...
Nostalgia
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...
"Sakura-san, please. Calm-"
The stinging slap of flesh connecting with flesh echoed loudly through the shadowed undergrowth. A flock of startled birds erupted from the branches overhead at the sound, their wingbeats fluttered and frantic in the descending darkness. Thunder boomed ominously overhead and receded into low, distant rumbles as a hushed whisper of drizzling rain fell swiftly over them.
"Do you have any idea what you've done?"
Sai reeled back, hand on his cheek; alarmed at the intensity in her scathing, uncharacteristically quiet voice.
"I-"
"Three days a week for the past two and a half months..." Sakura began, her voice dangerously low, "He…" she seemed to choke then, her gloved hand reaching up to clutch convulsively at the grimy neck of her shirt.
"He would come to my office," She breathed in shakily, "and I would have to sit there and watch… as the man who's been there for me and protected me since I was a child-who's done more for me than even my own father-" her voice cracked and she closed her eyes, ducking her head. Her shoulders shook, and whether it was from the strain of the last couple hours or from the fervent emotion coloring her voice, Sai couldn't tell.
When she finally lifted her head to look at him, her green eyes glinting feverishly through slick, pale pink strands of hair, her expression was blank and immeasurably cold-as if the anger she felt were too great to physically convey.
Sai's eyes widened and he took an unconscious step back. Sakura plowed on. Relentless.
"I would have to sit there and listen to him make jokes on the exam table while, sweating and shivering, he strained and tortured himself-just to use a spark of chakra."
Sai steadied himself against the sudden burning at the back of his throat, fisting his hands. He had known that Kakashi was under doctor's orders not to use any chakra throughout the duration of this mission, but...
Against his will, his mind summoned the image of the quiet, lamb-like acceptance in Kakashi's gaze as the man was knocked to the ground on that unfortunate infiltration mission into Hijame's camp months ago.
Sai clenched his jaw, feeling distinctly nauseous, but Sakura didn't stop there.
"I don't expect that you had even noticed that the man you call your team-leader has dropped nearly fifteen pounds and weighs roughly the same as a civilian teenage girl..." she advanced on him now, her green eyes slitted, "Or that he's only slept twice since this mission even started."
He opened and closed his mouth soundlessly for a moment, inexplicably stung.
"Sakura-san," he said coldly, "it is hardly my concern that Kakashi-san was declared mission-ready despite his obvious decline in health, seeing as I am not the team medic. I do, however, feel the need to remind you that escape was the only viable option at the-"
-Sakura slammedher fist into a nearby tree-trunk. A stinging spray of splintered wood burst into the air, making Sai flinch.
"Dammit, Sai!" her expression took on an agonized lilt, her eyes bright and wild, "You knew he wouldn't stand a chance if we left him!"
Sai said nothing. A cool mask of indifference had slid firmly into place, sealing the heated throb inside his chest with an icy layer of detachment. He didn't need this.
He didn't need to feel this.
"You knew…"
Her voice was small and broken then, and she seemed to wilt before him. Her knees gave out from under her as she stumbled against a tree, grimy fingernails clutching at the wet bark. Sai watched as she raised a shaky hand to cover her eyes, her head hanging as the rain pummeled the ground around them.
Something inside him twisted. Since when did Sakura look so weak and out of control? What was happening to them?
Sai tilted his head to glance down at Naruto's still, freshly-healed body lying limp on the moss before his feet.
What he needed was for Sakura to stop wasting time.
Everything in him, all of the lessons that had been beaten and branded into him during his years in ROOT, screamed at him to get moving.
But, when Sakura's quiet, torn voice filled the heavy, wet air again, Sai couldn't find it in himself to stop her.
"I just-I didn't..." she broke off, shaking her head, "I didn't want to believe that he wasn't okay… He's always so strong and… It's my fault."
"Sakura-san…"
"You're right. I shouldn't have cleared him to go on this mission. I knew he wasn't ready, he knew he wasn't ready, but I-"
"You did what you thought was right at the time." He cut her off then, "It wasn't the correct choice, but it's too late to change anything now. Kakashi-sensei wouldn't want you to waste time like this…"
"All we can do for him now is move forward."
Sakura's green eyes jerked up to look at him, and they roved over his face as if they were searching for something. Sai found himself wanting to step away, as if shifting to the side would hide him from the intense, desperate gleam in her piercing green eyes.
Finally, she seemed to find something in his dark, flat gaze that convinced her. She nodded, rubbing her forearm over her nose and sniffing once.
"You're right." her expression hardened and she seemed to collect herself, "I'm sorry Sai. Let's-"
"-Uuuahh," a low moan sounded loudly from the ground between them, "That is the last time I microwave grapes…"
"Naruto!"
Sakura dropped to her knees beside the Jinchuriki, hands fisting in the quickly-growing mud.
"How are you feeling?"
"Huh?" Naruto slowly propped himself up, rubbing at his head as he peered shrewdly at her through squinted eyes, "Sakura-chan did you change my outfit while I was sleeping? It's all black and grey now and there's all these tears in it-just like those expensive jeans you bought that one time."
"What. Why would I-" she stammered, flushing angrily, "You weren't sleeping, you idiot!"
"That's right, Naruto-chan," Sai cut in boldly, smiling sharply as Naruto's expression congealed into a caricature of horror at the impromptu suffix, "You decided to dive head-first into an explosion, smash your pea-brain against the unforgiving surface of several large boulders, and use an enormous waterfall as a slip-n-slide! How marvelous of you!"
Two pairs of eyes stared back at him in alarm. The rain drummed down around them, filling the growing silence.
"… Kakashi-sensei taught me sarcasm." He felt the need to explain.
"Haha wow!" Naruto laughed, "You sounded like a human-being, Sai!"
Sakura bonked the blonde on the head.
