Chapter Text
The instant Kakashi makes contact with the seal, a chill shoots up his arm.
It isn’t dissimilar to how lightning cutters had felt, back when he was practicing them for the first time. No element since then has ever humbled him as much as lightning— it’s a living, stubborn thing that spends every millisecond of its existence fighting to break free of its master, demanding total confidence and control. Before he had developed that mastery, the sheer force of it would leave his arm feeling like it had been rendered to jelly and pierced with an ice pick at the same time.
The ink that reaches towards him is a living, stubborn thing, too, and no less eager to break free. The same characters crawling over Iruka’s skin begin to seep into his own, bleeding into his hand and weaving lines around his forearm, igniting a cold fire that sears every inch of skin it touches.
His body shudders with the urge to wrench his arm free; he grits his teeth instead, forcing his hand to remain locked in place over the seal.
Focusing his own chakra towards his arm slows the progression of the ink, but struggles to fully halt it. With no room left to direct even a fraction of his remaining chakra anywhere else, the effort needed to keep the ink at bay is enough to force him to shut his Sharingan. It leaves both himself and Iruka wholly vulnerable to anyone else that happens upon the room— something Asuma seems to realize, too, considering the numerous swears being rattled off under his breath, and the shifting shadows and light in Kakashi’s peripheral as Asuma places himself between the table and the door.
The distraction allows the ink to continue its race up his arm before he clamps back down on it. With enough chakra forced into his arm to burn almost as fiercely as the ink, the characters finally come to a halt.
They’ve halted on Iruka’s skin, too— shuddering, but stable. Beneath Kakashi’s palm, the tattered seal is no longer unspooling, threadbare as it is.
Kakashi takes an uneven breath, and after a waver of hesitation, he pushes his chakra forward.
Characters return to crawling over tan skin, but this time, they march towards the seal beneath Kakashi’s hand. Their lines fragment when they reach Iruka’s stomach, coming apart at the seams as they’re pulled into a spiral around the seal. At first, the pooling ink remains formless, but as his cautious pushing with his chakra turns to molding, lines begin to take shape again, bending back into the symbols that had branded his memory from the first night he glimpsed them.
The seal shares subcomponents with those of Iruka’s research, but carries its own unique complexities necessitated when binding two living things together. One tiny wrong move in putting this back together, and he could kill Iruka just the same as if he’d stood by and allowed the seal to collapse.
A pang of fear; the characters waver, straining against his hold before he regains control of them. In his peripheral, light and shadows move again, cut through by the whistle of a kunai that barely misses Asuma. He grits his teeth, and he ignores it.
Piece by piece, the seal takes shape again. Kakashi leans closer, his eye scanning the delicate patterns of ink, looking for any imperfections— a task his Sharingan would make trivial, if he could open it. Still, even if he could divert his chakra to both tasks at once and maintain control over the seal, he’d be burning more chakra than he can afford to lose.
He thinks back, desperately, on every single fuuinjutsu lesson he’d been given, every diagram explained to him, every example drawn by slender hands. The memories come much easier than he anticipates, though not as a result of any particular interest in the subject itself.
He could learn anything, he thinks, if Iruka were the one to teach it. Could memorize entire textbooks, cover to cover, if those words were simply carried on his voice. No concept has ever sounded so heavenly to Kakashi as this: learning the world through Iruka, as Iruka learns the world through him.
Iruka doesn’t have to die here tonight. He will not die here tonight. Not when there are still cherry blossoms to see, and snowy peaks to summit, and an endless world out there that he hasn’t had the chance yet to meet.
Drop by drop, the spiral of ink drains until the last line is redrawn, and the seal shudders back into place.
And then that voice asks, raw, and confused, and weak, and beautiful all the same: “Kakashi?”
Iruka’s still struggling to regain his breath, and brown eyes are still disoriented, but they’re seeing again, finally focused on him. Kakashi scrambles to take his hand, only to recall his ankles and wrists are still bound to the table. With his own arm still throbbing, and his hands shaking fiercely, it’s a struggle to get the ties undone.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice tinged with its own rasp. “Asuma’s here, too.”
“Hey, kid,” Asuma steps up to the table, placing a hand on Iruka’s shoulder. “Ready to get out of here?”
He smiles at his brother, even as he casts an uneasy glance towards the door to the hall. For the moment, it’s silent.
The bruises left on Iruka’s skin by the binds— far from the most gruesome injuries Kakashi has come across in the field— still make his stomach turn. With the characters gone from Iruka’s skin, another wound on his left temple becomes apparent, scabbed over from what looks like a recent blow to the head.
