Title: Seeking Rin
Chapter: 15 - Chant
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 4432
Summary: When Sakura, newly in a relationship with Kakashi, finds out about Rin, she makes a choice that's hard on them both. Even worse, there's a mysterious illness cropping up in Konoha that even Tsunade can't heal. And what does Ino have to do with it? Kakashi x Rin, KakaSaku.
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it. Part 15 of ? Unbeta'd.


This is Rin.

Kakashi looks and looks and sees Ino-not Rin. The tiny, dead Rin, who hadn't even been real looks more like Rin than Ino does. It's not just colouring, it's the shape of the face, the width of the shoulders, the way her eyebrows curve.

But it's Rin's voice that says, It's me, Kakashi.

And Ino has never heard Rin's voice, unless she's stolen it right out of his mind, but Ino doesn't look well enough to open her eyes, let alone do that.

Naruto waits for him to respond, as patiently as Ino-not-Rin does.

Kakashi has been kidnapped, experimented on, and led around like a rabbit in a maze. He is currently wearing nothing but a mask, his hitae-ite, and a hospital gown that is uncomfortably drafty because there's never been a hospital gown in existence that wasn't drafty.

He is tired and lost and confused.

The rage murmurs behind the walls it's been pressed back with and Kakashi throttles it down. He doesn't want it taking him over, even though he doesn't understand what the rage is even for.

That leaves him only one response.

He bursts out laughing. It's horrible, ragged laughter that's just to the side of tears, though he refuses to cry.

Kakashi stands there and laughs.

Naruto twists around, still holding Ino's hand, and perches on the side of her bed. He does so carefully, so as not to disturb the many, many machines and wires she's hooked up to. It's his blue-eyed gaze, unsettlingly calm, unusually gentle, that eventually kills Kakashi's laughter. Ino (and Rin) don't react at all.

"It's true, Kakashi-sensei," Naruto says, as Kakashi stops laughing. "I know it's hard to believe. Especially with your memories messed up."

How many of his memories are still missing? How can it be true? Kakashi wonders. That and the words 'I don't believe you' hover on his lips.

They die before he can say them when Ino opens her eyes.

He has never liked Ino. As a child she had been everything he'd disliked about children-silly, air-headed, full of gossip and laughter and pointless arguments.

As a woman, he'd learned that most of what he'd hated about her as a child had been, if not a lie, had become one. Ino was neither silly nor air-headed and most of her pointless arguments she orchestrated for reasons he could not understand.

In hating her, though, he'd seen her eyes in almost every emotion. Filled with cheer, when she talked to Sakura or sultry when she flirted with the desk Chuunin, dark with solemnity at funerals and bright at festivals.

Narrow and cold with distaste and livid with rage-he's had that directed at himself.

Because of her association to Sakura, he has never been able to ignore her. She has always been relentlessly in his life, a constant irritant that he had to put up with because Sakura loves her. (And that is the one good thing he can find to say about Ino: she loves Sakura just as deeply as Sakura loves her.)

But through it all, her eyes had been a flawless blue-clear as a summer's sky and as disconcerting as a hurricane due to her lack of pupils.

He knows her eyes.

The eyes that look at him out of Ino's face aren't her own.

They are Rin's.

(Because he knows Ino's eyes but he knows Rin's better.)

She doesn't speak, but she doesn't need to. There's affection in the gaze and warmth-neither that have ever been in Ino's eyes, not when she's looked at him. (And truthfully, had she looked at him that way, Kakashi would have been deeply uncomfortable.)

It's Rin's expression in Ino's face.

It could be a trap! his mind babbles, trying desperately to warn him, to keep him from believing, to stop him from doing anything stupid. It has to be a trap! She got the information out of your head!

Kakashi, Rin says, it is so good to see you again.

"You can't be real," Kakashi says, knowing even as he speaks that it means part of him believes this is real.

If he didn't partly believe, he wouldn't have to insist it wasn't true. Kakashi hates himself a little for that.

I am real, Rin says softly. You're not imagining things or hallucinating.

"You're dead."

Naruto makes a sound, like a protest, but when Kakashi looks at him, Naruto looks away and says nothing, his jaw set stubbornly.

I am, Rin says agreeably, and I'm not. Not everything is black and white.

