Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Konoha is…different from anything Haku has ever known. Most of his life has been spent as a missing-nin—camping out in harsh weather, always on the run from hunter nin, going weeks at a time in between jobs with limited funds and not enough food. What he remembers of Kiri is pain and blood and loss, with none of the fondness or longing that Zabuza-shishou carries.

Konoha is warm, though part of that is that it’s still summer, and the streets are alive at all hours of the day. There are dozens of little pop-up markets with fruits and vegetables that he’s not familiar with, and there are shops with richly dyed cloth and the weapons at the forge are of a much nicer quality than what they could find in backwater towns on the road. There’s a ramen stand that Naruto excitedly drags him to and a plant nursery that has some of the herbs Haku likes to keep in stock. It’s a nice place, on the surface at least, although he knows enough from what Kakashi hinted at and what Zabuza suspects to know that—just as in any other shinobi village—there are plenty of secrets and not all of them pleasant.

But the best part of Konoha is not the village itself. Not the merchants or the goods, not the pretty mountain views or the stability of having a regular paycheck.

It’s the family he has somehow found himself with.

Something happened in Wave, though Haku can’t imagine what. Zabuza-shishou is different now, a little softer, a little more obvious in his care. Haku had long ago resigned himself that he would be nothing more than a tool, that his devotion to the man who saved him and trained him was only one-sided. But sometime between the moment they were contracted by Gato and the moment Zabuza-shishou stepped in front of Hatake Kakashi to form an alliance, something shifted.

And now they’re here, in Konoha, and Zabuza-shishou is Battle Bonded to Kakashi, and Haku is—at least on paper—their son. They live in one of the old Hatake Clan houses, and Haku has a room that is his, and he has two younger siblings now, Naruto and Sakura. Despite the wariness Haku felt towards Kakashi at first—especially back in Wave when he wasn’t sure the Copy-Nin could be trusted, especially when Zabuza-shishou told him they would be bonding and moving to Konoha—he has grown on Haku over the weeks.

Kakashi is often quiet, and outside of training or mealtimes, he doesn’t say much, preferring to read (tacky, illicit “literature”) or nap or generally keep to himself. But it never comes across as standoffish, and the conversations they do have are easy and comfortable. Kakashi cooks well and insists on making sure everyone has plenty to eat, and he doles out head pats as if he thinks children are like dogs. He might not be a good role model in terms of propriety—Zabuza-shishou married a shameless pervert—but he is a good clan head, a good sensei, a good father.

And if a part of Haku had thought he would be cast aside by Zabuza-shishou now that the man has other priorities, or if he thought Kakashi would never treat him as a true part of the family, given that he has three other children he has a stronger attachment to—well, his doubts are proven wrong very quickly.

As it turns out, Kakashi is not the only pervert in Konoha. Kakashi is not even the worst pervert in Konoha. That title belongs solely to the man who is currently standing on their doorstep and eying Haku with a look that he really doesn’t want to think too deeply about.

“And who might you be?” the man asks, and dear Kami, he even sounds lecherous. Haku takes a moment to be glad that Sakura is out with one of her friends and not at home—she’s younger and already very pretty in a girlish sort of way, and Haku worries constantly that one of the thousands of disgusting creeps in the world is going to try something before she’s strong enough to properly defend herself.

(He’s teaching her everything he knows about poisons and how to weave barbs into her hair so that anyone who tries to grab her that way is going to suffer for it. And he knows she’s tougher than she looks—he knows what she did to those Sound nin, and he’s proud of her—but she’s his sister now, and he can’t help but worry.)

Before Haku can answer, Kakashi appears from behind, likely having heard or sensed or even smelled someone at the door, and puts a hand on Haku’s shoulder, ever so slightly guiding him back and further into the house, slowly shifting so that Haku is behind him. Kakashi’s eye is crinkled into his signature smile again, but after weeks of seeing flashes of what he looks like when he’s genuinely happy, Haku can tell this one is fake.

“Jiraiya,” Kakashi greets, though his voice is chillier than the otherwise friendly greeting would imply. “I see you’ve met my son.”

The pervert, Jiraiya, chokes on his own spit—Haku half hopes he dies from it—and splutters like a fish struggling to breathe. “Your what? Are you sure? He’s too pretty to be a boy.”

To make matters worse—or maybe better, depending on whose perspective you’re considering—that’s about the time Zabuza-shishou returns from the market with Naruto in tow, and neither of them look happy.

“The fuck did you just say?” Zabuza snarls, eyes narrowed, but that’s drowned out by Naruto’s loud, theatrical gasp.

“It’s the pervert from the bathhouse!” He points directly at Jiraiya, his own face twisted up in outrage and offense. “He was spying on all the women while they were naked!”

“Is that so?” Kakashi says mildly. It’s deceptive how he can look so at ease right now when Haku can literally feel the electricity building on his skin. “What an impression you’ve made on my kids, Jiraiya.”

With Kakashi around, and now Zabuza-shishou too, Haku can let his guard down a little. He’s safe with them, because Zabuza-shishou is always ready for a good fight and if Kakashi thinks there’s even a miniscule threat to any of his precious people, he’ll go for blood before his opponent can so much as blink.

(Somehow…somehow Haku is one of Kakashi’s precious people. Somehow, when Kakashi said they would be a clan, a family, he meant it.

I see you’ve met my son.

What an impression you’ve made on my kids.

He wasn’t born to these people, but Zabuza-shishou and Kakashi and Naruto and Sakura, and even tetchy, grumpy Sasuke—they’re his now, and he’s theirs.)

The Pervert Jiraiya is, allegedly, one of the Sannin and therefore important to the village. Which means neither Haku, nor Zabuza-shishou, nor Kakashi are allowed to kill him. Which means he isn’t going anywhere for a while.

(Zabuza-shishou and Kakashi argue about it, just once, in a hushed whisper in the library, and though Haku does not hear the whole conversation, he hears enough.

“It’s not like with Danzo,” Kakashi insists, sounding frustrated. “He’s the current Hokage’s student and a spymaster that’s valuable to Konoha, and he’s in line to be the next Hokage. People would notice and care if he suddenly died. You don’t have to like him. I don’t like him most of the time. But we can’t kill him.”

“Tch. Fine.”)

Haku does not like him.

Not just because Jiraiya is a pervert, though that plays a big part. He’s crass, and even upon realizing Haku is a boy, he still sometimes stares in a way that makes Haku’s skin itch. Jiraiya continues to peep at the bathhouses. He often comes by the house reeking of the Red-Light District. And he’s not fit to be around children, as far as Haku is concerned, because the first time he meets Sakura, he calls her flat-chested.

Haku would have gutted him for even thinking to comment about a child like that, if not for the fact that Sakura has apparently been hanging around with a Yamanaka, and her new favorite hobby is verbally eviscerating people so thoroughly that it’s probably causing some kind of psychological damage.

“Why would I care about the opinion of a crusty, sad, friendless man who was born before bathing was invented?” she snarks back, casual and cheerily dismissive in a way that honestly reminds Haku a little bit of Kakashi. Of all the kids, Sakura is, surprisingly, the most like a Hatake in that she always, always goes for the throat.

“—I mean, why else would you smell like a public toilet? Your hair doesn’t look like it’s seen a brush even once in the thirty-million years that you’ve been alive, and yet you still wonder why you can’t get laid without paying for it. You have to peep on women in the bathhouses because no one would willingly show you their naked body. And you still call yourself a Sannin even though your team split up over a decade ago—is that because you haven’t accomplished anything useful on your own since you stopped riding on the coattails of more talented shinobi? You’re a washed up, dusty has-been, and you try to make yourself feel more powerful by making children struggle to earn your approval. It’s frankly sad and pathetic that Konoha would call you one of her best shinobi.”

