AN: In the midst of me trying to write a post-war Kakashi/Kurenai oneshot (which I am about 10k words in and absolutely hating every single word of that 10k lol), I kept getting sidetracked by this desire to write about Kakashi and Kurenai's relationship through the years that they'd known each other that still mostly follows canon except that they're much, much closer and have a potential for a romantic relationship regardless of Asuma being alive or not (I luv you still, Asuma). I wanted it to be a chaptered fic that, as mentioned, goes through their years from the academy through Naruto and after the war chronologically, but this specific plot point wouldn't stop bugging me lmao, so I just went ahead and wrote it. I'm not quite sure if I'll be able to go ahead and write that multi-chaptered fic I'd mentioned above, but I am going to categorize this fic on the basis of being that multi-chaptered fic I'd ideally want to write (i.e. M-rated, title, romantic pairing tag [even if it they're not quite yet romantic in this chapter]). In the event that I do end up writing it, I might change up the order of chapters or maybe even just go and create a new story post altogether that's separate from this fic. Regardless, I'm now talking too much, so I'll let you read in peace (if you haven't been turned off by the long-winded, ultimately irrelevant author's note, lol). Hopefully it's somewhat interesting of a read!
The fic takes place immediately after Team 10 (afka Team Shikamaru And Only Shikamaru, but w/e, it's not like I'm mad about Ino and Chouji deserving better or anything) + Team 7 defeat Hidan and Kakuzu.
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She wakes up in the middle of the night knowing two things for certain: that there is the smell of smoke coming from her window, and that Asuma is gone.
(Never coming back.
Make that three.)
"Yo," Kakashi says, a hand raised up lazily in greeting, scorch marks lining his bare fingertips. The tatters of his shirt, when he moves to sit from his crouch, smell overwhelmingly like lightning.
There are things Kurenai knows for certain, and yet still, she is disappointed. "You look like hell."
"Ah." Kakashi smiles, unruffled. She can see the hollow beneath his cheekbone through the rip in his mask, the shadows his hair casts over his face without his forehead protector. She tries to remember the last time he'd appeared so disheveled, and finds that she can't. Not for certain. "Is that something to say to your own personal avenger?"
Itachi, she thinks, probably. After the earlier pursuit on Akatsuki, but that she can only know from hearsay. "So it's done?"
His smile doesn't waver, but there's a drastic change in colour to it. Darker, less vibrant. "It's done."
It's in the darkness that her memory comes to light. Sasuke. Minato. Rin. Obito. His father. "His team?"
"All safe and sound," Kakashi says, almost sounding impressed, like he hadn't believed that they would be. "Some minor injuries they'll see to in the morning. Nothing that'll last."
The indentation of his mouth straightens once it's been said. Maybe he still doesn't, knows better not to; there are some wounds that are chronic, that will never fully heal regardless of time. "And Shikamaru?"
"Playing favourites now?" Kakashi drawls, but doesn't take too long afterwards to answer her question. "You already know where he is."
Kurenai does, feels the corner of her lips tugging upwards despite herself. "Let's hope he doesn't take after you and start arriving late to things."
"He's a man of his teacher's example," he says tangentially, nothing else, but there is no need for more. Kurenai already knows what that means, too. "How's the other brat?"
His open eye flicks down to her belly, makes her draw up her blanket reflexively; in surprise, because she hadn't thought that he would know, that he would care enough to know, and apprehension, because she is shinobi, and the feeling has been conditioned into her for so long. "How did you—"
"Your boyfriend's meticulous. Had a lot of back-up plans readied," he replies, shifts his weight onto the other half of his body, and under the fluorescence of her street's lighting, he is suddenly more than disheveled: he looks tired, from bone to muscle to flesh. "Really takes after the Third, doesn't he."
It's almost a relief, to see the same exhaustion she feels, on a face outside of a mirror, a face that isn't her own. "Don't let him hear you say that," she says out of habit, before she can truly think about it, but Kakashi is kind enough not to point out her mistake.
She immediately changes the subject, stands up to search for her first aid kit, gives her an excuse to avoid Kakashi's incisive stare. "Come in. I'll dress your wounds."
