This might be how it feels to be a natural disaster.
"Isn't the primary god of Fire Country a god of luck?" Hoshigaki asks while they're clearing the outpost. It's simple work. The contents are inoffensive: supplies in transit, humans in transit, personnel. The latter don't know Orochimaru's location, though a few have ideas that don't match each other's. Hoshigaki goes in with a normal katana, and neither of their transformations come close to getting broken.
"Kurama doesn't interact with shinobi." After a moment Kakashi adds, "If he did, what reason would he have to curse the Senju? Or my old team?" (As far as he told Hoshigaki, it was his team under Minato that had to deal with this.)
"I might be able to come up with some reasons for the Senju." That would sound vaguely treasonous from a Konoha-nin. Kakashi pretends he didn't hear. "Can you be certain he doesn't interfere with shinobi? How would you know?"
"He doesn't have a presence in Konoha." No temples, no public works, not even many minor superstitions. Although immigrants into the Village bring their beliefs with them, most learn quickly that practicing in public attracts a degree of awkwardness.
"Ah."
Some doubt there.
Hoshigaki's eroding trust in Kakashi's judgement has become a problem. It hasn't frayed far enough for Hoshigaki to act on it, but at this rate it's only a matter of time.
Even without that future threat, Kakashi can't work very well with someone who regards his every mildly erratic decision as evidence of a mental break.
Though he recognizes who the fault lies with.
Hoshigaki is not the one regularly pulling the amnesia card and justifying it with alternate memories or outright lies. If he's to stop treating Kakashi like a time bomb, then Kakashi first needs to stop acting like one. Maybe buy him good sushi, too, after he agreed to antagonize a Sannin for no reason other than Kakashi's asking him to.
Aside from a handful of clear-cut boundaries, he really plays along with anything. He didn't take issue with looking for Orochimaru, only with skiving off from their assignment to do it.
He's not gullible. He must understand he's being taken advantage of. But he doesn't object or seem to mind (emphasis on seem, because who but a Yamanaka can know for certain what goes on in someone else's head) unless Kakashi indicates he's not operating entirely rationally, and even that low, low bar is a post-Wave development.
He's such an easy mark that making any request at all of him is beginning to feel scummy.
It took Kakashi too long to realize since he wouldn't have expected it from an S-rank Kiri missing-nin with Hoshigaki's reputation and bingo book monikers, but the man doesn't say no. The closest he comes is later.
He means it, too. Who does that? Kakashi says later and means whenever's most inconvenient for you. Tenzo says it and means I will hide in a tree until senpai forgets we had this conversation. Of his acquaintances, only Gai, Naruto, and Hoshigaki consistently use it in good faith, which is not a comparison he should have needed to make.
Did Hoshigaki join the Akatsuki like that? Did Pein ask nicely, and his allergy to refusals compelled him to agree? Why didn't Kakashi think to ask him to stop fighting that first time they met in Konoha, since apparently it might have worked?
(Realistically it would have annoyed him because he holds higher standards for strangers than he does for his partner, but realistically Kakashi should be dead. He's grown more willing these days to entertain stupidity from himself.)
By the time evening rolls around, Nezuki's approaching catatonic, so they take a break from causing problems. The break extends into the next day: Nezuki's still randomly falling into fits of gibbering, Pakkun's pack refuses to take over mission-giving duties from her, and Hoshigaki has decided that they cannot possibly be in that much of a rush. Kakashi doesn't argue. This really is a terrible idea.
Would he have dragged anyone else he knows into a course of action this reckless, never mind someone who didn't want to come? Anyone at all? A single person?
Even looking at it purely pragmatically, he's cashed out on years' worth of accumulated trust with no plans for how to recover the balance. It's for a vital cause, but he could have handled it more delicately. To put it lightly.
What would Obito have done? Thrown into the past in a different role, responsible for the massacre of the... of a clan that wasn't his own family, involved in the Akatsuki, working alongside a missing-nin who's probably using an attachment to him as a coping mechanism for something...
...the thing is, Kakashi didn't know Obito for long. Not long enough to guess what he might do in response to this level of inanity. Kakashi ignored him when he wasn't deriding him, paid attention enough to grasp his basic personality and capabilities so Obito's flaws wouldn't trip him up during a mission, and little more than that. Couldn't name who Obito shared a household with until the team went to inform them of his passing.