"Thank you." Sai bowed, certain that he was being complimented. A distinctive warmth filled him at the sight of Naruto's grinning face and Sakura's relieved smile.
How curious it was that he should be experiencing so many different emotions in such a short span of time!
Absently, the artist marveled at the number of emotions he had been party to and witnessed in the last few minutes, ticking them off inside his head.
Confusion, distress, concern, guilt, lust (he was pretty sure Sakura's thoughts had been positively euphoric when she had stared at him that one time), relief, and now smugness at his own practiced wit.
Perhaps he was undergoing something similar to the PMS that Sakura had explained to him so haltingly that one time? He pondered this, trying to determine if he would need to borrow one of her tampon devices. He understood that they were crucial to regulating the flow of one's emotional discharge…
"Kakashi-sensei!" Naruto yelped suddenly, just now catching up to the instance in their conversation when their leader had last been mentioned, "What happened-where's Kakashi-sensei? I… he fell in the water. Did you-"
"-Naruto, he…" Sakura paused and corrected herself, "We didn't get to him in time." She laid her hand on the Jinchuriki's shoulder, catching Sai by surprise.
Hadn't she just been mowing down forests at the mention of Kakashi only moments before?
He peered at her contemplatively. Her expression was carefully neutral, but Sai suspected that she was mentally bracing herself for Naruto's reaction-
-That, or she had already applied a tampon to her emotional discharge… He really needed to get some of those.
Naruto frowned, jolting Sai out of his mental shopping list.
"Oh…" Naruto blinked, "Okay then."
Sakrua rocked back on her heels at this, her pink brows raised. Sai tensed, unsure what to make of Naruto's dispassionate answer.
In his experience, the blonde Jinchuriki was never dispassionate about anything.
"O-Okay then?" the pink-haired medic's voice wavered in alarm as she repeated the statement.
Sai imagined this was rather how it felt when one was enclosed within a high-security fortress and one of your teammates accidently knocked the pin out of a grenade…
"Yeah," Naruto huffed and pushed himself up, wiping the mud off his pants unconcernedly.
He frowned, sensing their strange looks and, as if he were stating the obvious said, "We'll just go get him then. Right?"
Sai blinked, stunned… He wasn't serious? Naruto couldn't honestly think that-
-The chances that Kakashi-sensei had survived that fall while unconscious, injured, and unable to use chakra were next to none.
The Jinchuriki himself had dived into the rapids in a wild attempt to save the man…
Sai felt his brow crease and he opened his mouth to correct his teammate, but snapped it closed at the sudden prickling sensation of his hair rising on the back of his neck. His eyes narrowed and his gaze slid over to the forest beside him. What was that?
"Oh, Naruto…" Sakura's green eyes were wet with tears and she shook her head minutely, clearly at a loss for what to say, "Hes-"
"Quiet." Sai whispered, cutting her off, "Someone is coming."
The three of them whipped their heads around to stare intently into the shadowed forest. A cold breeze, at once ominous and steadying, whirled through a break in the trees into the small clearing, bringing with it a hissing spray of scattered rain droplets and stray leaves. Thunder cracked loudly overhead.
Silently, they strained their ears and listened.
Leaves rustled faintly but, through the steady, drizzling rain, there was the hushed sound of light footfalls speeding towards them.
It was immediately clear to them that they had seconds before the unknown intruder came upon them.
Sai allowed himself a brief moment of discomfort. Now, of all times, would have been a good time for their team leader to not have foolishly jumped onto a wildly careening speedboat while injured and on the cusp of unconsciousness; engage the driver of said vehicle in combat, and ride it, as it sailed majestically through the air, over the top of an enormously unexpected waterfall …
With a quick nod to his teammates, Sai slipped back behind a thick, mossy tree to the right of the small clearing they had found, receding into the shadows like a specter in the mist.
Sakura mirrored his actions and positioned herself directly across from him on the left side of the clearing, her green eyes peeking out sharply from between the thin fronds of a fern.
Naruto's hands sped through a series of hand-signs and five shadow-clones tumbled into existence around him. They all sprang up, leaping from tree-trunk to tree-trunk, and scattered throughout the dense canopy above, hiding themselves soundlessly.
They waited in tense silence, the fine rain misting over their hunched figures, listening as the footfalls grew closer to their small clearing.
...
...
Yori checked anxiously over his shoulder, his wide hazel eyes flitting anxiously over the tangled undergrowth receding rapidly behind him.
They couldn't have noticed anything. There's no way that they'd noticed…
He really hoped they hadn't noticed.
It had only been about thirteen minutes since he had finished the parameters of his mission: drive the speedboat, engage the target, escape with target, and inject said target with the assigned substance.
Easy, done.
It had been six minutes since the commencement of his own plan…
Not so easy, not so done.
Yori quickly categorized all of the items he had stolen from the target, already deciding what they would be needed for.
All of the white-haired man's smaller, more common weapons, like his kunai and shurikan, had to be sold immediately. Yori had his own anyway.
Half of the smoke-bombs and steel cutting wire could rake in some nice money too, but he would need to keep the other half for himself for when they caught on to his plan and started pursuing him. He wasn't the best trap-setter, but it might slow them down.
But the main source of income would definitely come from the extensive collection of scrolls that he man had carried on his person.
Some of them had looked like small summoning scrolls, the type that would bring in extra weapons, while others, judging by their clean, unused appearance, might hold the blue-prints to some sort of half-finished original jutsu the man had been working on. If he could find the right bidder, Yori was sure that he could earn himself a small fortune from those.
He felt a keen sense of disappointment as he remembered how he had dropped and been forced to leave the thickest, oldest, and probably the most valuable of all the scrolls behind. Who knows what had been in that scroll?
It doesn't matter, he told himself, As long as I get out of here it doesn't matter.
