Chapter 3

Sakura busied herself, folding her blanket and putting it away. Kakashi said they would stay at an inn in the next town. She wondered if they would get a single room and supposed they had to, for the sake of the mission. With Kakashi disappearing every time she turned around, though, how were they going to complete the mission? It was obvious that he felt some affection for her, and she was beginning to realize she had some for him as well. His disappearances every time he got uncomfortable really frustrated her. She supposed they were going to have to talk about that, but she wasn't looking forward to it. Kakashi walked back into the clearing, and silently folded his blanket.

"I'm going to freshen up in the river. I'll be back in a bit," he said, and walked away. Sakura watched him go, feeling somehow that they lost all of the progress they just made.

"Okay, I'll wait then freshen up in a bit too," she muttered. [He really gets on my nerves! her Inner snarled]. For once, Sakura totally agreed with her and didn't say anything. She busied herself around the camp for what she thought was a decent amount of time, then began her trek.

As Sakura walked in Kakashi's wake, she tried controlling her rising irritation. He has issues, she growled to herself, but I want to be his friend. I thought he wanted to be my friend too.

That reminded her of Naruto's knuckleheaded ways, and she wondered how she could get Kakashi to open up and face his feelings. It was easy with Naruto; she just pounded him and he stopped his bullheadedness and listened to her. That was not something she wanted to do with Kakashi though … unless … he owed her a training session. Maybe she could beat it out of him then. She heard some splashing, and skidded to a stop. She had walked faster than she thought, and didn't want to burst in on Kakashi and embarrass them both. Before she could back up, white hair appeared over the rise in front of her, and a shirtless Kakashi appeared.

"I didn't mean for you to come that quickly, Sakura," Kakashi said after a tired sigh. "Well, hurry and get yourself freshened up. We need to leave for the town." Kakashi walked by her in his boxers without a glance. Plaid, Sakura asked herself. He looks almost Scottish in those. As he toweled his hair dry and picked up his shirt and pants, his leonine muscles stretched in sinewy stripes across his body. Then he walked away toward camp. Sakura stood rooted to the spot, red-faced. She didn't know what to think, but she figured with her heart beating as fast as it was, she probably shouldn't try to think too much. Her Inner opened her invisible mouth, but Sakura silenced her with a threat to pummel her into next week, as she went down to the river to bathe.

The trip into town was short, silent and uneventful. Sakura didn't dare say anything as Kakashi led them to a decent-looking inn and silently paid for a room. At least it wasn't a fleabag, Sakura thought. The matron flashed a bright grin at him, and Sakura hoped that she at least thought they were a couple. When Kakashi turned from the desk, he winked at her with a crinkled eye, but Sakura thought it lacked any feeling. "Here we are, Sakura, our room is 328," Kakashi said. He held the door open for her, as they left the office, and placed a solicitous hand on her back. Sakura knew he had switched to mission mode, and said, "Thank you," as if she really meant it, with a glowing beam aimed his way. Once they got in the room, Kakashi's hand dropped from her back like it was a hot iron, and he said, "No need to keep the charm turned on, Sakura. I don't want to do this anymore than you do." Sakura's eyes widened slightly.

She sat down on the bed, since there wasn't a couch, and patted the mattress beside her. "Kakashi, come here and sit down. We have a few things we need to talk about before this goes any further."

"You're absolutely right, Sakura," Kakashi said. "Because this isn't going any further."

Sakura looked at Kakashi standing stiffly in front of her, arms crossed, single eye unreadable. "Sit down, Kakashi, and I mean it," Sakura said, her eyes glowing green with anger. "I want to be your friend, and we need to work out how your past will let me be your friend without you disappearing every time you show some emotion toward me. I am being totally honest and open with you and I expect nothing but the same. Now, sit!"

"How my past… is that what you think?" Kakashi sighed as he sat down and put his head in his hands. "Sakura, you don't want to be around me. I come with too much baggage, and I'm probably not fixable. I'm flawed, irresponsible, and unreliable. I'm not even sure I can pull off this mission." "Kakashi, who am I talking to? I understand about feeling flawed. Hell, I'm flawed. I can even understand about feeling irresponsible, because you walk around with Icha Icha all the time, in public! You invite that, and seem to relish it. But unreliable? You are one of the most reliable people I know, outside of being chronically late and not wanting to socialize with anyone … but at least I can rely upon that …"

Kakashi looked up at her. "So, you get me. But I can't do anything about what I am, who I am. What you see, the constant disappearing, this is me. I have no control over it. I am constantly afraid I'm going to screw up another life, like I did with Rin and Obito. I let them down, and I let Minato down. "

"I think it sounds like time you told me about Rin and Obito. They were your team, weren't they? Your friends?" Sakura shifted on the bed to sit cross-legged in front of Kakashi. Taking a cue from her, he also shifted and sat cross-legged facing her. "I thought you might be more comfortable this way, since we're sitting on a bed," Sakura said.

