Sexy times turned to banter, banter to jokes, jokes to something else, and somehow they ended up dreaming together. "At least one," Kakashi said. "I have nothing against the shinobi life. It was good for me - it challenged my mind and body, and fostered discipline and loyalty. I definitely want at least one pup to pass that life on to."

"A human pup, or a wolf?" Orochimaru asked.

"Hmm…" Kakashi looked at his pants, wondering whether to put them on. He currently wore nothing on his lower half at Orochimaru's insistence. He would rather have stayed as clothed as possible. He pulled his underwear on. That would do for now. "A wolf. I'll be the first to admit that I am biased by my father's example and my history training nin-dogs. I won't allow any pup of mine to be disconnected from their wolf half the way my father was. And I am not entirely in favor of shinobi ways. I think it would do good to be a nontraditional shinobi."

Now that he had brought up this consideration, he hesitated. Did he really wish the life he had led on anyone else? But it was the only life he knew. As with all lives, it had upsides and downsides. He managed to feel a general sense of peace with who he was, episodes of neurotic depression notwithstanding. But was it right to choose that for someone else?

"That is what I currently fantasize about," he concluded. "Reality will almost assuredly be different. Don't hold me to anything I say now."

Orochimaru hissed. "Reality. That damned slippery thing."

"You would know," Kakashi pointed out. "You have experienced more of it than I have. How did your hatchlings turn out? Aside from being capable assistants with permission to scold your subordinates."

"Few became capable assistants," Orochimaru admitted. "Most were ordinary snakes. Many were humanlike, but not suited for shinobi. It was not as neat for me as it is in your family; most of them were disabled to some degree by their mix of different species. How does your family have such stability in your offspring?"

"I don't know." Why haven't I thought about that before? Kakashi pulled on his shirt as he thought. "Selection, perhaps? We've been the way we are for longer than we have records. Disability would have been bred out by now."

Orochimaru sat very still. He slowly asked, "Did you just state that your clan has no founding stories?"

"We have stories. Just not records."

"Every clan has records of their founding. Where they came from, who they are descended from. Every group of people that can call themselves a clan has that."

"Then maybe we can't call ourselves a clan." Kakashi shrugged. "It's not completely accurate to state that we are common descendants of anybody. We have myths of ancient people that bred with animals and became us, and today, we consider ourselves a clan mainly because of shared challenges with human society. We share those myths and experiences. That is what makes us family."

"So your family is not a political unit as other clans are?"

Kakashi shook his head. "With members in different villages, how could we be?"

Orochimaru lay down on the bed. "Names with no meaning. Families with no politics. What an interesting way of life you have here, Puppy."

"Do you want to join?" Kakashi meant that jokingly, but as soon as he said it he realized the question might really be serious. Might Orochimaru want a name that did not label him as a snake and a family that could share his experiences? Might he be lonely?

The Snake Sannin exhaled slowly. "I might already have. I share no blood with that boy. But he is a serpent, just like I am. You said once that there was a bond that needed acknowledging, and I must admit that you were right."

Kakashi returned to his pants, and immediately felt relief. He sprawled on his back next to Orochimaru. "What kinds of myths do serpents have?"

"Our mother," Orochimaru answered immediately. "If she is some kind of goddess, as the angels asserted, then we have all of her myths. A special purpose, to spread healing and life around the world."

"That's a nice myth."

"How do you think it happens?"

Kakashi sat straight up. "Damn! My clone must have returned by now. If you can spread healing and life, you won't find out by sitting here under rock and stone."

They got up, raced into whatever clothes they still lacked, and hurried in the direction of outside. They tried to, anyway. Kakashi skidded to a halt. "Wait." Without explanation, he turned down the corridor their little brother was supposed to be sleeping in. That isn't sleep. What is it?

Orochimaru passed him once it became clear where he was going. The snake reached for the door, looking ready for battle. "Stop," Kakashi called. Orochimaru stopped. His hand tightened on the handle, ready to push open the inward-swinging door. "Don't open the door." What the hell happened? Is he hurt?"I'll do it." Crap! I should have left a clone on watch! If he's hurt, it's all my fault. Why the hell did I…

He pressed a hand against the hinges of the door, releasing darkness into the room beyond. From outside the door he picked up the younger snake and lifted him back onto the bed. Only then did Kakashi open the door.

