Title: Seeking Rin
Chapter: 18 - Chord
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 4,603
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. Part 18 of ? Unbeta'd.
Notes: It's my birthday so you get a chapter~ Hope you enjoy it!
Kakashi knows just how terrible the situation is.
A quick stock of his inventory shows that he's got a drafty hospital gown, his mask, and his hitae-ite. The room itself is smothered with chakra dampeners and the door is locked and he's about to be surrounded by the grasping, undead-maybe bodies of the loyal shinobi that he'd gone on a mission with just a week ago.
There are four tables, a sheet per table, and three shambling nightmarish horrors coming from him.
Weirdly enough, Kakashi feels relieved.
There's a good chance that he's going to die-but he still has his wits and his taijutsu to rely on, even if he can't use any jutsu-but he'd much rather have to deal with impossible odds in a combat situation rather than struggle with the mystery of Rin and Ino and Naruto.
It's not that he's stupid, but when half the cast is messing with his head… he'll take a fight instead.
The first of the monsters reaches him and Kakashi kicks it away, slamming it into the far wall. It has terrible reaction time and gets up slowly, malice writ large in the waxen face. It likes the fight in him.
Kakashi grins back, fierce and angry, but this is his anger, cool and hard and well-known. Then the other two are upon him and his world focuses, narrows, shunts down to a battle for his life against worst odds than he's had in a while.
He's had things stacked against him before but he's usually armed with more than his body and his mind and what jutsu he feels is safe to use in this enclosed room.
A katon jutsu, a fireball to the face of one gaping, angry monster, does nothing except slow it down and cause it's face to melt off in horrifying rivulets of molten flesh that fill the room with a rotten stink. When it doesn't react with pain, seeming more confused than anything else, Kakashi knows that he's going to have several problems.
Likewise, ripping a hole through another, and tearing off its shoulder to boot, serves little except to make the room slick with bodily fluids from the undead shinobi.
(He knows these corpses.)
After that, Kakashi marshals his options and grimly sets about aiming to restrain instead of destroy them. The only jutsu he has that might be able to kill them would likely kill him as well, given the small room.
But he is strong enough to move the examination tables and the sheets serve to distract and confuse them, especially once he directs chakra into the sheets, making them come alive and tangle themselves around and through the limbs of his foes.
This is a better tactic but, he grimly acknowledges, it's not one that will get him a victory. He needs to escape.
Gruesomely, when he traps one of them under the table, they rip themselves apart to come after him. Worse yet, the pieces move faster than the whole. He looks about for an option to escape. The door is no good.
There's no window he can try to break through.
His eye settles about him, instead, on the air vent. As far as choices go, it's not his favourite. He kicks a few fingers into the wall, where despite being embedded by the force of it, they still wriggle and grope towards him, and makes a choice, flinging himself off of one of the beds and upwards.
The air vent is too clean.
That's his first frenzied impression as he tears the vent off the ceiling, ripping a few of his fingernails down to the quick, smashes the vent cover into the green-eyed waxen face and arms reaching for him, and then leaps up and into the vent.
It's… surprisingly roomy for an air vent too. He been in more than one and while he's slender compared to some men, he's still a full-grown man and yet his shoulders do not touch the sides of it. There's not room enough to turn around, unless he's willing to turn himself into a pretzel, but it's almost… comfortable, size-wise. Kakashi is deeply suspicious of this—there hasn't been a single surprise in this godforsaken place that's been unabashedly good-and given the prevalence of the Rin dolls, a dark, ugly part of him wonders if the vent was made to fit him.
He doesn't even want to imagine why someone would go through all that trouble. Kakashi doesn't believe in random chance and yet…
The only thing that's as he expected is that it's cool, almost cold.
Given that they're preserving corpses down here…
Snake-like he wiggles his way down the vent until he reaches a crossroads, where he can finally turn around and see if he's being pursued. He's not, though he can still hear them. Kakashi eyes the splotch of light where he'd entered the vent carefully. He doesn't think they can climb. He also doesn't trust them to keep their inability to climb. For all he knows he's the tasty bit of cheese the mice in the maze are after. He certainly feels that way.
But he's been bait before. He knows how to survive. He's survived worse. He will survive this.
