Chapter Two

Holding On

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Kakashi's hand closes around hers, and he yanks her off her feet just as the whole world comes crashing down around her to violent claps of what could be thunder. (But isn't.) And she senses two, four, six, maybe more, chakra signatures that shouldn't be there. (But are.)

Even so, Kakashi's grip around her fingers is firm. His jaw is set and his eyes are determined, and something inside of her knows – just knows – that he won't leave her behind to die.

(Like how Obito is dying, steadily fading until there is nothing left.)

Rin suddenly feels sick to her stomach and so weak weak weak, and she hopes to God that Kakashi won't notice. But he does, and without saying a word he tells her not to:

Look at me. Don't look back, look at me.

But she can't, because the boy they are leaving behind is her friend and teammate and Obito, and Rin just can't not look back. So she steals a last glance over her shoulder and immediately wishes that she hadn't.

(Or she wouldn't have seen him disappear under boulders, rock and dirt.)

Then all of a sudden, she isn't dangling anymore and he has somehow hauled her to her feet. He holds her close – closer than she has ever been – and he keeps her there, pressed up against him so tightly that it almost hurts, in a vice-grip that she knows she couldn't break free from even if she wanted to.

"Hold on," he rasps from behind his mask, rushing chakra to the balls of his feet and they explode up, up and up.

He deposits her none too gently against the smooth trunk of a tree before falling to his hands and knees, breathing heavily. Kakashi is far stronger than most people would guess from his slim build alone, though a trained eye could tell at an instant that he was practically born for speed, stealth and high-risk assassinations, just like sensei, but the fighting earlier has drained him of his usual grace.

(Though, at this point even Rin cannot tell if it is exhaustion or something else that racks his body.)

The enemy rock-nin are closing in on them fast, and Rin instinctively tightens her grip around her kunai. Iwagakure already took Obito – and soon it will take them, too – but she refuses to give up just yet. She has not spent nearly two years fighting and killing and saving her boys in all the ways that she could, simply to just die now. Rin is a ninja, and that is not what a ninja does or what a ninja is. There is still Kakashi and Minato-sensei and home, and that is why she will go down fighting; that is why a ninja always has something left to lose, even Kakashi who claims to need nothing and nobody, but whose eyes are filled with the same hatred that Rin feels burning behind her own eyelids.

There is a sudden flutter of hands, but before she fully understands what is happening, the air around his right fist has come alive with chakra and is screeching with fury. It is Kakashi's Chidori, she realizes, but it's so wild and uncontrolled (and so unlike anything they have come to expect from their Kakashi) that it looks nothing like she remembers. And Rin is proud.

"Hoho! You Leaf brats just don't die, do you?" laughs one of their pursuers crudely, crude like his village. "But you've got some balls, pulling a stunt like this on enemy territory, I'll give you that. Too bad it ends here."

"I'll hold them off for as long as I can," mutters Kakashi under his breath as he quickly slides his body between her and them, never taking his eyes off their would-be attackers. "Don't let them find you."

Rin doesn't want to understand. "But—"

"You don't die here, Rin." His voice is cold and flat, but she knows that he means it. "Even if I do, you won't."

(No, no, no.)

"K-Kakashi!"

(She is not leaving him. She is not leaving him like she left Obito, because there is no-one she would rather die for than Kakashi.)

"Rin, Obito liked you, loved you…" His tongue twists around the words awkwardly, as if he was unused to their shape in his mouth, and Rin feels her heart break a little. "You were important to him. And I promised."

"But what about me?" she cries, unable to hold it in any longer. "What about what I—"

"I abandoned my team." Kakashi's frank admission silences her at an instant, not because it is completely unexpected but because it is true. "I left my teammates to die."

Then suddenly and without warning, the rock-nin descend on them like vultures and Kakashi sinks a bit lower into the first stance that every shinobi is taught.

"Go, Rin!" he shouts as everything around them is washed in white light and drowned in noise. "Go!"

But she doesn't go. Instead, she remains frozen in place.