"Fuck," Orochimaru spit. The sheets were a tangled mess, wrapped around each other and thoroughly ensnaring the person who had left that hollow space in them. The twisted tendrils of fabric pointed off the bed, in the direction of the door, then suddenly backward toward the bed. No demon senses were needed to figure out what had happened.

Kakashi let the snake rush to his brother's side. He needed a moment. He had a longstanding tradition of pausing at the scene of a tragedy, once the emergency was over, and pondering what role he had played. That tradition could not be easily stopped.

Orochimaru checked the boy's hands. "He has splinters, and his face is bruising. He must have run into the door." He turned to face Kakashi. "How did this happen?"

Kakashi unveiled his demon eyes to check on the young snake's soul. I was in charge of looking after him, and I let him down. I failed to see that he was healed enough for something like this to happen. That was my one job. Rather than say that immediately, he examined the boy, allowing them both some moments of quiet.

"His soul looks clumpy," he reported. "It's not smooth and continuous. Communication between parts of him isn't easy. He could be unable to feel pain, or unable to use that feeling to decide to stop."

"But he is healed enough to move."

"Apparently."

Now comes the part where he tells me, very rightly, how I made a mistake. Kakashi stood still next to the door and waited for the inevitable. Once again, he had failed to use his demon abilities as they ought to be used. A completely ordinary child could have foreseen that the young snake would pass through this dangerous stage. He should have thought ahead. I have always been so impulsive, reacting instead of acting. Reacting to my father's death, to Obito's, to Rin's, to Sasuke's betrayal. Orochimaru has learned to plan for the future. I have learned nothing.

Everything he knew about Orochimaru, from the snake's harsh and purposeful patience to that one comment he had made about respecting subordinates who took the initiative to run wild as soon as he was not around to supervise, clearly indicated that no fool would be suffered gladly under one of these rocky roofs. That was why it made no sense whatsoever when Orochimaru picked up the boy and said, "We should put some salve on these hands to prevent infection."

Kakashi's body obediently moved out of the way of the door while his brain caught up with reality. Ah, I see. He must be putting it off until after all danger is passed. Ten minutes later, as all danger passed and Orochimaru finished applying bandages to the scratches left by the splinters, Kakashi continued to expect a reprimand.

Instead, Orochimaru stood over the younger snake, whose eyes were shifting back and forth as he moved his hand. The boy was going to wake again, and soon. Orochimaru stood over the pallet in the medical area of the base and silently watched him. The Snake Sannin's soul swirled in a curiously steady way. A holding pattern. There was no way to tell what he was thinking.

At last, he spoke. "This may be another part of it."

"Of what?" Kakashi asked.

"My dream is one of having responsibility for living things." Orochimaru tilted his head. "Yet I hand this lost soul who came to me, and me alone, over to you every chance I get. That does not seem right."

Kakashi crept closer. His tail was tucked nervously, and he didn't know why. "What are you saying?"

"That it is my fault he was not looked after. Even a demon like you must need reminders. You did well by checking on him even though we had different plans. But you cannot and should not carry all the responsibility for his welfare."

Aha! He said I couldn't! The part of Kakashi that demanded nothing less than an accurate (meaning negative) evaluation of himself was appeased. He was able to shake off his concerns and focus. "Hmm. If the feeling of responsibility is an important part of your dreams, then you won't find a greater responsibility anywhere else. You could be right."

Orochimaru glanced at him. Suspicion. What have I done that is suspicious? Orochimaru did not say. "It would serve me well to try something new, even if it is not essential."

"New?" Kakashi stared at him with his blankest, most innocent look.

Orochimaru smirked. "I will not pretend that my life hasn't been one of taking advantage of and using those less powerful than myself. Honestly serving a weaker person's best interests because they need me to seems patently ridiculous. But it is something I have never tried before…"

"What about your hatchlings?"

"Serpents are very independent, Puppy. Aside from being near me, they had very few needs for me to attend to."

