Chapter 28

Hatake Cousins

It killed Kakashi just a little bit to hear about Sakura's bad days. She never wrote about them in her letters, but Kusa and Pakkun were more than happy to share every detail whenever they poofed back to their realm. Hearing about her bad days at the hospital, Tenzō's meltdowns and the nights she lay awake unable to sleep made the ache for home a nearly unbearable weight. He wanted to be home, to kiss her to sleep, and to comfort his son.

The unending rain and cold in Lightning did nothing to improve his mood.

"Boss… They're doubling back."

Kakashi pulled his head back to the mission. Hopefully this would go a long way toward ending things earlier. So he could go home, so he could stay home. "Finally." He had been hanging back far enough that they either hadn't noticed him or didn't care. As they got closer to Kumo, wanting to catch them before they were in the village, he had stopped masking his scent and followed much closer. "Do they have any ninken with them?"

Senbei sniffed the air again, his tail wagging after a few moments. "Yes!"

"How many?"

"Three. I don't recognize them, Boss."

Kakashi rubbed his companions' ears and drew a kunai. "Good boy, Senbei. Remember, we don't want to fight with them, but if they attack first, defend yourself."

He barked softly, crouching, ready.

Thirty-two seconds later, three sets of glowing eyes appeared around the brush and boulders. They growled menacingly. Senbei responded in kind.

"I told you it was too good to be true, Raiu. He's obviously a Hatake, but not one of ours."

A disembodied female voice seemed to come from everywhere. Pulling his mask down below his nose, Kakashi inhaled deeply. A scent that felt familiar and yet totally foreign filled the area. Pack.

"Hm. Too bad. I was hoping—well no one I wanted to see again would have abandoned us for an enemy nation."

Raiu, male. He sounded closer and to Kakashi's left, and bitter, angry.

"I guess the White Fang wasn't the only one of our Konoha cousins to survive the last war after all."

There. Ten feet to his right. "I apologize for not visiting sooner." He fixed his mask and held his hands up in surrender. "I come as a Hatake first, not on behalf of Konoha. I just want to talk."

There was an angry snarl to his left and a kunai whizzed just shy of his head. "Why should we trust you, Konoha filth? You may be a Hatake, but you are an enemy."

"I didn't follow you all the way here to fight."

There was a flash of gray and white and another snarl as Raiu flew at him. A narrowly deflected lightning blade charged at his chest, followed by a quick barrage of kicks and kunai.

"Raiu!"

Seeing him up close, Kakashi determined that he was younger, twenty at the most. His taijutsu was good, fast and powerful. He tried another lightning blade, again Kakashi managed to dodge.

Beneath his white flak vest, he wore a tight black shirt, revealing a broad chest and muscular arms.

No wonder he hits so hard.

Deciding he needed to end this quickly, Kakashi danced around the younger shinobi, defending against his taijutsu as he looked for an opening. There. Summoning his own purple lightning, Kakashi struck.

Raiu's eyes widened, the light from Kakashi's attack illuminating him in the darkness. Getting his first good look at his face, Kakashi could see in his eyes that he knew that he was outclassed.

Huh. We do kind of look alike.

The purple lightning missed. Shit. But it was so close that his pants were singed as it crashed into the ground with a thunderous boom. Kakashi did not ease up his attack, did not allow an opening, swinging his own kunai, beating him down with his own powerful taijutsu.

Fangs flashed near his face.

He's getting desperate.

"Yield! I am not here to fight you."

Another electric charge, this one missing wide. "A Hatake never yields!"

No wonder we all died out.

"I am not here to hurt you."

He laughed.

Alright then, fuck you too.

Kakashi summoned his purple lightning again, this time not holding back. It slashed through the chill night air beside Raiu's head, the stench of singed hair and burned flesh filling his nose. A purple charged kunai stabbed through the shoulder not protected by his flak vest, followed by a knee to his gut.

"Raiu!"

He flew backwards into a tree and Kakashi flickered to his side, slamming him again into the tree. "Yield! Please. I'm not here to hurt you."

He was struggling to breathe, his chest heaving with great shuddering breaths. His ninken howled and snarled somewhere behind them and blood ran down his chin.

He glared up at Kakashi with dark, suspicious eyes for several seconds before sighing and dropping his head to the side, exposing his throat. Kakashi frowned, unsure what he was expecting him to do. Deciding to go on instinct, he pulled his mask down and bared his fangs, growling viciously. It felt kind of silly at first, but Raiu's reaction made him think it was the right thing to do.

The younger Hatake swallowed thickly, squeezing his eyes and lips shut, a low whine in his throat.

Huh. More things Sakumo never had the chance to explain.

