Notes:
If you're not a fan of violence, consider this sentence as your one warning. It starts gory and doesn't really get better. With that said, I hope you enjoy!
As always, thank you to LinSetsu for her amazing support, ideas, and cheerleading skills! This story truly wouldn't have gotten past the first scene if it wasn't for her. If you like this story, please check out hers as well! Another thank you goes to BakeKitsune for the wonderful brainstorm session we had!
Please let me know what you think, good or bad. I super appreciate all forms of feedback! Thanks for reading!
-.-.-
Peace Taught by the Battles Told
By MaethoMixup
-.-.-
"Where does the sun go?" Rin asked, hand outstretched, a tapestry of stars weaving between her fingers. Her brows furrowed, pout pulling tight at one side as she contemplated the sky above them. "It's got to go somewhere, right?"
Obito laid on Kakashi's other side. He laughed, swung his arms wide enough to encompass the night. "I bet it's afraid of the dark!"
Kakashi swatted his elbow away before it made contact with his chest. "That's stupid."
"Yeah, that doesn't sound right," she mumbled and huffed, but she turned her autumn gaze towards him. "Where do you think it goes, Kakashi?"
The moon above them was half hidden behind clouds and darkness, but Kakashi focused on it, on the size and shape and its similarities to the sun, and remembered old tales about men with two faces. One shining and friendly, the other broken and angry.
"It dies," he concluded, because two faced men reminded him of only one man.
Rin frowned. "And it comes back to life each day?"
"Now that's stupid," Obito declared with a huff of his own. "The dead don't come back. That's why they're dead."
She leaned up enough to shoot him a glare. "Don't be so depressing, Obito."
"You're right." He grinned, pushing his elbow into Kakashi's side on purpose this time. "That's his job, isn't?"
-.-.-
Pain is like a river; ever flowing, never stopping. The tides ebb and flow with each compounding wound, digging deep.
Deeper.
More, Kakashi thinks, stepping forward and allowing the sword to slide further into his gut. He grabs ahold of the surprised shinobi, brings their neck into his own weapon. They drop the hilt, but the blade stays inside him, wobbling, teetering above a ligament. The sharp edge teases between survival and certain death.
Blood splatters from them both and he doesn't care — he can't, lest he falter.
The man falls dead. Kakashi staggers without their weight to balance himself on, reaching blindly to find a tree, finds nothing, plants his feet only barely. Explosions rock the perimeter and the aftershocks screech like a forgotten teakettle. His footing catches on uneven ground as it splits apart and he lurches away, tumbles and slides past the crater.
The stench of sulfur drenches the wind, carrying the dull ticking of a gas burner from the slate stone clusters at his heels. Kakashi glances down, sees an explosive tag and switches himself with a corpse before his clothes catch aflame. The ringing begins anew; he's too close to the epicenter. Heat and debris sweep by his bare cheeks.
Mission. Clarity.
Find the source, his training urges.
Left. Twenty meters. Enemy: blue shirt, fast hands, madness on their lips. They throw another tag into the fray of bodies filling the clearing, injuring the environment more than flesh.
Kakashi takes a step forward, then another and one more. He's limping, swaying as if on purpose, but it's not enough to avoid the dart he sees coming, and he's not quick enough to dodge. Serrated edges corkscrew into his shoulder, dig deep through muscle to embed in bone, and he grunts, stumbles further, dances close.
They lift their arms. "You piece of — "
His fist finds their face. They don't die; they sneer as if he'd inconvenienced them, and Kakashi laughs because that's a funny thought.
Another punch. More. He doesn't stop until his knuckles breach their skull, head bursting like egg on concrete. Their innards ooze out, ruined along with that silly, out-of-place expression, and he laughs again because this is a mission and he's not suppose to feel anything else.
Not love nor regret nor the happiness he feels when past voices trickle into his movements, reminding him how to set his stance, hold his kunai, stretch his spine.
"Watch your left," one phantom says. He listens, deflects a shuriken.
"Balance your weight," says someone else, voice young - too young to be here.
Mission. Complete the mission, the ghost of his father whispers. Somehow, Kakashi doesn't believe that's him. He remembers his father glorifying more than victory, yet that doesn't matter here. In this battlefield of broken dreams and dying men, victory is all he can hope for — all he wants — because everything else is expecting too much.
Kakashi trips over a body. He hadn't known her prior to this assignment. Her black ops mask sits near her feet, white porcelain scattered across the flattened grass.
Her torso is missing and he doesn't search for it. Too late, he knows.