Kakashi stepped up beside him. "If you ever need a break, I am still available."

"Of course you are."

What does that mean? "Sorry?"

"Don't you have any ambitions of your own?" Orochimaru asked. "Any goals you had that could not be met in the village? Any things you've always wanted to try? Sights you always wanted to look at? For God's sakes, you are not a tool anymore, Puppy."

Kakashi stared at him. "My ambition is to see you happy."

Orochimaru scowled. "You have nothing that is for you and you alone?"

Kakashi shifted. "I...don't want to be lonely. I want to form bonds with people like me and keep them strong."

Orochimaru turned away. "You are not selfish enough for your own good."

He wants me to be selfish now? Hmm… What would that look like? "I selfishly asked you to stay belowground for too long just because I wanted to meet angels," Kakashi reminded him.

Orochimaru acknowledged that with a tilt of his head. "True. But I sense that was a one time occurrence. It shouldn't be."

"You want me to drag you along to do things for me?" Kakashi asked. Was that really what Orochimaru was asking? That would be crazy. He had to be sure.

Orochimaru paused. "Not exactly." He stayed silent for several minutes. Not even he knows what he wants, just like before. Will this lead to another fight? Finally I am predicting something! I must take action this time instead of waiting for something to react to. What action can I take…?

He got an idea. No, that is not a good idea. None of my students would be happy to see me, and it hasn't been that long. I'm sure they're handling themselves just fine. What could they need protection from? Demons?

"I have an idea," Kakashi announced. "How would you like it if I went away for several days? You could gather your thoughts and begin planting, and I could…have an adventure." Sneak back into Konoha to protect my students from demons.

Orochimaru grinned. "Finally! Yes, that is the sort of idea you should have, Puppy."

Kakashi wagged his tail. "Let's find my clone first. I'll set off first thing tomorrow morning."

.

Their spirits were dampened somewhat by watching a look of horror descend upon the clone's face. "Oh no," the clone whispered.

Kakashi held up a hand. He is one of my clones, so it may be nothing. "What happened?"

"I tucked the blankets over his feet," the clone replied.

Orochimaru facepalmed. For once, Kakashi could understand that reaction. But, once the clone explained why that was a bad thing, he would likely be able to understand. "What did that change?"

The clone explained how the boy had gotten up and walked into the wall in his presence. "He walked easily because the blankets fell off him," the clone explained. "I shouldn't have tucked them around his feet. I should have known that he might try to get up again."

"No harm done," Kakashi said, raising his arms in a reassuring gesture. "He didn't have any fall damage. All injuries were from pressing himself into the door. If he hadn't been tangled in the sheets, something worse could have happened, like him opening the door and wandering away."

The clone relaxed. "Ah, well… I got these." He held out some packets of seeds. "I didn't want to interrupt earlier."

Kakashi blushed. "Thank you." He gestured for the clone to come back. It did so, and he blushed further. The clone had had good sense.

He handed the seeds off to Orochimaru. "Go ahead and prepare to plant them. I'll take this -" He picked up a bag of celebratory prey that the clone had hunted "- and stay with our little brother. I don't want to strap him to the floor any more than necessary. It's inhumane."

Orochimaru tilted his head. "Why? Your dark straps aren't even uncomfortable."

Kakashi shot him a look. "Strapping people down is humiliating." Orochimaru still didn't seem to understand. "It is what you do to test subjects. Weren't you just talking about treating him differently from your test subjects?"

Finally, that seemed to make sense to the snake. "I see. What should I do when he needs to be restrained, then?"

"You have clone jutsus. Watch over him the old-fashioned way, like parents watch their toddlers."

Orochimaru hissed softly. "That sounds very annoying."

Kakashi grinned. "Mah, you'll be fine." His tail wagged Amusement.

"Do you think my discomfort is funny?"

Kakashi's tail wagged even harder. "Maybe."

Orochimaru smiled. "Puppy."

"Yes?"

"Bring out this side of you more often. I want to see more of it."

Huh? Is this a distinct side of me? Kakashi had always figured that this was just how he was when he wasn't worrying or overthinking. How could he stop worrying or overthinking? He couldn't just command himself. But if this is a distinct side of me, and not dependent on how I feel… I could try.