Jiraiya stays away for a whole week and purposefully avoids coming by the Hatake lands when he knows Sakura is in the vicinity. Haku wishes it would have been enough to send the man running out of the village for good, but he’ll take what he can get.

The other reason Haku does not like Jiraiya, is because of Naruto.

(“The fuck does that pervy fucker need to train Naruto for,” Zabuza-shishou asks after the first two rounds of the chuunin exams are well over and everyone is preparing for the one-on-one battles. He and Kakashi don’t argue much, but they always do it in private, away from the kids. Haku is good at being quiet, and he knows they’re not trying as hard to hide things from him as they are the younger ones, so he sometimes catches bits and pieces.

“He needs to prepare for the one-on-ones, and we’re stretched thin.”

“Bullshit.”

Haku is glad he doesn’t have to take the exam; his field experience and a private test with a Konoha jounin was enough to put him at a chuunin rank upon assimilating into the village. Kakashi’s kids are suffering through it for the practice if nothing else. They’re not ready to be promoted, too green still, but the experience will do them some good. Even if it’s dangerous—they ran into Orochimaru of all people in the forest and only barely escaped without serious injury.

“You’ll be busy training Sasuke in kenjutsu,” Kakashi reminds him, “and I’ve been assigned the task of looking for Orochimaru.”

“Haku is already teaching Naruto about senbon and stealth,” Zabuza-shishou argues. “Let him keep training him—you know Haku’s nearly as good as a jounin.”

“I know,” Kakashi says, and Haku feels pride swell in his chest. Kakashi never gives a compliment he doesn’t mean. He lies about a lot of other random, arbitrary things, but not when it counts. “Jiraiya wants to teach Naruto sealing, and that’s part of the Uzumaki heritage. I don’t want to keep Naruto from a connection to his family.”

“There are other teachers. There have to be other teachers.” Zabuza-shishou likes Jiraiya about as much as Haku does, and he doesn’t trust the man in the slightest. Especially not around family—and somehow, despite all odds, whatever it was about Wave that changed Zabuza-shishou enough to let him openly care about Haku has also made him protective of Kakashi and the genin as well. Or maybe it’s the Battle Bonding that did it. Haku’s not really sure.

Kakashi heaves a sigh. He sounds exhausted. “Jiraiya is also Naruto’s godfather.”)

Haku knows that Naruto didn’t have anyone before he was assigned to Team 7. Haku knows—at least a little—about how the villagers shun Naruto, how they scorn him, hate him. How there were small kindnesses that meant the world to him from the owner of the ramen shop and the one academy teacher who apparently isn’t garbage, but there was no one until Kakashi who really stepped up to protect him from the day to day shit.

For being a gross pervert who makes him and his siblings uncomfortable, Haku loathes Jiraiya.

For abandoning Naruto, leaving him to grow up alone and even now treating him like he’s a burden, some obligation to reluctantly fulfill, Haku will never forgive him.

Everyone is shaken by the attack on Konoha during the final round of the chuunin exams, their fragile illusion of peace and safety shattered. Haku and Zabuza-shishou are the only ones who aren’t really bothered—back in Kiri, there was an uprising or three every month, and they were usually a lot bloodier—but the village is in shambles, and Naruto is mourning the loss of the Hokage, who was something like a grandfather to him.

(Allegedly. From what Haku has pieced together about it, Sarutobi Hiruzen was even guiltier of neglecting Naruto than Jiraiya is, just on a more systemic level.)

In the aftermath, every available shinobi is being put to use to strengthen the village’s defenses or keep running missions to show they aren’t weakened by the attack. Even more importantly, they need a Kage, and quickly.

The Council wants Jiraiya to take up the post, though he miraculously refuses. Haku can’t see how the man would last a week without pissing off someone important and starting another shinobi world war. He offers to go find Tsunade—the Senju Princess and a legendary healer—to take up the hat instead.

He wants to take Naruto with him, probably because Naruto has a bizarre talent for wearing people down and talking them around to his way of thinking through sheer optimism and passion alone. Jiraiya argues that Tsunade will be stubborn, but with Naruto’s particular brand of charm, they may just sway her.

“No,” Zabuza-shishou says flat out, hand reaching for Kubikirbocho on instinct, like he’s going to fight Jiraiya here in the living room.

Kakashi’s whole body is tense and it’s obvious he’s unhappy with the situation. It’s no surprise; Kakashi likes his pack where he can see them, where he can check up on them and keep them safe. But he’s treating this like something he can’t say no to. Haku’s starting to suspect there must be more to it than Jiraiya being Naruto’s estranged godfather or even rank or village politics, because if anyone else treated Naruto so poorly and still tried demanding he accompany them out of the village without the rest of his team, it would never be under consideration.

But Jiraiya wants to take Naruto with him, and Kakashi is unhappy, but he won’t stop it—so something else is going on that Haku doesn’t know yet. It may have something to do with the Kyuubi, given that Naruto is the current jinchuuriki and Jiraiya is a seal-master, in which case, Haku can understand how things might be a bit more complicated.

Still.

“I will accompany them,” Haku offers, only it’s not an offer, it’s a statement of fact. Kakashi and Zabuza-shishou are needed here in Konoha to help rebuild and stabilize, and he would never suggest exposing the younger kids to Jiraiya more than absolutely necessary—not to mention that Jiraiya refuses to be within Sakura’s line of sight, and Sasuke is more likely to escalate any bad situation than diffuse it.

But Haku can go and keep an eye on things. He does not like Jiraiya, and he does not trust him with Naruto—he doesn’t, really, trust anyone with his newfound family—and it will make everyone feel better if he’s there to make sure nothing untoward or dangerous happens.

Well, Haku’s presence probably won’t make Jiraiya feel better, but his opinion doesn’t matter.

“Now wait just a second—” Jiraiya starts, but Kakashi is already smiling, some of the tension loosened from his frame.

“Excellent idea, Haku,” Kakashi says cheerfully. “Why don’t you go help Naruto pack before he takes half the house with him?”

Haku nods, a smile pulling at his mouth. Naruto is a chronic over-packer—probably a holdover from when he lived alone in that horrible apartment and there was a chance that anything he left behind at home would be stolen or vandalized while he was gone. It makes Haku sad, but it’s also kind of funny when Naruto has to be talked down from packing every single shirt he owns for a simple two-day mission.

“I didn’t agree to this!” Jiraiya is protesting by the time Haku is halfway up the stairs, but Kakashi snarls, and he shuts up.

“You will,” he says, voice deceptively calm. “You can take both Naruto and Haku with you, or neither. That’s my compromise.”

“You don’t trust me to look out for him?” Jiraiya asks, sounding wounded. As if he has any right.

The responding silence is deafening.

Chapter Text

Haku did not think his opinion of Jiraiya could drop lower, and yet here they are. Just past the gates of some civilian spa-town, Jiraiya bolts off to chase tail, leaving the two of them to fend for themselves in an unfamiliar city. It’s no trouble for Haku, who has traveled across the elemental nations since he was nine, but Naruto has only known Konoha and that one village in Wave.

(If Haku was going to be generous, he would allow that maybe Jiraiya only feels comfortable leaving them to do…whatever it is he’s doing because Haku is a responsible almost-adult who is there to supervise.