Too late, he fears, as he looks across the red meadow, sees people crumbling and not getting up. He kills another before he falls into place alongside an ally, and his ally dies before either of them can say hello.
"Hello," he says anyways, because that's funny too, to say it to the dead.
Of course they don't respond, and Kakashi feels insane for thinking they might.
And maybe he is insane. Maybe this is just a dream — a nightmare. A fantasy.
Two of his fingers find a man's eyes, bursting them, but he moves on. They're too heavily armored for Kakashi to kill without chakra and he has long since run empty. He's fueled by adrenaline, begging for it to last this battle, pleading with his muscles to remember what his mind can't.
They don't. A weapon slashes at him.
Pain is like a river, he chants, parrying death away from the artery in his arm. Kakashi's kunai knocks the scythe to the side with a steel screech and he bends his wrist, swooping down then up, surging towards their heart. They jump away before metal meets skin and send a waterspout in retaliation, made quick from slow hand signs, and still Kakashi can't dodge. The boiling water floods into every wound, turns cloth molten against flesh. His stance holds under the pressure until he can't. He just — can't — and his heels slip before the rest of him follows.
Kakashi slams into a tree and wonders where it had been earlier when he'd been searching for a crutch.
Wood pushes the sword in his gut free and blood follows too rapid for him to stop. His hand presses at the wound anyways, because it's reflex to want to live, but it's useless. He looks to where he knows a medic is.
Their intestines trail to what's left of the body: legs dangling from an axe and arms stuck in hardened mud.
Kakashi's still laughing; he hasn't stopped. Hysteria is a defense mechanism and it's the only shield he has left to guard against the approaching men as they step around the medic's remains, weapons drawn and muscles taut.
Mission, the voice still urges. Complete the mission.
He smiles. Perhaps he'll be able to say hello in the afterlife.
-.-.-
He awakens to a dark canopy blurred with starlines, twinkling madly, and a fire crackling beside him. It's almost peaceful, except the constellations are unfamiliar and his limbs are bound tight. His strength is too drained to struggle against the flat planks aligning his back.
Kakashi tests his hands to see if a weapon is within reach. No response. They're numb from the collarbone down.
"So you're not dead, eh?" a voice says, familiar. He can't turn to see who it is, but their face shifts into place above where he lays, smirk heavy, eyes heavier, and bandages wound tight around their throat. "Stop squirming. You'll aggravate your wounds, and I sure as shit don't have time to play doctor with you again."
"Genma," he rasps through the thickness of drugs.
He raises a brow. "Are we doing this? Right now? You're near death and I'm right behind you because someone, and I won't name the idiot, decided walking into a katana was the best way to kill his enemy."
Kakashi's responding look isn't quite threatening, but it's weary enough to get his point across. Genma sighs.
"Sea salt winds find sandy skirts," he says. "Which is still the dumbest identification code I've ever been given, and I once had Jiraiya as a team captain." Genma pauses. "You got that line from his book, didn't you?"
Relief soothes panic and his muscles relax as much as the bindings allow. "Maybe," Kakashi admits.
He scoffs, but a smile pulls at the corners of his mouth, "I thought you were better than that."
"Blame my head injury."
Genma snorts. "You weren't wounded back in Konoha. Your turn, by the way."
"The midnight sparrow tackles its prey," he says, amused at the eyeroll sent away from him. He continues, "Are there any other survivors?"
He remembers seeing one of their heads rolling in the grass just before the men had dragged him from the splintered tree.
"No. Dead," Genma answers. "I left their bodies. Getting yours was priority."
Kakashi can't fault him. He knows the mission, knows their village; the foreign eye within his socket is more important than both. "Why didn't you cut it out?"
"Fuck, Kakashi, you really think I would? You were still breathing." He glares, honeybee brown darkening to an angry black. His senbon cigarette dangles low, held dangerously between his lips like a pin waiting to drop, and Kakashi's reminded suddenly of home, of poker nights with the boys and laughter that perhaps he had only ever dreamed of.
"Do it," Genma would say from across a green table each free Friday night, glancing above a pair of cards, daring Kakashi to bluff his seven-two suit into a royal flush.
This man wears that same daring expression under loose hair and grime, crouching over Kakashi's prone form.
"Yes," Kakashi lies. He never says no to a challenge.
"Fuck you," Genma decides on, leaning back out of view. "Fuck you and your stupid death wish, you stupid, fucking man. I wasn't leaving you to die. You really think that?"
"Yes," he says again.
"Fuck."
"And the asset?" Kakashi asks.
