandbox. There’s blood under her nails and inside her is a Bijuu’s rage. She’s been used to manipulate her best friend, used to destroy her home. Used. Like her only worth in is what she could do to others. She’s been made into a bomb, a cracked Jinchuuriki, a jailer with a crumbling room.

Obito might have a temper but inside her is the sum of all destruction, a Tailed Beast willing to rampage and rage; it hits and hits, it hits and hits and hits….

She’s holding it in. It’s all she can do.

She’s gleaned more from it than she thinks Obito is comfortable knowing. The Bijuu improperly sealed inside her is furious, and it rages, but she’s almost sure it is afraid.

There’s something to its anger that’s familiar: the desperation of being captured, of being trapped, scrabbling helplessly at the walls until your fingers bloody and throb. She knows what it’s like to be taken, to be restrained. That’s what she feels when she concentrates, when the Bijuu’s heavy red chakra bursts out of her like a broken dam: the frantic panic of escape, the mindlessness of wanting out, just wanting out, out out out. Nothing else matters but the escape. The freedom that resonates deep within her core is a calm lake, a still pool, a relief that would feel like sinking beneath the waves.

It’s a dangerous need. Is it possible to drown in your own mind? If the Bijuu forces her under, slips from her grip, it’s all over.

She knows Obito thinks it’s just a thoughtless chakra construction, an evil manifestation of destruction, but that’s already a contradiction. Evil is an intention. A motivation. No one ever says the storms the kami direct are the fault of the storms and not the kami themselves. But she doesn’t think her Bijuu is evil. It just wants to be free, which is understandable. But it feels trapped. It feels. It wants. It yearns for the deep water in a way that makes the desert around her and the incessant thirst she feels even more unbearable.

It makes sense for her to think of it as an animal. After all, if the Kyuubi is a fox, maybe all the Tailed Beasts take the form of animals. She’s sure its water natured, like herself. Maybe a fish. Is there a fish that has multiple tails? She can almost see it, in her dreams, when the moon is full and the Bijuu is awake inside her and close to the surface. Big, dark….round? That feels right. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, but very few things about being a new jinchuuriki at 16 do.

It also feels right to refer to it as a male. There is something masculine about how he presents himself. It’s hard for her to articulate, but when he thrashes around inside her, trying to overwhelm her weak defenses, it’s the straightforward attack of a man used to simply bulldozing over obstacles. Powerful and used to it, although she supposes that might also be a Bijuu trait. But it feels right to think about him as a he.

Obito laughs when she tells him, but she holds her peace. There’s something brittle about her recovered teammate, the one she thought was dead for over two years, had mourned, only to have him swoop in at the last second. She remembers his lack of an attention span, his jumpiness, his impulsivity, but the obsession is new, the paranoia that keeps him from sleeping, keeps him building elaborate traps and counting and recounting their supplies.

His fuse is as short as any of his clan, but his mangekyo spins with the heat of a wildfire and the trees bend to brush their leaves against him when he passes. Power, raw power, enough to push against her Bijuu, to win. To keep her seal from timing out and breaking like a dam to release a flood of destruction.

But he’s nicknamed his favorite clones, the ones who cared for him in the cave, nursed him back to health, trained with him to get his strength back up. She’s seen the parts of him that are indifferentiable from the clone they killed in Ame. He won’t talk about the two years he spent in the cave. The details he volunteers are sparse. There are bad times. He has nightmares. She knows it must have been horrific. She’s felt his slapdash chakra network, felt the alien white flesh, seen his right arm regrowing like a lizard replacing a limb. The mokuton stitching the halves of him together’s not as cohesive as it should be, wrestling against his fire nature.

But she knows it must not have been all bad. She’s sensed a gratefulness in him. The confusion of his Uchiha loyalty butting up against the manipulation, unable to reconcile an Uchiha who doesn’t have his best interests at heart, and the rest of his clan. He has an orphan’s love for his ancestor warring with his stung pride at the betrayal. She’s picked up on the fact that he won’t say Madara’s name; it’s always the Old Man, or the Geezer.

He was always so sure as a kid. It hurts her to see him doubt himself, all his scheming turning inward. He used to dream of being the first Uchiha Hokage of the Hidden Leaf. Now he can’t even use his clan name. The village he wanted to lead would hunt him down like a dog if it knew he was still alive.

They don’t talk about Konoha. They’re missing nin. It would break their team, break it in ways simply dying didn’t touch. Minato is the Yondaime now, and Kakashi probably thought he’d killed her. That’s a regret Rin will carry for the rest of her life. Her last memory of that night is Kakashi’s wide, terrified eyes, staring at her in horror. The teen had already lost so much, and Rin hated to add to that burden. But the teammate that Obito supposedly died for, Obito’d left unconscious on the ground.

There are so many things they don’t talk about.

There was a time when they were inseparable. They knew everything about each other. Now Obito shares classified clan secrets but won’t talk about how he’s doing. Her teammate’s not faithful; the Uchiha secrets are the closest thing he has to sacred. He’ll share what no other outsider knows, but draws the line at emotional vulnerability.

Boys.

Rin folds her hand over her seal, like she can reach inside herself and feel her Bijuu. She thinks about how sure she is that he’s sentient. That they’re both victims of Madara’s plotting. That they have a common enemy. That if she could talk to him without the seal splintering, maybe they could reach an understanding. That there is a vague plan taking shape in her mind, a stupid one, a potentially disastrous one, and she isn’t sharing any of it with Obito.

It doesn’t affect their teamwork. They take down the bandit team like they are experienced bounty hunters. She doesn’t tell Obito what exactly it was he’d done to that genjutsu girl, because her entire chakra network had gone into catastrophic meltdown. It’s an effect she’d never seen before, a terrifying one, and he hadn’t seemed aware of what exactly his instinctual genjutsu counter had done. Illusions don’t cause physical damage, merely psychic, but his hostile chakra had a physiological effect. When she’d felt it, the Bijuu had roiled inside her.

It's a reaction she’s quickly learning to trust. Anything that worries a Bijuu worries her. And her Bijuu doesn’t trust Obito’s mangekyo.

There’s no great way to even begin to approach that thought. She’s being disingenuous. He doesn’t deserve this from her.

At the Capitol, Rin takes the lead at the gate. Short on details, vague on the location, not a perfect report, not like she’d been formally trained to give a verbal report by a ninja village. Sachira is from Tea Country. She doesn’t know how to give a perfect report.

Obito does his best to blend into the background, but he’s six feet tall and bulky, growing into his adult frame. He’s built like a bruiser and looks like an old brawler with the scars twisting his expression. The wind tugs at his hood, and she needs him to keep his head covered, keep his eye from spinning red and black. Needs to keep him close, if her seal is going to last more than 10 hours. It’s not a hard-and-fast time limit; if she strains it by calling on too much chakra, it destabilizes, regardless. She’s limited to basic ninjutsu, nothing above a D or C rank, and only the barest minimum of iroyo ninjutsu. It’s a handicap that limits her as a fighter and as a medic, but at least no one will be suspicious of her medical capabilities. At her current level, it’s entirely believable that she’s not village-trained.

The gate guard lets them through with a thinly veiled warning, but Rin’s not too concerned. This isn’t Sunagakure. They won’t have a garrison here big enough to spare on a tail for every foreign unaffiliated nin. Fire’s Daimyo has the Guardian 12; maybe there’s some similar position here, or maybe some samurai on loan from the Shogun.

She hopes not. The only things she knows about samurai are how to not engage and to not bother attempting bribes. In a society that depends on the shadiest of shinobi to function, it only makes sense that there’s a population of warriors above the duplicitousness of their own military structure. The Shogun in Iron usually keeps them all for himself, and since they operate on an honor system instead of a mercenary one, they can’t be hired, and stay out of the shinobi’s petty wars. They’re rare on the continent. She’s never seen one before. She can’t imagine the Shogun loans them out to his Daimyo unless something drastic threatens.

Through the heavy sandstone gates, the village opens up in front of them. The Daimyo’s Palace sprawls up ahead, an expansive white span of polished marble, cool and intimidating, a noble heiress reclining in the shade by the canals. The village has built itself up around it: a market district full of spice stalls and trading posts, two long arms of commerce following a thin river crowded with long boats poling their slow way along.

The river’s thin enough that colorful canvas awnings and banners hang over it in a canopy, casting even thinner shade, but it turns the sandstone marketecture into a riot of color. The banks are lined by lilies and palms waving in the breeze.

It’s some of the first green she’s seen in days and Obito is in a bright mood. It’s possible the mokuton really is rotting his brain and he’s going to just up and turn into a tree one day and never look back, the natural culmination of all his hijacked henges. He thinks she doesn’t notice. Sometimes she thinks he’d be happier as a tree.

The walls act as a windbreak and the sun bounces and reflects off the polished sandstone and white marble buildings; as a result, it’s even hotter inside than outside. Most buildings have cleverly tall vents to catch the breeze, like chimneys, and they whistle and moan in an undercurrent of sound. Then she steps into the first real shade she’s felt in days and there’s easily a 30-degree difference, instantly cool against her sweat.

They soak it in for a long minute and then Rin tugs him away, into the bustling market district. The smell of fried food makes her mouth water, but they have no money at all. They’re lucky enough to have a potential bounty practically dumped into their laps, but everything here is luxurious, catering to the whims of the Feudal Lord, and it’s all strikingly civilian. In Konoha, even the civilian districts see shinobi all the time, but all the shinobi here are hidden, like they’re downplaying the realities of the military force that protects the Daimyo.

Twining through the stalls are skinny cats with long tails and jeweled collars. Turquoise winks from the ears of most of the civilians; gold glints on fingers, in teeth. The Suna style of clothing is cool neutral colors, brown, creams, the occasional gold or white, but their yukata are intricately folded silks that drip embroidery and seed pearls, a wealth Rin can spot from a street away.

The important politicians and nobles wear kimono. Favored concubines carried by palanquin leave perfume wafting behind them. There’s no visible weapons anywhere. Even the tiles under her feet are glazed terra cotta, stylized and intricately designed.

Rin’s wearing frayed civilian pants and a sleeveless vest over a long sleeve shirt with a wide collar, spattered with blood with her hair unkempt and coated in dust. There’s a literal crust of dust-caked sweat on her and her hands are wind-chapped and chafing. Obito’s even worse because he refused healings and Rin lacked the energy to pick a fight with him about it and he’d picked at the scabs till they bled, leaving him rougher than anyone else she can see.

This is….not the place they need to be. Bounty hunting’s ugly; they’d hide it from civilian eyes. Not along the river then, lined on both sides by lush ferns and palms and landscaped flowers in rows. The gate guard mentioned the outskirts. She studies the patterns the hawks make against the sky and then she leads Obito around the pleasure district and they find a bar that looks like it caters to shinobi, a hole in the wall down a twisting ally, but there’s the shadow of a man in a flak jacket inside. They have to be getting close.

They pass some inns and a water feature with sculpted lilies and wade birds trawling along and a palm frond looks like it reaches out and touches Obito as they pass, and his fingers trail along it in greeting as well. She knows he can’t really control his mokuton, but she does wish that the trees learn discretion. They don’t have to make it obvious.

Further away, right up against the wall itself, is a little warren of shinobi influence: weapons shops, supply stores, a squat little building with the bounty seal small on the door, almost unnoticeable. The proprietors of the shops are retired shinobi, and their eyes follow the pair of them as Rin leads them to the bounty outpost.

She pushes her way inside and it’s dark and cool in the building. The counter’s a long sandstone runner, like a bar, sealing scrolls and the pull-out body drawers behind it with little numbered cards. It smells like cardamom and the two retired shinobi look nonchalant as they enter, but one’s polishing a tanto nice and slow.

The older shinobi’s missing some fingers. “Bounty?”

“Maybe,” Rin says. “Three missing nin formally of Suna. A wind user, a puppeteer and a genjutsu specialist.”

“Hmmmmm…” he says, “let’s see them then.”

It’s a good sign. He probably has the Bingo Book memorized. Rin brings out the sealing scrolls slowly, projecting her movements, and sets them flat on the counter. She summons the remains from the scrolls and the bounty nin frowns. “Head’s is less.”

Rin shrugs. “Couldn’t carry all seven,” she says slyly and watches the non-reaction of the old shinobi. “There’s this though,” she places the part of the puppet’s shell with the maker’s mark on the counter and the bounty nin squints at it with his one rheumy eye.

“Might be worth something, if you had it whole. Puppet was stole from the Playhouse, one of a master’s 10 spares.”

Missing Suna nin with a puppet stolen from the Playhouse. No wonder the damn thing had been hard to smash.

“What’s it worth in pieces?”

The haggling began. He door-in-the-faces her right off the bat, but she’s used to that treatment, used to being small and female and civilian. Her dad taught her how to haggle and she does him proud by fighting tooth and nail for every ryo. If she had a copy of the Book, she wouldn’t need to hear him low ball, but without a guaranteed price, she’s left doing the guesswork. Minato’s capped out at the 200 million ceiling; a regular no-name jounin should be at least a base million, maybe half for a chuunin. Suna doesn’t formally recognize clans, but maybe the puppet part could make up for the lost notoriety.

Obito’s sure to loom behind her like he could ward off her being cheated just by looking big. He looks like he’s following the math, but she can tell he’s got no real clue about bounties, about how much his life is worth to a village. Looking at him, even knowing what she does, she knows the Uchiha won’t ransom him back. Hell, they’d probably send an assassin of their own, to be sure he’s really dead this time. He’s empty-handed and scowling. His arm’s grown from a stump down to past his elbow, but she’s pretty sure he can use it as a newly jointed club.

After some back and forth, the shinobi gives his final price, “Take it or leave it.”

“Tell you what,” Rin says, “I throw in the puppet part for free and we get an updated copy of the Bingo Book.”

He chews on a senbon and squints at her again, “sounds fair enough. I’ll take it.”

His partner sweeps the evidence off the counter and into the body drawers while the three-fingered man counts their change and Rin stows away the storage scrolls. Before he hands over the money, he takes their names for the record and rifles through the Book to tear out the entries of the missing nin she’d just handed over. She wonders exactly how much she’s been had for. Nothing to do about it now.

She hands the money to Obito because he’s less likely to be targeted by pickpockets coming out of a bounty check post, but keeps the Book for herself. There’s things in it she doesn’t want him to see.

She pockets the Bingo Book and thanks the bounty nin for their business. Outside the sun’s high overhead and the hours are evaporating like mist in the morning. Obito’s likely already mentally spent all their money. “Hotel first,” she insists. “We can get food after we shower. I don’t think we have enough for new clothes, but there should be a laundry at the inn.”

They find the hotel that caters to shinobi because they’ll be turned away at a civilian one.

“Only got a one bed,” the desk clerk says.

“Do you have laundry on site?”

“Basement.”

“We’ll take it.”

He hands over the key and then, indoor plumbing.

“You first,” Obito offers. “I’ll run your laundry.”

Rin gladly agrees. It gives Obito hives to leave her alone when her seal can go at anytime, but she’ll risk it for a nice cool shower and clean hair.

It’s a shinobi inn, so all the soaps are unscented but she scrubs all the dirt off and combs her hair and the water pressure is fantastic. She sits around in a towel waiting for Obito to come back with her clothes.

To her unsurprise, he’s trapped the window and door. It’ll be almost prohibitively expensive, but they should look into picking up some sealing paper and ink, maybe buy some silencing seals and perception seals to hopefully mask the Bijuu acting up or the whole inn might come down on them. She’s never had to buy them for herself before; Kushina kept them well supplied, but she knows enough to dread the price tag on specialized fuuinjutsu supplies. Even worse, she doesn’t know how to write her own and the pre-made options are even more pricey.

When she peeks through the blinds of the window she can see a tea shop, a stand selling grilled yakitori, a stable for camels, a weapons shop, and a shinobi supply store.

Obito comes back with her newly clean clothes and then it’s his turn in the shower while she runs his laundry down in the cool basement. Someone’s used the far wall for target practice, and she spends some time calculating the shinobi’s height from the angle of the entry points and the distance from the washer/dryer combo to the wall. But maybe he was wearing stilts, or barefoot, or throwing from his knees, and she amuses herself running through all the variations, finally settling on a sandaled shinobi with scoliosis, 5’9, but with really bad aim.

She’s amazed when Obito’s cloak doesn’t immediately disintegrate in the washer and when everything’s dry, she carries them back upstairs to their room to find that instead of a towel, Obito’s taken the clean sheet off the bed and wrapped his entire body in it, spying shamelessly through the blinds in his bare feet with his regrowing hair drying in spikes. Is it growing faster than it should be? She chalks it up to the mokuton.

They walk down to the river and buy fresh food off a cart, udon and eggplant, bitter melon and tilefish that comes shredded over rice. They sit in the grass by the bank and watch the pleasure boats go by dripping string lights, the merchant vessels piled high with goods, the boats of musicians cajoling coin from onlookers with wind bag instruments, jaw harps, and shamisen. There are ducks and herons, and Obito tosses some rice for them to eat while the palms wave overhead in the slight breeze off the water. It’s the coolest she’s felt in days.

They people watch until the tiredness settles in, pointing out the richest merchants from the crowd, trying to deduce their backstories from their clothes, their bags, their expressions alone. “Indigestion,” Rin says. “He ate some bad shrimp.”

Obito studies the man with his face scrunched up as if in pain, walking stiffly with small steps along the path. “Milk,” he counters. “He’s lactose intolerant and they used the wrong creamer in his morning coffee.”

The strong drink has only recently become popular in Konoha, but here its more favored than tea. She sees entire shops specializing in brewing the bitter stuff.

“The milk expired and he forgot to pick up a new carton at the market. As revenge, his wife put it in his coffee as a lesson. She’s laughing somewhere, rubbing her hands together in glee.”

It’s a veritable menagerie, the possibilities endlessly fascinating. But even from the distance of the river walk, she can see the burnish on the metal around the jewelry, the fashion of the yukata several seasons out of style. Its an old wealth in Wind’s capitol, a clinging, desperate gesture to the station of nobility in a dirt-poor country that’s growing increasingly frustrated with its ruling class and the uncontrolled financial mobility of a rising merchant class. There’s cracks in the façade of Suna’s political Capitol. Does Obito, with his wealthy clan upbringing, see it, see how even the rich here live in endless performance of themselves, as deep cover as any agent? It’s not unforgivable, the lengths they go to pretend, but it must be exhausting.

“That,” he says, gesturing with his eyebrow, “is just a really ugly monkey summon in an obi.”

Rin stifles her laughter and finishes off her food. They walk back to the inn and vow to resupply later, but right now, Rin’s going to sleep in a real bed in clean clothes and a full stomach, fully hydrated and cool, with the Bijuu unusually calm like he’s enjoying the change of pace as well.

It’s the best sleep she’s had in weeks.

When Obito wakes her gently for her watch shift she trades places with him feeling refreshed and rested. He flips the pillow around and almost immediately passes out, still twitching in his sleep because he can’t ever keep still. She rolls her eyes at him fondly and plans their remaining funds. They need rations most of all, and weapons if they can afford them. They scavenged a few ninja tools from the Suna team, but they weren’t exactly well equipped. Rin can make do with her chakra scalpels at close range, but they need distance weapons, especially if they keep running into puppeteers, and Suna is famous for its puppet users. Some poisons can’t be extracted and she doesn’t have the facilities to craft an antidote. She’s a jinchuuriki and could probably shake it off eventually, and Obito is pretty confident in his immunity as well, but she’d rather not test either theory.

And water, as much as they can carry. Water is her new best friend, one that will kill her if she leaves them. There’ll be more traffic along the road to Sunagakure, more caravans and travelers along the way. Less chance of bandits, but more prying eyes dissecting their every move.

When her Bijuu shifts restlessly inside her, almost before the seal even starts unraveling, she has a hand clasped with Obito’s in the Snake seal and his mokuton bearing down on her. The nearby greenery helps and the Tailed Beast retreats under their efforts and Rin can only gasp in short pants from the fear and pray that none of the nearby shinobi could recognize the feel of a Bijuu briefly rearing its head. Or maybe its tails would be more accurate a statement.

She feels bad she woke him up, “go back to sleep, it’s still my watch.”

“Just a sec, I’m checking.”

There’s a tense moment before he finishes his sensory sweep. “All’s clear. I don’t think anyone cares enough to come check it out. Whole country’s dirt poor.”

She has to threaten to smother him with a pillow to get him to settle back down and he goes grumbling. His sleep’s not as deep this time and she’s careful not to wake him. She has memories of him sleeping on his side during missions when they were gennin, but now Obito sleeps like a shinobi, flat on his back, his one arm down by his side, in close reach of where she’d stashed a kunai under the mattress. He lays on a bed like it’s a hospital cot and she doesn’t think he’s realized.

In the morning, they pack up and Obito remembers the detail she was really hoping he’d forget. “Hey,” he says, “let’s see that Bingo Book. Maybe a few of these old guys are in it.”

She titters, nervously, and he zeroes in on her discomfort immediately.

“No,” he says and shakes his head vehemently. “You’re joking. You’re fucking with me.”

“Promise you won’t get mad?”

“Book,” he demands and she sighs and hands it over. He immediately flips to the Konoha section and pales before his sharingan flicks on to memorize the entry.

She knows what he’s seeing. It’s Kakashi’s face staring out at him.

His stats are recent, but his mugshot doesn’t hide the fact that, under the mask, his cheeks are still young-teen chubby. He's looking at the reader dead on.

Next to his name is his bounty. It’s three times higher than what they’d gotten from the Suna nukenin, combined.

Obito gapes. “How did this happen?”

She’s not happy about it either. “During the war, he flipped his designation from tracker to assassin. Remember his Chidori?”

He winces, unable to forget. Rin says, “he got good at it. Yu offered for him, but Kumo backed. Sensei benched him for a month when he found out, and then again once he was sworn in. Guess he read the clearance reports out of Hot Water.”

“Fucking Steam Country? What the hell did he do to piss them off?”

She shrugs, but she can guess. They all dealt with losing Obito in different ways. Minato might have ended the war that killed him, but it was Kakashi who was angry. In the information under his picture, they’re calling him the Copy nin Kakashi, or Sharingan no Kakashi. In the village, Obito’s clan calls him the Bastard Sharingan, but Rin doesn’t let him know that. She’s glad that nickname hasn’t made it into the Book.

In distress, he thumbs awkwardly through the pages, red eye spinning in his socket. Memorizing the entries. All the missing nin and dangerous unaffiliated mercenaries and bounty hunters are listed, as well as the entries for other notably dangerous shinobi. Konoha has its fair share; lots of jounin made a name for themselves in the last war.

He finds Minato’s page, a double-spread, and laughs meanly. Their teacher’s bounty is ridiculously huge, at the 200 million cap, and hilarious, seeing as his standing Flee on Sight order hasn’t expired even now that he’s Hokage. Its Kumo backed, but any country would be willing to pay for his head.

It ruins Obito’s mood for the rest of the day. She takes the Book back from him and studies it for herself; its been since her last deployment since she’s held one. Longtime favorites and new upstarts in glossy definition. The amount of information they have on Minato is concerning, diagrams of his kunai, mentions of his favored ninjutsu and patterns and habits, but Kakashi’s entry is sparse. They’ve got his lightning nature, but not doton, and there’s no mention of his tracking designation or ninken.

She’s not overly worried; Minato can handle himself, and he’s watching out for Kakashi. Any assassins would have to get through Kushina to get to either of them.

They finish packing and resupply at the handful of hidden ninja convenience shops. Like she predicted, there is an emphasis on poison in Suna and the apothecary is full of the shriveled leaves of deadly trees, tiny red mushrooms the size of her knuckle, glass vials filled with scorpions and canasters of gas. Snake fangs and powdered sea fish. Neurotoxins, paralytics. Carefully labeled antidotes. If Obito does have some toxin immunity, it most likely covers plant-derived poisons, not animal-based venoms. As a medic, she’d feel more comfortable carrying an antidote set, just in case. Not a lot can take down a jinchuuriki, but she’ll sleep better at night knowing they have all their bases covered. She handpicks a kit that caters to common shinobi poisons, as well some rarer animal-derived poisons, just in case they face another puppet user.

She buys more bandages for Obito and simple first aid supplies. They’re out of blood replenishers and painkillers, but they still have antibiotics and antihistamines. Enough alcohol to sterilize a senbon and preform a field surgery with ninja wire as stitches, one of the same tricks that had earned her her field promotion to chuunin at the end of the war.

In the weapon supplies shop, most of their funds go to weapons: three bundles of senbon, as many standard kunai and shuriken as they can afford. Obito tests the sharpness and balance of the blades and Rin picks out a good quality weapons oil. On the walls hang gunbai and katana, wakizashi and tanto and fans, but neither of them is big on kenjutsu and their weapons training only covers the basics.

Rin looks longingly at the mesh undershirts and bracers, the metal backed gloves and assorted pieces of armor in the understated Suna style, camouflaged against the sand, but with the bright flourishes and quirks of a shinobi’s affectations, bright red joints, genjutsu bells that send the memory of her own bell test aching through her. Pots of brightly colored paints and sealers, which she carefully ignores. The left-over money goes towards exploding tags and smoke bombs, ninja wire, precious few sheafs of sealing paper and chakra infused ink. She stocks up on storage scrolls as well, making sure to have one that’s big enough to fit an entire body this time, just in case they’re lucky enough to run into another potential bounty.

Then they go next door to the supply shop and fill all the storage scrolls with as many field rations as they can afford. The rest of the scrolls are relegated to carrying their water supply.

She wishes it was more. Obito still has a subpar kunai pouch, and his sandals don’t quite fit him and she feels naked without her chuunin vest and forest green flak jacket. Without her Konoha hitai ate. She doesn’t feel like a deserter, a traitor, an oath breaker, but she supposes they all tell themselves this.

They’re down to scant change after their shopping spree, just enough for a small hot breakfast before they start walking again. Back to the desert. Back to the heat. Not enough money for another night in the hotel. Too many eyes on them loading up on weapons, no hourglass hitai ate in sight. Too big a risk with the Bijuu inside her.

She loads them both down on a high calorie breakfast and a refreshing fruit juice packed with sugar and water. She’s losing weight; she knows it’s from the strain of her Bijuu, a constant tweaking, a weary that rises and falls like the tide. A bruise in the center of her being, poked and prodded every day, without even the promise of healing. If Obito’s noticed, he’s kindly not said anything. But he’s sneaking his rations in among hers when she’s not looking, abusing his mangekyo to do so. He still needs food too, dammit, but in the desert, she hadn’t had the fortitude to argue with him over something so asinine.

Rin loiters by the gate, pretending to people watch, but looking for a gap between the shinobi teams and protected caravans heading out. It’ll be easier to travel if they don’t have to dodge Suna nin on escort missions. Most of the traffic seems to be heading south, towards Sunagakure, or to the Bay of Sand, the port cities, or cutting straight west to the Wind Temple in the gold foothills by the sea.

Obito spots the gap, after a small caravan of merchant civilians without a shinobi escort. In the square, another group of traveling monks with no escort is readying themselves to leave, praying for protection in the desert, familiar motions and inflections ingrained in her from birth. He nudges Rin suggestively and she smacks him because he’d unthinkingly used his stump. He’s a splendid shinobi, but sometimes his impulsivity makes her want to pull her hair out by the roots, then lock him in a safe room and kill anyone who wanted to hurt him in the whole world.

The bloodlust is unsurprising; she’s always had a ruthless streak but now she has to be sure that the rage in entirely her own.

They queue in front of the temple monks and a different gate guard takes their names and records their leaving. Rin accurately says they’re heading south towards Sunagakure and the chuunin says they’ll hit the water outpost in two days if they travel steady and aren’t delayed by sandstorms, which can hit without warning.

Once outside, Rin leaves the antique comfort of the Daimyo’s Palace behind. It’ll be harder to blend in in Sunagakure herself. A hidden ninja village, like Konoha, jam packed with highly paranoid, highly skilled shinobi. They’ll likely have a Black Op tail as well. She’s not sure how to recognize Wind’s masked ninja but she’s had her fill of them enough to last a lifetime.

Rin looks down the road, south across the sand. Somewhere down there is another jinchuuriki. Another vessel/weapon targeted by Madara. Unwilling jailer to a Tailed Beast. A jinchuuriki like her.

Her Bijuu bucks and grumbles, waves crashing against each other. Her hand drops to her seal. No, not quite like her.

Obito’s messing with something in his hand. She snatches it away, quick as a flash and he flails, spluttering. “Hey!”

It’s a leaf he’s plucked from a flower of some kind, green with tiny pink spots. There were pots of them growing all around the village. With a grin, she sticks it to her forehead, tongue out, and Obito sulks. She strikes a Gai pose. “Why, thank you for this splendid training, my dear teammate! How did you know?”

Obito bucks and grumbles, logs shifting in a fire. Nothing green for miles. As much as being in the desert sucks for her, he’s got to be just as put out. After a moment, she unsticks the leaf and slaps it to his forehead instead. “Your own control could use some work, you know.”

He already looks happier to have the leaf back. It’s good to see him smile.

It gets sandier the further south they go. The wind humps it up into long ridges and valleys, drifts like snow in the north. Dunes. She imagines how big they’ll get towards the center of the Vast Desert of Solitude. The road disintegrates entirely, shifts from hardpack to a winding ribbon that shifts and flows along the backs of the dunes. The only way to navigate is to follow the markers set at steady intervals, high stone towers of wind-eroded sandstone pointing the way south.

No one around for miles, just the sand and the sun, each as merciless as the other. Rin thinks if her seal has to break and release to Tailed Beast to rampage, this would be the best place for it. In the vast solitude. No village to destroy. Nothing to damage but the dunes. And Obito could Kamui himself to safety. She would want him to survive, to go on fighting Madara. It’s not a promise she expects to extract from him. He’s determined to see her through this.

But Rin’s thinking about the future. Her entire life, like this. Every 10 hours, like clockwork. The sword hanging above her head for years. She’s already so tired, but this is a burden she can bear. There is no other choice. She will not leave her teammates. That is no longer a decision she is willing to make.

Rin thinks that they’ve slowed their pace to an acceptable level, but when she squints, in the distance is the civilian caravan on camels. Obito says, “We’re traveling like shinobi still.”

They’re currently struggling not to slide down the length of an entire dune. “We,” Rin says decisively, sweating, “are not.”

“But we’re still catching up to the civilians. Maybe camels are slow? Maybe they’re weighed down by cargo.”

The sun’s a killer and Rin is already dehydrated. Usually, they’ve been digging a shallow pit to conceal themselves, but the sand has grown too loose. “Let’s take a break. Let them gain a little distance.”

Obito scratches his chin and wipes some sweat off his lip. “If we wait too long, the monks’ll catch up.”

Rin would prefer the monks. She’s never felt called to the Path, to follow the kami where they go, but that same wanderlust is a consideration that lurks behind her decision to be a shinobi, to leave the village, to see the natural world around her. She’s neither a historian nor a scholar, but sometimes she thinks of the people who dedicate their life to knowledge in the Temples, determined to know everything there is to know about the world they live in and their purpose in it. The Academy told her her purpose was as a weapon, even as her mother taught her otherwise. Power should be used to protect, not just to destroy.

She kicks some sand around to find a cooler layer and the two plop down and pass around the water. It’s too hot to try sleeping and now that they’ve stopped moving the glare off the sand is blinding. But if they’re being recorded at each stop along the way, then Obito can’t just Kamui them further ahead without giving their abilities away. A shinobi pace is fine. An obvious time/space technique is not.

Rin thinks about that. Minato uses a time/space technique. He depends on a jutsu formula as an anchor to aim. It’s S rank fuuinjutsu, a forbidden technique he’d learned trial-and-error from studying Senju Tobirama. She’s been pulled along with him on missions and training before, and it’s always instantaneous, even a little nauseating at first. You disappear instantly at one marker and reappear just as instantly at the next.

Obito’s, she’s thinking…..isn’t like that. He’s not aiming it with any jutsu formula or using any fuuinjutsu, and when he brings her along, it doesn’t feel like disappearing and reappearing. When she pays attention to him when he’s doing it, it’s almost like the technique is pulling him in, like his mangekyo is sucking him in someplace and then spitting him out someplace else. It’s not instantaneous. It’s something else.

“Obito,” she asks, a vague theory beginning to emerge in her head. “Could you Kamui around for a bit? I want to check something.”

He sets the water jug down carefully on the sand. “Anywhere in particular you want me to go?”

“Just….make sure I can still see you.”

He gives her a funny look but obeys, activating his mangekyo and Kamuiing around her a few times. She’s studying him hard, her mind whirling as fast as his eye. It does indeed look like it’s centered on his mangekyo, they already knew that, but what if it’s more than just because it’s a mangekyo ability? It looks like he’s being actively sucked inside his own eye, and when he spirals back out, its centered on his eye as well.

A time/space technique for sure. But how is he aiming it?

She bites her lip. “Is it usual for Uchiha to get more than one mangekyo ability?”

Obito shakes his head. “No. Just the ultimate defense, the attack, and the genjutsu. Tsusanoo, Kamui for me, and Tsukuyomi. It’s why I can’t do Amaterasu or Kotoamatsukami.”

She’s never seen him do Tsusanoo. “Can you do Tsusanoo?”

His mouth puckers. “I guess. But it takes a lot of work and training to pull off a complete tengu. I could maybe just manifest a partial skeleton. And the chakra drain would be significant. It’s easier to just dodge the hits with my mangekyo.”

It’s not exactly a yes or no answer. “Could you try? Maybe later on tonight?”

He looks at her and his expression is scheming. “What are you thinking?”

“I think I have a theory….about your Kamui. But it’s pretty wild. I need to think on it some more.”

The scheming goes to straight paranoia. This is going to eat at him. “Okay,” he agrees reluctantly. “Tonight.”

They finish their water break and hit the dunes again. They snake and wind their way around the sandstone pillars, the wind whipping and slinging burning hot pellets of sand at them: in their hair, in their eyes. It’s like getting sandblasted. The desert is getting steadily more miserable as the day moves on.

There’s not a single cloud in the sky. Reversed, it’s a deep blue ocean that sets something dark and longing through her.

She grabs at Obito’s hand and his mokuton slams over her as she grits her teeth. Internally, she’s shoving back at the seal and thinking hard about how hot it is out here, how miserable her water natured Bijuu would be if he busted out in the middle of a desert. She’s not sure if he can hear her clearly enough through the busted seal to understand, but if she can pick up on things about him, then he must be getting some feedback from her as well. It’s her body he’s stuck inside.

The Tailed Beast slinks back behind the seal reluctantly. It’s been a few days since he’s really raged and Rin is dreading the next time he really makes a try for it, really pitching a fit. If it happens in Sunagakure they’re both done for.

As evening falls, they settle down for the night. They’ve been pacing themselves by lagging behind the civilians and they don’t want to sneak up on them in the night. The temperature is finally settling but the wind is not and it actually feels nice for once.

They shore up against the base of a dune, opposite the wind which keeps them from being directly sand blasted, but has the undesired effect of dumping sand over them as the dune shifts and crawls. It’s like they just can’t win.

Rin is healing her sunburn and fixing Obito’s blisters while they eat their rations. There’s no point in trapping the area around them and it’s giving Obito hives. Rin drops a genjutsu over them to be safe and marvels that her eyelids are sunburned from squinting. Her eyelids.

Obito’s been thinking hard. She’s seen him sneakily pass his hand through his now almost wrist-length stump. He’s been considering his mangekyo as they walk but it’s difficult to guess at what conclusions he’s come too. He should have a better handle on it; it’s his technique, but since it’s so natural, he might not be thinking about it the way she is.

He fidgets with a plain kunai a minute, like he’s trying to imagine their teacher’s three-pronged version, before saying, “I’m going to try a Tsusanoo.”

Rin says, “Don’t overdo it. And stay under the genjutsu.”

He slaps the sand off himself as best he can and then stands a little ways away. Even with his hood up, she can see his mangekyo burning, can feel the heat of it like the sun is rising again. His eye is narrowed with his concentration, his hand in the seal of confrontation to focus his chakra.

“Not through your eye!” Rin yells at him. Obito’s told her the Uchiha’s ultimate defense takes the form of a tengu, with them protected inside it. “Try to imagine it around you, project it out, not in!”

It’s not the best advice, she knows, but Obito seems to understand what she’s getting at. His mangekyo flares bright, spinning madly as he molds his chakra and then sends it out.

Ghostly flames flicker, sputter and die. She’d think it was katon if not for the turquoise, bleached pale in the light. Smokeless and curiously heatless. Ethereal, it doesn’t even sound like fire, no crackles or pops, no fuel but Obito’s pure chakra. Formless, certainly not a tengu, or even a partial ribcage. It isn’t very ultimate defense. It wouldn’t stop even a dull kunai.

“Huh,” he looks oddly put out. “Not even a bone.”

She blinks the afterimage of the wisps away. She says, encouragingly, “Not bad for your first try. How did it feel?”

Obito thinks before he answers. “Different. Like it wanted to be something other than fire, like the tengu, but fire was the only thing I knew how to make. Like, I could envision the shape of fire around me, but not a huge freaky skeleton.” He looks troubled. “But also…wrong. Incomplete.”

He crouches to feel the sand at his feet, presumably checking for heat. Rin says, “but that was a Tsusanoo?”

“I’m not sure? Probably not. It was weird. Maybe imagine it like 20 stories tall, with wings, maybe a sword. The portraits might exaggerate that though. The Old Man’s is depicted with six arms wearing spiked armor, able to level mountains with a swing of his sword. And fly. Because that makes even a lick of sense.”

It is admittedly difficult for her to imagine anything that large, and she has a gigantic chakra construct sealed inside her. “How’s your eye? Let me check.”

Obito submits to an eye exam with good grace. He’s getting used to her poking and prodding at him. He hates his body, she knows, either as a reminder of trauma or because he just finds it freaky and gross, she’s not sure. Maybe a bit of both. At least he doesn’t jump or go intangible from her unexpectedly touching him anymore. Most days she can almost pretend it was like it was in the past, before the bridge, before she lived years thinking he was dead.

She washes cool healing chakra over him, focusing on his orbital pathways. His supraorbital is blown again, but not as much as she expected. It’s not even bleeding, like after a big Kamui jump. Maybe because it wasn’t the full technique? He’d said it felt incomplete, and she’s wondering if it was so much less than he expected because he’s new at it, or if for some reason he needs both eyes. That might account for the incompleteness. The chakra drain isn’t anything like what he’d been expecting either.

While she has him, she sneakily heals his sunburn and windburn while she’s at it. When he catches on, he goes instantly intangible and her hand passes through him at the sudden lack of resistance. Her chakra in his system…..whoa. Her head swims and it’s another piece to the puzzle when it vanishes as well.

He catches the look on her face and then he’s solid again, carefully touching her hand. “Hey, you okay? I didn’t mean it.”

“Do that again.” She demands, putting her hands on his shoulder, his mokuton one, feeling like something alive and growing.

Her hands drop through him and she loses the connection, her chakra just…gone. And it shouldn’t be. If he is simply intangible, then her chakra should still be accessible to her, because he’s still here.

He’s tangible again and studying her face closely. “What is it? What’s this theory you have?”

Rin says, tentatively, feeling out the sound of it. “What if….they’re connected? Your mangekyo abilities. Kamui and the intangibility.” He’d already said Uchiha’s don’t get more than one. Kamui is his attack, even if he used it defensively. And he won’t try a Tsukuyomi on anyone; it’s a cruel technique, so there’s no good way to test that. She certainly won’t volunteer.

Obito’s considering that. “You’re thinking that it’s not like the Hiraishin. I can’t figure out how I’m aiming it either. I just do. Its intuitive.”

Here comes the crazy part. “What if that’s because Kamui doesn’t just take you from point A to point B, like Minato sensei’s Hiraishin. What if Kamui takes you somewhere between them, instead? And then you chose from there where to go? When you use it, it looks like you’re being pulled into your mangekyo. And when you exit, it’s coming from your mangekyo, your actual physical eye, the side of your face, in a spiral.”

He can’t see himself when he uses his Kamui. She continues, “And when you take me along with you, it doesn’t feel like true teleportation, like the Hiraishin. It feels almost as if we’re passing through someplace to get there. Like how you can let things pass through you.”

Obito can be so intelligent. “You think that’s how I’m doing it. Just then, you lost contact with your chakra, didn’t you? Like it had gone someplace else?”

“Yes. Like it went to …point A ½. The in-between space you access. Emphasis on the space part of your time/space technique.”

Obito says, “Like a summons?”

What Rin understands he’s really asking is if she’s suggesting he’s traveling to another realm. Like the dimension the summoning tribes inhabit.

“Yes, but just for you. A Kamui dimension.”

Obito warps himself around the camp, like he’s trying to get a feel on it. He lands in front of her. “Hit me.”

Three long seconds later she kicks at the side of his knee but it safely passes through. “You’re sending the hit away, so it can’t touch you. Using Kamui to transport it safely away. More specifically, using Kamui to transport that bit of yourself that should be getting hit away.”

He paces. He never could sit still. “An entire dimension? But I can’t feel it. You said you felt like we were passing through something?”

“You might not be able to, since its coming from you. It’s your mangekyo.”

He holds his hand out in an offer and when she takes it, he jumps them around and she concentrates, trying to feel for it, accustomed enough already to the side-along dizziness to push through it.

They land back on their feet in the sand, but her genjutsu broke the second he jumped her, and it shouldn’t have, if she’d never actually left. “Oh.” He says.

She takes a second to recast the illusion and hums thoughtfully. “Well, that answers that. I definitely left here for the jutsu to break.”

Obito practically plops himself down in the sand. “It’s all Kamui. I’m dimension hopping.”

“Pretty cool,” Rin says.

He says in despair, “at least you won’t have to come up with another name for it. It’s still just Kamui, whether I’m using it for moving all of myself, or just a piece.”

“Thank the kami,” Rin jokes. “All my other suggestions really sucked.”

“This,” Obito announces, “is too much. I’m going to sleep. When I wake up, it will be in this dimension. Suna. The Vast Fucking Desert of Vast Fucking Solitude.”

While he twitches himself into a light fitful sleep, Rin keeps watch thinking about the possibilities.

Minato would be fascinated. Rin thinks of strategies her sensei might come up with to test it, trials he would want to do. She amuses herself imagining Iwa’s reaction to the Yellow Flash of the Leaf’s Uchiha student developing his own time/space technique. The collective heart attack of Earth’s leadership is just funny enough to distract her as she watches the stars wheel overhead. The moon is almost full overhead, and it makes her itch in a way she can’t reason with.

It was Iwa nin who captured her the first time, attempted to interrogate her for information via genjutsu. It was war: ugly, brutal war, on both sides. Sometimes it was more akin to butchery, especially on the Iwa front, while the Kumo lines tended to fluctuate and move through Shimo forest enough to keep the shinobi sneaky. Iwa’s Demolition Corps didn’t leave pretty corpses. They were bombers, Explosion Release kekkei genkai users. Absolutely devastating in long range combat. The things she saw as a frontline medic….there were times she was grateful that Obito had died in the cave-in during the Kanabi Bridge mission, because it meant he wouldn’t be captured by Iwa. As gennin they were fairly useless, but it was war. Any information they might have had would have been extracted, using any means necessary. And there were no Yamanaka in Iwa. But there were a lot of T&I.

All the worst situations in her life, the Kanabi Bridge disaster and now this disaster with Madara and the Bijuu, all started with Rin being kidnapped. She’s not going to allow that to happen any more. Rin’s not some damsel. Rin’s a kunoichi. Not just a jinchuuriki, a human sacrifice, but a shinobi. And to her, shinobi doesn’t mean tool, doesn’t mean weapon. She’s a protector. If an Iwa bomber tries to take her again, they’ll get a nasty surprise. Hope they like pissed off Bijuu directly to the face. She’s not going to be taken down without a fight.

She wakes Obito to trade off watch shifts and then she lays down to fussy dreams filled with a misty monster and deep water that roils with the rage of a hurricane. Its big, bigger than she can conceptualize. A menacing, hulking beast that feels like drowning, water in her sinuses, in her lungs, pulling her down.

She’s tired the next day, crankier with Obito than usual. She’s not sure it’s entirely her own temper and it’s a chilling thought, flavored like the bottom of a lakebed. Obito senses it and gives her space. He’s experimenting with Kamui, trying to see if he can figure out why there’s that long three second delay between uses. She offers a few scant suggestions, but it seems it’s just a natural cap to his bloodline limit. He’s dissatisfied and goes back to fiddling with his leaf, which he’s somehow managed to keep lush and green despite being plucked two days ago and since been exposed to the desert. It’s impressive; he must be somehow using his mokuton to keep it alive using just his chakra.

Up ahead is the water outpost, and it looks like the civilians are hanging around still. The well building itself looks bigger than the last outpost, better maintained, maybe better staffed. Obito tries to spit but he’s got no saliva to make it work and its comical to watch him try, but Rin’s too dehydrated to laugh. “Can you sense anything?”

“No. Guess there’s nothing organic.” He carefully tucks his leaf into his makeshift kunai pouch and sighs. “Probably guards, maybe some civilian staff.”

Rin can taste sweat and sand in her mouth. “It’d be suspicious to wait.”

“Oh yeah, they might send out an attack team to investigate. It’d be smarter to get under the cover.”

“Yeah, totally. I absolutely agree. We can’t let the monks catch up with us either. They can be contagious in large numbers.”

“And predatory.”

“Might attack us too.”

“Just to be safe.”

“Completely agree with you.”

Their water is running low and the sun is high overhead. It doesn’t take much to talk themselves into it. The promise of shade and a drink is strong.

They approach cautiously and are checked out by a small staff of civilians and another chuunin guard. The civilian caravan is packing up and their camels are tied outside by a watering trough. The camels are tall, taller than even Obito who’s already hovering around 6 feet, and weighed down by packs and bundles. It looks like they’re carrying textiles in neutral prints: shinobi cloth, heading to the hidden village.

After a short questioning, they’re signed in and given access to the well. The chuunin is keeping an eye on them but the civilians give them a wide berth. It’s a merchant family, and something about them has Obito interested, and they’re uncomfortable with his attention. Rin elbows him and they find a nice place in the shade by the wall to sit and rest and rehydrate. While the civilians clear out, they give them a little over an hour’s head start. The Suna nin is unfriendly and they end up ignoring each other, but the clacking of his geta echoes irritatingly around the sandstone.

The news board is bigger here and Rin peruses the notices curiously, but most of the information isn’t useful to her. Trade information, mostly. And a bounty notice for the three ex-Suna nukenin they killed in the north.

Rin closes her eyes and pretends she can hear the water sloshing around in the cistern below their feet. Breathes in and out. Feels a deep underground lake in her center, which ripples like the wind across the dunes. She is not as forgiving as she needs to be.

They set back out. South some more. Rested and replenished. Alone once more.

Rin elbows him again. “Why were you staring at the civilian like a creep?”

Obito says, defensively, “I was checking out his mask thing. Like a face drape style?”

He’d been wearing a Suna style face drape, for shade, and to keep the sand and sun glare off of him, presumably. It’s a shinobi affectation, most likely. Odd for a civilian to sport, but practical. Rin can understand why Obito might be interested, even if it would cover the unscarred side of his face.

“I think you could pull it off,” she says. “It’s very Sand shinobi.”

“It would be good cover.”

The second they get their hands on some more money, Rin is buying him decent clothes, an actual kunai pouch, mesh undershirt and pants. That, or they’re embracing their status as missing nin and stealing. Obito deserves so much more than he’s been given. He’s trying so hard, asking so little in return. The least she could do for him is get him a pair of shoes that actually fit him. Somewhere is a pair of cracked orange goggles and a part of her will never stop hurting over it.

The wind picks up and they struggle through sand that shifts and shushes and slides their feet out from under them. It doesn’t let up that night either and Rin huddles behind Obito’s wide back to use him as a windbreak, to little success. When they eat their rations, the wind blows sand into her mouth, rough and gritty.

The next morning, she can see hazy mountains shimmering in the heat wave in the distance. One of them is a massive volcano, so maybe it’s not just the heat making the outline of them wavery and indistinct. The wind whips around them and the dunes writhe like something alive.

She squints. “Is that the civilians?”

A little ways in front of them is an encampment. Half a dozen tents, a circle of camels.

Obito says, “Got to be,” and his lips are stiff with scabs from where he’s picked at the chap and windburn till it bled.

“Why are they…” she trails away, looking back towards the distant mountains, tall and hazy. Taller and hazier now. A strong wind from the west. Sand in the air.

“Obito, look at the mountains.”

His sharingan spins and his eye widens. “Shit!”

“How long do we have before it hits?”

He’s running careful calculation in his head, in a split second, tracking distance and wind speed, how fast the cloud is moving towards them. “An hour? If it holds.”

All around them is nothing but sand. They have one thin blanket between them. No shelter at all. And a massive sandstorm bearing down on them from the west, driven by strong headwind.

“We need shelter,” Rin says. The dust will make the air nearly unbreathable. They could tear the blanket, use it as a filter, maybe. Kamui if it gets unbearable. “We’ll run out of water if it lasts too long.”

Obito’s looking at the tents. “So will the civilians.”

Damn it all. They can’t leave them. Obito’s sharingan is still spinning. “Can you heal a camel?”

“What?”

“One of their camels is injured, limping. I can see the movement. We could offer medical assistance in exchange for shelter, make sure they all come through the storm safe.”

Rin isn’t a vet and regular camels don’t have developed chakra networks, like summons. But she knows anatomy; some of it has to be transferable. “Maybe?”

One way to find out. They come closer to the tight circle of tents, approaching with their hands up. One of the camels makes a grunting camel sound at them and Rin calls out, “Hello, merchant san!”

The man with the face drape pokes his head out a tent with a rather severe frown. Rin smiles brightly, “I’m a trained medic nin and I was wondering if I could offer my assistance? My companion noticed one of your camels appears injured?”

He studies them. Obito tries to look less creepy than last time. The dark backdrop of the approaching sandstorm does him no favors. “A medic? The camel’s done for. Snakebite. You know anything about babies?”

Snake? Lucky that Rin stocked up on antidotes, and she’s reasonable sure she can extract the venom. But she’s a field medic; babies are not her specialty. “I have venom antidotes that may work for the camel, and I’d be happy to take a look at a baby, but children aren’t my specialty,” she admits. “It couldn’t hurt. I can also heal sunburn and wind chap.”

He looks to the west, at the storm, at their lack of shelter. “We can’t pay you.”

“If you have an extra shelter, we would be more than grateful, and for any tips about how to weather this storm.” Rin says, “We’re from Tea Country.”

It’s hard to read his expression behind the face drape but she hangs out with Obito all day and spent years learning Kakashi’s mask, Minato’s lack of expression. He’s not happy, but he says, “Better hurry then. Kid first.”

He climbs out the tent and introduces himself as Jeshiru. They introduce themselves back, with their aliases, and he leads them to the fifth tent, which has a woman, a young boy, and a toddler, maybe two years old. All are wearing desert attire, long flowy coverings that protect them from the sun and sand.

The mother’s startled to see foreign shinobi and the kid’s maybe 7 and distrustful. It’s overly crowded so Obito backs out to wait outside with Jeshiru, who introduces her as a medic here to take a look at her boy and then takes Obito to get a tent up.

The mother’s eyes light up and the boy warms towards her as well. “A medic? Tsuiseki has asthma and the sand and dust has bothered him greatly.”

Rin smiles, relieved that it’s something simple. “I can take a look.”

The toddler is cranky and unwilling to let Rin near him but his mother wrestles him into her lap while the older boy watches with wide eyes. “This won’t hurt at all,” she assures them, “I’m just going to check for inflammation in his lungs.”

She lets medical chakra collect over her hands and runs a gentle green glowing hand over the 2-year old’s chest. The boy is fascinated and the mother watches like a hawk. She eases the inflammation in his bronchioles from where he’s inhaled dust and irritated the tissue. It takes just a few minutes, and the boy is giggling and bouncing in excitement, his breathing nice and even. “All better?” she asks him, and he grins and jumps in his mother’s lap. He grabs a hank of her hair and yanks and she fake winces, complimenting him on his strong grip.

The mother smiles a relieved smile. She’s warmed considerably towards Rin and the older boy is flabbergasted. Neither of them has likely seen a medic nin at work.

Outside the tent, outside the circle of other tents, she finds Obito struggling to put up a tent with one arm. Jeshiru is over with the camels and the backdrop is dust and storm. He says it’s a sand viper that bit the camel on the leg, and Rin manages to extract some of the venom with iroyo ninjutsu, but it’s been too long since the initial bite for it to be very effective. But she thinks she can whip up an antidote, using the sample of venom she managed to extract. It’ll be good practice, regardless.

The area around the bite is hugely swollen and putrefying. Whatever a sand viper is, it’s nasty. The wind helps with the smell, but the camel is dicey. It tries to bite Rin when she prods at the wound. Its hooved, with wide splayed toes that remind Rin of civilian snowshoes, but for sand. She remembers the Suna nin running over the surface of dunes without causing any of the grains to shift.

The sky is darkening around them; they are running out of time. She ties the blanket around her face to filter some of the dust out of the air and continues mixing with her new antidote kit. Good thing she targeted animal-derived toxins, like snake venom, so this camel might just have a chance if she can get the balance right.

Jeshiru’s face drape is flapping harshly. The ill-tempered camel makes a deep groaning sound. Rin asks, “how much would you say this camel weighs?”

He answers and Rin ups her dosage for the antivenom. It’s hard to breathe through the blanket, but it’s working well enough as a filter for now.

She holds up the syringe, “I have no idea if this will work. But it’s worth a try.”

Jeshiru nods in agreement and she jabs the needle intravenously in the front left cephalic vein and almost gets another bite for her efforts. “Well, at least he’s a fighter,” she says. “We’ll have to see if he pulls through.”

He thanks her and Rin goes to help Obito, who is struggling with the tent. Sand is flinging against them already and the wind keeps knocking it concave. Obito is cursing around the rope in his teeth, hand clamped around a pole of some kind. Rin takes it from him and together they manage to wrangle a shelter out of it. Its poorly done, lumpy and something about the angle is wrong, but the sun is brown overhead and the sands are almost upon them. They huddle inside and its barley big enough for the two of them.

The sand starts pounding at them and the winds howl across the dunes. They’re shoulder to shoulder and Rin ties the other half of the blanket around Obito’s face as a filter for him to breathe through. Wind flaps through the entrance of the tent until Rin figures out how to tie it shut.

The shelter is maybe 3 ½ feet tall at a center point held up by a post that ends in a tripod in the sand. Its short enough that Obito hunches over, his scalp scratching against the canvas top. There’s not enough room to lay down, or really get comfortable, but it is better than being exposed to the storm.

After they manage to squirm around a bit and dig sand to heap against the walls for support, Obito asks, “how’s the kid?”

“Asthma. He should be fine.”

The sandblasting continues. “And the camel?”

Rin settles her hands in her lap and says, “We’ll have to see.”

They pass around the water, eat their rations. The tent is slowly being buried and Obito is already miserable. He says, “I saw Bakashi use Mud Wall enough; I should be able to use doton. It might make a better shelter than this.”

Rin is alarmed. Kakashi is strong in doton, but Obito didn’t have his sharingan to memorize the technique from him, and Kakashi at 12 was already skipping hand seals and taking shortcuts with his jutsu, tweaking them to fit his summons. She says, “you should be able to use doton techniques, but Mud Wall might not be the best place to start. There’s no mud here, no true earth even. Just sand.”

Obito says, “you could teach me Summon Water.”

That’s an A Rank suiton technique. Only the strongest suiton users can produce their own water, just from their chakra. Rin has yet to master the jutsu, but she can make it work, in the right environment, for small amounts. She knows the hand seals. “It might be smart, just in case we run out of water.”

She shows him the hand seals for it, and he nods once he has them down. “Just in case,” he repeats.

It gets close. The sandstorm rages for three whole days, partially burying the tent. They huddle against each other, unable to lay down, and they take turns sleeping propped against each other, breathing through the dust. When the full moon rises, hidden by the sand in the air, and her Bijuu rages and howls, a thin coat of red chakra seeping out over her, Obito and Rin fight it back tooth and nail while she thrashes and hisses through her teeth.

It’s a hate that has physical symptoms. Killing Intent with the weight of the world. Her palms shake and sweat. The fear tastes like tin in her mouth. The tent is too small; she’s trapped; she’s suffocating. Is it her fear, her helplessness, or do these feelings come from somewhere else inside her? She’d like to think that at the core of herself, she’s braver than the kid she had been once.

When the attack finally subsides, Obito is holding Rin to his chest like he’s cradling her and she stays like that till morning, dozing and shuddering in halves. Her seal is one big wound and her nails have bruised her palms. Rin is tired and Obito is tired and there’s nothing they can do about it.

His hand is stroking her hair in a comforting manner; he’s put that leaf over her stomach like it can help him focus his mokuton and it’s the only cool thing in the world, the only quiet and still and calm in her whole world.

When Obito sleeps it’s with his head on her shoulder while she holds his weight off the center pole. He drools into her hair. They don’t talk about their dreams. The claustrophobia isn’t new on him, but in the intimate space of the tent it’s impossible to ignore.

The water is running low. They practice chakra control in the dimness, Obito frustrated and shaky and Rin collected and getting better at bending her chakra around certain tenketsu points. They beat the sand off the side of the tent where its humping up like a snowdrift, threatening to cave in on them, and Obito is very clearly thinking hard on every other possibility and Rin distracts him by telling him stories of her parents, tales he’s heard a hundred times before, and there’s a comfort in that, in saying it will be as it was before. It’s a lie, but a comforting one, and they both cling to it in the days the storm rages outside, so different from the monsoons that Konoha gets. A drenching in sand and dust, clouds of desert that blow the sky to shreds for miles.

The water is running low, and they ration it more strictly now that they’re not active in the sun. Dehydration drains their spirits and even the leaf looks a little wilted, against Obito’s careful attention.

They can’t hear anything from the other tents over the roar of the desert and its useless asking if Obito can sense anything. The water is running low.

On the third day, Rin gets out the storage scrolls and Obito reinforces her seal with mokuton beforehand as a precaution. And he molds his chakra, and with Rin’s right hand he forms the seals for the Summon Water Technique.

Its barley a trickle and the chakra drain is akin to a long distance Kamui. He’s not quite ready for this A rank technique and while it leaves him tired, he has increased their water supply by half. Rin smiles and they toast his success, but they are in trouble and they know it.

The next day Obito is sleeping, and Rin is staring blankly at the wall, too numb to meditate, when she senses chakra and picks her head up. Shinobi. She twitches her shoulder and Obito lifts his head, and she says, quietly, just a breath, “Shinobi.”

His dark eye narrows and he puts his hood up, getting his feet better situated under him. He can’t quite crouch, but Rin has senbon sewn into the hem of her sleeves and a thirst in her core that goes beyond just a want of water.

Something knocks against the outside of their tent, and Rin carefully knocks back. Proof of life. She unties the top tie on the opening and it reveals a Suna nin, younger than them, probably just a gennin or a skilled kid who ranked up too quickly, like Kakashi.

The boy is cheerful until he sees Obito and then his face goes carefully neutral. Sand blows into the tent from the hole and Rin blinks to keep it out of her eyes. The Suna nin says, “we’re here to guide travelers on the road out of the storm and provide assistance. Are you shinobi hired to escort this caravan?”

“No,” Rin says. “We’re just travelers. Jeshiru san offered us hospitality during the storm.”

The boy says, “I’ll be right back. Stay here.”

As if there is anywhere they can go. If it gets bad, Obito’s hand is on her back. He can Kamui them to safety. They’ll be lost in the desert with no water, but as a last resort it’s better than being arrested.

The boy gets his captain, a carefully neutral jounin who wears his hitai ate as a bandana with a pair of wrap around goggles to keep the sand out of his eyes. He studies them and Rin keeps her hands clearly visible, making no threatening moves. The jounin says, “you healed a camel from snakebite?”

Rin answers cautiously, “It survived?”

The jounin nods slowly. “Were you unsure?”

Underestimate yourself. They can’t know you’re a frontline field medic. “I’ve never tried to treat an animal before.”

She can’t read his face. “Where were you trained?”

“Tea Country.”

“And him?”

Obito says, “Tobi. I’m from Tea as well.”

The Suna nin hums thoughtfully and retreats. It’s likely either a tracking team or a search and rescue team from Sunagakure, dispatched to keep travelers safe on the roads from the storm. And now two unaffiliated nin are complicating their nice, easy C rank.

Rin and Obito exchange glances.

A few minutes later the jounin captain returns. He says, “Jeshiru san and the caravan will accept our offer of an escort into the city. If you don’t cause trouble, you are welcome to follow.”

Damn it, there goes their tent. Rin and Obito silently converse and then Rin nods. “We accept your offer, shinobi san.”

They slowly emerge from the tent, after almost 3 full days of being cramped up in it. Rin is dying for a good stretch and Obito looks like he grew another inch taller. He keeps a surreptitious watch while Rin carefully takes down the makeshift shelter, shaking it out in the wind and letting the sand fly.

The storm’s still blowing but it has abated some. Rin guesses the worst has passed. The sun’s only a suggestion overhead, a brown blur in a dust dark sky. Its dark as dusk outside. The merchants are readying their camels and a gennin team mills around offering assistance.

Rin returns the tent to Jeshiru and thanks him for his hospitality, yelling a little over the wind, sand in her mouth regardless. Rin and Obito are given rope to tie around themselves to trail behind the camels so they don’t get separated and lost in the desert. As Rin ties the rope around Obito, trying to downplay his coping with one arm, she feels his hand brush against her thigh, under the cover of her body, right over her kunai pouch. He doesn’t say anything, but she’s willing to bet he just smuggled his leaf in there, so he'll be able to sense her if she does get lost in the storm.

It’s a brilliant tactic. Unassuming. Nobody would see it and jump to the conclusion that he has the mokuton. A green leaf in the desert is hard to explain, but the Wood Release is a fairy tale, more myth and legend than a nature someone could actually have.

They are also given Suna style glasses that have only the tiniest slit to see out of, and proper masks to filter out the dust, with seals on them that have the kanji for clean and breathe. Obito’s keeps slipping; his right ear is mangled and won’t hold up the arm of the glasses right. He doesn’t bother sticking it on with chakra, not with other shinobi there.

She feels a tug on the line connecting her to him. Obito’s biting his lip, squinting north. “The monks,” he says.

A gennin is closest to them, flanking the right, but if the jounin sensei is as protective as Minato was, he likely won’t appreciate her talking to his students. She catches the team leader’s eye, “Shinobi san,”

He totally hasn’t been watching their every move. He appears quickly.

Rin says, “There’s a group of traveling monks on the road a little ways behind us. I’m not sure how far out they are, but they were only an hour or two behind us at the last water outpost, on foot.”

He considers them. The smart thing would be to split his team and send his students on with the caravan while he went after the monks himself. But he won’t leave his students in a group with the two strange nin. It’s impossible to read his tone and his mask and glasses cover most of his face. “A team will be sent to retrieve them.”

Rin acquiesces and the caravan moves. The snake bit camel has indeed recovered and is carrying a lighter load than the others; it is to this specific camel that Obito and Rin are tied. The three gennin take the lead and flanks while the captain brings up the rear. He’s doing a good job of watching them while not ever even looking at them. Rin prays that none of them are sensors. Prays that none of the merchants mention the Killing Intent from the night before, thick enough to drown on. Prays that none of them get a good look at Obito’s eye.

They walk. The wind blows hard enough that they straggle, not in a straight line, as the wind quarters sharply at them. But the masks help immensely, and the slitted glasses keep the grit out of their eyes. It’s one foot in front of the other. Rin can barely see anything. Obito stays close enough to her back that he keeps a hand on the back of her vest, like she’s a seeing eye, or one of the Inuzuka’s wolf dogs. Just as tense as could be, but she can’t sense any chakra from him at all. They’re on their best behavior, she thinks firmly at her Bijuu. We all are on our very best behavior.

They walk all day through the storm and it’s a haze where Rin blindly follows the pull of a rope, the faint outline of a camel’s sashaying ass, and a growing, insistent thirst behind a pounding dehydration headache. Obito tugging at the hem of her shirt, just letting her know he’s there.

It’s getting darker and darker, and they are out of water. Rin’s not paying attention like she should have been, slogging along through the storm, but she notices when Obito pulls sharply at her shirt and she looks through her slits to see the blurry outline of a building a few hundred yards away. All her moods lift. A water outpost. They are guided to a water outpost, with solid walls and cool water. Water.

They are guided right to the door and the gennin are tying camels to the posts outside and Rin unties the two of them and they follow the merchants inside.

It’s packed with travelers, with quite a few gennin teams running around. This is the biggest outpost yet; located at the merger of two roads, it is half an inn with its own staff, a restaurant, and a bathhouse. The inn is sold out but groups are bedding down wherever there’s room. Fires crackle in pits and it smells like grilled fish and tea. People mill around the well and the bath houses, the info boards, the tiled inn. A chuunin keeps an eye on them but Rin almost doesn’t care, because there’s water here and it’s out of the wind that left every exposed inch of her raw and chafed.

Rin returns the masks and glasses to the jounin that led their escort team and thanks him for his trouble. He thanks her in return. It’s all very polite and civil. Her sensei would be proud.

But then Rin’s at the cistern and her and Obito are scooping water out and slurping it down. It feels like she’s slowly coming alive again, with the reintroduction of water in her system. Obito has been faring only slightly better than herself and he’s definitely a cat-inclined Uchiha because he’s almost purring with bliss at having a cool drink. As her headache fades, she feels like purring too.

They find a stretch of unclaimed wall and sit down with their backs to it and eat their rations. One look at her teammate tells her he isn’t even going to attempt to sleep tonight with them so exposed with so many people around. But Rin’s exhausted and her feet hurt, and she isn’t healing her many hurts and she feels safe enough with Obito keeping watch that she leans carefully against him and dozes lightly, on and off, aware on some subconscious level of her surroundings.

Minato trained her for her first Chuunin Exams by waking her from a dead sleep with thrown kunai and a yell to dodge. Her dad thought it was funny. Her mom insisted he stay for breakfast, but Minato cooked most of his own food, and was busy busy busy, even then. Fast with kunai. Fast to dodge social obligations. Faster still to assign sleep deprivation training, but after time on the frontlines, she’s mastered the shinobi art of hypervigilance, even while asleep.

In the morning, the storm is finally dying away. The sun’s brighter in the sky, but the dust still lingers, but it seems like the wind is driving it away now instead of bringing it in. They stock up on as much water as they can after their close call, but there’s only so much they can carry in the few scrolls they have. Obito’s hand is insecure as he clutches the scrolls, counting and recounting, running dozens of calculations in his head.

But when the storm dissipates enough for the travelers to move out, they hit the road as well. Suna shinobi are with the groups that have hired them as escorts but the gennin teams melt away like morning mist on the dunes. She can see them bounding away over the sands with the ease of Nara deer through the forest. Rin’s pretty sure she’s figured out the theory behind it and she’s itching to try but now is not the time for training, especially if its directly appropriating Suna nin specialties in front of Suna nin.

She is delighted to see that at some point, the monks had come in during the night while she slept, safe and sound.

For the rest of their journey, they keep in sight of another group. The traffic’s picked up, and the storm has them grouped in little moving teams. It severely limits their training, but her Bijuu is quiet after its rampage and Obito’s maintenance on her seal goes unnoticed. When she brushes against something crunchy in her kunai pouch when she returns a storage scroll full of water, she realizes that without Obito’s attention, the leaf from the Daimyo’s Palace has crisped and curled. He must know, must have felt it wither, an entire sense going blind, and Rin aches for him before she is abruptly angry. Fuck the desert. Fuck Madara. Fuck all this bullshit.

Obito’s hand on her elbow calms her down before she can set her Tailed Beast to raging. He’s regretful, but they don’t talk about it, not when they can be all to easily overheard. Rin wishes for Kushina’s silencing and privacy seals, for her perception and sense altering seals. Rin just wishes for Kushina. But that hurts just as bad and makes her angry at Madara and the world again.

There’s sand between the wrappings on her legs rubbing her raw and her feet can feel the heat of the ground through the soles of her sandals. In the distance, mirage shimmer and haze like a bad genjutsu, heat shadows they chase fruitlessly. Illusory as every vanishing dream.

Deep inside her, something shifts. Sand pouring through the hourglass of Suna. A deadline reset, but the teeth snapping of the Tailed Beast's charge touches some core of exhaustion in them both. For a split second, through the seal, she feels that neither of them want this.

She drops her hand to her stomach, over her unwilling passenger. How did she ever expect to prevent another war when she spent her days carrying it around with her? She calls herself a protector, but there’s no telling what she can unleash.

She hums a hymn, an old one, thinking all the while about vibrations on water. The library at the Fire Temple is older and larger than any in Konoha. Her mother says its full of scrolls about the kami, her gods of the elements, gods of the land and sea and sky, gods with the faces of animals. Her faith is older than shinobi; her faith predates chakra.

It wasn’t supposed to be used like this. Chakra is freedom, not chains.

She gathers medical chakra in her hand, runs it over the seal in the way she knows will make the wonky seal rise to the surface of her skin like ink on water. Obito looks at her oddly; there’s not telling what Madara trained him to believe about chakra, filled him up brimful about all the ways chakra can be used to destroy and control. That’s all the Moon-Eye Plan is really. A man’s attempt to control a world spun so horridly out of touch from its intention. It’s a shinobi plan, the closest thing to peace he can imagine.

But Rin knows peace. She keeps humming the hymn. She washes cool healing chakra over her seal, the barest touch of something helping, of chakra healing instead of hurting. Making connections. Building bonds.

Inside her, the shifting settles. The Bijuu doesn’t rush the seal, doesn’t flood the air around her with a desperate fear, a terror heavy enough to send her to her knees.

A drop in the ocean, she thinks, headache throbbing through her temples. Obito yanks at her sleeve. Heat haze blurs the hawks overhead. Ahead of them, the ribbon of road unspools into a deep depression. A village in a bowl. Another fucking crater with people sheltering at the bottom. She'll never get away from it, but maybe that's okay, because ahead of them is sand through the hourglass.

Sunagakure no Sato.

Chapter Text

Chapter 7: Obito: Sunagakure

It takes weeks to make it through the Vast Desert of Solitude. But make it they do. In the south side of Wind lies Sunagakure, the Village Hidden in the Sand. The Hidden Sand Village truly is hidden; without his sensing, he never would have suspected they were getting close, but he can feel palms, cacti, potted pothos and shrubbery. For an enemy village, its feels welcoming as his childhood bedroom: cool and green and growing and endlessly happy to see him.

He tugs on Rin’s vest to let her know they’re close. Its washing over him in a wave, every individual leaf, every stem and flower, a wealth of information akin to a sharingan’s perception. He’s not as lost in it this time, is learning how to filter out extraneous details like he would with his dojutsu’s arresting feedback, captured in technicolor precision for his every nightmare. If only his nights were an endless field of welcoming green instead of a red-filtered river shoreline.

It’s not until the road turns that Sunagakure no Sato spreads out below them like a city built in a bowl. The ground the village has settled on is sunken in, surrounded on all sides by sheer cliffs that slope straight down.

Rin straightens to see it, dry mouth opening in awe. Obito squints. “It looks like a footprint.”

She frowns at his irreverence. “It’s from the kami themselves.”

He nods agreeably. He might not have her faith, but it sure does look like a footprint to him. The crater is massive; easily near the size of Konoha and teeming with unfamiliar chakra signatures. He didn’t realize how big it would be, how many people they’d have to search through, to hide from. For some reason, he’s been picturing Sunagakure as significantly smaller than Konoha, both in population and acreage, but he’s not sure why. Has poor subconsciously meant lesser to him? He was raised on a Clan stipend hefty enough that his aunt didn’t work. He’s never really thought about what that meant till now, facing a poverty he can see from a mile away.

From up here, the village architecture looks oddly rounded and bulbous, like the wind eroded the buildings down over time since the founding of the village. It looks a drab, uniform brown, the same color as the exposed cliffs. Worn by the weather and by the generations in a way Konoha is not. It looks old, older than it should be. Run-down, like they don’t make repairs like they should. Shabby, even from afar.

The road winds down to the only slit in the sheer faces and a massive gate complex juts like tusks, two thick stone doors with Sunagakure no Sato on them and the symbol for Wind. It’s not doton-rendered, he can tell from here; the cut looks ancient.

The travelers around them are talking excitedly about the village. Further down, the road merges with a busier road coming south from the port cities, carrying food and other goods into the desert-locked village. They listen in on the gossip: shinobi gathering intel.

“They say it was sunken by the gods in a battle between the wind and the sand.” A father tells his young son bouncing in his lap in excitement. “The wind swept over the land to where nobody could live exposed to its strength. The sand was so much that nothing could be built on stable ground, and nothing could grow, and nobody could live like that either. But the people of Suna are strong; we’ve lived here generations before it was ever a ninja village. And when a huge monster blasted a crater into the desert, they raised a ninja village in its place. The first Kazekage built the towers, safe from both the wind and the sand, but they still occasionally disagree about who keeps the desert safe, and that’s where we get sandstorms from. And even the strongest Suna shinobi respect the sandstorms, for they’ve never listened to anything but the gods themselves.”

Obito is intrigued by the tale, but one detail in particular stands out. A huge monster made this crater? Obito glances at Rin; she’s been eavesdropping too. A huge monster, powerful enough to cause this much damage to the landscape. It sounds like a Tailed Beast. It sounds like Suna’s Bijuu.

But Sunagakure is massive. Surely nothing made this pit? It has to be a natural feature of the geology, except it looks made. It’s too perfectly circular to be naturally occurring. This is what they’re looking for? A being, a jinchuuriki, capable of this?

Obito’s more than a little daunted by the scale of the task they’ve chosen to follow. 9 Tailed Beasts, and Rin’s got one inside her. If Madara can combine their power, he’ll be unstoppable.

But Rin just looks awed at the size of the hole. Awed, and then determined. There’s more steel in her than a kunai pouch. They lock eyes and share a firm nod. Operation Fuck Up the Old Man is a go.

They merge into the crowd that bottlenecks outside the gates, the first of many chokepoints built into the bowl. They keep close to each other and ignore the unobtrusive eyes of the shinobi mixed into the crowd. There have to be plainclothes spies and civilian informants everywhere, for Suna and for other Elemental Nations. Obito knows his teacher’s sensei is Spymaster for Konoha; it’s some of the only privileged information he has about the Leaf Village, and he only knows because the Hokage and the Sannin share a summoning contract and sometimes when Minato summons his toads, they talk about Jiraiya. He knows little about him otherwise; Kushina doesn’t like him, and he wonders how much that has to do with how he’s never in the Hidden Leaf. The Toad Sage operates outside the village; they’ll have to be sure not to bump into him on the road or the whole jig is up.

They wait patiently for their chance to enter the village. He’s attempting to map the entire village in his head, just from its plant life. Its spotty as old cheese. Can he feel mold? That’s a plant, right? In his distraction, Rin steers them into place in line behind a group of carts carrying food from the port cities and hopes no one notices that the fucking cabbages turn to face him like sunflowers facing the sun. He wants to reach out and pet them. He doesn’t.

The gates are guarded by chuunin and they’re taking travel papers, of which they have none. Rin says, “We’re from Tea, seeking work in the village.”

The gate guard is tired but professional, the kind of career paperwork ninja who deals with the public on a daily basis. “Have you checked in at any checkpoints? Any way to document your movements in-country?”

“First stop at a water outpost with a chuunin named Burondi, then at the Daimyo’s Palace, more at water outposts along the way, and lastly at a larger checkpoint we were led to by a Suna gennin team during the storm to the north. Names are Sachira and Tobi, no clan names.”

Not a big deal, Obito hasn’t seen any clan markings on any Wind shinobi at all, which is unusual in the extreme. He wonders if Rin’s noticed.

“Will this team leader vouch for you?”

“He will acknowledge our presence, but we didn’t speak much.”

He hums thoughtfully. “Just one moment please.”

They’re led to a holding room while more paperwork ninja try to validate their claims. Rin hadn’t given the checkpoint through which they entered the country and he’s sure that hasn’t gone unnoticed.

They wait, him getting antsier and antsier. After an hour, a paper trail showing their presence in the country as unaffiliated nin are found in the records from the checkpoints and the other village along the way, by name of their aliases, physical descriptions, and receipt of the bounty on the former Suna gennin team gone missing nin. Suna has the fastest messenger hawks on the continent; it’s one of the only things keeping such a large country together, with the political, military, and religious Capitols spread out as they are.

They’ve been recorded at every step along the way through the desert. Even when no one had been around for miles, Suna had an eye in the sky.

His skin crawls at the thought.

It’s not exactly legal permission, or hard proof they are who they say they are. They don’t even pretend to have papers from Tea. It’s no surprise when they’re questioned separately, but it’s distressing to be separated from Rin just in case her seal goes off, but he’s been sneakily reinforcing it all day. They’re getting a good system down; just his hand on her elbow while the seal is inactive is enough to calm her Bijuu if it isn’t actively raging. She squeezes his hand just once before she’s led away, and he squeezes back just as hard and then she’s gone.

His interrogator is a jounin, presumably a T&I lackey, wearing a duster and inordinately hostile. They rehearsed their story until they had it down pat, but this is a highly skilled investigator and Obito’s always been bad at lying. Time to see if their aliases as unaffiliated nin are solid enough to fool a ninja village. He knows they’re not. But sometimes, villages will let someone stir the pot, just to see what happens. Its more important to know who spies work for than to know who spies are. Maybe if they’re interesting enough, Suna will let them stay, just to see what they give away, and then use them as a leak to disseminate disinformation before killing them. Its bleak, but he’s willing to risk it right now.

The interrogation is a careful dance, one he sucks at. The jounin starts, and Obito lies from the very word go. “Where are you from?”

“Tea Country.”

“Why are you in Suna?”

“My companion is seeking a medical apprenticeship in your hospital. I figured I’d get work wherever I could.”

“Who trained you?”

Course they’d never expect him to not be shinobi trained. He mentally apologizes to Minato and says, “My suishou’s a local healer in a small village along the northern part of Tea Country. Sachira learned healing. I did the rest.” Don’t get too specific, he’s never been to Tea Country in his life. No names, unless he asks.

On and on the questions come. Who is your companion. How did you meet. What is her goal. Why did you leave your village. Why couldn’t she be a medic in your own country. What are your skills. Your companion’s skillset. Where’d you get those scars.

He answers as accurately but as vaguely as possible. Sachira, Tobi, in Tea, to be a fully realized medic nin, maybe like a farmer he doesn’t know, taijutsu and suiton. A roof collapse.

Then he starts throwing curveballs, trying to trip him up. “How did you lose your hand?”

He very carefully does not grit his teeth. The arm’s the trickiest part, especially since the fucking thing is almost regrown. “Roof collapse. Same as the eye, and the rest of the scars.” Hopefully they don’t get to thinking too hard about why his missing eye is on the good side of his face, and his actual eye in the bad. He plans to be surly enough to outsiders that it’s believable no one has more details.

What are your parents like? And he answers carefully, hoping Rin’s in line with him enough to predict his answers for her own interrogation. “They support my decision to pursue a career as a shinobi. My mother always wanted me to train to be a real ninja. Her sister’s life was saved by a hired shinobi escort once when bandits attacked, and she never forgot it.”

It’s similar to Rin’s story, as far as he remembers. The best lies are truths turned on their head. Hopefully she’ll realize his strategy and keep their slapdash aliases from getting poked full of too many holes.

“You are the first shinobi in your family?”

Hardly. “I am.”

“And your companion?”

“She’s an orphan. She doesn’t like to talk about it, but she told me once.”

More oddball question, innocuous enough. Trying to catch him in a lie. “Who is the Feudal Lord for Tea County?”

Obito gave him a really? look but answers, “Tea’s Daimyo is Lord Moriyama Daibu.” He’s a bad student but Rin remembers that much from the Academy.

“Are the two of you romantically involved?”

Obito loves her so much he’ll burn this whole city to the ground if it hurts her, make it rain from a blue sky. “No, but we’re close. We’ll likely stay together while we settle into the village.”

After about an hour of questioning, he’s released back to the waiting room. Rin’s already there; her interrogation must have gone more smoothly than his. Dammit, but she’s charmed them. They likely grilled him harder than Rin. Shinobi work’s a boy’s world and even skilled kunoichi get overlooked. It doesn’t help that his wounds are old enough to have been sustained in the Third War. And that Rin’s the perfect age to be a war orphan from the Second.

Obito joins her and she’s breathing deep and even. It’s difficult for him to convey a scowl but Rin knows him well. She knows better than to look relieved, but they touch knuckles briefly as a hello.

A different jounin, maybe the one who had been interrogating Rin, comes in to see them. Rin looks up and he considers the pair of them. Shrewd, but Rin must have nailed her interview. They are suspicious and raising red flags, but are they the kind that would keep them from the village? It would be so much easier if Obito could Kamui them in without siccing whatever Wind has for a Barrier Corps on their ass. If they can find the jinchuuriki through regular means, without involving the Kazekage or anything to do with the Puppet Brigade and the Playhouse, he’ll walk penance through the desert civilian-style, barefoot and fasting. Anything to avoid the fucking Kazekage and his army of puppet users.

There’s a moment of silence that has Obito tensing but that Rin just let’s pass by. Obito’s close enough to grab her if things go south. The jounin says, “We’re allowing you access to the village on a probationary status. After two weeks, we’ll revisit your case. If you want to pursue shinobi work, they’ll be a preliminary exam and paperwork. Contact the Missions Desk for details. You will be arrested immediately upon violation of this probation.”

That sounds like a cautionary yes to Obito. They’ve successfully infiltrated Suna, either as free agents or as suspected spies. He spares a thought to hope that Konoha’s security is better and wouldn’t be fooled by suspicious shinobi with shaky aliases.

The jounin lays out the terms and conditions of their probationary status and Obito just listens, Rin asking a few clarifying questions. After, she readily agrees, followed by Obito.

They’re given official documentation, and instructions on how to file copies with the appropriate administration. Rin flips through the file while he reads over her shoulder to discover that approval and acceptance of foreign nin into their forces have to be directly approved by the Kazekage himself, a man named Rasa no Subaku, famed for his use of the Gold Dust kekkei genkai.

They’re escorted out of the building and when they step through that stucco door, they are suddenly in Sunagakure proper, with its round, gourd-shaped buildings and windows all in lines, many canvased instead of glassed.

They wander, Rin following Obito as he leads them to what he senses as the shinobi part of town. Sunagakure is sectioned in little round clusters: districts circling around wells and other central spaces and intersections where round-abouts have statues of who he presumes to be the past kage of Suna in the middle. Its no tackier than the Hokage Mountain. Everything winded, like the ribbon of roads on a dune’s back. The market district is grouped in clusters divided by good, little pods of foodstuff and other supplies. It’s charming, protected from the worst of the wind, and the civilians look friendly enough, if a little hardscrabble. They’re dressed in the loose Suna style and he can pick out the baggy jumpsuits, paint, and hoods of the puppeteers. Other shinobi carry gunbai or other fans not dissimilar to the uchiwa that inspires his clan crest. Wind can strengthen fire, but Minato never used a fan to manipulate wind, and wind is a rare enough chakra nature in Konoha that he isn’t super familiar with other fuuton users. Isn’t Sarutobi Asuma wind natured? He can’t remember.

The shinobi district feels familiar. The chakra natures all around him, the rooftop ninja too much in a hurry to use the street, bounding off the rounded buildings like ricochets bouncing around. Academy students brawling and gennin exhausted from a day of D ranks. Disillusioned chuunin with their threadbare vests the color of sand. Jounin that move like shadows, silent and deadly. The invisible Black Ops trailing them for sure. He hasn’t been around this many chakra signatures in years, and the bustle around him feels like he’s back in the Uchiha Compound.

He can’t spot a single family or clan crest in the entire throng around him, neither on shinobi nor civilian. Shinobi wear their Suna hitai ate around their necks, as armbands like lieutenants, as bandanas that cover their heads and wrap like hoods. The puppeteers tend to wear them as belts, shiny and gleaming among the faint skittering and chattering that comes from some of the smooth hooded masters of the Playhouse. There’s plenty of face paint and pops of color but no clan sigils at all.

The residential districts are cul-d-sac apartment complexes that cater to shinobi, and these sport little gardens in the front, some of the only green he can see, little cactuses and sturdy shrub things, tiny succulents the size of his knuckle in a bed of pebbles. No notable compound’s sprawl. Everything feels more compact than in Konoha, like they can’t outgrow the dimensions of the bowl.

Nobody is staring outright, but they are curious. Rin smiles politely, looking friendly. It will be easier to insert herself into the gossip if they like her. There is one constant across all shinobi, and that’s that they gossip like old maids. Especially the jounin. His clan Elders are the worst offenders.

They find an inn that’s willing to cater to foreign shinobi once they show their legal entrance papers. It’s cheaper to rent than the inn at the Daimyo’s Palace, but they can only afford a few nights at most before their funds run out.

The room’s simple stucco, cooled with a wind chimney vent that gives him murder-hole vibes. A Kakashi-sized shinobi could use it as an easy entrance point, and stab them to death in their sleep. He’s going to trap the shit out of it the second he can.

The floor is cool tile, wavy and a shade or two darker than the walls. Nothing here’s wood, and the absence of it in everything from the landscape to the architecture is glaring.

The only welcoming touch to the cheap inn is a tiny potted cactus on the windowsill, a single bright point in beige room. He perks up, and he swears it does too.

They pay for the room and the second they’re inside, out come the shitty silencing seals Rin bought for them. Its shitty quality ink on shitty quality paper. He half-believed it wouldn’t work, but by some miracle, it activates. It’ll be suspicious, but it can’t be helped. He’s not fluent in hand signs yet.

After the shimmer of the seal taking effect glimmers over the walls and windows of the rented room, there’s a moment where they just look at each other. Then they burst out into anxious, relieved, incredulous laugher.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Obito confesses. “I was ready to Kamui us out of there at any moment.”

Rin giggles breathlessly. “A sloppy alias and a bounty receipt to go with it. That shouldn’t have worked as well as it did.”

“Think they’re suspicious?”

Rin says, “If we’re outed, we’re Iwa.”

Obito grins. “Fine by me. I can even technically do doton, maybe. Long live the Tsuchikage!”

She grins and it’s a vicious expression. Them being spies is fine. Them being spies for fucking Iwa is even better. They kidnapped and bombed her, but they crushed him first.

Obito flips through the files, his sharingan spinning to memorize them. “They’re really prepared to offer us positions as Suna shinobi if we mind our manners long enough to take the oath.”

“Incredible.”

“That gives us a timeline, at least. How long can we put off taking oath under Wind before it gets suspicious.”

Rin says, “We’ll have to find the jinchuuriki before then.”

Obito says, “The profile is highly ranked, but not usually sent on missions outside the village. Close to the Kazekage through either family or other ties.” He says, thinking, “Uzumaki Mito was married to the Shodaime, and Kushina’s marrying the Yondaime.”

Rin shuffles through the files. “They’ll be hated, if people know.”

If their jinchuuriki status is well known, they’ll be hated by the civilians and distrusted by the shinobi. Honestly, the worse they’re treated, the easier it’ll be for them to find them. A sad truth, but one he knows she can work with, since she’s taking point for this mission.

He says, “I think Wind always had a Bijuu. The zetsu said something once about the Shodaime selling the captured Tailed Beasts as deterrents to the First War, but Suna wasn’t interested, because they’d captured theirs separately. Instead, they asked the Shodaime for a percentage off the other’s sales as the price for an alliance. Of course, all that backfired, but I think it means that Suna only has one for us to look for.”

Rin says more thoughtfully, “If the Tailed Beast is native to Wind, it might take the form of something native to Suna and the desert. Maybe a lizard or burrowing owl or something. There might be murals or tilework around the village referencing it. It might help us find the jinchuuriki.”

He’s not as convinced as she is of the Bijuu’s form but it makes a kind of sense to him regardless. Obito sobers, “we’ll need to infiltrate the jounin forces, see who fits the profile. See if the Kazekage has any family. And identify the jinchuuriki before Suna tries to install us as shinobi.”

“Without them finding out about either of us. We’ll need to be sure. And account for the jinchuuriki’s possible reaction. If they’re loyal enough to Suna, they may turn us in anyway. They may pick their village over the safety of the other jinchuuriki.”

They’re saying mum about Madara, but even with that damning exclusion, Zetsu’s a big tale to sell, but hopefully Rin, as a fellow jinchuuriki, can be granted the benefit of the doubt. They just need them to listen, to be aware, to eventually work with the Kazekage against the zetsu when they inevitably come knocking. At the very least, after they tell the jinchuuriki about the danger, they can leave. Obito can Kamui them safely away before they have to face a likely S ranked enemy jinchuuriki.

Rin says, “I’ll try to lean on the hospital. Nurses know everything, and they gossip almost as much as jounin. It’ll help keep our cover here in the village, and maybe pay rent. We’ll need income while we’re here.”

Obito says, “maybe I can mop floors or something. And your seal….”

Ten hours. That’s the most they can ask for. Less if she’s allowed to actively practice medical ninjutsu. She’s getting better at regulating her own chakra around the seal, but this was one ceiling he doesn’t want her to break against.

“Be ready,” she says quietly. “If you sense any Tailed Beast chakra, come get me. I’ll carry some wood or something with me at all times, so you can find me.”

Minato used to make them carry his jutsu formula with them on missions, so he could always find them. He’s adapting that same strategy for his own time/space technique.

Obito squirms, uncomfortable with the very thought of her seal bombing out but he nods. “Okay. I’ll find something for you to use that’ll work.”

Rin says, “As a last resort, maybe some Bijuu chakra would draw the other jinchuuriki out. If their seal is correct, there’s no way we would be able to sense them unless they were drawing on their Bijuu’s power.”

Obito frowns. “You are not using yourself as bait. We don’t do that.”

It’s a damn lie. Minato did it all the time. He would always attempt to draw the fighting away from his students, from other squads. It makes sense, for him to protect his team, just as it makes a kind of sense for her to use her Bijuu to draw the other one out. But he’s not Minato. This isn’t a risk he wants to take.

“Not yet, we’re not. I said as a last resort.”

He’s unhappy, but they don’t fight about it. He can’t argue against her when his own hypocrisy is easy ammo for Rin.

Obito says, “we’ll cross that bridge later, okay? That sounds like some desperate last-resort bullshit.”

They shake on it. Neither mentions their bad luck with bridges.

The silencing seals flare blue briefly and Obito rips a shuriken through one to disrupt the matrix and the whole room dims down as the shimmer dissipates. Rin has a kunai ready, but no further action comes. Obito makes sure the window blinds are secure and he goes through some bastardized one-handed hand signs to communicate with Rin in silence no enemies sensed

Rin signs back Nosy neighbors?

Concerned jounin?

Rin answers our Black Ops tail warning us not to be funny

Obito snickers meanly and carefully spells out the word fuck with his fingers, which just makes Rin huff a little laugh and sit down heavy on the bed.

Obito traps the living hell out of the room and then sits down next to her. He’s so glad to have chakra conductive ninja wire. They have no idea what Suna’s version of ANBU is, and he really doesn’t want to find out. Rin already has nightmares of porcelain masks grabbing her in the dark.

Rin burrows in the thin sheets. “In the morning,” she says. “Showers, decent food, and in the morning, I’ll go check in at the hospital.”

“I call first dibs.”

She smothers him with a pillow in response and he fights her off with much flailing and cursing. But she relents and lets him have the first turn at the plumbing. After they’re both clean, they wander around the market some, familiarizing themselves with the village, but they end up just eating dinner from their rations to save money.

They share the bed, one sitting up keeping watch just in case Black Ops comes for them in the night, and the other sleeping at their side. Obito’s having nightmares and stress dreams and he ends up leaning against Rin’s legs as he sleeps fitfully, his hand on her knee, ready to mokuton her Bijuu into submission when her Tailed Beast gets uppity about being crammed into a wack vessel. Rin keeps one hand on his head to sooth him and one hand on a kunai the entirety of her watch.

But the night goes by without incident. In the morning, they wish each other luck and Rin goes to the hospital to apply for a position. Obito shamelessly stalks her. He’ll try for a job later, once he’s sure she’s settled. Her position in the village is imperative; there is no amount of sneaking around that he can do. If she’s blocked at the door, they’ll never find what they need to in time.

Once she expresses she has some training she is presented with a dead fish and he watches her hold back a smile. He’s two streets away and peeking through a window, but what else is the sharingan for if not for this? What movement could be more arresting than Rin with a dead fish and a smirk?

Far as he can tell, she’s holding back on her skill, misrepresenting her knowledge and strength. Even with her handicap, she could accidentally give too much away. She’s Konoha-trained, and Suna was locked in a battle of wills against the Lady Tsunade all during the Second War, with their puppeteers concocting ever increasingly complicated poisons and the Sannin kunoichi foiling their every attempt and causing them no end of grief. He’s heard this all from Rin and more; she’s a rabid fangirl of the Slug Queen. Senju Tsunade reformed the entire medical field for Konoha, and traces of her reform must show in Rin’s own skill. A tricky Suna medic, with the right experience in the war, might be able to recognize Rin’s technique as Tsunade’s, as Konoha’s.

Once he’s sure she’s in a good place, and gets bored of stalking, Obito goes to get hired. Unsurprisingly, even with his entrance papers, he’s turned away from every civilian position he applies for, from dishwashing to mail carrying. One interviewer takes one look at him and laughs before throwing him on his ass. He’s not even sure what’s so explicitly wrong, except that’s he’s both obviously a shinobi, and an outsider. But its not like he can do shinobi work either, and Sand ninja might take offense at him offering independent contract work at an undercut price, the kind of offense that just leaves him dead in a ditch from what his teacher used to call “terminal stupidity.”

He spends all day job searching, to no avail. He’s grumpy and sunburned by the time business hours let off. He fiddles with the tiny cactus, getting friendly with the tiny spines, the spikey feel of it. Its short and squat, compact, wider than it is tall. Maybe he can get it to grow a nice little flower crown, like the one in the desert. It cheers him up after the never-ending chain of rejections.

“You’d hire me, wouldn’t you?”

The cactus flexes its needles in a way that’s expressive enough he takes it as a yes. He pats it, a pulse of mokuton chakra in his hand, and the cactus grows fatter by a happy inch.

Rin returns after her shift with a smile. Obito’s moping on the bed and she studies him. “No luck with the job search? Or the other search?”

He groans and smothers himself with a pillow. “I could always steal.”

“We’re not robbing them, Tobi.”

“We could.”

She hops onto the bed next to him. There’s no other place in the room to sit. “It’s day one. Let’s leave thieving as a last resort. Try again tomorrow, while I get acquainted with the hospital. Its way smaller than Konoha’s. They only have 700 in-patient beds! There’s over 100,000 people here, and an infrastructure that could be taken out by a good flu.”

He doesn’t know a lot about hospital infrastructure, but that does sound like a shitty number. “How many did we have?”

“Twice that many, in a single ward. They don’t even have specialized wings, and from what I can tell, triage is a nightmare.” She kicks her feet, humming thoughtfully. “I’ve never worked with civilians before. It’ll be good practice.”

He imagines a never-ending line of clumsy toddlers with broken arms and their frantic mothers, a hundred old people with broken hips and pneumonia. What else is it that civilians get sick with? Gout? Tonsillitis?

“If you get worms, you’re sleeping outside.”

She thwaps him with a pillow. “No judgement from the unemployed sector. Its good for us that they’re such a logistic mess. I’m sure their filing and organization is in need of overhaul. Half their charting is still waiting to be digitized. It’ll be easier for me to get my hands on.”

He rolls over, thwaps her with his own pillow. “And how’s your unlucky intern?”

“Lucky!”

They pillow fight until the Bijuu involves himself in the fray, hitting Obito in the hind brain with a sick slap of fear, a horror that freezes him in place a bare second before he fights through the blinding hate. Rin meets him halfway, her pillow dropped and her face pale. The whiplash of the playful atmosphere to the seething malice is hard to grasp, and unthinkingly, he grabs the tiny potted cactus for support.

It helps ground him, helps him focus the Wood Release down on the Tailed Beast. It’s a long second that feels a lifetime, but the corrosive chakra recedes as he successfully suppresses the Bijuu. He’s breaking out in a thin sheen of acrid fear sweat, dotting at his hairline. He’s never understood why Killing Intent is classified as a mental threat, not when it has such potent physical effects. Minato can send an enemy to his knees without lifting a finger. Rin’s Bijuu can halt an army in its tracks.

It should leave him gibbering, but he’s just panting. “Shit,” he says. “Think it’s the hospital work that’s got him so riled up?”

Rin swallows. “I barely did anything chakra intensive today. It was mostly orientation, after the test.”

That’s not great. Its not the full moon either, when it’s unusually restless, but it could be any number of factors getting her Bijuu up in arms: the heat, the lack of water or wood. Maybe it’s just getting serious about escaping, the seal wearing on it like it wears on Rin. Maybe it will degrade over time, regardless of his intervention.

Rin bops him on the nose with the pillow, in a half-hearted attempt to recover the ambiance. “Don’t start spiraling. We’ve got this.”

It falls flat. He sets the tiny cactus carefully back on the windowsill.

The next day, he stalks Rin to work after reinforcing her seal but when she’s not apprehended at the door, he sighs, and goes off to do more job hunting of his own.

It’s a fruitless day. Rin returns to report on her baby steps with her coworkers, all the helpful friends she’s making among the staff. She’s inundated with years’ worth of hospital gossip that’s interesting but not particularly helpful.

He still can’t a job. He’s used to opportunities opening up just because of his clan name. Even if his clan didn’t generally give a shit about him, its not like the village at large knew that. He thought he was getting better than the class dead last, had some true merit of his own, not his clan’s or the residual of his teacher. But the Suna job market treats him like he’s worthless, and it’s taking him back to an old headspace, one he thought Swirly talked him out of a year ago, when they were rewiring his brain, or whatever it was they were doing when they were in his head.

Rin’s making in-roads, scouting the filing systems, making small talk. He’s still begging merchants to let him sweep hair off the floor. He’s half tempted to give up and just dedicate his time to finding the jinchuuriki, but he’s sure they’re still being tailed to some unknown degree. He has to look like he’s making an effort.

He goes back at it.

Its more nothing. He’s tired, and hot, and frustrated. He wanders aimlessly, until he realizes he’s following the subconscious draw of the Wood Release. He follows his senses to the biggest spot of green in his mind’s eye.

Its on the outskirts, and his sense of it covers several acers, neatly parceled away, a balm on his senses like the slyest genjutsu.

It takes him a second to place the glass. Greenhouses.

He walks right up to them, helplessly pulled along by the promise of growing green things.

Sunagakure keeps her food supply under lock and guard, the perishables valuable enough for the Kazekage to station a duo of chuunin on the roofs to prevent starving people from stealing the food. One flickers down in his path. “Halt. This is a restricted area. State your purpose.”

His brain is full of blueberries. He says, stupidly, “I want to apply for a job.”

The chuunin’s eyes narrow dangerously and it strikes him that he sounds like an overconfident assassin, here to force a vacancy. “We’re not hiring guards.”

He clarifies quickly, “I’m not cleared for shinobi work, but I’m water natured. I can help with irrigation. I’m good at the Summon Water technique.”

The chuunin eyes him skeptically. He hopes they’re not a sensor, that they’re not reading his chakra signature that screams fire. They say, eventually, “I’ll take you to Jin san. He’ll figure out what to do with you.”

Obito follows behind them after they flash some signs to their partner keeping watch on the roof. Its still hot as hell in the greenhouse, but it’s a worse heat, wet and humid. Steamy. He feels instantly sticky.

But its worth it for the sight of lines and lines of corn and potatoes in mounds. Thank the Sage for the active ventilation, to account for the waving of the stalks upon his entrance.

Its loud in the greenhouse, humming and buzzing with the oscillating fans and the industrial equipment, the careful drip and spray of the irrigation. He’s fascinated. He’s never seen such industrialized farming methods, and its such a contrast to the outdated technology he’s seen in the rest of Suna.

There’s an office crammed in the front of the greenhouse, sharing space with the storage units. The chuunin knocks and a grouchy middle aged man barks, “it’s open!”

The chuunin introduces him by saying, “You’ve got a job hunter, Jin san.”

The man frowns at them both. “We can’t hire any more shinobi.”

Obito calls on every inch of his manners and says, “Tobi, at your service, Jin san. I’m not active service, but I can utilize suiton.”

Jin eyes him, his scars, his wrapped eye socket, his bandaged hand with its stubby fingers. He looks as skeptical as the chuunin did outside.

“He can make water,” the chuunin says, and Obito can see the interest in the man’s eyes.

He scratches his chin, nails scratching through the stubble. “Let’s see it, then.”

Jin leads them over to a bed of what Obito’s fairly certain are carrots. They feel like carrots. He points and the chuunin warily watches him as he molds chakra for the Water Wall, one of his only suiton and thankfully a defensive move. His choppy fingers awkwardly twist into the seals, landing on an Inu. “Suiton: Suijinheki.”

The water thankfully appears from his own chakra and he keeps it toned down, a splash more than a fully formed wall. He wants to ping as helpful, not dangerous, and thankfully, he’s lackluster enough at suiton anyway that his attempt is wobbly and ill-formed anyway.

As a defensive technique, it’s a disgrace. But it is water, water from chakra, in a place where water is worth its weight in gold. Common enough in Konoha, it’s a rare release in Wind. And not one they can afford for active duty ninja to waste. But Obito’s in the nebulous legal space between ninja and immigrant, a shinobi-coded alien who can’t join the force but can work water.

“Hmmm,” Jin grunts. “What do you know ‘bout farming, boy?”

Obito knows jack shit about farming but its not like it matters anymore. He says, instead, “I’m from Tea,” and doesn’t elaborate.

Jin shakes his head. “I can’t pay for shinobi work.”

Obito can read between the lines. “I’m just a gardener, Jin san.”

They haggle hours and shifts and benefits and Obito is sure he takes a horrible deal. He knows the price for extra water rations in the market, but its not like he’s had luck anywhere else. Besides, he wants to stay in the greenhouses, with the plants.

He shakes Jin’s hand and is introduced to the shift leader and the head gardener. The woman’s unsure of him, but the irrigation technician is hostile, like he thinks Obito’s trying to replace him. The woman warms after he demonstrates his usefulness by raising the level of a cistern.

After the interview and introduction, he leaves with a polite bow. “Jin san,” he says and genuflects like a good little peasant but he can tell it’s the civilian superstition that sells it to the irrigation technician. He watches his initial estimation fall in his eyes from threat to tolerable and understands a little of why Rin’s so tetchy all the time, and this is fucking Suna, they don’t even recognize clans here.

He almost skips home.

After Rin finishes stressing about how it might accidentally expose him, she laughs. He does too. He’s inordinately pleased with himself. Of course, he’d track down the highest concentration of plants in the village and gravitate towards it. Obito laughs with her as he defends himself, “Oh come on, I’ll be fine. Nobodies looking for the fucking mokuton. Most civilians think it’s just a fairy tale anyway. It’s easier to believe the Old Man’s alive and evil and wants to take over the fucking moon than it is that someone has Wood Release.”

“Just be careful,” Rin says. “It’ll be suspicious if Suna suddenly has tomatoes the size of melons.”

Obito snorts in laughter. He’s in high spirits today. “It’s the blueberries I have to look out for. But they’re letting me use suiton, so I’m getting in good practice at it. I’m not the best, but I don’t want to try too hard, ya know?”

Rin laughs again. “I can’t believe you just walked right in and asked for a job. That should not have worked.”

“Its literally what you did at the hospital.”

“I’m a medic! You are not a farmer.”

He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. I can fucking quadruple their output in like a week, like literally solve hunger in Sunagakure.”

“Don’t you dare,” she says reflexively, then frowns. “I mean—"

He waves it away, “yeah, I know. Tobi can’t. He’s just glad for the humidity. Told them it reminded him of the fucking swamp. Called it home.”

Rin shakes her head at him. “I’m serious. Don’t crash the grain market or anything, or they’ll put a hit on you, solving hunger or not. They’re guilds involved, and politics, and you’d be stepping on a lot of people’s toes who’ve made a career from keeping people hungry.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“That’s not even shinobi bullshit,” Rin says. “That’s just people.”

“Cynic,” he says and she rolls her eyes at him. “If you can fantasize about restructuring the hospital for efficiency, then I can grow gourds the size of fucking wagons.”

He thinks for a minute, says, “I know we can do a lot of good for the people here, but none of it will matter if the Hidden Sand doesn’t exist. Its like…triage. We prioritize.”

Rin snorts, “that is not triage, but I’m glad you want to help these people. You’re kind, after everything. Most people wouldn’t be.”

He can’t read her face. She says, a tad wistful, “I wouldn’t be. If it was Suna we fought against.”

He’s not sure he believes that, that Rin wouldn’t want to help if it was Iwa civilians hungry in the streets. He says, hopefully, “I think we would.”

She just smiles sadly at him. She’s so unforgiving. She’s still holding grudges against people who bullied him in the Academy, once pranked a proctor so hard on his behalf that he failed her for a written exam and she was almost forced out of the Academy. Discriminatory asshole deserved the green hair, even if it terrified him that she’d risked expulsion. If it was him, he’d get a slap on the wrist, but they almost kicked her out for “insubordination”.

Obito swallows, a little uncomfortable about the turn the conversation’s taken and tries for casual, says, “Oh, and hey, I think being around plants again is boosting the mokuton healing thing. My hand is getting……weird.”

Rin bullies him into letting her check it out and he gives in with only minimal fuss. He thinks he’s getting better at this whole medical care thing. The vast difference between how she treats him and how Swirly treated him is…it helps him keep everything separate. There’s less blur that way.

She unwraps the bandages to find that the stump has increased its length and the end of it is…. articulated. Rin studies the nubbly fingers critically and Obito looks nervous. “Can you move it for me?” she asks.

After a second, Obito pulses his chakra and the ends of them…twitch. He can’t exactly feel his own chakra coils, but if that worked then they must be assuming a regular cycle, one she’ll be familiar with.

“Yep,” she confirms. “Those are fingers.”

Obito can’t even look at the little nubs sticking out from the end of his stump. He looks vaguely nauseous about the whole thing, and he hopes his tone is impossible to read. “Yippie.”

“It’s functioning correctly?”

“I used it for some mangled suiton. They sucked, but I wanted them too?”

She hums. “I think its fine. Maybe pretend its not though. Can’t have you regrowing a hand in public.”

He groans, but they fall into some semblance of a routine. Its unexpectedly domestic. Suna’s not Konoha but working with Rin is familiar, and aspects of the village are charming. He misses trees so fucking much, but the glazed terra cotta around the village is pretty and he’s never seen such intricate tilework before. The people are reserved and not especially friendly, but they’re not outright hostile to him either.

If he really was an unaffiliated nin, he could make a life for himself here. Grow peanuts and beans, take missions when he wanted. Its not a future he ever considered, but if Suna was serious about offering oath, and he was serious about being in need of a village, he could see this working.

Rin would never be happy here. Maybe he could adapt like a weed in concrete but Rin would never be satisfied away from her family. She’d never stop trying to better the world in every capacity she could. The iroyo ninjutsu specialization is only the most obvious manifestation of her desire to help heal the world by browbeating it into submission. He might settle down for an easy life, but she never would.

They work at installing themselves into the pulse of the village. After a few days, Rin’s making friends with the other orderlies and trying not to stand out too much. Probing questions would be suspicious, so she’s restricted to the information she can gather naturally.

Obito is happy with his gardener position, but it severely limits his ability to gather information. The greenhouses are fairly isolated and none of his methods are subtle in the slightest. His coworkers leave him to his own devices and he spends most of his time begging vegetables not to give him away while thieving as much seed stock from storage as he can, just because he can, and it might be useful later. With enough chakra, he’s sure he can grow a plant from just a seed.

After a week of no promising leads, Obito is getting frustrated and Rin is stressing patience.

To cheer him up, they take their week’s pay and Rin takes them on a shopping spree. They buy sturdy Suna style clothes, shinobi sandals that actually fit him, a new kunai pouch for him as well, and a face drape to hide the blind half of his face, leaving just the bandage wrapped side free. He blends in better with the desert attire; people treat him less like an outsider. They can’t afford any mesh under armor yet, but they have rent and fresh food.

Obito smuggles a twig from a peach tree that Rin carries with her everywhere. “There’s an outbreak of leaf curl in the greenhouse peaches. This twig is the only healthy peach branch in the whole village. I can find you anywhere.”

There are close calls with her seal that leave him anxious and her shaking but their tail hasn’t exposed them as of yet. Obito even has to Kamui to the hospital once while Rin hides in a closet on her lunch break and wrestles the Bijuu chakra back into the seal when she suspects an intensive diagnosis has left it slipping. It’s wearing on her, but it’s manageable, for now. She swears she’ll tell him if it changes but he’s not so sure. He’s used to Rin being strong, the glue of Team 7, the reliable one of the bunch. He’s not sure how she’s really handling the seal now. They used to tell each other everything, but now there’s secrets he thinks they’re both keeping.

He Kamuis directly from the closet back to the greenhouses so nobody sees him, but Rin must have emerged from a closet disheveled and sweaty after her lunch break so the rumors and teasing fly and, capable as she is, Rin spins it into an opportunity to fish for information.

She tells him how it went, how she feigned sheepishness, pushed her hair back into her hairnet and straightened her scrubs, looking the part of a recently ravished sixteen-year-old. She laughs at the irony of it being a Tailed Beast who has her so undone, while she plays up having a secret boyfriend to the hospital staff. Obito laughs too, like its funny.

Rin does the voices: “Sachira!” She says in the same tone one might say scandalous in. “So talented, you are! It’s only been two weeks!”

He wonders how much a blush shows on his face. He knows she’s taken all the kunoichi classes as a gennin, and if she’s comfortable leveraging insinuations like this, more power to her.

“I didn’t expect it,” Rin goes demonstrably red in the face, clutching a pillow to her chest, really getting into the role. She’s such a better actor than him. “I wasn’t looking for a relationship. It just kinda….happened.”

“Tell us about him!” She sits up, sotto voce, “that’s my attending, and she’s a gossip at heart. If its anyone, she’ll be my in.”

She continues, faux bashful, “I told them that I don’t know too much about him. Said he’s from the village, a shinobi. Told them I’m still meeting new people everyday, and he’s been secretive about his family.”

She grins. “Inspiration is a beautiful thing. I said I think maybe he’s important and doesn’t want me to know yet?”

“No,” he says incredulously. “That can’t be how it works.”

“But it is! That was all the ammo they needed to launch into a who’s-who of important, high ranking Suna shinobi. I memorized all of the information, from names to appearances to skillset. All the top officers. At one point, I even nudged them to think his title’s important as well.”

Rin quickly educates him on the shinobi clans of Suna. Point being: there aren’t any. He knew it. Suna apparently did away with most clan structures; its why he hasn’t seen any sigils anywhere. But even without a formal clan system, there are important families, and most positions are nepotistic, including the kageship.

He can’t quite wrap his head around it. It’s so dissimilar to Konoha, to his own personal upbringing. Even if you dissolve clan boundaries, you’d still have the distinct ethnic groups, unless intermarriage reached a plateau. Now that he thinks about it, he can’t name any kekkei genkai or clan techniques from Wind at all. Maybe they just never had any.

That feels wrong. Probably, everyone here’s too poor to support entire clans so immediate families became the norm to dodge taxes and tithes.

He wonders what it would have been like to grow up somewhere without clans. Would Rin still be considered lesser in a system where the ruling classes aren’t so strictly denoted?

Rin’s not as interested as he is; possibly it doesn’t feel like such a huge shift to her. She steam rolls on to her overheard speculation on the Kazekage’s own family. His brother-in-law is a bachelor, one of the most eligible bachelors in the village. “And handsome, so very handsome, and strong!”

Obito recognizes his name from the Bingo Book, Yashamaru, a shinobi who can do things with glass that are illegal in most nations. “Wait,” he says, “That’s a bloodline.”

“Yes?”

“But, clans…” he says stupidly.

“Not important,” Rin says. “He fits the profile to a T. High ranking, close ties to the Kazekage, but if he’s the jinchuuriki, his status isn’t public information. The village loves him. His unusual technique might even be Bijuu influenced, now that I think about it. The only thing that doesn’t track is his mission history. He was active all throughout the Second War and never exhibited anything even resembling a Tailed Beast in nature. And he’s married into the family by his sister, the Kazehime, when Jinchuuriki are usually created young, the younger the better, so their chakra coils don’t warp from the onslaught.”

He stares. “Is that what happened to you?”

She looks calculating. “I’m not sure. The toxicity hasn’t affected me, but I’m not exactly doing a great job at keeping it in. Maybe so much leaked out in the beginning that the chakra poisoning wasn’t enough to damage my coils, and then the healing factor kicked in and I adjusted slowly over time.”

“But you’re okay now?”

She reassures him, “As okay as I can be. And we’ve got a lead!”

It’s too many details for mere underling gossip. He’s suspicious. “How’d you get all this?”

“I snuck into the hospital database and snooped his profile. It was risky, but I’m fairly certain it can’t be tracked back to me, and if it is, I can always play it off on me trying to spy on my crush instead of me trying to spy on the Kazekage’s brother-in-law.”

“Until they ask him and he can’t pick you out a lineup.”

She shrugs, nonplussed. “I’ll do more tomorrow. I had to leave halfway through, someone was coming. But his profile’s extensive, even without access to the classified documents. If he has a jinchuuriki’s healing ability, it sucks ass, or he’s got glass bones too.”

He laughs but there’s something uneasy about it. He doesn’t like Rin being saddled with most of the work while he hung around all day watering overly friendly squash stalks. It’s a good thing the greenhouses are empty or he’d be screwed.

The next day, after a paranoid shift of waiting for the peach branch to snap, he meets with her back in their room. He quietly watches her put up the silencing seals, a sinking feeling in his chest.

He can’t read her face at all. When did she get so good at that?

Rin says, “I learned more about the Kazekage’s family today. Lord Rasa no Subaku, the Yondaime Kazekage, of the Gold Dust. I was originally interested in the brother-in-law Yashamaru as the jinchuuriki, thinking his kekkei genkai was Bijuu related. But then I found his sister’s information, Lord Rasa sama’s wife, Karura.”

“And?”

Rin says, carefully, “They have two kids. Temari, the oldest, and Kankuro, who just celebrated his first birthday.”

He feels what little bit of his face pales, his mind turning down increasingly bad worst-case scenarios. He should have seen this coming. “It’s a kid?”

“Its….maybe. The children, they both had their chakra tested on their first birthday, like they’re checking their natures for something. The results are classified, but I could only think of a few reasons why they might do that.”

He immediately picks up what she’s saying. She can be so conniving, and she’d never get caught at it. He says, “They’re checking for compatibility, aren’t they? The Yondaime Kazekage wants to make his own child into a jinchuuriki.”

Rin says, “Konoha’s been taking advantage of Suna’s weakness for years, even before they lost the Second War. Even Wind’s Daimyo hires Leaf shinobi for important missions rather than his own nation’s forces. It’s got to be straining their finances.”

“So he’s desperate,” Obito says. “That’s no excuse.”

“No,” Rin agrees, arm resting on her stomach, over her unwilling passenger. “It’s not.”

Obito scrubs his hand through his hair, trying to divine how this impacts their mission. “A kid,” he says unhappily. “The Old Man’s after a literal child. They’re helpless.”

“But not defenseless,” Rin’s determined. “Not while we’re here.”

Obito takes a few deep breaths to center himself, but his hand’s still twitching; he’s jangling inside. “Okay. So you’re thinking it’s the younger kid, Kankuro?”

“Hard to tell if he matched whatever they were looking for. I assume you can’t just pick any random child as a vessel for a Tailed Beast. What if they have to match chakra natures? Like water and water, like mine? Maybe they’re looking for a wind natured kid.”

“That’s rare, even in Wind. Maybe he’ll just keep having kids until one matches up?”

Then Obito realizes what she really means. “Oh, Sage. Suna doesn’t currently have a jinchuuriki, do they? Unless they’re screening for a new one, like maybe the current is really old and dying. That’s why they’re screening kids. Suna has a Bijuu just sitting on a shelf somewhere,” he says in horror. “Zetsu can just grab it at any time.”

A triple timeline. Find it before Suna forces them to take oath. Find it before Suna crams it into an innocent kid. Find it before Madara makes his move.

“It won’t be just sitting on a shelf somewhere. It’ll be sealed to hell and back, under armed guard 24/7. Level 10 clearance. The single most protected thing in the village. We’d have a better chance trying to assassinate the Kazekage than trying to get a hand on a captive Bijuu, or one of his kids.”

Obito stresses, “No way to tell if the new kid passed the test. They might seal him at any time.”

They just look at each other, contemplating how their master plan has gone so completely sideways. He expected to run into snags eventually, but this is just the beginning, and it’s almost damning, so completely off the rails; it has every possible way of backfiring, outing them, getting them killed, letting Madara win.

“Fuck,” he looks at Rin. “This just became a heist, didn’t it. We’re gonna steal the Bijuu.”

She nods gravely. “We’re going to steal the Bijuu from Suna, right out from under the Kazekage’s nose.”

Obito flops back on the bed, his arm heavy over his eyes like he can block out how shitty the world has become. Steal a fucking Bijuu, and do fucking what with it. “There’s no way we’re going to get away with this.”

“Nope,” Rin says, perversely cheerful. “Our aliases will be burned for sure. But if we plan it right, we could just be missing nin thieves, instead of us as thieves. Unless you start doing Uchiha techniques in the center of the Kazekage tower.” She sits next to him on the bed. “Think about it. If you were the Kazekage, would you want to publicly admit to the other nations that you lost your Tailed Beast? Your ultimate weapon? When you’re already weakened?”

His voice is muffled. “I’d rather chop off my good arm.”

“I doubt that. But the sentiment remains. He’ll never admit it. We do a snatch and grab. Break in, take it, get out. Do not under any circumstances engage anyone ever. We’ll be ghosts. They’ll connect it to us only due to circumstance, once Sachira and Tobi go missing.”

“’No Uchiha techniques’”, he mocks her, stressed. “We’re dead without Kamui.”

She knife-hands him in the side and all the air wheezes out of him in an oof. “Stop moping. At least this way we don’t have to potentially fight a fully-realized jinchuuriki. And we don’t run the risk of them outing us to the Kazekage. It might actually be easier to just kidnap the poor thing.”

He is…not against stealing. He gets his breath back and sits back up, thinking about what he can do to lessen the variables he’d have to control. “It sounds too easy. Kamui in, grab it, Kamui out. But it’ll be a fortress. There’s no telling where they’ve buried it. They may have literally buried it, like in the ground, and I don’t know any doton. With a whole platoon sitting on it. Maybe it’s sealed in a way that isn’t mobile, and we can’t move it at all.”

“Recon,” Rin says. “Lots of it. As soon as possible. Locate it, scope out possible defenses. It’s textbook, Tobi,” she jokes. But since it was Senju Tobirama who wrote the particular textbook on these tactics, he’s healthily skeptical.

“Before he seals it in the kid, or a zetsu waltzes in.”

Rin says, strategizing, “How would a zetsu steal it?”

“That merging thing, probably. Spikey could do it, I’m sure, or maybe Peely, they’re sneakier, even if Spikey’s the fighter. Or he’d send Zetsu, either together or as halves.”

“Isn’t the merging mokuton-derived? Would it work in a stucco building? Or sandstone?”

He’s unsure, “I don’t know. The spies could merge in and out of the cave walls, and those were solid rock, but I do think it’s somehow some mokuton bullshit at work
too….Something to do with the Hashirama cells.”

She’s seen the grafted parts of him closely enough to agree. “What if….” It must be a weird thought for her to contemplate and Obito watches her thought process play across her face. She changes tracks. “You said you awakened the mangekyo and the mokuton at the same time. Maybe that’s why there’s no precursor of Kamui among Uchiha records, like the other mangekyo abilities. It might be mokuton influenced, just in the slightest way. You pass through. Maybe the zetsu merge. With anything. Wood. Rock.”

He is immediately offended. “That’s impossible,” he argues. “Kamui is mangekyo, not mokuton. I don’t think they can mix.”

Rin says quietly, “you’re proof they can.”

He gapes at her. There’s nothing to say to that, not for a long time.

She says, eventually, “It was blue, like suiton. A chakra nature you share with Kakashi. That might have influenced it, if you do need both eyes to pull off a Tsusanoo.”

“What?” Obito almost yells. “Since when can he use suiton?”

Rin smirks at him and his fear is getting nice and pissed off. That’s his newest thing. They’re both good at distracting themselves. “Since about a year ago. He’s already mastered raiton and doton. Now he’s working on suiton, and your clan has been beating katon into him. Minato sensei says if he figures out fuuton, he’ll teach him the Rasengan. He wants to master all 5 elemental natures, like the Sandaime. Why do you think they’ve named him the Copy Nin?”

Obito groans but is simultaneously proud, sad, and enraged, an emotion he knows Rin is intimately familiar with when to comes to all things Kakashi. Obito laments, “This is why we can’t have nice things. Give a kid prodigy a sharingan and he tries to take over the world.”

He meant it as a joke but to his increasing horror, Rin thinks about it. Could Kakashi take over the world? Fucking, probably. The Bingo Book accused him of somehow toppling Yu, and they weren’t even in the Third War. He’s only 14 and Rin says he’s already giving their Hokage gray hair.

Actually, now that he thinks about it, Obito can probably take over the world as well. It’s what Madara wanted him for, after all. And Rin too, as a jinchuuriki and medic. If their sensei helped them, it would be easy. Madara might have an army, but Minato ate armies for breakfast.

Too bad they’re nukenin, traitors to the Leaf, criminals to be executed sooner than captured. He feels a pang but pushes it away. It’s a familiar feeling, disappointing his teacher, his clan, one he’s painfully acclimated to. Was it like that for Rin? Was life as a missing nin rearranging her moral’s one by one? He never used to be a thief, but lately he’s been taking anything that’s not nailed down.

But they’ll hold each other accountable. They could both be monsters, but they wouldn’t let each other. That’s important.

They plan throughout the night. Obito’s mind works in creative ways. He excels at the twisty, backwards thinking that lends itself well into planning a heist, covering all the bases, accounting for possible deviations and unseen complications. He wants to control as much of the situation as he can.

Rin helps nail out the details by accounting for human behavior, trying to tie down opposing motivation, predict their defenses based on how important their Tailed Beast is to Suna. He knows he works in extremes: methodical until he’s spontaneous, controlling until he adapts, and Rin steers his more destructive impulses into something that’s not only functional, its effective. The bulk of the suppositions are hers; she knows more about village defenses, about politics, about how admin might move in a building. She’s got invaluable knowledge of how the security of Konoha’s Hokage Tower functions; skills she learned at the knee of the Hokage while he was dead in a cave.

They have a workable plan come dawn, but they keep running up against the same wall.

They don’t know fuuinjutsu. Minato’s drilled them on the basics, but Rin has no idea what kind of seal work it would take to hold a Bijuu captive. Obito’s powerful, but seal work doesn’t care about his type of strength. All the planning in the world falls apart when they consider what defenses might be in place around the Bijuu. It’s possible the two of them could blitz through any shinobi guards, but what the hell are they going to do against seals?

Their closeness with Kushina has taught them exactly what fuuinjutsu is capable of. It’s entirely possible they won’t be able to move it at all, or that it would require a blood sacrifice to unlock the matrix or might char both their arms off if they touch it, or take hours to crack, or has some other lethal trap. Lethal in ways that Obito’s Kamui can’t account for, that Rin’s jinchuuriki healing can’t counter.

Obito’s in a sour mood and the peach twig in Rin’s kunai pouch is curling in response; he can feel it squirming around. Out of anyone to get saddled with a technique that responds to emption, why’d it have to be him? His clan is notorious for being both stoic and understatedly dramatic: extremophiles, the lot of them. He’s never known how to feel things small, to let them not be all-consuming. It set him at odds with Kakashi and their sensei, both stunted in different ways, but endeared him further to Kushina. That woman’s a firestorm that just keeps happening. Her seals can shrivel the hands right off a man.

How are they going to steal something they might not be able to touch? And what the hell are they going to do once they have it? Just tote it around with them? With all of Suna and an army of zetsu on their tail?

But they can’t just leave it behind. There’s a kid in danger, a literal child, and he knows Rin feels for him, for the little dark haired chubby-cheeked boy next to Kankuro’s name in her pilfered files, or for Temari, the older girl with sandy blond hair and serious eyes. Or maybe the next kid, whenever the Kazekage has an heir compatible with the Bijuu. She’s maybe as concerned for the possible jinchuuriki as she is for the Bijuu.

A kid. And Obito’s always had a soft spot for children and the elderly, that powerful Uchiha love Rin says he gives so willingly while asking for so little in return. The temperature’s rising in the room as Obito’s chakra fluctuates and Rin calms him with a word before his frustration actually sets something on fire.

After a day of rest to get their bearings, it’s time to start their master plan. Their admission paperwork is being processed by Suna and the clock’s ticking on both Madara and the Bijuu. The wind’s picked up enough that even down in the sheltered bowl of Sunagakure they can feel it blowing fine particles of sand, but the sandstorms miss the hidden village. It will suck to be back in the desert, but there’s an appeal to the freedom of it, to the unapologetic villainy they’ll have to live with after their neutral position gets blown sky high. They’re both growing restless under the strict watch, with no time to really train, no release from the constant strain of lying, of pretending to be harmless and nice. Neither of them are built for infiltration, or deep-cover mission work. If he stays any longer, he runs the risk of getting crossed wires. He’s kept to himself, but even the intention of extending a welcoming hand to him makes it difficult to cast everyone around him as enemies. It’s less conditional than even his own clan. But while Suna might be willing to accept Sachira and Tobi, they’d execute them if they even suspect the truth.

But Obito’s going to betray that tentative trust first.

At the hospital, Rin carefully expresses interest in fuuinjutsu injuries after telling a completely made-up story to the other staff over their lunch break, as a bonding exercise. She tells them all about some of the things she’s seen on the road; most are entirely fabricated, but the Suna medics rarely leave the village at all and are fascinated by depictions of life outside the desert. She regales them with a fictitious story about her running into a missing nin in Kusa that had a curse mark, a forbidden seal that wore away at his chakra slowly until he died from it.

After the horror of the tale, it sparks a discussion on the medical application of certain stasis seals and a theoretical discussion of the myriad uses of fuuinjutsu in general. It’s a look into how Suna views seal work. Rin figures they must have some tricks up their sleeves if they managed to capture their Tailed Beast on their own, without the use of the Shodaime Hokage’s mokuton.

The nurses and orderlies have some creative ideas but very little experience with sealing. Nobody volunteers any story about the time they healed someone injured from fuuinjutsu, but this is a civilian ward, so Rin hadn’t expected much. Still, it’s a start.

The next day, she sneaks around in the file system again, looking for anything to do with fuuinjutsu. Maybe they won’t need to undo the matrix if they can just survive the consequences of triggering it. This is how desperate they’re getting.

She has no such luck. Anything helpful is likely classified so much over their head it’s laughable.

While Rin works, Obito uses his time off from the greenhouses to scope out the important sights around the village, possible places where they might keep a Bijuu. His sharingan can see through genjutsu, and he gets as close to the Playhouse and the Kazekage Tower as he dares. Both buildings are connected, the Playhouse a separate wing of the same building, big and imposing, full to the brim with master puppet users and their eared-hood apprentices. It’s not too architecturally different from the Academy to the Admin building. Rin will know more about that, but he’s pretty sure he knows where he’d hide a Tailed Beast, if he were Kazekage.

That night, Obito says, “It’ll be in the Tower. Rasa will want to keep it close. But there’s so much genjutsu at work, and the whole place is crawling with Black Ops. It’ll be hard to pin down an exact location.”

He can’t be as exact as he wants and it’s pissing him off. The whole place is lousy with misdirection and chokepoints, he’s seen almost too much detail through the layers of genjutsu. He’ll be having sharingan nightmares about fucking walls if he keeps this scrutiny up.

Rin says, “what if we triggered an evacuation or something, made them reveal its location when they went to move it? It’ll be easier to grab in transport.”

“Thought about it,” Obito admits. “I could set the whole place on fire, see what they try to save. But there’s kids that live there, too many innocents around. Suna may not have strong enough suiton users to contain the blaze; it could spread to the civilian sectors.”

Not to mention that the buildings are mostly stucco, but sharingan fire is stubborn. He can burn it down. But he won’t risk innocent lives to do it.

Rin says, “what if we didn’t use fire?”

“No,” Obito says immediately. “It’s stupid to use yourself as bait.”

“Yep,” Rin agrees. “I’m going to do it anyway.”

Obito groans in protest and flips the bed pillow over his face. He knows they need a big move, something drastic, but this is a stupid plan.

“Last resort,” Rin reminds him. “If they sense Bijuu chakra, they’ll rush to check theirs, thinking maybe the seals were failing or something. We follow them from there.”

He wants to argue. But it’s exactly the sort of plan he knows she learned from their sensei; risky to himself and no one else, with a high reward. But it’s risky in other ways too and that’s why he’s hesitant to agree. If he isn’t willing to risk random civilian lives, he’s not going to risk Rin’s easily.

He sighs from up under the pillow. But he can’t take this from her. She won’t allow it. “We have time to figure something else out.”

They really don’t.

The next few days, Rin prepares to enact her plan. She’s figured out how to trigger the seal easily enough, it’s closing it back off safely after that’s the issue. She’s never intentionally tried to rile her Bijuu up before; he’s afraid of what could come busting out if she goes knocking. While Obito sleeps, she meditates. She says its akin to envisioning a still place in her mind where she imagines her Tailed Beast can hear her, carefully channeling her chakra around the seal, barley letting it brush the seal to get his attention. When it works, Obito can feel the echo of its rage, its fear; its desperation chokes them both, crawling up his throat like bile.

Late at night, after her prayers, he can hear her whisper to it, “We’re going to save another Bijuu. Keep him from being sealed into a jinchuuriki. Protect him from Madara. I need your help to do it. Maybe we could work together? I know neither of us wanted this, but I don’t blame you at all. You are a victim just as I am. I am not your enemy. You are not my enemy. Help me in this, and I can save them.”

It’s impossible to know what exactly goes on between them, how much it picks up from her, but she insists it understands. If she can let a little of its chakra out without it overwhelming the seal and killing her, they can rescue Suna’s Bijuu. It’ll all come down to her, and them to him to contain the aftermath.

The next few days, the Bijuu is restless, restless enough for him to pick up on and he’s frustrated with the amount of effort it takes to keep it contained. Its almost as bad as a full moon, this potent hateful chakra that rises as inexorable as the tides.

“A week,” Rin says. “That’s all the time we have.”

Obito doesn’t answer for a long time. He’s taken to Kamuiing around the Kazekage’s Tower to check security positions and how they’d react to an intruder, never letting himself be seen; he doesn’t want to trigger a lockdown, but just nuisance enough to glimpse patrol rotations and popular hangouts for the genjutsu camouflaged Black Ops, who wear ceramic masks decorated with famous kabuki players, most poison purple, or ghostly green, as colorful as the face paint of the puppeteers.

This is a detail he keeps from Rin. She’s got a thing about ninja in masks; she’s got every right to, and his recent forays into the Tower’s defenses are already risky enough to scare her. He’s jumping around blind, trying to locate the Bijuu, trying to help as much as she has. There’s Black Ops everywhere and he can’t sense them well enough among the stucco and stone to know to avoid them. His chakra has to have been sensed already, but he’s managed to get away before they can pin him down. He hasn’t been visibly spotted yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they get a sensor type involved to nail his nosey ass to the wall.

Eventually, he sighs. “Okay. We do it your way.”

Rin looks up, eyes flashing. He cautions, “But we do it smart. I Kamui you somewhere far enough away that they can’t see us, but close enough for them to think it’s their own Bijuu acting up. After we get their attention, I suppress your Bijuu and jump us back to the Tower. We follow them to the Tailed Beast, defeat whatever defenses are in place, and do a snatch and grab. Once we have it, I Kamui us all away, north, towards Iwa. They won’t follow us into Iwa’s territory, not without sparking a war.”

And they don’t want anyone to know they lost their Bijuu in the first place. They’re counting on that.

“Can you find a good place to do it? And a place to infiltrate the Tower from?”

“I’ll have it covered. You focus on how to survive this. It’ll be a fight immediately after fixing your seal, against maybe all of Suna, the fucking Kazekage himself, even.”

They can’t afford to get mixed up wasting time with the Kazekage’s Gold Dust or the wrath of the Playhouse. The thought of fighting more puppet users inspires Rin to begin practicing her chakra control in a new way, trying to form chakra strings from her fingertips. She has the requisite control, and it might be a useful trick if she manages to get the knack of it. She practices at night, trying to sneakily attach strings to Obito’s hood to pull it down but he catches on quickly enough and they learn he can shrug off any chakra string attack by simply using Kamui to pass through it.

Because he’s paranoid and needs to be prepared, he comes up with contingencies for fighting just about anything but he can’t think his way past the Gold Dust. It has to be some kind of nature transformation, Earth and Lightning? No, that made Iwa’s Blast Release. Earth and Wind, maybe? He can’t nullify either of those. Neither of them has any type of raiton affinity, and he doesn’t know enough about the technique to figure out any potential weaknesses.

Not that fighting the Kazekage is any part of their plan. He doesn’t want to come within a mile of a kage level shinobi. His kage level sensei has left him with a clearer than most understanding of what exactly a kage is capable of. He has zero desire to face one across a battlefield. But he feels better for trying. He’ll be taking point for the offensive. He’s got a five-minute window before any attacks start to stick, but Rin doesn’t have that luxury.

They sharpen all their weapons, oil everything up. Clean and prepare and pack. Use their paycheck to purchase all the rations they can carry, measured out over a couple days, all at different places, to avoid suspicion.

It’s been a month in Sunagakure and the time has not flown by. They nail down their plan to the millisecond, adjust their formation for wind users, for puppet users, for Rasa, for an unleashed Bijuu, to counter poison, to counter Yashamaru’s Glass Release and the top lieutenant Baki’s purported taijutsu and kenjutsu prowess, since Obito sees him haunting the Tower more often than not. He’s got to be the busiest Jounin Commander on the continent, for the amount of time he spends in Admin. Rin has antidotes up and ready to go once she lifts the formulas right out of the hospital databases.

Neither of them sleep the night before. They’re fully dressed, packed, and ready to run. When the sun comes up, Rin doesn’t go to her shift at the hospital and Obito skips his shift at the greenhouses. The next thing their coworkers will hear is that they’re enemies of the state, although hopefully they won’t know exactly what it is that they’ve done.

They eat a small breakfast and talk little. There’s nothing much to say at this point. It’s been 4 weeks of arduous planning. They could both be dead by lunch.

There’s nothing much left to say.

The sun climbs higher and higher in the sky. The temperature rises. Obito’s pacing, unable to keep still. Rin meditates. He can’t slow down enough to even try meditation. The heat shimmers off the stucco. Rin brushes her hair, ties her pants legs closed with bandages. He looks thoughtfully at his tiny cactus friend and snatches it off the windowsill. He tucks it carefully into his kunai pouch. Its coming with him.

The streets empty as it approaches noon, everyone seeking shelter from the heat. It happens every day, the lull hours of the afternoon. The entire village grinds to a halt.

Countdown time. Rin rises to her feet and Obito hugs her snug and his chakra flares and the world twists away.

The land on a roof, round and sloping under the sun like its melting from the heat. He’s already sweating. He channels chakra to his feet and sticks fast. He’s left his right arm bound, like he’s been ever since it grew back to hide that he’s somehow regrown an entire limb like some kind of desert lizard. The fingers are still vague and not fully developed, so he leaves it bound so he’s not tempted to use it to block any taijutsu. Secret arm or not, that’s just bad technique, with the fingers not quite done and no real ability to move the wrist/hand area in any fine detail at all yet. It’s a liability, but one he’s trained for months to cover for. The dexterity of his left hand has finally equaled his dominant hand and he can perform hand seals well enough with it that his katon are just as strong.

They steady themselves on the rooftop, looking out over the Village Hidden in the Sand. It’s nearly sizzling with late summer heat. For a second, it’s like they’re back in the desert, alone in the world, the only two people around for miles.

“Ready?” Rin asks, and Obito clenches his hand around hers in the Snake seal, ready to bombard her with mokuton. He’s not molding chakra right now, but he can feel his sharingan start to spin, the wind fluttering his face drape. He’s dead serious and only nods and then Rin is closing her eyes, turning her awareness inwards, towards the seal, the leaky dam that holds back a Bijuu’s rage.

In a second, she’s dropped her chakra around her tenketsu points, and it’s easy, so easy, for him to feel her reach past the seal to that Tailed Beast within her, to stir it up and let the Killing Intent pour out, limning her in red like the sharingan’s filter, a murderous wave that rises high in the sky over the village, threatening to break, to drown the desert in wrath. She projects it as strong and as far as she can and her seal immediately wobbles, unraveling quickly under her Bijuu’s eagerness as it slams against it in a desperate bid for freedom.

There’s menace so thick in the air he can almost see it: massive, crushing as the depths, a weight that just doesn’t stop.

She looks at him in terror and her eyes flare red as his own.

Chapter Text

Chapter 8: Rin: A Series of (Un)fortunate Events

The second her seal warps, Obito is there, slamming it right back with mokuton, steady beside her instinctual panic and she fights with him, begging her Bijuu not to do this, to please cooperate, please please please

They don’t have time for a drawn-out fight, not when Suna nin are likely haring towards their position, and their window on the Tower’s Bijuu shrinking.

Rin catches a glimpse of a roiling lake, a fear big enough to drown on, her own maybe, but maybe not. And hate, so much hate, and anger. She blinks at the huge shape she feels she can almost see, thinking maybe she can hear over the roar in her ears I am not your enemy

The onslaught bends, turns around her. Obito is swearing high and stressed in her ear and he’s shoved his right shoulder against her, his mokuton half, which feels strangely bark-like and rough under his cloak, not like a shoulder at all, really. In her kunai pouch, a peach branch flowers.

Please

Just like that, he eases. It’s less an attack, and more like a natural disaster, suddenly lacking intent. They mop up the leaks, shore up the dam, reinforce the seal from a stormy sea into something she can manage. He settles, thank the kami, he settles, retreating back behind the barrier, the disastrous chakra receding like the tide.

Obito’s still swearing and Rin’s breathing in quick little pants. There’s no time to examine the dozen different epiphanies she’s having, the euphoria building under the terror. He listened to her! She’s sure of it. But they’re out of time.

“Quick!” she says and Obito grabs her and the roof warps away in a red spiral. There is a part of her that’s sinking into a still pool and another part that’s laughing.

They land on the roof of the Kazekage Tower itself, Obito dodging traps and leading Rin through the layered genjutsu with her eyes closed. He tugs her down to a window and the shattering of it is loud in the heat silence and they swing through, Rin opening her eyes with weapons in both hands, her own natural chakra surging erratically before she marshals it.

“Kai!”

The Tower is in chaos. It’s likely everyone in the village felt her Bijuu and jounin and shinobi teams fan out, the rooftops a blur of leaping ninja, but Obito knows where he’s going. He’s scouted for days in advance. She follows him, casting as powerful a henge as she dares, testing her own limits after the close call. They crouch behind a statue in the hallway and watch shinobi mill strategically around. Chokepoints. Blind corners. Bottlenecks. Hostile architecture meant to offer only disadvantage to intruders. Obito’s sharingan is active and he’s seeing directly through any concealments, and he checks one location, then the next, going around to all his predetermined hot spots where he’s deduced its likely they’re holding the Bijuu.

He Kamuis them a few more times, but they luck out as they land at the end of a corridor and are met with a team of painted Suna nin who recover from the shock of them just appearing and they waste valuable time dodging around them while more alarms shrill. Puppets! Rin curses. Why is it always fucking puppets? They’re not even on the side of the building the Playhouse is in.

She smashes what she can while Obito Kamuis through to disable the attackers. They’re trying not to outright kill anyone, but it’s harder to disable enemies at close quarters without killing them. She never knew before the war, but it takes more skill to be nonlethal. Any kid with a blade can kill a man. It takes a jounin to dodge and disarm one without removing the offending limb. But Wind will be pissed enough as it is without them trying to avenge their leadership. And Rin’s no jounin.

It gets dicey when one flashes through the hand seals for a summoning and Rin shouts at Obito to stop him before he summons kami knows what. Obito knocks him out with a blow to the head and the last puppeteer goes down releasing a cloud of inescapable poison that sears immediately down Rin’s throat and into her lungs.

She’s prepared for this and has an antidote up her nose immediately to neutralize the toxins and she shoves one up Obito’s own nose as a precaution. Inhalants are tricky since they target the nervous system directly and can’t be extracted through blood. She’s dizzy, but functional. She’s fought disorientated from explosions and smoke, knee deep in a concussion and hemorrhaging. This is nothing.

They leave the shinobi where they are and take off down the hallway, to a hidden stairway right next to the Kazekage’s offices that Obito identified a week ago. He shreds the genjutsu over it and Rin can see the stairs, leading down. She’s breathing rough still, but she can hear noises from down it.

Bingo. His eyes shine and they flow down the stairs as quickly and quietly as they can. At the bottom is a guard that Obito panickily chokes out and props silently against the wall. Inside the room is a sealing team with their backs to Obito and Rin: an old lady, a red-haired teen, Yashamaru, Baki, several masked shinobi, and the fucking Kazekage himself.

Masks. She too well trained to freeze but anyone would be cautious. She’s almost as scared of them as she is of Rasa. Obito’s mangekyo whirls as he tries to see if they’re adding protection or taking it down, but one of the Black Ops must be a sensor because they’re suddenly knee deep in a close-range brawl. More alarms start to shriek overhead. This is exactly what they can’t have. Rin throws shuriken after shuriken, and then follows with kunai, chakra scalpels out as it devolves into a short, brutal taijutsu match.

There’s gold glinting in the air and the chattering of puppets. Rin is terrified, but shinobi go down and a blazing katon from Obito earns them some space to maneuver. The remaining nin regroup; it’s Rasa, two puppeteers, the brother-in-law, and the new Jounin Commander. Rin’s bleeding lightly from where razor wire cut her and the throb of poison stings at her eyes. Her lungs are still on the fritz. There’s a tense moment of dead silence while the two sides study each other. Then the Suna nin attack.

They’re outnumbered, and quicker than she hoped, but she trained under the Yellow Flash of the Leaf. Speed doesn’t phase her. She dodges fast enough that a glass kunai only slices through her calf instead of her knee. They’re aiming to incapacitate, take them in for questioning. She twists around and blood sheets down; she breaks a finger blocking a puppet from the old lady, but her Bijuu is riled up; she’s already healing. She covers Obito during his delay and Rasa and Baki are targeting him directly. The Kazekage’s Gold Dust is fast, but not fast enough to keep up with Kamui, or fast enough to startle a Minato-trained shinobi. Baki wears a face-drape like Obito’s and he engages him in taijutsu, ruthlessly beating at his right side, but Obito passes right through it. A glass kunai shatters against her own and she sweeps down to the floor, calling up suiton and sending a small wave of water at Rasa’s Gold Dust, hoping to drench it enough to weight it down, feeling her reserves drain by more than a half at the move, the air far too dry for success.