But he’s not feeling generous, and everything he knows about Jiraiya suggests that this is a behavioral pattern done without thought rather than a calculated risk.)

They enjoy playing tourist in the city for the morning, hopping around to different food stalls and browsing various stores. Unlike most of the time Haku spent travelling during his youth, he actually has money to spend on frivolous things. And unlike Konoha, no one here has any ingrained prejudice against Naruto, leaving him free to go into any store he likes and be treated as nothing more than Haku’s rambunctious younger brother. It’s a novel experience for both of them, and they make the most of it.

After a lunch that consists of appetizers from a wide variety of vendors, they trek to a field on the outskirts of the city to train in. Haku runs them through the kata they’ve been practicing lately, then spars a couple of rounds with Naruto before setting him to target practice where he must randomly alternate between throwing kunai, shuriken, and senbon. It’s not their most intense training session, but if they try to work on jutsus, there’s a solid chance Naruto’s ocean of chakra will overpower it and demolish their surroundings—something that’s commonplace in Konoha, but which would draw far too much attention here.

It's late evening before Jiraiya comes to find them, and even then, he only stays long enough to get them checked into a hotel. A beautiful woman in the lobby is fluttering her lashes at him, and he passes off a room key to Haku with some half-assed excuse about further research before following after her.

Naruto wrinkles his nose. “Why was she interested in him? He’s so old. And gross.”

Excellent question. “Perhaps she is deranged.”

The room is nicer than a lot of the ones Haku has stayed in over the years, but that’s really not saying much. At least it looks clean enough, so it’s not the worst place to rest while Jiraiya persists in proving why he’s not fit to look after children. After they wash off the grime of the day, Haku pulls out a deck of playing cards and coaxes Naruto into playing a few hands to help still the boy’s restless energy. It’s a good distraction, though they don’t get more than two rounds in before they’re interrupted by knocking.

“Bet he got shot down already,” Naruto says with a laugh, rising to open the door.

There’s a twisting in Haku’s gut, a faint tingle across his skin, a prickle that registers as something being off. It’s this finally honed instinct that has saved him countless times, and Haku has learned to listen to it always.

Jiraiya has the second key, Haku thinks, reaching out to catch Naruto before he can open the door but missing by a hair. He wouldn’t need to knock.

It could be hotel management. It could be some civilian who needs a favor—they’re trusting of strangers like that. It could be someone who got confused about which room is theirs.

Maybe Haku has been a shinobi too long—maybe being a missing-nin from such a young age and being trained by Zabuza-shishou has made him too paranoid—but he doesn’t think what awaits them on the other side of that door is anything so innocuous.

“Naruto, wait—”

But he’s already turning the knob and pulling, already opening the door, and it’s too late.

Haku doesn’t know much about being a good older brother. He’s only had siblings for a few short months, ever since Kakashi Battle Bonded Zabuza-shishou and brought them to Konoha, made them into a clan. But he adores Naruto and Sakura—and even Sasuke, though the boy is prickly and doesn’t call Haku nii-san the way the other two do—and he is trying. He tries to protect them when he can, tries to be there for them, support them the way he thinks family is supposed to.

He’s been teaching Naruto how to be stealthier, how to handle senbon, how to fight more like a shinobi and less like a one-man army that relies on brute strength alone. He spends time in the garden with Sakura, showing her how to harvest herbs, how to make simple poultices and tinctures, how to distill poisons. He spars with Sasuke, and sits in the quiet with him, and once, after a nightmare, he listens while Sasuke tells him about the Uchiha clan and a bloodbath and the worst betrayal imaginable at the hands of someone he loved, every word seemingly ripped out of him in a heaving gasp.

So Haku might not have much experience being a good older brother, but as he stands in the doorway of the shitty hotel room with Naruto shaking behind him while he stares down Uchiha Itachi, Haku knows this:

He might not have been born into the position, but it has only taken him three months to figure out how to be a better brother than Uchiha Itachi will ever be.

But that’s not the most pressing matter right now.

Itachi’s not alone, and the figure standing behind him is much more easily recognizable—at least to Haku. He recognizes Itachi for how much he looks like Sasuke, but he recognizes Hoshigaki Kisame because everyone in Kiri knows Hoshigaki Kisame. And because, whether the shark-like man remembers it or not, Haku has actually met him once before.

(Haku was just shy of 9, back then, small and fragile and frail. Zabuza-shishou had only just taken him on to train, and it was a few months before they would decide to flee Kiri in the wake of a failed rebellion. Hoshigaki was leaving, arguing with Zabuza-shishou about the shit state of the country and the way everything was a lie and there was nothing good to save here. Zabuza-shishou was angry, trying to convince him to stay, to try, that they could make a difference.

It hadn’t worked.)

They wear identical cloaks: black with red clouds. Haku wracks his brain for a moment, and eventually some pieces of intel click in the back of his mind. Akatsuki. He and Zabuza-shishou had heard of them just before taking up work in Wave—an organization of high-ranked missing-nin who had banded together to, presumably, give themselves more credibility and make getting jobs easier. Solid information on the group is hard to come by, but what little Haku does know suggests that they have quite the reputation for getting the job done.

The fact that they’re here knocking on Haku and Naruto’s door does not bode well.

“Can I help you?” Haku asks politely. He’d rather not start a fight against two S-rank nin if he can help it, though the dread curling in his gut tells him he won’t have that option.

Kisame is looking at him strangely, eyebrows drawn close together and head tilted. It’s possible Kisame thinks he looks familiar, though whether he’ll be able to connect the dots to Zabuza-shishou—and whether that will mean anything to him—remains to be seen. Kiri nin don’t put a lot of stock in interpersonal connections, Haku has found, and being Zabuza-shishou’s apprentice might only make Kisame want to fight him more.

“We are here for the kyuubi,” Itachi drawls, his voice eerily blank. “Hand him over, and we need not fight.”

That’s exactly what Haku was afraid of.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Haku says, maintaining his polite façade by the skin of his teeth. Already, he’s mentally calculating how many senbon he has on him, how many more are in the room. His chakra levels are good, essentially untouched—they didn’t train jutsus today, which means Haku is as close to fresh as he could reasonably ask for.

He's going to need every trick he’s got. There is only one way this is going to go. There is no universe in which Haku will ever hand over Naruto, and there will be no talking their way out of this one, Naruto’s preternatural ability for persuasion or not. They’ll have to fight two S-rank missing nin. Who knows where the fuck Jiraiya is or if he’ll even bother to show up, and Naruto’s only a genin.

It’ll be up to Haku to keep them safe.

Kisame huffs out a laugh. “He’s just as polite as you are, Itachi. You take care of him, and I’ll make sure the blond brat doesn’t go anywhere. After all, it’s not like we need him in one piece.”

Naruto’s fist clenches in the back of Haku’s yukata. He’s scared—and Haku doesn’t blame him, because this situation is dire. Much worse than anything Naruto’s ever faced even counting the unfortunate run-in with Orochimaru, if only because Naruto is the target this time.

But Haku had the fear trained out of him by the time he was 10; there was too much of it all the time in Kiri and in those first years on the run that he became almost numb to it. It’s not that he’s not afraid, it’s just that he doesn’t feel it much even now when the odds are so drastically stacked against them.

He takes a breath, feels the way it chills his lungs as he quietly pools chakra in his body. The coolness of it is calming; he’s never been afraid of the cold, never been hindered by it the way others are.