He saluted. He did not know why; something about the action seemed appropriate to this personality Orochimaru had asked him to wear. The snake chuckled. Kakashi chuckled back. Perhaps he could act like this more often.

He left to unstrap the young snake.

.

The celebratory dinner was eaten under the cliff, among the scattered rocks, just like that dinner months before. This one was already a vast improvement. From the start, there was not a hint of awkwardness. Orochimaru busied himself with propping the younger snake up. Then he asked Kakashi to stick his hand in the fire again just for fun. After everything was cooked, they ate in peaceful silence. And then he got the idea to try feeding the boy a normal dinner.

Orochimaru held up a defurred mouse, swinging it in front of the boy's nose. The boy's eyes were wider than usual and moved about as if looking at things. He had made a noise when Kakashi's arm flared up. This continued while Orochimaru swung the mouse. "He might not be able to use multiple senses at the same time yet," Orochimaru murmured while putting his other hand over the boy's eyes. Shortly after he did that, the boy made sniffing noises. They stopped. Then, smacking his face into Orochimaru's hand hard enough to make Kakashi jump, he lunged forward and bit into the mouse and tossed it back and swallowed it all in one motion.

"Very intriguing." Kakashi knew from tone of voice alone that his companion's eyes must be sparkling. "What could this reveal about how the mind works?"

Kakashi suggested a few things based on his own observations. Orochimaru turned away from the boy, who was now doing nothing of interest, and they had a detailed discussion of what might be possible and what wasn't. Orochimaru, unlike most people, genuinely enjoyed having his established ideas of how things worked broken. Kakashi was surprised to find out how nonintuitive his own suggestions were. For example, Orochimaru had thought that walking was a relatively simple process, like smelling. He knew it had many parts and people might be kept from walking by many means, but he'd thought all of those parts generally worked the same way: towards moving the leg. Kakashi's discovery that walking required multiple processes (moving the leg, deciding where to move the leg, sensing the position of the leg, etc.) was a surprise. "I had no idea walking was so complex," Orochimaru said with glittering eyes. "How do children master all these different things and sum them together at such young ages?"

"It may be built into the human body as an instinct."

"You think that human beings have instincts towards the things that make us most human?"

Kakashi blinked. "Of course. Didn't someone say that there is a language instinct? Of course humans have human instincts. What other kind of instincts would we have?"

Orochimaru narrowed his eyes. "Instinct is what animals rely on. We are learning creatures, Puppy, not helplessly driven by instinct like beasts are. And I have never heard of such a thing as a language instinct."

"Language is too complicated," Kakashi argued. "Like birdsong. You think birds don't have song instincts? How could anyone learn something so complicated so fast if they weren't built to do it?"

"Same way they learn anything else."

Kakashi shook his head. "Too complicated. When children learn their first words, why do they use them in ways that can substitute for a whole sentence? How do they know how words are used to make meaning? Understanding the underlying nature of a craft is usually a sign of mastery, yet they're only just learning."

Orochimaru paused. "Hmm. That is something I have never thought of before. Where did you say you heard this?"

Kakashi paused. "Um… There was a man. He studied the mind. He...came to this conclusion…" Where? When? I have a feeling like decades ago. But...I don't exactly remember…

"Where? When?" Orochimaru pressed. "I need to know where this line of study came from."

"Ah… It's just…" Kakashi shook his head as if getting rid of flies. "It doesn't feel quite right."

Orochimaru hissed. He was starting to get rather annoyed. "What about it is not right?"

"The way it fits with everything else I know," Kakashi answered. The problem immediately became obvious. "Just like the starry sky that can't possibly be a real sky. It is the same."

Orochimaru lost some of his annoyance. "And the cities that honk like geese?"

"I told you, they're not geese."

"What else honks?"

"People, when they get mad at others for not moving fast enough."

Orochimaru looked at him strangely. "Why would people complain that others weren't moving fast enough? In the streets?"

