.
You can't learn to get back up
if you've never been knocked down.
Hiwa lets out a breath, slow and controlled, and listens as the two Kusa nin get closer and closer to her position, their footfalls pounding amidst the patter of rain against the forest.
She readjusts on the branch, her back pressed to the trunk and her feet bracing herself, arms held in to make herself as small as possible under the cover of the foliage. The bark digs into her skin through the thin robe she has on and drops of rain slip down the leaves and drip onto her head like beads of ice. It's not comfortable, but it helps ground her through the fog of fatigue clouding her mind.
They're in the middle of northern Rain Country. It's further than Hiwa thought she would get once she realized that she had a problem on her hands; the Kusa nin are all sprinters and she's a marathon runner.
Two hours out of Yomitan it became clear that they would keep pushing the pace beyond what Hiwa could ever hope to maintain. She's been pushing herself to their speed to stay ahead and it's wearing on her, faster than she'd like to admit. She might make it to the border, at this rate. Maybe. With some luck and all of the chakra she has in her. But she'll be leaving herself without any fuel to fight if they do end up chasing her down, and it'd be four against one. Even if they were at the end of their resources, too, they'll overwhelm her.
As of right now, she plans to dip south and loop around to the eastern side of Amegakure, bringing her somewhere in the middle of the border between Rain and Fire Country when she's done. She's got another five hours before that point.
She won't make it.
So, she has to slow them down and give herself some space, and hopefully even the odds out a bit. The other group is a solid ten kilometers behind. Hiwa is hoping that once if she takes two down, the others will stop and try to help. Or at the very least, investigate. And even if they don't? Well. She's about to make a mess that should slow them down, regardless.
"... which… further south? To… roger."
Hiwa winces and cuts the chakra to her ears—the migraine pounding against her skull is no joke, at this point. She's a bit surprised her ears aren't bleeding from overuse.
She assumed, initially, that both the groups of Kusa nin had sensors with them. That was until she started getting snippets of their one-sided conversations accompanying the sounds of them carving out their path through the forest, and realized that that wasn't quite the case.
The slower of the two groups has at least once sensor and some other form of a tracker, she's fairly certain of that. The other group has none—they're relying on the back group to relay her position through radio and are following her based on that. And that gave Hiwa an idea.
Hiwa leans to the side, just enough to put the cave behind her into her line of sight. The explosive tag pinned to the top of the cave near its mouth (the last in a line of them) isn't visible to her. And hopefully, it won't be for her target.
Neither will the handful scattered in a twenty-foot radius around the cave, hidden by a few inches of dirt.
The cave digs into the sheer mountain wall that rises behind it, one step in the stairway that makes up the mountain range of northern Rain Country. The entire place has been a mess of trees and rocks—the further west she goes, the more the trees thin and the rocks grow bare and numerous. She's never been to Claw, but she's heard it's almost entirely mountains with sprinkles of forestry here and there.
She takes another breath and preps herself for the discomfort—overuse, she's overused her senses, her nerves feel like they've been rubbed raw by the stimulation, there are stars if she blinks and fuzz in her ears and she feels two seconds from a bloody nose, but she can't stop—and then adds chakra to her ears again. She can hear them getting close enough to start.
She runs her fingers through the seals: ram, snake, tiger.
A clone of herself pops up in front of her.
Her clone is a mess of torn clothes, her wig long gone and her regular brown hair falling all over the place, scrapes and bruises, and fatigue. It's good to know her outside reflects her inside because that about sums up how she feels. The image shifts a bit as Hiwa imagines herself injured, limping, bleeding, even more of a disaster than she already is.
Satisfied, she sends the clone off in about the direction where the footfalls are coming from.
All Hiwa can do now is listen and wait.
Not too far, she doesn't want to send the clone too far—far enough from her position that it has time to disappear, close enough that it'll pull them in the right direction.
This is such a stupid idea.
But if she had something else, she'd use it.
She hears the second they spot the clone—"There, she just—", and "Target spotted, pursuing"—and sprint off after it.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One—
She dispels the clone, some twenty feet north of her position, headed right for the mouth of the cave.
