"I found you a partner," said the Uchiha who went by Madara. He never came across as particularly cheerful, but he sounded more irritated than usual then.

"I can keep going alone."

Madara waved dismissively. "No. It's not worth risking. Although," he added darkly, "your chances might not be better with this one." Before Kisame could ask if he had drawn the short stick for Kakuzu – he really had thought he was less expendable than that – Madara continued, "What do you know of the incident that occurred in Konoha a few months ago?"

Kisame had an inkling of where this was going. "Something happened with one of their clans, didn't it?" They'd kept a lid on it, and he hadn't gone prying. Having just broken from Kiri, he'd had other concerns when the news began leaking.

"Most of the Uchiha are dead."

"Oh. That's your..." Surely Madara wouldn't have recruited whoever had committed a bloodline cleansing against his family? Though it might have gone some way towards explaining his mood if he had.

Madara grunted. "A Konoha jounin was the perpetrator." He clapped his hands together. "Hatake Kakashi. It won't be easy, but try to get along. Ninja of that caliber don't grow on trees."

"You dislike him."

"Yes, well... you might understand once you meet him." He stood to leave. "If things come down to it, you're more important than he is. I'd prefer you didn't kill him, but if one of you has to die it's better if it's him." He'd already halfway vanished when he paused to add, "Oh, and he might not have joined willingly. Watch out for that."

Kisame had heard worse character recommendations.

He went to find Kakashi with more curiosity than caution. A shinobi who'd single-handedly decimated a major clan inside a Hidden Village's walls and without that Village's sanction sounded like a decent fight, if nothing else.

The man turned out to look fairly unassuming (not splattered in fresh blood) and did not greet Kisame's appearance with a rehearsed, flat-toned monologue on his hatred of bloodline limits or his storied and much-beloved stint working in T&I. When Kisame arrived he was only picking at the collar of his cloak, an impressive amount of distaste conveyed by the visible quarter of his face, rather than, say, in the midst of flaying a small animal or anonymous human limb. Kisame couldn't instantly take a gander at what Madara had found off-putting in him, which either boded well or boded terribly.

He did emit a fragrance suggesting that he hadn't washed in a week, and that at least one of the nights in that week might have been spent adjacent to a dumpster, and while none of it was red and bright there was blood on him. Most of it smelled human.

Kisame decided not to mention it. Madara had said to get along, which was a novel order for Kisame to receive and somewhat appealing on that basis alone. As far as maladaptive quirks went, lacking the motivation to do his own laundry was not problematic if the shinobi in question could deter scent tracking. The burgeoning infections he could scent beneath the grime were a more pressing concern, all told.

And then the first words Kakashi said were, "Of course it's Kiri," spoken with an ocean's worth of utter, dripping contempt.

Kisame managed for ten seconds not to take offense, but Kakashi had no compunctions against giving offense. Everything out of his mouth after that was a low-effort insult up until Kisame began returning the favor, to which he responded by upping the ante and digging for actual wounds to attack.

Kisame put up with the escalation for another half a minute, mostly to see if the Konoha-nin was going somewhere with it. Then Kakashi edged up largely by accident against the circumstances surrounding the newest Swordsman's acquisition of Samehada, and Kisame dropped all pretense, unhitched his sword, and asked, "You want to go?"

Kakashi had blatantly been fishing for that line in the first place and therefore offered no objections. Almost before he finished speaking, Kisame brought up Samehada to catch a tanto crackling with blue-white electricity.

He wasn't sure how impressed to feel over the level of recklessness required for a known ninjutsu specialist to immediately gun for kenjutsu in a fight against one of the Seven Swordsmen. Kakashi was either unbelievably arrogant, had a trick up his sleeve, or actively wanted to die.

A little of column A, a little of column B, it turned out. He had a trick – the transplanted Sharingan in his left eye – but he also wanted to die. Kisame normally felt significantly scummier about being used as a suicide method, but, to be fair to him in this case, Kakashi was a really good fight in spite of his apparent status as a ninjutsu specialist who hated using ninjutsu.