It doesn’t work even in the slightest, and now Rasa’s even more pissed off. The room is shaking with all the Killing Intent getting thrown around. The second Obito passes harmlessly through an attack, capture is no longer Suna’s imperative. They’re aiming to kill now.

A chakra signature spikes and doton rumbles up in a wall towards them but Obito grunts, more instinct than logic, and a katon roars through the room, singeing both the puppet users. The red-haired teen isn’t actively helping much, Rin notices, and most of his puppet strikes just end up interfering with the old woman’s and she’s getting increasingly frustrated by him.

They should both be dead already. They’re so outclassed it’s not even funny. Obito’s only alive because he’s safe in Kamui’s intangibility and they just can’t hit him, but he’ll run out after five minutes and get himself gutted. Rin’s barely managing against an oddly-matched puppet duo and Yashamaru, who hasn’t engaged physically yet, giving the puppet masters room to work while he wings glass shards from the sidelines.

Obito gets poisoned again; he’s bleeding heavily from somewhere on his torso but Rin misses what caused it. They’re not gaining ground at all, and the Suna nin are standing strong. This is all wasting time. They’ll be flooded with reinforcements any second, and they’re not even here to tangle with the Kazekage: they’re here to rescue a Bijuu.

Rin concentrates and then blasts through the doton wall with a “Suiton: Hato!”, using the water on the ground from earlier. It crumbles under her Surging Sea and the B Rank jutsu twinges at her seal and nosedives her chakra but it reveals a shelf and on that shelf is…..

Is that a pot of tea? What the fuck. Its stout and metal, covered in seals. She recognizes enough of them from Kushina to know it means don’t touch. “Here!” she calls out and Obito flashes to her side, his arm around her waist, and she flings out her arm and extends her new chakra strings to the pot of tea and fastens them to the small rounded body and then yanks it right off the shelf, bypassing the matrix and triggering it’s defenses, but that’s okay, because right as the seals detonate in a huge flash, the pot smacks into Rin’s hands and Obito twists sharply in her grip and the room warps around them and they land back on the roof of the Kazekage Tower.

This wasn’t the plan, and she looks over in alarm to see that at the last second Baki latched onto Obito and he got brought along for the ride as well. They fight on the roof as the explosion rocks under their feet, the aftershocks and heat ringing in her ears like an old nightmare. Obito’s vulnerable after his jump, and Rin doesn’t dare release the pot of tea to cover him and has to watch as Baki lands a chakra enhanced kick against Obito’s right thigh and it goes out from under him, suddenly unsteady, like it turns to water under him. Baki breaks his ankle next and Rin can hear the crunch. He can’t beat Baki in a close range taijutsu match, he needs space, and a Great Fireball blazes, forcing the Jounin Commander back.

Rasa survived the blast and can apparently fucking fly and he comes tearing out a window in a cloud of Gold Dust up to the roof carrying the red-haired teen, who halfheartedly sends a puppet at Rin with a wicked grin.

Obito staggers, his face blanched, and Rin crouches next to him and sends a shuriken jutsu at them to force them back while he gets his feet under him. The Killing Intent from the Kazekage alone is insane, but Rin can’t be paralyzed by it; she’s seen an ocean of rage and a pissed off kage is a drop in that puddle.

“Got it?” Obito asks through gritted teeth and before she can answer Rasa sends a fuuton slicing at them and Rin can’t dodge such an expansive attack; Obito can’t make her transparent too, and he blocks it from her using his right side only to have it slice right through and his entire arm falls off; he’d only bound it at the shoulder and the wind blade cuts neatly through everything. It flops out of his sleeve like some gross slug and plops on the roof.

Rin almost can’t comprehend how badly everything has gone. It might be a concussion from the blast. Obito dives to grab his arm and hollers, “Shit!” at the top of his lungs.

A puppet catches Rin across the face, and she tightens her grip on the pot she really hopes contains a Bijuu as blood blinds her, hot and coppery, the sound of Rasa’s Gold Dust gathering around them, oddly scratchy.

Obito grabs her at the last second and the roof lurches under her feet.

Kamui dumps them in the desert north of Sunagakure and they roll when they hit the sand, like it spit them out at an angle. Obito sinks down to his knees, wheezing, fresh blood sheeting down from his mangekyo and Rin has no idea how far they just jumped, but it must have been far.

The sun beats down on them. Apart from her ragged breathing, it’s too quiet.

After a long moment of unreal silence, Rin rolls to her feet, the last of her chakra gathering in her hands. Obito’s on his knees a little ways away and she keeps the pot of tea wrapped in one arm as she staggers through the sand towards him and holds her hands against the worst of the bleeding on his stomach. It’s a stab wound, maybe from a puppet, but the bleeding is already slowing as his healing factor kicks in. His eye is screwed shut and leaking blood.

“Well,” he says and spits a glob of blood into the sand, “that was fun.”

He’s hugging his severed arm to him and the bone is sticking out of his ankle. It’s not bad for tussling with a fucking kage, even for a few seconds. Rin says, bracingly, “only 7 more to go.”

He eases his eye open to stare at her and then they laugh and laugh and laugh. Rin heals the worst of his injuries and he says, “your pupils are different sizes. Like some new dojutsu.”

“I call it Ninja Art, Secret Technique: Concussion,” Rin says. “My Bijuu’s taking care of it.” He is, the bleeding on her calf and face has already stopped, all her smaller wounds closing up without much interference on her part.

She hands him a kunai. “Bite the handle.”

He stares at her. “That’s disgusting.”

She shrugs and sets his ankle with a jolt and Obito bites his tongue bloody to keep from lashing out. His chakra is still scorching hot and chakra exhaustion starts a migraine pounding through her temples. She’s only vaguely nauseous.

Chakra healing doesn’t do much for bones, but she can splint it and monitor for infection from the compound break. He’ll need to keep off it until it manages to heal naturally; even with his brute strength healing factor it might take days to a week. It’s a luxury they might not have. All of Suna will be after them.

Obito flinches when she sets her hand against his injured thigh, and he won’t let her see it. He’s just holding his arm. “Maybe I can put it back on. It’d be easier than regrowing it.”

Rin says, “let me,” and Obito rolls his shoulder socket towards her wordlessly. He’s looking out over the sand to the south, like he’s waiting for Rasa to fly out on a cloud of Gold Dust like a bat out of hell with a platoon on his heels.

She gives him mental props: that’s most likely exactly how he’s handing the situation. He just lost Suna’s only Bijuu to a team he was going to offer oath too. Its not a slight he’ll take sitting down.

She gingerly unwraps the bindings on his shoulder and the top part of the arm and lines them up as best she can, tying to reconnect the chakra networks between the two parts. She can’t touch bone, but flesh, blood; she’s an iroyonin: this is her trade. It’d be easy if she could utilize Mystic Palm, but the A rank technique is currently out of her reach, unless she wants bigger problems, and her recent run-in is still percolating in the back of her mind. She won’t risk it until she can think things through properly.

The flesh of his arm is white and oddly loose, like it’s wet pulp and the anatomy of it isn’t articulated cleanly. More of its internal structure is visible than last time, when he crushed it against a cave wall. It’s more a suggestion of bone and muscle and tendon than clear indicators for those things. It feels…..plantlike to her. Woody. It’s fascinating, but not something she thinks she’ll be able to fix with iroyo ninjutsu.

She lines it up as best she can, thankful that the wind scythe was sharp and neat. “Try to channel chakra through it. It may reconnect.”

He holds out his hand and they make the Snake seal together, his chakra flaring and blazing. “Not fire,” Rin says, “Try water instead. It’s more connected to your mokuton.”

He concentrates and she feels the conscious shift away from his Uchiha nature and more into his Hashirama side, chakra cycling through natures like it’s on a spectrum. At the same time, she pours medical chakra into the wound and miraculously, it begins to slowly stitch itself together. The connecting line is weak and uncoordinated, but she feels that maybe with time the mokuton will sort itself out. Its notoriously sturdy. The Shodaime shrugged off Madara’s attacks. Obito’s insistent that he’s not got it to that extent, but still. Even if it won’t reconnect, she can amputate, and it’ll just regrow anyway.

She makes sure to tie it back on securely, so it can hopefully finish healing completely. While Obito attends to the part of his upper right thigh, right on the patchwork part of him, Rin gently wipes the blood from his face and checks out his mangekyo. The strain is evident; he’s blown his supraorbital again and overloaded several smaller pathways. The damage is starting to scar, and it chills her to think that she can only slow the degeneration down, that eventually, Obito will be blind.

It’s a time limit not unlike her own. Maybe it’s the concussion making her thoughts fuzzy, but she looks down at the pot of tea on her lap and thinks to herself I can beat this for him. She stole a Bijuu. She is a jinchuuriki, with theoretical access to almost unlimited power, trained by both Namikaze Minato and the Sannin Senju Tsunade, sort of. She can figure this out. She’ll find a way for him to survive his own power.

Obito fusses over her own injuries and her chakra exhaustion from healing after the fight and the seal is setting a migraine in her head and a weariness in her bones. She’s faced chakra exhaustion before; she never had the reserves of her teammates, and she knows her own limits well. She’ll be fine, with some rest. She’s not dangerously low.

Obito’s likely just as exhausted. He’s staring blankly at the metal pot of tea in her lap. His face says what the fuck is that thing. His mouth says, “Suna keeps their Tailed Beast in a jar of fucking tea?”

Rin carefully sets it down in the sand between them so Obito can run his sharingan over it. Its metal, squat, rounder than it is tall, practically coated in seals and chakra suppression tags.

There’s a lid.

“We really shouldn’t….” Rin says, like she’s trying to convince herself. She wants to open it, but what if that frees the Bijuu? Frees them to go on a rampage, just to get recaptured? She knows what an astronomically bad idea it is, but she’s holding a Bijuu in her hands, one she’s not separated from by a busted seal and the temptation to try to communicate with them is intense. She strongly dislikes the idea of them being crammed in a pot of tea. What was Suna thinking?

Obito looking at her like he’s judging her intelligence. “We really shouldn’t,” he agrees cautiously.

“I want to.”

“That’s a really bad idea.”

“Yeah.”

They just stare at the tea some more. She really doesn’t want to be unwilling jailor to another Tailed Beast. “Sense anything?” she asks him. “How do we know that they’re really in there?”

Obito shrugs. “It has to be in there. What else could it be?”

“Maybe some kind of weapon?”

He snorts. “Maybe Rasa just really likes his fucking tea.”

The Kazekage himself fought them over this. They survived a fight against the fourth Kazekage and his entourage. “We weren’t subtle at all.”

They’re laughing again at the incredulity of it all. “Rasa’s going to be so pissed!” Obito laughs nervously, “and why didn’t anyone tell us the fucker can fly?”

“You Kamuied Baki!” Rin exclaims, “Right in front of Yashamaru! And the puppet users!”

“Was there something…. A little off about the red head?” Obito asks. “He didn’t seem to contribute much. He actually helped by being in the way so often against the old lady.”

Now that she thinks about it, she’s pretty sure the elder was the Lady Chiyo, Tsunade’s nemesis from the Second War. As for the red head, “He stabbed me in the face.”

“Well, yeah, I guess there’s that.”

Rin relents, “But yeah. I noticed that, too. He smiled at me. Like he knew a secret or something.”

“A spy?”

“Who would know us?”

Obito says quietly, “the Old Man. Zetsu. Any number of his missing nin minions.”

They’re suddenly not laughing now. Rin looks south, towards the village. “We need to get out of Wind.”

Obito grimaces. “I can Kamui us as far as I can, but….”

His own reserves aren’t unlimited. He has to be feeling it after abusing his mangekyo so much during the fight. He didn’t time out his intangibility but he has to be getting close. He also threw some major katon after using strong mokuton to fix her seal.

Should she fuss at him for the katon? She’d only seen one Fireball, but that is iconic enough to cause trouble, even if the other fire releases were basic.

Rin says instead, “You shouldn’t be walking. Not on that ankle.”

And not until his thigh’s stiffened back up again from where it’s gone all pulpy with blunt force trauma. Sunagakure will already be mobilizing against them. Rin fashions a sling bag from a blanket and swaddles the pot of tea snugly in it so she can carry it with her hands free. Obito hugs her with one arm, and they jump again, moving north towards Iwa, where Suna won’t dare follow. They land and he jumps again, then again, and they are close to the massive volcano now. Obito has Kamui’d them across almost half of the land of Wind.

He’s gasping now and his eye is bleeding again. Rin hates this, she really does, and she heals what she can, and they dig a shallow pit to rest up from the fight properly. After his eye is clear he looks at her unhappily. “That bastard scarred your nose.”

Rin feels the thin line across the bridge of her nose where the puppet struck her in the face. There’s another above her eyebrow. She says, “I don’t mind. It’s just scars.”

Obito doesn’t say anything to that, sulky fool, and she’s exhausted but manages to cast a small genjutsu over both of them so they can try to get some sleep. Her adrenaline is crashing, and her sleepless night catches up to her, but she takes first watch. Obito collapses with his ankle propped up on a little hill of sand.

When Rin finally goes to sleep, its late afternoon and her headache is part exhaustion, part aftereffect concussion. Head wounds are tricky; she knows she shouldn’t sleep, but what little of her Tailed Beast’s chakra that comes leaking out targets her injuries. She’s healing, she knows this, so with some sleep she can only heal faster.

It’s still oppressively hot, even as night falls. She feels marginally better and Obito’s swelling has gone down. If he’s in pain, he doesn’t show it. She checks them both over again, readministers an antibiotic and blood replenisher before they eat their rations and hydrate while watching the massive volcano ooze smoke and pour lave slowly over its sloping sides. They’re not close enough to see the fire of it, but it’s wider than it is tall, easy a mile in length, a curved slump the color of basalt against the red sand. Its smoke is the only cloud in the sky.

Obito tries walking after Rin splints his ankle nice and tight with a pair of pilfered chopsticks; even the utensils in Wind are pewter instead of wood. He’s wobbly and his face is pale, but he refuses to take another painkiller so soon after the first. It’s likely his mokuton burns it off faster than in a normal shinobi. Rin argues, but he’s stubborn about it as always.

There’s already sand in all her nooks and crannies. She may actually hate the desert.

Channeling chakra is tricky with her reserves so low, but she pools it to her feet and tries walking across the sand like a Suna shinobi. She gets the hang of it rather quickly; it’s not all that different from water walking or tree walking. Obito watches her before he copies her perfectly and the two hobble off across the dunes at a slow but steady pace, taking frequent breaks. It’s a good thing Wind is so vast, or Suna would have found them already. They’ll have sensors looking for them by now, but it helps they have no idea where to start looking, unless they somehow predict they’re going north. Rin had said Sachira was heading north while they were in Kusa, so it was possible they have that information. They’ll be investigating into the both of them by now, pulling their aliases apart at the seams. She hopes her coworkers aren’t in too much trouble.

In the morning, Rin’s seal gives a wrench and then her Bijuu is raging, sending waves of terror and hate crashing over her. Her seal is already slipping when Obito slaps his hand into hers, but it isn’t like it usually is. Her Bijuu had a taste of freedom earlier and wants more. He pushes back and it is with the strength of a hurricane, an ocean in storm, a focused attack that leaves her breathless and hunched over, and Obito in a panic as they wrestle back and forth, his mokuton weak from the desert, the both of them exhausted and in pain and the Bijuu none of these things.

It's not working. Obito grinds his mokuton into her and her chakra networks skitter and crash, red bubbling out over her stomach and then the panic sets in, the frantic realization that this may be it, that her seal is coming apart and they can’t stop it. It’s her enforced expiration date. The original point of the seal, a deadline unable to be pushed back any longer. She’s going to die. Her Bijuu is going to break free by tearing her to shreds in the process and then he’s going to kill Obito, who’s too tired to even Kamui himself away.

No, she thinks and it’s in the cadence of prayer, of a hundred hours kneeling with her mother as she beseeches the kami of land and sea and sky, of forest and storm and harvest. Please.

And she squeezes her eyes shut and drops into that lake in her mind, but it isn’t cool and calm and still. She drops like a stone, sinking fast, drowning, the currents swinging her this way and that, bubbles streaming from her mouth.

Rin’s drowning. The dam is breaking, all the water pouring out, and she’s drowning.

Something big moves through the water with her, something huge and hulking and gray. A single red eye blazes a burning crimson at her from underneath a heavily armored brow; massive, clawed paws swing through the water, and behind the impossibly big form agitate his tails. He’s big, almost too big to comprehend, and she looks him in the eye and pleads: Not Obito. Not like this. Not right now.

He listened before.

Their fear mingles. Their rage is the same: anger at the world that does this to Tailed Beasts, to the jinchuuriki to us. You are not my enemy. His single red eye stares at her and her breath burns in her chest, and suddenly it spins even more red, swirling with three black tomoe that twist into a black pinwheel, familiar. Obito’s mangekyo.

The rage sweeps through her, and the water churns red like blood, like it’s boiling. Her Bijuu’s roar is the only thing in the world.

Madara, she thinks or is it the Bijuu, but it’s Obito’s mangekyo, Obito’s pleading that comes muffled to her ears, and she feels like she’s been punched in the brainstem but suddenly she can breathe again, she isn’t drowning in a sea of fire, she’s looking straight into Obito’s active mangekyo while blood sheets down his face. Everything’s tinged in red. Even as the chakra cloak limning her recedes, the red doesn’t stop.

He's crying, begging her to come back, but she can’t move. She’s just as trapped in his gaze as she’d been in the lake. Inside her, something boils. And he hugs her and says, “Rin, Rin, it’s okay, Rin, please, you’re okay.”

It is death and madness to look an Uchiha in the eye, everyone knows that, but she’d never once feared it from Obito. His mangekyo deactivates like a muscle that just gives out and she can suddenly move again. He flinches when she blinks at him and numbly reaches for her seal, patting it through her shirt, trying to comprehend what just happened.

He’s still crying, “Rin, are you okay, Rin? Please tell me you’re okay.”

She swallows, “did you…did you just… genjutsu the Bijuu…through me?”

He lets her go and says, “I didn’t know what else to do. It was, you were dying, Rin, and I just…”

He’s not looking at her. He can’t bear to look at her. He’d panicked, reacted on any instinct he had. Rin says carefully, “That wasn’t Tsukuyomi.”

“I don’t know what it was,” Obito says, bloody tears tracking through the dirt on his face, running oddly through his scarring. “I just wanted it to stop.”

She feels… weird, but okay. She’s alive, which is more than she expected. She’s still holding the pot of tea. “Obito,” she says, “Look at me.”

He won’t do it. “Obito.” She says.

He finally looks at her, flinching, red tracking through his scar furrows, but she doesn’t look away. This is destroying him. Rin says, quietly, “thank you.”

They’d scared each other. Rin cries a little too and his face is sticky with blood and there’s a roar in her ears from her Bijuu but it feels very far away from her now. She’d seen him, her Bijuu, seen him inside her, behind the seal; had felt his rage, looked him in the eye only to see it reflect Obito’s.

“He’s a turtle,” she says wonderingly and Obito looks at her like she’s finally gone crazy, and also like it’s his fault. “My Bijuu,” she explains. “I saw him, when the seal almost failed. He’s a turtle, a big gray turtle, with a massive, armored shell, and his tails…” she mentally recalls them, counts them in her memory. “Three Tails,” she breathes out. “He’s the Sanbi. I’m jinchuuriki to the Sanbi.”

“You actually saw him?” Obito says and there’s still that little thrill of fear in his words, like he can’t believe Rin’s brain hasn’t melted out of her ears.

Rin nods, “I did. He’s huge and gray and….” Scared, she doesn’t say. She’s protective of him, she realizes. He’d looked her in the eye as she begged for her teammate’s life, and she’d thought the word us.

“The Sanbi, huh?” Obito says, “Wonder which one’s in the jar.”

Rin has one hand on her seal like she can hold the Sanbi inside her and the other resting on the lid of the pot of tea with Suna’s Bijuu. She isn’t even sure why she’s still crying.

She heals Obito’s eye once she gets her breath back and she’s sitting back on the sand when she sees them: movement to the west, a blur against the sand. Obito follows her gaze and his sharingan spins dangerously. “Suna nin. Three of them.”

“Guess they felt all that, huh?”

“Guess so.” He stands with a grimace. “Time to go.”

At least they’re carrying a convenient excuse for why someone might feel Bijuu chakra around her. They Kamui away before the shinobi get close enough to engage. But now they know what direction to direct their search in. They’re grim as they march further north. Obito can’t take much more, she suspects, but they have to keep dodging search teams left and right. They have a sensor on their tail and it’s damn annoying to keep shaking them. Rin can sense that each Kamui is covering a smaller and smaller distance as Obito wears out.

They take shelter in the shade of a massive dune around early afternoon. It’s getting rockier, with outcroppings of rough sandstone among the sand. The sand is less fine, more coarse, small pebbles mixed in. Small tufts of grass peek from the cracks and the lizards and snakes are back as well, which is why they’re in the shade from the dune and not the rock. Obito is tiredly glad for even the sparsest plant life, and he sits on the ground, emptying the sand from his sandals while Rin sprawls in the shade sipping water and keeping sweat out of her eyes.

She’s watching the mice scurry and hop around the crags while Obito fiddles with a blade of dry grass. She’s eyeing a curious white furred ferret that’s snuffling around the cracks after the mice. When it raised its head to sniff at them, she’s surprised to see it only has one eye and the other glitters with intelligence.

She’s instantly suspicious. “Obito,” she asks. “Does that ferret have….chakra?”

Obito squints at it just in time for it to stand up on its hind legs and pull out a giant scythe longer than it is tall. He summons a black and red vest and a dark green eyepatch as well as several smaller scythes. Obito scrambles through the sand towards her just as the ferret gives a war cry and launches itself at them faster than Rin’s eyes can follow.

“Kamatari!”

“Fuck!” Obito yelps and dives at her. Sand flies. She clutches the captive Bijuu to her chest as Obito catches her knee in his hand and wrenches.

They roll into Kamui and spiral out almost entirely into a cactus. Rin gets jabbed in the leg and Obito swears and then groans, needles halfway through his hand. “Hey look,” he says numbly. “Cactus.”

Rin sits up. “Did a ferret just try to fucking behead us?”

Obito picks a needle out of his palm with his teeth and spits it out. “Who the hell has ferret summons? I swear this is so unfair.”

She can almost feel Kakashi’s derision if he knew. Obito is despairing. “If I get killed by a ferret, just dump my body in the desert. I don’t deserve a pyre.”

Rin huffs out a tired laugh. “If you let a ferret kill you, I’ll never forgive you. Think of the jokes!”

“That thing was quick! Did you see it go?”

Rin hadn’t even been able to track it with her eyes. They only survived due to Obito’s motion-sensitive dojutsu and his time/space technique. She knows how lethal Kakashi’s hounds are, has seen what Minato’s toad summons can do, but there’s a hysterical part of her mind that’s just thinking: a fucking ferret. It was snow white! It had a little eyepatch! A little squeaky voice!

“I thought it was cute!” Rin laughs, “And it tried to kill us!”

“It totally would have!” Obito says, spitting out more cactus spines. “Sneaky little bastard.”

Rin picks out the cactus needles in her leg, wincing. “Um…” Obito says sheepishly, and she looks over at him questioningly. He says, “I lost my shoes.”

His feet are bare. Rin thinks again? She says, “How?”

“I was getting the sand out!” he says defensively. “There wasn’t time to grab them!”

Those sandals were expensive, and the sand’s hot enough to burn bare feet. She has no idea how they’re going to replace them. “The ferret has them now.”

Obito sulks. The tussle has smashed his tiny succulent almost flat, half of it bruised to pulp. He fixes it up while Rin fusses, kicking rocks. Barefoot, down an arm. Like they’re back to square one. She’s tired and frustrated and has almost been killed by a ferret wearing a vest that been more stylish than her own, with better weapons. “This isn’t even close to being fair.”

Obito looks at her critically. “Now who’s being needlessly morose?”

“This is appropriate,” she decides. “We were just attacked by a ferret who got the drop on us.”

“Kakashi would be ashamed.”

“Are you kidding me? Maybe we’d finally get to see him laugh.”

Obito looks at her strangely. “He doesn’t laugh?”

This is why they don’t talk about Kakashi. Rin says, simply, “You were the one always telling the jokes.”

“Oh.” He says.

She tosses the water at him, and he drinks while she surveys the land. Still desert, as far as she can see. There’s a dark spot in the air above them. “Damn it,” she says. “Another hawk. We need to move.”

They hadn’t slept the night before and it’s getting dark again. Maybe they can lose the tail in the night. It’s not likely. That sensor must be talented and have a massive range. Or Obito’s jumps are shrinking. It’s both, she knows this, but she’s trying to stay hopeful.

The next morning they’re exhausted. There’s still a hawk circling them and a sensor on their ass. She’s suspicious of every mouse and lizard and snake and Obito’s just as paranoid. He’s doing better than she is. He doesn’t need as much sleep as she does, but the chakra exhaustion affects him worse. Whenever Suna nin catch up, instead of fighting, they just Kamui away. Fuck fighting. It’s time for strategic retreats. She’s not sure of all the differences between shinobi and samurai, but she thinks that’s one of them, the consistently rewarding willingness to just fuck right on off.

Regardless, the constant running is wearing on them both. Her seal is starting to act up again as her Bijuu gets more restless, like he’s less cowed by her teammate as time goes by and the seal degrades.

Obito’s still heavily limping and Rin’s feet are dragging. She’s too short to give him her shoulder as a crutch so he can hobble faster. It’s getting harder to keep her chakra stable enough to run across the sand without sinking. They run right into an ambush and don’t even realize until the kunai whip at them and she dodges on instinct but a massive doton rumbles under her feet and camouflaged Suna shinobi pop up out of nowhere. She stumbles into Obito as stone pillars erupt from the ground and try to flatten them. Someone flings lightning at her and she sends a Water Bullet back to redirect it and feels the chakra drain immensely as her head spins. Obito drags her into Kamui and they stagger out into scrubland that’s been trapped to hell and back.

“They’ve pinned down our trajectory,” Obito gripes as an explosive tag ignites and he jumps them again.

He’s panting as they exit. Rin’s head throbs. Everything hurts. “We’ve got to throw them off. Go sideways or something. Aim towards Ame.”

“Or I could just kill all the birds,” he says. “Even from this distance I might be able to hit them with a genjutsu.”

It’s much too late for that, Rin thinks. Ranged genjutsu are draining. If only they could get some fucking rest, she thinks and Bijuu chakra bubbles out, dark and corrosive, Killing Intent rising. Obito grabs her and they made the snake seal but nothing’s happening. They stare at each other. But…this doesn’t feel like her.

“Oh, shit,” She pulls the pot of tea from the sling. One of the suppression tags has been damaged in the explosion. “It’s not the Sanbi.”

Obito bites his lip and halfheartedly sends some mokuton at the jar, but it does nothing. They watch to see if it will suddenly explode into a Tailed Beast and as the red chakra bubbles out, the Teapot suddenly sprouts a weird head that roars, “I am Shukaku! Tremble before me and die!”

“What the fuck,” Obito says as the head continues shouting threats at them in a bombastic, almost drunken tirade.

Rin stares at it incredulously. She squints, “He’s… a tanuki?”

“I am Shukaku of the Sand, most esteemed Ichibi, the most powerful of all Tailed Beasts!” His rage pours out but he doesn’t seem able to use any jutsu against them. “Release me and accept your deaths, you toe-eyed curs!”

Obito says, shakily, “Pretty rude tanuki. Are those curse marks?”

The Bijuu’s head that sticks out of the tea kettle wears the lid like a hat. He’s tan as the sand with a dark tanuki mask and pointed ears. He’s covered in dark blue seals.

Rin says, “Hello, Shukaku sama, I am Nohara Rin, jinchuuriki of the Sanbi, and this is Uchiha Obito. We’re rescuing you from Uchiha Madara, who’s after all the Bijuu to reflect an Infinite Tsukuyomi off the moon and take over the world.”

He just roars more insults at them: about how he hates them, hates all humans, is going to break free and kill them all, with highly inventive swears.

Obito stares in shock and dismay. “It’s evil.”

“He’s not!” Rin says hotly.

“He wants to kill us.”

“Die, bastards!” Shukaku yells. “I demand you release my most esteemed self and submit!”

“He totally is!” Obito almost yells, pointing wildly at the Ichibi. “Look at him!”

The tanuki is foaming at the mouth in his rage and desire to kill them. “He’s just….” Rin says, thinking of her own Bijuu, “He’s blustering. He’s vulnerable and scared. You’d be spouting off threats too if you were stuck in a tea kettle.”

The red chakra is burning her hands and her own Bijuu kicks inside her. At the touch of the Sanbi’s chakra that comes leaking out through her seal, the Ichibi just screams louder. Her headache racks up another notch.

Obito says, “He’ll draw them right to us! Can we, I don’t know, cram him back in there? Just for now?”

Rin hugs him to her, “No! He’s just being difficult.”

The tanuki tries to bite. Obito just stares.

She tries to talk to the Bijuu, but he just wails about murdering them some more. “Please, Shukaku sama, could you quiet down a little? Shinobi from Sunagakure, the ones who sealed you in this kettle, are on our tail. They were going to seal you inside a jinchuuriki, and we stopped them.”

He ignores them aside from insulting her entire bloodline. He’s not responding to anything she’s saying. When she squints, she notices that his eyes aren’t tracking her.

Obito’s patience is wearing thin. He’s tearing at his hair in stress. “We rescued the Bijuu, and it wants to kill us. It’s an evil tanuki, and it wants to kill us. Does yours want to kill us, too? Wait, don’t tell me. I can’t take it.”

This is quickly approaching Uchiha levels of drama. Rin’s just as tired and stressed and she snaps, “Not important. Madara wants to kill us too, and all of Wind Country. It doesn’t look like he can do much from inside the pot of tea, not unless we lose more of the seals. I don’t think he can hurt us, and those ninja certainly can.”

“Your hands are already blistering,” Obito argues. “And he’s shouting bloody murder at the top of his lungs!”

The aggressive uproar continues, words her mother would faint to hear. Shukaku is belligerent, but Rin carefully tucks him back into the sling. “Just ignore him. Let’s get out of here.”

“We’re just going to carry him around?” Obito asks incredulously.

This is the worst possible plan. Rin is too tired to figure something else out. “For now. Let’s just get out of Wind and we’ll figure the rest out.”

They run, their retreat punctuated by Shukaku yelling about how he’s going to paint the desert red with their blood. He threatens to eat them, which is a new threat Rin’s never had someone be literal about.

It’s even harder to dodge the shinobi with a tea kettle spouting off insults and Killing Intent. Rin shakes her head at him sadly but on they go, pushing their way north through scrubland. The plant life helps Obito sense the oncoming attacks but there are so many Suna nin swarming them. Every team in the northern half of the country must have been redirected to intercept them and recover their Tailed Beast.

A puppet goes right through Obito and sails into a cactus before bouncing back towards Rin. The moon rises and Shukaku just keeps yelling increasingly vile threats and insults, interspersed with how great he is. If he were a person, Rin thinks she’d hate him. But she feels too sorry for him now to muster up the energy to hate someone else boxed in with nowhere to go.

Another fucking puppet shears an inch off Rin’s hair when she’s slow to dodge and Obito’s sharingan’s almost constantly activated, even with his mokuton. But they have to be approaching the border. Suna’s getting more desperate in their attacks, even as Obito just phases right through them and drags Rin along with him into Kamui.

They haven’t slept properly in three days. It’s the hardest she’s pushed herself since the war, where she once sutured a sucking chest wound with ninja wire and used a tourniquet made from the packaging of blood replenisher pills on a chuunin hit with a blast from Iwa’s explosion corps while taking fire in a trench, so chakra exhausted the world blurred into blood and fire before her eyes. She can handle a few scrapes with her eyes closed. She can run while micro napping. This isn’t even as bad as she’s had it.

They’re chewing her old soldier pills from her currier mission gone pear-shaped, but it just increases Rin’s heartrate without making her feel any more awake. It makes Obito even more jumpy and paranoid. She offers water to Shukaku but he just spits in her face and she assumes that as a chakra construct, he doesn’t need sustenance like that and leaves him alone, tuning out the abuse.

The water’s running out as well. They can’t risk an outpost and Obito’s suiton’s just draining him further. They can’t sustain this. It’s a race to the border, which is sure to be fortified. They’ll need to jump right past it, into Stone, or into Key. Whichever, Rin doesn’t care. It would be war for Wind to invade any of the smaller nations. Iwa won’t stand for their neighbors to be taken over by their enemies, and the other Elemental Nations will see it as a power grab by Suna and respond accordingly. If they can just make it out of the country, they can rest, regroup, replan. Figure out their next move. If a zetsu jumps them right now Rin’s not sure they could take it.

The scrubland thickens, gets craggier with rocks. Stunted, twisted trees grow scraggly from the crags, crumbly and unstable in a way that makes them both nervous. Unlike the broad leafed deciduous of Fire, these trees are needled, tine conifers, shortleaf pines. Iwa is north, she knows, but isn’t Key and Stone and Bear supposed to be a greenbelt? Or is this still the desert’s influence?

The further north they go, the more trees appear. They reach out branches and thorns and snag Obito’s pants, his hood, his scalp. But his limp is easing up and he’s even breathing easier. When she heals the muscle around his ankle some more, she finds the bone strengthening faster, osteoclasts almost manic with activity, and his arm feels more solid, more securely attached to his shoulder. He twitches the fingers experimentally and the short nubs respond to his chakra in a way that make them both hopeful that maybe he’s saved himself from regrowing the whole thing.

There’s a high ridgeline in the distance. They’re out of water. Out of time.

Obito pulls to a stop as they trudge along. He’s focused on the distance sharp crags. “Multiple shinobi, and traps on the trees up ahead. Might be nearing the border.”

Hope flickers through her even as Shukaku promises to squeeze her until she pops then smear her slop across the sand. “Thank the kami,” she says.

“We’re north enough, I think,” Obito says. “I’ve been aiming us at Stone. It’s got to be around here somewhere.”

She pats Shukaku tiredly and thoughtlessly on the head and he almost bites her fingers off. He’s the only one of them not running out of steam.

They draw carefully closer. There’s some kind of structure on one of the ridges. “An outpost?”

Obito squints, “has to be. That’s the border. And there’s multiple teams in the area. One feels weird to me, probably some kekkei genkai. Maybe another summons.”

There’s a hawk perched nonchalantly on a treetop about a hundred yards from them. It plumes its feathers tauntingly at them. She’s certain it’s the one that’s been circling them for days, Takamaru, Suna’s most famous ninja hawk. Rin sighs. They’d be able to take them usually, but not like this. Obito picks up on her thoughts and sighs right back. “I’m going to sleep for a week after this.”

“We’ll ask Shukaku sama to keep watch. Yell if we’re about to be attacked.”

The tanuki yells. They ignore him, Obito stubbornly, Rin politely. Obito says, “It feels like plains after, or farmland. Flat and open, covered in grass. No cover. Vulnerable to long ranged attacks, fuuton-driven arrows are likely.”

“Or flying murder ferrets.”

“Can’t forget the murder ferrets.”

Obito sighs again and tugs a thornbush away from his pants. His feet are scratched raw and bruised from walking on rocks since he stopped channeling chakra to them to preserve his strength. A flower blooms under one foot.

“Hold on,” he says and activates his mangekyo. “Here we go.”

His Kamui is sluggish; it feels like it’s taking longer to spiral into it and longer to spit them out, information she files away to contemplate later. They come out just on the other side of the ridgeline, clear of the border, in the knee-high wire grass of the plains, and the shinobi on the ridgeline launch their attack, lobbing long range ninjutsu at them and weapons, arrows sheathed in fuuton chakra. Wind shears at them and Obito retaliates with katon while Rin dodges a poisoned arrow. Something big flies at them and Rin calls, “is that a fucking puppet?”

It unfolds in midair into a clockwork bird with knives as wings, spewing poison and senbon. She protects the tanuki in the sling and they run for it, haring off through the grassland away from the border and deeper into what has to be Stone. There’s a low smear of a treeline in the distance and they sprint through sawgrass and stickers and thorns with none of the grace of trained shinobi.

When they breach the treeline Obito gasps and the trees twist into a barrier as mokuton builds a shelter. Rin puts her hands on her knees and they pull in air. She gasps, “are they after us?”

Obito says, “They didn’t cross the border. We’re alone.”

“Stone?”

“Just a hired patrol team. Too confused by the Suna attack; I think it might even be a Suna-contracted team.”

That could be a problem; there might be Wind shinobi already legally in Stone who are able to take them out. “Stone contracts Wind on its own border? Why not Iwa in the south and Suna in the north? Or Kusa, even.”

“Curs!” the Ichibi bellows. “I am Shukaku! Die, simple scum!”

“Thanks for the input, Shukaku sama,” Rin says tiredly. She asks Obito, “Are we safe here or do we need to move?”

“Let’s just rest an hour or two and then we can move. Stone’s not militarized, but contracted Suna shinobi will be jumping at the bit to take us out. Iwa might even be active in the area.”

“Or Konoha.”

Obito just slides down to his back on the leaves and lets the trees cover them. After they get their breath back, they eat a small meal. There’s no water and it’s a huge problem, but now that they’re out of the desert they should be able to find a creek or pond or something somewhere. For now, they just rest, Rin grabbing a catnap while cradling the tanuki in his kettle.

It ends up being four hours they sit around napping and resting. Rin heals Obito’s feet and he’s too tired to even argue. “I don’t want them to track us from here,” he says. “One more Kamui, and then we’re walking.”

They end up more deeply in the forest. Stone is mixed deciduous trees with conifers and random huge boulders and rocks and gray granite scattered about. They camp up against one such giant stone and the forest works itself into a hostile architecture around them. A small creek trickles through the trees and they barely wait for the iodine drops to purify it before they drink and drink and drink. Obito traps the campsite and Rin tosses a genjutsu over it and only then do they feel safe enough to unpack bedrolls and Obito sinks into an exhausted sleep, so deep he doesn’t even twitch. Rin sets Shukaku on a natural shelf next to her and studies him with bleary eyes.

The Tailed Beast has star-shaped pupils and yellow sclera. While Obito snores, Rin attempts to talk to the captive Bijuu, but he’s not being very cooperative. He’s loud and he’s crass and he doesn’t react to anything she says in any meaningful way. She’s not sure how aware he is of his surroundings. He hasn’t look directly at her for long enough for her to be sure. Maybe the seals alter his perceptions? He’s a massive chakra construct shoved into a tea kettle covered in curse marks and forbidden fuuinjutsu. He might not even be able to see her or hear her.

But he can speak, and that’s more than most people believed Bijuu are capable of. That points to a consciousness, a personality, no matter how twisted. Maybe a century of captivity has made him crazy. Maybe he isn’t fabled-rampaging-Bijuu-crazy, maybe he is solitary-confinement-insane. Or just naturally a little skewed.

Obito sleeps 10 hours straight. It’s the most Rin’s seen him sleep since awakening his mokuton. He wakes up in the morning and lights them a campfire and they have a hot meal for the first time in days and Rin curls up on her own bedroll after Obito reinforces her seal, easier than it had been in over a month, since they’re back in a forest. He sets his little succulent as far away from the tanuki as he can, like Shukaku is a threat to his tiny plant.

Rin sleeps heavy. Obito lets her sleep until the next night, when hunger and thirst wake her and they feast and drink as much as they can. Her chakra reserves are recovering faster than they normally would, and she thanks her Bijuu. Obito’s feeling better, if babysitting their other Bijuu is wearing on his every last nerve. For a kid raised in an uptight clan, he sure picked up civilian-bent cursing from somewhere. Rin’s not guilty in the slightest.

“He’s a demon,” Obito says despairingly. “Believe it or not, he actually calmed down when you woke up. I think he likes you best.”

Rin says, “I’m not sure how aware he is of what’s going on. It’s like he’s shouting blindly through a door.”

“Think it’s the seals?”

“Could be,” Rin says. “We could…”

“That’s a terrible idea.”

“Yeah,” Rin agrees. “I kinda wanna do it anyway. Just to see.”

“He wants to kill us.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

They look at the rest of the suppression seals on the tea kettle. Maybe if Rin breaks another one, the Bijuu could see them, they could actually interact. Or maybe he’d kill them. Honestly, it’s a toss-up.

The Ichibi verbally lashes out at them again and Rin lets her chakra trickle over him and lets herself imagine that he calms slightly. Rin says, “He has a name. Not just ‘Ichibi’, or ‘One Tail’. He calls himself Shukaku of the Sand.”

“You want to know if the Sanbi has a name?”

“Why not? Shukaku sama does.” Rin says, “and I was right about him being a desert animal, with a chakra nature. He’s literally made of sand! And the Sanbi’s a turtle, a water natured animal. The Kyuubi’s a fox. Maybe they all have names, all have personalities. They might be sentient.”

Obito says skeptically, “maybe. If they are, I’m not sure it changes much. The Old Man isn’t going to stop his plans just because it means killing the Bijuu on top of the jinchuuriki.”

“No,” Rin agrees sadly. “He’s not.” Madara stomped over an entire nation of civilians, sicced the Nine Tails on the Leaf, tried to kill their founder. The Bijuu being sentient won’t bother him any.

They remain in their camp for two solid days, healing, recovering. Suna kicked their ass and they both know it. They fought the Kazekage but they hadn’t won. Mission accomplished, but they’re unlikely to ever face a captive Bijuu again. The rest will be jinchuuriki, maybe even on high alert if Suna blabs.

Obito focuses on working with his arm/hand while they rest. The fingers are coming back online and Rin suspects that must feel super weird, if not painful. At the end of the second day, he can almost get the fingers to wrap completely around the handle of a kunai. Its more than Rin ever thought he’d be able to have.

Rin focuses on sleeping and trying to break through to Shukaku. The Tailed Beast inspires insomnia by yelling all through her naps but she’s getting better at tuning out all his abuse. She studies the fuuinjutsu on the kettle, tries to make sense of the dark blue curse marks covering his head. She carefully trickles chakra over him, but when the Sanbi leaks out that just makes him even more catatonic.

She’s taken to meditating whenever her seal loosens, trying to glimpse the Sanbi again, to try and communicate with him. She pictures the lake in her mind, wills it still and calm, searches for that single eye. She whispers Sanbi sama, it’s Rin. Can you hear me? I want to see you. To talk to you. I’d like to know your name. But whenever she feels she gets close, the seal unwinds. It’s quite possibly killing her to try this and Obito is frazzled by her repeated attempts. He doesn’t understand the connection she feels with the Bijuu, even though he’d been kept underground for years. She immediately regrets that thought; it’s unkind and unfair; Obito doesn’t deserve that from her, even as just a passing thought.

She pronounces his ankle healed and they walk through the trees, Rin carrying Shukaku in his sling. There’s no point to being sneaky when he won’t stop screaming about wiping out all of humanity under his might, so they just walk. Rin’s back to half-capacity and Obito must be recovering chakra as well. He’s wrapped bandages around his feet to help him travel and his right arm steadies him against trees that try to hug him back as they pass.

It’s a blessing that Wind is so barren, otherwise Obito would have been outed as a mokuton user, which points right back at Konoha. Kamui isn’t immediately recognizable as a mangekyo technique, not unless someone also gets a glimpse of his dojutsu, and they’ve taken great pains to avoid that, or kill the ones that do, like the Suna ANBU caught in the blast of the detonating seal. He’d used katon against them but was recorded using suiton in the greenhouses. He’d picked up some new tricks and hopefully he wasn’t immediately recognizable as an Uchiha.

Rin’s another story. She has no idea how Suna will compartmentalize the fact that she’d let loose with chakra blades and a successful utilization of a chakra string technique, which has to have the Playhouse pissed as hell. She’s used B rank suiton as well as iroyo ninjutsu. Nothing particularly pointing back to a village, but she’s morbidly curious to see what Suna’s new Bingo Book entries will read. Hopefully she hasn’t outed herself as a jinchuuriki, that all the Killing Intent is traced back to Shukaku.

Sachira and Tobi might raise red flags all over the Elemental Nations, if it gets out that they’d snatched a Bijuu. If it includes good pictures of them, Konoha might even recognize them as Obito and Rin. They look different enough to fool anyone who hadn’t known them very well, but even under the bandages and hood and face drape, Rin knows Obito. Even with short hair and a plain face, Obito knows Rin. Kakashi’d know immediately. Minato and Kushina as well. The other Uchiha, Rin’s parents. Maybe even their old academy classmates and other friends.

Rin says, “We’ll be in the Bingo Book for sure after this.”

Over the shouting from the teapot, Obito makes a weird noise in his throat. “Oh, yeah.”

“Maybe with pictures. Me for sure, after all my work at the hospital.”

Obito knows what that has to mean. He tugs his hood closer around his face. “We’ll just have to be careful.”

They may have survived a fight against the Kazekage, but their sensei is a whole other story. He uses a time/space technique too, on top of being a perfect Sage. If Konoha finds out, they are so far beyond screwed. It will break their team’s heart, but they’ll do what needs to be done. There's no forgiveness for nukenin.

That night when they camp and the croaking of frogs fill the night air as summer tumbles into fall the further north they go, Rin’s paranoid at the thought of them being one of Minato’s toads come to spy. And they thought Takamaru and the ferret were bad! What the hell are they going to do if Gama-fucking-bunta came after them? Rin’s seen the boss summon level mountains.

She feels better in the morning, proof that the reintroduction of sleep and water are working their wonders. Her reserves are recovering and Obito’s twitchy but happy to be in the woods again. She does regular checkups on his arm, and he reports that he has some feeling in it and when he flexes, the fingers respond to his chakra. The hand itself is still clumsy and partially unformed, but he’ll have full use of it soon enough.

They’ve been staying away from civilization and people. Stone is scattered with small civilian villages but Shukaku’s presence isn’t something they feel like they can ever explain so they stick to the woods, where they ultimately feel safer. Rin’s getting used to carrying the kettled Bijuu around but she knows it’s not sustainable. How are they supposed to infiltrate the other shinobi villages with a pissed of Tailed Beast incessantly spouting murder at them?

Rin says, “We can’t just hide him somewhere. He wouldn’t be safe.”

Obito doesn’t say well we can’t take him into Earth with us. He says, “maybe we could seal him in like a tree? Use mokuton to suppress his chakra and let the trees protect him?”

“Would that even work? Especially if you weren’t physically here to rally them?”

There’s no good option. If he were quiet in his pot, she could simply tote him around but he’s too loud to contend with, too obvious an opportunity for passing shinobi. They can’t leave him; they can’t take him with them. There is no place to keep him safe from the zetsu and Madara. No one they can trust to watch him. No way to seal him more securely in the pot of tea so he’d shut up. Rin carefully pets the tanuki’s sandy head, cheerfully ignoring his violence and slurs.

They think about the problem throughout the day, Obito suggesting creative contingencies, but they haven’t learned anything substantial about fuuinjutsu since rescuing him. It all keeps coming down to seals: either his or Rin’s. The curse marks covering him are a big clue, one that Rin doesn’t like in the slightest.

She remembers the sluggish way that Kamui pulled them in when Obito was close to total chakra exhaustion. The slow way it had let them go. When they’d spiraled and stretched between places. Between the space. Underneath the underneath.

Kamui is a separate dimension that only Obito can access. Rin asks, “What would happen if you tried to Kamui without a destination in mind?”

When he lets attacks pass through him, they go into Kamui. Objects. Things going into his Kamui realm and then coming back out again. Things like kunai, puppets. Things like a kettle of tea that holds the angry Ichibi captive.

Obito stares at her, at the way she’s petting the tanuki on the ears while he tries to kill her hands. “You want to hide the Bijuu in Kamui?”

He’s always been smart. Not a lot of people had seen it when he was younger because he’d been kind of goofy and a whole lot hyperactive. But it never fooled Rin. She’s always known his potential, even before he wanted to be Hokage, back when he’d been just a crybaby ninja with eyedrops and goggles, bullied and self-conscious about his lack of sharingan.

She nods and he mulls it over. Hide Shukaku in an entirely separate plane of existence. Take that Madara. Bet the zetsu can’t reach him there. “Is it possible?”

Obito thinks it over. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I can use Kamui like that. Even if I get him in, what if we can’t get him back out again? He’d be trapped there forever.”

An eternity in a jar. Lightning in a bottle. A lake in her soul. Obito, in a cave filled with clones. Rin says, “I think it’s centered on your eye. Your mangekyo. It might mean keeping him in your actual physical eyeball.”

It just sounds like a bad idea. Obito reaches out and a tree branch sets itself helpfully in his hand. He strips a few leaves from it and says, “I could try it with this. See if I can drop some leaves in, get them back out. Without getting myself stuck.”

“You think you might be stuck?”

“Well, it’s only operated from the outside. Maybe once I’m inside it, I can’t influence it anymore.”

There was always something about Kamui that felt incomplete to Rin. Rules that it didn’t seem like he should have to follow. Weird limitations. She remembers the Susanoo sludging around him. What if he needs two eyeballs to use Kamui like that? One to enter, and another to exit?

“Wait!” Rin bites her lip. “It was just an idea.”

Obito says, “It’s not a bad one. If it works, problem solved. We’d potentially have a nice little hidey-hole too, if we ever need some R&R. Imagine if we could have taken a break in the desert, cooled out heels in Kamui for a few days. Utterly unreachable.”

Rin says, “You might need both eyes. Like the Susanoo. You could be trapped.”

“Oh.”

But as the day goes on, she can see Obito considering it. He experiments with small stones, skipping them through his torso, through his eye, letting them come out the other side. Living things come out still alive, everything unharmed by Kamui acting on it. Rin has been Kamuied dozens of times along with Obito and they are both fine. Baki had recovered quickly enough to break bones within the three second window.

That night, as they sit in a new campsite watching some rabbits Obito successfully snared roast over the fire, he says, “I think we should try it.”

Rin found some herbs and brewed a tea of some sort. It’s bitter and astringent, but more flavorful than water. Obito refused to drink it just from the smell. She sips it slowly from her cup and says, “It’s a huge risk.”

She’s a hypocrite. Obito is kind enough not to point it out. “Yep. It is.”

“How are your chakra reserves?”

“Almost back to normal.”

Rin breathes out a deep breath, cooling the tea in her hands. He’s not just risking his life. He’s risking their mission. She’s not sure she can do this without him. Not with her seal like it is. But if he’s sure enough he’ll be safe….. “You’ll be safe?”

His eye is dark. He’s holding a leafy branch in his right hand, loosely clasped in stiff, bandage-wrapped fingers. A part of her wants to agree that he just might be able to do anything, but part of her believed him dead for years and lived with that.

He says, “I promise, Rin, it doesn’t work like that. Kamui is my ability. My mangekyo. If I can alter its use, we need to know. Kamui is mine. I can do this.”

She doesn't know if its newfound confidence or that stubborn Uchiha pride. But damn it all if she doesn’t believe him. Her voice is small. “Okay. Just come back.”

The same thing he’d begged her when she went slipping too far into the lake, when her seal was coming undone. Come back, just come back to me, please. This shouldn’t feel like that moment, but it does.

Obito carefully selects a fist-sized rock off the ground and the branch in his other hand. On second thought, he carefully removes his potted succulent from his kunai pouch and sets it on the ground next to Rin. He grins at her with a here-goes-nothing attitude. “See ya on the other side.”

She can feel him activate his mangekyo; even with the heat of the fire, it blazes. The fire itself stirs higher, the trees groaning overhead. Obito’s eye narrows and he warps himself into Kamui, a tight spiral that sucks him away, centered on his pupil, the dangerously spinning pinwheel that subdued a Bijuu not even a week ago. It’s slower than usual, and she tracks his form as it lurches and twists, and then he’s gone.

The fire dies down. The trees stop their wavering. Shukaku doesn’t quite shut up, but Rin tunes him out. She meditates. She waits. Obito does not reappear.

She’s cold. The panic is not immediate. He might just need to rest a while before coming back. Or he was experimenting in his little realm. Maybe Kamui spit him out in a different place entirely and he has to take a minute to get himself back to Rin. In her kunai pouch is a peach blossom and a tiny succulent sits at her feet. She cradles Shukaku and almost starts rocking the kettle like he’s a fussy baby.

She thinks of the monks in the desert on their Path and she prays. The security hymn is entrenched in her core, her mother whispering lilting traveling mercies in her ear before her deployment. Its some of her favorite melodies; they’ve never sounded so tense before.

After twenty long minutes, the air next to her distorts and deposits her teammate neatly back in his place next to her. He’s bleeding from his eye again, but he’s laughing and he sweeps Rin up to her feet, spilling her tea, and spins her around, Shukaku clumsy and screaming in her arms.

“It works!” He yells in excitement, “Kamui really is a separate dimension! It’s a real place that I can go!”

Rin is lightheaded from the relief. She wipes at the blood on his face, “What’s it like?”

Obito says, “Really weird actually. Not like here at all. It’s very…rectangular. Like it’s made of a bunch of random rectangles, in random sizes and arrangements. It’s made of some weird kind of rock, so I think I could manipulate it with doton. We could store anything in there! I did some experimenting and there’s nothing organic at all. Just the weird rectangles. It’s perfectly safe!”

“Incredible!” Rin says and his excitement catches up to her. Obito even pats the Ichibi on his lid hat and laughs at the teeth.

This is a huge win. They really needed something to go right for once. “How did it feel?”

She checks his mangekyo and repairs the overworked tenketsu. He blinks at her and says, “No more draining than a big Kamui jump. I think it’s easier to use it as time/space than to try to physically access it as a time/space in itself.”

The possibilities are coming to them both. A potential bolt hole. An emergency exit where no one can follow them. A safe hiding place for Shukaku. Unreachable to anyone except her teammate. Sealed off from the entire world.

Obito says, “I think maybe I can store weapons in there, summon them to this realm. How useful could it be if I could launch kunai at an enemy from my mangekyo?”

It’s a terrifying image. She laughs in glee. Of course, he’s already planning how to weaponize it. “This is great!”

Obito says, “Shukaku should be fine in there. There’s nothing that can hurt him, and he doesn’t eat or anything. We can check on him occasionally, just to make sure, but I think this solves our angry tagalong problem.”

Rin hugs the angry tagalong to her chest. She’s gotten used to carrying him around with her, to healing the blisters that his corrosive chakra cause on her hands, to tuning out his tirades about genocide and his own superiority. The Ichibi is part of their little rebellion and in a weird way she’s going to miss the tanuki.

“Can you do another trip tonight or should you rest first?” She knows it’s safer to hide him away as soon as possible, before enemy nin or zetsu finds them, but she needs to be sure Obito’s safe.

Obito flares his chakra, testing his reserves. “I can do another jump.” His eye glints at her, “Want to visit a different dimension?”

Rin grins, “Boy, do I!”

He graciously offers his arm like a gentleman at court. She takes a firm hold on Shukaku and the world twists away and after a terrifying second of directionless darkness, she’s in Kamui, that same black void stretching endlessly on all around her, populated only by…rectangles, of a weird blue-green color. They are sitting on one, in a cavernous room made up of the same fractals, endlessly repeating in rectangular geometry.

On a rectangular table pillar sits the rock from Stone, and a branch. “Oh, good.” Obito says, “I didn’t want to enter at some other random place here.”

This is…a lot to take in. Rin crouches to feel the surface of the shape below her. It’s hard and solid, unlike any earth she knows, but maybe doton will work on it. She looks around to see Obito planning walls and shelves, talking her through the hideout he wants to build. Shukaku yells some but Rin just sits him carefully on the table next to the branch and stone. It doesn’t look uncomfortable, but it does look really empty in here. Lonely.

Not that Shukaku necessarily knows that. She thinks all his actual senses are still sealed off. He’s just manifesting an unfeeling head, terrified about the sudden change, shouting blindly at enemies he can’t even sense. She can understand his crass and violence. The legacy of jinchuuriki is a sad history, a cycle of violence they’re struggling to break.

They explore some of what they can see in the immediate area and then Rin says her goodbyes to the Ichibi. “Thank you, Shukaku sama. We’ll be back to check on you every now and then, until we can let you out when its safe.”

Obito glances at her at that but doesn’t say anything except, “See ya, you little bastard. Maybe we can get some decent sleep now.”

Rin rolls her eyes at him, and he laughs before pulling her into Kamui and they land back at the campsite in Stone to a merrily crackling fire and silence, finally silence, with no screams of doom and destruction. Obito picks up his plant and says, “It’s almost peaceful, like this.”

“Don’t jinx us,” Rin warns. “We could be ambushed at any second.”

“There’re enough trees around that I feel pretty confident we’d at least have a heads-up before the senbon start flying.”

Rin snorts at him and they eat their roasted rabbit and her sleep that night is almost blissful for the first time since leaving Sunagakure, with calm dreams and restful respite.

Obito’s in high spirits the next morning and they manage to cover a lot of ground on foot, heading north towards Iwa. They dodge around villages and once Obito senses shinobi in the area and they maneuver by without resorting to Kamui. Stone is a small country, but it’s not easy terrain to traverse, with all the changes in elevation. She gathers healing herbs and other edible plants she recognizes and Obito traps wildlife so they won’t have to rely just on their rations.

The next day, they have to be getting closer to the border and they’re planning how to infiltrate Iwagakure. They know that the Village Hidden in the Stone is somewhere in the east, not too far from the Stone Gulf. They’ll probably have to find a road and let it lead them to the ninja village.

Rin sets up the tent while Obito polishes the weapons just enough that the shine won’t give them away in the dark. They lost most of their supplies during their battle and flight from Sunagakure and he’s carefully oiling and maintaining their remaining kunai and shuriken.

While Rin’s busy setting up the bedrolls in the tent, glad that they’ve both fully recovered from the desert and Obito carefully works his right hand and fingers through the complicated motions of weapons upkeep, she’s interrupted by a blast of Killing Intent, almost locking her limbs in place; a high-level shinobi is practically on top of them. Obito’s answering chakra flares and blazes and fuck, but Rin recognizes that chakra signature, that windy edge of a modified kunai, breeze and power and control all at once, windburn and chill rotating around a calm center deadly as his Rasengan.

Rin scrambles out of the tent to see Obito fighting her teacher, who has a handful of three-pronged kunai ready to scatter around the campsite, his face a closed book and grisly determined.

This can’t be happening. Minato can’t be here. He can’t be fighting Obito, who so far has let all his attacks pass harmlessly through him, but they can’t compete with their sensei; they know it; can’t even hope to run from him. This is Namikaze Minato, their mentor. The man who trained them and believed in them since they were green gennin. Who mourned Obito with Rin after making a joke at his funeral, who is now looking at his former student with a Kage’s Killing Intent, Obito’s own mangekyo scorching the air between them as the fire rages and the forest twists into thorns, a killing breeze knifing through the branches, cold as ice, as vast and unmalleable as a glacier chewing up the land underfoot, strong enough to shape new continents whole.

Rin springs up and lets out a lash of her own chakra, augmented with the Sanbi’s own, and her Killing Intent far surpasses them both. They freeze, and Obito Kamuis to her side, his hand on her elbow, mokuton forcing her rage down.

Minato’s face is impassive even as his hands are full of weapons. He’s dangerously calm in the way she knows means business but when he speaks, the words are as close to begging as she knows from him.

His tone is even. Neutral in that way she can’t stand, even when she knows to read beyond it.

“I’d be willing to listen.”

She studies him before coming to a conclusion.

“I’ll make some tea.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 9: Kakashi: The Hatake

Kakashi wakes up in the hospital. It’s a usual thing for him; he’s prone to overdoing it and getting dangerously chakra depleted, but this feels different, somehow. Usually there’s a sense of relief to waking up, even through the aggravation of being hospitalized, but right now there’s something in him that feels like pulling away, letting his eye slide closed, that the dream is preferable to reality.

He’s surrounded by a steady beeping but he’s aware, with none of the fuzziness that comes from Konoha’s best pain relievers. He’s alert and immediately he sits up in the white bed, an IV-line tugging at his hand, dripping saline. His gloves are gone. They’ve left his mask in place and for that he’s grateful, but his headband is missing, the hitai ate he wears slanted to cover his implanted sharingan. Instead, the side of his face is swathed in bandages, which makes about as much sense as the dreadful ache still in him, but then he sees Minato sitting in a chair by his bed, and at the empty look on his teacher’s face it all comes rushing back.

His left eye sears, and electricity crackles through him, knocking the wind out of him as the memory sparks back with the perfect recall of the sharingan. The room reels around him.

Minato’s wearing his Yondaime Hokage robes, but not the hat. Kakashi can’t sense any ANBU in the room with them; they must be out in the hallway, with the guard squad. His teacher’s only 24 but he looks older in the bleached hospital light, like he hasn’t been sleeping, his yellow hair lank around his face, deep bags under his blue eyes. Its been two years since Kakashi's seen him look defeated.

Kakashi bolts for the window. Escaping from the hospital is a sacred jounin tradition, but it’s not medical care he’s running from: it’s the look on his mentor’s face, the dead look in his eyes that confirms the memories he doesn’t want to be true.

He makes it to the window and has both hands on the screen before Minato grabs him, yanking him back into the room by his collar. Kakashi’s fast, but nobody, not even the Raikage, is as quick as Namikaze Minato, the notorious Yellow Flash of the Leaf. Kakashi feints, tries to dodge, but his sensei won’t let him go. He squirms, but his body isn’t cooperating like it should; it feels like he hasn’t moved in days, and besides that, all his tricks are Minato’s first, and he won’t let him run.

To his horror, he finds himself being pulled into a hug, and to his even greater alarm, the fight just drains out of him. He feels dizzy with the departure of adrenaline, shaky with something he can’t name, can’t even think about.

Minato folds him into a hug and it can’t be real, none of this can be real. They can’t be mourning their teammate. Rin can’t be dead. Kakashi can’t have killed her.

Minato’s arms are around him and his breathing is all too even but when he speaks, his voice is hoarse. “I led the recovery team that found you. It’s been over a week. You’ve been in a coma for late-stage chakra exhaustion.”

He doesn’t say I thought you weren’t going to wake up, but it’s there in his voice, between the lines. Underneath the underneath, his teacher is hurting just as surely as Kakashi is and the unwelcome realization just makes him want to go to sleep forever, makes him want to never wake up.

Kakashi doesn’t say anything, and Minato says, “Uchiha Fugaku saved your life. I don’t know the details, but he kept it from killing you.”

It. Obito’s eye. The deathbed oath for the first teammate he killed. And Rin…..Rin—

In his mind, his Chidori sparks and chirps, crackling with lightning. He, he didn’t, he knows he didn’t, but Rin falls.

She’s still falling.

Minato lets him go but doesn’t move away, still close enough to stop him if he tries to run. Kakashi knows what’s coming and he thinks if he hears Minato ask, it will break them both. He hadn’t asked, before, after Kanabi Bridge, and Rin had taken it upon herself to tell him in small words that Obito was gone.

She’s not here to cover for him now.

Kakashi says, in a dull, flat tone, “I can give a verbal mission report now, Hokage sama.”

He’s retreating into formality, at parade rest, hands clasped loose behind his back, and it’s a relief for them both. Minato says, steady, too steady, and it’s not a gentleness, “Report, Hatake.”

Kakashi takes a grounding breath and delivers his verbal report in short, succinct sentences, just enough detail, no emotion, none at all. Its sterile, and it’s what he needs right now. “I tracked the group of enemy shinobi to the border, East of Taki, by the river. Two dozen high level shinobi, most likely jounin or Black Ops. I surmised it might be the group that had taken Nohara Rin during her courier mission, and I followed with no intent to engage until back up had arrived.”

He sent Guruko straight to Minato when he sensed how vastly outnumbered he was. But then he’d spotted her, and it hadn’t mattered that it was 12-1 odds.

“Nohara Rin was ahead of the enemy group, running for Fire, but the foreign shinobi were catching up fast. We met on the banks of the river and the Kiri nin engaged. There was a short battle. During which, Nohara Rin intercepted a raiton attack meant for an enemy.”

There hadn’t been any genjutsu controlling her; his sharingan could see through most genjutsu. She looked afraid, then determined, and she had willingly thrown herself on his Chidori. He doesn’t know why. But it killed her. He killed her.

Minato looks like nothing at all. Kakashi knows the feeling.

“I lost consciousness after that. I don’t remember anything else.” Only now does his voice waver imperceptibly.

Minato hasn’t said it, but if what Kakashi suspects has happened with his eye has happened, then she must be dead. No one has ever survived his assassination technique before. What must Minato have thought, when he’d seen her, dead from Kakashi’s own attack? Why isn’t he waking up in T&I?

This isn’t protocol. Minato isn’t projecting any Killing Intent, but he has a Kage’s control. His eyes have gone a flat slant, one of the only emotions Kakashi knows he’ll allow himself to show. It’s terrifying, to see that sign of anger on him.

“Kiri nin?” He asks, and his voice is still deceptively calm. This is the shinobi who once looked at an entire platoon and didn’t stop, ending the war then and there single-handedly.

He’s not sure why he needs this verified: Kakashi had managed to kill two of them before he went down, and if backup had arrived in time to keep the remaining ninja from killing him, they hadn’t had time to remove the bodies. Kakashi answers, “They had ceramic masks, displaying Kiri’s sigil on the forehead, and most were wearing Kiri hitai ate somewhere on their gear as well.”

This is, in hindsight, confusing for several reasons. Black Ops didn’t run under any sigil, and Kiri wasn’t even in the last war, and they were on the wrong side of the border on the far side of the Nation of Fire from their own Elemental Nation. Minato immediately sees it too and his eyes narrow even further but he doesn’t comment.

“That ends my verbal report, Hokage sama.”

That’s not all there is, he can see it in how his sensei taps his fingers on his thigh over his kunai pouch. He’s thinking hard on something, and the former child prodigy can recognize what that looks like in an adult like he’s catching a glimpse of his own future. Suspicion flares through him. “Hokage sama?”

When he doesn’t answer Kakashi tries again, “Minato sensei?”

Some of his anger dissipates. He says, slowly, like he’s still thinking through things, brilliant mind running leaps and bounds beyond his words, “Backup didn’t arrive in time. Your summons didn’t reach us until hours later, but a border patrol was already inbound to your location to investigate the source of all the chakra being thrown around. We met up at the scene around the same time, but the area had been demolished. Someone used high powered katon to torch the place. All the evidence was lost. But 16 corpses were there, burned beyond recognition. You only survived because you were half in the water. Whoever killed those ninja must have assumed you were dead.”

That doesn’t make any sense and they both knew it. Who is skilled enough to take out that many shinobi but hadn’t verified that he wasn’t still breathing? Who would even interfere in a battle between Konoha and Kiri? And then destroy the evidence?

“And… Rin?” Kakashi asks. Minato hasn’t mentioned recovering her body, but he knows she’s dead, and Minato must have guessed just enough about the mangekyo sharingan to know as well. “She… she would have been right next to me.”

“It’s impossible to identify any of the bodies.” Some of his anger is back, tight around his mouth and eyes, warring with the bone deep sadness, the exhaustion wrapped around him like his robes of office. He doesn’t say but, but they both know they’re kidding themselves to have hope at this point. Minato must have known, but to hear Kakashi confirm it must hurt him in places that had only just started healing from Obito’s loss two years prior.

Kakashi nods stiffly. “Permission to leave, sensei.”

Minato looks at him sharply. “Not until you are released from this hospital into Uchiha Fugaku’s care. There are things you need to know.”

He bets, but he doesn’t want to hear them. Not when there’s more pressing things he needs to do now. Kakashi salutes smartly, “Hokage sama.”

It’s not a promise, not from him, not like this, and Minato warns, “Don’t pursue this. We’re still investigating. Trust me to handle this, Kakashi. I will order it if I have to.”

The teen doesn’t even twitch. He’s been written up for insubordination before under the Sandaime enough that the threat has lost its shine. He doesn’t want to put his teacher in that position, but he’s a jounin. He is a capable adult under shinobi law.

The second the thought crosses his mind, Minato warns, “I mean it, Kakashi. I will chain you to this bed if I think you’ll interrupt this investigation. It could be an international incident. You will listen to me in this, or I’ll put ANBU on you. Or Kushina.”

Kakashi’s slipped ANBU tails before but hearing his teacher so stressed and serious enough to invoke the threat of Kushina makes him wilt. He bows his head, “Yes, Minato sensei.”

The Hokage sighs and rubs at the bridge of his nose. He sounds suddenly tired. “I’ve got a meeting with the Jounin Commander and T&I. Stay here, please. I’ll send for Fugaku sama. It shouldn’t be long.”

He looks like he wants to go in for another hug but something in Kakashi’s posture must alert him that that’s not a great idea. He stands up and walks out of the room with one last look; all the understated anger and fear few people know him well enough to read morphs back into empty grief. They’ll never learn how to say goodbye. Kakashi’s replaying that please in his mind, the slump of his shoulders, the knowledge that even if they find out, it won’t change anything. Rin’s still dead.

Kakashi waits until he hears Minato and his escort leave and he collects his gear from the pile over by the wall and then he’s back at the window, shimmying through it four stories up. It’s not as easy as it should be, he’s shaky and weak and chakra feels a long way away but he adapts; he improvises; he slides down the wall like a slug. He’s on a single-track thought path and the fixation carries him all the way to an empty house where the dust brings him up short, like it always does.

The door swings shut behind him, loud in the stillness. He drops his gear in a pile, pulls a shuriken from its place in the couch cushions and squeezes it, molding every bit of chakra he can reach, hands seals ending on Dog before he presses his palm flat to the living room floor.

Guruko appears in a poof of white chakra smoke and she lunges at him, knocking him back on the couch. He goes down, hand on her head while she noses every inch of him, worries at his bandages with her teeth. His eye slips closed, the adrenaline he’d been running on filtering away into a staticky shock. Under the bandages, a dead boy’s eye jutters and jerks, restless as it always is. He’s cold all over.

The greyhound is warm and she wiggles up onto him. “I went straight to the village. He left immediately.”

He nods, eye still closed. Guruko is the fastest of them all, but Minato wouldn’t have waited for her. She must have dismissed herself eventually.

He says, “Rin is dead.”

Guruko is quiet. Eventually, she sniffs at his covered eye, still wheeling with the remnants of another teammate he couldn’t save. “You’re not.”

He sighs. “Tell the others for me?”

He doesn’t have the chakra to pull the whole pack through and he doesn’t think he could face Pakkun. He’ll regret it later but there’s only so much he’s willing to say again and Pakkun knows him well enough to hear a dozen other things he hadn’t said, and he can’t quite bring himself to handle that right now.

He doesn’t have the chakra to sustain her in this realm for long, but now the pack will know he’s alive, that the Dog Contract is intact. Its always the first thing he does when he gets out of the hospital. They deserve so much more from him, but proof of life is all he has right now.

Guruko’s sad brown eyes vanish in a puff of white chakra smoke and he almost can’t deal with that either. He’s alone in the empty house of his father again, the memory of Rin dying on a loop in his mind. Complicated as his feelings towards Obito’s eye are, he doesn’t have anything of Rin’s to remember her by. He hadn’t really even spoken to her in weeks, spent most of his time in the village actively avoiding her.

She’d given both Minato and Kakashi the silent treatment, after Kanabi Bridge. But Kakashi was weaponizing his grief at the world and Minato was giving him a long enough leash to do it with. All her raging had shored uselessly up against the fact that he was a jounin and could do as he pleased, even when what he pleased was solo assassination missions, enough to land him in the Bingo Book with a bounty sizable enough to make missing nin and mercenaries take notice.

And then Yu happened. War ground them all to paste underfoot and suddenly it didn’t matter as much as it had that she thought he was too young. Obito was young. War never once bothered to spare kids. He knows that more than anyone.

He stays on the couch, safe surrounded by his home wards. Eventually, the red memory bleeds into a red dream. In it, Pain is a living thing; it grows, evolves, and sometimes it gets so big that it eats the world. If he didn’t have Obito’s sharingan, if there wasn’t a mangekyo form for this grief to take, what would have happened to him to signal the change? Surely he wouldn’t have stayed the same. He never has before. This isn’t any different. He has long practice at losing people.

Minato indeed puts ANBU on his ass for him pulling a runner. Now every time he leaves the Hatake House, he has to dodge hidden shinobi trailing him. Its old hat, but at least this new batch is smart enough to wear scent blockers to hide from his nose. He might be an assassin now, but he was a tracker first. None of his tails under the Sandaime ever figured that out.

He spends most of his time avoiding everyone. He doesn’t summon Pakkun, even when he has the chakra to. He avoids Minato. He’s benched until he passes a post-loss psyche eval and Minato won’t even let him schedule an appointment, so there’s no missions to throw himself into, no distractions to be had. The grief in him is a longtime ache that never really goes away.

Above all, he avoids Kushina. She doesn’t deserve it, but where Minato would approach him with clumsy platitudes, Kushina would come with every understanding. If there’s anyone in Konoha who knows what he’s going through, it’s the kunoichi who’s lost so much that it stops making sense. He’s lost his clan, and family, and team, but Kushina’s lost everything, all he’s let go and more; a homeland, a culture, and he doesn’t want her understanding. He wants to be alone, and he wants to forget Rin’s parents. He wants to go on missions and destroy training grounds and train until he hospitalizes himself again.

The one person he does not avoid is Uchiha Fugaku. The Police Chief is the only other mangekyo in the village; he’s the one who had forcibly deactivated his newborn dojutsu before it killed him. He’s continually frustrated by the indignity that is Obito’s old wound overtaking the new stab of Rin. He’s had years to adjust to the sharingan, to learn the bloodline that is not his, but the mangekyo is unforgiving and he’s not suited to it. Fugaku knows. Minato’s classified the details of Rin’s death, but the Uchiha Clan Head knows what it meant when he came back with a mangekyo and Rin didn’t come back at all.

The good news is that his ANBU agent can’t follow him into the Uchiha Compound; something in the clan’s charter prevents them from entering with explicit permission from the Leaf Police Force. He takes vindictive glee out of forcing his tail to follow his seemingly aimless rambling around before he beelines for the Uchiha District and leaves them at the gate.

He’s neglecting a lot of things in his life right now, but he dutifully shows up to training with Uchiha Fugaku, who’s mouth gets tighter and more severely drawn every time he sees the Bastard Sharingan. Bloodline thieving is Konoha’s strongest taboo: even the civilians know the horror and disgust of an empty socket. In a village full of paid mercenaries and torture enthusiasts, the dojutsu laws are their most sacred, their least forgiving. As it stands, they only want to hold him down and rip Obito’s last gift from his skull. If they thought he’d taken it by force, he would have been executed.

He's not popular with Fugaku. Or most everyone else. Hot Water is wiling to pay a small fortune for his head, but he doesn’t have to live in a shared village with Yu’s animosity like he does with the Uchiha. Kakashi’s the disgraced Hatake, last of his line, runt of the man who caused the Third War, with accusations of bloodline theft that run loud in the marketplace.

Obito wasn’t popular with the clan either, though Kakashi hadn’t known it at the time, hadn’t particularly cared, and his last decision caused the elders so much headache that his memory is surely not thought of fondly. At least, Kakashi never runs into anyone at the memorial stone, tracing his name with their eyes.

The clan only barely abides by their own provision that gifted eyes are acceptable, but Uchiha Fugaku does abide, sour as can be, and strict in his teaching, stingy with the secret techniques that keep it from killing him, and generally unpleasant to be around. The Clan Head is the only other sharingan to have awakened the mangekyo and he never outright says that keeping the Bastard Sharingan alive is beneath him, but he takes time out of his busy schedule, and he shows up to the hidden clan training ground to keep the implant from draining him entirely of chakra.

The training is more stiff-lipped lecture, prideful and severe, full of what clan history he deigns to pass on. The practical demonstrations are limited; Kakashi will never have the chakra reserves to manifest their strongest techniques, at least, not until he grows into his adult reserves. To top it off, he has a chakra nature that’s aligned with lightning, with a strong secondary in earth, busy bullying himself into learning suiton. The Clan Head made him learn the Fireball jutsu when he was 12, but it was only by copying him with the sharingan that the teen had managed it. Minato told him once that he might even be able to use all five elemental chakra natures one day, but for now his katons are only barely passable.

This is important because most of the mangekyo techniques deal with sharingan fire. Since the dojutsu is degenerative, Fugaku only demonstrates it for him once. Fugaku can manifest black flames that are tricky as hell to dodge, but if they touch you, they cannot be put out until they finish burning you up. He calls it Amaterasu, but since the pattern of Kakashi’s mangekyo is different it’s likely not a technique he can learn. Trying to copy it sure as hell doesn’t work.

Fugaku’s mangekyo is three right spun thin curves with alternating dots that wind around themselves like a spinning disk. The heat of his chakra is blistering and can scorch the earth around his feet, even before the unquenchable black flames appear.

Kakashi’s is a simple three-pointed spiked spiral, almost reminiscent of a curved shuriken and looks more like a pinwheel when it spins. His chakra crackles and snaps and his Phoenix Flame jutsu could be schooled by a gennin Obito.

After failing to get his mangekyo to do anything of use, he gets creative and tries to mold it with raiton chakra, thinking his lightning nature might have corrupted the inborn fire aspect of it, and watches as Fugaku’s lips get impossibly thinner.

“Incorrect,” he says, severely, every inch the Police Chief, like Kakashi’s committing some crime just by being in his line of sight. “My five-year-old can do better.”

Out of spite, Kakashi molds as much chakra as he can and directs it to the eye jumping and twitching in his skull, mangekyo pattern twisting into being as he blows his supraorbital wide open.

Predictably, he wakes up in the hospital, achy from chakra drain. Fugaku must have dumped him here himself and he’s sure to hear no end of it. The mangekyo is degenerative; he’s been warned; he’s been stupid; he hasn’t been in the hospital as long as he needed to be. There’s still time to make it to Rin’s funeral.

He thunks his bound head against the hospital cot. If he’s alone for the moment it only means Kushina’s going to return at any minute, and he’s been doing so well at avoiding her. He gathers his things and dives out the window.

There’s no public service, but somewhere in the village, her parents hold a small ceremony in their chosen temple, and the name Nohara Rin is added to the memorial stone.

He doesn’t go. He’s not sure Minato does either. He’s so busy now that he’s Yondaime, and Kushina chewed him out so much after the fiasco of Obito’s funeral that Kakashi’s not surprised if he’s avoiding it. Regardless, the next day, with the reprisal of his ANBU tail, Kakashi gets a bleak satisfaction out of forcing them to watch him stare at the updated memorial stone for multiple hours at a time. Maybe if he’s a big enough resource drain, they’ll call off this whole thing off.

It’s only been two years, but there are a lot of names between Obito’s and Rin’s. Still, its easy for him to find them. He can pick out the shape of the kanji in his sleep. Obito’s is flying high above hers, but the lines of her inscription are sharp and clear as a bell.

He stares at it for hours and hours.

After the requisite time has passed, Kakashi bullshits his way through his post-loss psyche eval with none other than Yamanaka Inoichi himself, who’s really too highly regarded to be dealing with run of the mill grief counseling. Then again, Kakashi’s made the underlings cry tears of frustration before.

“So,” the big, blond T&I head regards him steadily. “How are you feeling today?”

Kakashi delivers a textbook perfect evaluation of his mental state; its eloquent, it’s even inspiring, its full of so much bullshit Inoichi can smell it from a mile away.

Even so, there’s nothing to be done about it. Dodging the psyche department is jounin prerogative, and his every answer lines up perfectly with what he’s been schooled to say. If every ninja told the truth on these things the entire economy would grind to a halt.

Inoichi sighs, “Well, at least you’re stable,” and clears him for missions.

Kakashi goes immediately to the Missions Desk and accepts the first solo A rank he sees, a jog to the Capitol that he can use as cover to gather intel about the Hokage’s investigation into Kiri. When the ink of the scroll immediately starts to bleed, Ensui looks unrepentant. “Guards,” he calls, and Tiger flickers into place behind him. “Take him away.”

Tiger deposits him directly in front of the Hokage desk, ink still staining his gloves.

Minato looks at him and it strikes Kakashi that he looks tired. “That was a test,” he informs him, like Kakashi hasn’t already figured that out. “You failed.”

Didn’t he know it. He considers, “Nara Ensui is cheating on his partner.”

“No, he’s not,” Minato says. “He knows to wear sent blockers when dealing with you.”

Damn, then Inoichi’s in on it too. Why did his teacher have everyone out to get him. “He had a hickey.”

Minato pinches at the bridge of his nose. “What were you thinking?”

He’s thinking the official investigation’s turned up squat. He’s thinking he wanted to get an inkling if Minato was willing to go to war over Rin. Technically, the fighting took place outside Fire’s borders, but if a Konoha shinobi is proven to have been apprehended inside Fire, he can legally declare war. It might piss off the Daimyo if his brand new Hokage starts another war so soon after the last one, so Kakashi understands Minato’s need to be sure before he does anything the other nations might interpret as drastic.

He shrugs.

Minato sighs. “You’re benched, Kakashi. Trust me to handle this.”

But it’s not about trust, and his teacher will never understand that. So he salutes, lazy, just a bit unkind, and before he watches his teacher strain himself giving another lecture on loss, he tosses himself out the tower window.

Benched, Kakashi refocuses his efforts in village. He needs to be doing something, and without the outlet of missions, he’s spiraling. If Minato insists on cutting him out of the investigation, he’ll stir the pot at home, just to see what happens.

It’s not going well. His teacher’s keeping an irritatingly close eye on him and he’s only managed to bypass the concern of Kushina by having Uhei trail her to warn him when she’s getting close. Maybe he’s avoiding everyone. Maybe he’s throwing himself into trouble again like he did after Obito died. Maybe there’s no one, no war, to stop him this time either.

He writes the transfer request with his old handwriting, neat and rigid as how he used to be, unlike the formulated chicken scrawl he prefers now. He sprinkles sand over the application to dry the ink faster and Akino looks over his shoulder and whines.

“He’s not going to like that.”

Kakashi shrugs, waving clumps of fur away from the drying ink from where the husky’s blowing his winter coat all over his living room. Minato’s going to be furious, and Kakashi is interested in seeing exactly which flavor of mad he will be and why.

He holds up the completed scroll and hands it over to the husky. “Run this by the Tower and then get out of there. Do not engage.”

Akino looks skeptical but complies, taking the sealed scroll in his teeth. “Doef Pakkun knoumph—"

Kakashi waves him away. They both know the answer to that one already. The husky yelps and scrambles for the door, nails clicking on the tile.

He doesn’t get any official rejection, and when he checks his profile, there’s no paper trail of his request form in the system. The Yondaime probably set it on fire.

He thinks hard. Time for drastic measures.

After the third time Kakashi lands himself in the hospital with training injuries, he notices a toad on his windowsill. A summoner fighting fire with fire. How far can he push his sensei before any real repercussions? He’s interested in finding out. The Sandaime let too much slide, on account of him ‘being so young’. Since he’s stuck in the village, Minato’s the most danger he can conceivably find.

When he runs again, a tiger masked ANBU operative watches the front windows of his house, but Kakashi simply pries up the floorboards in his closet and forms a doton tunnel out past the gate for him to shimmy through. Before long, he’s unsupervised in the village again. He’s contemplating ways to break into the Secure Archives when Gai pounces on him, loudly crying about a challenge in the Springtime of Youth, and Kakashi is suddenly hit with a wave of odd vertigo before he can escape.

For a bare moment, he swears he almost gets a flash of a face, the light glinting off something sharp, like a kunai, and he can’t shake off Gai in time before the guards descend.

He’s dumped before Minato’s desk in the Hokage’s office and he’s rubbing at his right eye, trying to make sense of the weird flash of an image. Under his slanted hitai ate, his left sharingan eye itches. Maybe he strained it training. Fugaku’s a punishing drill sergeant, and he’s not forgiving of Kakashi’s long form ineptitude or his destructive grief.

His arresting guards vanish after throwing him at his Hokage on charges of suspicion. Smart men, to clear out as fast as possible. He’s not above making his game with his sensei have collateral. He will get what he wants, everyone else be damned. It’s not like he has anyone left to disappoint.

Minato is not pleased. He’s holding the bridge of his nose but everything else is contained. “Why were you apprehended lurking outside the Secure Archives?”

Kakashi admits, “I was thinking, hypothetically, how one might break in.”

If his sensei has a single ounce less of chakra control, the papers on his desk would be fluttering as if caught by a sudden breeze in the closed room. He doesn’t bother asking why his student is hypothetically interested in breaking into the Secure Archives. He knows what he’s after.

Minato scrubs a hand through his hair. He’s wearing the stupid hat today but it doesn’t curb Kakashi’s ire at being excluded in the slightest. “Boar,” he says, rubbing at his face like Kakashi has stomped on his every last nerve and the masked ANBU appears with a salute. Kakashi’s become accustomed to the sight of the agents; it’s not the warning it should be. “Send for Bear, then find someone to alert Tiger that their charge has escaped and can be found at the Hokage Tower.”

The ANBU vanishes into a shunshin and Kakashi perks up. Has ANBU found something relevant to the Kiri case? Are they finally letting him in?

He doesn’t hide his interest and Minato continues, “Namiashi,” and Raido of the Hokage Honor Guard Squadron appears. “If you could fetch the lovely lady for me, please.”

Horror washes through the teen and Raido, the bastard, says smugly, “Sure thing, Hokage sama.” He blurs away before Kakashi can stop him.

Minato is unrepentant. “You deserve this.”

He’s been lying to himself that his teacher is the most dangerous thing to him in Konoha, when it’s his fiancé that he’s been going out of his way to avoid. Where is Uhei? He eyes the windows but there’s no chance Minato lets him run.

She must have been nearby because then Uzumaki Kushina is storming through the doors to the Hokage’s office like a hurricane, red hair swinging, eyes narrowed at him in a glare. Something in his subconscious puffs, like Uhei just dismissed himself back to the summoning realm.

Her voice is loud and reverberates around the room. “What’s this I hear about you skulking about the Archives? First, you’re taking long term solo A rank missions and trying to join ANBU and now this?”

So Minato hadn’t buried his request entirely; he’d told his fiancé. Kakashi thinks that’s worse. He has a sneaking suspicion that Minato spent some time behind a mask; there’s a telling gap in his service record, and he’s got the mentality for it.

Her accusation is withering and Kakashi feels young in a way he hasn’t been since his father died. This is the real danger of Kushina: she cares about Team 7 absolutely, in a way that had stopped being surprising once he’d gotten to know her, after Minato finally introduced his team to his girlfriend. Back then, their relationship was Level 8 clearance, only known to the Hokage’s inner circle and the relevant administration heads, supposedly for ‘protection’. But Kakashi pities the fools who’d try to kidnap Kushina to use as leverage against the Hokage. The Red Hot Habanero would clobber them and then laugh about it.

He tries not to visibly wilt and she slaps silencing seals around on the walls, the wards activating with a shimmer. He hasn’t visited her in weeks. He’s been actively avoiding this confrontation and would have happily lived the rest of his life continuing to do so.

Once the seals are in place, she turns on him, hands on her hips. Before she can really tear into him, an ANBU appears, masked with the animal likeness of a bear.

“Bear, report.” The Yondaime says and Kakashi is shocked when the agent speaks. He’s never heard ANBU talk before; it’s not allowed while on active duty. He’d made sure to memorize their hand sign system so he could spy on his detail before his deployment during the war. He wonders to who’s benefit this performance is for.

“Hokage sama,” the ANBU says smartly and Kakashi wonders if he’s disguising his voice, if he could identify the agent without the mask. Not that he would consciously try. He’s not actually suicidal, even if he understands why those that don’t know him well think he might be. But Minato knows in detail the reasons why he’d never consider suicide as an option. He just interferes anyway.

Bear continues, “The operatives in Kirigakure report civil unrest. It’s unlikely they would risk a war with a major nation at this moment and no evidence exists of them recently losing a large number of high-level shinobi. Their Black Ops are occupied trying to keep the Swordsman from choosing a side in the dispute and the Mizukage isn’t letting his forces outside the borders.”

Kiri might not risk a war, but Konoha is just by having operatives undercover in a foreign nation. Everyone does it, but to be caught red-handed is asking for retaliation. Kakashi knows Minato is taking the threat seriously, but he hasn’t realized the extent of his reach. Moving new people in is an entirely different play from relying on implanted assets.

“Thank you, Bear. At ease.”

The man who Kakashi is beginning to suspect is the Commander of ANBU clasps his hands behind his back at rest and falls silent.

“Kakashi, what do you think of this?” Minato asks, and it’s like he’s back in a training session, his sensei attempting to get his team to learn tactics and strategy, sideways thinking, political maneuvering, an awareness of enemy motivations. Minato’s always treated them like their opinion matters, even when they made some stupidly incorrect assumptions, Kakashi and Obito coming to blows over their disagreements and Rin wording everything so she can always claim she’d been right all along (she usually was).

Kakashi straightens his spine and says, “Deflection and set up. They want us to think it was Kiri who kidnapped Rin. The real perpetrators could be anyone. Due to location, I might suspect Taki or Yu, especially if the latter knew my personal connection to the target, but they don’t have the reserves to waste on a war with a major nation.”

Yu patently hates him, but everyone knows Kiri’s an unending nightmare of civil war and insurrections. This doesn’t feel like them.

Minato pushes him even further. “What does this mean?”

Kumo’s still pissing itself over the thought of the Yellow Flash of the Leaf being the new Hokage and Iwa is similarly cowed from the war, after learning his vengeance. Not them, not Kiri… Suna? But why? He’s missing something big here. Not a major Elemental Nation, not a small nation, and that leaves……

“It might not be a country behind it at all. An organization, a confederation of missing nin maybe.”

Minato smiles a little and regardless of the circumstances, pride trickles through him. “We’re looking at reports of missing and unaffiliated nin moving all around the continent. We’ll have a completed profile soon.”

It’s admittedly more than Kakashi could have done beating the crap out of hired guards on solo assassination missions. The pride quickly bottoms out into shame. He ducks his head. Effective or not, he needs to be doing something. Rin can’t have died, and he does nothing about it. Minato should understand. Kakashi doesn’t entirely believe he doesn’t.

“Now tell me this,” Minato says, “why would anyone kidnap Rin? What value does she have to any foreign interest?”

It’s devastating to say, but Kakashi has already come to this miserable conclusion: that in the grand scheme of things, Rin isn’t worth much. She was a talented kunoichi, a skilled medical nin, but just a chuunin, with no access to classified information, and civilian born, with no way to leverage a clan for ransom. He has theories, of course, but they’re all grasping at straws and he knows it.

Defiantly, he says, “As a student of the Hokage she might have had value as a hostage.”

He watches his sensei’s expression tighten with a vicious satisfaction. It kills him how little it ends up mattering, that the village has indeed managed to go on without her, how easily the world went on.

The White Fang’s death was a precursor to war. He’s not sure Rin’s will be.

Kushina smacks him upside the head with a folder like he’s a pup and he’s not expecting it, doesn’t get a chance to dodge. “Watch it,” she growls. “You’re not the only one hurting, ya know?”

He looks away. As he does, the tingly feeling sweeps through his body again and he can see, he sees… sand? Lots of it, blinding under a hot sun, heat shimmering off it in gauzy waves. The flash is gone as quickly as it comes but Kakashi closes his eye, trying to recall what exactly he’d seen. There’s no afterimage, but he blinks and can almost feel his hidden sharingan twinge, as restless as the unquiet dead.

Is this his mangekyo ability manifesting? But he hasn’t been molding chakra, and his implant is fully covered. Maybe Kushina hit him harder than he thought. Could he make her do it again?

While he’s distracted Kushina swats him again. It’s clear she’s looking for an apology and the folder is raised again threateningly. He’d rather chew off his arm, but he says, stiffly, “Sorry, Minato sensei.”

The Hokage sighs and Kakashi is troubled but shoves the sensation away to focus on him. He’ll figure his eyeball situation out later. “The question is if they picked their target at random, or if they were after Rin specifically. Bear?”

The ANBU Commander says, “Nohara Rin was on a courier mission to a border outpost. When she never appeared for her rendezvous, they alerted the village via messenger hawk. We put together tracking and retrieval squads, each with an Inuzuka, but nothing was found. Two days later, Hatake Kakashi was recovered from a battlefield north of our border with the unincorporated lands west of Taki. An attending Aburame was unable to track the shinobi who eliminated the enemy nin. It is assumed they escaped.”

He continues, “It appears to have been a premeditated assault. The false Kiri gear indicates a conspiracy, as does the unusual number of enemies. It is unlikely they would target whatever solo individual they came across in Fire.”

“Conclusions?” Minato asks and Kakashi has a sinking feeling in his gut. This is about to go horribly wrong. He can feel it, finely honed instincts warning him to take cover, to hunker down and prepare for the hurt that’s coming.

“We looked into her background. Nohara Rin was not aware of any privileged information outside the identity of persons in this room. Her record is clean and there are no red flags for potential treason or desertion. This indicates that her value is personal, but not related to her status as a student of the Hokage, as no demands were ever made. It is possible the perpetrators were attempting to harm not the leadership of the village, but the jounin who found her.”

The room lurches sickeningly around him, swinging wildly from the rage he feels at them suspecting Rin was disloyal and the thought of them digging up her life when she deserved rest, and into a pit of horror so deep it feels as if his stomach has plummeted to the soles of his feet. That dreadful fucking night instantly reframes itself in his mind, not a Rin escaped, but a Rin being intentionally herded towards him. A high-ranking teen with a bright future, and a marked record of insubordination and failed psych evals. No familial ties left to the village, the last of his clan. A textbook flight risk, the high-strung prodigy pushed too far, with a famously borrowed dojutsu to boot. The student of the Yondaime Hokage, with the potential to crumple everything if he snapped and turned nukenin.

He's sick and Minato looks grim. “I’ve been trying to protect you, Kakashi. There’s a reason I didn’t want you looking into this.”

Of course Minato had guessed this, likely on that first night, while Kakashi had been in a coma, and has been trying to protect him from the possibility this whole time.

Had she known she was going to die, even before she threw herself on his Chidori? She’d been determined in her last moments, but for what? To rob her captors of some of the blame for her death? To turn Kakashi against himself instead of Kiri or the Leaf?

It doesn’t make any fucking sense. He’s missing something, he has to be. Something else is there. His record aside, Kakashi’s always been unwaveringly loyal to the Leaf Village and if this was their plan it was such a freakish long shot, to risk war to turn one shinobi. And why frame Kiri at all, unless they’d wanted to shift the blame from themselves, keep Konoha looking at the other nations instead of some kind of organization recruiting via forced intervention.

The realization is that somehow he’d potentially killed Rin even more than he already thought he had, which is a new low point for him. Lightning jolts loose and shivery through him and the ANBU, who Kakashi is beginning to suspect is some kind of Nara, turns his masked face towards him like he’s a danger, like he believes Kakashi could turn against the village.

Static crackles through him and the hairs on his arms raise with it, his grey sticky-outie hair standing on almost permanent end from his chakra. He’s thinking that if he did run, he’d never get away successfully. Minato would hunt him down himself. Nowhere would be safe; there is nowhere he could hide where his teacher could not find him and make it look easy. He’d bring him back, even if he has to break both his legs to do it. He’d make it look so easy.

So he stays put and Kushina slings an arm around his shoulders, dragging him into an embrace. He can count on one hand the number of hugs he’s gotten from his sensei over the years but the kunoichi is touchy, always has a tendency to grab people with both hands, no matter how jumpy they are or how often they tend to react with weapons when they’re surprised.

She squeezes him tight and then announces that she is commandeering his punishment for the rest of the day. He thinks he’d rather be booked and processed for the arrest.

“I’ll put him to work, ya know, keep him busy.” She promises, turning to steer him out of the office before Minato can protest or come up with an actual punishment for letting Gai get him nabbed by the guards for casing. Its one of his oldest lessons: it’s not that you did it, it’s that you got caught. And with Gai’s involvement, he can’t even make the play that the arrest was intentional just to force his hand.

He sighs and warns, “if you’re caught outside the Archives again, I’ll give you to Ibiki as a present. The chuunin recruits have been wanting a new chew toy. He’ll be absolutely thrilled.”

He is less enthused about being booked and processed. Morino Ibiki is the youngest head of T&I since the departments founding and he’d earned the title by bulldozing over the older candidates with a mixture of skill, Killing Intent, his ability to keep his victims alive for weeks, and his terrifying technique of summoning metal bear traps and other torture implements. He’d have no qualms about putting the fear of T&I into the wayward teen.

Kushina snorts, “I’d like to see him try.”

As they walk out, Kakashi is still reeling internally. Minato didn’t promise to keep him updated and Kakashi hadn’t expected him to. His sensei is a kage, with obligations to the village as a whole. While he can trust him to do what’s right for the village, Kakashi knows where Rin has rank on that list; a dead Rin is even less of a concern. And sensitive information is power; he’d been right not to tell Kakashi, and he’d likely keep on keeping his findings from his student. Which means Kakashi might soon make the acquaintance of a bunch of crazed chuunin from T&I, because if he can’t help gather intel himself, and Minato isn’t telling him, then it looks like he has to break into the Archives after all.

As promised, Kushina puts him to work helping her plan the wedding, and she doesn’t even let him make a clone to help with the heavy lifting. But afterward, she makes him tea and squeezes his hand like he’s a kid and her grief is as loud as her anger but it’s bearable because its not wallowing in his father’s self-flagellating. Maybe Pakkun is right about more than he gives him credit for.

The next day, he proves Pakkun wrong when he summons Uhei to spy on the toad summons Minato has left in his weedy thicket of a front garden. The bloodhound huffs, utterly unimpressed by his payback, but Kakashi is on a timetable. He resigns himself to the upcoming lecture from the pack once Uhei rats on him to Pakkun.

The tiger masked agent is back but they haven’t searched his apartment to find out how he’d given them the slip the day before so it’s easy to sneak out via secret doton tunnel again. This time he keeps an eye out for Gai as he makes his way to the Mission Desk. Maybe he can weasel a nice B rank out of the new guy so he doesn’t end up tearing his skin off his face. He’s wearing a trench in his living room from his restless pacing and the walls are dotted with splinters from where he’s using them for target practice. The empty Hatake House slowly wearing away as their last remaining son takes bites out of himself and the house in the process.

Akimichi Chouza bumps into him at the door and Kakashi curses. Gai’s and Genma’s old sensei knows him enough to block the way, which he does, folding his arms over his rotund belly with a slight frown, tugging at the choji clan marking swirls on both of his cheeks in the Akimichi red. He hasn’t even made it to the poster taped to the business side of the Missions Desk that has his Bingo Book entry photo on it over the words Do Not Serve, curtesy of Kushina, no doubt; in her on going prank campaign against several different administrative sectors of the village, Kakashi is just another casualty.

Kakashi doesn’t even wait for the incoming lecture. He just turns on his heel and shunshins his way to Training Ground 7, which he then demolishes with lightning and earth jutsu until he feels that maybe he’s worn himself out enough to sleep without the sharingan-induced nightmares keeping him up all night. There’s only so much of Rin dying that he can take.

He’s still jittery and tight as a bowstring, unable to shake his muscles loose, his attacks brutally efficient as he pummels the place where his team had trained as gennin into an unrecognizable crater. Maybe its not good coping, but it’s something, probably. It doesn’t feel like much of anything. Not that he’d ever admit to that even under Yamanaka interrogation.

He trains hard, but he trains smart, never letting himself land back in the hospital to give Kushina another reason to kidnap him for tea and manual labor. There are only so many times a week he can stomach ramen and the red head seems determined to eat old man Teuchi out of house and home. She wants Ichiraku’s to cater the ceremony, for crying out loud. If she asks him what color seat cushions she should have for the wedding again and shows him two exact shades of neon-eye-bleed-orange, he is going to ask Uchiha Mikoto, her maid of honor and co-conspirator, to end his pitiful life. Her husband’s perennially more than happy to oblige but he’d never give him the satisfaction, and he likes Mikoto in the exact amount that he’s terrified of her.

He doesn’t ask Fugaku about the weird flashes he might be getting from his sharingan. Instead, he skips their training all together. If it’s the mangekyo manifesting a technique, he would have asked, but he’s not so sure he hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Maybe the stress has finally gotten to him like Yamanaka Inoichi keeps promising him it will. He’s got a better bullshit meter than anyone Kakashi’s ever interacted with before, but being a smart ass on paper is not a martialable offense. He’s allowed his eccentricities.

He ignores everything to do with the unwelcome reminder of his numerous past failures permanently situated on his face, until it happens again, so real and vivid he can almost smell the air around him, the dry scorch of the red sand desert, arid and blistering, and a pale face, frightened, holding what looks like a pot of tea coated in seals, the sand so red around them it looks like the color is reflecting off the air, off her eyes.

Kakashi suddenly can’t breathe. He knows that face, even without her distinctive purple markings and her hair cut close in a rough bob. There’s a scar on her nose that shouldn’t be there, none of this should be there, because Rin is dead. He’d never once seen her without her paint, but Kakashi is a sharingan: he remembers.

As the flash fades, he clutches at his eye, slamming it closed and uncovering his sharingan only to feel his mangekyo spin unbiddenly and he covers it with his hand, trying to make sense of what he’s sure he’s seeing.

Rin: alive, in a way he’d never seen her when she’d actually been alive. It’s been months since her death, why is he plagued only now with guilt ridden visions of her…alive? Usually his nightmares shows him killing her on a loop, not like this, scared and covered with red in a desert. A big red sand desert. Suna?

His eye is tingling, his left eye, his sharingan eye. That is the one he’s using to see.

It strikes him suddenly and he staggers against the wall on a random rooftop in the market district. His eye. Obito’s eye.

He’s seeing Rin through Obito’s eye. But that’s impossible: both of his teammates are dead.

But he’s seeing glimpses of Rin, alive, in Suna. He remembers the flashes he caught before: a kunai, more sand, a glimpse of her face, still sans paint. Rin, frightened but alive.
Her body had never been recovered.

He’s breathing too heavy, his chakra jumpy and everything in him one long jolt that just won’t stop. He nicks his thumb, runs through the hand signs, and slams it on the ground, summoning Pakkun in a puff of smoke.

He hasn’t dared to face the pug for months. No time to get into it now. “Could you describe what the Suna desert looks like? What color is the sand?”

It’s an odd request, but the pug complies, eyeing him with a concern he can’t focus on right now. “Well, mostly its shades of red, but you get your white and gold areas, even black and brown. There’s dunes in the middle, but mostly its scrubland on the outskirts. There’s salt flats as well, in the south, but they’re impassable even to Wind shinobi.”

Not super enlightening. Kakashi thinks harder, chewing his tongue between his sharp teeth under his mask. “When you step on the sand, does it ripple or just shush outwards?” He demonstrates with his hands the difference he saw in that spit second image.

Pakkun scratches his chin. “Ripple, I guess. But if you used enough chakra it wouldn’t move at all. Suna shinobi practice walking on sand like Konoha shinobi tree walk.”

That’s exactly what he’d seen, when he had no way of knowing it. He thinks it over, mind racing from one thought to the next, a whiplash of intuition leaping from one theory and onward. He asks Pakkun, “What are the chances that I’m being genjutsued right now?”

The ninken bites him on the ankle, drawing blood. The pain is grounding, usually enough to dispel genjutsu, but no release is had. His leg just hurts. He wipes at the blood impatiently. He could have done that himself, but if this is the leader of his pack’s only retribution, he’ll take it.

Pakkun waits patiently while he follows his rabbit hole brain to its conclusion. He knows exactly how smart he is, but this conclusion makes him feel stupid. Either he could somehow no longer trust his sharingan and the mangekyo has damaged it somehow, or he is seeing glimpses of an alive Rin in Suna. It’s possible the degeneration of the mangekyo has reached his brain and is rotting him from the inside out, but he knows which one his gut is telling him is right. And his gut is rarely wrong.

Rin might be alive. He has to be sure. “I’m sending you to Suna. Observe and report back.”

It’s an illegal request, risking war unsanctioned. It’s the first thing he’s asked Pakkun for in months. He’s not sure if he’s crazy, or just desperate, or which would be preferable. Pakkun asks in his gruff voice, too gentle to not raise the hair on his arms, “what exactly am I looking for, Boss?”

Kakashi says, “I have reason to believe that Rin might have survived the Chidori and is currently in Suna. I need to be sure.”

Pakkun blinks at him. There’s no one in this world or any other who knows him as well. He nods shortly. “Send Bisuke as backup, and Guruko to run messenger between us at the border. I’ll send a report when I get there.”

“Thank you, Pakkun.” Kakashi says and the tiny ninken turns tail with a long last look and bounds away over the rooftops towards the village wall. He’s small enough that he’ll slip by the guards without notice. He quickly sends his infiltration trained ninken and his runner after him; they have ways of getting in and out unseen.

Neither ninken hesitates, but Bisuke’s not hiding his disbelief. Guruko’s smarter, has already inferred what this means, and she takes off without a backward look.

Which leaves him with the numbing realization that he can’t tell Minato. And if Minato suspected and hasn’t shared his suspicions with Kakashi, he can understand that. But Kakashi will verify above all else.

If Rin is alive, why hasn’t she come home? Why is she in Suna of all places? He knows she’s not on some deepcover rag with a cover he helped install. Minato would never use him like that. He’s sure of it. And if she isn’t in Konoha, has she abandoned her village? Is his teammate a missing nin?

And he’s only seen her with Obito’s eye. Seen her like he was looking right at her. No, Kakashi shakes his head, everything in him crystalizing. Seen him like Obito was looking right at her.

Rin’s hair was short. She hadn’t cut it one since Obito died.

Was he using his mangekyo and somehow sharing it with him? Because their eyes form a matched pair? Are their mangekyo linked?

He can’t ask Fugaku without raising suspicion. Rin surviving his raiton attack and tricking the mangekyo to become a missing nin is one thing. Thinking that Obito is still alive is another thing entirely.

He mourned Obito for years, tortured himself over not being able to protect him, took his last words to his heart and adopted his nindo as his own. Obito, alive. A missing nin. Together with Rin.

Somehow over the past months everything has stopped making sense to Kakashi. He can’t trust Minato enough to tell him his theory. He’s hiding something relating to the sharingan from Fugaku. And his teammates, both of them, might actually be alive. It’s senseless. At least during the war, he had a purpose, a direction, some measurable goal he was working towards, some convenient excuse for all the things he did to Yu in his grief. But they’re not at war now, and especially have no aggression towards Suna. He can’t think of any worthwhile reason that would necessitate the depth of this betrayal.

What will he even do if they are missing nin choosing not to come back to the village? Consider them an enemy? Trust in their reasons for desertion? Hear them out? Bring them in? It’s the ultimate betrayal. His Will of Fire might not survive it.

This will destroy Minato.

I can’t tell him, he thinks. He owe him that much. If it’s true, he can protect him from their treachery. He’ll never need to know.

He suddenly understands the stupid samurai blood of the White Fang, just the barest amount, diluted and deluded as the White Fang was. If it was just him, Kakashi can live through the dishonor of it. He's worn a mask since he was four. But disgrace is greedy, dishonor is catching, it spreads onto the innocent all the time. He understands the impulse to take it all on himself, to spare those he cares about.

For a second, he lets himself imagine it. Killing them both, for real this time. To spare her parents the disgrace. To save the Uchiha some pride and to keep Minato’s heart from breaking. He could do it; he is sure. How many assassinations has he carried out? People go missing all the time. Nobody is even looking for them. It would be easy. So easy. He already learned to mourn them, and to live with himself after. He’s been taught his grief.

He can almost see it, like a strange flash. Rin’s blood on his hands again, Obito crushed under Kakashi’s heel.

Horror washes through him. This isn’t some random missing nin on an assassination assignment. These are his teammates, his family after he lost everything. He could never hurt them. Could he? It would destroy him too, and then there would be no Team 7 at all. No last Hatake, no Bastard Sharingan in the village, no rising Copy Nin in the other nations. No Uchiha traitor besides the most famous missing nin in history. And Rin’s memory could rest secure in the fact that the truth would not tarnish it. Minato would grieve the loss of his remaining student, but he’d marry Kushina, eventually have actual kids of his own, stay busy running the Leaf. Eventually, this all might just be a nightmare to him. He would never forget, but would there ever be a time when it would feel less real?

If he knew for sure, would he let them go? Never tell anyone at all. Go on living his life as if they were dead? He’s not sure which pain is worse: the pain of them being dead, or the pain of them being alive.

Telling Minato is a death sentence. He's running out of ways to kill his teammates.

The White Fang would have handled it himself.

The urgency tears at him. He has to know for sure, before he does anything drastic. He’ll have to find them before Minato, or T&I would get involved and they vanish into the bowels of Torture and Interrogation. Their teacher is the Hokage but that just ties his hands.

He can’t be alone right now, or he’ll do something inadvisable. He goes home and after five minutes of sitting in the empty silence, he summons Urushi.

She pops into place beside him, prim and pleased. “You summoned Pakkun.”

“I sent him to Suna. I’m seeing Rin through Obito’s eye.”

She’s too poised to betray much reaction, very conservative with her energy, looking at him with the reserved old blood contemplation of a Spitz. After a moment, she lays down and crosses her paws, tail curled neatly over her back.

“Well,” she says. “That is a development.”

He drops down into seiza in front of her. They’re just a few feet from where he had to replace the floor in the living room, unable to scrub the bloodstains out. He says, “they might be alive. Both of them.”

“Perhaps.” She dips her head, studying him with brown eyes. “What are you going to do about it, if they are?”

“Nukenin are executed.”

His immediate response doesn’t faze her. She's been part of his pack from the very beginning. “Does the Yondaime know?”

He shakes his head. “I wanted to be sure.”

It sounds like a confession, and he hadn’t meant it to. Urushi doesn’t press. She’s one of his support position ninken, specializing in politics and dealing with nobles. She knows more about the Hatake history than he does, is more of an acting Clan Head than he’ll ever be. If anyone understands how muddy relationships can get in the real world, outside the ironclad bounds of a Contact, of pack, it’s the Spitz.

“Its easier, if they’re dead,” she says reasonably. “Do you want that?”

Is there any scenario where he wants them dead, truly? If they were disloyal, were working against the Leaf? He recalls their names on the memorial stone, the red stone shaped into a stylized lick of Fire. Would he want them to be alive, if it meant he couldn’t have them back?

What is honor even worth, when it doesn't come home at night?

“I don’t know.”

She dips her head, the band of her hitai ate resting against her throat like a jeweled collar. “It doesn’t have to be your decision.”

Its not. Legally, Minato’s responsible for them, not just as Yondaime, but as their sensei. But if he takes the matter to his teacher, its as good as signing their death warrant himself. The Yondaime isn’t known for his mercy.

“It’s a decision I get to make.”

“The pack stands behind you, whichever you choose.”

He knows, but its good to hear it, to have that one aspect of his life hold unchanging. He can count on his pack above all else.

He breathes out. Pakkun’s on his way to Suna for verification. He has both his old teammate’s scents memorized. If they’re there, the ninken will find them. He can trust the leader of his pack.

And if this is just a mental break, not even a Yamanaka can piece him back together. But he doesn’t think it is. He knows what he’s seen.

Urushi stays with him until his heart is beating slow and steady and his thoughts run less hectically, synapses firing with less lightning and more sense. If not a decision, he can make a plan.

It takes over a week, but Bisuke appears irritable and thirsty to report that Pakkun has set up a base and successfully infiltrated Sunagakure. Minato’d kick his ass if he knew he’d sent his ninken into enemy territory on an unsanctioned mission, but Pakkun and Bisuke knows how to blend in. Nobody ever suspects the cute little pug that waddles when he walks of being a highly skilled ninja hound, or the hound mix barely past puppyhood of being deep cover coded.

He lets Bisuke complain and laze about for another day recovering from his run while Guruko takes his station at the border; it’s safer to have no more than one ninken in Suna at a time, but backup is readily available. The hound mix whines that the sand has damaged his henohenomoheji until Akino tells him off for wearing his cape in Wind. Buru is dozing with his head on Kakashi’s legs, slobbering all over the couch, but it’s the only effective way the bulldog has found of keeping him still.

“But I can’t take off my sunglasses,” Akino wails, rolling over into Uhei, who huffs and snaps at him, playing tug of war with the Konoha hitai ate he stole from Bisuke. “It’s so sunny in Suna.”

Bisuke says, “if you were the one undercover, you’d have to. Regular dogs do not wear cool shades.”

Nobody but Pakkun will say it, but the ninken are worried about him. He can feel the tension under the play. Their summoner’s tying himself into knots over this and they are used to his eccentricities, but they’re not used to his fatalism. He isn’t either. The teen’s a cynic only because he knows the realities of the shinobi world, but it unsettles them to see him question his Will of Fire.

The bulldog snores and sputters some more drool onto the jounin. Kakashi knows that he’s just pinning him down, but he hasn’t the heart to shove the bruiser off the couch. And despite all the moaning and gnashing of teeth, he knows Bisuke isn’t jeopardizing the mission by running around Suna with his summoner’s henohenomoheji on his back. The hound mix is his youngest ninken, but Bisuke uses his puppy dog cuteness for infiltration. He knows he isn’t parading around a foreign ninja village wearing his uniform, dual wielding kunai with his teeth.

They’re trying to distract him from his frantic plotting. Akino noses under his hand asking for pats and Kakashi ruffles the husky’s ears on automatic, mussing the mohawk as he does. They’ve been practicing their tandem training, perfecting their Tracking Fang technique, which he thinks might be useful at subduing nukenin without killing them. Pakkun isn’t here to call him out on it, so the pack lets it slide, making up for their lack of confrontation with a disturbing amount of mother-henning. It’s unbecoming of a pack of lethal ninja hounds, and the other summoning tribes would be ashamed, but Kakashi lets them roll around and bicker and trash his house and harry the ANBU Shiba treed in his yard. Besides, this keeps the toads off his back as well and Gamariki tried to kiss him in his sleep last month and he had to wash his mouth out with soap after and Kushina had only laughed at him and said Minato would ask the toad to behave but he made no promises. Gamariki babysitting him is a worse punishment than any torture Ibiki could come up with, so Kakashi behaves when the pack is watching.

But when he dismisses them, its just him and the waiting and there’s nobody there to stop him.

It takes him two days of careful planning to break into the Secure Archives and take what he wanted: classified clan information on the mangekyo sharingan. He can’t ask Fugaku without raising suspicion with the Uchiha, but he wants to know if eyes can be linked, if a separated pair can still function in some capacity as one set. According to the records, it’s never happened before, but there are exactly no cases like his before. Ever. Uchiha are fiercely protective over their dojutsu and there are only three documented cases of gifted eyes, both from dead clan members who’d awakened the sharingan, one to a different Uchiha who’d been born blind, and one to a teammate who died in the First War. Apparently, Obito wasn’t even original in making his deathbed wish. He’d be annoyed, if he isn’t so sick inside.

It’s beyond frustrating and maddeningly unhelpful. Useless. And he risked being prosecuted as an actual traitor for this. Stealing from the Archives is treason and he’s risking the wrath of both the village and the Uchiha Clan, and for nothing.

He resolves to come up with a way to sneak the files back into the Archives before they’re discovered missing. It’ll be a hassle to get in again, but he has time.

It takes another week for him to summon Bisuke back with the update from Pakkun. And the information is concerning, but doesn’t make a lick of sense, which is turning into a recurring theme in his investigation.

Bisuke salutes with a paw and says, “Boss, Pakkun reports unrest in Sunagakure, their shinobi are mobilized and scouring the nation for something. It must be important for the excessive force to be justified. They’re throwing resources at it but to no avail. Pakkun thinks something was stolen, something secret, and the perps got away. There was a short battle but somehow the missing nin who took whatever it is escaped.”

Kakashi says, “missing nin?”

“There’s conflicting reports of them, but Pakkun says there’s most likely two: a tall one in a hood with a bizarre kekkei genkai where attacks almost seem to phase right through him. The Kazekage’s Gold Dust couldn’t touch him.”

That doesn’t sound familiar to him, but Bisuke goes on, “and the other one was a kunoichi, brown hair, was undercover in the hospital and reported to be quite skilled in medical ninjutsu.”

That strikes an ugly chord in him, in the worst possible way. “Was it Rin?”

Now the hound hesitates, “Pakkun says her scent is inconclusive, Boss.”

He’s never had one of his ninken report a scent as inconclusive before. His eye narrows. “Explain.”

Bisuke says quickly, “Pakkun says its….similar to Rin’s, but not quite Rin. He didn’t go into detail.”

“He’s not sure?” Pakkun is never wrong. This is a first for him. “And the other scent?”

“Inclusive as well, Boss.” Bisuke says.

Kakashi’s thinking hard. Two missing nin, one a brown haired kunoichi with iroyo ninjutsu skills who smells almost like Rin, and a tall, hooded shinobi with a weird kekkei genkai. Two missing nin, who stole something from Suna and bested their Kazekage to do it, the user of his own terrifying bloodline limit.

It sounds like it could be Rin, and as for the other missing nin, what if Obito’s mangekyo is to blame for the unusual technique?

It could be, but he can’t prove it.

Kakashi bites his lip and asks, “how long ago was this battle?”

“Ten days ago, Boss.”

That lines up with the weird flashes he got of a battle in the Suna desert, of Rin holding that pot of tea covered with the strange seals. Is that what they stole? Fucking weird tea?
When Kakashi falls silent, contemplating, Bisuke asks, “Do you want Pakkun to return? The pair of missing nin are no longer in Suna. He could follow…” the hound suggests but Kakashi shakes his head. Further mobilization is pushing risks he can’t calculate for, especially with their targets in the wind to an unknown destination.

“I’ll dismiss him. You’ve done good work. Thank you, Bisuke.”

He runs through the hand signs and dismisses the ninken in a puff of white smoke and then dismisses the rest of the pack, Buru looking at him mournfully but going.

Then he nicks his thumb with a kunai and summons Pakkun directly to him from Suna. The pug doesn’t look surprised to see him. Its not a good start.

“Thank you for your report, Pakkun.”

The ninken raised him from the age of four, met him seconds after his birth. He can’t hide anything from him. Pakkun squints at him. “Don’t do anything rash, Kakashi. Bisuke told me you were taking risks. Did you really steal clan secrets from the Archives?”

“Allegedly,” Kakashi interrupts, but the stupid files are sitting open on his coffee table, covered in protective seals that will shrivel his hands off if he opens them incorrectly or out of sequence. It took him four days to crack it. Pakkun is not amused. “Do you know which way they went?”

“Probably north, due to the concentration of Wind shinobi sent to patrol their border with Stone and Bear.”

Iwa? Why? Maybe they were selling whatever they had taken from Suna to Iwa, in true missing nin fashion.

Kakashi raises his hands to dismiss him, but Pakkun says, gruffly, in a way he knows to read as mitigatingly, “It might not be them, Boss.”

But it might be, and Pakkun knows him well enough to know that is all he needs. “Thank you, Pakkun,” he says, unable to look him in his wrinkled face. Pakkun is his earliest memory. The pug’s face is more familiar than his father’s. Before he can think it through enough to regret, he dismisses him with a pop of chakra.

He tosses the Archive files into a modified storage scroll that he smears with his blood to keep unwanted eyes out. Then he walks to his front door on autopilot and walks through it, waving at the tree where knows the tiger masked ANBU is, and then he throws himself into a shunshin, landing in the village and then throwing himself into another, all the way to the Hokage Tower, where he lets himself into Minato’s office using the window.

Nara Shikaku is leaning over the desk, hands lazily stuffed in his pockets, and he only glances at Kakashi’s blatant disrespect of basic operating procedures while Minato calls off the ANBU guards who appeared to intercept him.

Minato doesn’t quite glare, but he’s not happy about the window either. He keeps trying to break him of the habit, but Kakashi used to think it was funny, before. He’s not thinking of anything, now. Rational thought is a detriment, and the balm of protocol is all that is holding him together.

It’s the only decision he can make.

“We need to talk, Minato sensei.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Ten: Minato: The Yondaime

His scheduled cup of tea arrives on his desk like clockwork, steam rising from the lip, a few dregs swirling at the bottom of the cup. It looks like it would smell good, if he picks up the cup to warm his hands and takes a big inhale of the blend.

He doesn’t smell it. He studies it, wondering if this is to be the day.

He spoons out a measure of the tea and dumps it into the waiting matrix inked out on the open scroll covering his desk. The second the tea touches the ink, the lines flare red.

He sighs. “Boar.”

The Tower Captain appears silently. He says, “Reset the record, and give the new intern to Morino. Discreetly. I don’t want Kumo taking credit for another half-witted attempt.”

Boar salutes and flickers away. Propped in a chair over by the windows, Kushina says, conversationally, “we could always kill the Daimyo.”

He glances at his Honor Guard, but Raido looks considering. She says, “I mean, he’s only like a second cousin’s bastard. You’d be doing him a favor, really.”

The new intern was accepted as a favor for the court, to put needed distance between a bastard and the noble family. He managed to make it two weeks running papers before the daily temptation of an easy mark and a fake bribe exposed him. Kushina’s been running the misdirection, feeding him bogus rumors about courtesans, while the money for the bribe came from Admin, who are getting tired of trying to find trustworthy external hires for him.

He's lost count of the attempts on his life. Most of them were so inept they shouldn’t count, like his easily poisoned daily tea trap, and a few others were also secretly him weaseling out traitors, but there have been a few serious threats. The exploding ink brush from Iwa was uncharacteristically creative. Kumo’s browbeaten vanguard attack was less so.

Minato says, “Too much trouble. I’d rather disappear the cousin and tell the Daimyo he quit. See if we can recover the bribe, I’ll sent it as a condolence when he never shows up to the Capitol.”

Kushina snorts. “Now you’re really doing him a favor.”

Minato can’t disagree. His reputation precedes him, and the Daimyo’s taken to using the office of his newest military dictator as a dumping ground for his unsightly shames, and there’s nothing to make a coddled noble snap like office work. He’s gotten his last three interns with this same tea trick. It took the first one only a day to seize the opportunity of an unattended teacup meant for the new Yondaime. The second held out a few months and only broke for an absurd amount of money. He’d liked that one. They were good at filing. Too bad about the poison.

Iwashi sighs. “I’ll get rid of the cup. How many days did this make?”

Minato sweeps the offending matrix off his desk. “Twenty-two.”

Raido winces. “You don’t have to use real poison, Yondaime sama.”

Minato shrugs. “Its good practice for the new recruits. Sabotage has a new crop of hopefuls and the Commander will only accept them if they actually get to me.”

“And I’ve got a bet with him that the guard recruits stop the cup before it makes it to the office,” Kushina says, which makes the whole affair sound like a game, but right now there is a real civilian vanishing into the depths of T&I. A civilian who’d never been outside the luxury of the Capitol before, unused to ninja and a ninja village, who’d been offered enough money to live comfortably on after being forced from his home and made to do busywork. Anyone would be a little resentful.

Minato’s okay with being resented. But he can’t have Tower staff that turn so easily, or so stupidly. He could make the argument that no competent assassin would target so obvious a ruse, but its not about the capability.

Everyone always says he feels nothing. He doesn’t wish it were true, but he does know it would make things easier.

Kushina spins around in her chair, files flipping through her hands at a rapid speed while Iwashi disposes of the evidence. While his fiancé is rather flippant about this newest threat to his life, his Honor Guard is less amused. Raido’s picking at the edges of his burn scars again, and if the captain is unsettled by how casual it’s all starting to feel, it only means that Iwashi and Genma are taking it hard as well.

His secretary appears with a new load of work for him and sighs when she sees the reset board propped up on desk, showing a fat goose egg for the new tally. She dumps the armload of paperwork into his incoming box and separates the files marked urgent. “I’ll restart the hiring process, Yondaime sama.”

He waves in acknowledgement, looking at the two-foot-tall pile of files and scrolls. The top one is labeled with an address from the Capitol. Even unencrypted, the data doesn’t make any sense. There’s a bar graph, a scatter plot, an excerpt from a local area map, blown up and marked with red flags, all overlaid with annotations from various number crunchers, none of which he finds particularly trustworthy.

Minato is not having a good week. Actually, since he was sworn into office it seems that everything has been downhill. Hiruzen warned him that the stupid hat has a weight, but within months of his ascension as the Yondaime Hokage, Rin is kidnapped and killed on his watch. And the investigation of her death is opening up a conspiracy he doesn’t feel equipped to handle stuck behind this desk shuffling around mountains of paperwork.

Once the secretary leaves, Kushina throws the files she’d been working on down on his desk. “Fixed it,” she declares. “Just use the money from the shell in Wave as a cover and we can blackmail the Tsui into keeping their mouths shut about it.”

It’s an interesting solution to his problem with the trading guild accused of war profiteering in the border nations. It’s also just the barest edge into his investigation into the shinobi who took Rin from him, since the shell relies on independent contractors, mercenaries, nukenin and their ilk, to run, and as such, has no ties traceable to the Leaf.

He’d guessed that the perpetrators were operating unsanctioned by any nation or ninja village. The fake Kiri nin proved that much. But the scale of the attack is worrying because of the sheer numbers they’d used to herd his student to the border. Nukenin have never been recorded moving in force like this before.

And when his remaining student spent the week in a coma, his transplanted eye spinning with a black pinwheel, he didn’t want to assume the worst. He has just enough information about the sharingan to guess that maybe the mangekyo could be unlocked by killing a loved one and they hadn’t recovered Rin during the aftermath of whatever battle took place east of their border with Taki.

It had been a long week, waiting for him to wake up. The Council of Elders kept trying to have him moved to holding in T&I; he’s not the only non-Uchiha smart enough to guess about the dojutsu. Minato is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt as long as he can.

Kakashi’s report clarified some things for him, in the worst way. Nobody survived Kakashi’s Chidori. He doesn’t think he’s lying. He wouldn’t, not about that; Kakashi has strong feelings about suicide. He doesn’t know why she’d done it, but if she wanted to die, that is an effective way to do it.

He’ll never forget how Kakashi looked when he said it. As adult as his student insists he is, sometimes all Minato can see is a little kid in a lot of pain, the way a man’s pain lays overwhelmingly on the shoulders of a son who’s father’s values haunt him still; a father and a dog, and Minato with his own orphan’s upbringing, with no knowledge of how to alleviate either of those expectations for him.

He tried to protect his last student from the investigation because he knows that Kakashi would make a devastating missing nin, and the knowledge that Rin might have been chosen to manipulate him won’t help anyone and would only cause hurt.

He hands another armful of highly classified, politically tricky situations he needs to solve over to his fiancé. Kushina approaches everything like it’s a prank and it’s been surprisingly effective so far.

She flips through the taglines and scowls. “Ew, Kiri. Please, can I have them? As a wedding present?”

Even knowing how disastrous that would be, he’s tempted. He’s fairly certain that Water has nothing to do with Rin’s death, but it would be fun to unleash his fiancé onto Kiri. He’s frustrated by the lack of confirmation he’s getting from the island nation, and it took so much maneuvering to get those new assets into place.

He says, “I already gave you Kakashi.”

She brightens. “He’s having me tailed. The bloodhound was very apologetic about it. I gave him a biscuit.”

He very carefully does not stab the blatantly fraudulent mission request in his hands with a kunai and send it back to the requesters as-is. Fucking C ranks. “He did now.”

Kakashi won’t stop pushing. They are both grieving but while Minato is channeling his loss into productive outlets, Kakashi is trying to sign up for ANBU and break into the Secure Archives. He has a knack for slipping tails, and Bear is this close to using his shadows to bind him in place after Tiger lost him once again. ANBU ranks have started making tailing Kakashi a hazing experience for the new recruits.

ANBU isn’t even an organization that you can apply for. He’d modeled his request after the standard Chuunin Exams app and listed his qualifications as an assassin as evidence to his suitability. Bear looked it over and only said “Troublesome” before Minato was tearing it into teeny tiny pieces and then stuffing those pieces into the incinerator.

This whole situation is giving him gray hair, he is sure of it. He doesn’t want to see Kakashi vanish into the darkness of Black Ops, but he’s trying to use sanctioned missions as cover to sneak around outside the village. He hadn’t even hesitated before taking the obvious bait. Minato had no choice but to ground him.

Kushina says that it’s just how he’s grieving, that he’ll calm down after time wears the edge off the pain of losing Rin. But it’s been 2 years since Obito’s accident and the loss has only served to sharpen him further.

Minato has already failed two students, and now he is losing Kakashi as well. The teen resents him for excluding him from the investigation. He’s putting more and more distance between them. He isn’t talking to his friends or the other jounin. His toads report that he keeps the Hatake house warded at all times with lethal traps and the privacy seals he’d gotten from Kushina when he made jounin.

It took him getting arrested for Minato to see him. He’d been lurking around the Secure Archives, plotting, when Gai had seen and intervened. Thank the kami for Chouza’s team. He’d have to send the Akimichi some gift baskets in thanks, or maybe a nice edible flower arrangement made out of fruit.

Minato took off the kid gloves. If Kakashi wanted to be treated like an adult shinobi, a capable jounin, then it was time he knew why Minato had insisted he keep his distance. He would trust in his teacher, his Hokage, his village, or Minato really was going to throw him in jail for a while to stew.

They both missed the funeral. Kakashi because he’s hospitalized himself again, and Minato because he can’t bring himself to look into the face of Rin’s mother, can’t go anywhere near Rin’s father. He knows the civilian faith, knows how little consolation he can offer as a shinobi; how even as the Hokage, he can’t give them what they need from him. Failed missions, missing checkpoints, blank reports. He knows how shinobi would count it. That’s not any consolation either.

It never is. He doesn’t think it’s ever been worth it.

Kushina goes. She's at home in graveyards. She’s lost more people than Minato thought possible. He hates that he couldn’t spare any of them their latest hurt.

The investigation is being handled by ANBU, because if there is a conspiracy against the Leaf, he doesn’t need anyone else knowing about it. Kakashi might be a jounin, but he’s still a child, and a compromised one. He’s too close to be objective, and it would be irresponsible of Minato to involve a potential target into the investigation.

And it’s not like breaking into the Secure Archives will get him what he wants. Minato keeps the files under lock and key, sealed to hell and back in this very office. The only fuuinjutsu master skillful enough to crack the encryption on them is Kushina, and she’s not giving in anytime soon.

Bear handles the reports of ANBU’s findings in Kiri. It doesn’t look good. Kiri is hovering on the brink of another civil war, kept from slaughter only by the Mizukage strong-arming the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist, what was left of them, that is. It’s unlikely they were in the business of antagonizing Konoha by nabbing chuunin. And Iwa and Kumo learned the exact flavor of Minato’s wrath and he’d taught them caution and made sure they’d learned it hard when he’d singlehandedly sent an entire platoon back in boxes. They wouldn’t have forgotten so soon and this attack was too sideways for Iwa, too cowardly for Kumo.

It’s likely not any one nation behind it. So they started looking into missing nin. Konoha has a few missing nin, most gennin or low chuunin level, and their hunter nin are good enough at grabbing them that they made sure to operate outside of Fire’s borders.

And the reports they’re getting are….concerning. Missing nin across the continent are congregating around Ame, more are working in pairs rather than going solo, and reports of new players on the board are surfacing in Tani, in Kusa; in Suna, a shinobi pair composed of a talented medical nin and a one-armed bizarre freak are bold enough to stir up some shit with the Kazekage himself.

Talented medical ninja are rare, and this one is highly trained. She gave her name as Sachira and the hooded shinobi went by Tobi. No indication of which real nation they hailed from (he’d eat his hat if they were really from Tea) and their physical descriptions match no entries in any Bingo Book. No one’s reported two high level shinobi turning missing nin. They don’t show the same MO as the droves of newly unaffiliated nin fleeing Yu either.

And Suna’s pitching a fit, mobilizing their forces and generally acting hostile, but they won’t outright accuse anyone of wrongdoing. Konoha’s spies in Sunagakure report that its over something stolen from the Tower itself.

Its unusual, but not Konoha’s concern. Two missing nin raising hell in Suna doesn’t concern Konoha in the slightest, and there is no proof they are affiliated with whoever had taken Rin. Bear filed the information away, but Minato didn’t pursue it.

Kushina mentioning Kakashi’s bloodhound tracker reminds him to send a message with one of his toads to Jiraiya to keep an ear out for information about missing nin, specifically around Ame. He knows his teacher and spymaster is familiar with the region from his time in the Second War.

It is in parts infuriating and exhausting that no new information relating to either Rin, her captors, or the supposed S rank shinobi who’d torched the battlefield before they recovered Kakashi, surfaces. He feels like he is letting her down and it is a heavier thought that the hat on his head.

He glances at the clock on the wall by the official portraits of the past Hokage. Its getting late and he’s not expecting an update from his ANBU investigators until Bear’s recalled agents make it back from Water, and they’re staggering their extraction to alleviate suspicion.

He leaves the hat on the desk and shrugs out of his robes of office. “I’m calling it.”

“Ramen?” Kushina’s eyes shine and he can’t tell her no.

He dismisses his Honor Guard and he and Kushina walk to Teuchi’s, making nice with the villagers as they pass. He’s popular among the civilians, with his blue eyes and immigrant name. He is genial and friendly with the civilian clans, who should all know better, but somehow never do. It’s not surprising that they take him at face value. It’s easier when people aren’t interested in knowing more about him than what he presents to the world.

He eats the ramen without fear. There’s not a pressure point in the world that would make the ramen vendor cross Kushina. That’s not trust; he’d verified. Several times.

Kushina is the only one who can cheer him up. He doesn’t know how he could get through losing his student and Kakashi’s subsequent decline in delinquentism without her, even if all she can do is force his brat student into wedding planning and smack him around like a misbehaving puppy. She appropriated his punishment for Kakashi’s arrest, and it gave him some needed peace of mind. Kakashi has a soft spot for the fiery kunoichi that is half admiration/respect and half fear.

The only reason he can sleep at night is that the evidence of the jounin’s visible suffering is enough to keep the Elder Council off his back; half of whom wanted him in ANBU and the other half wanted him in jail. Even the Council of Clan Heads have started weighing in on his student’s future in the Leaf, with the Akimichi, Nara, Inuzuka, and Yamanaka favoring leniency in the face of multiple extenuating circumstances, and Fugaku wanting to nail his ass to the wall of T&I until he cries uncle. The Uchiha Clan Head suspects the teen is hiding something from him and he’d stopped attending their scheduled training sessions, which is unacceptable to the Chief of the Leaf Police, who is too busy and important to be stood up by a mere brat.

Honestly, Shikaku and Inoichi maybe agree with Fugaku, but they are loyal to Chouza, who’s old gennin team is longtime friends with Kakashi since their Academy days. He thinks Tsume is just interested in seeing what kind of hell the kid can raise if he’s loose in the village.

Hyuuga Hiashi is in the difficult position of thinking Kakashi is out of control but unable to actually agree with the other dojutsu clan. Generations of animosity and rivalry and turns out its Minato’s unruly student who gives them something to agree on. Kushina thinks its hilarious, objectively speaking.

The Aburame are the only major clan that hasn’t pestered him about muzzling the fourteen-year-old, but if Kakashi destroys another training ground, he might just raise Shibi to ire.

The next day, he’s seated at his desk in the Hokage office, going over the latest ANBU reports with a casual wear Shikaku on his lunch break. The Nara Clan Head is easily the brightest mind in the village, but even he’s stumped by the puzzle of Rin’s death. There is no reason for there to be such huge gaps in their information. ANBU has failed, their spy network has failed, their foreign informants have failed, and Minato has failed above all of them.

Shikaku has his hands in his pockets and he’s in his customary slouch, eyes half-lidded as if he’s seconds from nodding off, but Minato knows it’s all a show. Shikaku only likes puzzles when he can solve them. They’ve both been losing sleep over this.

The ANBU reports are lackluster. Not up to the usual standard. Eagle would have had a conniption, but he’s been dead for years, and Bear’s sector performs competently in all fields but this one, it seems. Something’s missing, some crucial piece of information that should lead them to their next clue. But for the life of him, Minato can’t figure it out. For all intents and purposes, the organization that orchestrated Rin’s death had surfaced and then vanished without a trace, much like the one who terminated all those shinobi. No clear motives. Nothing but theories. No hunches besides the instinct that he’s missing something.

He looks up when Kakashi swings in through his window, the office ANBU in the room appearing to intercept the threat while the shadows around his feet don’t even flinch. Shikaku looks annoyed and he sweeps all the sensitive information out of sight.

Minato calls off the ANBU and looks at his student. Really looks at him. It’s always been hard to gauge his expressions under his mask and headband, but Minato’s known him since he was 10. He’s distressed but nobody else in the room would notice. His visible eye is tight and there’s an alertness to his posture that goes beyond just a shinobi being aware of his surroundings. Kakashi’s standing with feet shoulder width apart, weight on the balls of his feet, arms loose and just slightly bent, like he’s expecting to be under attack at any second.

There’s something very brittle about him in this moment. He says, “Minato sensei, we need to talk.”

Minato nods and holds his hands open face-up on his desk. He looks at Kakashi to begin.

The Hatake says, “it’s regarding information adjacent to protected clan secrets.”

That’s…not what Minato was expecting when his student burst in his office like a pack of missing nin is on his heels. The sharingan? Shouldn’t he ask Fugaku? But he nods again and dismisses the ANBU from the room. His guard squad follows, Iwashi too proud to frown with anything but his light fingers, but his Honor Guard hates being dismissed. It gives Gemma hives and makes Raido drink. For some reason, they think that the Yellow Flash of the Leaf suddenly lost his ability to protect himself the second the hat touched his head.

He asks, “can Shikaku sama stay? You can trust his discretion.”

Kakashi’s eye narrows at the Nara and Minato realized he might have inadvertently blown the ANBU Commander’s cover. His student is too smart by far. It’s why he’s always in trouble. That same whiplash intelligence of the Nara, with none of the trademark laziness holding him back. No boundaries. No checks on his potential but what damage the outside world can do to his inside world.

But Kakashi nods shortly and Minato activates Kushina’s privacy seals, silencing seals, and other protective seals, effectively making this room its own secure space. The seals will glow blue if someone tries to breach them.

After the shimmer settles over the walls and windows, Kakashi says, “I request immunity from potential prosecution in exchange for information.”

Shikaku raises his eyebrows and Minato loses a year off his life. The sharp spike of a migraine settles itself behind his eyes. He tries not to sound as exasperated as he feels. “What did you do?”

But that isn’t an agreement and Kakashi keeps his mouth shut.

He sighs, “Were you caught?”

Kakashi looks offended.

“Will this cause an international incident or make the Uchiha riot in the streets?”

Damn it all, but Kakashi hesitates. “Negative to the international incident, unless you tell them, and probably not to the Uchiha rioting. They might get upset, though.”

Uchiha Fugaku kept him alive after the sharingan, after the mangekyo, not sure if it was kindness or abomination, and Minato will never be able to repay him for it. Minato repeats himself. “What did you do?”

Kakashi raises his chin. “I sent my ninken to infiltrate Sunagakure to gather intel on a lead.”

Suna, the one country he dismissed out of hand for not having any motivation to be behind Rin’s death. Suna, who had kept to itself since the end of the Second War. Minato’s eyes narrow. “What intel?”

Kakashi says, “A few weeks ago, I started getting flashes of images from my mangekyo, showing what looked like a skirmish between shinobi. Just flashes, single frames. A kunai, part of a face, sand. Lots of sand, with heat waves rising from it. I confirmed with Pakkun details about the texture of the red sand in the Suna desert, details I shouldn’t have known. I suspected it was some mangekyo technique I was subconsciously accessing, but that didn’t feel right to me. It had happened while I wasn’t molding chakra, with my sharingan covered.”

“It kept happening. Nothing concrete. Until I saw something else.” Kakashi is upset but hiding it well. He says the next words like he’s aware he shouldn’t believe them himself, but he wouldn’t have come to Minato if he wasn’t reasonably sure.

“I saw Rin. Her face. She’d cut her hair and wasn’t wearing her paint, but I know her. It was Rin, standing in the desert, surrounded by red, looking frightened while she held a pot of tea covered in unfamiliar seals.”

When he doesn’t immediately interrupt, Kakashi continues, “I was seeing her through my gifted sharingan, Obito’s sharingan. Seeing her like I was standing right in front of her.” Kakashi takes a breath, “Like Obito was standing right in front of her.”

It takes a second for Minato to feel the full impact of what Kakashi is implying and in that time, the teen goes on speaking, “I sent my ninken to gather intel in Suna. Pakkun successfully infiltrated the village and relayed his findings back to me. 10 days ago, a pair of missing nin broke into the Kazekage’s offices and stole something from Suna, something important.”

The hit doesn’t register like he knows it should. He knows he’s gone still and calm in that way that unsettles most people. Kushina calls it his scary-face. The Yamanaka call it something else entirely.

When he doesn’t respond, Kakashi says, “the missing nin responsible were described by witnesses as a tall shinobi in a hood with an unusual technique that allowed him to phase straight through enemy attacks. The second is a brown haired kunoichi, who’d been undercover in their hospital before the heist. A talented medical ninja, highly trained.”

Fuck, if it doesn’t match the reports they’d gotten from their spies in Suna. Something gone missing, the Kazekage furious. Kakashi continues, verbal mask as firmly in place as the cloth on over his face, “I sent Pakkun to get their scents and he says the kunoichi smells similar to Rin, but not exactly. I’ve never gotten an inconclusive result from Pakkun before. The same with the second shinobi’s scent. Similar, but not quite definitive.”

Kakashi doesn’t say but close enough for me. What he does say is, “I believe both Rin and Obito are still alive and were previously in Suna. Pakkun reports them heading north, towards Iwa.”

The missing nin from Kusa. Rin and Obito, alive. Rin and Obito, missing nin. His team, letting him think they were dead. Kakashi’s saying they were alive, that he’s seen them.

Minato focuses very hard. “You believe your mangekyo is linked to his.”

“Yes, and that the reported technique he’s using is a mangekyo ability. Every time I’ve caught flashes, it’s been in what appear to be a high stress situation. A kunai. Rin afraid. Times he might focus chakra through his sharingan.”

Minato can sense the questions brimming in Shikaku but he’s not sure he wants Kakashi cross-examined just yet. That brittleness is still there, something fragile in his core. He trusted Minato enough to confide in him. He’d come to him to fix the problem.

He knows what Kakashi expects from this. The law is clear.

He’s giving him permission.

Minato hardens.

He has a plan within a second. Nobody’s going to like it, least of all Kakashi. He says, “Shikaku, take his statement. Redraw the profile for Rin’s attackers. Covertly reopen the investigation into the Kanabi Bridge mission. Send for Fugaku to check his eye but keep the details need to know. I’m classifying this entire conversation above level 8 clearance.”

He stands up and shrugs out of his Hokage robes. Underneath, he’s wearing his standard shinobi blues: jounin attire, mesh armor and flak jacket. His kunai pouch is fully stocked. He has full rations but he won’t need them. It should only take a day, tops. He knows where to look. North of Sunagakure, heading towards Iwa. Rain, Stone, Key, Bear, in that order.

If he’s spotted, its war. But he’s never spotted. He’s too fast for that.

“I’ll leave a toad if you need me.”

There’s one of his three-pronged kunai in his hands and Kakashi’s eye widens in a panicked regret that comes too late. He lunges at him but Minato’s too quick. He reaches out to the bright sparks of his seals scattered throughout the village and surrounding country, tiny pricks of light in his consciousness.

Finally, some actionable option that requires no paperwork, no red tape and delays. A problem he could solve in his usual way. The calfskin of the handle is familiar, wrapped with his jutsu formula.