"I know that," Kakashi says. "But, you-Rin, I saw you die."

He'd stood by her bedside, holding her hand, as chakra poisoning had killed her by inches. Kakashi would never forget the days and nights he'd spent standing there, trying to comfort her when he'd desperately needed comfort himself and there had been no one left he'd trusted to give it to him.

I'm still dead. Your memories aren't wrong. Rin is silent for a few moments while Kakashi tries to formulate a response, any response, to that.

He can't. This isn't real, can't be real.

(It is real.)

Ino-chan is channelling me, Rin says eventually. You could say that I'm possessing her, though that is not quite accurate since she invited me in.

"I don't understand why you would want this," Kakashi says. "You're dead. You've been dead for years. Why now?"

Rin looks at him. There is still something I need to do. I made a mistake and it needs to be fixed.

Kakashi swallows, his throat dry. "Rin," he says hoarsely, "what mistake did you make that you'd have to come back from the dead to fix? What was so bad that you couldn't rest?"

He doesn't think, doesn't want, to really believe that this is Rin.

But he's beginning to, which scares him.

If Rin is here, where is Minato-sensei who would surely be furious at how Kakashi has not looked after his son? Where is Obito, who would never be left behind, even if he showed up a bit late?

Where is his father?

Rin doesn't answer him and, after a moment, Kakashi takes a step forward. "Rin," he says, "please."

It's not fair. If this were anyone else, anyone at all, he could keep believing that it was a trap. That this was some cruel joke.

But not Rin.

Which, the part of his mind that's not desperately torn between longing and anxiety, the part of him that is still analytically observing, just means it's more likely that she's not who she says she is. That she's a danger.

But it's Rin.

And the only danger, here and now, that Kakashi can see is to himself. He's always been better at defending other people than he has been at looking out for his own best interests.

He can't even push people away properly, not the way he wants to. Somehow they keep worming their way in under his defenses. No one knows how to stay away from him and even while he wishes they would, he's pleased by their friendship.

"I can help," Kakashi says, in the face of Rin's continued silence. It eats at him. This is a trap, this is a trap, this is a trap-

You already are, Rin says sorrowfully. It's already started, with the rage. It was easier to induce this time around.

Kakashi's eyes narrow slightly despite the way his heart feels lighter at the very idea of helping her. (He's an idiot, he thinks. Or is that being manipulated too?) "This time around?"

The last time went poorly, Rin tells him. My host died and Obito got in the way. After that, Sarutobi-sama refused to try again despite knowing that it would force the next Hokage to fix his mistakes. Ino's head tilts to the side, just slightly, Rin's eyes large in her face. And mine, she adds. I am glad Minato-sensei never had to try. I think it would have broken his heart.

Kakashi feels like he can't breathe. "Your host died?" he asks. There's other questions to ask but that's the first one that springs to his lips when she stops talking. He understands what she's saying but it means… it means… so many things he's thought he'd known are wrong.

The Rin you know, she says, was not the original Rin.

His hands clench—it's a way to keep his voice steady as Rin's voice yanks another stone in his foundation away from him—and swallows hard before he can ask the next question, the obvious one, the one that all three of them (four of them?) knows comes next.

"What do you mean?" he asks. "You were there, Rin. You were part of my team. That's not all a lie."

No, she says. It's not. But it's not the truth either. I was Rin and the girl who had given me her body was also named Rin, which made things simpler. She let me in and we worked together until her body fell apart.

"That's not the truth."

His voice is flat, not pleading, mostly because he can't bring himself to plead. The urge to laugh and laugh and laugh is coming back and he can feel the first creeping tendrils of rage bubble in the back of his mind.

He can recognize the rage as not his own though, which he couldn't do before. It would bother him more but there's so much to be bothered by that it falls to the wayside. "It can't be the truth," he says. "It doesn't even make sense. If you'd taken another girl to be your host, back then, she would have had to be very young. Yamanaka's not that young! She's almost the age you were when you died."

And he realizes, even as he speaks that Ino is dreadfully, dreadfully close to looking like death herself. How sick must she be to look like that? Is she even in there, somewhere, right now?

Rin let me take over, Rin says. She was dying. My possession gave her years more of life and spared her parents the sorrow of burying their only daughter before she was four. They gave Sarutobi-san permission for the procedure.

