Chapter Text
On the day they meet, Kakashi has to look up. It’s a minor thing, not worth noting. He notes it anyway. Standing across from him, ever so slightly taller, are a pair of freshly-graduated genin. He folds his arms over his chest and affords them little more than a cursory glance. They’re familiar faces; he went to the academy with them.
Rin Nohara.
Obito Uchiha.
Minato introduces them with a friendly smile and disarming charm that wins the other two over in a heartbeat.
Kakashi shouldn’t be on this genin team. He has plenty of field experience behind him and a fairly decent track record, if you ignore the disputes he’s had with teammates over the years. But, well. He’s been under Minato’s tutelage for several months, and with his teacher’s newly appointed status as a jōnin instructor, this is naturally where he finds himself.
Part of a genin team. As a chūnin.
Kakashi sighs. Obito shoots him a look, all scrunched up and sour with unpleasant words on his tongue. He’s just as short-tempered as he’s always been. Good to see some things never change.
Their first lesson is the bell test, and halfway through, Obito’s whining and annoyed. He pulls the team in, much to Kakashi’s ire as he finds an arm around his shoulder, and whispers, “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Kakashi, you distract him. Rin and I will—”
“That won’t work,” he says. He can already see Obito’s anger spiking, and if he plays his cards wrong, they’ll be fighting amongst themselves instead of working together to complete the test. But he also doesn’t care to mince his words. “Minato-sensei isn’t stupid. He’ll see through your half-baked plan in a heartbeat.”
“He will not!”
“Do you even know who Sensei is?” Kakashi shrugs off the hand on his shoulder and leans away. He can see their instructor watching from across the field, all smiles and good cheer. Minato probably thinks they’re making strides in their teamwork, which is certainly a leap of faith. “Haven’t you heard of Konoha’s Yellow Flash?”
Obito blinks. Dumbly.
“I have,” Rin hurries to interject. She can see the heat bubbling beneath the surface and is trying to simmer them down before they boil over. “Minato-sensei is famous even in other villages. He’s slated to be the next Hokage.”
“Wait, him ? Really?!” Obito spins around to face their mentor. “Someone that important is teaching us? Awesome.”
Kakashi sighs again. He expects to be doing a lot of that.
It takes another hour for Kakashi to snatch one of the bells free, and they collapse on the grass. Minato isn’t even out of breath. He’s congratulating them and giving some speech about the importance of teamwork, and Kakashi can’t bring himself to care. He and Obito keep locking eyes, glaring at each other, cursing with unsaid words.
At the end of their lesson, Obito stomps off, leaving Kakashi and Rin to lag in his wake. The genin smiles at him, sympathetic to his struggles, but he has nothing to say.
“He’s been worried about you, you know,” she says. “Ever since you left the academy.”
Kakashi stares at Obito’s back. The idiot doesn’t even seem to realize they’ve fallen behind. He’s ranting and raving all to himself.
“He really admires you,” Rin continues with a smile. “He’s always training. Says that he wants to catch up.”
In truth, he hasn’t given Obito any thought since his time in the academy.
Hasn’t thought about anything, really.
“Shut up! No, I don’t!”
Obito comes stomping back, apparently hearing Rin’s remarks from down the road, and goes red behind his stupid goggles. They bicker the whole way home.
Kakashi goes to shower when he steps inside. He puts his gear away and heads for the bathroom, removing his shirt. But as the spray is heating up, he catches sight of himself in the mirror and leans in. With narrowed eyes, he reads the dark words carved into his collarbone.
‘Arrogant brat.’
He tries to scrub it off, but it doesn’t work. It’s only after his skin is raw from his efforts that he finally caves, sitting on the rim of the bathtub and staring at the words through the mirror.
He must have met his soulmate. And they do not like him.
Kakashi sighs thrice over and decides that thoughts of this aren’t worth the space in his head. He’s never been interested in finding his soulmate, anyway.
Two months after taking on the genin, Kakashi is bored to death of D-rank missions. He’s tired of painting fences, weeding gardens, hunting cats, and putting up with loudmouth Uchiha rejects who are all bark and no bite.
Obito yelps as Tama, their regular mission target, digs trenches across his face with her claws. He holds the cat at arm’s length as blood seeps from fresh wounds. He’s terrible with cats. It’s like they sense his bad luck, or something.
Kakashi sighs. As soon as he does so, he feels the newly-familiar tingle of words etching into his skin, this time along his bicep. His soulmate sure does have a lot to say.