Every trick I know, he tells himself. Anything for Naruto, for this family he has somehow found himself in the midst of. Anything to bring them back home to Zabuza-shishou, and Kakashi, and Sakura, and Sasuke. Anything.

Haku learned how to fight from Zabuza-shishou, who doesn’t believe in fairness or half-assed measures. And he’s learning from Kakashi how to protect his precious people, who seems to take “reasonable force” and the concept of restraint as nothing more than a suggestion at the best of times, and who doesn’t shy away from even the most brutal of his instincts.

Haku is not stupid; he is not on Uchiha Itachi’s level. He is not a prodigy. He is not an S-rank nin. He is not even a jounin.

But Haku has ice in his blood and a cold rage that never really goes away, and just as there is something viciously monstrous in Kakashi’s instincts, there is something dark and swirling and savage in Haku’s. He is not on Uchiha Itachi’s level, but he is going to win this fight.

Footsteps echo in the hallway, too fast and light and audible to be Jiraiya’s, and a second later, Sasuke whips around the corner, terror plain in his expression. “Naruto! Haku!”

Itachi turns to look at his brother, while Kisame is turning away from Naruto, face lighting up in recognition as he looks at Haku again.

“Zabuza’s Haku? I thought you looked familiar,” he starts to say, but he barely gets the words out because Haku has been trained to take advantage of every distraction.

He had his fingers wrapped around three poisoned senbon the moment he heard the footsteps, and he releases them now with perfect accuracy. Perhaps the Kami are on his side, or perhaps it works because Kisame is distracted by Sasuke’s yelling, or perhaps it’s because until this very moment, both of the Akatsuki members had failed to view Haku as any sort of actual threat. The three senbon land true in Kisame’s dominant arm, his sword arm, and though Haku doubts the poison will be enough to do any permanent damage—he’d probably need at least a dozen more to take down a man of Kisame’s size—it should be enough to do what Haku needs it to do.

(It probably says something about Zabuza-shishou that he trained Haku for this.

Well. Not this specifically—two S-rank missing nin going after a small child that happens to be Haku’s newly adopted younger brother.

But fighting Kisame. Fighting any of the swordsmen, any of Kiri’s other strongest shinobi, should they come across them. Haku knows the ins and outs of the other swords almost as well as Zabuza-shishou does, and he knows Samehada is regarded as the most dangerous of the swords because it is sentient and because it eats chakra. It can render a lot of ninjutsu useless on the battlefield in addition to sapping the strength of its opponents.

It can do a lot less damage, though, if Kisame’s arm is too paralyzed to wield it.)

(“Kisame’s strong,” Zabuza-shishou had admitted with a touch of bitterness. Years after the failed rebellion, he’d always believed that if Kisame had stayed, they would have won. “But he’s not a dual wielder like Ameyuri was, and as far as I know, he never trained himself to be ambidextrous. If you take out his sword arm, he’ll most likely resort to using suiton techniques rather than try to fight left-handed. That’s its own problem to handle. They don’t call him the Tailless Tailed-Beast for nothing.”)

“Fuck,” Kisame swears, already starting to pull the senbon out. It won’t do him any good at this point, considering the poison is already in his bloodstream and nervous system. “You little shit.”

Haku ignores it, grabbing Naruto by the collar and swinging him under Uchiha Itachi’s arm while the man is briefly distracted by the fact that someone managed to land a hit—however seemingly insignificant—on Kisame. Haku flings Naruto down the hallway with enough force that the boy slides across the floor, nearly knocking into a still-frozen-in-place Sasuke, and then he flash-steps into the hallway himself, standing between the kids and the S-rank missing nin.

“Go,” Haku orders sharply, not sparing either of the children a glance. Any second now, Itachi and Kisame will get serious, and there won’t be any more opportune moments of distraction or luck. Things have only gone so well this far because they didn’t expect anything from him; that’s going to change now.

“But Haku-nii—”

“Now, Naruto. Take Sasuke and try to find the useless pervert.”

There are no further protests, but Haku doesn’t feel them moving through his sensing ability. Sasuke is standing stock-still, and Naruto seems to be gearing up to jump into the fight himself, which is frankly the last thing Haku needs. He won’t deny that the kids are talented for genin and that they learn fast, but they’re not ready for this fight, and right now, they’ll only get in the way.

“You’re out of your depth,” Itachi says, and it sounds like a warning, but Haku doesn’t care. He already knows he’s outclassed here. “Hand over the jinchuuriki.”

(What he can’t understand is why Itachi sounds like he’s trying to find a way out of this fight. Everything he’s heard about the rogue Uchiha suggests he’s proud to the point of arrogance, a violent sociopath, and eager to test his strength against any opponent. That’s what the whole massacre was about. Wasn’t it?)

(Although, the massacre of Haku’s clan—of every too-powerful clan in Kiri—was supposed to be about keeping dissenters down, ending coups, stopping treason. But it was always about power and fear, and getting rid of anyone who might’ve one day posed a threat to the Mizukage regardless of whether they actually were one.

Things in Kiri were never what they seemed.

Why should Konoha, really, be any different in that regard?)

“Don’t bother trying with him, Itachi,” Kisame says. His right arm hangs limp at his side, proving that the poison has done its work. He’s smiling, but it’s not a nice smile, and though Haku has long associated sharpened teeth with home, he doesn’t find the pointed edges comforting when they’re set in Kisame’s face. “He was trained by Momochi Zabuza. You’ll have to kill Haku before he gives up on a mission. Isn’t that right, kid? Zabuza always was the sort to con people into dying for him.”

The urge to defend Zabuza-shishou rises as it always does, but for once, someone else beats him to it.

“Zabuza-tou-san isn’t like that, you bastard,” Naruto shouts, indignant. “You don’t know him at all if you think that.”

There’s a moment of absolute quiet, and then Kisame, flabbergasted in a way that Haku would have never expected of him, says, “Did you just say…Zabuza-tou-san?”

That’s new, Haku thinks. But then, Naruto is, at his core, very emotional. He forms bonds easily, and it really shouldn’t be surprising that he thinks of Zabuza as a parent. He probably thinks of Kakashi as one as well, and…well, Haku will admit that, occasionally and only in the privacy of his own mind, he can’t help but agree. There is something domestic and familial about their household despite the fact that not a single one of them share blood.

“So what if I did?” Naruto snaps back. His face is red, embarrassed, but he’s just as defiant as always.

“What the fuck?” Kisame says, clearly thrown by this revelation.

Itachi is less so. “This is irrelevant. If you will not yield, you will be forced.”

The fact that this hasn’t already devolved into an all-out fight is nothing short of a miracle.

The fact that Jiraiya still hasn’t shown up despite all the stalling they’ve been doing is infuriating, but by now, Haku has given up hope on him arriving to save the day.

There are two things in this fight he has to be wary of: Kisame’s sword and Itachi’s genjutsu. Those are their strongest weapons, as far as Haku is aware. He’s mostly negated the first, though there’s always a chance Kisame has become more skilled in his non-dominant hand over his years as a missing nin.

It’s the genjutsu that really makes Haku nervous, though, because he’s not sure how to counteract it. He can dispel a normal genjutsu well enough, but the sharingan isn’t normal, and Itachi is notoriously a master at his craft. What he needs to do is to make sure the fight ends before it gets to that point, but…

But that seems ambitious.

And yet, there’s no other choice.