He just needed to get enough money off the stolen goods to buy a boat ticket to a port further south-and then he could hightail it on foot out of River Country and escape further into the North. Snow country was supposed to be nice this time of year, maybe-
How much time did he have? Yori whipped his head back over his shoulder again and quickly ran through the math for what might have been the hundredth time.
Half an hour allotted to complete the job; that evened out to about twelve minutes before he was expected back. Three, maybe five minutes before they sent someone after him... That equaled out to a twenty to twenty-two minute head start. The math was solid, this could work.
It had to work.
Because Yori really didn't think that, when Hijame caught on to his plan and sent a small band of upper-levels after him, captured him, and brought him back to his assigned base to have him publicly executed-he didn't think he could face that without crying. And, he'd promised his brother that-
-well they weren't going to catch him and that wasn't going to happen, so he didn't need to worry about that.
… But worry he did.
And maybe that was why, as he sprinted frantically through the steadily darkening forest, the young man didn't notice the trap until he was right on top of them.
One second he was flitting through a sea undulating leaves and stinging rain, and the next something cool and slimy had tangled around his legs, sending him flipping head-over-heels down to the mossy, root-tangled ground below.
Yori landed on his side with a painful crunch, his head bouncing off the ground.
"Uughh," he let out a low groan, his face scrunched in pain. Shit…
He tried to roll himself over-only to have a black, high-heeled boot stamp viciously on his shoulder and knock him, breathlessly, back to the ground.
Shit! Shit! Shit!
How did this happen? How had they caught up to him already? There was no way that they had-they must have suspected something!
Yori squeezed his eyes shut, struggling to breathe around the fear clogging his chest.
"Oh god, oh god no, please…" he whimpered.
"Look at me." a voice above him ordered cooly.
A thick sob curled in his throat, but Yori swallowed it down and forced himself, shivering in the cool mud, to pry his eyes open and look his captor in the face. The rain heightened in intensity. It pounded mercilessly down on him, stinging his face and making his eyelids flinch.
"You!"
He recoiled instinctively, cowering-and then, jerking and gasping in surprise, the boy realized that the voice he was hearing wasn't gravelly or deep.
Yori tilted his head against the falling rain and blinked his eyes, hardly daring to hope that he was at the mercy of a stranger.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
Bright green eyes framed in long, clumped lashes glared down at him frostily, narrowed and furious like a cat's, through straggles of limp, pink hair. Yori just stared.
"Answer me when I'm talking to you, dammit!" his captor snarled and she grinded the heel of her boot into Yori's shoulder. He hissed sharply in pain and instinctively tried to wriggle away, but she had him pinned.
"I would suggest that you do as she says," a steady, bland voice issued clearly from the other side of the clearing and a pale, dark-haired boy stepped out of the trees, "The hag can be quite nasty when she encounters resistance."
Hag? The young woman leering at him darkly against the backdrop of the murky, purpling sky looked many things, but "hag" wasn't one of them. Yori resisted the urge to laugh wildly.
"Can it, Sai." She snapped, tilting her head to rebuke the boy over her shoulder even as her piercing green orbs stayed locked on Yori's prone form. Her dark-haired companion, Sai, stalked silently over and took his place next to her, gazing down at their captive coldly, his expression flat and unreadable.
"This is the young assailant who drove the speedboat and went over the waterfall with Kakashi-sensei. How curious."
There was a distinct rustling of leaves above them, but Yori's attention was quickly diverted when the pink-haired girl gasped, whipped out a kunai, and shoved it against his neck. Yori gagged.
"Where is he? What have you done with-" she broke off, her eyes widening in horrified shock as she took in the extra weaponry and scrolls that Yori had stuffed into the compartments of his scuffed, gray imitation ANBU vest.
Yori quickly began to gather chakra in his hand, staring up at her with a not-entirely faked expression of apprehension and fear. Hopefully, because of his unique chakra, she wouldn't be able to sense it.
She didn't notice.
Yori resisted the urge to grin slightly, turns out that there are perks to having a genetic mutation that causes one to have no chakra affinity after all.
"Those are Kakashi-sensei's!" she exclaimed, wild anger coloring her voice, "You stole-" she bent down over him, reaching with one hand for the pockets on his chest and holding a kunai to his neck with the other-Yori interrupted her mid-sentence.
Jerking the arm at his side up in a motion so fast that even he couldn't track it, Yori caught her arm around her wrist. The kunai at his neck twitched and she froze; her sparkling green eyes wide in half-comprehending surprise, and screamed.
A rush of heat swirled up through the palm of his hand where his skin touched hers. His unique chakra absorbed her sparkling blue chakra, sucking it up through the chakra pathways of his forearm in a flurry of ravenous hunger. Her wild, furious energy exploded powerfully up through him as he leeched a miniscule taste of her chakra into his own body.
But, knowing that he had less than a second before she recovered from the shock and pain of his attack, Yori hiked his legs up under her and, gathering a portion of her own chakra in his legs, he kicked her roughly in the chest.
She flew off him.
A choked scream of terrified surprise split the air as her body shot back, flipping wildly through the stinging rain. She landed with a tremendous, earth-rattling crash into the trees lining the edge of the clearing behind her. Not one second later, splintered shards of broken wood still exploding into the droplet-strewn air, a furious rumble of echoing thunder boomed loudly overhead.
"Good God…"
Yori staggered dazedly to his feet, staring after her in horrified alarm-What the hell kind of a monster was she? Who would have thought that a watered down, flimsy imitation of her own chakra would do that?
He wasn't given a chance to think about it. Almost immediately, as soon as he had kicked the girl off of him, her dark-haired assailant had whipped out a small notebook and begun to scribble in it furiously. Yori whipped around to face him.
A horde of charging oxen, enormous and outlined in sleek lines of glistening black, erupted into the sheets of pouring rain and thundered towards him suddenly.