Skin-writing is a common form for a soul bond to take. Unlike other forms, it doesn’t appear until you’ve come into contact with your soulmate in some way or another. The trigger is different between pairs, so there aren’t any hints in early life, and some go without ever meeting their other half. That would have suited Kakashi just fine; romance is gross, he’s never had a crush, and allotting his time to someone else seems like a waste, given his line of work. Unfortunately, he’s crossed paths with his, and over time, the bond will grow. Right now, all he gets are one or two words: his bonded’s opinion of him written across his skin. In time, that will broaden into other, longer thoughts, expanded until whole sentences are etched across him like paint to a canvas. Given his soulmate’s animosity, he’s not looking forward to that.
Rin plucks the cat from Obito’s hands and ferries it over to Kakashi. “Hey, hold her for a second, okay? I have to treat Obito’s face.”
Kakashi reluctantly accepts the cat, which digs its nails into the front of his shirt. “No matter what you do, it’ll never look any better.”
“Hey!” Obito hisses, throwing up his hands. He has a temper, and often, Kakashi can’t resist the urge to poke the bear. “What’s your problem?!”
Kakashi only shrugs. The cat retracts her claws, settling none too comfortably against him, and he sneezes.
They rejoin Minato-sensei at a nearby park, then return the cat to her owner, an elderly woman who offers them far too many sweet treats, all of which Obito accepts. Then, it’s time to return to Mission Desk and fill out their report. Kakashi hangs back, scratching at the new words on his arm he has yet to see, and the reddening hives from where Tama’s nails dug just deep enough into his skin. She didn’t make him bleed, but his allergy likes to flare up at the worst times.
Sensei places a hand on his shoulder, and when he looks up, a warm, fatherly smile greets him. “Kakashi, why don’t you show them how to fill out the form?”
“Can’t you do it?” he wants to ask, but holds his tongue. It’s not his place to question orders.
Sighing in defeat, Kakashi retrieves the papers from his instructor and sets them across one of the small tables in the lobby. He points to the very top, at the blank space reserved for the mission code. “Remember that number on our mission scroll? This is where it goes. It tells the clerk the mission’s rank, type, and status. So, at the end of this number,” he plucks a pen up from the table and writes it out, “we’ll add 03, which means that it’s been successfully completed. 01 is used for an open mission, and 02 is used to show that a mission was compromised or otherwise unsuccessful.”
Rin listens, but already, Obito’s eyes are glazing over. He can’t pay attention for more than a few minutes, and has no interest whatsoever in the administrative aspects of shinobi life. If he ever makes chūnin, let alone jōnin, it’ll be a miracle.
Even after receiving treatment via Rin’s medical ninjutsu, faint claw marks remain across Obito’s right cheek and the bridge of his nose. They might scar. If he’s already getting hurt on D-ranks, they’ll never be sent on a real mission.
This is, of course, what Obito grouches about as they leave Mission Desk.
“Sensei,” he whines, “don’t ya think we’re ready for C-ranks yet? Come on. This little jerk is already a chūnin, and Rin and I can take care of ourselves.”
Kakashi shoves his hands into his pockets. “Tell that to the cat.”
Obito shoots him a glare, and he stubbornly looks away.
Minato has the patience of the sage, and explains that they haven’t yet reached the prerequisite number of successful D-ranks to qualify them for the next rank up. He’s sympathetic as he listens to Obito’s grievances, kind as he encourages him to hold out for another few months, and eventually, Obito is sated.
They part at the crossroads between the shinobi residential district and the Uchiha district. Obito waves his arms over his head, walking backwards to his home with a big grin. “See you at training, Rin!” Then he sticks his tongue out at Kakashi, turns on his heel, and runs off.
Kakashi rolls his eyes.
Minato is the next to break off, his home further downtown, leaving the last two members of their team to awkwardly shuffle along. Kakashi has no strong feelings about Rin one way or another. She’s fine, he supposes. An average teammate. But there’s nothing special about her. Her combative prowess is weak, she has a water affinity that she struggles to utilize, and her medical ninjutsu is still green. Other than that—
Well, that’s all that matters, isn’t it?
Rin folds her arms behind her back as they walk, looking up at the pink-orange gradient of the sky. “Why are you so hard on him?”
“Who?”
“Obito.”
