Chapter Text
The forests of Fire gave way to the mountainous heights of Lightning as they crossed the border into Hot Springs. It was a sign that time ran short and the mission needed to be completed now, before the target passed into Kumo territory. Kakashi was not worried.
The blade of his tantō was buried to the hilt in another man’s stomach, cutting cleanly through a Konoha-green flack jacket. He inhaled a slow, calming breath as he stared into the faded eyes of the man now limp on his blade and pulled it out in one clean, swift motion. Flecks of blood splattered against the grass at his feet and the man fell boneless to the ground. It dripped from his tantō, glinting off the metal in the moonlight. There was no need to check for a pulse; he was dead before he hit the ground.
He’d bit his tongue.
Kakashi knelt by the body, searching its person—pockets, pouches—for the scroll that had been taken from Konoha, but all that he found were shuriken and a pouch of ryō.
He looked to the steady incline of the mountains up ahead. There was one more. With a fluid shhhing , the tantō found its hilt and he pressed on.
Kakashi was no stranger to solo missions, especially man-hunts. His keen sense of smell made him an excellent tracker, one of ANBU’s best. At sixteen and with three years of service in the Black Ops unit under his belt, missions like these became an intrinsic part of everyday life. He worked well alone.
A scent wafted off the body that was not its own, belonging to someone else—a scent that Kakashi traced from the start of his mission. He was eight days out of the village and another day and a half to the border. There was little doubt that his target would take the mountain trail; going around would add another day to their travel.
One moment there, the next gone. Kakashi vanished with the leaves and wind.
Perched on a branch, Kakashi observed the campsite below him. A sole missing-nin curled beneath a thin blanket amidst the shrubbery. He dared to sleep like that while being pursued. But with his partner gone, he didn’t have much choice; if he staved off sleep any longer, he would have been no good in a confrontation. This made things easier for Kakashi.
Kakashi surveyed the area with a sharp eye and a lot of patience. The target wouldn’t sleep without a guarantee that he wouldn’t be unknowingly killed. There was a trap somewhere—or everywhere—but for all his experience, Kakashi couldn’t locate it. He was used to the standard tripwire, paper bombs and walls of kunai arranged to shoot at a moment’s notice, but there was no evidence of any such things. It was too easy, too simple. Going forward would put the mission at risk.
The scroll was there, in a pouch of the man’s rucksack. He could smell it through the dew and grass and sweat rising up off the campsite. He scented Konoha from that bag.
Kakashi slipped a shuriken out of his pouch and threw it down at the grass by the bag. The moment it embedded in the dirt below, it lit up in an explosion of fire that burned and crackled angrily until the metal glowed red-hot.
So that was it.
A series of hand-seals later and he managed to burn away the paper bombs hidden underground. That was all of them, he was sure of it, and—
A chill behind him caught his breath.
Kakashi kicked off the branch as torrents of water tunnelled out from the trees. He landed deftly between the seas of flame, white-hot fire licking at his ankles as he spun to head the attack. He looked down. The target was gone. The blanket lay crumpled amongst the grass. A clone. So focused on the scroll, he hadn’t thought—a stupid mistake.
Kakashi was good at making those. Stupid mistakes.
Kakashi couldn’t see the target but could smell him, receded into the shadows of the leaves. He was there, right where Kakashi once stood. In one fluid motion, he kicked off the ground and unsheathed his tantō. Kunai flung through the air, swallowed by the growing inferno, those flames fanning higher, further, closer to the scroll . One strayed from the rest and rang through the air like a warning. It cut through his stomach—but didn’t. The ANBU’s body vanished in a plume of smoke and a log clattered to the ground in his place.
The target snorted. “ You’re supposed to be ANBU? What a joke.” His hands came together in a seal. Kakashi watched carefully from the shadows with his Sharingan eye. Obito’s gift cut through the darkness. He could see the man, his outline clear in the night. He could see the defaced hitai-ate tied around his arm, the symbol of the Leaf, cut across in a jagged line of abandon. A traitor. “The old man must be pretty desperate if he’s recruiting kids into Black Ops nowadays.”
