Title: Five of Coins
Summary: Three months after Kannabi Bridge, Kakashi's eye starts bleeding and Rin is forced into a role of shaping the future of Konoha's Team Seven.
Pairing: None (for now)
Rating: T
Notes: Written due to the relative dearth of Rin-centric fics and especially ones where she grows up to be the badass jounin sensei of Team Seven.
Warnings: Blood, gore, speculations on bloodline abilities


Nothing changed when Obito died.

Perhaps it had been naïve of her to expect something. Individuals often went through profound changes at the passing of their loved ones. She thought maybe she would feel different once her friend's name was set in stone.

But she didn't feel different. Rin cried at the funeral because she was expected to. Wore black because everyone else did. She didn't feel wiser for the lesson in loss. The sky didn't fall down. The sun stayed up. She wondered if her numbness made her a terrible person and sensei reminded her that everyone processed grief differently.

The simple matter was that life resumed. Missions did not stop. Kakashi's rejection was hurtful but expected.

Obito's burial meant nothing.

She observed with a dispassionate eye as Kakashi's katon set a small hut ablaze. The enemy ninja were still trapped inside. Doors, windows and other exits had been rigged with exploding tags to make sure none escaped alive.

It was overkill. Like weeding the flowerbed with a doton. A second later, a sudden burst of flames sucked the oxygen from the air, imprinting against her skin like a film of heat. Rin blinked several times to bleed the light from her dazzled eyes. And as the land burned around them, Kakashi opened a map and struck a line across another until she couldn't tell where one country began and the other ended.

Idly, she traced the symbol for Konoha. She worried about her teammate. The way he stood and sat and ate and slept like a sleepwalker on the edge of wakefulness. She worried about the way he shivered, racked by jolts of lightning chakra diffused in his coils.

In a way, it was strange hearing his voice after days of visual cues. There was very little to talk of between them. She and Kakashi had almost nothing in common. The effort she made on the first day, trying to fill the air with inane chatter, had long faded to silence.

One more, he promised, picking through the smoldering ashes. He stacked four grinning skulls together and crushed them under his heel. Rin flinched when he stirred the dust with his feet, holding up an equal number of forehead protectors fused to bone.

Alright, she said, accepting the gift. She didn't believe him.

At her response, Kakashi turned west where the moon lit the clawing arc of his hair into a pale blaze. It was starting to get long on him. Curling past his ears to soften his lack of expression. It almost made him look nice. Personable even. It made him human.

She didn't voice the thought out loud and kept her council as she followed.

A lucky Iwa chunin had escaped his funerary pyre. The reasonable thing to do would have been to allow other patrol teams to arrest him. They were exhausted. She was exhausted. Why else would they broadcast their presence with explosions and loud conflagrations?

"He can't be too far." Kakashi repeated. "Just one more."

There would always be one more. All the Iwa blood in the world could not soothe Kakashi's wounded heart. Fortunately, the Iwa ninja had not manage to get far. He was injured from the explosion, having been caught literally with his pants down. The side of his face was the consistency of red bean paste on melted slush and she felt a twinge of pity for the boy, barely in his teens, as she drew back and took refuge in the too-tall mushrooms.

One more thing that had not changed since Obito's death. Kakashi would not allow her in battle.

Rin knew that during the time of the warring states, men and women fought equally. A distilled tea was just as deadly as a secret ninja technique. But Shinobi were bred as much as they were trained. When the ninja population crashed, a unanimous decision was made to protect the women from the frontlines.

After the establishment of the five shinobi nations, the anachronistic tradition remained seeped in the ninja creed. It bled into academy training and everyday life. Despite the robust number of civilians and her genetic worthlessness, she—as a girl—was discouraged from pursuing the art. When she was taught techniques of kunoichi such as Setsuna of Black Sand or Makoto the Blade, she didn't know how the clan heads ever made the women stop fighting.