Kakashi tilts his head, considering that. “He grates on my nerves. I hate that he’s confident with nothing to show for it. It’s guys like him who get people killed.”
Rin nods along with his words. “Sure. But we’re still just genin. If there was any time to make mistakes and learn, it’s now, right?”
He never thought of it that way.
Stepping into his apartment, still absently scratching his arm, he finds the mirror in the bathroom and pulls his shirt over his head, searching for the new text written across his skin.
‘Little jerk.’
Kakashi stares at it for a long, long time. Obito called him that, too. He wonders how many people he’s earned the animosity of, and what prompted his soulmate to think of him at all. The previous text beneath his collarbone has mostly faded, and as he inspects the rest of his body, those are the only words he finds.
With a heavy sigh, he digs through the cabinet for cream to put on his hives.
Five months after the formation of Team 7, Kakashi wakes up to a burning across his stomach. He grits his teeth and resists the urge to scratch it, knowing from experience just how much worse it will get if he does, and covers his face with his hands. A loud groan is muffled by his palms, and he hates that this is the start to his day off. Yesterday was already bad enough.
Obito blew up at him. He was trying to be better, to help Obito with his cloning technique. But Obito is terrible at anything and everything subtle, and Kakashi’s tongue has been sharp since he was five years old.
It was one word, “useless,” that set his teammate off.
For the first time, Obito put hands on him outside their spars. He took Kakashi’s shirt within his fist, and slammed him back against a tree. Kakashi could have stopped him. He didn’t.
There were tears in Obito’s eyes, burning and twisted, like flames erupting from hot coals.
Sensei told them to take the day off. He said it would be best for them to have their space. Kakashi figured he would train alone in one of the parks, or try to find an empty training field, but this bout of his skin-writing disease is particularly nasty.
He lifts his shirt and doubles over, trying to see the words, but they’re still forming, and only one character has appeared on his skin. The whole length of his stomach is reddening, hot to the touch, and it’ll be several hours before it’s run its course.
A soul mark isn’t meant to hurt. If his soulmate’s opinion of him was positive, or even neutral, then it wouldn’t. But because this person views him so negatively, Kakashi is suffering the consequences through their bond. And unless he learns who it is, there’s no making amends.
Perhaps he should spend the day being pleasant to people, and hope that one of them is his bonded. He can be nice. He’s not that bad. Sure, he can be snappy, and Dad used to say he didn’t have a filter, but…
But he thinks of Obito, and those tears in his eyes, and wonders if he’s lying to himself.
Kakashi moves to the bathroom first. He tosses his clothes in the basket by the door, sits on the shower stool, and tries not to look at his reflection in the tiles as he turns on the shower head. Ink blooms regularly across his skin these days, and he has all sorts of nasty words on his body. He’s been wearing long sleeves, covering more of his skin so no one will ask about it. Knowing that his soulmate hates him is fine, but admitting it to others is something else entirely. The last thing he needs is Minato-sensei or Rin being nosy. Or Obito mocking him for it. Kushina might try to find out who it is, too, and that would be mortifying.
He sees black splotches on his skin, too blurry to read through the reflection, but already knows what they say.
‘Stupid jerk.’
‘Smart-ass.’
‘Know-it-all.’
He wonders how he can be stupid and a smart-ass at the same time.
The one on his stomach has barely progressed by the time he towels off, and he resigns himself to feeling the burn of it for the next several hours to come.
After breakfast, he lounges around the apartment for a while before deciding he can’t take it. There’s nothing to do in his hole-in-the-wall unit but read, and nothing to distract him from the feeling of new insults tattooing his body. He goes in search of an empty training ground. It’s the weekend, so most genin teams are off work for the day, but many of them will get together with their academy friends and spar anyway. Gai usually follows him around, demanding he partake in some ridiculous challenge, but the one day Kakashi needs him, he’s nowhere to be found.
As he passes near the Uchiha district, figuring he might as well settle for a park, he spots a curled-up figure by the stream. He would recognize those obnoxious orange goggles anywhere. They’re resting atop some towels in a basket, and their owner is currently shirtless as he scrubs furiously at his arms with a rag.
Across his back, ink blooms, too far away to read.
“Obito?”
The genin jumps, scrambles to pull his jacket on, and whips his head around. His eyes are bloodshot, as though he spent the whole night crying. “Bakashi?!”