A flash of blood soaked into the floor of the cellar briefly overtakes his vision. Kakashi exhales slowly, only just curbing the sound from a hiss.
He reaches to lift Iruka from the table, but freezes when Iruka asks, “Where’s the baby?”
Kakashi shares an uncertain look with Asuma. “What baby?”
“I heard a baby crying,” Iruka explains, his eyes flitting between them, then around the room, still a little hazy. He’s shivering, Kakashi realizes— hard enough for it to make his words tremble. “There’s a baby somewhere— why—”
He shakes his head, still breathing too shallow, and too fast. Careful of the wound on his temple, Kakashi brushes the back of his palm against his forehead, poorly disguising it as an effort to sweep his disheveled hair out of his face.
His skin is cold.
“Iruka, slow down,” Asuma cautions him. “Just breathe for a minute—”
“They brought a baby here,” Iruka insists, his eyes beginning to shine beneath the overhead lights. “I knew— I knew they were going to make Kushina’s baby the host if he lived. It wouldn’t have been right. But the village was being attacked. There was— there was no time. Everyone was in danger—,” he shakes his head. “Then why— why now? Why tonight? How could they choose this when they don’t have to— they don’t have to—”
“Iruka,” Asuma raises his voice, “Hey— listen, you’ve got to breathe. You’re going to pass out.”
“He’s going into shock,” Kakashi mutters under his breath. “We need to get him out of here.”
Asuma glances towards the hall, then back at Iruka, hesitating. “...I’ll check and see if we’ve got a clear path—”
“No!” Iruka snaps. “We can’t leave it behind— I swear I heard—”
“We’re not leaving,” Asuma clarifies. “You two are leaving. I’ll look for it once you’re out of here. But I’m getting you out first.”
He disappears down the hall before Iruka can argue with him any further. Iruka huffs a frustrated breath and shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut with a grimace. When he speaks again, his voice is almost at a whisper. “All this time… I thought Kushina’s baby just had rotten luck. But it’s happening again.”
Kakashi’s shivering, even just watching Iruka shake like this. He sheds his own cloak, too impatient to fetch the extra from the backpack, wrapping it instead around Iruka as he gingerly eases him up into a sitting position.
“As long as there are shinobi,” he answers with a lowered voice, “war is going to chew them up and spit them out. It doesn’t care how old they are, or who their parents are.”
Iruka shakes his head again in a tiny, absent movement. “But we’re not at war now.”
Kakashi exhales, his gaze solemn. Looking into brown eyes, always so earnest, is momentarily overwhelming; he looks away.
“We’re always at war. Konoha can’t exist without it. And the Sandaime knows that.”
He knows how valuable a strong jinchuuriki would be. And he wants that power for Konoha. Even if it means killing you.
Kakashi barely bites the words back. This isn’t the right time for this— not with Iruka confused, frantic, hurting.
“Come on,” Asuma’s head pops back into the doorway. “It’s clear, but it won’t be for long.”
Kakashi casts a glance at Owl’s corpse. A teenager, he’s almost certain, who was following the orders given to him, just as Kakashi has spent a lifetime doing.
Supporting Iruka’s weight for him with one arm, he frees a hand just long enough to grab his Hound mask, and to cast it towards the floor. One of the ceramic ears fragments off on impact, shattering with a loud crack.
He nods to Asuma, lifts Iruka into his arms, and follows.
This time, he lags behind, carefully portioning out just enough chakra to keep up with him as he propels himself forward. He strains to keep his attention on the branching hallways around them, well aware that running headfirst into another fight would likely mean death, but again and again, his focus is pulled back to Iruka’s shuddering breaths, and how hard he’s shivering in his arms.
Once they finally break free into the night air, as painfully cold as it is, it’s a relief.
His legs itch to continue running, but the guilt pooling in his gut forces him to a halt. He turns back to face Asuma, whose features are slightly pinched, and his eyes stuck on the jinchuuriki in his arms.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” Kakashi asks, drawing Asuma’s gaze back up to his. “You could get put to death if you turn back.”
“I’ll be alright,” Asuma dismisses, and though his tone is gruff, Kakashi can hear the strained edge to it. “…Someone has to keep an eye on my father. And you have to go.”
“Please,” Iruka rasps, “try to find—”
“I know,” Asuma nods. “I will.” He glances behind himself at the open hatch to the bunker, its light a pale disc illuminating the dark. “…Just be safe, alright? Both of you.”