On worse days, Kakashi imagines shoving his past self under that boulder before Obito could reach him.
What would Rin have done, then?
Made the best of things. Not impulsively engineered a run-in with her former genin to check their statuses, not crumbled like cookie dough after meeting Gai, not damaged her relationship with an ally as valuable as Hoshigaki through both negligence and intent. And come up with a less unpredictable way to deal with Orochimaru, although Kakashi allows himself leeway for that fault – it makes for a workable plan, if not a clean one.
Although Kakashi can't change the past, the future's malleable. He doesn't need to like Hoshigaki, or accept him, but he needs to trust him a little more if he wants this relationship to become sustainable. Which he does. It's useful.
Before he can act on that new resolve, Hoshigaki takes their downtime as a chance to start a bar fight.
"What?" says Kakashi when Hoshigaki tells him afterwards.
"I asked some of the patrons if luck was a family trait. Most of them thought I was joking, but there were a few travellers from River Country who took offense to the laughter. It escalated."
That might be the stupidest thing Kakashi's heard, and he taught Naruto out of the Academy. "You... started a bar fight with that?"
"It seems like it's a contentious topic," Hoshigaki muses.
"It shouldn't be," says Kakashi blankly. "A fight? Really?"
"I'm interested in repeating it in a different country, but I suspect I would get a similar result. What's the god Kurama's range, do you know?"
Kakashi frowns. "It's not because of Kurama."
Hoshigaki pauses, making a quiet noise in his throat. He licks his teeth and says, "Hear me out for this. The example you gave was the Senju. Is it the most common one you reach for when you need to explain the luck thing?"
Everyone uses it. "That's how it was given to me," says Kakashi carefully.
"Bad luck passed down through the clan. If it's an innate trait we all have, then it couldn't be helped that it wiped them out."
Kakashi doesn't care for where this is going. "As opposed to a curse, which would carry intent."
"As opposed to a curse, which they would have needed to do something to deserve. That's not the right reputation for a founding clan that means to keep power to cultivate, is it?"
He really doesn't like where that went. "That's... kind of a stretch."
"...Aa," Hoshigaki says, considering him. "It is."
Time to try to pretend that didn't happen. Kakashi sighs, turning away. "So, you went to verify what I said."
Hoshigaki shrugs. "It's not that I didn't believe you..."
"No, I wouldn't have trusted me either if I were you." He doesn't mean the luck thing. That part's real.
After a moment, Hoshigaki begins in the tone of an aside, "Say, Kakashi-san, do you remember why you became a missing-nin?"
Kakashi glances his way.
"I don't intend to make anything out of it," he continues when Kakashi doesn't reply. "It's inconvenient, obviously, but we are each working around it." It being Kakashi's non-existent dedication to the Akatsuki. If he doesn't remember why he left Konoha, then it stands to reason that his loyalty remains with the Village. He figured Hoshigaki suspected, but the confirmation – finally – is... precarious. "Mostly."
Will Hoshigaki finally offer a hint as to why he's put up with Kakashi this long, or is this going to be another one of those conversations where neither admits to anything and they both have to gamble on the hope that they exist on the same wavelength? Or, occasionally, that they don't.
"I have just one question," Hoshigaki says. "It'd be preferable if you could answer honestly."
Preferable, huh?
That's one of the problems with Hoshigaki's agreeableness: it makes it difficult to tell how much he knows at any given point, because more or less information doesn't affect his decision-making as much as Kakashi really thinks it should. How many lies has he noticed and let skate by?
With perfect casualness, Hoshigaki asks, "We are teammates, aren't we?"
...Maybe Kakashi overthought it. Maybe Hoshigaki doesn't possess threateningly mysterious motives. Maybe he honestly wants new food, good fights, a touchstone of familiarity, someone whose life his death would leave an absence in, a cascade of small and selfish goals. Alien desires.
Kakashi has known other ninja like that, but they don't congregate in the same spaces as him. A chuunin who wants to clock out, go home, and watch television does their share to keep the Village running, but they don't end up in ANBU or the Hokage's inner circle.