“Hiraishin!”

He vanishes and reappears instantly outside the western gate. He ducks behind one of Hashirama’s vast trees he left protecting the heart of the Nation of Fire and summons Gamaken, who appears in his smaller form. “I’m going on a mission outside the village. In my office, you’ll find Nara Shikaku and Kakashi. They’ll fill you in. If there’s an emergency, alert Geratora. He can contact me.”

The scroll toad is currently residing in Minato’s stomach, so a swift kick should do the trick. Gamaken doesn’t waste time asking questions, knows better than to ask qualifiers when Minato’s expression is blank as a ceramic mask. He just starts hopping up and over the village wall.

Shikaku would covertly wrangle the ANBU guards, but Minato had only just begun teaching his Honor Guard squad a bastardized version of the Hiraishin that month so they could keep up with him. There is no way the three of them could follow him, even working together. Not yet at least. He is Namikaze Minato, the Yellow Flash of the Leaf, the Yondaime Hokage, and he is the fastest shinobi alive. No one can even come close to stopping him.

It only takes a dozen Hiraishin to get to the border they share with Ame, and then he is at the end of his preset locations. But that doesn’t matter. He’s fast enough on his feet that eyes can’t track his speed; it would take a sharingan to even see him passing through the rain.

Ame is a downpour, and he speeds around the small country searching for any signs of his students or missing nin. Once upon a time, both Rin and Obito had carried his seals so he could find them. He’s tagged his jutsu formula on them enough. He can find them anywhere.

They had ditched or destroyed his seals but it won’t slow him down too much. He takes a deep breath and sits on a stable tree branch, sinking deep into his battle calm and then right past it into utter stillness, into a deep meditation, where he can feel the nature chakra around him. He enters Sage Mode and opens his toad-pupiled eyes, letting the senjutsu increase his sensing range tenfold.

He can find them anywhere.

After he finishes casing Ame, he jumps over to Ishi. If they are heading to Iwagakure from Sunagakure, this is where they’ll be.

Night is falling now but it doesn’t slow him down. It isn’t long after that that he feels it, a tingle at the edge of his awareness. The faint echo of water chakra and the cool wash of iroyo ninjutsu, similar enough to his student, but there is something…off about it. He can’t put his finger on it and Kakashi saying even Pakkun wasn’t able to confirm definitely the owner of the chakra replays in his mind.

But its close enough. He’s suddenly sure.

She’s alive. Alive, and nearby.

He hardens his heart. If this is what is required of him as a Hokage, as a sensei, then he will do it. Kakashi knows he can, its why he asked. Kushina will understand, even if she’s disappointed in him for falling into old mindsets. He can kill them both, here and now, and nobody will ever have to know. He can do it, and it’ll be easy, and he’ll go home after and tell Kakashi it wasn’t them and maybe he’ll believe him, and maybe he won’t, but either way, they’re both prepared to live with it.

He feels the adrenaline in his hands, like he’s a rookie about to enter a battlefield before he learned the clarity and control of the battle calm.

He jumps closer, faster than anyone can reliably track. He lands on a wide branch overlooking a weird forest construction, a dome of brambles and undergrowth surrounding a hidden fire and campsite. It’s perfectly sheltered from anyone on the ground, but Minato is a Konoha shinobi, and he has the high ground. He peers down into the camp, feeling his Sage Mode fade away.

The hooded shinobi from the reports is setting traps around the fire. He must sense him because he startles and looks up, but it isn’t Rin. Minato catches a glimpse of a face drape in a distinctly Suna style, obscuring most of his features, but the one eye he sees widens at the sight of Minato’s sudden appearance, whirling with a mangekyo that is the exact twin to Kakashi’s.

Obito. It feels like a kunai to the gut, but it is his student. Back from the dead.

There’s not time for hellos. No niceties he can afford. Nothing can excuse the fact that he should have been dead but isn’t. That he should have come home but never did. In him is nothing but a grim determination.

The Uchiha scrambles to his feet and Minato lunges, leading with a double handful of ninja wire.

How many times have they sparred over the course of their training? This has none of that familiarity. Killing Intent whips the leaves on the branches around him, and its real, its all real.

The second he should have made contact, his ninja wire simply passes through, like Obito is air, like he’s a ghost. Minato’s ready to launch a handful of his marked kunai around the campsite, all too willing to abuse time/space techniques, when a wave of corrosive chakra hits him like a tsunami. Minato’s felt Killing Intent from Kages that didn’t pack the punch this chakra does, and he takes his eyes off Obito to locate the new threat.

It’s Rin. A barefaced Rin oozing a red chakra that drips with malice, as deep and powerful as an angry sea.

Minato faced Killer B during the last war. He knows how to recognize the feel of a Bijuu’s anger, and it’s a bewildering blow to him, yet another thing that doesn’t make any damn sense.

He shouldn’t freeze, he’s too deep in the battle calm for such a rookie response to Killing Intent, but that’s a Tailed Beast’s chakra emanating from his student, and it brings him up short. He hadn’t thought there was anything in the world to excuse desertion, but he never considered this.

He pauses and Obito warps himself away in a spiral to stand by her side. His hand is on her elbow and the chakra is fading back into the jinchuuriki.

The jinchuuriki.

It’s still just Rin.

Minato takes a deep breath and eases out of his stance, but he doesn’t disarm. He looks at the pair of missing nin. He looks at his students. For them to reach this point, he’s had to fail them in ways he struggles to comprehend. Maybe taking responsibility for that looks different from what he expected, from what Kakashi asked of him.

In the beginning, they’d offered to be each other’s family.

He’s cut off at the knees.

“I’d be willing to listen.”

It’s not a chance he would extend to anyone else. He can’t promise them any more than that.

Rin studies him with keen eyes. The fire crackles and it feels like the woods around them are leaning closer and closer, hedging them all in together.

“I’ll make tea,” she decides. “You’re welcome to join us, sensei.”

Minato edges cautiously closer, wary of the chakra he can feel permeating the air around Rin. Bijuu are an opponent to make even kage pause. He comes into the light of the fire as crickets begin to chirp around them in the twilight, settling after the Killing Intent dissipates. There’s live steel in his hands and Obito fixes him with his mangekyo. He knows he shouldn’t be looking an Uchiha in the eye, but he can’t help it. He’ll risk the genjutsu attack. He’s busy drinking in the sight of him.

The reports are incorrect; they’d noted a defining characteristic of the shinobi as being one-armed. What little he can make out of his face behind the drape is bandaged, but his nose and mouth are crooked, a thick line of old scars that almost perfectly bisects his face. From the cave-in?

Obito sees him looking and hunches his shoulders, closing himself off. Minato can’t read him, and he should be able to. Obito’s always worn his heart on his sleeve. He’s never seen him this obfuscating. Did he learn that from him?

They’re silent, studying each other across the fire while Rin sets the tea to boiling in a battered pot. He knows he’s not the easiest mark to read but he has no idea what his face is doing.

They are silent while the tea boils. Just taking each other in.

Each second he watches them is a mistake.

Rin is steady and sure in her movements. She’s chopped her hair off into a messy bob just past her chin and she’s not wearing her paint either. She’s lost weight but not muscle mass. She’s always been slender, but now she’s turned thin in a way that makes him wonder if she’s eating enough, or if she’s ill. She’s wearing civilian clothes instead of gear and they look worn and frayed. Her thin jacket won’t survive any true winter. She’s watching him right back and he has no idea what she sees.

Obito’s attention is focused on him in a way that’s both disconcerting and unlike him. It strikes him suddenly that it’s a very mature look. He’s not that hyperactive goofy 14-year-old Minato remembers, but a grown teen well on his way to manhood. He’s still but Minato can sense the turmoil inside of him, but he holds his peace while Rin seeps the tea.

He should have blitzed them while he had the chance. It was never his plan to hear them beg him for their lives. It would be easier, for all of them, if he’d never stopped, if he didn’t burden himself with the memory of whatever angles they’ll try that will inevitably fall short.

There’s only two cups and Rin passes Minato one and keep hold of the other for herself. She inhales the steam from it, and they consider each other until Obito fidgets and says, “Hokage, huh? Congratulations.”

His voice is deeper. Minato says, carefully, “it’s been over two years.”

Obito laughs, high and stressed. “Yeah, hn, about that…”

There is no possible reasoning to excuse this level of betrayal and Minato tenses. Rin elbows Obito, not sloshing the tea any. She takes a sip. “You first, Obito. It’s the only way any of this will make sense.”

They look at each other. Minato has the sense that he’s silently asking her how much he should tell, and what he should censor. Rin just sips her tea neatly, eyes on him, and it’s a challenge.

Obito says, hesitantly, “You know about the accident with the cave-in, on the Kanabi Bridge mission?”

When Minato looks at him blankly, Obito continues, “I didn’t die. I was rescued from the rubble and taken to a different cave to recover. I was….bad off. Physically, I mean. I should have died, and it took over a year before I could even walk again. Even then, I was still trapped. I wasn’t allowed to leave. That’s where I was, for two years. Stuck in a different hole in the ground.”

He doesn’t interrupt, but it doesn’t stop the thought that its not good enough. He hears more censure than truth. But he said he’d listen, and Obito better have a better story to tell than captivity, because he’s sure as hell not stuck underground now. Nothing should have stopped him from coming home.

Obito says, “I didn’t escape until the night I heard about Rin and Kakashi being nearby, and in trouble. I was on my way to help her and got there just in time to see Kakashi’s Chidori take her through the chest.”

His fist tightens at the remembered image. “I thought he’d killed her. I went a little crazy, awakened the mangekyo sharingan, took out the fake Kiri nin. Kakashi was unconscious, he never even saw me. When I realized that Rin was still alive, barely, I took her and ran. I didn’t think I could carry them both, and Kakashi didn’t seem injured, so… I left him behind. I figured backup was on the way.”

Obito is the supposed S rank shinobi who’d torched the battlefield. Even after seeing his technique in action, Minato can hardly believe it.

Even more concerningly…he’d left Kakashi behind. His teammate had survived, but the Obito Minato taught would have never left anyone behind. It’s not easy for him to see the shame Obito feels from that.

Its not easy for him to know that its no excuse. Kakashi killing Rin isn’t the argument he needs to make. He’ll never be convinced Obito believed Kakashi had done it on purpose.

Obito says, “Rin was dying, and I tried to take her back to the Leaf, but when I realized…” When he trails off this time, Minato knows it’s to give Rin the chance to name herself. When she just sips her tea, utterly impassive, eyes unwavering on Minato, Obito says, “I panicked. I didn’t even know where we were, I’d overshot my goal and went wide, and we ended up somewhere in Kusa. I was just trying to keep her alive.”

Minato folds his calm smaller and smaller inside him. It wasn’t Kakashi. Obito was going to come back to the Leaf, but he couldn’t trust them with Rin. He couldn’t trust Minato with Rin. Its uncomfortable, but a part of him can understand it. Something went horribly wrong, and he let it happen.

Now Rin says, blunt, like a challenge, “he kept me alive. I’d been taken by fake Kiri nin on a courier mission, and they were going to use me to destroy the Leaf.”

Rin looks at him and its everything. “I’m jinchuuriki of the Sanbi. The fake Kiri nin sealed him in me with a weak seal, meant to blow and release him to rampage in Konoha. They turned me into a bomb, sensei. And when I figured it out, I threw myself onto Kakashi’s Chidori. I wouldn’t let them use me to destroy the Leaf Village.”

His blood is ice in his veins. It’s a brutal plan, wickedly cunning, and if successful, it might have meant the end of Konoha. The civilian casualties from a rampaging Bijuu would be astronomical.

It wasn’t suicide, like Kakashi thought. Rin sacrificed herself to save the village. The loyalty of it is absolute, but its not everything. She could have sent a letter if it wasn’t safe to return. He could have met them at an outpost. He could cover up the existence of a Tailed Beast. He does it all the time.

Like she’s reading his mind, Rin continues, “Even after I healed, I couldn’t go back. The seal needs almost constant maintenance, or it will break. And only Obito can suppress the chakra escaping the seal enough to reset the expiration date. I am a danger. And the Sanbi is Kiri’s, they would start a war to get him back. The other Elemental Nations will declare war if they think Konoha gained another Bijuu; it upsets the balance of power too much.”

In her face, he sees the ghost of a trench. She’s too young to be a veteran, to know intimate details of the war she risks by existing. It’s a mature decision, but it’s not her decision. Warfare is Minato’s responsibility; starting them, ending them, that’s not on a chuunin.

They keep saying the Kiri nin were fake. His voice is quiet. “Who did this?”

Rin glances at Obito, who picks up the explanation. “The same old man who kept me trapped underground. He manipulated everything, trying to get me to awaken the mangekyo. He had Rin taken, had her made into a jinchuuriki, all so he could have access to a leveled-up sharingan. He wants to take over everything by casting a worldwide genjutsu off the moon. He needs to collect all the Bijuu to power it, so we’ve been disrupting his plans.”

Things are somehow starting to finally make sense while at the same time make no actual sense at all. A worldwide genjutsu? All the Tailed Beasts? The fucking moon?

“Who?” Minato demands. He will destroy this person. He will grind their bones into the dirt.

Obito says, darkly, “Uchiha Madara. He’s still alive too, leeching chakra from a demonic statue.”

It’s so far outside the realm of believable reality that he says, stupidly, “the first one?”

Obito laughs. It’s not a happy sound. “Yeah, it’s the same bastard. He’s old as the hills, but he has an army of clones protecting him. They’re all called zetsu, and they’re crafty, specialized in infiltration and information gathering. The cave was full of them. Definitely not human. Evil plant things, as close as we can figure out. But I’ve figured out how to hide from them, a little.”

Minato sips his cooling tea to give himself time to think. Its unapologetically awful; it would be better if Rin had tried to poison him to death outright. He would respect that, but this tastes like straight dirt. He tries to keep his face even, but Obito just looks amused.

Rin says, “We’ve been working towards taking him down. He needs the Bijuu for his plan to succeed, so we’ve been making that as difficult as possible for him. We already took Suna’s Bijuu out of play.”

Minato almost chokes on his tea. “That’s what you stole from the Kazekage? You stole the fucking Ichibi?”

Obito says, “you heard about that, huh? Yeah, he calls himself Shukaku. He’s a little murder tanuki, sealed in a pot of tea. Keeps screaming about how he's gonna kill us all. Grumpy bastard. Rin thinks he’s cute.”

Minato realizes he’s in the presence of a murderous Bijuu and one with an unstable seal. “Where is it now?”

“Somewhere safe,” Rin says firmly. “Where Madara can’t reach him. Only Obito can retrieve him.”

At his disbelief, Obito says, “it’s a mangekyo thing, the reason why I can let things pass through me, why I can teleport. It’s a time/space technique, but instead of relying on a jutsu formula like your Flying Thunder God, it’s a different dimension, accessible only to me. Rin named it Kamui.”

His mangekyo whirls and he warps himself around a bit under Minato’s stare to demonstrate. “Useful trick in battle, but an even better hiding place.”

Minato tilts his head consideringly, “time/space technique? How do you aim it with no anchor formula or seal work?”

“I access the Kamui dimension and pop out where I want to. Its fairly intuitive, like what you’d expect from an OP mangekyo move.”

“Fascinating.” Minato says, but he’s letting himself be distracted from the fact that they could have told him. He’s reciprocating too much of the conversation, falling into old speech patterns, and they hid this from him, and he could have helped. They could have told him, and they didn’t.

They let him think they were dead.

Rin sees it in his face, that he’s not convinced. She’s always known him the best, and she stalls now with, “How did you find us, Minato sensei? We’ve been staying ahead of the zetsu for months with no problem, but it seems you went right to us.”

Minato says, “Kakashi figured out you were alive earlier today and came to me. I left pretty immediately.”

Rin narrows her eyes at the knowledge that Kakashi aimed him here but Obito doesn’t realize what he means. He says, “Wait, today? It took you less than 12 hours to track us down?” He groans, holding his head in his hands, and its as dramatic as Minato remembers. It hits like a low ache.

Minato admits, “I didn’t want to think you could have a good enough reason for deserting us. I still don’t.”

The night is quiet but for the sound of insects. Rin says, “we can’t go back. Not yet. Not like this. I’m a danger to Konoha and Obito’s the only one who can track the white zetsu clones. We have the best shot at taking down Madara.”

All he hears is censure. “The only one? Why?”

Silence. This is the real reason they ran away. There’s something that they will not say, something neither wants to confess to.

Minato understands. He hopes its worth dying for. He’d give his life for the Leaf in a heartbeat; he can recognize what that determination looks like on the students he raised up through wartime only to lose them one by one. This time will have to stick. He’ll make sure of it.

Into the tension, Obito visibly wrestles with himself and there’s a warning in Rin’s eyes more dangerous than any Tailed Beast but they don’t run and they don’t fight him, so he lets Obito steel himself, drawing himself up like he’s making himself a bigger target for him.

Obito says, almost defiantly, “I can also do this.”

And he holds up his right hand, the one the reports said he’d lost, holds it out palm up, covered completely in bandages, but as Minato watches, a tiny green leaf sprouts from the palm of his hand and unfurls into an oak leaf, similar to the ones surrounding the Leaf Village.

Minato had thought it was his own wind nature making the leaves on the branches of the trees around them shiver and twitch, but the organic barrier makes a significant sense to him now.

“It’s the mokuton,” Obito says and it’s not without the requisite shame, the fear, but it’s a challenge as well. “I awakened it at the same time I did my mangekyo.”

It’s a knee jerk reaction to slit his throat, the gut instinct any Konoha nin has programmed into them. Minato isn’t unaffected, but he doesn’t leap across the fire to enact justice. He looks at the green leaf and sits with that truth a long second, wondering if this is going to be it.

“The mokuton,” he whispers. The most famous kekkei genkai in history. A bloodline limit that only the Senju should be able to access, the same ability that Senju Hashirama had used to end the warring states era and found the Leaf Village. It shouldn’t be possible, but there it is, a tiny little leaf in the palm of his Uchiha student’s hand. “How?”

There’s something in Obito’s eye, something about the line of his shoulders, his posture tensing, but he says, “the bastard old man did experiments on me, used the Hashirama cells to keep me alive when I should have died. The clones are made up of them too, so I can feel them if they get close. I can also use it to suppress the Sanbi’s chakra, keep the seal from breaking. It’s a lot, but we can manage.”

Experiments. It echoes in an ominous loop in his mind. Worse still is the way Obito can’t look at him as he says it. He’d easier admitted to the death sentence than look his teacher in the face and admit he hadn’t been willing.

Rin hasn’t so much as blinked. “You said Kakashi found us? How?”

She’s trying so hard to convince him, and he wants to let himself be convinced. He hadn’t thought it possible, that they’d have a good enough reason, but in the face of a Bijuu and a bloodline theft, he understands why they ran.

How the fuck had they gotten here? How could he have let this happen, to either of them?

The laws exist to protect Uchiha. It won’t matter. They’ll see him executed regardless. They’ll expect Minato to carry out the sentence, lay his corpse at the feet of Senju Tsunade, and it’ll be her every right to pursue the matter further, to further blame the clan her family rivaled for generations untold.

Minato is not unable to not see the exhaustion in them. They might be managing, yes, but it’s just treading water. Living under a sword 24/7. Almost constant maintenance.
He says, “He’s been getting weird flashes from his mangekyo. He thinks your eyes are linked, as a matched set. Sometimes when you use it, he can see what you see.”

Obito looks shocked. Minato continues, “He saw you in the desert, surrounded by sand. He just gets seconds, a kunai, a part of a face. But then he saw you, Rin. Pieced together that you were alive, that Obito must be too, that you were in Suna. He sent Pakkun to verify and then he came to me around noon.”

“We were following reports of missing nin, trying to find the perpetrators behind the fake Kiri nin and your kidnapping, Rin. We had intel about a pair of skilled shinobi first appearing in Kusa under the names Sachira and …” he pauses Obi…Tobi. He is not impressed.

He scolds the Uchiha, “That’s not even clever! You’re lucky no one’s seen through it.”

Rin’s stern façade cracks for the first time, just a little bit. “Told you so! The only reason he’s getting away with it is because Konoha doesn’t have him listed as a missing nin. No one’s looking for Uchiha Obito, or Nohara Rin. We’re using it to our advantage.”

No matter how much he hides himself under bandages and a face drape, Minato is sure that under that hood, Obito is a dead ringer for an Uchiha. The clan features are too distinctive, their techniques too recognizable. And Rin is no better; medical ninja are too valuable not to draw attention wherever they go. It’s a miracle they haven’t been caught.

Minato says, “I’m going to go all gray in my first year in office, and it won’t have anything to do with politics.”

“We’ll be better,” Rin promises, and he knows she doesn’t just mean about the aliases. “There was a bit of a learning curve, but we’re making it work.”

Not well enough. Not if they are taking on Uchiha Madara, who has a literal century’s head start. Minato asks, aware that’s it’s a concession, that he’s being convinced, “So what’s your plan?”

Rin sets her cup down and steeples her hands under her chin, all thin calloused fingers and scarred knuckles. It’s her scheming face; he recognizes it from the days she used to plot to break into all their apartments to drag them to team breakfast. In his experience, its highly effective, usually followed by her conning the boys into loud, flashy fights so she could sneak around in the background, stabbing things.

She says, “Madara needs to collect the chakra of all the 9 Bijuu to power his stupid genjutsu, so we’re going to take all the Bijuu out of play. At the very least, warn the jinchuuriki that Madara’s minions are gunning for them. After all the jinchuuriki are aware of the threat and the Bijuu are on board, we’ll pick them off one by one, draw them out and eliminate them. Then it’s just Zetsu and their clones. We destroy the Demonic Statue of the Outer Paths, and we kill Madara.”

Minato asks, “minions?”

“Like the fake Kiri nin. High level shinobi, based in Ame. He mobilizes them into doing his bidding, but I’m not sure how aware they are of his actual plans, or if he’s pulling their strings too.”

The confederation of nukenin. “What did you mean by, 'getting the Bijuu on board?'” Minato asks and Obito grins while Rin huffs at him, and then he’s treated to the view of his supposedly mature students having a slapfight. It’s a performance for his benefit, but the manipulation is flawless; nostalgia and affection wash over him at the sight, like they’re all still gennin, before everything went wrong. Before the death and guilt and shame ate Kakashi alive, before Obito held a leaf in his bandaged hand and said experiments, before Rin said they made me a bomb.

Obito smacks at her and says, “Rin thinks the Bijuu have thoughts and feelings. She thinks we can sway them to our side. Not the jinchuuriki, the actual chakra demons themselves.”

Rin sticks her tongue out at him, playful and childish, but still calculating. She’s not sure if she trusts his peace. “I know they do! If we can befriend them, think about how it could change everything.”

Minato thinks the Bijuu have personalities in the same way that animals have personalities. The Kyuubi has a low animal cunning and a predator’s rage. It wanted in so far as it wanted the destruction of everything. Its intelligent enough to be opportunistic, to try to take over and overwhelm their host’s bodies, but with the mindless violence of a fox chewing its leg off to be free.

Rin says hotly, “I can feel enough from my Bijuu to know he has feelings. I’ve seen him even, close enough to count his tails. He’s angry, but that’s just because he’s been crammed into a busted seal. I can tell when he’s sleeping and when he’s raging, but I think it’s just fear. I know he likes the water, and I think he has a name.”

Obito says, “She kept trying to talk to Shukaku, but he just kept spitting out death threats and highly inventive swearing. Sentient being or not, I wouldn’t want to be his friend.”

Rin ignores Obito to turn to Minato. “As Hokage, do you have information about the Bijuu? Like where we might find them?”

It’s a decision he arrives at in in milliseconds. It’s the easiest he’s ever capitulated.

Minato says, “We know from the Shodaime’s records which Bijuu he gave out to which nation, but that’s highly guarded information. I don’t know who the current jinchuuriki are, or where to find them.” He thinks about it. “Oh, except for the 8 Tails. I battled him in the last war. It’s the Raikage’s brother, Lord Killer B, in Kumo.”

Rin says, quietly, “and Kushina.”

Minato is very still. “You’re not supposed to know about that. Nobody is.”

Obito says, mitigatingly, “The zetsu know. I told you they were tricky.”

Its more evidence of Konoha’s drastic failure of information. Minato just took office but it feels like he’s starting at the bottom of a very deep hole. What the hell was Hiruzen up to while he wore the hat? In Minato’s opinion, the Sandaime had been asleep at the wheel. The to do list of what he needed to address and correct just keeps growing longer and more exhaustive.

Minato makes no excuses. They know his responsibilities to Konoha, and to Kushina herself. “I never meant for you to know.”

Rin says, “It doesn’t change how we feel about her. We’re doing this to protect her, and all the jinchuuriki.”

They say knowing her status doesn’t change anything, but Minato knows it does. It changes people, them knowing. But if anyone wouldn’t hold it against her, he hopes its another jinchuuriki and the students Kushina loved wholeheartedly from the second they had been introduced. It will crush her to lose them again.

Minato sighs and says, “I can tell you what I know. But first,” he reaches into his kunai pouch and removes two blank scrolls, the sort he uses for mission assignments, and the special ink he uses as Hokage. He writes one S rank mission scroll, signs it as the Yondaime Hokage, seals it, and hands it to Obito. He writes another S rank mission scroll and hands it to Rin. “This is what I can do. Burn them after you finish reading them.”

Obito’s scroll is a long-term S ranked mission with forged dates, the parameters of which he has left carefully vague. Its existence turns them from nukenin into undercover Konoha operatives who are preforming officially sanctioned duties. The only condition he leaves is that upon the completion of this mission, the shinobi are to report back to Konoha.

They can come home when they are done. The village will welcome them back. He’ll make sure of it.

Obito’s eye widens, tomoe spinning lazily as he memorizes the scroll. He hasn’t deactivated the sharingan since Minato’s arrival in the campsite. The sparks from the fire shoot higher into the night air. He swallows thickly, “Thank you, Hokage sama. I accept this mission.”

Rin’s scroll is an S ranked mission in the Land of Stone, a classified rendezvous with undercover Konoha shinobi near a small village by the border, backdated enough to cover up the legally suspect nature of it. Upon completion of this mission, it immediately jumps into the same assignment as Obito.

Loyal Konoha shinobi will always be welcome to come home at the end of their missions. This is the kind of leader he needs to be, for them.

At her look of confusion, Minato says, soft enough he hopes she hears all his regrets, “I wish I could fix your seal for you right now, Rin, but the only seal I know that would be strong enough would kill me to use it, and it might not even reseal the Sanbi safely to you.”

The Reaper Death Seal isn’t meant to be used to seal Bijuu, and that is the strongest fuuinjutsu he knows. But he isn’t the only fuuinjutsu master in the Leaf.

Rin’s face lights up when she puts together who she will rendezvous with. Her arm goes over her stomach, like she’s hugging the Sanbi inside her. Her reply is just as soft, “Thank you, Hokage sama. We accept this mission.”

The fire crackles and blazes with Obito’s chakra as they torch their scrolls. Minato says, “It’s the least I can do. Don’t worry about after. I will prepare your way.” He is the Yondaime Hokage of the Village Hidden in the Leaves, known for his callousness, for his efficiency, for killing whoever stood in his way and feeling nothing about it at all.

He’d like to be known for his students instead.

His students sniffle a bit. They never expected to be able to come home. Rin might still have reservations, but Obito looks hopeful for the first time, like its finally sinking in for him that Minato’s giving him this chance.

Here’s something else he can do for them. Minato bites the side of his thumb and flashes through the hand seals at his usual breakneck speed and he summons the smaller version of the dual-katana-wielding aquamarine toad.

“Gamahiro, Rin and Obito are assigned to an undercover S rank mission. You and Gamaken will occasionally run messages between the two of them and myself. You will keep this information from Jiraiya sensei for the time being.”

The toad summon looks delighted to see them alive and he nods and hops his squat form over to the teens. Minato continues, “Gamahiro is skilled in kenjutsu and close range taijutsu. He can reverse summon himself to Mount Myoboku, so he has a direct connection to Fugasaku sama and Geratora san in the case of emergencies.”

Gamahiro plops his squat self into Rin’s lap, “ooooh boy, is Jiraiya in for it now. Glad to see the two of you alive and kicking.” He settles into Rin’s lap and squirms.

Rin bows her head to the toad and Minato wonders wryly what the old pervert’s done now to be on the outs with Gamabunta and the Mount Myoboku toads.

Obito leans closer. His toads have always liked his students and even as much as Obito is desensitized to summons via the crows and cats tangled up with the Uchiha summoning contracts, and Kakashi’s ninken, he’d always been delighted by the toads and he got along with Gamahiro well after Minato used the toad to teach Kakashi kenjutsu so he could handle the tanto his father had left him. Minato can handle a blade fine, but he’d never specialized due to his speed’s tendency to nullify bladed attacks. The Hatake prodigy caught on to kenjutsu almost too quick, but at first the toad had kicked his ass. Obito had always cherished the memory.

The toad goes to work finishing Rin’s cup of tea and Obito refills it for him with tea warmed with his chakra. Of course the toad wouldn’t think it was gross. He eats bugs. Gamahiro inhales the steam and says, “Thanks, kid. You got taller.”

The Uchiha looks pleased and Minato laughs out loud, just a shot huff, relief settling through him at the sight of his summons and his students sharing tea by the fire. “That he did. They’ll fill you in on the details later. It’s a wild ride, so prepare yourself.”

The toad looks intrigued but only hums thoughtfully to himself, eyeing Obito’s active sharingan.

Minato says, “This is all I know about the Bijuu. The Ichibi was given to Suna. The Nibi and Haichibi are Kumo’s and I faced the Haichibi’s jinchuuriki in the last war, Lord Killer B, younger brother of the Yondaime Raikage. I liked him. He’s got a good spirit.” After their draw, it was his brother A who named him the Yellow Flash. He’ll always think of that moment as a turning point in his life, the first time he was acknowledged as a candidate even by ninja from other nations.

“The Sanbi was originally Kiri’s, as well as the Rokubi. The Yonbi and Gobi are in Iwa, though the Tsuchikage didn’t incorporate them into the last war, we assume due to their fear of us retaliating with the Kyuubi, but the 4 Tails and 5 Tails weren’t spotted in the Second War either. The other Tailed Beast is the 7 Tails, the only Bijuu not held by a major Elemental Nation. The Nanabi is in Taki.”

There’s a glint in Rin’s eyes that Minato associates with water bullets and chakra scalpels. She says, “So we’ve secured the Ichibi, the Sanbi, and the Kyuubi through Kushina as well. The closest two are indeed in Iwa. We can swing by Taki on our way to Kumo and hit Kiri last, since they’ll be sore they let the Sanbi get snatched. We’ll be taking out as many clones and minions as we can along the way. Thin his army and forces, weaken his control, the then assassinate him and then FUBAR the stump/husk/Demonic Statue of the Outer Paths.”

“I’ll help as much as I can from back in Konoha. We’re already looking into missing nin organizations. I can target the nukenin for you. And once Madara is dead, the two of you can come home.”

Gamahiro’s eyes are bugging comically out of his head at the mention of Bijuu, clones, whatever the hell the Demonic Statue of the Outer Paths is (and it doesn’t sound good, Minato’s dreading asking) and Uchiha fucking Madara. He whistles low and wheezy, “you two haven’t been on vacation, huh?”

Minato says, “I offer all the support that I can, but it’s likely they won’t let me out of the village anytime soon.”

He hadn’t exactly asked for council approval before he Hirashined right out of the country after missing nin. His guard squadron is probably having a collective mental break down. He’d approve them some vacation time as an apology if he thinks they’ll accept it.

Obito snorts, “You’re the Hokage. What are they gonna do, fire you?”

Rin grins and Gamahiro rolls his eyes.

“I may have left suddenly,” he admits sheepishly and Rin only laughs more. It’s a real laugh, unguarded, and it’s an indescribable feeling, hearing them laugh again. His team hasn’t laughed since the Kanabi Bridge disaster.

“Yeah, he’s gonna be pissed you left him.” Obito says, and Rin doesn’t flinch. Minato realizes that neither of them are going to tell him the truth. They’re sparing him the hurt.

Minato shrugs. “I can handle whatever temper tantrum he throws about it.”

Obito’s mouth twists into a sly smile, “heh, you’re just lucky his mangekyo is only resonating with mine. Imagine if he had the chakra to unlock its full potential. You’d be in big trouble then.”

Rin looks wickedly gleeful as the potential thought of a teleporting Kakashi hits him and how much of a hellion brat he would be if he could phase through walls. The alarm washes over him and Obito busts out laughing at the look on his face. The Clan Heads would riot and Shikaku might actually quit.

“You are not to teach him that,” Minato says sternly. “I mean it, he’ll end up hurting himself trying to jump around through restricted barriers like a crazed oni.”

The fire flares with Obito’s mirth, his chakra signature open enough Minato’d be able to pinpoint him even without Sage Mode. “I’m sure he’ll figure it out on his own. And then he’ll be unstoppable. Konoha will have two teleporting shinobi. Iwa and Kumo will shit themselves when they hear.”

Minato says, kindly, “there’s already two time/space Konoha shinobi.”

Rin’s expression softens and Obito turns his face away so Minato can’t see. He’s incredibly proud of his students, all of them, alive and fighting hard for their village in every way they can, even when they knew they wouldn’t be rewarded for it, would earn only contempt.

The silence gets awkward. He must have messed up the praise. At Kushina’s bequest, he’s been trying to be clearer about verbalizing, but he’s still figuring out how to apply the nuance to every conceivable social situation. He says, “I should be getting back soon, before my staff quits in reprimand.”

Obito’s still looking away, probably trying to hide his happy flush. “I should finish trapping the area,” and he Kamuis away, leaving just him and Rin around the fire.

With Obito gone, Rin has that calculating look on her face again. She looks at him with that inborn wariness, a civilian’s uncertain loyalty to their kage, always one part fear, and Minato can’t do anything about that, because he’s earned it as surely as he’s earned the hat.

Of all of his students, Rin’s the most unforgiving. She has to be.

He taught her that.

“It’s good to see you, sensei. I know this isn’t ideal.”

He came here to kill her and she knows it. He says, “I’m glad you’re alive. Kakashi will be too.”

“It was excruciating,” she says, “letting him think he’d killed me. It still is.”

She doesn’t say after Obito and his father, but he hears it anyway. He moves slowly to kneel at her side, projecting his intent as best he can before he pulls her into a hug.

After a startled moment, Rin leans into his hug and Gamahiro croaks and hops off her lap to avoid getting squished in their reunion. “Thanks, sensei.”

Minato lets her go reluctantly. “How are you really doing, in all this? I can’t even imagine….”

Rin looks at him. “I’m tired, Minato sensei. Obito won’t show it, but he is too. He’s angry, he has so much anger about being manipulated, about how things turned out. He blames himself.”

His heart sinks. Him and Kakashi both. “Knowing that you shouldn’t doesn’t always equal out in the mind.”

“He’s been through a lot. I do what I can to help, but he’s so stubborn. He doesn’t like talking about it. He won’t lie, but it hurts him to go back to it, I can tell. He won’t even say Madara’s name out loud if he can help it. It’s always the Geezer or the Old Man to him. There’s a part of him that’s grateful to him for saving his life, no matter his methods, and he can’t get it to reconcile with the villain who wants to control the world.”

It’s a complicated pressure point for him to have, and a concerning one. The Uchiha stress clan loyalty above everything, and there must be some part of his student who’s loyal to his ancestor still, even after everything. Rin is civilian born, like Minato himself, but she’s learned enough about the Uchiha to know their pride.

“And the mokuton?”

She wouldn’t have told him. He knows this. Her glare is cutting. “Never once did I look at him and think I didn’t know him.”

He doesn’t want to press, but bloodline theft isn’t something that’s in his power to forgive. Before he finds the words, Rin cuts him off. “Did you even look at him? I don’t think he asked for any of this.”

Even forced, it wouldn’t matter. They have to know that. “For this to work, nobody can know.”

Rin’s shoulders are tight. “I realize. But he’s getting better at hiding it. And if anyone feels Bijuu chakra around me, they’ll blame it on Shukaku.”

She’s only been talking about Obito. He asks, “How are you holding up? With the Sanbi?”

Her arm drops to her stomach, an absent touch, one that spoke of long habit. “I’m managing. I want to befriend the Sanbi, but I can’t do anything with the Bijuu without risking breaking the seal. It’s taxing, both the chakra drain from the seal and Obito’s suppressing of it. He’s….confused. Fixing the seal would secure him too, I think.”

“What makes you think you can reason with a Bijuu?” he asks curiously. The little that Kushina’s shared with him left him with the impression that she hates the Kyuubi and vise versa. It would gladly rip her to shreds and them rampage through the Leaf Village.

Rin says, “Shukaku is intelligent. He’s mean, but I swear he’s sentient. He doesn’t show it well, but I think they all are. They’re not just mindless chakra constructs; there’s a consciousness in there. Wouldn’t you be angry too if humans trapped you, sealed you away, used you as an unwilling weapon?”

It’s a perspective he’s never thought to consider. Trust Rin to try to empathize with demonic chakra monsters. He’s shrugs, “I don’t know enough to refute it. But you’re usually right about these things. Don’t let your good judge of character lead you astray though, if the Sanbi escapes the seal you will not survive.”

“I want to be an equal, not a warden. It’s not his fault he was sealed inside me. He’s a victim in all of this shitshow too.”

“Talk to Kushina,” he suggests. “She knows more than I ever will about being a jinchuuriki. And she’s better at fuuinjutsu. If anyone can fix your seal, it’s her.”

Rin sniffs. “I’m going to miss the wedding.”

Minato grins and updates her, “I’m going to take her clan name. The Uzumaki are an ancient clan, with a strong heritage. The fall of Uzushio is a tragedy and I’m going to surprise her as a wedding gift to give her the chance to start to rebuild her clan. Our kids will be honored to bear that legacy, and I will as well.”

It’s so good to see her smile. He’s pretty sure he’d start a war over it. He’s pretty sure it’s a fact that kept Rin from seeking him out. He can’t blame her. Its not Konoha’s mercy she’d have to throw herself on: its Minato’s. And he understands why she thinks he doesn’t have a lot of it.

Rin squeals and hugs him again, “I’m proud of you, sensei. The first Uzumaki Hokage! First in a long line!”

The thought of his future descendants following in his footsteps is an interesting but intimidating thought. But that isn’t his only legacy. He ruffles her short hair and she scowls in protest. “I’m proud of you too, Rin.”

To give her time to compose herself, he says, “I’ve got some gifts for you as well.”

Minato takes off his kunai pouch and dumps it out at her feet. Shuriken, senbon, regular standard issue kunai, weapons oil, ninja wire, explosive tags, smoke bombs, antidote for common poisons, soldier pills, first aid supplies, all his storage scrolls filled with rations, and other odds and ends. He pushes his money pouch at her as well. “I don’t usually carry a lot, but it should help. Get some sturdy gear at the next village; you’ll need warmer coats too. Iwa can get chilly at night, and Kumogakure’s high in the mountains. They’ll be snow, ice even.”

Rin looks through the seals on the storage scrolls and her face lights up as she reads through the medical supplies listed and even finds soaps and colored dyes. “This is perfect!”
“I can always get more. If there’s anything else you need, I can get Kushina to bring it for you.”

Rin starts writing out a list in her neat handwriting of specialized medical supplies that Minato doesn’t carry in his simple field medic kit and Minato promises to get it discreetly. As she starts organizing the supplies to add them to their own, Minato says, “I’m going to find Obito, see if he needs help with the traps.”

She nods knowingly and says, “watch out for the trees if you’re going to ambush him. They respond to his chakra. You don’t know panic until you’re being attacked by an angry thorn bush.”

He shakes his head incredulously. The mokuton. He still has to wrap his head around that one. “Thanks for the tip,” he says and Body Flickers out of the light of the campfire, outside the wooden dome.

The traps surrounding the camp are expertly laid, with fail safes in multilayered attacks. The only reason Minato is able to spot them is because it was him who’d originally taught his team to booby trap an area to death. Spotting them isn’t the same as avoiding them, so he carefully works his way through them, mindful about the exact placement of his feet as he bypasses a nasty set up that would launch a dozen kunai at him if triggered.

Obito is leaning against a tree maybe forty yards away, his back to Minato and his dark hood pointed at the sky like he’s looking at the moon floating high above the trees.

Minato sneaks closer, soundlessly, and as a hello he whips one of his custom marked kunai right at the back of his head, making sure to stay on what he knows is his blind side. Obito spins wordlessly and snatches it out of the air as it flies past, glaring at his teacher and spinning the three-pronged kunai in his grip.

“Good job,” Minato says, noticing he’d used his left hand, wondering how much truth there was to the reports. “The traps are excellently laid. I couldn’t have done them better myself.”

Obito says sourly, “But you still saw them, huh?”

Minato shrugs and goes to stand next to him. Together they look up at the sky. The moon is waxing, right over the trees, and Minato tries to imagine a genjutsu so powerful it reflects off of it, ensnaring the entire world under its control.

“Why does Madara want this genjutsu to work? Why is this his plan?”

Minato can’t see any part of Obito from under his dark hood, but he replies, “Madara doesn’t want to destroy the world. He just wants to conquer it. He wants to bring peace through control. Subjugate everyone to save them. He’s lost his faith in this world, in everything.”

Minato knows enough clan history to remember the name Izuna. He says, “He’s grieving.”

Obito huffs. “He’s killed thousands, manipulated Sage knows what else. He’s insane. It’s not an excuse.”

It’s not. Minato says, “He saved you.”

Obito hums. “Knowing him, he probably caused the cave-in.”

They watch the moon. It’s a clear night. Minato wants to see his students face, wants to see how he’s grown over the years. He taller, as tall as Minato, and broader in the shoulders. He’ll be built like a brick shithouse by 18, just like his father was and his uncles, one of those Uchiha built for front line assaults, his speed not hindered by his bulk since Minato’d made it a habit to throw sharp objects at him at every chance.

“How are you, Obito? Really?”

The hooded shinobi bumps him with his shoulder. “What? Are you gonna therapy no jutsu me?”

He’s uneasy with the misdirection, at tangible proof of how his student’s changed. Before, he never would have been so cagey with him. Obito used to take everything at face value, greedily accepting any recognition thrown his way, hungry for anything Minato had to say.

Minato bumps him back, “Don’t temp me. That’ll be an S ranked technique. The Yamanaka will flip their shit over it.”

Obito doesn’t laugh. He says, small, like he’s still a kid gennin, asking his teacher for reassurance, “How are they? Everyone back home?”

Minato thinks that Obito remembers him as a very different sensei to what Rin does. Rin would never share this much vulnerability, distrusts him too much because she knows him better than the student who never had to live with him through loss.

He still thinks Minato’s infallible, while Rin knows he’s not.

Minato thinks about what to tell him. He says, “your clan did right by your memory. Fugaku sama himself stepped in to help train Kakashi. Shisui graduated from the Academy and Itachi awakened his sharingan at 5 years old. They’re saying he’s a prodigy.”

“Fugaku sama trained Kakashi?” He sounds troubled. Something sours about the moment and Minato is reminded that the Uchiha Clan Head spends more time with the Bastard Sharingan than he ever did with Obito. His clan’s earned his disbelief, but the suspicion Minato hears is new.

“I didn’t give him much of a choice,” Minato admits. “I stood around outside the Clan Compound casually tossing around a kunai until the elders remembered why exactly the Hiraishin was invented.”

There’s a loud puff of air from Obito and the trees around them creak and groan while Minato watches interestedly.

“He had a choice.” Obito says, and Minato can’t argue. “And Itachi, huh? Five years old?”

“Yeah. He’s a good kid. Mikoto brings him around to visit Kushina. He’s a gentle child. Polite. Shisui treats him like a brother.”

He can hear a smile in Obito’s voice as he finds out about his family. “That’s good. They’ll be good for each other.” He’s quieter. “How’s Kakashi? Really?”

That’s who Obito is. He loves his family so much. He considers his team family, not just his clan. And he’s a worrier. He’s got to be beating himself up for leaving Kakashi behind, even while thinking that he’d killed Rin. Minato aches for him. He tries to put Obito at ease.

“He’s the real reason I’ll have gray hair. I told him not to investigate; I was trying to protect him. I thought Rin had been kidnapped to get at him, push him away from the village by severing all of his ties. But he didn’t listen, kept sneaking around on missions. I had to ground him, and then he tried to submit an application for ANBU, which I denied. He’s sending unsanctioned ninken into enemy territory behind my back and I’m pretty sure he tried to break into the Secure Archives when I wouldn’t tell him our findings. He throws all of his tails and the ANBU Commander’s using his guard detail as a punishment for unruly rookies.”

“You had him tailed?”

“He tried to join ANBU.”

Obito says, “Well yeah. You weren’t letting him help. He’ll pickle if he sits still, you know that, and you had him bound to the village. It’s no wonder he acted out.”

Obito understands easier Kakashi’s directionless grief. Minato says, “Kakashi’s not helping out. He tried to use assassination missions as cover to beat rumors out of the Daimyo’s palace guard.”

“You’re sending him on assassination missions?” Obito fixes him with an even look he recognizes as his own, the barest glint of red deep in his skull. “He’s fourteen.”

Minato sighs. “I’m against it. But he’s a jounin. He can take what missions he wants. I couldn’t ground him until he acted out. And you’re only sixteen, you and Rin both, and look at what you’ve taken on. I’m pretty sure you still qualify as a gennin, too.”

Obito twitches underneath his hood, looking back up at the sky. “Yeah, well I have the mangekyo and the mokuton. Suna will have me listed as an S rank criminal in their newest Bingo Book. I think I qualify, some.”

That might end up being a problem, if the pictures are clear enough. He is going to have to fabricate so much evidence. Minato makes a note to scrub their entries from all the Konoha editions.

“Itachi has the sharingan, but he’s still only five.”

“Hn. Moot point.” Obito says, quieter, “You’re going to tell him right? About us?”

Minato says gently, “Yeah. Don’t really have much of a choice, not if he’s literally seeing through your eye.”

“You won’t tell anyone else?” he checks, and now Minato can pick out the anxiety in him. The trees around him are literally mirroring his stress, creaking and warping. Obito doesn’t think his clan will welcome him back. A breeze picks up around them, whipped up by Minato’s anger. It never sat right with him, how his student was treated by his people, even with Obito’s loud insistence that it was fine.

But Minato was raised in Konoha’s orphanages. He knows an abuse that’s just neglect.

The trees quiet around them and Minato lets the wind die away. Can he even ask about it? He needs to know, but the taboo is delicate ground.

Obito brings it up, all stubborn unflinching pride and defiance, the unwilling home of a disgusting crime, but only because it wasn’t his originally. “They won’t stand for it, you know.”

He does. He says, instead, “Is that how you feel about Kakashi’s eye?”

Immediately, “it’s not the same.”

But they know what people assume. Minato says, “I’ll fix it. Don’t worry about home. I’ll take care of it.”

Obito takes a deep breath in, says, small, “Okay.”

A cloud floats over the moon and the forest gets darker around them. Obito tries for a joke to lighten the mood, “So that little menace has been spying on me? What’s he seen?”

“Nothing significant, aside from Rin’s face. Oh, and I think he saw the pot of tea the Ichibi’s in, but he didn’t know what it was. But just be aware, don’t do anything you might not want him to see.”

Obito sniggers meanly and Minato thinks about that and decides, yeah, he deserves to get his ass kicked for that one. The second the thought connects his hand flashes out to smack him upside the head in reprimand, only to have his hand pass entirely through him.

Minato studies how his hand just phased through Obito. “You don’t even feel this, do you?”

Obito shrugs. “You’re not actually touching me. The bit that your hand is passing through is actually in the Kamui dimension. Or maybe it’s the bit that’s me. Haven’t really figured out the specifics, but regardless, you’re nowhere near me.”

Minato withdraws his hand and says, “Oh, we are going to spar so hard when you get back. We’re gonna bust up Training Ground 7 so hard you’ll have to use your mokuton to fix the trees.”

Obito laughs and all the tension rolls out of him with the sound, like he’d been afraid Minato would think it was weird, was the condemnation Fugaku faced Kakashi with. “You’re on, old man. I’ll kick your ass.”

Minato is dismissive. The day one of his kids kicked his ass is the day he retires. And he’d just been sworn in. “You’ve got one neat trick; I’ve got a hundred. I’d like to see how your fancy technique matches up against my Senjutsu.”

“….I hadn’t considered that. Is that how you found us so fast? That’s cheating!”

Minato laughs while Obito groans. “Shinobi, Uchiha. Nothing’s cheating.”

“Just don’t sic the toads on me. I’d give them indigestion.”

“Jiraiya’s used Toad Stomach Trap on much nastier ninja than you. They eat bugs, Obito. I’m sure Gamabunta wouldn’t mind a little snack.”

Obito shudders exaggeratedly, so he could see it through the cloak. They’re being careful with each other, mimicking causal reactions, like it is as it was before.

Minato asks, cautiously, “Could you lower your hood for me? I’d like to see your face.”

Obito hesitates, but he complies, tugging the hood back so Minato can see him in the low light.

The left side of his face is covered by a Suna face drape, which is definitely not the intended styling, but Minato can see the scars that leak out the bandaging covering his right side, roughing up his nose, his mouth. Under it he wears nothing but an eye patch to protect his empty socket, and his skin is Uchiha pale. His hair is a dark shock, the clan mane hacked away by what looked like a bushwhacker, or an angry cat summons.

“Kami, kid. You should let Kushina give you a proper haircut. Did you got caught by a shinobi who fought with kitchen shears?”

The left side of his face smiles, and that’s when he really recognizes his student. “Rin did her best, but she kinda sucks at it, huh?”

“I’ll never admit it, and if you say I said it I’ll deny it to your face. But that is comically bad. I’d hide it under a hood too.”

Obito laughs, relieved. “I would never, sensei. Rin terrifies me.”

“As well she should,” Minato reaches out a hand to scrub through it, tugging on the uneven strands in relief when it doesn’t ghost through his grip. He’s real. Minato only hesitates a moment before pulling him carefully into a hug.

Obito submits to it willingly, but Minato can feel the tension in him still. Minato says, “I’m proud of you, Obito.”

The teen doesn’t flee this time. He relaxes into the embrace a long second before pulling away. “Thank you. Will you stay much longer?”

Minato says, “I should get back before Kakashi manages to wiggle through the drains and comes after me. I left Gamaken at the office, but you know he never respected him. I’ll get a jumpstart on taking down the nukenin and handpick the team I’ll send with Kushina. It shouldn’t take me long to get back; I left markers along the way.”

He picks up the three-pronged kunai that Obito had taken from him and wedged into the tree next to them, then holds it back out to his student. “Keep this one, just in case. I know you can’t carry it openly, but maybe you can put it in Kamui, with the Ichibi, just in case.”

It’s the same gift he’d given Kakashi when he made jounin. The significance is not lost on him. Obito takes it and wonders, “will you be able to feel it if it’s in another dimension?”

Minato suggests, “Let’s find out.”

Obito wraps his hand around it tight and then his Mangekyo blazes to life so powerfully that Minato can feel the heat off it from a distance, and he warps away, spiraling into his eye like he’s getting sucked into a whirlpool. Minato tries to track, tries to feel the anchor prick of light in his consciousness that his jutsu formula should provide, but it’s as if the kunai vanished. There’s no trace for him to follow.

Obito is only gone a few seconds before he whirls back into existence, his hands empty and grinning, but a few drops of blood run from his eye like tears. Obito scrubs at it and then ignores it like it happens all the time. Minato is alarmed, reminds himself that he’s self-taught, and takes his cues from his student.

Minato shakes his head. “It just vanished. I can’t feel it at all.”

“So, you’re saying, hypothetically, if you marked me in a spar, and I jumped into Kamui, you couldn’t follow?” Obito says innocently.

“Hypothetically, my ass. Keep dreaming, Uchiha.”

They start walking back to the campsite, winding around traps all the while.

Rin’s chatting to Gamahiro, filling him on the details while the toad stares in disbelief. A tiny succulent in a simple clay pot sits in the seat he vacated.

Minato stops by the fire. He watches them interact. He never had the chance to tell either of them goodbye before. He should take the time to tell them the hundreds of things they absolutely can’t do; be outed, be seen, be captured, or warn them of the things he will have to do in consequence: deny them, deny them, and nothing. If they are found out, it will be as Sachira and Tobi and Minato will have to let it happen.

But they don’t need a lecture. They’d somehow snatched Shukaku from under the Kazekage’s nose.

“Group hug,” Rin announces. “For luck.”

“We don’t need luck.” Obito says, but he obliges gracefully enough, and Minato wraps his arms around both of them, squeezing them tight.

“Come home,” Minato says, “the both of you.”

Rin shoves at him playfully. “You’ve got the harder job, sensei. You’re the one who’s going to have to tell the team.”

Minato smiles and says, “It won’t be hard at all. It’ll be the best news they’ve heard all year.”

Rin shrieks, “You proposed!”

“And I’ve been missing for over two years!”

Even Gamahiro laughs. “I’ll keep them on the straight and narrow, you can be sure of that.”

He nods, and with that, before he could have another failed awkward emotional moment that’s too stiff and he disappoints Rin again, or Obito starts crying, Minato mentally reaches out for the first in the long string of jutsu formulas he’d left on trees reaching in a rough line from Stone to Ame, and then all the way back to the Leaf.

He waves at them in farewell and cries, “Hiraishin!” as the mokuton campsite blurs away.

He uses the Flying Thunder God to get all the way back to Konoha, one after the other, collecting his markers as he goes along, in blinding speed, right up to the gates themselves, where he waves at the guards before shunshining back to the Hokage Tower.

As an exercise, using the Flying Raijin for such a distance isn’t bad practice, but he’s beginning to feel the drain from it. It isn’t an exhaustive technique, but he’s been spamming it all day long and his joints are getting creaky, tendons stiffening up.

Its late into the full dark of the night and he’s feeling the lack of sleep but there’s still so much to do. He goes straight for his office and opens it to see an exact replica of himself sitting in his Hokage chair, stupid hat and everything. Gamaken squats on the desk in front of him and he hops off when Minato throws open the doors.

Shikaku looks like he’s napping in a chair by the wall, but if he’s truly asleep, the doton clone of himself he’s henged into Minato would have burst. One eye peeks open at the ruckus and he sees Minato returned. The clone pops and the hat falls to the seat.

“Troublesome,” the Nara announces and pulls himself up like the effort of moving’s not worth it. His expression is decidedly neutral. If he thinks Minato’s killed them, the judgement for it’s not on his face.

“I said I’d be back,” Minato says in defense.

He’s got to handle this delicately. He may have fudged the mission parameters, but the Nara will know better, and Shikaku’s the most paranoid man Minato’s ever worked with. It makes him an excellent Commander, but he’ll never be convinced that Minato is right to spare them. He’ll obey orders, but the Nara’s a tricky bastard himself, and not someone Minato wants to piss off.

But both Bijuu and bloodlines aren’t something he can dance around, especially in the company he’s about to request. Kushina loves recklessly, but Kakashi folds himself into neat little boxes sometimes; he’s already been deferential to protocol when it came to his teammate’s lives, and that was when he didn’t know about the mokuton. Minato’s not sure how he’d handle it if Kakashi learns the truth and it doesn’t change his mind. If he doesn’t believe that Minato can make this work.

He says, “ANBU,” and the attending agents appear silently. Boar, with Dragonfly and Crane. “Find Kakashi and Kushina. Being them both here, and then you are dismissed for the night.”

The agents shunshin away and Minato asks Shikaku, “How was it?”

“The council is suspicious, but I think I fooled them well enough. They thought you were hungover.”

Minato probably deserves that. “And my Honor Guard?”

“Needs a raise, Sir.”

“Understood.” He looks at Gamaken. “The following discussion is classified under the highest clearance level. Do not relay this to Jiraiya until he can come here in person. You’ll be working with Gamahiro on this assignment.”

The Red-Horned Toad says nervously, “I’ll do my best.”

The ANBU Commander’s gaze is piercing. Kami know what contortions his mind is in right now. He’s frowning at the faint spatters of rain on Minato’s shoulders, from where he’d crossed through Ame, still drying. He tugs at his beard.

Minato picks up his hat of office, dusts it off, and then pulls on the robes carefully laid over the back of the chair.

Kakashi’s the first, he must have been anxiously skulking about. He smells like ozone and his hair’s standing on end with static. Its as close to coming undone as he comes.

He’d regretted it at the last moment, telling him, but it’d been too late by then. Whether he believes the lie he expects is coming is beside the point; he’ll have to accept it regardless.

Minato holds up his hands, nonthreateningly, a gesture of wait and Shikaku doesn’t frown at Kakashi’s newfound inclusion into the investigation, but it gets ever so slightly darker in the office, like the shadows thicken around him.

Kushina enters at a more sedate pace, but just barely. That’s just how she moves places.

He hadn’t discussed it with her beforehand; he just ran off. She’ll have many things to say to him about that, but he needs her support, especially because even though he’s bringing good news, it’s not easy news.

She immediately starts slapping seals over the walls, quickly burning through her peace. She is not his moral compass; contrary to popular belief, he does know right from wrong, but he’s disappointed her before and he never likes feeling like he’s let her down, especially about those things in himself he cannot change.

“The following conversation will never happen. There will be no written existence of it. You are not to discuss it outside of this room, with these people, with these seals in place. It is protected under the highest level of clearance. Understood?”

“You know it!” Kushina says as her sealwork shimmers over the walls and windows.

“Yes, Hokage sama,” Shikaku says seriously and they all look at Kakashi, who’s visible eye is narrowed to a dangerous slit, all pretense of laziness gone, and he gives a tight nod. “Aloud, Shinobi.”

“Understood, Hokage sama.”

“Good,” Minato nods. There’s is no preamble that exists to soften this blow.

“They’re alive,” he says and the Nara’s frown deepens and his hands fold into his personal seal that means he’s playing three dimensional shogi in his head and the consequences are that everybody dies. Kushina is wide-eyed shocked then overjoyed in quick succession, while Kakashi stands frozen.

“They’re both alive, and they’re coming home.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Eleven: Obito: Ishi

There’s a story his aunt used to tell him when he was young and had trouble sleeping. It’s about his parents. During the Second War, both of his parents rotated on and off of the front line for months. Most of the fighting ended up taking place in Ame and Hanzo was tearing the land into long shreds. The near constant downpour was dangerous for Uchiha; it dampened their katon and obscured their vision. Rain could be deadly confusing to a sharingan and he’d have nightmares during thunderstorms about his parents dying over and over again in the mud of a country diced to corpse and ditchwater. To comfort him, his aunt Tsubako would tell him about his parent’s meeting.

His father was an Uchiha, and his mother was not. They’d graduated the Academy together and were placed on the same gennin team. She fought using projectiles and was deadly accurate with senbon. His aunt Tsubako was always sure to stress her beauty, and even as a child Obito understood that this was her way of telling him how much she missed her sister.

“I see her in you,” she’d say, and she’d point out and tickle all the places on him that reminded her of his mother. “I see her in your bright smile,” she’d say and pinch his cheeks until he was laughing, “I see her in your joy,” and she’d tickle him some more. “I see her whenever you feel things so much, they spill out of you. You feel so deeply, Obito kun.” And he’d laugh and maybe cry just a little but eventually he’d nod off to sleep, comforted by all the parts of him that made his aunt smile, even if they made him sad sometimes. The other Uchiha made fun of him for crying so often, but it came from his mother, and his mother was beautiful, even if Obito had no memories of her.

He realized once he was older that she was scared for him, afraid of all the ways he was like his father, with his black hair and dark eyes and pale skin, the ways she had to make believe seeing the physical features of her sister in him. His oba san was a civilian and even when other Uchiha scorned him for being an Academy graduate who still hadn’t awakened the sharingan, with mixed blood for all that he followed his father in looks, he knew his aunt was glad he’d never awakened his dojutsu. She was afraid of losing him like she had lost her sister, like she’d lost her brother-in-law, just another name carved onto the memorial stone.

But Obito is an Uchiha. He was always going to be a shinobi.

When his aunt loved him even though he was a crybaby shinobi, a loser who wanted to be Hokage, with no real friends besides Rin, with big goggles and even bigger insecurities, it was a lie to pretend it would all work out in the end.

That’s how he felt now, watching Rin talk to Gamahiro, feeling the pull of fate on both of them, the ash of his S rank mission scroll scattering in the wind.

Like laughing over make believe.

“Were either of you going to tell me about Kakashi?”

Rin pinks, embarrassed at being caught. “I didn’t see a point to it.”

Gamahiro scoffs. “Watch it, boy. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it.”

The turquoise toad sits in Rin’s lap like a lapdog and he’s lying to them both but they let it slide. His true size is closer to the size of a building, tall as the Hokage Tower back in Konoha. Obito has a cherished memory of him schooling Kakashi with his matched katana. He has a habit of crushing things to death just by sitting on them. Jiraiya supposedly likes to summon him above enemies just to see them squish.

They taught Minato his Sage Mode.

He used to think Minato was invincible. That he’d swoop in and solve all their problems, like he used to during the war. But he took his cues from Rin, who’d gone polite in that way that signals to him how afraid she is, and he remembers thinking that she knows him best, knows them both best, and how in all her confession she’d never one named him.

He is not afraid of this, of him, like she is. Even with their teacher gone, the heavy air of treason hangs around the fire.

And it was Kakashi who sent him. He’s not sure what to make of that truth, but it can be nothing good. His sharingan has helpfully seared the memory of Minato onto his frontal lobe, and he reexamines it from every angle, picking apart every micro expression on his sensei’s face. None of it explains why Kakashi left them to die.

Rin catches the toad up on everything he’s missed and the toad is passing along whatever information he has about their teacher and the old pervy sage. Apparently, Jiraiya and the toads are on the outs again because he’d summoned Gamariki to help him perve on a bathhouse in Shimo and Gamariki ratted him out to Gamabunta and the other Mount Myoboku toads. Rin strongly disapproves of the Toad Sage’s disgusting habits but Gamahiro’s high-pitched impression of Jiraiya is hilarious and eventually has her laughing. She’s lighter, now that they’re alone again.

Rin laughing. Kushina coming here, to fix her seal. Rin laughing, without the threat of the Sanbi overwhelming her and her seal failing. She’ll finally get to try to talk to the Bijuu like she’s always wanted. Obito is thrilled for her. He can’t wait to see Kushina in a few days: Kushina, the jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi. The best fuuinjutsu master since the fall of Whirlpool. If anyone can help Rin and teach her about being a jinchuuriki, it’s the fiery redheaded kunoichi. Kushina, the woman who’d loved him immediately and without reserve.

And Minato, who he thinks came here to kill them, but who listened instead. Minato, who joked about his haircut instead of asking about his scars, who hugged him, even without knowing the details, and said he was proud.

He hadn’t been angry. Even when they were fighting, he hadn’t been mad. He knows his sensei isn’t an accurate litmus test for the reaction of most shinobi, but he is so immensely relieved it almost overshadows the memory of the very real Killing Intent he’d projected.

He’d stood in a tree and flew at him and it was his teacher, his Hokage, but he struck first and Obito reacted on instinct, his mangekyo activating. It felt like he was dying, just another betrayal, to trade blows with Minato outside of a friendly spar. To turn his mangekyo on him and mean it.

Obito is looking for the lie in it. Underneath the underneath. Minato is Hokage. He can’t just accept them back like that. They are nukenin, truly. Regardless of their reasons, it’s treason. They’d let him think they were dead. He had every right to be angry at them and he hadn’t been.

Even now, Gamahiro keeps one eye on him. He can’t read the toad’s expression like he thinks he should be able to, but he knows caution when he sees it. He grew up with that constantly levered at him, even from perfect strangers. He knows what people assume.

It’s not something he’s thought about in months. Being Tobi, being anonymous aside from his rank as a criminal, was refreshing. He went from being chained to his old Clan Head to the relative anonymity he’s never enjoyed before. Rin doesn’t treat it like a luxury, but he’s not so sure, now.

He shifts, watching the fire. He’s never let himself think about all that, really, didn’t want to invite in the hurt. It feels new and raw to consider going home.

It feels dangerous. He knows the insidious draw of things he can’t have, of what it does to Uchiha like him.

They won’t welcome him back. He wasn’t even wanted before; when he graduated from the Academy without activating his sharingan, his nastier aunts said it was because his blood was too thin. His clan would be shocked to see him alive; even with the mangekyo, he knows his return will be an unwelcome surprise. Minato said that Fugaku himself had trained Kakashi, so maybe they respected him, respected his death, enough to abide by his final wish. It’s a weird thought. But honoring a dead Obito is very different from welcoming a monstrous living Obito, half zombie-plant monster and half busted-up teenager. He can’t even consider the mokuton, not that he could ever let them know. They’ll have to cover it up as extensively as they’ll have to hide the existence of the Sanbi; at least Minato is well versed in keeping Bijuu under wraps.

At least his secret isn’t the epitome of all war. His is an individual crime, with a personal sentence. Rin’s secret would drag the nations kicking and screaming down with it.

Would his oba san even recognize him with how much he’s changed? She made up all the parts she recognized when he was a child. She’d never even wanted him to be a shinobi. Minato said she’s fine, but Obito must have broken his aunt’s heart. She’d lost everyone, and he may never make it up to her.

He’s brooding and Rin busts him for it as soon as he shifts to sit back next to her. She narrows her eyes at him and says, “You’re borrowing worry.”

That’s a little hypocritical, considering how she’d been acting towards their teacher. He points to his frown, “This? This is justified.”

The toad bonks him over the head with the hilt of his sword. “Ow!” He rubs at the spot where Gamahiro hit him hard enough to bruise.

The summons laughs at him. “I thought you were some big deal shinobi, with a fancy eyeball and everything. Good to know you’re still that kid I remember.”

When Obito tries to figure out whether or not he should be offended by this, Gamahiro just laughs harder. Even Rin is smirking at him now. His pride stings a little and the fire flares in response, but Obito can’t be mad now, not truly, not when Kushina is on her way, not when Minato said he was proud. He harrumphs good naturedly and flops back on the ground, staring upside down up at Rin and the toad.

They study each other. Obito’s always liked the turquoise toad; he gets along with most summons; even Kakashi’s grumpy pug Pakkun likes him. But he hasn’t seen the toad in years. Gamahiro squints at him and says, “You look like a Suna nin, boy.”

It’s the face drape. It’ll stand out here in Stone, or in Earth. It’ll need to be replaced, but Obito’s not sure with what. He defends himself, “Well, it helped me blend in while we were in Wind.”

“Ever think about a mask?”

In his mind is Swirly merging with his skin, a rot he has to burn out. He can still hear the whispers in his dreams sometimes, from the time when the clone kept him alive, kept him trapped, manipulated him, took his Will of Fire and replaced it with the Old Man’s. He almost shudders and says, “too much like ANBU.”

Maybe Rin is right and he’s just being paranoid, but he can’t help but know that everything they say and do will be reported back to Minato. The toad isn’t here as a spy, but Obito already finds himself censoring his speech. Rin knows why he’s wary of a mask; Obito isn’t sure he wants Minato to know all the details. He trusts his teacher, but nothing good will come from him knowing. He’s never lied to Rin, but Rin seems to know when he isn’t comfortable talking about the time he spent in the cave. Rin knows to let it be; Minato wouldn’t be able to let it go.

Gamahiro just croaks down at him and Obito closes his eye to feel the forest settle around him. It’s edging into morning by now but he couldn’t sleep if he tried. He needs to think, to process everything that his sensei said, all the implications and contingencies, how it affects their plan and how it doesn’t.

“I’ll keep watch,” he offers with his eye still closed.

Rin hums in agreement and wishes them both goodnight before she settles down in the tent. She’s taken to meditating before bed and Obito knows it’s got something to do with the Sanbi. He’s not going to pretend to understand, so he hasn’t asked. The Ichibi is already nightmare enough for him.

They don’t talk about Minato, not about all the things they hadn’t said, them or Minato, not in front of the toad contractually obligated to narc on them. He’s not exactly frustrated by it, but he has been noticing it more and more, even when its just them. He knows he’s not the best at talking, and Rin’s not the best at making him. He’s losing track of all the things slipping through the cracks.

He feels Gamahiro hop on top of a log, feels the compression of the moss under his feet. It’s like he can finally breathe again, being back in a forest, with plant life all around him, warning him to every little shift and footfall. He thinks his mokuton’s gotten more sensitive; before the months in the desert, he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to feel something as small as the moss squeezing under the weight of a single toad with enough clarity that it’s like seeing it with his eyes.

To the toad it must look like he’s sleeping on the job, but if Obito concentrates, the grass grows under him and tiny creepers and vines wind around his arms and legs. It’s getting easier to think about it as a part of him, even when all of his henges go sideways and he keeps transforming into an oak tree instead of whatever he’d been intending. While he worked the greenhouses in Suna, his supervisor scratched his head and wondered why their food output had suddenly increased so drastically in such a short amount of time. Obito smuggled seeds and trimmings out of the gardens and carries them around in his kunai pouch. He can grow a strawberry plant to fruit with mokuton in only a few minutes. Hashirama could grow huge oaks instantaneously; Obito will never be up to that level, but he is getting the mokuton to work with him better than it had been before. The thing about plants, is that they want to grow; Obito’s just learning how to ask them for what he wants.

He isn’t even channeling his mokuton right now, they just do this because they want. Plants like him. He’d never considered himself as having a green thumb before but now they go out of their way to snag at his clothes, brush up against his legs, make blueberries the size of oranges. When he is angry thorns spread and vines tangle in strangleholds. Poison ivy flares in the grass. Trees bend over into a wall around him. It felt unnatural at first, splintering against his fire nature, but he’s made peace with it now. He simply lets it be. He might hate what the Old Man had done to him and the white flesh of him might make him physically nauseous with shame, but he can’t hate the mokuton.

He should be rearranging all the moving parts of their plan, but instead he keeps getting distracted by thoughts of home, of Konoha and his clan. He hasn’t allowed himself to think of Konoha as his home and the relief is a band loosening from around his ribs. Its not all bad. He has missed them fiercely, even with everything else.

His cousin Shisui is doing well, a gennin who’d even fought in the last year of the war, much to Obito’s distress. When he was gennin with a ten-year-old Kakashi, it didn’t seem so egregious to send a ten-year-old off to war, but he remembers Shisui being born. In his mind, his cousin is a child, and he can’t imagine him as a gennin already with the experience of war. It’s not right. It shouldn’t exist: a Shisui with Rin’s shadows.

And Itachi is only five, and already awakened his sharingan. A child prodigy, which in Obito’s mind dooms him to the same fate as Kakashi, as Minato: overburdened and under-supported, with the eventual emotional intelligence of a fart. He babysat the kid, knows he was weirdly serious even as a toddler, but Kakashi is only fourteen and a skilled assassin, listed in the Bingo Book as the Copy Nin, which is partly his fault, he supposes. Minato said his younger teammate keeps trying to join ANBU, fucking ANBU, the organization that carries out classified wetwork and has a bad habit of just vanishing talented shinobi, or warping them past all recognition.

Everyone knows you have to have a darkness in you to do well in ANBU. Minato was hailed as a prodigy too, pushed into the shinobi life at a young age, the youngest Hokage ever at only 24, with a stylized red tattoo on his shoulder from his teen years, the practiced coldness that took lives and shrugged it off after. Obito had realized in the cave, when he was bedridden and alone with all his worst thoughts, that his teacher had never wanted that for them. He’d probably agreed to teach the Hatake prodigy solely to prevent Kakashi from following so closely in his shoes.

How it must tear him up inside, to see how Team 7 is turning out. An unstable jinchuuriki, a self-destructive whiplash of a Hatake, and whatever the fuck it is that Obito’s turning into.

But Sage, he loves the village. He loves his clan unapologetically, complicated as it shouldn’t be. He’d gladly die for his team. He dreams about the towering Hashirama trees that protect the heart of Fire Country, of the compound beside the Naka River, the memorial stone with the names of both his parents. He’d given them up in his heart and its almost too much to consider the possibility of one day having them back.

If they know how messed up he is, would they hate him? Fear him? Turn on him, try to drive him away, or simply send ANBU after him on a mission out of the village, just an unfortunate casualty to some C rank gone wrong?

He can’t deny that he’s powerful. And people fear power as much as they want it. He’s pretty sure its 90% of why jinchuuriki are treated so poorly.

If the Leaf Village turns on Rin, on Kushina, a part of him will want to set the entire settlement on fire. When his mind spins down that particular rabbit hole, he can almost see how it had happened with the Old Man. How he could suddenly just be caught up.

He doesn’t think that the Geezer is evil. Insane and genocidal, absolutely, but he believes he’s right, and while Obito hates him, he can understand the pain of losing everything and everyone, a grief that simply cannot be accepted. He’d gone a little crazy when he thought Kakashi killed Rin, he knows he had, he’d clubbed ninja to death with his bare hands while his chakra ran amok. It happened to Madara. Obito can’t say it is outside the realm of possibility for it to happen to him.

Ferns unfurl in his consciousness, just barely brushing his dark thoughts aside, cool leaves pressing over his temples in a way that is the exact opposite of rubble in a cave. Warm from his chakra, and finally calm as dawn breaks and the birds begin to sing.

He feels a peach branch stir, rise, head his way. Feels the grass bend under her feet as she walks over to study him.

“Need some help?” she asks.

Obito is partially obscured by crawling vines, the same creepers that wind around tree trunks and tie shut their barrier wall. “I’m meditating,” he says, eye still closed.

She has the decency to not act surprised. Obito is a bad meditator, and everything just keeps being too distracting, including himself. But maybe he’s getting the knack of it, just letting everything happen regardless. Actually, that probably isn’t meditating, isn’t proper peace either, but he isn’t going to admit that to Rin.

He hasn’t even moved since last night, and he carefully circulates his chakra. Instead of trying to move all the plant life off him like he would have before, he simply asks it to grow in a different way. Half the battle is getting plants to understand what he wants, but eventually they respond, the vines untangling from over him to spread out naturally among the campsite. When he can sit up without disturbing them, he grins and opens his eye to see Rin smiling down at him with the sunrise in the trees behind her and Gamahiro on his log watching him with a carefully blank look on his face. Out of practice as Obito is, this look is decidedly neutral.

“That’s senjutsu you’re sensing, boy. You’re not channeling it, otherwise you’d turn to stone, but you’re fairly attuned to the natural energy around you. I suppose it’s a side effect of the Wood Release.” Gamahiro croaks. “With some training, you’d make a half decent Sage.”

Senjutsu? Like Minato’s Sage Mode? Like Jiraiya of the Sannin? Only a few select summoning tribes are capable of teaching their summoners senjutsu; it’s part of what makes the Toad Contract so powerful.

Senju Hashirama was a sage, although Obito doesn’t know where he learned it. He says carefully, “as an Uchiha, I would traditionally be offered to either the cats or the crows.” Neither of which he knows is capable of teaching senjutsu.

“Cats and crows, huh, boy?” The skin under the toad’s mouth jumps, like he swallows. “Never had you picked for a bird brain.”

Once upon a time, this information ruined Kakashi’s day. “I was always partial to the ninneko of Sora Ku. Nekomata sama has been allied to the Uchiha for generations.”

He croaks a laugh. “Who do you think would win in a fight, Nekomata or Pakkun?”

The leader of Kakashi’s ninken is about eight inches tall. Nekomata is as big as a house and has knives for hands. “Hn….” He says, sensing a trap, which just makes the toad laugh harder.

Gamahiro turns to Rin when Obito refuses to entrap himself in an answer. “Well, girl?”

Rin smiles sweetly at the both of them and it is every possible threat. “I think my turtle is the obvious answer.”

That shuts the toad up real fast and now Obito laughs, shaking leaves out of his hair. “Even if Minato sensei sends Kushina’s team out as soon as possible, it’ll take them at least three days running full out to get to Stone. It might take us only a day to reach the border by foot, walking. We’ve got plenty of time.”

Rin rolls her eyes at his planning so early in the day. “Good morning to you, too.” She rifles through the scrolls for the supplies Minato left them and comes up empty. “Hey, Mr. Mokuton, can’t you find us some decent tea leaves?”

He rolls his eye right back. “Oh, yeah, sure, I’ll just consult my encyclopedic knowledge of every single plant native to Ishi and summon the perfect blended brew right up for you. Is there a particular knee you want me to grovel on when I serve it to you?”

“Thank you,” she exclaims sarcastically, gesturing at him for Gamahiro. “See, it doesn’t take much.”

They eat the leftovers from the rabbit Obito trapped the night before and come to the awkward realization that they have nothing toad-appropriate to offer Gamahiro for breakfast. “Um…” Rin asks him, “what would you like, Gamahiro san?”

“Bugs,” the turquoise toad croaks. “Or worms, preferably.”

What follows should count as a grueling D rank mission, the kind that seems unending and faintly pointlessly laborious, which Obito had been stuck with before he went from chasing lost cats and weeding gardens to sabotaging enemy territory and engaging with enemy shinobi.

After several false start and failed attempts to catch the toad some breakfast, he figures out to use his sharingan to spot bugs as they fly through the air, helps Rin trap them and swat them, but “not too hard!” Gamahiro watches them struggle from a stump, polishing his katana. Rin shares an incredulous look with him and they go back to chasing flies.

Turns out, Gamahiro refuses to eat grasshoppers. Rin’s politeness turns brittle as a glass kunai. Obito closes his eye, praying for strength. While his eye is closed, it’s easier to get out of his head, to focus with his non-visual senses, and he reaches with his mokuton and feels some grubs gnawing through a log and he digs them out with a kunai, wondering all the while if the toad is screwing with them.

Maybe this is a lesson, somehow? Knock Kakashi out teaching swordplay and make Obito and Rin waste a morning grunting for worms to teach… he doesn’t know, patience maybe? But his temper is rising with the sun in the sky and the toad just eats so much. Obito used to really put it away, back when he’d literally burn through calories, but he hasn’t needed nearly as much since the mokuton. It’s hours until the toad declares himself satisfied and gives a loud belch that has Rin’s eye twitching.

They pack up camp and Gamahiro nitpicks their training schedule as they walk. Obito outlines his abilities as best he could and Rin does the same. The toad harrumphs after they finish. “Good thing there’s some time to train along the way,” he says. “You two have gotten sloppy.”

Obito bites his tongue against all the things he could say to disprove that point but they’ll only make him sound childish. Rin’s easy acquiescence is every warning. He doesn’t think the toad cares.

Gamahiro is nosy about other areas as well. He watches Obito reinforce Rin’s seal and has a million questions that prickle Obito to answer and another million where he doesn’t even know what the toad’s asking. He bugs Rin about the Sanbi and has them describe the Ichibi. When Rin professes her desire to check on Shukaku in the next day or so, Obito interrupts and says, “Oh, I checked on him last night. I was only there a second, but he was fine. Still rude. Still murderous.”

“You went to Kamui and didn’t have me check your eye after?” Rin scolds, already moving towards his face with a green hand.

He flinches a bit at the sight of a hand coming toward his eye, an instinctive fear, a nightmare he only sometimes has. For years, his last memory of Rin was in the cave-in, reaching for his eye and leaving him blind and cold, the world getting darker and darker by parts as he bleeds out.

Rin sees his tic and immediately stops herself, checks her position, her intent, and asks, “Obito? Can I check your eye for scarring?”

He just barely avoids defensively activating his sharingan at her. He blinks a few times and forces his heartbeat to slow before nodding his consent. This is Rin. He trusts her with his back. He trusts her with his eye. He’s just got to remember that, sometimes. “Yes.”

Her chakra is cool like water. It flows rather soothingly through the chakra pathways in his eye. She tuts and fusses, “How’s your vision? Any abnormalities?”

Unease shoots through him. “No. Why?”

She just finishes the examination and they both pretend she hadn’t not answered his question. Is the degeneration from his mangekyo already noticeable? It’s only been a few months, and he’s supposed to have at least a decade before it breaks down completely. But his dojutsu is a parasite, and he uses it pretty heavily.

He can’t tell her that he’s going blind. She’ll just freak out, and he can’t limit his use of the mangekyo; it’s too necessary to their plans. It’s just part of the Curse, punishment for killing a precious friend. There’s nothing she could do.

The knowledge doesn’t make him want to believe Madara. He guesses he just thought he had more time.

Through it all is the yellow eyes of his teacher’s toad. Just observing. He’s annoyed, then he’s annoyed that he’s annoyed. Because he likes Gamahiro. He just got used to not being watched all the time, like he’s a sticky-fingered kid at market. Like he’s still got something to prove.

Stone is boring, but it’s easy to find the border village. Rin leads them to the rendezvous point mentioned in her mission assignment, a bar off the main road through the village. Its next to an Inn, and she rents them a room while they wait for Kushina’s sealing team from the Leaf to show up. They hide Gamahiro in the sling Rin used to carry Shukaku in, and Obito is grateful that the toad isn’t his true size, or even in his medium manifestation form that he’d used to spar kenjutsu in those years ago.

Obito comments, “Well, you’re certainly much nicer to carry around than Shukaku.”

Rin shoots him a dirty look that times up conveniently for her seal to expire and by the time they get it settled, she is pale and the lecture on Obito’s jab is forgotten. Even Gamahiro is unsettled by the Sanbi and his rage.

While they head off into the woods to train and blow off steam, Obito rigs the room to blow. Gamahiro shakes his head at him, a weird gesture since his shoulders are so forward-set. “You need to learn basic warding, kid. The traps are excessive.”

Obito complains to Rin, “Basic warding, he says, like any warding is basic. Besides, I’m a trap specialist.”

Probably. Maybe. Its not like he reached chuunin rank and scored an apprenticeship.

“The traps are fine,” Rin says brightly. “Its not paranoia if people are out to get you.”

Gamahiro croaks a laugh and Obito squishes him down into the sling to shut him up. On their way out, he impresses upon the staff that the room is being rented by shinobi, and they’d do best to keep out for the time being. Stone is demilitarized and the Inn isn’t used to housing shinobi, but Obito makes sure his nervous habit is catching and they’ll leave their stuff alone while they’re gone and not accidentally trigger any lethal traps by snooping around.

In the woods outside the village, Obito watches a melon-sized Gamahiro spar taijutsu with Rin. He specializes in toad style taijutsu, which Obito’s never had the opportunity to study in-depth before and he details it all with his sharingan before the toad turns to him, which totally isn’t cheating, no way.

When he hops at Obito, he angles his shoulders, minimizes his target area, and while midair, the toad strikes with all four feet and elbows and knees. He’s not even using his swords and Obito’s finding it difficult to block all eight striking points. If he were full sized, he’d whale him right into the dirt, and Obito’s trying to dodge and block organically, without relying on Kamui to phase them right through him. That had hurt him in the fight in Sunagakure. He couldn’t just phase everything through him and leave Rin to fend for herself against multiple A and S ranked enemies. While powerful, Kamui’s not a good teamwork technique and suffers with any collaboration. That’s how Obito had gotten stabbed in the first place, when he couldn’t dodge the glass kunai from Yashamaru without sending it right into Rin, and his hand was occupied keeping a puppet from disemboweling him. Rin’s good at covering for his vulnerability during the three second delay when he switches between Kamui uses, but when she was occupied with Shukaku, Baki had managed to hit him on the thigh hard enough for his bad patch to turn to goo and then snap his ankle in the same kick sequence.

That can’t happen again. With his luck, the Jounin Commander noticed his time limit and published it for all the world to abuse.

It's good to spar with both his arms again. The feeling in it’s tingly, a little numb, not as sensitive as his true flesh arm, but he can manipulate it well enough nobody should be able to notice. His balance is better with it back, and he can even press a left-handed advantage against the toad, who remembers him as a kid favoring his right hand, before the toad wises up in about three seconds and proceeds to beat him silly with just his elbows.

The physical exertion clicks something into place for him; even as his body moves, his mind continues to mull over the issue with the Old Man, the zetsu, the minions. The jinchuuriki and the Tailed Beasts. Rin’s seal. His eyes. Kushina, holding a Bijuu captive. Minato saying I never meant for you to know.

He isn’t worn out; even before the accident, Obito had nearly boundless energy. He’s pretty sure he could either out-stamina or out-stubborn the toad. And his dexterity is impressive, for all that he can’t actually feel a lot through the faked nerves of the Hashirama cells.

Actually, when Obito thinks about it, he really is starting to think the patchwork parts of him are pure mokuton and not really pieces of Senju Hashirama growing on him. He’s seen portraits of the Shodaime and knows him to be of typical Senju complexion: darker than the Uchiha and most other clans, dark like the bark of a tree, and that isn’t like the slapdash at all. Obito is naturally pale, like most of his clan, but the dead white flesh doesn’t mimics the First Hokage; it’s more like xylem or phloem, like the milk white inside of certain plants. It explains his sensory issues with it, why it can even regrow.

It helps him to think of it like that. Not like the body cells of some dead corpse-meat village founder, more like a scion of a fruit tree. Not a true bloodline thief, akin to an eyestealer. Just a boy with an artificial green thumb, unwillingly grown himself by a folklore monster more myth than real life.

He can’t hate the mokuton. If he is the mokuton….

It helps.

After the toad kicks him around in taijutsu, Obito demonstrates his newfound suiton ability. Gamahiro is water natured himself and while he just hums thoughtfully at Obito’s attempts, Obito’s got the feeling the toad is formulating a jutsu that will kick his ass for later. He’s looking forward to it.

He’d gotten a glimpse of one of the Black Ops Suna shinobi throwing a doton and while he’s itching to try an Earth Release technique, it had visibly differed from what he’d managed to patch together of his memories of Kakashi’s Mud Wall. Hell, his Mud Wall has his ninken’s faces on it, and he knows he was skipping steps. The disparity is enough that he isn’t sure of the actual hand seals. In the Suna fight, he’d been more focused on Rasa than the masked operatives and the sharingan couldn’t copy kekkei genkai.
Rin will kick his ass if he tries to pull off a half-baked doton from piecemeal hand seals and no working theory of Earth Release asides from hypothetically he should be able to do the nature transformation. What’s a nice D rank technique he could start with? Throw some hand signs, mold some chakra, hope he doesn’t light himself of fire by accident?

There is no way he’s asking Kakashi. Even if Pakkun was right in front of him.

Minato knows doton, he should have asked while he had the chance, but it just never came up. Maybe he could send some scrolls later on? He’s never been the best at learning by reading theory, but he’d be willing to try. Anything that gave him a better chance at protecting his precious people.

He showers away all the training grime after Rin and uses a small katon to dry himself, the kind of chakra waste he really doesn’t worry about anymore. He dresses and they rest. Then its lunch. Gamahiro’s stomach is a full time D rank mission and they’re both growing tired of catering to the toad’s ridiculous diet. Obito loves Gamahiro and Rin will never admit it out loud, but while they love the toad and are grateful of his company, the bug thing’s growing old fast.

Rin is excited about the possibility of her seal being fixed. Obito can see the tremble in her core, part nerves part elation. At night, she’s one long shake. Obito maintains the seal, but he isn’t sure how best to support her, besides being there. She doesn’t want to talk about her fears, at least where the toad can hear, so Obito never brings it up. When he tries to imagine what life might be like without the constant threat of the seal, he can’t help but think of Rin as a purple-painted gennin, how easy things had always been between them. He knows it's not fair to either of them to expect that ease to return. He doesn’t show his worry, but it prickles like heat rash over his skin.

At night he lays awake and tries to picture next week, next month, life a year from now. His eye aches and his heart beats unevenly. These are ugly thoughts, and unlike him, but he’s not surprised by how familiar these negative whispers in his mind are becoming, as insidious as Swirly’s words in his ear, inescapable, the inevitable way Madara had said he’d be back. He doesn’t sleep because he knows there’d be nightmares.

They train and they rest and on the third day, they stake out the meeting place waiting for the Uzumaki to show. Obito keeps a lookout, eyes peeled for the red haired kunoichi. Kushina was never really one for stealth; Obito’s sure she’ll find some way to announce herself that results in him getting hit and then hugged and carries with it the potential for massive property damage.

While Obito keeps watch with Gamahiro up a tree, Rin blends into the tavern itself. She sips a non-disgusting tea, courtesy of Minato sensei’s moneybag, and waits for Kushina to appear. The timeline’s not perfect, but they imagine he sent a sealing team rather quickly. The Leaf ninja could arrive any time today.

Rin chats with the civilians and Obito sits in a tree with a toad and tries to focus on the individual leaves on the trees around him. He should be able to sense a team of approaching shinobi, especially if they are moving at shinobi speeds and he’s paying attention.

Nobody ever shows. Towards nightfall Rin orders them takeout and they meet up back at the hotel. Obito’s nerves are jangling but Rin forces some food into him and Gamahiro. He isn’t entirely sure how this is going to play out; Kushina would know, but will the rest of her team know them? Would Obito have to hide from Leaf ninja? What if they come in the night? What if they feel Rin’s seal? The Bijuu has been quiet for a few days and that usually means he’s ratcheting up for a brawl that turns maintaining the wonky seal into a no-holds-barred streetfight. And you can’t streetfight the fucking Sanbi without people noticing.

Obito keeps watch all night and neither Rin nor Gamahiro try to talk him out of it. He goes over their supplies. He details the weapons. Counts the money. Does one-armed pushups. Shoves his chakra signature down to just the barest spark. Goes over the supplies again. Grows a small tree in the palm of his hand from an acorn, which he then feels responsible for and panics over how to either take it with them like his tiny succulent friend as a member of the team or find it a good home in the forest in the morning. When he arranges it carefully in the empty windowsill it immediately begins to wilt so he sticks it to his arm with his chakra and it immediately perks back up. He doesn’t mind wearing a tiny tree as a fashion accessory and ignores Gamahiro’s judgement. He’ll put it in Kamui later. Where he can check up on it as needed. Make sure it grows up happy and healthy and stupid big.

Outside, in the village, all the civilians are indoors. The only things moving around are night animals. The moon is waxing towards full again and he’s noticed that the Sanbi acts up more whenever the moon is full. Is it a Bijuu thing? Will the Ichibi react similarly? Why might that be?

Obito’s reserving judgement on the sentience of the Bijuu for now. Once Rin is in a more secure seal, he knows she’s going to attempt to reach the Tailed Beast inside her. Try to talk him around. Befriend him even. For her sake, he hopes it’s possible. The Ichibi talked, in a way, and even called himself Shukaku. While he’s skeptical, he’s willing to be convinced. If they could convince the turtle to help them out, under his own power, the possibilities are nearly endless for Rin. A basically unlimited chakra well. Maybe some impossible cool suiton, like the Water Dragon, one of Minato’s favorites. Or an exclusive turtle technique. She’ll be content with just making friends with the beast, but Obito can’t help but see the edge it will give them. For a century, jinchuuriki were weapons. He’s guilty of thinking like that too.

In the morning they stay on their best behavior. Breakfast at the inn. Three hours catching bugs for Gamahiro, who only grows more smug with their frustrations. There’s a far-away look in Rin’s eyes and her hand keeps straying to her stomach. Obito’s mokuton is heightened with his intent and his range hovers around the seven-mile mark. His own chakra is under a stranglehold as he tamps it down to civilian levels just in case the sealing team thinks he’s still dead and/or a missing nin and is hostile. No telling who Minato involved, but knowing his sensei it’s as few people as he can get away with.

There’s one particular chakra signature he’s ready to lock in on. Even suppressed, he’ll recognize the crackling whiplash and ozone of his teammate.

There are things they need to say, him to Kakashi, Rin to Kakashi, the both of them to each other.

But it’s not Kakashi he senses moving through the trees towards them from Fire around late afternoon. It’s a firestorm: swirling and whirling with excitement and destruction. She’s not hiding her signature at all and his mokuton homes in on the movement of shinobi sandals thumping over tree limbs, lichens crushed underfoot, tiny ferns waving in the breeze as the sealing team follows her lead. He focuses, tries to count, feeling the footsteps, the weight on the trunks of the small Ishi trees. One, two, three….Five. A five-man team, led by Kushina in formation C.

Kushina: a firestorm on the horizon, jinchuuriki to the Kyuubi no Kitsune who almost destroyed the Leaf Village. The Uzumaki who loved him as soon as they were introduced. Kushina-- closing fast.

He’s suddenly incredible happy.

Obito fluctuates his chakra just barely, in the agreed upon pattern, and the leaves of his succulent which sits in its pot on Rin’s table inside the tavern bend ever so slightly. Under his influence, they curl then move carefully, five times. Rin is nonchalant, but she must have seen the signal. She sips her tea, prudently not engaging with any of the civilians around.

Gamahiro’s with him in the tree. “It’s Kushina,” he whispers to the toad. They’re naturally camouflaged, and under a genjutsu, but if there’s a Hyuuga with the sealing team it’s a fat lot of good that will do. He doesn’t recognize any of the accompanying signatures, which means probably no Uchiha, and no Kakashi. He’s a little bummed, and a lot confused, and the two mix in uneasy ways he can’t help but make into fear, but Kushina is brazenly blazing his way like a challenge to the Old Man himself and he can’t keep the smile off his face.

They’re in position. There’s a clear line of sight to Rin; they can see any signals she uses and Obito can Kamui in and then Kamui them both out if need be. Her posture is alert but relaxed and Obito mentally tracks the Konoha nin into the village, Kushina and one other Leaf ninja splitting away and the other three establishing a perimeter around the settlement. Obito assumes the three running rings aren’t in the know and marks their positions to stay away from. He wonders who the shinobi with Kushina is; he doesn’t recognize him with his signature suppressed so much so as to be almost nonexistent. If he’s going to be face to face with Rin, he must have the necessary clearance, but Obito struggles to place the shinobi until they walk down the main thoroughfare of the village, dressed in standard Konoha shinobi uniform with jounin rank gear, but intentionally without any visible hitai ate. Kushina’s red hair is as fiery as her chakra and the man next to her is a dead ringer for a Nara.

Wait, Obito tries to recall, scales time back a few years, tries to erase that stupid looking beard from his chin, imagines his face without the two distinctive cuts slanting on it. It’s not just any Nara next to Kushina. That’s Nara Shikaku, the Clan Head himself. A strategic genius; Obito knows him only from rumors, but it makes sense if he’s in the know about their specific mission parameters. And while the Nara is studying his surroundings with a calculating eye, it’s not the shadow bender Obito focuses on.

Kushina stomps right up to the tavern and ducks under the noren in a move that tosses her hair out behind her like flames. Even with the distance, Obito can hear her yelling and he smiles fondly, sharingan reading the lips of the Nara Clan Head as he mutters the word troublesome to himself and ducks into the tavern to join them. He’s bad a lip leading but he knows enough to recognize trouble.

Rin sits up when they enter and Kushina wastes no time, doesn’t even bother proving her identity, just swoops down on his teammate and crushes her in a bearhug. Gamahiro winces.

Rin stands and hugs her back just as fiercely and then they’re squealing and jumping up and down and just generally causing a scene. Kushina drags her down into the booth and Obito can only see Rin’s reactions, Rin’s words. He watches the reunion while the Nara surreptitiously watches the surroundings, slumped against the wall like he’s seconds from falling asleep. He’s looking at Obito’s succulent sitting innocently on the table. Just to fuck with him, Obito curls it’s leaves just a bit, just to see if he’ll squirm. Gamahiro whacks him over the head with the sheath from one of his katana but Obito fends him off just to laugh as the Clan Head looks suddenly more awake at the movement of the tiny plant. It’s not hard to imagine him judging distances and light sources, dark eyes darting around from Rin to follow the clear line of sight right back to Obito’s tree.

The Nara are known for producing genius level intellects, but it’s a fact that Obito doesn’t quite feel until the Clan Head looks right at him. Obito’s behind a simple genjutsu; he knows that there’s no way that the Nara can actually see him, he’s just deduced his location in a single second of thought. But he’s looking right at him, like the cover’s not even there, accurate enough for him to believe he’s truly seeing him, not just approximating. What gave him away? Obito holds himself very still, but a vine curls around his pinkie finger where it spreads against the bark to anchor himself. Now that he’s paying attention, the tree he’s hiding in has bent slightly around him in an accommodating way. Shikaku’s not seeing through the genjutsu; he’s seeing the mokuton.

So there are some things Minato told. Even if it was necessary, he isn’t sure how to feel about it.

Obito curses and gently unwraps the vine from his hand. Busted. Gamahiro croaks, “have to wake up earlier to fool the shadow users, boy.”

Obito grumbles and ignores the Nara’s careful scrutiny in favor of memorizing everything about Kushina. She talks with her hands still, and she’s loud and passionate about everything. She’s wearing a jounin flak jacket over her usual green dress and she looks good. Her hair is bright and shiny, she’s not lost any noticeable weight, and she’s happy, so very happy, with his teacher’s ring on her finger and Rin sharing a booth with her. Obito aches to see it, knowing that the Kyuubi’s sealed inside her as well. The legacy of jinchuuriki is a violent, sad struggle and he’s never had to look past the smiling face before to consider the Tailed Beast within her. He’d promised Minato that knowing wouldn’t change anything between them, but he’s sad for reasons that verge into anger, mad at this stupid shinobi world that makes people into weapons so callously.

Rin can project glee like a shield but right now she’s genuine and her eyes sparkle when Kushina pats her on the head to compliment her new hairstyle.

They’re drawing attention; of course they are, Kushina is not a woman that can be easily ignored. The civilians are watching the reunion and unease raises the hairs on his arm and neck. The sealing team is almost unapologetically Konoha nin (seriously hiding hitai ate is not a disguise, what the fuck, he thought this man was a genius) and the familiar way they are embracing could tie their aliases back to the Leaf Village. Ishi isn’t allied with anyone, but Stone informs to everyone about everything. Sachira and Tobi are hunted by Suna, and Stone will gladly capitalize on a sighting of them.

The Nara knows it too. He’s lazily slouching against the booth but his eyes are sharp. There might not be many ninja willing to take on the Red Hot Habanero, but it’s just not good form. He murmurs something to Kushina, who shoots him a dirty look and tightens her grip on Rin, like his teammate is liable to up and disappear. Rin folds her own hand over the Uzumaki’s and smiles sweetly at the Clan Head. There's not telling if she recognizes him as a Clan Head.

The tavern proprietor senses the imminent property damage to his establishment and a server scurries over in a hurry, offering Rin her check. Kushina slaps some coins on the table hard enough to dent the wood and drags Rin away. She strongarms his teammate towards the door, leaving the succulent on the table, much to Obito’s immediate alarm.

The kunoichi exit the bar and Obito frantically waves the plant around at Shikaku, hoping he’d get the hint and grab his succulent for him. The Leaf ninja looks unimpressed but swipes the pot off the tabletop and Obito sighs in relieved gratitude.

Rin struggles a bit in Kushina’s grasp, trying to turn back to the table to get his plant, but she relaxes when she sees that Shikaku’s got it and is studying the succulent with half-lidded eyes.

Kushina marches them back to the Inn and Rin takes them up to their room. Obito settles Gamahiro in the sling and follows them, still staying out of sight. He’s subconsciously tracking the three outlying shinobi, and since the genjutsu is affixed to him and not the tree itself, it moves with him as long as he doesn’t go too fast. He disarms his traps with little flicks of his chakra as Rin keys open the door for them.

Obito loses them for a minute when they enter the building. Gamahiro squirms, trying to keep his eyes above the canvas lip of the sling. The toad’s not exactly light, even in his mini form, and Obito grunts as he throws his weight around to keep an eye on the surroundings.

It’s only a few minutes for Rin to appear at the window, signaling him to come on in. He keeps a hold of his sensei’s summon and lets his mangekyo whirl to life, Kamuiing directly into the hotel room.

The second he lands, something launches itself at him and he almost panics, but it hasn’t been three seconds yet so he can’t go transparent and Kushina catches him around the neck and hauls him down into a hug that squeezes the breath out of him in a long wheeze. His eye bugs out of his head in alarm and Rin rescues him by casually reintroducing herself into the hug so Kushina relinquishes the arm that’s strangling him to reel her in as well. She sniffling and he feels abruptly awful and awkward and he’s saved by Gamahiro loudly complaining about being squished. Obito quickly backs off and the toad huffs and hops out of the sling to plop himself down on the futon, grumbling all the while about the lack of respect.

“Hello to you too, Gamahiro kun,” Kushina pats the toad on the head like he’s a dog and the summons just grumbles even more, even as he smiles a bit at her. Nara Shikaku leans on the windowsill with his hands crammed deep in his pockets, silently observing them, backlit by the sunset that throws his shadow across the floor to touch Obito’s own. It’s subtle, but the precaution is not lost on Obito, who nods politely but coolly at the Clan Head. He’s rather neutral towards Nara in general; there’s no rivalry like with the Hyuuga, and Shikaku nods back slightly. Obito can only imagine the contortions his mind is in at his appearance. He’s still barefoot, and it seems like a bigger deal than it usually is, paired with a dusty Suna face drape and bandages and hood.

But he can’t focus on the jounin, not when Kushina is right there, and he hasn’t seen her in years. He grins at her; he’s grown taller than her, but he tries to look sheepish at her from up under his eyelashes, which always used to work when he was smaller. “Hey, Hime.”

She socks him on the arm hard enough to bruise and then hugs him again, more gently this time. “Hey, yourself, Obito.” She squeezes him until he puts his arms around her in return. “When Minato told me you were alive, it was one of the very best days of my life, ya know? You’re lucky I have responsibilities in the village, or I’d never let either of you out of my sight again.”

He smiles at her and she lets him go only to study him critically with her bright eyes. He braces himself, but when she speaks, it’s only to ask, “What the fuck happened to your hair?”

Rin brays with laughter and even Gamahiro croaks at him. Obito says fake sourly, “Rin is a terrible beautician. I used to think there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do, but this haircut is an affront to the Sage and I think she did it on purpose.”

Kushina hums thoughtfully, studying him further, taking it all in. She says, “I can maybe salvage some of it. And why on earth didn’t you ask Minato to send you some shoes?”

“Hn….” He says helpfully. “I forgot. It didn’t seem important, at the time?”

She snorts and fusses over him for a few more seconds, like a mother hen, tutting over his clothes, which he had washed specifically so they’d be as nice and clean as could be for her. He opens his mouth to defend himself further but she shushes him, eyes darting around the hotel room. Her hand goes to her kunai pouch and she withdraws a handful of premade seals and Obito recognizes her special silencing and privacy seals. She proceeds to ward the shit out of the room. The slight shimmer scrawls over the walls and they hum slightly as she activates them. Unlike the shitty Suna seals, this is total soundproofing. His heartbeat is louder, and the silence pushes at his ears, a weight all its own. The smallest rustle is magnified against the nothing that exists outside the room.

Rin looks at Obito for confirmation. He can still sense outside and it’s never been aural. The three Leaf shinobi have stationed themselves out on a perimeter and nothing else has moved in his range that concerns him. He shakes his head at her. No Kakashi.

She frowns.

“There!” Kushina finishes and the room is a cocoon separated from the rest of the world. Obito supposes in a pinch, sensitive information could be relayed inside Kamui, where there would be no potential spies, only a homicidal tanuki to contend with.

She turns towards Obito and Rin with her eyebrow raised. “So, Minato says Uchiha Madara’s being a real bastard about the Bijuu and you two are going to take him out.”

That isn’t an incorrect assessment, but it’s definitely not how he would have ever worded it. His eye is wide. Rin says, “got it in one. But there’s a big problem with that.” And she lifts her shirt’s hem up to expose her midriff, channeling her chakra carefully so the pattern of the wonky seal rises visibly to the surface.

Kushina’s eyes narrow into dangerous slits, and she leans closer to study the lines of the seal. She traces a line with her finger and pales. “This is….” She’s almost whispering, quiet in a way that doesn’t match her usual personality. Her eyes flash. “Madara did this?”

“Yes, via patsy. I’m jinchuuriki to the Sanbi.”

Her eyes follow the patterns of the seal, where it just doesn’t line up properly. Even Obito, with his subpar fuuinjutsu knowledge, can see obvious flaws in the matrix and layering sigils. The seal’s a nightmare, a bomb, and looking at it like this is like staring down an explosive tag.

But nobody alive knows fuuinjutsu like Kushina knows fuuinjutsu. She one of the only survivors of Uzushiogakure, the last Uzumaki, a sealing master unmatched by anyone since Whirlpool’s fall. If anyone can make sense of the busted seal and even begin to repair it, its Kushina. She asks, “can you describe the process that goes into maintaining it?”

Rin looks at Obito and he says, trying for casual and landing somewhere between terse and glib in a way that has him hiding a wince, “It’s suppressed by mokuton. Rin thinks it’s the earth nature of it nullifying the water nature of the Bijuu.”

Her brow furrows and she pokes experimentally at it. Rin’s ticklish but stands her ground during the inspection. “It’s derived from Senju Hashirama’s mokuton?”

“Yes.”

“Hmmmm… that shouldn’t work. So does the Sanbi’s chakra just leak out?”

“Its like a dam,” Rin explains. “And its full of holes. The mokuton can plug them up, temporarily, but there’s always new holes, and if the dam ever breaks, or if the Sanbi hits it too hard…”

Kushina looks grim. “Somehow you lucked into a viable way to reset the time limit. But it won’t last forever. The Bijuu’s chakra is corrosive: the seal can’t hold it back indefinitely, no matter how much you attempt to suppress it, not with how it is now.”

Obito is cold. His mouth is as dry as it was when he was baking in the desert heat. He remembers the blistering chakra pouring out, the way that even Shukaku burned bare hands with his chakra alone. He knows that they’ve been wearing away, but it’s the first time he’s heard it confirmed.

He’s not enough to save her.

Rin’s expression doesn’t balk. “Can you repair it?”

Kushina says, “I have an idea. I can’t reseal the Bijuu for you, and I can’t fix this busted seal; the core matrix would be too crowded with my corrections and the quadrants would bleed into each other. But I should be able to slap a whole new seal on over the broken one, and then we just let the old one bust naturally. It’d still be contained in you, so in theory, voila, brand new jinchuuriki without unsealing the Tailed Beast already inside.”

“Would that work?”

“No reason it shouldn’t,” Kushina says. “I don’t think it’s ever been done before, ya know? But the theory is sound. Layer an odd numbered matrix over an even and it should tear itself apart from the disparity. Out with the old, in with the new.”

Rin says, “Will it hurt him?”

Shikaku tilts his head thoughtfully to the side and Obito groans internally. Kushina asks, “hurt him?”

Rin is firm. “The Sanbi. Transferring him from one seal into another. Will it harm him in any way?”

Kushina answers, but it’s a question, “It shouldn’t?”

Rin cuts the chakra to the seal and it fades back into her skin like ink sinking into milk. Her shirt drops back into place. “Good.”

Into the awkwardness, Obito asks, “do you have everything you need? I could help, maybe, just in case--”

Kushina shakes her head. “No, this will be a massive sealing. I need space to work and a safe perimeter, outside the village. I have enough ink, and I’ll augment it with blood for added strength. And I know you want to be there, but I don’t know how the fuuinjutsu will react to you, Obito kun.” Obito sees it coming but he’s unsure how to head it off, but it’s too late, Kushina is saying, “You can help Shikaku with the perimeter.”

He frowns and Rin cuts him a look that warns him to be nice. But he’s sentenced to guard duty with a man who plays 3D shogi in his sleep for fun. But maybe his mokuton would disrupt the sealing; he doesn’t know enough about fuuinjutsu to dispute it, and he trusts that Kushina wouldn’t just get rid of him for no reason.

But Kushina’s not just an expert on fuuinjutsu. Rin hasn’t brought it up yet, but he knows she has questions, theories she wants to share with Kushina, about the Bijuu, about the Kyuubi. They share a look and its uncharacteristically difficult for him to read Rin’s expression, but Obito agrees, grudgingly. It makes him feel like ants are crawling all over him, but he trusts Kushina, he always has. If things have changed so much that he can’t trust Kushina then this whole world is a loss.

His heart beats a steady rhythm and he can feel his pulse down in his hands, which want to grip something but are empty. He hasn’t forgotten the Nara is there, if he focuses, he can hear the man breathing, but after a second of him looking at him, the shadow at his feet withdraws and Shikaku is holding out his little succulent towards him, which Obito takes gratefully. Its already better to have something to hold. He doesn’t quite relax, but the unexpectedly kind gesture from the Konoha nin calms him somewhat.

Not kind, he realizes, keen. Just another puppet user, pulling shadow strings with his brain.

He needs to pick that same brain about strategies and what the village is going to cover, but its sure to come paired with an interrogation, which will be about as fun as pulling teeth. He confided in his team but he’d outgrown his blind trust of everyone in Konoha. He tells himself that it’s because the village is compromised; Zetsu has made sure of it. Madara has spies everywhere. He’s not sure it’s the whole truth, anymore.

But Minato sent him. The Nara has his sensei’s trust. Obito files away his instinctual distrust in favor of his Hokage’s judgement. For now, at least. The possibilities of using Kamui to escape social obligations and skip out on his upcoming cross-examination quickly spin through his mind but he puts that aside as well. He’d never leave Rin to face this alone. Kushina said that it wouldn’t hurt the Sanbi, but the trapped turtle is a Bijuu, nothing can truly hurt him. It’s jinchuuriki, however….Obito has seen Rin screw her face up in pain over the seal before. She’s lost weight and hoped he hasn’t noticed. She never said that the original sealing had hurt, but Obito knows her well enough to recognize the omission.
It’s the same way he never talks about the cave.

He is uncharacteristically glad he killed them all that night.

Obito says, “I’ll be nearby, if you need me.”

He doesn’t say if something goes wrong, and Rin isn’t saying it either in the same way no one’s said the word mokuton out loud. It’s not even an option. Rin says, quietly, “Thank you, Obito.”

Kushina lays out what she wants for the sealing. “I’ll need a big, empty space, with lots of light, far away from people. No canopy; I need access to the constellations."

This is like no sealing Obito’s ever heard of. He hadn’t known that the star's alignment could even affect fuuinjutsu. Maybe that’s why the Sanbi rages harder every full moon? Obito says, “When can you start?”

Kushina grins wickedly and Obito’s never been tempted before to describe it as fox clever, but for the first time, with her red hair, her teeth, her deep purple eyes, he feels like maybe he can see a glimpse of the Kyuubi inside her. “I can do it tonight.”

Obito reaches out with his mokuton, over his whole range, feeling for a clearing like she described. He says, “I know just the place.”

Its seven miles out and he describes it as best he can without ever being there. “A big clearing, no structures around for miles. Should be plenty of light; there’s no trees close to the center. Ground feels fairly level.”

Rin is smiling softly because she’s in on it and she knows him enough to see where this is heading. Kushina repeats, “feels level?”

Obito smiles back at Rin and holds out a hand to Kushina, “Wanna check it out?”

Kushina jumps at the chance; Obito supposes she’s used to Minato’s own time/space technique that the novelty doesn’t faze her but Shikaku’s not quite as reckless. It’s the first time he’s spoke but he questions, “Can you carry four people?”

Obito shrugs. “Probably. I take Rin into Kamui all the time, and in Suna I accidentally Kamuied Baki after he grabbed me at the last second. And Shukaku and Gamahiro react fine to it as well.” The toad croaks his assent from the futon, where he’s been watching the exchange with yellow eyes.

“Shukaku?” Kushina asks.

Rin says, “The Ichibi. Shukaku sama is hidden in Obito’s Kamui dimension to keep the clones from nabbing him.”

Obito adds, “And so we don’t have to listen to him. I never thought a Tailed Beast could be annoying, but that tanuki takes the cake. I’d never even heard some of the swears he uses.”

Rin is still smiling serenely but her eyes promise swift retribution. Before they could even begin to argue, Shikaku asks, his face decidedly neutral, “The Ichibi swore at you?”

“He doesn’t mean it,” Rin defends.

Obito says, “Oh yeah. He swears worse than an Inuzuka.”

Kushina snorts a laugh at that and latches onto Obito’s arm. “Let’s deal with the Sanbi first. Now, I wanna see you Kamui somewhere, believe it!”

Obito wraps an arm around her shoulders securely while Rin gets Gamahiro from the futon and glues herself to Obito’s other side. Obito eyes the Nara and says, “All aboard.”

There’s no good way to do this, and its awkward but Obito ignores it. He’s good at that. Shikaku lets Rin and Kushina each grab an arm and haul him in, and the Nara Clan Head ends up squished against Obito’s chest, as close as can be, so he won’t accidentally get left behind. He’s not a small guy either. Obito’s curious to see if moving more people adds to the chakra drain, but he holds everyone tight as he can and asks, “Ready?”

After a muttered assent from the jounin and a squeeze from Rin, he activates his mangekyo and through the filter of red he sees the shadows in the room suddenly writhe in agitation at the blaze of his chakra. Shikaku’s likely never experienced the power of a mangekyo sharingan but Kushina is unperturbed. He holds on tight and calls out, “Kamui!” and drags the whole tangled group along with him.

He sticks the landing as Kamui exits them right at the center of the clearing he’d sensed. Rin touches down neatly and even the jounin only sway a bit before finding their feet. They don’t even look nauseous, but maybe the Nara is hiding it. The chakra drain is more, but Obito feels fine; it would take a greater distance for him to really feel the strain of carrying four people and a summon. He smirks at Rin and she says, “Showoff.” But it doesn’t irk him any: he is showing off for the Leaf ninja and he thinks he looks pretty cool. Time/space techniques are like the holy grail of abilities and his mangekyo is powerful enough that he can feel the heat off it, even when it’s just spinning in a pinwheel. He ups his coolness by a few degrees when the trees that ring the clearing start creaking and waving in greeting. He is maybe a little smug.

Rin is amused at him, but also a little proud, and she side hugs him quickly before stepping away to explore the clearing. Kushina hits the ground running, excited by the jump and demanding to know more.

Obito says, “Well, we’re seven miles away from the inn, out past the village and west of the perimeter set by the other three Leaf Ninja. The closest shinobi is four miles away, in a tree, and they’re….” he focuses on the hum he can feel through the bark, the dozens on tiny legs on the moss, the ferns, the vines. A swarm. A hive. No, a kikai colony. “An Aburame,” he finishes, proudly.

Even Rin looks amazed. Shikaku is considering. Gamahiro hops up to a log to survey the surroundings. Kushina looks around the clearing and says, “Yes, this should work fine. I just need a flat surface for writing.”

Shikaku steps forward and asks how large an area she needs, then the Nara runs through some hand seals. Obito quickly throws all social convention out the window and turns on his sharingan to steal. The jounin slams both hands into the floor of the clearing with a “Doton: Renga no Jutsu!”

The Practice Brick technique usually forms defensive walls, but Shikaku manipulates his into a low, flat area, raising the granite from the ground like a wall on its side to serve as the flat, clear surface Kushina needs. Rin darts a look at Obito to check if he indeed memorized the Earth Release technique and Obito grins back, already thinking of how much easier it would have been in the desert if he could make rudimentary shelters to keep the sand and sun and wind off of them.

Kushina pats the low granite stage. “This is perfect!”

Shikaku straightens up from where he crouched to hit the earth and then makes a bunshin, which peels off in the direction of the Aburame. “We’ll move the perimeter to center on the area. Anything else you need, Kushina hime?”

Kushina is unsealing scrolls filled with supplies and dumps several lanterns out towards them. “Hang these for me, would ya? I’ll need the light. I’m going to set perimeter barriers first.”

While the Nara sets the lanterns at intervals, Obito strengthens the area with mokuton, letting the trees twist around themselves into a wooden barrier, vines and thorns crawling to fill the gaps. Poison ivy flourishes and it feels good for Obito to ask the trees to lean away from the center of the clearing, to let as much natural light in as possible, to ask them to move for him and see them willingly comply. The more he uses the mokuton the better his arm feels and the forest around him creaks and bends, a friendly vine of poison oak crawling up his leg to twine around his hand.

Rin sits in the center of the stone platform and watches the forest move around him with a funny look on her face. Kushina is organizing the supplies and setting perimeter markers and the Nara is…napping? Whatever. Obito shunshins to her side in a spray of leaves, and wow he is out of practice with a regular Body Flicker, and sits down next to her, bumping her with his shoulder.

“Hey,” he says low enough that no one will be able to hear them. “You okay?”

Rin’s arms are folded over her middle. It’s impossible for Obito not to notice how tired she looks. She says, “In the morning, I could be a stable jinchuuriki.”

He won’t think of the alternative. Obito says, “Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice?”

Not amazing, because jinchuuriki suck, but if Rin can access the Sanbi’s chakra, without the threat of the seal blowing them both up, without losing access to all of her top tier jutsu, it will change everything for them. But even if it does nothing but save her life, even if the Sanbi is a non-sentient ball of destruction with no driving consciousness, they have to do this.

She leans into him and sighs. He’s awkward with the comfort, not sure where to put his hands, what to say, aware of the jounin near them and Gamahiro watching everything with his golden toad eyes. But Rin dismisses everything else around them and leans into his side and her eyes are sad, so sad. There is so much fear in him in this moment.

She hasn’t asked what he’ll do if she dies. They don’t talk like that. They’ve never even discussed how crazy he’d gone when he thought she really had died, how he’d almost lost it again when the seal was corrupting and nothing they could do was working. But he holds her and she has to know, and it would only hurt the both of them to say it out loud. He has made her no oaths apart from the one to keep her alive, promised her nothing at all beyond that simple fact, and she hasn’t asked him to.

His sharingan spins, taking her in. In his memories, she smiles more than she frowns. They were children, then there was war. The both of them only sixteen, teetering on the edge of another war. Rin’s eyes slide closed as he hugs her to his side and she’s pale underneath the uneven desert tan. There’s a moment of calm as even the trees settle, the birdsong fading into the twilight. Her lips are moving and the guilt might eat him alive but he won’t tell her. No matter what, Rin will survive, even if he has to shove Shukaku into the mix if the Sanbi breaks free. He won’t tell her that he’s scared he’s already losing vision and it’s been bare months, that he’ll likely be blind soon, his mangekyo ruining him in inches as the world goes slowly dark and cold around him, like he’s back in the cave, blind and waiting to die again, Rin the last thing he sees.

He loves her so much that he won’t sentence her to that. She sighs into his shoulder with her hair falling into her face, sad for reasons he refuses to think about, and he will never deserve Rin.

Kushina lights the lanterns with a small katon and there’s still nothing to say. Part of him thinks that he won’t leave her, no matter what Kushina says, but Rin would want him to go. She won’t want him to see, to give his sharingan more fuel for his nightmares, more visions of her dying over and over again on repeat. He won’t make her ask him to go. He will accept this last kindness.

The night creatures are calling now and the trees are filled with crickets and screechers, the moon waxing just above the horizon. Obito reaches into his kunai pouch and pulls out a strawberry seed, which he carefully grows from a sprout into a blossom, into a fruiting body. He carefully channels his chakra and it grows in the palms of his hands, green and fresh as spring even though fall is swift approaching. Rin’s eyes are closed and he wants it to be a surprise, tending to the growing bud as it erupts green and new in his hands, the fruit the size of a fingernail and green with unripe astringency. He lets it flourish and the leaves unfurl, the berries turning a deep red, dotted with more tiny black seeds. The roots are tangling into his skin like veins, following his chakra and he gently shakes it off before it tries to grow through his bandages and directly into his mokuton arm. When the strawberries are perfectly ripe and sweet smelling, he nudges Rin with his shoulder and she opens her eyes to see him cupping fresh fruit in his hands.

Rin smiles softly and brushes her fingertips against the new leaves and Obito almost swears that he can feel it, in the core of him that’s been hers since he was six. They share the fruit silently and it’s the only way Obito knows to express anything. He’s never been good with words, but Rin has never made him feel like she needed that from him. The strawberries are cool and sweet and he’s gotten better at growing them since leaving the greenhouses in Suna, at carrying around viable seeds and growing them to maturity with just his chakra. The strawberries are perfect and the single plant yields half a dozen. Obito hasn’t eaten all day, and he knows Rin’s only sipped tea, and they pass the berries back and forth between them. The sugar helps calm his stomach.

They watch the moon rise while Kushina sketches in a loose hand the faint edges of a huge fuuinjutsu matrix, marking the outer boundaries. Its already like nothing Obito’s ever seen, and if Rin recognizes it from her own sealing she doesn’t show it.

Gamahiro is with Shikaku and Obito can’t make out their muttering over the sound of the night. Through unspoken agreement, they leave the last two strawberries untouched, and Obito stretches the last strawberry out by taking a bite of it and then attempting to regrow the whole fruit from what remained. It takes a lot of chakra and too much concentration, but eventually, the fruit figures out what he wants and the bud swells in his hand, forming a misshapen but brand new strawberry. He grins and Rin is pleased as well and he splits it with her, thinking that as long as he has chakra they will never starve, will never thirst to death. This is, he thinks, the best thing about chakra manipulation. A survival tool, but not the weapon that shinobi make of it. He’s thinking of how long he could have kept her alive, before the seal ultimately broke. If they’d share a last meal of strawberries before the last big bang.

Kushina works and he hates that he can’t do this for her. That because of Madara, he can’t keep Rin alive. That even Kushina is marked for death under his master plan, and maybe even the Bijuu as well. A tanuki with a bad attitude and a shy turtle and an angry fox demon, just wiped out. The last Uzumaki, with a personality forceful but loving enough to light up a room. Rin, all that she is, just gone.

It goes against everything he believes, to exist in a world where his precious people are not. It’s always been his nindo, since he was a green gennin. Protect what family he has left, above everything else. Those who abandon their comrades are worse than scum.

The problem is, that’s Madara’s nindo too. Protect his people, the Uchiha Clan, his precious younger brothers, his parents. After Izuna was killed by the same technique that his sensei perfected, it wasn’t a world that the Old Man wanted to live in anymore. Obito will never admit it to Rin, but a part of him, the Uchiha part of him, the part that stresses and values family above everything else, understands.

And Madara had known as well, had primed and groomed and stoked the loyal Uchiha furnace inside Obito and played him for a fool, pulling his every string, manipulating every thought that ran through his mind for years. He’d picked his successor well and he knew it. Even now, Obito can’t shake off that understanding, the confusion and grief he feels at the thought of ending the Old Man that saved him. Tortured him, but saved him. Gave him the mokuton. Tried to kill Rin. Hadn’t stopped him when he left.

His anxiety twists through the trees around them, flares the lanterns hotter. Kushina shoots him a look, and he won’t make her ask. It’s fully dark now and he sighs and bumps Rin with his shoulder, his heart squeezing inside him. There is ice in her, there has to be, because thrills of fear are sharp down his spine but Rin wraps her arms around him and pulls him up and they stand in the center of the granite stage. There’s a slight breeze and it rustles his face drape and pools inside his hood and he tugs it down so she can see him clearly. There is no better time for it; there is no worse time for it. Shinobi are better than battlefield declarations, so they just look at each other and say nothing.

The stars are coming out and red chakra bubbles out, a furious wash of Killing Intent oozing from her seal and everything in the forest around them goes quiet and still in fear and Kushina sits up in alarm, Shikaku looking more awake than Obito’s seen him this whole time. Rin is grim and links hands with him as the Sanbi rages, blasting the area with corrosive Bijuu chakra. Together, they form the Snake seal and Obito pours his mokuton into it, shoring up against the leaky dam that holds back a roiling ocean of Tailed Beast destruction. Rin says he’s a turtle, but he feels like a tidal wave, and Obito bears down harder, his mangekyo activating from the force of his chakra.

Together they wrestle back the Bijuu and the Sanbi settles uneasily back behind the seal. Rin smiles tiredly at him, and he’s sick of seeing her with bags under her eyes, but part of him thrills that this might be the last time they maintain the dying seal.

The atmosphere clears up to reveal Kushina holding her hand in a half Tiger, ready to use her Chakra Chains. Obito supposes she has intimate knowledge of how to wrangle a Bijuu. The shadows are writhing and seeping across the ground from Shikaku, who holds a Rat seal with narrowed eyes, the lanterns stretching his shadow long and wide before him. The shadow user can trap him in an instant and the knowledge tightens inside him. When Obito looks at him, it’s with his mangekyo still activated and the jounin neatly avoids his gaze, and Obito feels uneasy suddenly, shutting down his dojutsu, his stomach churning.

After a long second, the Killing Intent fading from the air, the shadows dissipate naturally, the lanterns guttering and flickering.

“Woo!” Kushina exclaims, tossing her hair in the night. “The Sanbi packs a hit! Is it like that every time?”

Actually, the latest escape attempt was tame. Rin swallows and says, “Near about.”

A lie, and she squeezes his hand for it. He holds his silence and she says, “It will be a relief to have him steady.”

It’s an odd way to phrase it, but Obito parses it as: it will be a relief for him to have the seal stabilized, where him means the Sanbi.

Kushina just nods and says, “well let’s get serious then.”

It’s all she needs to say. Rin drops Obito’s hands and he pulls his hood back up, hiding everything he’s afraid will show on his face. “See ya,” he says, and it’s all the goodbye they can stand. Kushina joins Rin in the center of the platform and Obito walks over to Gamahiro and Shikaku. “Gamahiro san?” He offers the sling bag but the toad declines.

“I’ll stay here, boy.” The aquamarine toad’s expression is hard to decipher at the best of times, but it looks shadowed now. The summon says, gruffly, “I’ll stay close.”

Obito’s mouth tastes like ash, but he nods respectfully and bows away from the toad. It doesn’t register as a kindness to him until Obito considers having his teacher privy to the grilling he is about to receive from the Nara. Obito still can’t figure out if the lazy demeanor is a front or his actual personality. All he knows is that the Nara can trap him, immobilize him, strangle him to death without moving a muscle and Obito has realized that he can’t stand feeling trapped and the knowledge that the jounin can catch him grates against his every nerve.

Shikaku’s eyes are half-lidded and he’s returned both his hands to his pockets like he hasn’t a care in the world. He’s doesn’t trust the Nara because his clan techniques might be able to stop him. He’s afraid for the same reason that he fears the village will turn against him, if he were to ever go back.

Obito is a hypocrite.

“Let’s go,” the jounin jerks his chin towards the trees and he’s pointing with his beard, which is absurd enough that it forces Obito to see how young the Clan Head actually is. There is some drama there, with his rank, but he can’t recall the details. He can’t be older than his sensei, though younger than Obito’s own Clan Head, although Fugaku is stern enough he seems like a stiff old man, married with a prodigy kid. Obito can’t imagine Fugaku young, but Shikaku looks it suddenly, gesturing with a beard Obito realizes is new enough on him that he’s still figuring out how to utilize it. The scars are new as well, relics from the war, most likely. He’s not hiding them at all. When the jounin walks, Obito follows.

The barrier of trees part to let them through, then mold back into place once they pass, cutting them off from the clearing. Thorns and burrs have overtaken the far side of the barrier and Obito kneels to plant the strawberry among them, in an area where it would get enough sun. Shikaku just watches him. The moon is bright and the shadows are deep. Once the roots are firmly in place, Obito stands and the jounin nods once before they carry on, winding through the trees on foot.

Obito can sense very little of either Rin or Kushina, the doton interfering with the natural landscape enough to throw him for a loop. The insufficient information he is getting from the sealing in process reminds him of being in the desert, separated from Rin by a stupid day job. He needs a better system in place for occasions like this, where he might not be able to find her. He can feel the peach branch, but it’s not the comfort it should be.

Shikaku leads him about half a mile away and Obito follows him up a rock formation shaded by the full moon under some tall, straight trees. It’s bright enough out that the pattern of the leaves dapple the rock face under his feet, rough under his bare toes, but still warm from the earlier sunlight. The Nara settles with his back to the trunk, his hands on his bent knees, as comfortable on the rock as Obito would be in a tree.

He is at every disadvantage.

Obito leans gingerly against the rock and makes sure his head is as far back into his hood as he can. The Nara waits for him to stop fidgeting, but Obito’s not sure he can and eventually Shikaku gives up and asks, “can you sense the perimeter team?”

It’s not any one of the questions Obito’s been mentally preparing himself to hear. He answers, “Yes, 3 miles out and circling.”

“How accurate is your sensing?”

“I’m not a sensor type.” Obito says truthfully, no sure how much to give away, but unwilling to outright lie to someone who’s his ally. It’s not a good sign, to be already defensive on his second question.

Shikaku is too intelligent not to recognize a deflection. There’s a second while he runs through whether or not he is willing to honor that. The Nara reveals himself to be stubborn and repeats himself, “How accurate?”

It grates, but Obito says, “I can feel the bark under their feet carrying their weight. The Aburame’s kikai have six legs and I can feel each one crawling over a leaf, if I pay close enough attention.” And he is paying very close attention.

Shikaku considers him. The silence hangs between them. Obito is expecting a torrent of questions but the Nara seems content to just lean back and watch the stars pass overhead.

Its stressing him out.

He twitches a few minutes in the silence, stewing, before Obito asks, “how much do you know?”

It’s the wrong question and the Nara’s lips quirk. “I know everything you shared with the Hokage.”

Obito grits his teeth. “How much have you put together aside from that?”

More silence. Then, carefully, “that’s above your clearance level.”

“What? It’s our damn mission!”

Nara Shikaku shrugs, “Hokage’s orders.”

Obito breathes out long through his nose. It’s not an outright admission. “Sensei wants us in the dark?”

“No,” Shikaku says, “I’m keeping him nonpartial.”

The implications make Obito instantly furious. The temperature around them must raise a few degrees but the Nara appears unbothered. Obito fumes, chewing all his words down. This man outranks him and now that he’s not a missing nin, he has to consider repercussions again. He’s never really questioned orders before, but he’s not the same goofy kid he was when he was 12, tossed into a war without really even knowing the reasons why. Now he questions everything.

Obito finds he has nothing good to say to that and he’s not even sure how to defend himself and Rin to this man who’s possible the smartest shinobi in the Land of Fire. He’s angry, but it comes from fear. The Nara are too smart to be wrong. And Shikaku isn’t sure he can trust them.

Obito wrestles his calm back, imagining his sensei meditating on a rock, sinking into his battle calm. He mimics Minato’s deliberate breathing, lets the feel of the forest curl around him and replace what feels like burning. It’s not peace, but it helps him bite his tongue enough not to lash out. Maybe he has matured a little from the brat who’d fight his teammates over the slightest provocation.

He stews a bit until the silence between them lays wrong against all the questions in him. He can’t feel Rin or Kushina and micro-sensing the endlessly circling Konoha shinobi is driving him crazy. He needs a distraction. Obito shifts uncomfortably a few minutes before he musters up the ability to ask, “Is Kakashi in trouble?”

The Nara raises an eyebrow at him. Obito can’t figure out why he wasn’t sent on this mission with Kushina, why Minato’s keeping their team separate. It would have done them all immense good to reunite, for Obito to replace his last vision of Kakashi with a better ending. For Rin and Kakashi to forgive each other. To part again as a team instead of a broken bone.

In the silence, Obito recognizes that the Nara is censoring. Unease twanges through him. What if he really is in trouble for sending his ninken into Suna? What would the council do to him if they find out? How will Minato be forced to punish him?

He’s not quite panicking at the thought of his teammate being in trouble, but the trees give him away by creaking ominously around him. After a moment of observing, Shikaku says, “Hatake Kakashi stole documents from the Secure Archives.”

“What?”

“Classified clan information. He broke in and removed multiple secure files.”

It’s not what he’s expecting, but that sounds like treason to Obito, the kind of treason it would be difficult for the fourteen-year-old to argue his way out of. Obito’s already half planning how to break him out, but something is off about the whole thing. Why would Kakashi steal clan information? He should have access to all the Hatake clan scrolls, and doesn’t that brown dog of his know the histories? His ninken share everything with him.

Obito asks, “You have proof?”

“No,” he says, “But we know he did anyway.”

Fuck this guy. Obito’s not going to beg for information. Gamahiro is here as a messenger and the toad will update him once Minato summons him back. He crosses him arms over his chest and fumes. If it’s serious, and treason usually is, Obito will Kamui in and grab him and then keep him in Kamui babysitting the Ichibi where not even Minato can find him. They’ll never be able to prove anything.

Shikaku watches his performance for a moment before he adds, “the Hokage is protecting him as well as he can, and it helps that your clan has no proof it was him. He’s perfectly safe for now, but the Hokage thought it best to keep him close for the time being.”

A cold wind touches the center of him. Kakashi took classified clan secrets. But not his own. While Obito doesn’t know everything, instinct says that it’s somehow his fault. He knows Fugaku will not stand for it. He’d want Kakashi crucified, maybe demand the removal of his sharingan. At worst, treason and thieving of clan secrets is punishable by death. Kakashi is a lot of things, many of them annoying, but he is not disloyal. He wouldn’t risk the wrath of the Uchiha unless he was desperate. He’s faintly nauseous as all the pieces click together in his head.

But Minato will protect him for as long as he can. And, the Nara said, there is no proof. Kakashi is sneaky enough not to get caught. Obito has no doubt that his teammate had done it, for sure, but only because he’d been driven to it. Minato cut him out the investigation. He was grieving and going stir crazy all at once, grounded during the time he needed to be most active. Obito’s not about to nitpick his coping methods, but he could see the progression, almost see the defiance in Kakashi’s narrowed eye when they confronted him about the theft. The way he would never admit it was him, but he wouldn’t exactly refute it either. Too proud by far, and dancing on the razors edge between outright lying and being a smartass.

He swallows heavily around the tightness in his throat. Part of him wants to threaten the Konoha shinobi on Kakashi’s behalf, but he knows exactly the pile of nothing that will accomplish. But it’d make him feel better, so he considers it anyway.

He says, “Fugaku sama doesn’t know.”

“No.”

Would it change anything, if he did? Obito’s never exactly been the clan’s favorite member, and his stunt with his sharingan probably pissed them off in ways they couldn’t express when they thought he was dead. It might not exactly be a relief for Fugaku, that he’s actually alive.

But it’s worse than that. How would the other clans react, if they knew that Uchiha Madara is behind the one man war against all the nations?

As abhorrent that thought is, it protects Obito’s place on this mission. You need a sharingan to counter a sharingan. For the other clans to eventually accept the Uchiha clan as a whole again, an Uchiha needs to take him out. Only a mangekyo can fight a mangekyo, or Konoha will never trust his clan again.

It only takes him a second to run through all his contingencies. Shikaku lets him speedrun through denial and crash headfirst into acceptance. They are shinobi. He should have expected this.

He lets his head thunk audibly back against the rock. In the distance, Konoha nin circle, buzzing with action. There’s a blind spot the size of his whole team in his heart. The ground almost wheezes under his feet. He says, “I’m going to kill him.”

The Nara hums thoughtfully. “How?”

Obito says, “set all the clones on fire and then destroy the statue. The Old Man’s blind and feeble without his protections.”

Shikaku asks seriously, “Where are his eyes?”

Fuck if Obito knows. He shrugs. “Hid them, I guess.”

“Troublesome.”

“Yeah.”

The stars shine bright overhead. Moss creeps across the surface of the rock to fur against his hand. Shikaku says, “that’s an interesting technique.”

He says nothing. The mokuton is an entity unto itself and he’s defensive of it, of his right to wield it.

Shikaku says, “Village records record that the Shodaime could grow entire forests in an instant, make thousands of arms to hit targets, utilize wood clones, raise fortresses and tear down walls. Senju Hashirama made the landscape for battlefields.”

Obito shrugs. He couldn’t do anything like that, and he never would. He says, “The thing with the mokuton is, it’s alive. It’s not like water or earth or fire. It has its own agenda. I can’t really control it.”

He’s petting the moss like it’s a cat and it blooms under his hand. Shikaku eyes are keen. “You aren’t using chakra for that.”

“I’m not doing it. The moss has a mind of its own. It likes me.”

Shikaku parses all that goes unsaid after that and nods tightly, seeing the godlike ability of his founder reduced to parlor tricks. He asks, “What is the extent of your control over it?”

Is it really revealing clan secrets if they’re not his to give away? But he knows he can’t really dodge the Nara’s questions. But it’s not like he’s suddenly some expert on the Wood Release. From what he’s already seen, none of the information would be new or surprising.

“I can grow small plants on purpose, but it takes chakra. I can ask trees to grow a certain way, like in a barrier, but they mostly do that on their own. They want to help. The sensing’s useful, but only in a heavily forested area. I can detect the zetsu clones if they’re close enough. I can suppress the Bijuu’s chakra that leaks from the seal. In Suna, I worked in the greenhouses and maintained the crops for the village. Output almost tripled in a month. But it’s all….” he waves a hand, “passive. I’ve only ever manipulated it on purpose a few times.”

In his mind, wooden spikes shoot out of his right side and he breaks them off into clubs and rods. Shikaku asks, “What do you suppose is the purpose of Uchiha Madara giving you access to the mokuton?”

Obito knows the answer to that one, but it doesn’t quite feel right to him. “He wanted me to replace him, carry on his will. To do that, I had to be stronger. He experimented with a lot of different things; I guess the mokuton just stuck.”

That’s not all and Shikaku knows it. He says, “Why, specifically, the mokuton?”

Obito withdraws his hand from the patch of moss. “I don’t know. Senju Hashirama used it to kick his ass back in the day. It could counter a Tsusanoo. Maybe he just wanted me strong enough to clobber anything that pissed him off.”

He’s not following that thought to its natural conclusion because there’s something niggling at him about it. Always has, the thought of Madara giving Obito the ability of his greatest opponent. The way the two halves of him don’t jive right together, but sometimes it feels like something can be born from that dissonance, from the splinters and ash together. The greatest dojutsu and the greatest kekkei genkai merged into one. Obito is the bastard product of two bloodline limits that were never supposed to mix, wielder to a legacy of conflict going back generations.

“The clones are mokuton-derived.”

“I’m pretty sure. They feel like they are, at least. Look like it too. Rin understands the theory behind it better than I do. They’re connected to the husk as well, so it’s probably got something to do with that too.”

“Could you describe the husk to me?”

Obito shrugs. He’s doing a lot of that tonight. “It’s a creepy looking statue type thing. Kinda stumpy, covered in carved eyes. Zetsu calls it the Demonic Statue of the Outer Paths.”

The Nara asks, “How many?”

“How many what?”

Sharper now, a more cutting tone than he’s used so far, rising up through the lazy exterior. “How many eyes are on the statue?”

Obito’s memory is sharingan perfect. He’s never consciously counted them before. The realization hits him low in the gut. He whispers, “Nine.”

So that’s how Madara’d planned to hold the chakra of all the Tailed Beasts. Obito is a fool. Shikaku asks, “What do you get when you combine all nine Bijuu together?”

What the fuck indeed. “Not gonna find out.”

Silence, before the grilling resumes. The Nara’s changed directions. “Who is Zetsu?”

Obito snorts. “Not any easy questions, huh?”

“Explain.”

He sighs. “I’ve got no idea what Zetsu is. They feel wrong, all wrong, and there’s two distinct halves of them, one Black and one White, each with their own distinct personality and vocal quirks, able to separate and act on their own. The clones are all of White Zetsu, who’s creepy in a sing-song little-kid-villain kind of way. The Black one eats people. They can merge with the world around them, work as infiltration and spies. They’re in Konoha for sure.”

“You can confirm this?”

“Yeah. They were spying on Kushina, and probably everyone else.”

“And Black Zetsu?”

Obito admits, “I know even less about the Black half of Zetsu. They’re more alien than the White half, even less human. Sounds like a demon, looks like hell. There are no clones of them. They stay close to the Old Man. No idea why.”

“Do they usually operate alone?”

“No. Zetsu only separates for important missions, but even together as one, the two sides are distinct. They even argue with each other. But it’s not a weakness to exploit. They won’t turn against each other, or the Geezer.”

“You’ve killed these clones before.”

With perfect recall, Swirly burns inside him, screaming through every shudder of his pulse. “They’re weak to fire, and not very strong in combat. They’re meant to be informers, not warriors. They’re relatively weak in taijutsu and I don’t think they can utilize ninjutsu or genjutsu. Just the weird mokuton affinity, the defensive merging and the limited offensive abilities. But their senses are linked. One sees you; they’re all alerted. The Old Man knows in a second. An army’s on the way.”

“You can avoid the clones.” Shikaku points out easily enough.

This is where it gets tricky. Obito says, “I’m not comfortable discussing clan techniques.”

The Nara cuts his eyes at him. It’s taboo to even insinuate that the Clan Head is prying, but Obito means it. He will not discuss details about his mangekyo with this man. He’d experienced his Kamui already and maybe even seen the pattern of it wheeling in Obito’s eye, read all the reports of his abilities and whatever information on Tobi that Suna released. He knows about the time/space, about the intangibility. As a Clan Head he maybe even knows about the price of awakening such an evolution of the sharingan. He’s intelligent enough to piece together enough about Kakashi in the hospital and Rin being KIA to figure that out. He likely knows too much already, but Obito will not confirm any of it.

Shikaku says, thinly, the shadows dark around him, “It would help formulate a strategy to know the extent of your ability.”

Obito can’t deny that. But he doesn’t care. “I will not share clan secrets without the express permission of my Clan Head, Nara Shikaku sama.”

“You’ve already broken that sanction, Uchiha san.”

Obito says, “I will accept any consequences my Clan Head deems suitable for any information I though necessary to share with my teammates and my Hokage to ensure the success of this mission.”

Its probably a lie, but it still sounds right to say it. Its even amusing to stonewall the man. Until—

“You’ve shared more than just secrets with your teammates, Obito.”

His temper breaks and he snaps, “If you’re so curious about the mangekyo, ask Fugaku sama. But leave Kakashi out of this.” His agitation almost activates his own dojutsu and he swallows down on the anger in his throat that wants to emerge as fire. He’s furious, suddenly, and Minato’s voice is in his ear, telling him to master this, to be better than his anger, back before he lost everything and then gained the power to do something about it. But rage spreads like fire, quick and just as destructive. Obito could be angry, but it was Madara who taught him to use it, to let it fuel him, a poison in his blood.

But Obito was taught to be better than that by a man who was far better than Madara. So he hangs on to the cool breeze of his sensei’s words in his ear, forces his chakra down, breathes out long and slow, thinking of Rin meditating, of grass sprouting under his hands. He says, quietly, “my sharingan was meant as a gift. I may not have thought the consequences through as I was dying in a cave in Kusa, but any ill that comes from that is on me, Shikaku sama.”

Obito wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if he thought his sharingan was ruining Kakashi. He’d had it maybe five minutes before the end came for him. He was a kid, with no true idea what he was doing. Even after awakening the mangekyo, when the implant turned more parasitic, Obito found a grim solace in the fact that if Kakashi’s mangekyo ever burned itself out, he still had a true eye left. He wouldn’t be blind, but the last of Obito would be gone from the world.

Shikaku simply looks at him. Minato trusts this man. It will have to be enough for Obito. He takes control of the interrogation, flipping it on the jounin. “What is the Leaf Village planning to do to counter the nukenin?”

The Nara cocks his head, pointing his stupid beard again. “I’m in charge of the investigation into the organization. After the profile is complete, I’ll consider sending ANBU teams to infiltrate Ame, and Amegakure herself. S ranked criminals will be tagged and all movements will be accounted for.”

“Will you eliminate them?”

“If I feel the Leaf would benefit. Hanzo will not take kindly to our interference. An alliance between Ame and Madara is concerning on an international level.”

Obito doesn’t give a shit about Hanzo of the Salamander, or politics. He scoffs, “Yeah, because the moon doesn’t shine on just Konoha.”

Dark eyes stare at him. “We cannot afford another war.”