Kakashi stood up, looking around to find three strange ninken laying in the clearing, panting and docile. The female, Raiu's sister, crouched beside them, scratching Senbei's ears. Her silver hair was tied back in a thick braid that fell to her waist. Like her brother, she wore a tight black shirt beneath her white flak vest and her hitai-ate hung around her neck. "My name is Mebae. You must be the one they're calling the Purple Fang."

Kakashi groaned, nodding vaguely and looking back down at Raiu. "Can you stand?"

Raiu shifted, trying to get up but a tremor from the electric attack went through him and he hissed in pain. He shook his head.

Sighing, Kakashi glanced at the sister. "Is there shelter anywhere near? He needs to get out of the rain." He looked up at the dark sky, squinting against the rain. "I'd like to get out of it as well."

She tipped her head in thought for a moment before shaking her head. "No. But we have tarps."

Five minutes later, they had stretched a tarp out between trees over three of Kakashi's mud walls and hung a lantern. It was dry, at least.

Kakashi crouched beside Mebae as they worked together to patch up her brother. The wound on his shoulder had been immediately cauterized by the electricity, but it was deep. "Damn. I wish my wife was here."

Mebae glanced up at him from the corner of her eye. "Your mate is a medic?"

He sniffed, focusing his chakra to heal the worst of the damage. "She is. As skilled as her mentor, Senju Tsunade. I, unfortunately, won't be able to do much. You'll need to get him to a real medic soon."

"One of the Sanin? Why is she not at your side, then?"

He frowned, not answering.

"You have pups at home?"

Kakashi sighed. "Yes."

"Hm. You have not told us your name, cousin. Unless you'd prefer we call you the Purple Fang?"

Finishing what he was doing, Kakashi sat back on his bedroll and pet Senbei. "I'd rather you didn't." When both siblings suppressed small, smug smiles, Kakashi sighed. "For the last year, I've been called Karasu. My wife and I live with Sakumo and his son."

Raiu winced as he shifted, frowning at Kakashi. "Just the last year? What were you called before?"

"Look, I've got a long and unbelievable story. A story that I don't want getting back to my Kage or his council."

Mebae looked incredulous. "Then why tell us? We're ostensibly enemies."

Kakashi shrugged. "Because we're either going to decide to trust each other and you'll help me, or you'll keep it to yourselves because no one else would believe you. And I'm not really worried about you going to the Hokage. He's definitely your enemy."

The siblings shared a look before giving him their full attention, Mebae speaking for both of them. "You're pack, whoever else you are. You could have killed Raiu, but you didn't. We'll hear what you have to say, cousin."

"Good."

"Wait, and you never met us? Never even heard of us?"

Kakashi yawned. He had left out most of the irrelevant details, focusing on how bad the third war would be and a few other things he thought were pertinent. But it was late and he wanted to reread his latest letter from home and get a few hours of sleep. Oh well.

"No. I assume you die in this war, and probably fairly soon. By the time we were working together against Madara, there definitely weren't any of us left in Kumo." He made himself comfortable, eyeing her closer in the poor lamplight as he pulled out Sakura's scroll. Mebae looked very much like her brother, who himself looked like he could have been Kakashi's brother, save for the bright blue eyes. For a clan that supposedly frowned upon inbreeding, they were remarkably similar looking, even as distantly related as he presumably was with these two. Raiu even had a mole beneath his right eye. "I would prefer you to live, now that I've met you."

Mebae scoffed, watching her younger brother sleep. He had listened to Kakashi's story, decided he believed it because, 'only an idiot would lie about something so ridiculous,' and promptly passed out. "I'm not sure how much sway we have with the Raikage, but he's been saying the same thing as the Tsuchikage. Konoha started this." She sucked her teeth, shaking her head. "Not that it was difficult. There has been lingering hatred since the last war. I know we certainly haven't forgotten. Our entire family was slaughtered."

"So was mine. So were many. If nothing changes, it will happen again."

She sighed, looking out into the rain. "Is that from your mate?"

Kakashi blinked down at the scroll in his hands. "Yes."

The corner of her mouth ticked up. "It smells like a female. You said you had pups at home?"

Kakashi pulled the two photos he'd brought with him from his breast pocket, passing them to her. They were two he had taken himself. One showed Sakura holding Tenzō, his wide brown eyes focusing on a pile of powdery snow in his gloved hands. She was smiling at the camera, her cheek resting on Tenzō's head. In the other, Kakashi-kun and Tenzō were sitting on the engawa, their feet hanging over the edge. They were eating rice balls and dango. Kusa lay beside Tenzō, happily accepting a bite of his dango. The rest of the ninken sat on the ground, facing the boys, tails wagging.

Mebae laughed to herself. "She is beautiful. Your son, is he adopted?"

Kakashi nodded. "In our past life he was a good friend. He was conceived as part of an experiment to bring back a rare kekkei genkai. We rescued him early."