Though he admits, if only to himself, that he's never had his own village against him quite like this. It brings backs shades of the ostracization he'd endured after his father's disgrace and subsequent suicide. He'd been so angry back then and that anger had driven him to graduate at the age of five. Chuunin by the time he was six. To make Jounin by the time he was twelve. It's one of his oldest, sharpest tools. It's been all that's kept him alive some years.
And it's a complete liability here because someone has hijacked his foul temper. Oh, he can still feel it, but…
I can't give into my rage here and now, he reminds himself grimly. I have to remain in control.
Because underneath his very justified fury… someone else's rage bubbles and boils and rolls. He refuses to lose himself in it and that means he must control his temper with firmer reins that he's ever had to before. Working with his rage is easy. Working around it and not using it is something he's rusty at.
The first turn he takes down the vent in his ruined and bloody hospital gown, ignoring the pain in his hands (it hurts but it's a minor hurt that honestly grounds him more than distracts him), leads him to a dead end and a grate over a room that looks much like the one he just left. Kakashi peers through the vent for perhaps fifteen minutes, seeing no sign of life (or unlife) before deciding force the grate open. He drops through the open vent and lands in a completely empty examination room.
He rummages around through the cupboards, coming out with some bandage wraps and a few unused syringes that he eyes with trepidation. The door is locked—he'd expected that—but… otherwise, there's nothing in the room that holds his interest. Kakashi isn't nearly tired enough to consider laying down on one of the exam tables for a nap. He can imagine perfectly well what sort of situation he'd wake up in if he did that and he'll pass doing that to himself when everyone and everything else has it out for him already.
It's just common sense.
Washing off the worst of the blood from his fingernails, Kakashi dries his hands on spare bandages and then uses dry ones to lightly wrap his fingers, making sure to leave himself with full mobility. If it comes to another fight, he'll tear the bandages off, but until then… well.
It's better not to leave a trail a civilian could follow.
Then he leaps back up into the suspiciously wide air vent. He leaves the grate off, the better to know where he's been, and continues his explorations.
The second direction he goes in turns out much the same as this one. A few more rooms (why are there so many exam rooms on this floor? Does he want to know what they're doing with them all? Yes. But also no.) and he's just considering the idea of sleeping in the vent when he comes across a room that, from his vantage point looks decidedly different.
From his vantage point, Kakashi can't see much. What catches his eye, though, is the carpet. It's deep blue, edged in intricate gold swirls, and it's so incredibly jarring after endless rooms and halls of pale grey, eggshell white, and harsh, unforgiving lighting.
That's the second thing he notices. The light is soft, a buttery yellow that warms the gold and deepens the blue of the carpet.
He waits. He listens.
Nothing about the room below him changes. He can't hear anything except his soft breathing.
The room is almost certainly a trap. Just like everything else. Kakashi doesn't and won't trust it, no matter how inviting it looks after all of the cold, sterile and empty places he been to in the last… he's not sure how much time has passed.
A day, he decides. Maybe two. Certainly no more than three.
Kakashi grimly decides that he's going to choose to believe that. If it's been longer, he can't tell, and if he's lost that much time due to what's been happening to him… until he gets out of here it doesn't really matter anyway. If the time spent here becomes relevant, then he'll face it right on. Until then, it's just an extraneous worry and he doesn't need.
The pretty trap below him is more interesting to contemplate in any case.
Kakashi sweeps the area with chakra, finding nothing living, except himself. There's not even rats in the walls. That just proves they're smarter than people give them credit for. If he had a choice, he wouldn't be here either. Since he doesn't and deeming himself to be safe enough for the time being, he closes his eyes and with the ease of long practice forces himself into a meditative state.
As he does so, he delicately spins chakra into his ears and nose.
His senses expand ferociously, leaving him dizzy and, for several moments of heartbeats, defenseless. It's why he doesn't like to do this in the field, especially not to two senses at once. This is not a meager boost to what he can perceive. It is a mad, dizzying rush of information that bowls him over like a leaf in a storm, free-falling, flying, and falling all at once.
Even with practice, the initial disorientation doesn't fade. He's learned to ride it out, grab hold tight to what he always knows, and carefully spear through the new information as he can take it. Kakashi cannot hope to understand his senses are telling him as they tell him so he takes his time sorting through it, discarding the things he already knows.