They don't start with a unique non-bloodline, work their way to jounin and ANBU and a highly selective group of dedicated swordsmasters, earn a moniker like Monster of the Hidden Mist (from their own people, no less, since Hoshigaki was virtually unknown outside of Water until he killed the daimyo of Bear Country on an Akatsuki job), and join another highly selective group of international S-rank terrorists on a quest for world domination or whatever it is Pein means to try for with that pipe dream of a bomb plot.
Is Hoshigaki even real? The Akatsuki member with the orange mask has motivations that make more sense; at least he has motivations, even if no one had determined them by the time Pein attacked and Kakashi landed in this dreamscape. What does Hoshigaki live for? What does he mean to accomplish that forces him to continue existing?
Well, at least in this moment, Hoshigaki wants a response to what he asked.
Kakashi could only ever have one answer to give. The question is whether he'll be lying as he says it.
Teammates before the mission. The other Kakashi must have told Hoshigaki, and the implications of that Kakashi bringing it up unprompted... ugh. Where in the timeline did they diverge? How did any version of himself turn out as a genuine missing-nin?
He loathes his other version's decisions on principle, but Mist wasted Kisame by driving him to the point of betrayal. Kakashi has little incentive to make the same mistake.
His loyalty lies with the Village his loved ones died for and which Hoshigaki is currently helping him to protect. Right here and now, there's no conflict of interest.
"Yeah," he answers. "We are." Until their objectives diverge, he'll make it be the truth.
Kakashi also uses the break to do some housekeeping.
"You said, a while back, that Orochimaru shouldn't have survived leaving the Akatsuki."
Hoshigaki blinks at him. "When was this?"
"During the argument about coming here."
"Suppose I did," Hoshigaki says, still without the slightest shred of recognition. "I didn't explain what I meant by it?"
"Nope," says Kakashi. "What did you mean?"
Hoshigaki mulls the question over. He starts to speak. Stops. Grimaces. Eventually he says, "It isn't that important."
"...You sure?"
Kakashi's real question is does the Akatsuki have a known fail-safe measure that activates when people leave? They probably don't, or Hoshigaki wouldn't have acted as surprised as he did when he noted Orochimaru's survival – Orochimaru left years ago, Hoshigaki should have long since noticed if he was actually supposed to be dead – but probably isn't a good enough answer to a question like that.
"Very," says Hoshigaki, in a tone that brooks little argument. Kakashi frowns; it's going to be one those long-term things he'll have to come at sideways to get a proper answer for.
They determine that it's Kakashi's presence that sends a mission spiraling. Hoshigaki's involvement makes no difference either way.
Kakashi offers to continue alone and call in Hoshigaki only for atypical amounts of trouble, but Hoshigaki turns him down. (At which point Nezuki starts crying, and Hoshigaki has to summon Baburu – a great white shark, his primary utility summon, and the only person in their immediate circle who doesn't respond to tears with either bafflement or disgust – to calm her down.
"Look, Kisame-kun," Baburu says afterwards, "she recently came out of a war. She lost the last member of her contracted clan and took a disabling injury, she doesn't have much mobility anymore, and her life is the mouse clan's last hope of settling a new contract. And now she has reason to think her entire understanding of reality is flawed. I didn't come here to tell you what choices to make, but you... do take what I mean."
"As always, thank you," says Hoshigaki, not glancing the actual culprit's way. Counting Nezuki, that makes for two people Kakashi needs to be nicer to.
"Don't summon me for this a second time. You should learn how to do this without help."
Baburu dismisses himself. Hoshigaki says while the smoke fades and saltwater drenches the grass, "He doesn't give advice anymore expecting to be listened to. I burned him out years ago.")
Aside from the first outpost, they don't chance across much overt Sound activity. Luckily, they don't need to finish each mission; they can start one, keep at it until the shape of the other shoe reveals itself, and leave immediately if it isn't relevant.
One rest day, half a day of unrelated problems, and then, late in the afternoon of the second day, a Sound team tracks them down to inquire after the ransacked outpost.
"Oh, that," says Kakashi. "Just looking for something. Didn't find it, so... guess we'll keep going."
The Sound-nin don't care much for his answer.