“He doesn’t give a shit about what we can afford. He’s going to take it all if we let him.” He’s thinking about the poverty of Suna, of how nobody benefited from war. He’s thinking about how Madara inherited a fucked-up world and that’s why it’s so easy for him to sell a paradise. About how Konoha’s war handed Ame to Hanzo. He says, “It was our village that made the Old Man.”

Calculations are just as dark in the Nara’s eyes. “I thought it was the other way around.”

Madara may have named the village, but Hashirama had struck him from behind. Obito laughs and it’s an ugly sound, “here’s a tidbit the history books gloss over with their shiny victor’s revisionism. The Shodaime stabbed him in the back. His best friend, and he drove a sword between the shoulders of a man overcome with grief.”

Obito says, “I love the village, and I will give up my life to protect it, but Konoha made Madara.”

Shikaku is quiet for a long while. The moon is high overhead. Its approaching midnight. He asks, “Did Madara make you?”

All his incisions tingled, the slits in his soul where Madara had stuffed his black will in and sewn him up. Dripping venom into his veins, Swirly singing sweetly in his mind. He hadn’t just given him the mokuton, but Obito is going to make sure that was all that matters. He looks at Shikaku funny and says, “Minato sensei made me.”

The Nara is not convinced, Obito can see it in his eyes, in the wrinkle on his forehead. He says, “you do not trust me.”

Obito won’t deny that. “You’re a manipulator. It’s not your fault, you’re too smart not to be. But I’m nobody’s puppet. I have the Leaf’s Will of Fire and my own nindo. My team and Hokage understand this.”

“I understand that you have the potential to be a threat.”

“I’m a shinobi,” Obito says dismissively. “It’s in the job description.”

“It’s in my job description to make sure you’re a Konoha shinobi.”

A week ago, he’d been a literal textbook definition nukenin and it somehow matters more looking at the jounin with his Konoha standard gear and him barefoot in Suna clothes. Obito snorts meanly and says, “Don’t strain yourself, Shikaku sama. That almost sounds like work.”

It’s the most outright asshole thing he’s said so far, obviously disrespectful enough to warrant official punishment. The Nara straightens up and there is not an ounce of lazy in him like this, and the shadows sharpen around him. “You’re out of line, Uchiha.”

He’s pissed off, but he’s not stupid enough to pick a fight with the jounin. He’s aware enough to go intangible if he needs to, but that doesn’t fix his shadow and he knows it. The man would just time him out before strangling him to death. Obito leans back against the rock face, the picture of insolent ease, and lets his eye slide closed like he’s bored with it all. He hasn’t slept in days and he’s tired and cranky and Rin needs help and there’s nothing he can do and he’d rather fight Rasa again blindfolded than be this useless. It’s not his fault that the Nara’s an easy target and an asshole smart enough to push all his buttons. He reaches for his kunai pouch tiredly while saying, “This is not an attack,” so Shikaku won’t put him in a shadow bind and pulls out the strawberry they’d saved for him. He tosses it at the jounin who snags it nimbly out the air and peers at it suspiciously. “It’s a strawberry from earlier. Maybe a snack will calm us both down.”

It’s not bad as a peace offering and the jounin sniffs and nibbles it skeptically before deciding that it isn’t poison and eats it down to the bare top. “Hungry?” Obito asks wryly. The Nara shrugs and goes to toss the top away but Obito makes sure his hood is secure and holds up his hands and says, “here,” indicating that he should toss it back. When he does, Obito activates his mangekyo, letting the strawberry top pass through his open left hand and land squarely in his right. It’s a neat trick and looks clean when he manages to pull it off with a kunai, but a strawberry demonstrates the technique well enough. He might have refused to discuss his dojutsu with the Nara, and this isn’t an apology so much as showing off, but the Clan Head will know enough to recognize it with no words between them.

He lets the berry sit carefully in his right palm and it swells and flushes red with color as the fruit regrows itself from his chakra. Shikaku is watching the process closely and only glances up at his head once, but Obito knows his expression is mostly hidden by the hood, the face drape, the bandages, his scars, the dark. No telling what the Nara can see in the shadows. His stupid eye is red hot enough it almost glows in the dark on its own. When its fully formed and ripe he rolls it over his bandaged hand, offering it again to Shikaku.

He takes it with two fingers, turning it considering in his sight, looking at it this way and that. He says, “No one taught you this. Mokuton, or your mangekyo.”

While he’s getting better at diffusing his own anger, he’s less successful even recognizing his Uchiha pride rearing its proud head. Obito says, “No, I figured most of it out through trial and error. Some is intuitive, but Rin cracked most of the theory behind it. She named Kamui. She’s the one pushing me to train it in ways I’d never have considered. She’s teaching me suiton as well, and I’d never have learned another elemental release without her.”

Shikaku tastes the berry. Obito knows it’s perfect. “You can use suiton?”

“And doton, technically, but I’ve never used any. I don’t know any hand seals for Earth Release techniques and Kakashi personalized his too much for me to guess anything beyond the basics. Rin supposes it’s because the mokuton is a nature transformation of them both. I just had to get my fire nature out of the way to even consider it.”

“How proficient are you in suiton?”

“I can produce A Rank suiton techniques and have successfully recreated any jutsu Rin’s tried to teach me. I fooled Suna well enough with it that they never even considered I was fire natured.”

“But not doton?”

Obito shrugs. “I never learned any doton.”

Shikaku gazes at him. “You copied my Practice Brick technique earlier, didn’t you?”

It’s not illegal to copy but shinobi hoard their techniques and he’s not sure how touchy about it Shikaku is. He says, sheepish, “Yeah, I couldn’t help it. Might be useful later on.” It’s likely the only thing he could copy from the Nara, since the sharingan can’t steal kekkei genkai.

Shikaku doesn’t seem upset about the rudeness, even though Obito hadn’t asked permission. He clarifies, “But you’ve never even attempted an Earth Release technique before?”

“No.”

Shikaku looks at him and his expression is impossible to read. “Try it now.”

Obito perks up. “Really?”

“This rock should be enough. It’s a D Rank technique, if you can utilize doton it should be simple for you.”

He has the appropriate hand seals in his mind’s eye already, but he pauses. He’s never molded earth chakra before and its tricky enough to push past the fire to the water. While he had seen the earlier demonstration, that was just the physical movement of it, not what was happening below the surface. He isn’t a damn Hyuuga. He asks, “what does earth feel like, to you?”

It’s an unusual question, and one that makes him feel like he’s a kid questioning his Academy teacher, but the Nara’s eyes narrow in thought. He says, “Earth is grounding, solid, steady. If you feel the mokuton and the water that makes up half of it, then Earth Release is the structure of it. It’s the ground under your feet. It holds everything up, and its heavy, unless you force it not to be.”

It’s a better answer than he is expecting. This guy would make a decent jounin instructor. Obito raises his hands, going through the seals slowly, searching for the earth nature within the mokuton, trying to thread it in. ‘The earth is the ground’ sounds like dumb advice, but it works for him. He holds on to that steadiness and says, “Doton: Renga no Jutsu!” placing his hands on the rock face below him, sending his chakra down into the surface of the stone.

The rock wall erupts between them with the force of a bomb going off. Obito has seriously misjudged the amount of chakra needed to successfully activate the jutsu and the resulting wall slams up through the tree limbs above him, snapping them clean off and sending massive branches and the Practice Brick Wall crumbling down. “Shit!” he yells and Kamuis right through the wall, but that just leaves him vulnerable to the falling debris and the sight of rock tumbling down towards him outlined in sharingan red makes his chakra pulse high and thready.

But he has to keep Shikaku from getting caught by the falling canopy and he can’t phase them both through. He’ll have to Kamui them both away but when he comes out the other side, the Nara isn’t even there. And Obito’s sharingan isn’t picking any movement up either. He transports himself through the debris safely, and when the dust settles, the Nara is lounging in the shadows of a tree, looking like he hasn’t a care in the world, one eyebrow raised at him. “What are you doing?”

Stupid jounin. “Hn,” Obito emphasizes sourly, slapping the crumbs of earth off himself.

Shikaku surveys the destruction Obito managed to make with a simple D rank jutsu. “I’d say your doton needs some work.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Obito climbs over to him with dirt in his hair. “But it was an Earth Release.”

There was maybe the ghost of a smile on the Clan Head’s lips, and it is still more than Obito’d ever received from his own Clan Head. “I guess it was.”

They relocate to an eerily similar stone outcropping a little ways away; Ishi is just landscaped like that. While Obito focuses on repairing the damage his doton had done the trees, he asks, “How’s the Leaf Village really? After the war?”

Shikaku slouches against the stone and for all the world it looks like he just goes to sleep. Obito fixes the trees and without that distraction he is hyper fixating again on the blank spot in his perception. But before he can really spiral, Shikaku mumbles, eyes still closed, like he’s talking in his sleep, all about the Leaf Village and his teacher and his clan. He knows he’s lost a lot of classmates in the last year of the war, but most of those still left are chuunin now. Sarutobi Asuma and Yuuhi Kurenai were promoted around the same time that Rin was, and most of Akimichi Chouza’s Team 11 as well. They even promoted Shirunai Genma to tokubetsu jounin and put him on the Hokage’s guard squad. When he asks about Aoba, Shikaku is dismissive in that offhand way that signals to Obito that he must have joined ANBU. It makes his stomach sink to think that chicken-limbed Aoba, skinny chested and acne prone, is in ANBU. The crow user is only two years older than Obito, but Obito knows he’s highly skilled, even before the war confirmed it.

To make light of it, he jokes, “guess I’m the dead last again, still a gennin.” Him and fucking,, Ebisu. But the joke falls flat because now he’s thinking about all the childhoods that war has stolen, the kids grown disillusioned before their time. Or maybe Obito is just a cynic. He can’t even bring himself to consider Shisui as a fully-fledged shinobi already. In his memory, he is seven, unruly haired and excitable, collecting crow feathers by the banks of the Naka and bouncing off walls instead of walking in straight lines, bashing against furniture in that reckless way little kids had, even though he’d already mastered the clan katons and shunshin well enough he didn’t even blur anymore when he body flickered. His last birthday, he’d gotten a tanto. Obito simply couldn’t picture it.

Shikaku reads between the lines of his moody silence and says, “Now that we’re at peace, we can up the graduation age and start having real chuunin exams again. Children will graduate at 12 at minimum, even clan kids. It’s one of the first changes the Yondaime implemented.”

Is that Obito’s fault? Shikaku’s tone’s not as disinterested as it has been, and though he’s wearing gloves, Obito can guess there’s a ring under there. The Nara’s got a personal stake in not churning kids out onto battlefields. Obito smiles softly and says, “Congratulations.”

Shikaku peeks one eye open to stare at Obito but then he grunts noncommittally, but Obito can see that he’s pleased. The Nara clan will grow and Konoha will be ankle deep in shadow users. Then the larger implications hit him and he asks excitedly, “and Chouza sama?” picturing Team 11’s jounin sensei, the Akimichi Clan Head, and the second part of the notorious Ino-Shika-Cho trio. The three clans are so intrinsically tied together he can’t imagine them not half communally raising each other’s kids, preparing them for the future team-up.

Shikaku raises an eyebrow at him as he tracks that train of thought and replies, “Yoshino is godmother.”

Obito follows that logic puzzle and is thrilled. He only knows of Yoshino by reputation and she is fearsome indeed, a frontline battle medic. It amuses him to guess at who runs the household in that relationship and he snickers a minute at the picture of the chronically laid back jounin marrying a kunoichi with a personality as forceful as Kushina’s.

It seems that everyone’s getting married and having kids. Obito supposes the war sped things up. He’s glad to have some good gossip to share with Rin. Shikaku doesn’t have any updates about the Uchiha to share; the only member of Obito’s clan he can safely claim to interact with outside of work is Fugaku. Obito knows Mikoto is pregnant again as well; she’d announced it right before Rin was kidnapped. Its growing harder to keep his cheer.

Obito shares fun stories about their travels to keep distracted, surprised by how many he has. He tells Shikaku about the beauty of the Suna desert, the way the dunes bake and toast, the quickness of the basking lizards and the sand in all its colors. The vast stars overhead. The tiny flowers they grew in the Sunagakure greenhouses that smelled like juice. How Wind’s Daimyo wore turquoise and silks and the poor line the streets in Sunagakure. How Obito and Rin were almost killed by a ferret with a squeaky voice. That the Ichibi is covered in curse seals and swears like a sailor, that the Kazekage was going to seal him into one of his own kids. How Rin led the investigation, planned their heist, took out the masked operatives, used some of their last pay money to buy Obito his favorite food before the assault on the Tower. He speaks in short sentences, just enough details, not sure exactly why he’s sharing all this, but if he stops talking he’ll start to think about the time passing in the sealing, straining for the barest hint of his teammate. If he focuses hard enough, he can feel the kikai like they’re crawling on his skin.

It’s the most he’s said to anyone that’s not Rin in years. Madara wasn’t one for speeches and while the clones never shut up, he doesn’t count the zetsu. Talking to them is like herding cats.

He isn’t sure how much he should say about Sunagakure, or his time in Wind. He wasn’t there as a spy against them, and they’d been friendly enough, but now he is a Konoha operative, should he divulge everything he’d learned? He’s reluctant to turn on the village that was willing to give him a home, but Baki had broken his ankle and turned his thigh to paste and Rasa had chopped off his arm. There is no lost love between them, and Konoha might could use the information, especially since they were competing against Suna nin for missions, even in Wind’s own lands.

But Obito’s fairly certain that Shikaku has a red tattoo on his shoulder and there’s no telling how ANBU would utilize any info against Suna. And Konoha is compromised to the point he isn’t sure it wouldn’t get back to Madara via zetsu. So he keeps it bland, generalizations only, nothing specific really. If it doesn’t affect their mission, it isn’t important. Shikaku listens silently, his eyes closed, the shadows playing over his face, smearing sharp over the two long scars on his head. He hums occasionally in response to something Obito says, but other than that, the jounin could be sleeping.

The night stretches on in drags that pull at something fragile in him. There is no possible way he could sleep. It’s more likely he would randomly implode. He’d feel better running laps; it’s stupid they can’t patrol like the other Leaf nin; Obito can Kamui them both to the clearing if they need to intervene. He’s never been good at staying still, but a full year in a bed unable to move left him with a gratitude for the fresh air that is hard to shake. He’s happy not to be underground. He’s deeply unhappy to be away from his team.

The moon reaches its zenith and Obito flips his sharingan on to consider how the almost full face looks with a filter of red overlaid on it. There’s something weird about everything in this moment but he can’t hang onto the feeling for long before the worry overtakes it.

They settle into an uneasy silence after all of Obito’s words dry up and Shikaku seems content to just sit. He fiddles with a branch to pass the time. Tries to meditate a bit but fails. Picks the dirt out from under his toenails. Chews his fingernails down to bloody stubs. Flicks them at Shikaku just to see if he’ll get a response. The jounin ignores him completely.

Towards three there’s a shift in the air and all the birds fall silent. Obito sits up straighter. Shikaku doesn’t bat an eye.

Something tingles along his perception, then snaps into focus, a singeing burst of chakra, tinged with the aura of a Tailed Beast. Impossible to tell which one. It crests then scatters in the night, dispersing back into nature. The trees don’t move a single leaf. Nothing else happens. The world is still.

Obito is almost vibrating with tension. He asks, “was that it? Did it work?”

Shikaku says, “wait for the signal.”

There it is, two quick pulses from Kushina: wait.

Frustration battles the anxiety, the need to jump immediately into the clearing. It’s just a few seconds before the night shakes with the largest burst of chakra Obito’s ever felt, the heavy rage of an entire ocean of red, a Bijuu rearing its ugly head, Killing Intent making his limbs lock and his head spin as his vision distorts under the onslaught. He recognizes the menace this time. It’s the same chakra he fights against inside Rin; he recognizes it from the one time he’d turned his sharingan on her, no longer muffled by the protective seal between them.

The Sanbi is awake, and he is pissed.

Chapter Text

Chapter 12: Rin: Untethered

Rin isn’t thinking that she’s going to die, not until Obito walks away and she wishes, for a second, that she said goodbye. But he hadn’t reached out either, and he doesn’t look back as he follows Nara Shikaku out of the clearing.

In her kunai pouch is a peach branch she carried all the way from Suna and if she breaks it in half, Obito should feel it. This is her plan, for the moment. Inside of her is a shy menace and a control that drips through the cracks in the seal, river sand pouring through an hourglass. She’s leaking, and the turtle knows it. But he’s pulled back every time from killing her; he’s raged frightfully, but he goes back behind the barrier every time. He pushes, but no more than she can take. Rin has no delusions about the Sanbi’s power, about how weak the seal is. Her Bijuu’s only once tried to escape in a way that felt intentional, not just as a consequence of the seal fritzing out. There’s an understanding there, she’s sure. He’s not like Shukaku, yelling about murdering her. He feels like a lake and takes the form of a huge, heavily armored turtle. It’s not a stretch, she feels, to consider him a little timid.

Rin can be shy sometimes too; underneath all her kunoichi training is a little girl who had to force herself to stand out but in all actuality made only one real friend in her life. It’s not a stretch, she feels, that maybe the Sanbi could do with a friend.

Kushina freehands the borders of a huge sealing matrix. It takes up the entirety of the doton stage. Her fuuinjutsu is precise; she writes with the tip of her tongue between her teeth. There is consideration in every brush stroke. Kushina works quickly but with a care that is impossible to miss. Obito is like her, in some ways. But where he is devoted to certain people, Kushina is attached to anyone who stands still long enough. She spills love wherever she goes; its no wonder Minato couldn’t resist her.

Rin holds the strawberry in her hands but doesn’t want to distract her by offering it quite yet. There’s so much she wants to ask her, but she’s not sure she should. Not like this. But there will be no other opportunity.

Rin watches her mark the borders of the matrix with straight, bold lines. Rin specialized in iroyo ninjutsu over fuuinjutsu and the structure is unfamiliar to her. She can’t remember much of the writing that covered the cave she was in for her first sealing, and she must have been unconscious for the act itself, or under a genjutsu devastating enough it functioned like unconsciousness. Her memory before the blindfold came off is fuzzy, full of the sense of missing time. The false Kiri nin had sealed her in a cave, which made the situation echo her past kidnapping enough that the panic and grief was slowly overtaking the resolve inside her. It was her second time kidnapped, under an enemy genjutsu in a cave. Alone. She was already thinking of Obito, imagining the hard rock falling to crush them all. He’d sacrificed himself to save his team. From what Rin was picking up from the jeers of the Kiri nin, she was gathering the willpower to do the same.

Even now, their situations mirror each other: the both of them, captive underground and afraid. Then there’s the Sanbi: more of the same. In most ways, he’s still in that cave.

Rin can’t stand it.

Kushina says, “We need strongly demarcated borders. There can’t be any wiggle room, or he’ll escape.”

It doesn’t pass Rin that she refers to the Sanbi as a he. Rin says, “I hate that he’s trapped.”

It’s difficult to read Kushina’s expression. The lamplight twists and flickers over it oddly. Her voice is dismissive, but Rin can sense the wariness in her. “If he can’t be free, at least I can free you in some ways, from his influence.”

Rin understands her caution, but she’s not convinced. “It would be ideal, for us to be friends. Not jailor and prisoner.”

It takes her a while to gather her thoughts. Impulsive as Rin knows Kushina likes to people to think she is, the legacy of Whirlpool is a weight to slow even a firestorm. Eventually she says, “I was sealed by Uzumaki Mito, the first jinchuuriki ever. It’s a burden I inherited from Uzushio. This is her seal.” Her hands are sure and steady, but her tone isn’t as certain as she is projecting. “She taught me what it was to be a jinchuuriki. That it was my duty to protect the world from the Kyuubi.”

Rin’s felt destruction from her Bijuu, but in her mind, he is a lake, still and calm, peaceful until he was crammed into an unfit vessel like Shukaku is crammed in a jar of tea. Kushina might think she has to protect the world from the Bijuu, but Rin wants to protect the Bijuu from the world.

Rin says, “I don’t know anything about being a jinchuuriki. But I’ve seen glimpses of him, and I’ve seen the Ichibi name himself and I know the immense power they hold. But Shukaku sama is stuck in a kettle, cut off from the world. The Sanbi is improperly sealed. The zetsu are spying on the Kyuubi. The Bijuu get stuffed into shinobi as weapons of mass destruction, deterrents against the past three wars, and Uchiha Madara’s going to use them to end the world.”

Kushina says, “the Kyuubi is rage. He’s a wildfire, Rin, not a kicked puppy. Whether he’s being used as a weapon or not, he’ll gladly destroy the village. He already attacked the Leaf once, unprovoked, before jinchuuriki were ever conceived of. We call them Tailed Beasts for a reason.”

Rin isn’t looking at her. “Have you ever talked to him?”

“I don’t need to. I can feel his rage. I know what he’ll do if he runs amok.”

Its deflection. “Do you want to talk to him?”

Kushina stares at her. “….no. I don’t.”

“Why?”

Kushina doesn’t immediately answer, but Rin knows. Because the Kyuubi likely hates her, and Kushina hates him back. The woman who gives love so freely, hurt badly enough by her Bijuu that she isn’t willing to extend him an inch of mercy. Rin says, “It’s easy to hate something that’s causing you pain and doesn’t stop. I doubt the Kyuubi ever wanted to be sealed away.”

Kushina opens a new pot of ink. “None of us has a choice. If he’s sentient, and just wants freedom and is pissed because I am the one denying him, then there’s nothing I can do to remedy that. I can offer him nothing in exchange for a friendship neither of us want.”

Kushina’s angry but trying not to show it. She’s feigning nonchalance very poorly. Her knuckles are tight over the chakra ink. Rin knows next to nothing about Uzumaki Mito, but she knows Sarutobi Biwako was her gennin sensei, so Mito must have been her sealing master. If Kushina was her chuunin apprentice, and she was the previous jinchuuriki to the Kyuubi, then that means she died and the Nine Tails had no small role in it.

Rin wonders if she would be able to forgive him if the Sanbi killed her sensei. But imagining Minato dying in battle against a Bijuu is ridiculous. He fought Killer B and the Eight Tails and survived. But Rin is realizing that Kushina lost her teacher, and her anger is mixed with grief.

Rin says, “I have nightmares about the Sanbi killing me, breaking free and stomping Obito, crushing Konoha.” In these dreams, his eye is wheeling with a mangekyo sharingan. “Madara is using him. Maybe he always was.”

Kushina asks incredulously, “you think Madara was controlling the Kyuubi when he attacked the Leaf?”

These aren’t her secrets to tell, but it’s not like Obito ever told her. What had Madara offered the Demon Fox to entice him to rampage, when he’d never been interested in Konoha before?

“I’ve considered it. The Sanbi hates Obito, and it’s not like his usual desperation to get free.”

Kushina deadpans, “you imply a mangekyo controls a Bijuu.”

Rin shrugs, her arms around her knees. She’s not sure how much to admit. “Obito can genjutsu the Sanbi through me.”

Kushina is still. The implications stretch between them. Rin’s not sure if her theory of the Kyuubi being an unwilling participant in Madara’s battle against the Leaf changes anything. Kushina says, “it’s been generations since the first Bijuu were sealed. The Kyuubi’s had a long time to grow his hatred. If he was innocent then, he’s not now.” She looks at Rin and her eyes are intense. “I mean it, Rin, the Sanbi will take every opportunity to overwhelm you and take control. You can’t let him. He’ll shred you like rice paper.”

“Would it be possible,” Rin asks, “to strike some kind of deal with him? To let him out a bit, so he’s not so lonely and trapped?”

“You mean take his chakra? You’ll be able to pull on it, to an extent, but the more you use, the higher the risk it overwhelms you.”

Rin shakes her head, “No, not just share chakra.” She’s thinking of Shukaku, yelling through a closed door, cut off from his perception of the world. “Could I share senses with him?”

Kushina is alarmed. “The risk is too great. He would break free.”

Rin’s not sure how to get her to understand, but reiterating this argument isn’t productive. There’s so much she wants to talk about, and this is just scaring Kushina, who’s already lost her before and just wants to protect her now. Rin agrees, “I understand. Thank you for your council, jinchuuriki sama.” And she tosses the strawberry to her while Kushina sputters at the address. The mood lifts considerably.

They talk about the wedding, and if Mikoto will be far enough along in her pregnancy to have to alter her top. How Minato is taking Kushina’s clan name so they can rebuild the Uzumaki. And Kushina makes her laugh by recounting how she’d roped Kakashi into the planning and only Guruko and Urushi helped, but accidentally screwed with the color theme since they were color blind. The mental image of her teammate hiding behind his summons to escape event planning is hilarious. Even Gamahiro laughs at Kushina’s spot on impression of Kakashi’s horror when he realizes that the two female members of his pack would gladly lend an enthusiastic paw just to spite him.

“Guruko wants to be the ring bearer!”

They bray laughter. Gamahiro says, “make Gamaken do it! It might help his shyness!”

They laugh and joke around like its an ordinary evening, like she hasn’t been dead for months. “Before I forget,” Kushina says and tosses some scrolls to Rin, who rifles through them to find all her specialized medical supplies she’d asked for. Sterilizing equipment, a field intubation set, needles and shunts of all sizes. A strong magnet, colored dyes, a preloaded shot to stop her period for 6 months at a time. She has a month left on her previous prescription but it’s a relief to know she won’t have to deal with that unpleasantness while in the field.

She files them away, thanking her all the while. The whole time, Kushina fills in the quadrants of the sealing matrix, starting in the upper left-hand corner and moving down and counterclockwise. Although she’s writing in straight lines, her intent is filling them in as a spiral. Her earlier frustration at Kushina’s intractableness has melted back into her anxiety. Kushina hums under her breath as she works, a little tune that Rin’s not familiar with but suspects is from Whirlpool. The moon is bright overhead. Her mouth tastes like strawberries.

She’s thinking of her parents. Of all the people she left behind, they hurt the most because her father would never understand, and her mother would understand all too well. They would never reject her, and growing up, it felt like bragging, with her orphan teammates, to have two parents who loved her so completely. But this is what Rin learned from her parents: her ancestors lived by the coast and they followed the gods of the land and sea and storm and sky. She got the looks of her father but the heart of her mother. When she thinks of the prayer songs and chants, they’re in her mother’s rushing tenor voice as her father deftly plucks the strings of a lute.

She tried to distance herself from them and their beliefs when she joined the Academy. She didn’t think it was a shinobi belief, religion, and she’d wanted to fit in so badly. Just like the face paint it was an ignorance she stuck with out of pride.

She’ll regret it forever, even if her rejection didn’t last long. Her faith is a great comfort to her, especially now when those same stars her mother taught her wheel overhead, and the earth grows increasingly dark with chakra ink. Rin meditates, trying to reach the Sanbi through the seal without setting either of them off. She breathes deep and let herself drop into that calm, still place in the center of her being, trying to find her way back to the Sanbi’s lake, where she saw him for the first time, where she’ll have to go if she wants to talk to him.

But the seal twangs in warning and she retreats. She can’t reach him like this. Not really. But she thinks and meditates and tries to let her feelings flow through to him. She remembers looking into his open eye and thinking I am not your enemy. How it had been red even before it bled black tomoe. Is it just her imagination that he looked afraid? Or is it her own fear?

Kushina details the next quadrant with a brush as thin as a single hair. She bites her thumb and drops blood into the ink pot, mixing the black with red. Rin isn’t a sensor but she can feel the slow pulse of chakra through the lines of the seal, stronger with each completed part. By the end it is humming with power.

Kushina inks closer and closer to her, the spiral turning tighter in on itself. When Rin can reach out and touch her, she stops and says, “I’ll need to write the seals on you now.”

Rin removes her vest and shirt. Underneath, she’s wearing nothing but bandages and the night air is cool against her skin. Kushina directs her on how to sit and then seals are drawn carefully down her arms, over both legs, down the length of her spine. At the first touch of the brush her seal rises into visibility and Kushina inks in seals to it that connect her to the thrumming matrix around her, thick with blood and chakra. Her heart is that same quick thrum.

Kushina checks over her work one last time and Rin breathes deep, repeating a mantra to herself in the hopes that maybe the Sanbi will hear it and be calm.

The matrix looks neat and polished to Rin, with an internal organization that she doesn’t understand but appreciates nonetheless. It looks worlds away from the design on her stomach. Kushina double checks everything but Rin knows it’s perfect. Everything that can go wrong comes from Rin.

Kushina fusses with it a bit more but there’s really no reason to put it off. Goosebumps raise on her arms and she tells herself it’s the night chill.

Kushina finally asks, “Ready?”

Rin nods resolutely, fixing the faces of her loved ones in her mind. If she’s about to explode, she’s already chosen the last thing she wants to see. Her voice is strong and steady. “Yes.”

Kushina is just as determined as she comes to stand behind her, one hand firmly on her shoulder and the other forming a hand seal in front of her, one that Rin can’t see but can feel the power of. Kushina barks out, “Uzumaki fuuinjutsu: Hakke no Fuuin Shiki!”

The effect of the sealing technique is immediate. The massive fuuinjutsu matrix around her lights up and the quadrants begin to crawl in towards her, the borders collapsing around her and marching up her arms, up her legs, her spine, around her throat, recentering around her stomach with a bright flash. The chakra releasing shakes the doton stage underneath her and Kushina’s nails dig into her shoulder to keep her in place. The ink centers, organizes, then sinks into her and Kushina’s hold is the only thing keeping her on the earth. Rin gasps as the seal sinks into her like a stone through a pond.

The odd numbered seal lays unevenly over her wonky seal and for a moment there is blessed silence before the dissonance tears it apart, a rock against the fragile dam inside her and the seal bends, warps, shreds. It crumbles inside her, splintering, and suddenly, Rin can see the sea. Chakra lashes out and somewhere deep inside her, the Sanbi stirs as the dam breaks and the water bursts forth, one bright eye sliding open.

She makes eye contact with the Bijuu before all hell breaks loose.

The seal goes, and it does not go quietly. It goes like an explosion. Chakra rushes out in a bang, only to run into the new Five Trigrams seal searing itself on her belly. Rin is plunged into the water headfirst and spinning. The current tears at her and giant clawed paws shaped like spades agitate and stir the water and she struggles against it but there’s water up her nose, in her sinuses, trickling down her throat with every bubble that leaves her mouth. A tail whips through the water in front of her. It registers that she might be dying.

While one dam bursts, the new one holds and everything slams against it. She forces her eyes open, her consciousness battering against the new seal inside her. It not dissimilar to a dam, but the Sanbi is the flood to end all floods. She wheels around in the water, trying to locate him through all the murk, and tries to remember when the water got cloudy. She can’t see much of the giant turtle, but in the center of the agitation and current is a single blazing eye.

Please, she whispers in a trail of bubbles and the Sanbi opens his armored maw and roars; he hits and hits, he hits and hits and hits.

Bubbles trail from her mouth and nose. She drowning, drowning like all those girls from the myths, a whole waterlogged history of girls giving into death like going to sleep. But her drowning is not passive, is not a release, and she claws and kicks and a tail wallops her upside the head and it feels like all of her bones should be pulp and splinters. She reaches out and grabs onto it, her mantra ringing in her ears I am not your enemy. I would be your friend. Its smoother than she expected, a gray armored hulk she can only cling to. He’s cold under her hands.

It doesn’t make sense. Rin is drowning in her own mind. And the Sanbi—the Sanbi--he stills at her touch. The tail swings around and the currents subside and Rin is dangling in front of the Bijuu’s narrowed eye. His eye is bigger than she is tall.

For a moment, they look at each other. Rin’s lungs burn inside her chest. She’s going to pass out.

The Sanbi throws her.

He flings her hard enough it feels like the water almost peels her bandages clean off. She erupts drenched and sputtering, air scrubbing her throat raw, chakra pulsing around her. Her eyes open and she gasps in a deep breath, coughing up water all over herself.

She’s in the clearing in Ishi, and Kushina is smearing ink on her forehead. There’s a chakra suppression tag on her stomach and Obito is frantic. She blinks water out of her eyes and Nara Shikaku is there as well; he’s sending off bunshins while the forest spikes and snaps around them. There’s chakra running amok around her, a deep red chakra, unlike her own, and she realizes it’s the Sanbi. She cuts it off and its easier than it’s ever been, one hand over her new seal.

Obito’s crying, and she might be too. The seal on her stomach almost looks like a sunburst. Underneath the exhaustion, she thinks she might be deliriously happy.

Water streams from her eyes, her nose. She hacks it up from both lungs. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to her right now. Kushina is alarmed and yelling at Shikaku, but its Obito who catches her when she falls. She looks into his dark panicked eye, drenched to the bone and cackling, and smiles at him before passing out.

Rin’s dreams are bright and warped, sticky like dango and stretching in odd places, cobwebby as genjutsu settling around her. Something stirs. Something settles. Somewhere someone is singing.

Rin dreams of the sea.

She’s not under long. When she wakes it’s with a surge, aware of time lost and with one hand straying for her kunai pouch. Adrenaline leaves her drained and dizzy but she’s not at all sore, not like she expected. Rin opens her eyes to find a toad sitting squarely on her chest. Gamahiro squats there inches from her face, squinting at her with the hilts of his duel katanas sticking at an angle towards her eyes.

He’s very turquoise. It’s a lot to take in.

Her hand redirects from her kunai pouch to his bumpy toad head and she pats him like a dog. She’s maybe not as lucid as she thought she was.

Gamahiro croaks to alert the others and says, with not nearly enough grumpiness to cover his relief, “Nice to have you join us, girl.”

Obito appears like he teleports to her side. There’s a chakra suppression tag stuck to her forehead filling her with a numb fizziness and she wrinkles her nose at it, but Obito won’t let her snatch it off. Red hair descends as Kushina shoulders her way into Rin’s line of sight. “You’re awake!”

It’s loud with her nerves and Rin grimaces before nodding. “I don’t feel too bad?”

Obito is sneakily trying to take her pulse in the guise of holding her hand, like he would even know what to do with the information. She experimentally cycles her chakra only to find her sense of it muffled and dull. Chakra tag. Duh. She grimaces again.

Nara Shikaku appears with a green glowing hand held out to her. “May I?”

She nods her consent and he runs a hand over her head. His chakra feels….slippery, and dark. Like shadows. He’s not formally trained; she can tell after a second that he only knows the basics of field healing. But she holds still and lets him finish his examination.

He withdraws his hand and the shadows are dark over the scars on his face. He says, “you’ll live.”

Rin snorts and Obito sags in relief. Rin says, “thanks for the assessment, Nara sama.”

Obito sighs at her civilian born lack of basic respect for shinobi Clan Heads but Kushina laughs. “There she is! Our girl!” Her knuckles drag through her hair and her voice is excited. “You gave us quite a scare for a minute, but the seal worked perfectly!”

Rin peeks at it. It’s drastically changed from her wonky design. The Uzumaki seal is centered over a spiral with seals trailing off of it like a sun. Rin realizes that its beautiful. She trails her fingertips over it in wonder. “Thank you, Kushina.”

They hug, tight, until Obito squirms, caught in the crossfire. Even Gamahiro allows himself to be unceremoniously squished. The Clan Head is the only one who escapes the embrace before Kushina relinquishes her hold.

It’s early morning still. Rin wasn’t out for long. She asks, “what are the odds that somebody felt that?”

Now it’s Obito’s turn to grimace. Shikaku surprises her by answering, “Well, since we’re in Ishi, around 87%. There’s also a chance a clone sensed it as well and Madara knows both about your resealing and that you’re still in good standing with Konoha.”

Her eyes widen. Obito just looks annoyed by the Leaf jounin. His tone is sour enough to suggest that his interrogation wasn’t as friendly as she hoped it would be. “Well, we can Kamui away into Iwa before Stone can organize a search. The next jinchuuriki are in Earth anyway.”

The Nara cocks an eyebrow at him and Rin is instantly jealous. She’s always wanted to be able to do that. “And Madara’s spying is not a concern?”

Her teammate is gritting his teeth but his eye is tired. “What’s he gonna do? Leave the cave? Send more clones after us? He’s endgame and he knows it.”

“Boys, boys!” Kushina says, waving their argument away, “time and place, time and place. Chances are we need to disappear, and soon, and I’ve got missives for these two nukenin over here.”

Obito perks up, the greenery around the clearing still creaking with his anxiety. “Presents?”

Kushina grins. “Presents!”

Rin is disinterested; she has her gifts and is increasingly distracted by the memory of a massive turtle in her mind. Kushina tosses a frog shaped wallet to Obito, who catches it in one hand. “Minato didn’t know what sizes y’all’d need, so that’s for armor.” She glances at his bare feet, “and shoes.”

Obito is staring in distress at the concerningly frog themed wallet in his hand. Is it very green. It’s a lot to take in. Kushina turns to Gamahiro and says, “Minato says, and I quote, ‘it hops the rabbit. Sensei getting antsy. ‘Tora says hi.’” Kushina repeated, “It mean anything to you?”

The toad summons nodded sagely. “Gamaken worries too much. Tell the boss I said that.” He croaks, “And that I enjoy his student’s cooking.”

They groan but Kushina must understand because she just laughs and laughs. Shikaku looks put upon at it all.

Obito reseals all their new goodies and stows them away in the sling they use for Gamahiro. Rin’ll need to pick up a bag at the next town just to carry all their scrolls. When she stands, she’s only a little woozy, until she peels off the chakra suppression tag. There’s something inside her as big and deep as an ocean, something she can’t even scratch the surface of. She swallows. Is this all chakra? She knows the Sanbi is a chakra construct but it’s a truth she doesn’t feel until the full sense of the depth and breadth settles on her with the weight of a world.

Kushina watches her closely. Rin swallows again, and its easier to get a hold of it, to push it down and away until it doesn’t feel so crushing. There will be time to experiment later, to see just how far down this turtle goes, but it feels private, not something she want to poke at under Kushina and Shikaku’s scrupulous supervision.

When Shikaku pushes off a tree to slump over and Kushina straightens in response, it abruptly feels like a goodbye is staring her in the face. She’s not prepared for it. She doesn’t really know the Nara, but she’s missed Kushina every day.

They look at each other. It’s an awkward moment. Obito breaks it, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand and offering, “I can Kamui us all back to the room. We can checkout and you can head back to the Leaf Village.”

Kushina accepts and happily scoops up Gamahiro while Shikaku sighs and sends out yet more clones. Once they disappear into the shadows, off to alert the three other Konoha nin, he cancels out his doton from earlier while Obito looks eagerly on, shamelessly activating his sharingan to copy the hand signs. It feels like they’re on the clock again and once the clearing is free of any evidence of shinobi activity, his sharingan twists sharply into his mangekyo and they all pile on for the trip, Rin taking the opportunity to hug Kushina again.

Obito Kamui’s them directly back to their rented room at the inn and Rin is thankful that they never reactivated their warding seals. It would suck to have to dodge kunai and explosive tags while woozy from the time/space. Knowing Obito and his love of lethal traps, it’s likely the whole room is rigged to blow.

It’s still fully dark outside, maybe two hours before dawn. That leaves the Konoha nin time to get away before the petrified village can rope a shinobi team together to investigate. They are close to the border; any contracted shinobi are likely to be from Iwa, and they are close enough to Ame for nukenin to potentially be a bother.

Gamahiro hops to the futon and sits while Kushina gets hit by a sudden inspiration, drawing out a kunai with a gleam in her eye. “Obito kun,” she says, “your hair.”

The Nara frowns at the potentially wasted time, but he sits on the bed next to the toad and for all that Rin can tell, he goes right to sleep. Obito brightens. His hair’s grown out since she’d sheared it all off in Kusa and its growing in spikey and uneven. He sits cross legged in front of her on the floor so she can reach and tugs off his hood. Kushina eyes him and Obito fidgets a bit before she says, “I can work with this. How do you want it?”

Obito considers. “Short.”

“Can do.”

Rin watches as she pulls the kunai carefully through hanks of his hair. The inky strands pile on the floor. When she’s done, he’s left with a severe buzz cut that shows off all the planes of his skull. It’s not a good look on him, too severe, but when he runs his hand over his head, he smiles. Its skeletal and wicked. Makes him look like a villain, but not necessarily an Uchiha one, which Rin supposes is most of the point.

Obito trips into the bathroom to admire his new cut and Kushina offers to freshen up Rin’s look as well. Rin inspects the split ends and how her bob’s grown out to be rather limp and shaggy and readily accepts. Kushina trims up her ends to make them neat and even and then, because Rin’s had her own inspiration, gives her an undercut that’s hidden by the longer layers, really only visible if she pulls her hair up, but it should keep the back of her neck cool. She’d seen kunoichi in Sunagakure with the style and it might distance her from her Sachira alias. She’s running her hands through it, pleased with how much lighter it feels already, when Obito comes back smiling, his hands still in his own hair, or lack thereof.

She hugs Kushina again in thanks and then the goodbyes can’t be put off any longer. Shikaku sighs and levers himself off the bed. His hands are in his pockets, and he’s slouched in a way that keeps his frame loose, aware underneath all the sloth.

Obito scowls at him when he sighs heavily again, so put upon, and he says, “maybe if you ask nicely, Kushina will whack that goatee off your face for you.”

Rin’s not sure what to make of the antagonism when he’d gone out of his way to show respect towards the Nara earlier, but whatever went on between them during the interrogation, she’s not privy to it.

Shikaku just does his eyebrow thing again, sardonic this time, which is a different emotion on him that she’s seen before. He says, “you just wish you were old enough to grow a beard, Uchiha.”

Obito eyes him up and down and then asks, “What size shoe do you wear? I need to complete the look.”

That lowers his eyebrow back into a return scowl and Obito is playful now, estimating his height and gesturing exaggeratedly at his bare feet. “You can’t ask me to flee barefoot? What would the Hokage think?”

Even Kushina giggles. “Your look would be detracted by Shikaku’s gross old smelly sandals. You’ll do much better to get a new pair in Iwa.”

Shikaku says, “preferably before all of Iwa marches on this village.”

Obito rolls his eye. “Better get going then, Nara sama.”

Kushina rolls her eyes right back at them, “quit it with the bickering, boys. They’ll be plenty of Iwa nin to share, Taicho.” She tosses her hair over her shoulder and Rin almost laughs at Obito’s dismayed groan.

She says, “Tell Sensei I send my best wishes. Take lots of pictures of the wedding. And tell Kakashi that--” why wasn’t he here, “I’ll see him soon.” After everything she needed to say to her teammate, none of them were appropriate to send through a messenger. All she could promise was an apology in person, after this mission is complete. Then she could face Kakashi again.

Obito says, “Same. But add in that I’ll kick his ass if he joins ANBU.”

Shikaku looks supremely unimpressed by him.

“Oh,” Obito says, “And that he’d better not be spying on me. I swear, the toads are trying to turn him into a pervert.”

Gamahiro whacks him upside the head. Since he’d been on the bed before that, Rin is impressed.

“Ow!” Obito complains. “It’s true! Jiraiya sama told Minato sensei that Gamariki said—”

Gamahiro whacks him again.

“Ow!”

Kushina hugs him better and Rin dips her head politely at Shikaku in farewell. Obito offers to drop them off outside the village for decreased visibility and Shikaku grumbles his assent but Rin declines his invitation, thrilled that she has nothing to fear from being away from Obito. She sits on the bed next to Gamahiro and watches the two jounin use her teammate as a handy dandy transportation express. He pouts at her but they vanish in a swirl of chakra.

Just to mess with him, she rearms all of the traps while he’s gone. Gamahiro shrugs, in a toad way. “It’s good training.”

He’s only gone a few minutes. When he warps back in, the traps key in on his chakra immediately and launch. Rin and Gamahiro watch from the safety of ducking behind the bed as Obito’s forced to yelp in alarm and dance around to dodge the attacks. Gamahiro evaluates his performance with a critical eye and Rin also passes judgement. It’s funny, because he can’t simply Kamui through them for the first three seconds, which is forever in a battle scenario.

After he successfully dodges the barrage, he glares at the both of them, “what the hell?”

“Not fast enough,” Gamahiro says. “Needs to work on his footwork still.”

Rin nods demurely. “The wire would have caught him if he hadn’t landed in that exact spot.”

Obito’s eye twitches. “Yeah? Well feel free to come show me how it’s done, oh great ones, mightiest of the missing nin, you fucking sages, you.”

“Oh please,” Rin says dismissively, “It’s not like I rearmed any of the lethal ones. Or any of the ones that looked like they’d explode.”

“Good,” Obito says with a touch of pride. “Cause the exploding ones are nasty. This whole room would blow.”

Rin stands up and sits Gamahiro back on the bed. She says, “shame.”

Gamahiro croaks.

Obito says, “We should check out at dawn and hit the road before the mob can pin us down. That gives us an hour, tops.”

“Dibs on the shower.”

He sighs. “I’m gonna miss plumbing.”

Rin takes her time in the shower, washing her hair and relishing the new feel of it under her hands. The seal array on her stomach looks like a sunny day. The fuuinjutsu is stark black against her skin in a way that makes her feel steady, at last. It’s sinking in slowly, that she doesn’t have to worry about the Sanbi exploding out of her anymore. At least, no more than a regular jinchuuriki has to fear from their Bijuu.

She stands under the water, letting it drip off her fingers. Had he really punched her so hard he knocked her right out of her own mindscape? She places her hand over her seal, thinks of his single great eye glaring at her, how he’d suddenly thrown her. Had he meant to save her? Would she have actually drowned in her own head? Her memory of the first seal bombing out is fuzzy. The Sanbi’s chakra manifests as water; it was in her nose, in her lungs, she knows this. She felt like she was drowning and the danger had seemed very real.

She says her goodbyes to the warm water and lets Obito have his turn while she styles her hair so it’ll dry neat. While she showered, he’d reorganized everything to his own obsessive system and the scrolls are packed and ready to go. Gamahiro is counting the money from the frog wallet and once Obito is out, he hops into the shower room to enjoy his own.

Obito scrubs a towel over his shorn hair and exclaims at how easily it dries. Rin lifts her hair to show off her own short style and they giggle to keep from missing Kushina. Gamahiro emerges wrapped in a towel twice as big as his current self, already asking about breakfast.

They ready and Rin opts to carry Gamahiro instead of all the new storage scrolls. She already has about 50 pounds of gear, plus a toad summons that weighs just as much, if not more than all the rest of her supplies. Obito shoulders the scrolls and carefully tucks his succulent into his kunai pouch and they check out. They make it a point to be highly visible, buying breakfast from a stall in town who’s proprietors are visibly terrified. Rin feels a little bad about all the Killing Intent she was unintentionally throwing around the night before, but this would only do great things for their reputation.

They make sure to be seen leaving separately from the badly disguised Konoha nin, using the main road in a direction obviously away from the Land of Fire. Once they make enough tracks towards the border, Obito holds out his hand and Kamuis them away from the road and they veer straight north towards Iwa.

They exit and poke experimentally around. Obito declares the area shinobi free, as far as he could tell, and there’s even a stream nearby, Rin can hear it tumbling along the rocks. The landscape is rockier in general, with less of those scrubby trees around. “How far to Earth?” Rin asks.

Obito shrugs. “Dunno. Can’t be far.”

Gamahiro plops into a squat on the ground and blinks his square pupiled eyes. “Time for my breakfast.”

Obito gives a weary salute. It actually isn’t as sarcastic as it could have been. “Yessir. Coming right up.”

Rin knows he hasn’t slept in days and she’s almost running on empty as well, but they comply. Gamahiro polishes his katana and his toad mouth is pursed in a way that Rin almost wants to read as amusement. Obito activates his sharingan to track the movement of any bugs flying through the air and Rin grunts for worms. It’s a skillset she’d never considered the merits of but of which she is quickly becoming an expert. The damp ground by the creek yields a handful of earthworms and Obito swats down as many flies as he can. It isn’t hot yet, not like it’ll be at noon, but the hours of careful bug gathering is a chore. The more tired and disaffected they become, the more the toad looks like he’s holding back a laugh. If this is a lesson, they are failing with flying colors. What Rin wouldn’t give for a simple bell test.

While their teacher’s summons feasts on the insects they managed to gather, Rin asks, “can we have a hint, at least?”

“Hmmmm….” The toad says, smacking his lips obnoxiously. “No.”

Obito kicks a tree and then looks instantly contrite. Rin sighs.

A burp of a croak. “Figure it out.”

On it goes, until Gamahiro declares himself satisfied.

Obito make a round of the area to double check one more time and Rin sets up camp. They have two bed rolls now and extra blankets, even a real tent instead of the improvised shelter they’ve been using. She smiles when she sees that Minato had sent real tea along with the rest of the supplies. A tag stuck to the box reads use this instead of poison with a smiley face, signed with cartoon drawing of a toad.

When Obito returns from his trapping, she makes them both tea and they set up shifts for watch. They’ve been active for days and she knows Obito is low on chakra. They’re both going to crash, and crash hard. They need to be rested and refreshed before they even approach the Iwa border properly. Earth wouldn’t be like Wind, understaffed and under patrolled, with too much open space to disappear in. Iwa is militant, even more so than Konoha. Earth will eat them alive as surely as any desert.

After a tense moment where an argument looms over who would go first, they draw sticks. Rin draws the short stick, so she sets up for her watch while Obito grumbles. She knows he hasn’t been sleeping and while she has considered the benefits of a medically induced coma, it isn’t worth the bitchfit he’ll throw when he wakes up. He didn’t use to be so finnicky about sleep when they were both gennin; she remembers him sleeping in just about every weird position he could contort himself in, but since they’ve been reunited he’s down right kicking and screaming about the whole thing. Maybe it’s the mokuton; he does appear to function fine on less sleep. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t still need it. She understands his reluctance, to a point. She gets nightmares too.

Rin is ragged on sleep as well but her natural chakra reserves are in better shape, and she’s trained to function on little to no sleep. During the war, she lived off chakra and soldier pills for days straight, until she was sick with exhaustion. She could last a watch shift.

Obito fidgets and grumbles in the tent behind her. His sensing must look like holey cheese. Eventually, she hears him quiet. Gamahiro has disappeared, as he is prone to do, off on whatever secondary mission he’s using traveling with them as a cover for. Most likely, its spying for Jiraiya. The turquoise toad is sneaky; she’d yet to catch him writing any reports to Minato.

Alone finally, she watches the smoke rise and slows her breathing, slows her heartrate, sinks deeper and deeper in her own mind. She can’t get deep enough to see it truly. The seal is a solid barrier, hard iron under her feet, a dam without any holes or cracks at all. She can’t get a feel for much beyond it. When she knocks experimentally, she’s ignored.

She thinks. There’ve been a lot of changes in a short time for him and she doesn’t want to prod the sleeping bear. Maybe she should give him space to acclimate. Maybe she should try to meet him halfway first. Just because he hadn’t killed her when he had the chance didn’t mean he wanted to start making matching friendship bracelets.

She retreats and tells herself it has nothing to do with what Kushina said. The Sanbi isn’t the Kyuubi. And she’s not Kushina. She won’t be a captor. She won’t be just another violence committed against the Tailed Beasts.

The sun rises and she experiments with her chakra in the dawn. For the first time in months, she’s able to feel the full extent of her reserves without it triggering a meltdown. She summons water out of nothing and it’s the easiest the A rank jutsu has ever come to her. It feels so fluid she immediately tries to shave off a hand seal. It takes some finagling, but eventually she can half the required seals and fill up the teapot with just her chakra. It’s almost concerningly simple. She mastered suiton as a chuunin but A rank techniques are tricky; it should not be this easy. She knows her control has improved, but is that all she can account for?

When she goes to wake Obito to trade shifts she finds him shivering on his bed roll, face spasming and fingers twitching. He’s drenched in sour smelling fear sweat. Rin’s heart is heavy. As necessary as his sharingan is to their mission, she suspects the dojutsu is a burden beyond what he is willing to share with her. She sighs and whispers, careful not to look at him, “Obito, its me.”

His eye flies open and its red hot with a defensive genjutsu, almost reflexive. She’s not looking and he calms down, eye closed, deep breaths to center himself, knuckles white over the kunai he’d yanked from somewhere, maybe from his eye. He puts the weapon away and deactivates his sharingan with a sigh, “Oh, hey.”

Rin says, “I made tea. It’s by the fire.”

“Anything happen?”

“It’s been quiet. Smells like rain later.”

He huffs and stretches. “Perfect.” He rolls to his feet and she’s still not used to seeing him with his hood down and his head shaved. He says, more tentative, “anything else happen?”

Rin smiles just a little. “I can summon water with only half the required signs.”

“What?” he says, “that’s amazing!” He’s smiling. “Think it has something to do with the Sanbi?”

Rin shrugs. “My chakra control improved these past months. I didn’t want to try anything too drastic so soon after the sealing.”

Obito says, wry, “so you went with an A rank?”

“It felt….easy. Easier than I expected it to be.”

“How else do you feel?”

Rin says, “relieved.” It’s a weight off her shoulders, a hindrance she never thought she’d be able to put down.

Obito asks, “tired?”

She considers smothering him with the blankets. She gives him a duh look instead and he lobs the wadded up blanket he’d been using as a pillow at her. She catches it and folds it over her arm. “Have a good watch.”

“Yeah, see ya in a bit.”

He waves and ducks out of the tent. Rin settles down on her own bedroll right next to his. Usually, she’s in the habit of meditating before bed but exhaustion pulls at her and she drifts off immediately.

Rin dreams of the sea. Or maybe it’s just a big lake, endless in its capacity to overwhelm her. Its calm enough now, but that could change in an instant. Underneath her, something sleeps. In the vast nothing, the slumber is a lull. There’s something growing there, she’s sure of it.

She’s standing on the surface of the water, water waking, little ripples spreading out from her feet. A few feet under the water there are huge chains; they crisscross in a grid that stretches endlessly. The gaps between the chakra chains are large enough to drown in.

It hits her then, what she’s seeing, why jinchuuriki are referred to as jailors.

She’s seeing a cage.

The chakra cage is formed by Kushina’s seal. Somewhere in there, trapped, is the Sanbi. Her Bijuu. The giant turtle who’d inadvertently saved her; who’s chakra healed her after the Chidori, who’s chakra heals her even now. The Three Tails she’d looked in the eye and asked for her teammate’s life.

She can’t see him now. The flooded cage separates them. As she contemplates it, her chakra control wavers and she sinks to her ankles in the surface of the water. It’s chilly, colder than she imagined it would be. She thinks of Madara ripping him out of her, thinks that he’s relatively safe here in this cage, safely sealed away inside her. She’s protective of the Bijuu. If Madara comes for him Rin will die standing in his way.

Something shifts in her awareness. Not here, in the tent. Where she’s sleeping.

Rin comes to to Obito slinking in the tent with one finger over his lips. At her understanding silence, his hands form signs. Enemy. Closing

Rin nods and signs back shinobi?

He shakes his head and mouths back zetsu

A clone, sent by Madara to investigate all the Bijuu chakra released during the sealing. Rin grins and signs engage?

They could always run, but this is an opportunity to eliminate some of Madara’s army. Obito signs one enemy. North. He studies her, asking all the questions. Engage?

Rin nods back. She’s up for this. She signs back Affirmative

Obito considers. He holds out a hand and swirls them both into Kamui. When she looks around, it’s a dimension of rectangles filled only with the sound of the Ichibi calling them dirty curs and demanding that they submit to their deaths.

“Shit,” she says, peering at his eye, “you needed that chakra.”

He shrugs. “We need to coordinate our attack. I can drop us right on top of them from here.”

He unloads some of their unnecessary supplies, things they didn’t need to carry around with them. Rin sheds some weight as well. Obito stores it all away in neat piles, measuring dimensions of the ground as he does so, already planning shelves. Rin tugs her wrappings tighter and checks her weapons. She pats Shukaku on the head and he tries to bite off her fingers. She asks, “Gamahiro?”

“He’s watching the camp. Didn’t want to risk him.”

The toad can outfight most chuunin, even in his smaller form, but he’s too distinctive. It’s hard to hide who taught Minato his Sage Mode, not when the markings around his eyes reflect the toads too closely to be mistaken.

Obito says, “we need to hit them hard and fast, like last time. No rain, little cover, with gaping holes in my sensing. If they see us, we’re busted, even if we kill them.”

Rin’s sure that Madara already knows about them being together and against him. The only information she wants to protect is that they are still loyal agents of the Leaf Village. And maybe that her seal is fixed. Rin says, “there’s little we can give away that he doesn’t already know.”

Obito says, irritably, like Zetsu is only a minor inconvenience, “and we just cut our hair.”

“Okay,” Rin says, “the regular clones can’t use mokuton like the Original. If we blindside them, we should be able to sever the spine.”

Obito says, “I take us back, we get a position, and then I drop us right on top of them. We hit hard. I’ll cover us with a regular katon, not a clan technique. I distract, you go for the head.”

Rin forms her chakra scalpels and is shocked by how they rocket and then fizzle out. Her control is unusually wobbly; she’s putting way too much chakra into the technique. When she dials it down a bit they form correctly, sharp little blade of compressed medical chakra. They’re not sharp enough to hack through a spinal column but Rin’s a medic. She knows better than to aim for hard bone, not when there are ligaments and tendons she could hit just as easily for twice the amount of damage.

She fists a kunai in her other hand and nods, ready. Obito reaches out to her and they Kamui away, back to the forest in Ishi.

They’re in the shadow of a dark granite rock formation. Obito is pressed up against her side, his lips at her ear. He breathes, “left.”

Rin assumes they’re staying in the plant life and scans around the rocks for any sight of the clone. It takes her a second to place the zetsu; they’re playing it safe, staying inside the trees. All she can see is a nasty yellow eye staring out from the hollow of a twisted pine.

She signs, very carefully shit

He’s frowning. They’ll have to wait till it left the tree to get a good shot, but she can’t think of a natural reason for them to leave, not if they could just stay merged with the plant life around them. She signs bait? Thinking maybe they could draw them out.

He signs back fire? and she realizes he’s considering burning down the whole forest to make sure they get them. It’s a Konoha tactic, easy enough to deploy in their forests, but the landscape is so dry here that Rin fears the landscape if the blaze goes out of control. Sharingan fire is tricky; it tends to stick to things and be a bitch to put out, oddly resistant to suiton. Rin’s not sure she wants to risk it.

The eye in the tree blinks and as Rin watches, it oozes down into the ground, only to emerge a few minutes later as a head sticking out of a different tree a few yards away. It’s kind of fascinating, in a gross way.

Rin turns her head to whisper in his ear, “we need to pin them down.”

The white of his eye is pink with blood and his sharingan spins threateningly. Rin brings her hands together, focuses on using the right amount of chakra, and calls up a water clone, which she then henges into a strange male shinobi. She sends it to be a distraction, maybe see if it can draw out the clone from their hiding place. Her water clones are more sturdy than regular bunshin but it’ll pop with a solid hit. It’s no match for the zetsu, but maybe it can be bait.

They watch as her clone sneaks away to rustle some bushes a ways away. Her bunshin’s none too careful and a dry twig snaps under its foot. The ghost white head turns, yellow eyes narrow.

The zetsu spots her clone but doesn’t quite fall for the ruse. They’re curious as a spy, but reluctant to leave cover. Obito sighs and pulls out a kunai with an exploding tag tied to it. Rin raises her eyebrows at him and he shrugs. They sign back and forth then he nods and Rin drops a genjutsu over the tag as well, hoping it’ll manage to infiltrate the clone’s hearing during the explosion. It’s her best genjutsu technique and it served her well in the war against Iwa’s Blast Corps.

Obito slings the kunai at the tree and it would have struck the clone right between their eyes if they didn’t pull back into the tree just before the impact. The explosive tag ignites and its one of Kushina’s modified ones, over-loaded with Obito’s chakra. The tree blows apart and the zetsu dives from the smoldering wreckage, scrambling for another tree but they’re disoriented as her genjutsu takes effect, throwing off their balance and sense of perception. Obito throws more tags and Rin covers with a barrage of shuriken, forcing them away from cover and pinning them against a rock wall.

Obito flashes through hand signs and slams his hands on the ground like a kuchiyose and a wall of rock slams up between them, cutting off their sight lines but hemming in the zetsu clone even tighter. Rin’s thinking,, was that a fucking doton, I’m going to kill him, and goes through the hand seals for a Mizurappa, drawing in chakra from her belly and blowing it all out through her mouth. The resulting Water Trumpet is massive, twice the size she meant it to be, and she loses control of it. It slams into the mouth of the rock formation where they’d pinned the clone and decimates the Practice Brick that Obito’s thrown up, crumbling it under the force of the water. It washes out and the resulting flood is full of boulders and other debris.

When the technique thins and dissipates, the clone’s lying face down in a puddle, pale and pulpy and smeary, like she’d smashed them between the rocks and the water. It doesn’t look right but they’re twitching still, trying to turn their head, and they both hit it with a barrage of shuriken and kunai until they stops moving. The zetsu looks like a porcupine.

Obito is gaping at her like she’s grown a third head. Rin nudges a kunai sunk into the bleached back, satisfied at how dead it feels. “I think I got them.”

His eye is wide. “You think?” he asks. “What was that you hit them with?”

She says, “just a Mizurappa.”

“That didn’t look like a Mizurappa.”

“A big Mizurappa.”

But Rin’s a bit concerned as well. Her chakra control isn’t normal. Maybe it’s her seal? The Bijuu affecting her techniques? Jinchuuriki have notoriously powerful attacks, maybe all her regular techniques got an upgrade and she just needs to adjust?

Its disconcerting. She’s always relied on her control over almost all else; it’s why she’s such a good medic. But with her chakra control on the frits, if she tries an iroyo technique on Obito right now, she might kill him.

Obito kicks the smushy shoulder and instead of flipping over, his foot just sinks into the body. He grimaces and shakes his head. He announces, “I’m gonna puke,” wiping his foot frantically through the puddle trying to scrape off all the goo.

Rin starts wrenching all the weapons out of it and examining the edges with distaste. “Well, it’s dead.”

“Overkill,” Obito agrees. “They had no idea what hit them.”

They hadn’t even used katon, or any other identifying technique. Asides from Rin’s lack of control over her suiton it wasn’t a bad attack. Messy, sure, but successful.

Rin says, “We could seal it in the body scroll for Minato sensei. Let him know what exactly he’s up against.”

It’s not much of a body. Without the mokuton animating them, the zetsu appears to be less solid and dense than they should be, more goopy, and the wounds scattershot on the pale flesh are brutal and unclean. Minato’d read their sloppy attack in a heartbeat.

Obito looks at her and says, “Maybe not this one. We can gift wrap him the next.”

Rin swiftly agrees.

Obito sets the corpse on fire. Its damp but it burns well. The flames snap and crackle like they’re burning logs and not a weird plant clone. It smells oddly sweet and the smoke is cloying and thick.

Obito scans the area. “We’re clear, for now. Another one might show up to check out what killed this one, but…” he shrugs. “Might not.”

They scatter the ash and then walk back to camp. Rin feels fine, even after a supercharged suiton, but Obito was running low to begin with. “How’s your eye?” she asks.

He blinks. “I think I’m getting better at not fucking it up any worse,” he says. “I mean, it doesn’t bleed as much as it used to.”

“And your sight?”

Obito shrugs again, projecting nonchalance like a shield between them. She says, “I want to check it, but I’m not sure I’ve adjusted to my newly untethered chakra reserve.”

“Yeah, I’d rather not have you make my eye explode, thanks,” He says. “I’ve only got the one.”

She hip-checks him. “Give me a few days and I’ll figure it out.”

He bumps her back. “You’d better! Can’t have you on the fritz. One of us needs to stay sane on this team or Minato sensei will retire into an early grave.”

“I nominate Kakashi as the sane one.”

She’s fishing but Obito snorts. “That kid’s the craziest out of all of us. The Nara said he’s been a handful recently.”

She’s instantly suspicious. “In what ways?”

Obito taps on the limb of a tree as they pass. He says, “he stole clan documents from the secure Archives.”

Rin is cold. “From the Hatake?” Maybe if it was his own clan it wouldn’t count as treason.

Obito shakes his head. “From mine.”

The coldness doesn’t go away. “Oh,” she says.

Obito sighs. “Yeah. Good thing is, they can’t prove it was him. But they know regardless.”

That sounds like their teammate. Rin asks, “what else did Shikaku sama say?” She confesses, “I don’t know him that well.”

Obito snorts, “Well, the guy’s a genius. Not like prodigy genius, like actual genius. His intellect is off the charts. Nara Clan Head to boot. I guess he’s working for sensei for politics. He’s a master of strategy. Guess he was brought in to help plan Konoha’s assault on the nukenin. Also: he’s totally ANBU. I couldn’t ask just in case he’d have to kill me, but I’m pretty sure.”

“ANBU?” Rin frowns. “Makes sense, I suppose.” She’s still thinking but coming up with nothing. “Do you know him?”

“No,” Obito says. “Only by reputation.”

“It seemed like you knew him.”

“He’s just an ass.”

Rin deadpans at him. He mutters, “Okay, maybe I was an ass right back. But he started it.”

“The interrogation?”

Obito says, like it settles everything, “He’s a manipulator.”

Rin says, “he doesn’t trust us.”

“He doesn’t trust me, specifically. He might have alluded to me being as bad as the Old Man. I’ve got a feeling he studied the Nidaime.”

Rin’s not sure what he means by that. “Senju Tobirama?”

Obito says, “Yeah. Lord Second wasn’t too fond of the Uchiha. Blamed us for the Geezer attacking the Leaf. A lot of it was left over from the Warring Clans era but he’s the one who moved the Clan Compound to the outskirts of the village.”

Rin hadn’t heard any of this, and they’d done a whole unit on the past Hokage in the Academy. Her civilian upbringing’s showing and it’s irritating her. She scowls, “I’d heard that there was a rivalry between the Senju and the Uchiha before the village was founded, but they act like it’s all fine now. I’ve heard more about your rivalry with the Hyuuga.”

Obito waves, dismissive. “Revisionism. The clan is respected, but the civilians fear us. Regular forces shinobi distrust us because of how tied the clan is to the Leaf Police Force.”

That’s always bothered her, because it doesn’t make a lick of sense. “Why is the Police Force just Uchiha?”

Obito looks at her funny. “The Nidaime did it to make sure the Uchiha weren’t involved in other, more powerful capacities of Village administration. Can’t be Jounin Commander if you’re busy running the Leaf Police.”

Rin isn’t shocked, but she is disappointed. She’d hoped the Leaf would be above this. She says, “I didn’t know.”

Obito says, “I didn’t know a lot of it, as a kid. I knew people didn’t like us, but I thought it was, like, a weird respect, or jealousy, or rivalry, like with the Hyuuga. And I knew that the Nidaime didn’t like us, just from how people talked, but I also knew he was Uchiha Kagami’s teacher and they say that my little cousin Shisui looks just like him. When I bothered to think about any of it, I guess I thought we chose to live separate from everyone else, that we wanted to be so far from the rest of the village. They tell us as kids that doing police work is a great honor, but it’s really to keep our dojutsu in the village. Uchiha with active sharingan aren’t even allowed to go on solo missions.”

Rin recenters the history she learned as a student in her mind. It’s a shift that makes sense to her as a shinobi. She can see all the justifications for it, whatever bullshit excuses the council admins make because they’re still, after all these years, they’re still blaming the Uchiha for Madara. She can see the progression, almost hear the whisper campaign disseminating the information. Whatever propaganda they propagated to turn the Leaf Village against one of the clans that founded it. She can see it and she hates it with every beat of her heart.

Obito’s fiddling with a leaf, not looking at her. He says, “When I was a kid and wanted to be Hokage, that was part of the reason why. I thought if I was acknowledged as Hokage then the Uchiha would not only acknowledge me right back, but maybe the rest of the village would acknowledge the clan through me.” He admits, “I wanted to fix it for them.”

Rin repeats, small, “Wanted?”

He huffs air through his nose. “Yeah.” He does not elaborate. He looks…wistful maybe? Regretful? Rin can’t identify it, but her instincts raise the hair on her neck at it.

“Hey,” she says, “I think you’d be a great Hokage.” She always has. That hasn’t changed.

He smiles at her, and this time it’s with more of that emotion that she can’t quite place. Half sad, half wry. She’s afraid of it, of what it might mean.

He changes the subject. “How was Kushina and the sealing? Did you get to talk?”

She shakes off her fear but does not forget it. She says, “Kushina hates the Kyuubi. I’m not sure she’s willing to initiate an interaction with it. She didn’t like me talking about it, but she’s really just afraid for me.” She hugs her new sunburst seal array. “Afraid of him.”

She knows Obito doesn’t entirely disagree. He says, “She knows the risks better than anyone.”

Rin says, “I think she lost her shishou.”

Obito just says, “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

They walk in silence for a bit. Kushina’s unforgiving, and she holds grudges like it’s a mandate. Compassionate as she is, she doesn’t often give second chances. If the Kyuubi killed her mentor, she’ll never look at it with the grace Rin wants from her.

It’s late afternoon still and the adrenaline from the attack is wearing off, leaving her tired. She walks around a rock and says, “Since when can you use doton?”

Obito looks sheepish. “I copied the technique from Shikaku sama. He helped me with it.”

That was unexpectedly nice of him. Rin had the impression that they didn’t much care for each other outside of the parameters of a mission. “That was the Practice Brick technique, right?”

“Yeah,” Obito says. “I blew it on the first try, but that one worked nicely, huh?”

It sinks in quickly, a rock through a pond. Her teammate can use three elemental releases. “That’s incredible.”

He laughs, “Ha! Says the kunoichi who killed a zetsu with a Mizurappa.”

They laugh some more, to cover their worry. Obito is scanning the landscape around them. Its making him paranoid to be close to the border. Rin can see the way the plant life is reacting to his anxiety, how thorns reach out to snag at his clothing, how the pines twist and creak into defensive positions, vines winding over their tracks like friendly snakes. She missed the change happening, but all the trees around her are conifers instead of deciduous, with needles and cones instead of broad leaves. Its like she’s further from home without that expected cover, without the oaks, closer to Iwa, to danger.

Obito says, “It was nice to see Kushina again.”

It shouldn’t be a red flag to her but it is, in a way she doesn’t want to think about. It has been years for him since he’d seen her but why the sadness now? Because it wasn’t Kakashi? She says cautiously, “It was.”

They make it back to camp, Obito leading her safely through his minefield of traps. Gamahiro greets them with katana out and a scowl. He croaks, “what’s the code?”

“Uh…” Obito says, “which one?”

There are several standard Konoha shinobi codes. Rin’s unsure which the toad is referring to. She tries, “The evening under the trees is cool and soft.”

“Nope. Wrong!” The toad frowns.

Obito says, “what about, ‘the …uh…something something…trees, and the Will of Fire?”

The toad angles his matched blades at the both of them. Rin senses a lesson inbound. A painful one. “Did we even agree on a code?”

Obito’s irritated but he eyes the swords warily. He says, “what about this, huh?” and flashes his sharingan at the summon. “Is this proof enough for you?”

Gamahiro dismisses, “there’s a shinobi running around Konoha with that exact same pattern in his eye, boy.”

Obito snorts, “yeah, but can he do this?” and he simply turns it off.

Rin would’ve laughed, but the toad leaps at Obito with his swords out. There’s the clang of a blade deflecting off a kunai and the two blur into a short but brutal kenjutsu match. Once the toad finishes knocking her teammate around, Gamahiro turns on Rin, who gulps. She’s terrible at kenjutsu.

“A shinobi who cannot recite the agreed upon code is an enemy shinobi!” Gamahiro cries and lunges at her in a blur of sharp steel. The toad fights with precision and her kunai aren’t enough of a counter. He taps a katana against her throat, the other angled to pierce her femoral artery. Rin never even touched him. “Dead!” he announces. “Now I can wait for the real Obito and Rin to show up.”

There’s a rising welt on Obito’s cheek where it looks like he was struck with the hilt of a katana. He rubs at it and scowls, “Okay, okay, we get it. We’ll set up a code.”

“Good,” the toad huffs. “And not a standard Fire County one either. Use your heads.”

Rin is embarrassed. They sit around the fire and brainstorm ideas for a code while recounting how they took out the zetsu to Gamahiro. The summons hides his reactions well but Rin knows he’s thinking hard. He says, “So the boy can use doton and your suiton needs to be fine-tuned?”

That’s…not an incorrect assessment. Rin recalls that the toad is water natured himself and she feels more bruises in her future. Obito realizes it at the same time and he shoots her a look that’s amused and pitying. Rin asks innocently, “Gamahiro san, maybe you could help me recalibrate my suiton levels. I think Obito would benefit from more suiton instruction as well.”

His eye narrows in offense at the blatant betrayal. Gamahiro says, “that’s a wonderful idea, girl. We’ll train suiton tomorrow. I’ve got an A rank you should be able to master, if you’re willing to put in the work.” He squints at Obito. “I’ll show you a nice C rank. You both need to relearn moderation.”

Obito grumbles to himself and stirs up the fire but he doesn’t argue. The swelling under his eye is already going down. They took down a clone without a scratch but a tiny toad kicked their ass. Granted, that toad is usually the size of a house and has multiple swords. But still. It’s a stupid, humbling, mistake.

They eat their rations and Obito says, “I wanted to stay in Stone longer, but soon the shinobi will expand their search effort to almost all of Ishi. We should get out of Stone while we still can.”

Rin tries to remember a full night’s sleep. She says, “We could use the cover of darkness. Slip over it tonight. It’ll be harder to hide in Iwa.”

Obito says, “If we get desperate, we could R&R in Kamui. We have the rations for it.”

They could, but Rin knows they can’t afford it. Now that they’ve got the Ichibi, it might force Madara to move against the other Bijuu. They have to get into Iwa, find the jinchuuriki, and get out.

Gamahiro says, “Iwa’s border will be relentlessly patrolled. It will be difficult to infiltrate the country on foot.”

Rin asks, “are you familiar with the area, Gamahiro san?”

The toad replies, “I’ve been active inside Earth a few times for Jiraiya during the start of the Second War, and a few times after the end of the Second but before the Third for reconnaissance. But I’ve never been so far as Iwagakure and my information is likely outdated.”

Obito asks, “Is there anything you can tell us about the border itself?”

Gamahiro answers, “it is clearly demarcated with Earth Walls and strongly fortified. There will be traps as we approach, and sensors as well. Chuunin stationed in the garrisons will respond to any attempts to cross outside of one of their gates.”

Rin says, “We’d never make it through an official checkpoint.”

Obito says, “We Kamui over the border. Our fights not with Iwa. We find a road and walk by foot to Iwagakure. We know its somewhere in the northeast part of Earth.”

“And we’ll need to gather information as we go. We have no idea who the jinchuuriki are. They haven’t been seen in years, not even during the war.”

“We should go tonight.” Obito says. “Make for the border and then skip over it.”

“They might be on the lookout for us.” Rin says.

“Yeah,” Obito says. “Most likely. We’ll need to get new outfits. It’s too risky to use genjutsu or henge. The hair helps, but we’re still too distinctive.” Sachira and Tobi hadn’t exactly been subtle in their escape of Sunagakure. A flying Rasa and a loudmouth Shukaku had made sure of that.

“Armor,” Rin says.

“Shoes,” Obito says.

They hash out the plan and then Rin packs up camp while Obito retrieves all of the traps. When the campsite is spotless and even the trees straightened back into nonchalance, they set off north towards the border. Obito’s carrying Gamahiro, which leaves Rin with whatever camping supplies they’d left outside of Kamui for them to carry. She resolves to get a bag as well, one that matches her vest. A rock wedges itself into the toe of her sandal and she irritably digs it out. And maybe a ribbon for her hair. Would purple be too on the nose of a color scheme for her?

They make for the border. The sun sinks lower and lower over the craggy horizon. The trees grow shrubbier and scraggly as the land grow drier and more arid. It isn’t like the Suna sand, but as the pressure drops, the clouds build up into dark towers. The heat wave is calling up a thunderstorm to break the low pressure. Rin can feel the barometer dropping as they trudge straight north.

As evening hits, the wind picks up. Obito frowns. He doesn’t trust the rain. She supposes it has something do with his reliance on katon, or maybe even his sharingan. The trees creak in the wind whipping up the storm front. The sky is a heavy gray.

Rin doesn’t mind the rain, but if he wants to stop, she’ll agree.

They keep walking and Rin keeps a lookout for a shelter or something should the sky open up. Thunder rumbles in the distance. She can taste rain on her tongue. The tension in the air feels like Kakashi, that same white whipcrack of chakra that sparks like lightning and smells like ozone.

The clouds build and build. Rin watches the giant anvil head of the storm system level out into cirrus, high in the atmosphere. In the Academy, they taught her that storms could be miles high, that they level out because the air got too thin to hold moisture. Thin enough it leeches off into empty space. They say that the mountains in Kumo are so tall you could see the tops of clouds and the air is thin and cold. She struggles to imagine such a sight. What color is the top of a cloud? How could the air be thin? What is space like? She knows Senju Tobirama theorized heavily about the nature of the universe but she suddenly doubts his judgement in the light of his prejudice. It taints his legacy, in her mind.

The wind whips through the trees and whistles around the exposed granite monuments. Obito’s mood darkens to match the sky by the time the front rolls in. Lightning forks and the air feels singed right before the storm opens up.

It pours. She’s soaked to the bone in a minute flat. It’s chilly, but not painfully so. Obito huddles in his hood and scowls.

Gamahiro’s exposed eyes are drawn in and squinted against the water. He says, “maybe we should take shelter. It’s unsafe to risk a crossing with such poor visibility.”

Rin thinks the rain will ease up after the front passes, dragging its curtain of rain more gently but just as stubborn over the land behind it. The clouds are a lacy veil pulled over the Ishi dust. The trees are dripping with it. The pale clouds are an indistinct smear that’s more a color than a true shape. A pale hazy white gray.

Oddly enough, it looks just like her younger teammate’s hair.

Obito grumbles a bit and kicks at some wet rocks but he agrees. “I don’t feel any shelter or anything nearby.”

Rin had actually seen a few smallish caves but she can imagine that they aren’t counted in Obito’s criteria for appropriate, acceptable hiding places. He says, “I could try to Kamui us further north, out of the storm.”

Gamahiro says, “we might hit the border blind.”

It’s too risky. Can’t stay in the weather, can’t escape. Stuck between Iwa and a hard place. In her mind, the mission clock ticks.

“Fuck.” Obito says emphatically.

Rin says, “Maybe try some doton? Shikaku sama could use Practice Brick for more than a wall. Maybe you can make, like, a lean to? Just something to keep the rain off.”

It isn’t a bad idea. Obito considers it. “Okay, but it might not work. I accidentally made my first wall explode.”

Gamahiro splutters but Obito’s already going through the hand seals. She can sense him molding chakra. He says to focus, “Doton: Renga no Jutsu!”

One leaning rock wall shoots out of the ground and he shoves it over more at more of an angle. They observe it. This could work. Then he walks around it and does the same thing to form the other wall. It shoots out and screeches against the first rock wall when he gets the length wrong and it cracks a bit but holds. The finished product is a leaky lean-to made from earth, but it’s better than nothing.

They huddle inside it and Obito is already drying off. He runs hotter than anyone she’s ever known and even his clothes are steaming the evaporation into humidity. He pulls his hood down and scrubs a hand over his hair. “It’s not perfect, but it should do the trick.”

It’s not a bad attempt, truly. Rin tells herself it’s supposed to look lopsided, and the lack of straight lines help it blend in. Like an earth tent.

Obito traps the immediate area but for the most part, they just watch the rain and listen to it batter against the roof. It puddles in the dirt around them. There’s mud between her toes.

They don’t speak. After a while, she leans against him and shuts her eyes, letting the sound of rain reclaim her lost sleep.

She wakes with her head on his shoulder, her hip aching from the hard ground. She’s drooled on his cloak, on the hood that she was using as a pillow. Its steady sprinkling outside but the sky is darker.

Rin shakes off the grogginess. “What time is it?”

Obito rolls his shoulder and says, “Almost dusk.”

He’s pretending the dark spot on his hood is from a leak in the roof. Rin loves him a little more for it.

Gamahiro says, “It’s slacked off a bit. It should clear up soon.”

Obito says, “I’ve been thinking and the rain should help cover our tracks.”

Rin knows from their teammate that rain could interfere with tracking, dampen the scents, wash away all evidence. It’s unlikely that Iwa has shinobi who rely on such tactics as olfactory tracking like the Inuzuka or Kakashi, but she doesn’t discount the possibility after a ferret almost took her head off.

“We should move.”

“Yeah,” Obito stretches his legs out in front of him. He’s more cramped than she is. Rin feels pretty great actually. Her nap did wonders.

They crawl out of the doton and Obito fusses around with how to cancel out the technique. When he can’t figure out how to get the earth to retract, Rin just smashes it with another supersized Mizurappa. Gamahiro watches with wide eyes. Obito takes a few minutes to coax vines to hide the wreckage and they are happy enough to help out and then Rin declares that it’s good enough.

They set out into the low light, into a steady drizzle that doesn’t quite impede their sight lines but irritates Obito to no end. Gamahiro isn’t one to complain about the weather, but Rin knows he isn’t having such a great time in the rain either. He keeps his eyes slatted and drawn, ducked down in the sling as much as he could. The cold-blooded amphibian is shivering. Rin worries about hypothermia.

The thunder rumbles very far off, just a low buzz on the edge of her hearing. When she turns her focus inward, she finds herself humming the pattern of the rain on the roof of the lean-to. It’s a comforting sound, but not one of her own. She thinks do you like the rain? at the Sanbi, playing the low drone on a loop in her subconscious, unsure if the sound could reach him in the seal, in that giant steel cage she had seen him in in her dreams.

“Stop,” Obito calls and Rin freezes with her foot off the ground. He says, “There’s a trap on the tree ahead. Non-lethal. Tripwire. But I can’t feel the bare patches.”

“The border?”

“We’re still technically in Ishi. I don’t sense any shinobi ahead, but if we’re encountering traps, we can’t be far off.”

It’s almost true night now. It will be a bitch to spot and avoid the traps in the dark. Obito says, “Want to try to jump now? I can’t sense the border but if we’re off I can just throw us north again.”

“Wait,” Rin says, “We should henge. Just in case.”

Obito nods but as Rin carefully henges herself into an unidentifiably bland shinobi, Obito just turns himself into a tree. He’d done the same thing the last time he’d tried a henge.

Rin just stares.

“Shit!” He cancels the jutsu. “It’s the mokuton. Its hijacking the Transformation.”

“You can’t henge?” Rin asks. “At all?”

Gamahiro is alarmed. “Genjutsu won’t work for this, boy. Let the girl fix you.”

He’s right, there was no way to get a genjutsu in place against the senses of any observers. That’s why ranged genjutsu are above her ability. Only specialists can pull off such a trick. Rin bites her lip.

Obito says, “You’re not going to accidentally explode me, right?”

She won’t draw on any chakra but her own for the technique, but the henge is basic, requiring so little chakra that it would be easy to overdo it. She says, “I’d heal you if you exploded.”

“Great,” he says, but he’s a little nervous. She carefully channels chakra into him and her Transformation Jutsu henges him into a taller version of her own bland disguise. They could be twins, if he wasn’t so damn tall.

“Your chakra feels…..” his brow is wrinkled in concentration. “I’m not sure. It’s different. Bigger, almost.” He says, “It’s not the Sanbi. It still feels like you.”

Rin files the observation away. It’s comforting to still be herself. She says, “I can’t believe the Nara thought you were a sensor.”

Gamahiro snickers and Obito retaliates by activating his sharingan, the three tomoe twisting into a sharp pinwheel as he pushes chakra past that into his mangekyo. The rain steams around them. “Be ready,” he says and Rin has a kunai out and prepped as Obito catches them up in his Kamui.

They exit but before Rin can even get her bearings everything warps away again. His grip on her tightens and he jumps them once more. They land and Obito pulls her down into a crouch. The world is dark around them and steady with the beat of the rain. The night feels alive with an awareness that Rin recognizes as active mokuton, scrubby flora around them reacting defensively.

She can’t see much with the night and the storm but the knowledge that they’re in enemy territory is heavy. This is Iwa, the same nation that kidnapped her during the war, that was going to kill her, a mere gennin, when she didn’t break under genjutsu interrogation, when she didn’t have any useful information to give. The same nation whose Explosion Corps she faced in a trench and after the bombardment ended, she was a chuunin.

This is the nation that crushed Obito. Dealt the first blow to their team, a fracture that never healed right, even after his return. A nation that sent a platoon to slaughter 20 Konoha nin pinned down in a gulch, and Minato folded his grief small inside him and did what he did best and felt nothing after.

Obito says, “We’re clear. For now.” They stand up warily, Rin blinking water out of her eyes. It is fully dark in the stubby trees around them. Obito says, “Our first jump was too close to the border. Dozens of traps, but the wall itself is stone. I couldn’t sense how many shinobi there were, but there must have been a few. We should be clear now.”

Rin cancels her henge on them both and in the darkness, she can’t tell if his eye is bleeding or not. “How far did we go?”

They’re both whispering. “Not far. Maybe 30 miles past the wall itself?”

Out of the range of any regular sensors, but back in the storm. Gamahiro hunkers down in the sling and they follow suit. It’s raining too hard already to bother with the tent, and the sound of rain off the artificial roof could give them away, so they find a sheltered place in the craggy pines and Obito makes another overhang with his new Practice Brick technique and lets the sweet smelling wood curl protectively around them.

It storms throughout the night. The wind isn’t too bad, but the thunder shakes the giant stone monoliths around them hard enough that Rin can hear crumbles tumbling and clattering down off the rocks. Obito won’t sleep and Rin is having trouble drifting off as well. It’s a miserable night and her clothes stick to her and her hair’s drying in stringy hanks.

The rain doesn’t taper off and the sunrise is a pewter gray. They eat cold rations of rice porridge and Gamahiro goes hungry when the hard ground yields no worms and the rains keep the bugs away. They’re tired and irritable and on alert.

Then they walk. Cautiously, and quietly. Rin is itching for an opportunity to work on her newly unleashed techniques but chakra usage will give them away for sure. Suna was dangerous for them because it was hot and they were unaffiliated nin. But Iwa feels openly hostile, even if parts of it are just as empty. The crags are inhospitable in different ways than the desert, but the hardscrabble landscape is no less lethal.

All around them are signs of the war. Areas of scorched earth where the jagged monoliths lay in blasted chunks. As a medic, Rin never ventured far past the stationary battle lines crisscrossing through Kusa but all around them are evidence of battles. Acres of conifers have been burned around the cliffs and it’s a Konoha tactic, she knows it is, she learned how to cover her tracks in the Academy and then Minato taught her how to use fire to obliterate evidence of a fight. She knows squads were sent behind the lines all the time, but one mile from where they huddle in a makeshift shelter there’s a mountain ravaged by a massive doton jutsu.

The Land of Fire is not similarly destroyed. They won the war. There are scars on these rocks that won’t ever heal.

And Iwa is rock. The Land of Earth lives up to its name. The landscape is dominated by huge stone monoliths and jagged formations of bare earth that jut and scarper. Between these are valleys full of trees and other native greenery, most of which Rin is unfamiliar with. It’s beautiful, in a rugged, hardscape sort of way. If the shinobi of this nation favor the earth itself, then Rin would rather avoid confrontations altogether.

They stay in the tree line, even as the gulches sluice with rainwater and wash out into flash floods she watches sweep away entire trees like kindling. Rin sticks chakra to her feet and they water walk over the canyons full of debris and overflow. It’s not an easy march, but its safest for them to stay in the cover of the trees than to risk the open ground of the exposed stone.

The road, when they find one, is carved out of the rock itself, winding switchback over the sheer cliffs. She supposes they’re mountains really, but more in the sense that the Hokage Mountain is technically a mountain, and not like the mountains of Kumo.

They stay off of it. The road will be watched, and they don’t want to be seen. It’s unlikely that Suna will fess up to losing their greatest weapon, but they’ll almost surely put a bounty of Sachira and Tobi’s heads. Messenger hawks could have spread their blood price all over the continent by now and Rin doesn’t want the headache of dealing with hunter nin and mercenaries. They stay close to it but out of sight.

The rains continue into the next night, cooling off the atmosphere into true fall. Obito’s having nightmares again and Gamahiro is hungry and cranky with it. When Rin meditates, she sees a cage as waterlogged as the land around them, with chains and bars as hard as rock. Somewhere inside it, where the rain won’t bother him, the Sanbi sleeps. Rin is both fascinated by his presence and perturbed by her newfound role as a jailor. Being a true jinchuuriki changes the dynamics between them in ways she didn’t expect. She no longer feels like as much as a victim. While her situation improved, the Sanbi’s cage just got smaller, his abuse shifting hands. Like she more fully owns the blame. It’s not true, but it feels like the truth, that she’s not as unwilling and blameless as she was before.

Rin speaks through the bars of the cage, softly, not truly wanting to wake him. Not for this. It’s not wrong for me to fix the seal. You deserve to live and be free, but I do too. She feels the depth of the cage, the darkness of the cold water between them. She says we’re teammates. And nobody gets left behind.

The next day, she chances a healing on Obito’s foot after he steps on a sharp stone and cuts it. It’s not a deep wound, but the blood is a problem. The gash is superficial and she carefully cleans the tissues and knits them back together with a green glowing hand, her chakra under strict control. She seals the wound and the scar is fading even as she watches.

Obito tests it out and says, “thanks.”

“And you didn’t even explode,” Rin teases, secretly pleased that she’s adjusting so quickly. Her chakra coils should warp under the pressure of the chakra welling up in her, but her jinchuuriki healing deals with it nicely enough. It’s a wonder she hasn’t exploded herself.

She sticks leaves to herself experimentally to further fine tune everything. She’s humming again. All things considered, she’s not having a bad time of it.

Obito grouches about the weather and Gamahiro commiserates. Rin thinks that they’re both acting like crotchety old men instead of proper shinobi and when she comments on it, they just exclude her from the conversation about the chilliness of rain in Iwa verses the humidity of Konoha. Rin’s not bothered by either.

When the road veers through a gully with high walls on either side, Rin successfully leads them to skirt around it and they high five after. Obito’s trying to conserve chakra and Rin enjoys the occasional chance to not be totally stupid whenever she can. All of her interactions with Earth ninja have been outside of Earth, but she’s heard enough about this particular construction to know to stay as far from it as possible.

Later on in the day, the rains finally taper off. Rin is scraggly as the needles on the ground and her clothes are uncomfortably moist as they dry, but the heat wave breaks under the weather system rolling through, leaving the evening cool and refreshed. It’s the first time in their entire journey where she thinks she might not be actively sweating.

The boys are still discussing the weather. Gamahiro says, “good thing too. I was about to start growing mushrooms.”

Obito jokes, “I could help with that, I think.”

To which the toad scoffs and says, “No, boy, the mokuton only works on plants.”

“Yeah, and?”

“Mushrooms aren’t plants.”

“What do you mean, mushrooms aren’t plants? Of course they are!”

Rin says, “Fungi.”

Obito’s mouth hangs open, “What?”

“Mushrooms aren’t plants, they’re technically fungi.” Rin says mildly. “So the Wood Release shouldn’t work on them.”

“I—but--that’s ridiculous. The mokuton doesn’t care about technicalities.” Obito argues vehemently. “It’s like, all plant life.”

“But a mushroom’s not a plant.”

“Stop that! It counts as one. It’s basically a plant. It functions like one.”

“Except, it’s totally not. It’s called the Wood Release for a reason.”

He says, “Succulents don’t have any wood either but I can feel them just fine!”

Rin says, “Can you feel any mushrooms right now?”

She can almost feel him reach out with his mokuton. It’s like the forest becomes more aware of them, trees perk up, roots curl around his toes. Water drips off the needles as branches shiver. He then turns on his sharingan and visually scans their surroundings. He says, “Its fucking Iwa. There’s just not any nearby.”

“Or can you just not feel them?” Rin asks innocently, “because they’re not fucking plants?”

“They’re alive!” Obito’s all wound up. It’s some of the most fun Rin’s had since crossing into Earth. “I should be able to feel them!”

Gamahiro jumps in, “are you implying that mushrooms aren’t alive, boy?”

“What? No! They’re alive!”

“So you can sense all living things, boy? Like animals? Like ninja?”

Rin says, “If a mouse eats a lot of seeds, can you still feel them inside the mouse?”

Gamahiro asks, “Can you grow them inside the mouse?”

He pinches the bridge of his nose exactly like Minato does when he’s utterly exasperated. Both Gamahiro and Rin recognize the habit and it softens Rin a little to see her teammate unconsciously adopt their teacher’s mannerisms. For as much as the stupid Nara Clan Head thinks he’s Madara’s pupil, he’s Minato’s student first.

“You guys,” he says, like he’s in great physical pain. “Do you all have mushrooms for brains? I am going to figure out how to resurrect the Shodaime and have him show you himself.”

Senju Hashirama could make thousands of arms to hit people with and control nonliving plant matter as well. He probably could influence mushrooms. Rin says, “But can you do it?”

“You know what?” Obito says. “That’s how I’m going to beat Zetsu. Trap them in a mushroom circle, so they can’t fight back.”

Gamahiro says, “So you admit mokuton won’t work?”

“Our mokuton is totally different!”

On and on it goes. Iwa is so stony that Obito can’t find any fungi handy to demonstrate his correctness. How is there not even mold or lichen or anything in this entire country? Her teammate’s spitting mad and the toad is having a grand time winding him up over it. It escalates into betting and Gamahiro preaches about the Shinobi Prohibitions, and then claims that as a summons, they don’t apply to him.

Watching them squabble and speculate, it strikes Rin how easy she is breathing. She might even be happy. The mokuton isn’t just her lifeline, the essential reset to counter her busted seal. She isn’t going to die, except for all the ways that a regular undercover jinchuuriki kunoichi could. The sword has been removed from her neck. She can heal. The Sanbi is safe inside her. He can heal as well.

When the road leads to a medium sized mining village snug between a clump of bald ridges, Rin is smiling more often than she has in over two years. They watch the traffic at the gates and the security around the wall and decide they either have to Kamui in or brave the shinobi manning the towers in the village.

They sneak in. No papers, just their aliases from Suna. Stand in line and check in at the gate. Not exactly stealthy, but Rin is curious to see how quickly news has spread, or if Suna is covering everything up so as not to lose face. It’s a risk they’ve agreed is worth it. The information they’ll gain will inform their movement in the country as a whole.

The chuunin at the gate don’t so much as blink at the names but it means little. “Business,” he states, stone faced as the wall he stands atop.

“Travel,” Rin replies. “North, towards the sea.”

Iwa shinobi wear red uniforms with dark flak jackets. She supposes it would blend in against the stone. “Shinobi?”

“Non-practicing.” Rin says. “We hope to take vows with a pilgrimage by sea.” Her plan is to hope that maybe he’ll see Obito’s bare feet and robe and think they’re religious.

He is impassive. “Cause trouble and you’ll be detained.”

“Understood.”

They’re granted access. As soon as they are out of earshot Obito rounds on her. “Did you imply I was a monk?”

She shrugs. “Might as well be. I bet lots of deserters and refugees from the war find religion.”

“I can’t quote scripture! My clan follows the Sage!”

She says, “I can teach you the prayers. Like my mother taught me.”

He doesn’t respond to that, just makes sure Gamahiro is squished down in the sling out of sight, like a warty loaf of bread.

The first hotel turns them away. The only rooms they can find willing to house them are a civilian apartment complex with vacant rooms. The shinobi hostel is hostile towards non-Iwa shinobi, but the civilians seem a little more relaxed after Rin feeds them her newly enlightened byline.

They ward the room and then Rin showers, she brushes her hair, and she drags Obito shopping.

She’s wanted this for so long and she makes him try on several different styles of dress to see what suits him best. He’s indulges her, but she knows his patience for it is not the greatest. She puts him in mesh and the outfitter grumbles about potentially arming foreign nin until she drops major coin on a fitted mesh shirt with half sleeves and mesh shorts to cover the white patch on his right leg. She wants all of his grafts protected, since he seems to have made it a habit of losing his arm and his thigh was badly damaged in the fight against Baki.

She layers it with a lightweight half sleeve shinobi style shirt, dark purple, because she can’t recall any major nation with purple as one of their colors, with a wide collar, movable but backed with tightly woven gear. He refuses to try on the cargo pants and picks out a pair of dark, straight legged trousers, flat black. He’ll have to wrap the ankles, and the sleeves, but it fits him and isn’t restricting.

He eventually settles on a new hooded cloak with a tight weave pattern, a dark ash gray color that pairs with the purple of his shirt and sturdy sandals that actually fit him. The proprietor offers to stitch any clan sigil on the back of the cloak and Obito smiles politely and turns her down.

Rin replaces her civilian vest with a fitted wrap dress over a mesh shirt and shorts, pink because she doesn’t want to match Obito too closely. It has capped sleeves and an offset hemline she’s sure she can modify to hide senbon. She throws a vest on over it with her new matching bag and calls it a day.

Their cover story is falling apart around them, especially when she buys a discounted brace of razor wire. They’ll be the best armed monks this side of the continent. The proprietor of the shop just shakes his head and says, “All you Hot Water bastards keep draining me dry. At least you didn’t try to convert me.”

She wonders what the fuck kind of ninja are fleeing Yu to Iwa to leave him with that impression.

They buy several sets of civilian wear just in case, with the understanding that Obito can drop off the backup in Kamui the next time he goes to check on Shukaku.

They pick up dinner from a street stall and learn that the village’s name is Boulder City, of all things. Iwa is nothing if not straightforward. Rin teaches him the simplest of mealtime prayers in a low voice as he mouths the words to himself, the ghost of her father’s lute like a half-heard melody she can’t quite make out. She feels closer to her family, like this, passing along the litanies in the same cadence she first learned them in herself.

The civilians are better off than in Suna, but it’s clear that they’re recovering from a recent war they just lost whereas Suna’s still recovering from a war they lost a generation ago. The message boards are lists of obituaries and missing persons reports. There’s a new memorial in construction in the village square. Everything is roughshod, plain, utilitarian in decoration. The buildings are roughhewn and dusty, with square edges and thick walls, shingled in pine and cedar, everything smelling of fresh pitch. There are no party shops or carts selling flowers. Nothing frivolous. There’s not even strays in the streets. Or children.

The civilians are almost as stone faced as the few shinobi teams stationed around. Taciturn, with hard expressions and rough hands. Square jaws and big noses, but as dark haired as people from the Land of Fire, with eyes of any color under the sun. Generally shorter and built more solidly; Obito sticks out like a sore thumb with his height and even Rin is slenderer and more under-muscled than the two kunoichi she sees around with their hair scraped back in tight braids.

The shinobi style is Iwa uniforms, with very few of the affectations or personalization that Konoha nin are prone to. The civilians dress in sturdy robes, informal, in the myriad colors of the earth itself. If their eyes are tired, they hide it well.

They pass a shop that seems half a restaurant and half an apothecary and discover that an Iwa delicacy is crickets fire roasted in honey and spices, scorpions dried and fried on skewers, and even blackened termites sold by the handful as a crunchy treat. They can’t help themselves and fill up a pouch on a whim as an experiment, giggling as they do.

Back in the room, Gamahiro’s plops himself squarely in the middle of Obito’s pillow, sharpening his katana till they gleam, well-honed enough to spilt a hair. They present the summons with the buggy treats with a flourish and bow. The toad delves through the pouch to unearth the crickets tossed in chili powder and looks first shocked then pleased.

They make exaggerated obeisance and genuflect through their overly serious form of address. “Careful, most esteemed Gamahiro sama, Lord of All Things Toad, Daimyo of the Mountain of Myoboku Country, the gentleman proprietor warned us that they were hot.”

The toad tossed a handful into his mouth with a leggy crunch. Rin is riveted. He chews a moment and swallows. Gamahiro declares, “Its good!”

He eats the whole pouch, offering commentary and critique on all the options. He’s not a fan of the scorpions, says they’re much better raw, and that frying them dries up all their delicate flavors. The termites are his favorite, and he eats through them like salt corn.

The next morning, Rin wakes well rested. They’re all in better moods and Gamahiro approves of the utility and discretion of their new outfits. They leave Boulder City behind them and head northeast, towards where they think Iwagakure no Sato lays.

The land dries out as they go, either from the lack of new rain or the latitude, Rin doesn’t know. The exposed rock gets larger than life, towering mesas, and other geological features she can’t name but is in awe of. Iwa shinobi teams travel by jumping from rocky spire to rocky spire, their feet planted solidly at all times like they’re connected to the stone. The teams watch them but do not engage, busy with whatever missions they’re assigned to. They take the main road to draw less suspicion. Obito even says he senses a hidden Black Ops team pass by, under a Concealment jutsu. The Land of Earth is vastly more populated than Wind and they’re watched almost every few hours by travelers passing them on the road going south.

Most of the foot traffic in Fire is merchants, but that’s not the case in Earth. The civilians on the road are refugees, relocating to seek better fortune in securer parts of the war-torn nation. They’re desperately poor, and largely ignored by the shinobi teams moving through. At least half of them are willing to steal to survive and Rin sees them eyeing the both of them consideringly, hollowed eyes lingering on their new gear, on the way they carry easily snatched packs, but Obito’s scowling and scars deter them more than a kunai pouch worn openly.

They camp out in the trees off the road in their tent, surrounded by traps and pines that would get pissed off if something tried to kill Obito. They’re keeping it low key, but trees don’t understand discretion. It aches at Rin inside, but she doesn’t poke her sleeping Bijuu either.

When Rin wakes one morning, almost halfway to the Village Hidden in the Stone, it’s to two toads sitting by the fire, Gamahiro chatting away to a red horned toad with black markings, wearing a black kimono with a white sash and mesh armor underneath, a sakazuki on his back and a sasumata in his hand.

Rin grins, “Welcome, Gamaken san! It’s so nice to see you!”

“Hello again, Rin chan. Thank you for being alive,” he says awkwardly. “I will try my best to assist you in this endeavor, but I am afraid I am most clumsy and ungraceful.”

Gamahiro laughs and thumps the more modest toad on the back, “no better toad for the job, Ken san!”

Obito’s watching the interaction from where he fiddles with designing a new trap. It looks like he wants to modify it to shoot poisoned barbs. He asks, “will you be leaving us, Gamahiro?”

“Not without a goodbye, boy.” The toad croaks, “I reached my limit for how long I can stay in this realm and I need a vacation.”

Rin understands that the summons is low on chakra and will have to be dismissed to Mount Myoboku to recover and recharge. It’s only been weeks since Minato summoned Gamahiro to them in Ishi. She underestimated their time limit on this plane.

She bows to Gamahiro. “Thank you for your service.”

Obito says, “Tell sensei we said hi.”

He waves it all away in favor of introducing the red toad to them properly, like it’s the first time they’ve met. “This is Gamaken. Expert at melee. Stamina is off the charts. He can take a hit but watch his self-esteem. One of the most reliable toads on the whole mountain, and one of the few that idiot Sage hasn’t managed to corrupt.” Gamahiro ignores Gamaken’s stutters about how he’s actually the worst and threatens, “If you neglect him, I will reverse summon myself back here and kick you asses so hard your ancestors will feel it.”

They nod seriously. Rin doesn’t know the horned toad that well but he seems shy. There’s something about him that reminds her of the Sanbi. Even the shield on his back mimics a shell.

Obito asks, “Would you like some breakfast, Gamaken san?”

“Ummmm……I do not require sustenance while on this plane, Obito kun, and I do not deserve your, your kind offering,” the red toad stammers.

There’s a beat of incredulous silence. Even the trees still.

“Time to go!” Gamahiro cackles over Obito’s enraged yell. Its inarticulate, but he lunges at the aquamarine toad who just croaks a nasty laugh and dismisses himself in a puff of white chakra smoke.

Rin shouldn’t feel betrayed by this, but she does. Obito says, “Frog legs! That’s a thing that people eat, right? Toad legs!”

“Ummmmmmm……” Gamaken flattens himself onto the rock, looking intimidated. In his full form he’s as big as the mountain who’s shadow they’re sheltering in. Right now, he looks like he’s been run over by a cart.

Obito’s still yelling and throwing rocks around, so Rin explains, “Gamahiro had us spend hours each day collecting bugs for him to eat.”

Obito’s fuming so Rin offers to carry Gamaken in an attempt to get to know the toad better. She learns he’s fire natured, usually fights other summons, and can cause explosions with his sasumata, which he stresses, are nothing special at all, and but a meagre attempt to represent the prestige of the Toad Contract. She learns that Kushina’s team made it safely back to Konoha and they’re investigating Ame and looking into the oldest records of the Leaf Village for mentions of Madara while keeping an eye out for anything Zetsu related.

Rin catches him up on their own accomplishments, which amount to, one brand new seal and a set of clean clothes and successful infiltration of an enemy state. Oh, and the Ichibi. Shukaku counts, she swears by it.

They walk and the road gets more and more packed. Gamaken has to stay out of sight; he’s a bright red toad wearing armor. And both Minato and Jiraiya weren’t shy about summoning the toads in the past wars. There’s every chance someone will recognize the newest Hokage’s summons and wonder why they were hanging around with a pair of missing nin. He fits in the sling and Rin covers him with her old vest to hide his toady redness. Just his yellow eyes peek out.

The road is full civilian refugees seeking asylum in Iwagakure or at the capital with the Daimyo. They travel in family groups or alone, pulling carts of furniture or carrying nothing with them but the clothes on their back. Everyone keeps to themselves. Iwa has bigger concerns than two unaffiliated nin minding their own business.

The land grows more severe. She hadn’t realized how north the Hidden Stone is, how drastically that changes the landscape. The stone formations get larger and larger, the canyon walls higher and the gorges deeper. Mesas and high plateaus rise over the scrubby ground. Scummy pools of water run through ditches in the deepest cuts of stone. It’s not as dry as Suna but its impassable just for the difficulty of the monoliths. The granite is stripped and striated like muscle, banded like all the anatomy books Rin studied in the hospital, like all the exposed muscle she’s stitched back together because of them.

The crossroads are populated by pop up shanty towns and they stay the night in one, crouched off the road in a bowl of stone to avoid the pickpockets. A trap goes off in the night, the high whine of wire stringing taut, and Obito jolts awake at the noise. Rin stands alert, ready to defend, but the trap does its work.

By the time they pick their way carefully to him, he’s dead. He’s wearing a dirty shinobi uniform but no hitai ate. He’s likely a deserter from the war and he’s skin and bones, fragile looking even clutching a wakizashi in one scarred hand, ninja wire looped around his throat.

She never even heard him coming.

Rin hides the body and Obito takes over her watch shift. Her nightmares are all about the war. Being in Earth is bringing back her worst memories. When she wakes, she’s hugging Gamaken like he’s a plush toy. Her teacher’s summons doesn’t mention it. Obito’s grown flowers around the campsite, a short spikey wildflower type with tiny yellow petals. Rin’s not one to pray over assassins in the night, but looking at the bunch of stems and petals lying on the unnamed man’s shallow grave, or maybe at Obito’s disturbed expression, she feels the need to sing a funereal chant under her breath in a low, mournful tune.

When she’s finished, Obito says, “The Path teaches that all battles are consecrated. That you do your enemy honor by treating him like an enemy. By not holding back.”

A gennin against traps set by a paranoid Uchiha, likely S ranked if still technically a gennin himself. Obito’s killed before, she’s seen him, and Rin has too, all shinobi do, but this didn’t feel like a battle. He was just desperate, hungry enough to be lured by their camp.

She says, “the flowers are a nice gesture. He would appreciate the care you took with them.”

There’re no good words to say. Justifications fall flat, sound more like excuses. Once, she’d watched Minato speak at Obito’s funereal and been furious that he’d found the words without crying. He’d even smiled and joked, sharing memories of his student as a gennin like he wasn’t gone. Even in her grief, she knew her teacher is cracked in ways that only ever hurt other people; that he feels nothing at all for opponents and very little for anyone else. She’s not convinced that the secret of his famed battle calm isn’t just apathy on an unthinkable scale. She’s not sure if he tries to justify the killing to himself, how she can justify it now. She’s just glad that with all the traits Obito copied from their teacher, a lack of empathy isn’t one of them.

She puts her arm around his shoulders and the angle is skewed since he’s so damn tall now but she teaches him the right prayers for saying goodbye and his voice is stumbling and hoarse and he can’t carry a tune in a bucket but the prayer songs sound good in any register and she can harmonize with the best of them.

Gamaken goes with Obito the rest of the day. People in the Land of Earth smoke more than anyone she’s ever seen, and he keeps his chakra under tight control so the flames at the end of the hand rolled cigarettes and pipes don’t ignite due to his dark mood. The Sandaime smoked, as do a few others, but she’s always categorized tobacco usage as a Sarutobi clan trait. But the civilians here smoke enough that she’s sure Kakashi could track the road just from the smell of them alone.

Soon, the land flattens out into a low, flat area, like the bed of a huge dried-up lake or an ancient seafloor. In the middle of the rocky plain lies an escarpment of huge boulders, maybe chunks of mountains eroded to a tumbledown rockslide of stone. In the middle of this natural fortification, shaped by generations of doton jutsu, lies Iwagakure no Sato, the Village Hidden in the Stone.

Nothing beside remains. The surrounding land has been cleared for miles. There is no way to sneak up on the natural stronghold on foot. Kamuing in directly will alert the Barrier Corps and the village will be on high alert. They stay on the road and hope their alias work as well as it did in the Hidden Sand Village.

She knows they should have a better plan than this, but ninja villages are designed as impenetrable fortresses. They can always try again later in a less kind capacity, but as a test run, they need to know how news of their escape from Suna has spread, if they’ll be detained at the gates or if they need to change their entire approach to the mission.

Instead of a wall, the gates are set inside the side of the mountain itself, open into a tunnel lit by recessed bulbs. The kanji for Earth is carved deeply above the gates, underneath that are the words Iwagakure no Sato.

This is the biggest risk they have taken so far. It borders on outright stupid. She’s likes to think she’s ready for any outcome, but if the jinchuuriki are problematically loyal to the third Tsuchikage, she’s not sure how to handle that. They fought Rasa, sort of, but Rin doesn’t kid herself about their odds against two enemy jinchuuriki.

As they approach the gates, Obito keeps his hand out, subtly grazing the hem of her vest, ready to snatch them both away if this goes south. They’re both wearing their mesh under their traveling gear. Gamaken is hiding rolled up inside their extra clothes. If the toad is spotted and recognized, it will be war for Konoha.

The chuunin at the gate is stony faced. He’s wearing the red shinobi uniform with a brown chuunin vest. A katana leans against the desk beside him in easy reach and his face is interestingly scarred. After a second, she realizes he’s survived a raiton attack that left its branching burns imprinted on his skin. She knows the pain of lightning, how it feels punching through your body, lighting every nerve on fire, the jolt of the electrocution. Its only thanks to the Sanbi that she’s not covered in Lichtenberg scars from the Chidori.

The gate guard is older than her father and serious. “Names and business.”

Rin takes the lead. “Sachira and Tobi, no clannames. Unaffiliated nin seeking refuge and work.”

If this is going to crash and burn, she wants the fucking street cred. Aliases are most useful if they’re entirely unknown or wildly famous.

“Papers.”

“We have only traveling permits from the Land of Wind.”

The guard says impassively, “stand aside.”

There is no argument to be had. They stand aside and another older chuunin comes to collect them. “Follow me,” he orders and leads them into a hidden room off to the side of the main gate, sculpted straight from the mountain.

They are alone in the room. The Iwa shinobi leaves them without another word. Standard procedure. They look at each other but don’t risk speaking. Obito is tense, likely spooked by being underground, but Rin keeps her body loose and waiting. They were not searched or disarmed. It’s protocol to interrogate strange ninja trying to enter your village but Rin doesn’t feel assuaged. Some gut instinct is telling her that something is wrong here.

They’re left waiting for hours in the small room. No windows. No food or water. No bathroom. Minato made sure they were accustomed to the hurry up and wait aspect of war but as the time drags on it feels more and more like a mistake to stay here. They don’t speak or signal to each other that the plan needs to change, but Rin knows their teamwork is tight enough that they’re on the same page. Obito does not move far from her side.

Eventually the door opens to reveal a team of Iwa shinobi wearing jounin flak jackets. Their chakra signatures feel like solid granite, immobile as the cliffs waves break against. The team captain says, “The Tsuchikage will see you now.”

Busted. Her heart sinks. Obito’s hand skims her elbow, ready to bail but Rin shifts her weight away from him and he stills. She runs through the contingencies in a split second. They can still gain more than they could reveal, if they play their cards right. Rin bows politely towards the captain. “We will follow, shinobi san.”

They don’t go through the main gates. The Iwa nin leads them through a smaller, more winding tunnel, the four Iwa nin in formation around them. They carry no visible weapons and their uniforms have no deviations. They even look eerily the same, carry themselves with the same unflinching solidness. There was no hint at specializations or techniques. These are the same enemies that Rin faced in war barely a year ago. She still has nightmares about ninja wearing that same uniform, and being surrounded by them now, deep underground, has both her and Obito’s hackles up.

When they emerge from the hidden door, it’s to a small alley not too far away from a huge tower with a conical roof with a huge kanji for Earth as its only decoration. The Tsuchikage Tower is shingled all over like the buildings in Boulder City, the roof steepling to a steep point.

There are people moving around going about their business in the square outside the administration building, both shinobi and civilian alike. Their group is eyeballed with suspicion but ignored with the same hardness they experienced from the travelers on the road.

Most of the infrastructure she can see is carved from the surrounding rock, brown with dun colored highlights running through the stone. The buildings rise in conical towers and tall spirals. There’s a surprising amount of water around, in fountains and pools, cascading down in waterfalls around buildings, running through canals under the bridges that crisscross between the massive structures of the village infrastructure.

The Tower is the tallest building and they are led right through the front doors. They aren’t restrained and Rin doesn’t feel like they’ve been arrested but a Black Ops agent in a ceramic mask signals from an alcove and vanishes. The entire Tower will be crawling with operatives. Rin tries to get a look around but the jounin next to her is blocking her view with his body, but Rin is positive she can identify different wings leading away to the missions desk, archives, and other administration centers.

They are led right up to the Tsuchikage’s office, the door to which is guarded by two more masked operatives in ceremonial tack. The markings of Iwa Blacks Ops are brown and they stand stark against the white of the ceramic, the solid brown of their plate armor. At the coded knock from the head jounin, the doors swing open and they’re led inside.

The desk is smooth stone in front of the most uncomfortable looking chair Rin’s ever seen. The dreaded hat sits neatly on the desk. It is the only thing in the entire room.

The Third Tsuchikage is old, older than she imagined, and short, barely over three feet tall. She thinks she could pick him up and carry him like a child. But Lord Ohnoki wears a severe frown on his liver spotted face and he’s methodically stroking his pointed white beard. The hand she can see is strong in its movements, deft as it strokes his whiskers just as severely as he’s frowning. The Sandaime is old too and Rin knows what advanced age really meant in shinobi.

Instead of leaving, the jounin team join the operatives in the office, one at each cardinal point and Rin’s heart sinks even further.

They study each other in silence. Rin also studies the office and the other shinobi in the room. Two aids flank the desk. The operatives have flickered out of sight, leaving only the four visible jounin, and the Tsuchikage himself. The legendary Fence Sitter, master of the Particle Style kekkei tota, one of the only three-way nature transformations in the world. The possibility of this meeting going south and all of her atoms being disintegrated only makes her wonder what would happen to the Sanbi if she gets unmade by this man.

Something hums inside her.

The Tsuchikage finishes eyeing Obito and his sharp gaze returns to her. Chancing it, she drops into a slow but polite bow. “Lord Tsuchikage sama.”

He tilts his head at them as if he’s making a decision. A signal passes around the room so quickly she doesn’t catch it and chakra ignites from the four jounin in the corners, their hands coming together as a four corner barrier seal springs up between them. Rin has a healthy fear of fuuinjutsu and Obito must come to the same conclusion because his hand is on her, ready to yank them both away, but the barrier doesn’t come at them. Instead, it connects between the four cardinal points of a compass, each member of the jounin, no the sealing team serving as a corner.

It’s not an offensive technique. It’s a barrier. It’s a trap. A cage, like the one she has inside of her.

The walls of the four corners barrier jutsu are stable and flicker a nice pink color, setting everything in the office awash with a pink filter not unlike how she imagines Obito’s sharingan paints the world around him. She spares one look at her teammate and his eye is still dark, dojutsu inactive but his mouth is set in a deliberate thin line. When he glances at her, it is with a small smile, only for her.

She sets her own face into impassivity, more comfortably falling into her roll as Sachira. Obito lets go of her elbow and she keeps the relief off of her face. She cocks her own head, birdlike. Her fear of Iwa’s kage is her own, not Sachira’s, the nobody girl from Tea. She says, “Tsuchikage sama?”

Ohnoki straightens in his chair and she can hear his back crack from across the room, through the barrier. He lifts his bearded chin and laughs and laughs, a slow, rumbling sound that crashes out of him. He says, “don’t play coy with me, child. I know who you are.”

Did he? It isn’t impossible. But she’s willing to bet he doesn’t. She keeps silent, just in case.

He says, “you’re the ones giving Suna the runaround.” She feels even more relief and keeps it from her face. Even Obito relaxes slightly. Ohnoki continues, “My spies told me about your tricks.”

He indicates the barrier. It’s a favorable position for him and she can admire how clever the plan is, how simple. He keeps them trapped, gets what he wants from them, be it information or otherwise, and they stand helpless under the threat of him atomically annihilating them at his leisure.

But he miscalculated. He’s misjudged Obito’s technique. It isn’t a typical time/space jutsu, and this trap, which they had no doubt modeled with Minato in mind, doesn’t account for the truth of his jutsu. Obito stands tall and alert. Ohnoki should be more observant, because he doesn’t look trapped. He’s grown confident in himself and his abilities. If this audience goes sideways, he isn’t cut off from Kamui. Ohnoki hasn’t neutralized the threat, he just thinks he did. Rin hopes it makes him overconfident, lets him give away more than he means.

The Tsuchikage says, “the newest Bingo Book lists you two as thieves wanted by Wind. I know that idiot Rasa and his misplaced pride. I can even,” he says, “guess what exactly it is you stole.”

Inside her, waves lap against the bars as something big stirs the waters. The Sanbi is waking up. Rin says, deciding to go all in, “and what is it do you think we allegedly stole, Tsuchikage sama?”

Ohnoki just laughs some more, like they’re the funniest things he’s seen since the war. It’s not a nice sound, grating and hacking like he’s going to cough up a lung. He says, “the thrice damned Ichibi, that’s what.”

She can salvage this. There’s no need to retreat. She can spin this their way still. Rin widens her eyes, the picture of shocked innocence, just a little too wide to be sincere. She says, fishing, “why would we do that, Tsuchikage sama?”

The mirth leaves his face. Ohnoki says, “If you’re here to gain access to Earth’s own Bijuu you are sorely mistaken. I want to know who sent you and why.”

Rin says, “No one sent us.”

“No?” Ohnoki asks. “You were paupers in Sunagakure and now wear brand new armor. You’ve a sponsor, at the very least, or I’ll eat my hat.”

Rin repeats, firmer, “No one sent us, Tsuchikage sama.”

He fires back, “What did you do with Wind’s Tailed Beast?”

“You think I know anything about the Tailed Beasts?”

“I hoped you would,” Ohnoki says. “Because I’d be willing to buy it from you.”

There’s a beat of absolute silence. Obito says, “Motherfucker.”

Black rage fills her, leaking through the bars of the cage from the Sanbi. The guards tense, furious at the disrespect, but she doesn’t care. Even if Obito is cut off, Rin thinks that maybe, if she unleashes the Sanbi’s power, she can overload the barrier and escape. She says, voice tight with anger, “The Bijuu are not weapons, Tsuchikage sama. They weren’t meant to be controlled.”

He’s not actually dismissive and that worries her immediately. He’s too clever by far and she wonders what exactly it is that she’s giving away. He says, “No? Then what are we meant to do with them, Sachira of the Land of Tea?”

Free them, her heart says, but that’s Rin speaking, not Sachira. A missing nin would find some way to take advantage of one of the greatest weapons in the world. She says, “I would be willing to trade. The sealed Ichibi for an audience with the jinchuuriki of the Gobi and Yonbi.”

She’s surprised him, and the other shinobi in the room. They’re too skilled to give much away, but the sealing team maintaining the barrier shift enough that their chakra control wavers and tiny ripples flicker over the surface of the barrier like static.

Ohnoki says, “Prove you have the Ichibi first.”

He’s lying. Rin says, “Prove you have the Yonbi and the Gobi.”

He could be carved from stone, hard and cold, just an extension of the chair he sits on. Here comes the vaporization. Obito hangs on to her vest, the rolled-up shirt containing Gamaken in his sling tucked close to his chest. Inspiration seizes her and Rin takes her chance, grabbing the bundle from Obito and holding it out.

“The Ichibi’s in here,” she says and Gamaken gives a helpful wiggle, causing Ohnoki’s eyes to bug out of his head. “Your turn.”

He rounds on his shinobi, “You didn’t search them?”

It’s clearly rhetorical and the captain holds his tongue. There are veins bulging out of the Tsuchikage’s forehead, looking fit to burst. He’s apoplectic. It’s in his rage, in the shifting of the guard, the uncertainty and surprise when she first named them, that Rin understands.

She says, “Beware a being named Zetsu, one half black and one half white. No good comes from them. They are oni, demon, kijin, and when they come to whisper their lies, remember that I warned you.” She looks around at the other Iwa nin. “I warned you all.”

Obito takes his cue, his hand tightening on her arm, looking resolutely at the ground to hide his eye as his chakra flares hot and heavy, wrenching them from inside the barrier into Kamui. In the last split second, she can hear the Tsuchikage’s roar of rage at their escape, but she’s got Gamaken in one hand and her teammate in the other and the time has come to utilize one of her sensei’s harder lessons for her to learn. There is no shame in a tactical retreat. It’s time to cut and run.

Chapter Text

Chapter Thirteen: Kakashi: Headlong Rush

Kakashi is going to kill his sensei. There’s a half-formed plan in his head, and it won’t work, it would never work, but its stubbornly formulating there anyway, festering every minute since Minato dodged his leap and Hirashined right out of his office, going after his teammates and leaving Kakashi behind.

Left him behind, after using his intel, that he had gathered. He dove for the window, recognizing the look in his sensei’s blue eyes, that chilling silence, the killing violence, and he did this, but he still isn’t fast enough. Minato flashes away. He’s gone. He left Kakashi behind.

He’s frozen only a moment from the shock of it, from the instant static of panic, but then he has a plan. Not a good one. He wheels around towards the windows, intending to jump, but before he can make it there’s a “Kage Mane no Jutsu,” and he freezes again as the technique takes effect.

“Shadow Possession Jutsu, complete.” Nara Shikaku is crouched by the wall, hands in a rat seal, and his shadow extends out to capture Kakashi’s own. He stands and puppets Kakashi down from the windowsill, forcing him to mimic his movements. Frustration surges through him but he can’t break the jutsu.

Shikaku says, “keep your head on, boy. No telling where he’s gone.” He lets Kakashi struggle internally a bit. “If I let you go, are you going to run? Or are you going to follow orders like a shinobi?”

Kakashi can’t even blink. The Nara Clan Head’s hold is tight enough that if he focuses his attention, he can keep Kakashi’s lungs from inflating, his chest from rising and falling. He seethes, but not much else.

Shikaku studies him then sighs, letting him go. The part of him that’s fourteen and angry, and in this moment it feels like most of him, wants to retaliate. But in his bones, he’s a trained and talented shinobi, a veteran jounin, and he will not embarrass either himself or his sensei by throwing lightning at a Clan Head. To keep from feeling tempted, he falls into attention, his hands clasped behind his back, mentally reciting the calendar backwards by holiday until he’s sure his one exposed eye shows nothing but cold indifference. Turning it all off is a skill he’s picked up from his teacher, and it used to make Rin sadder than usual but then he killed her and then maybe he needed it to function.

“Nara sama, permission to be dismissed.” His tone is flat. He’d be proud of how well he’s doing if he was feeling anything.

The Nara says, “you are to go home, Hatake. You are to go directly home and not to leave until you are summoned. This is classified. Understood?”

He nods tightly, squashing the resentment. He sounds bored, digging just the tiniest bit at the Nara. “Understood, Nara sama.”

Shikaku is indifferent to his subtle disrespect. “Go home, Kakashi.”

He salutes, and it’s not even sarcastic, neat and clean he as fires it off and even leaves through the doors to make a point. A bunshin peels off him and hares away into the night. He gives it three minutes before the Nara sets an entire ANBU squad on him. He takes the roofs back to the Hatake compound, his careful mask slipping. He goes, but he goes home.

When he gets there, he funnels chakra through his nose. His tail is getting smarter about covering their scents from him, but he can just feel in his gut that they’re out there. He locks the door then activates his wards. With a few quick hand signs and some deliberation, he summons Guruko and Uhei.

The greyhound appears in a puff of smoke, the bloodhound at her side. After discerning the lack of attack around them her hackles lie flat and she peers at Kakashi with just the right amount of worry. She says, “Pakkun said you might call on me.”

Irrationally, this just pisses him off more. He hates being fourteen. He says, “Uhei, there’s a bunshin heading for the wall.”

The hound looks up at him with droopy eyes but he nods and vanishes out the door. A part of him knows it won’t be enough. Minato is already gone. There’s no stopping him now.

“Sensei’s gone after them.”

It settles around them. She sighs, sitting primly and crossing her paws like a classy kunoichi. She says, “what are you going to do?”

Its less that his thoughts are a muddle, and more like they’re going everywhere all at once. He contingency plans have contingencies. It all boils down to: “They might be alive.”

After a long second, he adds, “And he’ll lie to me about it.”

Because Minato won’t want him to carry the guilt. Konoha wouldn’t want to admit it either. The Uchiha would kill him themselves before they’d allow word to get out. And Minato is such a complete liar that Kakashi will live the rest of his life never knowing if he killed his teammates during the war or after. He doesn’t know why the distinction matter so much, they’ll be dead either way, and its not like he’s unfamiliar with shame. But this would change things. This would change him.

“What are you going to do, Kakashi?”

He doesn’t know.

“I need more information.”

She hums thoughtfully. They’ve known each other all his life. His pack knows him like no other, knows how he struggles to ask for help, how he can’t come right out and say what he needs in this moment. He thinks they’re the only things he might trust completely in the whole world.

He slides down to the tatami and allows Guruko to press herself against his leg. She says, “whatever you learn, they are still your teammates.” And she says it to mean pack and maybe that’s why it hurts so much. In his mind Obito is saying, “those who turn their back on their friends are worse than scum” and in this very room he found his own father in a pool of blood.

He can’t force the images of his old dead teammates and this new possibility of alive nukenin teammates to reconcile, so he handed the responsibility up the chain of command. Textbook compliance. He’s never thought of himself as a coward, but it shames him, how readily he’d washed his hands of them.

There’s not enough regret in the entire war-torn world to convince a man like Minato to choose mercy. He’d known that. He’d done it anyway. Telling Minato was his choice.

When the pressure gets to be too much, he dismisses her, then both Uhei and the doomed clone. He can’t lean on his pack, not for this, not when their morals raised him.

He has half a plan in his mind but its grown so convoluted that it wraps back around to wound him instead. All his plans tend to do that, lately.

Hours trip past in a daze when Dragonfly comes to tell him he’s been summoned by the Hokage. All the rage leaks back in to cover the fear that he’s about to face his teacher with the same empty look on his face he had when Kakashi woke up in the hospital with one eye covered and the memory of Rin’s blood on his hands.

He blows through the Hokage Tower and into the office with a vengeance. It’s not quite a front; he is angry at Minato. The Nara being there makes it worse.

And the worst thing is that Minato doesn’t look empty.

Fear crackles higher through him.

Kushina’s arrives shrouds the meeting in secrecy, and he can almost hear the cover up begin. Minato is looking at him like he expects him not to like a word that comes out of his mouth and he’s a better liar than this but he knows.

Minato says, “They’re alive. They’re both alive, and they’re coming home.”

Kakashi reels back from the shock. He recalculates, reorients, rocks forward onto his toes, locking his attention on Minato with the intensity of a collie in a stare down.

The story comes out in carefully sectioned chunks, meant to not be overwhelming. Kakashi hadn’t thought there could be any explanation for desertion and the pieces click into place with a finality he hadn’t expected either.

A Bijuu. A sacrifice framed as a suicide. Uchiha Madara, something called the Gedo Mazo, Zetsu. And more damning than all of it together: the mokuton.

Under the hitai ate, his sharingan burns in his head. He hears more than Minato says, hears the word mangekyo sharingan where Kushina and Shikaku won’t. It’s a different kind of sense, an ugly, wretched sense, to connect Uchiha Madara to his Chidori punching through Rin.

Taken separately, these are all capitol offenses. Inexcusable. Minato says Sanbi, says Ichibi, says unintentional like that should mean something it doesn't. Most unbelievable is that Minato listened, that’s he’s convinced of this impossibility.

While Kakashi knows Minato is a perfect liar, he knows his teammates aren’t. The Obito he knew is incapable of even the most basic forms of deceit.

It can’t be some elaborate trick concocted to save their skins. Even together, the pieces don’t fit into any cohesive whole, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Minato was willing to be convinced, even in the face of several very good reasons to terminate the nukenin on sight.

Kakashi has that same choice.

Minato says bomb, says experiments. His sensei, protecting his team. His team.

They’re alive.

Its not really much of a choice after all.

“Kushina,” Minato says and the Uzu kunoichi bares her teeth in delight, every inch a vengeful princess of Whirlpool ready to rain her wrath upon the heads of whoever dared touch her people. “You’ll take a sealing team to Ishi, lock down the Sanbi’s seal.”

Red flashes behind her as she tosses her head imperially. “You know it.”

Kakashi straightens when Kushina does, ready to accompany her off to Stone. There is no doubt in his mind that he is going. Even Shikaku is going.

“Kakashi will help me address the security leak and the nukenin organization playing patsy around the continent.”

He feels like he’s been jolted by his own raiton. He is hot, then cold, then hot again.

He revisits his kagecide plans. He says, inflectionless, “What.”

Minato looks at him. “Kushina, Shikaku, you have your orders. Circle back for a full debrief. You leave as soon as possible.”

Kushina looks unhappily at him but she leaves and Shikaku follows, grumbling. When it’s just Minato and Kakashi left alone in the room, he says, “I’m going.”

Minato says, “I’m not excluding you. But you can’t go. Not when the council is breathing down my neck about you and the security of the village is compromised.”

He says that, but Kakashi feels like he’s being excluded. They’re alive. He says, “you’re keeping me from them.”

Minato closes his eyes. “Not willingly.”

“For paperwork.”

He just sighs.

“I can help them.”

“You can help me, here, in the village. I need shinobi I can trust.”

Kakashi is silent. It is a rebellion. Minato says seriously, “Kakashi, if I let you go, then you know I’d have to ask you to come back. Don’t make me burden you with that choice.”

He repeats, stubbornly, “I can help them.”

“You’re too high profile to be a nukenin, Kakashi. After how short a leash I’ve kept you on, do you really think the village would believe that I’d suddenly just thrown you into the wind? My last student?” If it hurts, Kakashi ignores it in favor of being mad again. Minato continues, “And I know you broke into the Archives and stole those scrolls. The only reason you’re not in T&I right now is because you know we can’t prove it. Fugaku has filed a formal complaint with the office of the Hokage. Consider this your punishment.”

He's fuming still. Minato says, “sit down, Kakashi. Let me explain.”

He sits. Stiffly. Crosses his arms, projects nonchalance so hard it just accentuates the unhappy tension thrumming through him like lightning.

Minato says, “I’m reinstating you. You have a mission, effective immediately.”

Kakashi doesn’t trust it, but he’s interested against his will. His sensei says, “It’s S rank and I’m trusting your discretion with it. I’m giving you clearance up to level 8 and the ability to requisition regular forces without approval, but I remind you that the village is potentially compromised and your teammate’s lives and the fate of the shinobi world rest on your good judgement with this. Do you accept?”

“I do.”

Minato says consideringly, “you did your own reconnaissance in Suna to find them. I need you to track these nukenin and zetsu and keep them out of the village. Look for missing nin, anomalies in local plant life, weird growth patterns, anything unusual. Information is getting out, and I want to find out how. Find the leak, be it zetsu or the patsy org. If necessary, eliminate them.”

It doesn’t sound like just paperwork. “Understood, Hokage sama.”

Minato says, “You will be based here in the village, but upon my approval you can follow your leads if they take you elsewhere.” He says, slower now, “be careful with this one. There’s no telling how far down this goes and I have a bad feeling about it.”

Kakashi’s not sure what to say to that. His own instincts are excellent. Minato sighs and says, “come on, get over here. I’ve got something for you.”

Kakashi warily approaches and almost panics when Minato pulls him into a hug. That’s twice now in just a few months. If he keeps this up, Kakashi will equate hugs to lifechanging news. He squirms, pulling away, before it hits him and he freezes for a second before he’s sniffing again, inhaling deeply through his mask, drinking in the scents of Obito and Rin, of his team,, alive. Something in him clicks into place again and this time he doesn’t question the picture it makes. He settles into the embrace, memorizing all the changes. No wonder Pakkun said the lead was inconclusive. Obito smells like a tree on fire now, and Rin’s is fundamentally different in a way he is forced to categorize as jinchuuriki. The second the thought connects, he realizes where he’s smelled it before.

He bites his lip under his mask but keeps quiet. If Minato or Kushina meant for him to know, they would have told him. He wonders if his teacher knows just what secret he’s accidentally given away, what Kakashi is able to discern about his fiancé through the changes in Rin’s scent.

Smelling them calms him. His pack tends to roll around on each other, to cover themselves in the familiar, comforting scents of their packmates. Kakashi’s never really understood the impulse until now.

“Thank you,” he says quietly. He feels more relaxed than he has in a long time.

Minato lets him go with a smile, like he’d known the good it would do him to smell the proof on his jacket. He says, “They said to tell you hi for them.”

Kakashi doubts that. “Is that all?”

“They’re doing okay,” Minato says. “Better than to be expected, given what they’ve went through. Rin’s major problem can hopefully be cleared up and save the both of them a lot of grief.”

Kakashi clarifies, “did they say anything else?”

He looks at Kakashi and it’s an odd expression, like he knows that Kakashi won’t accept pity from him. He says, “what they need to say to you, all the important things, you already know. Rin wants to see you in person. Obito will bluster, but he does as well.”

All of his nightmares recently have been Rin’s blood up to his elbow, seared onto his brain forever, of Obito trading his life away for his. Maybe it’s for the best they take a chance to talk it all over in person.

Minato says, “I’m sending Kushina with a list of supplies. Is there anything you’d like to say to them?”

He doesn’t need to think about it. “They already know.”

He dodges Fugaku on the way home. Guess the Nara really did send for him. He’s not in the mood. He enters through his doton tunnel just to screw with the ANBU, checks to make sure his personal and generational clan wards are in place, the old blood and chakra keyed into the wards thrumming like a building storm.

He slices viciously at his thumb with a shuriken till it bleeds enough to call them all here. The hand signs are ingrained. He’s on auto pilot, already planning. “Kuchiyose no Jutsu!”
He summons his pack. When the smoke clears, he says, “they’re alive. Both of them.”

Pakkun looks grim, like he’s sure Kakashi is going to ask for his help to kill them both again. For a second, the relief is astounding. To know he did not have to hunt down his teammates. That he could help them instead.

He relays the situation and their newest role in it. It doesn’t sound any less wild than the first time he heard it. “Here,” he says, spreading his arms. “I’ve got the mokuton’s scent on me. We can use it to track the clones.”

They pile on in, wiggling in their excitement. There is no small amount of relief in them either. He says, “case the village. They’re getting in somehow, without alerting the Barrier Corps. Tracking only. Do not engage. From now on, every tree is a potential enemy.”

The pack disperses, out his tunnel and away. Only Pakkun is left. The pug says, “What are you going to do, Boss?”

“I’m going to set something on fire. Watch for it, it’ll be impossible to miss.”

The pug just shakes his head at his methods but doesn’t argue. Once he leaves, Kakashi goes out the front, making sure his ANBU detail follows.

Once back in the business district, he loses them. It’s not as hard as it should be. One day the Nara will snap and sic an Aburame on him, but until then Kakashi utilizes the oversight while he can. When he’s sure he’s alone, he scopes out a warehouse filled with scrap. Someone’s been using it to store a variety of overstock, from textiles to beans to lamp oil. The explosive tags adhere nicely to the beans.

Then he sends a clone to find Gai and lure him and his team to the market. He bumps into Asuma and Kurenai buying produce and maneuvers them into place as well. He flares his chakra to get the attention of his scrambling guards and forms a single-handed seal behind his back.

The warehouse erupts. It’s not a pyre or a watchfire, but it is big. A fitting tribute. The lamp oil is overkill. The ensuing flames draw in the attention of all the shinobi nearby and the ANBU reveal themselves to battle the fire with suiton. Uhei is peeking out from an alley, keeping an eye on the situation.

To everyone nearby, it looks like an unusual amount of highly ranked ninja and ANBU just so happened to be hanging around this warehouse. Even Chouza is there, so the noble clans are sure to be involved. In a minute, the Leaf Police will be on scene. Inspired, Kakashi joins in, making sure his actions are a little too frantic, just a little desperate to save a no-name warehouse full of junk. Even better, Gai is full of genuine grief, loud and bawling, making it into a scene above its call for. Even civilians on the block take notice.

From the alley, Uhei nods at him. In the chaos, Kakashi flashes new orders at him and he slinks away. Kakashi himself skedaddles before Fugaku shows up. As much as the Clan Head would love to arrest him for arson, that would not be exercising discretion.

From a safe distance, he watches jounin scramble among the remains of a ton of old beans while officers scratch their heads. The ANBU have helpfully vanished. Rin would think its hilarious.

That night, the pack returns to give their findings. “You were right, Boss.” Uhei says, flopping down across his knees for a pat. “Word has already traveled, and the suspicions are flying. After the official investigation is up, let’s see who comes sifting through the ashes.”

“Bet they’ll be disappointed it was just old beans!” Bisuke grins a doggy grin, tongue lolling out.

“And the casing?” Kakashi asks.

“Nothing to report. No sign of any clones or scent of the mokuton,” Pakkun states.

“There was one weird tree over by the flower shop, but I think it’s just regular-ugly and not evil-ugly,” Akino says and is then tackled by Bisuke who cries, “I told you it was supposed to look like that!”

They wrestle as Kakashi considers the information. “Am I implicated in the fire?”

“Dunno,” Guruko says. “Your ANBU stayed on you until the shift change. One could have reported you after.”

He hums thoughtfully. “I’ll watch the warehouse. You get some rest.”

Buru takes that as an invitation to sit on him and make himself comfortable. When he tries to shove himself away, the bulldog just gives him sad, kicked puppy eyes. With his size, it’s shouldn’t work as well as it does.

He sighs. He gets the message. He knows he should sleep as well but he’s already baited the perfect trap for traitors and dated any potential leaked information. His teammates stole a Bijuu from a kage. The least he can do is find the leak.

But Pakkun looks grumpier than usual at his attempts to escape and he really hasn’t celebrated his teammates being alive and loyal Konoha shinobi yet. He settles down in the middle of his pack as they all press close. He’ll give himself this one night. Let his pack stay close to him for now. They’ll be enough work to do in the morning.

When he wakes sweating and shivering from a nightmare where they’re truly dead, the both of them, dead again, and it’s his fault, it’s the tinniest possible tongue that licks the back of his wrist, calming him down enough to go back to sleep.

He’s eating grilled eggplant for breakfast when his proximity tag goes off. Tiger knocks on his door with a summons to the Hokage’s office. He forces himself not to consider her shinobi identity, out of respect for her station, if not her tailing abilities. If pressed, he could probably identify half of his usual detail. Owl has his damn clan sigil on the pommel of his sword.

He accepts the summons and finishes his breakfast before strolling nonchalantly past the scene of the crime on his way in. Hands in his pockets. Carefree. Not guilty in the slightest.

Minato’s head is in his hands. “Help me remember,” he says, “since when has having level 8 clearance given you a pass on arson.”

Kakashi says, “If you find the culprit, maybe you could ask him.”

“ANBU and a dozen witnesses put you on sight.”

“On sight doing what? I was going to challenge Gai to a race through the market.”

Minato sighs. “Do I need to order a full investigation on this, yes or no?”

Kakashi says, “It’d be a better use of resources to see who comes sniffing around a nondescript warehouse fire that had half a dozen ANBU on scene immediately, as well as several high profile off duty jounin. This comes at an auspicious time, too.”

Minato says, “I’m deducting the cost of the property damage from your mission pay, Kakashi. We do not sanction arson against our own property. Especially in the middle of the village.”

Kakashi narrows his eye. He can think of three potential times that Sarutobi may have sanctioned worse property damage to cover covert operations in the village and one time he definitely did. He says, “the warehouse is fine. It was just some old beans.”

Minato shakes his head. Kakashi wonders why he’s so surprised; he taught him this exact tactic. He says, “just keep me updated, will you? And stop dodging Fugaku. We need him on our good side now, remember?”

Obito. Kakashi cringes a bit inside. “Yes, sensei.”

To show he’s not too mad, Minato invites him to dinner later that evening. The prospect of free ramen lifts his spirits some.

He swings by the Leaf Police to find Fugaku sitting in his sparse office with a severe frown, the red armband of a Chief stark against the dark navy of his uniform. The blueprints for a warehouse are laid out on his desk. His frown only deepens when he spots Kakashi hovering outside his open door.

“Hatake,” he says, “you’ve skipped our last three sessions.”

Kakashi swallows his pride. He bows, genuinely. “My apologies, Fugaku sama. It will not happen again.”

The lack of his usual excuses stumps him for a second. “What is it you want, Hatake?”

He stays bowed. “To continue our lessons, Fugaku sama. I also have a request for a clan medic.”

He raises himself and taps on his tilted hitai ate, over his implanted eye. Fugaku squints at him. They’re in public still, so he only says, “Have you damaged the implant, Hatake?”

He feigns sheepishness, knowing Fugaku would interpret it correctly. After a second of suspicion, he sighs. “Be at Training Ground H. 8 o’clock. I will arrange for a clan medic in the morning.”

“Thank you, Fugaku sama. I will see you then.”

Gai pounces on him outside the building and they really do have that race. Property damage ensues, out of spite on his part and exuberance on Gai’s. He’s losing, until he throws an elbow, then a smoke bomb when that doesn’t work. Gai’s not great at fighting dirty, but his longer legs and insane stamina keep him ahead until Kakashi gets creative. He’s got to stop challenging his rival to physical challenges until after he has his growth spurt. He’s fast, but Gai is a machine.

They trade banter as they sprint headlong through throngs of innocent bystanders, a jounin and a tokubetsu slap fighting mid-stride. Its all on script, until Gai tilts a white good guy smile at him, one that doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

“I see the Fires of Youth burn bright in you, my Esteemed Rival!”

At the mention of fire, Kakashi escalates his cheating beyond all call for, stabbing for a kidney with a kunai in immediate discouragement.