The sound of his heartbeat, gone. His soft breathing. Gone. The salty stress of his sweat and the ache in his hands disappear. Acknowledged and assigned to be ignored. Likewise, the chill of the vent and the discomfort of wearing nothing but a hospital gown are shunted away.
Once he's gotten rid of everything that he's brought with him, for a long moment Kakashi exists in a space where there's nothing, not even him.
Then, gradually, the world begins to come back to life.
There's water running through pipes in the walls, unusually unheard but now, to him, a rushing susurrus. Somewhere in the room below, where it doesn't impact upon his view, Kakashi can hear the off-kilter flicker of a light soon to extinguish itself for good. He can smell the dust in the carpet and knows it's not new, though it hadn't looked old. Now he smells the difference between cables that have been replaced over the years. There's something he can't identify in the room below him, tangled up with a tinge of ozone, like a coming thunderstorm, and the faintest, barely perceptible even with his hearing extremely magnified, clink, clink, clink.
It's more regular than a steady pulse and Kakashi flits his thoughts in between each teeny, tiny clink as he tries to decipher what it could be.
He listens longer than he probably should, lulled by the soft repetitive noise against the edges of his consciousness, before he begins the slow drop out of his meditations, unravelling the chakra he'd seeded throughout his senses with a sense of relief as the world dimmed and dulled around him. It hurt to go that high, that far, too close to his upper limits of what he could comprehend and handle. He had no bloodline talent of his own. His senses were honed with years of practice, generations of shinobi all giving him that genetic push to be a tiny bit better, giving him a hand up on the depth of skill he could expect to learn.
But he had no bloodline talent. Everything he had was anything a normal person could have, with the right training, health, and determination to succeed.
Obito's borrowed eye was… something else entirely. He'd adapted to it but it hadn't changed the fact that, fundamentally, he remained an ordinary, if extraordinarily skilled, human being.
Having his senses stretched like that wasn't something he cared to do often. A slight augmentation was one thing and, even then, if he needed a better nose than his… his dogs were more than capable of it under most circumstances.
As he caught his breath and enjoyed the quiet and how his risk had paid off Kakashi works on relaxing and tensing each muscle in his body. A slow stretch to ground him back in himself. Nothing had attacked him. Nothing had hurt him (except he, himself). Nothing about his situation had shifted in a way he could notice. If there was a puppet master pulling his strings… perhaps it was intermission. Kakashi smiles faintly as his own folly and, once he's rested and the worst of the over-stimulation has faded…
He gives into curiosity and drops down to the carpeted room below, leaving the grate swinging, dangling wildly in the air above him. A tangible danger to anyone not paying attention. Kakashi finds it comforting. An obvious threat in a world where nothing is certain.
Nothing attacks him and, on first blush, nothing in the room can attack him.
The room is… opulent.
Kakashi straightens slowly as he takes it all in. The carpet is soft and, while he knows it isn't new, it looks it and is sinfully soft under his bare feet. He ties his hospital gown tighter about him (a futile effort) as he realizes the walls look greatly like marble (he'd have to touch them to know for sure it's reality and not just another amazing fake out). Along the walls, at regular intervals, are sturdy pillars, with elaborate grooves carved into them. Lanterns flicker from where they are ensconced in little cubbies cut into the pillars to minimize their disruption of the pattern.
There is no overhead lighting. There are statues lining the walls, half-hidden in the shadows, each upon their own stand, marching in steady order towards the far side of the room where he can see the door.
He's landed on one side of the room and, while there's no door on his end, there is something that looks unsettlingly like an altar a top a dais. He surveys the altar's paraphernalia critically but, while he can spot influence from the Will of Fire, as well as the suggestion of leaves and, here and there, the swirls that indicate Whirlpool had, at some point, something to do with all of this, he doesn't actually recognize the symbology being used. He can speculate, and does, but the uncertainty of it all grates on him.
Fire is purity, rebirth. Water is cleansing.
That they'd be combined isn't all that surprising, but he can't even begin to figure out how it relates to the production of monsters, filling him with a rage that isn't is, and the Rin dolls. How to Naruto and Yamanaka Ino tie into this?
Kakashi looks down the long length of the room. The air feels heavier, all of a sudden, like it is thick with foreboding. This room and what it holds are unsettling in a way that the undead monsters and the Rin copies had not been.
Maybe because all he could do was observe. The undead he'd been able to fight and Rin had been able to converse with him, though the whys and hows of her existence remained nonsensical at this time.