With Iruka’s head tilted towards his brother, Kakashi can’t see his eyes, but he can hear the catch of his breath, and the slight sniffles that are starting. Though his own throat is tight, and his feet unwilling, he forces himself to turn, and to dash into the trees.
He’s passed through these woods countless times coming and going from the village, but tonight, the landscape is alien to him. The ground isn’t quite solid beneath his feet, and the branches he flits past are a tangled mass of incomprehensible lines. The sensation evokes a strange familiarity that nags at him for nearly an hour of running until he finally places it: how the Hatake estate had been wholly unrecognizable after his father’s death, rendered into some indefinable other.
Will Iruka feel the same relief he had, leaving behind a lifeless home? Or will having his life upended be too much grief for him to bear?
Kakashi reaches his senses back out to the thick woods around them, but can’t feel any nearby presence. It isn’t as far as he’d like to be from Konoha, but he’ll have to find some place to rest until daylight. He needs to recuperate as much energy as he can, and Iruka needs to get warmer.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I know it’s freezing. I’ll make camp here.”
Iruka’s still shivering hard enough to hear it in his shallow breathing. Kakashi braces himself for a weak voice wracked with tremors— but no response comes.
“Iruka?” he prompts, looking down at the jinchuuriki bundled in his grasp. Though it’s hard to see him clearly by only the light of the moon, he can tell that his eyes are closed, and his face is completely lax. Another prompt of his name produces no response.
He curses under his breath, and he rushes to dump the gear from Asuma’s pack.
It isn’t as well-protected of a spot as he would have preferred, but a cluster of evergreens provides at least marginally better coverage from being spotted overhead than spiderwebs of bare branches. The tent is barely large enough for one sleeping bag, but with less space to heat, the cramped interior is a blessing in disguise.
He tells himself that Iruka will rouse again once he’s warmer, but even when he’s settled with him in the sleeping bag, curled around him to offer as much heat as he can, Iruka remains unresponsive.
As the long night creeps on, doubt joins the growing pit of guilt in his stomach. Had he been too late to stabilize the seal? Or had Iruka’s poisoning already gone too far to recover from?
Kakashi means to sleep, but he can’t stop listening to Iruka’s breathing. Every time his eye begins to close, a jolt of panic forces him back to the surface in fear that if he drifts off, he’ll miss Iruka stop breathing. Each intake is too shallow, too uneven, and still wracked with shivers, even as his skin begins to warm.
An hour before dawn, Kakashi slips into dreams of inked characters rushing over skin, and a seal unspooling beyond repair. He wakes with a start to sunlight filtering through the canvas walls of the tent, jarred enough that he doesn’t notice he’s using his Sharingan to check Iruka for wayward characters until it’s already open.
His skin is clear to both eyes— a relief instantly crushed by the realization that Iruka still hasn’t woken.
Kakashi murmurs his name, then repeats it louder, squeezing his arm around him firmly. The silence that follows is heavy enough that when a twig snaps somewhere outside the tent, the sound is deafening.
He shoots up to a crouch, listening intently as another twig, closer this time, is crushed underfoot. With a kunai in hand, he slips soundlessly from the tent’s opening, and freezes upon meeting eyes with the culprit—
Eyes that belong not to another shinobi, but to a deer.
It bolts before his own locked limbs will budge. Once he’s caught his breath, and the pounding of his heart has slowed, he scrubs a hand over his face, and he sighs.
Daylight does little to help with any sense of familiarity of the land. As he progresses northwest, the evergreens become more dominant, and the freezing air drops several more degrees. His brain automatically supplies past snippets of traveling through this area— a small town here, a cave system there, stray safe houses he can no longer depend upon to get out from the cold— and even still, none of it feels like any place he’s set foot before.
All the while, Iruka remains shivering in his arms, but otherwise motionless.
As the sun begins to set again, a valley opens up beneath him, nestled within the increasingly mountainous land. The village clustered along the river that cuts through it is one of the larger of Fire’s countryside, and easy to get lost amongst. He’s spent more than a few nights here recuperating between arduous fights, or simply finding a warm place to duck his head into.
It’s always been safe enough— but then again, he’s never been here while being hunted by his own village.
It would probably be safer, finding another remote camping spot to hide away in, but the smell of flurries is in the air, and dark clouds are gathering on the horizon. If he spends another night with Iruka outside, he risks getting caught in a snowstorm with him.
He tells himself that it’s logical, finding some place sturdier to rest in the meantime. He does not acknowledge the desire to produce any shred of comfort he can for the jinchuuriki in his arms, or his desperation for anything that could finally lead to some visible improvement in his health. Some sign that Kakashi wasn’t too late, too weak, too much of a coward for too long.