She holds her breath and hopes that her cobbled together genjutsu cover and the foliage will keep her out of sight as the two Kusa nin dart out from the trees.
"Shit," she hears one mutter.
"I know she went this way."
A pause.
Their voices are lowered to just above a whisper, quiet enough that Hiwa can barely hear it around the buzz. She forces herself to add a bit of chakra again—once more, just once more—and closes her eyes, her lungs burning.
"Wait, I—I think I smell her," the first one says. "I don't hear anything, though. And it's dark and it sounds like the cave goes pretty deep. Can't see anything, but I can hear water dripping fairly far off." A pause. "I can smell blood coming from in the cave, and she had some visible injuries. She's probably run in there."
Good.
A couple of steps forward.
From the second one, she hears, "Wait."
The footsteps stop.
"She's been covering her tracks well the whole time. I don't buy that she's only now letting us track her," the second one says. "Yeah, she was limping, so the blood might be real, but she's been smart so far. I doubt she's enough of an idiot to let us find her like that. If she's there, she'll be ready for us." A scoff. "Can't believe you almost just ran in there. Any chunin should be able to spot a trap like that."
Hiwa grins to herself.
Maybe those extra explosive tags won't be wasted.
A sigh. "Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."
"Let me see what the sensors say. Come in, squad three."
There's a short pause.
"Update on the target's location. She still near us?" the second one says. "Yeah? Close. Can you get me anything more exact? Hmm. No, that'll do. When you're closer and can get a better read, give us a heads up. Okay. Thanks, we'll update you."
"Sounds like she must be close to the mouth of the cave if our signatures are still stacked," the first one whispers.
"Probably waiting to ambush us. Keep your eyes up and stay alert for genjutsu. She's an infiltrator—most of them have a decent repertoire of genjutsu. At the very least, she's got something up her sleeve. And she's desperate. Cornered animals always fight the hardest. She might be injured, but she got this far, and she thinks she's going to be able to take us out if she's trying to corner us like this. Stay alert."
A feral sort of satisfaction warms her against the chill of the rain and wind. Her grin widens, so much that she feels her chapped lips lift over her canines.
Indeed, cornered animals fight the hardest. But she doubts they realize they cornered a wolf, not a puppy.
"Yes, sir."
Footsteps, from soft on the dirt to heavy as they hit the rock, echo in her ears.
She slips the messily drawn seal out from her waistband and holds it carefully in her palm to avoid smudging the somewhat fresh ink.
Hiwa cuts the chakra to her ears and the sounds of their footsteps fade from her ears, leaving the buzz. She gets herself onto the balls of her toes, her sore muscles coiled and ready to go.
With a little prayer to whatever shitty ass higher power might exist in this world and an apology to her conscience for the new weight she's about to lay down on it, Hiwa channels chakra into the seal and launches herself out of the tree.
The sound of the further off explosions in the line of seals is like a series of pops, each one growing louder as the line of twelve detonates, each one a half-second after the other. The last third of the seals that go, the extra tags that she scattered near the entrance in case one of the Kusa nin grew cautious and hung back, rock the mountain with a shuddering crack like thunder rumbling to signal an oncoming storm, and the force it gives off slams against her back.
Yet another invention of Jiraiya's—remote detonation explosive tags.
She sacrificed precious minutes for the sake of drawing all twelve. Eight in the cave, four outside, with each tag connected to the matrix seal that she could detonate it from, the timers baked into the matrix's equation. Admittedly, she got it out of Jiraiya by force when Rei stole one of his sealing notebooks during her campaign against his furniture. This is the first time she's ever used them, actually.
And she's glad Rei stole it because they probably just saved her life.
She sprints faster than she has in a long time as the mountainside comes down behind her, the rocks and debris sliding through the forest as a few thousand tons of rock crumble down like a crushed sandcastle.
But using something for the first time always has its complications. And pretty quick, Hiwa's realizes that in this case, when she guesstimated the scale of the explosion based on the tag's internal equations, she underestimated.
