Warnings: lots of swearing, violence, gore.
"Well, that's done," Snake murmurs, staring down at Hawk's collapsed form. His eyes are open and unfocused, his hand twitching at the sweat-drenched collar of his shirt. Kakashi makes a soft noise of agreement, his expression unreadable, as he shucks off his backpack to find the body-storage scroll inside.
Sakumo watches the ragged rise and fall of Hawk's chest with an uncomfortable twisting in his stomach. "Why is he being executed this way? This isn't right. A fellow Konoha-nin..."
They're a days journey north of Konoha. Except for the narrow path that they themselves have made through the sparse pine forest, there are no roads whatsoever, and no chance of anyone stumbling upon them. It hadn't been difficult to dose Hawk's water bottle with a tasteless, slow-acting poison when he was taking his turn in the shower yesterday night. The short trek through the forest had sped up the poison's circulation and taken down the ANBU easily.
Under Snake's watchful eye, Hawk's breath stutters and stops. Sakumo has to close his eyes briefly.
Snake crouches down to check his pulse and Kakashi frowns, still picking at the tie holding the scroll shut. "Senpai, is—" The startled flutter of Snake's chakra makes Kakashi look up in alarm.
"You've been distracted, Snake," Hawk snarls, his breathing heavy as he presses the kunai in his hand harder against her jugular. He has her back against his chest, his other hand twisting her arm behind her. Kakashi stares, his body frozen and his eyes wide, his instinctive reach for his katana halted by Hawk's glare. "Put your hands down!" And Kakashi obeys, movements slow.
Snake swears softly, looking not so much frightened but annoyed. Sakumo follows the line of her sight and finds something glinting in the leaf litter. It's a tiny syringe, a drop of fluid still in the barrel. It's the distinctive magenta colour of the antidote for most common poisons. It won't save Hawk, but it'll give him time.
"This is embarrassing," Snake mutters. Her gaze meets Kakashi's and the hard line of her mouth softens. "Don't worry, dear." The tense frown on Kakashi's face only deepens.
"Shut your mouth!" Hawk growls, twisting her arm further until she gasps. "Fucking backstabbers." A thick droplet of blood escapes his nose, trailing down to his mouth and he licks it away irritably. "Hokage-sama sent you to kill me."
"Yes," Kakashi says honestly, and Hawk's narrowed eyes snap to him. "Please. We have no personal stake in this. Let her go and we'll just report this mission as a failure."
The other man bursts into wheezing laughter, not a hint of mirth in the sound. "And that's exactly the problem, isn't it? You're just following orders but this is my life we're talking about. They treat us like we're expendable weapons, throw us away when they're done using us, and it'll all just following orders right?" Contempt saturates his words. "I thought you had some empathy. But you're nothing like your father!" Blood drips down his chin and he shakes with fury and exertion both.
Kakashi's jaw clenches.
Now Sakumo would have never accepted a mission like this in the first place, and the Hokage wouldn't have given it to him, but it didn't mean he was disappointed in Kakashi. A shinobi's duty is to their Hokage and Sakumo understands the tension here all too well.
As Hawk drags himself and Snake up to their feet and backs off to put more distance between them and Kakashi, Sakumo wonders if this would be the time to intervene. But he knows what Snake and Kakashi have planned. It makes him wince to consider things this way, but if Hawk kills Snake, the burden of her death won't be on Kakashi. It'll be the lesser of two evils.
Hawk turns his bloodshot stare to Kakashi again once he has his back to a tree. "I've got a proposition for you," he says tersely, his voice thin with pain. "Give me the proper antidote and take out the Sharingan, and I'll let her go."
"What's the point of this?" Snake snaps, barely noticing the blood beading against the point of Hawk's kunai as she twists about. "Just kill me and be done with it."
The crack of bone is shockingly loud. Snake jerks as a grunt of pain escapes her and the kunai skids dangerously along the vulnerable column of her neck, but Hawk is careful not to let Snake fatally injure herself with it. She looks up at Kakashi through the strands of hair that had fallen over her face, her free hand twitching into the signal for "kill" by her side before Hawk changes his grip and holds that arm hostage instead.