Obito had been her friend. Until he died, she hadn't known what it felt to be the weakest link. If Obito was alive, she could have deluded herself into thinking that Kakashi cared for her. He could have even loved her. But she knew that her desperate dream could never bear fruit. Obito ruined everything when he asked Kakashi to protect her. Her, the one who graduated ahead of an Uchiha when he was busy choking on a piece of candy.

White chakra shrieked with the cry of a thousand birds as it shot past her. The Iwa chunin ceased his whimpers at the sound, at the sudden flash of Kakashi's hair, fearful of the famed Yellow Flash or the White Fang newly resurrected.

But it was neither who lanced lightning in his gut, a sharingan whirling like the mad eyes of a goshawk. The boy dropped to the ground. Blood splattered on the grass. Miraculously, the boy survived and was crying as his wound sucked at Kakashi's hand. Kakashi had deliberately missed the vital parts.

He wanted the Iwa teen to live.

Rin squashed a green mayfly against her elbow and cleared her throat.

"Kakashi."

When her teammate failed to answer, she shoved him aside, scanning the bleeding chunin for any information that could excuse Kakashi's actions. The teenager looked vaguely familiar. His clan symbol was stitched on the back of his collar, hidden from view. Her stomach curdled when she saw that he was a Kamizuru, a powerful Iwa clan. A second, smaller character below it stylizing his given name. After sketching the images on the back of an exploding tag, she slit the boy's throat.

The irony was that she did not care for Iwa-nin. Rin was a field medic, not a doctor or a nurse. She had taken no oaths to guard the sanctity of life, none that she hadn't broken when she left Obito in his shallow grave—she didn't know the boy at all. But she teared up when blood boiled past his lips and streaked his chin. She was furious—enough to chew exploding clay—because this boy made her feel when Obito couldn't.

"Rin."

Kakashi held out his hand, obviously discomfited by her silence. She sniffled and looked up. He hadn't fixed his forehead protector yet. Both eyes were visible. His left eye was bleeding.

No, not his left eye—Obito's eye.

Rin leapt to her feet, towering over Kakashi's tender twelve years. It had made her horribly awkward at first. Next to her genius teammate, she might as well have been a giantess from the far reaches from the Dark Continent. But she pressed her height to her advantage and inspected his injured eye. She knew that he would never voice his pain out loud. Help might come from the Uchiha compound, sitting through judgement and vitriol that Obito's sharingan deserved to be placed with someone worthier of the clan ability.

Rin's parents were civilians. Their parents were civilians. Rin lacked the decorated pedigree of shinobi who were promoted past chunin. She had no special techniques to pass down. No bloodline ability to beget a new clan. She was at best, a competent medic. A decent fighter in a pinch. To her, an eye was an eye.

For Kakashi, the circumstances were different. He was the scion of the Hatake clan. She did not understand clan politics but she knew this. Kakashi could not ask the Uchiha for aid.

"Uchiha need doctors too." Kakashi had rasped on the first night, gathered around a small stick fire and heating gruel over the smoke. She remembered draping at least three cloaks on him because he'd shivered, as though he couldn't get warm enough, folded around a bowl of watery rice like a starving dog.

It was Minato-sensei who had insisted they sit down and share a meal, fill their stomachs with something hot even if it meant they threw it up later. The only thing she had been able to do was keep the eye clean and pus-free. She consoled herself with the knowledge that despite the circumstances, the transplant had been a success. The scar beneath her thumb unfortunate but Kakashi was very, very lucky.

"There's got to be someone at the hospital who knows how to treat this."

Organ transfers were common during war. Between close relatives, it was easy. The village hospital kept meticulous records of compatible donors and patients. But she did not know anything about the transference of bloodline abilities between two non-relatives. By her estimate, she violated at least a dozen medical protocols when she'd replaced Kakashi's blinded eye. Such a thing was impossible, unheard of.

And slowly, it had dawned on her.

Minato-sensei, like Kakashi, was stalling. They both knew the risk of revealing Obito's sharingan to his clan. Her cheeks flamed when she realized how little she knew of the village she was determined to protect. It had been her fault. Her fault for being captured, her fault Obito died. If she hadn't been captured, Obito would have been alive.