Once half of the team goes down, the remainders flee; Kakashi and Hoshigaki don't give chase. Watching them run, Hoshigaki says in the perfectly blank tone that means he's sitting on a whole heap of annoyance, "We're leaving a lot of survivors."
He didn't object to it in Wave, but everything about this detour seems to be rubbing him the wrong way.
"It's sloppy, I know," Kakashi replies. "Sorry for that." Orochimaru might be more inclined to investigate personally if he thinks he knows who he's dealing with, which requires keeping his people alive to pass on the word.
"You shouldn't say that if you don't mean it."
Kakashi hums. "A full year without my bullshit once this is over."
Hoshigaki doesn't point out that he wouldn't have demanded as much if Kakashi had just agreed to put the excursion off for another couple of months, but Kakashi's pretty sure he's thinking it.
"Kakashi-san," Hoshigaki says idly while Kakashi's crouched packing the bodies into scrolls (Sasori might trade a favor for corpses hosting cursed seals), "do you know what I used to do for Kirigakure?"
Kakashi glances over without slowing in his work. "No. Do you want me to guess?" Strange. They practically never talk about their pasts to each other.
"Please."
"Infiltration and assassination in ANBU. More assassination than infiltration." It sounds counterintuitive looking at Hoshigaki – six feet tall and then some, sporting gills and blue skin and circular eyes and chakra to rival a jinchuuriki – but he's competent at staying covert. Not talented, but competent. Even if he doesn't particularly enjoy it, he doesn't loathe it either.
With some care and an ANBU mask, he could have remained anonymous for his entire career. Mist-nin with affinities for swords and water are a dime a dozen. There's little other explanation for how he persisted for so long as an unknown – he's S-rank, yet he didn't even feature in a bingo book until Mist posted his first bounty upon his defection.
"I can't argue against that," Hoshigaki says. "Though I think I only killed a handful of enemies from other countries." Including some from Fire, just as Kakashi has killed Water's citizens. Quid pro quo. There's a reason they don't discuss what they did before they became missing-nin. Outside of aberrations like the Akatsuki, missing-nin who don't work alone still cluster by forehead protector.
Kakashi pauses with the scroll halfway rolled up. "You handled internal issues?"
"That's one way to put it. I was a part of the reason why you couldn't trust anyone in Kiri with your back."
...Is he threatening Kakashi?
Hoshigaki continues, "I joined the organization on the condition that I wouldn't be tasked with killing anyone in it."
Kakashi grabs that piece of information to hoard, adding a third item to the list of what he knows about the circumstances of Hoshigaki's recruitment. Joined willingly, did so not long after his defection, set terms for his entry into the Akatsuki... and those terms specifically.
If he joined the Akatsuki in return for ditching his previous job, then did Kiri lose him because they wouldn't let him change his posting? Do saboteurs run the place?
Hoshigaki says, "Orochimaru attacked you first and then bailed, I'm not fussed about him. If we come across someone else who doesn't care for what we're doing here, though... you might be on your own."
This still doesn't not sound like a threat. "Is... that likely?"
"Probably not."
That he suspects Kakashi retains loyalty to Konoha and yet hasn't acted upon that understanding muddles things. Will he not intervene to help Kakashi kill the hypothetical Orochimaru-favoring Akatsuki member or will he not intervene to help the third party, who may or may not be Akatsuki, kill Kakashi?
Actually, he couldn't have phrased his intentions this ambiguously by accident. He's doing it deliberately.
"What are you saying?" Kakashi asks, absently propping the scroll upright under his palm. Makes it faster to let go of if he needs to.
"I'd like to keep some plausible deniability," Hoshigaki replies, which answers absolutely nothing. Is this payback for what Kakashi's been putting him through?
It is, isn't it?
Kakashi says carefully, "You know what this sounds like."
"If someone notices your memory problems, Kakashi-san, it won't be from me telling them. This is about something else."
Right. Snitching on Kakashi would net Hoshigaki a new partner, and there's no telling what temperament the replacement would have. Ninja like Hidan and Deidara exist. Maybe that's more important than having a partner even halfway loyal to the cause. "Just checking." Then: "Would I know what you were talking about if I remembered everything I should?"