"Because...speed is very important…" Go on. I must go on. Trying to elaborate on this mysterious knowledge will help me locate other pieces of mysterious knowledge, and if I recognize enough of them I might be able to locate where they came from. "Efficiency...work…" Kakashi wracked his brain trying to come up with anything related to this. "Time is money."

"What?" Orochimaru snorted in amusement. "Time is money? What kind of foolish idea is that?"

Kakashi tried to think of why this idea existed, but came up with nothing. "I don't know."

"Time is power," Orochimaru declared. "That is what it truly is. How could time be anything as basic as money? That's nearly insulting."

"It's gone." Kakashi shook his head. "Looks like I'll be locating these pieces of strange knowledge in bursts, like finding deposits of ore."

"I look forward to the next one," Orochimaru said, raising a bird in a toast. "They're very entertaining. People who honk like geese…" He swallowed the bird.

Kakashi wrapped his arms around his knees and looked into the fire. He wasn't sure what to think of these bits of strange knowledge. Were they merely entertaining? Were they a sign of something very bad? Something very good? Were they mistaken, erroneous, mutated? Or were they in some way correct? Could something unnatural have caused them, like whatever had stolen his name? Should I be worried, or not?

Orochimaru checked over the boy again. He chuckled softly at some joke only he knew. He likes it when I do not. He has asked me to act the way I act when I do not worry. So I should not.

Kakashi put that personality back on. He wasn't quite sure what he was even doing, but it seemed to happen naturally. "Maybe there'll be something crazy in there," he said. "Like swimming pools of glass, or books that are secretly monsters." He couldn't help but notice that his pitch was slightly higher and the rhythm of his voice, not to mention the words themselves, sounded childish.

Orochimaru looked at him strangely. His gaze was methodical, as if he was studying a test subject. A test subject he wasn't too sure he wanted to approach. "What is it?" Kakashi asked, suddenly very worried.

"You sound...not quite right." Orochimaru continued to study him from a distance. "It doesn't fit with the rest of you."

"I'm just trying to do what you said," Kakashi raced to say. "You asked me to act fun and unworried more often."

Orochimaru lost that clinical look, but continued to think in silence. Only several minutes after he said it did Kakashi realize what the snake had been implying. That's the exact phrasing I used to talk about my strange knowledge. Does he think this way of acting is related? It can't be. It's so natural. I just happen to have a fun part of my personality. There's nothing unusual about that. In fact, most of my personality doesn't fit with the rest of my personality. I couldn't remember what I had been thinking just a few hours after that anxious breakdown. I'm naturally disjointed.

"Perhaps." Orochimaru turned to look at the fire. He poked at it, sending sparks flying into the air. "Perhaps it is nothing more than your usual oddness."

But neither of them really believed that.

.

A/N: The theory of language presented here is based on Noam Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar. I heard about his idea in the past, but only vaguely. Upon a much closer reading of the Wikipedia article for Universal Grammar, it seems I may have misunderstood. His theory was more along the lines of every human being born with certain grammatical rules encoded into our brains (for example, the difference between nouns and verbs), and that's why every language has these features. Learning language, then, is just a matter of mapping specific words and cultural rules onto the knowledge that kids already have.

I thought it was something a little different. At the time I wrote this chapter, I thought it was a way of thinking that all people have, that all human beings naturally understand the importance of language and the way that language is designed. I mean, why are children's first words always the words that have the most meaning? Why not meaningless words that they probably hear more often? An animal of another species that had no idea about human language would probably repeat what it heard most often, and that would be words like "at." People don't do that. We know where the meaning is. So I figured that sure, it makes sense that people are born with an innate understanding of what language is. Makes sense to me! That immediate latching on to the parts that made sense to me is probably why I misinterpreted exactly what his theory was.

Btw, I read a book on mood disorders in the past month. It's looking more and more possible that I might have one. I don't know if it's normal to rapidly shift from extremely distressed to bright and hopeful inside of ten minutes (ONLY in that direction, never any other), but I can't help but think it's probably not. And then there's the more general variability, the way I never know how I will be feeling and what I'll be capable of doing even a few hours from now. In case anyone was identifying way too strongly with Kakashi in this story, uh, get checked out. I should.