This… just exists. A mute testimony to… something.
The only way to find out is to explore.
He leaves the altar exactly has he'd left it. Kakashi would be lying if he said he wasn't superstitious. Most Jounin are, though the superstitions they follow are as varied as they themselves are. If there's a god involved, until he knows the plan for sure, he'd rather not anger it.
A mad god is the last thing I need right now. Unless it was on my side.
And he's not counting on anything or anyone being on his side. He can't. Not at this juncture.
Kakashi ambles over to the first statue which, under the soft warm light, turns out to have a plaque that reads:
THE APOSTATE - PATIENT ZERO
Underneath that, in lettering so small that he has to crouch down to read it, is:
Awakening
Troubled, Kakashi looks up at the statue, examining the woman depicted carefully. He's never been a historian. He can tell she was young, perhaps mid-twenties. Her clothes are elaborate and elegant. Her hair is loose and unadorned, falling to the small of her back.
She is smiling, the expression bright and unrepentant. Whatever it is that she started, she is not sorry about it.
Kakashi suppresses a shudder and steps over to the next statue in the row, bending to read the plaque, only to stop as he reads:
THE BLUGEONER – PATIENT TWO
And underneath:
Breakdown
Patient two? He frowns and looks across to the other side of the room, before heading over to check the statue directly across from Patient Zero.
"Ah," he murmurs as he reads the plaque. "They zig-zag."
THE GRIEVER – PATIENT ONE
Savage
He doesn't know what any of this means. Patient One and Patient Two are also ladies in their early twenties, so far as he can tell, though one has hair cut in a short bob and the other has wild curls. They are not smiling. Patient One weeps while Patient Two looks as if she's in horrible pain.
Kakashi wonders what their names were. Who were they? If this is all that is left of them can they even be said to be remembered?
He shudders away from Patient Two, zig-zags across the room, and looks at Patient Three, then Four, then Five…
Each of them is different. Hair, eyes, clothes…
Each of them is the same, too.
They are all young women.
As he slowly drifts down the hall, moving back and forth and reading each plaque, studying each young woman, Kakashi looks for other similarities. There are none that he can spot from the statues. They are young women. He suspects they are all from Konohagakure no Sato simply by virtue of this seeming to be a problem endemic to the village itself. While he does not recognize any of them, per se, they are not all civilians, or civilian-born kunoichi.
It is impossible to not recognize the kunoichi that come from the Clans. An Akimichi is the Patient Eleven (THE SINGER – PATIENT ELEVEN and underneath: Soulless) while, a few down from her, Patient Fourteen (THE RIDER – PATIENT FOURTEEN and underneath: Charming) is a Hyuuga. Patient Fifteen, who stares haughtily across at Patient Fourteen, is an Uchiha.
Her plaque reads THE FOLLOWER – PATIENT FIFTEEN
And underneath is the word:
Empty
The first large change that he notices is at THE PRINCESS – PATIENT TWENTY (her plaque, underneath, simply reads dignity). He doesn't know who she is, though she looks like a Shinto priestess, wielding a tanto.
But there's a man with her. For the first time, the young lady is not alone.
Well, Kakashi amends, after a moment, she is not entirely alone. The young woman and the equally young man face different directions and do not appear to actually be interacting with one another, for all that their statues are carved from the same stone. The woman attacks while the man, his back to her, reads a scroll. She is fiercely intent. He is equally so.
They do not look like siblings, his first thought.
There is no plaque for the man. There is nothing to indicate who he is or why he now joins this particular Patient to be immortalized in a statue most people will never see.
After that, each patient is accompanied by another. In most cases it is a young man, though a few times, there is an older one. Once, it's a much younger boy, looking about five and in tears. It is never another woman.
Kakashi wonders at that, even as he drifts along slowly, dreading a little what he has guessed must be coming as he comes closer and closer to the end of the room.
What he suspects comes true as he stops in front of THE HEALER – PATIENT THIRTY (underneath is the word: meticulous) and he looks into the face of the Rin he knows. Only it's not quite his Rin because she'd died before she'd ever reached the age of the young woman carved out of stone.
But it's his Rin and, equally aged up, is Obito.
He is not surprised, having guessed that the men had to be people close to each woman, but the sight of his two teammates, older than they ever actually lived, still stabs right through him, leaving him reeling with a pain that he is not nearly as blasé about as he wishes.