Ugh, that nickname. It’s so childish. Kakashi doesn’t remark, taking stock of the way his teammate is stubbornly holding his jacket closed with his hands, water soaking into the sleeves from his skin. He should probably leave; Minato told them to spend time apart. Then he thinks of the ink on Obito’s back, and finds himself stepping closer.
He stands over Obito, unsure of what to say. Finally, he asks, “What are you doing out here?”
“Laundry?” Obito stutters, his eyes shifting to the side.
“You’re a terrible liar.”
Against his better judgment, Kakashi sets his bag down on the grass and takes a seat next to his teammate. He keeps his attention on the stream, trying not to pry, but his mind is on the ink he saw. Kakashi hasn’t seen soul marks on another person. People tend to hide them, and shinobi cover up thoroughly even without the excuse of skin-writing disease.
“Your soulmate?” Kakashi prods, unable to stop himself. Obito deflates, all his energy sapped out of him like a dying weed, and draws his knees up to his chest. “Did they say something bad about you?”
Obito opens his mouth, as though to reject the claim, then hangs his head. “They always do.”
Kakashi knows a thing or two about that. “Can I see?”
“Buzz off,” Obito grumbles, burying his face against his arms. “I’m tired of you mocking me.”
Does he mock Obito? Is that why they fought yesterday?
Silence stretches between them, broken up by the steady flow of the stream. Obito picks up pebbles to toss into the water, and Kakashi wonders how he might fix the heavy atmosphere between them. For as stupid, and cocky, and ridiculous as Obito is, Kakashi doesn’t hate him. They don’t know each other well enough for that, and even if Obito’s brand of confidence is dangerous, that doesn’t make him a bad person.
Awkwardly, he lifts his shirt and clears his throat, revealing the angry red mark on his stomach. Obito looks over at him, eyes wide. The ink is still barely there, not enough to form the sentiment it will be later in the day, but it’s obvious enough that whatever it’s going to say won’t be positive.
“You, too?” Obito asks. “Does it hurt?”
“Burns like a bitch,” Kakashi answers flatly.
Obito snorts, reaching out as though to touch the angry rash. Instead, he lets the ends of his jacket hang open, and across his chest, right along his breastbone, it reads that word, ‘Useless.’
His teammate rubs the back of his neck and looks away. More ink peeks out from beneath his sleeve, but not enough to read. “I guess they really hate me,” he laughs, the sound too sharp to be honest. “I think it’s someone in my clan. They’re all kinda… like that.”
Kakashi keeps staring at that word as though it came from his own mouth.
“Nothing I can do about it,” Obito shrugs. “And unless they’re Rin, I don’t really care. But… it gets to me sometimes. Seeing it.”
Kakashi pries his eyes away from the word, facing his legs. “Sorry. For yesterday.”
“Um… yeah. Me, too.”
The birds are loud so early in the morning, and they’re grateful for it. It makes the space between their words seem less vast.
“But you can’t wash it off, idiot,” Kakashi adds, unable to resist.
“Shut up, Bakashi! I know that!”
It isn’t until the next morning that the burning settles. Kakashi climbs out of bed, his feet automatically drive him to the bathroom, and stares at the first sentence offered by his soul bond, there on his stomach.
‘What did I do that was so wrong?’
They take a C-rank courier mission to the southern side of Fire Country. Kakashi lies awake that night. He's taking the second watch, but as he stares up at the moon, he can't sleep. His hand is on his stomach, over the raised words there that are still bold and dark, yet to fade.
No new words have appeared on his body, but the first sentence shared between them is persistent, and it's possible it could last the rest of his days. Soul marks are like that. But if Kakashi has to keep one until he dies, he hopes it isn't this one.
He's been wondering about his soulmate lately. Who they are, and why they’re so full of anger. If Kakashi is the cause of their despair, or a symptom.
After speaking with Obito, he realized that his soulmate must have started seeing his own thoughts on their body. But he doesn't know who they are or what his opinion of them is. Does he paint them with crass words and harsh comments? Do they feel the same burn when new ink blooms across their arms?
“Close your damn eyes, Bakashi. Jeez.”
Kakashi rolls his head to the side, staring at his teammate. Obito took the first watch. He's a nightmare to wake up, so if they let him go later in the night, someone else might be stuck doing two shifts back-to-back, and exhaustion can kill. The mission might be low risk, but there's a war going on, and anything can happen.
Kakashi crawls out of his sleeping bag and sits on top of it. “Can’t sleep.”
“You didn't even try.”