“As I told you before,” Haku says, and when he speaks, his breath puffs out cold against his lips, chills the air around him in a slow crawl. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

Itachi’s head tilts, dark hair swaying. “Then die.”

As if he was merely waiting for Itachi’s cue, Kisame’s one good hand flashes through a series of signs. Haku doesn’t know the specific jutsu, but he can guess it’ll be suiton natured and probably destructive. Kisame doesn’t seem the sort to hold back.

Perfect, Haku thinks. This is what he’s been waiting for.

A wave of water bursts forth from the surrounding pipes in the walls, flooding the hallway and swirling towards Naruto and Sasuke, most likely hoping to trap them and keep them from running. It’s not quite like Zabuza-shishou’s water prison, but a swirling whirl of water you can’t break through without being swept away is nothing to sneeze at.

Unfortunately for Kisame, water isn’t the best choice when Haku’s around.

His clan’s kekkei genkai is strong in him—stronger than it had been in his mother, stronger than most others in his clan for generations, or so Zabuza-shishou says—and Haku barely needs to guide his chakra with hand signs in order to make it do what he wants. When it comes to making ice, it’s always been as though the water wants to do what he asks.

He breaths out another puff of cold air, then tugs hard with his chakra, fingers curling as if that will make Kisame’s water jutsu become his that much faster. Haku’s chakra weaves through the water, and just as it always does, the water yields to him, crystalizing to his will with only a thought. It takes effort, concentration, and more chakra than Haku would like to spend on a single jutsu—more than he had been planning on—but it’s the only thing he can think of that might stop them, even for a second.

There’s a lot of water, but he makes it spread thin across the hallway, coating everything in a layer of ice that spirals outward from where he stands. He forces it back towards Kisame and Itachi, forces the ice to cling to the walls and the floors, to follow them even as the two Akatsuki nin try to jump back and out of the way. There’s nowhere they can run, though. Nowhere in this hallway, in this building, that Haku won’t be able to reach them now. Kisame took the water from the pipes, and that means it’s everywhere.

Before they can jump out of the way once more, Haku wraps the ice tight around their feet, up their ankles, winds it around their legs and binds their hands to their sides. He can feel the drain on his chakra now, the way it’s making him lightheaded and making sweat bead at his brow, but he can’t stop. Not until the kids are safe.

Realistically, the ice probably won’t hold them long. Samehada will eventually start to eat through the residual chakra in the jutsu, and Itachi is an Uchiha, so that means he probably knows a fire jutsu that will melt things before long.

Kill them, a part of Haku thinks. Make sure they are never a threat again. Make sure Itachi can’t torture Sasuke ever again. Make sure Kisame will never threaten to separate Naruto from his limbs. Make sure they are safe. Keep them safe.

Kisame is swearing up a storm and desperately trying to wiggle out of the ice’s hold, but it’s still fresh and solid. He might manage it once the heat has set in, but not now. Itachi’s eyes are wide, though Haku is desperately trying not to look at them. If he gets trapped in a genjutsu now, it’s all over.

The ice is slowing, no longer as quick as it was earlier, and that’s a sign of both Haku’s chakra exhaustion and the fact that he’s just about used up all the water he has access to right now. Still, Haku pushes, tightens the ice as much as he can around Itachi’s neck, tight enough to make him wheeze out a breath. It’s not enough to kill them. Itachi’s head is still free, though he’s encased from his neck down, and Kisame is only frozen up to his mid-chest.

That won’t hold for long. A few minutes if they’re lucky. Less than one if they’re not.

He reaches for the senbon in the pouch at his waist. There are a few left, none of them poisoned—the rest are still in the hotel room—but if he can hit the nerve that will knock them out…

His fingers tremble as he tries to grip them, not from the cold but from the exertion, and his vision is blurring at the edges. Kisame is still wriggling, and there’s a creaking sound coming from the ice that isn’t good, and fuck, Haku just needs one more minute, but he can tell he’s already hit his limit.

He’s not used to widespread jutsus like this, not used to altering the terrain to this extent. Nor is he used to the drain of overtaking someone else’s large-scale jutsu—he knows he must have had to match Kisame’s own chakra output at least just to take control of the water. And he’s never used his ice for something this big before—it’s always been the mirrors or ice senbon that he can spit from his mouth or a little puddle frozen over for his enemy to slip on—and the fatigue is setting in faster than he thought it would.

“When I get out of here,” Kisame hisses, looking bluer than usual. “You’re fucking dead.”

Haku barely hears him. The sound is muted somehow, and there’s something almost hot running down his lip. Haku wipes it away absently, and his hand comes away red. Oh. He’s bleeding. His nose, probably, though whether that’s because the cold air has dried out the nasal passage or because he’s overextended himself, it’s hard to say.

(That’s a lie. He knows which one it is. He hasn’t felt this dizzy since he was a child learning to make shapes from the river in the woods, so enamored with making little frost bunnies chase each other that he didn’t realize he was close to passing out until he fell face first in the snow.)

There’s heat at his elbow, orange and yellow—Naruto. “Haku-nii?”

They need to go. They need to get out now. Kisame wriggles again, and the cracking is louder. Strong, Zabuza-shishou had called him, but that might have been an understatement.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Kisame grits out, and this time when he pushes, the ice gives way, shattering.

“Fuck,” Haku whispers, unable to help himself. He doesn’t like to curse around the kids, but if any situation calls for it, it’s this one.

With his good arm, Kisame reaches back and grabs Samehada, swings it with just enough precision at the ice holding Itachi to put a big crack in it. The Uchiha doesn’t need more help than that, and a second later, there’s just enough fire in the palm of his hands to melt the ice around them.

“Fuck,” he says again, a little louder, and tastes his own blood as it slips past his lips.

Naruto’s eyes go wide at the swear, but he just sets his jaw and makes the sign for his shadow clones. A few dozen spill into the hallway, or maybe it’s less than that and Haku’s vision is swimming. He can’t tell anymore. He knows there’s an arm around his waist trying to pull him away from the fight, and he knows Kisame is dispelling the clones almost as fast as Naruto can make them, and he knows Sasuke is rushing towards Itachi, and Itachi is rushing towards…maybe Haku? Or maybe he knows which Naruto is the real one?

And then the building shakes, Haku is falling to the side, and the clone that was holding him bursts into smoke. Itachi is toppling too, having lost his balance in the explosion, and he falls practically on top of Haku.

Haku will not look him in the eyes, no matter what, but he sees the flash of a kunai all the same, and there’s not much chakra left in him, but there’s enough for this. A needle of ice spins into existence between his fingers, long and thin, and he jabs it with as much force as he can muster into Itachi’s neck just as he feels the kunai sink into his gut.

Itachi’s mouth has gone slack, and Haku must have hit the right spot to disrupt his chakra pathways, because the sharingan shutters off like a switch has been flipped. There’s iron in the back of Haku’s throat, and his vision is really, properly going dark, but this is a win. Even if Haku dies here. Even if Itachi lives—which he most likely will, because Haku is not so arrogant to believe he can kill an S-rank missing nin of that caliber.

There’s a scream filled with rage, and then a blur of dark blue and black is forcibly tackling Itachi off of Haku, but even without the pressure of another human right on top of him, he still doesn’t feel like he can breathe. Which is…not good.

“I, Jiraiya the Toad Sage, have arrived!” calls a familiar voice from the hole that’s been blasted into the side of the hotel.

Fucking useless.

And that’s the last thing he thinks before it all goes dark.