"That transition wasn't even smooth." Genma sneers, Kakashi hears it in the undertone of his words. "Try harder if you want me to stop calling you out on your hypocritical bullshit."
"Genma." His voice cracks between syllables, breath pained, ribs aching, but there's still a mission pulling his mind from the gutters of sleep. Their asset had been a diplomat traveling from the Waterfall villages to one hidden within a rice field. They had been paid to protect him and his ferret on this journey.
"He died after you were grabbed. Ran away, directly into an explosion. Cowards should at least have a good directional sense if running is all they're good for."
He groans, though he's not surprised. "He wasn't their target, then."
"No," Genma agrees. "They went towards you first. We didn't have a plan for that. The others couldn't adapt." Kakashi thinks he hears him laugh, but the sound of wood thrown onto the campfire blankets the tremors. "They were new recruits. This was their first mission. Either it's coincidence, or it was planned."
The heat grows next to them.
"Maybe I'm just too cynical," he adds.
"Cynical?" It's Kakashi's turn to laugh. "Call it pragmatic."
"I'll call it whatever the hell I want," he says, nudging him with his toes. "I'm not the one lying half-dead. You know we're not out of Rice country, right? That means all your shit should be kept on silent until we either make it through Sound or Hot Water, and who knows who's following us." He sighs, runs a hand through his hair and continues, "Orochimaru is our best case scenario, and that's saying something. At least with him we know what to expect."
"Probably not him."
"Yeah," Genma says, settling in closer to the flames and fanning the smoke away, "but maybe one of his lackeys. Or worse, an ally. That'd be my luck. Finally finding Akatsuki during a dumb escort mission."
His voice stays steady, but his foot taps the dirt. One, two. One, two. It's the music of a nervous man.
Kakashi tries to look at him, tries to see his face and feelings, but the brace prevents him from moving anything more than his knees and numbness envelops the rest. "My arms," he starts. Stops.
"Just medicine. Got rid of the poison," he says. "It won't last our trip home, but there should be enough to prevent infection. Why? Did you need to piss or something?"
"No." Kakashi hopes to save that embarrassment for when he's desperate. "The ones who ambushed us, did you kill them?"
"All but that armored one. His eyes were busted. Due to you, I'm guessing?" He chuckles, shifts so his smirk is revealed by the firelight. "He was flailing next to where you were passed out, screaming for his mother."
Kakashi hums instead of nods. "No way to cut through him."
"I know," Genma agrees. "I tried too."
-.-.-
The rising sun burns bright through the leaves. Slivers of light sprinkle onto the dying embers of their campsite, each sunbeam searing orange onto his closed lids. When he opens one, the color lingers, dazzling him until he blinks it away.
"Good morning," Genma says from nearby. "Sea salt winds find sandy skirts, in case you're worried."
He grunts a response and tests his jaw, ignoring Genma to analyze what he hadn't the night before. Bandages made from torn clothes wrap around the majority of his body, secured by wire and rope and knots hastily done. His mask is missing, but there's a vague memory of it being ripped from his face during a scuttle through the trees.
A glance at his teammate confirms that he hadn't escaped unscathed either. Besides the neck wound Kakashi had noticed before, his pants had been reduced to scraggy shorts by savage flames. Red splotches spiral down his legs, blisters decorating the burns like bloated polka dots.
The brace around his neck tightens as he attempts to roll onto his side, and Kakashi abandons the movement before he snaps the wood. He sighs.
"Can you — " he starts, but his voice shatters into a sandstorm of pain as the words tumble through his throat.
"Shit!" Genma shouts, twigs clattering from his lap. His head pops into view along with a canteen and he flicks open the lid, grabs Kakashi's chin, forces his mouth wide enough to trickle water into. "Shit, I'm sorry! I'm sorry. Are you okay?"
Kakashi nods, not trusting his body with anything more difficult.
"I'm the worst doctor, aren't I?" he asks. He has the nerve to grin, but his lips fall flat and his hand drifts from Kakashi's growing stubble to the fabric securing the brace in place, fingers a delicate pinprick where they rest. "I'm going to check your wounds, okay? Most of this I can't fix, but you're stable, and in a few days you might be able to walk if your fever clears up."
Kakashi's eye flickers down to his legs.
"Nothing wrong with those," Genma assures him. "It's your stomach I'm worried about. You suffered more blood loss than the pills could replenish."
He exhales sharply, sets the canteen beside him and pulls the strap of his bag towards them. "We don't have as much time as I would like." The top flap snaps up and he reaches inside. Metal jangles against plastic and Kakashi sees the blunted edges of their meager arsenal push into the outer tweed. "I snagged this pouch from an enemy corpse while escaping. Nothing here to identify them, of course. That would be too easy."