He slides his legs to dangle off the sill one after the other, drags his feet against her floorboards until he reaches her sofa. She thinks momentarily of reprimanding him for the noise—it is half-past two in the morning, when she bothers to look at her clock, runs out of other options to not meet Kakashi's eyes—but there is a tightness starting just below her throat, like the needle she holds has stitched through her own chest and pulled too tautly at the threads, trying to keep whatever is inside, whatever is left of her, from falling out.
She sheathes her needle, reaches for the bottle of antiseptic, gets to cleaning the minor cuts littering his forearms instead. Clinically, routinely; no thinking required.
"Shizune said my last physical was unremarkable," she says softly, mindlessly, when she's finally able to find her voice, because this requires no thinking, either; to love so surely, so unconditionally, so much, that even when she's trying to hoard it all inside, to shield it away from anyone who could only bring it hurt, she can't.
She does not regret living as a shinobi. She does not regret the loss of blood over the years; not in pinpricks on her thumbs from life-binding contracts, nor in puddles on tatami mats from slitting enemy nins' necks with the kunai she hides beneath night gowns and silk robes. She does not regret all the times that she would come home to the smell of nicotine lining her curtains so potently that it is suffocating, but still not as suffocating as the seals on their tongues, the stipulations of their oaths, forbidding them from voicing the horrors of night and the carnage of day, even to the one person who would understand it most.
She does not regret living as a shinobi, does not regret that it brought him to her just as easily as it had taken him away. But what she does regret is loving as a shinobi: quiet and cautious and fearful, always allowing the next mission to keep her from saying what she has always wanted to say.
But no more. She will love this child—their child—loudly and recklessly and unafraid, and hope, at the end of it all, that it would be enough to keep it safe.
"The baby's healthy," she adds, recalling Shizune's exact words. "No abnormal chakra flaring, no premature defects, no deviation from the standard progression of fetal development."
"Nice," Kakashi hums, as if her words had gone in one ear and out the other, both eyes shut as he leans his head back over the armrest of her couch. Kurenai knows Kakashi as much as anyone can truly know someone who doesn't want to be known, but she is an expert in masks and deceit. She knows, at the very least, when he is putting on an illusion, knows when he is pretending not to pay attention.
Even when he is cloaked in fatigue and on the brink of sleep, he is always paying attention. "Hold your shirt up for me."
He complies willingly and without comment, rolls the hem of the garment up to the bottom of his chest. It reveals a foot-long gash across his abdomen that is deep enough to require stitching but not enough that she should be alarmed for his well-being. He is no longer bleeding out, anyhow; from the darkened edges, she can tell that he has already cauterized most of the wound himself.
"Sloppy," she murmurs under her breath, picks her needle back up and sterilizes it with a shake of her head. "You couldn't let Sakura see to this first?"
"Mhm." The sound comes from somewhere low in his throat, incomprehensible. "She was busy."
Kurenai doesn't truly know Kakashi, not in all the ways that count, but she knows him to be more self-preserving than this. "Too busy to spare a minute to heal a small wound?"
"Naruto," he says simply, and Kurenai's hand halts before her needle can breach skin. "Did a real number on himself with his new technique."
She takes a calming breath, pushes the tip in and begins sewing. "But he's alright?"
She knows the answer before he says it, before she even finishes asking. Kakashi wouldn't be here in her apartment if he wasn't. "Going to be."
She doesn't know why he is here in the first place.
"This won't be too long," Kurenai says belatedly, ignores the idle thought, but Kakashi grunts his affirmation and reclines back in his seat and doesn't complain about the pain. He has experienced far worse; they both have.
They resume their lull of silence, Kurenai working gently at Kakashi's wound as he quietly dozes off. She has done this plenty of times before, has mapped out the same wiry sinews on other bodies as she does on Kakashi's right now: on comrades and civilians, on the field and off. On herself, once, but on Asuma, the most; thirteen, and he was all skin and bones, wielding his blades for the first time and without practice that he had ended up slicing himself in his arrogance; twenty, and he had grown muscle much larger than the rest of their batchmates, but not enough to outmatch his own father in their first physical fight and their final moment of honesty for the next couple of years; twenty-seven, and he is much bulkier than she remembers, but still as idiotic as to sneak up behind her as she tends to her garden, gets her shears embedded to his side in the same way that his lips become embedded to hers; thirty-one, and he is sloppier, stores just as much fat in his stomach from all the barbecue he eats, overlooks a blind spot when a rogue nin attacks, and she is so angry at him for his carelessness that she demands he learn how to stitch her up when their child has to eventually be cut open from her due to the stress of having someone as cocky as him for a husband—
And suddenly her hands are shaking, her breaths coming in shallow pants, and she thinks Asuma is gone, thinks he is never coming back, thinks it over and over and over in her head—
"Hey." —until Kakashi's voice breaks through her thoughts, strong and steady and not one bit as somnolent as before— "You ever think about it?"