He shrugs. His thoughts are too loud for him to settle right now.
Part of him wants to see something new from his soul bond, just to know his soulmate’s frame of mind.
He eyes Obito through the dark. “How are your marks looking—”
Obito covers his mouth and hisses warnings between his teeth, staring at the rest of their team. No one else heard; they're dead asleep.
Kakashi didn't realize it was a secret.
“They’re fine, okay?” Obito whispers. “Shut up.”
When the hand falls away from his mask, Kakashi raises a brow. “They stopped insulting you?”
“Not… not exactly…”
After a long moment of staring, Obito groans and rolls up his sleeve. It's hard to see through the dark, but Kakashi leans in, and reads, ‘Idiot.’
“No change, then?”
“No, it’s—” Obito tucks the mark beneath his sleeve again. “It's not as bad, I guess? Like, it sucks, ‘cause my soulmate is supposed to be the person who cares about me the most. But I'm used to being called an idiot. Even Rin says stuff like that sometimes. It doesn't… hit the way some of their messages did.”
Messages? He never looked at them like that.
If he were to try, could he send his soulmate a message through their bond? Maybe that's something he can trial-and-error when he's back in Konoha. Maybe he could apologize, just in case.
“What about you? What'd that one on your stomach say?”
Kakashi tugs his shirt down further. “It's personal.”
Obito rolls his eyes, and it looks like he'll complain, but he pauses, tilting his head back. “What about the one on your arm?”
“I don't have one on my arm.”
“Yeah, you do.” Obito pokes the back of his bicep, where the fabric of his sleeve is torn from one of their previous spars. “Right here.”
Obito goes to read it, and Kakashi hurriedly burrows back into his sleeping bag, pulling it over his head. There is no way he'll let Obito read the mark before he has, knowing how his soulmate can be.
Obito grumbles. “You're such an ass. I showed you mine…”
But Kakashi shouldn't have another one. He hasn't felt the burn of new ink.
The writing on his arm is at an awkward angle, and Kakashi failed to read it when he was on night watch. He can get a look at it when he's home. For now, the mission takes priority.
Obito’s bad luck must be infectious, because of course the mission goes sideways on day two. Kiri-nin attack when they encroach on the border, and Obito takes an arrow to the back. Kakashi steps in front of him as the Kiri-nin swarm like vultures to carrion, and stops their blades with the teeth of his own. As he holds his ground, as Minato-sensei cuts through their foes like practice dummies, he sees his tantō and thinks of Dad.
Dad, who put his teammates above the village. Dad, who sacrificed their future for a momentary success.
The enemy falls. Rin rushes over to Obito, already inspecting the arrow embedded in his skin. Kakashi watches on, and wonders if he would make the same mistakes as his father.
They secure the perimeter and make camp. It's early, and they're close to the settlement they're supposed to deliver the supplies to, but Obito needs treatment. Kakashi keeps his weapon drawn, high-strung and ready to attack the moment he sees movement. Chakra itches beneath his skin, waiting to be unleashed. If anyone were to touch him, he just might snap.
Someone could have died.
“Obito, come on,” Rin groans, gesturing with her hands, “we have to cut off your shirt. How do you expect me to help if I can't see what I'm working with?”
A sheen of sweat coats Obito’s skin, falling down his neck. He grits his teeth, his face twisted in the sort of pain shinobi know well. “I’m fine,” he stutters, a subtle quaver to his voice. “Just pull it out.”
“I can't just pull it out. It has barbed hooks; it'll tear through you if it isn't removed properly, and cause more damage. Take it off. I'm not asking.”
Obito ducks his head and otherwise doesn't move.
This is about his soul marks, isn’t it? Kakashi understands, but putting his insecurities above his well-being won’t get him anywhere.
Minato-sensei is currently scoping the area. He's usually the one who gets through to Obito when he's feeling particularly obstinate, but he's not around to work his magic.
While his teammates argue, Kakashi approaches them. He takes a knee next to Obito. “We don't have time for this,” he says. “You're a shinobi: your personal hang-ups don't matter here. The worst thing you could ever do for the team is make our medic’s job harder than it already is.”
Obito goes to protest, but the words are stuck. He grips his pant legs, lowers his head, and bites his lip.
With one quick swipe of his blade, Kakashi cuts away Obito’s shirt near the wound. Obito jumps, swatting at him, and he drags his knife through a trail of torn fabric. The shirt falls away, revealing stark black ink around the wound.