"Self-righteous," Hawk pants, his face frighteningly pale now. "Asking me "what's the point" when you're the ones trying to kill me. Tell me, what am I fighting for? Money? Peace? Konoha? Fuck the village, we're not even properly part of it. We're all just being used." He bares teeth stained with blood.
"Oh," Sakumo thinks, realisation sparking as painfully as an actual burn. "He's an anti-Konoha Uchiha dissenter." Uchiha ANBUs are becoming increasingly rare nowadays, what with the simmering tension between the Uchiha and the rest of the clans. Hawk must be highly respected within the Uchiha clan, influential even, by virtue of his high-ranking position in ANBU. The threat that Hawk posed with his Madara-esque opinions must have been clear to the Hokage.
There are ways to deal with dissent, and assassination it is the fastest, the easiest, and the most permanent. But in Sakumo's mind, it is also the worst of them all. Behind the Hokage's signature, how much of it was Hiruzen and how much of it was Danzou?
"I don't care about your life, Snake," the ANBU continues to rant. "It's just as fucking worthless as the rest of us. The antidote and the Sharingan, now!"
Kakashi holds up his hands. "Alright, I understand. The antidote is in my backpack. I'll also need a kunai to cut the optic nerve and muscles, some water to clean my hands, and something clean to put it into," Kakashi lists calmly. "Don't hurt her."
At Kakashi's acquiescence, Hawk seems to relax fractionally. "Then do as I say." Hawk leans closer to Snake but his gimlet-eyed stare stays on Kakashi. "See how much he likes you? You'd better make it up to him afterwards." Snake growls, teeth clenched in a snarl as she writhes, testing his strength. Hawk tightens his hold and an alarming amount of blood washes down her neck. "Stay. Still."
"Senpai! Just, hold on." Hurrying over to his pack, Kakashi crouches down and reaches for the flap. "Don't worry, I know."
"I would have taken you along, you know?" Hawk mutters as Kakashi rummages about. "If you had wanted to escape." The disappointment in Hawk's voice makes Kakashi pause, his expression twisting for a moment before he forcibly shutters his expression.
"Sorry," the silver-haired teen murmurs, his shoulders hunching.
Then his gloved hand twitches and he's sprinting across the distance between them in an explosive burst of movement, katana flashing in his hand.
Snake relaxes even as Hawk exclaims in shock, disbelief draining his face of all colour. His eyes swirl into the deep red of the Sharingan, but the unerring line of Kakashi's strike cannot be avoided. In a split second, Kakashi's blade pierces through flesh and bone, driving through Snake's side and up between Hawk's ribs, right into the heart. The man gasps, an accusing rage contorting his features. "Friend-Killer Kakashi...!"
But there's a smile on Snake's face. Blood trickles down her wrist where she has gripped Hawk's kunai, bare palm against metal. With a slick sound, Kakashi withdraws the katana flings it away in favour of catching Snake, letting her slump against him as Hawk falls down, dead for sure this time.
Laying her down, Kakashi presses a hand to her side and another against her sliced-up neck. Pain flickers across her face, her eyes squeezing shut briefly before she looks up at Kakashi again. "Good job," she murmurs, barely moving her lips.
Kakashi shakes his head in a sudden, angry movement, his brows knitting tightly. "I brought the pills. This should have been painless." He glances over at Hawk, his mouth twisting unhappily behind his mask.
She huffs weakly, her left hand sliding up to latch onto his wrist. Her thumb brushes across his bounding pulse. "Better this way." Her Henge begins to flicker, blurring with each sluggish well of blood against Kakashi's hand where it is pressed against her side. "Don't look," she whispers, her gaze sliding over Kakashi's shoulder to linger on the sky.
"It's okay," he whispers back, his expression softening even as her skin warps into a dense spiderweb of scars, crawling up like vines to mark her neck and face. The affection in Kakashi's eyes doesn't waver. "It's okay, senpai."
Her grip on his wrist tightens briefly as she drinks in his face with tear-damp eyes. "Sorry, Kakashi. I've asked too much of you..."