Genma shakes his head as he takes a med kit into his arms. Kakashi watches him, listening, but he doesn't share his thoughts, doesn't tell him to leave, to run without Kakashi's deadweight dragging them both to their demise.
Doesn't beg him to stay, either. Because he's selfish like his father, but he won't admit it out loud.
His wounds are dressed and replaced, and Genma slumps down beside him with the bag between them. "I miss home," he murmurs. Kakashi feels his chin against his shoulder, forehead pressed into his neck, and Genma shudders a breath down his spine, like a whimper he hadn't meant to give life to.
They tremble in each other's warmth until there's too much sunlight and not enough excuses.
-.-.-
A week later, Genma still carries Kakashi on his back.
A heavy breeze takes pollen from the branched flowers surrounding them. Without his mask or half his clothes, it makes Kakashi want to sneeze, and he shivers. He counts every minute they're away from a fire. They tick by slow.
He remembers being a child, before he'd found his father's body sprawled by their window. Days then had felt like years, and years had felt like ages. Against Genma's back, hours become centuries again. Nothing is right, not truly, but being carried through rice fields, each wet step meticulous, makes him feel safe. He trusts this man to get them home and that optimism, though likely misplaced, doesn't feel wrong. That's why he latches onto it. That's why his forehead presses into the man's padded shoulder, focused on fighting off his fever rather than keeping watch of their surroundings.
It is, perhaps, the fever that's ruined his priorities, creating this illusion of hope. Kakashi knows this as well as any trained killer. Miles away from their country's borders, safety is measured by speed. Carrying a near-corpse on blistered legs means they're on a snail's pace; refuge will be weeks away rather than the days Genma predicts.
And they both know what falsehoods drip from that statement. Each night before their eyes close, Genma rolls over, grins, swears this will all be over soon. It's a testament to the pain leeching at his bones that Kakashi finds himself believing that promise more than the facts his training interjects.
Maybe his fever is the cause of that, too, this baseless confidence and shroud he so willingly cocoons himself with, but that doesn't excuse Genma.
Genma is just too damn good, he decides.
Evil follows the righteous. He'd learned that, somewhere. Read it in a book he can no longer remember, but the phrase had stuck to him like his memories, leeching at his waking thoughts.
Genma isn't innocent, yet he's good. Righteous. Though he lies and gambles and smiles in ways he shouldn't, he's a man with the right sort of priorities.
"I save damsels for a living," Genma had once said.
"Do you still save damsels?" Kakashi asks now, barely a whisper, too afraid of being heard by whoever has been chasing them from that blood-soaked grass to here.
There's a rumble inside Genma's chest — a shuddered giggle — and his eyes slant towards the only one Kakashi has open. "That's what you're thinking about right now?"
"Yeah," he admits through the fog of his own brain.
"Well," he says, hiking Kakashi tighter into his hold. "I'm saving your sorry ass. I'm pretty sure that counts."
Kakashi snorts, and it's thunderous within the near quiet of these fields. Genma's foot pauses, listening, waiting, and then they continue, crouched lower this time.
"I don't have anything else to help with that fever," Genma says after a while. "It would've been better if I were the one nearly dead. You're better at — " He breaks off, laughs like the burn of whiskey, sharp and fleeting and replaced quickly by another sip.
He shakes his head, takes a steadying breath. "This is all I can do, I'm sorry."
Kakashi presses closer, latches his dying strength around the wideness of Genma's shoulders and buries his mouth into the juncture below his neck, teeth clamping on the blood-worn jacket between them. It's all he can do; the words he tries to say are nothing but slurred gibberish, and his head is pounding. He can't focus. Thoughts keep slipping through pain, but he's determined.
"You're too kind," he tries saying again. "You should have left me. You should have cut out this eye."
It's no use; all Genma hears is a soft murmur breathed into his back, and he hums, hitching Kakashi more securely against him, clutching Kakashi like he isn't — tender. Holds him like he doesn't care. His muscles flex, biceps squeezing around Kakashi's thighs to the point where bruises weep and stretch, but the ache is no worse than his other screaming injuries.
Kakashi recognizes this snug coldness for what it is: fear.
The sensation centers him, forces his attention from his memories to the golden waves of rice that engulf them and the hum still surfing through the rib cage he surrounds.
He can't press himself any closer. There's no space left between them and Kakashi doesn't want to let go. He suspects the same is true for Genma.