Gai gets the message. He backs off the subject, flails loudly as a distraction so the exchange goes unnoticed by the spectators shaking their heads at them. Kakashi’s not even an official suspect, but somehow, the spandex-wearing taijutsu specialist knows him well enough to predict and then abide the standdown. His only excuse is that the older teen wore him down over years of persistent nagging and also that Gai’s far more perceptive than anyone ever gives him credit for. That’s the thing about speaking in capitals and wearing green spandex: people tend to stop looking further.

Kakashi’s only up by two now. Gai keeps meticulous score, lamenting his loss, but praising the qualities of Youth in both himself and his rival. Kakashi ambles off before those bright eyes see through his careful layers of misdirection and to the turmoil beneath. Gai’s meddlesome when he feels he needs to be and not above intervening in his rival’s life. It’s always annoying, but downright disastrous at the moment.

After a ramen dinner with a single Minato, he checks into the Uchiha Compound under the disapproving eye of the clan guard. The clan training grounds are organized by a letter system instead of numbers, and he’s sure that all the letters mean something significant, but he’s never been told what.

Fugaku is seething during their training. Kakashi guesses he got a standdown order from the Hokage about the arson case. There is no small chance he’s seen Kakashi’s name on the witness account and surmised whatever nefarious deeds he suspects him to have done. But he’s too smart to ask outright. He takes his ire out by smacking Kakashi around and criticizing his katon, thin lips getting thinner by the minute.

After Kakashi fudges the reason he needs a medic, he gives his mangekyo a cursory once over and declares it fine in his eyes. It’s not like Kakashi can tell him about the flashes. He still can’t figure out Kamui for himself, the time/space technique Obito unlocked. The most Kakashi can do is chakra exhaust himself staring at a log. He can get it to twist from its sharingan state into the pointed mangekyo pattern but after that, it feels a lot like burning chakra just looking around. The Uchiha warned him that it functions like a parasite, draining him while destroying itself as well. He’d taken the knowledge of his eventual blindness like a kunai to the gut. He didn’t like the possibility of losing Obito’s last gift to him. It’s a good thing that his teammate is not as dead as previously believed.

That night, a cold nose presses into his neck and Akino whines. He sits up and the husky says, “Uhei’s got something.”

Someone must have taken the bait at the warehouse. He gears up in seconds and shunshins to a nearby rooftop, sneaking up on the crime scene, still marked off by Leaf Police tape. He can’t spot the bloodhound mix at all. After a few minutes of staring at charred beans, he has to admit that he isn’t seeing anything. But something feels off, in his gut. The night is still and the wind carries few scents to him from this vantage point, but something niggles at him. Uhei wouldn’t have been mistaken. Someone is there.

He sneaks closer, right up to the barricade. He still doesn’t see anything. There’s prints in the ash at his feet; no telling how old they are, not with the lack of wind and Uchiha stomping all over the crime scene. But Kakashi’s was a tracker before he was an assassin. He crouches low, funneling chakra through his nose, pulling air intently through his mask. A flash of familiar armor, honing oil, something that smells musty, like stale air clinging to the fabric of the uniform underneath the armor.

His eye narrows. Why is a camouflaged ANBU operative sifting through the debris after the Hokage ordered the police to look away? There’s no evidence of scent blockers, but it’s not one of his usual detail, who’s scent should be here from earlier.

The agent leaves without revealing themselves. Kakashi mulls it over. In the darkness, Uhei slinks over, nose to the ground. He sneezes, blowing ash over his sandals.

Kakashi pats his head. If it was professional curiosity, they’d’ve come off duty. The uniform makes it official, but he’s almost sure it isn’t.

He spends the next few days surreptitiously trying to identify individual ANBU, not by their shinobi identities, or even their masked identities, nothing like that, but on a basis of who interacts with who. It would have been easier if his own tails hadn’t disappeared overnight. He guesses Minato finally pulled them just when he started taking advantage of his own personal entourage. He has his pack busy counter-trailing them through the village and that in itself is risky enough business, but he knows Minato’ll never give him the clearance to look at the ANBU roster and the Nara would skin him alive for even asking.

But ANBU are the one organization free to move around the village in complete secrecy.

He’s thinking about plant monsters moving around the village, and he’s thinking about enemy shinobi moving around the village, and which one would be harder to spot. He’s thinking about how nobody sees ANBU. Not even other ANBU. If one has turned traitor and is leaking information, they could do irreparable damage to the village, even if they’re in no affiliated with Madara and his minion organization.

But the operative had been on duty, and that worries him more than anything. He was wearing the uniform. He had the mask, and those aren’t just lying around.

But he has no true evidence. Just a single scent where it shouldn’t have been. He would be sure, first. He has to be sure.

No one but the Hokage has the authority to mobilize ANBU. From everything his team relayed about Madara and Zetsu, it isn’t inconceivable that they’ve gained some control over Konoha’s operations within the village. He just expected plant clone things to be the problem, not shinobi. There’s the nukenin organization, but this doesn’t fit their MO either.

He’s summoned to the Hokage’s office a few days later and he arrives to see that Kushina’s sealing team has returned. The Uzumaki and the Nara stand ready to give their verbal report and the walls shimmer with her privacy seals. Unsure exactly where to stand, he slouches against the wall, carefully studying the returned shinobi. Kushina looks eager, but the Nara just looks bored, but in a stern kind of way.

“Thank you for joining us, Kakashi,” Minato says, wearing his hat improperly on his head, the dumb brim tilted off to the side so he can see better. He nods at the sealing team, “Report.”

Kushina says, “We rendezvoused with the targets at the border town in Stone. The mission was a success.” She’s grinning and the tension drains out of Kakashi to hear that Rin is no longer struggling with the consequences of Madara’s manipulations.

Minato looks down in relief. “Anything else to report?”

Nara Shikaku speaks up. “I’ll update their profiles.”

Kushina adds, “they say hi. Oh, and,” she turns to face Kakashi, “Obito says if you join ANBU, he’ll kick your ass.”

Kakashi says, “Debatable.”

Minato says, “He’s taller than you now.”

“Not fair,” Kakashi says immediately. “He’s two years older. Of course he’s taller than me.”

Kushina says, “He’s built like a damn tree.”

The Nara says, “He can utilize three chakra natures on top of the mokuton and dojutsu.”

That gives him pause. That’s only one less elemental release than he himself can do.

Kushina says, “and Rin’s a medically trained jinchuuriki. She could kick your ass and make it look like you died of natural causes.”

This is unacceptable. Kakashi knows her temper. She’ll want the whole world to know it was her. “No she wouldn’t.”

Minato agrees with a laugh. They’ve both been on the receiving end of Rin’s unexpectedly bloodthirsty streak before. There is a reason why Obito never pranked her growing up, and it wasn’t because they were friends.

“Anything on your end?” the Nara asks, but he’s watching Kakashi.

He says carefully, “No.”

Minato asks, “and Ame?”

Kushina shrugs. “Rainy. We didn’t go near the city. Not much to report. Didn’t run into anyone on the way, didn’t hear any interesting rumors about nukenin or evil plant clones.”

Shame, Kakashi thinks. He hates it when the enemy is just as smart. But in his experience, if it’s easy, it’s because he’s being manipulated. He doesn’t trust convenience.

When Minato dismisses them, he makes sure to leave before Kushina gets her clutches on him or Minato tries to have a sensei moment. He’s sure the Nara is suspicious of him. He’s also sure he’s the Commander of ANBU, so Kakashi’s suspicious of him right back. Problem is, the jounin is too risky to tail; he’s paranoid enough to notice and will recognize the members of Kakashi’s pack. It’s not a huge issue; Kakashi’s already identified his scent profile. If it shows up anywhere it shouldn’t be, he’ll recognize it.

Another week goes by, and he’s identified two dozen regular agents operating inside the village. He’s identified all of the regular hangouts and outposts, the rooftops they tend to linger on. If he catches them when they are out of uniform and off duty, he dismisses them from his mind. He holds onto the one aspect of the shinobi’s scent he made sure to internalize. Musty. Stale. Like the air doesn’t circulate.

That narrows down possible locations, but not really. He’s thinking a cave maybe, somewhere outside the village, but that doesn’t track. The logic doesn’t follow. It’ll have to be somewhere closer. He’s set on somewhere underground, but he doesn’t know of many places that fit that criteria in Konoha. How many buildings have basements in Fire? Tornadoes are a Taki problem.

The highest security Archives are underground, but he’s recently been all over the Secure Archives and knows that isn’t it. Plenty of ANBU are stationed around the stacks, but none of them ever smelled quite like that. Like they rarely ever see the sun.

The only other thing he can think of is the evacuation shelters carved into the Hokage Mountain. But when he pokes around them, he comes up empty-handed. They’re vandalized by kids, a popular hangout spot for Academy students playing hooky. There’s too much traffic for him to entertain the idea for long.

He summons Pakkun. “You want me to what?” The pug scratches his head, looking unimpressed by him.

Kakashi repeats, “Can you identify possible sites of any hidden facilities, particularly underground, with an emphasis on ANBU presence?”

Pakkun frowns. “What’s this about, Boss?”

They don’t talk about Pakkun’s familiarity with ANBU, the experience he has with the organization from before Kakashi was even a ninja. Pakkun is Kakashi’s only ninken who was also his father’s, and Kakashi’s relying on his insider knowledge. He knows the pug won’t confirm, but Pakkun can probably name half a dozen agents by name, more if his father’s old squad is still alive and active.

He’s leaned on the pug’s experience before, especially in Yu, but he knows why Pakkun doesn’t like this request. Kakashi doesn’t like the implications either.

He says, “I think it’s a base. It doesn’t make sense that someone had an ANBU uniform in storage gathering dust and they brought it out just to look at a warehouse. Its underground.”

Pakkun says, “ANBU headquarters isn’t underground, Boss.”

That’s exactly the problem. “I realize.”

Pakkun clarifies, “In the village, or around it?”

He feels bad, he does, but, “Both. It would have to be close, but don’t discount anything too far outside the wall.”

He’s getting impatient. He’s used to missions taking less time than this. Even Yu was actionable, measurable steps in a cyclical timeline he devised. He’s expecting results and the only thing he has is a hunch. It’s frustrating, and feels enough like a failure that’s he’s willing to take some unnecessary risks. Sending Pakkun out for a tracking mission with such vague parameters is an expenditure he wouldn’t have considered a week ago.

Pakkun knows this too. He looks at Kakashi knowingly and for a second, he thinks the pug is going to argue or refuse. Pakkun’s always been the only one of his pack to question orders. The pug knows him, has seen him, maybe better than any other living soul and sometimes Kakashi can’t stand it.

Pakkun scratches his chin, “All right, Boss. I’ll see what I can find.” He trots out of the alley and on his way, blue cape lying across his shoulders like a blanket. He’s so tiny that even with the shinobi adornments, he’s largely unnoticed in the busy market. Kakashi watches him go and doesn’t worry, not even a little.

He’s thinking he needs another trap, something to spur a reaction from the stale hidden ninja. Minato won’t like more arson and he doesn’t want to push Fugaku further away, not when their relationship is plateauing at the level of no verbal disrespect. They still call him The Bastard Sharingan behind his back, but he’s seen the newest Bingo Book and heard the rising popularity of the Copy Nin enough that it only bothers him because of the disrespect it assumes towards Obito.

His feet lead him to the memorial stone. Obito and Rin’s names are on there, with the other war dead. His father’s is not.

His teammates are alive. His father continues not to be.

He loses time standing there, staring. It’s changed, his time tracing the kanji in the stone. There’s still guilt, still an old, desperate grief, but before, any expectation had been placed on him posthumously. Now the weight on his shoulders is from the knowledge that his teammates are saving the world and he’s struggling to find one information leak.

If he was a foreign interest, he would be interested in…. defense plans. Barrier Corps identification protocols. Admin pressures. What would draw out any infiltrators? He would go after ANBU information, gate guard passcodes….Clan information.

He frowns under his mask. Now there’s an idea. Fugaku might really kill him, but if this works….

He moseys casually back in the general vicinity of the Secure Archives, a bunshin heading back towards the market to be casual and obvious. After an hour of loitering in the shade, he thinks he can identify the positions of the ANBU agents on duty. Regular forces shinobi wear mesh. Only ANBU smells like plate armor and ceramic.

Half a dozen camouflaged agents. Another two chuunin at the door. He’s glad to see that they’ve upped the ante after his earlier break-in, the weakness in their defensives that he’d exploited to enter unseen carefully reconfigured.

But he uncovered a few weak points in the security of the Archives before he’d shimmied through the vents. His previous foray only exposed the most obvious reasons why grown ninja shouldn’t be the only ones in charge of deciding what counted as a point of entrance. It will be more difficult this time, with the extra eyes, but as long as none of the guards are sensors, he should be able to pull it off.

He’s had the break in plan in place for weeks, already carefully considered and ready to execute. It’d be a waste to ignore the opportunity to cause a real stir.

He checks the sun. The timing has to be just right for this to work.

From the cover of the tree, he forms hand signs. The doton tunnel mimics perfectly the one in his closet that he uses to sneak in and out of his own house. The second the opening forms, he scans the surrounding area to check that the chakra usage has gone unnoticed. Or that Gai isn’t about to swoop down on him, his rival’s sense of when he’s up to no good kicking in at inopportune times. When no ANBU swarm him, he tosses a genjutsu over the top and ducks underground. He crawls along on his belly through the tunnel towards the building.

The Archives are majority underground; the deeper the stacks, the higher level of clearance is needed to access the levels. Kakashi is breathing in dirt and squinting through total darkness, following the curve of the tunnel towards the wall he will inevitably hit. When the dead end bumps him on the head, he pauses to collect himself, sending his chakra sparking and crackling in careful feelers through the earth around him, not strong enough to collapse the doton technique, but enough for him to feel the space around him. Konoha’s architecture is wood, but for such a sensitive area, they’d opted for something stronger for the Archives, to keep attackers from busting in with a strong enough Earth Release. But there’s an exploitable weakness when using metal as a building material: raiton.

He aims straight for the area he’d marked in his earlier planning and is off by about three feet. He uses his hands to dig the last couple feet to the left, tunneling determinedly towards the welded seam holding the interlocking shells of steel together. When he can run his gloved fingers over the surface of the wall and feel the bumps and ripples of the seam, he wiggles his arm back down to his kunai pouch to fish out an exploding tag. There’s no point Chidoring his way in with such an identifiable technique, but there’s few raiton that generate enough electricity to blow a hole in solid steel. He won’t need to. Not when he’s got one of Kushina’s overcharged explosive seals.

He shores up the tunnel around the mouth of the seam, using doton to change the density of the earth until it’s as hard and sturdy as rock. It needs to withstand the blast aimed at the metal.

He knocks his fist against it. It should hold.

It isn’t dignified, but he wiggles back out of the tunnel feet-first, almost expecting someone to grab his ankles and yank. He backs carefully out of the tunnel, still crouched behind the cover of the tree and further camouflages the entrance to his tunnel.

He’s filthy, so he henges himself and shunshins back to his house for a quick shower. He’s running out of time. He always wears mesh under his jounin uniform but he makes sure his hitai ate’s clean, but not suspiciously clean. It won’t fool Minato, but fooling his sensei isn’t the point.

Then, hands stuffed in his pockets, eye lazy and mild, he strolls over to the Secure Archives once more, but this time, he walks right up to the front entrance. He signs in, eye-smiling at the frowning guard, a jounin Yamanaka, tossing his shiny new Level Eight Clearance badge around. The blond shinobi frowns, but all Kakashi’s paperwork, while messily filled out and signed in henohenomoheji, is in order. The Yamanaka hands over the keys to unlock the seals with a stern warning not to remove any information from the levels or copy it in any way, shape, or form to reproduce later. Kakashi had an eidetic memory even before the sharingan, so he just shrugs amiably. It’s a move he envisions working better once he’s hit his growth spurt. Pakkun can boast about being tiny and deadly all he wants; Kakashi is tired of being kid-sized when he’d outgrown childhood as a four-year-old.

Once he’s inside, he checks the recycled air, just to be sure. Not the same, at all. It’s not the archives he’s looking for, that’s for sure. But the archives are a highly visible target, especially for what he has planned.

The deepest he can go is down to level 8. Past level 5 there is no elevator. The dust grows thicker and he simply retraces his earlier steps to the classified Clan information, making sure to disrupt dust lines and leave his footprints around the stacks. There’s no one else down here. That is essential.

The stairway to the lower levels is covered in fuuinjutsu, but it’s a code he’s cracked before. He’s weak in sealing, but he can recognize patterns with the best of them. A simple scan with his sharingan, and he reverse engineers the key from what it was last time, and how it changed. Kushina’s always complaining about how uninspired the Sealing Corps is. With two hours of careful scribbling and a shimmer of chakra releasing, he’s through.

Kakashi minds his steps this time. No evidence can be traced back to him, but there must be evidence. He walks to the Clan Information, rustles through the files, leaves drawers open, removes folders just to stick them back in the wrong order. Tugs sheets of paper out of them, wrinkles edges. He aims for the noble clans, where an investigation would hit the hardest yet be the most unwelcome. The Hyuuga. The Aburame. Others. The Uchiha. Ino-Shika-Cho. Inuzuka. He sees the shelf with his own clan sigil but he leaves the Hatake alone, all except for one file, which he turns upside down in the stacks, like it was carelessly replaced by someone who valued speed over secrecy. No one would be interested in the Hatake as a whole. But the file he’d chosen had his own face.

He purposefully looks at no information at all. It’s the willful blindness any jounin learns to cultivate around covert information. He’s not here for information, or clan secrets, not this time. The files he pulls are random. He’s not even paying attention to the labels. Once he has his crime scene set, he walks over to the wall, carefully tapping along the seam to find the spot that thunks hollow.

Now for the unpleasant part. The hand signs are fluid but it’s not a technique he utilizes often. The Kage Bunshin no Jutsu isn’t the only S ranked technique he’s copied over the years, but it is a dicey one. He’ll never get used to the feel of his chakra reserves being halved. How Senju Tobirama stood it, he doesn’t know. The only way Minato gets away with it is because he has large reserves to pull from. Kakashi doesn’t.

The Shadow Clone henges itself into the likeness of an ANBU operative. It’s a detail he’s not sure he should include, but he’s curious to see how the shinobi he’s been on the lookout for will react. He arms the clone and then he retreats back to the Eight stacks, where he belongs. Where he’s expected to be.

The countdown in his head runs out. Right on cue, the door to the stairway creaks open, all the two-way seals already broken from earlier. Investigators won’t know that. The clone enters.

They nod at each other.

Kakashi triggers ever alarm he can, flaring his chakra widely, immediately yelling for the guards, and then he and his clone launch into a careful taijutsu match, none of their hits hard enough to pop the clone. Its sturdier than a regular bunshin, but a kunai will take it out. Kakashi flings shuriken around, really making it look like he’s giving his best.

Above him, the ANBU shift change is interrupted by the alarms. There’s twice the amount of guards hanging around and they all descend on the fight. Kakashi drives the clone back towards the stairwell just as the first guard enters the room, catching a glimpse of the two of them going at it.

In the Nine stacks, the clone retreats to the wall just as all the guards begin to converge on them. Using the gathering chakra in the room as a cover, Kakashi activates the exploding tag he planted earlier. The wall detonates, blowing inward, exposing the doton tunnel. Quick as a flash, the clone escapes through the breach.

Kakashi pulls back, allowing the responding ANBU to give chase. He’s not concerned about being caught. These are the operatives he’s been slipping for weeks. His clone will lead them on a merry chase and then vanish once they’re gone.

The remaining ANBU round on him, flashing hand signs at him, standard Konoha jounin code. Kakashi reports succinctly, “Intruder interrupted my research in the Level Eight stacks, coming up from the Nine. I identified his behavior as suspicious. He failed to give the proper identification codes. When he attempted to retreat, I set off the alarms and engaged. Suspect is high level, strong in taijutsu, possibly Earth natured.”

The chuunin guard appears, a paperwork ninja, puffing from sprinting down so many stairs, followed by the jounin Yamanaka.

“Hatake san, report.”

Kakashi repeats himself, and follows the jounin to give his written statement, then accompanies the Yamanaka to the Hokage’s office to report the severe breach in Leaf security. Two of the ANBU follow, ones that had seen the tail end of the fight.

Unfortunately, Minato isn’t in his office. Instead, Nara Shikaku is butting heads with two geriatrics Kakashi recognizes as members of the Elder Council. The same ones who want him either in ANBU or otherwise punished for various things he’s done in the past. They glare at each other, the woman’s nose in the air. She’s always been particularly snooty to him. Shikaku’s eyes turn to slits at the sight of the archive guard frog-marching him into the Hokage’s office, followed by two uncamouflaged, highly-visible ANBU.

“What’s this about?” The old man sputters. He’s at least as old as Sarutobi and balding.

The Yamanaka says, “There’s been a breach in the Secure Archives. Hatake san is a witness. He identified and engaged the intruder, who escaped through the stacks in Nine.”
The Nara’s face is blank. Behind the Yamanaka’s back, but in front of the ANBU, Kakashi eye-smiles at him.

“Turtle san, if you could please fetch the Hokage,” The ANBU Commander-who’s- pretending-not-to-be-the-ANBU-Commander, even to his own agents, asks. His tone is flat.

The turtle-masked ANBU shunshins out of sight. His buddy stays in place by the door.

Kakashi repeats his report on what happened in the stacks and the Yamanaka verifies his account. The agent signs his own rendition. The three perspectives agree with the story Kakashi hopes to tell.

Shikaku’s not buying it. He says, “Maybe you should report to your captain to await further instruction. Yamanaka san, I want evidence.”

The ANBU vanishes. The Yamanaka says, “right away, sir.”

The Council buts in. The Nara doesn’t have the authority to even begin to dismiss them, and as soon as the agent leaves, they’re on him with their own questions, all of which Kakashi gives polite, succinct, completely fabricated answers to, Shikaku studying him the whole time, the shadows around the desk agitating.

After a few minutes, Minato Hiraishins in, to the marker he keeps placed at his desk. He assesses the situation before his Hokage robes even settle. “Fusui san, thank you for your response to the situation. You are dismissed until further notice. Shikaku will take your statement later today.”

Fuck, it’s Inoichi’s cousin. Kakashi’s never going to pass a psyche eval at this rate.

Fusui bows, “Thank you, Hokage sama.” He leaves the room. Shikaku will have to burn his statement, if he even bothered to write it down.

The council turns on Minato, each voicing loud suggestions and criticisms. After a minute, Minato puts his hands up and says, “Homura sama, Koharu sama, I will handle this matter. I will inform you when it is settled. If you would allow me to discuss the intrusion with our witness….”

It’s as close to a dismissal as he can give. The elders bristle. Kakashi’s thinking there’s supposed to be three of them. Where’s the old war hawk with the cane?

They bicker amongst themselves, even threaten Minato in underhanded, snide ways over the rudeness, but eventually they leave. When they are out of sight and the door swings shut behind them, Minato rubs at his face like even the sight of the Councilmembers has exhausted him. That’s what Kakashi is betting on, at least. He’s sure the exasperation has nothing to do with him.

Minato says, “I was just pulled from picking flower arrangements for the wedding.” He levels a hard look at Kakashi, “there better be a good explanation for this.”

Kakashi shrugs. He clasps his hands behind his back.

Shikaku asks, “exactly who are eight ANBU chasing very visibly through the marketplace?”

Kakashi says, “a bunshin.”

Minato sits heavily at his desk. “Is it your bunshin? Or do I need to go Flying Raijin an infiltrator in front of a hundred civilians.”

Kakashi perks up. The Hokage himself chasing his ruse would give it added gravity. He says, “that might help, actually.”

Shikaku groans, “Troublesome.” But after a moment he says, grudgingly, “But clever.”

Minato studies him. “What kind of bunshin is throwing off eight pursuing ANBU?”

Kakashi knows what he’s really asking. He must look as drained as he feels. He says, a tad meekly, “Kage Bunshin.”

Minato sighs. He won’t pursue it knowing that if he pops it, Kakashi is stuck with the memory of his teacher knifing him. Shikaku repeats, in the face of Kakashi using S ranked kinjutsu, “troublesome.”

“I didn’t teach him that,” Minato defends himself.

He didn’t have to. Kakashi learned it like he learns most of the jutsu in his expansive, ever-growing arsenal: flagrant cheating via sharingan. Forbidden jutsu or not, he copies everything he gets a good enough look at.

Minato says, sternly, “you better not have looked at any of those files you threw around.”

Kakashi projects professional hurt, “Maa, sensei…”

Shikaku says, “How did you break into the Secure Archives again? We fixed the ventilation system.”

Kakashi repeats innocently, “Again?”

They both sigh. Kakashi swallows down any more sass and insolence and says, “I made an escape tunnel beforehand and rigged it to blow. I checked into Level Eight legally. Cracked the door code on the stairwell, fabricated a crime scene, henged the clone into an intruder and staged a confrontation. A loud one, right at shift change. Let ANBU witness, pulled the tag, clone escapes. It’ll throw the squad any second now.”

The Nara’s hands are folded into a personal seal, fingertips spread but touching in an upside-down sphere. He asks, “How’d you get past the seals on the door?”

Now, that would incriminate him, because it’s part of how he actually broke in last time. He says cheerily, “Luck.”

Minato is fiddling with a three-pronged kunai. He says thoughtfully, “it could work.”

They don’t yet know that Kakashi disguised the clone as an ANBU, but they will find out. Kakashi says, “I’m looking into a suspicious person I caught at the scene of the warehouse fire. This could draw him out.”

“Describe him.”

Kakashi says, “a camouflaged shinobi, masking his chakra signature. Smelled like he’d never seen the sun.” He hesitates, but continues, “Wearing an ANBU uniform.”

Minato’s fiddling stills. Shikaku cracks open an eye. Minato doesn’t ask him to confirm. Just studies him, face hard. He nods, accepting it. “We’ll look into it.”

Somewhere in the village, Kakashi’s Shadow Clone pops. The feeling of dying sweeps over him in a rush, assimilating all the memories the clone accrued in it’s chase. His chakra returns to him but he’s sweaty and shivers from the nauseating sensation of dying, but the clone had successfully thrown the ANBU. Minato looks concerned for a moment but let’s Kakashi collect himself. He almost hates that his teacher can read him so well, even with his face covered.

The door blows open. Shikaku never even flinches. But Kakashi whirls, kunai ready, still thinking about dying, but it’s just Genma, performatively out of breath, followed by Raido and Iwashi. All three of the Honor Guards look sour and put out. Raido snaps off a salute, says, sternly, “Hokage sama.”

Minato says, “six minutes. If you’d master the modified Hiraishin you could have followed in seconds.”

Kakashi coughs. He’s still holding a kunai. Behind Raido’s back, Iwashi scowls at him but Genma looks curious before remembering that he’s really not supposed to question anything he might glean as the Hokage’s guard and snaps his eyes forward again, rolling a senbon around his teeth, ignoring him with all the expertise of a ninja who spent his formative years exposed to Gai.

Minato says, “Kakashi, thank you for your diligence in this matter.”

Kakashi straightens, reading it both as a dismissal and an expectation to keep him updated on his investigation. His knees are maybe a little weak but Kakashi nods, saluting back, trying to make it snappier than Raido’s had been. “Hokage sama.”

He goes on a walk then, pleased to see that the gossip mongers are hard at work, doing his job for him. No one gossips like ninja. Only, they call it intelligence gathering and not chitchat. Even in the market, the civilians are recounting how eight ANBU had chased another through the market, making a beeline for the wall.

What did he do, they whisper excitedly, but a little concerned. ANBU are like ghosts to regular forces shinobi, like devils to civilians. Many have never seen a masked ninja before. It’s a few minutes before he hears the Archives get tossed into the mix and he guesses that the paperwork ninja blabbed, just like Kakashi needed him too. When his name gets added to the mix, he makes sure to take to the rooftops with a faux-serious demeanor.

But he’s already been spotted. The whispers get louder.

He’s feeling inordinately satisfied. This worked out better than he could have hoped. He stops by the base of a tree to retrieve the fallen kunai his Shadow Clone used to pop itself and stows it away with a grimace. At least there’s no evidence.

It only takes three days for his pack to locate the stale ninja again. Kakashi immediately goes to intercept. This time, he’s lurking around the Secure Archives, by the tree Kakashi used to cover the mouth of the tunnel. Still camouflaged, still masking his chakra signature. The only sign at all there’s someone there is the smell of armor on the breeze and the musty scent of dank underground spaces.

Kakashi crouches on a roof, squinting considering at the hidden shinobi. Shiba crawls on his belly to join him. If indeed he’s looking dead at an infiltrator, he should engage and capture for questioning. But high-level infiltrators are trained to never be taken alive and Kakashi can’t just kill him; he’s his only lead.

He signs non-lethal at Shiba, who’s opening move is usually to rip out hamstrings before going for the throat.

The battle ninken growls softly at his side, probably sensing the incoming bad decision. The pack’s radar for his mistakes is as precognizant as Gai’s.

Shiba’s ire is enough to make him rethink his strategy. A take down’s probably not the move here; he’s too exposed, right next to the Archives, and there’s ANBU still prickly about the break in loitering around inside for sure. The appearance of masks would give his target the perfect opportunity to blend in and escape and besides, there’s information he can get from blowing the cover over trying to capture the agent alive.

With a bit of concentration, he dismisses the Shiba Inu, not willing to risk his sure-to-be-violent-escalation in case this goes south. At the soft pop of chakra as the ninken disappears, he stands up, shoving his hitai ate up to expose his sharingan.

He stares right at the spot the hidden ninja stands. To make himself perfectly clear, he raises a hand and points a condemning finger at the hidden shinobi.

There’s a second of stillness, nothing at all catching in his sharingan through the filter of red over his vision. Then the shinobi bolts, not right at Kakashi to silence him, which is a small relief, but back towards the center of the village. He throws himself into a shunshin after the fleeing shinobi, relying on his sharingan to capture the small movements of dirt flinging from his steps, the imprint of a sandal in soft soil, his nostrils flared to follow the musty smell as closely and quickly as he can. Now that it’s not a battle, he wishes he hadn’t dismissed Shiba but there’s no time to resummon him as backup.

He’s chasing an invisible ninja through the night and he knows he’s falling behind. He can’t track him fast enough to keep up. But as long as he doesn’t lose the trail, it shouldn’t matter. He doesn’t want to catch the shinobi, he just wants to follow him back to his base of operations. And maybe see what he’ll do now that he knows Kakashi’s on to him.

The trail ends in a stream, one of the dozen that flow through the village. He pulls at his hair in frustration, taking the time to resummon Shiba to help him search for where the trail picks back up. He summons Uhei as a tracker as well. Shiba’s not pleased at his abrupt dismissal earlier but he puts his nose to the ground immediately. They search for an hour before he’s forced to admit that the invisible ninja has given them the slip.

He returns to the Archives to try to reverse-track where he’d come from but the wind is strong and the trail is stale as the ninja himself. They don’t get very far. It’s disheartening. Back at the house, he throws his arm over his eyes to hide his face. Instead of apologizing, he gives Shiba a piece of tough jerky to rip apart instead and is summarily forgiven for his rudeness.

He has a hundred theories, none of them provable. Or even probable. All he knows is that Madara utilized fake Kiri nin in his machinations and now there’s a fake ANBU in Konoha.

But it doesn’t fit the profile. Madara uses S rank nukenin, or the clones. If he’s going to infiltrate the Leaf Village, Madara wouldn’t send a minion. Not when he could send a clone.

The only thing more dangerous than a missing nin is a traitor nin who doesn’t desert. A turncoat that continues to operate in-village, selling secrets to foreign powers from the safety of their homes. Kakashi isn’t convinced of this either. It doesn’t explain the armor. This isn’t a retired agent donning their old uniform. He’s sure that retired agents aren’t allowed to keep their uniforms.

Who has access to ANBU uniforms is a small list. But it doesn’t explain the smell.

Oddly enough, the theory that seems to hold the most water is that this is a legal operation. A real on-duty ANBU. But a dangerous one. Unregistered. One not answering to the Hokage. Who in the village has the power to command fake ANBU like Madara commands fake Kiri nin, if not Madara himself? What proxy could there possibly be? And how can he find out?

His suspicion of an underground base gives this theory credence. He tailors the profile in his head. The fake ANBU won’t be the real threat. He’s taking orders from someone. There’s no telling how high up this goes. And there’s no reason to believe that there’s only one fake ANBU operating within Konoha. Or outside of it, carrying out who-knows-what kind of missions.

The next day, when he goes out to run his errands around town, it’s with the suspicion that maybe his home village is hostile ground. If there is an entity operating in the shadows of Konoha, then he’s just pointed a light at it. That won’t be well received. He’s too good of an assassin to make himself an easy target, but he can’t track everything in the hustle and bustle of the main thoroughfares.

The suspicion won’t leave him. He prickly with the awareness but this isn’t getting him anywhere. He’d never strike a target in a busy market, so he stays in high traffic areas, eats lunch at a bustling café. Rigorously checks his meal for poisons under the uncertain gaze of his server. He’s not sure how to best appear inattentive. It would be easier if he had something to visibly occupy his attention, like a book or something he could read, held in front of his face like another mask.

He’s not good at being this paranoid for long. He finds Guruko keeping watch on the warehouse and collects her with a low whistle. She follows at a distance, reading the tension in his body language, on alert with him.

Here’s one thing Minato taught him when he suspected a potential ambush: make it not an ambush. With that in mind, he goes to the memorial stone. The cemetery is deserted at this time of day.

There is no greater invitation than this.

Guruko circles, low in the grass, creeping through the shrines and memorials to the dead. He’s not looking at her. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her hackles raise and the satisfaction at being right is not enough to dampen the growing realization that he’s about to be assassinated.

There’s no telling how many there are. Guruko’s teeth are showing, white in the sun. His chakra is steady inside him. He’s ready for an attack, but maybe he can salvage this still. If he kills the hidden ninja, he’s no closer to answers, to the proof he needs. Hands in his pockets, casual, but limbs lose and ready just in case, he says, loud enough to carry, “You know, I’ve been following you for weeks and I never tried to assassinate you.”

The wind shifts and he gets a faint whiff of weapon oil, bright steel, and old dark places. Several areas of interest. He may very well be surrounded by an invisible death squad. He says, fishing, “If you have orders to eliminate me, tell your boss that circumstances have changed.”

There’s a moment of tension, Killing Intent leaking out, like invoking his knowledge of a boss is a kill worthy offense. But he has their attention. No attack comes.

Kakashi says, “I’m not a threat. I may even be of assistance in the future.”

After a few tense moments, the Killing Intent fades away. Nothing else happens. After ten minutes of standing motionless in front of the stone his teammate’s names watch him from, Guruko slinks over.

She’s too trained to tremble in every limb, but the fear for his life is in her still when she says, “they’re gone. There were at least 6 of them. You were surrounded.”

He’s touched they think him dangerous enough to warrant such high numbers. And now he knows there’s more than one, for sure this time. And a leader giving orders.

He lets out a breath, the adrenaline crash leaving him just as shaky. He’s not at all sure he could have lasted long, not against those numbers.

Guruko bumps his leg with the top of her head, relief in every flattening hair along the ridge of her spine. “Are you going to tell the Hokage?”

If he tells Minato he was almost assassinated in the middle of the Konoha, he’ll burst a blood vessel. An angry Minato is scary enough. But angry Minato can be talked down, can be reasoned with. When Minato stops being mad, he stops feeling anything at all. And then he’s unstoppable. If Kakashi goes to him with as little information as he has, no identities, no locations, nothing but implications spinning darker and darker in his mind, he knows how his teacher will react. He’s protective of his students. He wouldn’t abide this.

He settles a white-knuckled hand on her soft brown head. Its calming, grounding. He says, “……not yet. This doesn’t feel like you-know-who.”

It’ll be easier if this is Madara. That’s a face, an identity. A too-convenient identity. But this is like investigating shadows. Some faceless threat is living in the heart of Konoha.

She presses her back into his leg, like she’s trying to steer him away. She says, “next time, call Shiba.”

It’s her quiet reprimand, the reminder that she doesn’t want to see him die. He doesn’t send her to track the retreating hidden ninja. It doesn’t matter now. His name’s all over the investigation. His singular file flipped over in the Archives. His finger pointing out shinobi where no shinobi should be. Him baiting them in public with their own likeness.

Instead, they go back home and gorge on snacks. He grills a whitefish and they eat it, just the two of them. She finishes off his jerky stash and he eats an entire eggplant grilled with the fish.

When Pakkun trots in later that evening, it’s to the two of them halfway into food comas, assorted snack packaging scattered around them. He raises a wrinkly pug brow at them, prompting Guruko to roll onto her distended stomach and rat him out. “The hidden ninja sent a death squad after Kakashi. He talked them out of it.”

He points a chopstick at her like a kunai. “Hey,” he protests.

Pakkun blinks as he takes that in. Digests it. If he’s just going to lecture him, Kakashi doesn’t want to hear it. He’s a capable shinobi. He knows there’s a part of the pug that wants to coddle him, a huge part, the part that raised him, but if he pitches a fit Kakashi won’t thank him for it. He earned his rank. He isn’t just being reckless. He’s ensuring results.

Pakkun reads it off his face. He makes it easy for him; his mask is down, like it almost never is. Pakkun sighs. “Guruko, if you could give us a minute.”

Guruko huffs and levers herself to her feet. She’s so stuffed on human food she’ll need a week in the summoning dimension to sleep it off. Pakkun is disapproving but grilling various street food is a harmless enough coping mechanism. Much less destructive than his usual go to: solo A rank missions, the further away from the village the better.

He hops up onto Kakashi’s coffee table and sits. Staring down at him. Kakashi is spread eagle on the floor, looking up at him upside down with his sticky-uppy hair loose around his head. His hitai ate is gone, his right eye firmly closed under the scarred slash straight down his face. It is, he admits, not quite a presentation to garner Pakkun’s less paternal instincts.

Pakkun sighs. “Help me understand, Kakashi. What did you do?”

He’s uncomfortable with how exposed his face suddenly feels. The micro-expressions the pug can read off of him. Kakashi says, “the risk paid. They backed off.”

“Why were you a target?”

Kakashi says, “Shiba caught wind of one sneaking around outside the Archives after I broke in and then framed them for. He was camouflaged. Invisible, like they’ve all been.”

Pakkun says, “And?”

“I pointed at him.”

The pug closes his eyes like he’s praying. Anyone else might ask why, but Pakkun already knows why. After a second he says, “how many did they send after you?”

He hates that tone of voice, like Pakkun’s trying to be patient with him, like Kakashi’s the one out of line.

“Guruko says at least six. I said I had a message for their boss. We’ll have to see what they decide.”

Pakkun says, “Tell Minato.”

Kakashi frowns upside down at him. “Tell him what? That I almost died and still don’t have any actionable information?”

His flippancy only serves to piss the pug off more. The disappointment is hardening in him. Pakkun is unquestionably loyal, but once he’d told Kakashi not to summon him for a particularly nasty mission in Yu. He’d said don’t ask me to help you die, Kakashi. This feels a bit like that moment. The reminder doesn’t help either of them handle themselves.

Pakkun says, “you are more important to the Hokage that finding the leak.”

It’s true, but it shouldn’t be. Obito and Rin are in enemy territory actively saving the entire world, and Minato would throw away a chance to unravel a conspiracy in the Leaf Village itself in favor of making life marginally safer for Kakashi, the jounin of the team. It’s a sentiment the pug no doubt finds relatable.

Kakashi says, “I will go to sensei after the boss responds. It should be within the next week.”

The pug is silent. It’s his version of arguing without saying anything. Kakashi closes his eye against the sight, resisting the impulse to hide his face with his arm. Eventually, Pakkun says, “I finished canvasing the village and surrounding area for likely spots for a secret underground hideout.”

Kakashi opens his eye, rolling over onto his front to properly see the pug. “What did you find?”

Pakkun says, “there’s numerous underground places of interest in the area. Most are outside the village in the surrounding woods. They’re the most interesting.”

“Why?”

“Genjutsu protected. Couldn’t figure out why I was wandering in circles.”

That sounds promising. Nothing worth protecting’s ever not hidden. “How many?”

“Four. They might not be connected to each other.”

Kakashi hums thoughtfully. It will take time to survey them all. He’ll be going in blind, into a nest of unknown hostiles. He asks, “scent profile of them?”

Pakkun says, “the hidden nin, for sure. One is worse than the others. And one is…weird. Smells like it could be a hospital. Antiseptic...sickness.”

That’s as unexpected as it is concerning. “The hidden nin are using the hospital smell hole?”

Pakkun said, “The shinobi never go inside. They’re more like guards. Stand outside.”

Kakashi wants to find out what a conspiracy like the hidden nin are interested in guarding. Something that smells like illness and has Pakkun wrinkling his nose in distaste and caution. Kakashi asks, accidentally sounding younger than he feels most times, “If I wanted to investigate, would you back me?”

The pug sighs but his eyes are soft. He says, not nearly gruff enough, “Yeah, Boss. Don’t worry about me. You know I’ve got your back.”

Kakashi softens too. After a moment, he asks, “If there was a conspiracy shadow organization operating in Konoha utilizing false ANBU, how high up the chain of command might it go?”

Pakkun has a better sense of history than Kakashi does. He hums, scratching a bit before answering. “There’s not many in a position to control anything to do with ANBU. I’d wager at Commander level, at least. Maybe high-level Administration.”

Kakashi slumps down onto his crossed arms. “It’d be too easy if it was the damn Nara.”

“Minato trusts him.”

“Sensei’s too trusting sometimes.” He settles in. “Who does that leave?”

“Jounin Commander, Regular Forces Commander, probably not Chuunin Commander or Gennin Corps. Not Leaf Police. Not the lieutenants either.”

None of that feels right. He needs a motive. “Admin side?”

Pakkun says, “Maybe the Elder Council, or a select few of the noble Clan Heads on the Clan Council. No civilian, merchant, or guild council members would have the gall, even if they could foot the bill easier than the others.”

He remembers Koharu Utatane giving him the stink-eye in the Hokage office, how she always pushes him, even when he was far younger than he is now. He can see her ordering his death. And Homura wants him harshly and publicly punished for insubordination, first under Sarutobi and then again under Minato. He asks, “What do you know about the Elder Councilmembers?”

Pakkun considers. Then, “there’s three of them. Old friends. All students of Senju Tobirama. Homura Mitokado is a hardliner. He’s….not forgiving of what he views as mistakes.”

Kakashi understands he’s meant to interpret that as an admission that Homura is one of the people that drove his father to suicide. The realization sets a buzzing feeling through him. Before he can focus on it, Pakkun goes on, “I know Koharu Utatane best. She opposed Minato’s appointment. She doesn’t like the peace treaties, and she has a grudge against Suna the size of the desert itself. She’s….gotten stricter, in her age. More conservative. She didn’t used to follow Homura’s vote so often.”

There’s something there, under the buzzing, but he’s not in the mindset to pursue Pakkun’s past connections with a Councilmember through a summoning contract not his own.

But a controlling interest in political clout sounds like motive for turning against the Hokage. And they’re old; they’ve been the council for years and years, ever since they aged out of being proper contenders. That’s plenty of time to establish a hidden shadow organization. If they’re Senju Tobirama’s students, then they must have close ties to the previous Hokage.

Kakashi asks, “How were they under the Sandaime? Any contention?”

“Plenty. The Council always challenges the Hokage. They advocate for harsher reparations, steeper taxes, especially on imports. It was their policies that almost ruined Suna after the Second War. War hawks, all of them. Shimura Danzo is the worst of the bunch. He’s Hiruzen’s right hand but he’s jealous of the hat; he wants to be Hokage. He campaigned for the position, back in the day. That might have driven a wedge between him and Hiruzen, especially after Uchiha Kagami died. The loss of a contender brought up the question of succession at a difficult time.”

Not that Uchiha Kagami was a legitimate contender. Kakashi may only be the Bastard Sharingan, but he knows he’ll never live to see an Uchiha wear the hat.

Pakkun says, after a moment of silence, “Sakumo said Danzo got away with a lot. I don’t have details, but with the missions he was taking, with his clearance level….”

It’s not often that Pakkun mentions Hatake Sakumo so openly. Kakashi doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t know what the pug thinks about what Sakumo had done, either before or after his death. But if he’s mentioning him now, it because he trusts his father’s judgement on this.

Kakashi accepts it. Best friends. Rivals. One the Hokage and one just a Councilmember. Decades with the access and means to build a shadow organization to operate against the administrative power over the military he’d been denied.

It feels like he’s connecting the dots. It fit the profile. A man in power. Years of resentment. A bitter hard liner. Willing to eliminate loyal Konoha shinobi who were snooping around their shadows. Plenty of knowledge from his sensei Tobirama to infiltrate and emulate the ANBU organization he’d founded.

Kakashi says, “The Elder Council has a private army. Even if sensei disagrees with their policies or suggestions, they can carry out whatever missions they want. However they want.”

But which Councilmember? Two of them, in cahoots? All of them? How was Sarutobi not aware? An organization that size has to leave tracks, especially in its inauguration. They have secret lairs outside the village. That doesn’t happen without several somebodies knowing something.

Investigating the Council will be as dangerous as tailing ANBU through town, as pointing at a hidden nin.

Pakkun’s frowning at the look on his face. “I’m not sure what exactly it is you’ve stepped in with this, Kakashi. But they’ve already tried to hit you once. Tell Minato. Tomorrow.”

Asking twice is Pakkun’s personal equivalent of saying please. Kakashi huffs but drags himself into a sitting position, feeling crumbs from his earlier binge roll off him. He squints at the pug, then snatches him off the low table and deposits him in his lap. Pakkun squirms but doesn’t resist. Kakashi takes that as permission to cuddle the grumpy pug in his lap. He says, “If I get into a bind, I’ll summon the pack. If I’m going to accuse a Councilmember, I need solid proof.”

Pakkun says, “Let Minato find the proof. Or the Nara. He can subpoena the Council’s records.”

If this is true, then there won’t be records. They both know it. And Minato’ll have to go through official channels, giving them plenty of time to burn whatever evidence they did have. Kakashi lays back down, pulling the pug up to his chest, a tiny spot of warmth. He offers him a chip he finds on the floor. Pakkun refuses. Human food’s never agreed with him. Kakashi says, in apology, “Guruko ate all the jerky.”

Pakkun sighs but settles down, using his cape as a blanket. It is almost unbearably cute. If Kakashi says it out loud, the ninken will bite him. But it doesn’t make it not true.

Guruko slinks back in. That night, Kakashi sleeps on his living room floor, Pakkun on his chest and Guruko snoring at his side. She doesn’t snore in the field, so she’s just doing it to annoy them both.

In the morning when he leaves, there’s two hidden nin tailing him in the village. He’s maybe the best at slipping tails, but when they’re invisible it’s hard to know with any degree of certainty. To be sure, he spends a few extra hours making his path increasingly unpredictable and convoluted before heading to the wall. To be fair, Minato did say he’ll approve him leaving the village if he’s investigating. He just hadn’t asked for approval first. He’s really just expediting the process.

He’s seen the ANBU Camouflage Jutsu enough by now that he has it down pat. He can be invisible too. He chakra walks up and over the wall, right between two manned outposts full of chuunin. The Barrier Corps will get an alert, but when he finishes being mad, Minato would be sure to bury it for him.

Once safely on the other side of the wall, Kakashi summons Pakkun, who leads him to the first suspicious spot of interest for a potential underground hidden nin headquarters. It’s close, only three miles out, well in the range of talented sensors, of which Konoha regrettable doesn’t have many. A massive hollow tree, easily fifty feet across, likely grown by Senju Hashirama himself, disguised the first entrance. There’s a slight whiff of musty air from the mouth of the hole, but it looks more like a bolt hole than a true entrance. A base will ideally have several entrances, and if the operator is paranoid enough, several trapped shills laying around being obvious. This feels like a fake dead end to him. He doesn’t sense that it goes deep enough to meet his requirements.

He doesn’t risk it. He marks its location carefully in his mind and moves on.

The next is more promising. A trapdoor, hidden by genjutsu his sharingan sees right through. He notes its location for future stake-outs and moves on. He isn’t looking to barge into a secret base fist-first. Not today.

The next feels like another shill, inside a tumble of boulders in the same ridge that will eventually make the Hokage Mountain. It doesn’t quite smell quite right either. Too dry. Not dank enough.

The next is….so much worse than Pakkun led him to believe. It’s a huge entrance hidden by powerful genjutsu, absolutely reeking of death and sickness. Honestly, the only thing about it that pings him as ,,hospital is the smell of antiseptic, of peroxide. It reeks of old blood, vomit….something else. He gets dreadfully closer, pressing his face right against the edge of the genjutsu barrier. Something…dry. Rattling. Scales in his sinuses, strong enough to make him dizzy with the threat.

He backs away, instincts screaming snake.

This is an altogether unexpected twist. What is one of the Sannin doing with a hidden murder hole? This makes even less sense. He’s following this lead down a rabbit hole that smells how screaming sounds and the implication are wild and twisted, harrying away from him almost faster than even his mind can follow.

He backs up, pulling Pakkun with him. The pug wrinkles his nose. “It wasn’t that strong earlier,” he whispers.

It’s fresher. Orochimaru’s been here recently, is maybe down there now. It explains the lack of its usual guards.

It’s enough to make him nauseous. This is far more than he bargained for. He couldn’t dream of facing a Sannin. Kakashi whispers, “Orochimaru,” and the pug’s dark eyes widen, no doubt picturing a snake large enough to help counter a poison-breathing salamander. “Let’s get out of here.”

They retreat quick, but make sure to cover their tracks. They go back up and over the wall, Kakashi carrying Pakkun stuck down the front of his flak jacket. Back to his house, the too-empty Hatake Compound surrounding them with its empty windows and leaning porches and unmown grass. Back to the safety of his living room, still scattered with crumbs from the day before, when he faced a death squad and felt less afraid than he did smelling Orochimaru all over a hidden entrance to what he is almost certain is an unauthorized R&D lab.

He can still smell the blood oozing out of the ground under him, stinking like a gut wound. In his mind, he hears Minato admit that Madara, the bastard, had conducted experiments on Obito, one of which resulted in him having the mokuton. Or some version of it, at least.

And that, horrible as it is, is motive enough for him. He thinks there’s very little someone who’s determined to reproduce the most famous kekkei genkai in history wouldn’t do to access that, no matter how unethical. The mokuton’s a weapon like no other. If someone has a private army, they’ll need the perfect weapon to pair with it. He thinks he might be sick, just from the thought of it.

There’s only one explanation for why they even know it’s possible to force the mokuton on someone. The Council, the hidden nin, Madara, Orochimaru, it’s all connected. A tree rotten from the roots, it’s going to take them all down.

He says, “the mokuton.”

Even Pakkun goes green at that. It’s a massive intuitive leap, but it makes the worst kind of sense.

Kakashi asks, “Why would Orochimaru partner with the hidden nin?”

The second he asks it, he knows. “Oh,” he says. “The hat.”

All the Sannin are contenders for the Hokageship. But Senju Tsunade left and Jiraiya had too, in his own way. Orochimaru is the only one left after the Second War. Konoha doesn’t practice nepotism along traditional family lines, but the Leaf’s sensei-student line is unbroken since the days of their founding. Following that example, Kakashi himself is a new contender, just by merit of studying under the new Yondaime.

Kakashi thinks that he never wants to be Hokage. Minato sure didn’t. He thinks to actually want the stupid hat, you have to be evil. Madara. Danzo. Orochimaru.

It’s too much, suddenly. He says, “I need to tell Sensei.”

A proximity alarm goes off. There’s a knock at his door. A kunai finds its way to his palm. Pakkun follows him, out of sight behind furniture.

Kakashi cracks the door open. It’s an ANBU. An ANBU smelling like a hole in the ground. Wearing perfect regulation steel, tattoo glinting with sealed ink. His mask is styled after a lion.

Kakashi pulls his affability around himself like a shield. They came for him in his home. “Yes, shinobi san?”

The ANBU speaks, and it’s a red flag he never thought he’d see. He says in a monotone devoid of any inflection or emotion at all, “Lord Danzo sama will see you now. I will take you to him.”

A beat of silence while Kakashi internally scrambles. Then, coolly, “Of course, shinobi san. Let me get my sandals.”

He closes the door in his face. Pakkun is wide-eyed. “Summon me,” he asks. “Promise, if it goes south, you’ll summon me.”

Kakashi nods, finger to his masked lips. He signs nightfall, points to himself, then towards town. Signs backup. Spells outsensei. The pug nods back and Kakashi pulls on his sandals, wishing the weapons locked up as evidence from the break-in had been returned to him. He only has a reasonable amount now, instead of an arsenal.

For a second, he thinks about running. Out the tunnel and racing the agent to the Tower. But it’s unlikely they only sent one when earlier there had been a full squad. He doesn’t know what he’s up against, doesn’t have enough information, even now.

But he could. This is a play he can make.

He takes a second to make sure his mask is in place, and then makes sure his other masks are just as obscuring. He eye-smiles lazily at the lion-masked ANBU. “Lead the way.”

Predictably, instead of towards the Hokage Tower where the Elder Council usually meets, Kakashi is led back towards the wall, through a secret passage as old as the village, possibly made by the Nidaime himself, and back into the forest. He doesn’t even dare look at his old tracks. Most ninja can’t smell like he can. He won’t give himself away like that. He has half a plan forming in his head. If he gets out of here alive, he’s going right to Minato to spill his guts about everything.

Lion takes him to the real entrance to the hidden nin’s secret lair, not one of the shills they scouted earlier. It’s built into the base of a boulder, blending seamlessly with the landscape, absolutely coated in genjutsu and fuuinjutsu tags. He thinks if he tried approaching it without Lion right there, it might actually kill him, the power coming off of it is so intense. There’s years worth of seals reinforcing the rock. The huge double doors open at a series of codes, exchanged in whispered nonsensical syllables, not even real words or numbers. The doors are solid steel, a foot thick. He’s not sure any jutsu he has could get through them.

Inside, the air is dead, stirred only by their passing. It’s dim, lit only by recessed electric lighting that buzzes a low hum through the air. Dank. Musty. Overpowering enough it clings to the fabric of his clothes, sticks to his mask. He’ll be breathing it in all day.

The tunnel goes on for what feels like a mile, slanting deeper and deeper into the earth. He underestimated the size of the base. He underestimated the power the organization already has in the village and at large. Madara wants to destroy the village for sure, but only by way of the world. The hidden nin are working with him in some unspecified capacity.

At the end of the tunnel is a large expanse of a room, full of catwalks and false skylights to illuminate it. They enter near the top. On the ground, he can see entire squadrons training. More than he ever feared. A true private army. He’s regretting the earlier decisions that led to him being stuck underground with the hidden nin. He’s just, caught up, suddenly.

He failed to look before he leapt, and now he’s landed on a snake.

There’s a man with a cane standing on a platform in the middle, looking down on the training ground below, in the area where all the walkways intersect. He’s surrounded by four masked shinobi. Kakashi recognizes him by reputation. Scarred chin from the war. Black hair. Bandages over half his face, covering his eye, going down over his shoulder and chest, presumably down his arm, where he can see bandaged fingers wrap around the curved head of a cane carved into the visage of a war hawk.

He looks up as they approach and Lion drops into a one-kneed kneel. Shimura Danzo’s face is a permanent scowl and Kakashi’s trying real hard to maintain his air of calm. Danzo’s visible eye is shrewd; Kakashi’s not sure how much of the façade he believes.

Taking his cue from Lion, Kakashi drops too. He does not speak.

After a long moment of scrutiny, the only sound the cadets training in the stadium below, Danzo says, “Hatake Kakashi.”

His voice is slow and rumbly, deep as this hideout. He doesn’t like the sound of his clan name in his mouth. Kakashi says, “Lord Danzo sama,” and is relieved when his own voice comes out even.

Danzo looks at him. Then, “Remove your headband.”

The order panics him. If Danzo tries to remove Obito’s sharingan from him, Kakashi will die and be sure to destroy the eye with him. His chakra is high and thready, a sharp snapping crackle inside him. He slowly reaches up and pushes the tilted Konoha hitai ate straight, revealing the sharingan. If anyone makes a move, he’s sending his hand into the eye and executing an ungrounded raiton technique. That should fry them both good and crispy. If he grabs Danzo with his other hand, maybe he can take him down too.

If the bandaged arm is covering what Kakashi fears its covering, it probably won’t. But he’ll feel better for trying.

Danzo peers at the sharingan, spinning with Kakashi’s fear. He orders, “now the mangekyo.”

He shouldn’t know about that. Kakashi hesitates. “I can’t control it.”

Danzo’s cane whips out to crack against his shin, hard enough to fracture bone. Kakashi goes down to both knees, eyes watering from the stunning pain of it. After a moment, he grits his teeth and collects himself, forcing chakra to his orbital pathways, twisting the sharingan into its pointed mangekyo pattern.

Danzo’s face never changes. Kakashi holds it, already feeling the chakra drain, ready at any moment to die.

Danzo huffs, tapping his cane. “Come with me.”

Still smarting with pain, Kakashi allows the mangekyo to fade away, back to the sharingan that he can’t turn off. He tugs his headband back down to cover it, biting his tongue as he rises up to walk on a leg that feels splintered. He stands straight, walks determinedly after Danzo as he goes down a catwalk, out over the hidden nin below.

Danzo’s walk is slow but not especially labored. Only the most disingenuous would call it a limp. Kakashi hopes it pains him. Below, a masked kunoichi decimates a dummy so hard the stuffing comes out.

The pageantry of it gives him hope. You don’t bother to intimidate people you’re going to kill. He’s never been a religious type, but the fervent hope almost edges into prayer. But if they’re not going to kill him, he’s afraid for that too.

The hall is lined with wings of offices and storage space, filled with weapons, training gear, uniforms and more. They reach Danzo’s main office. It’s not decorated or ostentatious; its only boast is its size. Its comparable to the Hokage office. There’s a masked shinobi waiting at that same half-crouch attention by the desk. He’s only a little shorter than Kakashi. His mask is the blank, predatory stare of a hunting cat.

Once inside, Danzo stands behind his desk but does not sit in his chair. There is no chair for Kakashi, so he stands as well, weight even across his feet out of sheer spite. After a moment of consideration, Danzo gestures to the Lynx masked shinobi, who clasps his gloved hands into a Snake seal and a wooden chair springs quickly into existence.

The shinobi doesn’t name his technique, but he doesn’t have to. Kakashi’s stomach is sinking at the display, at the surge of unfamiliar chakra in the room, wild and green. He smells like wood.

He’ll recognize the mokuton anywhere.

Danzo gestures for him to sit and he does. He’s done it. They’ve successfully reproduced the mokuton. Danzo’s still showing off. Kakashi estimates he has maybe a 40% chance of walking out of here.

After Kakashi settles in the wooden chair, the,, mokuton chair, Danzo takes a seat as well. He says, “You’ve been offering me somewhat of a headache, Hatake. Framing me in the village. Calling attention to us.”

He already has enough evidence to see them all swing. Kakashi says, “I’ve been trying to seek an audience with you, Lord Danzo sama.”

“And why,” Danzo barks, “are you trying to do that?”

Kakashi sinks into the role he has to play. “I want to join your organization.” He will carry everything he sees back to Minato, in perfect sharingan recall.

Danzo asks, “Why?”

They wouldn’t let me in ANBU doesn’t sound like a strong enough excuse, but it’s all his brain is giving him. Thankfully, the thought leads him to another. “The Hokage has lost his faith in me. He denies me promotions that I rightfully deserve and keeps me confined to the village.”

He hopes the bit about being bitter in his stalled career resonates with the old bastard. Danzo hums. He says, “I do not believe you. I think you come here as a spy and an infiltrator. You’ve stumbled into something you were not meant to find, Hatake san.”

His chances plummet to almost zero.

“Thankfully, that will not matter.” Danzo says matter-o-factly. “I will grant your wish.”

He pulls a ceramic mask from a drawer in his desk, white with red markings while Kakashi is still reeling, complete with a set of ANBU armor and standard uniform. The door closes behind them, trapping Kakashi into the room with Danzo and the wood user.

Danzo says, tapping at a bottle of black chakra ink. “We have ways of ensuring your loyalty.”

Afterwards, he is taken home and deposited back into his living room. The wards let them. The door is shut behind him. He’s weak and shaking, the cursed seal seared against the back of his tongue sending waves of pain through his body.

There are splinters under his nails.

The second the coast is clear, Pakkun comes out from where he’d been hiding under the couch. Kakashi just shivers on the ground, arms wrapped around himself, a set of ANBU gear piled next to him, topped with a mask in the likeness of a dog.

“Oh, pup,” Pakkun says. “You didn’t call me.”

Kakashi saved Pakkun’s life by leaving him here. He hooks a trembling finger under the edge of his mask, tugs it down under his chin. Sticks his tongue out far enough to the pug to see. His already wide eyes just get wider.

Kakashi tries it. He clears his throat, swallows painfully. Tries to say Root, hoping the curse mark doesn’t count ninken in its purvey, hoping that since the summons are tangled into his own chakra, he’ll be able to find a way around the gag.

Instead of a word, he chokes, mouth somehow both numb and on fire with a burning pain. He struggles against it, gagging and spitting, but Pakkun unfreezes and runs over, a paw on his head to hold him still.

“Enough of that, Kakashi. I know,” he says, looking down at his devastated summoner, forever marked with a forbidden seal. “I know.”

When it finally feels like he can breathe again, Kakashi whispers, “I fucked up.” The rest of the words don’t come. He loses them in the fear. Danzo has an army, and he’s figured out the mokuton, with help from Orochimaru and Uchiha fucking Madara.

He wants to say that it’s a coup waiting to happen. That they’ll kill his sensei. Kill his teammates. Destroy the world together.

And force him to help them do it.

Rin had thrown herself onto his Chidori rather than hurt the village. His father had killed himself in the same room Kakashi lays powerless in right now, for atonement and honor.

He went too far with this. It spiraled out of his control. He could not harm the Leaf. His Will of Fire won’t allow it.

But he promised himself when he was five that he’d never do what his father did, what Rin attempted. But in this moment, he feels that same hopelessness they must have felt.

He looks at Pakkun. There are no other signers. If he dies, the ninken contract is void. His pack would remain confined to the summoning dimension.

He’s overwhelmed suddenly. Drowning. He might even cry a little, there on his floor, with just Pakkun there, worriedly pressing his nose into his hair to scent him.

He went to Danzo expecting to be a spy. But Danzo turned him into one.

Not as Hatake Kakashi.

But as Root’s Hound.

Chapter Text

Chapter Nine: Taki: Obito

Obito is, quite frankly, sick of fleeing for his life across the width and breadth of entire Elemental Nations. He drags them into Kamui again and it dumps them out on a cliff in Earth, south of Iwagakure, right on top of a team of Iwa nin, who say hello with a volley of boulders and blasts.

“Do you think the Tsuchikage’s mad at us?” Obito asks, dodging a flying rock and pulling Rin and Gamaken back into Kamui. Why did it always have to be fucking boulders falling on him? He thinks he hates Iwa, and Iwa nin. They exit and there’s no enemy nin in sight, but his sense of the landscape is fragmentary with the exposed rock everywhere. “I feel like he’s mad at us.”

Rin’s eyes are narrowed in rage and there’s shuriken in her hands. When nobody attacks them, she hurls them into a tree.

“Hey,” Obito protests.

She growls at him and stalks over to rip the weapons out of the bark. “There’s no jinchuuriki in Iwa! There haven’t been any in years!” She snatches the shuriken out only to throw them back at the poor pine. Obito shudders in sympathy. “The Yonbi and Gobi were never here! Their jinchuuriki were driven away years ago! That’s why they weren’t in the war! They defected a decade ago!”

Obito is just as frustrated as Rin is about how Iwa turned out to be a huge waste of time, but he knows the idea of jinchuuriki being treated harshly enough they defect is a topic she takes personally.

He lets her blow off steam. A good spar might make her feel better but he’s already tired from jumping them halfway across Iwa. He nudges Gamaken suggestively and the toad gulps, shaking his head. Rin growls and kicks some bark off the tree. Obito says, “Does it make you feel better to know that the Tsuchikage thinks you just pointed a Bijuu at him and then escaped his perfect time/space trap?”

“He wanted to buy Shukaku sama. Like we’re arms dealers. Like we’re weapons.”

Obito understands the we here is jinchuuriki. He says, “well, they got out. Good for them.”

Bad for us, he thinks. It’ll be almost impossible to track down two rogue jinchuuriki, especially ones that have evaded capture for a decade. If Ohnoki couldn’t find them, Obito doesn’t have high hopes for himself.

Rin says, “Madara could find them. I’m sure the clones could track them down before we could.”

“Fuck.”

He buries his face in his hands. Gamaken looks concerned at the both of them, but he always kind of looks like that. He says, nervously, “Is there a reason you’re finding them in order?”

Rin sighs and begins collecting her weapons. “No. But we wasted time in Iwa. Valuable time. And our aliases are burned for sure. And now Iwa hates us, and we didn’t even do anything to them!”

Obito isn’t concerned with Iwa hating them. He thinks he’s always hated Iwa. The feeling is mutual. He says, “Kamui can save us some time. And our aliases aren’t burned. If anything, we just got a little more notorious, but it’s not like they know who we are, or what we’re doing.”

He feels like a problem solver, but Rin just keeps hitting things. She asks, “where are we now?”

“Southeast of the village. I was aiming us for the border by Taki. Don’t know how far we got.”

The Nanabi is next up on their tour of the known world. It’ll be good to get out of the Elemental Nations. Obito thinks that if he really were a nukenin, like the Iwa jinchuuriki, he’d stick to the smaller nations. Easier to avoid hunter nin that way. Not as heavy a military presence. Maybe they’ll get lucky and the Yonbi and Gobi will be in Taki.

Not likely.

He watches Rin think it over. There’s not much else they can do. She sighs again. “Let me check your eye.”

She’s still angry enough that he’s wary, but he accepts her offer. Once some of the pressure is gone, they both feel better. He sighs as her chakra leaves him. He’s not been losing vision, not yet, and it hasn’t been bleeding as badly from the long jumps, but he’s wearing at his chakra pathways and coils by continually forcing his mangekyo to activate for Kamui. He thinks if he didn’t have the resilience of the mokuton to act as a buffer, he’d be suffering the effects worse. It’s a timebomb he hasn’t had the opportunity to focus on, with Rin’s more pressing expiration date staring him down. He should be more worried about losing his vision, slow and steady as it is.

He ignores it for now. It’s been working so far.

The more immediate problem is: Iwa’s out to get them, especially after Rin waved a fake Bijuu around in their Tsuchikage’s face, and the old Fence Sitter won’t take that lying down. He needs Kamui to get them out of this mess. Earth is already mobilizing against them. It’ll be a nightmare to get to the border.

He says, “we could sprint outright for Taki on foot, or I can Kamui us as close as I can.”

Problem part two is: he can’t sustain that pace and neither of them have the slightest clue what part of the country the Hidden Waterfall is in.

Rin says, “You can’t sustain Kamui that far.” She looks out, to the southeast, where they know the border of Taki is. She says, “We run for it. If we find trouble, we dodge or jump around.”

Obito scans the area and picks up Gamaken so he can tuck the toad into the sling. They’ve got to keep the summons out of sight, or they’re in hot water. He says, “My sensing is spotty. I’ll try to lead us around but stay close.”

They run. Rin carries more weight than him but it’s like she never gets tired. Obito has stamina but shinobi sprinting across uneven ground wears him out. His conditioning has improved but there’s something in Rin that just doesn’t stop. They’re both fast; they’re trained by the Yellow Flash, and they tear through Iwa straight for the border, dodging around anything that feels like an ambush. Problem the third is: everything in Earth feels like a potential ambush. There are too many people on the roads, too many civilian refugees, too many shinobi masking their chakra signature. Anyone could be a hunter nin. Any group of people could be a capture team. Everyone is an enemy.

“They know what way we’re going,” Rin says grimly as they skirt around a team of chuunin, one of which has an unseen summons that moves low and quick across the ground.

It’s not difficult to predict that they’re getting the hell out of Iwa. The border with Taki is closest. It’s going to be hell to get through. Obito says, “I don’t think they have a sensor on us, at least.”

“Not yet,” Rin says grimly.

Obito sighs, “you realize you’ve doomed us, right? There’s a sensor on their way right now.” He gestures towards the….groundhog? What the fuck, Iwa. “The summon’s a sensor. We’re screwed.”

They’re backed into a corner, between a wide river and an exposed monolith. No cover in either, with danger flickering across his senses in warning but impossible to pin down.

Gamaken says nervously, “if it’s a capture team, there’s a fourth behind the line, out of sight. That’s the point of contact. They’ll have a long-ranged ninjutsu, specialized in non-lethal takedown.”

“Brilliant,” Rin whispers. “At least they’re not trying to kill us.”

“Ideally,” Obito jokes, “they’d only need one of us. I’ve only got to outrun you.”

He knows her answering hand sign by heart. It’s the first one he learned as an Academy Student. They sent a letter home that he had to get signed by his aunt, something about his ‘comportment in a classroom environment’ and ‘disrespectful personality’ and “unbecoming pranking”. It was always manners with them, or countenance, and all those other prepackaged phrases that couched the word halfblood. He returns her gesture with interest and its almost muscle memory in his new arm.

They bear crawl down the escarpment, the sling turned so it rests against his back. Small stones skitter and slide under his feet, dig into his palms, tear the bandages. Rin skids down alongside him and she’s quieter than him. His weight and higher center of gravity work against him. He’s not as flexible either and there’s only so much sneaking he can do down a 60 degree incline. It sounds like he’s throwing boulders off the mountain every time his sandal hits a loose pebble.

It takes an hour of careful crawling to reach the bottom and he’s sweaty and covered in dirt and contusions by the end of their descent. The bank of the river is rock and pitfall and erosion, but they’re out of sight of the shinobi team, unless one of them sticks their head over the cliffs. He thinks, if he were them, he’d just drop an exploding tag off the top and throw kunai at whatever the shrapnel doesn’t kill.

“This,” he says lowly, “is not a better position.”

“In the water,” Rin says. “It’ll cover us.”

She slips into the river and vanishes into the current. This is a terrible idea, but he follows her, gritting his teeth, hugging Gamaken to his chest. The water is unpleasantly warm, like it’s absorbed all the sunlight and held it, and it stings at all of his scrapes. The current’s not fast, but it is interrupted by huge boulders that rise out of the depths and split the flow around them in unpredictable patterns. It’s hard to see and even harder to avoid knocking his head in.

They let the current carry them downstream, well past the chuunin team. Rin’s the better swimmer, more confident in the water than he is, and he struggles to keep up. He has to make sure he’s giving Gamaken time to breathe and every time they carefully break the surface, he scans around them with his sharingan full of muddy water.

It becomes a strict pattern: let the river wash him downstream, avoid getting slammed into rocks, breach to breathe, check on the toad, scan the area, submerge again. There’s a nonnegotiable timeline to the repetition, the lengths of the breaths he can hold, the stretch and burn of his lungs. He’s disoriented sometimes, in the murk and froth, but always, Rin appears, guiding him forward. She’s half-fish, he swears. He’s sure he’s not that graceful, but he loses himself in the pattern, measuring his air, keeping pace with her, hyperaware of Gamaken’s warning kicks.

After an indeterminate length of time, Rin leads him to the bank. The pebbly sand under his feet gives way to loose stones that trip him up and twist his ankles. They crouch behind a huge rock and make sure nobody’s wised up to their escape. Obito is sucking in air and the Red Horned Toad clutches his sasumata and wrings water out of his obi.

“I think we lost them,” Rin says, at a normal volume.

Obito is wet. “Good,” he huffs and lets his chakra rise in him, strong and hot, using a katon to dry himself. Gamaken gladly leans in but Rin frowns. He doesn’t care about the chakra use, frankly. He’s already exhausted; he might as well be dry.

They run through the night, leaning slightly more east, trying to recall knowledge of the continent from their Academy years. There is little moon and the terrain is treacherous, hidden canyons waiting to plummet them to their deaths, ravines that collapse open under their feet, sheer cliffs. The elevation varies to such an absurd degree that even though they’re covering a lot of ground, they’re not actually getting far with all the up/down they have to do. Trees are getting fewer and far between and Obito has to rely on his sharingan to keep them out of yawning pits and hole traps. It’s impossible to tell how far away the border is.

In the night, it’s even more difficult to discern black flak jackets. The hunter nin wait for them on a high plateau that gradually slopes down into washout, losing elevation. Obito thinks that’s been the general trend of the landscape for the past few miles, inching lower and lower with no mountains to regain the previous height. He takes it as a sign that they’re getting closer.

The hunter nin blindside them in the night. 3 Iwa jounin surround them. The fourth is out of sight. A standard rescue/capture team formation, just like Gamaken warned them about. Before he can react, a barrage of shuriken separates him and Rin as they dodge in different directions. He’s frustrated, forced on the defensive as two of the shinobi target him directly with powerful doton attacks. Killing Intent explodes over the stone. They using lethal techniques, and of course it’s him they’ve decided to kill. Rin flips over the ninja wire the third sends towards her but before they can fight their way back together, the fourth teammate’s broken, mangled body rolls to a stop in the middle of the scuffle.

It’s so unexpected that the fighting stutters to an uneven halt as the newcomer enters the fray, just a hulking dark shape against the rock, the body at his feet bent at odd angles.

He’s big, taller than Obito, and in the night his eyes are a weird shade of jewel green, the only thing he can see in a darkly tanned face. The rest is covered by a black mask and sweatband that holds back his hair. On the sweatband is a scratched through Taki hitai ate glinting in the weak moonlight. But its only when he sees the motion of black threads retracting from the body of the dead Iwa nin that he recognizes him from the Bingo Book.

His Killing Intent feels like nothing he’s ever felt before.

Kakuzu pulls the mask down around his neck while the Iwa nin look on in horror. The corners of his mouth writhe with black thread in a rictus grimace. Obito is frozen at the sight, helplessly capturing every detail as the scene spins into scuff and fractal around him, the blood slowly pooling on the ground. The kinjutsu is as disgusting as it is terrifying and he doesn’t need Gamaken’s panicked kick to his gut to know they’ve overstepped, and big time.

The S rank nukenin looks at Rin and Obito follows his gaze as he says, “I’ll be collecting your bounties now. You are worth quite a lot of money.” Rin pales as Kakuzu tilts his head to the side, considering. “Your hearts might be worth something to me as well.”

That does snap him out of the dangerous compulsion of his dojutsu, even as he revs his chakra up to mangekyo intensity.

He’ll give this to the Iwa shinobi: they’re fearless. Any sane team would have retreated the second the bounty hunter entered the fight. They regroup in formation and Kakuzu bursts into a mass of black threads in the night, the hint of a mask peeking over his shoulder as a razor blast of wind tears over the plateau at them. He hears “Ninja Art: Earth Grudge Fear,” and has just enough time to think fuck that before he’s desperately throwing himself at Rin in a panic, who catches him as Kakuzu rips through the Earth shinobi with an eruption of black thread. Someone starts screaming. He grabs on to her hand blindly, almost crushing Gamaken, and yanks them into Kamui as they go crashing towards the ground.

They exit in a tangled pile into a world that is still and quiet, except for the hoarse yelling of the Ichibi. Obito rolls off of Rin and onto his back, his breath coming in shaky pants. Blood drips down his cheek. He can hear Rin recovering next to him. He can feel the tremor in her leg where it shakes against his calf. Gamaken’s eyes are wide when he peeks out of the sling and only widen when he sees the Kamui dimension.

Obito’s adrenaline is crashing through him. He’s fought S rank shinobi before, but he’s never been as afraid to face an opponent as he was when he realized who it was that had stepped into the fight on the plateau.

This isn’t some hunter nin set to capture them. Kakuzu was going to kill the both of them. For money. He’d set the Sanbi free, trap the Ichibi forever. End the known world, for a paycheck.

“Was that…” Rin’s still catching her breath in quick pants. She tries again, “was that fucking Kakuzu?”

“I guess the old Fence Sitter upped our bounty.”

The joke lands badly. Obito winces.

But they’re safe in Kamui now. Nothing can get them here. Obito can breathe. He can rest. In the real world, an immortal S rank nukenin bounty hunter is out to kill them and take their hearts. But they don’t have to face that right now. This is his escape. His refuge. The most helpful thing his mangekyo’s ever given him.

Eventually, Rin sits up. “What was that ninjutsu he used? There at the end?”

He shivers at the memory, the echo of Killing Intent still thrilling through his bloodstream. He’s suddenly glad the sharingan can’t copy every technique. “I think,” he says, reliving the memory of Kakuzu shredding the Iwa nin like rice paper, “I think those threads came out of him.”

Rin says, “that’s so fucked up.”

Obito agrees, still flat on his back with a concerned toad on his chest.

Rin says, “thank you, for getting us out of there.”

“No problem. I’m just glad I had enough chakra to bring us all into Kamui.”

She scoots over to him. “Eye.”

He nods and she heals his eye. Gamaken hops off of him to survey their rectangular surroundings with wonder.

“What?” Obito asks him when Rin’s done. “Not like the summoning dimension?”

“Not quite,” Gamaken admits faintly.

Rin’s brow furrows. “I thought you’d be used to interdimensional travel.”

Behind him, on the table, the Ichibi calls him a ‘fucking minger’. Obito thinks he’s running out of insults. Obito doesn’t even know what a minger is.

Gamaken bravely ignores the tanuki and blinks around at the endless array of pale rectangles. “How am I seeing this?” he asks. “What’s the source of light?”

Obito shrugs. “Dunno. Welcome to Kamui. It just is.”

Rin levers herself up to standing. Obito is content to stay on the ground. She says, “some R&R can’t hurt. I’m going to set up the tent, check our supplies.”

She separates from him while he decompresses, each needing to process the wrench that is Kakuzu thrown into their plans.

He takes deep breaths, letting the adrenaline leech out in slow increments. His heartbeat is so fast it’s a thrum like a rush in the blood. He reexamines the memory of the bounty hunter from every angle, the way the threads had torn from his mouth, the way the mask had risen from under his cloak. Immortal, the Bingo Book says. With a chakra signature like a body badly stitched together.

This, he tells himself, is what a bloodline thief looks like. This memory of writhing threads, corpse hearts incorporated into a weapon, every elemental nature achieved not through a lifetime of training, but a cheap robbery.

This is a monster. It doesn’t look like him at all.

He breathes the realization in. Holds it to see how it fits. Let’s it go.

He’s tired. He thinks he’s tired enough to go to sleep right here on the ground, but he eventually drags himself over to where Rin set up a camp and flops himself down onto a bedroll, rolling himself up in a blanket. “Sleeping,” he warns Gamaken, who just blinks at him from on top of a nearby rectangle.

And he does. No traps around him. No watch. No mokuton sensing to serve as an early warning. The only plant in all of Kamui is his succulent and a peach branch and both are a clear spot of comfort to him. But he feels safe here, secure. It’s maybe too quiet, too still, too empty, but he’s already thinking about how he can create hanging gardens and canals and structure and, besides, the angry Ichibi yells him a lullaby of howling death. It is its own kind of comforting.

He sleeps deeply, for what feels like a long time. When he wakes, he feels better than he has in days, since they ever crossed into Iwa, really.

Rin is fast asleep on the other bedroll, using Gamaken like a plush child’s toy. It’s adorable. If he had a camera, he’d take a picture to remember it by. Oh, duh, he thinks, flicking on his sharingan to capture it forever. He can’t show it to anyone else like this, but at least he has it for him. Gamaken frowns at him and Obito sticks his tongue out.

Obito keeps enough rations in Kamui for them to last for days without needing to leave. There’s extra clothes, medical supplies, iodine drops for purifying water. He thinks if he summons enough water and checks on them frequently enough, he could even grow plants in here. In his head, he’s already curating the space into a haven. He’s already started to shape it a bit using doton, but now that he’s copied a few more earth techniques, he’s itching to implement more structure to it.

Rin explores some of the changes he’s made since she’s been here last. The table and organized cubbies are about the extent of what he can do at the time, but she’s impressed nonetheless at the amount of stuff he’s managed to steal and squirrel away in here for safekeeping. He can hear her talking to the Ichibi but the crazed tanuki’s still insensible. He knows she has theories about that, crazy, potentially disastrous theories, but he trusts her not to experiment on exactly how many seals the pot of tea can lose before Shukaku emerges to kill them all.

They stay safely in Kamui for a few days to recover and give Kakuzu time to get bored and hopefully wander off. Obito recharges and starts tweaking the architecture of the area. A few Practice Bricks have the flow of the space feeling more organic and less rectangular. Rin helpfully fills a few places with water for him; she’s better at suiton than him and the amount of water she can produce is just absurd. As an experiment, he plants some seeds in some crumbled material from the rectangles and jumpstarts them with mokuton to see if they’ll take. He thinks there’s enough light for them to grow.

Rin meditates holding the pot of tea and Obito and Gamaken spar to keep from thinking about anything that might even mean. Gamaken is determined to turn Obito into a proper melee fighter and this suits him just fine. He remembers clubbing ninja to death with sticks. Its inelegant, but he’s built for it and fast enough that with a poled weapon he can do damage. He thinks he might like a staff as a weapon, a wooden one, made more versatile with mokuton, if the entire concept doesn’t give him away.

He talks it over with Gamaken and the toad drills him on kata that would suit a staff user. Neither of them mention how all the portraits of Madara show him with a gunbai that’s ubiquitous to the man himself, as identifying as his fire, as his eyes. It’s weird to practice when he doesn’t actually have a staff to swing around and hit things with. He knows that, technically, he should be able to grow wooden spikes out of his body; he’s done it once before; but it’s a technique that feels alien and wrong to him. Madara gave him the mokuton as a weapon. Obito doesn’t want to use it as one.

Besides, the experimental carrots are taking root. He much prefers using his Wood Release for growing things.

He spars with Rin as well, and if he doesn’t cheat with Kamui she beats him into the ground. All she has to do to tear his meniscus and put him down is lightly tap the side of his knee with her chakra scalpels. Her knowledge of human anatomy translates into the fastest, most efficient way to take him apart. They’re both pulling their punches, it’s just a spar, but her stamina has improved exponentially and with just a glancing touch she can force her chakra into his system and catch him in whatever wicked genjutsu she wants. He has some natural resistance to it but a non-mangekyo shinobi would fall.

That’s not even counting her suiton. She can pull some limited chakra from the Sanbi for truly devastating attacks. She rarely does; she must feel guilty using the chakra of the Sanbi like this, but Obito pushes her into it by throwing so much fire around she has to counter it. She makes water clones to cover for her while she goes through the 44 meticulous hand seals for a Water Dragon only to send it arcing out into the wider emptiness of Kamui when the massive dragon turns out powerful enough to obliterate their entire camp.

She describes the Sanbi to him like this: “the seal’s like a massive cage, and he’s in the middle of it. I can fit through the chains, I can reach him, but I run out of air before I even get close. How do I talk to him if everything’s underwater?”

She’s frustrated. Obito won’t pretend to comprehend all the nuance of a jinchuuriki and their Tailed Beast, but he knows how optimistic and friendly Rin naturally is. It’s likely never occurred to her that even with the ability to talk more freely to the Sanbi, the Bijuu trapped inside her might not want to talk to her. To him, it sounds like the Sanbi wants nothing to do with her. That’s a decision he can make.

But she’s stubborn too. And she won’t give up, not when she’s determined to befriend the Bijuu unhappily sealed inside her. She wants the Sanbi as a friend and Rin doesn’t give up on her friends.

They strategize in the camp that feels more comfortable with every day that Obito tinkers with it. When he’s fully recovered from his near chakra exhaustion, they’ll have to go back to Iwa. He could try to teleport them all the way to Taki from Kamui but he has no idea how well that would work. At least in Iwa, they knew they were getting close.

But Kakuzu might be waiting for them in Iwa. He’s an ex-Taki shinobi, so they can’t count on being able to evade him even if they cross the border. Iwa would stop chasing them, but as a nukenin, Kakuzu isn’t confined by borders. And he knows Taki. If he thought they were in Grass, he might follow them back into his home country.

They try to think up ways they might be able to counter the bounty hunter, but outrunning him seems like their best bet. If he’s really immortal, killing him is out of the question. They have no idea what his ninjutsu even is. Only that there was a lot of black thread involved and it was terrifying, and he used it to take down an entire team of Iwa hunter nin like they were Academy Students. His page in the Bingo Book emphasizes his high rank without expanding on his abilities. His eyes really are that shade of green, green as emeralds. Hard and cold as jewels. Reports put him varying degrees of both impenetrable and oddly disjointed. He either eats the hearts he collects or he uses them in a ritual to prolong his life indefinitely. Also, he can utilize all five elemental releases. This last bit is presented, disconcertingly enough, like a fun fact.

Obito’s good with running. He has no desire to fight the immortal bastard with the creepy smile. They’ve tangled with S ranks before, but while Rasa’s Magnet Release makes sense; hell, even Ohnoki’s kekkei tota is understandable, all overpowered insanity aside, Kakuzu is a whole other echelon of danger.

In the middle of their battle planning, Gamaken poofs out in a puff of white chakra smoke, in the middle of a sentence. They stare at the spot where the Red Horned Toad had been.

“Bet it was Jiraiya sama,” Rin comments on the toad’s disappearance, but Obito’s busy reconfiguring his plan for the husk.

It hits her a second later. “Oh,” she says. “The statue. You were going to put it here?”

“Not anymore.”

“Obviously. Any idea how we destroy it?”

He’s been working on it. He knows its immune to fire and can repair itself somehow. Grows back probably; its mokuton affiliated in some way he doesn’t understand. It’s a power source, he’s pretty sure. A demonic one. It keeps Madara alive; the cave bound clones are attached to it by a tether that withers and dies if broken. He says, reasonably enough to his mind, “the Old Man and Zetsu can’t use it if they’re both dead.”

It's not a plan and they both know it. But if they can’t destroy it right off the bat, killing everything in the cave will buy them the time to figure out how to take the husk out permanently.

It’s even quieter in the camp without the soft-spoken toad. Obito sighs, “we should go back. Kakuzu probably got bored and left and I’m as rested as I’m gonna get.”

Rin pats the weird blue/green rectangular material of Kamui. “You know,” she says conversationally, “It’s growing on me. I’m going to miss the soundtrack.”

Shukaku yells profanity like he’s aware of the cue. Rin smiles wryly. “I’m going to get through to him, too. When all this is over and he’s safe, I’ll befriend Shukaku.”

“Please wait until we can take him out of Kamui. We might actually be inside my eyeball. I’d rather not have a Bijuu rampage in my eyeball. I’ve only got the one,” he jokes.

She snorts and shoves at him playfully. He pushes back and they wrestle around until she pulls back with a smile. He’s so glad every time she smiles. He feels like these past few months have been a nonstop fight for their lives and she can still smile. They both can.

She combs her fingers through where he’s messed up her short hair, arranging it neatly back into its style, humming a tune that itches somewhere in the back of his mind. Rin is the careful daughter of a civilian family and she carries her faith in quiet ways and he forgets that sometimes. Obito remembers Rin sitting by the fire back in Iwa, singing her heathen songs. His clan would be scandalized but his aunt would approve. His baa san always liked Rin.

It doesn’t take long to pack. The empty sling is stored away. He brings her close, ready to pull either weapons or pull them back into Kamui, and activates his mangekyo.

It’s night in Earth again. In the distance, he can see the plateau where Kakuzu killed the Iwa team. He orients himself, his mokuton rushing over his senses again and the hum of living things around relaxes him. They’re alone, except for the biting flies that aim for his ankles and eye.

They sprint. The ground slopes downwards, leveling out. The Taki border can’t be far.

In the dawn, they can see the outposts up ahead of them, squared off towers and spires that all face outward. They creep closer, making sure he’s feeling this right.

The border faces a sheer cliff, a wide slow-moving river at its base. Grasslands rise in gentle hills beyond, covered with morning mist.

Taki. They’re bluffside, but he can feel grass. He faces the plains and Rin holds on as he Kamuis them completely out of Iwa, over the border, and well into Taki itself. He wants to get inland as quick as he can, making a huge jump in the hope of throwing any potential trackers or sensors off their tail.

They land in cool, dew-damp grass. The grasslands unspool around them into gently rolling plains. His sense of the area washes over him and the knee-high grasses hug around his calves, dotting with tiny blue wildflowers. He smiles. “We’re clear.”

Rin relaxes out of her defensive stance to look around as sunrise breaks over the hills and the mist lights up in the morning. “It’s beautiful,” she says, like she’s surprised.

“I can work with this,” Obito says, feeling the full extent of his range in detail, interrupted only by random stretches of sandy soil where the limestone peaks out. He trails his fingers through the grass as small insects scatter and jump. If he concentrates, he can even feel where the giant grasshoppers cling to the thousand stalks.

“Where are we?” Rin asks.

“Somewhere in the north of Taki.” They have no idea where the hidden village is. The plan is to find a town and ask directions, but they’ll have to be careful. Grass nin are fierce. He faced a team of them in his disastrous Chuunin Exams. One tried to feed him to a giant centipede in the Forest of Death. He’s never forgotten that particular horror.

It takes some searching to find anything resembling a road. The plains are crisscrossed by creeks and streams that feel like roads to his sensing and game trails are the easiest accessible points of entry in the high grass. The grass ranges in height from ankle deep to well over his head and some areas are nigh impenetrable. It’s not just one species, it’s hundreds of individual stalks and grasses and sedges. Instead of bushwhacking his way through, the native grasses bend towards him in greeting and if he loses focus, he ends up tangled in the long stems.

There’s life everywhere. Huge rabbits that leap and dart through the open sections, disappearing into burrows. Many of the open sandy spots are flourishing prairie towns full of rabbits and groundhogs and prairie dogs. There’s giant burrowing tortoises and owls that run around on skinny legs. The game trail they’re following’s made by some kind of hoofed deer thing they’ve yet to catch up to. Wildflowers the size of his spread hand turn the sedge into a riot of colors.

It’s not all ease; rattlesnakes lurk in the grass, and he can sense some kind of wolves at work ahead of them. Some of the grass has blades sharp as saws and litter them both with hundreds of slicing cuts the width of a hair, harmless really, especially with his healing factor, but surprisingly painful. Some species of grass have hooked seed pods that dig into skin or sticky hairs that rub off at the slightest brush, or sticker burrs that tear up exposed arms and legs. The lack of true trees makes him feel exposed; the sky too wide and blue overhead, somehow feeling closer and heavier overhead than it did in the empty desert of Wind. In Suna, the sky was a far-away blue. Here it’s like if he stretches, he might just touch it.

But there’s plenty of late summer blueberries that have lingered past the first breath of fall’s chill. Obito traps a rabbit and their lunch is some of the first fresh food they’ve had in days. Probably many of the stalks are edible, but he can’t identify any of them. The water in the streams is cool and flowing, surprisingly cold. Mid-sized carp lip at the surface. Rin suggests it’s fed by the mountain snowmelt and glaciers of Shimo, flowing through Taki on its way to the North Sea.

Since Taki’s hidden village is named Waterfall, Obito figures that staying near a water source might lead them to the village. It’s as good a plan as any and they wander south, away from the coast, thinking it’s unlikely the shinobi village would be on the shore. Despite Grass not being one of the Five Elemental Nations, it’s the largest of the smaller nations, known for producing highly skilled jounin. Even though it occupies fertile ground between Iwa and Konoha and Kumo, it has never successfully been invaded. The few ninja from Grass he met during the Chuunin Exams were an odd group but incredibly talented. If the exams hadn’t been interrupted by the outbreak of war, he’s sure the Grass nin would have been promoted.

“Remember the purple-haired kunoichi from the exams?” Rin asks, thinking along the same lines as Obito.

“Yes!” Obito says, “that thing she could do, with her hands? That was terrifying.”

Rin agrees, “what a cluster that turned out to be! But at least there’s no giant centipedes here for them to use.”

“It was one time!”

They bicker back and forth, poking fun at those early failures. It’s incredible to ponder how far they’ve both come in terms of their shinobi skills. They aren’t here to fight, but if Obito meet the red-headed kid again, he wouldn’t mind a rematch, away from any massive man-eating bugs.

When he notices the gap in his sensing, he thinks it’s just another sandy burrow town and ignores it until it moves. The weird staticky void of it registers and he stops moving, throwing a hand up to halt Rin as he pins its location down. Rin goes on alert at his signal, looking around the plains for danger.

He locks in on it. “Zetsu,” he says. “South of us.”

Damn, it will be a nightmare trying to separate them from the grass. Rin’s eyes narrow, calculating. “We could hit them with ranged attacks.”

Sneaking up on them through the open land is the problem. The lack of cover works in the zetsu’s favor, with their merging abilities, but is detrimental to them. It would be difficult, but if all else fails, Obito can just set the whole hill on fire. Rin can put it out before it spreads, but he’d like to see the clone hide in a wildfire.

They crouch low to the ground, Obito leading them forward towards the gap in his perception, moving and slipping around like a shadow of negative space. They’re being less cautious than he would expect, like they’re in a hurry. Rin henges herself as a precaution but Obito thinks a tree would stand out almost as much as a billboard announcing his presence. They slither through the grass, Obito pulling them towards the zetsu. There’s an open area ahead, and if they force them into the sand, it should be easy to pin them down without burning the area. He adjusts their approach to get the zetsu between them and the limestone he can see up ahead. Something moves in his perception and he realizes that there are goats up ahead as well, hoofing all over the limestone, big curly horned sheep munching on the grass. He signs sheep to Rin, spelling it out and she dips her chin in acknowledgement.

They creep right up on it. He signals and they slowly inch their way up, eyes open for any sign of the clone. The breeze waves the grass like sand on dunes or waves in the sea and the movement hides the zetsu completely. He knows where they are; he can feel their exact blankness, but he can’t see it. The sheep bleat and patter around, gnats buzz in the grass and he activates his sharingan to peer into the middle of his blind spot. The red filter sharpens every individual blade of sedge into stark relief.

His finger taps a signal on Rin’s arm. Forward. 2 o’clock.

They go through hand seals, Obito noticing she’s going for a broad slicing attack. On his signal, she releases a suiton offensive, her Water Blade cutting cleanly through the grass and the middle of the zetsu in an arc. At the sound and movement, the goats scatter, fleet-footed, and vanish into the tall grass. Her attack would have killed a regular opponent, but the clone just topples with a weird hissing sound. The zetsu bleeds a white sappy lymph, each half separating from the grass and falling to the side.

Obito’s ready with a “katon: Ryuuka no Jutsu!” and his Dragon Flame encases both halves of the clone before they can even turn their head to identify the attackers. There’re a few seconds where the halves struggle, even on fire, before they succumb.

They watch it burn for a minute to be sure it isn’t just playing dead before they emerge from their hiding place to approach the blaze. Obito’s katon had been precise and hot, and the surrounding grass is smoldering from the heat. To prevent a conflagration, Rin dampens the torch and Obito kicks the crispy halves of the clone into a pile and continues to burn it to ash. The thick black smoke rises over the plains, but he burns it down to nothing, satisfied by how good they’re getting at taking out the zetsu.

When Rin jumps and spins, launching shuriken at the limestone, he thinks she’s spooked by the sheep. He’s almost ready to taunt her about it when he sees the eyes, the green hair and manic white smile hanging open, teeth even as dead fish. There’s a clone casually lounging against the sand, leaning against the low hump of limestone and observing them with a grin, perfectly in his blind spot.

The zetsu dodges her shuriken attack with a high-pitched giggle, turning their face away to hide the grin and they’ve been watching them for who know how long; Zetsu has been watching them through their cunning yellow eyes.

“Wait,” he grabs at Rin’s kunai arm before she can launch another attack to take out the newest zetsu.

But Obito knows this one; he recognizes the exact arrangement of the protuberances from their shoulders, the spiral of their face parts. He says, “Hey, Peely. Long time no see.”

The zetsu giggles. They’re unarmed, but they’re a direct link to the other clones, to Madara himself.

“Hello Obi-tobi-to. We thought we might run into you here. And little Rin chan as well! Now what a fun surprise this has turned out to be!”

“Figured it out, have you?” Obito asks while Rin glances between him and the zetsu. “Wondered how long it would take you to realize it was us killing all those clones.”

“Oh, we knew you have,” they giggle, “hidden depths, Obi-tobi-to. You left us too soon, Zetsu is most interested in how you kept the girl from blowing chunks.” They singsong, regressing into the creepy baby talk, “Bakashi and Rin chan, shaking with raiton hands, Obi-tobi-to san, saw her blood all on the sand.”

Anger surges through him and his Killing Intent ignites the stalks around him. He says with faux surprise, feeling flames crawl up his throat, his lungs fill with smoke and embers, “Did Swirly not tell you before I burned them out? Something the Geezer did stuck.” He breathes through his fire nature, reaching out with mokuton to see thorny sedge unfurl around them, twisting into a barrier of claws. His mangekyo spins threateningly.

Peely claps their hands together in glee, a performance that feels just a tad overblown. Maybe it’s for Rin’s benefit; before, the clown act was Swirly’s prerogative. Peely’s to sly for it to suit them.

“Marvelous! Is that all Madara sama got to stick, I wonder?”

Even knowing its manipulation, he can’t help but be riled. Peely’s always know what buttons to push, what strings to set him on.

“You tell the Old Man I’m coming for him,” Obito says, looking right into their yellow eyes like he could stare down Zetsu themself. “And I’m going to kill every zetsu between us.”

Peely laughs at him, a manic, empty sound. Obito did one-armed pushups with the clone sitting cross legged on his back singing the count. Peely brought him his meals and wanted to know how he would describe the taste of gruel. He’d considered the zetsu, not a friend exactly, but he did get used to having them around, and between Swirly’s medical coding and Spikey’s training regiment, he found Peely the most bearable. They weren’t nearly as creepy in the cave, milling around him everyday, as they are out here in the open, all of their green haired freakshow registering as a contrived, created thing.

Peely cocks their head at him. “But of course you’re coming home, Obi-tobi-to kun!” They cry, “Madara sama can’t just let you go! The plan’s still incomplete!”

Some of the heat leaves him. Swirly said something like that too, right before they tried to hijack Obito’s body to take him back to the cave. To where Madara said, with every assurance, that he would come back. The Old Man had done a lot of unspeakably evil things to Obito, but he’d never lied to him.

“What do you mean?” Obito demands. He’s furious, but he’s scared as well, more scared than he is afraid, more afraid for what the fear does to him. There are Peely’s fingerprints smeared across his bones. What is all this talk implying? What else has Madara gotten to stick?

Peely put their hands on their hips and strikes a pose at him, like a bizarre mother hen. It’s a strikingly dissonant moment, knowing that they are villains when he remembers their kindness. Swirly was kind too, in their own way. He supposes any lens that kept him alive can feel sympathetic in the right light. The awareness is no less confusing.

When they speak, it’s with less of the singsong lilting. “He gave you those eyes too late, Obito kun. There are things you should have seen.” They tilt their head at him, yellow eyes narrowed to slits. “Things you should not have seen.”

“Fuck that,” Obito says. “My eyes are my own.”

Now Peely laughs outright, like he’s told a great joke. They mime wiping a tear. “Are they?” they ask slyly and Obito wants to think its Kakashi, he knows its Kakashi, even if Madara switched his eye while he was in his coma, his teammate’s mangekyo matches his exactly, and it sure as hell degenerates. Kamui is his.

“Don’t overestimate yourself, Obi-tobi-to.” They sing a different tune than earlier, simpler, more cadence than grate, “Obi-tobi-tobi-kun, thought that he could beat the moon, a down a down a down up. How wrong he was,” they sing grinning, and croon, “how wrong, and so soon.”

He hates that fucking song. It’s all static in his head, Swirly’s ghost whispering a loud hiss. Rin touches his arm. His mangekyo has activated at some point and he’s letting his Killing Intent skyrocket and the hill withers around him. He’s done letting the zetsu play him, letting Madara wind him up.

He dives at the clone, pulling a kunai and Peely yelps but giggles as they dodge, rolling into the high grass with a laugh, like they’re sparring in the cave again and Peely’s letting Obito win so he won’t pout in his hospital bed the rest of the day.

Peely dives for the ground but Obito’s mokuton is confused, shying away from the creeping numbness of the zetsu, of the way the grass under them grows mold. He growls and shreds through the knotting briars, but Peely has vanished into the soil, merging deep into the root system, getting less and less distinct.

“Shit,” he snarls, slamming his hands on the ground, sending a pulse of mokuton down into the ground but it cancels out at whatever Peely throws back at him. They shouldn’t be able to fucking do that, the zetsu’s mokuton capacity is barely anything, but it’s like their affinities clash and equal out. He can still picture the smug grin as the clone sank into the ground, knowing Obito wouldn’t be able to follow.

“Obito,” Rin says, and there’s evidence around her of where she’s cut herself free of the creepers. But Obito’s frustrated and pissed off, and he tears and kicks at the ground like he can taunt Peely back. His temper flares but the zetsu doesn’t appear.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Obito yells, “Fuck! They knew I couldn’t sense them outside of plants. It was a trap, and we blundered right into it!”

Rin lets him rage around, kicking at the dirt, trying to locate any sense of the clone. She’s calm in a way that both grounds him and pisses him off. It takes a while for him to calm down, for the fear to grow strong enough to replace the anger. He sits heavily on the hump of rock, staring into the distance, Peely’s taunting words on a loop in his mind.

Rin sits next to him, careful not to touch. “It’s not a terrible time for them to find out.”

Obito scrubs a hand across his face, rubbing at his eye, at the scars surrounding it. “Now the Old Man knows where we are, what we’re doing. And Zetsu.”

Rin says, carefully, “I think they already knew.”

“Yeah?” he asks meanly. “Awesome. You mean they’re right. I overestimated myself.”

She ignores his barb. “What did they mean by all that? You know them better than I do.”

It’s her own barb. He’s worried her, naming a clone, talking to them. He says, “Peely was one of the ones in the cave with me. It makes sense that Zetsu would send them, just to provoke me.” And they had. Miserably, he asks, “what did I reveal?”

“I don’t think we gave away much. They knew how to hide from you already, knew you were the one taking out the clones. Figured out you could track them and how. The only new thing that might have been revealed was that not only was I alive and with you, but that I was stable. Bet they’re scratching their heads over that one.”

Peely’s sly taunts linger. Rin asks, “What did it mean, by things Madara got to stick?” She asks cautiously, “what else did he do?”

The to you is implied. Rin’s been the best at not pushing him about the two years he spent in the cave, just as he’s been the best at not thinking about them. They haven’t talked about it. Obito’s early memories are hazy, indistinct apart from the feeling of Swirly encasing him, merging with him to keep him alive. The most he’s admitted is that the Old Man had done experiments. He knows Rin assumes it was all torture, but it wasn’t. Not all the time.

“I couldn’t even guess,” Obito says truthfully. “There was….it was a lot.”

Rin is quiet for a long moment. “I think they gave away more than they got. Some of those taunts, were they warnings? We already knew he was behind what happened to me, that he made sure you were there to see it. We knew about your dojutsu, your mokuton. Does Madara have some way of controlling you still?”

Obito hates this. The way Peely had asked are they. The way Rin won’t look at him as she suggests he might be compromised, that in all his scheming, Madara might have devised a way to ensure his loyalty, even after he left. After Madara let him leave. After he promised he would come back.

He hates that he can’t be sure. He’s been manipulated so much he’s not sure he’d even recognize when Zetsu is yanking his chain around and when they’re just fucking with him.

“I wouldn’t know,” he says and it’s tinged with helplessness. “I just wouldn’t even fucking know.”

“We need to think on this,” Rin says. “It might not change the plan.”

“Really?” Obito asks sarcastically. “I might be compromised, and you want to stay with me?” He’s bitter but he can’t help it. “You’d be safer in Konoha.”

She rolls her eyes. “Sure I would. Because there’s not any zetsu in the village.”

She’s too flippant. She doesn’t understand the danger of him, the way he cannot guarantee himself. He repeats, “you’d be safer in Konohagakure.”

Rin stills. He’s not even sure he’s asking her to leave or just wants her to be aware of the continued risk of him. When he glances at her, her eyes are wide, like she’s finally realized, but when she speaks, its to say, “You said Konohagakure.”

“What?” He rubs at his eye, irritated at the way it won’t fucking turn off.

She smacks his hand away. “Leave it alone and tell me why you said Konohagakure.”

“What the fuck, Rin?”

“You didn’t call it Konoha, like it’s your home. You said Konohagakure.” She accuses, and she’s mad suddenly, really fucking mad and he’s not even sure why it’s that big a deal. He can’t get his stupid fucking eyeball to stop spinning itself out of his skull and when her own Killing Intent rises, its heavy with the influence of the Sanbi. “I know it’s not because you plan to die fighting Madara and Zetsu. When you talk about them, it’s all action and strategy and victory. But when you talk about going home, you’re wry, rueful, almost sarcastic, even. In Ishi you insisted we were nukenin.”

His stomach drops, because he’d thought she understood. He’s subconsciously dropped hints before and Rin always acts like she doesn’t notice. He’s used to her letting his comments pass but she’s challenging them now. Maybe he’s been getting lax about deceiving her, or maybe she’s been noticing his guilt more and more. Her hands tighten into fists.

When he won’t defend himself, she just gets angrier. It’s a good thing he’s already sitting, her Killing Intent would send him to his knees. He’s dizzy with it and he snaps, “because I’m a fucking bloodline thief! Your family will be overjoyed to get you back! Mine won’t be able to look at me without shame! Without revulsion!”

“Bullshit! You don’t think of yourself like that, Uchiha Obito. Don’t you dare fucking think of yourself like that.”

He has been getting kinder to himself recently. The mokuton was big and imposing before, less integrated, unnatural, but now its folded into him like butter into dough, even and everywhere, and there may never be a time where it’s his alone, but he’s no longer upset at the thought of waiting for it to be a part of him in a way that feels okay.

But that’s just him. Accepting himself won’t force others to as well.

“You don’t get it,” he says, but he knows she might. Rin knows what its like to live with ghosts. She won’t accept it from him.

“No, you don’t get it. I don’t give a shit about your backasswards Clan Head. You have a family, Obito, and they want to see you at the end of this. I want to see you at the end of this.”

“They don’t deserve this.”

“You don’t deserve this, asshole.”

This is the worst pep talk he’s ever received. His skin is starting to feel dangerously hot from the Sanbi’s chakra lashing at him. He can’t see her straight and he belatedly realizes it’s because his stupid fucking eye has finally blown a gasket and started bleeding gain.

The Bijuu chakra cuts off as suddenly as it started. “Shit, Obito, let me see.”

He can still taste the anger in the air but her hands on his face are gentle. Her chakra is blessedly cool, working through his senses like a balm. While she works at his overworked pathways, she says, “What did they mean, about your eyes not being your own?”

He closes his eye, trying to imagine the darkness he sees as complete, what it will be like to open his eye and greet that same darkness. “Just bullshit scare tactics, probably. Mean tricks. They’re assholes, all of them.”

“Probably?”

He shrugs.

“Look at me,” she snaps and he flinches, hesitantly meeting her eyes. Everyone knows not to meet an Uchiha’s gaze but she’s never flinched from him even once. “Look at me. I know it has something to do with your mangekyo. You called it a curse in Suna. I know its degenerative, a parasite, you called it. But what does that have to do with whatever contingency they’re dangling over your head?”

Clan secrets sounds like a pathetic excuse, with her chakra all up in his dojutsu. But this secret involves him more than any other Uchiha. Madara made sure of it. He made sure to make it personal. He pushes away but she won’t let him. “Tell me.”

He chews on his tongue, but its not like it can get any worse. Maybe then she’d understand. “Those jabs Peely was throwing, they’re about the Curse of Hatred. About the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan. That’s what they want from me.”

She sounds skeptical. “Curse of Hatred?”

He nods, bitter. “Like, its how the sharingan evolves. Killing loved ones for power. Sacrificing bonds for visual prowess. It makes us crazy, eventually.”

“Bullshit,” she says immediately. “You didn’t kill me.”

“Kakashi must have thought he did. He has my dojutsu. You’re precious to the both of us.”

There’s a beat of silence. “That’s bullshit,” she says repeats. “Kakashi didn’t kill me either.”

Obito says, “it doesn’t matter. He Chidoried you. No one survives that. He had no reason to think he hadn’t killed you. And by being too late to save you, I thought I had killed you too.”

“Bullshit,” she says. “That can’t be how it works. That doesn’t make any sense.”

He shrugs. “A magic eyeball giving me the ability to summon an ultimate defense shaped like a giant tengu that can fly and shoot flaming arrows through the powers of visual prowess doesn’t make any sense either.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Not the point. The mangekyo sharingan as a fatal curse for killing your loved ones for power makes more sense than Susanoo.”

“So what, it’s the blindness?” She says it so casually and its her medical coded levelheadedness. He usually appreciates her staidness but now it’s just another cut.

“That’s just a symptom, a punishment. It’s the hatred, the madness, that’s the curse. I’m doomed to fall for it eventually. That’s what they’re counting on, why they’re so sure I’ll go back.”

“I see.” She says, skeptically. “And this Curse of Hatred, it was diagnosed by a medical professional?”

He snorts. “It’s the truth. Eventually, I’ll snap, snap like Madara did. Go batshit insane and try to take over the fucking moon, or worse.”

“You’re telling me that the degeneration from the mangekyo sharingan, what? Travels into your brain and eats away your rational thinking? Turns you evil? That’s what’s insane. The mangekyo’s an eyeball. A powerful eyeball, but its still just an eyeball. Its not suddenly going to make you evil.”

“It’s the truth! Punishment for killing a loved one for power!”

She says, “the gods I believe in would never blame you for what others did to you.”

He gapes. There’s nothing he can say to that.

“Did Madara tell you that? He told you it was real?”

Madara told him all kinds of things, but he didn’t need the Old Man to know there was evil somewhere in him. “Its not more insane than the Gedo Mazo, and that’s sure as fuck real, real and evil.”

“The Gedo Mazo is a statue that an evil man is going to use to do evil things. I doubt its intrinsically evil. Obito, you’re not a sleeper agent.”

He’s not convinced. How can he tell her that he has the Curse of Hatred stamped across his cultural memory? That every Uchiha with a sharingan knows what he knows. That every Uchiha is tempted. And he’s already achieved the mangekyo. There’s only one more evolution for him to undergo, for him to have eyes like Madara.

Madara hadn’t swapped out his eyes while he was in a coma. But he definitely plans to. He doesn’t have any use for a puppet going blind in inches. Hell, he probably plans to give him his own eyes, wherever they are.

Madara’s eyes. Izuna’s eyes. That’s what Nara Shikaku is forgetting. The eyes that Madara sees the world through belong to a dead man. And the dead are unforgiving.

He shrugs. There’s generations of observational and anecdotal proof he has inside him but none of it will convince the medic who thinks spiritualism is intricate and multifaceted and forgiving. Hers are not the gods Obito was taught to fear, clan history taught in cascading chains of causality, cause and effect, then and then and then, all divine punishment and retribution, wars and power and sacrifice until the Sage. Until the Senju realized that dojutsu could be transplanted.

She shakes her head at him. “You don’t mean that. Maybe he does have some contingency in mind for you, but its not some switch in your head that fluctuates between good and evil. It’s not something he can just turn on via visual prowess. Besides, that’s not what the zetsu meant, about your eyes.”

He swallows. “It wasn’t. Peely meant the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan. It’s the next step, for me.”

“Another evolution of the sharingan?” She’s confused.

“An Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan. Its…it’s the cure you’re looking for. For the blindness. An Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan won’t burn out. Its not degenerative. Not a parasite. Its….worse. The Curse of Hatred, the madness, that’s its punishment.”

Her eyes light up. “So there is a treatment.”

“No! No, its not some magical solution! Its an abomination! It would make me evil, not by flipping some switch in my head, but because it meant I ripped a mangekyo out of a clansmen’s head and took it for myself!”

“I’m pretty sure Madara would just hand it over, if you asked nicely.” She says, like she’s being reasonable, like it’s not the worst thing he’s ever heard.

Now he succeeds in breaking her grip to shove himself away. “No, no, no!”

His horror and immediate panic seem to get through to her and she clarifies, “I don’t mean anything by it except that there is a part of your biology that can adapt to your dojutsu without the degeneration. And if a way exists, I can find it. I can fix this for you, without resorting to such….drastic measures.”

That does calm him. She’s thinking about exploiting it in a different way than he would ever consider. No Uchiha would think past the instinctual no into what it meant for their biology, medically speaking. If this is the proof that gives her hope, he won’t disabuse her of it. He may not ever get her to understand the depth of the taboo, but maybe he will never understand her willingness to twist his curse into something she can use. Use to help him.

They sit and compose themselves. A heard of goats watch them from the grass. After a while, Rin leans against his shoulder. “You’re so stupid,” she says tiredly. She’s hoarse and he realizes its from tears.

He’s never made her cry before.

“What else do you want to know?” He tries.

She asks, “what timeline are we looking at?”

He says, “sometime before I lose vision completely.”

She stiffens, likely imagining whatever damage she’s already felt build up in him from his near constant use of his mangekyo. He imagines his dojutsu as a kind of fire in itself, burning away at his future a bite at a time, every time he uses it.

She says, “I can’t ask you to stop using it.”

If she asked him, he would. He’d swear it. But she doesn’t. It might be the only technique that can counter Madara and she knows it. They rely on Kamui for too much.

But if she asks, he’ll do it. He’s always loved her, since they were kids, and she knows it. He hasn’t stopped. In the cave, the thought of them reuniting was one of the only things that kept him going, that gave him the strength to resist. But he’s doomed and she deserves more than anything he can give.

“I’m sorry,” he rasps, his own throat closing on a knot of pain.

“Shut up,” she says, wiping tears from her cheeks. “You asshole. You think that I would let you suffer? Me? Your stupid dumbass clan has never had me before. I’m one of the best battlefield iroyonin Konoha has, and I’m only trained as a chuunin. I’ve got a fucking Bijuu’s worth of resources to throw at your stupid dumbass dojutsu.”

He says, “I have no excuse. I didn’t want to hurt you again, Rin.”

“You don’t keep things from me. Do you understand me? You don’t keep things from me.”

“Okay,” he says, sounding small. “Okay, Rin. I won’t.”

The clone they killed smolders in the grass. The bugs return and bite viciously at his ankles, at his eye, at the tears on his face.

Her breath is still uneven. “You’ll tell me everything,” she says. “Whatever I need to know to fix this.”

“Okay,” he repeats. He’ll agree to anything to fix this. He can’t stand seeing her so unhappy.

“I’m still furious at you,” she warns him. “It might take me a while to stop being angry.”

“Okay,” he says. He’ll wait forever for her if she needs it. If she wants his promise, he’ll give it to her.

“Who else knows?”

“The clan told me a little about the sharingan, but I never even knew there was another evolution to it. The mangekyo sharingan is a secret known only to a few. Fugaku sama knows, maybe one or two others. You know about the mangekyo, because I told you, and Minato sensei knows, because he’s seen mine, and, I guess, Kakashi’s. But the Eternal Mangekyo is…no one would know.”

“And you trust Madara to tell you the truth?”

“I do,” Obito says quietly. “He never once lied to me.”

“I am going to figure this out,” Rin declares. “I will learn how to fix this for you, and for any other Uchiha unlucky enough to activate it. You are not going to be blind, Obito. I don’t accept it.”

She sounds so determined Obito can’t help but smile. He didn’t accept her dying either.

When he lets his head drop back against hers, she asks, “how did Madara get his?”

Obito doesn’t know. He says, “he had other brothers, not just Izuna. Parents, uncles, aunts, cousins he was close too. He lost them all.” Madara is an Uchiha. He loved his clan, loved his family fiercely. Loved them enough that when he lost them, he lost his way. Obito can see how he thought that killing Rin, killing Kakashi, how killing all of Obito’s precious people would sway him more firmly to his side. If he thinks about it, he can almost imagine what Madara must see, how him and Izuna must have gotten their mangekyo from the same person, each brother compounding the other’s grief, keeping the flame of vengeance alive at the cost of all else.

“And we don’t know where his eyes are?”

Where would he keep the last thing he had of his brother? Was anywhere secure enough to hold those last remnants?

“No idea. I’m sure that’ll come bite us in the ass on down the road. Some random patsy duel-wielding the Old Man’s fucking eyes, the strongest mangekyo sharingan in existence, and he’s gonna gut us in the night.”

“Splendid.”

He sighs, “I really am sorry, though.”

She pulls away from him with a sigh. “Dumbass.”

He scrubs at his face, trying to remove the evidence, but then his head shoots to the side, every sense screeching at him. There are feet in the grass around him, and they hadn’t been there a second ago. They’d come out of nowhere.

He never even felt them.

He grabs Rin and dives off the low hump of limestone as the first kunai whizzes by. Rin’s eyes widen as they crash to the base, cushioned somewhat by the grass that helpfully catches them even as Obito frantically tries to get it not to react. But his emotions are still running high and the plant life around him reflects it.

The kunai lodges in the stone where they had just been and a voice barks out, “Don’t move! You’re surrounded. You are trespassing in the Land of Grass. If you resist, we will respond with force.”

Damn it, they’re surrounded. Obito has no idea how. A squad of Grass nin has them pinned down with no cover. They could fight, but they aren’t here to make another country hate them. He nods at Rin, one hand catching the hem of her vest, just in case. There’s still this between them. There’s always been this.

Rin swallows, composes herself admirably, and calls out to the Taki shinobi, “We mean you no harm. We are unaffiliated nin from Tea, on our way to Takigakure.”

“What is your business in Waterfall?”

Rin calls back, “We seek an audience with your leader. We mean no harm to Taki or her shinobi.”

The squad leader reveals herself, standing up among the grass. Her eyes are an unusual shade of purple and they’re hard as gemstones. She’s old enough to be his aunt, and experienced. She looks at them and Obito can see the second she matches them to whatever information is floating around about them. Her face is hard.

“Sachira and Tobi of Tea, you are being detained for trespassing. Surrender and disarm and you will be treated civilly.”

Rin says, “will you take us to Takigakure?”

If they are worth as much as Kakuzu seems to suggest, the second they are disarmed the Grass nin will execute them.

“If you do not resist.” The kunoichi replies.

Obito doesn’t trust it. Not one bit. He shakes his head just enough for Rin to feel but she doesn’t reply. He knows she’s thinking they can risk it, but they can’t. Neither of them can die, they just can’t, for separate but still similar reasons. They can get into Waterfall another way.

Rin decides. “We’re disarming,” she calls out and Obito frowns at her, but he won’t dare argue. She moves slowly, projecting her motions as she unties her kunai pouch and lets it fall to the ground. Obito unties his with one hand, the other firmly on Rin’s vest, ready to snatch them both out of this mess. He mournfully says his goodbyes to his stuff.

“And the pack.”

Rin says, “there are no weapons in the pack. Just rations and medical supplies.”

“Drop it.”

Obito grits his teeth, but Rin slips the straps slowly off her shoulders, unbuckling the pack from her back and setting it carefully on the ground with their weapons pouches. He knows they should have left earlier; they’d blasted the area with enough Killing Intent to alert any half-gennin in the north of Grass. This is their own fault, but he should have known. He’s only glad that Gamaken was summoned before they were captured. The toad would be difficult to lie away.

“Hands up, the both of you. Palms out, fingers spread. Slowly.”

Obito uses the motion of his hands rising to disguise his foot nudging forward to touch Rin’s. He doesn’t need hand signs to Kamui them safely away.

The other three Taki shinobi appear in the high grass around them. They move with that quality of danger and grace he attributes to jounin level shinobi. Two come for them while the other stands nearby, surveying the damage around them, the congealed, oddly gooey ashes of the one clone they managed to kill.

The jounin wearing his Taki hitai ate as a bandana loops ninja wire around his wrists and wrenches both of his hands behind his back, pulling the razor wire tight enough to cut through the bandages around his right wrist, letting a segment of them fall away. Next to him, the other jounin restrains Rin in the same manner.

The third jounin kicks at the ashes, likely intending to scatter them to prevent a flareup. When he sees how viscous the remains are, he yells out, “Taicho!” at the same time the shredded bandages covering the dead white flesh of his right wrist give way, reveling the grafted skin underneath. The jounin at his back notices immediately and the point of a kunai digs into his arm, a shocking, ugly pain, tearing through his bandages to reveal the skin, which oozes the same white sap substance that the clones bleed.

The kunai raises to lay into the side of his neck, right against his jugular, hard enough blood streams down his throat. “Taicho! He’s one of them!”

His blood freezes at the feel of the sharp metal against his throat and he instinctually goes very still. He’s ready to reveal himself to get away from the sure death the jounin has him in, even as his knees get kicked out from under him and the jounin takes him to the ground, the kunai never shifting, his face drape ripped away by the hand that yanks down his hood to leave him even more exposed.

Before he even gets the chance to act, Rin blasts them all with enough Killing Intent to freeze even the jounin. When Obito looks over she’s limned in red chakra he recognizes as the Sanbi’s. He hasn’t seen it physically since her seal was fixed but there’s so much of it coming off her now that its visible to the naked eye. “Nobody move!” she yells and the hand holding the knife to his jugular stiffens.

“Stand down!” the captain calls out, her eyes fixed now on Rin, back to Obito’s exposed arm, to the wall of sedge surrounding the battleground, to the way the ash sticks to the foot of the jounin. “Explain yourselves! Now!”

Cutting down on the menace of her Bijuu, the massive storm of it in the air, Rin says, “We said we mean you no harm. We meant it. We seek an audience with Takigakure.”

The captain says, “he’s a monster.”

“He’s not,” Rin says vehemently while Obito bites his tongue. “What do you know about the monster over there? The one we killed earlier today? I bet you felt the fight.”

The captain’s face is impassable. “You killed it?”

“Yes,” Rin says. “Green hair, white like a dead fish, yellow eyes. Tells lies.”

For a long while nobody moves. Obito is ready to make a break for it with his hands behind his back. He trusts Rin to keep him from bleeding out long enough to get them away. Before he can make his move, the captain nods slowly. “We’ll take you to Takigakure. Do not resist and no harm will come to you.”

The kunai is slowly removed from his artery. It just bleeds more. He’s losing a good amount of blood and his head spins from the loss. He’s still leaking gross fluid from his wrist and arm, where the jounin cut him to rip the bandages off but he thinks any second now his healing will kick in and take care of the wounds to his arm. The wire’s tight enough that if he’s not careful, it’ll likely go right through his right wrist and he’ll lose his hand. It’ll probably regrow, but it’ll be a pain.

Instead of giving him his coverings back, he’s fitted with a black hood that covers his head that drawstrings closed around his neck. Is this a fucking executioner’s hood? He thinks he’d rather they just kill him outright than blind him, every instinct in him cringing away from the shroud. It blocks out all light, but he’s not totally blind; he can sense a good enough idea of the area around him that if he needs to run to Rin it shouldn’t be too impossible. He scrambles for a silver lining. He’s not totally blind. And he can activate his mangekyo in it without revealing his identity. He can be convincing. He’s apparently a good liar.

He’s thinking that maybe they won’t kill him when they slap a chakra suppression tag on the bare skin of his neck. A strong one. The drain makes him wobble on his feet. They’re not playing around, this tag could put a jounin on his ass.

He can feel Rin still, even if it’s muffled. His mokuton is passive enough it uses no chakra but he loses his grip on details. The tag is that strong.

“Is he out?” the captain asks and the jounin shakes him a bit, but Obito’s conscious.

“No, taicho. Should I put another on him?”

“No. We don’t want to kill him.”

“The girl’s conscious still as well.” The other jounin says and Obito’s relieved the Sanbi protects her that much from the effects of the tag.

“Doesn’t matter,” the captain says. “They’re hooded and tagged. We’ll march them. Make sure the bonds are tight.”

Obito can’t even feel his right hand anymore. It’s not as solid, not as dense as his left and the ninja wire cuts into it where it should just immobilize him. The jounin yanks the knots tighter and Obito swallows against the pain of it, so much harder to ignore without any visual stimuli. He won’t give them a sound.

He’s pulled to his feet and after they make sure he can walk, he’s marched blindly into the grass. The Taki shinobi steers him and he can feel Rin in front of him. Knowing her, she’s cycling what chakra she can around the suppression tag like it’s the fucking leaf test. Obito has nowhere near the control for that, he can’t even feel individual tenketsu points on a good day, and an exhaustion headache sets an insistent warning throb behind his eyes.

He’s led to a place where he can feel the darkness in front of him, hood or no hood. The ground under his feet slopes down and the smell of earth and damp hit him. He balks, digging his heels in. He’s not going into some fucking cave. He’d rather fight them right now than let them take him underground.

The jounin marching him shoves him forward. “Walk, shinobi.”

“I’m not going in there,” Obito says. It’s the first words he’s said to the Taki nin and he means them. They can’t make him.

“It’s okay, Tobi.” Rin says from in front of him. “It’s a tunnel.”

He can hear someone shove her for speaking and his temper spikes, pounding along with the headache in his skull. “Don’t fucking touch her,” he spits.

The kunoichi captain says, “It’s the quickest way to Waterfall. Either you walk or I knock you out and let your friend carry you.”

The only thing worse than the idea of being underground is being unconscious underground, tied up and surrounded. Blind as a cave in Kusa. There are gaps in his memory that feel just like this moment and the panic rises.

“Tobi,” Rin says from somewhere in front of him. “Just follow me. It’ll be okay.”

But he can’t sense her, not in some limestone tunnel underground. She’s not even carrying the peach branch in her kunai pouch he could use as a marker to help him locate her anymore. He’s truly blind. Blind in a fucking cave.

“Tobi, follow me,” Rin says, and he’ll do anything she asks. His feet somehow move forward. He walks underground.

It’s indeed a tunnel, long, made of limestone, maybe naturally carved by a water source or shaped with doton, he doesn’t know, but it explains how they were able to sneak up on him like they had. They literally popped up out of the ground around him.

They walk for miles, twisting and turning, going around corners and taking forks. There must be a network of tunnels all under Grass. It’s brilliant, from a military perspective, but Obito can’t appreciate it. He just follows, his idea of the roots above him clearer to him than the space around him. He thinks they might be heading vaguely west but he can’t be sure.

He trudges onward. Its chilly underground and he can’t warm himself like he usually would. His feet ache and he’s possibly even dehydrated. They walk for hours, underground all the while. The Grass nin must communicate through hand signs because no one speaks.

When the roots he can sense around them start to thicken, he takes notice. His range isn’t clear, but they don’t feel like the mat of hair thin roots from the plains above them. They feel heavier, woodier. Like he’s sensing a real tree.

The closer they get, the bigger it feels. It’s massive enough that it breaks through the painful monotony of the trip. The miles shrink but the tree only grows bigger.

It’s the biggest tree he’s ever felt, the roots alone as thick as the trees that populate the Land of Fire. He can’t make sense of it. A tree can’t be that tall and many times as thick. Nothing grows that big. It isn’t possible.

He registers the distant sound of rushing water. It takes him a second to place it; the only true waterfall he’s seen is the one in the Valley of the End. It’s been years since Minato took them out there to see where Madara and Hashirama fought hard enough to permanently change the landscape. But he remembers the sound the waterfall made, the rushing roar of the Naka River taking flight.

This sounds just like that, but even bigger. Louder. He thought the Village Hidden in a Waterfall is just a creative name, but he’s led on a slippery moss-covered path right around the base of the waterfall and into a tunnel directly behind it. His sense of things is fuzzy but what he can feel still feels oddly fuzzy. He can’t place it and the moss he can feel isn’t much of an indicator.

Even in the village, he can tell from the temperature that they’re still underground, the permanent chill that leeches from the deep earth. Sound bounces like it does in a cave. He is intimately familiar with the sound. There’s people around him, possibly buildings, but they don’t interact.

They’re taken to what has to be a holding cell. He could hear chains creak as the door opens and they’re pushed forward into the cell and the chains attached to the wall clamp around his ankles. When the door swings shut, only then can he hear a different door open. Alarmed, he realizes they’re being kept in separate cells.

The squad who captured them leaves without so much as a word. Obito is already imagining all the horrors he learned about in the T&I section of the Academy. He tugs on the shackles around his ankles, scooting over as far as he can towards the wall he’s pretty sure he shares with Rin.

Rin must guess his plan; he can hear her testing the length of her own tether. “Guards?” she calls.

Nobody appears. The guards are likely stationed in the hallway; they might not have a good view of the inside of the individual cells.

He’s going to risk it. He takes a deep breath, activating his mangekyo and pulling his feet through the chains before he can pass out from the drain. They fall away with heavy clanks, surely suspicious, but nobody shows up to stop him. He crawls to the wall of the cell, his hands still tied behind his back, and taps on it with a foot to be sure. When Rin taps back, from close enough to let him know it’s indeed the next cell, he concentrates and Kamuis himself through the wall, falling right through the wall as he passes it right through him. Nausea roils through him and he’s almost sick inside his hood there on the floor of the cell.

“Tobi,” Rin whispers and he crawls over to her. She’s stretched out on her side, shackled to the floor. “Right upper arm,” she whispers and Obito wiggles around to get his bound hands against her suppression tag. He can’t get his fingers to move right to pull it off, but his scrabbling must manage to damage it enough to deactivate it.

She sighs as her chakra returns and Obito squirms his head into her hands. “Neck,” he whispers and Rin’s nails catch the lip of the tag and rip it off. At least half his chakra returns to him. The relief is instant and he slumps, letting the sense of the massive tree wash over him in detail. He’s overwhelmed by it for a second; he’s never felt anything like it.

Rin moves her hands to tug at his hood and when she gets a good enough grip he wiggles out of it and then uses his teeth to pull hers off. The cell is bland, dull gray in color, and only the door and restraints are metal bars. The rest is smooth tile, so doton is out. When he looks back, Rin is gnawing at the shoulder of her vest, biting through the threads with her teeth. She gets a hidden senbon in her mouth and rolls it around like Shirunai before spitting it over her shoulder into her hand. “Can you get out of the wire?”

He can feel where the wire has dug so deep in wrist if feels like it grinds against bone with every movement. The wire is slick and slippery. But it’s been so long his stupid arm is healing over it; he can’t pass it through without serious damage. “I could, but I might lose my hand.”

She twists the point of the senbon through the wire, expertly twisting it through the loops of the knot, working it free. It’s slow going but when it’s loose enough, she slips it off. When her hands are free she uses the senbon to pick the locks on her shackles, bending the tip into place. When she’s free he turns so she can untie his hands. He can feel her hesitate. “It’s grown into the wire,” she murmurs.

“I don’t care. Get it off.”

She’s careful, but he can feel the edges of the wound leak with the damage, pain settling up into his shoulder blade, in his spine. When his right hand is free he brings his arms back in front of him, the relief settling through his strained shoulders to inspect the dangling bracelet of ninja wire looped through his right wrist. The wounds on his arm have closed up, but he’s got to get the wire off.

Rin hands him the rolled-up hood they had on him. “Bite down, I’m going to pull it through.”

He doesn’t argue this time.

She heals it after and double checks the cuts on his arm, heals the cut on his neck down to nothing. “How are you?”

“Half done. But I can get us out. I even know where our stuff is.” He can feel his plant in his kunai pouch, in the same building even. He tugs the hood of his own cloak over him, hiding his face as best he can, ready to escape.

“Wait,” Rin says. “They know about the clones.”

“That’s not a good thing, Sachira. We should leave while we can, before they put another of those damned tags on me.”

“But—"

“We’re imprisoned in a foreign nation and you want to stay?” They know what happens to shinobi prisoners. T&I will extract all the information they can and then they’ll be killed. Rin has no clan to ransom her release and Obito’s clan thinks he’s dead. Minato could get them back, but they couldn’t say they were working with Konoha. They’ll die before they sell out their Hokage to Taki.

Rin hisses, “We need the Nanabi! And they’ve dealt with the clones. Taki borders the Mountain’s Graveyard; the place might be crawling with zetsu. I bet they sent them to spy on the jinchuuriki and got caught.”

“Or they could be working for Zetsu. We’re gonna be gift wrapped.”

“We need to be sure,” Rin insists. “We’ve already missed Iwa’s Bijuu. We can’t leave Taki yet.”

He wants to beat his head against the floor. It doesn’t make any sense to him. In shinobi terms, this is worst case scenario. You fight to the death to not risk capture. And they walked right into a cell. If their sensei knew how monumentally stupid they’re being he’d implode.

He groans. “They’re going to kill us.”

“I don’t think they’re going to kill us. They tried to kill you because they thought you were a clone. They’re obviously not fond of them.”

“You’re right, they tried to kill me. We can trust them.”

Their whispered argument is interrupted by a team entering the hall where the cells are. They scramble to their feet, the bent senbon stuffed down Rin’s shirt, hands up and ready to either fight or flee.

“What the—” a Grass nin says when he sees Obito’s empty cell. “He’s esc—”

The group rounds to find them both up and ready in Rin’s cell. The captain of the team that captured them is there and her eyes widen to see them up. Rin steps carefully half in front of him and he crouches a little, ready to hide his activated mangekyo and escape for real.

Finding their prisoners up and un-chakra-suppressed, hands free, throws them but they recover. They jump into formation around the leader wearing the fancy formal robes, pulling weapons.

Rin puts her hands up and says, “Hello again, taicho. We are one second away from escaping all of Taki but I hope we can still be civil about things. I believe we have a mutual enemy.”

There’s an elder behind the group of shinobi and the robed man and he breaks out into a wheezy laugh, thumping at his stomach. Its incongruous as Kakuzu tossing the body of the Iwa nin into the middle of their fight. Everyone in the room pauses and the elder just hees and haws.

“Oh, I like her.” He says and the robed man purses his lips. “She’s got spunk! Reminds me of a certain someone, no?”

The robed man looks at Rin and asks, “You are a jinchuuriki? Meli chan insists you are. Says you used Bijuu chakra to intimidate them. There’s no indication of your status in your file.”

Obito adds everyone in the room onto a list of people they need to kill before they can escape, as well as the other three Grass nin from the capture team. He’s about to start relieving shinobi of weapons and enact the plan but Rin cocks her head at the old man standing in the back of the room behind the shinobi.

She says, “it’s a developing situation.”

The nonsensical reply just makes the old man laugh harder. “You snatched the tanuki from Wind, did you? Who have you got, Sachira from Tea?”

“Why? Do you have the Nanabi?”

It’s like she’s trying to get them killed. But the crazy old man pats his stomach with a wink and Obito understands. The old man is jinchuuriki to the Nanabi. They found the Bijuu already, just like that. He came to meet them in jail. Can this horrible day actually turn out productive? It can’t be that easy.

The old man turns to the robed man, “Come on, Shibuki. Let them out. They’ve got a story for us, I’ll bet a tail on it. It’s luck.”

At the name, Obito realizes the robed man is the leader of Taki. They don’t call their military leader a kage, but Shibuki is their equivalent.

Shibuki gives a curt nod and a shinobi retrieves a key to unlock the cell door. It slides open but the jounin in the room don’t relax when they don’t immediately attack. Shibuki says, “Pardon the cautious introductions, Sachira from Tea, Tobi from Tea. We’re higher strung than usual. There have been recent intrusions into out village from beings I won’t stoop to call guests.”

Rin bows, “Understandable, Shibuki sama. It’s strange times we live in.”

Obito jerks his head down to be polite, but he’s not trusting the sudden change of pace. The full about-face is too much.

Shibuki acknowledges them with a small dip of his own head. “Let us move to more comfortable accommodations?”

They’re led up through the building, past empty cells down a long tiled hallway and out into Takigakure herself.

The village is a strange mix of incredible and uncomfortable. The entire village rests under the root ball of the massive tree, the buildings and structures woven into the roots itself. Instead of rock, the ceiling is thick canopy. The light is shadowy and colored lanterns hang from the buildings in strings, adding their soft light. It feels just enough like its underground to unnerve him, but it’s so interesting he can’t help but look around.

The village is like noting he’s ever seen. He can’t even comprehend the giant tree, and the village snug underneath it. Skylights filter down what light they can but the paper lanterns make everything glow. Moss hangs everywhere, covers and furs over most surfaces. There’s water everywhere, in decorative pools, in canals, misting through the air from fans to keep everything just slightly damp. Most of the people he sees appear to be shinobi; there are very few civilians. They wear bright colors, and their eyes are brighter.

When they pass a huge root close enough to touch he can’t help but reach out and put his hand on it. His sense of the tree awes him; he can feel every leaf arcing overhead in boughs, the branches wide as boulevards, and the tree creaks and shivers in greeting at his touch. If clones are getting in, he can see how; the tree is everywhere. There’s no place one couldn’t be.

He can’t feel any now and he casually puts his hands in his pockets. He doesn’t think anyone but Rin noticed the slight movement of everything after he touched the root. The lanterns sway slightly and he ignores it.

Instead of a kage tower, Shibuki lives in a temple in the middle of the village, just under the trunk. Its modest by elemental nations standards but decorated with wall hangings and embroidered panels depicting strange scenes: a fire in the grass, a robed shinobi with a sasumata, a giant insectoid, its buggy hands folded as if in prayer.

He stays close to Rin. His sense of the weight of the tree overhead has him paranoid and twitchy. A less civil plan that’s sprung into his mind now that they’ve located a jinchuuriki is to just kidnap him via Kamui and then return him safely once Rin’s finished giving him the rundown. He really likes this plan. The only downside is the inherent rudeness of kidnapping, but they locked him up first so he thinks it might even out. He likes old people, but he has to remind himself that the man is jinchuuriki to the Nanabi; there’s no telling what he’s capable of. His trust of the elderly has hurt him enough already he’s not willing to let a kind smile and a funny laugh get his guard down.

Instead of an office or official business chamber, they’re taken to a formal dining room with a long, low table.

“Tea?” Shibuki asks, toeing off his sandals to leave by the door. “I find it helps with discussion.”

Rin removes her shoes and Obito reluctantly follows suit. He needs to get a spare pair in Kamui, just in case.

They wait for Shibuki to take his seat. The jinchuuriki takes the seat immediately to his right and gestures for Rin to sit next to him. Obito sits seiza next to her and settles uncomfortably on the cushion. It’s bright in the room and he’s wearing nothing under the hood but a few dirty bandages covering his empty eye socket; most of his worst scars are exposed and without the face drape he feels like his identity is on display to anyone who looks too closely at him.

The captain of the capture squad sits across from Obito and the last place setting at the table is taken by one of the shinobi from the jail, wearing plate armor like a Black Ops but no mask. Instead, he wears a green sash from shoulder to hip, over the armor, his Taki hitai ate loose around his neck. Maybe he’s T&I, or their equivalent, or the sash denotes a commander. His bearing is assured, almost serene.

The rest of the ninja disperse. Obito’s willing to bet there’s disguised operatives in the room but he can’t be sure how many. That just leaves 3 Grass nin and the jinchuuriki. He knows very little about Taki or their leader, but the robed man isn’t striking him as a kage level shinobi. He’s dressed as a monk, for one, and lives in a temple. He seems stern enough and his subordinates treat him with respect but he doesn’t walk like a jounin, not like the other two Grass nin. In a fight, he thinks he can take them, or run.

The jinchuuriki’s the wild card. He’s humming tunelessly to himself while the tea is poured, and snacks are brought out on platters.

Rin can’t keep her eyes off him.

Obito holds his tea, sniffs at it suspiciously, which is a mistake because it smells delicious. He doesn’t think it’s poisoned but it would be stupid to assume that. Rin takes a sip of hers and he thinks he might break out in hives. He stares at her in disbelief and she ignores him. He wishes he could read her mind, to know what she’s thinking, or that she could read his, so she’d know the amount of heart palpitations he’s had over these last few hours. This much stress can’t be good for him.

He doesn’t touch the food. He’s tense as ninja wire while everyone else settles in, sipping their tea and studying each other over the gilded rims of their cups.

“Why don’t we start,” Shibuki says, setting his cup down. “Meli chan and her team sensed high level shinobi activity. When they investigated, they found you, and the burned remains of one of the singing monsters that have recently begun to plague the village.”

He continues, “you’re faces are quite known, Sachira and Tobi from Tea. The Kazekage has placed a steep bounty on your heads, one that the Tsuchikage has recently doubled. It is my belief that you stole the Ichibi from Suna and come here asking after the Nanabi. Sachira has revealed herself to be a jinchuuriki and Tobi possesses a most unusual technique. I can see through his torn sleeve that his arm is as white as the singers. You have knowledge of the abominations; knowledge of how to kill them at least and I suspect more than that as well.”

None of these are questions. Rin says, “we have information about a danger to the Bijuu and their jinchuuriki. It is our goal to inform of the threat.”

“What threat is this?”

“An organization of missing nin seeks to extract the chakra from all nine Bijuu, killing their jinchuuriki and trapping the Tailed Beasts to power a superweapon. The monsters are called zetsu and they’re working with this organization. They’re spies and infiltrators, and they tell lies to sway you to their side.”

It’s all technically correct, in the broadest terms. There are truths they simply can’t reveal, about themselves and their true mission but he’s impressed by the framing of what she shares.

There’s a moment while the Taki shinobi digest this. “This organization, they can pose a threat to jinchuuriki?”

Rin says, “It would be unwise to underestimate them. They’re all S ranked and will likely target you with information the zetsu provide.”

Shibuki strokes his pointed beard thoughtfully. “They seek to combine the Bijuu, yes?”

Obito has no idea how they know this. Rin says simply, “Yes.”

The jinchuuriki hums. “So it’s true then? The tall tales.”

Rin says, “I’m not sure what you refer to.”

He looks at her oddly. “The Bijuu myths.” He squints at her, like he can see the Tailed Beast inside her. “You don’t know your own history, girl.”

Obito can see the disquiet in her. She dislikes her ignorance; she’ll lap up any information they have. Even Obito’s a little intrigued by the concept of Bijuu myths. Rin says, carefully, “My history is not particularly illuminating.”

The jinchuuriki narrows his eyes. “It’s the turtle we sense in you, girl. That a myth in itself, that. Can you name who it is you’ve got?”

They know too much; even Rin didn’t know the Sanbi is a turtle until recently. Instead of talking, Rin clams up. There’s very little of her story they can reveal. Her lips are sealed.

She sips her tea.

It’s tense in the room. Obito knows she though the Sanbi had a name, just like the Ichibi calls himself Shukaku. Obito distracts them, pulling the attention off Rin. “We know enough to know the danger.”

“You, boy?” the Taki jinchuuriki asks. “You with the white arm know what you get when you add all nine Tailed Beasts together?” At his silence the old man answers himself, “Ten Tails, is what you get. The Juubi. Unlucky, that is.”

Obito’s never heard of such a thing. The Ten Tails. The husk is for the Juubi. The shock settles through him, then the dread.

Rin asks quietly, “The Juubi?”

The old man clears his throat, and to Obito’s shock, when he speaks again, it’s with a different voice entirely. “Hello, all! Sorry for interrupting, Lucky Seven here. It’s been ages since I’ve seen my onii chan. I’d like to speak to him directly, if you don’t mind.”

Rin’s eyes are round as coins.

A Bijuu just spoke to them, and it wasn’t Shukaku’s bombastic threats. It was intelligible, perfectly sentient. Not just a mindless chakra monster. Rin is right about everything. This day has reached a new level of strange and incredulous for Obito.

Her mouth is open, just a little bit. She closes it, swallows. Does not speak.

The Taki jinchuuriki, no, the Nanabi, deflates. “Oh,” they say, sounding small. “I see.”

The Grass nin around the table are looking at them in shock. Shibuki’s lips are thin, his eyes narrow. He’s stroking his beard like it’s a talisman.