She tapped the picture of the boys. "And this is the younger version of you?" Kakashi nodded. "That must be confusing. Though, I suppose in saving your father and preventing him from being made a shinobi already, he is going to be an entirely different person than you."

Kakashi accepted his photos back. "He's already so different I barely recognize him."

She nodded. "He has pack and you were alone. Hatake's are pack animals, being alone is dangerous for us. How did you even survive that so young?"

He sighed. "My ninken and a lot of compartmentalization." He dropped his head to the side. "Mostly we have a lot of skilled and stubborn doctors that wouldn't let me die." When she winced, sympathy a little too obvious on her face, Kakashi sighed. "Since I was so young when Sakumo died, and it was only us left before that, there's a lot I never learned about our clan."

Her eyes lit up. "Oh? Like what? Do you have questions?"

A curious smile tugged at the corner of Kakashi's lips. "How do we look so much alike? I can't imagine we're closely related."

Her head fell to the side with a chuckle. "Very strong genetics. I was told it has to do with our original ninken contract, part of keeping the canine features. The rest just sort of… follow along. It's why we don't inter-marry. With such strong genes," her nose wrinkled, "it severely negatively affects any pups. It's only been allowed twice, generations ago. Both times the pups were more hound than human. They apparently didn't live very long either. Our clan leadership banned it after the second time."

Huh. Probably no pink haired children, then… shame. I quite like Sakura's hair.

Mebae stretched her arms over her head as well as she could in their low, makeshift tent, and leaned forward into a crouch. "I'll take the first watch, cousin."

Kakashi nodded in acknowledgement as she left, petting Senbei on his way in from his perimeter check. "All clear, Boss."

Kakashi reached over to scratch his wet ears. "Good job, Senbei. Let's get a few hours of sleep."

He curled up beside Kakashi's legs and fell asleep almost right away. It took Kakashi a little longer, pulling Sakura's letter to his nose, inhaling deeply of her lingering scent.

The next morning, Kakashi and Raiu both donned henges and did in fact travel to a nearby hot spring while Mebae went on to Kumo to speak with the Raikage. The hope was that he would be open to speaking to Kakashi, and share any thoughts he may have about their suspicions that Konoha had started the war under false pretenses. Granted, the war was already well underway, and as Mebae had pointed out, there were old grievances. They may not be able to change anything. But, knowing everything he did, Kakashi had to try.

It was a nice hot spring. They had rooms with private onsen and stunning mountain views. In her recent letter, Sakura had agreed that, yes, she would like to join him in a place like this. She had been rather explicit in what exactly she wanted him to do to her, and what she would do to him.

Unfortunately, Kakashi was not enjoying this particular private onsen alone, so he packed away thoughts of his wife and her detailed reply for another time.

"I met your father once." Raiu had his arms spread out along the edge of the hot spring, his eyes closed. His shoulder length silver hair, normally worn loose, was pulled up and out of the water in a lazy top knot, a style Kakashi had utilized as well. "It was about a year and a half before the last war. Our whole branch of the family came to Konoha to visit. I think I was around six." He sighed, relaxing down a little further into the warm water. "He was eighteen and a Jōnin and already so cool. I remember thinking that I wanted to grow up to be just like him. My sister said she saw him later on the battlefield. He refused to fight her. Honorable, cool."

Clan before village. It was an old way of thinking most Kage's actively tried to break. He could understand why, but he disliked it more and more.

"Have you ever met the Raikage?"

Kakashi looked over to find his cousin watching him again. "Not the third, but I'm familiar with his reputation."

Raiu smirked. "You might be more powerful than me, Karasu, but A would definitely kill you."

Kakashi scoffed. "I'm not stupid enough to pick a fight with the Raikage. My wife would kill me if I got myself killed like that.

Raiu chuckled. "What is she like, your mate? Is she a kunoichi?"

"In our past life, she was the most powerful kunoichi of her generation." He sank a little further into the water, thinking about his Sakura. "Beautiful, so intelligent… loving and thoughtful, but her temper though." A grin stretched his hidden lips. "It's extremely hazardous to piss her off."

"Hm. I think my sister would like to meet her. It has been so long since we've had more family, female family specifically. She's been after me to find a mate and get married since I turned eighteen. Does she think she needs to do the same? Of course not."

Kakashi hummed. "I am sure my wife would be happy to meet her too once the war is over." Hopefully soon. He wanted to go home.

"Do you really think this plan of yours will work? I mean, selfishly I hope so because I'd like to live, and the war you remember sounded terrible. But… It's already started. Can we really hope to end it with talking?"

"Well, it would take more than just talking, but I used to know a guy that could end conflict that way." Naruto's cheerful face floated through his memory. What would his life be like now? "So, I'd say it's possible."