Chapter Text
Grass blades fold beneath his feet, soil molding to the shape of his soles. Minato stands in a field of dancing sage and falling leaves. There is one set of footprints in the mud, one trail of disturbed dust, one tapping foot, and one pair of searching eyes. Minato is well and thoroughly alone.
Which wouldn't be odd in any other case, most shinobi are rather isolated creatures by nature. The only problem is, well— Minato is alone. On a Tuesday, meaning training day, a scheduled training day.
He is alone in a training ground and not a single student of his in sight. Granted, it is much too early for him to have arrived, it's barely even time for the meet up—but that's just it, isn't it? Minato is alone in a training field, on a scheduled training day, with no sign of Kakashi. .
When he'd first arrived, he had fully expected to spot a tuft of silver hair either hidden in the trees or already scorching the newly grown grass of the field. Minato had expected to see the trailing end of that spiky silver hair, to be faced with a glare that really shouldn't have made him wilt as much as it did.
Nothing.
He shrugged it off at first, even a punctual beast like Kakashi could have some cheat days, besides, his student was barely two digits old and about yeah high, children needed adequate sleep—and who was Minato to fuss over Kakashi possibly prioritizing his health over training for once?
It is only when he saw Rin enthusiastically waving at him, did he start to feel panic slowly claw its way into him.
“Good morning, Minato-sensei,” Rin greets him, polite as ever even as her eyes dart around, hands moving to clasp behind her back, “did Kakashi start on his own already?”
“No…he hasn’t arrived yet.”
Rin blinks at him once, twice, head tilting, before slowly turning to face towards the entrance of the training ground, still utterly devoid of the silver haired chunin.
“Huh.”
They glance at one another, silent, and move to stand side by side. The sun had risen hours ago and Konoha was beginning to stir, the bustling sounds of the market and idle morning chatter ringing in their ears. Rin sucks in her cheeks, eyes darting to the foliage. Minato can only bring himself to smile, its corners tight even as his cheeks ache, his hand burrowing its way into Rin’s hair.
“ I’m sure he’s just peachy.” He answers her unspoken question, determined to chase away the worry in her eyes and smoothen the furrow in her brows. Rin smiles back in response, just as tight as his, and ducks her carefully combed hair away from his offending hand.
They spend the rest of the time in silence, both intently staring at the entrance as they waited for the rest of their team. The longer the minutes dragged on, the more Minato's gut twisted, curling in itself as Rin continued to fidget in her spot.
When a gaggle of limbs and a blur of orange dashes forward with a screech halfway out his mouth, Minato has to violently bite his tongue to avoid slipping a distressed little sound at the sight of Obito. Glancing at the sun's position, Minato reckons that Obito isn’t even horribly late this time. That thought doesn’t stop his stomach from twisting into elaborate little bows, threatening to send bile rushing up his throat.
“I'm not late– am I? I’m not, hah! See? See?! I'm on time, hahah!” a deep breath,”Take that, Kaka—” Obito sputters off, finger freezing mid air from where it rose to point at where the chunin would normally be.
“Eh?” Obito, eyes rapidly blinking, crouches down and starts, rather aggressively, patting the grass—the grass Kakashi should've been standing on— and blinking harder with each grain of soil sticking onto his palm. “Is he hiding? Again?! I swear once I see his smug little face—”
“Obito, Rin,” a voice cuts Obito off, stern and uncharacteristically acrid, his soiled hands pausing midair as both his and Rins backs straighten on instinct. Minato looks off into the distance, eyes narrowed with his heart lurching up his throat. “You two wait here and start on your warm ups. I'll go check on Kakashi, Alright?”
“Yes, sensei!” They yell in unison, but they make no move to start even as Minato disappears with a shunshin, two pairs of eyes tracing the path of the drifting leaves to the ground. Rin and Obito share a glance, concerned and disgruntled respectively.
“Do you think he's okay?” Rin gnaws on her lip.
Obito continues to smack the ground.