When the unnamed jinchuuriki speaks again, it’s as himself. He’s frowning, looking immeasurably sad. “Oh,” he repeats. “I see as well. Girl, how long have you been a jinchuuriki?”

It’s a knowing question. Rin is obviously much older than a newly sealed child. Its leading, at once horrified and heartbroken. The shinobi at the table are visibly upset and Obito had already gotten the impression that Taki treats it’s jinchuuriki, and even its Tailed Beast, with respect. But even Shibuki looks distressed at the implications.

For a terrible second, Obito thinks Rin’s going to cry. She should be excited, she was right, the Bijuu are sentient. She can talk to the Sanbi, even let him speak through her. He though she would be demanding to know everything, up out of her seat in her eagerness. But her hands are on her stomach and shame twists her face. She admits, in a voice still very much her own, “months, jinchuuriki sama. I never wanted to be his jailer.”

Silence meets her words. “Oh, girl,” the jinchuuriki says sadly. He looks at Shibuki intently. “Let them stay, one week at least, two would be better. Let me teach the girl to know herself.”

Rin looks so hopeful that Obito has already reconfigured their timeline to give her as much time as she needs. However long it is, they can afford it. They have to. She needs this.

Shibuki considers. “It would be best, I believe. Arrangements will be made,” he says. “Whatever you have faced, whatever circumstances led to this, in Taki, we honor the Bijuu. You will be safe during your stay here.”

“Thank you, Shibuki sama.” Rin says, “This means everything to me.”

They are dismissed while the arrangements are made. They end up in a set of rooms off of the temple itself. Both Shibuki and the Taki jinchuuriki are nearby. They are left with instructions to wait for a runner to retrieve them for dinner.

The second they’re alone, Rin turns to him. “Obito,” she whispers.

“I know,” Obito says. “Whatever you have to do. I can keep myself occupied.”

They hug. The shock and incredulousness are wearing off. The excitement is setting in, making his head spin. “The Nanabi spoke to us!” Rin exclaims. “It called itself Lucky Seven!”

“You were right!” Obito says, mirroring her joy. He almost can’t believe their luck.

“And the Juubi!” Rin says. “That’s what he’s going to do. That’s what the statue’s for.”

Obito says, “That damn Nara was right. I guess you can’t just seal the Ten Tails into a kid and use it like that. He needs a bigger container.”

She’s hugging her seal through her shirt. They’re both grinning like happy idiots; it’s hard to believe they were in fucking jail. That before, they were fighting on the plains. That Peely taunted him over the ashes of whatever poor bastard they used as bait.

Dinner is a small affair, just the same shinobi from tea time. Its formal and he has to catch himself from revealing his clan mannerisms, holding the wrong utensils in the wrong grip, everything just slightly off beat like he’s mimicking the others around him. Obito knows his way around a tea ceremony. Tobi decidedly does not.

Shibuki is their host. Obito can’t wrap his head around the fact that they’re dining with the leader of a nation instead of fighting. He’s never dined with a kage or a kage equivalent before. He’s never even formally dined with anyone outside his clan before. He sits there in his hood and his scars, wearing patched gear and no obi. They’d given him back his Suna style face drape and his shoes, though he’s not wearing the sandals now.

Dinner is also an awkward affair. Its not an outright interrogation, but leading questions invariably pop up, couched in the guise of civility. It only takes a few skillful deflections from Rin before they puzzle what pieces they have together, look at the big picture, and then decide that they actually don’t want to know.

It makes them the most intelligent ninja he’s had to deal with so far.

The food is simple fare but plentiful, each dish serve in its own little ramekin. He stays quiet, letting Rin hash out the details. They will stay in Taki for two weeks while Rin works with the jinchuuriki.

Shibuki says, “Taki is a friend to all Tailed Beasts.”

It’s better than Obito ever expected.

Rin is thrilled; she starts secret jinchuuriki training in the morning. She’s so excited that night she can’t even sleep. Obito has to threaten her to get her to stay still. Their supplies have been returned and he has his plant back, as well as all of his weapons. And he’s worried; he doesn’t want to make a mistake trusting someone he shouldn’t, but he’s warming up to the Taki shinobi, almost against his will. They remind him of some of his old Academy teachers; more patient than he was used too, too willing to work with them. He can’t see how these are the people that produced Kakuzu.

In the morning Rin gets ready in record time and Obito disarms the traps around the rooms. He never caught the name of the Taki jinchuuriki, and it seems too late to ask, so he just lets Rin do all the talking.

Meli is there as well, the veteran jounin who arrested them on the plains. She offers to take him on a tour of Waterfall while Rin is training. It’s babysitting, a polite way of tailing him, but he’s curious enough about the village that he accepts.

It’s incredible, once he gets over the squeamishness from being sort-of underground. It’s smaller than Konoha, than the other two hidden villages they’ve seen, but spread out enough that it doesn’t feel small. It’s populated mostly by shinobi; the civilians, he learns, live on the plains, or in one of the other towns along the coast, or at the capital with Grass’s Daimyo.

The training grounds are full of Grass nin. Meli says he’s free to use them as he pleases but the imagined awkwardness stops him. They’re both relieved by his declination.

As they continue to walk around the mossy pools, Obito says, “I have to ask. This tree…I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Meli laughs. “She is the joy of Taki. She has many names, but she’s older than most everything around. We built under her out of convenience; Waterfall’s never been taken under siege. Never.”

“Why is it so big?” Obito asks.

Meli says, “Every hundred years, Waterfall produces a substance called Hero Water. It grants a single Grass shinobi many times their own strength. It waters the tree, makes it grow to its massive size.”

Why the fuck would she tell him this? “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“It is very real, I assure you. It is one of our treasures.” She looks at him slyly. “It would kill you many times over to try.”

Loud and clear then. But he can prod too. “Is that why Taki nin are so skilled? We ran into an ex-Taki bounty hunter in Iwa. His jutsu was like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

Meli’s face sours. “Kakuzu. He shames all of Grass. You faced him?”

“He killed a squad of Iwa hunter nin who were after us. We ran while they were fighting.”

“That is for the best,” Meli decides. “Kakuzu is a dangerous man. He is older than he seems. Our very first Daimyo sent him on a mission to assassinate the Shodaime Hokage of the Leaf for imprisoning the Bijuu like he had, selling them out to the countries as weapons. Kakuzu failed and when he returned, he stole kinjutsu, slaughtered his way out of Waterfall, and now lives as a nukenin. He only cares about money but he stays out of Taki. He would not look for you here, even for millions.”

“The Bingo Book says he’s immortal.”

“This is true enough. You have to kill him five times over, destroy each mask. His last heart should be his own.”

Obito shivers. That’s horrifying. Is this how people see him?

That night, Rin returns with stars in her eyes. It’s because, he learns, the Nanabi has a blinding scale powder attack and the old man used it on her. He can also fly. Rin is talking so fast he almost can’t understand her.

“Wings!” she shouts, spinning around with her arm outstretched. “He has wings! The Nanabi is a beetle!”

She studies with the Taki jinchuuriki every day for a week, learning their history, their burden. The history of the Bijuu is fraught with tragedy, but she doesn’t think there’s ever been a jinchuuriki quite like her. She’s not telling them everything, and they’re not asking for details, but they know she was sealed against her will. That the fact is so abhorrent and unacceptable to them ingratiates them to Obito. He regrets planning to kill them all. That plan is firmly shelved unless circumstances drastically change.

One night while they are staying up late discussing everything Rin’s learned, the window flies open, setting off half a dozen of Obito’s traps. He can’t believe his eyes at the form that comes through, flailing and dodging the attacks with the grace of a dying fish. Most of the traps he set were non-lethal but he almost regrets it as the toad hops onto his bed to take a short bow.

“Tada!” He shouts, “Infiltration!”

Obito groans and even Rin looks a little dismayed as the aquamarine, bow-clad toad twirls around in a pirouette and purses red lips at Obito in a smooch before trying to lay a big, wet, juicy one on him. Obito goes transparent as self-defense, but the toad just looks more gleeful, like he’s seen a cool party trick.

“Looks like he found out about our screw up in Iwa,” Obito says, still fending off the toad’s advances. “Sensei hates us. This is our punishment, I just know it.”

Obito is all about looking underneath the underneath for hidden agendas, but he’d come to the disheartening conclusion when he was twelve that the flamboyant toad wasn’t fucking with them to hide his true personality from non-summoners like a sneaky shinobi might. Gamariki is naturally just this irritating. And he has a crush on all three of Minato’s students, and practically anyone who he comes into contact with, much to their collective dismay.

“Nope!” the toad pops his lips on the P, obnoxiously. “The others are busy right now, so he sent me!”

Gamariki is a genjutsu expert, and a major pervert. He works well with Jiraiya. When he turns big eyes on Rin, she dodges behind him to avoid her own enthusiastic hello.

Someone knocks one the door, “Everything okay in there? We heard a disturbance.”

Obito panics, stuffs the toad behind the pillows to hide him in case anyone comes in. They can’t let anyone in Taki see him; he’s too horribly recognizable. Obito has no idea how the toad even found them, or how he got into Waterfall without being spotted. He wears a fucking bow!

“We’re fine!” Rin calls. “No problems!”

When the danger of discovery passes, Obito lets the highly offended toad up. “That was rude,” Gamariki says, pouting. “And here I was just so happy to see you both again. They told me you were dead.”

Guilt flares through him. “Sorry, Gamariki san, but we can’t let the Grass nin see you, okay?”

After he’s done pouting, they catch him up on what’s happened since Gamaken was summoned away from them. Gamariki confirms it was Jiraiya who called him away, and giggles about how upset the Sannin was at all the toads refusing to tell him what was going on, no matter how much he bribed them.

When they’re done with their update, Gamariki tells them what’s been going on back in the Leaf Village. Kakashi’s been causing ‘undue ruckus and mayhem’, the toad declares, but he’s closer to finding the leak. He’s identified a suspicious character in the village, a fake ANBU operative. It’s concerning; first fake Kiri Black Ops and now a false ANBU, right in Konoha itself. Obito is alarmed, but the toad assures him that Minato won’t let Kakashi get in too over his head. The teen’s not even allowed to leave the village.

Obito’s not convinced. He knows how dangerous seemingly ‘safe’ missions turn out to be. More shinobi die on up-jumped C ranks than any B. Rin’s worried as well but there’s very little they can do to help. Realistically, they’re the ones on a quantifiably much more dangerous mission, and their teammate is highly skilled, if a little socially maladjusted. Kakashi earned his rank, and he has the others looking out for him.

Rin leaves the toad with Obito during the day and so much unfiltered quality time with Gamariki is exhausting. He’s not fully convinced if he were to go out in the village, that the toad would behave himself. But after a few days he gets bored and runs kata in the courtyard outside their rooms, only for Meli to stop by and see him in the middle of one of the kata Gamaken taught him for balance with a long weapon. When he looks up to see her watching him, he panics, overbalances, and crashes to the tile, looking wildly around for Gamariki, already anticipating the worst.

The toad sits squarely on the middle of his open window frame, looking smug. There is no way to miss him, but Meli’s eyes glide right over him. She looks curiously at him sprawled out on the floor instead.

“I want to know,” she says, once he picks himself up, prickly with embarrassment. “How you killed that zetsu.”

“I can track them,” he says, fudging the truth. “I have a sensing ability. They’re relatively weak fighters, but the zetsu are linked. They can see everything any of them see.”

“But you’ve killed them?” she checks.

“A fair few,” he says.

She asks, “would you like to kill more?”

He focuses, reaching out to the tree around them, but there are no weird voids. He says, “there’s not any around Waterfall right now.”

Meli says, “There is a village in the east, by the unincorporated lands. There are reports of the zetsu harassing them with their lies, trying to recruit shinobi to their cause. The mission would take a few days, and it would just be my team, the ones from our first meeting. If you can track them, we could kill them.”

During their first meeting, the bandana jounin almost made him lose his hand. He couldn’t have known his right wrist is weaker than his left, but it hurt something fierce. But still, he’s bored out of his mind stuck in the room all day while Rin learns all kinds of cool stuff.

But he hesitates, “when do you leave?”

“In the morning. You can have the night to decide. We’re meeting by the temple, if you want to join us.”

He nods and once she leaves, he frowns at the toad, shaking his head. “Did you genjutsu me?”

“Not you!” Gamariki giggles. “But the Grass nin didn’t see anything unusual.”

Obito’s reluctantly impressed. The speed required to cast that genjutsu is extreme. He asks, “how did you infiltrate her chakra network so quickly?”

The toad smacks his lips, fluttering his eyelashes, “Wanna learn, Obito kun?”

It turns out that Gamariki can send his chakra out just through croaking. He can use genjutsu at the speed of sound to alter people’s perceptions, making them see things that aren’t there, making them ,,not see things that are. He demonstrates by making Obito see a vision of himself standing on the edge of a cliff, teetering forward; it’s so realistic that he can feel the vertigo, the wind against his face and he panics instead of dispelling it, falling forward off the cliff only to land on his bed, safe and sound. When the toad laughs at him, Obito throws a pillow only to discover that he’s still under a genjutsu and the toad’s really three away from where he seems. Obito has to activate his sharingan to be sure he’s out from under the summon’s influence.

When Rin returns from her training session soaking wet, he tells her about Meli’s offer to join her team for a mission.

She towel dries her hair. “I think you should go. The more dead clones the better, and Taki needs to protect themselves. Besides, I know you’re bored here during the day.”

“But what if—”

“If what? They’re teaching me to reach the Sanbi. At some point we have to trust them.”

“But—"

She cuts off his paranoid worrying. “Taki has never been taken, and they’ve offered me sanctuary. They actually like their jinchuuriki; he’s Shibuki’s uncle and he’s always had a place in the village. It was an honor for him to be chosen by the Nanabi.”

“But what if—”

“Go show off for the Grass nin,” Rin says. “But not too much, okay? If Peely or one of the others try to taunt you again, set them on fire first. You don’t need to listen to their lies.”

He joins Meli’s team by the temple the next morning, anxious and restless, packed for a mission of a few days. He’s telling himself that Rin can hold her own, and he can always pop back to check in if he panics too much.

Meli looks genuine pleased to see that he’s joining them and introduces him to the rest of the team, officially. Meli’s captain, and the other are two jounin and a chuunin apprentice. The bandana man who tied him up is Kichimaru, and medic is Guko and the chuunin is his apprentice, Eoi. He’s introduced to them as Tobi, and Kichimaru shakes his hand, his right one, which he has properly bandaged, without any weirdness.

“Hey, Tobi san, sorry for the first meeting. Got off on the wrong foot, you know? Hope I didn’t nick you too badly.” Kichimaru says, and he seems to be sincere.

Obito shrugs in response. “It’s good reflexes.”

Meli takes them to a tunnel and Obito sours. It is more definitively underground than the rest of the village. But he grits his teeth and follows the team; he will not give himself away by this. It’s not any easier or more bearable, even when he’s not bound and blind. If the team notices his sudden mood swing, they don’t comment. They chakra run through tunnels, taking turns until Obito’s not sure he could reliably backtrack his way back to the village.

He learns that the tunnels are riddled all throughout Taki, right through the limestone. They’re a natural feature of the land, although the underground highways are painstakingly maintained by the Grass nin through a series of C rank missions, which improve upon them and make new ones using doton as needed. The passageways are all memorized by them as gennin.

After hours of running east, they emerge out onto the plains in the middle of a vast herd of stripped antelope. Obito immediately anticipates a stampede. The antelope are wary but apparently desensitized to ninja popping out of the ground.

He feels much better out on the plains and chatter resumes between him and the team. He knows it’s not an intentional interrogation, but he’s careful with anything he might reveal. It’s difficult, because he actually likes the Grass nin. They’re capable and they treat their people right. He admires that loyalty.

The village is civilian, but there’s a few gennin teams here on assignment. They’re suspicious, but when Meli says that Obito’s with them they relax. The jounin sensei are less easily appeased; they recognize him from the Bingo Book.

But they give him room to work. He’s pretending to be a sensor, so he runs through some bullshit hand signs at the speed his sensei drilled into him, just in case anyone’s paying attention. He even flares his chakra, just in case any of them have sensing abilities of their own and are trying to catch him out. His mokuton tells him exactly where the clones are, and there are three he can sense in the area. It’s an unusual number; he’s only ever encountered lone spies before Peely. But these aren’t spies; these are active recruiters, targeting the shinobi in the village, whispering lies about a world of peace to impressionable young gennin. Padding the ranks of his minion organization as cannon fodder, or using the students against their teachers, who are the more likely targets. Despicable motivations, either way.

He deliberates as the team watches him. “There’s three, and they’re spread out in the grass surrounding the village. Once we take one out the others will react. They might try to gang up on us, but most likely they’ll try to flee. The zetsu aren’t meant for real combat.”

“You can track them if they flee?”

Obito says, “They’re good at vanishing, and they know I can find them. If they know it’s me here after them, it might make things worse for Taki. They really don’t like me.” They don’t ask, but just to reassure them that it has nothing to do with the fact that he’s maybe half-clone himself, he says, “I’ve killed a lot of them. It seems to have pissed them off.”

“We don’t let them see us,” Kichimaru says. “Hit them fast and hard, before they can regroup.”

“Aim for the head,” Obito says. “It’ll down them but we burn the pieces, or they might heal.”

He leads them to the nearest clone, lurking inside a roped off pasture full of domesticated goats. There’re civilian kids watching the animals but they scatter when the Grass nin go to play bait and distraction. While the clone is spying on the team, Obito sneaks up on where they’re lounging in the grass, only partially hidden.

They never even see him coming. He’s got a kunai through their head, pulling them up and out of the grass before they can try to escape. Against his senses, he can feel two staticky spots suddenly rise up to full alert.

The Grass nin converge on him. Guko whistles through his teeth, poking experimentally at the corpse. “It sure is ugly.”

Obito says, “the others are coming to investigate.”

“Get down,” Meli commands and the team drops into the grass, virtually disappearing from sight. Obito’s not sure how to warn them that if the clones use what limited, backwards mokuton they have, hiding in the grass is a bad idea. He thinks if he even thinks the word mokuton too loudly, Rin will figure out time/space jutsu and appear just to club him over the head.

They leave the body as bait; it should be down for a while, Obito severed its spinal cord just to be sure. When the other clones come creeping, he points them out to the Grass nin with a jerk of his head, yellow eyes in the stalks, green hair that doesn’t quite match the grass.

On Meli’s signal, the Grass nin strike. Obito hangs back, not willing to be seen, watching Meli target one with a tanto while Kichimaru uses doton to throw a boulder to crush the other. It makes him wince; that is not a technique he thinks he’ll learn to utilize.

They toss the bodies together. Kichimaru’s clone is smashed to goo, so they just incinerate the boulder to make sure they get it all. The team is inordinately pleased by the ease of the kills. But Obito knows they were lucky to catch them off guard.

Over the next few days, more clones pop up in the area. They’re sneakier and after day two, they’ve figured out it’s Obito tracking them and they start hiding in his blind spots, which is difficult to explain to the others because it’s not how real sensing works.

“They know it’s me and they’re countering my sensing,” is the best he can do and not offer details.

Meli just hums. “We can use this. You could play bait, draw them in.”

So Obito stops hiding as well as he should, lets a clone glimpse him in a sloppy takedown. It works too well: the next day he can sense half a dozen, all together, like they’re going to capture him and take him back.

“Six of them, all together,” he says.

“I don’t like this,” Kichimaru says immediately. “That’s a huge divergence from their earlier movements.”

Meli asks carefully, “Are they trying to kill you, Tobi?”

He shrugs nonchalantly, all casual avoidance. “I might have stolen something they want.”

If Meli reads the Ichibi into that she doesn’t show it. “These might not be noncombatants, then. Stay on your toes, everyone. The game’s changed.”

They’re not trying to hide, but Obito doesn’t want to engage them head on like they expect. They could call him by name, sow dissention between him and the Grass nin. Zetsu is too crafty to give them the opportunity.

The second he gets close, it changes. The grass ripples with rotting mokuton and he tries to nullify it before the team can notice, throwing chakra out through a snake seal to counter it. The plains writhe around him, torn between the withering direction of the zetsu but conflicted by Obito’s silent plea to just stay still. The team slows when he starts making hand seals, not sure what he’s up to, but the mokuton attack is a distraction.

When he looks up, it’s to the odd tingling feeling that the clones are merging. But they’re not merging into the ground.

They’re merging into each other.

The dreadful amalgamation of half a dozen clones rises over the plains, hideous with half-faces smearing into muscle, random arms waving; the anatomy is just a horror to look at. It’s a new trick, but one he’s not surprised by. The massive zetsu is slower, but many times as strong, shuriken just lodge harmlessly in it. He’s not sure how to take it down; there’s too many heads, not any easily defined central nervous system.

Undeterred, the Grass nin attack. Bladed weapons just seem to irritate it and it gurgles out of its many mouths. It is the weirdest blessing that it can’t seem to figure out how to speak intelligibly. Kichimaru lops off an arm but a new one just sprouts.

The medics try to disengage; they’re not close combat trained, but the zetsu slams a massive blow into the ground and the chuunin goes down when it craters underfoot. Instead of retreating, Guko stops to drag Eoi out of the way of another blow. Obito stops pulling his punches. He Kamui’s between the medics and hits the zetsu hard enough his fist sinks into the white flesh. It has no effect other than being really gross, but it gives Guko time to get Eoi out of there.

“Move,” Obito yells, and Meli and Kichimaru dodge around attacks, darting away as Obito runs through hand signs for a Fireball Jutsu. He’s taking in a huge breath, chakra rising while at the same time he Kamui’s himself around to it other side so he doesn’t catch the team in the katon. The second he lands he releases the katon; the ensuing inferno is unbelievably big and it slams into the zetsu and starts crisping it away instantly. It’s too big and gooey to burn all at once and it roars, still on fire, running towards the team.

Thinking fast, Obito throws up a Practice Brick between them, blocking it off. When it falls apart into separate clumps of melting clones, he hits them each with a perfectly aimed Phoenix Flame, warping himself out of the way of the collapsing pile of charred ooze.

The heat from the blaze is too hot for the surrounding dry grass to handle. He throws up more doton walls to box the mess in to keep the flames from spreading, but his sharingan has already picked up on the embers traveling in the breeze. So he drenches the area around the burning clone with one of Rin’s Mizzurapa, just on a smaller scale.

He surveys his work to make sure it’s contained and leaves the mess to burn itself out for now. He deactivates his sharingan before turning around, shunshining back to the team.

Guko’s working on Eoi and Meli and Kichimaru are covering him.

“How is he?” Obito asks at the same time Meli says, “is it eliminated?”

Obito replies, “It is.” He can see that Eoi’s leg is badly broken. The chuunin is unconscious, probably from his head striking the ground.

“Are there more?”

“No.”

Whatever Guko’s doing, it’s working. Eoi’s waking up. The chuunin groans, probably wishing he wasn’t, but Obito hopes it’s just a light concussion and not a more serious head wound.

Guko says, relieved, “he’ll make it. We’ll need to get him back, he’ll need surgery on his leg.”

Obito says, “I can take him back. It’ll only take a second; I can come right back.” When Guko just looks at him, Obito says, “there’s no clones nearby. You can come too; I don’t know where the hospital is.” It’ll also look bad if he just shows up with an injured chuunin.

“Is it safe?” Guko asks, and Obito knows it’s his way of being unsure about everything. They’ve never seen him use any of the techniques his Bingo Book entry warn about, and he just used them to take out a massive zetsu monster almost singlehandedly.

“Perfectly safe,” Obito says, hoping that they would trust him.

“Take me,” Meli says. “Guko’s fire natured, you two stay here and make sure that thing burns properly. We’ll be right back.”

Kichimaru salutes, “Taicho.” Obito kneels to pick up Eoi. He’s older than Obito but Obito’s bigger. He gets his arms under his knees and shoulders and lifts, careful of jostling his leg. Eoi helpfully passes out again, head lolling on his shoulder.

He can’t even pretend to make hand signs. “Hold on,” he tells Meli and looks away as she grabs on to his shoulder with both hands. He activates his mangekyo and Kamuis the three of them all the way back to Waterfall in one jump.

They land next to the temple and Meli’s a little green.

“Where’s the hospital?”

She points and Obito jumps them again, right to the front doors of the building.

There’s iroyo nin on him in a second, hostile with confusion, but Meli gets them focused on the situation at hand. Eoi is transferred to a stretcher and they wheel him away down the hall into reconstructive surgery for his leg.

After he disappears, Obito asks Meli, “Ready to go back?”

“This is insane.” She takes his arm. Instantly, they’re back with the rest of her team out on the plains outside the civilian village.

He’s a little winded. That’s a long way, and he was carrying people. But he’s secretly pleased at how well his plan to kill the zetsu monster worked.

Kichimaru jumps when they land and Guko is keeping the fire going to make sure every last bit of it burns. He looks up immediately, “How is he?”

“He’s in surgery right now. He’ll be fine.” Meli assures him.

“What was that thing?” Kichimaru asks.

“It was all six zetsu, merged into one. I’ve never seen them do that before,” Obito says.

“Well,” he tugs at his bandana, “I think you got it. Could you have been doing all of that this whole time? Why did you let us capture you?”

Obito shrugs again. He says honestly, “we needed to get to Takigakure and didn’t know where it was.”

The jounin laughs loud and long. “Is that the way they do things in Tea?”

There is no way they think he’s really from Tea. He’d used two clan katons to take down the clone monster but there is almost no possibility they would recognize them as being unique to the Uchiha, since Taki never fought a war with Fire. Not unless he was really unlucky and they faced one of his clan member’s pyrotechnics in a Chuunin Exam back in the day.

He shrugs again. “That’s how we do it.”

“Are there any more of them?” Meli asks.

He forgets to bullshit his sensing before he answers, “No. They’ll likely regroup after that.”

“We will too,” Meli says. “We’re going back. If we stay here, they’ll just swarm the village to get to us.”

“Are we walking?” Kichimaru asks. “I’d like a turn on the whatever the hell that is.”

Obito snorts. “That’s a long way to carry three people. You’re on your own.”

“You do not want a turn,” Meli assures him. “I’m still nauseous. We’re walking as soon as that bonfire is properly out.”

The second they’re back in the village, Meli goes to report, Guko goes to the hospital to check on Eoi, and Obito goes to see if Rin’s in the rooms. She’s not, but Gamariki is, upside down on Obito’s pillow, drooling, smearing his lipstick on the pillowcase.

It is borderline unacceptable. He kicks the bedframe and the toad jolts awake with a croak. The second he looks mopey up at him, Obito activates his sharingan, catching him in an unformed genjutsu for a few seconds. The toad breaks it but hops up with glee, “Obito kun! You did it!”

“I’ve got something for you,” Obito says and pulls out a sealing scroll, one into which he’d sealed the body of a zetsu clone. “There’s a zetsu in it. It should help sensei; I bet he can do some lab work, find out more about what makes it work.”

Gamariki takes the scroll with a dip of his bow-bedecked head. There’s a knock on the door and when Obito opens it, it’s to find Meli waiting in the hallway.

“Hey, Tobi, I just wanted to let you know Eoi’s out of surgery. He’s going to be just fine. He thanks you, for your timely action in getting him back.”

“No problem,” Obito says, but she’s looking over his shoulder into the room with wide eyes and he turns to find Gamariki reapplying his lipstick in plain view of all of Taki.

It feels like his brain stutters to a halt.

“Uh,” he says, blanking. “He’s with me?”

It comes out as a question.

Meli raises an eyebrow. Obito tries again, “hn, I, uh, summon frogs. He’s just going now.”

Gamariki just stares. For a second, he thinks the toad’s going to call him out, but with a big sarcastic bow, the toad blows a big, wet raspberry and reverse summons himself, disappearing in a puff of white chakra smoke, looking for all the world like Obito just dismissed him himself. Because he’s a frog summoner.

“Okay,” she says slowly, in a not-even-going-to-question-it tone. “I’m gonna go. Thanks for your assistance with the mission. We make sure you get commission pay.”

She leaves and Obito faceplants onto his bed. He stays like that until Rin returns from training.

She studies him facedown on top of the comforter. “That bad, huh?”

“The mission was fine,” he says muffled, “Gamariki’s just an idiot. Meli san saw him.” He rolls over so Rin can hear him better. “I said he was a frog.”

“A frog?”

“Yeah,” he says miserable.

“Did that work?”

In answer, he attempts to smother himself with a pillow.

“Where is he now?”

“Reverse summoned himself, made it look like I did it. I sealed a zetsu in a body scroll for sensei, to see what he can find out.”

“That’s clever,” Rin says, flopping down next to him. “Good thinking.”

“How’s jinchuuriki training?”

“I’ve hit a wall,” Rin admits. “There’s not much else I can do until the Sanbi talks to me. I think he’s shy. It might take time to build up the trust between us.”

There’s a tinge of sadness in her tone, or disappointment. Obito twists to face her. “We’re leaving?”

“Yeah. We’ve been in Taki too long already.”

Peely implied they were moving the timeline up, likely due to Obito and Rin’s interference. He says, “Okay. Maybe Kumo won’t be too bad.” It feels like they’ve been on a nice two-week vacation, away from the constant battle that this mission is becoming.

There’s a dinner to see them off. Shibuki thanks him for his help with the clones, and for getting Eoi back safely. They’re given fresh rations as a parting gift and the Taki jinchuuriki of the Nanabi personally walks them to the gate, where the Grass nin team waits, minus Eoi who’s still recovering. They say their goodbyes and shake hands and even joke around some when Obito spots a mushroom and proudly presents it to Rin as secret proof that he could use mokuton on the fungi.

This action concerns Guko, because apparently the mushroom is highly toxic. Obito has to wait to make sure it won’t affect him before the medic will agree to let him go.

“See,” Obito says, once they’re a safe distance from the village. “It is a plant.”

“It is not.”

“But I can feel it.”

“Since when has that been the scientific criteria?”

They bicker back and forth, and then they’re through the waterfall and Takigakure is gone. Obito Kamuis them to the border where they happily kill some more clones on their way out of Grass. He hasn’t asked, but Rin displays a need for catharsis that lets him know that everything hadn’t gone how she wanted it to with her jinchuuriki training.

It’s likely the turtle won’t talk to her. Its understandable, even if she’s frustrated.

Its unincorporated territory from here to Frost and Yu; they’ll need to cut to the coast and try to find a boat to take them by sea to the Land of Lightning. The mountains separating Lightning from the rest of the continent are mostly impassible, and as the days grow shorter the passage only gets worse.

But the trees return after a few days of traveling and so, unexpectedly, does Gamahiro, hopping along the branches. He doesn’t have any new information; Minato apparently sent him out as soon as Gamariki arrived. Obito gladly settles the katana toad into the sling to carry him. He’s missed the teal toad. They get a good laugh out of him playing off Gamariki as a frog. Obito shows him the mushroom and when he concentrates and channels mokuton through it, it flutters its little fuzzy cap. Waterfall is full of them; that’s the fuzzy thing Obito kept sensing.

Gamahiro immediately sides with Rin against him on the mushroom front. “Algae,” he says stubbornly. “Lichen.”

Obito throws up his hands at them.

It’s smooth travels, for them to be so close to the Mountain’s Graveyard. He’s expecting it to go wrong, but he’s not expecting what actually happens. He thought the danger would be closer to the cave Madara resides in, not once they’re safely past the border into Yu.

He first senses them north of Hot Water. The trees are mixed with bamboo stands but he still feels them, 4 shinobi, closing fast.

He hides the toad and alerts Rin. He’s thinking hunter nin, bandits, bounty hunters. What he is not expecting is a team of ANBU agents to body flicker into sight and it makes him hesitate before he can Kamui them away. They’re Konoha operatives, part of him thinks that maybe they’re envoys from Minato, and in his second of hesitation, the ANBU squad attacks them with a precise violence that is shocking in both its brutality and its efficiency.

An ANBU masked as a moth runs him through with a naginata. He can’t just Kamui it through him because of Gamahiro in the way and the second the shock wears off, the forest around them erupts, roots tangling around legs and dragging. Rin’s done something to the neck of a Lion masked ANBU and he’s wheezing his last breaths under her chakra scalpels.

Gamahiro kills the moth ANBU who stabbed him and when Rin down’s a third, the last ANBU, one in a Rabbit mask, retreats.

The fight lasts less than 30 seconds.

Gamahiro keeps an eye on the last ANBU, who’s retreated to a safe distance, while Rin looks at the naginata lodged through his gut. The forest is still writhing around him and he tries to calm down, tries to breath deep and even because he’s upsetting the plants. He can taste blood in his mouth.

Rin says, distantly, “you’re going to be okay, but this is going to hurt.”

And she pulls the naginata out of him.

It gets fuzzy after that. He loses a lot of blood. His healing kicks in and Rin works with it to patch the hole in him. He’s full of her chakra, green and familiar, and bamboo is sprouting around him. There’s three Leaf shinobi dead at his feet and that’s the oddest out of all of it. He can’t comprehend it.

He blinks up at Rin. “Did we just kill Konoha shinobi?”

There’s blood on her face, but he thinks it’s his. She looks grim. “Those aren’t Sensei’s ANBU.”

He thinks Kakashi’s hidden nin. Like the fake Kiri operatives. But Madara wouldn’t have tried to kill him, not when Obito had the Ichibi and he still needed it.

The Rabbit ANBU is watching them from the distant trees but makes no move to interfere. It’s a death squad and he can’t understand why.

“You’re going to be okay,” Rin’s saying, pushing pills into his mouth. Blood replenishers, painkillers, antibiotics. “I don’t think the poison is affecting you.”

That’s nice, he thinks. “Rabbit,” he says. “He’s watching us.”

“The assassination failed,” Gamahiro says. “He’ll either leave or tail us to try again later. Maybe when backup arrives.”

“No,” Rin says, pale as a mask herself. “He’s not following ANBU protocol. Sensei didn’t send him. There won’t be back up.”

“We need to kill him,” Obito insists. As soon as he can stand, he’s going to try.

“Stay down, kid.” Gamahiro says. “Let me think this through. He’s not attacking and he should be; we’re less vulnerable by the second.”

Obito says, “Secondary assignment.”

“He’s a tail.” Rin says. “Assassination failed, so he’s turning spy.”

There’s a second where they just look at each other, surrounded by dead ANBU, one still watching from a tree. ANBU agents. From Konoha.

They even fought like Leaf shinobi.

Obito says, “We’ve got to tell Sensei.”

“Working on it,” Gamahiro says and with a poof, he vanishes.

They look at the spot where the toad had been. “Help me up?” Obito asks.

Rin frets but he pulls himself to his feet. The mesh shirt he was wearing underneath the cloak helped but it’s ruined now. But the wound has closed up, even if it’s weak and tender. “Thanks,” he says.

“Next time you can’t just Kamui something through you, dodge.” She says, “You gave me a heart attack.”

He froze, unwilling to use lethal force against someone he recognized as a Leaf ninja, an ally. He thought maybe a real ANBU squad ran into the notorious missing nin duo and acted.

It was a mistake. That hesitation got him stabbed.

Rin hadn’t hesitated. He has to remember that while he was stuck in a cave, she was finishing a war as a front-line medic. She’s more experienced than him. He made a rookie mistake. For all that he is likely S ranked, Obito is still a gennin.

Gamahiro pops back into being. He says, “Marching orders from the Boss. It’s a stand down.”

“What?” Obito asks. “How did you do that?”

At the same time, Rin echoes in disbelief, “A stand down?”

“Let him tail you,” Gamahiro says. “Be a flashy distraction outside of the village. Keep them looking at you.”

“Oh,” Rin says grimly. “They’re in the village too.”

Obito thinks about that and says, “Not for much longer.”

This will put Minato on the warpath. He’ll go ballistic in the way that’s presents as the opposite and then there would suddenly be no more hidden nin inside Konoha’s walls.

If Minato wants them to let Rabbit tail them, they can do that. Obito digs a doton hole and they roll the ANBU inside to hide them. Obito keeps the naginata. Finders keepers.

It’s slow, stressful going. He’s hunched over as he hobbles slow over the ground, sore enough that it feels like he’s still being stabbed. At night, Obito sets so many traps around camp that it takes an hour just to disarm them all. He’s barley sleeping, so anxious is he that Rabbit is going to try to kill them in their sleep. They have constant watch shifts.

Rabbit is a haunting presence that ghosts on the edges of his perceptions. He stays a safe distance away, but he’s always there, steady following them, a blank and silent watcher.

They don’t Kamui. They don’t attempt to slip the tail. Obito heals to a degree that he can walk without assistance in under three days and even Rin can’t believe it. They go north through Yu, through endless waving bamboo forests, to the coast. They kill another clone, dodge around the shinobi fleeing the country in droves. There’s dodgy cult shit happening in the shadows that Rin takes one look at and steers them well clear of. All the while, Rabbit is there with them.

They barter their way onto a civilian boat under henge. It’s the first time Obito’s seen the ocean. He loves the smell of it, the salt and sand, the wind off the dunes. It’s as big and empty as the Suna desert. They walk up the gangplank, Gamahiro disguised as cargo, and Rabbit watches from the distance while Obito and Rin stand on the deck of a slow trawler and watch Rabbit get smaller and smaller.

Rabbit watches them until they fade from view completely.

Chapter Text

Chapter 15: Minato: Puzzles and Politics

The report sits on his desk. He flips it open, skims, flips it closed again. Shuffles the paperwork so that the budget report lies on the top of his Urgent list instead. Reshuffles to get a look at the informer reports out of the Capitol. Flips through the sealed ANBU report one more time. There’s a hypertension headache sneaking its fingers around his temples.

He can’t remember the last time he slept properly. Kushina bullies him into his bed every few days but between the wedding and the disarray his team has become he carries dark circles under his eyes into all his meetings. Suna’s a second away from accusing everyone of Tailed Beast thieving and declaring another pointless war over their injured pride. He’s received a missive from Ohnoki during the last peace talks to find that Earth is objecting to the restoration project on the premise that they just don’t want to cooperate with anyone else. He knows from his students that the old bastard Fence Sitter tried to buy a Bijuu off the missing nin after inventing an anti-time/space jutsu and he’s ready to pull his hair out over the whole situation. He doesn’t even know what the fuck’s going on in Kiri, but it wouldn’t surprise him overmuch if they start trying to declare war on him as well.

His newest intern comes in with an armload of new paperwork. This one has yet to try to kill him, and it’s been weeks longer than the last one lasted. He’s not exactly optimistic, but he like her just fine enough now. Minato doesn’t enjoy disappearing interns, but his position is more tenuous than he would have liked. He expected pushback from various departments, used to doing things a certain way and unused to peace as they were, but the amount of red tape a single department can generate to stall his new policies is astonishing. He never saw strategy half so efficient in war, or allies so easily corrupted.

“New marching orders,” she says and dumps the armload into his incoming Urgent box before collecting everything in his outgoing box to take with her. She’s civilian, from a noble family, another of the royal family’s bastards, but she’s got a mind for politics, her father’s ruthless opportunistics tempered by her mother’s sensibility and caution. She’ll go far in this position, if she can refrain from offing her new boss.

And the paperwork ninja like her. That’s a stronger accolade than anything else.

“Thank you, Akiko san. Tell Kaede sama to keep them coming.”

Akiko nods, gathering the appropriate files into her arms without once glancing at any identifying information. “The screeners are in a rush today. It’s the festival, I think.”

He nods thoughtfully but his mind isn’t on the festivities. “You should take off early today. Go get ready for the festival. It’s a party you don’t want to miss.”

Her Capitol upbringing has prepared her in some way to navigate a shinobi village, at least. She doesn’t need a second hint. “Thank you, Yondaime sama. Happy Fire Day to you, too.”

The festival won’t kick off until that evening, when the sun goes down and they can light the fires to brighten the night. “Happy Fire Day. Be well.”

Akiko leaves and he can hear her flipping the availability tile by his office door to negative on her way out. That will keep the staff off his back for the time being. He glances at the clock on the wall, then at the new files on his desk. The top file is stamped with the official seal of the bounty hunter’s guild. The newest Bingo Book has a notable update for Sachira and Tobi. Iwa has almost doubled Suna’s bounty. Neither nation can afford to cash it in but it’s turning into a pissing contest between Wind and Earth. He had to have Shikaku intercept the Bingo Book shipments into the Leaf Village and scrub his students faces from them.

They’re in the top ten. Minato hasn’t slept peacefully since he found out.

The updated profile is just sitting there. He reads through it again as the headache grows more pronounced.

“Crane,” he says and the ANBU appears at attention. “Summon Bear.”

Crane vanishes. The words on the report don’t change. After a few minutes the two agents appear back in his office. Minato eyes the bear-masked operative, the report open on his desk and asks, “is this a good time?”

Bear nods slowly and Minato dismisses the other operatives in the room, then sends his guard trio to wait in the hall. When they’re alone with the seals activated, he sighs, kneading at his forehead. He is already tired of having this argument with the Nara. “Something you need to say, Shikaku?”

The ANBU Commander pulls his mask to the side, revealing his face. He looks neither pleased nor surprised that Minato has called him in. He says, “It’s all in the report.”

Minato read it. He just can’t agree. Minato takes a deep breath and says, “the Leaf Village mistrusting Madara for his power is one of the things that drove him away. By treating them with suspicion, you force them down that same path. They are not a threat.”

The Nara shrugs. “They could be.”

Minato’s face is impassive.

Shikaku eyes lose a bit of their customary blandness. “Obito in particular is radicalized and sympathetic with the enemy. His loyalties are divided.”

Minato knows that its Rin who’s the real radical on his team. He dismisses, “All high-level shinobi could cause damage if they turn nukenin. But we don’t hold that against them.” His expression hardens. “Or is it only my students that you consider so disingenuously? A month ago you singled out Kakashi.”

In the Commander’s defense, Minato’s not sure how exactly to categorize his youngest student’s recent behavior. For the life of him, Minato can’t figure it out either.

Shikaku says, “I cannot discount the possibility that Obito is compromised.”

“Obito is my student. He is loyal to the village.”

“He is loyal to his team. And potentially to his clan, to a lesser degree.”

There’s an errant breeze agitating the pages of the report and Minato breaths it in deeply to keep a tight lid on his Killing Intent before the guard squadron kicks down the door to come save him. Raido in particular is stab first, ask questions later, which he approves of, but would be a political nightmare if the Commander and Clan Head got tagged by a kunai in his office, by his guard, while on duty as Bear.

Is this the reason why Hiruzen chain-smoked in the office all day? Dealing with all this? Minato asks carefully, “Is it Obito you fear, Shikaku, or his Clan?”

“It would be remiss not to consider the past.”

Minato is civilian born and proud of it. He is the first Hokage not from an important clan. Jiraiya of the Sannin didn’t train him because of his last name, nor did he reach his own title on the coattails of a family history or by being born into a kekkei genkai. But he knows how important the clans are to the village, and the importance the clans placed on themselves in the village, and the distance between those two things.

He says, "You're not your grandfather, Shikaku." The Nara's eyes narrow but he doesn't react beyond that. "And Obito is not Madara. Obito has ties to the village. Strong bonds, to his team and to his family. And Rin has a civilian family. They would not jeopardize their safety.”

Shikaku concedes, “Not willingly.”

But they both know how power covets. How it corrupts. That’s the heart of it, really. It doesn’t matter to him that they need the mokuton to counter the mokuton and the mangekyo to counter the mangekyo, or that Rin’s been recently unshackled from the seal. The two of them are growing into themselves, finally, away from Konoha’s influence.

The big difference between the Hokage and his ANBU Commander is that what Shikaku sees and is terrified by, Minato feels only pride.

“They’ve never shown any hint of disloyalty. We will treat them with every courtesy afforded by their status up to and until that changes.”

“They were nukenin for months.” Shikaku’s eyes are calculating. “They let you think they were dead. The both of them. That’s textbook. You were ready to kill them, I know you were.”

Minato’s hands still from where they’ve been fiddling with the pages of the report. Written to include words like sedition and compromised. He sits up slowly in his desk, straightening through his headache. “I thought you understood the details of that particular situation.”

“They could have sent a message. At the very least.”

Minato says, “You’re smarter than that, Shikaku. We’re the ones who are compromised.”

The Nara looks intractable, as stubborn as he is intelligent. Minato says, “Not every Konoha nin outside the village is a nukenin. The Sannin have never been classified as a threat, and Tsunade’s been gone for years. Jiraiya sensei comes to visit once every few years, barely, and never in the village itself. Neither of them actively participated in the Third War. Would you call them traitors?”

He doesn’t squirm but he doesn’t actively call his Hokage’s mentor a traitor, or the other powerful, revered Sannin, last of the Senju who helped found the Leaf Village, a traitor either. “The extenuating circumstances are not comparable.”

“I fail to see how.”

Minato is tired of this argument. In Shikaku’s mind, he is biased, so he is not worth listening to. He considers, then runs through hand seals faster than the eye can reliably see, nicking his thumb and slamming his hand down on the surface of this desk.

Gamahiro appears with a pop and takes in the empty office and lack of threat, the tension between the two shinobi. Minato asks his back up, “Gamahiro san, could you give a verbal report on the character of my students as you have observed them?”

The toad blinks and squats on his desk, glancing over the open files on his desk with a frown. He sits up, side-eyes the Nara, and croaks, “Obito lacks patience and his chakra control is awful. I’ve been trying to train him to use his inborn genjutsu affinity but the only thinking he does with his eye is for fire and Kamui. He’s obsessive and highly skilled. He’s a creative problem solver. He’s developed a touch of kleptomania, likely as a coping mechanism, but its harmless enough. He relies too much on ninjutsu and taijutsu. Seems content to let the mokuton abide as a sensing and defensive measure. He masters ninjutsu at an extraordinary pace but falls back on a handful of trusted techniques.” He croaks, “he’s no copy nin. In a fight, you’ll be lucky if he uses half a dozen different techniques.”

“And his mental state?” Minato prompts, nailing the Nara with a look.

“The boy has nightmares,” Gamahiro says levelly. “Not every night, but often enough. They don’t appear to affect him during the day. He sleeps little. Eats little. That may be the mokuton’s influence. He relies on Rin to too high of a degree. That may ease off a bit since she’s no longer in such imminent danger, but I doubt it. It seems ingrained. His obsessive tendencies are not detrimental, at this time. His attention span's as short as it always was, and he’s easily distracted. He has a temper, but he’s rarely harsh with his words, even when he disagrees. He’s polite and respectful. He smiles. He makes jokes. I don’t believe he’s so terribly unstable, or on the edge of any massive personality changes. He doesn’t talk much about the two years when he was a captive, and he might not pass a Yamanaka’s psych eval without lying, but what shinobi would?”

“Thank you, Gamahiro.” They both give the Nara the stink eye.

The toad goes on, “He’s…unthinkingly selfless. There’s a kindness at his core that he’s yet to lose. He is more prone to introspection than I recall, but what sixteen-year-old isn’t moody?” He says, firmly, “I don’t doubt his loyalty, or his determination.” He narrows his yellow eyes at the Shikaku. “Shame on you, Nara. The boy needs your support, not your suspicion.”

Minato makes a note to get the toad as many snacks as he wants after this. Shikaku is frowning, and it makes him look like Fugaku. Why are Clan Heads like this?

He’s thinking of course Obito is unselfish. This is the boy who was late to missions because he helped old ladies cross the street. The boy who threw himself under a cave-in to save Kakashi, who, when a doton exploded in his face, his first thought was to save Shikaku. He’s read that report as well, just as ungenerous as this most recent dossier.

The toad harrumphs and continues patronizingly, “And Rin is one of the most competent shinobi I have had the pleasure of observing. Her chakra control is impeccable. I think she got Obito’s share. She was actively channeling chakra around the seal, through individual tenketsu points so as to avoid setting it off prematurely. Her iroyo ninjutsu surpasses most shinobi of her training level. I think Tsunade would have an interest in her, if the two were to meet.”

That’s a thought. The toad continues, “She is forward-thinking, and more willing to engage in combat than a typical medic nin, but its only to her benefit. Her chakra scalpel technique is an unusual weapon but it suits her. She’s weak in taijutsu and downright terrible at kenjutsu but she has a surprising affinity for genjutsu, particularly identifying and resisting them. She’s the leader of the two, and takes the initiative in most confrontations. She’s intuitive and socially competent, able to blend with civilians as a flawless infiltrator. She’s empathetic, but holds no hate for either her captors or her Tailed Beast. She’s quick to anger, but she forgives just as quickly. It was Rin who crafted their aliases and led their infiltration of Suna. Rin identified the Ichibi and snatched him using a technique she picked up from watching the puppeteer performances in the village. She keeps Obito focused. Pulls him out of his head.”

He looks smug. “And that not even counting the Sanbi. Who knows what she’s truly capable of in terms of power level? I look forward to seeing how she’ll develop. She’s the ideal counter to Obito’s impulsiveness, but she can improvise with the best of them. She’s rational and caring. She wants to befriend the Sanbi and I pity the world for when she learns how to sic the turtle on her enemies of his own free will.”

“And she will do it, Shikaku,” the toad says. “She’s just as stubborn as you. It’ll be like Killer B and the Haichibi, but better. More equal. More fluid. I, for one, can’t wait.”

He doubles down, puffed up in pride even as he glares at the Commander. “Her loyalty is not in question. Her mental stability is commendable after all she’s been through. If you doubt her, it is because you are projecting your own fears onto her.”

The summons is currently the size of a basket but his Killing Intent is the size of the Tower itself. He’s keeping a good hold on it, but his square pupils are slits.

This is better than Minato hoped. He owes the toad all the snacks. He makes a mental note to call the toad in during his next Council meeting to let him wear down the old windbags. He’s thinking he’ll never argue in person again; he’ll just sic Gamahiro on all his detractors. He’s a fine orator himself, and that’s Jiraiya’s influence in him, but he lacks the desire most of the time to bother wrangling bureaucrats. Gamahiro, however, loves knocking puffed up administrators down a few pegs.

Shikaku is too grown of a shinobi to look chagrined after being scolded by a toad, but Minato’s sure the novelty won’t wear off for a while.

Minato considers this the end of the matter. He flips to the end of Shikaku’s report, which highlights……not much. The jounin is supposed to be looking into Madara’s Ame-based organization but so far they have exactly no leads besides that they’re based in Rain. And Ame is hostile enough towards the nations that destroyed it that sending in ANBU is risking a retaliatory war. They’ve improved on Obito’s profile exactly none. S rank nukenin. Well, that certainly narrows it down, but it doesn’t exactly help that shinobi of that rank are good at covering their tracks.

Minato says, “about the patsy organization…”

“It’s a drag,” Shikaku admits, “but I have no definite leads. They’re a shadow.” He doesn’t look happy about it.

Minato says, “would you consider sending in a team?”

“Not in this climate.”

Minato understands that to mean: not until they find the leak. Shikaku doesn’t trust his own ANBU. Not when one of the last updates they’d gotten from Kakashi had mentioned a hidden shinobi wearing full ANBU regalia utilizing their secret cloaking jutsu. Neither of them liked that very much.

Shikaku is also pissed that Kakashi broke into the Secure Archives yet again, and this time he’s somehow painted himself as the hero to the general population about it, saving the village from invaders. He’s doubly pissed that someone somewhere has the audacity to impersonate one of his operatives.

They’re both hoping its impersonation. The alternatives are vastly more unpleasant.

But the leak is Kakashi’s investigation. They need to do something about the nukenin. When Madara decides to make his move, he’s not going to rely on the clones. He’s going to call in the heavy hitters to collect the Bijuu he needs for his plan. There is every possibility that these are the ninja his students are going to face, unless Shikaku identifies and takes them down first.

Minato is determined to give them that chance. He’s aware that it’s unfair to ask them to take on so much. It tears him up inside that he cannot take their place.

He knows they can take it. They’ve been taking it all their life. But they shouldn’t have to. They’ve never once deserved any of the shit they’ve gone through. Very few shinobi do.

He rubs at his face. Shikaku’s probably deduced his headache by now, the bastard genius who can’t find any credible missing nin to populate Madara’s ranks. He ponders if a deadline would help motivate the jounin, but this isn’t laziness. S rank nukenin are S rank for a reason. Their information isn’t just lying around.

They need to try harder. They have to be doing more. He says, “They’ve secured four of the nine Bijuu. Our target could counter them in retaliation at any moment.”

That is his true fear of lagging behind his students. If they outdo Madara by too great a degree, he knows the Old Man will be pressed to do something drastic. That would likely be him sending his men out after the remaining jinchuuriki and making it a race to secure the Tailed Beasts.

That is the future he sees if they can’t thin the ranks, draw some of the attention away from his students while Rin learns how to utilize her Bijuu while Obito kicks the hornet’s nest of clones by taunting Madara in his own front yard. He knows Madara won’t accept the losses to his clone army. He has to have something they didn’t consider, some ace up his sleeve. This is a plan decades in the making. Minato isn’t convinced he isn’t sitting on a whole slew of contingencies, a dozen tailor-made to the shinobi he’d groomed to take his place. He’ll know exactly the ways to nullify Obito, to counter Rin and the Sanbi.

There is a puff of smoke and when it clears, he finds Gamariki twirling in the center of his desk while Gamahiro smirks in amusement. The flamboyant toad has reverse-summoned himself to Minato, and one webbed foot clutches a sealing scroll like a string of pearls.

When his pirouette ends in a leap kiss-first towards Shikaku, the other shinobi throw himself into the shadows to escape. Gamahiro laughs uproariously, even as Minato’s blood pressure rises. The team hadn’t even gone a full week with the toad before they’d come up with some way to get rid of him.

The toad in question abandons all aspects of being a highly trained ninja summons and is instead chasing his ANBU Commander around his office. “Greetings, Gamariki,” he says with a forced smile. “Do you have something for me?”

The toad pauses and looks at the scroll clutched in his hand, like it’s a surprise. “Oh, yes, I do!”

He leaps back up onto the desk with maximum flailing. He presents the scroll with a flourish. “Don’t open it here,” He whispers conspiratorially. “There’s a clone in it.”

That interests him. He leans over the scroll. It’s a standard sized body scroll, used by hunter nin to transport corpses. You’re not supposed to seal anything living in the matrix but knowing his students….. “Is it…alive?”

“Nope.” Gamariki says obnoxiously. “Deader than dead. It’s a present for that cutie over there.”

Shikaku has been edging closer in his interest in the scroll but at Gamariki’s address he retreats back to the shadows. The toad’s front makes most people uncomfortable, but Minato knows to look past the façade his toad uses as a shield, past his well-crafted mask of projected glee and glitter. Gamariki is an expert in genjutsu and infiltration. He hoped his students would look past the front to see the summons’s use but it has barely been a week.

He considers. Gamaken is tired up with Jiraiya. He will admit to using the information Jiraiya so desperately craves as incentive to make sure his sensei is in town for the wedding. The toads are helping marvelously on that front. The last he heard, Jiraiya is meandering his way back through Yu towards Konoha. He should be here in time for both the wedding and helping with the situation in Ame. His spy network is extensive. He’ll be an unparalleled asset with his knowledge of the country.

But he’s already summoned Gamahiro here. “Gamahiro, could you report to Taki?”

The toad nods and plops a partially webbed foot over Gamariki’s shoulders. “This one here will tell me the coordinates and I’ll be off.”

“Thank you. You’re both dismissed. Gamariki, thank you for delivering the scroll to me. Get some rest.”

They hop out together, using the window. They are picking up his student’s bad habits. No wonder the council doesn’t respect him or his leadership.

Once the toads are gone, Shikaku creeps closer. Minato gives him a disapproving look. “Like your deer are any less over the top.”

“My clan’s deer are not shinobi.”

“Oh, that’s why you ran from Gamariki. His ninja prowess. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that he wears lipstick.” He shakes his head at the Clan Head. “What would Yoshino think…..”

The jounin pales.

They look at the sealing scroll. “Do you have someplace you can take this?”

Shikaku nods grimly. “I can have a full screening done.”

He’s going to ask his wife. Minato doesn’t envy him there. Nara Yoshino scares him. The medic nin is terrifying. She’d tied Minato to his bed once when he landed himself in the hospital and threatened to hamstring him to keep him there until he recovered from his chakra exhaustion. No one had ever looked so gleeful as they held up a scalpel like a kunai. She scares all the jounin. Maybe especially her husband.

“Good. Lets find out what we’re up against,” he says. “Destroy it when you’re done.” This thing supposedly has the mokuton. There’s no telling the evil it will do if the leak gets its hands on the fucking Hashirama Cell.

“Understood. I’ll report my findings at the earliest possible convenience.”

This feels like they’re getting somewhere. He feels better with a concrete goal to work towards. Even if it comes hand-delivered with a bow from his students in Taki. That’s backwards, he knows it is, but he isn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth.

He hands over the scroll to Shikaku, who pockets it carefully. “Obito says the clones are connected. I want to know how.”

Shikaku nods. He pulls his mask back on straight and when he straightens back up, it’s as ANBU Commander Bear. He leaves out the window as well. Minato ponders the merits of nailing it shut, but if he does that, he’ll probably never see Kakashi again. The teen has a chip on his shoulder about doors and how to use them in polite company. It’s already been a week since he’s last seen him, but Fugaku reports that he seems fine at their weekly session, even though Minato suspects he is…distant. Quieter. His new apathy more genuine.

He’s most likely busy with his investigation, but Minato knows how his student lets his missions consume him. He needs to check in again. And soon.

He summons his regular staff back into his office. The ANBU flicker back into place and his Honor Guard take their positions at the back of the room, behind his desk. He tucks the file into his own robes. He says, “I need an aspirin. And could someone send a dinner invitation to Kakashi, before the festival? My treat.”

Someone quietly shunshins away and he gets up to follow. He’s got to deliver the scroll to Kushina, who he’s entrusted with coordinating all their evidence. At this time of evening, he knows exactly where to find her.

The village is in rapid preparations for the lightshow later that night. His duties for the festival are simple: he lights the first ceremonial torch in the square outside the Tower, with the Hokage Mountain as his backdrop, a stunning reminder of force and victory. During wartime, the celebration of the village’s charter from the Daimyo was dampened by curfews and sugar rations. He’s just as interested as everyone else to see what a peacetime celebration of a village built for war looks like.

As he guessed, Kushina’s sequestered away at the wedding venue, folding napkins into the shape of swans and chatting animatedly to Mikoto. They’ve hired a gennin team for the actual heavy lifting, on account of Mikoto’s pregnancy, and Team 11 counts boxes in the background, Kotetsu annoyed whenever Izumo loses count.

He scoots onto the bench next to her, waving a hello to Mikoto. The kunoichi dips her head politely, her hands full of silverware polished bright as live steel. They’ve been friendly for years; one of the first gauntlets he had to run to date Kushina officially was hers. But she’s been notably cooler towards him since his ascension. He’s only recently began to consider her as the Lady of the Uchiha instead of simply Kushina’s gennin teammate, much in the same way she must be newly considering him as Yondaime Hokage instead of Kushina’s plus one.

He's not sure what to do about that. It’s well known he studied the Nidaime’s writings. It’s well known who invented his famous jutsu, and what they used it for. Maybe they blame him for policies written decades before his birth, but maybe he’s blaming them for how Obito was treated. Maybe he’s seeing the two as more interconnected than he first realized. Maybe he’s more to blame for that than he’ll ever be comfortable with, or even begin to know how to address.

But he needs the Uchiha to welcome Obito back, even if they’ll view him as nothing but Minato’s ear to their ground. On top of all the other baggage Obito drags behind him, this will be the most obvious point of contention, a student of the Hokage bound by blood to the clan Minato’s office oppresses above all others.

Kakashi can be easily dismissed. He’s the Bastard Sharingan. But Obito is another case else entirely.

“Evening, Mikoto. How’s your son?”

“Itachi is helping prepare the compound for the festival.” She’s polite enough, but its surface level. He’s not sure how to try harder, here, if this is even the time or the place to begin. But if its not his responsibility, then its no ones, and nothing will change.

But he knows how to be charming. He can mime personability with the best of them. He spent years at the Palace hiding among politicians and concubines alike. He knows how to control a conversation to avoid awkwardness, to steer even pauses in his favor.

He continues his amiable chat but Mikoto is the wife of a Clan Head and a fearsome strategist besides. She’s a genjutsu type, a Clan trained illusionist, capable of convincing an enemy jounin to slit his own teammate's throat.

Kushina lets them playact buddies for longer than she usually allows his fronting, not frowning at either of them but making her displeasure at the politics known by folding a napkin with more vigor than required, like she’s snapping a pair of chopsticks, or someone’s arm.

He turns to her, dropping his façade. “I invited Kakashi to an early dinner with us tonight.”

She crowns him with a folded swan napkin. It is maybe a little lopsided. She says, “Good. The little squirt can help with the napkins.”

When they’d first gotten engaged, Sarutobi Biwako hunted him down for the most graphic shovel talk he’s ever been subjected to. The iroyonin knows more ways to castrate a man than should rightly exist in the word. But Mikoto’s words had been sweet as Rin could be, and he knows the threat they hide. Biwako knows the threat Kushina specifically faces from a public wedding, but Mikoto doesn’t.

But he could never deny Kushina the joy of a big wedding. She knows the risks of marrying him. She would not thank him for trying to protect her, not like this. Not when having a ceremony feels like a middle finger to all their enemies, Kyuubi be damned.

The decision to take her name was an easy one. He doesn’t think there is anything he won’t do for her. When she raises her arms to adjust the napkin on his head, he slides the report into her dress, easy as can be. Casual. If Mikoto notices, and there’s not much he thinks gets past her eyes, she’ll assume it’s a love poem or some other equally gooey and embarrassing gift. That, or have the tact not to call out a dead drop when she sees one.

Kushina plays off the exchange like a champ. Her face never changes. “Here,” she hands him a stack of white napkins. “I’m drafting you into service. Mikoto can show you how to do the folds.”

It doesn’t take long to get the hang of it. The wedding is less than a month away and the list of things they have to get done before then just gets longer and longer. Being Hokage doesn’t help at all. Event planners are vicious, and the catering service is passive aggressive enough to count as T&I. The first caterers quit after Kushina booked Teuchi and Ichiraku as their main entrée provider. Kushina takes planning a wedding as a challenge, as an enemy she can browbeat into submission. It’s worked for her so far. He’s still not sure how she managed to keep on the good side of the Akimichi with that move, but she’s always been better than him at that sort of maneuvering.

Afterward, they say their goodbyes to Mikoto and they go to dinner. Neither of them is much of a cook and Minato’s particular about who he accepts food from. A lot of their usual places are closed early for the festival, but he suspects Teuchi holds regular hours on days like this just in case they show up. The Hokage’s personal endorsement wins him a lot of business.

They wait outside Ichiraku’s for Kakashi to show up.

Kakashi never does.

Eventually, they eat without him. It isn’t like him to turn down free ramen. Maybe he should check on him, now. He knows how his student gets, especially if he’s run into a wall with his investigation. Minato knows Kakashi was taught as a child that hurting himself for the sake of the village is an honorable thing. While he could strangle Sakumo for leaving him with that impression, there is very little he can do about it now but be on the lookout for any self-destructive behavior. Any self-isolating behavior.

Without any solo A ranks for him to take, this has translated over into his attempts to join an organization that left deep marks on the souls of those who manage to live through it and get out. ANBU had taught him his battle calm, yes, but they’d also taught him that not feeling things was a bonus and it took serious work to retrain himself out of that mindset. He’d removed his ANBU tail when he gave him this mission but he still needs someone to check in on him, to make sure he isn’t pushing himself too hard, or punishing himself if he isn’t wielding results.

The kid is wallowing somewhere. He can feel it in his bones. Minato doesn’t want Kakashi learning his mistakes.

Appearing at his house might be taking it too far. That’s drastic. Maybe just summon him to the office for a verbal report of his findings. Conveniently have lunch ready. Threaten him with therapy again, as if the teen wasn’t smart enough to lie his way through any psyche eval. He drives Inoichi just as bonkers as Shikaku.

Kushina notices his unease. “Hey,” she says, “just call him in tomorrow. If he flakes then, send the guards after him. Or you can go to his house.”

Kami, he loves her. It’s just them in the stall. He sweeps in for a quick kiss; he’s fast, the fastest, but she slows him down. She always has. Even his thoughts, always racing, wedging in on themselves, slow down when he thinks about how he feels about her.

After, he dons his rarely worn ceremonial robes for the festival lighting, his robes of office and hat over the top. Katon is his weakest elemental affinity, a relic of his immigrant blood, and the source of much old gossip during his appointment. He is, after all, the Hokage for Fire Country, and his predecessor can famously utilize all chakra natures.

But he has enough fire in him for this.

The torch whips in the night with the sound of tearing silk. This is a tradition that comes from lighting watchfires and he thinks everyone’s wondering what place it has now. The sparks travel high into the night, casting shadows over his face, over his entourage, bright in the warmth of the fire.

In the crowd, a few shinobi write their wishes on slips of flashpaper that go up with sharp sizzles when tossed into the bonfires around the village. Civilians cheer, but Minato knows the wishes are an Uchiha influence in the village they helped found. Not everyone writes their wishes to give to the fire, but Minato considers it, pondering what he would write. In a very real way, peace in Konoha is his to shape as he sees fit.

All night long, the fires burn bright and shinobi and civilians alike sing and dance and drink in the streets. Suiton units on roofs keep an eye on the multiplicity of blazes. Uchiha officers in the street are scowled at even as civilians unknowingly appropriate their traditions. He’s thinking about that, more than he ever has before. Is it becoming more common, their distrust more open, or is he just aware enough to see it now?

Is this the environment that drove Madara away? Is this the environment Obito was raised in? That he would have to come back to?

Kakashi never appears. Out of all of Team 7, Minato doesn’t know if the last Hatake knows how to stop fighting. Minato graduated at 10 into the same war as Kakashi. What more does he know about being a shinobi in peacetime?

He’s determined to find out. For all of them. For Konoha. For his students. For himself.

At his side, Kushina's hair is red as flame. She feels like a firestorm, drawing everyone's attention when she twirls, the Uzu designs on her dress fanning out like flames in themselves, colors inked in tiny, sharp-tongued, intricate sealwork. Her fire is enough to consume the world. The torches blaze higher when she draws near, mischievous, toothy. The crowd cheers.

The next day, he sends a missive for Kakashi to report to his office at noon. Everyone is sluggish and sleepy or visibly hung over and nothing feels urgent, like this. He has sandwiches at the ready. He’s in a good mood.

Noon comes and goes.

He has important paperwork he should be doing. The Council is hounding him again about the peace treaties with Iwa. He inherited that delightful problem directly from Hiruzen. Personally, he thinks a peace treaty based entirely on fear is doomed to fail. Especially when the perpetrator of a good portion of the violence against Iwa is the holder of the treaty. He spent some time on the border with Iwa, where he’d crunched his grief small at them costing him his student. He’d allowed the battle calm to take over and when he came out the other side there was one less enemy platoon to worry about.

They wrote songs about it. As much as Hiruzen liked to act like it was Minato who single handedly ended the war, Minato is aware that the violence he inflicted on Iwa as a victor was identical to the violence of any aggressor in a conflict, as ugly and as mean as the worst brutality he saw from any enemy.

That’s what Shikaku doesn’t understand. His teacher had. At the core of Minato is nothing at all, a mirror that can reflect the worst of the shinobi world back at everyone around him. At the core of Obito is a kindness that nothing can touch. He makes things better. Minato’s never built anything he isn’t capable of breaking.

He really should be busy, but he finds himself by the window, looking at his lunch growing stale. The actual summon had been for 10. Knowing Kakashi’s late habit he’d adopted from Obito, and the tired nature of the day, Minato’d aimed for him to wander in around noon.

But that was two hours ago. He isn’t coming. It really isn’t like him to ignore a direct summon.

He fills his pockets with the privacy seals Kushina keeps his desk well stocked with. He has a marker a respectful distance from the Hatake compound, just in case.

He looks at his guards, “Stay here,” and vanishes into a Hiraishin before they can protest. They’ll be exasperated at him, but he isn’t used to being followed around everywhere, and he knows Kakashi will clam up even harder if he shows with Raido, Genma, and Iwashi in tow.

Besides, he’s perfectly safe. He isn’t leaving the village. There isn’t anything that would harm him while he is safe inside Konoha’s walls.

He touches down outside the Hatake Compound. The first time he’d seen the living conditions of his student, he’d been appalled. Chuunin or not, Kakashi was 10 and he’d been living alone for years. It was unacceptable. But his attempts to remedy the situation butted up against his student’s stubbornness and the reality that as the last Hatake, Kakashi must feel obligated to stay on his family land.

Even now, there’s something desperately sad about the state of the place. The grass is overgrown and shutters hang open. The paint is dull and streaky. It feels abandoned, but it’s been warded to hell and back with the kind of paranoid defensiveness most shinobi never develop outside of ANBU but that his student had perfected as a kid. The wards feel old in the way that only the Clan compounds really do, generations heaped upon each other like new paint on an old canvas.

Chakra skitters over him when he passes the bounds of the walled yard, tingly with static. Every Hatake that contributed to the protections here is gone. The truth is, he’d gotten to Kakashi too late. He barely knew Sakumo, never even heard of his son. But Obito and Rin’s gennin teammate had quit shinobi life a week out of the Academy, and the Sandaime thought it would do the chuunin some good to socialize with kids his own age. This was code for: Kakashi was terrorizing his jounin mentor and such a painful stickler for the rules he was going to get either himself or someone else killed. He was cold, closed off. Far too distrustful. Far too intelligent for any real help to work.

Minato was a natural prodigy himself. He’d guessed that Hiruzen thought he could handle the last Hatake, but by 10 Kakashi had been on his own for too long already. He was ferociously independent. Naturally secretive as a deeply ingrained defense mechanism. Minato never even knew the kid had ninken summons until a mission went south enough to require him to call them.

10 years old, and already with a veteran’s familiarity with crisis, an unspoken seamlessness with his teamwork, one of long, comfortable association, that let him know that he’s had them for years, both the crises and the ninken. Minato isn’t sure, but he thinks Kakashi might be the youngest summoner in Konoha’s history. He’s never heard of anyone even close to the age he feared his student was when he signed a contract.

Every bit of stability the teen has is thanks to his summons. Minato could never have taught him teamwork unless the pack had instilled it into him almost from birth. He might be a feral teen half-raised by ninken, but Minato could never thank Pakkun enough.

He remembers, in the early beginning of Team 7, flipping through the file of a high chuunin and wondering if the trauma would make him sensitive or unhinged, more sympathetic to others or cold because of the value of his own hurt. He saw both in ANBU, but the mask rewards the latter more consistently.

It had taken years for him to unguard himself towards Minato and his team. Years to earn his respect. He could still be defensive, and stubborn, but he is loyal to an absurd degree to anyone who earns it in the eyes of himself and his pack. Unfortunately, that number is small. His team, Chouza’s team. And he never really opened up to them. They were friends, but they weren’t his pack.

Minato feels himself trigger proximity alarms on his way up the walk towards the one occupied house in the small compound, the pressure dropping as he goes. The air always feels like an oncoming storm here. Before the hidden villages, the Hatake were nomadic. To find them, you followed the storms that drug the pressure down over a forest the same way a storm cloud drags its rain. There’s even rumors that the clan is mixed with samurai. Rumors they’re mixed with the wolves from the mountains of Iron. Rumors they’re part lightning, liable to burn up all at once in one fierce snap.

He knocks on the door, trying to sense if his student was in his house or not. “Kakashi? Its Minato.”

He can’t hear anything from inside the house. There is no movement from the windows. He thinks about breaking in. He thinks about the possibility that Kakashi is just not home; that he’s out neck-deep in his investigation. He thinks about leaving a note on the door and searching for him in the village.

But if he was investigating, he won’t welcome Minato’s intrusion. Just by being the Hokage, Minato draws notice when he’s out and about.

He tells himself that its fine, really. Kakashi’s just busy. He’ll report when he can. It’s unlikely that he’s in trouble; finding the leak is difficult because they have so very few leads, but Kakashi is still in the village. This is S ranked out of secrecy, not any true danger. Even with the increased need to only utilize shinobi already in the know, Minato would never send Kakashi into true danger willingly. A surely frustrating change of pace from Kakashi’s usual missions, but one with a very small chance of turning deadly.

He's trying to convince himself. But he knows his team’s luck. If anything could happen, it would happen to Kakashi. It’s probably nothing, but he’ll feel better if he could just check.

His mind made up, he turns to go try to find his student in the village. Only when he turns away does the door slide open a crack. A single flat gray eye peeks out.

“Kakashi?” Minato doesn’t like the silence. He says, “Is everything okay? I’m just checking up on you. You missed dinner and we didn’t see you at the festival.”

“I’m fine.” The little of his expression Minato can see is smooth and blank. It isn’t an unusual look on him but some red flags jangle a warning in the back of Minato’s brain. He’s too intuitive not to notice. He scrambles for an appropriate topic to continue the conversation.

He says, “we have a new lead.”

Now that visible eye narrows in question but he doesn’t voice it aloud.

Minato says, “I can’t talk about it here. You should swing by the office later.” To make it sound less like an order he adds, lamely, “There’s sandwiches.”

There’s a beat of stillness. Minato can almost see him swallow. Then Kakashi nods. “I will.”

He feels curiously like he’s failing this conversation. He’s better at talking to him than this, but this is like Kakashi has regressed back into that distrustful 10-year-old, the one who thought that everything, even sandwiches, was manipulation tactics. He isn’t sure what to make of it. But he knows he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t trust it.

He doesn’t know what to do about it. Not when he feels like he’s been caught wrong-footed in some unknowable way. Not when Kakashi won’t open the door all the way. Minato says, “Okay then. I’ll see you later.”

Kakashi nods and slides the door closed again. There’s a slight static from the wards reactivating. Minato just stares.

He walks back slowly. The last update he’d gotten from his student had been that he was looking into a suspicious shinobi, one that had dressed in ANBU gear. He’d called him the hidden nin. The one he’d blown up a warehouse to find. The one he’d broken into the Archives to frame.

Back at the tower, he is preoccupied. Sometimes his intelligence is faster than conscious though; that’s what he’s known for, intuitive leaps he doesn’t have time to explain on the battlefield but work out favorably regardless. And sometimes knowledge builds in him slowly, adding up little by little like layers of ice splintering rock over time. Like something in him is freezing and refreezing until the chill breaks the world to its core.

The Elder Council is on his last nerve. And worse: now the Daimyo is backing them. He isn’t entirely sure what swayed him, unless it’s just the intense dislike between their feudal lord and his military. He doesn’t care overmuch. Handling Fire’s Daimyo is half of ANBU’s entire job. He spent good time as a teen running fake assassination missions against him to keep him scared and distracted enough to keep backing Sarutobi’s Konoha. The council as a ruling body is only backing the Daimyo now because he happened to agree with their goal of taxing Iwa into the ground in retribution.

Minato will not have another Suna on his conscious. He promises to consider it just to shut them all up. He respects their age, but their experiences just make them afraid. He’s still figuring out what a village like Konoha needs in peacetime, what they need from him, but he’s sure it doesn’t need hard liners like the Elder Council. Danzo especially acts like they’re still at war.

And Kumo is little better. At least they’re quieter about their unhappiness. He’s sure they’re planning something big, but the Yondaime Raikage is as new to his post as Minato is. It will keep him cautious, until it’s time to take a stance. From what he knows of A, it will be subtle as a kick in the teeth. He’ll send their treaty back crammed in the mouth of a corpse the second it benefits him to do so.

He stews in his office for hours afterwards. And the day had started out so nice.

Kushina comes by around evening, clutching a letter in her hands and fuming. “Remember those plans to assassinate the Daimyo? How shelved are they?”

“Fairly,” he answers. “Unless you want a child heir at the Capitol.”

In response, she thrusts the letter under his nose. He skims quickly. He’d sent his congratulations on the wedding as well as a lackluster gift, and his congrats are full of poorly hidden snide opinions. The man is a huge misogynist. And apparently anti-Uzu as well.

He wrinkles his nose. “The only thing worse for Fire is a boy Feudal Lord at the helm.”

She snatches the parchment back and storms around raging as she reads her answering response aloud to him, making fake retching noises to punctuate the bits where she’d tried to be civil. Its more rant than thank you. But it does bring a smile to his face.

“Here,” he says, pulling out his official Hokage stamp. “This’ll really drive the message home.”

Kushina gleefully shoves the letter back at him and he stamps the corner with his personal seal. To rub it in even more, he signs the bottom, right behind Kushina’s name, as Uzumaki Minato.

When Kushina reads how he signed his name, she pounces on him. Another thing he dislikes about his office is the near constant audience. He can almost feel the awkwardness from his guards. When he hears a knock interrupting his very important meeting with her, he’s annoyed at the rudeness before he realizes it’s coming from the windows. Then he thinks it’s Kakashi, finally come to see him. But when he looks over Kushina’s red mane of hair, it’s to an ANBU mask looking in at him from the window.

He sits up attentively while Kushina just growls under her breath, twisting to glare towards the interruption before recognizing Bear. She slides out of his lap while Minato signals Bear to enter with one hand. He says, “Crane,” then hesitates but forges ahead with, “Bring Kakashi. The rest are dismissed for the evening.”

Crane flickers out of view. Kakashi might resent being fetched in such a manner, especially when he’d already made concrete plans to swing by, but Minato needs him here for this now, not just to relay information to later. He wants to get Shikaku’s opinion of the teen.

Bear waits until Kushina finishes securing the room. “This better be good,” she warns.

Bear doesn’t reply. Minato’s heart sinks.

When Kakashi appears, it’s like a ghost on the other side of the glass of the window. He silently slides the window open just enough for him to slip through then stands at attention in the room in front of them.

He looks fine. If anything, he looks bored by the meeting.

There’s a tense moment where Minato realizes that Bear can’t give his full report. He can almost feel Shikaku giving him a look from under the mask.

Minato turns to Kakashi. “Do you know who this is?”

“ANBU Bear san.”

The redirection makes him feel better, but the address decidedly doesn't. He says, “Do you know his shinobi identity?”

Kakashi blinks. “I would never sniff out an ANBU’s shinobi identity, Hokage sama.”

That confirms it for him. “1000 yen,” Kushina says immediately.

Minato shakes his head. “Sucker bet.”

“A thousand yen he’s known for weeks. Since the first meeting.” Kushina corrects.

He can take that bet. Shikaku is surely frowning at him under there and somewhere Jiraiya is lecturing about the Three Shinobi Prohibitions, as hypocritical as that is for him. He holds out his hand. “Deal.”

Bear sighs. “Sucker bet,” Shikaku confirms, pulling his mask to the side to speak.

Kakashi’s eye widens at hearing the ANBU speak and Minato can see the white of it from behind his desk. Did he really not know?

“Well?” Kushina asks eagerly. “Do I win?”

Kakashi says carefully, “I would never consciously identify any ANBU. But Sensei owes you dinner.”

“Troublesome,” Shikaku says. “I had to have your detail wear scent blockers. They’re not happy with you, Hatake.”

Kakashi shrugs. “They were useful during the break in. They almost caught the perpetrator, too.”

Kakashi seems normal enough. But Minato feels there’s something off. He can’t articulate why. Instinct leads him wrong all the time, an animal’s response instead of an analytical mind, a reaction he’d trained out of himself years ago. But something’s there. He knows there is. Kakashi’s almost….too controlled? Too calm. Like he’s rehearsed his responses ahead of time. He’s playing his role flawlessly and for that, Minato’s gut is twisting.

“Believe it!” Kushina punches the air and turns to him with a grin. He makes a show out of digging out his frog wallet to pay up to cover his growing unease. He forks the notes over into Kushina’s grabby palm with a false grin. She picks up on it and his eyes narrow back towards where Kakashi stands behind her back, out of sight, even as she pockets the notes. She blinks back and it all seems normal enough, but now she’s on alert too, at least.

Minato says, “Now that introductions are out of the way, Shikaku, you have something for us?”

The Nara’s face is dark. Shadows spill over the floor to his feet. He says gravely, “The screening for the clone is complete. We ran a full autopsy on the remains. The results are….concerning, to say the least.”

From his pocket he pulls a little box. He unseals it with a pop and inside there rests a single thumb, white as a dead fish. Kushina leans in with interest, raising a finger as if to poke it. She asks, “its growing back?”

“It’s a feature of the mokuton that animates it. If we were to replant this bit of it, it might regrow a whole new clone.”

Minato’s thinking of Obito’s arm. They all might be. He says, “I thought we were going to destroy the evidence.”

“This is the last of it. The rest is ash.”

Good. He prods at the thumb, at what used to be a clean edge from an amputating cut turned wobbly with new growth. Like a weed. He asks, “What else can you tell me?”

Shikaku gives his verbal report. “The clone’s body isn’t analogous to a human’s. There’s just the barest suggestion of internal structure. No true heart or lungs. No stomach. The bones are a woodier, stronger substance. If you damage the cells, they almost disincorporate completely. If you hit that thumb hard enough, it would almost melt. The body was falling apart during the procedure, but even dead, the cells heal themselves. Its resilient. To be sure it’s really dead, you have to destroy it entirely. Fire is sufficient. Acid is another. There may be more but we didn’t experiment in favor of ending it before it regrew. It was delivered with extensive damage to the nervous system. Blunt force to the back of the skull. Its brain was almost mush. Spinal cord was severed with a kunai. These injuries were effective at putting it down, but without knowing its healing capabilities given time to regrow itself, they may not be lastingly fatal.”

Minato mulls it over. He says, “Obito said they’re connected somehow. To the Original and to the other clones. Like they share senses.”

Shikaku shakes his head. “We found no physical evidence of that. It may be a feature of the mokuton used to make these creatures.”

“How do you suppose they are made?” Kushina asks.

“If I had to guess, I’d say they were grown. Like Obito growing a strawberry.”

Kushina and Shikaku share a knowing look. Minato and Kakashi share a look that’s just confused. Kushina says, “So this Zetsu, the White Zetsu specifically, can grow copies of themselves? Like...budding?”

That doesn’t make sense. “Then is this what Zetsu is? A mokuton creation itself? I doubt the Shodaime just created an evil living plant monster and then forgot to mention it.”

Shikaku says, “Obito doesn’t know what Zetsu is or where they came from. They may be a creation of Madara in an attempt to utilize the Hashirama Cells in a successful transplant of the Senju kekkei genkai.”

Is this what Madara did to Obito? Took an arm and other parts of a zetsu clone and grafted them onto his human body? He’s not usually squeamish but Minato feels sick at the thought. He asks, carefully, “Could this process be replicated?”

Kakashi’s attention sharpens in his periphery.

Shikaku says, “The Hashirama Cell is powerful. It would more likely overtake other cells instead of merging successfully with them. I’m guessing Obito was a lucky survivor. Lucky by far. It likely took many failed experiments for Madara to have a success.”

The sickness is hardening into anger at the old Uchiha, at his callous regard of human life. How many had he killed before Obito survived? He says through gritted teeth, “At least we don’t have to worry about him giving his minions a powerup.” He looks down at the thumb. “I want this destroyed. All evidence of the Hashirama Cell existing will be purged.”

“Understood. It won’t leave this office. I’ll burn it myself.” Shikaku promises, looking a little queasy at the thought. But they couldn’t afford this getting out. Madara already successfully revived some version of the mokuton, to whatever lesser extent it manifested itself in Obito. Even Obito’s reports on the original Zetsu had them well below the power of the Shodaime. But even weakened mokuton is mokuton.

“How did Madara even get his hands on the Hashirama Cell?” Kushina asks.

“He probably took it from the Shodaime himself. Or stole it off his body.” The distaste is overt. A common bloodline thief, that’s what Madara is. Lowest of the low.

Kushina asks, “Is there any evidence that it’s gotten out from Madara? He’s working with a group. Could he have given it to Ame?”

Minato frowns. “You think there’s others out there? Asides from Obito?”

Kushina shrugs. “What do you do when you make a super weapon only to have it turn on you?”

You make another, Minato thinks. The thought is chilling.

Kakashi’s been quiet throughout the report. The nonreaction gets his attention more than shock would have. Minato asks, “do you think there might be others with the mokuton out there, Kakashi?”

Kakashi clears his throat before speaking. When he answers, his voice is perfectly smooth. “There could be.”

“Yeah, but what do you think? Would Madara share his discovery with anyone else? You understand his profile.”

His eye is staring even as his body is relaxed. He says, carefully, “I think Madara’s determined to win. If he thought someone could aid him in his goal, he might offer it as a bargaining chip. He’s been stuck in a cave for years. He needs outside help for nearly everything. The Hashirama Cell might be the only thing he has to offer.”

He’s hedging. Minato hears it. He accepts that Kakashi will always have more information at any point than he’s going to be willing to share. And he’s been casing the village for signs of the zetsu, of mokuton. Minato’s willing to bet even more money on the fact that Kakashi’s found something in his investigation. Something he’s either not sure of, or doesn’t trust Minato with.

This is not the time to have that conversation. If it’s a trust issue, bringing it up in front of the others will just cement in his mind that he can’t tell his teacher what he’s found. If it’s just a hunch he’s waiting to pan out or confirm, imposing an unconscious deadline on him might make him do something drastic. Like set something else on fire. Commit soft treason by breaking in the Secure Archives. Again.

For now, he ignores the censure. He acknowledges the statement with a nod. It’s an astute deduction, if a worryingly incomplete one.

Shikaku asks, “What of your investigation, Hatake? What can you report?”

“My investigation remains inconclusive. I will report with any update to that status.”

Minato sees what’s coming. He tries to signal with his eyes for Shikaku to shut up, but the Nara smells blood in the water. He says, “You have nothing at all to report?” The disbelief is thick in his tone.

A muscle jumps in Kakashi’s cheek, under his mask. He says, “No.”

Kushina elbows Minato. He quickly interrupts, “That’s fine, Kakashi. You report when you are able.”

Shikaku cuts his eyes over to him and he gives a small shake of his head while Kushina shields the movement from Kakashi. Shikaku frowns.

Kakashi looks suddenly resentful. He fires off a salute, sarcastic as can be. “Yes, Hokage sama.”

“Kakashi,” Kushina reprimands quietly, for her, but he almost jumps at the scold. He looks down, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

Minato sighs. “This meeting is adjourned. We’ll reconvene when we have new information. Gamahiro is on route to Obito and Rin near Yu.” He says, “There’s cold sandwiches in the foyer. Help yourselves.”

Kakashi is out the window and gone before he even finishes speaking. Shikaku turns to him immediately. “What’s all that about?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll talk to him.”

“He’s lying.”

“He’s not sure yet, is all.” Minato defends his student. “He won’t bring us anything on an unconfirmed hunch.”

Shikaku’s eyes are narrowed. The shadows almost writhe around him. He says, “he’s looking into the fake ANBU. It’s not that he’s not sure. He found out. He’s decided he can’t trust us with it. He either thinks I’m involved, or you as Hokage are.”

Kushina raises her eyebrows, asks, “you think it goes up this high?”

“If it’s a conspiracy? It’d have to.” Shikaku’s frown deepens. “He thinks we’re either involved, or complicit.”

“Or he thinks we’re vulnerable to the leak,” Minato points out reasonably.

“He’s compromised.”

“Not this again,” Minato warns. “Try again.”

Shikaku swerves, “He’s lying to his Hokage.”

“To protect what he’s found out. I’ll trust him on this, for now. Let him follow it through.”

“I could have him tailed.”

“You’re not stalking him via ANBU, Shikaku. He’s trying to root out a fake ANBU.”

Kushina says, “leave him be, Shikaku. He’ll come to Minato when he has the proof he needs, either of the leak, or of whatever danger he’s afraid of.”

Was he afraid? Minato tries to remember if any of his façade hid fear, but he’s taught him to lie too well to go off anything he shows on his face. He doesn’t like the idea of something scaring Kakashi badly enough he is lying to him about it. But he knows that if Kakashi is trying to protect them, or the Leaf Village, he’d lie in a heartbeat. The idea of the 14-year-old trying to protect his sensei is laughable, but the teen is stubborn enough to try it.

It’s a comical reversal of his earlier attempts to have him fired for general incompetence. Before Obito, when he’d made his nindo and relaxed a bit about the rules, Kakashi had tried to report him as an unfit mentor, claiming that Kushina was a distraction. When he confiscated the file, it was unrepentant and over 13 pages of meticulous observations. It didn’t take a genius to get that the kid was jealous. But also afraid of being alone again.

Kakashi is bad at asking for help. He always has been. Skittish as a hand shy stray, always expecting the hit behind the open palm.

He trusts Kakashi. If he’s not ready, he’s not going to push him. Not if he feels he’s protecting them.

But that doesn’t mean he’s going to turn a blind eye. He won’t authorize ANBU to follow him, but he’ll check up on him himself. If he thinks Minato is complicit by the stature of his office, he will convince him that he’s not.

He can see that Shikaku doesn’t agree, but he won’t push it. Not when he’s already on thin ice with Minato over his low opinion of his students. He’s got enough brains for that.

He takes a match from his pocket and strikes it. They all watch the creepy thumb burn. And that’s the end of that. Shikaku pulls his mask back straight and he’s Bear again. He leaves via the window. Minato and Kushina go home and eat cold sandwiches in the house he bought them after they got engaged, when they moved out of his tiny apartment uptown and into a more residential area. A few jounin live in the neighborhood and they recommended the area when he went asking. Kushina has decorated it in Uzushio’s colors. He’s working on having the whirlpool sigil stitched onto the back of his Hokage robes for her, as a surprise for the wedding.

The next few days are quiet. It’s not that Kakashi is avoiding him. He just won’t talk about anything of worth. He’s never been an open book, but a conversation is newly like pulling teeth.

As he sits in his office turning everything he knows over in his mind, following theories through to the end, it’s the sound that alerts him first. The clacking of geta down the tile of the hallway. Even now, it’s a sound that haunts the background of some of his oldest dreams: geta on the floor of a stone cavern and a booming voice that echoes through everyone who hears it.

It’s been years since he’s heard the sound.

He’s up out of his chair before the door even opens, waving off his guard as they turn warily towards the newcomer, who’s loud and boisterous and fills up the space of the office with an effortless presence that Minato’s always admired.

“Brat!” The Sannin exclaims. “Who the fuck gave you that hat?”

Minato launches himself at his teacher. It’s been years since Jiraiya’s been in the Leaf Village. He knows it’s not that simple, but when he lets himself think about his teacher, the part of him that was 14 and never asked for help, the part that never wanted to be alone again, misses him terribly. Now that he’s here, Minato slams into his middle with his full weight, trying to bring him down.

“Oof!” The Sannin wavers, but doesn’t budge. Minato never caught up to him in size; few shinobi will; the Toad Sage is built along the same lines of Obito: tall, broad, a real frontline brawler. One of the three ninja that managed to fight Hanzo to a standstill in the Second War.

Minato laughs, part performative, part helpless. “They were going to force it on you, but nobody could track you down! They had to settle with me.”

Jiraiya laughs and hugs him back when he’s done trying to pry the hat off his head. He’s got big hands, large, strong, with scars and calluses and crooked fingers. They feel the same against the back of his neck, like nothing’s changed. “Good thing too! Suits you a great deal more. I look terrible in formalwear.”

This is demonstrably untrue. He says, “Gamabunta has pictures of you in a—”

His teacher half strangles him to get him to shut up. His guards look slightly concerned, but also awed. The Sannin’s reputation proceeds him.

Minato shoves him off and straightens, still laughing. Raido looks more concerned at the humor than the scuffle. He’s his oldest guard, the most experienced, old hat with ANBU, with Minato in ANBU. He’ll have heard the rumors. About Jiraiya. About Minato and Jiraiya.

He introduces his guards to his teacher. “Raido, Genma, Iwashi, this is Jiraiya of the Sannin, the Toad Sage, and my own sensei. Jiraiya sensei, these are my honor guards: Namiashi Raido, Shirunai Genma, and Tatami Iwashi.”

The younger two look appropriately awed. He knows Iwashi is a big fan of the Sannin. The 17-year-old looks starstruck as Jiraiya shakes his hand, flashing a blinding smile, personable, charming. There’s this aspect about him that makes you feel just as big as he is, just as important. Jiraiya’s is a force that lifts everyone around him up.

When the introductions fade, Minato claps his hands together. “Lunch!” He declares. “My treat.”

“Now you’re talking,” Jiraiya says. “I worked up an appetite while I was researching my latest novel.”

This is code for two things: One, that he was perving on women in an onsen in Yu, and two, that he was setting up a spy and informant ring in the recently demilitarized nation. Minato can only hope for the latter. His leer suggests a great deal of the former.

They go to a popular Akimichi hot pot spot and Minato orders an absurd amount of meat and vegetables. Word must be spreading of Jiraiya’s arrival, because halfway through a regaling tale of his exploits in Yu, Kushina arrives to join them. Kakashi does not. Neither, notably but unsurprisingly, does Orochimaru, the only other Sannin in the Leaf Village, the Snake Sannin, and Jiraiya’s teammate.

Kushina’s arrival redirects some of the man’s attention and Minato gives her a small smile of gratitude as she tosses her hair and gets to work at playing distraction, her answering smile not reaching her eyes at the man’s attention.

Minato isn’t tense, exactly, but he’s far from relaxed. He studies the lack of age lines on his teacher’s face, how under the red tattoos down his cheeks, he looks good. He looks like he always does, like a man in a spotlight, and used to playing his part.

Minato looks at the empty spaces in the booth. Jiraiya’s carries that spotlight everywhere he goes; its light gets everyone, eventually. Iwashi wouldn’t know the weight of it; Minato knows intimately how tiring it gets to pretend.

Minato knows things between the previous iteration of Team 7 are complicated. The Second Shinobi World War was a nightmare hellscape, one that the Sannin had been on the front line of for years, day in and day out, finally halting Hanzo’s destruction of Ame, where three Elemental Nations got together and kicked the shit out of each other with no regard for the smaller nations they were trampling in the middle ground. All war is hell, but the Ame front was a particular depravity. It affected them each in different ways. Tsunade left, traumatized by the mere sight of blood, grieving desperately over the death of both her lover and her brother. Jiraiya left too, in his own way.

Minato’s not sure what he did during the years when he was off the grid. When he resurfaced, it was as the author of pervy novels filled with cheap porn. Orochimaru, fascinated with death and determined to defeat it through science, retreated into his experiments. He rarely came out of his labs. The Sandaime had to veto some of his less ethical ideas and the Sannin is sour about it still. Minato avoids him when he can. Minato couldn’t believe he’d attracted a chuunin apprentice, but by all accounts, the Mitarashi girl is a little freaky in her own right. Last he’d heard, he was teaching her to be a snake summoner.

He'd hoped that having Jiraiya back in the village would give the two teammates time to reconcile. But Orochimaru never appears. And Jiraiya never asks after him.

Regardless, it’s a boisterous lunch party. Jiraiya’s travels are filled with daring adventure, willowy damsels in distress, and lots and lots of,, research for his Icha Icha novels, which neither Minato or Kushina will ever admit they read, much less that they read them together, giggling like schoolchildren. As popular as the series is, high literature they are not. Minato can almost feel himself blushing red as Kushina’s hair just thinking about it.

Minato catches him up on everything in the village, as much as he can in public. Kushina fills in the gaps and Jiraiya just laughs at the knowledge that Minato is taking her clan name. He thumps him hard on the back and Minato feels the breath whoosh out of him. Very few shinobi can make him feel physically small, but Jiraiya towers over everyone and he pretends he forgets his own strength sometimes. The geta don’t help.

Minato manages to wind the welcome part down after they finish the bottle of sake. He herds the group back towards the office, where to his delight, Kakashi is lurking around, eyeballing the Missions Desk, at all the paperwork ninja who have blessed him out over the state of his lazy, incomplete reports, signed with doodles, weeks late. It’s how he shows his displeasure at what he considers mundane missions. The teen had grown up in war, got used to the pace of it. Now that peace broke out, its courier B ranks, team escort missions, unless he can wrangle anything higher. Stir crazy, they call it. He’s never felt it himself, but Kakashi clearly feels its effects.

Minato collects him from glaring at the staff and wheels him around to face Jiraiya. The two shinobi eyeball each other. The height difference is comical. Even Genma looks a little smug about it.

“Kakashi, glad I found you,” Minato says. “This my sensei, Jiraiya of the Sannin. Sensei, this is my student, Hatake Kakashi.”

“Hatake?” Jiraiya scratches at his chin, studying him. “I knew your father, kid. Good man.”

There’s a second where Minato predicts an eruption of sobering violence from the teen. The way Kakashi ices over is worse. He looks like a cat in a thunderstorm, like he got zapped by his own electricity. Instead of acknowledging the mention of Sakumo, Kakashi just jerks his chin into a short bow. “Jiraiya sama.”

Trying to gloss over the tension, Minato ushers them into his office, keeping his own expression smooth. That could have gone better. He was already worrying about how Kakashi would take to Jiraiya and now his student is stiff and polite in the way that means he’s holding himself back from throwing lightning around.

Once successfully sequestered behind his closed office doors, he sends away all of his guards. The atmosphere shifts when it’s just them left. They stopped pretending to each other years ago, when Jiraiya decided Minato was no longer worthy of his performances, leaving him thinking that he had failed in some fundamental way, and then just leaving him. It’s disheartening to realize that he had been Kakashi’s age then, just 14, and relearning all over again the abandonment.

The doors seal themselves closed and some of the good humor leaves Jiraiya’s expression. It strikes Minato that his previous demeanor aside, his teacher might not have been pleased to be forced back to the village he’d left years ago. The ultimatum from the toads must irk him, but it’s one of the challenges of sharing a summoning contract with a man unused to sharing.

The toads are an invaluable lifeline to information on his sensei, but messages and gossip are no replacement for the real thing. Jiraiya in Konoha feels like the one miracle him being Hokage managed not to screw up.

When the walls shimmer and hum with Kushina’s seals, Jiraiya turns to him. “What’s all this about, then?” He’s not frowning, but the seriousness is set on his face. Minato is suddenly sure that he would not have come back for the wedding. He didn’t come for his swearing in. Anything he might feel he boxes up nice and neat right then in that moment. He sits in his Hokage chair and carefully places his robes of office aside. He sets his hat neatly on the pile.

Minato says, “There’s a situation you need to be informed of. In person.”

“What is it?” Jiraiya’s eyeing both Kushina, but especially Kakashi. But they let him break the news.

Minato says, “my students are alive and currently on an S ranked mission to save the world from Uchiha Madara.”

It takes hours to bring Jiraiya up to speed. He grows progressively more serious throughout Minato’s detailed information on Obito, on Rin, on the zetsu, on the patsy organization. He asks meticulous questions, most of which Minato cannot answer. They don’t know exactly how Madara is still alive. They don’t know what exactly The Demonic Statue of the Outer Paths is, or how he’s using it to keep himself alive. They don’t know what Zetsu is. The motivations don’t even make sense from a broad perspective; Madara was a madman to want this plan to succeed, but he clearly wasn’t insane to have concocted it to start with. They don’t know what exactly Madara did to Obito, or how they even got their hands on the Sanbi for Rin.

Jiraiya is especially troubled by the news about Madara missing his eyes. He’s clacking up and down the length of the office, rubbing his square chin.

He says, “There’s got to be a way to track the clones. We’ve got to keep them out of the village.”

“Kakashi is working on both the investigation into the leak and the village defenses from the zetsu.”

Jiraiya turns to the teen with disbelief. “The kid? What’s he come up with?”

Kakashi twitches. The room smells like ozone. Minato defends, “It’s an ongoing investigation. There’s no reliable way to track, or even detect, the clones. Not that we’ve found. They appear to lack chakra signatures altogether.”

Jiraiya rubs at his face. “Besides the gaping holes in the security of the village, we’ve got to protect our Tailed Beast. Madara could send the clones after the Kyuubi at any moment.”

Jiraiya doesn’t know the identity of the current jinchuuriki to the Kyuubi. Neither does Kakashi. Actually, it’s weird the teen hasn’t brought it up before now. He squints at the Hatake, immediately suspicious.

Kushina gives nothing away. Minato says, “The jinchuuriki to the Kyuubi has been secured.”

“How?” Jiraiya wants to know. “What protocols are in place?”

The truth is, the only protocol Kushina would accept is her temporary confinement to the village and Minato’s understanding that if the clones or minions came for her, she’d make the ensuing fight as loud and destructive as possible. Minato would be at her side in a heartbeat, a squad of ANBU accompanying him. Madara didn’t get Kushina. Minato would make sure. Not with the two of them working together.

He hedges, “I’ve got the Commander of ANBU heading the protection of the jinchuuriki. The Bijuu is out of play. It’s unlikely that Madara would risk a full-scale invasion of Konoha for it, even with an army.”

“But Obito’s got the Ichibi in this, Kamui, is it? And only he can get it out?” Jiraiya checks. “Isn’t Madara’s plan already a bust, then?”

For a second, Minato is afraid that Jiraiya is thinking the same insidious thought that keeps him up at night, the same one that threads between the lines of Shikaku’s every report. He feels the battle calm creeping around the edges of his vision. Nobody has dared to suggest it out loud, but if Jiraiya tells him that the safest play to ensure victory over Madara and his plan is to simply eliminate Obito, locking the Ichibi and its chakra away from this plane forever, Minato’s not sure what he would do. Jiraiya is his sensei, and it’s a sound plan, a shinobi plan, but Obito is his student. He won’t hear it. He just won’t hear it.

Kushina must sense him going distant and empty, the swelling grim urgency that accompanies the realization that he’s going to have to kill someone overtaken by his own subconscious preparation for the act itself, because she steps in to take over for him. He most likely wouldn’t have acted, but if Jiraiya dares to suggest the murder of his student, he doesn’t know what he’d do, how he’d handle that, especially from his own sensei, with Kakashi watching with a keen eye.

Kushina says, smoothly covering for him, “Madara’s been planning this for generations. It’s unlikely he won’t have a contingency in place to cover the loss of a singular Bijuu. To be sure we’ve succeeded in stopping him, we must eliminate him. And first we have to eliminate both his private army of zetsu, and his patsy organization. And Zetsu, just to be sure. I wouldn’t put it past him to have this set up to continue on even in the case of his death.”

Jiraiya looks troubled. “What is the Infinite Tsukuyomi? What do we know of it?”

The world is bleeding back into warmth and color. Nothing sounds muffled to him anymore. He shoots Kushina a grateful look and reenters the conversation. “Not much. It’s a genjutsu technique, meant to put everyone under a powerful illusion. It would be reflected off the moon, powered by chakra from all 9 Tailed Beasts.”

“What does Obito say about it? He’s got to have theories.”

Minato admits, “I believe he was unconscious for much of his early time in the cave, and heavily drugged besides. He called it the ‘Moon Eye Plan’ at first.” At this, Kakashi sniggers meanly. There is a reason Rin named Kamui. He ignores him and continues, “It took him awhile to connect the technique to the fabled mangekyo technique.”

Jiraiya’s eyes narrow. It looks mean with the red paint he wears in lines down his face. He asks, “Obito can cast Tsukuyomi?”

Minato says, “There’s no evidence of that.”

Kushina says, “What, do you want him to practice? Think Rin’s going to volunteer?”

Jiraiya ignores her and it prickles at him. Jiraiya says, “But why a mangekyo technique in the first place?”

Minato says, “A mangekyo sharingan is the most powerful dojutsu in the world. What else could power such a technique?”

Jiraiya stops pacing. He goes oddly pale. His mouth hangs open, but no words come. He looks stunned. When he moves, it’s to sink into one of the chairs in front of the Hokage desk.

Minato is alarmed at the display. He’s rarely seen his sensei look so shaken before. “Jiraiya sensei?” He asks, tentatively, aware of every micro expression on his mentor’s face before the Sannin shuts everything down.

He’s not old, not quite, but he sounds it when he asks, “This organization, it’s based in Ame?”

Minato’s not sure what to make of the old grief on his face, of the suddenly tired lines around his eyes. They must have been there the whole time. It’s a different style of mask. He says, “Yes, an organization of S ranked nukenin, operating out of Rain. A patsy group for Madara and his will, with a continental reach.”

“You were going to ask me to look into it. See if I had any spies or informants in place, any information on their movements.”

Minato says, “Infiltration would be difficult, but you know Ame best.”

He sighs. It’s a heavy sound. “I accept the mission.”

For a second, Minato wants to protest, but that doesn’t make sense. He wants Jiraiya to go to Ame. His experience with the country from his time in the Second War makes him the most obvious choice. But the Sannin is shaken by something, and it’s not just old war memories. It’s insulting to double check, but he can’t help himself. “Sensei?”

“I’ll do it. Rain is a wreck, but it’s a wreck I helped create. I can get into Amegakure. I’ll find this organization. But,” he says, the loss on his face once again before he quickly buries it, “I request permission to either handle the situation in a way I see fit, or have some influence over the fate of the organization. I—” He cuts off, tries again. “I may have a hunch about them.”

Shikaku is not going to like this. Minato could not even begin to accurately guess at what his teacher may have meant by that. He could come up with theories, but they are all more fanciful and senseless than the next. But if Jiraiya is asking for his permission, then it means a great deal to him. He was less shocked hearing Obito and Rin were alive, that Madara was alive. Minato is not going to deny him this.

He says, “You can handle them. I’m giving you full overview.” Relief crosses Jiraiya’s face, that his technical superior officer isn’t going to ask him to cross whatever line Minato couldn’t see. He says, “Do what you have to. I’ll back you.”

Jiraiya says, “Thank you, Hokage sama.” It’s the first time he’s addressed his student properly. The pride hits Minato only in that moment. He realizes that he wanted him to see his student in the hat, wanted him to see the face they’re carving onto the Hokage Mountain, still smoke stained from last night’s festivities. He’s not sure what he thought it would change. Minato’s never known what exactly he’s been compared to, with Jiraiya, with Gamamaru, with prophecies spoken over a pool of Toad Oil. But he’s always felt the lack.

“Minato, I’ll leave immediately. I’ll need the toads for this.” Jiraiya says, already planning. “Don’t summon Gamariki.”

“You should stay,” Minato hears himself saying, “Just for a few days. Rest.”

But Jiraiya’s already shaking his head. “This needs my attention now. We have to resolve this before we can eliminate Madara.”

That same ticking mission clock runs through Minato’s head on a shrill loop every day. He’s about to insist, play dirty by mentioning he visit with Orochimaru while he has the chance, but Jiraiya interrupts him before he can get it out.

“I won’t be back in time for the wedding.” He says with a grimace, bowing his head towards Kushina and her narrowed eyes. “Apologies. I’ll have to send a gift.” But Kushina’s looking back at Minato, knowing he’ll be the one truly hurt by this. Jiraiya follows her gaze to his student and says, “You have my blessing, Minato. I wish you both all the happiness in the world.”

It sounds like a goodbye. Odd, that he should recognize it happening now, when he didn’t before. He guesses its just another thing he's learned from the man.

Minato says, “Just one night. Have dinner with us at our home. You can leave in the morning, after you’ve rested some.”

Jiraiya won’t meet his eyes. Even Kakashi looks uncomfortable. Minato is Hokage, he could order it, but he won’t. He’s past the point of begging his teacher to stay. The disappointment curdles within him, but he’s used to Jiraiya not being there. He’s not a kid chuunin anymore, a civilian born orphan who needed guidance before his genius bent the Will of Fire back to burn him out. He’s a grown man, the Yondaime Hokage, a sensei in his own right. He will be grateful, but he will not beg.

“Okay then,” he says, at Jiraiya’s silent refusal to compromise. “Collect whatever supplies you need. Gamahiro’s back with Obito and Rin. I won’t send Gamaken unless it’s urgent.”

The relief at Minato not making a scene out of it brings some of Jiraiya’s cheer back to him. He loves drama, but only when he can control it. He claps Minato on the back in comradery. “Much thanks, my boy! I’ll report back as soon as I can. No pit stops along the way, I swear, even if the ladies weep at my feet!”

Minato knows whatever money he takes with him is to fund his nightly stays in inns. Part of it is to keep up his guise as a traveling writer, but the ruse isn’t a mask so much as it a parallel goal. It’s not that Minato’s forgotten the way that Jiraiya talks to him like he’s the hero in one of his novels. He knows to expect it by now. But once, Jiraiya talked about him like he was the Child of Prophecy. When he aged out of whatever qualifications Gamamaru even meant by that, he was relegated to side character status in his teacher’s mind. It is ridiculous to feel hurt by that. He puts it all away.

He hugs him back, on his way out the window. He’d be a coward not to. But when Jiraiya is gone, he slumps back at his desk. The feelings are far away and getting further, with every step his teacher takes away from the Tower.

Kushina slams the window closed behind him. Her face says fuck him, but she doesn’t say it aloud, for Minato’s sake. Kakashi, however, says, “I don’t like him.”

Minato sighs, “Yeah, I bet you don’t. He’s rough around the edges, but he taught me everything I know.”

It’s a lie, but a generous one. The toads taught him senjutsu. He invented Rasengan. He taught himself Hiraishin from studying the encrypted notes left by the Nidaime. But he’s also sure that without Jiraiya’s support during a time in his life when everything was crunching smaller and smaller in him, he never could have accomplished any of it. He only fell into ANBU after Jiraiya left the village. It was Kushina who pulled him out. Kushina, and three kids. Students he’d promised himself he’d be a better sensei to than his own was to him.

Kakashi is skeptical, but Minato levers himself up. “C’mere, Kakashi.” When the teen backs away warily, he’s caught by Kushina, who deposits him in front of Minato with a neat spin. He hugs the teen, even when he squirms in indignation. He’s trying to make a point of it more. “I want you to know that I will never abandon you. Any of you. No matter how old and crotchety you get, you’ll still be my student.”

Kakashi softens imperceptibly. Whatever’s going on with him, it’s important for Minato to know that Kakashi knows he his teacher’s support. Whatever crisis of faith he’s suffering, his Hokage will stand strong against it. Whenever he’s ready to tell him what’s really been going on, Minato will be there.

“Now,” he says, “Let’s get some ramen. I’m starving.”

After, it’s a slow week for crime after the festival but the reports of displeasure with the Leaf Police Force make it all the way up the ladder to his office, despite all the interference Fugaku must be running to keep it from happening. Someone may even be fired for letting the scroll reach his desk. But Minato reads thought the transparent, barely logical complaints. Couch them in whatever niceties you want, elders whining about the way things used to be will never be a compelling argument for him.

But its barely a week later when the retaliation comes. He’s not unprepared for it, but he is surprised at the form it takes.

He returns to his office to find the place ransacked. He’s been out training his guards how to keep up with him, getting them better and better at their modified collaboration on the Hiraishin. They’re sweaty and covered in dirt, playfully ribbing each other. It’s a good day, he doesn’t get to train as often as he’d like, and the sudden subversion flips him immediately into a defensive stance.

His guards sound the alarm the second they walk in to find that the Hokage Office is destroyed. File cabinets are dented and gutted, papers shredded and strewn about. The chairs are piles of splinters and kindling. The portraits of the previous Hokage are confetti in the air, blowing in the sudden gust of Minato’s displeasure.

The two attending ANBU appear and his honor guard fan out around him. “Lock down the Tower,” Minato says. “Alert Bear that security is compromised.”

Even when he’s not here, there should be guards on duty inside the room. That there’s not is a bigger clue than he wants to contend with at the moment, but the information gets filed away in the back of his mind to pursue later.

One ANBU body flickers away and the other triggers all the alarm seals to initiate a Tower-wide lock down protocol.

He checks his desk, his guards milling anxiously around him, worried for traps or poison. But Minato’s seen, yes, there it is. Someone’s carved a massive Uchiwa into the surface of his desk. Raido’s eyebrows disappear into his hairline when he recognizes the Uchiha Clan sigil. In the center of the mark sits a single green leaf.

He feels it like a kick to the teeth. Innocuous as it is, Minato gets the message. “Secure the room,” he says. “Don’t breathe a word about this to anyone.”

“Yes, Hokage sama.”

While Genma and Iwashi clear the room, Minato’s eyes rove over the walls of the office, the furniture. The huge oak wood desk. The wooden chairs. The decorative carved wooden panels on the walls. He thinks of the frame of the building, of most of the buildings in Konoha. He thinks about how he’s surrounded by wood, all day long; they all are. It’s the fucking Village Hidden in the Leaves.

He gathers himself, going completely still, sinking into the battle calm and out the other side, collecting nature chakra. When he opens his eyes again, it’s with square pupils in yellow eyes. He’s scans the room in his Sage Mode, then quickly expands his enhanced sensing range to cover most of the Leaf Village, before letting it fade away. However the clone got in, it’s gone now.

He can hear bickering in the hallway over the sound of the alarms. Koharu whining about the racket, wanting to know what’s going on. Quick as a flash, he forms a small rasengan in the palm of his hand and smashes it through the surface of his desk, obliterating the Uchiha sigil. Iwashi jumps at the noise.

There’s pounding on his shut doors, but they’re sealed shut in the lockdown. “Don’t open it,” he says. There will be hell to pay with the Council, but he needs to figure out what to do, why Madara would so clearly show his hand like this. There’s a sinking feeling in his core. Air rushes in his ears.

He knows. Madara knows he’s working with Obito and Rin. Something gave them away, and a clone came looking for….something. Something Madera wanted badly enough to blow whatever advantage he might gain from not alerting Minato that he knew.

“Kushina,” he says.

Raido hesitates. “The lockdown—”

“She may be in danger.”

“It’s a—”

But Minato’s already gone. Kushina keeps a marker on her and Minato locates his fuuinjutsu formula and Hiraishins to her before Raido can even finish his word. He appears suddenly in the Uchiha Clan Head’s house, wards kicking the temperature up threateningly. Fuck. Fugaku would demand an explanation for this one.

They’re at a table and a small kid is practicing his kanji and when Minato appears, Mikoto looks at him with spinning sharingan, fully developed, and if he makes a threatening move, she may incinerate him before the wards get a chance. Even Kushina’s eyes flash dangerously before she recognizes Minato. He holds a finger to his lips and nods at Mikoto to put down the shuriken, holding out his other hand to Kushina. When she holds onto him, he mentally locates the marker he keeps outside the Hatake compound and takes her along with him.

She blinks at the walled compound in front of them. He says, “the target knows. He’s retaliated.”

Kushina’s eyes widen and then set into a ferocious glare. They hurry up the walk to Kakashi’s house.

“Kakashi,” She yells, beating the door half down while Minato scans the yard around them. It’s a unsettling feeling to not trust the very trees around him.

Kakashi opens the door with a bored expression that doesn’t twitch when he sees them.

“Come on,” Kushina says and grabs for him, hauling him in close. “Meeting time. Bastard Old Man is up to something.”

Kakashi’s eye widens but Minato has already flashed the three of them back to the Hokage office, where his guards jump again at his sudden reappearance. He’s been gone less than two minutes.

Kushina growls at the state of the office and Kakashi freezes, taking a slow and careful sniff through his mask, his eye going dark. It’s as much proof as Minato needs.

There’s a knock from the glass of his window. Bear crouches on the windowsill, barred from entry by the lockdown. Minato flashes some hand signs at him and he nods before Minato Hiraishins to a marker in the courtyard and then body flickers up to grab Bear, taking them both back inside the office. The only reason it works is because Kushina keyed the seals to allow his chakra to pass through them, thinking that as Hokage he has the authority to bypass through any security measures in the event of an emergency. It rankles him that while he is fighting to keep the peace treaty between Fire and Earth viable, Ohnoki is constructing a lethal trap for him similar in nature to this very concept. It’s just another step in the recent parade of things designed to piss him off.

When they’re all in the office he says to his guards, “Protect the Council. Say nothing. I’ll be out shortly.”

It is not in their job capacity to abandon him, especially during a lockdown, even for the members of the Elder Council. When Raido opens his mouth to protest, Minato cuts him off with a sharp jerk of his chin towards the door. They fall into silent attention and file out. He’ll owe them all an apology later, but he has to deal with this first.

When the door opens, Mitokado tries to force his way in. “Not now,” Minato says. “I’ll fill you in later,” he lies. “Set the meeting for tomorrow morning.”

“Now see here,” Mitokado says as Homura shoves her foot through the crack. Council members. He works with literal children.

Kushina unceremoniously shoves at them, almost spitting, until a rough voice barks for order. Its Danzo, banging his cane against the floor, two ANBU from the Tower security flanking him. His voice is authoritative, and it cuts through the ruckus of the klaxon, shutting everyone up. He waits to make sure he has everyone’s attention and when he speaks, it’s at a normal volume. Everyone still hears him.

“Now, friends, I’m sure our Hokage is busy dealing with the ramifications of…” Through the crack in the door, the destruction of the office is apparent. “This disastrous failure of security. We will convene in the morning to discuss news of what is surely our next step in keeping the village safe from anyone who would do her harm.”

It simultaneously calms the listening attendants and staff members down while instilling in them a deep fear of another approaching war. Even the shinobi in the crowd are thinking it. Fucking old opportunistic war hawk.

He steps up to the door. Kushina lets it fall open as the councilmembers step back to allow him room to address the crowd in the hall. “The perpetrator has already been identified. I am taking immediate steps to both address this incident and prevent anything like it from happening again.” He turns to Danzo in particular, “I will hold a council meeting tomorrow morning regarding this. You can all sleep tonight knowing Konoha is safe and in good hands.”

He checks the reaction from the crowd, making sure they’re not going to panic unduly, but 80% of them are shinobi and they accept their Hokage’s reassurance. Then he closes the door in Mitokado’s face, resting his forehead against the wood as he sighs. “I shouldn’t’ve said the word incident. Now they think there’s an incident.”

Kushina says, “Oh, there’s a fucking incident alright. I’m going to break my foot off so far up Koharu’s stuffy, saggy ass that she’ll have my toenails in her useless, windbag, whiney ass lungs.”

He thumps his head off the door in silent agreement. Kami, he can’t stand bureaucracy. As a kid he hadn’t understood how much of being the Hokage is fucking politics. He is much better at stabbing things until they stop moving than dealing with the council’s collective bullshit.

He takes a deep breath to recenter himself and when he opens his eyes, it’s to Bear surveying the damage while Kakashi carefully sifts through the splinters of the desk, ghosting after traces of the mokuton’s scent the clone left behind.

Bear pulls his mask to the side. “What gave us away?”

Minato says, “I don’t know. But it carved the Uchiha Clan sigil into the desk and left a green leaf sitting in the middle.”

Shikaku frowns, his hands folding into his private seal. “Obito. He must have given it away. They know we’re in league.”

“What was it after?” Kushina asks, looking around.

Minato thinks, because it wasn’t the Kyuubi, or any of them to use as a hostage to force Obito and Rin to stop their crusade. But Rin has parents. She’s not an orphan like the others, and Obito has an aunt he’s close to.

He asks Shikaku, “do we have the resources to protect any potential civilian hostages?”

“Off the books?” His eyes are closed as he runs his thousand thousand calculations. “Depends on for how long.”

“For the time being,” Minato says. “Rin’s parents, Obito’s aunt. I want them protected.”

Shikaku frowns, eyes still closed. “The Uchiha wouldn’t allow ANBU within their compound.”

Minato can't possibly care about Fugaku in this moment. “The Nohara for now, then. We’ll have to rely on the Uchiha to watch their own compound. If she’s in the village, I want a detail on her, if at all possible.”

“Whatever it wanted, I don’t think it found it.” Kushina says, gesturing wildly around the shreds of the office. “This is a temper tantrum as much as it is a message.”

“The Ichibi,” Kakashi says immediately but stills when everyone turns to look at him, Shikaku cracking one eye open. He continues, more slowly, “Madara wants the Bijuu and the clones know he’s not just carrying it around in the grasslands of Taki. If he knows we’re in cahoots, he might think Obito left it with you to guard.”

Shikaku hums thoughtfully. “Not bad, Hatake. He doesn’t know the details about Kamui. Where else would he think Obito would stash it? Who would he, a certified missing nin, trust with a Bijuu?”

“How’d he get in?” Minato asks, already fearing the worst.

“It’s scent’s all over the desk. I think it just came through the wall, from the wood inside. With the tree root network in the village,” his voice gets oddly high and tight here, like he’s got a cough, “the clone could slip under the wall and right into the office without ever leaving the protection of the surrounding plant life.”

“You’ll like this plan, then, Hatake,” Shikaku says seriously. “We burn off the forest around the wall. They can still merge through it, but we’d have a better shot of seeing them coming.”

Minato shakes his head. “It can still come through the dirt.”

“But it would make it harder for them with less plant life to manipulate.”

“We are not burning down the Shodaime’s forest. It protects us from too much.” They are the Village Hidden in the Leaves for a reason. Shade in the summer, warmth in the winter, a protective buffer from the storms from the south, a defensive jungle defending them from intruders, an invaluable landscape Konoha shinobi are trained to utilize to their advantage in a fight. They’ll lose more than they’ll gain with a stunt like that.

“He failed,” Kushina says. “We don’t have the Ichibi.”

When Kakashi doesn’t naturally follow up with a question about the Kyuubi, Minato can almost see the contrition in him. He’s getting married in a few scant weeks to Kushina and suddenly Kakashi won’t talk to them. If this is the reason, he might pull his hair out at the roots. Obito and Rin don’t care about her jinchuuriki status, but it might have been wishful thinking to hope that it wouldn’t affect Kakashi if he found out.

He realizes he’s glaring at Kakashi. “You know the identity of the Kyuubi’s jinchuuriki,” he accuses. Shikaku sits up and Kushina goes quiet. He’s seen her face down a dozen charging raiders just to scream back at them. She only goes silent like this when she’s really afraid and Minato hates everything about this moment so much, but he has to be sure.

There’s a long moment as Kakashi internally scrambles, the only tell the slight dilation of his gray pupil. He says, “I would never hold it against them, Sensei. Ever.”

“How long have you known?”

Kakashi looks apologetic. “Since you came back from Ishi.” He looks at Kushina, “you smell like Rin. Or, I guess, Rin smells like you now.”

The relief is soothing to his nerves. He’s been stressed lately, but knowing that his student isn’t acting weird because he’s bigoted towards his fiancé is a win for him.

To Kakashi’s visible alarm, Kushina sniffles a bit and then grabs him into a hug. He Kawarima’s with Shikaku of all things and Kushina wails at his narrow escape and she drops a disgruntled Shikaku to the ground to chase after him. Kakashi’s uncomfortable with the emotion in the room, but with it still sealed off there’s nowhere he can go. Kushina corners him and Minato just shakes his head at the wide-eyed look Kakashi throws him.

“You deserve this,” he says. “You’ve known for months and said nothing.”

“It’s a secret!” Kakashi protests, yielding to Kushina’s embrace with poor grace.

As bad as the office looks, this is a win. Madara didn’t get the Ichibi and showed his hand for nothing. The portraits can be redone. He can get a new desk. This is scare tactics, and he isn’t going to be cowed. Maybe the clones can get into the village whenever they want, but now he’s got a better idea of how they’re moving and he’s confident most of his shinobi could take one in a fight. They know how to take down clones, how to destroy them. And now his whole team knows about Kushina and they love her just as much still. It’s a peace he didn’t expect to find in the rubble of his office, but he’ll take it and take it gladly.

He says, “I’m going to lift the lockdown. I used Sage Mode to check for clones and didn’t sense anything. We’re good for now. The Council will be a pain but maybe,” he looks hopefully at Shikaku, thinking maybe they had someone condemned to be executed currently held by T&I that he could dress up as a nukenin and give to the Council to get them off his back.

Shikaku pulls his mask back around to cover his face and crosses his arms, red ANBU tattoo stark on the muscle of his shoulder. The no is loud and clear.

“If you had them disappeared by morning, I swear I wouldn’t be mad.”

He stands by the window, waiting for Minato to release the lockdown. Minato sighs in exasperation, “Fine,” and flashes through the hand seals to end the lockdown. In the hallway outside the office door, the alarms stop their shrilling. Bear vanishes out the window.

“I’m going to assure Mikoto that the world’s not ending.” Kushina declares.

“I’ll send a fruit basket.”

Kushina says gleefully, “she was totally about to stab you.”

“An Akimichi fruit basket.”

“Acceptable.” She slugs him in the arm on her way out, leaving just him and Kakashi in the debris of the office. Classified debris, kami, the paperwork ninja will have a heart attack.

Before Kakashi can slip away, Minato stops him, “Wait, Kakashi, just a moment.”

The teen waits, gray eye quizzical. Minato says, “It means a lot, that you still care for Kushina, knowing what she is. That we can trust you to keep her secret and not treat her differently because of it.”

Kakashi says, quietly, “It was an easy decision, Sensei.”

The impulse to hug Kakashi himself sweeps over him but Kakashi has an oncoming affection radar and dips out of the window before Minato can make the conscious decision to act on it.

When he eventually lets them in to begin to organize the cleanup effort, the paperwork nin are dismayed. Minato just shrugs apologetically. In the meantime, there’s spare office space he can use in the Tower to concoct whatever bullshit he’s going to feed the Council, and one even has sandwiches and a brewing stand for tea. And a couch. A nice couch. As soon as everyone leaves him alone long enough, he’s going to nap on that couch.

In the aftermath, he’s almost afraid that Madara’s going to retaliate more out of anger at failing to secure the Ichibi. He has a nightmare about the wedding, they get up to the ‘does anyone have any objections’ part and a clone stands up to object. When he tells Kushina the next morning, she just laughs and whaps him on the nose for worrying. She says for that strong an objection, Madara should just come himself, and bring the damn statue with him.

“Win win,” she says, snuggling into his side. “His head would make a great decoration. We could use the statue as a footstool.”

Of course that’s what Kushina imagines as an appropriate wedding gift: the heads of her enemies. He’s exasperated but amused nonetheless. Most importantly, he’s not thinking of clones anymore, not in an immediate front-and-center type way. His subconscious is always chewing away at the whole puzzle, but he’s not actively worrying about wedding crashers at least.

He gets a new desk delivered to the Hokage Office once all the repairs are finished. Shikaku drops by to update him. He’s been having a few trusted ANBU on a rotation on the civilian family of his team. It’s a logistic mistake of resource allocation, but Minato sleeps better at night knowing Rin’s family is safe. Kushina’s been spending time at the Uchiha Clan Head House with Mikoto to help her with the morning sickness that’s plaguing her this far into her pregnancy. Apparently the name is a misnomer, because Minato thinks Mikoto’s sick all the time. But she’s been furtively watching out for Obito’s aunt while she’s visiting and Minato can’t thank her enough.

The office is back to normal after the ordeal. Minato commissions new official portraits and that will take time to complete, but everything else is right again. Shikaku is sitting slouched into one of the new office chairs as he gives his report. Civilian detail is almost unbearably mundane for ANBU but he’s got agents working it that he trusts.

It’s while listing to the verbal report of Rin’s parents visiting the market to buy groceries that he feels a kick in his stomach. He frowns. The odd sensation repeats, sharper, more urgent. He recognizes it and his eyes widen.

It’s an actual kick in his stomach and he pushes his chair back to give himself room as he opens his mouth wide, feeling Gerotora squirm his slimy way up his throat as he gags, bringing the scroll toad safely up from his stomach. He hangs his head over his desk to deposit the toad down with a final shiver and wretch as the toad flops out of his mouth and onto his desk.

The Nara Clan Head looks queasy. “That,” he says, “is disgusting. You ate your summons? Wait, I don’t want to know.”

Minato ignores him. “Gerotora,” He says. “What’s happened?”

The scroll toad shakes his head. “Dunno, Boss. Message from ‘Hiro.”

He unrolls himself onto the desk. Onto the blank white of the scroll, kanji appear in a handwriting Minato recognizes as Gamahiro’s.

Attacked by Konoha ANBU en route to Kumo. 4 man team, using Konoha tactics. 3 eliminated. The 4th follows at a distance. Seems content to follow. For now. Masks depict Moth, Lion, and some kind of Koi fish. The watcher is Rabbit.

Minato reads the message. Reads it again to make sure he got it right. “Do the ANBU codenames Moth, Lion, Koi, or Rabbit mean anything to you?”

Shikaku says seriously. “There are no ANBU by any of those codenames. The Rabbit mask was retired 2 years ago when the agent died.”

“Understood,” He says, rifling through his pockets for his bottle of chakra ink.

He wipes the message away with a wave of his hand and writes back: Understood. ANBU are unauthorized and not in registry. Suspected hidden nin activity. If Rabbit attacks, attempt C&I. Lethal force approved. If Rabbit is a tail, keep them occupied. This is a stand down order. You are being watched. Act accordingly.

He carefully inscribes the seals that will relay his message through Gerotora to another scroll toad in Mount Myoboku for Gamahiro to read, and then scribbles the sealing matrix underneath in the space left over for Gamahiro to reverse-summon himself back to Obito and Rin to deliver the message. The matrix is complicated, but his hand is steady and as quick with a brush as it is a kunai. He cuts his finger and drops blood carefully onto it, his other hand in a half-tora as he concentrates to send the message through.

The seals flash and the kanji disappear like they’re being absorbed into the scroll. Gerotora rolls himself back up like window blinds, his arms crossed over his chest as he expertly balances himself on his elongated body. “What’s all this about, huh? Was that a reverse summoning you sent through?”

“For Gamahiro.” He explains, aware of Shikaku’s frantic calculations over the unusual exchange. “Thank you for delivering the message, Gerotora. How are you on chakra? Do you need a break?”

“I’m good for a while still,” Gerotora assures him. “Unless you need more messages sent through.”

Minato can’t promise that. “Jiraiya sensei will need to be updated.”

Gerotora snorts. “’Hiro will see to it. He’s got a soft spot for that old pervert.”

The Mount Myoboku toads will make sure his teacher is aware of the danger. He nods and turns to Shikaku. “You’re really not going to like this next part,” he warns. Minato sure isn’t. Neither, for a fact, is Gerotora.

The Nara looks away while he forces the scroll toad back down to his stomach without being sick on anyone involved. It’s a close call; he’ll never get used to carrying around a scroll toad, but when Gerotora is settled safe and secure inside him, he can’t even feel him.

He shudders, trying to erase the taste of him going down, and says, “Okay, you can look now. Gerotora’s gone.”

Shikaku says, emphatically, “What the fuck, Hokage sama.”

“Obito and Rin were attacked by an ANBU squad. They eliminated 3, but Rabbit’s tailing them at a distance.”

His face says what the fuck even louder. “The hidden nin. It’s an organization.”

Minato says, “a Konoha-based organization. I gave them a stand down order on Rabbit. They’ll keep them distracted, outside the village. The ranks were just thinned. We’ll have to see how they react.”

Shikaku says, “Kakashi knows. This is what he found that scared him. He thinks we’re running it.”

It would be easy to accept Shikaku’s words. But he knows that Kakashi knows he’d never authorize a hit on Obito or Rin. He knows Kakashi knows he wouldn’t be involved in this. Shikaku’s close, but this isn’t it. Not all of it, not what’s really got his student afraid enough he can’t even speak straight.

Fake ANBU, operating within Konoha, likely trained by Konoha shinobi. It goes against everything he stands for as the Yondaime. Konoha is supposed to be better than the other ninja villages. Minato is supposed to be better than the other kage.

“Be careful with this, Shikaku.” He says. “This…its rotten. From the foundation.”

Shikaku looks grim. “What are you going to do?”

What wouldn’t he do to protect this village? To protect his students? Minato looks just as grim, spinning a kunai by its longest point against the new wood of his desk, sure to leave a gouge in the expensive finish.

“I’d like to have a word with some of these masked ninja.”

“I’ll get the cells ready. Timeline?”

If Kakashi wanted him to fly out armed with knives, he would have told him already. It’s the only thought that slows him down, keeps him in his office, more pieces of the puzzle falling into place around him.

Involve him. Shikaku thinks he’s complicit. Give him a chance to prove he’s not.

“Not immediately,” he says. “I want to see something first.”

Shikaku tilts his head at him consideringly, like he’s defied some expectation. But he nods and leans back in his chair, folding his hands into his personal seal, eyebrows drawing together.

Minato’s doing his own version of thinking, live steel in his hands, gouging into the desk.

ANBU masks and organizations. Kakashi’s reticence. The things he trusts, and the ways he knows better.

The knowledge is cold. Something is splintering.

Its not the desk.

Chapter Text

Chapter 16: Rin: Kumo

Rin hears retching, for the fourth time this hour. She looks over to see Obito curled over the railing of the slow trawler-- violently, miserably, ill. He’s been green almost since they stepped foot on the boat and he’s been seasick ever since.

The waves don’t bother her. She thinks the rocking is nice, even. She’d been wary of the grunginess of the vessel at first, the salt eaten rails rust-worn and inches from foundering. She’s thinking of infection, of tetanus and lock jaw, the bandages around Obito’s middle fresh enough to worry her.

But he’s regrowing his liver splendidly. Most people can regenerate even large portions of liver, but Obito’s healing factor is something else entirely. Even with his blood loss, he was upright within an hour. The waves appear to bother him more than the grievous injury.

There’s nothing she can do to help relieve him of the dizziness, the nausea. There might be a genjutsu technique that would alter his perception enough to make him believe he wasn’t on a boat, but Rin doesn’t know it.

He groans and more bile spatters over the side. She pats his back comfortingly.

This leg of their journey was supposed to be a welcome respite from the recent, unwelcome, addition to their group. They should be able to speak freely now, away from Rabbit. But there’s something she’s not telling him.

The false ANBU tail they’d picked up in Yu is nowhere in sight, for the first time in over a week. The rabbit-masked operative is the sole survivor of the elimination squad sent to assassinate them. As soon as they attacked, Rin had known exactly what they were: envoys of the hidden nin, a conspiracy operating in Konoha outside of the Hokage’s orders. She had acted accordingly, killing two.

Obito had not. He’d hesitated, thinking they were real ANBU mistaking them for dangerous nukenin. In his hesitation, one put a naginata in his gut. If Gamahiro hadn’t defended him, he would have been disemboweled.

Obito collapses at her feet, his face pressed into the scummy fish blood of the deck. He’s shivering. She checks, but it’s not fever. It’s just the abject misery of the boat. The only thing keeping him on the trawler is the fact that they’re too far from shore for him to go back. He can’t Kamui them all the way to the Land of Lightning, across mountains and the sea. Neither can he escape into Kamui to wait out the journey. His uppermost range for a single jump hovers around a hundred miles. He’d lose Rin to the sea outside his range.

After a week of anxiety dodging cults in Yu, playacting flashy distraction to their Rabbity follower, leaving him behind on the shore of the fishing town felt like liberation. Instead of sleeping easy, her teammate is hurling sick. It always seems to happen to Obito.

It isn’t fair.

At least the crew leaves them alone. Yu is recently demilitarized, and they avoid the shinobi who chartered them passage to Kumo. The heavy trawler is a shrimp vessel; they drag nets behind them that make them slow and sloshy. Rin finds her feet easily enough, but Obito glues his eye to the horizon as the deck sways and dips, seagulls screeching around them. Rin is never going to get the smell of shrimp out of her clothes.

Rin is fascinated with the sea, with the fishing, with the way the dockhands and crew run the boat. There’s a young boy on board who’s job is to tie a rope to his waist and scurry over the side to scrape off all the pleco fish that attach themselves to the sides of the boat, attracting a kind of shark that takes bites out of the hull. He does this while utilizing no chakra. Just a rope to keep him out of the ocean and his own nimbleness.

While Obito tries not to give up the ghost there on the floor of a shrimp boat, Rin let the swells lull her into her mind space. Before she’d seen the real ocean, this false sea was all she had. Inside of her is a cage. Inside of the cage is the Sanbi. Between them is a fathom of water that seems immeasurable. If she could reach him, if they could come face to face, they could converse with each other. But every time she tries to get close, the distance presses in on her; she runs out of air. She drowns before she can reach him.

The Sanbi had been captured a century ago, taken from his home in the natural world, a still deep lake she sees sometimes in her dreams, and unceremoniously stuffed inside a shinobi. Made into a weapon, a prisoner to the jinchuuriki who used him for his immense chakra reserves. Sold by the Shodaime Hokage to the newly formed Kiri as a deterrent to devastating war.

But the wars had happened regardless. And the Sanbi was a valuable part of them. He’d been shoved around, abused for decades, eventually passed down to more jinchuuriki who only used him more and more.

Rin is determined that that wouldn’t be her story. She never wanted to be a jailer.

But she’d gotten to him too late. The Sanbi doesn’t want to talk to her. He hides in the cage inside her. He doesn’t trust his newest jinchuuriki, who in his mind, she’s sure, is simply the newest in a long line of tormentors. He doesn’t trust the new seal he’s locked behind, even if it makes it easier for the both of them to coexist.

A century of imprisonment and cruel exploitation have twisted the Ichibi into a violent soul. She’s not sure she feels that from the Sanbi. He is plenty resentful; she’s felt the storm of his rage, heavy and unfathomable as the ocean itself. But the one time she’s come face to face with the Three Tails, the turtle saved her life.

He won’t let her near him now. He is a recluse, hiding from her in her own consciousness. Before she went to Taki and meet the Nanabi, spoke with them face to face through the vessel of the Grass jinchuuriki, she’d occasionally used his chakra to power her suiton techniques, even drawing on his own rage and hurt to strengthen her own Killing Intent. She’d never wanted to be a jailer, but when she got to Taki, she’d already been falling into the habit of exploiting him.

It’s no wonder he doesn’t trust her.

Taki taught her to be better. She hasn’t used his chakra since. Under the short tutelage of the Nanabi, she learned her own history. Lucky Seven insists that the nine Bijuu are siblings, though their imprisonment has estranged them. When they lost trust in mankind, they lost trust in each other. Lucky Seven hasn’t spoken to their siblings in a hundred years.

Madara wants to extract the Bijuu’s chakra to combine them into the Juubi again, undoing the work of the Sage of Six Paths and erasing their individual consciousnesses in the process. Not only would this kill the jinchuuriki they were sealed inside, this would kill the Tailed Beasts. Even if the world wasn’t at stake, Rin would fight this tooth and nail. Not only do the Bijuu deserve their own lives, they deserve to be free again.

She will see it done. This is her goal. After all of this is over, after Madara has been defeated and the Moon Eye Plan unequivocally routed, Rin will dedicate her life towards freeing the Bijuu. She will go home and convince Konoha to release the Kyuubi upon Kushina’s death. She will set the Ichibi free. She will set the Sanbi free upon her own death. She will force the other nations to follow suit, or she will make them regret every decision they’ve ever made.

Before their capture and internment, the Bijuu were peaceful. Maybe they are angry now, maybe some, like Shukaku and the Kyuubi, want destruction, want revenge. Maybe some want to be free, like Lucky Seven.

The Sanbi, it seems, just wants to be left alone.

She will give them that chance. Even the angry ones, like the Ichibi and Kyuubi, after a few decades of rebuilding their trust and gaining their friendship, she is willing to bet they aren’t as mindlessly murderous as they present themselves.

She’s seen what a jinchuuriki and their Bijuu living together in harmony looks like. And she wants that for herself, for the Sanbi. She doesn’t have to be a jailer. The seal doesn’t have to be a cage.

When she finally had the proof she needed in Taki, she thought she’d be so excited to be right. But she’d already known she was right, that the Bijuu are sentient. And she’d used him anyway. Instead of being glad, she’d been so ashamed she cried.

It was a lot, at the time. Maybe she’s been holding herself to impossible standards, minding Obito’s fluctuating temper, their recent fight, the endless frustrations of a mission turning to complete shit, the weeks of living rough in the woods off of rabbits and boiled creek water, and Kakuzu, and the zetsu, and the Sanbi was a crutch, and she was tired, and for all her experience, she is only 16. She forgets that, because she doesn’t feel like it most of the time. But in hindsight, the mistake is apparent. It scares her, how easily she slotted into the existing power structure, to the expectation that the dynamic between her and the Sanbi was inherently transactional. She hadn’t even realized how often it was happening, how used she was getting to exploiting him.

The sadness in Lucky Seven’s voice when they realized how thoughtlessly Rin was treating their brother might haunt her forever.

But Rin was trained by the Yellow Flash of the Leaf, the Yondaime Hokage of Konoha. She doesn’t make mistakes more than once.

When she opens her eyes, the boat has disappeared. She’s standing on the surface of a calm sea. Beneath her crisscross chakra chains coated in seals. If she cuts off the chakra to her feet, she will sink into the water like a stone, through the bars of the cage.

Once inside, the Sanbi could hurt her. He could crush her, shred her, slam her into the bars. Drown her. Do whatever he can to set himself free. But he hasn’t. He doesn’t attack her. He simply hides.

And she can’t find him. If he needs time to trust her, she is willing to give it to him. She won’t bother him. If he wants to be left alone, she’ll oblige him.

But she won’t ignore him. She can’t imagine how isolating it must be, to exist a century as a captive. She can’t imagine the depth of his suffering; 2 years is nothing compared to a thousand, but she does know what it’s like to be alone. Their grief is not so different. She knows the worst thing about loneliness is that it makes it feel impossible to admit it.

She won’t make him. She shares her own chakra with the Sanbi, insignificant as it is compared to his own. She sings to him, down through the water. She meditates, sending feelings of contentment and peace and calm through to him. She speaks to him through the seal. She doesn’t seek him out, she doesn’t push him. In her mind, he’s a shy turtle, pulling his head into his shell to avoid her. She’ll give him time, give him space. Eventually, maybe he’ll peek his eye open. Get curious. Come to her.

She is determined. And she is patient.

Before, when her first seal was eroding, she got flashes of him, bits of insight, a feeling or two. The new seal prevents that, but she could go behind the seal, hovering in the water just inside the chains, not encroaching on his space, and send her own feelings to him. He hasn’t reciprocated, but she’s not giving up.

Right now, she closes her eyes, sinking into the lake of her mind. Inside her she carries the sound of seagulls, the smell of salt, the gentle lull of the waves. She thinks he likes things to do with water, with wide open spaces. With a landscape that feels like freedom, even to Rin.

It passes the time. It’s a good enough distraction from where she’s been subconsciously untangling the cryptic hints that the zetsu left them with before they escaped. She’s sure there’s more to the taunts and gibberish the clone had spouted. While Obito insists that Madara has no need for dishonesty, she knows the zetsu don’t share that trait. They’d implied his will wasn’t his own. She’d thought it was a lie; she knows they lie, but the fear had grown in her.

It’s only logical to consider that Madara’s manipulating them, even now. The Nara is considering it, and the shadow user is purportedly a genius. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that this is his plan, still. They have the Ichibi, they have the Sanbi, they have the Kyuubi. Obito has easy access to a solid third of the Bijuu needed to power the husk. If she’s pessimistic, it almost feels like they’re doing the zetsu’s job for them: gathering up all the jinchuuriki.

The recent attack from the false ANBU doesn’t negate this. The kill squad wasn’t taking orders from Minato, but it doesn’t make sense for Madara to try to kill them either. They are interfering with his plan and killing his clones, but he needs Obito; he wouldn’t have him killed in the bamboo backwoods of Yu, trapping the Ichibi away from his possession. That’s the more terrifying part: the unknown third party who knows enough to target them. That the security of the Leaf Village is that compromised. Minato told them to abide Rabbit and for a week they let an ANBU tail study them. They were careful, quiet and civilian, everything about them a misdirection. Gamahiro was already exposed, but it didn’t matter because they already knew. They knew because they learned it from the leak; there is no other explanation.