"You would," says Hoshigaki without hesitation. He's smiling a bit, which, yeah, confirms he's being cryptic and ominous on purpose. Like every Kiri-nin Kakashi has met, Hoshigaki considers schadenfreude the peak of comedy. "It's unlikely to come up. If it does, though, this is your forewarning. I think I've said more than I should have."
He wouldn't act this cagey about any old Akatsuki member. It has to be either Pein or Konan, and even if those two have reason to interfere they'd first have to know that Kakashi and Hoshigaki are in Rice Country instead of where they should have gone.
Kakashi says, "Has Sasori ever tried to kill Orochimaru?" If anyone in the Akatsuki might have, it'd be him.
"He has. It wasn't all that long ago."
"He failed," Kakashi prods.
"Orochimaru met him with preparations."
"And the organization knew that Sasori was going to – ?"
"Leader gave the assignment."
Sasori and Orochimaru could have worked together closely enough that Orochimaru predicted Sasori's movements even after they split. Besides that, their spy networks overlap to an extent, and Sasori's new partner is Deidara, who isn't particularly stealthy. Orochimaru had plenty of innocuous methods by which to anticipate the attack.
But Hoshigaki's implying the existence of a mole.
He might believe it, or this might be an elaborate joke at Kakashi's expense. The latter seems a little out of character, but Kakashi will admit that he's been very annoying to Hoshigaki lately.
"You don't mind covering for whoever it is?" Kakashi asks.
Hoshigaki sits on the question for a moment, thumping his fingers against his katana's hilt. "...I do, actually. I'll be happier if I'm wrong."
Assuming he isn't wrong, though, the worst case scenario has upgraded from Orochimaru showing up heavily prepared for his actual opponents to Orochimaru having a means by which to contact Pein or Konan. Hoshigaki really could have mentioned this earlier.
Well, too late to account for it now.
Pakkun returns an hour later with directions to the base the surviving half of the Sound team fled to. It isn't the Hidden Sound proper, but at this rate they'll find it eventually.
They break into it come nightfall. A supply depot, barely more than an oversized cellar tucked away beneath an existing village. Nobody in this base has much to say either. As before, they kill the combatants, leave the runners and noncombatants alone, and break out the people who want it. Tucked alone into one of the side rooms sits a glass tank of water with a chakra signature and nothing else inside; Kakashi raps it lightly with his knuckles and says, "Are you conscious in there?"
"Of course," the water tank replies in a voice too young to have broken. "Hey, hey, is that Kisame-senpai?"
Hoshigaki looks up as he ducks through the doorway. He's still passing as a Konoha missing-nin.
"That chakra's hard to mistake," says the water tank smugly. Fair enough. Sometimes they put effort into their disguises, and sometimes they throw one on just so they can claim they tried.
Hoshigaki says, "You're..."
"Suigetsu," answers the water tank. Sasuke's potential teammate, huh? What an odd place to meet him for the first time in. "Hoozuki Mangetsu's little brother." Hoshigaki continues to stare. "Come on, you don't remember me?"
Recognition dawns. "Suigetsu! How did you end up here?"
"Let me out first?"
Hoshigaki steps forwards and slams the butt of his katana into the glass to crack it. Another strike shatters a hole large enough for water to stream out of.
A boy peels himself off of the puddle spreading across the floor. He grins at Hoshigaki with a set of sharpened teeth that mirrors the other Mist-nin's. If Sasuke leaves Konoha again, looks like he'll need to find someone else for his team. "Appreciate the help, senpai."
"Luck was on your side," says Hoshigaki, huffing a laugh on the last word. Kakashi moves back to take a seat on the edge of a stack of crates. "But... next time, don't call someone out if you recognize them under a henge. I would have broken you out anyway. How did you find yourself here?"
Suigetsu scratches the back of his head. "Yondaime-sama thought I'd be more useful filling the Village's coffers than I was as a ninja."
That's... absolutely disgusting. What kind of kage sells their ninja?
"...Did he," says Hoshigaki steadily. An odd look settles across him as his gaze flicks over Suigetsu's face, from the bitter edge curdling Suigetsu's smile to the hard sheen in his eyes. This boy is no more a child than Kakashi was at his age.
"It was a matter of time. Kekkei genkai, you know?"