Kisame had no such qualms and flooded the area the first opportunity he got in order to deny the Leaf-nin access to the nearby trees. The battle fell into something of a rhythm after that, but it was broken quickly by Kakashi stumbling as his foot went through the water's surface.

Kisame pulled back a swing that would have decapitated the man and waited with some bafflement as Kakashi recovered. "Are you alright?" he asked, not because he particularly cared or because the answer wasn't particularly obvious but simply because it seemed warranted.

Kakashi went for his throat in lieu of answering. Kisame didn't mind.

They were well on their way to killing each other when Kakashi finally resorted to his first non-clone, non-substitution ninjutsu. Kisame didn't get to see what it was meant to do, because on the fourth seal a monstrous amount of plant matter rose out of nowhere and immobilized them both.

"I left you for five minutes," said Madara, stepping out of the air between them.

Had he? It had felt longer. Kisame tested the give of the wood and determined that he could free himself if he put in significant effort, though he refrained from doing so. No reason to reveal that card. Across from him Kakashi didn't even struggle, though when the Konoha-nin spotted Madara his glower and a trick of the light made his Sharingan seem to darken.

Maybe not a trick of the light, actually, since Madara reacted by warping over and shoving his palm over the eye. Kakashi flinched back, but there was nowhere to go. Madara leaned in and whispered something Kisame couldn't make out, then grabbed Kakashi's cloth headband and pushed it down none too gently to cover the doujutsu.

The Konoha-nin slumped over, apparently unconscious. Genjutsu? Whatever the cause, Madara seemed unconcerned. He headed over to Kisame and set a hand on the wood restraints, which began to retract into his skin. He either ignored or didn't pick up on the implied question.

"Is he dead?" Kisame asked finally.

"Chakra exhaustion."

Chakra what.

"Yes, really," said Madara, sounding less than impressed with the entire concept.

Kisame continued to doubt.

The condition occurred rarely, typically in shinobi who'd been pushed to the brink and let loose every technique in their repertoire under the expectation that they were about to die anyway. It was difficult to contract chakra exhaustion. Chakra reserves operated similarly to physical muscles – the more the owner strained them, the harder it became to keep pushing them. The body kept limits in place to prevent the mind from working it to death.

On top of which, Kakashi had employed a total of two non-solid clones, one substitution, and a few minor body and weapon augmentations, and Samehada had stolen nearly no chakra because he tasted staticky and she wasn't a fan.

Ah, and Kisame supposed there was the doujutsu too, but one red eye couldn't have taken that much energy to sustain.

"How low is his capacity?" he asked skeptically. When Madara didn't respond, Kisame had a thought and revised the question: "You said it wasn't his own decision to join."

Madara said nothing to that either.

"When did you find him?"

The Uchiha turned back to look at the other Konoha-nin. "Yesterday."

"Enlistment or death," Kisame guessed.

A grunt.

"And he chose..."

"Badly. He chose badly," Madara said, crossing his arms. "I trapped him in a dumpster overnight. His outlook was much brighter in the morning."

So Kakashi had already lost a fight and then hadn't slept at all afterwards. That explained quite a bit of his performance against Kisame.

In other news, Madara had beaten up Hatake Kakashi and locked him in a crate for eight hours without taking a visible injury. Two bloodline limits and a unique space-time translocation technique in a single person had never seemed more excessive. He had to have some weakness. That musing aside, though... "Petty," Kisame remarked, because it had been. Little wonder Kakashi had acted half rabid.

Though he had first killed Madara's family, for some reason, so the Uchiha's spite didn't seem unwarranted.

Madara glanced at Kisame, pressure in the air, and Kisame abruptly remembered that he was still speaking to the Fourth Mizukage. He looked away, wiping his face and body language blank. "My apologies."

"Can you work with him?"

Wasn't that a question. Kisame had a proper battle to look forward to, one where his surprisingly entertaining opponent wasn't sleep-deprived, injured, and chakra-exhausted of all ailments, so he would at least put up with Kakashi for as long as it took the man to physically recover. Past that point the future became murkier. Try to get along was what Madara had said, but that required some level of effort from both parties, didn't it?