That becomes clear to her when one of the trees, knocked over by the flow of debris, slams into her from behind mid-air. It slaps her down like a fly being swatted. She hits the dirt hard and sparks dance before her eyes. Instincts have her up on her feet in less than a second and sprinting again despite the way her ribs scream in protest, the pain vicious enough that Hiwa stumbles her way through the first few steps before getting her feet properly under her.
It's a solid minute of full-tilt sprinting to get away from the last vestiges of the havoc she caused.
Safe, she takes a second to breathe, leaned into a tree for support. Her lungs burn like somebody's stuck it full of needles and she struggles to get a full breath—broken ribs, her mind supplies, badly broken.
The aftermath is reminiscent of a volcano. The rocks cleared a path through the forest, and from where she stands, a solid kilometer and a half away from where the cave used to be, she can see the crumbled remains of the mountain. With how deep the tags went and that she disrupted the foundation of the mountain, the rest seemed to tumble like a house of cards.
And there are two bodies buried in there, so deep that she doubts they'll ever be recovered. Not that she trusts Kusa will bother to try.
Hiwa bows her head and ignores how her stomach turns.
Now she just has to hope she can outrun the other two and avoid any kind of confrontation.
.
.
Hiwa's not in Yomitan.
It's a big village, and Kakashi knows that it would have taken a few hours to canvas it, even with his whole pack out in the streets hunting for her. But he knows before they even get to the gates that she isn't in there when Rei skids to a stop, her eyes boring into Kakashi's.
She yips something to Pakkun.
"She isn't in there," Pakkun says. "Rei thinks she hit a snag and dipped."
Kakashi works his jaw, frustration burning in his chest.
"Think her cover got blown?" Bull asks.
He doesn't think she'd let herself get caught like that, not with stakes this high. But he has no way of knowing what things are like inside the gates—complications can happen even with the best of the best on the job.
"Spread out," Kakashi says. "Find her trail as she was leaving."
.
.
"Looks like she was headed into Rain Country, boss."
Kakashi crouches down and rests his hand on Bisuke's head, laying the other flat in the dirt.
"She went west," Kakashi says. "Avoiding the Fire Country border."
With a short burst of his chakra, he calls back the rest of his pack to him. He's not worried about attracting attention from the Kusa nin crawling all over the place—his chakra isn't exactly high, right now, but he has soldier pills. Besides, he doubts they have anybody on hand that can pose a threat to him. Kusa has never been known for heavy-hitting ninja. They focus more on information gathering and commerce, and when it comes to their frontline force, quantity over quality.
If they want to pick a fight with him they're welcome to; their deaths aren't any skin off his back.
Pakkun lifts one of his back paws to scratch his ear with a contemplative frown. "Why didn't she cut south? That'd be faster. Way more direct route and she'd still end up in Rain to use their border."
Going straight south from Yomitan would have put her right in the middle of the border between Rain Country and Fire Country, once all was said and done. Hiwa knows this—it's obvious. So, he knows she had a reason for not doing it.
"I'm guessing she just wanted out of Grass Country as soon as possible."
"Even the footing, put 'em both in unfamiliar territory," Pakkun says. "Makes sense."
Because from what his pack has found, there are four different trails on Hiwa's heels, and that tells Kakashi everything he needs to know about how fast they have to move. She can't fight off that many, not unless they're genin which Kakashi knows they won't be. That'd be outright idiotic on Kusa's part, to have genin guarding such a valuable asset.
Hiwa isn't incapable in combat—he's seen her fight. He knows she can, otherwise, she would never have been promoted to special jonin, no matter how good she is at infiltration work. But taking on four ninjas at once isn't within her capabilities.
Kakashi clenches his jaw and lets the cold determination that he's familiar with fill his veins. It clears his head like a splash of ice water on his face. "We'll hit southwest. Try and make up time by cutting off some of the travel."
Pakkun tilts his head. "You sure you want to do that? We won't have no trail to follow if we do that. You're hedging your bet that we'll cross paths."
"She's going to have to go south eventually after she makes it into Rain. She's not going to go through Claw; she's going to try and cross through the Rain Country border," Kakashi says. "We'll find her trail."