More than doubt, or guilt, or the ever-present crushing force of pressure, it’s fear that keeps Kakashi awake through another night spent in silence.
----
When Iruka wakes, he wakes to sound.
It isn’t coming from within his room, but it’s close by. With his body heavy, and his eyelids uncooperative, he’s forced to try to identify the source by that fuzzy noise alone. It’s almost like birdsong, but it’s too late in winter for so many calls to be layering upon one another. The weather is no more hospitable for the cicadas that would have been his next guess— though his bedroom isn’t nearly as cold as he anticipates it being.
It isn’t until he finally manages to crack sluggish eyelids open, and he realizes that his bedroom isn’t his bedroom at all, that his brain finally identifies that strange sound as… people, somewhere outside. The concept alone doesn’t compute.
He frowns, squinting against the sunlight that brightens the room. It’s late enough in the morning— or afternoon?— to be obtrusive, even with the curtains drawn over the window. The light isn’t the only thing that tells him he must have overslept for some time: his mouth is as dry as cotton, and hunger pangs are gnawing a hole in his stomach.
It takes a minute for his eyes to adjust enough to make out the details of the room around him: the desk pushed up against the covered window, a bare nightstand, the wooden frame of the bed he’s laying on, the faded quilt covering him—
And the tuft of silver hair, even more disheveled than usual, that belongs to a man with his head resting on Iruka’s stomach. He’s slumped over in a chair that had likely once belonged to the desk before being dragged over to the bedside, and he appears to be thoroughly asleep, albeit unintentionally so.
Iruka’s brain is slow to reconnect with his body, the signals muzzy and muted. It takes effort to remember how to tell his hand to move, but once it finally cooperates, he places it on messy silver hair, and he voices a rasped, “Kakashi?”
Kakashi’s face scrunches briefly with a grimace before a single eye slowly opens, landing on him half-lidded. After a beat, it widens.
“Iruka,” he responds, shooting back upright in his chair. “You’re awake.”
The words are voiced as though observing pigs flying. Iruka frowns slightly in confusion, but affirms, “I am.”
He thinks he is, at least, though he can’t explain how he’s gotten to a room that is certainly not in his house, or how there are people close enough nearby to hear their passing chatter. The endless questions piling up within minutes of waking are troubling, but nowhere near as jarring as the realization that Kakashi is beginning to cry.
“Whoa,” Iruka breathes out, alarmed, struggling to try to push himself up to a sitting position. “What’s—”
But before he can fully voice the question, arms have woven around him, clinging to him like if Kakashi lets go, he won’t get him back.
“You’re awake,” Kakashi repeats, the words muffled against the shirt Iruka has on— another unfamiliar variable, until he recognizes it as one of Kakashi’s undershirts by the attached mask that’s gathered around his neck.
Kakashi is shaking against him, and there’s a wet patch of tears growing where his face is pressed against his collarbone. It’s enough to make Iruka’s throat constrict, and for his second attempt at voicing his question to be even more difficult. Still, somehow, he manages, “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Kakashi pulls back to look at him, relief mixed with a worry that only makes Iruka’s throat tighter. “You don’t remember?”
Iruka wracks his brain for the events that led them here, but all that comes to him are blurry, hectic images. He knows Owl was at the house— knows he’d gone down to the cellar alone— but everything afterward is hazy, like a dream he can’t quite recall.
“Not really,” he admits, the realization fueling his own unease. “Where are we?”
Kakashi’s mouth opens, then closes, his dark eye conflicted. “Let me get you some food and water first.”
Iruka wants to protest, but with tear tracks still marking Kakashi’s face, he doesn’t have the heart to deny him anything. He reaches out with a shaking hand instead to wipe at the tracks, and he responds with a soft, “Okay.”
As soon as Kakashi steps away from the bed, Iruka realizes how weak he is from merely sitting up for a few minutes. He leans back against the headboard and barely suppresses a grimace. With how godawful he feels, he knows keeping his food down is going to present a challenge—
Braces himself for it the best he can, but the nausea doesn’t come. He’s exhausted, and dizzy, but he still has an appetite after taking a few bites of a ration bar, which is a first in months. The sight is enough to relieve Kakashi, but he doesn’t seem surprised by it at all.
“Kakashi,” Iruka says, lowering the remainder of the bar to his lap. “Please tell me what’s going on.”
Kakashi looks away from him, hesitating again. At length, he exhales, and he agrees, “Alright. If you keep eating.”