The rocking sets Obito off again and he’s newly wracked with a fresh wave of nausea. It’s a shrimp boat, not a ferry, and they haven’t been given any designated area below deck or in a cabin. They’re in an unoccupied spot on the corner of the deck and Rin covers them with a tarp. It helps hide Gamahiro, who can’t sustain a henge for the entire trip without exhausting himself and returning to the summoning dimension. The toad handles being on the open water fine, but Obito’s abject misery has them all small with sympathy.

The toad is sturdy, and while he’s good at hiding, it does make her silence easier. There’s something she’s not telling him too.

It’s a week’s journey up the coast from Hot Water, north past Frost, north into Lightning. They are too far out in the sea to see the mountain ranges and glaciers of Shimo, but the sea air carries the chill of them. There’s an island nation off the coast of Kumo; it’s unincorporated but habited, smaller than Momo, and they need to pass through the strait between the island and the mainland to get to the shrimp boat’s destination. There’s a thriving deep-water port city where the mouth of the Spark River meets the bay. They will have to travel back south to get to Kumogakure, past the Capital, back into the mountains.

The week on the sea gives her plenty of time to strategize uninterrupted. She is a hypocrite; as angry as she is at discovering that Obito has been keeping vital information from her, when he was gutted by ANBU Moth and she was healing him, her chakra was all in his system. And the naginata was poisoned. And while she was fighting to keep him from bleeding out long enough for his mokuton healing to kick in, she’d felt a hint of what she’s now convinced is the ace up Madara’s sleeve, even as he metabolized the venom coating the blade quickly enough he hadn’t even realized what she had. The machinations that the zetsu had hinted at.

Now that she knew what to look for, when her chakra touched his heart, it lit up like a festival.

Rin is no expert in fuuinjutsu, but she can recognize the feel of a curse seal when her own chakra touches it, even inactive as this one is. In the direct aftermath of the attack, with the blank porcelain face of a Rabbit mask observing their every twitch, there had been no opportunity to discuss it with him.

In the week on the boat, she comes to several bleak conclusions. The ugliest is that she’s not sure she would tell him, regardless of their enforced silence ending once they reach Kumo.

The truth is that he had scared her. He had named a clone to her before, but in her mind, the zetsu are interchangeable, expendable extensions of White Zetsu. But Obito knows them well enough to recognize them as individuals, to name them. And Peely had known enough about him to lure him into a trap, knew enough about Team 7 to call Kakashi Bakashi. He doesn’t talk about the years he spent in the cave, but she knows him. Behind his projected shield, he is naturally friendly; he’ll talk to anyone that stands still long enough. He wouldn’t be able to resist talking to the clones. While Rin views them as monsters, Obito knows them as acquaintances. His brief talk with Peely had proved how he is able to navigate the terrifying nonsense register that the clones communicate on. He can easily parse the singing and threats and gibberish and respond to them.

She trusts him completely, she does. But she doesn’t trust the seal on his heart. If it is a contingency placed there by Madara, and she is almost certain it is, she doesn’t know what its effects could be. Worst case scenario, it’s an enforced loyalty measure and would change every aspect of his personality to mold him more completely to Madara’s will. Best case scenario, it will simply kill him if activated. That thought is a comfort; Madara won’t activate it while Obito has the Ichibi in Kamui. In all of his scheming, she is sure nobody would have predicted that when Madara tricked Obito into awakening his mangekyo, it would grant him his own pocket dimension unique to himself, completely inaccessible to any other outside force. And Obito wouldn’t retrieve Shukaku willingly.

It gives her enough time to come up with a solution. Maybe Kushina will know something, and she can secretly get Gamahiro to get her take on it. But telling Obito right now will panic him. He is paranoid in the extreme about the old Uchiha and the self-doubt will tear him apart. She doesn’t want to see him turn that fear inward. It might even remotely trigger the seal to activate prematurely.

If it is a death seal, he will not survive its activation. It’s wrapped around the chambers of his heart, in every ventricle, brushing against his every pulse. She doubts even his impressive healing could save him if his heart is destroyed.

But maybe she can. She’s been his medic for years. She knows his chakra system like no one else. She knows his body, even the grafts of the Hashirama Cell. If she can’t remove the seal with fuuinjutsu, all she needs to do is keep him alive through the consequences of it activating. He has impressive healing; she’s seen him regrow entire limbs, heal bones in days, shrug off being stabbed and disemboweled. Rin has impeccable chakra control and she’s only improved in the past months. With the Sanbi’s help, she potentially has access to a Bijuu’s worth of chakra. If she can keep his heart beating long enough, she could pull him through having his heart destroyed.

It's not a good plan. But she won’t allow him to die.

So for now, she keeps it from him. The seal is inactive. She’s not sure it’s doing anything outside of being an eventuality. It doesn’t shake her trust in him. She’s already determined to solve the mystery of his degenerative dojutsu, of the bullshit Curse of Hatred. This is just another aspect of keeping him alive and she accepts it like she accepts like any inconvenient but irrevocable truth.

Sunsets over the ocean are stunning and she lifts the tarp to show Obito, who is in no great position to appreciate anything to do with the sea but maybe Gamahiro will enjoy it. The stars are bright overhead at night. He smells like shrimp. She does too, like it’s seeping into her pores. Kakashi would be just as miserable, and when she jokes about it, its maybe a small comfort to her teammate.

After the seventh day at sea, an alarm goes up from the trawling crew. The strait is up ahead, in sight. The narrow passage is patrolled by merchant ships and other fishing vessels. No Elemental Nation really has a navy outside of Kiri, but there are a few schooners carrying shinobi teams to discourage the pirates from Peach from targeting the merchants to beggar the Daimyo. Kumo is cut off from the rest of the continent, sequestered on a peninsula behind steep, almost impassable mountains. They get almost all of their trade by sea.

The channel is bustling with cargo barges, slower even than the shrimp boat. They’re flying the gray and white of Kumo and if she squints, she can see shinobi water walking between the boats, checking cargo, collecting import taxes and dock fees, guiding boats to port through the sandbars marked by colorful buoys.

She nudges Obito the second they see land and he squints blearily at the outline of the mainland. His sharingan spins as he makes sure he’s really seeing land. “Oh, thank the Sage,” he says fervently. “Let’s get off this fucking boat.”

It’s the best idea she’s heard all day. They crouch under the tarp, Rin hugging Gamahiro in his sling, and Obito Kamuis them directly into the city, off the boat and over all the gennin teams in the port checking import papers.

They exit Kamui into a narrow, crooked alley in the city, strewn with fish scraps and full of stray cats. Obito sinks to his knees on the ground right there as the cats look at them curiously. As he grounds himself, Rin scans the area while a friendly stray butts his head against her calf and mews. A few wander over to Obito to sniff at the shrimp on his clothes. He peeks his eye open at the cats and immediately raises both hands to scratch at their backs, delighted as they purr.

“I like Kumo,” he says and Rin rolls her eyes at the Uchiha, thinking of the ninneko of Sora Ku. “Is there any other way to get to Kiri that doesn’t involve another fucking boat? I don’t care if we have to island hop to it in and out of Kamui. This is the first time I’ve been able to think straight since Hot Water.”

That is an obstacle they can face later. Rin has a list of things that they need to buy before they leave the port city for Kumogakure. The Hidden Cloud Village is high in the mountains. They will need winter gear, a new mesh shirt for Obito, some way to insulate Gamahiro, who is cold blooded and can’t afford to expend chakra warming himself in this realm. Obito says bye to the cats and they go shopping, inconspicuous in the crowds of the bustling market, the biggest she’s ever seen. Cargo is unloaded off the barges, off the river skips that transport the supplies to the rest of the peninsula. The port city is the largest civilian village she’s ever been in, twice as populated as Suna’s Capital, where Wind’s Daimyo dresses his court in turquoise and silks while people starve on the streets in the Hidden Sand.

Unlike the other Elemental Nations Rin’s been in, the people of Kumo are distinctive in how different they are from each other. Dark skin is common, but so is bright hair and light eyes. Even the civilians dress with a shinobi’s eccentricities; there’s sashes and hats and many, many colorful tattoos in wonderful designs, on men and women both, in as many colors as the crowd. The shinobi they see dress in the standard colors of Lightning: gray uniform and one shouldered flak jacket, in Hidden Cloud white. Kumo red accents on the shin guards and bracers. Hitai ates worn in any fashion.

Their faces are too easily recognizable, too obviously shinobi. Kumo is a tight knit nation, fiercely protective of their own, to the point where they’ve shamelessly stomped over any treaty attempt in the past when it benefited them. Known for hoarding power and might, they’re notoriously not above bloodline theft. They’re a haven for many shinobi fleeing the bloodline purges in Kiri, or the shinobi in Yu who lost their purpose to peace. Maybe the one redeeming quality Konoha recognizes in Kumo is that once they’ve accepted you, and they’re willing to accept anyone they deem strong enough to fit in, they’ll protect you just as fiercely as they do a natural born Lightning ninja. A mixed nation of misfits, known for their both their uncompromising strength and loyalty to their own to the detriment of all others. Minato’s peace treaty is doomed to live only till their newest Raikage finds a single benefit in breaking it.

Rin hides Obito and Gamahiro in an alley while she does the shopping. She blends in better with the civilians, is less noticeable than her teammate, and he seems happy enough to stay with the well fed strays. She buys Obito replacement armor and sturdy metal backed gloves that will cover his wrists without impeding his movement. He’d almost lost his hand just from being tied up with ninja wire because he hadn’t had anything protecting the softer flesh of his right side. Some of her medicines that she’d bought in Suna have expired and she restocks what she needs from an apothecary, as well as picking up a few other necessary supplies. They always need clean bandages.

After they are restocked on supplies, Obito mournfully says by to the cats and then Kamuis them out of the port city, away from the Kumo shinobi teams. As they walk, Gamahiro drills Obito on handling the naginata he’d gotten from ANBU Moth. It’s too short for him; it almost looks kid-sized in his grip. Now that she thinks about it, all of the attacking ANBU had been small, built for speed more than heavy-hitting. Its not a bad formation; if they knew about Obito’s intangibility, a surprise attack was their only hope of mission success.

Not that it worked. They left the masks on for the burial.

Rin is better at handling the weapon than him; she’d learned naginata in her kunoichi classes at the Academy, even if she fell out of practice once she perfected her chakra blade technique. But Obito is determined to have some kind of specialized weapon, even if he uses it more like a club than a blade.

They strategize as they walk. They have an advantage going into Kumogakure; they know the identity of one of the two jinchuuriki in Lightning. The jinchuuriki to the Haichibi is the new Raikage’s brother, the second in their infamous tag team combo attack. Knowing Killer B is one of their targets helps only slightly; from Minato’s encounters with the duo over the war, they know A is fiercely, murderously protective of his brother. He won’t be easy to get close to. And there is no guarantee B will know who the other jinchuuriki, the holder of the Nibi, is. The pan is to tell B to tell his brother the Yondaime Raikage, to tell the Nibi, so they don’t have to hunt down both jinchuuriki themselves.

Obito says, nonchalantly swinging around his new weapon like a pole, “We know who he is this time. We could just kidnap him.”

Rin thinks of the headlines. “Two notorious nukenin kidnap the jinchuuriki brother of the Raikage. We would totally survive that.”

Obito says, “you win him over and I can take him back before the Raikage even knows he’s gone. If they’re as close as Sensei says, the Raikage will oppose the Old Man’s plan just on the basis that it will kill his brother.”

“Kumo respects power,” Rin says. “If they think allying with Madara will benefit them in terms of strength, they just might go for it.”

Obito shakes his head. “Nah, not when it would risk their own.”

“No way Zetsu would tell them the truth. They’d spin it to benefit Kumo exclusively. Destroy everyone else with the Tsukuyomi but leave Lightning alone.”

“No way he’s dumb enough to fall for that. He wouldn’t sacrifice his brother for it.”

Rin thinks Obito puts too much emphasis on their supposed bond. It’s the Uchiha in him, blindly loyal to family and friends. Its unthinkable to him, the notion of sacrificing a loved one for power. So abhorrent that the mangekyo the act spawns half kills them in retribution. But A is the new Yondaime Raikage. He will put Kumo first, over everything. The same way that Minato made a peace treaty with the nation that killed his student.

Obito asks, “What else do you know about him? Other than that he survived Sensei?”

She shrugs. That he survived Minato, twice, tells her everything she needs to know about his battle prowess, but she knows almost nothing of the man himself, him or his brother, other than what Minato told them in Stone.

He would be the authority. They’d kept him on the ever-shifting Kumo front to counter A’s renowned speed while Rin was stuck in a trench in Kusa while the Iwa battle lines pulled the smaller nation in half. They’d only called Minato in when every other option had been exhausted. 10,000 shinobi in Frost for a battle that lasted 3 days straight and killed the Sandaime Raikage, one of the most powerful shinobi in history, from exhaustion, and Minato butchered a platoon in Earth the second he faced Iwa again after the Kanabi Bridge mission. The war ended, but everyone knows the price was too high.

Rin says, “I was stationed in Kusa for the remainder of the war. Sensei was the only shinobi fast enough to keep up with A. Kakashi was around Yu and Shimo. It was classified.”

The teen was probably assassinating suppliers to Lightning. Killing civilians is always classified, since they’re noncombatants. Just guarding them is an A rank mission in wartime.

Obito frowns as he reads through that thought. “That’s ANBU parameters.”

Gamahiro scowls at them both. “What do the two of you know about ANBU parameters?”

Rin doesn’t even want to think about what ANBU had been busy enough with that they sent a kid to do their job instead. She shrugs at them both. “He was willing to go. And Minato sensei was just a regular jounin. He couldn’t stop him.”

“He’s still letting him go on solo A ranks now, you said.”

He’s upset. Rin says, “He’s been doing it successfully for years by the time Sensei became Hokage. I think it was his way of staying busy.”

Kakashi’s like Obito, in that regard. He doesn’t like sitting around the village, in that big empty house of his, with an eye that wouldn’t turn off. He wouldn’t talk to Rin, wouldn’t talk to Minato. Rin could tell when the projected boredom was starting to slip into real apathy. Rin had poured herself into her training, into the war, into becoming qualified to be a frontline battle medic. To save what lives she could, after losing the one that mattered most. Kakashi did the same, in his own way. She’d though that to Kakashi, assassination felt like something he could do, some control he had still.

Obito growls, swinging the naginata around inefficiently, just for the motion of it, while Gamahiro frowns at the technique. Obito knows enough to read the after that came after busy and know why she hadn’t said it. He chews through whatever he’d been going to say, swallows it down, and instead tries for a joke. Always trying to lighten the mood. He can’t stand them unhappy.

He says, “what are the odds that Kakashi terrorized Hot Water enough that he’s the reason they demilitarized?”

Yu demilitarized as a form of self-defense because it couldn’t survive being sandwiched between the two powerhouses of Lightning and Fire. They also lost their Daimyo rather suddenly and he’d had no living heirs by the time of his death, so that’s probably some of what ANBU was busy with. Rin says, joking back, “he took over an onsen and told them they’d have to fight him for it back.”

Even Gamahiro snorts. Obito says, “they got rid of their entire military rather than face his scrawny self.”

“He threatened them with a stray puppy and they ran.”

“Hey now,” Gamahiro interrupts. “Pakkun’s not that small.”

“Lies!” Obito declares. “As a renowned summoner of frogs, I would know.”

“What?”

They laugh through the explanation, much to the toad’s offense. “Why did you let Gamariki reveal himself like that?”

“I thought he genjutsued her.”

“Why didn’t you genjutsu her?”

Now Obito is offended, but only to cover his embarrassment. Gamariki had given him lessons in genjutsu. It was probably only now occurring to him that he’d failed the toad’s test.

“That eye’s not just for time/space, boy.” Gamahiro says, his eyes narrowed. “Now, I’m feeling peckish. Find me some bugs, will you?”

“I-what?” Obito throws his hands up, exasperated. “You don’t even need to eat! Gamaken told us!”

“Gamaken is too polite,” Gamahiro says. “And it’s not about the bugs, boy. That was a lesson. You failed that one too.”

Obito looks at Rin incredulously but she’s already connecting the dots. “It’s genjutsu, isn’t it? You wanted him to use genjutsu to catch the bugs somehow.”

Gamahiro stubbornly doesn’t answer her. “You put the mission in danger, boy. Taki might not always be a nominal ally. This could hurt Konoha years down the road.”

Obito is appropriately ashamed. They take a break from walking to gather the required bugs for Gamahiro, brainstorming ways of using genjutsu to locate/track/catch them. It feels like a punishment, but it’s still a lesson. One Rin’s almost figured out.

Obito is flashing his mangekyo determinedly at a beetle. Rin says, “Tsukuyomi it.”

He’s startles, almost dropping the bug. “What?”

“You should be able to cast Tsukuyomi, just like Madara. Its why he needed you to activate your mangekyo, to help with the plan.”

Tsukuyomi is a devastating technique. Obito frowns at Gamahiro, uneasy. “That’s kinjutsu. Does Sensei know about this?”

“It’s too secret to have a classification, boy.”

He’s still frowning. “You want me to torture a bug to death?”

Rin says, “You can’t practice on people. It might help, knowing how the technique works. We might learn how to stop it.”

“Killing the Old Man should stop it just fine,” Obito grumbles. He’s squinting at the bug like he’s not convinced he should.

Rin debates with herself. She says, “Remember the genjutsu user in Suna? From the bandit attack?”

He directs his frown at her. He doesn’t like that she’s bringing her up now, like this. He’s suspicious. “Why?”

“It wasn’t you turning her own attack back at her that killed her. Her chakra system was destroyed completely. It wasn’t Tsukuyomi, but it couldn’t have been far off, power wise.”

The forest creaks around them. They’re in the heavily forested foothills of the Kumo mountains and Obito can sense for miles around them. He says, “Oh,” and he’s maybe a little sad. She thinks that maybe he’s been thinking of his mangekyo as a useful tool but not exactly as a form of attack. Like his mokuton, wanting his most powerful abilities to be useful but not necessarily because they’re deadly. He uses them defensively. But Tsukuyomi isn’t just deadly, it’s cruel. And Obito’s never been cruel.

“Start small,” Gamahiro suggests finally, after a minute of Obito just staring at the beetle with a frown, plain sharingan spinning. “Just looking at something with intent should be enough to paralyze them temporarily.”

“I thought that was Killing Intent doing that.”

“That’s genjutsu, boy. It’s in your chakra, shutting down their system.”

Obito is more willing to try this method of genjutsu. He likes paralysis over 72 hours of torture, insanity, and death. He concentrates, his sharingan twisting into his pointed mangekyo pattern. When he focuses on the beetle, it stops moving, its little waving legs going rigid, twitching antennae freezing.

“Hey, I—oh wait, it’s just dead.” He sounds disheartened.

Gamahiro harrumphs and his tongue shoots out to snatch the beetle out of Obito’s grasp. “Hey,” Obito says, “That’s a frog thing.”

“Crunchy,” Gamahiro says. Rin thinks that the beetle simply isn’t developed enough to handle any amount of genjutsu without croaking.

“Hey, wait,” Obito’s arm shoots out, grabs for the toad, his mangekyo still spinning threateningly in his head. “Someone’s coming.”

Rin steps up to his side. The forest feels alive around her, buzzing with energy. “Just one,” he says, securing Gamahiro in the sling out of sight. “Shinobi. Let’s get out of here.”

“Wait,” Rin says. “We should see who it is first. Is it just one? And they’re coming right for us?”

“It could be Kakuzu.”

“Or Rabbit found us again.”

This isn’t a small chance. It would have been easy to find out where the shrimp boat was heading. He could have gotten a faster boat and beat them to Kumo. And they were supposed to be playing flashy distraction to the hidden nin, keep them looking at Obito and Rin so Minato could hunt them down in the village.

“Shit,” Obito says. “Stay close. We’ll see if it’s Rabbit first.”

They hide in some bushes while they wait for the shinobi to catch up to them. Obito’s signaling their location to her in slow hand signs. Close. Slowing. There.

She looks and indeed, it’s the blank white face of a Rabbit mask, the specter who haunted them for a week in Hot Water, their unwelcome ANBU tail that Minato told them not to get rid of. As much as Rin is dismayed, she’s relieved it’s an enemy who won’t outright attack them, probably.

Obito is frowning at the false ANBU and Rin’s also wondering how the operative has narrowed their location down to such an accurate measure. On a hunch, she molds some chakra, sends out a small pulse of it, virtually unnoticeable.

Immediately, Rabbit’s blank face mask swivels directly to the bush where they’re hiding, one hand in a half tora. Everything in her sours.

“Ahhh,” Obito says, standing up facing the wrong direction, stretching out his arms with a loud sigh, giving the agent time to retreat out of sight. They’re both pretending they don’t realize they’re even being followed most times. They can’t appear too willing/resigned or the agent will get suspicious. While the false ANBU backs up to his usual trailing distance, Obito whispers to Rin, “Not fair. Konoha’s only got like, 5 sensors in the entire regular forces. How do the hidden nin have one?”

Rin doesn’t risk replying. They’ll have to go back to their deep cover charades, everything as a misdirection, not a single true word between them. It’s a pain, but it explains how the ANBU was able to find them so accurately. Obito had been practicing genjutsu, and Rabbit had sensed him from where he was casing the path to the Hidden Cloud. It’s not ideal. Sensors are the rarest of the natural abilities. It doesn’t bode well that the hidden nin not only have one, but have one busy following them.

The rest of their way to Kumogakure is much more subdued. They don’t train. They barely speak. Gamahiro’s already exposed himself in the fight by killing Moth, so at least he’s not stuck in the sling all day, but they do try to keep the toad out of sight. Obito is twitchy and high strung; at night he sets over an hours’ worth of traps around the camp. Rin meditates with the Sanbi, trying to stay calm and clear as a pool of still water. Her stillness is counterpoint to Obito’s growing anxiety at having Rabbit back.

It's been over two weeks since the fake ANBU kill squad targeted them. They have received no update from the Leaf Village. Until they have updated orders, their mission is clear. Allow the tail. Do not willingly engage. Draw as many out of hiding as possible.

No backup has arrived for the operative, but Rin doesn’t expect any to. Even if they have the numbers, throwing bodies at them accomplishes less than a talented spy would.

And Rabbit is talented. He keeps his distance, out of range of all but the most extreme attacks, but still close enough to be an immediate threat. He stays out of sight, but even with the ANBU’s Chameleon Jutsu, Obito can sense him as long as he stays in the trees. And he is Konoha trained, that’s for sure. He never leaves the safety of the trees. He’d attacked them from above and while his taijutsu was not Academy standard, it was acrobatic and agile, recognizable on sight as a Leaf shinobi style. Even his observation pattern is impeccable, the textbook solo surveillance patterns, optimal and flawless enough it's like he has Senju Tobirama’s outline with him to reference.

Due to their unwelcome watcher, they’re forced to dodge Kumo nin by foot. Sensor or not, they don’t know his range and can’t risk losing him for good. Instead of Kamuing around obstacles, they sneak, they hide, they crawl through gross drainage ditches and walk across bridges chakra sticking to the bottom. It’s slow, nervous going. Rabbit is adept at dodging the passing teams, but it irks Obito to no end that he isn’t allowed to lose him. One good Kamui, and goodbye creepy stalker.

But they don’t dare. Even as the hills grow steeper and the nights grow colder, they keep moving at a slow enough pace to make sure Rabbit can follow, doggedly in their tracks. As Rin breaks out the winter gear she’d bought them in the port city, it occurs to her that they’re doing this backwards. They should have went to Kumo in the summer, and Suna in the winter. They’re just as unprepared to face the mountain cold as they were the summer sun in the desert, exposed to the worst of the elements that the Elemental Nations have to offer.

Obito gets a thick wool cloak to go over his gear and a fur liner for his hood to keep his ears warm. Rin zips herself up in a long jacket, gray as the Hidden Cloud nin, with a hat to match. She doesn’t like how gloves feel on her hands, so she keeps them in her pockets. She’s comfortable enough during the day, but the temperature starts plummeting at night, as they skirt carefully around the Capitol in a wide arc, wanting nothing to do with the Daimyo and his forces. Gamahiro is carried exclusively by Obito, wrapped up in his cloak, toasty in the heat he gives off naturally. The toad is slower, less active, even during the day. His time limit for staying in this realm is nearing and the summons is low on chakra and can’t spare any to keep himself warm. At night, Rin keeps watch to make sure Rabbit doesn’t assassinate them in their sleep. She sleeps against Obito’s side when he keeps watch to keep from shivering in the low temperatures, using his cloak as a pillow.

The road they’re following from the woods veers upwards into the mountains true. The mountains of Kumo makes everything in Iwa look short. They’re tall, jagged spikes and spires, a tan color, exposed to the biting wind, tall enough to get literally lost in the clouds. Hidden Villages, Rin is discovering, are accurately if uncreatively named.

It’s in the ridges and peaks that everything gets fuzzy for Obito again. It’s just winds him up tighter. He’s not sleeping again, paranoid as his mokuton sensing is less and less reliable while Rabbit’s sensing isn’t affected at all. The strain is wearing on them both, having to consider every word, every gesture. It’s the hardest stand down Rin’s ever had to swallow, the most difficult yet easily remedied. They're both flagging.

It’s in the passes that they run into trouble. They’re on the alert, so he doesn’t surprise them like he had before. Part of Rin has been expecting him to jump out from behind every corner, but the sight of Kakuzu blocking their path is a culmination of at least 3 of her top ten fears.

It’s been over a month since they’ve last seen him, and this time he’s got on a long black cloak decorated with red clouds to keep the cold off him. But it’s the same hard green eyes, the scratched through Taki hitai ate, the same nightmarish black threads that start writhing out from his arms, his back, his fucking mouth.

That rictus slash opens and he says, “I’ve been offered a large sum for your capture. Come quietly and I will not remove your limbs beforehand.”

Fuck that, Rin thinks and latches onto Obito’s arm. From what they learned about Kakuzu from Taki, he’s basically immortal and there’s no easy counter for his kinjutsu.

Instead of Kamuing them safely away, as had been their plan all along if they run into the bounty hunter again, the fucking S ranked bounty hunter, Obito hesitates. Even as Kakuzu takes their silence as a reply and launches into an attack, Obito only Kamuis them around out of the way. He’s making bunny ears with his left hand even as his eye’s wide with panic, wide, and red in a way that Rin prays Kakuzu’s too busy readying his next attack to notice.

Fucking Kakuzu found them, and Obito’s worried about their tail. Kakuzu will kill Rabbit for sure and her teammate is conflicted about it. Rin whips a kunai at Kakuzu and he doesn’t even flinch, the skin of his neck hardening and turning gray, bouncing the kunai harmlessly off and out of sight.

“Ninja Art: Earth Grudge Fear.”

Kakuzu’s mouth unhinges into a demon of black thread, masks revealing themselves from under the cloak.

They are out of time. They can’t fight an immortal S ranked bastard. Rin looks wildly at Obito, her heart pounding in her ears, at the same time that Rabbit launches himself into the fight with a kusarigama.

And he’s not aiming at Kakuzu. Faced with the bounty hunter, their tail has decided to kill them himself rather than let his quarry fall into someone else’s hands.

“Shit!” Obito yells and whirls to dodge Rabbit’s vicious attack while a scorching blast of fire lights up the shadows on the stone. Kakuzu’s not even humanoid anymore; it’s the most monstrous display of power Rin’s ever witnessed, and she’s seen a Bijuu’s wings sprout from the back of a monk and hoist him into the air. Someone drops a smoke bomb. “Grab him!”

“What!” Rin’s busy overpowering the katon with a Water Bullet. She’s running on her own chakra here and her reserves, while amplified, are not inexhaustible.

There’s water all over the ground from her counter and the bird-masked horror simply zaps the saturated ground with raiton. To avoid being electrocuted, Rin leaps off of the stone and twists through the air. Obito and Rabbit are tangling, simultaneously attacking each other and Kakuzu. A toad-sized katana shears through any threads that come close.

Rin predicts there’s five seconds before someone dies. The only reason they’ve lasted this long is that Kakuzu’s priorities have shifted from killing them for a bounty to capturing them. Kakuzu is only partially transformed, two writhing masses of black threads forming animalistic bodies with grotesque mask faces, a beaked one and something with teeth, gushing fire from its mouth.

“Here!” Obito yells and Rin see’s he’s wrestled the ANBU to the ground, tangling him in the fundo chain from the kusarigama, even as the sickle blade circles his shoulder. Rin leaps at them, tearing at the blade, even as Obito twists them all sharply into Kamui the second she makes contact.

They land hard, Rin bruises her shoulder and rolls, but Obito’s still struggling with Rabbit. He’s successfully captured his hands with the chain and for the first time, Rin realizes the size difference between them up close as her teammate forces the ANBU to the ground with brute strength as the stand of conifers he’s dumped them into needle around them.

He gets the ANBU well and truly caught, him still struggling and Rin pins down his legs to hold him still. “Who do you work for?” Obito snarls.

In the second of silence, the ANBU doesn’t answer out loud. Rabbit only leans forward and hooks the blade of the kusarigama around his own neck and jerks, slitting his throat.

“Shit!” Obito yells and Rin knocks his hands out of the way to staunch the bleeding, her chakra flaring as her mind shifts into medic mode at the sight of so much red. Rabbit is struggling weakly, not wanting her to heal him, and Obito snaps, “Don’t do that! Shit!” with his mangekyo still spinning and Rabbit freezes underneath her hands while her chakra floods his system. In it, she can feel Obito’s chakra as the genjutsu takes effect.

“Keep him still,” she says, focusing on stopping the bleeding, the kunoichi part of her mind wondering why she’s even bothering. It’s not a clean cut; the angle is awkward, but it is sufficient, a crude but effective way of ensuring the ANBU’s silence. And in him, she can feel the dark pulsing of a curse mark, like the curse seal wrapped around Obito’s own heart, actively strangling him.

Fucking curse marks. This isn’t going to be pretty. “Mystical Palm!”

Even under whatever genjutsu Obito has him in, his body unconsciously reacts to the strength of the healing technique. But Obito’s holding him down, and she seals the artery closed, cutting off the spurting blood from his jugular. Once the damage is repaired, she wraps gauze and bandages around it, committing the taboo of removing the ANBU mask to force blood replenishing pills down his throat. On the back of his tongue, almost like a tattoo, is a curse mark.

Obito is pale under all the blood. “It’s a kid.”

It’s not quite true. He’s small, and acne ridden, but Rabbit’s at least their age, maybe a year or two older. That’s middle-aged for shinobi, but his size makes him look younger. His eyes are glazed over with the pointed black pinwheel of Obito’s mangekyo. She can feel his chakra invading Rabbit’s system, burning like fire, and he’s not doing any conscious damage but the strength of the genjutsu is starting to erode away at Rabbit’s chakra coils.

“Okay,” she says, “He’s stable. You can let him up.”

The red filter over Rabbit’s eyes fades away as Obito allows the genjutsu to break. He’s still tied up and Obito’s stripped him of weapons to deny him any other suicide attempts. His face is as blank as his mask, even covered in his own bright arterial blood. For a second, she thinks Obito accidentally fried his brains; there’s a total lack of emotion on the teen’s face.

“What the fuck was all that about, huh?” Obito demands and he’s scared, but Rin can tell just from looking at him that Rabbit won’t say a word. Even unmasked and restrained, the ANBU’s loyal to the hidden nin who sent him. He keeps his mouth tightly shut, his dark eyes blank and dead in his face.

Rin only understands because she’s been considering that Obito’s own curse mark is a loyalty ensuring measure. But the location of the seal is significant. They sealed his tongue. He couldn’t talk even if he wanted to.

“He won’t say anything,” Rin says. “Let’s go. Leave him here.”

Obito looks at her incredulously. “We can’t just leave him tied up for the cloud nin.” It will be war if Kumo finds an ANBU on their land.

“Leave him a senbon, and let’s get out of here.”

Gamahiro’s head is peeking out of the sling with just his eyes but Rin can sense his frown. But Rin didn’t save his life just to kill him now, tied up and defenseless. He’s a threat to them, but she thinks he already knows the highlights. He’d thrown a smoke bomb before entering the fray. He was prepared to face a sharingan. He’d known all along who they really were, who they were working for.

Obito is distressed; the conifers are poking at her back with sharp needles, stabbing at her scalp. He can’t help it, the trees do what they want, but Rin’s not about to give away anything Rabbit might not have already known. “We need to go.”

He’s still conflicted, but he nods at Rin and holds out his hand to Kamui them away, leaving Rabbit tied up but reluctantly alive. It’s a mistake, she knows it is, they should kill him before he can report back to his handler. But Rin kept him from bleeding out, felt the seal on his tongue. That's some of the worst kinjutsu, ugly and brutal. She wonders exactly how willing Rabbit was to get it.

They land even higher up in the mountains. Obito says, “what the fuck was that about?”

“He knew already. Everything. He knows exactly who we are.”

Obito’s gnarled forehead wrinkles worse than it usually is. “The smoke bomb.”

“There’s a curse mark sealing his tongue. He couldn’t talk even if he wanted.”

“Shit.” Obito shoves at his hood, pulling it tightly around his face. “Why did he even…”

The second Rabbit realized he was caught, he hadn’t hesitated to slit his own throat. It’s the same choice Rin had faced, captured by the enemy, facing genjutsu interrogation. But while Rin knew her team would come for her, Rabbit knows there will be no backup. The ANBU is on his own.

The fight is replaying in her head. Gamahiro says, “I should take this back to Minato. I can’t stay much longer, anyway.” He wiggles until Obito helps the toad out of the sling. Gamahiro says, “Don’t let him tail you anymore if his mission parameters have shifted. If you can’t shake him, kill him.”

Rin agrees when Obito doesn’t. The toad shivers in the chill and dismisses himself back to Mount Myoboku. Obito stares at the place where the toad vanished and says, “Even Kakuzu was being weird.”

“Who even has enough money to buy out a bounty hunter? He isn’t listed as a mercenary in the Bingo Book.”

Obito says, “How’d he even find us?”

But Rin knows this one. “Zetsu.”

It’s a bleak realization. Kakuzu fits the profile. The only thing Zetsu would have to promise to get the nukenin on board is to pay him.

Obito asks, “Do you think Gamahiro will figure it out?”

“If he doesn’t, Sensei will.”

Madara must have gotten tired of their running around. By securing 4 of the nine Bijuu, they’ve disrupted his precious plan enough that he’s stepping in. They need Obito alive, both for his mangekyo and the Ichibi. It’s some comfort to Rin that his heart seal doesn’t appear to be able to be activated at a distance. Madara needs to drag him back to force him into service.

They’re both grim. Obito Kamuis them higher and higher, making sure they lose Kakuzu properly. The mountains get so dense that the bases merge together. It’s like when the Lightning ninja couldn’t go forward anymore, they just built up.

They come upon Kumogakure no Sato stuck high in the peaks, past the cloud line. It clings to the mountain sides, built along ledges, arranged into clusters around the spires and connected with a hundred bridges. On the tallest mountain is a wide blue structure; even from this distance, Rin can read the kanji for Lightning.

It’s the tallest thing around; its all she sees. Kumogakure might be the Hidden Village most easily found, but its not without its natural defenses. Much can be said for the martial strength of having the high ground and clear sight lines all around for miles. Especially when they’re keen on lobbing lightning attacks.

They’re past sneaking in under their aliases. Kamuing in might alert the Barrier Corps but it’s easier than braving the gates. Iwa taught them that, at least. Rin has no desire to meet Kumo’s newest Raikage. She’s already met two more than she ever though she would, and Rasa and Ohnoki give the kage a bad rap, in her opinion.

They wait until nightfall, watching the topside of the cloud layer shift and shred. Rin’s never been so high up before, and the air is chill and thin. The moisture from the clouds freezes to the stone it touches, limning everything in a crystal layer of ice. It would be beautiful, if it wasn’t so damn cold.

Under the cover of blackest night, Obito takes them right in. Above the clouds, the moon glows white and the streets are surprisingly still full of shinobi and civilians alike. While the civilians bundle up for the bustling night life, shinobi wear just the cloud nin uniform, many with one arm exposed to show off intricate tattoos. They’re loud and the friend groups hang in knots outside taverns and bars lit by electric lighting. They don’t act like a village that has recently lost both a war and their kage. Where Iwa was decimated in the south, the mountains protected Lightning from the worst of the damage. Very little of the fighting had been done inside Kumo’s borders.

It’s too risky to try to book a room in an inn. From what Rin can tell, there is not typical look to a cloud nin; she’s never seen so many blondes in her life, many with dark skin. But a shinobi catering hotel might recognize them and skilled ninja will sense a henge. They are too suspicious, too obviously cold.

It’s too cold to stay out in the elements. They set up a base camp stuck under the girders of a wide bridge. They can hear every echoing footstep, but they’re out of sight, even from shinobi who might on a whim decide to cross upside down. They huddle together on the thin lip of the metal ledge which feels like it leeches every bit of warmth from Rin. But Obito wraps her up in his cloak and he’s toasty enough that she can settle without endless shivering, her chakra foldes small inside her.

In the morning, when they blend in better moving around the city, the hunt begins. This time, they know the name of their target. They don’t know how to get to him, but Minato told them enough about his spirit that it shouldn’t take more than a few days to find Killer B. His identity is known to everyone in the village and he was active in the Third War. His brother A is the reason their teacher has a standing flee on sight order that has yet to expire. And B is skilled enough in battle that Minato had given him the name of ‘Killer’.

They start in the marketplace, a wide, round boulevard with every terraced level specializing in a different good, situated around the peak of one of the lower mountains, in the shadow of the Raikage’s Tower. Colorful banners hang between every bridge, dyed rugs on lines, ninja wire stringing braces of kunai overhead. There’s stalls selling specialized tattoo inks and exotic birds. A band plays live music from a street corner, heckling a tolerant crowd for coin.

Obito’s looking around with wide eyes, ever a tourist. “It’s so lively.”

“It’s got to be bigger than back home,” Rin says. “Just look at all these people!”

There’s a fucking rhino wearing spiked shoulder padrones pulling a cart up a steep incline. She’s not even sure it’s a summon or if it just fits the aesthetic. The buildings are decorated in lacquer layered over each other, red as fresh blood. When she brushes her fingertip against it, its smooth as silk.

They wander, eventually buying a light breakfast from a onigiri stall. It’s Obito who finds the first flyer. He rips the offending paper program from the wall it’s stuck on. His mouth is hanging open in shock.

“What?” Rin says, thinking it’s a wanted poster of them or something even worse.

Wordlessly, Obito shoves the flyer into her hands and Rin reads:

Bakayaro! Konoyaro! Come see me, the Lord Killer B!
Rap Concert! Battle the real Lightning Blade!

Below the large infographic is a picture of a man with face tattoos holding seven different swords at once, with a huge tentacled monster in the background.

Rin blinks. “Is this a joke?”

“It can’t be that easy.”

Rin rereads the poster, trying to recall the date. “It’s at noon today! Where is the stadium?”

All the mountain clusters have adjectival names, strength, power, majesty, honor, but they don’t know them or how to differentiate how one mountain is particularly more noble than the others. They’re running out of time, so Rin asks a local merchant for directions to Noble and she and Obito hurry over to the venue.

It’s a huge open training ground that has been cleared of equipment. Instead, a huge stage has been rigged with lights and sound equipment. The stage is flanked by huge cut-outs of the Raikage’s brother spitting bars mid mic-drop. The stands around the stadium are mostly empty and its easy for Obito and Rin to find some seats. The Kumo nin in the audience are eager but the civilians in attendance scowl at the posters of the jinchuuriki. Some even hold bags of ripe tomatoes.

Obito elbows her as a reminder to stay calm. Seeing the tomatoes has her angry, duly so, but anything she might have said is interrupted by B taking the stage. He’s wearing jounin standard gear, no haori under his white flak jacket, tied with a red rope belt that matches the red accents on his standard shin and arm guards. He’s muscular in the way few shinobi are, bulky even, and a tattoo on his exposed shoulder reads the kanji for ,,Iron. The tattoos on his face reflect the horns of the Bijuu in his poster. He’s wearing cool shades to shield himself from the stage lights and he dances hip hop across the stage to the microphone. He’s older than Minato, but still spry, if his disruptive moves are any indication.

A few of the shinobi cheer him on, but the civilians jeer. It hurts his confidence exactly none, and Killer B grabs the microphone to spit his opening rap introduction:

You know me by my pyroclastic flow
You’re looking at the hip hop king, ring a war lord vocal chord
So vicious, my riches pull up and take down bitches! Ha!
And you know it’s the chivalry, the lyrical delivery
With the power to do what I wanna, I got the Eight Tails in my corner!
Flow so lethal I just got to defeat ya, flow so chill
They call me Killer B, yo! I straight bless the mic
Try as I might can’t stop won’t stop till I get the drop
On all the haters, make them respect mine! Bars so hard
Call it ninja art: I’m winning! I don’t spit fire I throw straight lightning!

The shinobi cheer and whoop, even as the civilians throw tomatoes and Killer B makes the dodging look like more dancing.

Rin can’t take her eyes off him. “He’s incredible! Was that freestyling?”

Obito’s mouth is hanging open in surprise and growing delight. “He’s not half bad.”

The concert continues, several of the shinobi invited up onto the stage to engage Killer B in more freestyle rap battles. He’s electric, always in motion; no one else can hope to keep up. His roasts are cutting but hilarious; he can size up an opponent and tear them down with just a few lines.

The most shocking thing about the performance is how openly, unapologetically himself he is. He’s the second son of the late Raikage, and adopted besides, but she doesn’t think it matters in Kumo like it would in Konoha. He references his brother in the same line he credit’s the Haichibi. He’s tosses thin bladed swords around as he writes lyrics in a notebook, mock sparring with the few shinobi who dare to step on his stage. When he’s chewed through the volunteers, he gives a closing outro, bowing, paired with a mic-drop, and moonwalks himself off the stage, around to a back waiting area where the Kumo nin start to congregate.

Braver now, the civilians really let loose, covering the empty stage with vegetables and booing. Rin looks down at the flyer in her hands, at Killer B outlined by the Eight Tailed Beast. She says, “I’m going to get his autograph. Cover me.”

Obito frets but follows her around backstage, where B is wrestling and laughing with the same shinobi he beat in rap battles onstage. He’s got multiple swords strapped to his back and a Bijuu inside him. He’s surrounded by almost a dozen Kumo nin who all look up at their approach.

Obito is half a step behind her, nervously brushing his gloved fingers against the back of her long coat. Rin’s clutching the flyer in both hands, making sure to look small and young and nondescript, fidgeting with excitement to call attention to herself and not her taller, meaner looking teammate.

“Lord Killer B sama!” she exclaims, “that was an incredible performance! I would be honored if you’d sign my flyer.”

B looks at them curiously but Rin’s eyes and smile are wide and genuine. “Oh?” he says, “Got some new fans in the stands, do we Eight Oh?”

Rin knows exactly what her Bingo Book entry looks like, but she’s fully covered with just her face showing under a hat that hides her hair. But there’s no hiding Obito; his scars are too distinctive. He’s looking away, suspiciously hunched over to help hide his height, but there’s only one nukenin in the Bingo Book that looks like him.

Killer B reads the note she’s scribbled on the flyer with chakra ink and his easy face doesn’t change, even as the cloud nin straighten, looking at them in alarm. Rin says, “wanna get away, jinchuuriki sama?”

B’s brow raises at her offered hand, but he looks away from the note to the other Kumo shinobi, many of whom are recognizing them in that very moment, pulling weapons and raising chakra to attack. But B looks back at her and makes a decision, raising his own fist to fist bump her in the second that Obito decides that yes, she’s finally giving him permission to kidnap someone.

He pulls Rin into Kamui and Rin pulls B right along with them.

They exit on the mountain overlooking Kumogakure across the steep valley, a sheer drop at their feet. Rin immediately rocks from the wind. It’s where they hid and waited for nightfall before entering the village. The second they land, Rin and Obito back away from B, their hands up.

The Kumo jounin looks around them, sees the village in the distance. He’s not thrown by the time/space but his expression has hardened when he looks back at Rin. He’s bigger than Obito, well over six feet tall, and built like a professional wrestler.

“I’ll take you back,” Obito says quickly. “Just hear us out.”

Killer B says, casually, “ya got a few minutes before my bro comes for me, fools, ya fools. He won’t even believe I got got by two tools.”

Rin’s note reads: I’m a jinchuuriki and I’m trying to save us all.

She says, “There’s a threat against all the jinchuuriki. A nukenin organization seeks to extract chakra from all nine Bijuu and combine them back together to form the Ten Tails to subjugate the world. A being named Zetsu is behind it, and there’s a private army of their clones backing them up.”

Rin says, “We’ve secured the Ichibi, the Sanbi, the Nanabi, and the Kyuubi. If you and the Nibi’s jinchuuriki know about them, it makes it infinitely harder for them to take you out. They’re S ranked nukenin, hired as mercenaries, but Zetsu is in charge. We’re here to warn you that your village is likely already compromised by the zetsu clones. They could move against you at any moment. You should take precautions, tell the Raikage, protect the other jinchuuriki in Lightning. If they capture you, they will kill you extracting the Haichibi.”

B frowns at her. “I’m not going to lose to any zetsus. They come for me, I’ll jinchuuriki them into ooze.”

He’s still freestyling. Rin wonders if this is what Minato meant by ‘spirited’. Why do jounin have to be so weird. Rin says, “They came for me, B sama, and I wasn’t ready. They’ve already made plays for both the Ichibi and the Nanabi. The caliber of ninja at work here, think Kakuzu, formerly of Taki. And the clones are tricky, almost impossible to locate.”

B dismisses, “Don’t care about no clones, tiny jinchuuriki. I never fight alone.”

Rin smiles just a little at that. “I bet, Lord Killer B sama, Lord Eight Tails sama. Your combo attacks are infamous. As a tag team with the Yondaime Raikage, you are unstoppable. But the zetsu will make sure you’re isolated. They’ll turn everyone against you with their lies.”

“They’re welcome to try,” B raps.

He’s just hopping off of what she says. She tries a new direction, thinking carefully.

She tries, “Even with the Sanbi, the shinobi will try anything to come back at me. Zetsu is pressed cause we’re messing with his plans, got them all stressed but we just pressing through.”

B is delighted. He jumps around, pointing a finger at her while Obito just shakes his head. He raps back, “I like your flow, yo, but what I don’t know is what these shinobi got to do with me?”

Rin says, “They’ll come for you both and they’ll come so cold you can’t help but worry, they’ve been planning so old.”

Even Obito winces at that line. “Strike two,” B raps. “and I even kinda liked you. What skin you got in the game, how are you kin to me and mine?”

Okay, yeah, she’s lying, but she has to. The Kumo nin is astute and his observations are cutting. He knew them immediately, and he still fist bumped her. She knows she owes him an explanation, but she doesn’t dare. He tried to kill her sensei once, and yeah, that was war, but if he learns who they really are, apart from Sachira and Tobi, he might attack them regardless. And she doesn’t kid herself to think she stands a chance against somebody who survived her teacher twice.

She says, “Long story and really kind of boring. Don’t believe what you read in the books, they’ll say anything long as it hooks and reels, regardless of whether it’s actually real.”

“You got any proof ‘bout sneaking on roofs?”

She unzips her jacket, lifting her vest and calling chakra to her seal, letting it rise to the surface in all its sunburst fuuinjutsu patterns. It still looks like a sun to her, even against the goosebump chill that settles into her with the biting wind.

B looks at her seal with interest and whistles. “Nice ink,” he says. “I think you’re telling the truth to me, Sachira from Tea. How do I keep the dawn from turning red while other nations’ still wetting the bed?”

Rin drops the rapping. “I’m going to find the Iwa jinchuuriki to warn them, but they deserted Earth years ago. Kiri’s next on the list, and then we’re going to kill the leaders, just to be sure. Protecting the jinchuuriki should nullify their plan, but we’re going to be sure. The Bijuu will be safe. I’ll make sure of it.”

B opens his mouth but when he speaks, it’s not him. She’s seen this before, but it’s no less awe inspiring.

The Haichibi’s voice is surprisingly deep. He doesn’t rap either. The Eight Tails says, “why do you care about other jinchuuriki?”

She bows to the Bijuu in respect. “I am not a willing jinchuuriki and the Sanbi is not a willing captive. After this threat has passed, I will free the Bijuu from every nation. We will be the last jinchuuriki.”

Obito doesn’t say anything to her declaration. If anything, he’s likely guessed where her heart is. He’ll support her, she knows he will. Learning the truth about the Bijuu just strengthened her own convictions, even if Obito doubts his.

The Haichibi just laughs. “Before B, I rampaged in the village and killed shinobi and civilians alike. They will not grant me any freedom. B’s already forbidden from transforming.”

Rin says, “We have a lifetime to change their minds.”

The Eight Tails snorts like a bull. “My siblings might not be as willing to let bygones be. I’ve met my younger brother and his fiery jinchuuriki from the islands. She will not change her mind. Or his.”

Rin says, “Leave the Kyuubi to me. I will convince him and Shukaku sama.”

B cocks his head at her in surprise. “The Ichibi named himself to you?”

“He names himself every other breath. He is confident in his fierceness.”

The Eight Tails laughs, merging seamlessly back into B’s own laugh. He laughs uproariously, slapping his knee, bringing out his book to scribble down lines in it.

He slaps it closed with a snap and says, “I like you, Sachira. Here’s some free advice, cool as ice. You should have started in Tea Country. The Yonbi and the Gobi are both older than me. The Tailed sibs can find each other; it’s a bother, but they’ve been silent for years. If you can tame the fear inside you, maybe the Sanbi could give them a holler.”

Rin’s eyes are wide. She says, “thank you, jinchuuriki sama. The Nanabi is reaching out, if you can reach them, they’d like a word.”

B pats the Iron seal on his shoulder, looking thoughtful. “Nibi’s Nii’s a toddler still. Been years since bug brain’s raised their glittery head. Eight Oh’d very much like to see what’s been said.”

Below them, there’s a stir, uneasy on the wind. The hair raises on the back of her neck. The village must be in uproar over their jinchuuriki’s disappearance. Rin can see the distress from here. The Raikage must be pitching a fit; she can feel his Killing Intent from miles away, strong enough to punch the breath from her lungs.

“Oops,” she says, swaying a little. “I think someone told your brother, Lord Killer B sama.”

B nods in agreement. Even though she can’t see his eyes behind his shades, she can feel the sharpness of his gaze. She’s not sure much gets past him.

Obito says, “I can take you back, Killer B sama. Before the Raikage electrocutes us. Or whatever your famous combo attack is.”

“It’ll be ya head in our Double La-ri-at! Fools, ya fools!” He pumps his fist in the air, offering his other knuckles to Obito, who tentatively fist bumps the Kumo nin with his bound hand. Rin can’t make out much of his expression as he turns away to face him, but there’s a small smile on his face and none on Obito’s.

Obito holds out his hand, “Ready?” he asks as Rin holds on, holding out another hand to Killer B, turning his face into the thick fur of his hood to hide his activated dojutsu, even as Rin feels warmer just from standing near him. B takes his hand, looking curious, even as Rin subtly angles her body between them. Even him obviously hiding his eye is suspicious; dojutsu are rare enough that even without seeing it, B can guess. He’s most likely faced Uchiha in the war.

Obito doesn’t give him time to look. He Kamuis them back to the concert venue and dumps B onto his feet, whisking them both immediately away before any of the scrambling Kumo nin can get even an eye on them.

Obito Kamuis them away, east through the mountains, towards the coast, trying to put distance between them and the pissed off Raikage. And Kakuzu. And Rabbit. They stop only when his eye starts bleeding and Rin forces him to halt so she can heal it, checking up on the seal on his heart while she’s at it.

She asks, “are you feeling okay? Nothing weird? Or out of sorts?”

Obito frowns. “What’s wrong? Is my eye going bad?”

He’s straining his supraorbital pathways and his superior tenketsu point is shredded. But her maintenance is holding up. For now. She says, “No, it’s not that. I’m just curious.”

He thinks, looking like he’s trying to feel his body from the inside. He says, “I feel like I usually do. My right side’s a little numb, slower almost, but I think it just doesn’t like the cold.”

He has no idea at all what is inside him. Rabbit and his enforced censure are days gone.

Rin isn’t going to tell him. Not yet. Not until she knows what to do about it.

They walk. Obito says, “If the shinobi thing doesn’t work out for you, you have a career in rap.”

Rin shoves at him as he laughs, dodging. She says, “I like B. Jounin are just weird.”

“It’s like it’s a rule,” Obito agrees.

Even though she says, slyly, “You’ll fit right in,” Rin thinks there’s more to it than that, underneath the underneath. She can extrapolate the self-protective gesture of not allowing anyone to ignore you, to project your presence like a shield before you. The shinobi liked him well enough, but the civilian’s distaste would be hard for anyone to bear. She can only imagine the weight, after a lifetime of derision.

He tosses a rock at her head, underhanded. “You’re closer to jounin than me! Hey, you don’t think they’ll make me retake the Chuunin Exams?”

Rin laughs just picturing it. Without a war, he has no other way to get promoted. “Well, at least Taki likes you this time around.”

“They don’t know who I am!”

Rin says, “You know, Sachira and Tobi will probably have to die at the end of this. It won’t fool anyone, but they should think twice before questioning it.”

Obito snorts, “Yeah, right. A long lost Uchiha shows up after being dead for years, who just so happens to have a time/space technique? Nobody will buy that.”

“We can say Sensei taught it to you. Are you going to keep the mangekyo a secret, after all this is over?”

Obito looks around at the heavy forest around them, happily brushing against his shoulders as he passes. No one can ever know bout the mokuton, but she thinks his dojutsu is an acceptable way to excel.

“I don’t know,” he says. “People knowing would change things. They’d want me to use it like the Uchiha of old, until the madness gets to me.”

She very carefully does not snort in derision but it’s a close thing. The Cure of Hatred is so stupid, but it’s something he believes. “They don’t pressure Fugaku sama.”

He shrugs and suddenly she’s not sure. How much would Obito even know, with how ostracized he was as a kid? What might Madara have told him?

“What do you want to do?” Rin asks. “When we get back?”

Obito shrugs. “I haven’t thought about it. I’ll be happy to see my Baa san again. And my little cousins. Shisui’s a gennin now. He’s still a little kid in my head, like Itachi.”

Rin says, “Once I’m jounin, I’m going to ask Sensei to make me an ambassador, once I complete the training. I’m going to secure the Bijuu’s freedom, then retire as a trauma surgeon.”

She's not afraid of the allegations that would follow her career. She isn't sure she's afraid of war, not like she was. The wars between ninja are mostly nonsensical, but this is a cause she will go to war for. She almost didn't notice the shift happening. She hasn't forgotten the trenches, but maybe they mean something different to her now. Maybe she's different now.

Obito says, “yeah, I heard. Do you think the other countries will go for it?”

Rin says, “They’d better. Or I’ll make them. Taki will sign on. Maybe Kumo. Suna doesn’t have a say. Iwa probably doesn’t either.”

Obito says, “What are you going to do about Shukaku? And the Kyuubi?”

“I have a lifetime to befriend them. A century of servitude’s made them angry, but they were peaceful for a millennia.”

“Could you parse the hints B was saying? Did he say that the Iwa jinchuuriki were in fucking Tea?”

“Yes!” Rin says. What pathetic fucking Tea nin they were. “We’ll have to swing by on our way back across the continent.”

He sours. “There’s no way to walk to Kiri, is there?”

They’ll have to find another boat. Obito’s not happy about that, but Kiri is an island nation, out in the Chigiri Sea. They hadn’t been involved in the last war, but Kiri has a long history of being politically unstable, embroiled in coups and civil wars. They have a reputation of being bloodthirsty, killing off their kekkei genkai out of fear of their power to sway how the dissention tips. A lot of the refugees fleeing the bloodline purges went straight for Kumo.

She says, upbeat, “But we’ve found the Kumo jinchuuriki! B will tell the Raikage and they’ll be aware. They won’t fall to Kakuzu, or Zetsu. That’s 6 of the 9 Bijuu accounted for.”

“The Old Man won’t be happy about that. Kakuzu’s already trailing us, and he knows we’re heading for Kiri.”

Dread laps at her as the clouds roll in with the evening. They’ve covered a lot of ground and they camp under a Practice Brick that Obito erects to keep the wind off them. They’ll have to wait for a toad to show up tell Minato that they can cross Kumo off their list.

Obito argues that kidnapping is their new status quo. He insists on just grabbing the jinchuuriki in Kiri and dropping them off later. Abduction worked so well for them in Lightning, Rin can’t find a good counter for it, besides that its rude to just snatch people from their homes.

That night, while Rin sleeps pressed up against Obito to keep from shivering, it snows for the first time in the mountains. She can’t help but gravitate towards him in her sleep; he’s the only warm thing. She dreams, for the first time, of a clearing in the forest, a merrily crackling fire in the center. Its fuzzy and indistinct; she feels there might be other people there, but she can’t make out much other than the clearing, the fire in its center. She thinks she might be happy, or at least content. In her memories, it carries the same sense of warmth and contentedness, of calm, of belonging, as that still lake in her mind.

She wakes curled into Obito, his cloak thrown over her as an extra blanket. “Look,” he says, pointing outside, where the snow has covered the conifers with a light dusting, a white blanket tossed over the mountain. Everything is still and quiet.

Rin says, “I dreamed of the Sanbi.” Not much gets through Kushina’s improved seal, but she’s sure she’s never been in that particular clearing before. It’s one of the Sanbi’s memories.

“Oh?” he says. “Is he talking to you?”

“Not yet. But there was a clearing, with a campfire in the middle. He was happy, I think. To be there. With the others.” She hadn’t realized it until she said it out loud, but who else would share a campfire with a Tailed Beast?

“Others?”

“His siblings. The other Bijuu.”

Rin sets a pot of tea on to simmer while Obito de-traps the campsite, rooting through the snow to unearth them. The snow is cold but she can’t help but touch it. Its light, powdery. Leaves her fingers red and numb and melts in her hands. She’s never seen so much snow before, Konoha only ever gets light dustings, but it’s transformed the mountain into something softer, less defined. The peaks are lost in the sky, the same flat white as the ground. It’s an impressive optical illusion, makes her feel like she’s at the center of the world, like the stone and the sky are one.

Everything is quiet in the cold. Crisp. New.

She closes her eyes and drops into her mind space, the underwater cage in the center of her being. She’s floating on the surface, water walking, the chakra chains crisscrossing underneath her into the massive cage.

When she cuts off the chakra control to her feet, she sinks down through the water, past the bars coated in seals, into the cage itself. The water is cool, maybe even a little chilly, but after a minute she doesn’t even notice it. Somewhere in the darkness of the depths is a giant turtle, and this is his territory.

She can’t speak underwater, but she kneads some chakra in her hands, lets it drift off into the water for him. She’s thinking of the snow, how beautiful it is. How unexpected, even in the mountains, for her to experience an aspect of winter that hasn’t visited Fire in years.

She lets herself drift, not swimming down into the depths. Inside the seal, past the bars of the cage, things are looser. She can feel him here, like she had before the seal was shored up, back when feeling him was a constant threat. He can feel her too, and she carefully replays the voice of the Haichibi speaking to her directly from out of the mouth of Killer B. If he’s dreaming of the clearing, of his siblings, maybe hearing their voices will entice him to come closer. She thinks of the Eight Tails and B’s relationship, of the Nanabi and their monk sprouting glittering insectoid wings. She thinks of their voice too. She even recalls Shukaku’s blustering for him, tinted with her hunch that he’s really just as frightened as she was when she awoke in a cave surrounded by fake Kiri nin.

Beneath her, something stirs. The Sanbi is big, bigger than sense, a massive, heavily armed turtle with a thick gray shell, three armor plated tails, and a single viciously glowing eye. The first time she saw him, it was in a thrill of doom, the seal unraveling, Obito’s malformed genjutsu unraveling just as quickly. She was sure she was going to die.

Something moves. She’s inside the seal, past the safety of the chains, but she doesn’t retreat. She’s still, just floating, calm as can be, even as the dark spot in the center of her field of vision shifts. Bubbles trail past her in streams. A current swirls through her short hair, tugging at her clothes. Even as she tries to hide it, excitement wells up in her.

The Sanbi is awake.

She replays the voices of the Bijuu in her mind, sharing her chakra and thoughts with the Sanbi. But she’s running out of air, the burn in her lungs more and more urgent with every bubble that trails past her. She doesn’t want to move, in case it frightens him off. She can feel his distrust mounting, feel his caution, but she has his attention, for the first time, and she doesn’t want to ruin it.

His chakra is heavy as the pressure at the bottom of the ocean. It buffets her like the current. The Sanbi is chakra, in the purest sense of the word, and it’s difficult to comprehend the immeasurable quantity that feels so vast and endless. He’s a well to the center of the world, a chasm crammed in a bottle. He has all her attention, even as she can’t breathe.

A great red eye cracks open, peers up at her, a slit pupil that looks nothing like a turtle and everything like a predator. There’s black spots encroaching in her vision. Her ears pop. She thinks her old mantra from the time when being a jinchuuriki was an uphill battle. I am not your enemy. I’m Rin.

He comes closer. Once, he held her up to that great eye and studied her before flinging her away like an ant. She is so small and the danger is impossible to ignore, but she shoves it all down. She might be drowning. It’s a very real possibility. She’s been under too long and the pain of it is just another thing to ignore for the moment.

I’m Nohara Rin. It’s nice to meet you.

It’s not words, just thoughts and she can’t be sure how well he receives them. If she opens her mouth, all her precious air will escape.

The Sanbi stares at her. The depths of his eye is unfathomable. She can’t read anything on his face. She’s surrounded by the thick heavy cloud of his caution and when his armored maw opens it sends everything to churning. Something rumbles, deep and resonant.

The Sanbi says, “Breathe, girl.”

She can’t breathe. The chakra in the water weighs her down; she’s no longer sure how far under she even is. Has he pulled her down? Is she going to drown? Her chest is burning and only now the panic and confusion hits; she can’t even make out the surface. The only thing she can see is the Sanbi; he’s her whole vision now. He’s come close, too close, she’s within range of those waving tails. He could kill her so easily, but he doesn’t. She looks at him and she’s asked him to trust her over and over. She has to trust him too.

He said breathe.

Rin’s lungs give out. She opens her mouth, almost against her will, and breathes. Water rushes into her, down her throat, up her nose into her sinuses, burning. She thrashes, choking, and the water is in her. The water that’s heavy with the Bijuu’s chakra, saturated with the Sanbi, and it coats her lungs, burning. The pain is blinding, but the water pulls in and out of her as she drowns, and she’s breathing through it, the pain, breathing through the water in her lungs, sucking more in, pushing it out, and it’s a fight with her body, against the water, against the chakra in it, but the Sanbi is chakra, and she shouldn’t be fighting the Sanbi.

“Breathe,” he rumbles again as she gasps and flails, but she knows this chakra, she’s felt it for months, has used it on occasion for her own use. It’s not hers, but its familiar. She knows how it feels welling inside her, knows the strength of it, the power. It coats her lungs and she’s feeling the currents of it, the push and pull, steady and dependable as the tides. She doesn’t fight it and it carries her.

She’s not drowning. The water is in her lungs, filling her up, but she’s not drowning. The panic makes everything hazy but she’s not thrashing around anymore like a fish out of water. The Sanbi is watching her closely as she pulls water in, pushes it out again with every breathe and she’s not drowning, not at all. His chakra surrounds her, cloaks her with red, coats her lungs, and she’s not drowning.

The red eye narrows, studying her again as closely as he had the first time and he rumbles again, that massive plated maw opening to reveal crushing plate armor palates in a turtle face. His voice is as deep as the trenches at the bottom of the ocean. He squints at her, like he’s making sure she’s survived.

“Good,” he says.

The wonder sinks in. He didn’t kill her, and he had every chance. He’s guarded, wary, and his tails arc threateningly overhead, but he’s talking to her.

She’s willing to try anything.

She orients herself in the water, slowly moving her limbs as if to check their functionality. When she feels that she’s upright, she drops her head into a bow, clearing her throat, unsure how well this will work, but she lets his chakra guide her, trusts in it. Hums into the water to see the feel of it, if her vocal cords even work like this underwater. It isn’t exactly analogous to talking, but she can make herself understood just fine, even if she sounds distinctly watery.

“Hello, Sanbi sama, I’m Nohara Rin.”

He squints at and huffs dismissively. “Another jinchuuriki.”

Rin says, “not a willing one.”

His tails swing about, agitating the water. Rin says, “I could show you, Sanbi sama.”

He’s curious but cautious. He doesn’t trust her. But he doesn’t argue and she’s cycling her own chakra now and around her, her mind space dissolves.

She’s in a cave. There are ninja wearing Kiri hitai ate. There are seals all over the walls. There is a seal on her.

The scene shifts. She’s running through Fire and the Kiri nin are close behind. She’s escaped and ahead of her she can feel the sharp white whiplash of her teammate’s chakra. She doesn’t know it at the time, but she’s being herded towards Kakashi. Inside of her is a roiling ocean in storm, a confusion she can’t name until she feels him, until she sees the red chakra leaking out of the wonky fuuinjutsu matrix on her stomach. And when she realizes, she throws herself in front of Kakashi’s Chidori.

Everything changes. Obito is alive and they’re back in Kusa, where she lost him years ago. Alive, and with a red mangekyo spinning in his head, one-armed with oaks leafing around him, their hands folded into a Snake seal as his mokuton suppresses the Sanbi’s chakra eroding the seal. Kakashi is not there. Obito names a clone Swirly. Uchiha Madara pulls every string.

A twist, and they’re in the Suna desert. The seal is in catastrophic meltdown. Rin is grabbing a pot of tea that yells at her. Obito in his panic has cast his mangekyo,, through her.
In Ishi, Minato flies at them expressionless and Rin blasts him with the Sanbi’s menace. Gamahiro sips his tea. Obito says experiments and Rin says bomb. Minato is still expressionless. Kushina says the Kyuubi is hateful and puts a seal on her that looks like a sun and the Sanbi throws her so hard she regains consciousness to Obito shaking, he’s so afraid.

In Iwa, the Tsuchikage wants to buy Shukaku. There are no Bijuu in Earth. They’re safe in Kamui, safe from Kakuzu, safe from zetsu, safe in a dimension where nothing can touch the Ichibi. Nothing can use him as a weapon.

In Taki, she yells at Obito while tears stream down her face. A monk sprouts shimmering wings. The Nanabi calls themselves Lucky Sevens and looks at her like she’s the sum of all sadness. They say they’d like to speak to the Sanbi. She says I never wanted to be his jailor.

In Yu, an ANBU wearing a Moth mask stabs Obito through the gut while Rabbit watches from the trees. There’s a seal on his heart. There’s a seal on Rabbit’s tongue.

In Kumo, civilians jeer and throw tomatoes at B. They rap together. He calls the Haichibi Eight Oh and his voice is not as deep as the Sanbi’s. He says the Nibi is sealed in a toddler. That the Tailed Beasts haven’t spoken to each other in years. That the Yonbi and Gobi are in Tea.

Rabbit slits his throat and they leave him tied up on a bare peak after saving him first from Kakuzu, and them from himself. She hasn’t said a word to Obito. There’s snow outside. There’s an ocean inside. She dreams of a clearing with a fire in the middle.

When the Sanbi understands, he is enraged. His roar almost shakes her world apart and his tails slash through the water. If she were standing, his Killing Intent would put her on the ground. Her heart trembles and his chakra is corrosive, it’s hurting her almost as fast as its healing her. There’s grief tied up with his anger, an old hatred, an old, instinctual fear.

She gets only flashes. A fire lit clearing full of tiny beasts. A sense of contentment turned into deep loss. A calm, still lake where he stays for a millennia in peace. His confusion when a long-haired shinobi using Wood Release and a monkey style Sage Mode seals him away before he even knows the danger. A Kiri nin with a massive sword and the Sanbi just another weapon. Rampaging through a newborn village when the imperialist Kiri nin looks towards the fishing villages that left him alone in peace for generations. Killing countless. Control wrestled away from him. A new Kiri nin. The same sword. A building hatred. A new sword. The sword through his back, rupturing the seal. Another Kiri nin, younger. The night of a full moon when he finally overwhelmed him and ran amok. A cycle of retaliatory violence that lasts a century.

A new Kiri nin. A girl in a cave. Wearing a Konoha hitai ate with purple paint on her face under wide, scared eyes. A seal that hurts them both. The time he could have escaped but a red spinning eye stole his will, stole his agency like all other ninja before him and all ninja after. She uses his chakra like the others, until she doesn’t. A new seal, a better one, and he’s contained again, caged, but away from all the loose, wavering emotions, the messy feelings and thoughts of the newest jinchuuriki. Her pitiful attempts to share her chakra with him. The voices of his siblings. Her repeated mantra I am not your enemy.

But she is. She is shinobi, interchangeable to him as all who came before her. She may be a victim, but she's also his victimizer, and she knows no easy way to navigate that truth. She might never be able to separate the legacy of the seal from herself. The fuuinjutsu might look like a sun, but it manifests as iron bars. She is free. He isn't, and a large part of the fault is hers.

Its almost too much for Rin to handle. The Sanbi is eons old and his memories are heavy with a resentment that’s festered a hundred years. There’s a hate in him Rin doesn’t want to touch. Its an artificial hate, one grown in him as a consequence of his captivity. Its not there in his early memories, but there’s plenty of it now. She doesn’t know where to put all the hate. It doesn’t fit easily in her.

He rages, and she lets him. Like Obito in a temper, the Sanbi is a tempest. It’s not like before, where if he hit too hard on the dam, the seal would break. This is Kushina’s seal work. It will hold. She lets him roar and she lets him slash and the cage does not break. Rin does not break. She is stronger than all the hate inside him.

In her memories, her mother sings to her. Her father carries her around on his shoulders. They don’t quite understand why she feels like she needs this, but they pick her up from the Academy every day. They buy her purple paint. Obito is her best friend. Kakashi is a handful, but he grows on her. Kushina invites her to tea and eventually they plan a wedding. Minato leads them and she trusts him to protect them. Even when he can’t, she doesn’t hate him. When he cracks blank-faced jokes at Obito’s funeral, she still can’t hate him. Her Academy friends are all there. There are less than she started out with. She learns iroyo ninjutsu. She doesn’t hate Iwa even as she lays in a trench with a comatose chuunin and the bombs fall. She doesn’t hate Kumo when Kakashi vanishes into Yu for months on end. She doesn’t hate Kiri when she wakes up in a cave after a courier mission goes sideways. She thinks she doesn’t even hate Madara, even if Obito is sadder than he’s ever been. Obito grows strawberries. He grows an arm. He takes her to a world of rectangles. He laughs with her. He will not manipulate her. He will never hate her even if she doesn’t always tell the truth. She thinks she’s always loved him.

Rin doesn’t hate the Sanbi.

Hate might not be how Madara plans to win, but love is how Rin will beat him. Once, the Sanbi was small enough to hold in her hands. There’s not an ounce of hate in him then. The Sage of Six Paths gave him a name that means beach swimmer, an old name for the god of the sea Rin learned to sing to as a child standing on the banks of the Naka River. She can’t hate the Sanbi. She has decided to love him as she loves listening to her mother sing to the old gods, the gods of nature, gods with the faces of animals, as she loves that her chakra expresses itself as water.

To the Sanbi’s anger, Rin says, “Isobu.”

He calms. He has to. None of his previous jinchuuriki ever cared enough to learn his name. The currents tearing at her still, his tails stop lashing around. The storm abates. A red eye stares at her.

She says, “I will free you. I will free you all. Before I can, I will love you as fiercely as you’ve been used in the past. That’s my nindo.”

He’s staring at her. She can’t read shock on his reinforced face, but she feels it. A giant paw swings around to her and she grabs on carefully to one of the short, blunt nails in the spade-shaped paw, good for swimming, good for digging. He lifts her up to his face, to eye level. His other eye peers cautiously open, and its just as bright as the first. He studies her. It’s a parody of the first time, but instead of throwing her, he snorts and it shuffles through her hair. He lifts her up further, raising her up to the surface of the cage, right up against the bars that hum with the power of the seal.

She won’t push him. She swims up through the bars under her own power and when she crosses the barrier of the seal, everything becomes less conjoined, more distinctly separate. She can’t feel him anymore, even as she can see him hovering below the chains.

She bows her head in goodbye as bubbles raise around her from the Sanbi, from Isobu. Her head is swimming still, little flashes of insight and memory caught inside her like spindrift. Its difficult to disengage, to pull herself to the surface of the water, to blink her eyes open to the real world around her, to the tent on a mountainside in Kumo, covered in the first gentle snows of the season.

Her lungs feel raw, like she’s been scrubbed out by a salt scour. She’s also soaking wet, sitting in a puddle of water in the middle of the tent, still covered in a cloak of red Bijuu chakra that shifts and swirls and bubbles out in the air around her.

Obito is crouched two feet away from her, his mangekyo spinning in panic. The chain of the kusarigama fundo is knotted through his hands, which are red and raw, chapped and blistered like they’ve been burned. His right hand is charred. Everything smells like cedar and pine. When she blinks at him his tight expression breaks open into relief. “Rin,” he breathes, shaky. “Thank the Sage.”

“Obito,” she says, lifting a hand to see how the chakra cloak shifts and moves. “I met the Sanbi! He spoke to me.”

“That’s great, Rin,” he says, and the terror is still high in him. “Hey, maybe next time you could give me a heads up? I thought he might be hurting you.”

He’s all twisted up in his fear and his eye is wide in his pale face. Rin says, “Oh, I’m sorry,” but when she reaches for him in reassurance, he tenses and leans away. She’s still coated in the Bijuu chakra and the burns on his hands make awful sense to her.

She concentrates, trying to cut off the flow of the Sanbi’s chakra to her but it feels like it’s everywhere in her, like she’d been breathing it in. “Just a sec,” she says, waving her hands around experimentally. “Let me figure out how to turn this off.”

After a few moments, she figures out how to get the Sanbi’s chakra cloak to dissipate. The second it’s gone, the cold hits her. Rin’s freezing; she’s soaking wet in sub zero temperatures. Its so cold the sensation goes immediately to pain. She shakes violently.

“Shit,” Obito stresses, “Here.” He gives her his left hand and takes her through hand signs for his katon warming technique. Heat hits her as smoke fills the air. Obito pulls his cloak off, bundling her up in it.

Her teeth are chattering even as she cycles her chakra to help warm herself as water evaporates off of her clothes. “Here,” she makes grabby hands for Obito’s burns.

He gingerly places his hands in hers and the right is charred from where Isobu’s chakra lashed it. The left is burned more simply and its weeping lymph and blood. Chakra burns are tricky but Rin learned how to handle them after a few run-ins with Iwa’s Blast Corps. His left should be fine, but he should watch his right for a few days at least. Some of the Hashirama Cell have been destroyed, but he can twitch his fingers still so the damage doesn’t go too deep. His mokuton healing should regrow over the damaged patches, but she knows it must hurt something fierce. A burn is a different type of pain, urgent and immediate with every beat of your heart.

“Thanks,” he says, flexing his left hand before forcing his right back inside its metal backed glove. The kusarigama lies abandoned at his feet and when she’s sure he’ll be fine, she burrows into him, following the heat of his chakra. She’s so familiar with him she thinks she’d be able to pick him out of a lineup blindfolded, even if he’s suppressing his signature. He hugs her while she warms up. “What happened in there?”

Rin says, “I was just meditating, but he came up and spoke to me!” The wonder is still new. She says, “I couldn’t breathe, but he helped me talk to him. I shared some memories with him, of the others, of everything that’s happened. He was angry, but not at me. I think we have an understanding, for now. It was a lot. I think we’re taking a break.”

Obito says, “you told him everything? He’ll help us?”

Rin struggles to explain. “It wasn’t words, exactly. It’s a lot to take in for him. But I think it’s a good start.”

Obito squeezes her. “Of course it’s a good start. Have you met yourself? He has to like you.”

Rin laughs a little breathily and leans into him. “Sorry for scaring you. Thank you for not doing anything drastic.”

“I was considering it,” he admits. “You were covered in Bijuu chakra, but it didn’t seem to be hurting you exactly. You weren’t twitching or anything, you didn’t look like you were in pain, but it was freaking me out.”

Rin is exhausted, but she isn’t in any pain. She says, “I don’t think his chakra hurts me like it hurts you.” He must have tried to touch her while she was cloaked. It would explain the placement of the burns on his hands.

He says, “You’re his jinchuuriki. It makes sense it wouldn’t hurt you; you’re full of it. And I’ll be fine. I just panicked, tried to grab you. It was stupid. I knew I shouldn’t touch the chakra; I tried once in Kusa and the same thing happened. I just forgot, in the moment.”

Rin shifts, oddly restless, and says, “He’s incredible. He’s so old, his memories stretch back a millennia. Its hard to even comprehend how big he is, how long he’s been around.”

Obito says, “Does he have a name? Or is he just the Sanbi?”

Rin hesitates. “I know his name. It feels private though, I’m not sure I should share it without his permission. No ones known it in years.”

He says thoughtfully, “The Nanabi calls themselves Lucky Sevens and the Haichibi calls himself Eight Oh. Does he have a nickname I can use?” The Leaf calls the Kyuubi the Demon Fox, but Rin doubts that’s a name the Nine Tails chose for himself.

“I’ll have to ask. Sanbi should be fine for now, or Three Tails.”

“Do I get to meet him? He’s part of the team now.”

Of course Obito wants to meet the Bijuu. He’s already accepted him as part of the family. Rin warns him, “if he wants to. I’m not sure he trusts you yet.”

“Is it because of that time in Suna?”

“No,” Rin lies. “Not exactly. I don’t think he appreciated it, though.”

“I saved your life!” Obito’s visibly distressed by this. “I mean, I’ll apologize though, if he wants me too.”

“I’ll pass it along,” Rin says, finally starting to get comfortable. She says regretfully, “We should probably get out of here. I bet you could sense the Sanbi earlier, and we have no idea what Rabbit’s range is.”

“Or Kakuzu.” Obito agrees. “I’m already packed up, we just need the tent and we should be good to go.”

They Kamui further down south, out of the mountains, leaving the snow behind them. Obito’s rubbing at his eye, like it irritates him. His left eye, the empty socket he keeps covered with bandages. She’s seen him do it before but she’s noticing it more and more. When they get far enough towards the coast, where its still temperate, they shed their heavy winter gear entirely and Obito stashes it away in Kamui for them, checking on the Ichibi while he’s there, and watering his plants, which are apparently doing just fine. Usually when he makes his quick trips into his pocket dimension, he returns in a good mood but this time he’s frowning.

He says, “Did you leave a cup of tea in Kamui last time we were there?”

“No?”

He’s frowning. “There’s a cup of cold tea on the floor. I swear I didn’t put it there.”

Rin knows exactly how many cups they own and he does too. She says, “No one else can access Kamui. It had to be one of us.” She thinks about it for a moment and then amends, “Or Kakashi.”

Obito brightens. “You think he’s figured out Kamui? Why would he leave us tea?”

Rin shrugs. “He could be experimenting. You’ve been rubbing at your eye. Are you getting anything from him? Sensei said he could get flashes from you.”

Obito frowns, thinking. “I don’t think so? I mean, I haven’t like, seen Konoha or anything.”

“What have you seen?”

Obito shrugs weakly. “Tea?”

Rin huffs a laugh. “I think we’ve solved the mystery of the appearing teacup.”

“I wonder if we can use this to send messages to each other,” he ponders. “Or supplies. It would be useful if he could drop a toad off in Kamui and I could pick him up from there.”

It’s been weeks since they’ve had one of their teacher’s summons with them. The toads get cold in Kumo and they’ve covered so much ground there’s no telling when one might catch up. They haven’t heard anything from the Leaf Village since that short message after Rabbit’s attack. Has Minato fixed the problem with the false ANBU? Do they know Kakuzu switched sides? What did they learn about the clone corpse that Obito sealed away for them? They aren’t operating blind or anything, but it would be nice to know what was going on on Konoha’s end.

They migrate south and east by turns, down through vast pine barrens. Rin visits with Isobu whenever she finds the time. They’re still getting to know each other but they’re getting better at communicating. The turtle sleeps for long periods of time and even when he’s awake he isn’t necessarily chatty. But he’ll float a feeling or two towards her, make his opinion known. They’re taking baby steps. It suits Rin just fine.

Obito’s getting better at the kusarigama. He grudgingly passes along the naginata to her. “You’re better at it.”

It’s the truth, but she thinks he’ll do better with one that would suit his height.

He’s working on a move that would phase his body through attackers only to tangle them in the fundo chain he drags behind him. Working with Kamui like this exposes another flaw to the technique. Like the three second opening between uses, after about five minutes of constantly Kamuiing attacks through him, his endurance starts flagging and he’s down to fire and fists.

“Guess it’s another stupid time limit,” he says, pulling the curved blade from the dirt by its chain to catch it in his hand. “Hey, spar with me.”

After a few days, he has his Kamui trick down and can successfully catch her in the chain. Rin is just as fast with the naginata. Rin thinks that if Gamaken shows up, he’d be pleasantly surprised by their weapons training in his absence.

But no toad shows up. Rabbit doesn’t show up either, or Kakuzu. They don’t even run into any cloud ninja on their way to the coast.

But they do find the coast. Rin smells it first, the crisp salt in the air, the way the Sanbi opens his eye inside her consciousness when it first registers. She’s been working on sharing her senses and perceptions with him. It doesn’t work too well yet, and she can never seem to get it to function on command, but it’s a work in progress. Maybe soon he’ll be able to talk through her if he wants too. He doesn’t really want to talk at all, but it will be nice to give him the option.

The south coast of Lightning is rocky and the beach is gritty and pebbly, dotted by teeming tidepools and kelp beds. There is no one in sight, so Rin tiptoes into the shallow waves and dips her toes in the surf to find that the water is shockingly cold. The driftwood they burn is blue and green and crackling from the salt, the waves a constant shush against the sand, a sea breeze making her hair shaggy where it’s growing out.

They watch the waves. Obito says, “I can feel the seaweed. There’s something big out there, nibbling it.”

But he can’t sense any land. There’s no town in sight, no boat, no archipelago to island hop across on their way to Kiri. Rin can name a dozen nations somewhere out there from her Academy days but none are close enough to reach. A lot of the islands are unincorporated land, but she knows roughly where Hanakusa is supposed to be, but nearby or not, she doesn’t know if they’re north or south of it.

Obito says, “we should go south. At least we know where Shimo and Yu are.”

Rin says, “the mountain passes are supposed to be impassable once the snows set in.” She vastly dislikes the idea of wandering around the glaciers until they die of exposure or are forced to retreat into Kamui until spring.

Obito says, “there’s got to be a town or something on the coast before we get all the way to Frost. A tiny fishing village.”

“A tiny fishing village won’t take us to Kiri.”

“It might take us to Yu.”

She’s thinking of the famous onsens in the south of Yu. How nice the hot springs will feel in the chill of winter. “I’m not opposed to Yu.”

The incoming tide makes them retreat back up the cliffs. The head south. They do find a temple built into the side of the cliffs, facing the Chigiri Sea, named after the pirates that prowl between the islands. After Rin correctly recites a handful of prayers, they offer them sanctuary for the night and its some of the best clam stew Rin’s ever eaten, spicy enough to burn her mouth, but fresh enough she can taste the sea. The monks say there’s a town further down the coastline and they say their goodbyes and leave the next morning. Obito is awkward in his ignorance but the monks are nice enough. They think his facial covering is a type of penance.

She explains it to him like this: Shinobi worship the Sage who used chakra. They praise his power, his strength. Civilians worship the entities who control the natural world and work with them for the rains, for the harvest, for harmony and peace, even as the shinobi carve the world into bloody chunks. They are thankful, grateful even in a world in which they have little power even over their own lives. Shinobi pray like this: bring me victory in battle, protect me from my enemies. Civilians pray like this: I am grateful for what I have. Protect this land which we all rely on.

Obito squints at her. “But the Sage made the Bijuu.”

Did he? Rin thinks but she shrugs. “It’s not the power that appeals to civilians.”

He looks thoughtful. “What appeals to you?”

She thinks about it. “I like the harmony of it. The balance between the elements. It’s a kinder view of the world.”

She doesn’t say it out loud, but she also likes the singing and how it reminds her of her parents, how it’s a way to keep them close even when she hasn’t seen them in months. Even when they think she’s dead. She can’t imagine her mother singing her funeral rights without a deep aching sadness. All of her most valuable skills she learned, she learned from them, not the shinobi world.

Obito considers that for a while. He says, jokingly “a kinder view of the world, huh? What was I, a charity case? Admit it, you were only friends with me through pity.”

She rubs sand in his hair and he howls with laughter. A green pine needle falls onto her face like a slap as a nearby tree becomes invested in their sprawl. They always take Obito’s side, as a general rule. “Ha!” Obito says as the tree pokes her with its needles. “The balance of nature says I win.”

They find the fishing village that evening, just a small little inlet town. They can’t sense any shinobi in the area.

There’s less than a dozen boats docked at the wharf. None of them are willing to take them to Kiri, or even Yu. They’re skiffs and sloops, not meant for rough open water, but when Rin flashes some coin, one old man is willing to take them as far as Hanakusa. He won’t take them further for any amount of money.

They don’t have any other option. To catch the tide, they have to leave immediately and Obito is already depressed just at the sight of the wooden skiff. Its maybe 20 feet long, wind powered, with a mainsail and a few other little ones that Rin doesn’t know enough about boats to identify the use of. A kind woman sells her some candied ginger for Obito to chew on. It’s supposed to help settle his stomach from the affects of his seasickness but he’s already green just watching the waves roll in.

The boats name turns out to be Hareta Hi and Rin takes it as a good omen. The gentleman who’s agreed to take them introduces himself as Mayomaru and he usually catches bluefin tuna to sell up the river to the Capitol for the Daimyo. “I catch the best tuna here round,” he brags. “Good firm tuna. If they don’t put up a fight, I throw them back.”

Obito sits on an overturned bucket and keeps his eyes on the horizon, gnawing furiously on the ginger candy. He’s ignoring them in favor of not being sick and Rin can’t hold it against him, even if it leaves her making small talk with Mayomaru, who’s just a little odd.

“You shinobi?” he asks. “Don’t see to many soldiers around these parts. Not since the war.”

“Unaffiliated,” Rin says. “We’re from Tea.”

The fisherman shakes his head. “Don’t got no business going to Kiri. They’re killing their own shinobi over there. It’d be better for you to go to the Hidden Cloud. The Raikage treats his people right. You seem like a nice girl. You’d fit right in.”

“Thank you,” Rin says. “But we’re trying to stay out of wars. Getting off the continent would be best.”

“Harrumph.” Mayomaru says at the same time that Obito loses his inner battle and stands up to hurl over the side of the boat. “Kiri’s at war, girl. Just with itself.”

When he’s done, Obito curls in the bottom of the skiff. Mayomaru says, “That one don’t got his sea legs on right.”

Rin sighs. “Not a lot of boats in Tea.”

Hanakusa is thankfully not too far away. It’s a small cluster of volcanic islands all in a row, many of them uninhabited. They have to pass a few to get to a habited one, where there will hopefully be a boat willing to take them on the next leg of their journey.

But when they round past the third uninhabited island, a larger ship is drifting in the shallows. When they come into sight of it, it lifts anchor and white sails unfurl. The bow points at them like a condemning finger as the ship wheels about to give chase, a flag with colors Rin isn’t familiar with hoists into sight.

Mayomaru’s face goes pale. He spits over the side of the skiff three times in quick succession. “Damned pirates,” he says.

From the floor of the boat, his forehead pressed into the bucket, Obito just groans.

Chapter Text

Chapter 17: To Bite the Hand: Kakashi

He wants to blitz into the underground Root base, crackling with carefully controlled fury but he is decidedly, artificially, numb. The curse mark is a warning burn in the back of his throat, already not liking the direction of his thoughts, but Kakashi’s anger, his fear, his shame, it throbs but its distant. It compartmentalizes neatly away for the moment.

The other Root ninja are blank faced at his entrance; he’s never seen one show anything that could be even generously called an emotion. It is the one real difference between them still, one he relishes, even as he is aware that it is a useless, contrived divide with no true effect. He may still be able to be angry about the seal, but that anger stops him in no way against the absolute compulsion the seal has him under, just the same. His expression may be bland but his hands are tight fists.

Even Danzo looks unimpressed with his display, maybe faintly disgusted at the sign of weakness, but Kakashi’s already learned his worth to the Commander of Root. Danzo might deeply dislike his newest operative, but he won’t dispose of him until he stops being useful. And Kakashi is too useful for him to kill just yet.

Kakashi stands tense-tall before Danzo, feeling ozone crisp electric around him. Danzo won’t abide any disrespect, but this is the one place, surrounded by ninja with the same curse mark, that Kakashi can speak his mind. It’s a tightrope between what punishments he’s willing to accept for his words and how skilled the Root medics in the base are at keeping him cleaned up enough that Minato doesn’t get suspicious. It doesn’t help that Kakashi keeps 99% of his skin covered at all times.

He snaps a textbook perfect salute, eye focused on the Foundation Head. He says, “Danzo sama, newest report from the Office of the Hokage. The Root assassination squad has failed their mission.”

It’s not quite an accusation, but Kakashi is sick with the knowledge that this is all his fault. He hadn’t known that Danzo would send a kill squad after his teammates when he told him their last location, but it doesn’t matter even if he had. He would have told Danzo anyway. He wouldn’t have able to help himself.

To Danzo silence, he takes a calculated risk, pressing further. “Agents Moth, Lion, and Koi are eliminated. Agent Rabbit has changed his mission parameters to tailing.”

Danzo doesn’t react. Sometimes it’s like he’s fashioned the emotional parameters on himself. Its not usual for Kakashi to be the most expressive in the room.

Danzo taps the fingers of his good hand upon his desk. “The Ichibi is still in danger of being reclaimed. As long as Uchiha Obito survives, there’s a chance that Uchiha Madara can force him to retrieve it from his Kamui dimension. To secure the Leaf Village’s safety, Obito is a necessary sacrifice.”

Kakashi asks, tightly, “And Rin?”

Only now does Danzo frown. He hates being questioned, in any form. Kakashi doesn’t even expect him to answer but he says, “The Sanbi would be back in play, in a capacity we’re prepared to deal with, Hound.”

He never calls him by his name. Kakashi is Hound, now. At least, in all the ways that matter. The implications of his answer make the rage spike in him and as punishment for his Killing Intent directed at Danzo, the seal activates at his treason, sending burning pain down his every nerve, slicing down his spine. It’s debilitating, but Kakashi can’t even react. He’s learned how to hide the effects after long practice keeping his reactions from Minato when he treads too close to what he can and can’t say.

Danzo’s still frowning a rare frown at him, like he can’t understand Kakashi’s anger at him trying to have his team killed. He says, “Hound, see Hawk on your way out. You’re dismissed until further notice.”

Kakashi salutes again but it takes everything Kakashi has to remain impartial. The curse mark is a violence against himself, a concentrated, ugly wound he self-inflicts with everything he can’t say to his teacher, with everything he can’t help but say to Danzo.

He’s told them everything he knows. And he knows enough to be damning. He is the spy, the leak, the conspirator slipping information to Danzo from the Hokage’s desk itself. He’s told them about Obito, about Rin, about the Bijuu and Uchiha Madara, the mangekyo and the mokuton, anything he knows about the minions, whatever he’s been able to piece together about ANBU and the office of the Hokage. He’s even told them about Kushina, who’s never done him any wrong except smell too similarly to Rin.

He is too close to the investigation to not cause harm. Danzo chose his target well. Even now, Minato calls him in for meetings and everything he says Kakashi will repeat to Danzo after. He is unable to help himself. If Danzo asks, the seal compels him to answer. He can’t hide anything; he can’t lie by omission or misdirection. The seal works on intent: he can neither write, gesture, or act out anything having to do with Danzo, or Root, or the Foundation. He can give nothing away to Minato, no hint, no sly guess, and his genius mind contorts itself down rabbit holes of loopholes that the seal nullifies before he can even consider acting. He can’t even activate the gag in front of Minato to point out that something is wrong.

He experimented with the seal, at first, on his living room floor with Pakkun, to see just how far he can bend the rules before the seal enforces its will on him. Since Pakkun isn’t sealed, he’s the perfect partner for Kakashi to learn the rules. If he attempts to speak anything even in code about what happened after the ANBU collected him from his house, the gag activates and chokes him into painful silence. His hand paralyzes and refuses to write the kanji. His whole body either goes numb or fills with a burning pain, the symptoms of which he is further compelled to hide from Pakkun. The curse mark’s control is complete. His will is not his own.

Kakashi can’t handle Danzo’s will. He can’t stand being dishonest with his pack, with lying to Pakkun, with betraying Minato and his team and his village. It’s quite possibly tearing him up inside, a physical pain that only grows the better he gets at his deception.

In the update meeting, Minato says kill squad and Kakashi understands that he has gotten his team killed. Root assassins have killed Obito before he even got to see him again; Root assassins have killed Rin. If they are dead, he is going to find some way to get himself killed. The plan grows more appealing every day he is forced to be a traitor and the steps flow logically in a neat order that leads to a confrontation with real ANBU that has nothing at all to do with Root but has everything to do with goading them into killing him. It is no real relief to hear that they survived this first attack. Not when Kakashi himself will be forced into helping plan the next.

He thinks back to that now, just in case it’s the last time he can muster up any reactivity towards it. Kill squad, Minato said, and maybe he was more perplexed than angry. It’s difficult to tell; he’s so rarely seen his teacher not have the answers. It’s a sight that’s becoming disconcertingly familiar. He knows his mentor is not infallible, but he doesn’t like reminders. He’s unprepared for the reality that is Minato in the dark, when he needs him so desperately to piece it all together, before Kakashi succeeds in killing them again.

As Minato continued to speak, Kakashi thinks he succeeded in looking appropriately bored. He’s trying very, very hard to look uninterested, even as sparklers fizz and fritz in his blood. Minato is concerned about him, Kakashi knows he is, but the teen is all misdirection and he’s intentionally leading Minato to all the wrong conclusions. His sensei even suspected him of being a bigot; it’s a successful enough distraction from the real reason he’s avoiding his teacher, which is that if Minato openly suspected Kakashi of being a hidden nin, Kakashi would be compelled into attempting to kill either his teacher or himself. Telling him is suicide, and if Minato knows, Kakashi is dead already; his Hokage will put a Rasengan through him and it will be righteous. Even Kakashi is rooting for him most days.

This isn’t what he focuses on. He can’t afford to forget his sensei’s even expression, to forget that he feels things he doesn’t show.

Hawk is waiting for him by the door. Hawk is some kind of bastard Yamanaka and nothing in all of Kakashi’s experience dodging Inoichi’s psyche evals has prepared him for the way Root has weaponized the clan ability. There are a few clan kids in Root; Kakashi has seen the kaikachu of the Aburame, the blond ponytails of Yamanaka, has seen shadows twist around the feet of a blank-faced teen. The one clan he’s sure has been spared having their kids stolen and pressed into service through the Foundation is the Uchiha and Inuzuka. Danzo relies too much on Kakashi for him to think he’d dared to add a sharingan to his ranks and there are no ninken partners with any of the agents, which is either proof of their lack of involvement or further evidence of the unspeakable horrors of the Foundation’s Graduation Exam, which make the Blood Mist Village’s own exam looks like child’s play. He’s sick just thinking about it. But Kakashi crossed a line in questioning Danzo, especially in front of the others, and this is his punishment for his insubordination, useless as it is.

Hawk catches his head in a iron claw and there’s nothing he can do to avoid the invasion of Root into his very thoughts, modifying his behavior and rewiring his thought process to be more easily overwrote by the seal and Danzo’s will. She’s good, but she’s young, and self-taught. In her hands, the technique is assuredly clumsier, more painful than necessary, but effective nonetheless. When Hawk is done, the anger and shame feel further away, easier to hide. Less urgent, less important. The impulse to do violent murder upon Danzo’s person has disappeared entirely.

Only Pakkun has noticed when he comes back more and more empty, but Kakashi has ordered him into inaction. Pakkun knows enough about his investigation before everything fell apart that he could name the hidden nin, even name Danzo from how Kakashi is sure he’s carried the Councilmember’s scent home on his new uniform. The realization is the opposite of hope. His first words to the pug had been not to tell Minato and that it was an order. And while Pakkun could argue with him in the past over orders, he could not disobey a direct order from his summoner once given. His pack is just as trapped as Kakashi is, seals on their tongues or no curse marks at all.

Kakashi has his orders. He leaves and nobody stops him. He doesn’t case the village for zetsu; he’s stopped doing whatever he can get away with before the seal suspects self-sabotage. He needs something to give Minato, but as Danzo had dismissed him, it fits nicely into the compartment that let him go instead to his house and try to sleep off Hawk’s mental meddling. He’s recovering less and less every time; eventually, somebody has to notice. Unfortunately, Kakashi has done a good job isolating himself from almost everyone. and even to his team and few friends he presents a false face, masks upon masks. There is little hope for him to give himself away in this way, which means that it’s one of the few ways he can allow himself to cope without the seal interfering.

He enters through his tunnel, into the closet, then out into the living room. The house is empty. He hasn’t been summoning his pack. He won’t force his own failings on them. The first time he put on the armor and summoned them for a mission, all his ninken were quiet as Buru. They’d known he was Root, but it hurts them to see him so helpless, for them to be so helpless to help him. They can’t stand it. He won’t make them.

He can’t sleep. His mind is overrun with the memory of Minato saying,, kill squad, of the realization that Kakashi has killed them again, more finally this time, in a way that sticks. How quickly and decisively his teacher had reacted to the news, the way his blue eyes iced over, the way he wouldn’t let go of one of his marked kunai. Kakashi couldn’t even look at his Hokage most days, knowing how deeply his betrayal went. Even now, as he tosses and turns, his brain formulates new ways he can sabotage his sensei’s investigation into the hidden nin, what he can do to keep everything from leading back to the Foundation, to Danzo, to Root.

It’s a miserable night, and its sure to be a busy day tomorrow. Minato is on the warpath and Kakashi doesn’t like what he’s thinking he’ll do to keep his teacher busy enough to overlook Root, what he’s sure Danzo will make him do. And the Nara is already naturally suspicious of him; Kakashi hasn’t figured out yet how the laziest man alive is such an interfering busybody.

He’s tired in the morning, but he reports at daybreak to the Hokage Tower, ready to keep his teacher from accomplishing his goals. Minato is there, wearing standard jounin gear and he’s sitting cross legged on the surface of his new desk, eyes closed. His breathing is deep and even. It is not a good sign.

Kakashi flares his chakra to announce himself and skirts over to the windows to see what he can see in the village. Minato doesn’t twitch.

An ANBU flickers into view on the other side of the window and Kakashi backs up to let them through. Bear is flanked by two others, one in a crow mask, and one in the stylized mask of a chameleon, eyes disconcertingly going different ways. It’s a mask Kakashi recognizes. His heart is sinking but he remains indifferent to the deep cover Root operative as the squad slips into the room. He can almost feel Bear eyeing him from underneath his mask but Kakashi ignores him.

Kushina appears, slamming the door closed behind her right in Mitokado’s surprised face. She’s grumbling and irritated, but Kakashi’s never even sensed a hint of what lies beneath. As a jinchuuriki, Kushina must keep the Kyuubi under lock and key.

She’s wearing her jounin gear as well instead of her green dress and her long hair is tied up behind her hitai ate. She nods at the ANBU, still grumbling under her breath, a cup of coffee in one hand and a sharpened kunai in the other. She is not a morning person.

At the sound of the door slamming closed, Minato opens his eyes and his pupils are horizontal and yellowed, the orange flare markings signaling a perfect Sage Mode in effect. Kakashi tenses fractionally as his teacher’s odd eyes sweep over the group, right past Kakashi and Chameleon, only to zero in on the cup of coffee in Kushina’s hand. The gravity of the Sage Mode is immediately negated by the grabby hands he makes for the coffee.

When Kushina hands him the cup, he drains it in one big gulp. It is toady enough that Kakashi is weirdly grateful that his ninken can’t teach senjutsu. With a smack of his lips, Minato looks over at the ANBU squad. Kakashi is hopeful that they’re going to split up; it would spread the two Root agents evenly among the groups to cover all the intel. He’s then horrified in a vague, distant way at how easily the thought rose in him. The seal is insidious and he repeats the nindo he adopted from the teammate who sacrificed so much for him, even as he actively works towards his death. Obito’s words in his mind help keep him focused on his real self. Kakashi has friends, a team, he has bonds in the Leaf, and Danzo will not make him forget. His nindo is one of the only things separating Kakashi from Hound.

Minato addresses Bear first. “This mission is classified. We’re casing the village for the Hidden nin. Your team will assist on the original investigation, then retreat to cover ANBU’s ranks. Assume every agent could be compromised. There are ANBU operating outside official sanctions. I want one in custody by the end of the day.”

Bear nods sharply and Crow and Chameleon salute. That assignment is fucked from the beginning, Chameleon will make sure of it. Minato turns to Kushina, looks at Kakashi with his Senjutsu eyes, and Kakashi is unnerved slightly; it’s like looking dead at an enemy dojutsu. Minato says, “My team is going to cover the entirety of the Leaf Village today. If there’s any Hidden nin around, I want them alive for questioning.”

Kakashi nods while Kushina just grinds a fist into her opposite hand, like she’s imagining her revenge on those who attacked Obito and Rin.

The Village is divided into quadrants, then further broken down into districts. The search is going to be thorough, but pointless. Danzo had the nights head start to get everything out, courtesy of Kakashi himself.

In the small hours of the morning, they start at the wall behind the Hokage Mountain and work inwards. Minato scans everything with his Sage Mode, which ups his naturally poor sensing to frankly ridiculous levels. When the movement wears off the Senjutsu, Kushina and Kakashi guard him while he gathers more nature chakra for the next leg of the casing. His sensei has markers scattered throughout the village at strategic intervals, but they work their way through it on foot. The pointlessness of the exercise makes him grind his molars together under his mask, especially when he nicks his hand on a shuriken to summon Uhei and Guruko, his best trackers, to aid the look that he is helping. Guruko is subdued and Uhei’s tail is low, but they dutifully go off on an assignment they know is pointless, forced into helping Kakashi maintain his lie. The list in his head of people he will never make it up to grows longer and longer each day.

By lunch, Minato is frustrated but not showing it very well. He knows that he should have found something by now, and the fact that there’s not anything here rubs him the wrong way. Kakashi can see his frown deepen as the day goes on without so much of a hint of suspicious activity in the village. The silence is deafening and Chameleon and Kakashi have matching blank expressions.

Uhei slinks back to report that he’s got nothing on his end towards evening and his eyes are sad and Kakashi wordlessly dismisses them before anyone can pick up on their mannerisms. Maybe only Minato knows his pack well enough to notice if they are acting off, but he’s distracted right now by the utter lack of fake ANBU to discover.

They search the whole village before nightfall. Nothing outside the expected is found, even if they stop a few petty crimes in progress, Minato taking the time to dump them at the Leaf Police just to feel like he’s accomplishing something worthwhile on his day off from his Hokage duties. It’s almost funny: the look on the amateur thief’s face when he saw his pissed off Sage Mode Hokage bearing down on him in an alley for snatching purses at the market. He’s sure Fugaku’s not particularly pleased at the influx of pickpockets and simple lowlifes in his police station. The thing that makes it not so funny to picture is the realization of how Minato will turn all that anger on him in a heartbeat. Kakashi can’t even seriously consider fighting Minato. It would be easier for Kakashi to take himself down than for him to let Minato give him over to Morino Ibiki for interrogation and let Inoichi get a peek at his head when he wouldn’t break under the torture.

But he wouldn’t last that long. Root is everywhere. He’d be silenced before the Yamanaka got a chance to crack his skull like an egg.

At nightfall, the ANBU melt away until Kakashi can’t sense them anymore, off to dig through the ranks for anyone who shouldn’t be there. They won’t find anything. After a full day of fruitless searching, Minato Hirashins him and Kushina back to the Hokage Office to strategize for the next day. Kakashi carefully keeps their focus inside the village walls. He’s not sure if Minato can locate the base with his Sage Mode, but he’d rather not take that risk.

Minato is slumped in his chair, dejected and worn out from a day of near constant Senjutsu. Kushina is more angry than upset; she wants vengeance for the kill squad and Kakashi mimics them both, a careful tightrope of concerned and frustrated. The frustration is very real; it helps sell the lie nicely.

Kakashi agrees to meet again in the office at the same time tomorrow to do it all over again and he dodges Kushina’s attempt to ruffle his hair on his way out, substituting himself with a potted plant to escape. It’s the shape of their usual interactions, but the guilt wears at him.

He goes straight home after. He’s tired and starving, but instead of eating or showering or sleeping he chews up a soldier pill and carefully changes out of his standard jounin uniform and into his Root uniform, the ANBU gear and armor, his usual tanto exchanged for a uniform tip-less tanto. The plate armor fastens with a few final clicks and on his exposed shoulder he carefully draws on a red stylized ANBU Leaf sigil. A few of the agents have real ANBU tattoos from where they’ve successfully infiltrated ANBU ranks, like Chameleon, but only one person in the entire village can tattoo ANBU and Danzo won’t risk exposing them to bring him into the illicit operation. The red paint is sealed to keep it from smearing or washing away and then Kakashi slides his mask into place.

In the mirror is Hound, leanly muscled, all his height in his hair, pale as a ghost in the reflection in the mirror of his childhood bedroom, mask as empty and void of personality as the abandoned compound around him.

He reports back to Danzo with the soldier pill churning artificial energy into him, his alertness tinged with a staticky erratic quality that keeps his heart pumping above his usual resting rate. The crash would be horrible, but he knows he won’t be able to perform accurately without it, not on how little sleep he’s been getting, not with the long night ahead of him.

The secret tunnel under the wall is abandoned: signs of Danzo’s preparations for the Hokage’s search. He slips through the forest to the base and is greeted at the door by blank faced guards who take his passcode and stare him silently through.

The base is busier than usual, with most of the operatives sheltering there away from Minato’s prying eyes. Kakashi estimates that there’s maybe 60-70 operatives all together, most around the age of 18. The average age of a new Root agent is 16, younger even, if they graduated through the Foundation. One of the oldest teams was Lion’s, who just got wiped out during the attack on Obito and Rin. The loss of three top agents is a blow Kakashi’s not sure how Danzo will recover from, especially with Rabbit still tied up somewhere in Yu or Kumo. He wonders how Obito and Rin felt, having to defend themselves from fellow Leaf shinobi. Obito had never killed in the time that they were on Team 7 together and Rin is primarily a medic. They don’t have the experience at it that Kakashi does, even if the Bingo Book states that Obito had quickly passed that particular milestone in a shinobi’s career.

He reports immediately to Danzo, in the office with the big oak wood desk. Danzo doesn’t look up from where he’s signing his name to papers on his desk and Kakashi salutes and drops to attention until he looks up at him with a stern look.

“Danzo sama, report from the Office of the Hokage.” At Danzo’s prompting look, Kakashi continues, “Misdirection mission was a success. The Hokage used Senjutsu to search the village, as expected. He is suspicious about the lack of activity but doesn’t suspect sabotage.”

Danzo hums thoughtfully, his expression severe under his bandages. “Do you have an update on Chameleon?”

“Chameleon is with ANBU Commander Bear searching through the ranks.”

Danzo asks in his deep, commanding voice, “Do you know the identity of the ANBU Commander, Hound?”

He doesn’t even hesitate. “ANBU Commander Bear is Nara Shikaku sama.”

The address is all the rebellion he can give. It doesn’t get past Danzo, who frowns at him like he’s being unreasonable again. “How sure are you, Hound?”

He grinds out, “I’ve seen him unmasked, Danzo sama.”

Danzo’s eye narrows, almost disappearing into the wrinkles on his face. He barks out, “in my day, ANBU had more propriety. I would see any operative removed from his position for such a breach of security.”

Kakashi has nothing to say to that so he remains quiet while Danzo thinks. After shuffling the papers on his desk, Danzo barks out, “Lynx, Cricket,” and the two masked agents appear silently before him, on either side of Kakashi. Danzo says, “I have a mission for you three. Destabilize the relations between the Uchiha clan and the village Administration. A Uchiwa was left at the scene of the breach of security in the Office of the Hokage, as well as at other crime scenes in the village recently. The Leaf Police are covering this information up. I want a whisper campaign against the clan running by sunup.”

“Hound,” he says and Kakashi snaps to unwilling attention. “You take point on this one. Lynx is young. Maybe he can learn some discretion from your experience. Cricket is your second.”

Lynx doesn’t even flinch. Kakashi says, “Danzo sama, the Hokage has ordered me to assist him in stabilizing relationships between the Uchiha and the village.”

The blatant conflict of interest doesn’t faze the old war hawk. He says, “the Uchiha are a threat to the Leaf. You will do this, Hound. The Hokage has not taken any actions to realize any plan he may have regarding the clan.”

Kakashi grits out, “he’s been distracted lately, Danzo sama.”

The defense of his sensei displeases the councilman. “Regardless, the Hokage’s inaction is but a sign of his weakness in defending the security of the Leaf Village. I want the civilians in on the distrust of the clan. Your sharingan should be more than capable of instilling some terror into them.”

Even as he hates it, Kakashi knows he will do this thing, because Danzo told him to, and Danzo’s will is ingrained in him by a seal on the back of his tongue. He salutes snappily, “Danzo sama.”

The three of them leave in formation, tree walking back through the forest, back under the wall and into the village. They Shunshin onto a bare rooftop to strategize. Kakashi is already hatefully familiar with Lynx and his abilities, but Cricket is a mystery to him. “What are your specialties, Cricket san?”

The Root operative replies in a monotone but Kakashi pegs them as one of the rare kunoichi in Root. Danzo, for all his other flaws, is also a misogynist and the ranks reflect his bias. “Genjutsu and infiltration expert.”

That explains why Danzo sent them on this mission. Kakashi says, “We’re going to utilize you as our point. We’ll be under henge.”

Cricket nods and body flickers away. Kakashi henges himself into a simple shinobi uniform disguise, his hair just as unruly, but now black as ink. He’s pale enough to pull off the skin tone and when he tugs his headband straight, revealing his sharingan, he’s indistinguishable from an officer on the Leaf Police. Lynx follows his example, but Kakashi thinks he’s little more than a kid and his officer disguise is too short to pass off as a real Uchiha.

Kakashi shakes his head, “You’re the civilian.”

After a second of silence, Lynx switches his henge into a civilian disguise, the blandest henge Kakashi’s ever seen, no hint of any imagination or creativity. Kakashi’s yet to see any evidence that Danzo’s pet mokuton user has a personality, and this uninspired disguise is just another strike against him. Kakashi says in disbelief, “Have you ever even seen a civilian before?”

Lynx looks at him blankly. Kakashi wonders if he was raised in Orochimaru’s lab and immediately funneled into the Foundation, if the kid’s ever even seen the sun before. Kakashi demonstrates a believable Transformation Jutsu, and Lynx tweaks his disguise to match him. He’s got all the personality of a bare wall, but Kakashi figures his age will be enough to garner the appropriate amount of sympathy.

He sends Lynx off to get into position. Then he henges himself back into an officer of the Leaf Police, sharingan visible for the world to see, the chakra drain already pulling at him as he waits for an audience to wander by.

After a few minutes, a henged Cricket is in position with a small crowd of civilians on their way back from some dessert stand, holding cartons of sweets and laughing. Lynx kicks at rocks in the middle of the road, in full view, some bored little kid minding his own business. Kakashi thinks he really can’t be more than 10 but any sympathy he might feel for the lab rat gets placed neatly aside. When the civilians get close enough, Kakashi swoops down into position. He’s almost looking forward to this part.

It’s Cricket who throws a rock through the glass window of the store and shatters it but when the civilians look towards the noise, Lynx is all they see, kicking rocks around like it was an accident. A better agent would look chagrined but Lynx is apathetic.

Kakashi Shunshins directly in front of the kid, roughly grabbing his skinny arm and manhandling him to the ground. Lynx allows it, quiet, but maybe the civilians will think its out of fear or shock. “Halt!” Kakashi barks in his best impression of an angry Fugaku. “I’m taking you in for that, brat!”

To Lynx’s empty look, he whispers, “fight me,” only to regret it when the scent of Wood Release washes over them. “Not like that!” He hisses quickly, not wanting to pick splinters out of his hands again.

Lynx squirms a bit unconvincingly, but Kakashi helps the performance by shaking the kid around hard enough his head lolls. “Stop resisting!”

The civilians call out in protest at his rough handling of a literal child, and Kakashi whirls on them, dragging Lynx along with him. His sharingan is blazing in his head and the civilians recoil from him in instinctive fear and distrust, Cricket’s genjutsu making it look like he’s got a full set.

It’s a scene they repeat on the other side of the village. Police brutality and abuse of power squared away, Kakashi summons Bisuke and mimes an Uchiha kicking an adorably cute puppy around to check off the animal cruelty box. Bisuke plays along with gusto, but his eyes are sad when he obeys Kakashi’s orders to play stray and walks off with a fake limp and a yelp as Kakashi’s mimed kick connects. It’s a display even the most cold-hearted bastards would regard as unacceptable from decent folk.

In a shinobi bar, Cricket sashays around spreading rumors of the Uchiha’s involvement in the break in. She’s older and brunette and the chuunin’s eyes follow her around as she spreads her tale. Kakashi’s worn out from playacting Uchiha and his sharingan aches in his face. They stage similar scenes around the village throughout the night. In the morning, the rumors will start to spread. In three days, all the shinobi will have heard them. By the end of the week, the civilians will be on board as well.

In the early morning, he reports back to Root to inform of a successful mission and to drop off the Foundation agents back to Danzo. Then he goes home and changes back into his regular jounin gear. He washes his face, slaps himself a little, and checks himself in the mirror. The exhaustion prints a dark bag under his eye, but most of the evidence is hidden by his regular mask. He devours a few ration bars and chugs some water and then he sets out for the Hokage Tower for another full day of uselessly casing the village with Minato and Kushina.

Bear is back, with Crow and Chameleon. Minato wordlessly studies Kakashi and when Kushina arrives with the coffee, he shoves his cup on Kakashi with a stern look. Kakashi obediently stands in the corner to hide his face while he gulps down the caffeine, another soldier pill still jittering in his blood. He is not looking forward to the approaching crash.

They start again. Kakashi is trying to conserve the chakra he has left and does not summon his pack. He will admit, he’s not paying close enough attention as they move, already resigned to the pointless mission. He trudges along behind Kushina but he cannot match her energy. He almost misses it entirely when Minato signals his intent, his yellow eyes narrowed, the orange Sage Mode marking them like eerie eyeshadow.

Minato signals the attending ANBU and Kakashi follows the signs Enemy. Two. 1 o’clock. Prepare to engage

Kakashi’s mind spins tiredly as he makes sense of that, even as he falls into position behind his sensei, shooting a look at Chameleon. What are Root agents doing here? Hadn’t Danzo pulled them all out?

Minato is going still in front of him, in a way Kakashi recognizes, but Kushina just looks eager. He thinks, dumbly, oh, and Minato Shunshins to the camouflaged agents with a polite smile but nothing in his eyes. He says, “Agents, you’re out of area. Identify yourselves.”

The codes are impeccably up to date, delivered with the correct sequence of hand signs. This won’t save them, not from the brittle way the Yondaime Hokage smiles at them, and the one on the left drops a smoke bomb to initiate a general vamoose.

That won’t save them either, not from the Yellow Flash, and Minato has the first one in ninja wire before he can even take three steps, even as the other Shunshines away in swirl of leaves. The second the agent realizes he’s captured, he uses the metal ninja wire looped expertly around his hands to execute a high powered but ungrounded raiton jutsu, electrocuting himself. Minato leaps back in alarm to avoid the electricity that has Kakashi’s hair standing on end.

Chameleon is their designated medic. He falls to the side of the downed operative, feigning medical care but Kakashi knows he’s ensuring that the agent is properly dead. Kakashi is sure he is, even as the body twitches and spasms from the lightning, he knows it’s just reflexive. There’s blood leaking out of his ears. Kakashi realizes he’s fried his brains to keep the Yamanaka out.

He expected it, but the sight still spooks him. The suddenness of the suicide, the brutality of it. The unexpected twist brings Minato out of his headspace and he blinks at the body still seizing on the ground in shock before he throws himself after the other agent, already vanishing into the crowd, but he can’t hide from Minato, not when he’s in Sage Mode, and his teacher tackles him and immediately vanishes into a Hirashin.

Bear is growling under his breath as Chameleon stands and signs,, terminated. Kushina looks grim and Crow is setting a perimeter to keep any nosey people away from the cooling corpse on the ground. Their Hokage has a reputation, but Leaf citizens seeing him murder his way through a pair of shinobi who look like Konoha ANBU won’t be good for anyone.

It’s less than a minute later when Minato reappears, a hand on Kushina’s back; she must be carrying one of his markers. He looks darkly at the body on the ground. “Get him to T&I, we’ll see what we can salvage. The other is disarmed in a cell, awaiting interrogation.”

Bear nods and the ANBU grab the body and vanish. Minato stalks through the rest of the village, but Danzo has only sacrificed two members to uphold their cover. Kakashi said Minato was suspicious and Danzo has remedied that quite adequately. He may have hoped for the agents to escape, but if he sent them to face Minato, he would have to be fully prepared to lose them. Minato may have Hiraishined one directly into T&I but there is protocol for captured operatives.

Kakashi follows with the full knowledge that he is a pawn to Danzo. As expendable as the agents he sacrificed to maintain Kakashi’s position with the Hokage. He is sure Root will kill him; the second he stops being useful his life is forfeit. He may have believed at one time that he was merely a tool for the village to use, but he’s been taught better. It had taken years for Pakkun to convince him that his life had worth apart from his shinobi capability. It had taken years of Minato reinforcing the idea for him to begin to believe he wasn’t some interchangeable tool in the arsenal that is Konoha. Danzo would negate that in a heartbeat and not even blink after. Hound is his tool. Nothing more.

The day drags by but no other hidden nin are discovered. The ANBU do not reappear. A bunshin reverse summons itself out of a bear trap and calls Minato away and Kakashi knows what must have happened to the agent in T&I. Grim faced, Kushina takes him back to the Tower and orders them a platter of sandwiches. Kakashi is starving but the soldier pills turn his stomach and he can just nibble on the crusts, stuffing the crumbs under the rug with the toe of his sandal. Kushina talks with her hands and there are crumbs everywhere from where her tight hold on the dry bread cracks it. They talk about the hidden nin they encountered and Kushina is full of theories that he nudges aside, turning the conversation towards more mundane things, things he can talk about without being sick.

Kushina is the opposite of Minato; when his agitation makes him go still and quiet, Kushina just paces and gets even louder. She’s half yelling and Kakashi has to dodge a hail of crumbs. She’s super pissed at the fucking audacity of the false ANBU to electrocute himself rather than face capture. She turns on him when she takes his silence for agreement. “You are not allowed!” she says. “I don’t care who captures you. Tell them to send a ransom and we’ll get you back!”

The one time Kakashi was almost taken on a mission, he’d simply killed his captors. That won’t work here. He assures her, “Maa, it won’t happen.” He’s lying, but it’s a kind lie.

His eye is aching, either from overuse or because his teammate is being exceptionally stupid at the moment. Obito unintentionally broadcasts the weirdest things to him; piecing together all the hints about his location is an A rank mission in itself. Unfortunately, bamboo is native only to Hot Water, so Kakashi had a close idea of where to tell Danzo to aim the kill squad. He’s received nothing from Obito since that last flash of bamboo forests where the leaves all turned to face him. He’s seen no evidence of that aspect of the mokuton in Lynx. Danzo’s pet wood user seems to use his Wood Release primarily for conjuring furniture and for creating sharp spikes and restraints. The offensive possibilities of building a chair are limited, but Kakashi knows the power of the spikes, the unbreakable hardness of the stocks, how it feels to claw bloody splinters into his hands, desperate the second Danzo’s good hand touched his mask.

Kushina says, “but even! And Ibiki san later….”

He can admit it doesn’t look good. He says, “whatever happened, we will recover. The mission is too important.”

Minato flashes into the office, right into his chair. He’s tired and he puts his head into his hands. The movement is heavy. Kakashi knows what he’s going to say.

“The apprehended agent has been found assassinated in his cell. Neither bodies are good candidates for information retrieval.”

Their bodies will reveal nothing either. The seal will vanish upon the death of an operative. If they were Foundation members, there will be no record of them at all. No names. No faces. No identities outside of what Danzo allows them for missions.

Kushina says, “Assassinated? In his cell? In T&I?”

Minato keeps his face covered by his hands, like he can’t look at any of them. He says, “in lieu of actionable information, we must assume greater numbers than we anticipated, as well as further entanglement in the ranks than predicted. I’m halting non-essential ANBU operations until Bear gets it sorted out on his end.”

Kushina says, “what will we do?”

“We’ll carry on. I’ve got to go back to my Hokage duties tomorrow, but when Bear is freed up, he’ll join you in your investigation, Kakashi. I’m no longer comfortable letting you operate alone, not when I believe we’ve underestimated the reach of the hidden nin.”

This is an alarming problem for him. Kakashi says, “I don’t need Bear’s assistance. He should focus on ANBU. You gave me purvey to pull from the regular forces.”

He’ll agree to include Gai in his investigation if it keeps the Nara off his back. Minato sighs, “I’m not sure that’s wise, not when we don’t know how far down this goes. They’re in T&I for sure.”

He won’t ask twice, not when Minato’s figured it out that that’s Kakashi’s way of begging. He just nods and ups the timeline of his approaching death. He wonders how much premeditation Minato will read into it if he conveniently removes the ninken contract from the Hatake clan Archives and relocates it to his house.

Minato thankfully dismisses him before Kakashi’s awkwardness translates into treason. He hadn’t made solid eye contact with his teacher for the entirety of the meeting. Danzo will already know about the dead operatives, so Kakashi goes home and makes himself sick to get rid of the remainder of the soldier pills lingering in him and then crashes hard on the floor of his living room, curled up under his coffee table. There’s a decoy in his bed and if killed, it should trigger an alarm loud enough to wake him even from the clutches of the comedown.

He sleeps a full day and night cycle and wakes achy and still tired. He feels only marginally more alive after a shower and a full breakfast made out of everything he has in his fridge, which is mainly eggs and assorted condiments. There’s a compulsion in him to report to Danzo for an updated mission but it’s nullified by careful focusing on how he needs to stay around in case Minato summons him.

Eventually hunger forces him to dress and leave after a day of laying around. He doesn’t want to eat his supply of field rations in case he needs them later, but there’s no food in the house apart from salad dressing and a cheese slice that’s been in there since Rin forced it onto him years ago during one of her teambuilding brunches. It’s been moldering away in there ever since, sealed into Tupperware he figures will have to be burned.

He’s keeping his ears open at the market to sample the town gossip and it’s the only warning he has before Gai hooks an arm around his neck and drags him into the street. Kakashi is beyond tired but he’s turned down the last several challenges from his neglected rival. When Kakashi agrees to the competition, Gai sobs with joy and he takes this as permission to get a head start while the chuunin is distracted. Kakashi abandons his shopping and flips over into a handstand, using his momentum to send him forward into a race on his hands. Behind him, he can hear Gai promise to run 100 laps around the village, backwards, on his hands, before sunset, if he fails this race. The sentiment spurs him on and pretty soon Gai is passing Kakashi as they scramble on their hands for Ichiraku’s. Even on a good day Kakashi would be hard pressed to win this one against Gai. His arms are trembling but Gai is a taijutsu tank, muscular in all the places Kakashi’s skinny. His own personal goal is to not lose too badly.

Teuchi is not impressed by them arriving sweaty and grimy with dust, their hands filthy. Kakashi has dust in his hair and a crick in his neck from watching where he’s going. He takes their orders but makes them eat outside so they wouldn’t dirty up his counter. Kakashi pays for Gai’s meal, insisting its because he lost and tear tracks of joy trail clean tracks down his face from under his bowl cut. They hadn’t even broken anything on their way or caused chaos or mayhem in the village. Maybe he is learning.

For as loud and boisterous as Gai is, Kakashi knows it hides a highly perceptive individual. At the end of their meal, he has to firmly shake off the concern that’s expressed just a little less loudly and boisterously. “Rival, what is wrong? You are not Shining with the Strength of Youth.”

He hides it well, but Gai is capable of seriousness, just like Kakashi has a silly side; it’s one of the reasons they make such great rivals. Granted, rivals don’t also eat dinner together, usually, but nothing Gai does is ever normal. But he does bring out a lighter side in Kakashi that he doesn’t appreciate at the moment. He’s never sure how to handle genuine concern.

He’s too tired for anything more elegant than a bitten off, “Leave it.” He shakes off Gai, only marginally guilty. He’s protecting him. He’s betraying him. It’s all mixed up inside. He’s all mixed up inside.

By the time he gets back to the market, all the good produce and meats are long gone. He just buys more eggs and guesses one morning soon he’ll properly stock up on enough groceries to not have to leave his house ever again.

He’s left alone for a few days while Minato figures out what he’s going to do and Danzo figures out how he’s going to counter. Kakashi watches the shogi match from a distance, a pawn for both sides. In the market, the civilians are whispering about how those vile Uchiha are abusing their power and its tinged with the distrust for shinobi that civilians tend to harbor, but exacerbated by eyewitness accounts of police brutality and animal cruelty. They whisper that it was the Uchiha who broke into the Hokage Tower, who broke into the Secure Archives, who are using their power as the Leaf Police to cover it up. Some of the conspiracy is evidence planted by Kakashi, but the story has taken on a life of its own. In his weekly session with Fugaku, the Clan Head’s lips are the thinnest Kakashi’s ever seen them. He thinks Obito would cry and then kill him if he knew what disservice his teammate is up to against his clan.

Ignoring him a trick that’s becoming less and less effective because Obito keeps sending him flashes of bugs and he can’t even attempt to fathom why his teammate feels the dire need to activate his mangekyo at a beetle a 4pm on a random Tuesday. The mystery pisses him off enough that he activates his own mangekyo focused on his upheld middle finger. He doesn’t think Obito gets flashes of what Kakashi can see like Kakashi can sometimes see what Obito sees, but the attempt makes him feel less useless.

He’s getting nowhere with Fugaku during his sessions and it’s gnawing away at him. He should be able to tap into some aspect of Kamui, but with Fugaku in the dark about Obito’s abilities, Kakashi can’t exactly pick his brain for ideas on how to do that. Danzo has his own ideas and during his harsh training regime Kakashi fixes Danzo’s face in his mangekyo, stares hard at the entirety of the Root base, everything incriminating he can see, but he knows he’s not successful in transmitting any of it to Obito. The seal sends waves of buzzing pain through him anyway.

Danzo’s keeping him paired with Lynx for the time being and the ten-year-old remains a mystery. Kakashi thinks he wasn’t that obtuse at ten. By Lynx’s age, Kakashi was an independent shinobi but he doesn’t think that the kid’s at jounin level, even with the mokuton. He has no idea what horrors Orochimaru committed to make the wood user, but Lynx is loyal to Danzo in an absolute, unthinking way that the seal tells Kakashi he should emulate. Kakashi has half an idea about turning the kid good but the seal won’t let him even try. Maybe Obito could have done it, but Kakashi resents the Root agents too much to try to form bonds with them. That is the big difference between him and his teammates; Rin and Obito never wanted to be alone and Kakashi ensured that he was. He didn’t consider himself a child at 10, but Lynx is so small the insidious thought sneaks up on him sometimes, especially when Lynx practices his mokuton in the underground base and its all building tables and small scale houses and not deadly spears. He thinks that if it was him with the mokuton and not Obito or Lynx, he’d have figured out 1000 ways to kill with it by now. Growing chairs could be deadly, say, if he grew them in the chest of an opponent.

But Lynx lacks any apparent creativity to consider the merits of conjuring a desk in the lungs of an enemy. Kakashi used to think his own personality was stunted, but the Root agents make him appear positively delightful in comparison. He can speak outside of a monotone, for one. It’s a big plus in current company.

Even if he could speak freely around the Root agents, all sealed like him, they don’t reciprocate. Cricket won’t speculate with him about their missions or Danzo. Lynx doesn’t see the point behind small talk. Chameleon is selectively mute and communicates exclusively through hand signs, stubbornly sticking to advanced ANBU code at all times. Kakashi knows he’s not here to make friends but the teamwork part of him, the part of him that was nurtured by a pack of ninken, can’t help but try.

Some of the operatives are just so young. One of the first changes Minato made as Hokage was to increase the minimum graduation age from the Academy to 12, in an attempt to avoid having any more Kakashis probably, but the Foundation graduates are as young as 7. Seven years old, with no pack to show them the right way, with no Minato to steer them into more productive coping mechanisms. Kids more twisted than Kakashi ever was, with only Danzo to turn to. He pities them, but it doesn’t make them any less lethal. There’s a five-year-old Aburame walking around with a hive of kaikachu that kills with just a touch of their poison. A blond-haired toddler follows Hawk around like he’s her official shadow. Favorites of Danzo, the both of them.

Danzo watches him closely and the feel of his eye sends crawls up his spine. The problem is that Root has lost 6 agents in the past few weeks and it’s a full tenth of their total forces. He relies more heavily on Kakashi in the coming weeks, to the point where Hound and a medic/poisoner in a Shrew mask get sent out to eliminate the entire household of a political dissenter in the Capitol. Kakashi’s assassinated civilians before, but these are citizens of the Land of Fire and it leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

Minato catches wind of the brewing storm between the Uchiha and the village and he pulls Kakashi from his active investigation of the Hidden nin, and puts him on fixing the relations between the clan that calls him the ,, Bastard Sharingan and the Admin of the Leaf. The ridiculousness of working with Minato and Fugaku during the day, only to undue all the progress that night with Danzo in a repeating cycle makes him want to pull his hair out. It’s a relief that Minato is too busy to notice the distance between them that Kakashi is carefully but intentionally cultivating. Even Kushina is frazzled enough with the wedding that for the most part, Kakashi is left blessedly alone.

It gives him plenty of time to trip over to the Capitol with Shrew. He comes home to his hollow house in the empty Hatake compound. He hasn’t been summoning his pack outside of missions, but he summons Pakkun today because he’s unsteady and numb and the guilt at shutting him out is growing too hard to bear. Pakkun, he is realizing, is a wound he doesn’t have to inflict on himself.

The pug appears in a puff of chakra smoke and his face is gruff even if his eyes are sad. Kakashi’s been sleeping in his armor lately and maybe he smells of it to the ninken. He’s sitting leaning against the counters in his kitchen, the knob of a cabinet digging into his back.

Seeing Pakkun again makes everything simultaneously better and also worse. He thinks it might be the same for the pug too. By now, he’s so involved in Root work that there’s very little he can say to him. Everything inside him is a knot. When he doesn’t immediately volunteer any words, Pakkun just sighs after studying him for a long minute, his little nose working. He hops up into Kakashi’s lap right there on his kitchen floor and curls up into a tight ball, using his cape as a blanket while Kakashi’s scrapes the dried clots off his tanto with a nail. When he’s finished cleaning the blade, Kakashi slowly pushes up his headband and the two just stare at each other while his sharingan spins.

The week carries on. Gamahiro returns to Mount Myoboku and suddenly Obito and Rin are without a stable connection to the village. Minato doesn’t send another toad after them. He says the cold is too extreme and there’s no pinpoint on their location. Kakashi cannot help. They’re somewhere in Kumo running from a S ranked bounty turned headhunter and Minato can’t send a support toad because Jiraiya’s using them to hunt down other minions in Ame, the same ones that Danzo used Root to sabotage during the battle against Hanzo of the Salamander in the Second War, leaving them vulnerable and reeling in the loss of their leader, an exploit that Zetsu took full advantage of. This is all information vital to their mission that Kakashi has pieced together but cannot share.

Losing the connection to Obito and Rin has Minato more stressed than usual and Kakashi catches him obsessively going over Senju Tobirama’s encoded notes. Kakashi’s never been one for fuuinjutsu and Tobirama may have been a genius, but he was a paranoid one and only Minato has really cracked the code on his personal techniques. He deals with the loss by clinging uncomfortably close to Kakashi, insistent on dragging him into the wedding planning, trying to keep him feeling involved.

Kakashi can’t stand it. Minato’s huggier than usual and it puts him on edge. He’s insistent on repeating affirmations to Kakashi that just make him hate everything that much more. His teacher’s every kindness is a kindness Kakashi does not deserve and it tears him up inside. He can’t listen to Minato say how much he cares about him without picturing the empty spot where his name will never grace the memorial stone he spends so much time staring at.

Fugaku is similarly on his nerves and a growing part of him, courtesy of the seal, begins to relish the damage Hound inflicts on his name. To keep him from getting too friendly with Lynx, Danzo has them spar in front of the others and the ten-year-old has no concept of pulling his punches. It’s not malicious, simply ignorant; Lynx doesn’t have the capacity to understand a friendly spar from a no holds barred battle. Kakashi won’t outright murder the kid, but he’s out of patience for accommodating the wood user’s apathy and every splinter he pulls from his body takes another bite out of it.

It inspires him to train even harder with his mangekyo; he’d like to see Lynx shove wood at him if every attack just phases through. He experiments unsuccessfully around his house trying to move objects through himself, but he really just smashes a bunch of plates. He’s sure he could copy it if he just saw Obito do it, but Obito figured it out by himself and that spurs him on.

He has a breakthrough while he considers more breakable objects in his kitchen. He’s thinking about the flashes he gets from Obito, how his sharingan is really just Obito’s, and maybe he’s been considering it wrong. His Chidori was an incomplete jutsu before the sharingan stabilized it enough to use. Maybe Kamui is an incomplete technique as well, since its split between two users. If that’s the case, then he shouldn’t be trying to use Kamui like Obito uses Kamui. He should be looking for the weaknesses in Kamui that might exist in Obito’s technique because they’re the gaps that Kakashi inherited.

Obito, he thinks, moves himself into Kamui. What if Kakashi could move others? Obito has to be touching whatever he moved. What if Kakashi’s Kamui is ranged?

He picks an ugly teacup as a target and then fills it full of tea, just in case it works. He activates his mangekyo and stares hard at the tea, funneling an alarming amount of chakra into his supraorbital pathway, enough that his head spins and his vision warps oddly, centered on the teacup.

He blacks out.

Kakashi wakes a week later in the hospital.

Minato is sitting in a chair by his bed and he’s fast asleep, mouth open, propped back against the wall in a pose that’s sure to hurt his neck. He looks rumpled, like he hasn’t moved in days.

Kakashi feels awful, like he just got back from a month-long solo assassination mission where he lived off of chakra pills and rainwater. The chakra exhaustion roils through him like nausea, and its not as bad as the pounding headache. He’s recovered from serious illness better than this.

His first move is to rip out his IV and escape, but the movement wakes Minato up, who stops him with a quick hand over his. He’s not frowning; he’s relieved. “You’re up,” he says, “how do you feel?”

It’s a stupid question. Kakashi works his mouth under his mask but its so dry. He manages to croak, “What happened?”

The worry is back in Minato’s expression. “You missed an official summon and I went to check on you. I had to break in to get to you and you were unconscious on your kitchen floor with dried blood on your face. It had been hours.”

Kakashi digests that slowly. There’re still too many drugs in his system. He says, “so it worked.”

Minato pinches the bridge of his nose and it looks like he’s in pain. “You could have died, Kakashi.”

“But I didn’t,” he says and if he wasn’t in a hospital bed he thinks Minato might have swatted him. But he just looks even more concerned. He’s not sure which one is worse to see on his teacher. Or more embarrassing. He mumbles, “Thank you, Sensei. For finding me in time.”

His expression is still pinched like he’s hurting but Minato smiles at him, the same kindness Kakashi doesn’t know how to make reconcile with what he’s done. “I’ll always find you. But please, don’t be so reckless next time. What were you even doing?”

Kakashi says, “experimenting. I think I used Kamui. Was there a really ugly teacup next to me?”

Minato answers immediately, like he had the scene memorized, “No.”

“I think I sent it to Obito. In Kamui.”

Minato says, “You almost died to send a cup of tea to Kumo.”

Kakashi didn’t think it would have been so drastic if he hadn’t passed out with his mangekyo uncovered, leaching chakra from him for all the hours it took Minato to come save him. “I didn’t think it would affect me so badly.”

Minato says, “no more experimenting alone, okay? Use myself or Fugaku. It it’s dire, use a ninken to at least cover it back up and go get help. You’re lucky you didn’t give yourself permanent damage from this.”

But he’ll be blind eventually, his sharingan going dark. The part of Obito he carries with him gone. The realization that he’d just taken a huge leap towards that end chills him. He agrees readily enough.

Promise extracted, Minato relaxes slightly, like he’d expected more push back from him, but Kakashi promised his four-year-old self he wasn’t just going to roll over and die. If Root wants him dead, he’ll make Danzo work for it. He won’t do the dirty work himself.

Kushina comes to visit him and they talk about nothing of substance at all and it is a relief. He’s tired and sluggish and when he calls on his chakra, it aches through his overtaxed coils. He’s still planning on busting out as soon as he’s alone but that plan goes to shit when Shikaku shows up with a shit eating grin, his visit just a front to sic Tiger on him. His ANBU tail stays on the outside of his hospital window, vanishing out of sight. Kakashi would have rather he just handcuffed him to the bed.

“Next time you almost die on us, it’ll be a whole squad,” the Nara says. “I’ve got some new recruits that need the training.”

Kakashi’s considering how difficult it will be to kill Tiger so he can report to Danzo. He says, “Careful, Shikaku sama. Can’t let the agents know you know.”

He just raises an eyebrow at him. “I would bet money you identified Tiger months ago.”

Kakashi says, “How much?”

Shikaku scowls at him. He feels floaty inside still, like the drugs haven’t worn off yet. He’s hooked up to machines that beep and chirp and he thinks he may be parched but its difficult to hold onto that feeling. Minato’s face is swirling around and when Kakashi looks over, its to find that Shikaku has laid a heavy finger on the pain pump that dopes him up.

He scowls back at him, “not fair,” but its slurred as the exhaustion tugs at him. Minato won’t let him claw the IV out of his hand and it pulls him under again.

When he wakes up again, he’s feeling better: the headache not as intense, the nausea gone. Instead of the usual entourage of visitors he expects when he’s in the hospital, its Uchiha Mikoto sitting in the chair next to his bed, flipping through a book about pregnancy. There’s a little black haired kid there as well, staring at him with big curious eyes. It’s Itachi, the quiet kid just staring at him, and it’s creepy but he has a plan for that.

He thinks this is his chance but before he can bolt, Mikoto glares at him and everything in him just wilts. She tucks a shuriken between the pages as a bookmark and slaps the book shut in her lap. Itachi doesn’t twitch.

“Don’t you dare, kid. I’m still in top shape and can and will hunt you down if you run.”

Kakashi eases back down onto the bed. He’s always been intimidated by Kushina’s best friend and gennin teammate. Mikoto keeps Fugaku under her thumb. There’s no telling what she will do to him if she catches him, and Kakashi doesn’t want to get got in front of a literal child. He asks instead, rather rudely, but he thinks he can blame the bluntness on the lingering sedatives in his system, “Why are you here?”

“Kushina had to step away for a second. I’m the cavalry.”

He considers. “What time is it?”

“Ten at night. There abouts.” Her face warns him not to ask the obvious question but he has no other point of contact with the Uchiha, besides the times he pretends to be her to kick puppies in public. He’s bad at small talk. He won’t ask her about the weather or the wedding, or Sage forbid, her pregnancy. He suspected that book has pictures and Mikoto will gleefully scar him for life.

He pretends to fall asleep immediately and without reason. It seems the path of least resistance. Mikoto must know he’s faking but she doesn’t call him out on it. He thinks it’s a hospital perk. Itachi seems content to just watch him fake sleep.

When Kushina returns, it’s with a slamming door and a tray of terribly bland hospital coffees. When the smell hits him, he perks up in the bed.

“Kakashi! You’re up!” Kushina descends on him and he submits to her fussing so he can steal her coffee when she’s distracted but Mikoto swipes it from him with a stern look.

“The last thing you need is caffeine,” Mikoto scolds.

“I’m thirsty,” he says and Kushina finds a pitcher of water for him and they politely look away while he chugs from it, after a stern look at Itachi to follow his mother’s lead.

Kushina says, “Minato is on his way. They’re going to release you into his care. We figured it would be best to officially discharge you than to have you wiggle under the doors and escape.”

This is going to ruin his streak of successfully breaking out of the hospital. He frowns, “I wouldn’t skip out on medical care, Kushina hime. If the doctors want me to stay under observation, I should stay.”

“Nope!” she says, fluffing his pillow with a grin. “You’ll be under observation alright!”

That is his fear. He covers it by pouting. “I have a record.”

“And I’ve preemptively sealed the windows shut!”

Kakashi studies the hospital windows in his room to see that they have indeed been sealed shut. He wonders when he got predictable, when Kushina knew him enough to anticipate him. It’s a feeling which might have been tender under other circumstances but now he just finds it uncomfortable, even vaguely threatening.

“That’s a safety hazard.”

“That’s a safety ensure. I’ll take it down before the next occupant gets here.”

The door knob turns and it’s Minato, wearing his official robes a little wrinkled after a long day but without the hat. He’s customized them past how the Sandaime wore them and the red flames along the hem are cool even if Kakashi will never admit it out loud. He says, instead, “that’s ridiculous.”

Minato brightens to see him awake and aware. “Hey, Kakashi kun. No need to be jealous. I’m sure one day, if you train very, very hard, every day, for decades, and also eat a lot of bugs, you may one day be as cool as your Hokage.”

The kid doesn’t even smile at his performance, even as Minato ruffles his hair. “Hey, Itachi chan. Thanks for watching him for me.”

Itachi says seriously, “the mission was a success. I never looked away, Hokage sama.”

Mikoto smiles and pulls the kid into her arms and up onto her lap. “Good job, Itachi.”

“You’ll be a fine shinobi, Itachi chan,” Minato says. “Just be sure to not land yourself in the hospital like some Konoha shinobi.”

“Maa, Sensei. Kushina says you’re busting me out?”

Minato grabs his charts off the end of his bed and signs them with a flourish. “There are perks to being in charge. You’re officially sprung. Your streak is ruined.”

It’s ridiculous that Kakashi is distressed by this. He thinks he would have managed to escape if Shikaku hadn’t messed with his IV, even with Tiger lurking outside his sealed window. He asks, “Who has it now?”

Minato answers, “that’s classified. And you’re not getting yourself hospitalized ever again, so don’t even try it.”

Kakashi parses that and the realization is horrifying. He squeaks out, “not the Na—” and Kushina whacks him upside the head while Mikoto pretends she’s gone selectively deaf, covering her son’s ears with her hands. Minato will neither confirm nor deny his accusations but the name on what little he can see on his medical charts reads Yoshino.

Minato drops a bag at the foot of his bed. “Your gear,” he says. “We’ll let you get changed, but if you want your weapons, you’ll have to come with me to check them out at the front desk.”