Kakashi shakes his head again, so desperate to reassure her that Sakumo's heart pangs sharply. "I can handle it. Don't worry."
Her lashless, scarred eyelids lower with regret. "I know. I believe in you. Listen, in my bag, there's a letter," she stops, panting faintly as sweat dampens her brow. Kakashi has to lean in order to hear her as she whispers into his ear. "Read it, alright?"
"Of course."
The corner of her lips quirks in a smile again, the wan expression pulling strangely at her tight skin. "Thank you." Her hand falls away from his wrist, her breath shallow and laboured as she regards him gently. "The mission begins... now..."
With a strangled sound of anguish, Kakashi draws down his mask and presses his lips against her ruined cheek, his other hand lifting away from her wound to cradle the other side of her face. Her breathing hitches faintly in surprise and her eyes slip closed, her smile growing as she mouths his name silently.
"Kakashi."
Just as quickly, he pulls away and hides his face against her shoulder, his entire frame trembling.
"Understood," he gasps.
Tears escape from the corner of her closed eyes, pooling against Kakashi's bloodied hand. They spill over his knuckles, red.
He sits up after a far too short period of time. Sakumo catches a glimpse of pure, aching grief before Kakashi pulls up his mask again. He opens his Sharingan to look over both Hawk's and Snake's corpses before slanting his hitai-ate over the eye again, his movements deliberate and smooth. There's no trace of chakra in either of them anymore.
For a moment, he stares down blankly at the tacky blood drying over his bare hands. The remaining blood is quickly wiped away on Kakashi's trousers, which are already soaked from knee-down with the same dark crimson. He looks a mess as he stumbles into motion, unrolling the storage scroll until it is laid out on the ground, two of the seals clearly visible.
He takes a towel, wets it with a weak Suiton, and begins to clean up the bodies the best he can, careful to close their eyes before wiping away the blood and shifting them away from the soaked ground. The appropriate hand seals causes body bags pop out from the scroll. Hawk goes into a bag, his heavier bulk not straining Kakashi at all, and once the body bag is positioned over the seal, it disappears with another hand seal.
Kakashi hadn't lingered earlier, but he hesitates now. He has Snake's arm over his shoulder as he tries to manoeuvre her into the bag, his other hand against her back of head to keep her steady. Looking down, his expression tightens at splash of blood on his shoulder.
He sets her down again, gently, and looks at her neck wound. It's grotesque.
Rising to his feet with the fatigue of a man truly deserving his silver hair, Kakashi ruffles through his backpack and pulls out a roll of bandages. He looks over, as if asking her opinion, before sighing and walking over.
The bandages go around her neck snugly. He gets her out of her outer armour and does the same for the wound piercing her side, pulling the bandages tight around her abdomen. There's not much fresh blood anymore, but it still seeps through to make the bandages faintly pink.
Pulling down the hem of her shirt, Kakashi leans his forehead against her shoulder again, hiccuping. "I can't do this. Senpai, I can't do this."
But he does.
He picks himself up again after a long moment and puts her in the body bag with trembling hands. The body bag goes in the scroll and the scroll goes into his backpack, and suddenly, all that's left is the empty forest.
"Carry on, carry on," Sakumo thinks sorrowfully, remembering how during war time, Tsunade used to mutter that over and over again to herself as she made her rounds amongst the dead and the dying, looking no-one in the eye. The same strain is written along the fragile curve of Kakashi's spine he kneels and presses his hands to the ground, sending a Doton rippling through the earth to bury all traces of DNA. Only a small disturbance in the soil left behind; a few raindrops will soon wash even that away.
"Let's go home, senpai," Kakashi murmurs to himself as he shoulders his backpack, collects his katana, and slips on his gloves. His hand are shaking so badly that he can't get the gloves on and in a final fit of emotion, he hurls them at a tree with a wild yell. Sakumo watches, brokenhearted and aghast, as Kakashi drops into a crouch, shoulders shaking as he hides his face in his bloodstained sleeves.
With a hand fisted in his hair, Kakashi begins to laugh hysterically.
A/N: Goodbye Snake, my precious OC :'( I will miss you.
(Sorry Hawk, farewell to you too.)