Iruka does, at first. He gets through one ration bar and accepts the second handed to him, equally as motivated by his empty stomach as he is by keeping the lines of worry from worming their way back into Kakashi’s features.
But even with his best efforts, he manages only a bite of the second bar before the retelling forces him into stillness.
“…we got here last night,” Kakashi finishes. “We only have a couple days at most before we’ll need to move on—”
“And here is a place with… people,” Iruka responds, glancing at the covered window. “A lot of people.”
“Yes.”
Iruka’s mouth opens, but at first, all he can get out is a choked, disbelieving note. “If the seal breaks in such a populated place— Kakashi, this village would be ruined—”
“That’s not going to happen,” Kakashi insists. “The seal is stable, and you’re healing from the poison—”
“I was sick a long time before I was poisoned,” Iruka reminds him. “We still don’t know what my health is going to look like long-term. I could still be dying. And I could hurt a lot of people in the process.”
“If the Sandaime had any serious reasons to believe your health could devastate Konoha at any time, he wouldn’t have needed to poison you as an excuse to choose a new host,” Kakashi points out. “You’ve been held hostage on the basis of what-ifs since you were a kid. I’m not going to let that happen to you again.”
Iruka shakes his head, placing his forehead in his hands. “But— all of my research is still back there. How am I going to recreate a decade of research without any texts— I have to make sure that seal is ready before anything happens to me—”
“Iruka,” Kakashi interrupts him, weaving his fingers around Iruka’s wrists and gently pulling his hands away from his face. “I’ve got most of that here,” he reminds him, releasing one of his wrists to point at his Sharingan. “You’re not doing this alone. We’ll figure it out together.”
This could end terribly. It will end terribly, if Iruka is to believe what’s been drilled into his head for more than a decade. If even a short walk through Konoha to visit the cemetery was too dangerous, running away from the village altogether is unspeakably reckless.
But had that short walk ever truly been that dangerous?
The question alone makes his head spin almost as much as the sound of people on the street below. All of it is too much, too quickly, and he doesn’t realize he’s locked up until arms weave around him again, gentler than before.
“Don’t worry about it for now,” Kakashi murmurs. “We’ve got time.”
It’s a novel concept, having time on his hands— almost as frightening to entertain as it is relieving. Iruka isn’t sure if he wholly believes it, yet.
But he supposes that if there’s anything he’d known well before the events of the past few days, it’s that trusting Kakashi is no longer a frightening concept at all, but rather something that comes as easily to him as breathing.
----
The scissors in Kakashi’s hand are unnaturally heavy. They’re far from the most dangerous weapon he’s ever handled, but he can’t help but hesitate when it’s Iruka on the other end of the blade.
“Are you sure about this?”
Iruka leans forward in the desk chair, considering himself in the small mirror he‘d brought in from the bathroom.
“I am,” he sighs after a beat. “My hair is… a lot longer than most people’s. It makes me more recognizable for anyone asking around about us.”
It is longer than most people’s— and though the soldier in him would usually disapprove of anything impractical, he won’t even attempt to deny his significant bias towards anything related to Iruka. He winds a soft lock of brown hair around a finger, then unwinds it.
“How short do you want it, then?”
Iruka hums softly, frowning. “I still want to be able to tie it back whenever I need to. Maybe we can cut it at my shoulders?”
Though Kakashi’s soul aches at the request, he’s mollified, at least, that Iruka isn’t getting rid of all of it. The way dark brown strands frame his face is unfairly beautiful, and a sight Kakashi wants to be seeing for the rest of his days— or, at the very least, every single one he has left to savor with Iruka. Knowing, now, that those days are likely to span years yet, he supposes he can’t really complain about something as trivial as cutting his hair.
He takes more time than he really needs to, focusing perhaps a little too intently on cutting everything as even as humanly possible. He works silently, at first, but as he nears the end, he comments, “Travel will be slow with the weather, but I think we can make it up to the mountain in time to see the cherry blossoms.”
Brown eyes catch his in the mirror, widened slightly. Iruka turns around in the chair, and before Kakashi can scold him for nearly causing a wayward snip of hair with the movement, the smile he’s met with is no less stunning than it had been the first time he was lucky enough to see it.
“I’d like that,” Iruka affirms with crinkled eyes. After he turns back, the afterimage of that smile remains, a tiny sun that stains Kakashi’s vision even more stubbornly than a recording from his Sharingan.
He files it away just as carefully as he cuts the final few locks of hair, and he meets Iruka’s gaze in the mirror with a small smile of his own.