‘Crybaby.’
‘Dead Last.’
‘Annoying.’
‘Idiot.’
Rin stares at the soul marks for a long, long time. The silence only makes her friend more anxious, fidgeting through the pain he must be in. It takes a hard nudge for her to come back to herself.
“Rin?” Obito asks, voice small.
Rin clears her throat, scrubs her eyes, and gets to work. “It's pretty deep, but I don’t think it hit anything vital. This is going to hurt a lot, okay? I'm going to cover the barbs so they don't hook into your tissue when I go to pull it out.”
“You could just lie, you know. Tell me it'll feel like sunshine and rainbows.”
It gets a laugh out of her. “Sure. Sunshine and rainbows. You'll be getting a lot of that.” Then, she looks at Kakashi, and mouths, “Distract him.”
He really doesn’t want to. In fact, he doesn’t know how. Most conversations between them are some form of bickering, and the only civil words they’ve shared have been in solidarity, as they’re each dealing with their own unfortunate soul bonds. But Rin keeps looking at him.
Reluctantly, Kakashi moves to sit in front of Obito and brings his hand up to his torn shirt. “Can I remove this now?”
Obito glares at him for all of five seconds before taking a deep breath. “Yeah, sure,” he bites out. “Rip off the bandage, why don’t you?”
Kakashi guides the fabric down his teammate’s arms, revealing more and more ink blooming in patches across his skin, and…
‘Your form is terrible.’
He has a sentence, too. One Kakashi can painfully understand.
“Your soulmate might be rude, but they’re not wrong.”
“Sh-shut up, Bakashi.”
Obito grunts as Rin works at his back, gritting his teeth, but he’s at least somewhat distracted. Kakashi grabs one of Obito’s arms, surprised when there’s no pushback, and fixates on the soul mark he was shown last night. True enough, none of these words are as biting as the one he saw last month. In their academy days, Obito was mocked so regularly that these comments could belong to any of their classmates, really, or a member of the Uchiha clan. His clansmen are more likely to have seen him train recently.
Obito bites back a cry. Kakashi isn’t doing the best job of distracting him, stuck in his own head like he is. Begrudgingly, he raises his own arm before his teammate, where the fabric is split and ink bleeds through. As reluctant as he is to allow this, it’s his best shot at keeping Obito’s mind off what happens next. “Help me read the mark you found last night. I can’t see it.”
The genin pants heavily in the open air as hazy eyes trying to focus on the patch of skin peeking out from beneath Kakashi’s sleeve. His shaking hand parts the edges of the fabric, tired eyes squinting at the word, and he says nothing.
“Obito?” Kakashi prods. Rin nods at him; she’s ready, and this next part will hurt worse than what came before it. “What does it say?”
Black eyes dart from his arm to his face.
“Well?”
Obito opens his mouth, heavy breaths filling the silence, and behind him, Rin grips the shaft of the arrow.
Kakashi pulls off his glove, holds it up, and orders, “Bite down.”
The moment the leather is between Obito’s teeth, a scream tears from his throat. He doubles over, falling onto Kakashi, his whole body trembling as the green glow of medical ninjutsu washes out their campsite. Kakashi awkwardly wraps an arm around Obito’s shoulder, a wet patch soaking into his shirt, and stares up at the clouds.
Crybaby ninja.
After the success of their mission, they’re given a week off because Obito needs further treatment from the medics at the hospital. As habit dictates, Kakashi goes straight to his bathroom when he gets home and pulls his shirt over his head, trying to find the mark on his arm that Obito read. Obito wouldn’t tell him what it said, so it must have been a special kind of nasty. But it’s already gone.
The one on his stomach stands, though, its ink only now beginning to fade.
He doesn’t understand why he never noticed the other mark. During the earliest days, he didn’t feel the itch too strongly when a soul mark formed, but it worsened over time as his soulmate’s resentment grew.
While showering, he falls back on the idea of sending his soulmate a message. Even if he doesn’t know who they are, he theorizes that if he thinks specifically of his soulmate, and not the person behind the bond, his thoughts might be transferred to their skin. Soul marks are a private matter, rarely discussed. Those words are meant only for their partner, after all. But Obito called them messages, and if he thinks of them that way, he can’t help but see it as a form of correspondence. The stronger the bond, the more is shared, after all, and once a bond settles, unrelated thoughts begin to transfer.