Yori, his hazel eyes widening in shock, stumbled backwards at the sight of the monsters flying towards him, his muscles locking in rigid terror.
His bare feet stumbled over a patch of soggy moss and he slipped and crashed to the ground, landing on his back with a frightened yelp. The behemoths thundered towards him, shaking the ground with each juddering step. Wild panic whirled through him.
Instinctively, in a reflexive motion that had saved his life countless times, Yori twisted around, gathering the remains of the girl's sapped chakra into his fists, and flopped onto his side, bringing his chakra-strengthened hands slamming into the ground as he curled into a ball.
An earth-shattering wave of raw power exploded out from where his fists made contact with the ground beneath him, shooting enormous ripples of furious, unchecked energy blasting out in waves that crumbled the earth around him.
The charging oxen stumbled over the cracking landscape, their thick legs twisting and snapping as the earth split and erupted beneath them, and they exploded in a sudden spray of stinging black ink. Yori scrambled to his feet.
And then, before he could so much as draw a weapon, the dark-haired boy was on him, swinging a short silver blade through the sleeting rain with battering force.
He had just enough time to catch a glimpse of hard, blank black eyes glaring at him with a placid steadiness that was so cold it was unnerving, and then the boy struck-Yori jerked his arms up in a reflexive block.
Searing pain exploded through him. Yori cried out sharply as the icy steel of the blade cut into the bare skin of his forearms, the slender blade singing as it sliced through the droplet-saturated air.
Blood splattered up in a vibrant spray of red. Yori fell to the ground. Muddy water blossomed up around him as his body crashed to the forest floor. He curled in on himself, hugging his shredded arms to his chest. In the midst of the heated pain blaring loudly in the forefront of his mind, Yori was distantly aware of the thunderous approach of the girl he had thrown off him earlier.
How had everything gone so wrong, so fast?
A sharp glint of shining metal shimmered above him through the pounding rain as the dark-haired boy raised his arm high to strike again. Yori gasped, paralyzed with pain and terror.
The sludgy earth vibrated under him, pools of murky water sloshing over his cheek and into his grimacing mouth, as the pink-haired girl with the enormous chakra sped towards him. Leaves shuddered and flapped wildly in the dense canopy above them.
Yori squeezed his eyes shut, a sharp sob of helpless fear spilling out as he braced himself-
-for an attack that never came. A cool rush of swirling air and scattered rain swept over him just as a loud clashing of metal rang out sharply above him. A heartbeat later several thumps of landing feet splashed down on the soggy ground, forming a scattered ring around him. Yori squinted his eyes open.
Standing directly before him, his slender legs dressed in a charred orange and black jumpsuit, a blond-haired boy stood resolutely between Yori and the pale, dark-haired shinobi, a steely kunai glinting as it held off the other's sharp, slender blade. Several shadow clones crouched defensively around him in various battle-ready stances, their blue eyes tense and narrowed.
"Naruto…" the black-haired boy breathed, his dark, flat eyes flashing in a brief moment of recognition.
"What are you doing, Sai?" The blonde boy's voice was calm and soft, but a powerful undercurrent of anger roiled faintly beneath the surface.
"I-" Yori watched in amazement as his unexpected protector, who was apparently a teammate of the pale boy and the pink-haired girl, cut his friend off mid-word.
"Calm down. He's not going anywhere."
The black-haired boy, Sai Yori remembered he had been called, stepped back concisely, bowing his head.
"Now…" an undeniable rush of foreboding swept through Yori.
The blonde-haired boy, Naruto, turned his head slightly to look back at Yori over his shoulder. Yori gasped. Electric blue eyes, dizzying in their ferocity, glared down at him, narrowed and menacing through strands of thin, feathery blonde hair. They whipped about the boy's unnaturally bright eyes, casting them in shadow as the angry wind buffeted them over his steely gaze. Yori shivered.
"Tell us. What did you do to Kakashi-sensei?"
…
...
"What was that?" Kakashi huffed as he pushed himself shakily to his knees, his half-gloved fingers scraping over the pebbles scattered through the wet, grainy mud. He looked around himself a little wildly, feeling distinctly paranoid.
"Why did he feel the need to molest me?"
The foreign substance that the cruel, clearly gender-confused young man had injected into him still thrummed heatedly through his body, bringing with it an unusual lilt of confusion and anxiety to his voice.
"Damn druggies and their pushy-I didn't want your crack!" Kakashi interrupted his half-conscious mumbling with a defiant yell, swinging his fist vehemently at the trees behind him. The motion brought with it a sudden whirl of sparking pain. He collapsed, gasping and cringing, back into the mud.
Kakashi whined lowly and closed his eyes as a cloud of popping black dots hovered lazily into his vision.
Right. He forgot-he was injured… Ow.
The jounin panted wetly through his mask, swaying a little in his half-kneeling position, and forced himself into stillness as he rode out the pain.
Finally, after an indeterminate period of time, Kakashi staggered to his feet. His pulse fluttered loudly in his ears and he hugged his shattered elbow gently to his body, shivering pathetically in his mud-slicked clothes. Things couldn't be worse.
His pants dropped to his ankles with a final, resounding shlump.
…
"Why does this keep happening to me?" Kakashi whimpered, turning his face up to the grumbling dark sky in fervent supplication, as if, sopping wet and shivering, he could entice an explanation from the heavens.
Seriously. Partial nudity was so not on his list of things to do today.
But, never one to loaf around in self-pity, the Copy-ninja forced himself to bend down and pluck a kunai up from the random scattering of items that had been dropped in the mud, left behind when the young thief had taken flight.
"These were good pants…" Kakashi sighed ruefully and stepped gingerly out of the clothes puddled around his sandals. Keeping his injured arm folded closely to his side, he yanked his mask down, placed the handle of the kunai between his grimacing teeth, and lifted up his soggy trousers with his free hand.