"You should have left me," he repeats. He doesn't get a response.
He doesn't know if his words were said aloud.
-.-.-
Trekking across hard stones and scree is more difficult than winning at a rigged game of poker, Genma tells him, whispering harshly as he hauls them both over the terrain.
"You should lose some weight," he says, balancing one foot on steaming water and another on a spiked stepping stone. "Think of how much easier this would be if you were a tiny woman. You'd be like carrying a feather, and soft. And there would be boobs pressing against my back. How fucking nice would that be? The fucking best. Literally how I want to die. Boobs against me." Genma jumps, wobbles on the edge of a rock, and continues, "Instead, I get a dumb man who thinks impaling himself on a katana is an effective battle strategy."
He snorts when Kakashi grunts. "Don't try to die your way out of this. I saw everything. I was right across the fucking meadow using the treeline as cover like someone should have been doing too, if they were any sort of a good team leader. Which, you're not. Have I told you that yet? You're not. You can't even walk." He pauses. "That's not true. You probably could, but I don't fucking trust you, not after that shit you pulled. Running into a sword. How fucking dumb are you? You could have done, I don't know, a lot of other things. Not that, that's for sure."
Kakashi doubts Genma knows he's truly awake, just as Kakashi's uncertain if this is real, but he doesn't complain. It's almost soothing how Genma's quiet rants never stop, never pause, never assume that they won't make it home.
They both still know the odds.
"A fucking katana. I'm going to teach you how to use one, later. And, surprise! You don't hold the pointy end with your chest cavity, you fucking, horrible, horrible man."
They both know the odds, and they know ninja can't survive in Hot Water unless they are quick in and even quicker out.
It's been four days.
"In three more they'll think to send a search party. That's our due date. You're too important for them to lose, do you hear me?"
Kakashi grunts again, hopes it's enough, hopes that Genma can beat those odds, because his optimism hasn't dwindled like it should've. Every breath is a death rattle, pulled from the graveyard settled within his creaking ribs, but he can't let go of that promise. That it will all be over soon.
"So now you're cocky," Genma laughs, and maybe Kakashi said something out loud, though he doubts it. "You know you're hot shit. Of course you do. Of course you're important."
He laughs again, like an echo eaten by mist, and hops over the water to the next stone.
"Of course you're too important to lose, you stupid, horrible man."
-.-.-
Kakashi isn't sure what day it is, but it's dark and there's no fire. Genma's hands hold the back of his head, cradling Kakashi as if he's precious, and it's wrong because there's not a brace and there should be.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," Genma says, face too close to his own, voice too low, too suspicious — too ready to say something too loud, too worried. "You have to get up now, Kakashi. Someone's close. One of my traps went off. You need to stand up."
Kakashi blinks at him, at his shadowed skin and brown hair, and thinks that he's fine with looking at him for longer; except this man — Genma, he reminds himself — is scared, and that's wrong too. A man like him should be forever confident and boasting each day that he walks by Kakashi in the Hokage's tower, pretending as if he'd saved their new, drunken leader from something terrible.
"Guess what I did today," Genma had said each and every time, pulling Kakashi's attention to him.
"You need to stand up," he says now, and Kakashi listens because he always does. He hangs onto his every word because it's only natural for him to do so.
Because it's still all he can do.
"That's right, Kakashi. That's right. Come on," he urges, and Kakashi staggers forward. "How fast can you run? Fast, right? Faster than them? Of course you can. Remember, you're the best. Remember that girl you have waiting for you, that little girl with pink hair. Remember her? The one you swore you would train after you found him? Sasuke. Remember?"
He remembers. Kakashi remembers a team and bells and finally — finally — being proud, thinking that maybe this is it. Maybe this is what a family feels like, all over again.
He remembers how that family had crashed and burned, too. Like a cycle, like the sun and moon and men with two faces.
At least he had tried harder this time. At least he had tried to stop Sasuke instead of pretending family's a concept that only exists for people that don't constantly hurt.
At least he had wanted to care, this time.
"That's right, Kakashi," Genma says beside him. "That's right. Keep running. You got this. Just go straight and maybe, maybe they won't. Won't catch up. Just, keeping going, and maybe I'll catch up, okay? Don't stop. Don't stop, do you promise?"
Kakashi can only grunt, only feel pain — like a river, he chants — and hopes that Genma will promise the same. That he'll catch up. That this isn't goodbye.
Genma doesn't. Kakashi hears metal find metal, footsteps fading far, and he doesn't stop running.
He'd promised.