When Kakashi spun his fanatical gaze upon her, she'd felt fear and resentment. She had dreamed of such moment many times, ever since she was assigned to Kakashi's team, turned it over and over in her head until the idea had transmuted itself into fantasy she could construct with her eyes closed.

Kakashi was looking at her. He saw her and he needed her help. And she had hated him for it. Why? Why look at her when he'd already confessed he did not and could not care for her?

Because they were a team.

It didn't matter Obito was dead. Kakashi wasn't dead. Minato-sensei wasn't dead and she wasn't dead.

As soon as they returned to the village, she went to the hospital. Nobody had been surprised to see her. News traveled faster than flu in winter. Doctors on duty expressed their concern but she'd waved them off. She broke into the records room, rifling through file after file when a nurse caught her, face bruised with anger, her eyes deep from lost sleep.

"My teammate died." She'd burst out. "He was an Uchiha."

It had explained nothing but the nurse's face slackened into one of understanding. Her stomach twisted into knots. Rin hated lying. She hated she had to lie to people who had worked hard, was loyal to the village and cared. All for an eye Kakashi should never use. The eye hadn't protected Obito and he was an Uchiha.

And as soon as they came, she was ashamed of her thoughts. It hadn't been pity in the woman's eyes, it was compassion. They had all lost someone in the war. Every day, bodies were wheeled in, tagged and sent to the incinerator. Before closing the door behind her, the nurse simply knocked the correct files down with a sly grin, just because she thought it would make Rin's day a bit better.

She'd burst into messy tears. All the sorrow she had bottled up since Team Seven left its soul in the dirt of the Grass Country. Obito was more than a soldier of the Leaf. He had been her friend and she missed him very much.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much in the way of information. The Uchiha rarely deigned to visit the village hospital. Never for their sharingan. The shoudaime and the nidaime had wrote exclusively on tactics. They said Uchiha bodies had to be burned.

Thankfully, Kakashi's eye never showed any signs of infection. She assumed that he retained perception in his left eye though the chakra drain made it nearly worthless. Kakashi kept it covered up as a result. First behind the thick bandages and currently, his forehead protector. Everyone knew that the prodigy Kakashi received a debilitating injury when he fought against the Iwa. What they couldn't understand was why he refused donations of perfectly good eyes.

So Rin smiled and lied through her teeth. She told the well-wishers that Kakashi would come around. Someday, he might even be ready. She might be ready. No one needed to know.

Nothing changed. Kakashi killed and she healed.

"You're bleeding."

Kakashi grunted, shaking off her concern. He wiped his hand with a handful of grass, kicking the Iwa chunin for posterity. She winced.

"Kakashi." She placed a hand on the boy's shoulder and he reacted explosively. Only when he saw that it was her, just her, plain, old Rin, did his alarmed expression collapse into one of brittle recognition.

His legs gathered beneath him.

"Rin," He acknowledged in a voice on the precipice. "I'm fine."

She was beginning to hate that word. Fine, as though anything was fine. Only the metal-mongers were fine, rich in blood money. They were not fine, they were ninja—they would never be fine. But Kakashi would be fine, at least in body, if she could just get a good look at his eye.

"No you're not." She disagreed. Without Obito as a buffer, she had learned to assert herself. "Look."

Rin drew a surgical scalpel from her pouch, clean and shiny enough to eat from. She tilted it to offer him a glimpse of his reflection.

Kakashi's eye was bleeding, a thin gush of blood trickling down his scar soaking into the fabric. There was also something else. Rin had not had privilege of seeing a regular sharingan up close. The Uchiha were notoriously secretive of their bloodline abilities, they would have never found her enough of a threat to activate it in her presence. But Obito's eyes, warm and pulsating in the cup of her hand, she remembered clearly. Black on red, two perfectly formed commas seared deep in the red irises. The eyes she still felt when blood stained her hands. And Obito's empty eye socket when she brushed it closed.

Kakashi had told her, it was why he could never acknowledge her feelings. It wasn't fair. The war, it took too much. It just wasn't fair.