"No," Kakashi says, shaking his head. "No. I refuse to accept that. Rin, you're sick or I'm sick, or we're both sick and this is all in our minds but—no, Rin, that's not how it was."

Rin's eyes are very gentle and he thinks she's about to answer when alarms go off, the machines that Rin (that Ino) are hooked up to shrilling wildly as Rin's brown eyes dim and go out, leaving Ino's blue clear for him to see before they slide shut as she coughs desperately, hacking and wheezing, her body seizing up.

Naruto, showing more proficiency than Kakashi would ever have guessed helps her sit up and his hands glow with the unmistakable green of medical jutsu. Kakashi can't tell what the jutsu is for but it helps ease Ino's coughing, which is done in her own voice.

He, feeling worn, crosses the room and sits next to the dead Rin left against the wall like an abandoned doll. Vaguely he supposes that he should help… but Naruto seems like he has it well in hand and Kakashi just… just feels numb.

He needs time to think.

He tries to scrounge up the feeling to care more for Ino but can't. He's never liked her. The only reason he even tries is because of Sakura and, now, Rin. Ino is Sakura's best friend and she's something to Rin, even if he doesn't follow exactly what wand how and doesn't really want to because it makes his heart ache.

It's probably that reason that means even though he tries, it's halfhearted, at best, and he doesn't really care. He listens to her struggle to breathe and just feels tired.

Kakashi side-eyes the tiny Rin and with a glance at Naruto, who is thoroughly occupied with Ino, he gently pokes the Rin in the shoulder.

She feels real.

She slumps to the side and he feels bad for that-worse than he feels over Ino, truth be told, which would make him feel like a horrible person if he gave a damn-and Kakashi reaches over to straighten her up. It's bad enough that she's been left over here, he reasons, but to leave her on her side like she doesn't matter...

Kakashi is aware it's irrational, even as he leans the Rin against his shoulder, and tells himself that this way, at least, it will just look like she's sleeping. She's gone and she wasn't even the Rin he knew.

Those facts don't make a whole lot of difference to his feelings.

The floor is surprisingly warm to against his skin and he finds that comforting, sitting there, with the body of a ghost who isn't quite as dead, or quite what he's believed she was, and watches silently as Naruto deals with Ino.

Naruto's medical expertise is interesting. He wouldn't have believed it if he wasn't seeing it. Kakashi doesn't feel bad for that thought-Sakura wouldn't believe it either.

Thinking of Sakura makes him think he should care more because she would and she'd be upset that he was just sitting here but he... can't. Kakashi slumps back against the wall and closes his eyes. The wall is cool, though the floor is warm, and he wonders at the contrast before dismissing it as unimportant.

He needs time to think and he doesn't want to think and that's just him going around in circles and the worst part is that he knows that and doesn't feel up to trying to break the cycle. Kakashi cracks one eye open, feeling the tell-tale surge of chakra that precedes a jutsu and just nods when several Narutos appear. Kage Bunshin no Jutsu.

Now he really doesn't need to do anything. There's more than enough Naruto's to take care of Ino.

(That's just an excuse.)

It doesn't change the way he feels vaguely guilty about just sitting here.

Tiny Rin shifts and he gently pats her shoulder. Then he freezes because tiny Rin has turned her head and she's dead and that can't happen.

"Rin?" he asks.

Rin doesn't answer him but begins moving very slowly, stretching out her fingers and then her wrists and elbows, stretching carefully. Kakashi watches, wondering if he should be alarmed, and instead marvels at the fact that he's, well, pleased. Relieved.

(Has the other Rin, the one that led him to this one, woken up again? He hopes so. He hopes so more than he should truthfully.)

When Rin stands, still wobbly, Kakashi reaches out to steady her by the elbow. She turns and smiles at him.

He smiles back. It's all unbidden, unrehearsed and he knows it's dangerous. She shouldn't be able to do this, he shouldn't be so happy that she can, and it's all gone to hell.

Rin takes his hand and tugs on it gently but insistently. Kakashi rises to his feet. "Where do you want me to go?" he asks, knowing she can't or won't answer.

She just looks at him and then at the door.

"I got that much," he says softly, glancing at the Narutos and at Ino and the shrilling alarms that have faded into the background by now. For him, at least. "Is it okay? I don't think... I don't think the closer copy was finished talking to me."