Carefully, Pakkun says, "That's assuming she's made it long enough to move south. We both know there's a chance she's run into trouble—"
Kakashi stiffens. "Then we'll loop back north and retrace her steps."
Raising Pakkun from a puppy and having him as the second in command of his pack means that Kakashi is familiar with every single mannerism Pakkun has. So, Kakashi knows the pitying look on Pakkun's face when he sees it, the one where Pakkun thinks he's being stubborn but doesn't deem the issue worth pushing.
"Let's get going," Kakashi says. "The others will catch up."
Pakkun sighs but disappears with a poof, never one for long-distance runs like the others are.
Kakashi takes off without a backward glance.
.
.
Hiwa is struggling.
The longer she runs, the worse the ache gets, and at this point, she can't bring herself to enhance her hearing to get a gauge at how far behind her the Kusa nin are. Her regular pace wasn't enough to stay ahead of them and she's lagging a bit from that, going two thirds the speed or so.
Each breath is harder and harder to pull in and she's getting concerned one of her likely three broken ribs punctured a lung, at this point.
But she has a plan; she should stay ahead.
She had nine kilometers on them when she started and bought herself a bit more room with that explosive note stunt. She was right—they stopped for a few minutes to take stock, once they came across it. That stupid stunt will probably be what saves her when all is said and done.
She's going to cut it closer than she would ever want, but, but, she can do it. By the skin of her teeth, she'll do it.
One of her jumps jars her ribs and at the burst of pain, she misses her landing, distracted and late with her chakra application. Her foot slips. With what little coordination she has left, she manages to right herself in the air, so when she lands it's not flat on her face.
She tries to roll with it and the pain is so overwhelming that her vision whites out.
A few seconds pass, she thinks, when she comes back to awareness, laid flat on her back on the forest floor, her pack a few feet away.
The first thing she does is laugh. And fuck does it hurt. But the breathless, grim sound finds a way to leave her mouth anyways, about as mangled as she feels.
Her arm is leaden as she reaches up and brushes the sweat-matted mess that is her hair off her forehead. She stares up at the black sky, barely able to see the stars through the foliage.
She makes herself get back up; she makes herself keep moving.
A few seconds wasted won't be what dooms her, not this time.
.
.
It's adrenaline and pure bullheaded stubbornness that keeps her at the pace she needs to stay ahead.
That, and a soldier pill. One of the Inuzuka ones she still has, designed for a quick, intense burst of chakra rather than the drawn-out release of standard ones.
Hiwa pops it when she's only an hour and a half out from the border and can hear her tail growing closer and closer, having picked up the pace when they made the same realization that she did: she's almost in the clear. Sort of, at least.
She planned for this. She knew they would try and press her right in the last leg.
She also knows that even with the help of the pill, she has no hope of matching their pace if they buckle down. But she's given herself enough space that they won't catch up to her in time to corner her. They shouldn't, at least.
As much as Hiwa would love to have an unshakeable confidence n this, though, the realist in her knows that at best, she's hedging a bet.
Her mental map of the scouting posts tells her that there isn't much guarding this part of the border if she is where she thinks she is. At the very least, the topography around makes it clear that she didn't cut as far east as she meant to, nowhere near as much, and according to the map she saw in Jiraiya's office the concentration of posts has moved further north to only the more northern parts of the border with Rain Country. Most of their forces are concerned with securing the Grass Country border, rather than Rain Country. She's too south to run into scouting post.
It's too late to course-correct because trying to shoot for the border will leave her in Rain longer than she'd like. She has to loop back north regardless to pick up Rei, and she'd rather do that in her home turf where there's a chance that she might run into some Konoha nin.
So, she pushes her pace as fast as she can physically manage with the pain in her chest and the ache in her bones, and she sticks it out.
.
.
Kakashi finds out he's right, as always.
They end up picking her path near the bottom third of Rain and follow it down. He's not sure what to make of the fact that once they do find it, she only has two trails, not four. And she's hurt. He can see in the unsteady, uneven rip of the bark that makes up her footfalls along the branches.
Whatever she did to lose half her entourage cost her.
"They've started gaining on her," Pakkun says. "The gaps between their jumps are growing while hers is shrinking."
