Kakashi forces himself to sit still when he feels her chakra return. It's not the first time since she returned that he wonders what happened in the labs. Does he want to know? Kakashi isn't sure he does. Minato once said that to scout the enemy instead of pretending they don't exist, but he also knows that there is no going back once he knows everything.
Even with the hints of it, the alarming report that his sister had given his mind enough fuel to guess.
Body not... belonging
Not belonging? Whose body, belonging to who? He turns a page of his novel, not really reading it. Shisui would know, or he might. He would have a better guess of what those words might mean.
The loathing curdles in the pit of his stomach. He remembers being sent out for backup for his sister's squad. The mission that should have been his squad's was reassigned to Fuuko when he accidentally broke his arm. He wonders if she blames him. She would not have lost her squad leader, would not have to feel the loss of another teammate had he had gone for that mission.
"Nii-san?" she hovers behind him. The way she calls him is different, like she's trying to fit names to an image. Kakashi pushes his doubts away. After all that she's gone through, the one thing he can do is make sure that he's there for her, just like she was there for him.
"Maa... I ate all the eggplant already, and rice."
"Nii-saan..." she pouts at him.
"You didn't want the eggplant anyway. We always eat eggplant anyway," he mimics her voice.
"At least leave the rice for me! And pickles!" Kakashi can see from the corner of his eyes that in spite of her light tone, there is a strange light in her eyes. Itachi's chakra pulses lightly and he motions 'later' to Itachi when Fuuko turns to the fridge.
"There's the leftover katsudon," he drawls, coming up behind her.
She sighs and takes it out anyway. He was going to drag her out to the yakiniku restaurant, he knew that nothing fixes his sister up better than a full course yakiniku platter. Except judging by her demeanour and Itachi hovering about in the shadows, he wasn't going to risk it.
'Just go slowly with her,' he mumbles inaudibly under his breath, reminding himself of the medic's words. Like that's so easy.
Kakashi waves at her, pretending to be engrossed in his book but really tracking her chakra across the apartment, watching it until it fades into a sleepy pulse.
Itachi sits across him. "She didn't detect my presence until I let her detect," he starts and that's really all Kakashi needs to know. His sister is one of the best chakra sensors around that not even Itachi or Tenzo can hide from her.
"Just go slowly with her," he reminds the crestfallen Uchiha, because that is all they can do for her.
\W/ \W/ \W/
"Tou-san! Imouto! Look!" he burst into the house, the house was far unnaturally dark. "Tou-san? Imouto?" The metallic smell savaged his nose as he stepped into the pitch black house.
'Oh kami, not my house,' he reiterated to himself, forcing his legs to take him past the genkan. He heard of one of the Uchiha houses that had been hit by enemy-nins that had managed to get past the village's defences. Tou-san was supposed to be here, tou-san would have destroyed them easily.
"Tou-san," he called out again, choking on the smell of blood. Maybe it's the enemy-nins that tou-san killed, he told himself, trying to comfort himself from the terrifying images of seeing his two year old sister dead, because that seemed like the only plausible explanation.
Channelling some chakra into his eyes, he stopped at the edge of the living room. Kakashi could feel his mind slip, his world tilting on its axis as he tried to process what he was seeing. His father sprawled on the floor, blood bleeding into the tatami mats could only belong to one.
"Tou-san!" he stepped towards Sakumo, the thick viscous liquid beneath his ninja sandal causing him to slip. His heart threatening to burst from his chest as he crawled to the older silver-haired man. He tried so hard to get tou-san to look at them again, tried to pull him out.
Was he not good enough? Was he not good enough for him to come back out? Why had he left him?
Kakashi tilted his face up, the more he tried to stop the tears, the more they persisted.
"Kakashi-kun?" the baritone called from the doorway.
Minato-sensei, he had forgotten he was supposed to meet sensei.
He heard sensei swear and shunshin-ed towards him. "What happened?"
"I wasn't good enough," he replied, holding tightly onto the cold body. "Not good enough." He swallowed dryly, scrubbing the tears away, ignoring the flare of chakra from Sensei and the other approaching chakra source.
"Kakashi-kun," Minato said gently, crouching by him. "Come, let Kushina deal with this, okay?" He peeled Kakashi's hands from the body, hoisting him up into his arms. Kakashi would have been outraged for being treated like a kid but he couldn't find the energy to care, instead he listed against him, taking comfort in the warm source.
"Where is imouto?" he asked the blond jounin.
The jounin froze, then flipped hand seals as he swore. "Gamata, find Fuuko-chan."
The frog bounded away and stopped. "Minato, she's under the couch."
Minato placed him down. Lying flat on the ground, he reached out for Fuuko. Kakashi could hear her crying. "Fuuko-chan, it's me. Remember me? Mii-chi? I have your nii-san here with me."
He really was turning out to be a shitty nii-san, wasn't he? Kakashi forced the thought down, compelling his legs to kneel beside Minato. With the chakra enhanced eyesight, he could make out the streaks of dried blood across her face. How long had she been stuck in the room with… with their father?
Minato carefully pushed the couch up and pulled her towards them. She held her hands out to him, her tiny hands curling tightly his bloodied shirt. "I'm here imouto," he said, gripping her tightly. She was all he had left. Noujou-oba was dead, Kouuki-kun was dead and now their father dead.
If there was a god listening, please don't let him lose her as well.