Shivering slightly as a chilly gust of wind brought a faint spray of icy rain sprinkling over him, Kakashi raised the waistband of his pants up to the kunai in his mouth.
He paused for a moment and let himself lament for a brief moment over how, if his beautiful young spring maiden were to stumble upon him now-she would probably just laugh at him and go back to her secret, erotic village alone.
Nope, no magical love encounters for Hatake Kakashi. Not ever.
Pushing the tangled tapestry of his tragic love-life behind him, the Copy-ninja sliced a long slit into the side of his pants with a sharp jerk of his head. Spitting out the kunai, brief thoughts of his friend Genma coming to mind at the movement, Kakashi stepped back into his now thoroughly-shredded pants.
What he wouldn't give to be back in his cozy little apartment, wrapped snugly in his shurikan-printed quilt, reading his weathered first copy of Icha Icha…
The jounin pursed his lips slightly as he, one-handedly, tied the two sides of the jagged slit together over the side of his hip.
"Hmm..." He glanced down at his impromptu wardrobe modification, noting the unattractive bulge of a knot at his side and the consequent wrinkles, "Well it won't be winning any fashion prizes, but it'll do."
…
...
"So what you're saying is, our sensei didn't die after he fell comatose, injured, and chakraless over the largest waterfall in the nation-and that you injected a lethal poison into his bloodstream?" The pretty, pink-haired girl, who he had recently discovered (through a jumbled assault of screams and growls) was called Sakura, yelled at him.
Yori stammered wordlessly back at her, wondering at what point exactly during his interrogation the role of interrogator had been awarded to the vicious, ear-drum bursting female. The other two boys cowered behind her.
"No!" Yori jerked in his bonds, unconsciously trying to raise his hands up in a placating gesture, "No, I didn't! It-Ow!" he gasped as the movement brought a wild, stinging throb of pain to his sluggishly bleeding forearms. God this was the worst.
"Oh. So what you're saying is that you just accidently happened to kidnap our sensei and, by some crazy random happenstance inject a lethal poison into his bloodstream?"
"What? No, I-"
Sakura growled fiercely and, her hands bunching into fists at her sides, she stomped sharply between Yori's spread legs infrustration.
"Eeh!" He recoiled back, flinching. Was she trying to castrate him or something? This was ridiculous!
"Ngh-I can't tell you anything when you keep interrupting me!" He cut himself off mid-whimper and then shivered at his own audacity.
Oh shit, I've gone and done it now…
Sakura snarled, and Yori swore he saw the veins in her slender arms bulge as her fists clenched even tighter.
"Oh god." He muttered absently, staring up at her with wide, horrified eyes. She looked like she was trying to sprout another limb…
Sakura suddenly dropped to a crouch over him, her high-heeled boots pressing into the soggy ground on either side of his thigh, and fisted a petite hand in his hair, jerking his head back. She pressed her face uncomfortably close to his, her eyes narrowed and her teeth clenching. The rain pounded down around them.
Her lips curled back in a ferocious snarl, clearly displeased. Yori didn't even try to hide the panicked terror in his eyes. Who even makes faces like that? He thought wildly.
"What did you just-" she paused and jerked back slightly, her livid expression suddenly slipping into one of faint surprise, "Oh. Wow-you have a really unique eye-color."
Yori paled under his freckles.
"Help me! She's crazy!" He burst out, pleading to the two other boys quivering in the background.
"What!" she yelped, affronted, and then growled again, leaning in close, "You jerk-I was giving you a compliment! Don't you know that when a lady-"
"Sakura-chan, he didn't mean-"
"-typical macho attitude! I wasn't coming onto you, you self-absorbed little-"
"-Sakura-san, you're illegitimate sexual advances are really of no consequence to-"
"Please don't let her be the one to kill me!"
"-you're not even wearing shoes! I would never like a guy who didn't wear shoes!"
"Sakura-chan! That's mean! What if he left them at a friend's house? You shouldn't-"
"You dumb, little turd, what makes you think that I would ever-"
"-the penis is a far better indicator-"
"Sai! Why the hell would you mention manparts in front of a lady! As if I want to hear about-"
"-that one time, and I had to run around the village in just my socks and it was very cold and rainy, so my toes-"
"Ohmygod!" Yori gasped out, his head reeling, "It wasn't a poison! I didn't inject him with a poison! It was a recently synthesized strain of bacteria that rebuilds its anatomical structure to model the chakra it is first exposed to, and it only reacts when it comes into contact with that specific chakra! I injected him with bacteria that had been aligned solely with the chakra of one of the higher-ups, so that when he-"
"Woah, wait. Hold on." Sakura's fury-clouded face cleared and she stumbled back a step, "Say that again."
Yori, panting from his previous outburst, looked up at her apprehensively through surprised, widened eyes. Crap. What was he doing?
He had just told the teammates of Hijame's new target highly classified information that he himself wasn't even under express permission to know.
And every second longer this brain-rattling conversation went on was another second closer to Hijame finding out he had tried to run away. And then…
"Hey! Are you listening to me?"
He could just imagine a fleet of those upper-levels crowing with malicious joy as they set out after him, the perverse delight in their eyes as they gathered their weapons and boasted over who would hurt him the worst. Who could make him cry the hardest…
"Hey!"
And then, after he'd been beaten and torn to ribbons, barely conscious and shivering with pain and fear, they would drag him up to the execution pedestal and then he'd start to sob, pleading and begging for them not to kill him like they'd killed-
"Hey." a small hand, surprisingly gentle and soft, grabbed his chin and directed his distant, petrified gaze over to a pair of steady, intense green orbs, "Calm down."
A wet sob tumbled thickly out of Yori's chest and he realized he was hyperventilating.