Haku wakes up to the green glow of medical chakra and a pretty dark-haired woman smiling down at him. Despite the unfamiliar face and the foreign chakra pulsing through him, Haku knows better than to move. Healing is a finnicky process even for the most skilled medic-nin, and from what Haku remembers of the fight, he’s sure he wasn’t in great shape.

"Naruto?" he asks the moment the woman moves her hands away. “Is he—”

“The brat’s fine,” a blonde woman snaps, but her tone holds a thread of fondness. “He and the other one won’t stop trying to sneak in to see you.”

“Sasuke?”

“Grumpy like a drowned cat, but in one piece.”

Ah, well. That sounded like business as usual. Though seeing Itachi again probably left more of an impact on Sasuke than the boy is letting on. Haku will have to check in on that later.

He relaxes back into the cot, still tired. Maybe they’ll let him rest a little more.

“Not going to ask about Jiraiya?” the blonde woman asks, amused this time.

“Why? Is he dead?” Haku honestly can’t say he cares. Jiraiya’s neglect nearly got them all killed, and while he’s probably the only reason none of them actually are dead right now, Haku isn’t inclined to forgive him for leaving them in the first place.

There’s a sharp bark of laughter. “Nah. He’s like a cockroach like that.”

“Oh.” Belatedly, Haku realizes he sounds disappointed, but he doesn’t have the energy to try to correct himself.

Another laugh. “You’re alright, kid. Shizune—”

Whatever’s said next fades in and out to the point Haku can’t track it anymore. But his family is safe for now, and that’s all that matters.

He lets himself rest.

Chapter Text

After Jiraiya chases them off—and truthfully, Itachi knows he only got away with calling for a retreat because that hyouton user was more trouble than either of them were expecting, and both he and Kisame had sustained enough injuries that fighting a Sannin on top of everything would have been pushing it—they make camp in the woods to collect themselves and recover before returning to the Akatsuki to report their failure.

Kisame’s arm is still hanging limply at his side, though he insists the numbness is starting to ease up, and they’re both soaked to the bone. A change of clothes and a good fire will do them both some good. And besides, Itachi’s still sluggishly bleeding out the side of his neck where the hyouton user had stabbed him with an ice needle.

He can’t get the image of the boy out of his head, lying beneath him on the floor, chakra drained and exhausted and bleeding from his nose—the contrast of the red on his pale skin had been…unusually intriguing—and yet still defiant. Still insistent on fighting. Itachi had thought he was at his limit, had thought the kunai to his gut would finish the job, and then, with only the barest twitch of his fingers, the boy had spun a needle into existence and stabbed. And his eyes, in that moment, had been so dark and cold, so sharp despite the impending unconsciousness.

(There had been a few times in that fight that Itachi felt almost like he was looking into a mirror, seeing an alternate version of himself. The cold, detached politeness counterbalanced with a deep-seeded vicious streak. The determination to fulfill a duty even when all reason suggested to do so would be fatal.

Like calls to like, he’d read somewhere. And thinking of the boy, Itachi can’t help but believe it must be true.)

“Damn Yuki bastard,” Kisame spits, though the effect is somewhat ruined by his chattering teeth. There’s frost coating their clothes, their skin, but the worst of the cold goes deeper, like it’s burrowed into them and has no intention of coming back out. “Didn’t even fucking use hand-signs for all that ice. And that’s why that crazy bastard Yagura hunted down bloodline abilities. Fucking dangerous, that shit.”

Ah, Itachi thinks. Another survivor of a slaughtered clan.

It’s no wonder the Yuki nin would look at Itachi and see everything he hates condensed into one person. As the perpetrator of a genocide himself, Itachi can only imagine that the other boy took their fight personally.

“Though it wasn’t like with the Uchiha, done all at once,” Kisame continues, unprompted, and while Itachi usually prefers not to talk about the massacre, in this case, he’s curious enough about the Yuki nin to want to know more. And about Kisame, who never seems to talk much about his time in Kiri. “Started with Kiri shinobi who would just go missing on missions. And then they’d bring in families for questioning, only it was never just questioning. It took a couple of weeks for the clan to go down in size by half, and by then some had started to catch on to the way things were headed and fled. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened with Haku. Zabuza—” Here, Kisame pauses and there’s a flash of emotion that Itachi isn’t fast enough to identify, not with his sharingan still disabled for the time being and his normal eyesight so blurred. “—Zabuza took the kid in after his father killed his mother and tried to kill him. They’d gotten out, but by then, the fear of bloodline abilities was so strong, it didn’t matter.” He grunts to himself. “Kiri was so fucked.”

Itachi doesn’t know what to say to that—he could agree, but it doesn’t feel like it’s his place. Kisame will never admit it out loud, but there’s a part of him that loves Kiri still, just like he’s pretty sure Kisame knows he still loves Konoha. They have a silent agreement not to mention things like that, not to step on each other’s toes, unbury each other’s secrets.

“You met him before?” Itachi asks, and the fact that Itachi is asking about someone who is neither an immediate target or a client seems to startle Kisame, makes the shark-man look at him a little more closely. “This…Haku?”

“Once,” Kisame answers after a long moment. “Right before I left Kiri. So it’s been, what? 7 years?”

“Hn.”

Kisame raises a brow, probably wants to prod at what has caught Itachi’s attention. He knows it’s unusual for him to ask after anyone, to show interest in anything besides their mission, dango, and the occasional conversation that Kisame draws him into.

Even Itachi can’t say why he’s so…preoccupied. This is hardly the first strong shinobi he’s met—and really, the boy, Haku, was losing, wasn’t strong enough to take either of them on individually let alone both at once. But—

Dark eyes, the unfailingly polite smile, the dark hair and delicate throat and the soft pink of his yukata, the elegance with which he’d thrown those senbon, the sheer skill required to take control of Kisame’s suiton jutsu and make it his own.

(The way he’d put Sasuke behind him, not just Naruto. The way he’d protected them. The way Sasuke had lunged after Itachi, had tackled him off of Haku, had been yelling, “Don’t touch him.”)

(Itachi is not quite sure what to think about that. Not sure what to think about Sasuke, in general. He’d looked…good. Well-rested, well-fed, well-looked-after. Still a child in a way that Itachi had been forced out of by that age.

There’s a part of Itachi that thinks he ought to stamp it out, no matter how painful or brutal it would be. It would hurt Sasuke now, but it would be good for him in the long run. Most of the things Itachi has done where it concerns his little brother seem to work out like that.

Lie to him, make him hate Itachi, push him to get justice for their clan—these are unpleasant, though Itachi has come to terms with the necessity of it. Because at least Sasuke doesn’t know—that Itachi could only bear to slaughter their clan, their family, because it was the only way to keep Sasuke safe. At least Sasuke will never blame himself. At least Sasuke will hate Itachi too much to miss him. At least, in the end, Itachi can be punished for what he’s done. At least, when he’s dead, Sasuke will have closure.)

(And now, Itachi can even release the near-constant worry he has that Sasuke will crumble away into nothing in the meantime. Because there is someone else looking after him while Itachi can’t.)

Ah. This Haku is important to Sasuke, Itachi realizes, and suddenly it makes sense. That’s why I’m thinking about him.

