Three Seasons
Summary: When summer comes to the forests, Hidden Leaf goes to war. OneShot- Kakashi, Obito, Rin.
Warning: AU once more. I needed – no, wanted – to write an older Rin, Kakashi and Obito.
Set: story-unrelated, down into the future of another timeline.
Disclaimer: Standards apply.
Dedicated to Kari-Kateora, who requested a Team Yondaime-fic. This one was written before your request, but I figured maybe it was what you were asking for?
When summer comes to the forests, Hidden Leaf goes to war.
All preparations finished, all troupes ready to march. All intelligence gathered. All alternatives checked and discarded - no subterfuge possible.
War.
Rin doesn't like it. Doesn't like it at all. She has been fighting and arguing the entire spring, trying to persuade the Elders to find another solution to the dawning threat. She has spent days and nights trying to convince the Council and its oh-so-clever members to not agree to what most likely will be one great catastrophe. There hasn't been one single war in history that has ended well, neither for the offenders nor for the defenders, and it doesn't matter which role Hidden Leaf has here (it's the one of the defender, actually, but the lines are so blurred nobody really cares about it) except for the one of the lead nation in an alliance against Akatsuki. It's crazy. It's crazy, and it's ugly and stupid and Rin can feel the end will be worse than anything she can imagine.
It will be war.
Nothing good ever came from that. She knows it first-hand – the last Great Shinobi War took place only seventeen years ago and she was old enough to fight in it. She knows how many people died (the faces get blurred in her mind but the names still ring out clearly and she recognizes them all on the Cenotaph) and she knows what happened to those who were left behind. She knows about honor and duty – she's a kunoichi to Hidden Leaf. She knows about sacrifice and loss – she's been ANBU, before, and she knows about death – she's a trained medic nin. But she knows about happiness, too. She knows about peace and laughter and about children growing up unharmed, untainted, by the horrors of war, and if there is anything in this world – anything! – she deems worth protecting, it is the innocence of the children she has watched from their infant years.
She does not want to see them wither away like so many of her generation did.
She isn't given a choice in the matter. On a beautiful early summer's day they leave the village, so many children and teenagers and adults, all bearing the forehead protector with the alliance rune and the green vest that won't save them even if they think it will. They leave in small groups and larger ones, some designated to meet up with other alliance troupes, some bound for the frontier, some off to gather intelligence. Rin watches them leave – all the faces, so young and full of naivety – and wonders why she doesn't feel anything anymore. She just feels old, old and worn and empty.
Kakashi and Obito watch them leave with her and then it's only them left in Hidden Leaf. At least it feels like that. And the next day they are gone as well and Rin knows what remains is a village full of old people and women and children. And she wonders whether she'll ever see her hometown again but the thought doesn't scare her as much as the thought of what will happen to all those children she met at least once or twice in her life – either as their doctor or as their teacher. The thought of never returning again doesn't terrify her as much as the thought of what will happen to those children. And even that thought loses substance in the face of the realization that one of the two people at her side might not be there anymore when she returns.
She doesn't look back and neither do Kakashi and Obito. They know it never brought luck to anyone.
When summer comes to the forests, Hidden Leaf goes to war.
…
When fall colors the leaves red, Hidden Leaf is at war.
There is little time to think, something Obito already realized the last time he found himself in the middle of a battle field. Soldiers don't think. Soldiers don't cry, either, or dream, or smile. They are too numb to cry, too broken to smile, and the only dreams that haunt them are nightmares. And because those he leads are children and because the sight of them is more than he can bear he sometimes wishes - prays, desperately - to never see again. Blindness is a luxury compared to the sight of these hollow faces and dead eyes. They look up to him like lost sheep look up to a shepherd and Obito thinks he's too young to be a veteran, no matter how well-versed he is with the on-goings of warfare. He's too young to be the one the children look up to, too young to be the one to push them around, make them move, run, hide, fight, faster, faster, faster, because he knows one slow motion might kill them. He gets a feeling this is how Sensei must have felt when he sent them to war (not voluntarily, never voluntarily, but they went and Sensei was the one who pushed them forward and oh God, he's too young to feel that old).
Of course, the children die in front of his eyes.
He sees them fall. Tenten. Miyako. Naoki. Moegi. They go down under hailstorms of kunai, under black rains of shuriken, under the earth-shattering power of elemental jutsus. Down, down, down. They go down bleeding, unconscious, wounded, dead, go down under the pressure of a fight that is not theirs.