"It's okay. We're not going to hurt you. Shhh…"
Just over her shoulders Yori could see her two teammates standing just behind her, looking down at him. Naruto's eyes were bright with alarmed concern.
"Don't worry, uh…" she moved her hands down to his shoulders, patting them awkwardly, casting a helpless glance over her shoulder to her friends. Yori, still panting harshly, let his head fall forwards. He just felt so weak and tired-he didn't even care that he was crying in front of a girl.
"Look. I-I'm sorry that I yelled at you. I can get a little… emotional sometimes…"
"Yeah, yeah she does." was muttered behind her faintly.
"Shut up!" she jerked around and hissed quietly, "I'm trying to be a nice, thoughtful individual!"
Yori closed his eyes, an exhausted, disbelieving grin tugging at his lips. This was beyond ridiculous.
Sakura turned back to him, green eyes skipping over his slumped form anxiously.
"And I'm sorry Sai tried to saw your arms off." She continued, starting to gather momentum, "That wasn't part of the plan either. It's just," her voice caught then and Yori lifted his head to look up at her, weakly, "We need your help… You know something about what's going on here and what happened to our sensei. We need you to tell us everything you know."
"…Please," she said, and her voice sounded inexplicably weak and fervent, "You don't understand-we need to get him back. It's… It's my fault that he's even in this situation… And if we were to lose him, I don't know what I-I wouldn't…" she choked, "It would be me that killed him."
Yori stared, dumbfounded.
"You…" he started, feeling disoriented in the wake of such raw emotion, "He's your leader, right? How come you… Why do you care about him so much?"
A slightly raspy voice spoke up suddenly from behind Sakura.
"Because Kakashi-sensei taught us that you don't abandon your teammates."
Sakura stepped back from Yori slowly and both of their eyes moved to fasten on the somber, steely expression on Naruto's whiskered face.
Yori couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"Remember, Sakura-chan?" Naruto's brilliant blue eyes flickered over to Sakura's tear-filled gaze and thunder rumbled profoundly overhead, the sky now ferocious and dark over the thrashing treetops, "'Ninja who break the rules are regarded as scum. But those who abandon their comrades are worse than scum'. That's what he always said."
Yori blinked away the rainwater filling his eyes, his chest straining against his bonds with each heavy breath. What was this?
He could only remember feeling that way, that fierce loyalty and unwavering admiration, for one person in the world… And it most certainly hadn't been his leader or those guys on his team who used to beat him into a bloody, quivering pulp whenever things got slow. These… these people…
They were different somehow.
"He's done more for everyone here than I could tell you. He's a genuinely good person who values the lives of others above his own and he's saved each of us more times than I can count…It's just…"
"Without him, without Kakashi-sensei… Everything's broken."
…
...
"It's about time you called! I was starting to-Woah…" Pakkun's chiding tone splintered off into uneasy concern, "You okay there, pup?"
His pack crowded around him, their tails wagging uncertainly, as he stepped forwards and nudged his cool, wet nose solicitously against Kakashi's ankle.
The only response this earned was a slow traveling of the man's gloved hands up to the sides of his head, where they stopped; pale fingers curling into the soft silvery strands to fist tightly against his skull. Kakashi stared forwards blankly; his slender body folded in a huddled crouch, and gasped shakily.
"Kakashi!" Pakkun barked, rising up on his back legs to press his front paws to the jounin's knees, "Snap out of it!"
"Huunnh… I…" he breathed out slowly, and Pakkun noticed with sharp alarm how the man's visible eye seemed to be following an invisible script, the dusky black of his dilated pupil flitting blindly back and forth as if he couldn't see the world in front of him. Kakashi's slanted brow, dewy with sweat and plastered with tendrils of wayward silver hair, creased.
"N-no!" The dogs whined and scattered wildly in alarm when Kakashi suddenly thrashed about and fell back, flailing, into the mud.
Pakkun leaped back, his brown eyes wide. What was going on?
"Please! You don't-you don't have to-" Kakashi gasped and shuddered terribly, his mouth falling open in a breathless gasp and his visible eye squeezing closed in an expression of acute pain.
"What's going on? Why is he-"
"-need to get him emergency treatment! He smells wrong, I don't-"
"Oy!" Pakkun barked sharply, stilling the pack's frantic movements. They all turned their worried faces towards him, searching for reassurance, their tongues lolling out, panting.
"Calm down…" the small dog issued a firm layer of steady authority into his gravelly voice, "We'll find out what's wrong with him and then we'll decide if we need to go for help."
Stepping forward decisively, he trotted over to the white-haired man. But, despite his strong, unflappable attitude, a distinct flare of unease licked through him at the sight of his young master lying belly-up in the mud, clutching at his head and gasping as if something were trying to claw its way out of his skull.
Out of all the Hatakes he'd served in his long life, generation after generation of majestic, powerful warriors-how was it that it was this one who had managed to get so close to him? That it was the young man crumpled before him, who was still little more than a pup in the ninken's eyes, who never failed to pull at his heartstrings and worry him into insanity?
Pakkun had fathered many younglings in his time, with many a fine dame he might add, but he'd never really saw himself as parental or truly loyal to someone who needed him-until Kakashi.
He had sort of fancied himself a lone wolf, rogue-ish type.
But, that had all changed from the first moment he'd met Kakashi.
He still remembered the shock he'd felt when, after nearly a decade of waiting for his new master, he was jolted out of an exhilarating hunt and transported, snarling and bristling, right into the middle of a dilapidated, creaking old shed-only to be greeted by the wide, glistening gray eyes of a thin, waifish child-whose pale, bruise-splotched face and wild, tufty white hair did little to detract from the devilish, slightly manic grin that broke out over the boy's face at the sight of him.