"Yes," says Hoshigaki. "I do." The unreadable expression doesn't clear while he regards Suigetsu. "Do you have a place to go?"
Suigetsu pouts. "No. I spent a lot of time thinking while I was in there" – he jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the tank – "but now that I'm out again, I don't know. Terumi-san, maybe." He chews on that for a bit, then perks up. "Hey, senpai, what are you doing here?"
"It's a long and boring story."
"It can't be that boring. Did you lose Samehada? Didn't you steal her when you ran?"
They left her with Pakkun and Nezuki a few miles out. "Are you interested in her?" Hoshigaki asks.
Suigetsu seems to suddenly remember that Hoshigaki's a jounin to his chuunin or genin. He takes a step back and doesn't react as his bare foot lands on glass shards. It doesn't draw blood, either.
Hoshigaki smiles and sheathes the plain sword at his waist. "She's still with me."
"Kametou was a Hoozuki, you know," says Suigetsu slyly, creeping forwards again. Not a name that means anything to Kakashi, but Hoshigaki doesn't seem lost by it. "That's how they stayed in the ocean long enough to get her."
"Kametou hatched from a turtle egg." What? "That doesn't sound like a Hoozuki."
"What would senpai know? You weren't my mom's midwife."
"I know that if you try to claim Samehada right now, things will end very badly. Learn some patience and wait a few years like the rest of us. Maybe I'll even drop dead on my own and you won't need to grow strong enough to kill me."
Suigetsu frowns. "I might not be alive in a few years."
Out of nowhere, a staggering amount of killing intent floods the room, cold and liquid and heavy, the weight impacting like a physical blow. An old, old grudge. Suigetsu stumbles and hits the ground on his rear, and even Kakashi has to pay attention to keep his breathing even. The only reason he doesn't reach for a weapon is because Hoshigaki, the source of the pressure, hasn't budged an inch. Kakashi would have liked a warning.
Hoshigaki snorts. "Mangetsu was never so bitey. But you're your own person, aren't you?" The bloodthirst ebbs, though Suigetsu doesn't yet move to stand, his chest still heaving and his eyes wide.
Kakashi hasn't felt killing intent from Hoshigaki before, no more than the ignorable background amount that leaks from any chakra user playing for keeps. Which is unusual – the baseline scales according to chakra level, so Hoshigaki's default should be several times worse than average. Kakashi figured he tamps it down deliberately so he won't discourage fights before they can begin, but he didn't expect to be quite this right.
Hoshigaki's bizarrely laid-back, but he frequently does things that make it impossible to forget where he came from.
"Get an idea of what you're going to do," Hoshigaki says, unaffected. "Weapons and clothes are on the bodies outside. You may have to adjust them for your size."
As Suigetsu hauls himself to his feet, grabbing the shattered edges of the hole in the tank for leverage, Kakashi leans back on his crate and says, "Kisame, what's your plan if he doesn't have anywhere to go?"
Both of the Mist-nin glance his way. "Suigetsu's a chuunin," says Hoshigaki, side-eyeing the ninja in question. "You should be by now, at least."
"Tokubetsu, actually." Suigetsu's bounced back from Hoshigaki's show of force very quickly.
Kakashi raises an eyebrow. Even for the Bloody Mist, that feels young. "Specializing in kenjutsu?" he guesses, and Suigetsu nods. He's certainly not specializing in basic sense. If Hoshigaki's disguise was one he actually cared about and Kakashi didn't know he was transformed, Suigetsu would have blown Hoshigaki's cover and revealed himself as an information leak. Not outing someone under a henge when you don't understand the situation shouldn't need to be taught.
Hoshigaki shrugs. "He's a jounin. He can take care of himself."
"What about the people around him?"
Hoshigaki blinks. "Oh, good point. Suigetsu, if you're striking out on your own, we need to talk first." A twelve-year old jounin from the Bloody Mist won't have any idea how to fit in on the mainland.
"Just talk?" Suigetsu murmurs. "I can let you know once I decide. Probably."
"Certainly," Hoshigaki corrects.
Suigetsu smiles like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. "Of course. Senpai, who is that? Have we met?"