Go down under his own hands. The enemy sends in children, too, and he knows every single face. Kabuto sends them back their own dead: dark, twisted images, faces cut and bruised, limbs missing more often than not. But their eyes always have the same expression they wore when Obito last saw them. Get me out of here, they scream, please, I beg you, and he wants to close his eyes (gouge them out, tear them out, become blind) and ears and cower somewhere and never look up again. Those Akatsuki bastards send them their own children back to fight against, their family and friends and Obito cannot remember the last time he saw gazes without the haunted, terrified look all his soldiers have in their eyes now. Sometimes he wonders what they have done to deserve this and then realizes it hasn't been them, of course not. Nobody is at fault here. It's only Kabuto's, the snake's, Kabuto's, the twisted, mad traitor to the village, and he seeks revenge above everything.
Their faces haunt him in his dreams. It's why he barely sleeps, just long enough to fill up his reserves. He sees the children, the dead, the broken – but more often than anything he sees the eyes of the living and it's more terrifying than anything else. The war changes them, brings out sides they would never have developed if not for it, and he catches himself wishing they wouldn't need to learn all of this. Shy, little Hinata has become hard and brittle, Kiba and Shino constantly close to her, and they make a deathly trio. Lee's enthusiasm is gone, Neji's last softness has been lost under the expectations of the Clan, Tenten herself is gone forever. Ino, Shikamaru and Chouji have closed themselves off against their surroundings since they lost Asuma, Sakura lost her innocence in the field lazarettos, Naruto barely smiles. And Sasuke – his serious, clever, nagging, eager cousin Sasuke – has developed an air of hatred so thick he can barely breathe himself, let alone all the people in his surroundings.
Obito has seen what war can do. He sees it again, every day. Every day, his eyes search the fields and his heart-beat calls out and only when he sees Rin and Kakashi – if only from far, even – he feels a tiny bit relieved.
They cling to each other. It is little comfort, but more than they could hope for. (Selfish, selfish, selfish man, he tells himself, believing the world will somehow be alright as long as they are. He cannot help it.)
When fall colors the leaves red, Hidden Leaf is at war.
…
Winter is mild that year and Hidden Leaf might or might not be winning.
The Alliance. Alliance. Kakashi wants to laugh when he hears the word because Hidden Leaf clearly is the leader, clearly has made the greatest sacrifices. Then he remembers that Suna and Iwa and all the others still fight at their side, still fight and lose (win) by their side, and he just feels tired. Old. What, he wonders, does Jiraiya-sama feel when he looks at the reports he receives daily? Of course he's out there somewhere, as well, the Fire Shadow fighting next to his shinobi, Tsunade-hime and Orochimaru-san probably never leaving his side. More than once the Elders had tried to bind him to his post in the office but the Sannin has stubbornly refused. And really, what good is it to leave their strongest fighter at home? He is everywhere at once, fighting and helping. Encouraging. Giving out kind words left and right, touching wounded, facing the angry. Sparing himself nothing. Tsunade-hime is a whirlwind of healing chakra and deathly power, kind hand and iron fist, and Orochimaru's strategies and plans have saved many lives but not enough, because every single life is one too much. It is clearly written in the sag of his shoulders when nobody watches and only in the presence of Tsunade and Jiraiya he seems comfortable. He blames himself most for the betrayal of his first student, everyone can see. The three of them are always together, always close, and sometimes Kakashi wonders whether they could have been that way, too. He, Rin, and Obito. Or Sasuke, Sakura and Naruto. Three in three, forever together. Only forever is a concept too distant to believe in in times like these and together somewhat loses substance when looking at what this war does to all of them. Perhaps they won't even see the gates of their home again in this life.
Home.
Hidden Leaf could as well have been razed by now. They don't get much information from home, not in the small spying teams he works with. Every day Kakashi finds himself somewhere else again, his ANBU team moving fast and never lingering. Every time he closes his eyes for his two hours of sleep he feels too numb to even think about what has happened the day before. Pure instinct drives him forward, survival reflexes he has trained on himself in the first Shinobi War and which, he had hoped, he never would have to use again. But here he is, in his dark cloak and his wolf porcelain mask, melting into the shadows more day by day.
One thought keeps him from becoming what he never wants to be.
He rarely spends time thinking of it. It pops into his head now and then and every time it does he only lingers on it shortly because he knows any second of carelessness could get him killed instantly. He shoves away the smiling faces that seem to come from a different era: Rin, her dark, deep eyes, her smile, her silvery-violet hair. Obito, his grin, his carefree attitude, his pride when he tells stories about his cousins. It is dangerous, that thought, dangerous and treacherous. And he wishes he could see them except he doesn't. Of course they're in danger where they are, as well, Rin being one of Jiraiya-Sama's direct aides and a field medic under Tsunade-hime, Obito in charge of the mixed chuunin and genin teams. One of them is Kakashi's old team. They all are too young, he thinks, so young so terribly young – and it is only then he realizes he's not much older.