Rin tugs at his hand again and Kakashi goes with her.

It probably says something about him that he's much happier following a dead girl's younger self than he is watching Sakura's best friend struggle for her life. A distant part of him thinks that, in other circumstances, he'd care more about Ino. He should, he knows that, but the knowledge feels distant and untouchable and he doesn't care enough to try and reach it.

He doesn't look back as he follows Rin out of the two rooms and then down a different hallway than he had come from. "Where are we going now?" he asks her.

Rin squeezes his hand and says nothing.

"I wish you could talk," he says idly. "Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you're here, but your older self was easier to get information out of."

Her shoulders shake and he suspects that she's laughing, in her own way.

Kakashi knows he shouldn't feel at ease but he does. It's almost like someone's turned time back because he's got Rin and she's laughing.

The world is all wrong, he knows that, and he knows his pleasure comes from a false source.

But it's so nice.

Rin leads him through more doors and down more halls until they're back in the blindingly white hallways, the blue and cream left far behind. They walk leisurely and Kakashi makes Rin's shoulders shake with silent laughter three more times.

It's a good time. It feels like a safe time.

It's all a lie and Kakashi knows he's going to be loath to give it up. Maybe he can find a way to keep Rin? Not as a pet, he thinks, but maybe as a daughter? He looks down at the top of Rin's head and tries to imagine how Sakura would take that.

He doesn't know. He doesn't think that she'd leave her here but... anything else is uncertain.

And it's ridiculous anyway because this has to be a trap. It must be.

Every time he tells himself that, though, it becomes a little less convincing and he's aware of that too.

(It should trouble him more than it does. Alarm stirs like a sluggish serpent in the back of his mind.)

"How much further are we going?" Kakashi asks, his voice breaking through the soothing silence that has enveloped the walk. The only sounds are their footfalls. His silent and hers a little clattery as she walks in sandals that have to be of civilian make because they make too much noise for any shinobi brand of footwear.

Rin tilts her head up and then let's go of his hand, takes two steps forward, so that she's in front of him and lifts her arms up.

Kakashi smiles despite himself and picks her up. She settles her arms around her neck and rests her head on his shoulder.

"None of that's an answer," he tells her, turning when she points for him to do so and continuing down another hallway. His admonishment is weak and soft even to his own ears.

He finds it hard to care.

There's so much right with all the wrongness that he knows his judgement is flawed, that he's probably walking even further into a trap, and it still doesn't change anything for him.

He's happy.

Kakashi is slow to realize that and once he does, he's left speechless, mechanically following Rin's pointed directions as he dwells on the wonder of being happy. It's been a long time since he has been. There's been good moods and good days and even good weeks. Being with Sakura has been good for him, he's been content and his demons had been quieter than they'd been in years.

But right now he's happy, in a way that he rarely remembers having been, even back when he'd been a child.

The depth of it is a little frightening, a little disorienting, and Kakashi stumbles on a step, which is unlike him enough that even tiny Rin turns her face up to his as he catches his balance, her eyes wide and concerned.

Ridiculously, that sends another surge of good feeling reeling through him. "It's all right," he tells her. "Even I'm clumsy sometimes."

She looks unimpressed and unconvinced but smiles and presses a kiss to his cheek as he continues down the stairs, carrying her in his arms.

He looks around, realizing for the first time that they've left the white halls again and are in a place that's slate grey and dreary. He doesn't feel dreary, which makes him more inclined to dismiss his impression of the place as pure nonsense.

(He knows that's wrong but can't bring himself to care. He should care.)

Rin stops him outside of a heavy door, the only one in the hall. It has no window and no doorknob.

"Through here?" he asks. It reminds him, vaguely, of the doors that the final bosses hide behind in Naruto's video games.

Rin nods and wriggles until he sets her down. Kakashi feels a little colder in doing so until she takes his hand and smiles at him.

He takes a breath, he's being ridiculous, and presses his hand to the panel that he can't see but knows must be there. The door grows warm under his hands and then there's the sharp bite of many needles sinking into his skin. Kakashi swallows several swearwords out of deference to Rin's presence.

"Is it supposed to do that?" he asks, trying to pull his hand away but finding himself unable to move it.