... That, and Pakkun had been none too happy to discover that, unlike during the years he'd spent under his last master, he now looked nothing like the ferocious, sharp-toothed beast he'd been before.
He supposed his different form had something to do with the fact that, when his last master had first summoned him, the imperious man had not been an orphaned, mistreated, unloved slip of a child-who had, resiliently and without complaint, been living off of garbage scraps in the broken down shed of his foster family's backyard for the past three weeks.
Shaking his head, Pakkun pushed away the thorny tangle of memories and forced himself to return to the present. He had to find out what was wrong with Kakashi.
A loud crack of thunder burst powerfully in the dark sky overhead, whisking a sheet of stinging, icy rain down upon them from the heavens. The trees lining the shallow, pebbly beach bowed under a harsh gust of wind, their leaves twisting and flipping frantically on their stems.
His pack whined and huddled closer, Bull stomping up to sit with a forlorn splash in the mud right against Kakashi's back. Pakkun stepped forwards.
As his paws came up softly beside the Copy-ninja's head, the white feathery strands tumbling wetly into the dark mud, Pakkun lowered his head to sniff over the man's prone form and Kakashi breathed out a barely audible whimper.
Pakkun's fuzzy, wrinkled brow furrowed and he paused. He ran his tongue in a quick, soothing lick over Kakashi's ear and then continued to run his nose over the jounin.
"What have you gotten yourself into now, little one?"
…
...
"Yes," Yori stressed, for the umpteenth time, annoyance coloring his tone now, "Your sensei, Hatashi Kakate-"
"Hatake Kakashi!"
"Whatever! Your sensei is Hijame's new target." He looked Sakura plainly in the face, willing her to understand,"He's working with that Izanami woman to-"
"Izanami!" Sakura spat, her green eyes widening in furious alarm, "I knew something was up-That bitch!"
"Right. Well she wants-"
"Wait, wait wait!" Naruto whined helplessly from behind him, where he worked fastidiously on severing Yori's bonds without hurting him, "I still don't understand the whole poison thing!"
Sai, his gloved hand lifted absently as a visor for his eyes against the drumming rain, sighed agitatedly.
"Ow!" Yori winced as a particularly sharp tug sent a stab of pain throbbing through his forearms, "I told you! It wasn't a poison, it was a bacteria!"
"Bac-ter-i-a… " Naruto mouthed the word lowly, frowning, "Do you mean germs?"
"God…" Yori huffed, his eyes closed in fervent disbelief. How had these people managed to capture him again?
"Yes, Naruto!" Sakura cut off the blonde, seeing that he was about to open his mouth and waste time with more elementary definitions, "That's right! Now go on…" she nodded wildly to Yori from her perch in a nearby tree, her hands moving rapidly as she tied together the foliage to form an impromptu shelter form the ceaseless rain.
"Right. Well this bacteria was recently synthesized-that means created," he edited for Naruto's benefit, "-back in a lab in Suna. What it does is, the first time it's exposed to someone's chakra, it changes its anatomical structure-it's uh, shape-to match it."
"Gotcha. Like an octopus."
"Like a? What-"
"Don't listen to him; he's just trying to sound smart." Sakura cut in sharply, oblivious to the emphatically defiant wails this elicited from her teammate, "Just keep going."
"The bacteria that I injected into your friend had already been aligned with the chakra of one of the upper-levels." Yori explained, spitting out rainwater distractedly, "So it was sort of like I injected some of the upper-level's chakra into your sensei… But not, cause it was a bacteria strain, not a-"
His bonds fell away from him, landing with a soft splash in the growing mud beneath him. Yori felt the sudden shifting of Naruto behind him as the boy stood slowly to his feet. All of a sudden, the thick, rain-filled air seemed to sharpen around him.
Yori remembered that, despite the trio's strange camaraderie, they were still tense, dangerous… If they didn't like what they heard, they could very well decide to finish what they'd started. He stiffened.
"Here," he flinched when Sakura's light voice rang out again through the pounding rain, "Come here and I'll heal you." Naruto and Sai were already scurrying (or, in Sai's case, stalking) over to the impromptu shelter she now crouched under.
He hesitated.
"If you run, we'll just catch you again." She warned, somehow reading his mind. Yori sighed.
…
...
"We'll find another way!" Kakashi growled, "There's got to be another way!"
"No, listen to me, Rin-don't!"
His hands reached out weakly then, his gaze dark and desperate over the thin, soaked material of his mask. The dogs were quick to crowd him, tongues and tails wagging anxiously as the jounin's hands fisted desperately in their damp, shaggy fur. He cried out, a loud, hoarse cry that sent the fur bristling up over Pakkun's spine.
"Oh, god, Rin no…" He moaned lowly, burying his face in Shiba's side, shaking his head minutely, "Please… please no…" his shoulders shook, "This-no… Rin…"
Pakkun, resting back on his haunches beside the quietly sobbing man, cast his own gaze cursorily around the area… As if the stunted cries spilling out of his master, his friend didn't make him want to whine and scamper around just as helplessly as the rest of his pack.
It had been a couple minutes now, and, at this point, three things had become very clear to him.
Something had been done to Kakashi that made him smell off-kilter. Not necessarily unlike himself-but wrong. It was almost as if a nearly intangible layer of menace lurked, vicious and foreboding, just under the man's natural scent, seeping through and stinging Pakkun's nose with it's acerbic, cutting smell whenever he got too close. Whether it was a disease or some toxin, Pakkun didn't know.
Secondly, whatever it was that was causing (or at least contributing to) Kakashi's distress-there was nothing they could do about it. They'd tried everything, even nipping at the man's ticklish sides, and nothing they did seemed to rouse him. Kakashi was inconsolable. The only thing they could do was let his hands seek comfort in their soft summer coats, lick his face consolingly, and listen as the man they would give up their existence for relived one of the worst moments of his life.