Kakashi grits his teeth. "Let's move—double the pace. We're only an hour behind her. We can catch up."
"What do you think she'll do?"
"The second she crosses the border she'll go northeast." Kakashi drops his hand down on top of Rei's head. "She still thinks she has to retrieve this one. We'll meet her midway."
"You got it, boss."
.
.
Hiwa makes it through the border.
She starts to climb north the second she starts hopping through Hashirama trees, not wanting to give the Kusa nin a chance to cut her off.
And she would have kept heading that way if not for the fact that within half an hour of crossing the border into Fire Country, she gets a blip on her chakra radar that Rei is back above the border.
Hiwa stumbles the second she feels it and has to hastily grab at a branch in front of her, pulling painfully at her ribs, and lower herself to the ground. The sound of her heavy breathing echoes in the still night as she waits, unsure if it's a hallucination. But when it doesn't go away she knows it's real and while she can't find any type of rational reason for Rei to be there, Hiwa doesn't think twice before she throws herself back into the trees and alters her path again, now moving northwest instead of northeast.
Even if this gives the Kusa nin a chance to cut her off and corner her, Hiwa is fine with that—regardless of her injury, regardless of however the fuck Rei found herself here, Hiwa has to go to her.
She feels it, as she gets closer. As Rei's signature grows stronger and clearer.
It's the only thing Hiwa can bring herself to focus on.
A stupid thing, one she thinks might have cost her life when, ten minutes after her direction change, a form darts out from the trees and flies towards her. Hiwa almost screams—almost not because she doesn't try, but because the sound that leaves her is weak, more of a wheeze, like air being pushed out of a plastic bag.
Then the scent of artificial strawberry hits her nose and she sees the shock of bright white hair through the darkness.
She stumbles. "K—Kakashi?"
He grabs her by the shoulders, steadying her before she can land on her face. His hands are warm and firm and a wave of disbelieving relief washes over her like the sun after a week of cloudy grey skies.
"What are you—"
"How bad?" he asks, words clipped and tight.
"Where's Rei?"
"Moving towards the ninja who've been trailing you," he says. "How bad?"
"What? No, she can't—she needs help we can't leave her alone—"
"My whole pack is with her, she'll be fine," he snaps. "Stop ignoring my question, Hiwa. How bad?"
"Bad," she manages. "Lungs—punctured, I think. I'm… pretty much out of chakra. I ate through the chakra from my soldier pill like, ten minutes ago. Might be concussed? Got smacked into the ground pretty…" She blinks. "Why are you here?"
In any other situation, the way his stone-cold expression melts into something more akin to stunned annoyance would have been comical. He echoes, "Why am I here."
"It—can't have been that long? Nobody… should know I needed back up…" The rest of the words die in her throat when one of his hands cups her jaw and he wipes the blood from her chin with his thumb, and his other hand shifts from her shoulder to the base of her neck, at her collarbone. "Uh. Kakashi?"
He seems almost as surprised to see her as she is him. His brow is furrowed and she can see the bag under his eye, more pronounced than usual, and the exhaustion that's as clear in him as she's sure it is in her.
Her brain can't quite wrap itself around the idea that he's here, solid, real, in front of her. How could he be here? Why is he here? It's been a handful of days since she left the village and there's no way anybody could have known that she'd run into trouble.
And why is his hand still cupped around her jaw? Why is his hand there in the first place? There's something indescribably tender about the way he does it, like she'll break if he holds her too hard, and despite the situation, she feels her cheeks flush red.
He looks like he's going to say something.
Wait.
Hiwa squints and realizes that he doesn't look like he's going to say something, he is saying something, and forces herself to focus and listen.
"... need to keep going, how many are still following you?"
She blinks. "I—sorry. Just two, I got rid of half of them. Dropped a mountain on them—"
"That's how you did that? You dropped—" He cuts himself off. "We have to move. Can you travel?"
Adrenaline and a soldier pill had kept her going before but with Kakashi here, she finds that her vision is getting blurrier with each second that passes. It was a mistake to stop, the way that taking a break in the last few miles of a marathon is a death sentence, asking for your body's fatigue to catch up with your mind and doom you to stagnation.