⋆⁺₊⋆ ━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━ ⋆⁺₊⋆
Kushina had once bashed Minato's case of being a mother hen. Normally, he argues back and defends himself because they're shinobis at war — he's just being vigilant ! On another, unrelated note, that was the day Minato found out that it was a rather difficult task to refute the claim of being a mother hen when you're actively adding a seal that allows for instant transportation onto the surfaces of your students' door frames.
Kakashi had loathed the sentiment, he claimed he didn't need his sensei to be at his every beck and call.
Still, Minato could pat his own back for his past vigilance because it allowed him to cross half of Konoha in a mere few seconds. In front of Kakashi's apartment door.
Kakashi's torn and bloodied door.
It is only the years of experience and his own sheer pure will that Minato manages to shove the unbridled panic rising up his throat back to the depths of his training and take a deep breath before promptly freaking out, calmly.
He digs his fingers into the grainy texture of wood, assaulted with the lingering stench of rot and decay after he wrenches the door open. Lingering wouldn't even be the right word, actually, not when it was reaching near overwhelming heights with how forcefully it clung to the room.
“Kakashi?”
Crimson streaks the flooring, sinking deep into the wood. The walls are charred black, clumps of ash cracking away and falling away into tiny chunks. Furniture had toppled over and ripped, stuffing pitifully piling on top one another as gravity forced them out of their home. Water drips from the ceiling, a groaning pipe precariously tiling out of a busted ceiling.
Minato bites his tongue, an amateur move, when he spots a long trail of blood, the width of the line enough to resemble a mockingly red river. It is the denial that cuts through him, through his instincts, that stops him from taking off and immediately following the trail. Instead, he crouches down and only manages to lightly dip a finger in before he's bolting off to where it leads.
The blood was still warm.
Minato hasn't felt a lick of chakra since he's stepped foot in here, but he also knows that dread has clouded his judgement enough to the point he can't fully rely on his senses at the moment. Still, the lack of chakra either meant Kakashi was not at home, or he is currently in a state of such severe chakra exhaustion that he can barely be sensed.
Minato doesn't know which one he'd prefer.
But the blood had been warm, so much so that it must've just recently spilled. Recently in the sense that it must've only hit the ground between the time Minato appeared at the door and him tearing it open.
Which means Kakashi had been here by the time he arrived, or at least someone was. But he wasn't able to fully feel for a signature and so whoever they were most likely did not have enough chakra for even a simple shunshin, or at least they wouldn't be able to pull it off without alerting him.
All points lead to Kakashi, an a lone Kakashi. Because despite all the wear and tear of the apartment, it did not look like there was any actual resistance. The blood, the charred walls, the torn furniture, the busted ceiling, none of them had any sort of rhyme or reason to it, nothing like the usual collateral of a fight.
This was not a fight.
A fight would have shown that the furniture was either used as a weapon, a shield, or a landing from a hit. It did not. The charred walls would've shown hints of a fire jutsu and its destructive nature. It didn't. The ceiling gives the impression of a rusted metal pipe simply having been encouraged to collapse earlier by an extraneous element rather than it having been a result of aggression.
The ground shows only one set of unsteady, small , footsteps.
So, unless the other party was particularly good at hiding their tracks and Minato was just making stuff up in his bouts of denial, then this was not a fight involving two or more people.
this was just Kakashi. And the blood had been warm .
He walks alongside the trail, steady and appropriately weary. His footsteps are silent, he knows they are, yet they seem to echo in his ear with every slight thump of the ground. The pungent stench of death wafting through the air and the line of red guides him towards another door. Behind it, the sound of shattering porcelain echoes.
Without further fanfare, he lifts his leg and readies to strike.
The wood crumbles with a groan beneath the added force, leaving Minato staring into the wide eye of his student.
Eye, singular. Abounding gore obscures the other eye, layers upon layers blanketing the left side of his face. In Kakashi's grasp is a small, rounded object, almost squirming within the blood pooling between the crevices and folds of his skin.
Sages above, is that his fucking eye?!