Itachi watches as Kisame stands over the firepit, turning at intervals as though he’s trying to cook himself like a chicken, rotisserie style. It’s been two days since their encounter with the Yuki shinobi, and whatever technique he used on them, the chill hasn’t yet worn off despite the fact it’s mid-August. Nothing seems to help: not the heavy Akatsuki coats, not a warm fire, not the summer’s heat or a hot bath. Itachi still occasionally feels the icy grip in his chest—a different pressure from the increasingly familiar weight of infection in his lungs—and panics, wondering if somehow the ice is like a poison, lingering in their blood and waiting to kill them the moment they drop their guard.

It's impressive. For all that the attack ultimately couldn’t hold them, couldn’t end the fight, its ability to linger like this is unique. Interesting.

Perhaps it’s the suicidal streak in him, but Itachi wants to meet Haku again. Not right now, but in a few months, or perhaps a year. Enough time for him to grow, get stronger. Enough time for him to hone that dangerous power and make it deadlier.

Haku will be a good opponent one day, assuming he lives long enough. He wasn’t afraid during their fight. Angry, yes, and merciless, but not afraid. He was creative, too: paralyzing Kisame’s arm was inspired, and the way he wielded the ice like it was an extension of his body was like nothing Itachi’s ever seen. And there was the ice needle—still, Itachi cannot forget it, and not solely because he had his sharingan activated at the time.

(And he was beautiful. Even as he was doing his best to kill Itachi. Maybe especially then.)

“Kakuzu should send us to Hot Water Country. Or Tea Country. Or somewhere fucking warm,” Kisame complains. Itachi doesn’t bother pointing out that it is warm here—midsummer in Fire Country is sweltering, the humidity making it even worse—it’s just that they’re both still chilled to the bone and will likely be that way for a little while yet.

Even fire-breathing techniques from the Uchiha archives don’t help, and those were used back in the Warring States era to keep people warm when they ran out of firewood in midwinter. There’s something unnatural about this kind of cold, and perhaps there’s something unnatural about Haku himself, to be able to create it.

Even more interesting.

The last of the unnatural, unsettling chill fades after two weeks, by which point Itachi and Kisame have been to both Hot Water and Tea Country for an assassination and guard duty respectively. When, for the first morning since the fight, they wake up without shivers wracking their bodies, Kisame dramatically offers up his thanks to the Kami and says he was one bad day from lighting himself on fire to ease the discomfort.

Itachi kind of misses it.

It’s not that he got used to the feeling, or that he liked being cold, but the continuous icy, frigid ache in his bones gave him a reason for continually thinking about the boy who caused it. Now that the excuse is gone, Itachi isn’t sure he can justify why he still has dreams of delicate fingers and ice winding over his body, trapping him while cool breath ghosts over his cheek, the sharp pinprick of a frozen needle sliding against the fragile skin of his neck.

He's not waking up cold anymore; he’s waking up hot.

He understands attraction as a concept. He’s seen it in action—both in others and when it’s directed towards himself. But he hasn’t felt it before, not really. Not like this.

(There was Izumi, once, but they were still children then. And that was different. Something softer, more fragile, tenderly built in a time when the idea of peace wasn’t just an illusion.)

He’s not sure what it says about him that what he thinks of most are the moments when Haku got closest to killing him. The moments when there was something vicious and dark in his eyes, something lethal in the way he twisted the ice around him, something beautiful in the blood and fatigue and killing intent. The contrast between how soft, how pretty he looks, and how much devastating power is held within him.

Is it that Itachi doesn’t know any other way to be? That he’s been a weapon for so long, he can’t imagine intimacy without violence? Can’t imagine being touched without it hurting, even if it feels good at the same time?

That feels too generous.

Maybe it’s that he’s always been monstrous, no matter how he tried to ignore it. Maybe it’s that he always ruins everything he touches. Maybe it’s the knowledge that he could have Haku, but only if he destroys him in the process, or else is destroyed himself.

None of it matters, anyway. Itachi has his missions—from the Akatsuki, from Konoha, from himself. He can’t let himself be swayed away from his purpose. Can’t afford to be distracted.

Itachi walks through a market in Tea Country to occupy himself for a day. Their most recent job ended earlier than expected, and it’s nice, occasionally, to take a day for themselves. Kisame is making good use of his time and money in the Red Light District, but Itachi has never felt comfortable with the idea of a stranger touching him—even a professional—and besides, rumor has it that there are no less than three dango shops in this stretch of town. There will be plenty of time to try them all.

As he walks, enjoying the background noise of people going about their lives, his eye catches on a small cart tucked away in the entrance of an alley. The ware of choice is textiles: bolts of silk and thin chiffon, lightweight cotton and thick wool. But what snares his attention are the ribbons fluttering in the breeze from where they are tied around the sides of the cart.

One is pale pink. Not quite sakura-bloom pink, but softer, a little more muted.

It reminds him of ice, dark hair and pale skin and a smear of blood.

Later, when he reunites with Kisame, the man gives him a onceover.

“How much fucking sugar did you have?”

“I was very moderate in my consumption,” Itachi assures him, and for once, it’s even—mostly—true. There’s a ribbon in his pocket, whose price was not particularly exorbitant, but it did mean he had to order only six sticks of dango from each shop rather than his usual nine.

Kisame doesn’t look like he believes him. “Right.”

“And you?” Itachi asks, partly because it is polite, and partly because he does, on occasion, like to tease Kisame. And today he’s in a particularly good mood. “Were you moderate in your consumption?”

Kisame chokes, coughing violently, and there’s even a hint of darker blue at his cheeks. A blush, which is exceedingly rare. Itachi smiles, so faintly no one but Kisame would even be able to tell—and he’s too busy being baffled that Itachi just made a sexual innuendo to notice.

A good day, Itachi thinks.

*omake 1*

“The fuck is up with that Uchiha bastard, hmm?” Deidara asks, mostly rhetorically, as he leans against the wall at the Akatsuki headquarters. Kisame and Itachi returned from an extended mission less than 24 hours ago, and while the others may not notice Itachi acting fucking weird, Deidara absolutely does.

Everyone else thinks Itachi’s “the normal one,” even usually intelligent people like Sasori. The only other person who seems to think Itachi is at all odd is Hidan—which doesn’t lend Deidara a lot of credibility—and that’s only because Hidan swears by the fact that once, while he was up at three in the morning doing a sacrificial ritual probably involving goats and virgins, he saw Itachi in the kitchen eating (allegedly) dozens of sticks of dango.

(“Not piece by piece,” Hidan had whispered urgently. “He fucking deepthroated them, and then pulled the stick back out clean. What the fuck is that?”

Deidara hadn’t known what to say to that. When Hidan mentioned he had something important to tell him about Itachi, this wasn’t what Deidara had expected.

Luckily—or unluckily as the case may be—Hidan could talk enough for two.

“Man’s got no gag reflex though. Respect.”)

“If this is more of your conspiracy on how he’s secretly a traitor—” Sasori starts, unwilling to spend another ten minutes of his life on this banal topic.

Deidara waves the accusation off. “This is different.”

“—or really just a bunch of crows in a flesh suit—”

“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen!”

“—then I don’t want to hear it.”

“It’s not!” Deidara insists, then pauses. “But he is up to something, yeah.”

Sasori sighs deeply, an action meant solely to display his displeasure since, as a puppet, he has no need to breathe. “I’m going to regret asking. But what is he up to?”

“I think he’s got a girlfriend.” Deidara’s nose wrinkles at the thought—Itachi may be pretty to look at, like art itself, yeah, but he’s an asshole of epic proportions and fucking suspicious as hell. “I saw him with a pink ribbon this morning.”

Sasori stares at him, dead-eyed. “This is a waste of my time.”