It was unfortunate.

Kisame said, "He doesn't seem willing."

"He's never handled himself appropriately in teams," said Madara. Kisame wasn't sure what the implied level of familiarity signified. "Don't force yourself. I'll just have to find something else to do with him."

He headed to Kakashi, Kisame plodding after him. Looking at the Konoha-nin like this, up close and barely breathing, it was easier to wonder at what set of circumstances could have brought him to this point. Kisame had seen similar – Kisame had been there not even so long ago, though he didn't quite like thinking about it anymore – but Kakashi was from the Leaf, not the Bloody Mist.

Well, shit happened everywhere, evidently. Konoha had churned out Madara, too, so there had to be some deep rot festering behind its walls.

"We can try it," said Kisame. When Madara looked up at him, he clarified, "A trial period as a team."

"Why?"

If Madara had said no, Kisame would have dropped it. Part of him appreciated that the man had not. Another part did not appreciate the question he didn't know how to answer. He wanted to mull it over, but Madara started fidgeting impatiently after only a few seconds.

"You said," Kisame responded then, picking the words out carefully, "that for as long as I'm in the Akatsuki, I'll never receive an order to kill another member of the same organization." Madara had stopped shifting his weight. He was doing nothing but listening. Kisame felt uncomfortably exposed saying the things he was beneath that level of attention, despite the fact that in reality he was only repeating Madara's words back to him like a trained parrot. "If someone dies because of me, it will not be from an order.

"Autonomy. Not – real choice, but more than I had. The allowance to turn down missions as long as they are not vital. To practice skills that have nothing to do with being a good shinobi. To travel on my own terms rather than being confined to the Village outside of missions. I'm still an asset, but it doesn't harm your agenda to let me be a person on the side. Are you willing to extend that to letting me choose my own partner?"

"I might be," said Madara dispassionately. He had turned back to Kakashi. "But why him?"

"Well, it's a bad idea," said Kisame. "If he keeps acting like he was, I'll need to kill him just out of self-defense."

"...And?"

"I've taken missions with ninja that way before." He had always felt at least a little anxious about receiving those assignments. They tended to turn out far more exciting than they really had to be. "But I wouldn't be against trying something new this time, with him."

He braced himself. If he was speaking to Yagura, the next sentence would get him messily executed. But this wasn't Kiri, and while Madara might or might not have created Yagura, a shinobi was not their jutsu. "I've never been allowed to get emotionally invested in a teammate." Or any human being, actually. Himself included.

Madara twitched, and Kisame grimaced and forced himself not to tighten his grip on Samehada. "Emotionally invested. You care about him."

Kisame might have overstepped after all. "No," he said tightly. That was true. He'd known Kakashi for all of five minutes, during which time Kakashi had insulted his Village, his sword, his choice of organization, and him. But maybe, if he was allowed to try, the potential was there. He'd never done it before, so he had no way of knowing for certain either way.

"There might be anything wrong with him. You don't know," said Madara. "He might experiment on children. He might kill all his teammates. He might drink the lifeblood of kittens."

Kisame had done one of those, but as he didn't have a death wish he kept his mouth shut. Also somewhat curious was that Madara had not mentioned the bloodline massacre Kakashi had verifiably committed. "I'm not sure high-ranked ninja without at least one major psychological problem exist."

Madara was silent for a long moment. So was Kisame, though perhaps for a different reason.

Then Madara said, distinctly offended, "I don't have issues."

...No, of course not.

The Uchiha tsked and swept away, unpatterned cloak billowing around him. "Fine. Do what you want. There's a doctor in a town fourteen miles to the southwest who will treat him with no questions asked. Blue sign over the door, empty pigeon nest on the roof. This is a one-time thing" – Sharingan hypnosis, in other words – "but tell her you're from Rain and she won't take payment."

Then he was gone, leaving Kisame alone with his poor decision.

But it was, in the end, his decision. He figured there was a good chance he would regret it, but right then and there he did not know how to. He found he was alright with that.