Rin nods and wraps her arms around his leg.

Despite himself, Kakashi feels better.

It seems like an eternity, though it's probably only minutes, before the needles retract and the door opens.

Kakashi shakes his hand out, wincing as he does, and makes no move to enter that room. "I find it worrisome," he tells tiny Rin, "that this door needed blood to open." His hand stings but doesn't seem to be deeply injured. It's not enough to slow him down in a fight but it's a nuisance where he didn't need one.

Rin, being herself, says nothing.

Kakashi nods and takes a step and then another step into the room. It's dark but with each step he takes, a little more of it lights up. He finds that disturbing too. He's maybe ten paces in when he realizes that tiny Rin hasn't followed him. He turns to look for her and sees her standing, haloed in the light from the hallway. She regards him with huge, solemn eyes and raises her hand in a wave.

The door shuts with a click even as he lunges for it. Kakashi searches for a panel-there's nothing-and when that doesn't work, slowly turns to study the room. It's still dim. Whatever lighting there is, it's only turned on where he's been. His skin prickles. He doesn't like this.

He has no one to blame but himself. He'd known that tiny Rin had to be leading him to trap and he hadn't cared. Thinking about it now, Kakashi finds he cares a lot more. There's got to be an exit, Kakashi thinks, ignoring the cold slime of worry that wonders if the locked door he's beside was the only exit. Taking a deep breath, he shakes out his hands to make sure they're jutsu ready, since jutsu are going to have to be his main weapon until he finds something better, and begins sidling along the wall.

Better to get an outline of the room, Kakashi thinks, before seeing what's in the middle. He keeps his senses extended, just in case there's a chakra signature anywhere, but he can't feel anything, not even Ino and Naruto's signatures, which he should be able to feel. This place has more chakra dampening jutsu embedded in the walls than any other place he's ever seen. The lab must be the work of generations.

Kakashi doesn't find that comforting.

The room turns out to be large and more rectangular than square. There's only one door. There are no cabinets or counters along the walls and the entire way around he'd been unhindered and hadn't had to go around anything. The floor is cool tile.

The light only makes the remaining dusk of the room even more discomfiting.

But that's probably because of the bodies.

In the shadowy twilight of the room, Kakashi can see four tables, much like the one he'd woken up on. One of them is empty. Three of them... aren't. He remains vigilant at the door for minutes, watching like a hawk, until he's absolutely certain that none of them are breathing. They aren't. They don't even twitch an eyelash under his careful scrutiny.

Which isn't comforting either. Why would tiny Rin have led him to a room with nothing but corpses and no way out… there's got to be something he's missing, but what? Kakashi hates this. Hates it.

Hates that he can't bring himself to hate Rin. He just hates himself for having gone along with it so easily.

Carefully, he approaches the nearest body. There's a thin sheet covering him-he can tell it's a male-from the waist down, which Kakashi finds vaguely amusing. Who cares about modesty once they're dead? Closer, he can see that the corpse looks like none he's ever seen. (And, in his lifetime, he's seen a lot of corpses.)

The skin is waxen and pale but it's not the pallor of death. Kakashi doesn't touch the body, keeps a foot of distance between the table and himself, just in case. If it tries to grab him, he's far enough away to be able to react. He doesn't like this. Not at all. There's something about the colour that niggles at his memories. He frowns sharply and studies the man a little harder. He knows that haircut, he realizes, and that face, he knows that too. He hadn't recognized it at first because of the circumstances but he does.

Thinking he's got a handle on some of this situation, Kakashi moves onto the next body. He knows this one too and the next.

Kakashi leans against the door he can't open and fights the shivery, shuddery feelings wracking through his body. He knows these bodies. They'd gone on a mission with him. He thinks it was the last mission he'd done. Something about a swamp and an experiment and being late, which isn't anything unusual, except that it had been...

He takes a long, deep swallow, which doesn't help his nerves and refuses to look at the empty bed. He's not laying there, not even if that's what he's supposed to do.

(He strongly suspects that's what he's supposed to do.)

He'd rather die.

Looking at the bodies of his teammates, Kakashi thinks that might be more likely than he wants it to be—they've begun to move. Mouths gaping, breaths rasping, expressions mindless, they're slowly sitting up.