Except that he is.
Because it is winter, the earth is too frozen to bury the dead. He could regret the fact but in reality is as relieved as every other Alliance shinobi is. Frozen earth means Kabuto cannot bury and resurrect the death. In the cold and frozen air of winter they sit and wait for whatever is to happen next. The pyres glow dimly in the cold night's air. The smoke rises up straight into the sky. What, he thinks bitterly, might that mean. As the list of names grows, he watches the people shrink. They huddle together in their tents and during their guard. War doesn't only take lives but more: it takes the lives of those left behind as well. Kakashi only wishes for one thing during the winter season.
Winter is mild that year and Hidden Leaf just might be winning, but the price is too high.
…
Spring comes late that year.
With the return of the first migratory birds and the first few, shy sun rays, the news travel all over the country: Kabuto is dead.
Akatsuki is defeated.
Kabuto is dead.
Nobody has the strength to feel relief. Slowly, piece by piece, Hidden Leaf and its allies gather what is left of a year's and a lifetime's worth of war. Children are sent home cold and empty. One after another they leave, the ones still alive to do so. Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura are. Team Eight is. Team Ten will never return again. Team Gai returns, changed like everybody else. For the children, going home is the only thing that is left to do. They look forward to it – a return to the place where they were happy, where they were allowed to be children. Hidden Leaf is their harbor. There, they are allowed to grieve, there, they are allowed to forget. Perhaps allowed to heal, slowly, bit by bit. Obito knows it is possible because he, too, once returned, a child-not-a-child-any-more after two seasons of war. Like the children they once were, these children will find peace again, slowly, carefully, but with all the determination the Will of Fire gives. The children might not cry and laugh but their eyes tell him they are going home.
Obito fears returning.
He fears returning home because he has to face all the grandparents and parents with the news, as to provide information and to render account for every child that never will return again. He is not the only one. Rin fears returning because she has to help lead a village that has lost its will to live. She has to treat and cure and everyone expects results but she is no heroine, no magician. Kakashi fears returning because he knows he has lost another piece of himself out there and because he knows he won't be able to mend the scars on his Teams' souls. So they watch Tsunade-hime frantically trying to save Jiraiya-sama he received when fighting the reborn Uchiha Madara, watch Orochimaru-san seal and burn Kabuto's dead body and watch the Rookies-that-aren't-Rookies-anymore bury four friends. They watch Yugao and Hayate hold each other when they think nobody is watching when actually they don't care if somebody cares, and nobody cares, really. The warmth of another human being is the only thing that makes them not feel lost and for exactly that reason, they sleep in the same tent.
They are inseparable those days: Kakashi, Rin and Obito.
Other things can come apart. The allied countries leave, too. One day Suna takes her leave, the Kazekage leaving behind his younger son as ambassador to Hidden Leaf. Iwa disappears with fewer good wishes. Blood has been running bad between Iwa and Konoha for quite some time and now that the threat that was Kabuto is eliminated, the basis for cooperation has fallen to zero again. Other villages vanish, taking with them their shinobi and leaving promises, veiled threats or assurances, and the only thing that remains is the taste of ashes in their mouths.
Kakashi stays as close to Rin as possible, and Obito takes her hand whenever she looks like she's fading. Together they wait until the last shinobi of Hidden Leaf have left, returning towards a home they haven't seen for almost a year, and when nothing is left to remind them of what has happened here except for the great, carved stone in the middle of a small clearing, they turn and leave, too.
Hidden Leaf tries to adjust.
Tsunade-hime has taken the position as temporary head of the village, as long as Jiraiya-sama is in recovery. Team Seven meets on the training grounds every Thursday and Team Eight visits Kurenai and plays with her little daughter. Neji takes Hinata out for training and lets her cry. Kiba and Shino give him a piece of mind because of that. Yugao retires (she's pregnant) and Anko disappears for a few months and returns sharper and softer. Genma and Hayate prepare a barbecue event one evening and Jiraiya-sama wakes from his coma. One day, Sasuke sheds his mask of hatred and Itachi and Shisui leave for a longer mission and the Kazekage's son befriends Naruto even more.
Only then it feels like coming home.
They stand on the cliffs above the Fourth's great, stony head, and watch the sun rise over Hidden Leaf. Obito and Kakashi flank Rin, who has her arms around herself like she is freezing. Every now and then, she turns her gaze away from the sight before them, as if to reassure herself of the fact that they are still there. Kakashi revels in the fact that they are, all three of them, and Obito's relaxed shoulders tell them he feels the same. Now and then, one of them reaches out. They have to make sure they're all still there.
"I think," Rin says finally, her soft voice warm and barely audible over the cool wind, "Spring is coming."