A/N: Part 2 of double-update :)
Sprawled out on the synthetic leather couch, Snake watches idly as Kakashi gets his ANBU tattoo done by Hiromi, the med-nin and resident tattoo artist of the ANBU hospital. The teen is lying on his side on a padded bench, a fluffy pillow stuffed beneath his head. With the outline of the stylised Konoha symbol finished, all that is left is filling it in with the same crimson ink.
"Painful, Hound-kun?" Snake asks playfully. With his latex gloved hands, Hiromi holds the skin over Kakashi's deltoid firmly between two fingers and positions the needle carefully against it*.
Kakashi glares but a muscle under his eye jumps when Hiromi begins to pierce the already sensitive skin with practiced movements. "Hardly feel a thing." Perched at the foot of the padded bench, Sakumo shakes his head with a snort.
The med-nin lifts the bamboo-handled tool away from Kakashi's arm and wipes a damp cloth over the design, carrying away the excess ink. "Macho kid," he chuckles, sharing an amused look with Snake as Kakashi glowers.
"Get on with it please," Kakashi grumbles, hiding his face against the pillow.
Snake sits up on the creaking couch. "Let me distract you with something good, Hound-kun. I owe you an apology for what happened yesterday anyway." Kakashi turns his head to her a little and nods slowly, wariness bright in his uncovered grey eye.
The faint shimmering that comes with her transformation warps her outline for a moment before settling into a body slightly taller than her original. Her hair lengthens and darkens into a shiny waterfall of ebony that slips over her shoulders. Kakashi's brow creases with confusion as she takes off her mask, revealing a lovely face with delicate features and large, long-lashed black eyes.
The sight of that face almost stops Sakumo's heart and his lungs spasm in a loud gasp.
"Who is that?" Kakashi asks, bemused. Rin is silent, her concerned gaze flitting between Snake and Sakumo.
Snake face softens in sympathy. Rage flashes through Sakumo, hot and prickling on his skin, before it disappears, leaving a marrow-deep yearning. "Yoriko..." He stares like a man dying of thirst, drinking in every feature of the face he had given up on seeing ever again – the line of her nose, the tilt of her eyebrows, the curve of her lips...
And he forgets how to breathe.
"My captain and Boar's as well." Sakumo doesn't know if she is speaking the truth because Yoriko's work had never been something Sakumo was privy to. It stirs up old feelings of jealousy that Sakumo thought he had put to rest together with her ashes (his love, his missing other half, coming home in a pretty, glazed urn). There's a terrible squeezing around his chest and every breath is burns with so much else — fear, inadequacy, a love that wants to be understanding but still aches with not enough, never enough.
Sakumo had never really known Yoriko as fully as he craved, and in the end she was simply gone.
"Boar had this huge teenage crush on her. It was so freaking embarassing." Snake laughs and god, it hurts like a knife to the gut to hear her voice, to see her smile. But Yoriko had never laughed as boldly as that. (Or had she with her ANBU team? Sakumo doesn't know. He won't ever know.) Sakumo had dreamed of making her laugh as openly as that and now, it seems defiled by this woman's imitation.
"So?" Impatient.
She smirks like she's sharing a secret. "Then one Hatake Sakumo barges in and makes a married woman of her, of course!"
Kakashi tenses from head to toe, his eyes wide as saucers. Hiromi clicks his tongue, saying: "Relax, please." Kakashi forcibly does so, his gaze still skipping rapidly over Snake's borrowed face.
"This... This is what okaa-san looked like?"
The rapid repetition of "no, no, no" in Sakumo's brain is suddenly silenced by his son's unusually timorous words. Snake leans close, letting Kakashi's whirring Sharingan record her face in perfect detail. "Everyone says you look like your father, but I bet if you take off that mask, you'll look like your mother just as much."
Blinking away unbidden tears, Kakashi closes his eyes and Snake releases her transformation behind her mask once more. Sakumo has no Sharingan to help him remember and that hollowness in his chest is already craving another glimpse of his wife. (So take off that mask again, please...)
"Thank you," Kakashi croaks once he has himself under control again. "I-I could never manage to remember what okaa-san looked like and there were never any pictures around."
Another thing he has stolen from Kakashi, Sakumo realises. In his grief, he could not bear to be reminded of what he had lost and for that he had deprived Kakashi as well. Kakashi had never pried... too mature and conscientious of his father's broken heart to ask for what was rightfully his.
Snake adjusts her mask, her voice becoming gentle. "It's no problem, Hound. You deserve to know."
'And he does,' Sakumo muses heavily. Kakashi deserves to see his mother's face again more than anyone else, including Sakumo. Unlike yesterday, what had just happened was a gift, not a cruelty.
And for that, Sakumo is thankful.
* Hiromi is using the traditional Japanese tattooing technique instead of the modern handheld machine version. It's more painful!
A/N: Snake is really taking everyone on strolls down on memory lane, isn't she?
There's some writer's block here and there because I'm wrestling with the fine details of the plot and characterisation, so... if I miss an update you know what's happened! Hopefully the right ideas will pop up in time and that wouldn't happen ;)