Kakashi looked at her and said, "Where did you get all this grown up-ness from, Sakura?"

"I don't know if it's as much being grown up as much as it's wanting to be your friend, Kakashi. Ino has done this many times for me. Maybe you can thank her."

Kakashi smiled. "She's a good friend then. All right, I'll tell you." Kakashi began to illustrate his relationship with Rin and Obito, how Rin seemed to be always tagging after him. "I guess I was like Shikamaru and thought that was too troublesome," he sighed. "She was a medic, and a good one. You remind me of her, though you are much more fiery. Uchiha Obito… where Sasuke was the best and the brightest of the Uchiha clan, Obito lagged behind. He made up for that with an excessive amount of determination. In fact, he reminds me a little of Naruto. He was a clown, but he was the one that I learned about teamwork from. He is the reason I am always late, and why I will not abandon my team, no matter what."

Sakura regarded Kakashi silently, waiting for him to continue. Kakashi's voice grew quieter as he relived the mission and how they split up because of Kakashi's insistence on following the rules, and Rin's capture by enemy ninja. When he told of Obito's impassioned plea to Kakashi to not abandon Rin for the sake of the mission, Sakura's eyes filled with tears. She could see how this still affected Kakashi. The story of the subsequent fight to free the captured Rin, and Obito saving her but getting crushed under the rock released by the Stone ninja, tore at her heart.

"So, Obito told me he wasn't going to make it, in that body, but that he wanted to be with me so he could see what we did in the future and be with us. Obito asked Rin to transplant his Sharingen, that had activated for the first time during the fight, into my eye. He said that this was his gift to me for reaching Jonin and that since I had lost my eye in the fight protecting him, he would be my eye. I couldn't refuse such a gift no matter how much it turned my stomach to be the reason for his death. I so wanted everything to be different, but I was powerless to do anything." Here, Kakashi's voice caught, rough, and he stopped, breathing hard. He grasped his hair as if he would pull it out, then covered his face. "And some people still don't get it… I didn't want it and I didn't take it from him." This last was said with a rough whisper.

"It still affects you like it was yesterday, doesn't it?" Sakura asked, tears running down her face.

"Yes," Kakashi said. "I live with it every day. I visit the memorial to let Obito know I'm trying to live up to the legacy that he left me and apologize to Rin but I still feel like a failure."

Sakura reached out and grasped Kakashi's hands, pulling them away from his face. "You're not a failure, Kakashi. You stood by us, all of us. And you wouldn't let us go, either."

"I didn't pay as much attention to you as I should have. I spent time with Naruto and Sasuke, and then Sasuke defected and I always felt responsible for that." Here Kakashi stopped, checking Sakura's face for reaction at the mention of Sasuke's name. The tears had dried by now. Sakura was touched at his concern.

"Thanks for checking, Kakashi, but I'm way over that. I was a silly girl in love with an idea of love that didn't measure up to anything real, and he never even knew I existed. When he did acknowledge me, I was an irritant, something to be slapped away. I finally woke up and let that go. It wasn't without some hard work, though," Sakura said softly. "Now, continue."

"What else is there to say?" Kakashi said.

"I want to know when you started wearing the mask and why," Sakura said. "I can't help but feel that it's somehow connected to all of this."

"Now, that, is something I have never told anyone."

"Come on, Kakashi, even you know it is not good to keep things like this inside. They fester after awhile, and can turn you into a completely different person. It's often hard to get rid of the personas that develop, if potentially dangerous psychological traumas aren't dealt with."

Kakashi's eyes became hard and flat. "You're the doctor," he said. "You have no idea what you're getting yourself into."

"Kakashi, I have read your medical file, what parts of it Tsunade thought were appropriate in light of treating you when you've returned to Konoha half dead and we've had to put you back together too many times! You can trust me."

"Trust… that is a word I have never really liked, because I can't trust myself," Kakashi mused. "All right, I don't know what else I could lose." He sighed. "My dad was Konoha's White Fang. Evidently I look just like him. He was a highly skilled Jonin, well liked, and earned a lot of respect for Konoha. Something happened on one of his missions, and he abandoned the mission to save the lives of his teammates. Because of that, the mission failed and was a huge loss for Konoha. He was ostracized by everyone in the town, including his team. He could never forgive himself. I found his body when he committed suicide. I was 9. After that, I began wearing a mask, so people wouldn't be so quick to notice I was his son, and it helped me to focus on the ninja code." Kakashi's voice tapered off and he sat silently, looking at Sakura.