\W/ \W/ \W/
Kakashi wakes with a sudden alertness, his body still pliant, heart beating slowly in a imitation of being asleep. Why had he woken? Admittedly the dream had been one of his most horrible memories, but still… He casts his senses out, searching for the threat his consciousness had pegged and groans. "Damnit Shisui." Choosing to ignore the Uchiha lurking in his apartment for now, the elder Hatake drags his shirt over his face and plods into the bathroom. He pauses outside his sister's room, toothbrush in his mouth and stares at her sleeping form.
'She's alive. Traumatized but alive,' he tells himself. Wouldn't be the first time they had a trauma. They always work through it. He remembers Obito and Rin, remembers how she followed him into ANBU after Minato's death.
Imouto.
He sits on the edge of her bed, hand twitching in the want to touch her to assure himself. She breathes slow and easy, her guard entirely let down. Not common but it worries him anyway. The cold drip of his toothpaste dribbling on his hand snaps him from further thoughts and he shunshins back to the bathroom to rinse his mouth.
Why are you here so early? He signs to the black haired boy standing in his kitchen.
"Breakfast," he grins, motioning to the fishes on grill. Kakashi would nag at Shisui for doing morning training despite the medic's words except who is he to say that? He's infamous for escaping hospitals after all. Shisui stretches his left arm carefully, rotating it around a few times. "It'll be fine by the week's end," Shisui tells him. "Watch the fish! I'm going to wake Fuu-chan~!"
Kakashi grabs him by the collar before he can even flounce towards his sister's room. "Imouto is currently sleeping," he says through clenched teeth. "I would appreciate if a young man like you to not go into a girl's room - my imouto's room especially while she's sleeping."
Shisui sulks. "But Kakashi-sempai! We sleep together anyway when you're not around."
His lip twitches Shisui's words and tightens his grip around Shisui's raised collared shirt. "Shisui, be careful. Or I might accidentally kill* you with water. I might actually do it anyway." Kakashi gives him a single eye crinkle, making sure his killer intent is extra potent.
He gulps audibly, drops of sweat beading on his forehead. "Mou- Kakashi-sempai! You know I don't mean that kind of sleeping together." Kakashi's hand spasms at his last two words, tightening the collar around Shisui's neck. "C-can't breathe-" Shisui gasps.
"Nii-san, stop manhandling my squad mate."
"But he was talking bad about you!" Kakashi whines, reluctantly dropping Shisui when she frowns at him.
"But he was telling the truth…" She taps her bottom lip thoughtfully. "There was also that one time where we had to sleep naked together with our sleep rolls wrapped around us. We were caught in a snowstorm, wasn't it?"
His single eye twitches and before he can grab hold of Shisui again, he zips behind her. "Please don't tell your brother that while I'm here. We didn't do anything! It was just conserving heat!"
"But it was funny." She brushes past Kakashi and dishes the food out, sitting on the chair closest to the kitchen window.
She is sitting on his usual seat, the seat that he had picked (and squabbled over) since they moved into this apartment a decade ago. Kakashi's breath hitches.
"We don't know what happened in the lab, Kakashi-san. We have to prepare for the worst."
He forces himself to sit on the opposite seat, his sister's seat, shovelling the food in his mouth so fast that Shisui has not noticed that he has started eating. Then he stands just as Shisui says itadakimasu, slipping the mask up with an eye smile. "Well then, I have an appointment with my squad."
Kakashi wiggles his fingers in farewell before flickering to the Hokage tower.
It's a horrible theory that he doesn't want to consider, but the longer he observes, the more the theory becomes less of a theory and more of a conclusion. Teammate killer, what would be next? Kin Betrayal?
He forces his steps to be slow and plodding, face immersed in a familiar orange book, his body posture, a model for boredom and insouciance. It isn't his squad that is waiting in the meeting room when he finally makes it there. The Sandaime and Inoichi, the head of T&I, looks up with a weary look.
"Well?" Sandaime asks him.
His sister isn't quite his sister anymore, he thinks though he doesn't vocalise it. He doesn't tell them that his sister might be broken in ways that none of them has considered - he doesn't even want to touch that idea on how with a twelve metre pole. Instead, he shrugs in a perfectly recalcitrant manner and drawls, "Well, Shisui's watching her and Itachi's watching Shisui. Apart from finding out that Shisui slept with my imouto, nothing else has been ground breaking." Even if she's not quite his sister (and he suspects that there's more than just brainwashing), he'll do his best to protect her.
Inoichi chokes at his words and Kakashi can't blame him. The idea of Fuuko naked with Shisui… Kakashi grimaces, then plans to string the Uchiha and set Naruto on him.
A/N:
- Noujou-obu and Kouuki-kun are both Hatake OCs. There will be further brief mentions of them, but in case anyone actually tries to google who they are. No, they don't exist canonically. Noujou is Sakumo's elder sister while Kouuki is her son.
- I'm trying to slowly extend the chapters out, though I'm well aware that by extending it out, I'll be taking a lot longer time per chapter.
- I'm embarrassingly shy on responding reviews, I'm sorry if I don't respond to your questions. Not trying to put anyone off on reviewing/commenting, just not sure how to respond. There are a lot of questions right now, but it is just the beginning.
* Shisui can mean Shi - (Dead ,死) and Sui (water, 死) so Kakashi is making a pun on Shisui's name.