Naruto
There's No
Could-Have-Been (200-word drabble)
It's not strictly
cannon, but I am pretty convinced that Kiba's father is out of the
picture. (Circumstantial evidence: chapter 137, page 12, where the
women of the Inuzuka clan are shown fighting and any men are
conspicuously absent.) This is set in the past, sometime during
the Ninja Academy.
Here's Kiba: he's young and reckless and has a genius for getting up really early, doing a crazy, aerial morning exercise, and then sleeping through class at the Academy. He's still young and so he sometimes still has nightmares about the filthy, scuffed head protector being pressed into his mother's shaking hand—but he loves his mother, and he loves his sister, and as long as the sun shines that's enough for him.
Here's Akamaru: he's Kiba's partner, a special breed of jutsu-enabled dog, and if you call him a pet that statement will come back to bite you in the ass. He is younger than Kiba but generally has more common sense, and there's never, ever any doubt that he understands, communicates, and collaborates with Kiba. No, never a pet.
Akamaru can also lie very still at night, ignoring the pain of a young boy's desperately clutching, pulling hands and allowing that boy to bury his tears and muffle his sobs in the dog's soft fur. He is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a surrogate father, but he is a lifelong companion and comrade.
Kibakamaru: for now and forever one, neither of them could imagine anything else.