Which means that the longer they stand around, the more her answer creeps towards 'no, sweep me off my feet and carry me away'.
But before she can make the mistake of saying something that stupid, his whole body tightens up and his head snaps to the left, dropping his hand from her face to let it hover over his kunai holster. The killing intent that pours out of him is so thick and potent that Hiwa feels her knees shake a bit, beyond what they already were.
She doesn't know what happens. Where it comes from, who's doing it, what's even happening.
But out of nowhere, pain like nothing she's ever felt in her entire life engulfs her left leg. This time she does scream, and it's high-pitched and sounds almost like a child's.
She's surprised that she doesn't just pass out on the spot.
She falls to her right knee and the position makes it even worse, any movement of her left leg makes it worse, and she finally catches sight of what's done it. One hand presses into the dirt while the other wraps around her left knee, eyes wide.
The whole of her left foot is encased in a stone shoe. A chunk of earth shaped like a rectangle, crushing the life out of her foot. Not dirt, but cold, hardened stone.
Most of her thoughts are consumed by the shock and overwhelming pain.
However, the slightly delirious part of her mind that has the capacity for it wonders, Is this karma?
The irony of having her foot boxed in and crushed by stone only a few hours after she dropped a mountain on two people isn't lost on her.
Her stomach rolls, a wave of nausea ripping through her, but she manages to hold it in. Not like she even has anything to vomit—she's had a single ration bar to sustain her since she left, and she burned those calories a long time ago.
Hiwa blinks away the stars. A ragged, harsh breath tears itself out of her. Not a sob but close to one. And as the initial shock of the pain in her foot starts to recede, she becomes aware of how much worse the pain in her chest is, like she'd been punched in the gut, too.
She has no idea what's going on behind her—she doesn't have the wherewithal.
But she trusts Kakashi to have it handled.
Not like she could do anything to be helpful in a fight, at this point.
So she puts the whole thing out of her mind and focuses on keeping her breathing and her leg steady, eyes shut tight.
She thinks of that time when she was little, maybe five, and she cut herself on one of her dad's kunai, trying to experiment with them. This was when she mostly was an actual little kid—her past life's memories and her older consciousness were mostly dormant, still. But the memory is crystal clear.
Holding the too-heavy kunai. The leather supple but too slippery in uncalloused hands. How it slid right out of her fingers, even as she held it with both hands, and sliced a massive gash into her left foot. She stared at it down in shock before she started screaming her head off. Her dad came in with all the rush of a ninja, weapon drawn and ready for a fight, when he realized what happened.
He swept her up and ferried her over to the bathroom, where he kept his first-aid kit because he, like most ninja, avoided going to the hospital when at all possible.
He'd held her foot in his hand and smiled at her. "This is going to hurt, okay?" he'd said. "But you're a strong girl. I know you can do it."
"I don't want to," she'd answered. "I'm scared."
And he told her, "That's okay. Being scared is okay. But I have to do it. Just look at me, alright? Eyes on me."
He took her foot and put in the four stitches himself, and anytime she started to squirm and cry, he would have her look at him, he'd smile, and he'd tell her it was okay. And when it was all done, he held her against his chest and soothed away the last of her tears.
She still has the scar, a clean line along the top of her foot. She's never been able to face her fears her quite as easily without him around to coach her through it, though.
A hand touches her shoulder and Hiwa jerks back, startled, already in panic mode. The movement sends a fresh wave of pain up her leg and her eyes fly open, a choked sound leaving her.
In the back of her mind, with what vague awareness she has beyond the immediate pain, she realizes that Rei's chakra signature, as close as it had gotten to her, is now heading away from them.
The hand doesn't move.
Once the initial shock clears, Hiwa realizes it's Kakashi, crouched in front of her. "With me?" he asks.
Hiwa nods once, slight and shaky.
"I need verbal confirmation."
Her hand clenches in the dirt, and the wet feel of soil under her nails helps to ground her. "I'm—I can hear you," she says, panting. "I'm cognizant."
Because that's what he's looking for. Whether or not she's lost in the haze of pain and fatigue, unable to comprehend anything that's going on around her.