And lastly, Pakkun realized with a heavy thrum of dread, even if there was something they could do to help him; they had no idea where they were. They were powerless.
"Rin…"
Kakashi's death-grip on Shiba seemed to lessen, and his heavy lid slipped back closed over his one visible eye, covering up his blind, horrified stare. He seemed to settle back into the mud, the distressed lines of his face slackening. Pakkun stood up quickly, his curly tail wagging in expectation. The Copy-ninja made no noise but for the faint huff of his breath puffing up weakly into the chilly mist.
"Kakashi?" the little pug trotted closer once again to the man, "Wake up now, pup…" He swiped his tongue anxiously over the jounin's pale, sweaty temple. Kakashi moaned faintly under his ministrations, his brow creasing again.
"C'mon now," Pakkun let a fine layer of rebuttal color his voice despite the worry knotting through him, "You're giving the boys quite a scare."
The white-haired man's visible eye-lid twitched slightly, as if he were fighting to surface from the shadowed throes of memory, and cracked open slowly.
"Mmm, Pakkun?"
…
...
"So…" Sakura drew out the word slowly, her brow furrowing in thought, "What does that do to him? The bacterium that has the anatomic structure of your 'upper-level', I mean."
She lifted her gaze earnestly to the uncertain, luminous hazel eyes of the boy before her, trying to instill a calming tingle into her healing chakra as she cradled his bloody forearms in her palms. His eyes connected briefly with hers, then flitted away.
"It…" he seemed to think about the best way to phrase his next sentence, which she didn't blame him, considering that it was Naruto who sat right next to him, "It would make it possible for the upper-level to cast a genjutsu on your sensei from far away."
Sakura stiffened.
"How far away?"
"Umm," he tilted his head back evasively, as if he were addressing the branch hanging over them, "Well distance doesn't matter actually. He could cast a genjutsu from anywhere."
Sai seemed to stop his silent perusal of the forest around them at this. Sakura watched the rogue-ninja shiver slightly as her teammate's flat, emotionless dark eyes swung around to stare at him.
"Then I think the question we should be asking is from where will this genjutsu be cast?"
…
...
"Kakashi, what is going on?"
"I… Pakkun…"
"You scared us half to death, summoning us here in the middle of nowhere after God knows how long-only to collapse and start sniveling like a prepubescent little girl the moment you see us."
Kakashi's eyes widened and he froze in the middle of shaking his head groggily; his hand paused halfway through the ruffling of his thick, tousled white locks. A tinge of pink crept over the edge of his mask.
Pakkun stiffened; he hadn't meant to be that articulate. Whoops.
"Damn, you're articulate and sexist today." Kakashi ground out, glaring cooly at the little dog askance.
"…Sorry." Pakkun tried to look apologetic. Kakashi snorted.
The pack watched apprehensively, faint whines tumbling out as they crowded around their pack leader. Kakashi wincingly pushed himself back to his feet with one arm, and every so often one of the dogs would dart in to support him whenever he looked particularly unsteady. Pakkun shuffled his paws impatiently in the mud, flicking his ears mindlessly under the onslaught of sleeting rain.
"So, are you going to tell us what happened? Or is it too embarrassing?"
Kakashi ignored him.
"I summoned you all because I've been separated from my team, and I've lost track of my client."
Pakkun sighed. He hated it when the pup acted like this. Didn't he know that they were a pack-which, by definition, meant that no one had to handle anything alone?
"Kakashi…" he whined, brown eyes following the young man's hazy outline step away from the pack through the barrage of drilling rain. The other dogs glanced at each other uncertainly, half-comforted by their master's familiar closed-off behavior and half-distressed by it.
But, before Pakkun could begin to broach the subject again, Kakashi's low voice interrupted him.
"It's been going on for a while now actually…" he admitted softly.
Pakkun's heart lurched. To think that Kakashi had been suffering-and without them! …It put a bad taste in his mouth. The pack whimpered and stilled around him, several of them falling into a sit in the cold mud.
"I'm… I'm starting to think that it'll never get better."
Pakkun opened his muzzle to say something-a rush of senseless comfort building up to spill out-but then Kakashi turned his head slightly to look at him over his shoulder. The sheer exhaustion and helpless despair that he saw burning in that single gray, half-lidded orb was enough to steal his breath from his lungs.
"It's just that, every time I use chakra I see them… It's like I-"
Suddenly Kakashi jerked.
His spine stiffened ramrod-straight and his limbs locked rigidly into place, every inch of his already white skin paling, and his gray eye, which had been so dull before widened in inexpressible horror.
Pakkun frowned. Several of the dogs snapped to alert, leaping instantly to their feet, snarling.
"Kakashi, what're you-"
"Do you hear that?" his voice was hoarse and shaky. The Copy-nin shuddered fiercely.
"Hear what? I don't-"
But Kakashi's head was already whipping around frantically, unkempt strands of silky hair slinging out droplets of water with the wild movement. He stumbled forwards and then, still clasping his shattered arm tightly to his side, he promptly turned back around and started lurching towards the forest. Pakkun leaped after him, the other dogs hot on his heels.
"Hold it right there, pup!" he barked out, coming even with the white-haired man's legs just as they started to break into a run, "What's going on?"
"We need to find them. Now."
Kakashi's answer sent a jolt of true fear prickling down his spine.
Not because of what he said, but because of the flat, strained, inexpressibly urgent voice that he had said it in.
Pakkun hadn't heard the Copy-ninja use that tone since ANBU…
The thought sent a terrified shudder through him, and Pakkun sprang forwards with all of the strength he had in his little body. The dark cover of heavy, low-hanging clouds roiled and whirled threateningly over their heads as thick sheets of rain pelted down steadily upon them.
…
...
Thanks for reading! If you wish to review, I'll get back to you as soon as I can :)
~Flinty