Kakashi’s glad he kept his Root gear hidden in a box under the floorboards. With the windows sealed and Minato in the hallway there is little possibility he could sneak away to report to Danzo. The seal on his tongue itches, like it needs fresh input, and it’s growing more and more distracting. When they go to wait in the hallway, he carefully removes his IV and various tubing with a practiced hand. Rin would have done it better, but he makes due. They’d left him his standard uniform and it’s nice to have underwear on, and mesh. The hospital staff knows him enough to know to leave him his mask and headband; once, he’d woken up from unconsciousness and almost zapped a nurse when she tried to remove his mask to give him a cannula, then passed right back out. He’s sure it was memorable, and the sharingan records everything it sees, even if he’s unconscious. It’s possible he has a nightmare in his future that is just hours of him staring facedown at his kitchen floor.

Minato takes him to check out his weapons, which had been confiscated when he was brought in. He’s maybe a little achy, a little tired, but his chakra level hovers around half capacity and he thinks he’ll be fine. He’s just sore from spending a week in bed recovering from severe chakra depletion.

When he’s been given all his gear and the all clear to leave, Mikoto says her goodbyes and prompts Itachi to give his own polite farewell to Kakashi, and Minato grabs hold of Kushina and Kakashi to whisk them all back to the Hokage Tower. The scent profile of Minato’s office isn’t unusual, but Fugaku was here recently. He’s been working with Minato to undo the damage Kakashi is doing to his clan, so it isn’t unusual, but it lingers heavy in the room, like he’d spent a lot of time here, scattered about like he’d been pacing. It’s difficult for him to imagine the Clan Head irritated enough that he is brought to pacing.

Kushina activates her privacy seals and Kakashi waits to hear what they’ve been so busy with at 10 o’clock at night that they’d left Mikoto on him at the hospital.

Minato sits in his chair and glances at the files spread over his new desk. He says, “not much happened while you were out, but there’s been several important updates. Suna issued a new entry for the Bingo Book. Akasuna no Sasori has deserted the Land of Wind after it was revealed that he was the one to assassinate the Sandaime Kazekage. He’s using kinjutsu to turn people bodies into puppets and through this, he can utilize their chakra natures and kekkei genkai.”

That is more than alarming but not really their problem. Kakashi connects the dots. “You think he’s Madara's.”

Minato sighs, “he fits the profile, and there’s significant losses in his past that may leave him vulnerable to Zetsu’s machinations. We think it may be their interference that prompted him to reveal his true loyalties.”

Eliminating Madara’s minions is a mission that Danzo would approve of. He’d used the organization in the past, while he was still growing Root’s ranks, but he’d recently fallen out of favor with Zetsu after refusing to ally with them to take over the world. Kakashi thinks world domination is a goal Danzo is keeping for himself; he won’t allow another to beat him to the point.

Kakashi says, “we should move on him. Do we know his location?”

Kushina says, “Hold on there, you’re not cleared for combat. You’re on bed rest for the rest of the week until you’re fully recovered.”

Kakashi doubts Danzo will respect that timeline. He says, “I can manage.”

Minato says, “Shikaku’s got a plan.” But he’s frowning and he doesn’t elaborate, so Kakashi knows he does not approve of whatever convoluted scheme the Nara’s championing now. “He’s getting a team together. There’s a place for you on it, if you behave and don’t disregard the doctor’s orders.”

That’s a safe goal for him to focus on. He’s never faced an S ranked enemy before, and he doesn’t kid himself that he’s up to that level. Minato is S ranked. The Sandaime is S ranked. So are the Sannin. He is so far below that skill level that the exact power scaling stops mattering. Their only hope is to put together the perfect counter team and overwhelm him with numbers.

He says, “what about Kakuzu? Do we have a location on him?”

Minato face is pinched. “We haven’t gotten any update from Obito and Rin, but they’re maybe still in Kumo. Kakuzu is presumably on their tail, but he’s little actual threat to them with Obito’s Kamui ability. We’ll move on him when he’s closer and we won’t have to spread resources that far.”

The information blackout is maddeningly unhelpful, but he knows there’s little they can do to reestablish contact with his teammates, not until Jiraiya freed up the toads from Ame.

He wonders if Obito is truly S ranked or just cheating. If the Sanbi makes Rin S ranked. If Kushina is actually S ranked as well and nobody realizes. Its no comfort that he technically outranks his team, especially when one Kamui put him in the hospital and Gamahiro says Obito spams it like he’s forgotten every other technique he’s ever learned.

There must be painkillers in him still, he’s not usually so floaty. “And Jiraiya sama?”

“Nothing yet, but these missions take time. He’ll come back when he’s satisfied with his intel.”

Kakashi wings it, trying to act dutifully involved instead of suspiciously nosey. “And the Uchiha? How are relations with the clan?”

Minato’s face darkens and he rubs at his eyes. “A C rank outside the village fell apart. We lost a gennin and Uchiha Shisui was gravely injured.” He sighs, “you’re not the only one in the village with a new mangekyo. Fugaku’s been with him all day but he’s still in the hospital. They say he’ll pull through, but he’s the youngest Uchiha ever to activate the dojutsu and it’s wearing at his developing chakra coils.”

Kakashi’s mind goes helpfully blank. He’s not thinking of anything at all. Nothing in particular. The compartments in his brain are empty of any conscious thought. He says quickly but carefully, outrunning his internal censor, “you need to protect him, Sensei. He may be vulnerable to outside influences seeking the power of the clan ability.”

Minato frowns at him and there’s a tense moment where Kakashi waits for him to ask a question he won’t be able to answer. Kakashi convinces himself he was being literal, if vague. Many people would jump at the chance to acquire the dojutsu. Nukenin. Kumo. Not just Danzo and Root.

When the thought crosses his mind, the seal connects and he stoically rides out the waves of punishment shredding through him. He’d once gotten away with saying the exact words ‘hidden root network’ to Minato’s face by believing completely in the literal meaning of how the zetsu were getting around the Leaf Village. This wasn’t toeing the line like that had been. He can take it. It’s not even that if Danzo gets ahold of another mangekyo, he’ll likely kill Kakashi. This is Obito’s cousin. He can protect him like this, even as he destroys the clan’s reputation.

To his vast relief, Minato only nods. “Fugaku’s got him, and I’ve got ANBU covering the hospital.”

It is all he can do. Kakashi nods his assent.

Minato takes him home and Kakashi can smell Tiger nearby, lurking around the edges of the compound. All his traps and built in alarms are dead and he doesn’t have the chakra to reset them. Minato walks him to his door, presumably to ensure he actually goes home, and his entryway is a crime scene from how Minato tore through his defenses to break in. He doesn’t look the slightest bit guilty.

Kakashi looks around at the ripped tags, still a little fuzzy, and asks, “how long did it take you to get through them?”

Minato shrugs. “It’s fuuinjutsu, and I know how your mind works. Don’t worry, it would have kept anyone else away.” He plants himself in the doorway, blocking Kakashi’s view of outside.

When he makes a motion like he’s going to hug him, Kakashi leans subtly away, enough to signal his discomfort and Minato sighs but backs off. “Rest, please, Kakashi. I can’t lose you.”

"You won't" he promises and the guilt is a small thing, now, but its eating him alive. He’s getting better at lying to his teacher, the betrayal suiting him more and more as time goes on. He’s too good a shinobi.

When Minato leaves, it’s with another tired sigh. He’s only 24 but Kashi knows this has aged him. That’s guilt too, but he’s trained himself to ignore it, repress it all, or it’d tear him apart.

The second he’s gone, Kakashi makes eggs. After scarfing them down hot right from the pan, he slips into his bedroom to change. His Root uniform is locked in a box under the floorboards, sealed shut and rigged to detonate if unlocked without his chakra. Tattoo in place, mask on, Hound creeps down the earth tunnel hidden in his closet. If Tiger pursues, he will kill her to ensure she won’t compromise Danzo’s location. It would destroy Owl, and Bear might suspect him, but he won’t have a choice. Danzo’s life comes before all others.

It’s not an issue. When he carefully exits the tunnel, Tiger’s attention is on the Hatake house. When he leaves, she doesn’t follow.

When he enters the base, it’s like the past week hasn’t happened. Lynx collects him at the door and takes him right to Danzo to report in.

Kakashi goes to one knee, mimicking Lynx. “Danzo sama, Hound reporting in from the Office of the Hokage.”

Danzo’s frowning, sitting at his desk with files open before him. It’s a terrible facsimile to how he’d just seen Minato. Kakashi sometimes thinks that Danzo has more control over Konoha than the actual Hokage. But where Minato operates in the daylight, under the oversight of the council and administration and citizens, Danzo thrives in the darkness, in the shadows, doing what he thinks needs to be done. It’s not a mentality Kakashi would normally agree with, but damn if it isn’t effective. The Foundation recruits say that Root is the foundation that holds up the rest of the Leaf Village. It’s a similar enough nindo to the Will of Fire that it sneaks into his consciousness, insidious. It’s the seal, Kakashi knows it is, but Hound doesn’t care.

“Explain yourself.”

He answers immediately, “The hospitalization was following a successful application of Kamui, which left me chakra depleted.”

That gets his full attention. Danzo’s interest in the sharingan is what prompted him to warn Minato to keep an eye on Shisui. It would be a small thing, for him to kidnap the gennin from his hospital bed and brand him with the curse seal. Uchiha Shisui would be officially declared dead, but a new animal mask would join the ranks of Root, as unwilling and helpless a recruit as Kakashi himself.

Danzo barks, “Demonstrate this ability.”

He doesn’t argue, even as the persistent ache of chakra exhaustion pulls at his every muscle. He just digs out a chakra pill from his kunai pouch and pops it into his mouth to chew up fast enough that the entire movement is just a blur. Both Danzo and Lynx have seen him unmasked and it’s a hateful thing.

As chakra trickles into him from the artificial boost, he turns his Hound mask sideways the way agents do when addressing someone and tugs his headband up. He doesn’t wear his tilted Konoha hitai ate as a Root agent, it feels too perverse, but the simple blue cloth functions just as his forehead protector would.

Just opening his eye is a struggle, but when he manages to force his mangekyo to activate, it’s to fix it on Danzo’s face, thinking very carefully about everything but the teammate who’s visual prowess he shares. It helps that Danzo has ordered it directly.

It doesn’t work. He doesn’t have enough chakra to access Kamui. He remembers what he’d done the first time with a sharingan’s clarity, but knowing how doesn’t help him when he simply doesn’t have the reserves to pull it off.

When he fails, Danzo’s expression tightens. He isn’t a man to tolerate failure, and Kakashi doesn’t offer excuses. He says simply, “I see.”

Kakashi swallows down the nausea, shivering, and mentally subtracts another week from his lifespan. What bleak arithmetic he takes part in, seeing exactly the algorithms that Danzo uses to sacrifice his agents for the greater good. Kakashi’s turn will come about sooner or later, protract it as he does by informing on the Hokage.

He bows his head instead, closing his eye and pulling his Hound mask straight again. He’s teetering on exhaustion again and everything aches and roils in him. His hands are fists at his sides.

Danzo says, “you have an ANBU detail, Hound.”

Kakashi thinks having him tailed is how Bear shows he cares. But this is Tiger’s life at stake. He says, “It’s a non-issue, Danzo sama.”

“It better be, or you will eliminate them.”

Kakashi scrambles internally for how to word this so it doesn’t sound like he would presume to tell Danzo what to do. “Chameleon can verify my history of slipping ANBU tails. Shrike, Shrew, and Hawk can as well.”

Maybe if Danzo could have his tails replaced by undercover Root operatives he can negate this entire situation. With Bear as twitchy over security as he is right now, the only hope is that he mistakenly trusts Chameleon to be who he claims to be. Kakashi knows that it points to the agent as a non-Foundation recruit like him, potentially as conscripted as he is. It doesn’t make him like the guy.

Danzo hums thoughtfully and Kakashi hopes he’s considering it. He says, “what news do you bring from the Hokage?”

Kakashi never liked how he says the word ,, Hokage, like it’s a fruit he wants to take a bite out of. Kakashi says, head still bowed, “Jiraiya sama is still active in Ame. There are no updates from either him or Team 7. A minion has been identified as Akasuna no Sasori. An elimination team is being assembled to deal with the threat. I am on it.”

He considers this, stroking the x shaped scar on his chin like it was a beard, a souvenir from the very first Shinobi World War. Kakashi thinks that if the Nidaime saw the student he sacrificed himself to save, he’d Edo Tensei himself to deliver a suiton style beatdown. Picturing it brings him a grim satisfaction, even as the seal flares in warning at the direction of his thoughts.

“Anything else, Hound?”

He hates this. “Uchiha Shisui has activated the mangekyo sharingan. He is hospitalized under Fugaku sama’s direct protection.”

That has his every attention and chills go up his spine. “Do you know what ability he has manifested?”

“I do not, Danzo sama.”

“You will find out.”

He grits his teeth. “Of course, Danzo sama.”

Danzo studies him. “Dismissed, Hound. Report with any updates.”

He stands and salutes, already shaky with depletion. He should still be in the hospital. But he leaves, and somehow makes it all the way back to his house, past Tiger, under the ground, and into his bedroom, where he strips and pulls on sweatpants over his mesh. He cuts his arm with a kunai and with the last of his chakra, he uses his blood to summon Pakkun.

It had been over a week since the pack has heard from him and the relief on the pug’s face is no small amount. It turns quickly to concern; Kakashi hasn’t showered since leaving the hospital and must still reek of it, and the base.

He says, “I figured out Kamui.”

Pakkun noses at him, double checking that he’s going to be okay, even as his chakra flares sickly and erratic in him. “Of course you did, Boss.”

He says, “My traps are out.”

Pakkun sniffs dubiously around the room before hopping up onto the bed to make himself comfortable. “Come on then. I’ll keep watch.”

It’s the only reason Kakashi can fall asleep. As tired as he is, it’s Pakkun at his back that lets him drift off.

It’s a boring week, highlighted only by the fact that Kakashi learns that Shisui has unlocked a genjutsu technique called Kotoamatsukami. It’s supposedly the most powerful, the most complete, genjutsu ever. Telling Danzo confirms Kakashi’s worse suspicions about the man. The newborn dojutsu isn’t a good prospect for a Root agent since it can overwhelm the curse seal.

It’s a simple enough remedy for the councilman. He will simply kill the kid and remove his eyeballs, the same fate that awaits Kakashi himself, when the body stops being useful but Danzo still covets the eyes. The taboo on bloodline thieving slows him down exactly none. Danzo will take Obito’s sharingan right out of Kakashi’s head, remove both eyes from Obito’s cousin.

Shisui’s one saving grace is that the time limit on the technique is less than ideal. And apparently Fugaku’s not letting him out of his sight. As much as he potentially despises the man, or, at least, resents what he means to Obito, Kakashi will sing his praises if he keeps the gennin safe.

Minato makes him stay at home, makes him recover fully from his chakra depletion. His recovery is drawn out by Danzo’s refusal to abide by the same guidelines and he tells Minato he just gets bored staying at home, that he can’t help training. Kushina threatens and blusters and he polishes a lot of silverware and place settings for the wedding as punishment for getting out of bed against the doctors orders and he bites his tongue under his mask until it bleeds.

Nara Yoshino does his final check up and after he twitches through a full physical, she declares him once again fit for the field. To celebrate, he’s given copious amounts of ramen. When he’s done, Minato whisks them from Ichiraku’s back to his office, where Bear is waiting for them, loosely at attention but Kakashi has a suspicion the man has perfected the art of napping standing up. It’s impossible to tell with the mask on.

When the resigned honor guards leave and Kushina seals off the room, Bear pulls his mask sideways to reveal his face. Shikaku says, “my wife says you would have been cleared days ago if you had only obeyed direct orders and rested.”

Kakashi shrugs. He’s cleared now.

Minato asks, “How goes the team?”

“Ready for deployment, Hokage sama.”

Minato drums his fingers on his desk. He’s still frowning. Whatever plan Shikaku has, he must not have approved it yet. Kakashi guesses it’s dangerous, with a high probability of either heavy casualties or failure.

“Kakashi,” Minato asks. “If you had to assemble a team, who would you pick?”

“For an S ranked kinjutsu puppeteer?” Kakashi thinks. “Can I pick ANBU?”

Shikaku frowns, like he knows he’s not going to like this. He nods tentatively.

“Chameleon,” Kakashi says immediately, thinking he’d get him away from Shisui and the others. A pang goes through him in warning but he forges on. “Crow.” He’d worked with the crow summoner in the past and their styles complement each other. He says, “and Genma.” It’d be smart to have another poisoner there if they’re facing a puppeteer and his laid back nature might work with him in case Kakashi has the opportunity to assassinate any certain team members.

It’s a highly unusual team formation and Minato frowns at him. Shikaku says, “How do you even know the agent’s fighting styles?”

Kakashi gives him a blank look. “You gave him the crow mask. That is not a secret identity.”

He’d already compiled as complete a roster as he could for Danzo. Crow was one of the first he’d identified. Thanks to him, fourteen ANBU’s shinobi identities are outed and burned.

Shadows swirl around Shikaku and his eyes are narrow. Kakashi says, “you trust these men already and they have passed whatever examination you gave to ferret out the hidden nin. If this is to be covert, our pool to draw from is severely limited.”

Minato says, “Ranged attacks are a good choice, but these shinobi lack the experience of others who fought against puppet users in the Second War. I’d hoped that due to the rank, we could send a jounin only team. Genma and Crow are tokubetsu.”

Kakashi shrugs. He’s doing a lot of that lately. It’s better than speaking. There’s no one better for poison than Genma, full jounin or not, and everyone knows it. Besides, it’s a thin line between guard and assassin, just two sides of the same coin.

Shikaku says, “I stand by the team I proposed earlier, Yondaime.”

Minato sighs and Kushina puts her hands on his shoulders. He says, “I can’t risk three clan heads, Shikaku.”

“Ensui is more than capable--”

“Your wife is pregnant, Shikaku, and the other clan heads are sure to follow. You have a responsibility to your family, to your clan. We can’t risk that much for one nukenin.”
Of course the Nara wants his team. There’s no one else he works better with, that he trusts more. The Ino-Shika-Cho trio is infamous, but Kakashi doesn’t see how especially effective it would be against a single puppet master hiding behind a screen of weaponized puppets. Maybe Chouza could smash them up, but it isn’t like Inoichi can do anything against empty shells any better than a regular shinobi.

Minato says, “Regardless, we still don’t have a location.”

Shikaku says, “my original plan proposal stands.”

There’s an errant breeze in the room. “No.”

Kakashi asks, “what’s the plan?”

“No,” Minato says. “I reject that plan. Come up with a new one.”

Shikaku says, “We use you as bait, kid. Don’t need a location when we can make him come to us.”

Picking the battlefield would be a huge advantage, and he could understand why his sensei doesn’t like the idea of using his student as bait, but Kakashi doesn’t see why that would even work. “Why would Akasuna no Sasori come to me?”

“Revenge.”

Minato slams his hands flat against the table. The breeze is picking up enough that it’s flipping pages in the files on his desk. “You’re out of line, Shikaku.”

Kakashi wonders exactly who he killed to piss of an ex-Suna nin. He’s killed a lot of people, but no prominent Wind shinobi that he can remember. He says, “I don’t recall killing any puppeteers.”

But Shikaku holds his tongue, a wise move considering how Minato is glaring at him. It’s a silent stand off in the room between the Hokage and the ANBU Commander. Kushina attempts to ease the tension by laughing and standing between the two men. She says, “Come on now, you two. No need to get all riled up, ya know.”

Kakashi says, “I want to know,” and Minato directs his glare at him instead. His hair’s ruffling in the wind but he stands his ground.

Eventually, the wind slacks and Minato just looks at him. Kakashi wonders if he’s going to deny him, but he sighs and sits back in his chair. He’s unhappy, and upset enough at Shikaku for forcing this that he holds up a hand towards the clan head to cut him off.

Minato’s studying him. He says, “the White Fang killed his parents.”

Everything in him goes small. Oh. There’s a buzzing and he thinks it might be him but it makes sense. Shikaku wants to publicize his location, lure Sasori in with the promise of revenge. It’s a good plan, maybe their only shot against the minion. Picking the battlefield is too great an advantage to give up.

Kakashi is a shinobi. He says, “It’s a good plan.”

“You are not bait, Kakashi.”

“I’ve already been bait, sensei. It was a good plan when Madara did it. It’ll work for us as well.”

Now even Kushina’s frowning at him, and she almost never frowns. She’s almost quiet when she tells him, “that’s not fair. You are worth more to us than that.”

He shrugs again, his hands in his pockets. He already has an expiration date he’s operating under.

“Oh, everybody calm down,” Shikaku says. “I’m not gonna sacrifice the kid, Minato. I’ll keep an eye on him the entire time, keep him from doing anything too reckless.”

Minato’s pinching the bridge of his nose like he does when he’s fighting one of his headaches. He says, “Not tonight. I will decide by Friday.”

Kakashi takes it as a dismissal. He goes home and summons Pakkun. He asks the pug, “what do you know of a former Suna shinobi known as Sasori? A puppet master, earned the moniker Akasuna.”

Pakkun scratches at the wrinkles on his face. “Sasori, you said?” He thinks. “Not ringing any bells here, Boss.”

Suna doesn’t use clan names, and this makes things difficult. Kakashi says, “his parents were killed by the White Fang, presumable during the Second War or sometime soon after.”

Pakkun stops scratching at the mention of his father. He says, “how old is he?”

Kakashi memorized the profile. “19, red hair. Dark paint.”

“The name is unfamiliar, but a jounin matching that description was at the Playhouse during my infiltration of Sunagakure. Was an apprentice to the Lady Chiyo.”

Kakashi says, “He’s a minion.”

“Need a location on him?”

He shakes his head. “He’ll come to me.”

Pakkun doesn’t like that. “They’re using you as bait?”

“The Nara’s plan. I agreed.”

There’s a huge wall between them made of everything he can’t say and Pakkun can’t ask. But the pug’s smart enough to recognize when Kakashi’s being destructive. He asks carefully, “Kakashi, are you in more trouble than usual?”

It doesn’t feel like something he could accurately answer. He says, “No.”

There’s quiet between them. Pakkun never had to learn how to detect when he’s lying to him before. The ninken says, softly, “I hate this.”

Kakashi does too. Even if he was allowed the words, he didn’t think he could express how much he hates this. He doesn’t ask Pakkun to stay, but the pug circles up against his back, just a small warmth in an empty house, and it’s the only reason Kakashi can sleep.

Minato okays the Nara’s plan. It’s the best move to maximize the chance of success with the least amount of casualties. He isn’t happy about it, but it’s the best decision he could make. He settles on a full squad, led by Shikaku. They aren’t going as ANBU, because Kakashi ironically doesn’t make the cut, and he is introduced to a calm man wearing regular Konoha jounin gear by the name of Kinoe. He is to function as the team’s medic and Kakashi is half hoping that Sasori will do him a favor and kill him. And he already knows Aoba pretty well; the two shake hands and Kakashi tries to ignore the dusty smell of feathers on him, even as beady eyes reflect at him from where a huge crow perches on a branch behind Kakashi. They don’t get Genma on the basis that, as honor guard, he isn’t regular forces.

Shikaku has already leaked the information that Kakashi is going on a solo mission outside the village. There are traces of mokuton lingering around the Leaf, and it isn’t from Lynx. If Sasori is one of Madara’s, he’ll know exactly where the object of his hatred will be.

As he packs for the mission, he cuts his hand badly enough to draw the right amount of blood to summon his whole pack. He isn’t planning on dying, but they are facing an S rank nukenin with three jounin and a tokubetsu. He’s been neglecting his pack out of guilt and shame, but he won’t deny them this.

Akino sniffs at his clothes, “the crow boy? With the cool shades?”

Buru drools into his hand while Bisuke hops around his feet. “I bet he’s a bird brain.”

Kakashi pets Uhei and says, “Aoba’s a specialist.”

Guruko frowns at him while Uhei runs in circles around them. “But you’ll call us if you need too, right?”

Kakashi is not in the business of getting his summons killed fighting puppets. He says, “if there’s a need too.”

Urushi huffs and Shiba licks his teeth. “You always need us, Boss.”

He can’t argue with that.

They stay with him that night, in a big pile like he hasn’t allowed himself in months, since he felt he didn’t deserve their support anymore. Buru is ruining his hair and he couldn’t move without disturbing half a dozen sleeping ninken. They cover his vulnerable parts, curled up against his ribs, his major arteries, Guruko’s slender muzzle pressed against his throat like she’s subconsciously guarding him from attack. Pakkun is the only one awake and he sits right over his heart, looking at Kakashi with those sad puppy dog eyes that by rights of his age he shouldn’t have. And Kakashi feels safe, he knows he should sleep, but he stays up too, just watching the pug rise and fall with his breathing.

Minato meets him at his door in the morning and he walks him over to the gates personally. He’s twitchy and huggy in a way that Kakashi cannot abide long. Kushina’s waiting for them at the gates with the rest of the team, and a homemade bento for him to take with him. She’s huggy too, in a way he feels even worse about dodging.

Shikaku’s already there, and he’s saying goodbye to Yoshino over by the wall. Aoba’s got a crow perched on his head while another preens itself on his shoulder. Kinoe just watches them all with a mild expression. Danzo had readily agreed to the mission. He wants Madara out of his way and has no compunctions about using Kakashi and Kinoe to achieve it.

“You better come back in one piece, mister.” Kushina says. “If you miss the wedding, I will kill you myself.”

“Yes ma’am,” he salutes her with false gravity as the gate guards sign them out.

Shikaku wanders over from Yoshino and he’s wearing standard gear, apart from the Nara sigil he’s sewed onto every surface large enough to hold it. “Okay, team.” He says. “Move out.”

Minato unsurprisingly manages to steal a hug. “Proud of you. Come back safe,” he whispers while he’s close before Kakashi squirms away with the guilt gnawing chunks out of him.

They wave until they’re out of view, and then them team takes to the canopy, tree walking to the ambush site. They’ve singled out a strike zone decently into Fire, close enough to the border to tempt Sasori but close enough to backup and medical care if the plan goes sideways. It’s a good plan. But it will go sideways. He doesn’t like Kinoe’s eyes on him.

They make it in good time. The camp Aoba sets up is a decoy and the trees are littered with a flock of crows. Aoba’s crows are less like Kakashi’s summoning contract and more like the Inuzuka. He doesn’t summon them; they are just shinobi partners with him. They live permanently in this realm, apart from the crow summons of the Uchiha. Aoba dotes on them like the birds are his siblings but Kakashi can’t even tell them apart without his sharingan.

It doesn’t take long before one of the corvid sentries picks up on an approaching shinobi. There is a harsh caw, and the forest here is so thick that the echo is swallowed up. They’re in position, ready and waiting, when Akasuna no Sasori comes into view.

If he senses a trap, it doesn’t seem to bother him at all. The confidence is concerning. It reminds him of Jiraiya, how the Sannin just says anything he wanted, however he wanted, because he knows there isn’t anybody who can make him eat his words.

He’s moving deceptively slowly over the forest floor, hunched over and misshapen, but Kakashi knows it’ just the Hiruko puppet shell he wears. The real Sasori is safely inside. Their first challenge is to unearth their real target out from inside his weaponized body.

The Hiruko puppet sways and lurches its way across the detritus of the forest floor. The shell is wrapped in a concealing cloak of black with red clouds and Kakashi wondered what Madara is doing with such a distinctive, on the nose uniform. Maybe the call sign helps Zetsu with recruiting. Kakashi finds it tacky.

First order of business is to lure him up into the trees. When he reaches the strike zone, Shikaku signals for him to move.

Kakashi steps out onto a wide branch from behind his concealment and cocks his head at the nukenin, affecting a lazy affectation he hopes is infuriating to the man. “You’re trespassing in the Land of Fire. State your business.”

Hiruko pauses and there is a faint mechanical whirr as the head tilts up. The mouth is covered by a ripped piece of cloth and the eyes are startingly humanesque. The profile they all memorized says he is guilty of turning human bodies into puppets. Some jutsu are just disgusting. He has no interest in copying this particular technique.

All it takes is him standing there with his storm grey hair. The voice is deeper than he expected from a 19-year-old, but it could be modulated somehow. Hiruko says, “Hatake.”

Kakashi says, “I don’t believe we’ve met before. You are?”

In answer, Hiruko’s face cloth falls to the side to reveal a gaping hole that launches a hail of senbon at him, all reeking of poison. At least he doesn't keep him waiting.

He dodges easily enough with the abundance of cover around and moves higher and higher, tauntingly out of reach of attacks. He’s not sure if the puppet can move vertically, but if they get him in the trees they can attack from all axes, a skill Konoha shinobi excel at and all other ninja fall short.

Kakashi returns fire with a deluge of shuriken, just to bait him. A metal scorpion tail emerges from under the cloak to deflect them and they skitter against the metal with clangs only for the fingers to disjoint and turn into projectiles that are aimed directly at his face. Kakashi ducks behind the trunk and the whole tree shakes at the power of the impact. He rigs a line of ninja wire with exploding tags and circles it around the base of the tree, but the detonation has no impact at all of the hard shell of the puppet.

He flies through the trees, throwing himself into a shunshin to avoid more missiles from Hiruko’s elbows, from his eyes. When he gets around to the back of the monstrosity, its only to discover a never-ending storm of senbon erupting from the shell itself.

Hiruko is still planted firmly on the ground. Kakashi curses and switched tactics. He calls out, “I think I would have remembered meeting so skilled an opponent.”

Something chitters and flies through the air at him with blinding speed and he flips to avoid it. The hand itself is on a wire and it recoils back into his wrist like shinobi throwing their own hands at you is a thing he has to deal with everyday. Kakashi ducks behind a screen of autumn yellow leaves and says, “Yep, I’ve never had somebody throw their hand at me before. I’m sure I would have remembered that.”

A series of explosions rips apart the tree he’s in and he simply leaps into the next one, dancing around the puppet shell. With the poison the nukenin is likely using, even a single scratch is death. But he’d been dodging sharp objects thrown at him ever since he’d been placed on Minato’s team and he circles around and around the puppeteer, drawing him away from where his other team members hide. They wouldn’t engage until Kakashi gets Hiruko off the ground, or destroys the shell itself, unless Shikaku changes the battle plan after observing the puppet user.

Kakashi is sure a good raiton would be enough to destroy the shell, but if he gets close enough to deliver the blow the whole shell is likely to burst into a cloud of poison gas. He tests the puppet nin’s limits with clones but he’s careful not to use any flashy jutsu. He says, “something the matter, nin san? You seem mad at me.”

A clone of his helpfully calls out from the puppet’s back, “yeah, almost like I stole something of yours.”

Another clone echoes, “almost like I killed someone of yours.”

It’s a dirty trick, but Kakashi is a shinobi. There are no such thing as fair tactics. He says, “Or two someones.”

He’s successfully merged the image of his father with his in Sasori’s mind. Hiruko roars in rage and the metal tail lashes through the air to bury itself in tree bark. Its spindly limbs heave the heavy shell into the air and the puppet starts to climb.

It’s faster than Kakashi hoped but it is working. He lures Hiruko higher and the puppet comes after him, chattering like one thousand angry beavers.

Shikaku springs the attack. Shadow tendrils snake out quick as thought to ensnare the puppet shell while Aoba distracts him with a loud flashy assault. The second he’s caught in the Shadow Bind, Kakashi drops closer, calling up a Chidori in his hand while exposing his sharingan. The chattering is met with the sound of one thousand birds and he shoves the lightning blade into the puppet body and it splinters and cracks, spewing noxious purple fumes that he simply falls right through and away from on his retreat.

When he gets some distance, he turns back to see a red-haired man clawing his way out of the busted puppet shell. Akasuna no Sasori is also dressed in the smooth hooded robe and face paint and the loss of Hiruko has enraged him. He throws back his cloak to reveal rows of sealing scrolls and chakra strings fly from his fingers as he summons the first wave of his puppet attacks.

It’s the real fight now. Shikaku is essential, he can paralyze multiple targets at once and it lets Aoba remove the puppets with ease. But the goal is not to strip Sasori of weapons. Eventually, he’ll bring out the puppet of the Yondaime Kazekage and they have no good counter for his Iron Sand. His puppets are already disgorging fire and lightning at them and the fight is devastating the landscape around them.

This is what it is to battle an S ranked shinobi. His kinjutsu is overwhelming in its versatility and Sasori’s prowess at manipulating his puppet army is absolute. Aoba’s got fuma shurikens slicing through the bodies of immobilized puppets while crows slice through the chakra strings with razor sharp talons. Kinoe hangs on the outskirts of the fight, stepping in only when he has a clear opening. He’s fire natured and swaths of puppets burn but the medic plays secondary to Shikaku, protecting the Nara while he’s down in a crouch to shadow bind.

Kakashi’s not playing around anymore. It’s a fight for his life and Sasori’s on his heels the entire time with the brunt of his attack. The air grows hazy with poison but the gas is heavy and sinks back towards the ground in smeary purple drifts. His clones are dispelled almost as soon as he creates them and he’s relying on his sharingan to guide him through the maze of attacks Sasori throws at him. The puppeteer is focusing the majority of his strength on him. It’s keeping the other’s safe for now, but time is not on their side. Shikaku will wear out first and without his forces tied up by shadows, Sasori would make quick work of them all.

A puppet swings at his face and he Kawarimi’s with a nearby log, only for a separate attack to blow up the entire tree he is standing in. Something jams into the meat of his thigh, something sharp slices across a bracer, but his armor protects him from the worst of it. He doesn’t think he’s been poisoned but he is full of splinters and isn’t he sick of that. A puppet lets loose with a fire ball and a crow gets singed and spirals down to the ground in smoke while the flock swells with rage.

Something knocks his legs out from under him and he can’t see it through the smoke. He lands in a roll and all he can still see is Sasori, bringing out a new puppet, one in a hood made up of shifting metal flakes, shedding shavings on the ground around him. The Third Kazekage’s Iron Sand is a total defense and they didn’t have a fuuton counter strong enough to nullify the Magnet Release.

The shadow bind on a dozen puppets breaks when Kinoe gets caught up in an attack and can’t defend Shikaku. Aoba is still winging weapons around but against magnet release it’s a detriment. Kakashi activates his mangekyo through a blaze of pain and feels blood sheet down his face. He really hoped it wouldn’t come to this.

He focuses on the living body of the puppeteer, past all the shielding attacks. He croaks out: “Kamui!”

His control is off but it doesn’t end up mattering. The dark void spirals a good chunk of the nukenin away into Kamui, one arm, a shoulder, part of his head, gone in a bloody rip that tears Sasori to bits. His torso thuds to the ground while Kakashi’s head spins; around him all the puppets go dead. The Third Kazekage slumps to the ground.

His vision is encroaching black spots. Sasori is missing important pieces of himself. This is maybe true of Kakashi as well.

In his remaining field of vision, Kinoe lands lightly on the balls of his feet to consider him with a blank face. Maybe he’s been planning ways to halfheartedly off his teammate as well. There’s enough blood on Kakashi’s face for him to wipe it off onto his hand and the hand seals are ingrained. “Kuchiyose no Jutsu!”

Pakkun appears hackled and ready to hamstring. He growls threateningly at Kinoe.

The chakra expenditure is too much for him. He sinks under the black.

Chapter Text

18: Minato: The Other Perspective

For all his lauded genius, it takes Minato too long of a time to figure it out. His subconscious is continually mulling over the problem of the hidden nin, of the kill squad, of the leak, of his students, but even with that constant process, he’d allowed himself to be distracted. He’d let a teenager manipulate him. He’d been led to all the wrong conclusions. He failed to see how interconnected it was. How Kakashi hadn’t been afraid until the hidden nin, and then he hadn’t been much of anything.

Give him a chance, he thinks. Shikaku believes Kakashi’s complicit. Let him prove he’s not.

It’s easy enough to test. After the attack on Obito and Rin, he cancels all his meetings, all his obligations as Hokage. It takes him 2 days to find one of Kakashi’s mysterious hidden nin. He’s got his team working in tandem with Bear’s capture team to root out the infiltrators playacting ANBU and before Minato can take them safely into custody, one commits suicide. The other is mysteriously killed in their holding cell before Inoichi can get down to T&I for the interrogation.

The bodies are a loss. His Sage Mode fades away as he looks into the cell, at what had been done to ensure no information could be extracted from the mind of the ninja.
Someone who is familiar with how the Yamanaka Clan’s jutsu worked had ensured he would be useless to them.

Minato’s never lost a suspect in holding before. That doesn’t happen. It just plain doesn’t happen. The leads are gone, but he can’t shake how convenient it is. How there had been no one the day before, and then two showed up almost gift wrapped for him in a sector of little interest to infiltrators. The worrying turns into a persistent gnawing and the bites get bigger and bigger.

Not finding any evidence is answer enough, but finding convenient targets is conclusive in a way he hadn’t expected. He already knows what he would risk to protect Kakashi; its different to have proof of what the hidden nin would sacrifice to protect their leak’s cover.

He calls a team meeting. Shikaku’s not in attendance; he’s busy cleaning up the ranks, covertly rescreening every single one of his agents to make sure they are who they say they are and that they are supposed to be there.

When he tells them that the captured agent is a loss, Kushina is gratuitously dismayed but Kakashi doesn’t react at all. He doesn’t say a word. Kakashi doesn’t even twitch. Part of him thinks that the teen’s used raiton to assassinate enough people that the turn of the capture mission just doesn’t faze him.

He’s been thinking things in that same vein for a while now. Excuses, ways to explain his student’s increasingly unusual behavior away. It’s not suspicious, but he knows Kakashi. And because he knows Kakashi, it becomes suspicious.

In the nonreaction, Minato realizes why Kakashi’s been so distant, so quiet. Why he’d stopped updating his reports on the hidden nin. Why he’d stopped updating on anything of significance at all. How it seems like he struggles to meet anyone’s eyes recently. Kushina told him a week ago that she thought he was afraid, and the consideration made Minato forgive too much of his behavior. He hadn’t been challenging it like he should. Now it’s all he sees.

Minato says assassinated in his cell and Kakashi doesn’t have an ounce of surprise in him.

The knot in his mind cinches tighter. He’s sure suddenly, a huge intuitive leap it takes his gut a second to articulate. It was a simple test, and Kakashi failed spectacularly, in several different ways. After he mentioned offhand how weird it was that the village was so empty to Kakashi, the next day, two sacrifices are offered up to appease his suspicion. This was how the hidden nin had gotten an accurate target on Obito and Rin. He’d said kill squad, and Kakashi hadn’t flinched then either.

He has to stop lying to himself that it was shock. Kakashi is rarely shocked by any depravity the shinobi world can offer. It doesn’t feel like it should have been a surprise to him either.

Shikaku was right. Kakashi had found the hidden nin. And he hadn’t told them.

He’d found them, and then he’d joined them.

He is compromised.

He doesn’t know how they’ve gotten to him, what they threatened him with. It has to have been serious to get Kakashi to turn. He wants there to be leverage but there’s no evidence of that, no excuses to make to explain this, to even begin to make sense of how wrong everything’s gone. The fact is that his student is no longer on his side.

It’s his last failure as a sensei. He’s lost them all, in one way or another, one by one. He’d gained Obito back after years just to lose Kakashi now.

The realization hits him and it’s too much, really. Everything clicks into place and it all makes the worst kind of sense. He knows what he should do, how the Hokage of the Leaf Village should handle treason.

But it’s Kakashi, the student he’d tried for years to keep from turning out like him. He knows Kakashi. Knows him well enough that he doesn’t need evidence. He doesn’t need an explanation.

His face is still in his hands and it’s the only thing that hides his sudden revelation from Kakashi, while Kushina helpfully goes on a diatribe. This can’t be it. This can’t be all there is to it. Kakashi is compromised, but the agents he’d exposed were dead within hours. Even if he is a spy, Minato would never see his student dead.

Kakashi is compromised and there’s nothing he can do about it. The other hidden nin had killed himself rather than talk. The one he had managed to capture was assassinated in his cell. Hidden nin whose covers are blown died. He could never kill Kakashi. That is the absolute truth of it.

It’s unusual for him to feel this helpless. He can’t look at the teen standing at silent attention in his office without feeling the battle calm begin to overtake him. But it’s not Kakashi he’s mad at. Minato’d sent him to the hidden nin. And somehow, they’d sent him right back at him as a weapon.

How much has he already given away? He knows about Kushina. He knows about his teammates. The hidden nin have already been acting on his information. He’d almost gotten Obito and Rin killed.

Minato sinks into his office chair while Kushina covers for him. He just looks at Kakashi as all feeling leeches away.

He can’t have wanted this. That’s what he gets stuck on. It isn’t that Kakashi has betrayed him, has betrayed the Leaf Village. Kakashi would never have betrayed Obito and Rin.

He can’t confront him. But he can’t let it go on. He just keeps thinking that Kakashi can’t have wanted this.

He sends Kakashi home. When he’s gone, Minato runs through the breathing exercises the toads taught him to help control himself, to help him reach the battle calm, to try to manage the headaches he’d hoped he’d outgrow once he left ANBU, when the wound healed.

He says, “Kakashi’s the leak.”

Kushina is grim. She’s quiet a long while, doing her own calculations, but she’s too intelligent to not see the awful sense it all makes. “How sure are you?”

“Yesterday I mentioned how empty the village was. He took it as suspicion.”

He folds his arms on his desk, puts his head down on them. She rubs comforting circles onto his shoulders, grounding him. She says, “they’ve got something on him.”

There is little proof. He speaks into his arms. “I can’t count on that.”

Her hands turn into claws on him. “You will. It’s Kakashi.”

She makes it sound so easy, to forgive him even this. He says, “If we blow his cover, they’ll kill him.”

“We can use this,” she says. “Its too risky to feed him false information, not when they could suspect him, or suspect that we know. But you’ve already got them to sacrifice two of their own to keep his cover. We could flush more out.”

Tremendous risk aside, it’s not the right move. He says, “Those agents from earlier, you didn’t see, they were little more than kids, Kushina. I took this job to protect shinobi like them.”

They think it over but there are no easy solutions and too many risks. She asks, “What are we going to do?”

He picks his head up and it’s heavy. “I’ll talk to Shikaku, come up with some way to protect him. We’ll distance him naturally from the investigation. I’ll keep him distracted, put him on the Uchiha instead. He’ll do less damage there. We’ll figure it out.”

He’s already got the contingencies in place, a list of everything that’s compromised. It’s a distressingly long list. Kakashi is perfectly situated as an informer; he’d trusted him with things no other shinobi knew, even upped his official clearance to bolster the investigation, given him access to basically everything. He knows about Kushina and the Kyuubi. About Madara and Zetsu. He knows everything about the mangekyo and the mokuton; he knows more about the dojutsu than Minato himself does. He even occasionally sees through Obito’s eye; it’s how he must have given the kill squad his coordinates for the ambush.

Absolutely everything has to change and change in a way that won’t cause suspicion. He says, “Shikaku’s going to want to nail him to the wall. How many ANBU do you think are burned?”

She draws in air through her teeth. “All of them, probably. Anyone who’s been around him for more than a few shifts for sure.” She says, dicey, “He won’t stand for it.”

Minato thinks he’s already given too many stand downs to his shinobi this year, but he doesn’t see any way around it. Shikaku is going to be equal parts pissed and smug that he was right. The Nara’d been telling him all along how he didn’t trust Kakashi.

He leans his head back against her stomach with a thump. He says, “I’ll handle Shikaku. Our new priority is protecting Kakashi. We can’t blow his cover. We can’t exclude him, but we can neutralize some of the harm he’s done. It’s better that we know. We can control what we have turn to shit.”

She bends over to kiss the top of his head. “It’s not all shit. He’s alive. They’re all alive.”

He didn’t have that before. Maybe he hasn’t lost him permanently. Like Obito and Rin, maybe he can eventually get Kakashi back.

It’ll be meticulous, but he can be objective about it. His teacher is a spy master. He knows how he’ll need to spin this, the lengths he’ll have to go to ensure both Kakashi’s safety and his usefulness. Another kage wouldn’t have bothered.

Minato’s not any other kage.

He stands and flashes them both home, to their new house. They plan most of the night and by morning, he is confident about how in control he is of the situation. Maybe Kakashi is compromised, but he can’t have wanted this. Minato could work with that. Maybe his student has betrayed him, but he would never betray Kakashi.

He gets ready with care to look official. He’s not going to enjoy this, but it’s something he should have done long ago. He’s been putting it off, and it’s just another mistake on his part. He makes sure his hat’s on right; he could never make the stupid thing look good but he thinks he has a solution to make the official robes suit him more. His new set of Hokage robes should be done by the end of the week and he’s looking forward to unveiling them, just to see the council’s faces as he strolls into a meeting with red flames along the hem of his official robes of office. He’s already checked the rules twice, to be sure modifying the traditional white is allowed. He even planned to get the Uzumaki spiral on the back before the wedding, but for now these will do.

The Sarutobi estates are expansive, filled with lush gardens and water features. They are an old clan, and powerful. They’re collectors, and they were integral in gathering shinobi clans to Konoha after the Warring States Era, an influence that lingers in their wealth and status in the village even today. His wife Biwako is Kushina’s gennin sensei and serves as her medic, helping her keep the Kyuubi under wraps after Uzumaki Mito passed. He respects the clan; he is grateful to Biwako, but he isn’t too friendly with his previous commanding officer. It’s part of why he’d put off this meeting in the first place, but he can’t ignore the Sandaime anymore, not when it looks like the hidden nin were established well before Minato’s time in office.

He waits at the carved wooden gates until a clan member appears to escort him inside. It’s his youngest, Asuma, smelling like tobacco, already well on his way to adopting his father’s bad habit no matter how much rumors say there is contention between father and son. Asuma greets him politely enough but they meander a bit through the gardens, giving the main house time to scramble in response to the Hokage’s unexpected arrival. By the time the two wind-natured shinobi get through moseying their slow way through Biwako’s flower gardens, it’s well into morning and Minato wants to grind his teeth together. Raido might resign his post at any second. Iwashi is dulling all the tips on his pens right now.

Eventually, Asuma leads him to the main house and his elder sister greets him at the door with tea. He toes off his sandals but declines her invitation to take his robes. He wants the air they give him for this meeting.

Hiruzen is seated in his home office, puffing at one of his long pipes. The smoke immediately brings back all the memories he has of how the Hokage Office still smells after 40 years of Hiruzen chain smoking incessantly in it. He had to have all the rugs and tapestries fumigated to get the smell out, but it’s like it’s soaked into the wood.

He bows politely to the older man, “Good morning, Hiruzen sama. I hope I’m not intruding?”

“Morning, Minato sama,” his lips thin into a smile around the stem of his pipe at the address. “I’m retired and they don’t even let me out of the house now. It’s like as soon as I took off the hat I forgot I was a shinobi.”

Minato says, “I have the exact opposite problem, Lord Sandaime. My Honor Guard thinks I’m suddenly helpless.”

Hiruzen laughed a round, good natured laugh, like he had no weight on him at all. “That’s how it is, yes, Yondaime.” He puffs a few times on his pipe and his face loses none of its good nature. “I trust this is not a social call?”

Minato says, “I’m afraid not. I have a few questions for you, pertaining to things that may have gone on during your tenure.” He swallows down his careful neutrality. “I was hoping for your council.”

Hiruzen gestures at the chair in front of him and Minato sits, facing the desk, feeling like a pre-gennin in trouble at the Academy. Hiruzen studies him a few long moments, still smoking. Minato says, evenly, “They’re of a delicate nature.”

Some of the joviality leaves his expression. He runs through a few hand seals to soundproof the room and his chakra signature is unlike any Minato’s ever encountered. This is a man who can use all five chakra natures, nicknamed the God of Shinobi, an S ranked shinobi who raised up a team that earned the moniker Sannin. This is his sensei’s sensei.

But he is beginning to suspect that the Sandaime had fucked up enough as Hokage that a good part of his effort is spent undoing some of the stupider decisions of his predecessor. He knows Hiruzen had a hard time of it, leader through two wars, but he should have retired years before. He’d found some of the actions they’d taken in the last war to be extreme and he’d lost his conviction that the previous Hokage could serve as an advisor to him in any capacity.

Hiruzen had kept him from responding when Rin went missing. Hiruzen split them up for the Kannabi Bridge mission. He was too soft of spine to stand up to the council and it’s most of the reason the old windbags think they could push him around today. He was emphatically negligent in his rule as Hokage, but had no issue sending Minato to kill thousands. Minato would never ask his forces to do something he himself wouldn’t do.

When the seals shiver over the walls and windows, Minato says, decisively, “There’s an organization working from within Konoha. They’re well enough established that they had to have begun while you were in office.”

Hiruzen’s face is suddenly cold. It’s a long time before he says anything at all.

The smoke fills the room. Hiruzen says, “What is it you know of your position?”

The line of questioning unsettles him. He hadn’t been prepared for so obvious a deflection and his heart sinks. He says, “I uphold the Will of Fire. I protect Konoha. I protect the Land of Fire for the Daimyo. I protect my shinobi.”

Hiruzen just takes a long pull from his pipe, letting the smoke seep from his nostrils. Minato feels absurdly like he’s answered wrongly.

Hiruzen says slowly, “There is a position that rises out of yours. You are the fourth Fire Shadow, but the shadow you cast is long as well as deep. There is another. There always has been, since the time of Senju Hashirama. One who walks in the darkness where you cannot, upholding the ideals of the village from the shadows. The First had Uchiha Madara as his partner. Tobirama sensei had his lover behind him. I had a shadow as well.”

Minato digests this. It’s not easy. “A…Shadow Hokage?”

“The hat is a heavy burden. It’s easier shared by two people, someone you find yourself relying on, trusting in, to help you lead the village. A partner, a teammate. I had hoped Kushina would be yours, or that new Nara. I know you rely on them both.”

Minato asks, “who was your shadow, Hiruzen sama?”

The Sarutobi’s face goes distant, almost wistful. He says, “My shadow was a man I trusted above all others. I relied on him too much, perhaps, by parts over the years, granting him more and more power. Eventually, he got too used to it. He had accrued massive influence. I could not stop him.”

Minato doesn’t like where this is going. Hiruzen is known as a pacifist leader, and as the commander of an army of shinobi in a hidden village, this is not a benefit. He can almost see the need for a second, secret, Fire Shadow to arise. But it almost seems like an admission that Hiruzen had been willfully negligent. It sounds to Minato like the Third had been asleep at the wheel.

Hiruzen rolls the pipe thoughtfully around in his hands by the stem, turning it over as if contemplating the carvings down the sides. He says, “There was an organization. I approved its charter. They answered only to my shadow but when their power grew too much, their mission assignments too dark, I had it disbanded. Its shinobi were reinstated and absorbed into other sectors.”

Minato is silent a long moment but nothing else comes. He asks, “Was it ANBU?”

It’s a slow nod from Hiruzen and for the first time there’s regret on his face. “Root was a sector of ANBU but their missions were too much for any hidden village, even in wartime. All off the record, no written proof they even existed. They were the unseen. The recruitment process was…unacceptable to me. When I found out what the organization had become, it was already too late. The agents are loyal only to their leader.”

He files the name away in his mind: Root. Fake ANBU loyal only to their Commander, taking their orders from him instead of Minato. Ninja sent to eliminate loyal Konoha shinobi behind the Hokage’s back. He says, “You allowed this organization to continue operation after you disbanded it.”

“Not knowingly. I did not know until you confirmed it for me just now.”

Minato says, hard, “But you suspected it.”

Hiruzen sighs. “Yes, I suspected it.”

He’d known, and he’d done nothing. He’d allowed Root to continue, to do kami knows what to his own citizens, without sanction or oversight. It is an outrage, a perversion of the Will of Fire that the Hokage swore to uphold. Minato says, “I need a name.”

Hiruzen just studies him. “I will not name my shadow. He has too much power and cannot be defeated by conventional means. I made you Hokage for a reason, Minato. You are all that stands between him and the Leaf Village.”

Conventional means. As if killing him wouldn’t solve 100% of his problem.

“He is your shadow, Sandaime.”

Hiruzen’s face twists. “He was. I regret the problems I left you, Minato. You do not deserve the burden of my wrongs. I would not stand up to him then, and I cannot now.”

“Name him.”

He shakes his head, stroking his beard. “I will not. If you kill him, it will throw the Leaf into chaos. You will understand these things in time.”

“I understand you allowed yourself to be blinded by your trust in this man and its caused untold harm to the people you swore to protect.” Minato shakes his head. “I understand cowardice when I see it. I will not make your mistakes. I will put an end to Root, and to your Shadow.”

“It is unfair to leave you to do what I could not. It is not deniability that stays me now.” He puts the pipe back firmly between his teeth, and this is the commander that Minato remembers, not the grandfatherly persona he so favors. “Root is a necessary evil. Without it, the foundation would crumble.”

Wind breezes through his hair. He says, “that is not my nindo. I didn’t sign up to be a puppet to some unseen manipulator. I am the foundation that upholds the Leaf Village.”

Hiruzen just shakes his head sadly at him. “Root is too strong by now. You cannot imagine what he can do, all the places he can reach, the influence he has over village policy, over every decision. If you’re here, he’s already revealed his presence to you. He would have anticipated you would come to me.”

Minato says, “I’ll protect you and your family. He won’t touch you.”

Smoke rings circle around, until the wind scatters them. He says, “it’s far too late for that, I’m afraid. I will say no more of him. This is to protect you as best I can.”

For a wild moment, Minato thinks about court marshalling him. It’s within his power, but the last shinobi he’d taken into custody had ended up in pieces in a cell. And Hiruzen is well respected; his legacy to the people is as a Professor, a kind leader who steered them to victory through two separate wars. They would not take well to Minato tossing him into a cell to be assassinated. He’d be impeached within a month. The council is his old gennin team for kami’s sake.

Minato just looks at him and Hiruzen lowers his pipe. He looks old suddenly, like the conversation’s aged him a decade. It doesn’t soften him any.

Minato says, “this was your responsibility. Your highest responsibility, to the people of this village.”

Hiruzen waves a hand through the smoke, idly, like he’s not facing Minato. “I am retired, long past my time. My actions now keep the peace.”

Minato shakes his head. “This isn’t peace. This is a coup waiting to happen, held off only by a veneer of deniability.”

There’s suddenly something old in him, in Hiruzen, in the wrinkles on his face, the spotting on his hands where they clutch the pipe. Minato is struck by the thought that this is a deeply unhappy man, one who maybe wanted to be a teacher but who excelled in war. Is it his reputation he’s afraid of losing? Looking at Hiruzen, he realizes, if anything, his predecessor carries the expectation of him to make things exponentially worse, to take Jiraiya’s escalation tactics, Hiruzen’s own techniques, and use them to run Konoha into the ground.

Hiruzen says, low and slow, in a voice like a rasp against a blade, “Peace is a young man’s game. I have no part of it now.”

Minato cannot agree. Fighting wars is indeed a young man’s game, but the mean and bones of war, the who what when where and fucking why are all decided by men much older and grayer than even the old Sarutobi. He’s not sure what peace looks like, but he’s sure as hell it doesn’t look like either of them, the old war CO or the young upstart he’d used to end them.

“Peace,” Minato says, “is easier imagined for others. That was your job, to see it happen, not for you, but those who would come after.”

Hiruzen chews the stem of his pipe, face grave. “You will start a war in Konoha herself.”

“Then it’s a good thing that you taught me how to win them.”

They stare each other down with tension in the air between them. Minato isn’t sure he means to start a war in the village; he just wants the old man to understand. He wants to understand himself. He doesn’t think he learned peace, only how to escalate the size of the war, the number of the dead. That’s what Jiraiya taught him, what Hiruzen must have taught him, and Tobirama before him. Originator of the blame or not, Root is Minato’s problem now. Minato learned the same lessons from war that Hiruzen did, but somehow he believed that he’d turn out different? This is built into the system as surely as everything else he is fighting to change, just another consequence of the hat on his head.

Hiruzen looks away first. “I warned you of the weight this position carries. It will not allow you to be both a good man and a good leader. Root is a necessity.”

Minato knows how good he is, when he’s allowed to do what he needs to do. He’d found his students in under 9 hours, with nothing but a rumor and a direction. He is an excellent shinobi. Excellent enough to know that half of what he’d been made to do under his previous Hokage was blatant escalation, mismanagement, and logistical errors, in a war as stupid and brutal as the men who led it. He can recognize Hiruzen’s past like he’s seeing an alternate version of himself, one where he doesn’t learn from his mistakes.

Minato says, “they deserved better than you at the helm.”

Hiruzen heavy exhales smoke and there’s a smidgen of shame in him, finally. He says, “I always said I’d forgive myself eventually. For all the times I looked away.”

He won’t pity this man. He won’t absolve him. He says, “I think I’ll be leaving now.”

Hiruzen nods sadly. “I wish you more than luck, Minato sama.”

He stands stiffly. He doesn’t bow himself out of the room. He doesn’t show his back. If he opens his mouth again, he will regret what comes out.

Asuma shows him back to the gate, awkward with the tension in him. He shunshins all the way to the Tower, just to expend some of his furious energy. His guard squad snaps to attention when he blows through the doors. Iwashi’s got something hidden behind his back, whatever personal item from his desk he’d seen fit to vandalize in retribution for him going AWOL for 4 hours.

He puts them at ease and sits at his desk, steepling his hands in front of him, thinking hard. “Genma,” he says. “I need Nara Shikaku here. Raido, if you could find ANBU Bear for me. I’ve temporarily dismissed the ANBU on the floor; you might have to go to headquarters to find someone to send for them.”

He doesn’t trust his ANBU, but he’d handpicked his Honor Guards. He trusts the three shinobi with his life. He even taught them Hiraishin to help make their job easier. It is unlikely they are Root, since he already has Kakashi keeping an eye on him.

Genma salutes good naturedly. Nothing ever really fazes him. “Yes, Hokage sama,” and he vanishes into a shunshin. Raido frowns but follows.

“Iwashi,” he says, peering over the tops of his folded hands. “Please find me three new pens. And Kushina.”

The younger shinobi salutes somewhat sheepishly and walks out to steal from the nearest desk. He’s an expert at tactical relocation of inventory. And sabotage. He’s got too much energy for guardwork, but it’s that hyperawareness that Minato relies on.

Minato meditates in the quiet, allowing his thoughts to fall into place. It’s not an easy thing, to have the Third betray him so completely. He had done well as Hokage, and he would be well remembered. Minato will not jeopardize that. But he will never forget the words spoken today, the look on Hiruzen’s face as he refused to name his mistakes, afraid of how Minato would fix them.

Kushina’s the first to arrive; she’s been expecting him but it’s not long before Shikaku slouches through the door. The guard trio knows the drill by now but it doesn’t mean they have to like it and Raido’s still grumbling, but they go and Kushina seals the room.

Minato takes a moment to compose himself. To Shikaku’s expecting look he says, “the hidden nin organization is called Root. It was a sector of ANBU chartered by the Sandaime and disbanded when the leader pushed it too far. The Sandaime allowed it to continue working after its official cancellation because he believes that it is a necessary evil, doing what is necessary to protect Konoha from the shadows. The Sandaime refuses to name the leader.”

Shikaku’s hands fold into his personal seal as Minato continues, “The commander of Root is the Sandaime’s Hokage no Hokage. The Third Shadow Hokage is still working against us and he has amassed massive power and influence. Root is his personal army, loyal only to him. It won’t be easy to take him down.”

Repeating everything Hiruzen had said verbatim for them only makes it sound worse. He repeats the history of the Fire Shadows, the precedent built into the Hokage position for a secret partner. How Hiruzen, through his cowardice, hurt the village he swore to protect. At the end of his report, Killing Intent rolls off of Kushina, hot and heavy, “what do you mean he won’t tell you who it is?”

He thinks he’s protecting the village by being silent, protecting them from Minato’s violence, but all Minato sees is him protecting this Shadow. Is he right to be afraid of Minato’s leadership? Why would he have picked him as his successor, if he feared what he would do?

He shakes his head. Only his enemies should fear him.

“The Sandaime believes that Root should be allowed to continue. And also, that knowing a name would put a target on my back.”

Kushina scoffs, “there’s a dozen targets on your back already. He’ll never get an assassin close enough.”

The second she says it aloud she realizes her mistake and her mouth opens in horror.

Minato will be the one to say it. He tells Shikaku, “It’s Kakashi. He’s compromised.”

An eye cracks open and his face is severe with the shadows that shade it. He doesn’t rub it in that he was right. He does say, “That is a problem.”

Minato says, “Assume everything is leaked to Root already, including the current ANBU rosters.”

Shadows twist with the Nara’s own Killing Intent. He asks, “where’s he being held? Inoichi can--”

“He’s not being held. If we take him into custody, Root will have him killed.”

Shikaku’s eyebrow raises at him in disbelief. “You want to use him as a mole?”

Minato shakes his head. “I won’t risk him. In any way.”

The ANBU Commander stills. “You can’t just let him go free. You’re the Hokage. And he’s a nukenin.”

Kushina says cuttingly, “He’s not. They’ve got something on him. He’s being forced.”

Shikaku says, “Forced or not, there is a choice. He must be dealt with.”

Minato waves away the growing Killing Intent from them both before the Honor Guard blows up the doors to come save him. It’s difficult for him to keep a tight lid on his own agitation. He says, simply, “I don’t care. He’s my student.”

“You’re asking me to stand down?” Shikaku’s tone is thick with disbelief. It’s the most troubled he’s looked during the whole explanation.

“I am. We can work around him. I’ll distance him naturally from the investigation. I can’t change the harm he’s already done, but I can neutralize future threats.”

“He’s a traitor.”

“He’s fourteen, Shikaku.” That shuts the Nara up. “He’s fourteen, and he’s scared, and he’s in over his head. I’m the one who sent him to Root in the first place. I got him involved. I don’t know how they’re pressuring him, but he would never willingly betray us.”

“I agree,” Kushina says. “He’s innocent until proven guilty. But if we move on him, they’ll have him killed. We can’t take that risk.”

Minato knows what Shikaku’s response to that will be and makes sure his glare tells the Nara what a bad idea that will be. The Nara wisely shut up and reverses his argument. “If you let him go, he’ll continue to betray operations. He’s too close to the investigation, and to you, Hokage sama.”

“We’re not letting him go,” Minato says, “We’re allowing him to operate behind a mirror, for his own safety. We can control what he knows. Keep him distracted. Use him in an official capacity to muddy the waters, but not enough to cause suspicion. If they even suspect that we know his cover’s blown, they’ll eliminate him.”

“They won’t just kill him,” Shikaku says darkly. “They’ll take the eye out of his head and then they’ll have access to a mangekyo sharingan with a direct connection to Obito.”

“All the more reason to protect him,” Kushina says.

Minato says, “This is what we’re going to do. I’m going to phase him out of the investigation. I’ll come up with other things for him to do until we can identify the Root Commander and eliminate him. Kakashi’s going to talk on everything he already knows, so we limit the range he has. We keep him in the dark about the updates. I’ll come up with a threat for the wedding and make him run security. I’ll put him on the Uchiha case. We’ll identify Root and their leader and we take them out. We find out how they’re pressuring him and covertly negate it. Without that pressure, he should be free to return to us.”

But Shikaku’s shaking his head. “You can’t prove he’s unwilling. There might not be a pressure point we can reverse.”

“I don’t need proof. I know he’s unwilling. He may even be reaching out for help in ways that I haven’t understood.” He looks away, down at the gouge on his desk. “He said the words, ‘hidden root network’ to me. I didn’t think anything of it then. But he may have been warning me.”

“They’re watching him,” Kushina says. “Ensuring his compliance. They don’t trust he’s fully on their side.”

Shikaku shakes his head. “That’s a stupid risk. An unnecessary one. He would risk his life to warn you?”

Both Kushina and Minato nod, resolute. The teen is stubborn enough to believe that’s even his job. “Absolutely.”

The Nara sighs. “I don’t agree with your handling of this, Hokage sama. But Hatake is your student. I won’t presume to intrude. I will stand down until the situation changes.”

He can’t hide the relief. He could have ordered it officially, but he never wanted to be that kind of leader. He should inspire comradery from his subordinates, not fear. “Thank you, Commander.”

Shikaku hums thoughtfully. “All my ANBU are either compromised or burned. We should halt all unnecessary mission assignments until I get this sorted out. They all passed my original screening but there’s been plenty of years to bury the evidence. It could raise suspicion to rescreen them.”

Minato says, “Do it. They already know we’re on to Root, and they’ll know I visited Hiruzen this morning. They can know we know about them. They just can’t know we know about Kakashi.”

“Understood.” He salutes lazily. “I’m going to take a nap, and then I’m going to have a plan.”

Minato can respect that thought process. “If you could, Genma’s out looking for ANBU Bear.”

Shikaku sighs. “I’ll send a clone. You should keep your guard close.”

He shrugs. If any assassins wanted a piece of him, they were welcome to try. According to the Bingo Book, Minato is worth quite a bit of money. Killing him would be lucrative. It’s been a while since someone took a stab at him; it kept his first few weeks in office from getting too bogged down in the bureaucracy. Ohnoki practically signed his name to a few, but the Kumo attempts were sneakier, if just as unsuccessful. He’s used to having enemies. Root is just one more.

Shikaku just sighs at his stubborn expression and says, “try not to rely on ANBU to save you. I think we all just might get a nasty surprise.”

He slouches through the door, the picture of a bored intellectual. Minato shakes his head at the display and checks the time. He has a council meeting after lunch that he doesn’t want to be late for. He’s pushing for more resource allocation to training their forces and the old windbags keep the village purse as tight as their frowns whenever he brought up his reforms to the Academy system. Kushina says, “I’m having lunch with Mikoto. Her sickness is finally settling.”

He bumps his elbow against her. “That’s great. I don’t remember her being this sick with Itachi.”

Kushina laughs and elbows him back. “Itachi was too polite, even in the womb. I’m hoping this one is a hellion. Our kids need fun friends.”

Minato echoes, “Our kids?”

Kushina winks and drops a kiss onto his hair. She sashays out of the room and he shakes his head after her. But she has succeeded in lifting his spirits, making him think about all the good he has to look forward to, even if things are hard right now. This is the future he’s working so hard towards. This is why peace matters, if not for people like him, then for the people who will come after him.

It’s a calm that shatters when he goes to take a working lunch and is interrupted by Iwashi announcing a stone faced Uchiha Fugaku is here to see him. The man always looks serious but Minato knows somehow that this is a true case.

He sets his soup to the side as Iwashi closes the doors behind him. Fugaku bows at his Hokage. He’s wearing his full Leaf Police Chief uniform and his perpetual frown is deep. “Good afternoon, Hokage sama.”

Minato inclines his head. “Fugaku sama. What is it you have for me?”

Fugaku says, “I have a warrant for the arrest of Hatake Kakashi.”

So much for that plan. Into the mental shredder goes at least seven contingencies.

He considers this request very carefully. He studies the Uchiha, then looks around at his Honor Guards. He makes a decision. For the first time, when he signals for the room to be sealed, he doesn’t release the guard trio. There’s a plan forming in his mind that they’re a part of. And he likes the idea of potential witnesses to keep everyone behaving civilly.

Once Genma’s secured the room, Minato says, “that is serious. Thank you for coming to me first. What are the charges?”

“Multiple counts of impersonating a police officer, abuse of power, civilian abuse, dojutsu abuse, animal abuse, intention to incite riots, civil disobedience, and domestic terrorism.”

It’s all a fancy way of saying treason. Minato says, “What happened?”

“Someone’s been impersonating Uchiha to scare the civilians. Someone with a sharingan. A witness picked one of his summons out of a line up.”

“Why were you screening against his summons? Where did you even get that information?”

Fugaku frown deepens. “It was already on file from the war. The particular ninken, named Bisuke,” he frowns even more, as if the name offends him, “was used by Hatake to call for backup once and an Uchiha responded. A sharingan doesn’t forget.”

Minato doesn’t doubt that. “What was Bisuke doing?”

“Playacting a scene of animal abuse with an Uchiha perpetrator to scare civilians. The rumors are already flying about the clan abusing its power as investigators and abusing our dojutsu. They’re saying evidence was left incriminating the clan at several high-profile crime scenes, including the break in at your office, and that we’ve been covering it up.”

That sounds like Root to him, undermining his goal to revive the clan’s reputation, and using Kakashi and his sharingan to make a fine job of it. He’d be proud, if the sabotage wasn’t in service to the anthesis of his position.

He folds his hands on the top of his desk and makes steady eye contact with Fugaku, then in turn with each of his guards, making sure they all recognize the sign of trust it is. He says, “the following conversation will not exist. If brought up, I will deny it. It is classified beyond your clearance level.”

Fugaku looks instantly suspicious, like he knows he’s not going to like what he’s about to hear. “Understood, Hokage sama.”

Minato says, “I will not deny that Kakashi was most likely the perpetrator. His actions are currently outside of my jurisdiction. There’s an organization seeking to destabilize the Leaf Village. If you out him, it’s the same as killing him.”

“He’s undercover? I wasn’t aware he was covert trained.”

Minato considers the merit of this particular lie. It’s an easy assumption, and one that casts him in the kindest light.

But dishonesty isn’t the right move. Fugaku’s a human lie detector, and Minato doubts his opinion of the Hokage can get any lower. He loses very little by an admission of incompetence that he won’t regain by the display of trust.

“No. He’s not undercover. He’s not under my control. They’re pressuring him and if we move against him, they’ll kill him. They’ll remove his eye first.”

Fugaku’s nostrils flare. He’s sallow suddenly, paler than usual. “He’s compromised.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re not doing anything. To the ninja or for the boy.”

Minato cuts his eyes quickly to the detective. “I wouldn’t suggest that.”

Furious is not a good look on him. Minato is surprised by its intensity, considering that the Chief came here with a warrant for his arrest. He grinds out, “I taught him to use that jutsu and he’s turning it against my clan.”

Minato can’t deny that. “He is. I understand your anger, but I’m asking you not to pursue this. I am handling it. It will not be an issue for much longer.”

The stand down isn’t ideal, but Minato won’t lie to him. It would just drive the Uchiha further away. Fugaku says, “If it’s an issue of village security, the police should be involved.”

The offer to help surprises him, but Fugaku is willing to do anything to protect his clan. Minato says, “I agree, Fugaku. The Uchiha would be valuable in the investigation. But everyone I’ve sent against them has been killed. The agents I have captured commit suicide or get assassinated in their cells within the hour. I will not risk you or your clan members at this stage.”

While Fugaku digests that, Minato continues, “I have always respected your input, Fugaku sama. This organization would see the rift between the Uchiha and the rest of the Leaf grow to irreparable levels. I will not allow that. We will fix this.”

Eventually, Fugaku says, “I appreciate your honesty with me in this matter. I will not continue with the arrest warrant. I wish to see the divide between my clan and my village lessen, but this organization is succeeding. There are people who wish to see radical change. There have been for years; this will just make the dissenters louder, more bold.”

Minato agrees. “What do you suggest we do?”

Fugaku says, “they will not be satisfied with a stand down. We need someone to pin the blame on.”

Minato says, “I think I can provide a suitable sacrifice, Fugaku sama. Would a body help?”

Fugaku catches his drift immediately and the Clan Head looks thoughtful. “Could one of mine assist?”

“Of course,” Minato says. “Make it a spectacle. Give the corpse to the Elders.”

They come to a compromise. Hiruzen was able to accept balances on his power, ones that kept the bad guys winning, and Minato does not. But Fugaku is a necessary ally, and not just for Obito’s eventual reintegration.

It’s the perfect distraction for Kakashi. Minato gives him a few days of rest to recover; it’s no wonder he looked so tired for their casing, if Root has him out all night committing crimes. Then he has Ibiki provide a fresh body; he has Kakashi dress it up like a hidden nin, on the look out for any giveaways, but the teen is good. Minato trained him, but it’s a detriment in this situation. Adding animal cruelty to the performance is a spark of inspiration only his student would consider.

When the body is prepared, he has a camouflaged Bear puppet it around using Shadow Possession while Kakashi lays the same genjutsu he’d supposedly used to make it look like he had two sharingan. They maneuver it into position for an Uchiha Police squad to take out rather publicly. Minato releases a statement condemning the attacks on the Uchiha’s reputation and commends them for their swift action in identifying the perpetrator and rectifying the situation.

The press eats it up. Kakashi eye-smiles throughout the congratulations ceremony. The irony is not lost on Minato.

Fugaku continues to train Kakashi in his dojutsu and if things are tense with the Clan Head knowing his divided loyalties, the part he played in starting the whole mess, Fugaku is professional enough he doesn’t let it show.

Kakashi is quieter, more distant, all of the things he’d let slide before but now he knows the reason, he can’t stop cataloging them as symptoms of his position. He’s tenser during meetings, but he allows himself to be pulled from the investigation and reassigned to the Uchiha mission for the time being. But now that he knows what to look for, the signs are all there, and some are glaringly obvious.

Kakashi is always tired now. There is a dark bag under his visible eye. He stays in his house and there is a conspicuous lack of dog hair on his uniforms that speaks of the way he is isolating himself even from his pack. He is silent, unable to meet people’s eyes on the rare occasion he spoke voluntarily. He never really was a hugger, but he avoids Kushina’s affection like it physically hurt him. He usually does that, but Minato can see the seriousness in it now. It isn’t resigned struggle, half desperate, half playful anymore, the only way he knew to accept casual affection. Minato can see the fear in him now, the way he speaks so carefully about nothing at all. How he isn’t asking for missions. How he seems content to let Kushina bully him into wedding prep.

It's all so subtle. It would have fooled anyone who thought that the teen was all that he appeared to be. But Minato knows there is more to him than he ever shows anyone; underneath five layers of misdirection and masks and deception, there’s an insecure teenager who learned socialization from a pack of ninken. And now that he’s looking for it, the fear is all he can see. And Minato is sure: he hadn’t wanted this.

Minato is sure, but he doesn’t push him. When Kakashi falls quiet, he allows it. He lets him participate in the investigation in whatever limited capacity he feels is necessary. He is given no important information but nonessentials are allowed to be collected and disseminated to avoid suspicion.

Shikaku masterminded their policy to handle him. It’s exactly the sort of convoluted three-dimensional shogi his brain is suited for. Every single detail is maneuvered with a master’s skill and strategy, already prepared for intricate counters and inevitable consequences many moves down the line. Kakashi never even suspects he is being used to elicit a response from Root. It had been his original idea to frame Root for the break in, and Minato just borrowed it for Fugaku’s ruse, and they watched to see how Root would respond to so blatant a call out.

Maybe losing their members cowed them, because all Root does to respond to the bait is to redouble their efforts to victimize the Uchiha. Minato is sure Kakashi is pivotal in their efforts; he has a sharingan and a bag full of tricks to get people to dislike him. It’s driving Fugaku crazy, having to playact civil to him during the day knowing he is spending his nights directly undoing all their progress.

But that is an action they can control. Keep him busy worsening relations, trying to incite a Clan war, or a coup, or a mass desertion, or a civilian massacre. It’s despicable, but it’s predictable. They can counter it; contain the damage he is doing. It isn’t ideal, but they can work with it.

What’s hurting them is that Fugaku is covering up the evidence left at the break-in to his office. There was an Uchiha uchiwa left on his desk. Kakashi had seen it. Root knew and was taking every possible advantage. The information is weaponized in a whisper campaign that is successful partly because Minato had been taught them by Jiraiya, and there is a reason the Sannin is their spy master.

Shikaku bangs his head against his hands. “He’s too good at this, Yondaime. This is your fault.”

Minato shrugs. “He’s naturally talented. I just helped steer it.”

“He just undid a weeks’ worth of progress in a single night.”

Minato just frowns at his ANBU Commander. “Are you letting a teen outsmart you?”

“Troublesome!”

Gamahiro poofs into existence on the desk between them. It’s the first time Minato’s seen the toad in weeks. “Gamahiro! Welcome back!”

The toad is shivering and there’s flecks of blood on him. Shikaku straightens out of his slouch and Minato grabs for the toad in alarm.

“They’re all right!” Gamahiro croaks, “The blood’s Rabbits. Kakuzu caught up in the mountains of Kumo, just outside the Hidden Cloud, and he decided to kill them rather than let Kakuzu get them.”

That is….heartening. Shikaku says, “that’s the proof that Root and Madara aren’t allies.”

“Root?”

“In a minute,” Minato promises. “What’s happening with Obito and Rin?”

The toad harrumphs. “Instead of fleeing, Obito decided he had to save the dumbass tail who thought he could fight off the bounty hunter. They think he’s an official minion now; he was trying to capture them, not kill them. They managed to grab Rabbit and remove him from the situation, but the second they had him caught, the bastard slits his own throat. Rin had to intervene to save his life. There’s some kind of Cursed Seal on the back of his tongue. Rin think’s it’s a loyalty ensuring measure, a gag order, something that imposes the will of the caster onto the agent. They saved his life, but he couldn’t give them any information even if he wanted to. They left him on the mountain.”

Everything falls into place for him. The splintering is back, needles of ice in his blood. Even Shikaku’s eyes widen.

Minato goes very still. Conventional methods, Hiruzen said. The recruiting process was unacceptable to him, unacceptable to the man who approved egregious amounts of atrocities. He says, “that’s how they’re doing it. They put a Curse Mark on him. He found them and they sealed him.”

Gamahiro is confused, but everything makes sense to Minato finally. Kakashi hadn’t wanted this.

Someone put a Curse Mark on his student. He is going to find who did it and kill them. Then use the Nidaime’s Edo Tensei to resurrect them and kill them again. The relief is matched only by the horror. Kakashi’s not just being pressured into service: a forbidden seal is stripping his will from him.

Shikaku is pale. “They could all be controlled. It’s not a private army. It’s a puppet army.”

He relays to Gamahiro the information about Root, about Kakashi. He says, “you can share this with the others, but don’t tell Obito and Rin about Kakashi just yet. I don’t want them to worry. I’m keeping him in the village, and I don’t think Root would waste more agents on another useless kill squad. It unlikely he’d send him to face them.”

Shikaku says, “they just might. You need a mangekyo to counter Obito’s own. Kakashi may be the only shinobi who can counter Kamui. If they’re desperate, they’ll use that.”

Minato says, “we can’t let them get that desperate. We’ve got to keep them in the village.”

He’s already dealing with nightmares where he faces a Root agent only for it to turn out to be Kakashi behind the mask. He doesn’t wish the same on Rin and Obito. Obito’s already hesitated in the past. There can’t be room for doubt.

Shikaku says, “We’ve got to figure out how to release the seal. If we negate the Curse Mark, Root loses their army.”

“Some of them,” Minato says. “The Sandaime says they’re loyal to him regardless. Kakashi’s not, and there might be others, but the majority wouldn’t be radically affected at all.”

“It would free Kakashi,” Shikaku says. “As a counter informer, he’d be invaluable.”

Minato shakes his head, “They’d kill him regardless. His forced loyalty is all of his use to them. If they can’t control him, they’ll dispose of him. Besides, we know how to undue all the Curse Seals, all at once.”

“Kill the caster.”

“Take out the Commander of Root, the Sandaime Shadow Hokage, and Kakashi’s free. They all are. We sort them out from there.”

Shikaku says, “you were right, Minato. He’s being controlled against his will.”

“I’ll tell Fugaku; it should put his resentment to rest, at least partially.”

The Nara says, “It’s not Root we have to worry about. The kid’s slippery. If he fucks up, he’ll be forced to kill himself before Root can even resolve it. Like the first agent.”

Minato’s already thought of that. He says, “I’m working on a countermeasure in the case of an accidental reveal, on his part, or ours.”

Shikaku nods. “I’ll work contingencies into the plan. Knowing it’s a Curse Mark helps predict his reactions. He won’t respond to stimuli like himself; his will’s all tied up with another’s. It’ll be more difficult than I thought to corral him.”

“Don’t deny you like the challenge.”

“It’s the stakes I don’t like,” Shikaku shakes his head. “This isn’t a game of shogi. We slip up, and the kid’s dead.”

It’s the responsibility that irks him. The shadow user has a lazy personality that’s only half front.

He says, “Kushina’s the fuuinjutsu expert. If anything’s possible about releasing only one of the affected agents, she’ll know it.”

But they can’t count on that. Shikaku says, “Rabbit will report back and we can’t get caught in a lie. Tell Kakashi that Gamahiro returned but he had nothing beside a vague location and a general update, and that Kakuzu’s still tracking them.”

Gamahiro’s wrapped himself in Minato’s official robes to warm up. He says, “Not a peep.”

Minato has some candy roasted crickets in his desk he’d been saving for just this occasion. He had to ask around the market for any merchants from out west. He digs them out, to the toad’s delight. “Thank you for all your hard work, Gamahiro. When you’re ready, you’re free to go.”

The toad crams a double handful of crickets into his wide mouth. He says, “I’m going to eat these in an onsen,” and reverse summons himself to Mount Myoboku.

When his summons vanished, Minato says, “that’s the last toad I can send for a while. It’s too cold in Kumo right now for them, and Rin and Obito move too quickly for even my best trackers to get a bead on them. Jiraiya sensei’s still in Ame; I won’t risk tying up his resources until I know he’s clear.”

He goes and tells Kushina about the Curse Seal and her horror is quickly overwritten by her determination to figure it out. She’s the last Uzumaki practitioner of Uzushio’s legendary fuuinjutsu. If anyone could overwrite a Curse Mark, it’s her. Minato thinks he could section it off, but he doesn’t want it contained, he wants it gone. Kushina can invent seals or twist existing ones in ways that make Jiraiya and Minato’s head spin. And she’s the best at sealing living flesh. Curse Marks are usually anchored to chakra gates and that makes them both tricky and insidious, especially if its intent based, like Rin seems to suspect.

Minato buries himself in the Nidaime’s encoded notes on fuuinjutsu. If it’s a kinjutsu technique, odds are that Tobirama invented it. The notebooks left by the Nidaime are convoluted, the ramblings of an obsessively intelligent inventor who saw no distinction between could do and should do. It doesn’t take a great intellect to figure out that a zombie army is a bad idea, and Minato avoided most of the sections that look like they were too morally sketchy in his original perusal of the journals. Hiraishin had piqued his interest the first time, but now he ignores it in favor of trying to read through whatever else that Tobirama might have come up with in his chapters on fuuinjutsu and sealing techniques.

Kakashi catches him researching, but he can’t read the encryptions. It’s easy to let him assume he’s just worried about the blackout on Obito and Rin. It’s ironic, to recognize that he’s turning the same technique Kakashi used to deceive him back on this student. No wonder his student is so proficient at the method of letting him jump to all the wrong conclusions. He just shakes his head, reassures Kakashi that he’s just worried.

He’s been doing that more recently too; letting Kakashi know that he’s still got his sensei’s support. He doesn’t think its suspicious to want to reassure his student. Nobody would find fault in Minato being maybe a little clingy, coming up with bullshit distractions to keep Kakashi occupied and off the Root roster. He wants Kakashi to feel involved; to feel that Minato’s involved with his life even if he’s busier now as Hokage. They pick out his design for the name cards for the reserved seating, make sure the caterers have the right number of decorative chafers and lexans. The linen order is short and the kitchen is stuck on how to adequately plate the ramen entrée. It’s a headache he can throw the teen at, a problem he has to solve by cooperating with civilians and not just aggressively tossing lightning around.

The teen has a head for the kitchen, and he can navigate the multitasking of a banquet event admirably. Minato has a suspicion that there isn’t anything Kakashi can’t learn and then excel at. Eventually, he’s going to figure out fuuton and Minato’s gonna have to teach him Rasengan. Really, he’s a menace, and he shakes off Minato’s every kindness like he can’t stand to hear it. Maybe he can’t. Minato can’t even begin to imagine what the teen’s going through right now, how torn up he must be. The last Hatake’s built along uneven edges and he hides it well, but Minato’s past being fooled. This is just the latest injustice in his student’s unlucky life, another failure Minato struggles to understand. Minato swore he’d never let something hurt his student like this again, but he’s failed to protect Kakashi from Root. He’d sent him right to them. All he’d did was Minato’s job for him.

He thinks that people forget that, when they look at Kakashi, at Obito, at any Uchiha unlucky enough to awaken their sharingan, or kami forbid, their mangekyo. They think that the dojutsu is power, a tool, useful enough that they forget to see the blood. The pinwheel patterns represent a loss of the highest order; every eye is a grief, but that’s not how most people think, what Root thought. Root sees Kakashi and his mangekyo and think of all the harm he can cause with it, and not the harm that was done to him to acquire it.

Minato can’t imagine the emotional strain it would take to kill a loved one. He’s low-empathy naturally, and every time he’s gotten close to feeling a grief of any magnitude, ANBU taught him to simply turn it off. He got good at repressing, at apathy. At compartmentalizing until he lost the thread of feeling entirely. He’d gotten better the last few years, but losing Obito had thrust him right back in that headspace. He couldn’t even remember the funeral. He’d gotten close again when he lost Rin, and he wasn’t even the one to stick a Chidori through her. That is Kakashi’s burden. There’s no telling what damage it’s done besides give him a shiny new murdereye.

As close as he’s trying to keep him, Kakashi wants distance and he’s good at getting what he wants. Minato can’t keep too close an eye on him, not without a valid excuse, so when Kakashi disappears for days on end, he just hopes he’s not off on some Root mission getting himself killed. But to try to stop him would be to definitely get him killed. He’s low-anxiety, too used to controlling all the variables, to having plans for when things go wrong. But this, the enforced helplessness of letting him go, of trusting that he’s capable enough to excel, is new to him. He’s having to find new ways of managing stress, with an anxiety he's never had to content with before.

He waits as long as he can, then he sends Genma with an official summon. Kakashi’s fallen off the face of the earth and its giving Minato hives. He’ll make up some bullshit excuse later for why he called a meeting, but Genma returns unsuccessful. He says, “he wasn’t answering his door and I didn’t want to break in.”

Minato says, “that’s fine. He’ll show up fashionably late.”

But he never does. The worry winds tighter and tighter. An hour passes. Two hours. He can’t concentrate, thinking of all the worst possible conclusions. It’s not like him. He doesn’t care. He says, “I’m going after him.”

Before Genma can stop him, he flashes himself to the Hatake marker. The house is as empty as always but there’s a light on somewhere; he can see the glow of it from through the seals coating the window. The wards buzz familiarly against him as he approaches, a static field on his skin. He knocks on the door, “Kakashi? It Minato. I’m just checking up on you, you missed the meeting.”

Nothing happens. Minato considers breaking in. He thinks about what Kushina would think about his impulse to break in. He thinks about going to get her to elicit either her opinion or her help. He waits a few minutes, knocking occasionally, but Kakashi’s either not home, or he’s ignoring him like he’s never done before.

He takes a few moments of stillness to call up enough Senjutsu to activate his Sage Mode, just to be sure. The variety of seals and tags muddy everything in the house, but he’s sure enough that he’s home.

He’s home, and he’s not moving. He’s home, and he’s not moving, and he’s sprawled out on his kitchen floor.

The dread is immediate and the chill of it chases away his Sage Mode. His mind is made; he’s breaking in. Right the fuck now. His hand’s on the knob, ready to brave whatever lethal hell will unleash if he forces it open, when his brain catches up with him. He’d sensed a tunnel nearby and he whirls to hunt it down. It’d be faster than untangling the fuuinjutsu on the door or the windows. He finds the doton tunnel and shimmies through it; it’s difficult, sized for a scrawny teen and not a grown man but he’s fueled by something as close to panic as he ever comes. The tunnel ends in a closet, and he drags himself out scraped and filthy and rushes to the kitchen with all the speed he possesses.

Kakashi is sprawled out on the kitchen tile and he’s terribly still. Minato thinks he’s too late, that Kakashi broke under the pressure, that he’s ended his life in the same house that his father committed suicide in. Minato’s hands are on him, checking for a pulse, for a breath, for any signs of life, and his sharingan is revealed and spinning lazily, treacherously, in his face. There’s an alarming amount of blood crusted around it, pooling on the tile under his cheek. It’s still active, draining him, and with a lurch Minato realizes he can’t feel his student’s chakra signature, not at all.

It’s an effective way of ending his life, if he’s been forbidden from taking any action by Root and the Curse Seal. The kitchen is destroyed, plates are smashed, mugs and cups destroyed, and Kakashi is in the mess of it all, going cold.

His hands feel the barest hint of a pulse and it’s all he needs. He grabs the teen and slings him over his shoulder, mentally reaching for the jutsu formula he keeps at the hospital. He flashes them right into triage and yells for a nurse. Yoshino is thankfully right there and she takes Kakashi from him with practiced care, and Minato says, “Severe chakra depletion, I think. I’m not sure if there’s anything else.”

Yoshino tugs down his headband and says, “I need expertise.”

Minato disappears into a Hiraishin and he reappears at the Leaf Police station. Twenty Uchiha, detectives and beat officers alike, all look up at his sudden appearance, but he ignores them, intent on grabbing Fugaku. He’s in his office, in some kind of meeting, Minato doesn’t care, he barges right in and bodily abducts the Clan Head without a word, pulling him into a Hiraishin and taking them both back to the hospital, dumping him on Yoshino.

Fugaku’s irritated, narrowed eyes widen at the sight of the teen, at the blood on his face, and he immediately activates his own sharingan, checking the teen over. He allows Yoshino to whisk him away, following Kakashi out on a gurney.

Minato paces, then flashes back to the Hatake House, slapping a temporary marker on the wall. He burns every detail of the scene into his memory. Then he flashes into ANBU headquarters, almost gets reflexively stabbed, good job on Owl’s part, and kidnaps the Commander. He dumps Bear in the middle of the mess of the Hatake kitchen and says, “I found Kakashi unconscious on the floor with blood on his face. His headband was up and he’s barely breathing. Yoshino has him. Fugaku sama’s with him.”

He lets Bear analyze the scene. Bear signs suicide?

“I don’t know,” Minato admits. “The implants not like a regular dojutsu. It won’t turn off if it doesn’t get enough power. It’ll drain him dry.”

Bear considers. He signs time?

“Uncertain. He missed a summon and I waited two hours to check on him. I don’t know how severe the strain is. But it had to have been a few hours.”

Motive?

He shakes his head. “Not on our end. I hadn’t seen him in days.”

Bear starts carefully moving through the debris of the kitchen, shifting through the plates but making sure not to disturb them. Minato says, “I got in through a doton tunnel. That’s how he’s been slipping your ANBU. He’s tunneled through the floorboards of his closet.”

Minato shows him the tunnel and Bear forms the Rat seal and lets his shadows carefully check out the length of the tunnel. They seep through the floorboards and Bear cocks his head, tapping along the seam of one, gingerly prying it up. Underneath is a lockbox coated in seals that take Minato seconds to recognize. “It’s rigged to blow if you open it without Kakashi’s chakra.”

Bear points at him. Minato says, “I’ll need time to crack it.”

Bear hands it over and continues checking out the rest of the house. While studying the seals, Minato thinks about how Kushina would approach the puzzle. He takes out his brushes and chakra ink and instead of cracking the code, he simply changes the troublesome seals into more easily managed seals. It takes a few minutes to modify the lockbox into a preserving box but he manages it.

He signals Bear to return, and it could be anything in the box, maybe something personal, something from his father maybe, but it’s the same shape and size as a uniform box and when Minato cracks the lid, it’s to the ceramic staring face of a Hound mask. The uniform is identical to Minato’s old ANBU regs, identical to Bear’s own, minus the Commander armband. The only deviation is the tipless tanto, not Kakashi’s usual chakra blade imbued with raiton, passed down from the White Fang. Bear combs over the uniform without touching it and they tuck it carefully back into the box it came from. Minato can’t stop staring at the Hound mask’s red stylized eyes.

He knows empirically that Kakashi is Root, but the proof is different when he could hold it in his hands. He says, “moratorium on the Hound mask. Do not engage.”

Bear spells out, slowly suspicious.

“This is just for you to know. Going forward.”

Bear nods, then digs around in his kunai pouch and withdraws a few scent blockers. He breaks one open and liberally nukes the lockbox to remove any trace of their scent from the uniform. Minato spends fifteen minutes carefully repairing the seals and tweaking them back to their original function. The box gets nuked, and placed exactly back under the floorboards in the closet, then the whole bedroom gets bombed with the blockers.

To draw attention away from the closet, Minato fabricates evidence of a different form of entry. He apologizes to the Hatake ancestors before creating a break-in of the seals in the living room. He activates a few to cause some damage, and either breaks or shatters the others to make it look like he came in through the door. The wards are serious and he has to work to keeps the overpowered tags from blowing up the whole house. He’ll have to have a talk with Kakashi about the unnecessary strength of the jutsu tucked into the seals, the absurd number of kunai and shuriken that blast out at him.

Bear finishes his evidence sweep. Minato turns from where kunai are buried in the paneling of the short hallway and repeats his fear. “Verdict?”

Bear signs Uncertain. Training accident?

“The mangekyo,” Minato says. “If he gets low enough on chakra, would it turn back into the sharingan?”

Bear shrugs. Minato says, aware of the broken seals, “the nukenin can utilize a time/space and Kakashi can….break plates?”

Frustration? Training?

Minato is warming to the idea. He says, “so he’s training, by himself, alone, he overdoes it with the mangekyo, passes out, and can’t turn it off or cover it up. It just keeps pulling chakra from him.”

Yes?

That is infinitely better than a suicide attempt. Minato is prepared to deal with the consequences of a botched training attempt. He is less prepared to face a Kakashi who lived under the restraint of the Curse Mark and decided he wanted to die. If he is strong enough to keep being a traitor, Minato could eventually get him out of this. But he can’t undo death.

“Okay,” he says, “Okay, we can salvage this. He’s hospitalized. I’ll cover up the house. I’ll take you back to headquarters. Give Owl kudos, he’s got a good reaction time with that wakizashi.”

He can feel Bear roll his eyes. Minato offers his arm and teleports them back to ANBU headquarters, where Owl tries to stab him again, stab them both, at the same time that Tiger snaps into attention. Minato evades the attack and says “Stand down, Owl, it’s me. I’m bringing this one back.” He turns Bear loose on the agent who’s frozen into horrified place. Minato says, “I like the initiative, but please refrain from assassinating your Commander. It’d be work to replace them.”

Bear folds his arms over his chest faux-menacingly to cow him and Tiger shakes with repressed laughter and Minato wishes that they’d been in ANBU at the same time. Bear would have been a much better Commander to work under than Eagle. Eagle was a hardass who ate nails for breakfast. Very few shinobi intimidated him, but Minato had once seen Eagle use his own intestines as field sutures. The memory haunts him still.

Hiruzen would approve of Eagle. The man put Konoha above all else. Especially ethics. Especially in war time. All ANBU are supposed to. Maybe its only outside of a mask that he’s seeing how much damage that expectation excuses.

He bows to the ANBU and flashes himself back to the hospital to check on Kakashi. He is still in the back, so Minato goes to get Kushina. He has to hunt her down; she’s not in any of her usual haunts and she’s frustratingly left his marker at their house. After some thinking, he goes back to the office to find her sitting in his Hokage chair with a grave expression, chatting amiably with Akiko san, casually flipping through his outgoing box.

When he pops in, she says, “Oh look, it’s the Yondaime.” She says to him, conspiratorially, “Your Honor Guard wouldn’t tell me where you’d gone. I was about to subject them to tortures outside their wildest imagination.”

Iwashi actually rolls his eyes and complains, “like we know where he goes when he hares off like that. Flying Thunder God’s useless if you don’t know where to aim it.”

Minato says, “I told Genma kun.”

“What?” Raido smacks the senbon right out of the younger shinobi’s mouth. “You didn’t say anything?”

Genma shrugs, pulling out another senbon, presumably one of his non-poisoned ones to replace the one that had fallen to the floor. He drawls, “No point. Classified.”

“That’s my cue,” Akiko says and gathers up a few of the files Kushina sorted through. “There’s more the censors are crunching through, but the numbers should be on the desk by evening.”

“Excellent,” Kushina says. “And tell the Cipher Corps I want it in triplicate, and to send copies to that damn Umino.”

Akiko bows herself from the room, off to assist in whatever prank Kushina is pulling on the hapless paperwork ninja now. Whatever it is, Raido looks mighty unimpressed, while Iwashi is awed. Genma is amused, smug around a mouthful of senbon.

When the civilian is gone, Minato says, “Kakashi’s in the hospital. He’s under care right now and I’ve got Fugaku sama with him.”

Everyone straightens at that. Kushina’s expression darkens. “Take me there,” she commands him and Minato obliges, with a stern look at his guard to follow.

They appear in the waiting room. After a few seconds, the guard trio gets organized enough to pull off a collaborative Hiraishin and clumsily land next to them in the hospital waiting room, wobbly and nauseous. Minato says, “Not bad. Next time, focus on the middle of the marker, not just the image of the marker. Ground yourselves better and the disorientation’s less.”

Iwashi’s green around the gills but he nods, pleased they’d successfully utilized the technique to follow their Hokage around.

They wait. Minato puts his lips on Kushina’s ear and whispers a short summary about how he’d found Kakashi unconscious from severe chakra depletion in his home. The waiting room’s full of curious civilians getting their first prolonged up close look at their Hokage and a few shinobi waiting on news of loved ones as well, and they nod respectfully but keep their distance. He could pull on his approachability easily enough, score a few popularity poll points, but he doesn’t feel up to it at the moment.

It’s Nara Yoshino who eventually comes to update them. Her scrubs are rolled up to her elbows and she’s just barley showing the first hint of her pregnancy. She says to their hopeful expressions, “He’s stable. It’s a more severe case of chakra exhaustion than we usually see. Its good you found him when you did, he didn’t have much time left. Fugaku sama brought a clan medic to check out the implant; I’m sure he’ll update you with what you need to know about all that.”

“Can we see him?” Kushina asks.

“He’s still under; he’ll be unconscious for days. He’s got a recovery ahead of him.”

Kushina says, “I want to see him.”

Yoshino softens. “You can see him. He’s in 4073.”

They go en masse to flood the room. Kakashi’s knocked out on the railed bed, hooked up to fluids and other drips and machines that beep out his vitals. Minato’s no iroyonin but he knows the important things to look for and his vitals look steady. The constant line of his breathing is the greatest relief.

They’d left his mask on but his headband has been replaced wide a wide swath of white bandages. Fugaku’s waiting for them in the chair by the bed; he stands when they enter. He says, “He’ll be fine. No permanent damage was done.”

Kushina fluffs his pillow, fussing over him, and Fugaku pulls Minato aside. He says, seriously, “whatever stunt this was, it would have killed him if you hadn’t found him.”

Minato says, “I don’t think it was the stunt you’re considering.” Fugaku knows about the Curse Mark, about Kakashi’s family history. It’s not an unusual leap of logic to connect the dots. Minato says, “I really think he was just being reckless. He likely didn’t think activating Kamui would affect him so badly.”

The Uchiha looks at him oddly. “The what?”

Minato realizes that he’s misspoke, mixed up what truths the Uchiha knew. The kind of mistake that would get his students killed. There’s no way to dig out of this one, so he just shakes his head and says, “Later.”

The Clan Head is suspicious, but he nods slowly and Minato loses hope that Fugaku would drop it. He thinks Shikaku may kill him for this, if Kushina doesn’t flay him first.

There’s not much to do now, but it calms him, settles some anxious energy in him, to see Kakashi and know he’s going to be okay. He’s going to be okay, and out of Root for the time being. It’s a guilty relief. There are injuries on his charts that he cannot account for. Healings not logged at the hospital. Minato quietly has Yoshino doctor the charts to erase documentation of them. It’s an odd request; there’s no telling what Shikaku’s told her outright or she’s pieced together herself from how he handed her a dead zetsu for an autopsy.

But she complies and his new chart lists only the chakra exhaustion. He’ll be under for maybe a week, estimates say. It’s more than usual, a sign of just how close he’d come to dying. They’ll have to sedate him when he gets closer to waking up to help manage the pain and sickness. He won’t be able to keep anything down until the nausea leaves him.
Movement from the window catches his attention. ANBU Chameleon salutes at him before vanishing to a safe distance and Minato’s grateful that Bear’s already got a detail on him.

“Thank you, Fugaku sama,” Minato says. “For everything you’ve done for him. I’m more grateful than I can express.”

Fugaku’s not frowning for once. He picks his words carefully, “Hatake is aggravating to me on a daily basis. I would not miss his meddling. But perhaps I’ve grown attached to the imp, more than I had anticipated when I agreed to train him.” He says, softer, “I swear I can see Obito in him sometimes.”

Minato sighs, “I do to. Behind all the lazy snark and lightning, Kakashi can be kind. Kind in a way you wouldn’t expect him to still have.”

Kushina is smiling too, a secret smile, just for him. Maybe Fugaku remembers Obito more fondly posthumously, but he’d have to be a cold-blooded bastard to prefer him dead.

There’s not much else to do. Kakashi is stable and in for a long stay. They make sure he’s comfortable, but Yoshino has been assigned as his nurse. She’ll take good care of him until he wakes up.

They take the opportunity while Kakashi is removed from the picture to get good work done. Bear rescreens ANBU for suspicious nin, with the Curse Mark in mind this time. Minato covertly cases the village at night with Sage Mode; he even identifies a pair of Root operatives on the move and passes their call signs along to Bear to place them on the do not trust list. One of them, Shrew, is a longtime ANBU agent, and her successful infiltration is distressing on ten different fronts, the least of which is that she is a full blooded Hyuuga, not even branch family.

Knowing about the Curse Mark changes how they operate in their investigation. Minato identifies them, and then he lets them go. He would not chance their loss if they were forced into service and killing them gains him nothing at all. Bear has about ten agents he suspects. Guesses in rank put Root numbers between 30 as a lowball score and upwards of 50, most high chuunin or greater.

Fugaku proves an equal concern for the security of the investigation. He shows up to Minato’s office again, this time for an explanation. He asks flatly, “Kamui?”

Shit. Minato laughs uneasily. “I don’t suppose you’d consider forgetting I said that?”

Fugaku crosses his arms. “I fail to see how keeping details of Kakashi’s dojutsu training from me is any benefit. I fail to see how this is a secret I am not privy to.”

Minato says, “There’s more going on with this, Fugaku sama. It’s a stand down, for the safety of the agents involved.”

Fugaku says, “there are no Uchiha on such missions, ANBU or otherwise.”

The Clan Head is too smart for his own good. Minato says, “I will neither confirm nor deny.”

There’s silence between them and Minato fears he’s connecting things in the quiet. It’s a huge, unbelievable leap from secret deepcover Uchiha operative to Obito’s alive, but not an impossible one, considering Kakashi’s connection with him.

Fugaku says, “If such an agent existed, I would have to insist that they return to the village immediately. There are things they need to know, as soon as possible. Things only Uchiha can see.”

The urgency in his tone is unusual for the man. Minato asks, “surely if that were true, you would have relayed the appropriate information to Kakashi?”

Fugaku says, “it is not a thing that concerns him. He is not an Uchiha. His implant poses a risk to him, yes, but there are separate risks from having a full set, from having Uchiha blood and a mangekyo sharingan. If this is the case, I’m afraid as Uchiha Clan Head, I have to insist, stand down or no stand down, Hokage sama.”

Minato studies him and the worst thing is how genuine the man is. Fugaku’s honestly concerned; that can’t be a good thing. Is there really some danger to Obito he doesn’t know about? Some cost to the mangekyo he is abusing by using it like he does?

He hedges, “Hypothetically, if a long time deepcover Uchiha agent activated his mangekyo sharingan outside the village, would you consider writing the relevant information on a sealed scroll that could be carried by summon directly to them? I could guarantee its clearance.”

Fugaku’s already shaking his head. “No, it could not be relayed in such a manner. I’m telling you, Yondaime, there is something that they need to see. In person.”

This is troubling. Minato says, “If there were an opportunity in the next year for this to be a possibility, would you be satisfied waiting for the successful completion of a mission?”

“A year is too long to wait. It may be too late.”

“What would the potential consequences be?”

Fugaku just shakes his head. “Drastic.”

“Fatal?”

“In a way.”

Well that isn’t helpful at all. Minato says, “I will take your council under consideration. If there were such an agent, there is no way for me to reliably contact them at this time.” It is all the truth he can give him.

Fugaku seems to sense that he’s reached the limit. He says, “I cannot reiterate the importance of this. I would be willing to work with you to ensure its stays as covert as possible.”

“Thank you, Fugaku sama. If such a situation were to arise, I would keep you in mind.”

The Clan Head chews on some more words, but he says none of them. He bows his head stiffly. “Hokage sama.”

Minato thinks that could have gone better. He wastes the evening with useless speculation on whatever horror Fugaku is hinting at but he comes up with nothing. What could be worse than a mangekyo sharingan? Hadn’t Madara already told Obito everything he needed to know? Was there a possibility Fugaku knew something that Madara didn’t? More likely, was there vital information Madara kept from Obito regarding the dojutsu Madara had forced onto him?

Kami, this is going to ruin his day. He’ll worry until he got a toad to them to ask Obito for clarification, to relay Fugaku’s cryptic warning. It’s a long, anxious evening until he can go home and blab to Kushina, who speculates with him but can add no better suggestion that the toad plan he came up with earlier.

It’s among this frustrating news that he gets his first update of Obito and Rin’s activities. He reads the headline once. Rereads it. Groans and thunks his head down at the kitchen table. He’d taken some of his less urgent scrolls home with him to work through and buried in there is a missive from an informant in Kumogakure.

Kushina looks up at him in concern. She’s brewing them tea and morning light slips through the window and sets her hair aflame and he was having a great morning, all thoughts of the Uchiha aside, before this.

He says, muffled, “did they really kidnap B from the middle of the Hidden Cloud Village surrounded by a dozen Kumo jounin.”

Kushina laughs, delighted. “Serves him right! Cloud nin are bastards.”

Minato says, “Cloud nin brought us together.”

She laughs again, “I remember. Didn’t you try to save me like I was some damsel and I yelled at you because I had broken my bonds a mile back and was waiting for a good distraction?”

He turns his head so she can see him and grins. “I was a good distraction.”

She throws a sugar packet at his head. “You were distracted, more like.”

Minato says, “Did we ever tell them that that’s how we met? Or did they kidnap him just for fun and not revenge?”

Kushina says, “Don’t ruin this for me. They took him as vengeance! I owe them both a thank you.” She gets a sly look on her face, clever with mischief. “Let’s invite A to the wedding.”

Minato snorts, “That’ll go over smoothly. I don’t think ‘homicidal rage’ was on our registry.”

She says, “I could make string lights out of his teeth.”

He sputters and throws the report at her. She catches it nimbly and scans the report about how notorious missing nin Sachira and Tobi had kidnapped Killer B right out from under the Raikage’s nose. She flips it over with a frown, “What, is that all? No details?”

“It’s just a rumors report from an informant.”

“Boring!” She throws it back at him. “I want a real state secret I can torment A with in all my revenge fantasies.”

Minato matches her sly grin. He says, “I think I could be convinced to give up some state secrets.”

“Oh really?” she challenges him, turning the burner off with an audible click. “I’m pretty convincing.”

His brain gets stuck on yeah, you’re so pretty and he may say that out loud. He may be a genius, but the smartest move he’s ever made was convincing Kushina to marry him.

Later, he’s in the office going through the more urgent reports with Shikaku and he gets another interesting piece of news, this time from Wind. A high-profile puppeteer named Sasori was revealed to have killed the third Kazekage, stolen puppet kinjutsu, dueled the Lady Chiyo on his way out, and went and wiped out an entire country overnight south of Hoshi and Bird in his debut as a nukenin using puppets made from the bodies of his victims. This included the Sandaime Kazekage, so one of his human puppets came equipped with the Iron Sand kekkei genkai. Sasori had earned himself the moniker Red Sand, after the blood he’s presumably spilled on his way out of Suna.

“Human puppets?” Shikaku’s lip curls with distaste. “Why is it always fucking puppets with these guys.”

Minato says, “Akasuna no Sasori….isn’t that Chiyo’s apprentice? The poisoner who gave Tsunade sama all that trouble in the Second War?”

“Is it?” Shikaku scratched his chin while Minato just stared. “What? My memory’s not eidetic. Unlike some stubborn jounin.”

Kakashi is still unconscious. Minato calls, “Akiko san, could I get a profile on Akasuna no Sasori from Wind?”

The profile is delivered with a flourish, still coated in dust from the Archives. Minato flips through it while Shikaku reads it upside down from across the desk. “Huh, that’s him. He’s her grandson. She raised him after his parents were killed by….oh.”

Shikaku says, “S ranked nukenin. Exploitable losses in his past. Randomly ditches his village in a display of carnage. Creepy puppet jutsu. Potentially hates Konoha, and Kakashi specifically.”

Minato says, “well, that just about checks all the boxes, doesn’t it.”

Shikaku says, “we should take him out. When Kakashi’s better, we can—”

“Nope,” Minato says. “Do not say the words ‘he can be bait’ to me.”

Shikaku says stubbornly, “It’s the best possible situation. The target will be emotionally compromised and we can lure him into a strike zone of our choosing. We’ll need every advantage against an S rank.”

Minato says, “Teamwork will be our greatest advantage. Even a S ranked shinobi can be outnumbered.”

Shikaku snorts. “You killed a platoon.”

“That’s different.”

“It’s really not.”

Minato says, “Using Kakashi as bait was Madara’s plan.”

“That’s because it’s a shinobi plan.”

Minato sighs, “It doesn’t matter. Kakashi’s not cleared for combat. He won’t be for weeks.”

“Yoshino says he’ll be good to go with 7 days rest.”

“You gossip like an old maid,” he grumbles. “How can someone so lazy be so irritating?”

“It’s my true ninja art.”

Minato shakes his head. “Get out of my office. Come back with a better plan.”

It’s the next day when he’s interrupted by an urgent call from the gate guards. It’s Kurenai on duty and the alarm code reaches the Tower within minutes. Gennin team returned. Medical care urgent. And the last code, the one he dreads hearing every day. Man down. Fatality.

He flashes to the gates as soon as he hears and his guard trio follow almost immediately. They’re getting quicker at it. The front gate is a frenzy of organized activity; chuunin are on site and the returning gennin team is falling apart. One is dragging the unconscious jounin instructor. The young girl’s the only one on her feet.

It’s Team 1. Kurenai’s covering the body of the gennin who didn’t make it with a sheet to hide him from the eyes of the civilians. ANBU are popping up on scene. Minato says, “medical transport here.”

He grabs the unconscious jounin and the other gennin; he’s in such a bad shape it takes him a second to recognize it’s Fugaku’s nephew Shisui. There’s blood on his face, under both eyes. His heart sinks.

There’s nothing he can do for the other gennin.

He takes them both to the hospital then considers and flashes in to grab Fugaku at his office again. He looks up and frowns. “Kakashi again?”

Minato shakes his head. “It’s Shisui.”

His tone tells him everything he needs to know. Fugaku pales. Minato says, “I’ll take you to him.”

Fugaku is immediately escorted back to assist with Shisui. Minato goes back to the gates to see the activity has cleared and regular operations have resumed. The body is nowhere in sight. The kunoichi has been taken either for a checkup just in case or for a verbal report. Minato turns to Yuuhi Kurenai, “What happened?”

“They just appeared, a few miles out. Mai chan had…the boy, and Ichimaru sensei had Shisui kun, and he collapsed as soon as he was in range of the village. I had the other guards go to bring them in while I signaled out. Mai chan was just repeating that they needed help. They’ve taken her to get checked out.”

“Thank you, Kurenai san. You’ve done well, signaling as quickly as you did.”

Konoha wasn’t in the habit of losing gennin since the war. Hadn’t it just been a C rank? An in-country civilian escort?

With the whole team hospitalized, there is little he can piece together about how it had gone so tragically wrong. Wrong enough that he suspected that there were new mangekyo in the village, the first Uchiha since Fugaku himself to active the full dojutsu.

Uchiha Shisui is a child. Obito used to babysit him; it would make him late for team meetings. He’s barely a gennin.

Ichimaru’s still in surgery. It’s Fugaku who updates him eventually, after many hours of waiting, looking haunted. He rubs his hand over his own eyes, like they ache.

Minato asks, “It’s the mangekyo, isn’t it.”

He sighs heavily. “He’s 10, Yondaime. He doesn’t even have chakra coils developed enough to sustain it.”

Minato says, “his teammate was 12.”

Fugaku startles out of his frown before shaking his head. “Let’s go somewhere to talk, Yondaime.”

Minato nods and offers his arm. Fugaku takes hold and he takes them back to his office, just to make it more official. He activates the privacy seals. It takes Fugaku a long moment to gather his thoughts.

He says, “you know things about the mangekyo sharingan you shouldn’t by right of your birth.” He shakes his head. “It’s not Kakashi who told you how a mangekyo is activated, because I didn’t tell him the whole truth of it. It would just hurt him and make him suspicious of me, when all the possible damage has been done and I was in a position to help him.”

Minato can’t say he hasn’t wondered how Fugaku had gotten his eyes. It was a smart move, concealing it from Kakashi, who came back utterly wrecked. He didn’t need to know the details. Not when Rin was dead and Fugaku was offering to train him.

Minato says nothing.

Fugaku says, “It’s Obito, isn’t it.”

Minato says nothing.

Fugaku sits down in the chair. His eyes are red and spinning slowly; he’s analyzing Minato’s every micro expression. He says, “I put some pieces together. You’ve had the Books baked, but the modifications don’t stand up to a sharingan. You removed pictures of nukenin. Nukenin that just appeared out of thin air at the same time that Kakashi comes back with his mangekyo. A mangekyo you know too much about.”

Minato says, “Leave it alone, Fugaku. Don’t pursue this.”

“I don’t need to,” he says. “My clansman is alive and you’ve been keeping me in the dark.”

“Damn it, Chief. What part of stand down do you not understand? You’re putting him in more danger than you know, putting us all in more danger than you realize.”

Fugaku says, “I won’t pretend to even guess at the circumstances that brought this on, but if that’s true, then he is in a greater danger than I believe you realize as well.”

He should have known the investigator wouldn’t let this go. The Police Chief is like a dog with a bone, especially where his clan was concerned. Minato says, “you knowing he’s alive changes exactly nothing about his situation. The village is compromised, Fugaku sama. If you even say his name, even in an empty room, you risk him. Trust me when I say this mission he’s on is of the utmost importance. I cannot stress how difficult it is, how damn convoluted it is, to keep him alive long enough to come home.”

Fugaku actually looks relieved by his outburst. He says, “I don’t presume to know why he’s running around with a nukenin from Tea to kidnap Bijuu. But it is good to hear that he’s alive. He’s alive, and coming home.”

Minato growls, “you spread that around and he’s dead within a week. Do you understand me, Fugaku? Nobody, not his aunt, not Mikoto, nobody.”

“I understand, Hokage sama.” He looks hesitant but forges on with the pride of his clan. “Is there anything you can tell me?”

Minato just stares at him. It takes a full minute for the disbelief to shift into resignment. He doesn’t have a clan, but if he found out his long lost presumed dead clan member was alive, he guesses he’d want to know what he could.

He choses his words very carefully. “He’s….doing okay. He’s been through unspeakable things, but he’s still the boy you remember. He’s got more power than he knows what to do with; you’d never believe he’s the same gennin your clan used to ridicule.” Its not quite an accusation, but he breezes right along. “He laughs. He likes flowers. He called the Tsuchikage a motherfucker to his face. He’s good at traps but bad at patience. And genjutsu. It’s good to see him smile. He’s taken an impossible mission upon his shoulders, but he will come home when he’s done and you and your clan will welcome him back or so help me kami, I will remind you why the Hiraishin was invented.”

The threat phases him exactly none. Fugaku says, “You’ve seen him.”

“He’s as tall as you already and just as broad. Built like a damn tree.”

Fugaku says, quietly, “Thank you. It is good to hear that he’s doing well.”

Minato says, “He’s knowledgeable about his dojutsu. If there’s some threat you are worried about him not knowing, he may know it already. I will ask him to be sure, but it may take weeks before I can safely send a toad.”

There’s a hundred questions he could ask but Fugaku voices none of them. He’s said what he came to say. He says instead, “I appreciate the gesture. I’m going to look after Shisui now. The two of them are close. I’ll make sure he’s still around to show off for.”

“Thank you, Fugaku sama. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.”

Fugaku nods and bows himself to the door. Before Minato can dismiss the sealing so he can leave, Fugaku turns back around to face him. He says, more hesitantly, “You’ve shown me great honesty today. I am grateful. About my eyes…it’s an accident I can never take back, a consequence I can never make right again. I was not surprised by Kakashi’s own activation. Intent, it seems, matters little to whatever governs these things.”

He continues, “Shisui is a kind boy. He’s like Obito in that regard. I don’t know the circumstances that brought this on, but it is fair to give him the benefit of the doubt. If he was close enough to his teammate to cause this, I doubt he acted willingly.”

Minato says, “I did not mean to imply—”

“You implied it. Of him, and of me as well.”

He had. Maybe subconsciously, but he had indeed suspected it of the both of them, in a way he hadn’t of his own students. Maybe it’s his knowledge of Madara tainting his suspicion, or maybe he’s just more generous of his students, but he had wondered who Fugaku had killed, and how he had gotten away with it.

He says, “my apologies, Fugaku sama. It is unfair of me. You don’t deserve that, and neither does Shisui kun.”

Fugaku nods and with that acceptance, he breaks the seals barrier and leaves.

Minato is tired. Tired enough he can’t seem to stop cramming his foot in his mouth. Shikaku will kill him for this, and he will deserve it.

He tells them both later that night that Fugaku knows. Shikaku is, predictably, furious. He’ll make a great dad; he’s got the lecture tone down pat. Kushina’s eyes shine. She says, “I get to tell Mikoto.”

“No!” Shikaku says, “nobody’s telling anyone!”

Kushina looks smug, “Mikoto’s got that old grump wrapped around her fingers. I bet she already knows.”

“Academy students have better discretion than you! The leadership of the village!”

Kushina sticks her tongue out at him, “You’re a talking ANBU agent with his mask on sideways. Don’t lecture me about discretion, Commander.”

Shikaku rubs his eyes. He looks like he’d rather be asleep as well, like everything that happened was just a bad dream he could wake up from. They’re all tired, and cranky, and snapping at each other like kids who missed naptime. Minato sighs and say, “there’s nothing to be done about it now. The zetsu and Root are watching the Uchiha. If Fugaku talks, they’ll know, and then we’ll know.”

Shikaku says, darkly, “I could disappear him.”

“No, we do not disappear Konoha shinobi. Especially Clan Heads. Especially the Leaf Police Chief.” Why is that every ANBU’s first plan? Has he ever been that murder happy? Minato shakes his head.

Shikaku says, “I didn’t mean assassinate him. I’d bring him back later, when it’s all over. It’d be a miracle. He wouldn’t even remember being gone.”

“You are not tying the Uchiha Clan Head up in Inoichi’s basement. He’s got his second kid on the way and I will not save you from the wrath of Uchiha Mikoto if you kidnap her husband. New plan, Nara.”

Shikaku frowns at him, “You expect me to have all these plans, but then you don’t like any of them, when they’re statistically our best shot for success.”

Minato has to try hard not to snap back at his ANBU Commander like they’re both bickering kids. He says, “you want to take ino-shika-cho to take out Sasori using Kakashi as bait. As a village, we cannot risk three Clan Heads, the ANBU Commander, and the Investigation Head of T&I.”

Shikaku says, “Kakashi would agree that it’s the best plan.”

Kushina says, “Kakashi doesn’t have the healthiest view of himself, especially right now. You don’t even have a medic on that team, and you want to face an S ranked enemy shinobi? A puppeteer trained by the master who gave Senju Tsunade trouble?”

The only battle medic the Nara trusts enough for it is likely Yoshino, but he won’t dare risk her or her pregnancy on any field mission. Minato says, “We’re not arguing about this. Fugaku sama knows the bare minimum. He doesn’t even know that Rin’s the kunoichi leading the mission. He knows exactly no compromising information aside from the fact that Obito’s alive. In and of itself, it could be worse. Now he can train Kakashi on Kamui in a way that won’t put him in the hospital for a week. And we’ve gotten no updates on Sasori or his movements. We don’t even know for sure he’s Madara’s man. We’ll take him out, but not until we have the right team in place.”

Shikaku shrugs. “Kakashi will wake up soon. He’ll agree with me. Hell, maybe even Root will make themselves useful and provide an assist.”

“I think we’ve overestimated their numbers. They’ve lost a fair amount of agents recently. It’s unlikely they’ll risk more on so high profile an assassination.”

It’s a good point, but they’re just talking circles. Minato nods at Kushina but says, “I’m calling this meeting. Everyone, get some sleep. We’ll reconvene tomorrow. Kakashi should wake up in two days; I want someone there with him. We can’t let him go get updated orders from Root. He’s in the dark right now on their will but the second he wakes he’ll try to run. I want someone with him at all times.”

Shikaku says, “I trust Tiger to accept a stand down on guarding him. If he tries to sneak away, she’ll let him and alert us instead.”

Minato says, “It’s risky. Root may see a tail as a threat.”

“Not if she lets him go.”

Minato shakes his head to stall another argument. He says, “I’m dismissed. I’m going to bed. I’ll take first shift at the hospital tomorrow.” He holds out his arm, “Kushina?”

She latches on and Shikaku sighs, pulling his mask back around straight. Bear signs,, dismissed and Minato leaves him in his office and takes Kushina straight home and he sleeps like the dead. He feels much better when he wakes, much more human, even with strands of red hair stuck in his mouth from where he slept deep enough to drool. He’s sure he looks very dignified for a kage. He can’t look worse than Ohnoki at least. The old Tsuchikage is a sight even on his best days.

They eat breakfast at the hospital and Minato sits in the chair by Kakashi’s bed and waits for him to wake up. Yoshino’s got him preemptively on painkillers to help manage the pain he’ll feel when he regains consciousness but he’s still out like a light. Everyone looks smaller in a hospital bed, but its hard to forget that the big bad Copy Nin Kakashi’s still only fourteen. His hair is limp and dull, bleached whiter by the fluorescents. His breathing is deep and even.

Kushina’s squirming. She says, “I want to look at his seal.”

Oh. They look at him sleep. Minato says, “what do you think it’ll help?”

“If I know the exact design, I could maybe come up with a way to not only release it, but release it in such a way that won’t alert Root that it’s inactive.”

The problem is, with a Curse Seal, it’s tied into the victim’s chakra. Messing around with it could damage Kakashi, if not kill him outright. If the caster senses his Curse Mark go wonky, he’ll kill Kakashi. But if they leave the mark in place and functioning, it could also kill Kakashi. Minato hates that so many options recently end with a dead Kakashi.

But just looking at it should be fine. If anyone could figure something out, Kushina can, and she thought that seeing the actual arrangement of the matrix would help in some way. There is really only one obstacle.

They look at the sleeping Kakashi. Minato has never once seen his student unmasked. Neither, he assumes, has Kushina. It would be a betrayal to take advantage of that fact now, as he lies unconscious. They would get away with it, but he knows that Kakashi would resent it if he knew.

If Kakashi didn’t wear a mask, he’s sure that looking at the seal is one of the first things they would have done when they had the opportunity. If only the Curse Mark was on his arm or somewhere, not in his mouth, not under his mask. Minato feels sick just considering that Root had taken his mask off to seal him. It’s not anything he likes to think about.

He says, “Kushina….”

She sighs, “I know. Would he forgive me, if I could fix it?”

He thinks that Kakashi trusts maybe one person in the entire world absolutely, and it is a dog. Minato thinks that Kakashi’s been taught betrayal often enough he’s learned to expect it from others. It would be an action taken out of love and he would understand why Kushina had done it, but he would never forget that she’d unmasked him while he was vulnerable. Kakashi hates being helpless. Being unwillingly sealed has to be his worst nightmare and it wouldn’t go away when he woke up. Minato doesn’t think he would add to that.

He says, “I’m going on a coffee run. I’ll be back in a few.”

He wanders around, checks in on Shisui. The gennin came through reparative surgery to stop the bleeding and reset broken bones and his prognosis looks good. Ichimaru pulled through as well but he’s being kept in a medically induced coma to help combat a head wound. When he wakes, Minato will have to tell him his student has died. He’s been on the other side of that twice and it never gets any easier, even if his students miraculously survived their supposed deaths. It never gets any easier.

Shisui’s room is surrounded by a small crowd of Uchiha. The only people they are letting back to see him are family, and the surviving teammate, Mai. The girl had carried him on her back all the way from Nochi village, by the Black River, where their escort team had been attacked by nukenin. The enemy nin outnumbered them, and they had no moral compunctions about targeting the gennin as the weaker shinobi.

Mai says that the battle was a blur. Ichimaru protected them as best he could, but Giyo went down and Shisui could barely stand after. Giyo was 12.

It never gets any easier.

He returns to Kakashi’s room with two coffees. Kushina’s looking thoughtful.

She accepts the coffee and says, “I didn’t. When we get in contact with Rin again, maybe she can send a sketch of it. Or we could wrestle a random agent to the ground and check his out before he offs himself and it disappears.”

He would have supported whatever decision she made, but he is relieved. He says, “I’ll put it on my to do list.” And they lean against each other and watch him sleep and wait for him to wake up again.

Kushina goes to watch Itachi for Mikoto while she and Fugaku sit vigil waiting for Shisui to wake up. The boy’s own father has mobility issues that prevent him from being at the hospital himself, old war injuries, and the Clan Head is standing in for him.

They get an updated timeline from Yoshino when she comes in to adjust his medications. They plan everything perfectly. With Kakashi waking up, they go back to evasion protocol. Shikaku has everything under strict control.

It goes smoothly. Everyone is in place for when he wakes up. Minato is napping in the chair by his bed, half-asleep half-meditating, but he comes too immediately when Kakashi snaps awake and the first move he makes is to claw his IV out and escape. He’s a little loopy with the drugs in his system, but when Minato asks him what happened, he gets a goofy look in his visible eye and says, “I figured out Kamui.”

The relief is absolute. He could deal with recklessness. Minato could handle this Kakashi. He wants to know if there was an ugly teacup next to him and Minato had memorized the scene with Bear to make sure it wasn’t a suicide attempt. When he says no, Kakashi says it’s because he sent it to Obito, all the way in Kumo, or another dimension entirely.

Kushina entering right on time is a welcome distraction from the absurdity of Kakashi almost dying over tea. He’s starting to get antsy, more lucid, more unwilling to be in the hospital in general, but they planned for this, and Shikaku arrives right on cue, Tiger in tow. The ANBU has been instructed to pretend to be a tail, but allow him to leave. She knows about the tunnel in his house, so if he sneaks out using it, she’ll let him go. They can’t keep him from Root forever, but they just need to prolong it a few hours.

When he gets too squirrely, Shikaku adjusts his drip line and sends him back under so they can make the necessary preparations. There are things they can’t talk about in the hospital, things they have to spin to Kakashi without causing suspicion. He has to be involved, but not aware of anything too important. There are things that are already a given, but Shikaku has the tightrope of information down to an exact science.

When they’re ready for him, Kakashi’s allowed to wake up again. They’ve got Mikoto on duty to throw the sense of clockwork off; nobody would suspect they put a five-year-old on him as a guard. Itachi takes his job very seriously. It’s kind of adorable. Minato’s thinking he wouldn’t mind kids and he gets distracted trying to picture what a mini half-Kushina half-him would even be like. Then he pictures having like a small army of them. It’s not a bad image.

They’ve got the building on lock down. Tiger’s on his window, which Kushina’s sealed shut to prevent him from bolting. Kakashi is not pleased. There’s something off in his banter with Shikaku. He’s not addled, Yoshino has weaned him off the painkillers while he slept, and his drip lines are running pure saline. He says, “Careful, Shikaku sama. You wouldn’t want your agents to know you know.”

Shikaku plays it off but there’s a part of Minato that wonders if it’s some kind of warning. A lot changed while Kakashi’s been under, and he can’t know Root’s will for him just yet. If they can update him first, they have a better chance of Kakashi responding as himself, before Root can override all his natural reactions.

They maneuver him out of the hospital. Minato works with Yoshino to get Kakashi released into his care. It’s too soon really, to let him go, but Minato has zero confidence in Kakashi’s ability to stay put and follow the doctor’s orders. It’s best they let him out legally and mitigate the consequences of him walking around, all eyes and ears.

If Kakashi’s distressed by his supervision, he fronts it with annoyance. He previously had the record for successful consecutive jailbreaks from the hospital and this will break his streak. It’s jounin tradition to bolt from medical care but Minato couldn’t allow him to run now.

It’s already late, and Minato uses the lure of weapons to get Kakashi not to escape while he was changing into his gear. Then he successfully flashes them all to the Hokage Office, and Kakashi’s updated with everything on Shikaku’s safe list. He’s told about Sasori, but he wants to know about Jiraiya, about Obito and Rin, about why his office smells like Uchiha Fugaku. It seems like Kakashi’s recent life mission is to make life difficult on the Uchiha, but soon Shisui will be common enough knowledge. There is no reason to hide it from him, not when he’ll find out on his own.

Minato says, “A C rank fell apart and we lost a gennin. Uchiha Shisui was injured.” He says, “you’re not the only one in the village with a new mangekyo. Fugaku’s been with him all day but he’s still in the hospital. They say he’ll pull through, but he’s the youngest Uchiha ever to activate the dojutsu and it’s wearing at his developing chakra coils.”

Kakashi’s says immediately, “you need to protect him, Sensei. He may be vulnerable to outside influences seeking the power of the clan ability.”

Minato frowns to hide his excitement. That was a warning, he was sure. As much of one as Kakashi could give, with his blank face, oddly stilted words, his eye vacant of anything at all. Root would be interested in Shisui. Behind Kakashi’s back, Shikaku’s face hardens at the confirmation. Minato can’t question this, doesn’t dare push further. He says, “Fugaku’s got him. I have ANBU at the hospital.”

If Kakashi’s relieved, he doesn’t show it. He shrugs a lot, and it’s not because he’s tired.

Minato’s forced by Shikaku to give up the details on Sasori. He’s betting that since Rabbit fought Kakuzu that Madara and Root don’t get along. He thinks that if they offer the mission assignment to Kakashi, he’ll instinctively get Root involved in the takedown in some way, either as backup or in the hopes of killing a few of them off. The teen is analytical enough they know that’s where his mind will go. And Minato is convinced that they couldn’t just ignore the connection between Sasori and Kakashi. If the puppeteer is going on a revenge trip, he’ll target the teen anyway. He’s not happy about it, or at Shikaku for forcing his hand like this, but if anyone’s going to tell Kakashi, it will be Minato.

Minato says, “Sasori’s parents were killed by the White Fang.”

Kakashi has complicated feelings about his father and he buzzes with them all now. He says simply, “Oh.”

Minato’s going to strangle Shikaku, but Kakashi likes the plan well enough. He’s always willing to risk himself, even when he’s not being used as a tool by an evil organization. Minato could pull his hair out by the root at the whole conversation, but he thinks they’re doing an admirable job of not raising any red flags with the teen.

Minato asks Kakashi what team he would assemble if given the chance, just to see what he would say. Kakashi considers for a moment and then clarifies if he can pick ANBU. Shikaku goes a few shades darker, and Minato thinks that he’s about to have to do damage control, but he nods his assent.

Kakashi says immediately, “Chameleon,” and it’s such an unusual request that it confirms that the ANBU’s a deepcover Root agent. He then says, “Crow,” and surprisingly enough he finishes the squad off with Genma.

It’s convoluted, but Minato can track his thought process. Ranged attackers for the puppets, a skilled poisoner. He hedges, “I’d hoped for an all jounin team.”

Kakashi shrugs but stands firm on his suggestions. There’s a moment of tension where Shikaku questions how he knows he works well with Crow’s fighting style and Kakashi casually burns his callsign. He’s worked with Aoba before, and Minato has to admit that giving the crow summoner the ANBU Crow mask was maybe not the most covert of codenames, but that is rich coming from the ninken summoner with a secret Root Hound mask. Like that is any better.

Shikaku’s going to explode in another minute. Minato intervenes, “Friday. I’ll make my decision by Friday.”

The shadow user seethes behind Kakashi’s back. Minato says, “I’m taking you home. You’re on bedrest for the rest of the week.”

By now, they’ve given Tiger enough time to get into position. It’s breaking his heart that they’re treating Kakashi like a criminal but he doesn’t have a better option at the moment. The second he leaves him, he knows he’ll run off to Root. He knows it, and he’s helpless to stop it.

The Hatake House looks worse than usual. He was maybe too careless fabricating a break in and the wood of the hall is scored with deep gouges and scorch marks. He reassures Kakashi it would have kept someone else out, and it would have, the teen had rigged the entire house to explode in a display of aggressive paranoid that he couldn’t exactly fault knowing what the teen was going through on a daily basis. He’s full of reassurances actually, useless as they feel. Kakashi doesn’t want to hear them. At the door, he looks miserable enough that Minato doesn’t try to hug him goodbye. Maybe he’s just making everything worse on the teen.

It takes a lot out of him to leave Kakashi there, knowing what’s going to happen. Tiger is in position, but they won’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know.

He flashes back to the Tower. Shikaku is less sad and more furious. He says, “Chameleon’s compromised for sure. Damn it, they were running the screenings under me. All the data is fucked. I’ll have to restart my whole list.”

Kushina says, “But he warned us about Shisui.”

Shikaku says, “Root wants the mangekyo. Shisui’s just a gennin. It wouldn’t be too hard to entrap the kid. I’ll have to have ANBU tail him. And I’ve only got like, 5, no 3, ANBU I trust at this moment. My poison tooth check only works for a small sample size. And Tiger’s stuck on Kakashi.”

Minato says, “It’s not a bad team arrangement. You could stop the puppets and Crow can take them out. Chameleon’s Root, but he’s a medic. You can limit his involvement, and I think Kakashi wants to keep an eye on him for whatever reason. I trust that instinct.”

“Genma’s tokubetsu.”

“You can’t have Genma,” Minato says. He’s got his own plans for the poisoner. “A four-man squad. Three jounin and a tokubetsu’s not a bad line up.”

“A solid half is Root.”

“Your goals will align. Root wants the minions gone. They should cooperate without any problems. If they turn on you, you and Crow will have to adjust. We’ve got a plan in place of exposure. It can stretch to include Chameleon.”

Shikaku’s not happy, but he’s never happy. Minato’s not happy either, but this works. He can make this work.

The next day, Tiger reports that Kakashi was gone for three hours in the dead of night and returned safely to his house. She did not pursue. It puts a bad taste in Minato’s mouth, but he knew it was coming. He’d seen the damn uniform under the floorboards. The list of recent injuries on Yoshino’s charts before he had the evidence scrubbed. He can only hope it was some light domestic terrorism but he knows Kakashi’s specialties better than anyone. The Copy Nin wasn’t in the Bingo Book for impersonating police officers or inciting civil unrest. The one jutsu he’d invented instead of stolen had no non-lethal applications. He’s kidding himself to think that Root had gotten ahold of a sharingan and weren’t abusing it at every possible turn.

The week follows much the same anxious vein. Root is not abiding by the doctor’s orders and Kakashi halfheartedly claims he’s been training out of boredom. Tiger says he goes out every single night. Yoshino pushes his recovery date back three days, then four.

Minato’s hands are tied. There’s nothing he can do. He approves the takedown of Akasuna no Sasori. He doesn’t like it either, but it’s their best option. If Minato won’t use Kakashi as bait the right way, there is no guarantee Root won’t send him out alone to get it done. This protects him, keeps Minato with some measure of control.

Shikaku gets the four man team and he’s keeping a close eye on both Kakashi and Kinoe. Aoba’s a weapons specialist, and he’s briefed on the barest details only. He knows that if the mission goes sideways, he is to side with Shikaku above his other teammates, above anything else. He will obey whatever his captain says.

While the team is preparing for the mission, Minato takes the opportunity to take Genma aside. There’s something he’s been meaning to ask the guard but he’s never had the time.

He asks him, “Is there a poison that would immediately incapacitate a target nonlethally with no pain or lasting side effects? A barbiturate, or a paralytic?”

Genma rolls the senbon around in his mouth thoughtfully. “Depends on the dosage. Too little wouldn’t affect the target enough. Too much would kill them. If you need it to work immediately, it’s got to be just right.”

“Could you do it with no margin of error?”

As laid back as Genma is, he has to have connected all the dots already. He considers Minato and says, “I could do it, Hokage sama. I would need as close to an exact weight as you can get me and a few days to brew it and let it seep to the right strength. It would be ready to go by Monday.”

He doesn’t even need to think about the specifications. He has his most recent charts memorized. Minato says, “Target is 107 pounds. If you could prepare multiple doses, that would be even better.”

If Genma recognizes Kakashi he doesn’t mention it, or judge Minato for wanting to poison his student. Genma knows the stakes. He knows Kakashi isn’t willing and he is willing to help.

Genma brings him the completed poison the day before the mission leaves. He hands Minato three hypodermic injectors disguised as senbon. He says, “Right in the jugular. It’ll knock him out in seconds. Harmless as long as you have the antidote.”

He hands over three different needles filled with a different color poison. “When you want to wake him, inject him with this. He’ll stay down until he receives the antidote, so it’s a capture technique, not an elimination. No side effects, but he’ll starve eventually if you leave him down. Hook him up to a drip line and he could go weeks just fine.”

The Shirunai techniques are brutally effective. This is exactly what he needs. Minato says, “Thank you, Genma. I hope I won’t need it, but I feel better having the option.”

Genma says, “He’ll be fine. He’s tough. Besides, what’s a little poisoning among friends?”

Most likely, friendly poisoning’s how the Shirunai say hello. Minato says, “We’ve got the proper contingencies in place. I’ve got a set up ready and equipped to deal with the fallout. I will count on you and the others to guard him while the timeline ticks down. There is every possibility of hostile engagement, but I won’t approve of lethal methods for them either. Not at this time.”

“Understood,” Genma says. He gives a lazy salute, chewing on a senbon like it’s a strand of grass. Minato wonders if he poisons them to build up a personal immunity to his arsenal. Knowing his clan, his mother and sisters were probably dosing Genma in the crib.

He gives a dose of poison and antidote to Shikaku to take with him on the mission, just in case. A needle the size of a senbon directly to the jugular is a tricky shot to make at the best of times, but Shikaku won’t miss.

Minato sees the team off at the gates. Kushina’s sending lunch along with them and Yoshino’s there as well. Kakashi’s finally been cleared for fieldwork and he’s been itching to get out of the village. Minato never really enjoys sending him on dangerous assassination missions but he does have a lot of experience with it. At least this time, Kakashi isn’t going out alone. Shikaku will watch him like a hawk and Aoba would step in if needed.

Kakashi does accept a goodbye hug from him and that hurts too. There are crows hidden in the trees around them and they watch Kakashi and Kinoe with black eyes. Minato isn’t going to be able to concentrate till he knows they’re safe.

He’s hyper focused on analyzing Kakashi’s every gesture. He doesn’t seem bitter or resigned, like he’s planning on the mission going south. Minato doesn’t think Root will sabotage it. They’ll eliminate Sasori of the Red Sand and come home safe. That’s the only option.

Shikaku gathers his team and they head out. Kushina hugs him as they watch the Konoha team get smaller and smaller. Yoshino stands with them, a hand on her belly. Kushina says, “they can take some young punk from Wind who hides behind creepy puppets. They’ll bring back souvenirs for us. I heard chakra conducting wood’s expensive.”

Yoshino says, “I’m not worried. Shikaku wouldn’t go if he wasn’t absolutely sure.”

That’s not entirely true; Shikaku would go if Minato asked. But this is as best a plan as they could come up with. If they don’t strike first, Root would surely send Kakashi anyway. Preempting it is better.

Kushina says, “Let’s all go wait together in the office and order takeout.”

Yoshino says, “I’m craving squid.”

“Squid it is!” Kushina links arms with her and steers the iroyonin back towards the Hokage Tower in the center of the Leaf Village.

There’s a map in Minato’s mind of every Hiraishin he would need to get to the strike zone and back. One of the hardest parts about wearing the hat is how it anchors him in place. But he trained Kakashi. Root agent or not, he knows Kakashi’s skill level. He is a prodigy on par with Minato himself at that age. All of his students have come so far and he couldn’t congratulate himself at all. Kakashi was always going to turn out as tricky as he was competent. The only reason he’s even partway sane is a pack of ninken. Fate itself seemed to intervene with Rin and Obito. None of this is on him at all, but he’s done his best to prepare them as best he could.

Kushina and Yoshino eat their way through a whole pile of grilled squid. Kushina has the biggest appetite he’s ever seen, but Yoshino is a pregnant woman satisfying a craving. He charges it to the essential funds tab and, when Mitokado shows up to complain about it, imagines how much easier his life would be if he let Shikaku vanish the Councilmembers for him.

He's done everything he can from inside the village. He’d used Sage Mode to locate a zetsu and had Owl leak the information about the mission to a spooky oak tree. Sasori would know exactly where to find them. He’ll be expecting Kakashi to be alone. He wouldn’t anticipate the ambush. Madara didn’t know he could ferret out clones using Sage Mode and there is no indication it’s a set up. While Obito and Rin battle the zetsu and Madara out wherever they are now, Minato battles corruption in the village and prepares the way for them. It doesn’t feel like enough, but killing Sasori is an important score. It’s removing a weapon from Madara’s arsenal. It would piss off Zetsu, but Minato isn’t afraid of a weird plant thing.

It's a long vigil. Yoshino destroys Iwashi in shogi. The paperwork crawls to a halt. He hasn’t been very productive in an official capacity recently, but everything is so mired in secrecy that the council could choke on it. Minato is doing just fine as Hokage. Nothing is more important than the missions his students have taken upon themselves.

Minato sinks into Sage Mode, sensing the Leaf Village around him while the others distract each other. An unsanctioned ANBU stands sentinel on the roof across the street; watching him no doubt. A zetsu lurks around the training grounds but he can’t kill it for the same reason he can’t take out the Root agents. Information is control. As long as Minato can control what the clone spies picked up, they are more useful than threatening, and outing the power of his Sage Mode to Madara isn’t worth it for a single spy all alone in Training Ground 64. If a zetsu wants to hang out in the Forest of Death, Minato isn’t going to go out of his way to stop them.

It's thanks to his Sage Mode he senses the incoming crow beelining for the Tower. He lets the markings around his eyes fade away as he stands to open the window to let the bird in. The crow swoops down onto the desk with a harsh caw and everyone in the room looks at the slip of paper it drops on the desk.

Minato seizes it and shakes it open. The report is succinct, in a messy handwriting that looks like chicken scratch, or like the crow had written it himself holding the pen in his beak. Mission successful. Returning.

Relief sweeps through him. He says, “The mission was a success. They’re on their way back.”

The tension lifts from the room and Kushina laughs breathily. They celebrate and it takes another few hours for the team to make it back home. Shikaku appears to give his verbal report and he’s accompanied only by Kinoe. The two of them are battered and torn up and probably need a checkup.

Shikaku salutes and Kinoe falls into attention beside him. He says, “Nara Shikaku reporting in. The mission was successful. Akasuna no Sasori has been eliminated.”

“Shikaku,” Minato asks politely, “Where is my student?”

The Nara slouches. “Aoba’s taking him to the hospital. He’s chakra depleted again.”

Minato face palms. “You said—”

“I was watching him! Everything was fine until he used some fancy dojutsu attack to take out the puppeteer. It was effective, but he overdid it.”

Minato contains himself. Not in front of Kinoe. He says, “I want written reports by tomorrow. Go get yourselves checked out.”