"So that's where you began to hold so tightly to the rules, and why you were known as 'Rules Kakashi' for awhile, "Sakura said. Kakashi nodded. "What happened to you in Anbu? Tsunade would never let me see the file."

"And rightly so," said Kakashi. "That was the darkest time of my life. Again, this is something I've never told anyone, willingly. Yamanaka Inoichi got in my mind and got the truth, but not without a fight," he said darkly.

Sakura's eyes narrowed. "Ino's dad? But that means that the Hokage sanctioned it and that…"

"Yes, we'll get to that," Kakashi said bitterly. "This isn't something that I'm proud of, and it's something that I'd dearly like to forget. I'm giving you my heart here, Sakura, as a friend, and I beg you not to crush it."

Sakura was shocked. He talked like they were in a romantic relationship, but they weren't. Sakura supposed that bearing your soul as nakedly as Kakashi was counted as almost the same thing. After all, the only thing left was the mask on his face.

"Your heart is safe with me, Kakashi. You kept me safe all those years. Let me return the favor by at least listening," she encouraged.

Kakashi looked at her for a moment, searchingly, and clenched their grasped hands a little tighter. "I don't know why I'm opening up to you like this. It isn't because you remind me of Rin, you're as different from her as night from the day. The only resemblance is how you two cared about me. No, there's something different here. My heart wants to say it's something it's never known, but I am not ready to acknowledge that now and may never be and I'm not even sure if I could define that."

He took a deep breath. "I took too easily to being in Anbu. I wanted to forget, and Anbu was a way to embrace being a ninja and put away all my pain and fears. I was good at it; perhaps the best Anbu Konoha had ever seen. They even said I surpassed my father, and I was only 14 at the time."

"So young," Sakura murmured. Her thumbs stroked Kakashi's hands in a comforting massage.

"As I was saying," he continued, "I threw myself into the job, and took increasingly difficult missions. Something in me began to have a righteous thirst for blood. When I killed in the name of Konoha, it would roar in triumph and the blood… tasted good." Sakura's eyes widened slightly.

"It wasn't a physical taste, but a taste inside my mind," he continued. "And it became more and more thirsty. Soon, the targeted enemies were not the only ones it craved. And I became aware that Wolf was the persona, and Wolf had known my dad. Wolf engulfed me and I existed for the hunt, the prowl and the kill. I became less than human, and barely communicated with anyone. During one mission, Anbu surrounded me and subdued me, but not before I killed 10 of the enemy after they had been captured and were restrained in a group, waiting to be transported to Konoha."

Silence fell, and Sakura let the silence be. Kakashi had bowed his head as if he, too, was observing a moment of silence for the fallen ninja. "Was Pakkun with you then too," Sakura whispered.

"Yes," Kakashi replied. "He and the pack bowed to the Alpha Wolf."

After a moment, Kakashi went on. "I woke up in the Konoha interrogation area. Morino Ibiki was there, and Inoichi was in my head, trying to get to the person he knew, the comrade. Wolf wouldn't let him in, and threw him out of my head. They gave me drugs to try and control Wolf, but nothing had an effect. It was as though I had my own personal tailed beast inside me like Naruto."

"What happened to change this?" Sakura asked.

"What they gave me eventually brought me to the brink of death," Kakashi related. "It was the only time that Wolf lost his hold on me. That gave Inoichi time enough to get in my head and begin to try and mend the frayed edges and find the answers to help them put me back together as a sane person. Having a Yamanaka in every thought you've ever had is no picnic. Nothing was hidden from him." Kakashi shuddered. "Thankfully, I recovered chiefly with the help of a friend who kept challenging me and kept my eyes open so that I stayed rooted in reality."

"And Wolf? Is he gone?" Sakura asked, heart in her mouth.

Kakashi said, "He has stayed so, yes. But I don't let my guard down and I am on constant watch. These reactions I have had concern me and make me think he may try to reappear. I do not welcome it but I do not know what to do about it."

Sakura shifted on the bed until she was sitting next to Kakashi again. She put her arm around his shoulders and laid her head against him. "I don't know what the answers are, and when we get back to Konoha I would like to do a full brain scan on you, but for right now, just know you have someone here who cares for you and is pulling for you," Sakura said. "We will find the answers together. You are safe with me."

Kakashi laughed shortly, and stopped as Sakura looked at him with her eyebrows raised dangerously. "With my reputation, you are the one telling me I am safe with you?" he explained as he pulled out his Icha Icha volume, waving it meaningfully. He and Sakura looked at each other for a moment. Sakura finally couldn't hold it in any longer, and began to giggle, a hand to her mouth. Kakashi smirked, then gave in, and the two colors, pink and white, mingled together as Kakashi and Sakura rocked back and forth, laughing and holding each other.