“He was using it to tie up a bundle of senbon. Itachi doesn’t use senbon.” Deidara would know. He’s been keeping an eye on the Uchiha from the moment he was recruited into the Akatsuki, just waiting for the right time to kill him. He’s been cataloguing all of Itachi’s strengths (which there are annoyingly a lot of) and weaknesses (which there aren’t nearly fucking enough of), and if he’d shown any above average skill with senbon, Deidara would know.

But until this morning, he’s never seen Itachi use one, even as a spare weapon.

Sasori pauses, thinking it over.

(For once—perhaps the first time ever—Deidara has made an actual point. Senbon are an unusual weapon choice, not nearly as offensive as kunai and shuriken, though they do serve as a suitable vessel for poison. Sasori doesn’t use them himself, given that everything he fights with is laced with poison—and now that he’s thinking about it, among the Akatsuki, no one else favors them either.

They must be going to someone else, then, which is odd enough on its own. Does Itachi have associates outside of Akatsuki? It doesn’t seem likely. A girlfriend—or boyfriend, or partner of any sort outside of the business variety—seems even less likely. Deidara has to be wrong.)

“It could be a threat,” Sasori offers. “Or a challenge. Giving your enemy a weapon is essentially telling them they will need all the assistance they can get.”

Deidara frowns. Itachi is that much of a petty bastard for all that he seems level-headed and cool on the exterior. Deidara still hasn’t forgotten how Itachi made a fool of him the first time they met—Sasori’s theory isn’t out of the question.

Still.

“Kisame would know,” Deidara says, certain. “They’re practically inseparable.”

“Fine. Hoshigaki,” Sasori calls, motioning the shark-man over just as he’s passing by. Kisame is amiable as ever, and he secretly loves a good bit of gossip, as Deidara has learned, so he joins them in the corner with little prompting. “Deidara is convinced your partner has found himself a lover. Do you know anything of this?”

Kisame’s face pinches, but more out of confusion than anything else. “Itachi? I didn’t think he was interested in that kind of thing.”

“Then what’s with the pink ribbon? And the senbon?” Deidara says. Honestly, at this rate, he’s going to have to resort to sharing his theory with Hidan again, and even if Hidan would believe him, Deidara’s not sure it’s worth it. The validation would be nice, but Hidan is fucking crazy, and the less time Deidara spends around him, the better.

Kisame’s eyes go wide, and he groans. “Fucking Yuki bastard. Of course he couldn’t have a normal crush. It just has to be the kid who can freeze an entire building without hand-signs and who put a shard of ice through his neck.”

Sasori’s little wooden mouth drops open, which is immensely gratifying. It’s so rare to see him openly shocked, rarer still for him to show such a lapse in control.

And then the rest of what Kisame just said catches up with Deidara, and he screeches. “WHAT?! Some fucking kid stabbed Itachi in the neck? BEFORE ME?” He grabs Kisame by the front of his Akatsuki robe. “How close did he get to killing him, hmm?”

Kisame’s brows rise. “Uh. First of all, the Yuki kid is probably the same age as you, maybe older. Definitely more mature, either way—”

“FUCK YOU.”

“—and it’s not like he could really have killed Itachi. I mean, he was close to passing out from chakra exhaustion himself, and Itachi did stab him in the gut the same time Haku got him with the ice, so it wasn’t some one-sided beat-down.”

“So his name’s Haku, is it?” Deidara says, and there must be some sort of gleam in his eyes giving away his intentions, because suddenly Kisame grabs him by the cloak and lifts until they’re eye-level and Deidara’s feet are kicking.

“Hey, put me the fuck down—”

“Do Not,” Kisame says, voice serious, “go after Haku. If, somehow, Itachi doesn’t get you for going after what’s his—and I’m sure he’ll see it that way, even if that Yuki kid doesn’t know it yet—then Momochi Zabuza absolutely will. And you’re good, kid, but Zabuza’s got a decade on you and an upbringing in the bloody mist. You’d be a smear on the pavement before you could blink.”

“Actually,” Sasori says. “It’s Hatake Zabuza now, if my informants are correct.”

Kisame drops Deidara and slaps a hand over his face. “Of course it is. Of fucking course it is.”

*omake 2*

Haku eyes the bundle sitting innocuously on the windowsill of the inn he’s staying at and tries not to let the burgeoning trepidation overwhelm him.

He’s on an escort mission with three other chuunin from Konoha, and their client is a merchant with fine tastes, which means there’s been little camping out, nights in a tent exchanged for a proper bed and a roof overhead. It’s a slow crawl from Konoha to the portside city where they’re headed, but the trip has been uneventful so far, and now, with only a day left before they drop off their client and make the much quicker journey home, Haku is fairly certain they won’t run into serious trouble.

Or he was, until he returned from dinner to find the bundle of senbon sitting on his windowsill, wrapped in a slim, pink ribbon that matches his favorite yukata perfectly. There’s no note, no address card, no hint of who left it, but it is unmistakably for Haku, and that makes him…uneasy.

It could be from one of his teammates on this mission. That would be the most reassuring answer—would explain how they got the gift into his room, and it’s not like they don’t know he prefers senbon over any other weapon. But Haku doesn’t wear the yukata except during his down time, at home or occasionally to collect herbs, and none of his mission partners know him well enough for that. Of course, the ribbon could be a coincidence, but Haku doesn’t think so. It feels…too pointed.

Everyone else who would know him well enough to pick that specific color is in his immediate family and back in Konoha right now. And besides, Naruto and Sakura would have just given him a gift in person, and neither Zabuza, Kakashi, nor Sasuke would have ever thought to wrap anything with a bow.

All of which leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that Haku has a stalker. And—since the senbon weren’t there before dinner but are here now—they might still be watching.

It’s a shame. The senbon look to be of a high quality, but Haku doesn’t want to give the false impression that such advances are welcome by accepting the gift. It’s already going to be hell explaining to Zabuza-shishou that he somehow has a stalker he never noticed, and all the subsequent training that will follow just to ensure Haku isn’t caught off guard again.

He opens the window, intending to use a small water-jutsu to wash the package off the sill and into the bushes below—better not to touch, just in case it’s poisoned, in case it’s a trap. But before he can even complete the first hand-sign, there’s a caw and a flutter of wings, and suddenly a crow is perched next to the bundle.

A crow with a red, sharingan eye.

Oh no.

It was unnerving enough when Haku didn’t know who had left the gift on his windowsill, during a mission where no one but his mission partners should have known precisely where he was. Unnerving to think that someone had observed him enough to pick a ribbon in a color that matched his favorite piece of clothing, to have found senbon that were good quality and exactly like his preferred ones that he always kept in the pouch by his hip.

It is ten times worse to know that person is Uchiha Itachi.

The crow caws again, and Haku looks at it on reflex, watches as it ruffles its feathers and takes off to a nearby tree. Watches as it perches not on a branch, but on a shoulder.

Watches as Uchiha Itachi watches him back.

Before Haku can call for backup—and what good would that do, except to get his mission partners killed—Itachi dips his head just a little and bursts into a flock of crows, all of which disperse in every direction.

The bundle of senbon still sits on the windowsill.

(If he gets rid of them now, it will be a waste of perfectly good senbon. And what would be the point? Would Itachi be deterred by a refused gift? Would he even know?)

Carefully, Haku runs a thumb over the smooth ribbon, then pockets the senbon.

Zabuza-shishou and Kakashi will want to see the evidence anyway.