As it turned out, the man lacked a quality of stealth that the average shinobi did not. As Kakashi cloned himself and the blue-white sparks of Chidori crackled at his fingertips, he wondered if it was the missing-nin’s lack of stealth that contributed to his betrayal. He wondered if this man ever made it to chunin or even genin. He wondered this while his hand tore through flesh and Chidori's lightning boiled blood as it came out the other side.
He wondered until he could no longer wonder, until the only thing that came to mind were Rin’s vacant eyes.
When the man fell, Kakashi didn’t see the body. He saw his hand, bloody and still hot with surging chakra. He closed his fist and breathed through the memories.
The flames from the paper bombs fed off the dry grass and moved further in, encroaching on the rucksack that contained Konoha’s scent, and Kakashi frowned behind his mask. His mission was not to assassinate the intruders. His mission was to retrieve that scroll by any means necessary.
For a moment, he considered dousing the fire with one of his water-style jutsu. No , he thought, it may damage the scroll. Instead, he cleared a path with a wind-style technique and bent down next to the bag.
He unhinged the clasp and reached in. Something clicked. The air around him shivered. That was the only warning he got. A concussive force threw him back and he scraped against the earth until he came to a dead halt. The sound was felt more than heard, like a too-large explosion of something that he couldn’t see, and still, his ears rang. They rang as though a bomb went off right next to him and he swayed as he sat up, disoriented and nauseous. The scroll was in his hand, crushed beneath his grip, but he couldn’t focus on that.
The ground rumbled beneath him and he clung to the grass as a second wave came. He expected a bang —some loud noise that even the ringing couldn’t block, but if there was, he didn’t hear it. A light, bright and blinding and terrible, lit up the night sky until everything went dark.
And everything was dark. Black—blotchy. The fires around him should have staved off that darkness but all he could make out were vague impressions of nothing that he could discern. But they were there—still there— he could smell them . Smoke filled his lungs. His throat ached with every inhale and he coughed, ragged, until his throat went raw. The fire was there —
But he could not see it.
Kakashi scrabbled back, away from the heat that he felt on his face, blindly searching with his hands for something to latch onto. His palm pressed on something cold and wet and he knew that feeling, knew that scent: blood. The missing-nin’s corpse.
The ringing in his ears drowned out his thoughts and all he could wonder was how long it would last.
Iruka decided that courier missions sucked seven days ago when they first set out. He reaffirmed that decision this morning when his team was ambushed partway through their journey. They were a team of genin. Their jōnin instructor told them to go and, so, he went. Ran. He ran as far and fast as his eleven-year-old legs would carry him, until his lungs burned and his body shook and all the stamina in the world wouldn’t be enough to get him moving faster than a crawl.
In hindsight, Iruka was not entirely sure that running was the wisest choice. ‘Go’ could mean a lot of things: it could mean ‘go hide nearby until it’s safe to come out,’ or ‘go back to the village and tell somebody what happened.’ Really, it was the instructor’s fault for being so vague. There was no point in dwelling, though, and so he wouldn’t.
When his legs decided that going forward was no longer worth the effort, Iruka stopped and looked back in the direction that he came. He knew that he needed to go back but had no faith he could find the way; this was his first mission so far out of Konoha and he didn’t have the experience needed to retrace his steps back home. Even if he did, there were those enemy ninjas to worry about—the ones who attacked. As much as he hoped that Sensei dealt with them, Iruka was no fool. This was a C-ranked mission. They weren’t supposed to have to worry about ninjas . But they did. This was out of his league as a budding genin and he understood that.
When his brain wouldn’t provide him with the answers that he wanted, he shrank down onto a log and waited out the dawn. There was no use wasting energy when he didn’t yet have a course of action to follow through. There were also Hayate and Mizuki to worry about because they ran, too.
They ran together . Iruka was the genius who took off on his own.
Iruka buried his face in his hands and let out a long, loud groan. With it, he hoped to expel all of his pent-up frustration and fear and continue forward with a clear mind. It succeeded in doing exactly none of that and he wondered why he bothered.
Shut up and think.