But her teammate was hurt. He was bleeding and that was something she could help with. There was more at stake than her unrequited crush. She could tell, even without touching, he was expending massive amount of chakra just to keep his borrowed eye open.

She attempted to shield it with her hand. As far as she knew, sharingan did not offer night vision and her sticky palms were better than nothing if only to keep Obito from staring out his lost eye. But Kakashi spurned her touch and pushed her away. His grip on the handle of the scalpel iron-clad as three commas in his sharingan warped and spiraled into a pinwheel black on red.

The black points blurred into branches and then there was a shape, one she had never seen before, solidifying just briefly and she thought she saw the air ripple into the whirlpool of a jounin flak jacket. Chakra gathered, monstrous and impossible, as though her teammate was attempting chidori with his eye, when Kakashi's legs went from underneath him, pouring him in a boneless heap on top of the dead Iwa chunin.

Rin let out a small squeak as she slid down to her knees, pressing her fingers against his pulse point to make sure that he still breathed. To her relief, Kakashi's heartbeat was steady. It was Kakashi after all. Ba-Kashi as Obito would have called him.

She did not have time to waste. Rin dug her fingers into the blood puddle and smeared her thumb on a summoning scroll. A cheeky blue toadling appeared, in a cloud of smoke-edged chakra. Though nominally neutral, the toads were fond of sensei and his sensei and were a massive help to the war effort in Konoha.

Waving a tiny, webbed feet, the little toad took a moment to reorient itself.

"Tamonten forest, three kilometers west." She barked. "Find help, please. Tell them it's Kakashi."

Hours must have crawled by. She thought surely the sun had gone down and come up again in the time the toadling had gone. As Rin made the decision to attempt another summon, Kushina arrived in a storm of leaves, enough medical supplies for an open heart surgery clutched in her two fists.

After Obito's death, Minato-sensei shared the secrets of the Hiraishin with those closest to him. It was supposed to have been a surprise. At any rate, only sensei had enough chakra stores and control to attempt it more than once on the field. But she couldn't help but resent her teacher a little at the thought that if he had told them, if he had been there, things would have been different. Obito wouldn't have died.

She gave Kushina a quick hug and noticed that the older woman was pale, panicked grey eyes draining every last drop of color from her normally vibrant face. Instead of reacting with her usual anger, Kushina despaired when she saw Kakashi.

Between the two of them, they had enough chakra to jump-start Kakashi's recovery. While her teammate was wheeled off into a private room, she went to Minato-sensei and told her teacher everything.

Minato-sensei was grim. It was no small affair asking favor from the Uchiha clan. Especially when person asking was the candidate for the seat of a kage. Before, it wouldn't have mattered. Association with Obito allowed them insight into the clan no other villager was allowed. But even the meager handful of tolerance faded when Obito turned eleven, twelve, thirteen, without his eyes ever taking the blood-red shade. It pained her the Uchiha would never know Obito's worth beyond his cursed eyes.

Kushina put her fist through the wall.

"I'll ask Mikoto, even if it means dragging her out of the compound myself." She declared.

"She'll tell." Minato-sensei said promptly.

"Damn clan politics!"

"Kushina..."

"But we'll know first." Rin spoke up, fidgeting when all eyes rested on her. "Right?"

Minato-sensei did not like it. None of them liked it. But Kakashi had already signed himself out of the hospital against medical advice. He was holed up in his house and he had stank of blood, even to her whose abilities only came from experience.

Uchiha Mikoto was sent for but did not come immediately. She waited until sunset, her form illuminated by the brilliant orange and magenta of the sky when she knocked on the door.

Obito's second cousin once removed was beautiful with long black hair, heart-shaped face and night-black eyes all Uchiha possessed. There was a sense of melancholy about her that refused to slough off as she set her basket down, peeling off her slippers one by one before folding into Kushina-nee's embrace. Sensing something amiss, Rin scooted between the Uchiha woman and Kakashi who was lying down with an ice pack balanced on his forehead. Though her eyes tracked the subtle shift, Uchiha Mikoto did not comment as she listened to Minato-sensei's explanation.