To distract himself, he looks back down the long row of statues and wonders how many of them were younger than they appeared to be—or older. And why were some of the men older or younger instead?
And who made all of these statues?
He is not a religious man but, combined with the opulence of the room, and the altar about the dais, Kakashi wonders if he's in the presence of dignitaries, sacrifices, those revered beyond others for their words, actions, and closeness to…
But what are they closer to? What purpose does all of this serve?
He looks up into Rin's gentle eyes. Her hands are held out as if she's healing someone. Obito is shouting something.
Neither wears their hitae-ite and, for the first time, he realizes that none of the statues have worn their hitae-ite, even though many of them would have them. He adds it to the list of things that probably means something but that he doesn't have context enough to know what.
Greatly daring, he reaches out and touches wraps one of his hands around Rin's out-stretched hand. It's cool, but not cold to the touch. He holds on tightly. Obito does not have a hand free but holding Obito's shoulder satisfies the same need.
He will never admit it aloud but even still a large part of him wishes that he was there with them, encased in a statue, having existed and now was gone. It would hurt less. Kakashi presses his forehead against the coolness of their statue and wonders what else he's missed in his own life.
He wonders if they ever resented him for not knowing what they went through. Kakashi hopes not.
Reluctantly, he pulls away from them, committing every last detail of their older selves, the selves they never got to be, to memory—he even raises his hitae-ite so that Obito's eye memorizes it as well—and then, settling his forehead protector back down, he grimly moves on.
To his own surprise, he doesn't recognize THE THIEF – PATIENT THIRTY-ONE. (Her plaque reads shadow, though she's not a Nara.)
The next two statues, though, he does recognize.
To his own surprise, the statues aren't finished. Even as he watches, infinitesimal pieces of stone piece themselves together, being built without human intervention or hands involved in the process. Neither of them has plaques yet.
Patient Thirty-Two is Yamanaka Ino, her long hair in loose about her face as she laughs. Naruto, the shadow of the Kyuubi wreathed about him, is with her, a fierce, angry guard to her blithe amusement. Their expressions are done but the details of their bodies are vague. Whatever they're doing or holding has not yet been set out in stone.
He looks at them, one a woman he's never liked, and the other his old student, and isn't sure what to feel. The fact that their statue isn't complete yet implies, he thinks, that they're not dead—yet. As he watches, the word saboteur fades into view for half a second, then fades away again, like it hasn't been settled.
"It's a good word for her," he says roughly, and turns to the next, and last statue.
There's space left in the room for more. The door still some ways away.
Across from Ino and Naruto, he finds Patient Thirty-Three being built. It's Sakura, rolling her eyes, and when he glances back over his shoulder he realizes that, even in this odd, uncomfortable room of mysteries, Ino and Sakura are interacting.
Ino is laughing at something Sakura has said, while Sakura rolls her eyes at Ino's reaction.
It's… oddly reassuring that neither of them is alone for all that they both have men with them. He doesn't like Yamanaka Ino but he has known for years that, whether he does or doesn't won't change Sakura's feelings.
He's never had a friendship like theirs.
(It's one of the reasons he can't stand Yamanaka Ino. Envy is a petty, ugly creature.)
The man with Sakura is himself.
Naruto had been a hovering guard. All fire and fury and protectiveness.
Kakashi looks at himself and all he sees is exhaustion and love, writ there in the stone, his expression more open than he'd ever want it to be in real life. Neither he nor Sakura is fully rendered. Just their faces and the beginnings of their poses.
Even though he waits, no words float about around this statue.
Perhaps which words apply to them haven't yet been decided. As he watches, Sakura's hair ever so slowly begins to gain more definition, more detail. It's a painstakingly slow process. A silent one.
Kakashi expects that, if he expanded his senses again, he'd find that the soft clink, clink, clink of things being put into place would be right here, right in front of him, and right behind him.
He looks at the statue of him and Sakura, then back across the room at Ino and Naruto, still less than half-finished, still being put together, and he nods slowly.
Whatever this is, whatever they're all part of, there's still time to change it.
They're not set in stone yet. Whatever is happening to them is still happening. They're not like Rin and Obito, whose stories are told and done and over with.
(And that still hurts to think. It always will.)
Kakashi steels himself—and heads for the door.