"Uchiha Itachi," Kakashi lies, because there's no way Suigetsu won't spill everything to the first familiar face who asks him about who he met here. He has no incentive to keep quiet. Hoshigaki looks as if he means to say something – Kakashi realizes suddenly that taking the name of an Uchiha might be tasteless coming from him – but a second later the impulse passes without comment. "A pleasure."
"Don't ask what caste," Hoshigaki says quietly when Suigetsu opens his mouth. "He's not from Kiri."
Kakashi waves. "Konoha-nin here."
"Konoha," Suigetsu repeats slowly, handling the word like a mouthful of food he hasn't yet decided if he enjoys or not. "Are you two working together? Why?"
Kakashi replies, "Isn't it obvious? We're married."
...Okay, so Kisame losing it at that is unexpected. Suigetsu glances between his senpai, currently doubled over and breathless (he's lowered his hand since, but at the initial bark of laughter he moved to cover his mouth like some demure aristocrat, which was such an incongruous first response that Kakashi keeps doubling back to the memory to check that he isn't making it up), and Kakashi, steadfastly pretending Hoshigaki's reaction was planned.
"Kisame-senpai," Suigetsu says, "aren't you aiming too high?"
Does Suigetsu know who Itachi is? ...No, he has no reason to, Itachi isn't in bingo books. So then...
...right, other people care about physical appearances, and Hoshigaki's features aren't the sort that show up on magazine covers. Whereas Kakashi's henge is Minato with enough adjustments to make it not a copy.
"Brat," Kisame drawls, still catching his breath, "I'm aiming too low. I met him when I was fishing him out of a dumpster. He's a raccoon with delusions of grandeur."
"That's rude," Kakashi mutters without heat. Didn't they meet when Hoshigaki beat the other Kakashi up to recruit him into the Akatsuki?
"But you won't tell me I'm wrong."
Sometimes the store is a five minute walk away, and the trash can with the practically uneaten tray of takoyaki he literally just watched a parent discard is a five second walk away. He has no defence.
"I don't want to make you look bad in front of your kouhai," he replies, which sets Hoshigaki off again. Kakashi turns to Suigetsu and props his elbows on his knees. "Suigetsu-kun, it's best if you don't hang around us too long." Nezuki is one thing, but Suigetsu's a hundred times her size, a much larger target.
"I wasn't planning to," Suigetsu answers, eyeing Hoshigaki. "You talk a lot more than you used to, senpai. You don't sound like a missing-nin."
"It's always flattering to hear that I don't sound like a starving, diseased bandit pining after the structure only found in a Hidden Village."
"Suigetsu-kun, you're going to catch a cold," Kakashi prods.
"Am not," Suigetsu says, but he darts past Hoshigaki and out of the room anyway to look for clothes.
He tries to slip off into the night as soon as he's looted an Oto uniform from the nearest-sized corpse and doctored it enough with a needle and thread borrowed from Kakashi that it won't fall from his shoulders. Hoshigaki stops him with a sword at his throat, then sits him down with a bottle of water and a pair of ration bars, all of which he practically inhales once Hoshigaki has also taken enough of each to prove that they're probably not poisoned.
"I don't care where you mean to go," Hoshigaki says while Suigetsu eats, "beyond if it's Water Country or mainland."
"What about Wave Country?" Suigetsu says, spraying crumbs.
"Or Whirlpool, I suppose. Look at that, we've both seen a map. For this, Wave can count as mainland."
"You're being awfully helpful. It's not that I don't appreciate it, but..."
"I'll tell you the angle after you answer."
Suigetsu frowns at him. "...Mainland," he says eventually. He gestures with the ration bar. "Maybe I'll see about Terumi-san later, but if that side loses I don't want to get locked up by Yagura-sama again."
The cowardice takes Kakashi's breath away, but Hoshigaki doesn't bat an eye. "In that case," Hoshigaki says, "I didn't break you out so you can go get yourself killed tomorrow by drawing too much attention. Civilians on the mainland can afford to be softer than you're used to, and having a bloodline limit means something different."
Hoshigaki lets him go after pounding in some ground rules about how not to behave and giving him another ration bar for the road. It turns out to be very much for the best that he left quickly, because the next day Orochimaru comes to meet them.