But she's coming back. She's starting to see the world straight, not tilted. Enough that she understands what's happening when he pushes his fingers through a couple of seals, his gaze set on her foot.
She braces herself for pain, unsure of what he's about to try and do but trusting that it'll be something to help her.
The stone turns to dust around her foot and the sudden lack of pain is as startling as an increase would have been, and Hiwa gasps. The stab like a thousand tiny teeth gnawing at her foot subsides into more of a dull ache. All the tightness evaporating from her body, and her arm that had been supporting most of her weight goes boneless.
Kakashi keeps her upright, darting forward in time for her shoulder to land on his chest and his arm to wrap around her back. She lets herself lean into his chest, breathing heavily, once again a hair's breadth from passing out. It's tempting. It would be easy to let herself fall, but she isn't ready to, not yet, so she pinches her eyes closed and her hand curls into a weak fist, fighting to keep her wits about her.
He eases her back so she's sitting on her rear, her bad foot in front of her.
She appreciates that he doesn't tell her not to look at the mangled mess that is her left foot, but she can only manage a glance before she has to force herself to look up at the sky, tears stinging in her eyes for the first time since this mess started.
"That's bad," she chokes out over a laugh. "Wow. That's bad."
In a voice that could only belong to somebody used to being a commanding officer, Kakashi says, "Listen."
She forces herself to stare at him.
His eyes—both are open, and there's the Sharingan she's always heard was under there but never seen—flick over her face. She doesn't know what he's looking for.
His face draws shut like blinds being pulled over a window. "I need to set this."
"I know."
So without preamble, he pulls the first-aid kit out of his pack and hands her a bundle of bandages to squeeze.
"Rei?" she asks.
"She took care of one of the Kusa nin, one that was going to try and flank us while the other attacked. Kusa nin is dead, Rei's fine. I sent her back to the village with a note to warn them—she's faster than any of my ninken, and they're going to have to have a hospital room ready for you."
Hiwa nods, unable to do more than that right now.
She would have liked to see Rei, just to feel her, see her, but Hiwa can't argue with the logic.
Two more dead.
The uncomfortable hollowness reminds her of her time on the frontlines during the war.
It falls into the rest of the tidal pool swirling around inside of her right now, though, lost amongst so much else, and she can't bring herself to try and fish it out.
Kakashi disappears for a few minutes to find a handful of sturdy branches to hold the bones in place.
Hiwa swallows bile.
Nobody has to tell her that this is going to hurt. Having her foot crushed like a car in a compactor hurt, but having to now set it without any type of pain medication is going to be an entire other level. She's watched it happen to other people. Hell, she did it to somebody else, once, way back when. She knows exactly what she's getting into on this one and she's not looking forward to it.
From out of his bag, Kakashi pulls out a shirt and rips a chunk out of it that he hands to her, and Hiwa bites down on it.
He doesn't count down from three or anything like that. He just double checks that she's got the roll of bandages in her fist and the cloth clenched beneath her teeth and he snaps the alignment of her ankle back into place.
Hiwa does blackout for a bit, on this one. She thinks she might have screamed, but she has no idea, and she doesn't feel it when Kakashi straightens out the rest of her foot.
When she comes back to herself, her upper body is twisted so that her forehead is pressed against Kakashi's chest, her bad foot still stretched out in front of her. The chunk of cloth that was in her mouth is thrown to the side. She can see blood spotted all over the cloth, probably from her lungs, once again.
The position isn't comfortable. She can't bring herself to move from it, though. The feel of her forehead pressed against something solid is too comforting.
A short, broken sob leaves her mouth, and she can feel Kakashi go as stiff as a board. She tries to stop the tears because she's already tired and she knows that he is, too, and if he's not equipped to handle this from her when he's well-rested she highly doubts he can do it now when he looks like he's been through the wringer. But once they start there's no stopping them, even though they feel like hot water on a burn with her ribs.
After a minute of this, Kakashi places a careful hand on her back and rubs it up and down.
"Sorry," Hiwa manages between crying and gasping for breath. She's not sure the words are even discernable. "Sorry, I'm—I'm sorry."