If she was surprised by Obito's sharingan, she did not show it. She raked Kakashi's still form with a brief glance and nodded.

"May I?" she asked politely, hovering before her teammate's face.

Kakashi swallowed but nodded once in agreement.

Uchiha Mikoto gathered chakra into her hands and Rin could not figure out why the movements seemed so familiar until she burst out, "You're a medic!"

"Yes," Uchiha Mikoto answered without missing a beat. "I took up the art when I realized I would not be allowed to remain with my jounin team because of my marriage. This way, I could continue to fight."

Kakashi's eye opened. Everyone else startled at the oppressive wave of chakra, like a rabid thing slobbering its warning from behind a rusted fence. Rin could feel the sharingan roll, drinking what little energy left in her teammate to a single point in his pupil that radiated into a three-armed shuriken.

Uchiha Mikoto sighed and leaned back, a slump to her shoulders like a teacher disappointed by a talented but a lazy pupil.

"I was afraid of this." She said finally, folding her hands across her lap. "Jounin Hatake." She asked, "When did you start experiencing pain in your left eye?"

The possessive did nothing to lessen the tension. Kakashi's hand twitched, fighting the urge to slide his forehead protector down his face.

"Yesterday morning," he grunted in admission and she seethed at the realization she had not noticed, at all. "But it's always like that. My body, it's not used to it."

"No, I suppose not."

"You can't take my eye." Kakashi said flatly.

"Kakashi," Minato-sensei chided. "Please excuse him Uchiha-san. Obito's death, he took it badly."

"Very well." Uchiha Mikoto commented without any inflection. After a moment of consideration, she said, "What I'm about to say next must not leave this room."

Night was falling. Crows cawed the last of their goodbyes before parting from the rafters, crickets, mice and owls swiftly taking the post they abandoned. Rin desperately wanted to close her ears. She did not want to hear it. Knowledge was the cudgel that determined their safety or death. She did not want to know what she could have done to save her friend.

"The Uchiha," Uchiha Mikoto continued, "have always prided themselves on their dojutsu. In recent years, it has become a mark of status within the clan. But it has not always been this way. It is said, the first Uchiha achieved the sharingan when his mother died during childbirth. The sharingan is considered a sign of mourning."

Kakashi flinched.

"There is a variant of the sharingan called the mangekyo. It is power which can only be achieved at a great price. If it had been a technique, it would be a kinjutsu—a forbidden technique. But the mangekyo cannot be learned, it is given. When the bond between us and our loved ones is severed forcibly through death."

Her hands flew up to her mouth.

"That's horrible!"

Uchiha Mikoto pinned her with disapproval, lips thinned and almost bloodless.

"The mangekyo signals the beginning of an end. In exchange for power, the neural nerves are flooded with chakra. It is as though," She paused, "I have heard it explained as filling a glass with a river. It cannot be done. It erodes the paths and leads to an eventual death."

Kushina-nee voiced her denial.

Kakashi—her Kakashi, would die? But Kakashi sat up, chin held proudly at his death sentence.

Uchiha Mikoto shook her head.

"This is why we discourage our children from befriending those from outside the clan. Our children first give their loyalties to their parents, to their family and finally friends. If they form a deep connection with an outsider, the clan cannot guarantee their safety. War never ends. Only few children are born to our clan per generation, each precious. Even fewer survive. In our hearts, the sharingan is no more our greatest weapon than our darkest shame.

"When the village asked for its sacrifice, the clan elders decreed Obito be our offering. They believed him a burden. His parentage," she frowned, "Was not ideal."

Kakashi tried to interrupt, "What do you mean not ideal..."

A pair of sharingan cut through his attempt. Color warred in the Uchiha woman's eyes, at times appearing to be wine red and in others, pitch black.

"Obito was an orphan. He was free to give his loyalties to you."

Kakashi looked like he wanted to throw up.

"But he had a cousin. They were like brothers once. This afternoon, Uchiha Shisui completed his mangekyo sharingan."