—and the novelty of it all prompts her to try and recentre herself enough to respond— "Think about what?"
"How much he really takes after the Third," he says, looks her straight in the eye with only the utmost seriousness and sincerity, and then, "Like in bed. Or...you know." Both of his eyes flit down briefly to his groin—
—and it is so twisted, so normal, so Kakashi in its concept and execution, that she is still shaking to her very core, but out of unbridled laughter now more than anything as soul-wrenching as earlier. "God, you're—you're fucking sick."
"Weren't you ever curious?" he shrugs, lounges back into the couch and closes his eyes, as if he hadn't ever been awoken. "It's a valid question."
"Hush," she scolds mildly, her laughter stopping, but so does her trembling. "You'll mess me up."
"Wouldn't want that," he mumbles blearily, but poses no combat for the rest of her needlework.
She finishes stitching his wound up, gives it a last cleanse before dressing it in gauze, doesn't shake or lose breath or dwell in the absolutes of her thoughts, and then she is packing up her equipment as she tells him, "This is the most I can do. The rest, an actual medic-nin has to check out for you."
"Got it," he says, as if he hadn't ever been asleep, and stands up from her couch with an audible pop of his joints before making his way back to her window, feet still dragging evenly against wood.
This is how she remembers seeing Asuma last: with his back turned, walking away, leaving the scent of smoke and words unsaid in his trail. "Kakashi."
This is not how she remembers seeing Asuma last: crouched upon her windowsill, neck craned backwards, sparing her a cursory glance. "Yeah?"
"Thank you." She vows never again to remember anyone as she last remembers Asuma. "For everything."
Kakashi looks at her for a long few seconds, that same shrewd, calculating stare, but this time, Kurenai doesn't look away. "Let's be friends, ne, Kurenai?"
Kurenai recoils. He has always been so unpredictable, but she doesn't know whether to be grateful or resentful that he has run the gamut of unpredictability with her just in one night. "I—"
He disappears before she can answer, and it is just as well; she doesn't have one to give that isn't a question itself, anyway. Aren't we already?
"Oi!" There is an aggressive pattern of knocking coming from below her, the voice of her landlord weedy through the cracks of her floor. "How many times do I have to tell you to keep it quiet up there? I swear to God, one of these days—"
She will be evicted: for the footsteps in the early morning and the smell of smoke permeating through the vents and the copious amounts of cigarette butts falling from her fourth-floor balcony. She has heard it all before. "Sorry, Sugimoto-san."
"We'll see who's really sorry in the morning!" her landlord grumbles.
The smell of smoke is difficult to uproot from wood, though; it will never truly disappear, just as much as she will never truly want it to.
Even so, she will remain.
(This, she now knows for certain, too.)
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AN: Damn, even more notes? lmao but I just want to say how much I love that whole scene right before Asuma leaves for the Akatsuki pursuit between Kakashi, him, and Kurenai (where Asuma visits Kakashi in the hospital, wanting to say something to Kakashi, only to be interrupted by Kurenai's entrance, and Kakashi being like "but I want to know now..." lol). I've always loved the jounin-sensei quartet, and wished there were more scenes of them being friends (don't even get me started on how much Kurenai's potential was wasted in the series lol), and I just wanted to kind of touch upon on the Kakashi/Kurenai side of the square re: Asuma's death. You have Kakashi going off to avenge Asuma and then Kurenai going through the grief only a lover can go through, separately, and I just wanted to explore on how it could come together (also, as it now may be obvious, Kakashi/Kurenai was one of my favourite rare(crack?)-ships when I used to be obsessed with Naruto a long, long time ago, lol).