His other hand comes up to sit on the back of her head. He's solid when nothing else is, right now. "Breathe," he says, voice monotone. "With the state of your ribs, you're going to pass out if you lose your breath."
She tries.
But if anything it gets worse when she starts trying to slow down, and she ends up with hiccuping sobs that jar her ribs, the pain of which only seems to make her sob harder.
She's taken a flying leap well over the line of exhaustion and she's paying for it. Pots boil over, cups overflow, and turning off the tap doesn't get rid of the excess water—you have to pour it out.
With stiff movements, Kakashi picks up one of her hands and presses it against his chest. She feels the way his chest rises and falls with each deep breath he takes. And she doesn't think about it, but slowly, breath by breath, she feels the way her breathing relaxes to match his pace, and the sobs begin to slow down into more calm tears.
He lets go of her hand once she's gotten herself under control.
Hiwa keeps it there, though, pressed against him, and he doesn't push her off him or move away. He just lets her stay.
And in turn, she lets herself a minute of selfishness.
She remembers hearing that he'd been the one to carry her the whole way back from the resort, him tying the handkerchief around her finger, and then the way he touched her face, and she can't help but read the signals. Kakashi hanging around her, more. The takeout.
Then this. Letting her into his space, pulling her into it, even.
If Kakashi didn't want her to touch him, she wouldn't be touching him. It's as simple as that.
All of that emboldens her to give this a shot, to let herself have this because if she doesn't try now, she doesn't know when she'll have the chance to again. When she'll have the lack of inhibitions to let her do it without overthinking it, stepping back and questioning, weighing out the pros and cons of the situation.
"How'd you know to do that?" she asks. "It… helped. A lot."
She fully expects him to ignore the question, but after a minute of uncomfortable silence Kakashi says, "Minato."
"With you?"
"Teammate."
Like an idiot, she laughs. The movement stabs at her ribs like a knife and she sucks in an equally sharp breath at the burst of pain. Kakashi's grip on her tightens a fraction at the sound.
"Sounds like him," she says. "He seemed—seemed like the type to be good with kids. And that sort of stuff."
Kakashi doesn't miss a beat when he says, "I need to wrap your ribs."
The dodge is painfully obvious. She has no desire to call him on it, though.
"I know," she mumbles.
But she doesn't move and again, he doesn't make her, nor does he try to start wrapping her ribs.
So, she takes another swing at this. "I feel safe, around you."
Kakashi goes rigid. "You shouldn't."
"Do, though." She can feel herself starting to slip with the worst of things is over. The worst of the pain is passing, the worst of the danger is gone. Her body's not in fight or flight mode. "Have every mission we've been on. Specially since the last one, at the resort. Last few weeks. Now."
He pulls away, now, and stares down at her. His headband is back down covering his Sharingan, but the look in his normal eye is intense enough to count for both.
"You shouldn't—" Kakashi cuts himself off, and from the outline of his mouth under the mask, she can tell that he's scowling. "Why?"
She gives him a dopey smile. "You won't let stuff happen to me. And, you get it. All of it. The kinda hurt. With the 10th, and all that. Losing people. Just makes me feel good to be around you when you aren't tryna get on my nerves."
She waits for him to look at her like she's grown a second head or brush off the conversation or pull away. But he puts his hand on her face, again, like he did to wipe off the blood earlier, but this time there's no blood to wipe away. Just the feel of his gloved hand, warm and light, pressed against her skin, and his eye locked on her like she's a puzzle he's trying to solve.
It feels nice.
Too nice, actually, because her eyes start to get heavier. Her whole body is warm and tingly, especially where he's touching her, and she knows she's at the end of the line.
That she lasted this long is a feat in and of itself.
Because it feels polite to warn him, Hiwa says, "I'm gonna pass out."
She catches the look of panic on his face before she lets her eyes closed and falls forward. The last thing she feels is his arm around her, again, keeping her from falling into the dirt, before she's out cold.
A/N: I edited and shifted this chapter around like four times and the words contained in it no longer make sense to me. Fingers crossed that it's sensical to all of y'all reading it.