He had enough rations for another eight days—except that he didn't. Hayate was carrying the supplies when the ambush happened. Sensei had the merchandise. Being the team's sensor, Iruka was tasked with keeping guard, so all he had on him was his weapons and a few first aid supplies in his back pouch. That amounted to a whole lot of nothing.
Oh, right. He was a sensor. There was something that he could do, after all.
Iruka closed his eyes and focused on the world around him. He wasn't the most talented sensor around, so the only way for him to discern one chakra signature from another was to stop moving and actively feel it out. Sensei said he'd get better with time. He hoped so. It hadn’t been useful so far. He couldn't sense his teammates, meaning they had to be out of range, which was great. Peachy. But , the silver lining: he did not sense the enemy-nin, either.
There was something else, though. Something coming down the mountains. Some wavering, unsteady flicker of chakra, slowly shifting through the forests like a ghost.
It was probably a traveller. No ninja was that slow.
Iruka opened his eyes and deemed this a safe enough spot to rest. One thing he did have on him was a map. He grabbed it out of his pocket and unfolded it, splaying it open across the grass. The problem, then, was location. Where the hell did he run to?
Iruka followed their path from Konoha with the pad of his finger. He knew they stopped once in a town three days back, so he used that as a guide when their journey became a little too fuzzy. From there, they continued straight down the main road. Then they branched off yesterday and veered into the forest; they neared the border of Hot Springs and needed to be cautious, Sensei said. And then…
The mountain range was in sight. He was at the foot of one of the mountains that were still within Fire Country, but it stretched on and on and he didn't have a compass.
Walking away from the mountains was as good a choice as any.
Iruka packed away the map and rose on tired legs. The more time he wasted, the closer night became. He’d rather not spend the night out all by his lonesome. Without supplies.
The shrubbery behind him rustled and he nearly jumped out of his skin. Suddenly, the memory of that oddly swaying chakra signature stuck out to him as unusual. Chakra signatures do not sway.
People sway.
Iruka slipped a kunai down his sleeve and cautiously turned around, raising it to the quivering leaves of movement. He licked his lips and forced his hand steady. He caught a bright silver, glaringly obvious against the green calliope of trees. Then white. Black. A piercing red .
A boy stumbled down the mountainside, looking like he didn't know which way was up.
The stranger swayed unsteadily, his footing never quite as grounded as it should be, an arm raised to guide the way down. On his face was the porcelain mask of a hound, white with bright red patterns painted carefully across the front. Black clothes, a grey flak jacket.
Iruka heard stories about ANBU. They were more like ghost stories, really. The Hokage's assassins. Konoha's finest shinobi who gave up their names for the village. He heard stories of their animal masks and the tantō carried on their backs, but he never saw one.
Having never seen one, he didn't know the uniform variations between villages. He braced himself and the grip on his kunai tightened.
"Don't move." Iruka managed to keep his voice level somehow. The boy did not listen, though. No, wait. He paused. His head, previously hung low, lifted just a bit. "Take off the mask."
Probably not the best thing to demand from the ANBU Black Ops , but Iruka held firm. The flak jacket shared a close resemblance to Konoha's chunin uniform, which was a small comfort. It eased his racing heart when the mask finally faced him.
"A-are you from Konoha?" He raised a hand to adjust his headband. "Me, too. See?"
The ANBU stood his ground and calmly unsheathed his tantō. Shhhink.
Oh, well. That’s not good. Iruka flailed, hands going up in surrender. There was no way he could fight an ANBU, regardless of what village the guy was from. Not that he expected mercy from a certified assassin, either.
The ANBU stepped forward and Iruka stepped back, the tantō's blade levelled on Iruka. But it didn't make sense. That uniform, it resembled Konoha uniforms so closely —
A tattoo. He knew what the ANBU tattoo looked like. If he could just…
He leaned right. The symbol of ANBU was always tattooed on the left shoulder. He couldn't quite make it out, though, so he side-stepped further, leaned in closer, until the elegant curl of red ink was in sight. All of his anxiety flowed out like water and with a breath, the tension left him. Konoha ANBU. Nothing to be afraid of.
Except this ANBU raised a blade to him.
Iruka noticed something strange, though, something that pushed back his fear in favour of curiosity.