He stares at the fading sentence across his stomach, the one that burned for an entire day, and wonders, ‘Are you okay?’
It’s silly. This won’t work, and even if it did, he wouldn’t have any way of knowing. As he towels off, glancing once more at the mirror, he takes note of the patchy flush of his skin, and sighs.
At least their bond can’t convey his embarrassment.
He spends Sunday in the gardens at the back of the Uzumaki house, wrist-deep in soil. Kushina places a wide-brimmed hat on his head, her grin blinding as she reminds him how easily his skin burns. He groans, and pretends the red spots on his face are from the sun.
Kakashi doesn’t have a family. Dad took what little he had and spilled it across the floor of their estate. But if he had a sister, he imagines this is what it would feel like. Minato will always be his mentor, his role model. But Kushina is warm like the sun and easy to smile. She drags him out of his apartment when he shuts himself in, and brings him meals if he trains for too long. Even though she says Obito is her favourite, she’s never made him feel unwanted.
Today, she wants help weeding. The garden has been dead all year, the war having taken too much of her time, and she’s determined to give it some love now, while she has a few days of breathing room. She doesn’t know how many years she has left in this house, because she and Minato will join households one day, and wants to care for it while she can.
Kakashi doesn’t mind. It reminds him of his brief time with Dad, and those few good memories he clings to.
Kushina heaves a breath, swiping her arm across her brow, sweat beading down her face. The movement draws Kakashi’s eyes, and he can’t help but stare at the unmarked skin on display, her sleeveless shirt betraying no ink.
“Alright,” she sighs, “I think we’ve earned a break. Let’s grab something to drink, hey?”
Kakashi waits in the shade of the big tree in her yard, and she returns with juice and snacks. They rest against the trunk at their backs, the air filled with birdsong and wind, and Kakashi keeps staring at her arms. When Kushina notices, he asks, “You don’t have skin-writing disease?”
“Kakashi,” she chastises, “it’s not a disease. Skin-writing bonds are super common, y’know!”
To him, it feels like an illness that flares up at random, one without a cure, doomed to follow him the rest of his days. But he won’t argue; he knows most people enjoy the words given to them by their bonded.
“I do have a skin-writing bond,” Kushina confesses, rubbing the back of her neck. “But it’s a distant bond, so not a lot of marks crop up.”
Kakashi pulls down his mask to sip at his drink. “How do you make the bond distant?”
Kushina clears her throat. “A-ah, well… It’s not something you do. It just happens as people grow apart. My soulmate is married. Because we’re dedicated to other people, and because we aren’t as close, the marks I get are few and far between. Only death can sever a bond, but distance and time can mute it.”
He doesn’t understand, brows furrowed as he mulls that over. “Isn’t Minato-sensei your soulmate?”
Kushina barks out a laugh, flicking the brim of Kakashi’s hat. “No way, not at all. I love Minato, but that doesn’t make him my soulmate.”
Huh. Kakashi never thought of it like that. He assumed everyone either ended up alone or with their soulmate—that they all found their bonded sooner or later, and that was just how things went.
If that’s not the case, maybe his soulmate hating him isn’t that big of a deal, in the grand scheme of things. He already assumed he would remain alone. Kakashi hasn’t had a crush, or wanted to get close to someone in that way. He thinks Minato-sensei and Kushina are a bit disgusting with the way they fawn over one another. Romance was never a thought in his head, and maybe it doesn’t have to be.
Kushina folds her arms over her knees, her hair falling down her shoulders as she smiles at him. “Kashi,” she calls softly, drawing his eyes, “do you have something you want to share?”
He opens his mouth to say something, then looks away. “No.”
“Really?” Kushina lifts her arm, poking the space on his neck just below his ear. “Why don’t I believe that?”
“I don’t know,” he grumbles, swatting her hand away. Then, with slow-growing horror, it dawns on him that his mask is still down, and the skin of his neck is visible. He grips the edge of his mask, ready to pull it up over his face, but stops. Licking his lips, swallowing the lump in his throat, he asks, “What does it say?”
Kushina hooks her finger around the fabric and tugs it down, leaning in to get a closer look. Kakashi tilts his head away, trying to make whatever words are there visible. “Let’s see here… ‘I’ll live,’ it says. Huh. That’s a weird one.”
‘I’ll live.’
It might mean nothing. It probably does. But as his face burns red, and as he tugs the mask back over his nose, he can’t help but wonder if he got a response.
Message received.