The ANBU still faced forward. He didn't notice that Iruka moved.
"Hey," he called. "Can you see me?"
Nothing. Iruka licked his lips.
"...Can you hear me?"
He waited longer this time and stepped in closer. Waited again. But the shinobi did nothing and a growing sense of unease turned his stomach. Was this boy hurt in an attack? Was it Kumo, or missing-nin? Something else entirely?
The ANBU’s head snapped to him and he swung wide. Iruka stumbled back, just out of range of the tantō, and let out a strangled noise that he would later deny. He lost footing and tumbled down, hitting the dirt with a painful thump and scrabbling back even further. But the ANBU did not move to pursue.
The ANBU—Hound, Hound was easy to remember—looked frantically, this way and that, adjusting the grip on his weapon. Beneath his vest, his chest moved with panting breath. Like he was scared.
Hound couldn’t see or hear. Whatever trigger he reacted to, it was no longer there. Iruka’s presence was indiscernible. It was hard to feel threatened knowing that.
Iruka gathered himself back up, brushed off his pant legs, and felt newfound frustration. This boy couldn’t see him, couldn’t hear him. To him, this left one option. He quickly untied his hitai-ate and slid it across the ground. The metal scraped along the dirt until it stopped by Hound’s feet.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t notice that,” he muttered, “because I really don’t know where to go from there.”
Iruka swore that he saw Hound flinch. Just a bit. But Hound noticed. He crouched down and brushed his fingers along the fabric of the headband until he found the metal plate and gathered it into his hands. He traced the engraving of the Leaf with careful consideration, then looked up, towards its source. Not at Iruka, but through.
“Look,” he said. “Nothing to worry about. Okay?”
Hound rose to his feet and sheathed his tantō. He held out the hitai-ate, which Iruka gladly took, brandishing it proudly across his forehead. That was one crisis over and dealt with, but it didn’t feel like progress. Now, he had to wonder who could have put a Black Ops assassin in such a dismal state. And how . And whoever they were, were they still a threat?
Iruka covered his face with his hands and groaned loudly; it wasn’t like Hound could hear him. This was a mess waiting to happen.
Hound was about a head taller than Iruka. There was an age difference there, but it couldn’t have been more than four or five years; Hound didn’t have the physique of an adult. He had the same awkward proportions that Iruka, himself, had the misfortune of growing into. There was muscle there, and his legs and arms were long and lithe, but he hadn’t filled out yet. His exposed skin was littered with cuts and bruises. It looked more like an unfortunate side effect of his current situation than battle scars from another shinobi. He was bleeding, too, dark stains blackening his already dark clothes, reminiscent of Iruka’s own injuries from his blind scramble through the forest.
Iruka nodded. “I’ll help you back,” he said, as though he even knew the way. “But first…”
But first.
Iruka closed the distance between them and put a hand on either of Hound’s shoulders, pushing down on them with all of his strength. Hound didn’t budge; the guy was like a rock. Then, Hound understood. He lowered himself onto the grass where he sat cross-legged, awaiting instruction.
Hound had no idea who he was dealing with, huh? All Hound could go off of was the symbol on Iruka’s headband. He couldn’t have known how old Iruka was, or what he was wearing. What situation they were in. The weight of knowing that he was responsible for the safety of an ANBU was disparaging in a multitude of ways.
Iruka rummaged through his various pouches for his first-aid supplies. He set about rolling up Hound’s sleeve—ignoring Hound’s wince as the fabric rolled over a particularly deep cut—and cleaned the area. Iruka knew nothing of medical ninjutsu, but what he did know was first-aid. He managed where he could. There were no serious injuries, so there wasn’t pressure to do everything perfectly. As he disinfected the wounds and covered them with bandages and gauze, Hound remained perfectly still.
When finished, Iruka leaned back to analyze his work with a critical eye. Not bad. Not bad at all.
“I think we’re good to go,” Iruka said. This would be the hard part. “I bet you’d know the way back, wouldn’t you?”
There was no point in asking. At this point, he was talking to himself.
Iruka took Hound’s hand in his and guided him blindly through the trees. ‘Away from the border’ was a good enough start. They could worry about the rest later.