Lost Songbirds
You wake to the sound of nothing.
No fire crackling. No birdsong. Just the thick hush of fog pressing against the world, and the dull ache lodged deep in your joints that tells you you’ve stayed still too long on cold ground.
Your breath slips out in a pale plume.
The blanket draped over your shoulders is heavy with damp and ash, half-frozen at the edges where the mist settled during the night. The fire is out. Snuffed clean. Only the ghost of smoke lingers, curling upward from a ring of blackened stones, then vanishing into the low, suffocating fog that’s swallowed the forest whole.
It’s early. The kind of early that doesn’t belong to people. The air is colorless, the trees draped in translucent white, their bark wet and gleaming like old bones. The light is watery—diffused through the mist with no discernible source. Every shape is softened. Every edge blurred.
For a moment, you don’t know where east is.
And Kakashi isn’t beside you.
You sit up too fast, spine stiff, knees aching, and the sudden rush of blood makes your vision tilt. Pain lances up your leg—your calf cramped tight, the muscle seizing like it’s being wrung out. You hiss under your breath, stretch, knead it. The blanket slips off your shoulders, pooling in your lap with a damp, papery slap.
You reach out, almost without thinking—reflex more than conscious action.
His chakra is nearby.
Close.
Focused. Controlled.
But not settled.
There’s something tightly wound about it. Something drawn in and thinned to a strand. No excess. No movement. Just the sensation of being watched from the inside.
You rise slowly. Wrap your cloak around your shoulders and move through the wet underbrush, each step muffled by the soaked forest floor. The fog curls around your boots, rolls in slow eddies as you pass. Even your breath sounds too loud.
You find him standing just beyond the ring of camp, shadowed beneath the skeletal arms of a birch tree, one shoulder leaned against the pale trunk. He’s facing away, half obscured by the mist. Still as a statue, but listening. You can feel it in the angle of his head, in the way his fingers rest at the edge of his mask—not adjusting it. Just touching it, like he forgot it was there.
He doesn’t move when you stop beside him.
“Morning,” you say, soft, quiet enough not to ripple the air.
His voice comes after a beat. Flat. “You slept through first watch.”
“You didn’t wake me.”
“No.”
A silence opens, but it isn’t gentle.
It thrums. Hums. There’s something tight strung between you—an invisible cord pulled taut, vibrating with whatever it is he’s holding back. It’s not anger. Not fear. It’s something else. Something colder.
You shift your cloak higher on your shoulders and step closer.
Close enough now to see it.
The tension in his posture. The fine tremor just beneath the surface. The white line of his knuckles where his hand curls at his side.
“Something’s wrong,” you murmur.
“Nothing’s wrong.”
His voice doesn’t rise. Doesn’t waver. But it’s not convincing, and he doesn’t try to make it so.
You don’t speak. Just wait.
He finally looks at you. Just a glance.
Then, clipped: “There was movement northeast. Two chakra signatures. ANBU. Faint. They didn’t get close.”
You almost say how—you hadn’t felt them, and you’re not exactly sloppy with your senses—but you bite it down. His expression tells you enough.
He didn’t sleep.
He felt them because he never stopped watching.
You nod once. “We keep moving?”
“We pack light. No fire tonight.”
“Rations?”
“There’s food in my satchel. Enough to last the day. You take first portion.”
The words come sharp. Clipped. Tactical.
You hum with a frown. “You’re acting like we’re in enemy territory.”
This time, he turns.
Looks you dead in the eye.
And says, “We are.”
It lands in you like a blade edge.
Not fear. Not panic.
Recognition.
You don’t ask what happened. Not yet. Because you’ve known this kind of silence before—the heavy kind. The kind that swells in the aftermath of something you can’t undo. You’ve worn it, too. After the war. After missions that ended in blood and silence. After betrayals.
You’ve seen how grief speaks through containment.
Not sobs. Not shouting.
Just the stillness. The control. The way a man stands too straight. The way he stares too long into nothing, because if he lets go for even a second, he won’t be able to stop the collapse.
And this—this man in front of you now—is holding something much heavier than fear.
He’s holding himself.
And maybe something else, too.
Something that doesn’t quite belong to him.
You turn before the chill sets in too deep. Head back toward camp, letting the silence follow you like a shadow. You kneel at the remnants of the fire pit, hands moving through muscle memory—packing gear, shaking ash from the blanket, checking blades.
You don’t look back at him.
But you feel his gaze all the same.
Heavy.
Fixed.
And unreadable.
The days pass in quiet rhythm, strung together like beads on a fraying thread—measured by footfalls, by breath, by the slow turn of the sun overhead.
Each morning begins in mist. Low and clinging, it curls around your ankles like the ghost of tidewater, blurring the world to soft grey and silver. Trees emerge slowly as you walk—first as shadows, then as trunks, their limbs black against the sky, etched with frost. Even your breath hangs suspended in the cold, before vanishing into nothing.
By midday, the fog has burned away, and the light stretches long across the land. You follow forgotten roads—once cobbled, now crumbling—threading through thickets and overgrown fields. The land here feels untouched. Not wild exactly, but abandoned. As if whoever once called this place home left in a hurry and never came back.
You pass no travelers. No carts. No signs of war or weather. Only remnants: a shrine sunken in vines and half-swallowed by a hill, its offering bowl still intact; a post marker smoothed unreadable by rain; the bleached remains of a wooden fence, trailing away like a memory into the tall grass.
Even the birds are quiet sometimes.
You don’t speak much.
He walks ahead some mornings, his cloak catching the wind just enough to betray motion—like he’s gliding, not walking. Other days you lead, navigating by instinct or memory or something that pulls faintly behind your ribs. Neither of you comments when you begin falling into the same pace. Same stride. Same silences.
It happens gradually, then all at once.
A rhythm between you.
Unspoken.
Unchallenged.
The world around you begins to soften. The winter’s edge dulls. Spring seeps in slow—at first only in color. A hint of green at the edge of the path. The flush of new buds along the birches. Then in smell. Damp earth. Blossoms unfurling. The sharp scent of pine giving way to loam.
Eventually, warmth follows.
Not enough to leave your cloaks behind, but enough that your fingers stop aching. Enough that you begin to notice the world again—the way sunlight catches in Kakashi’s hair when he walks beneath it, silver igniting like frostfire. The shape of his breath when it fogs the air before him, the faint hitch in it when he’s thinking too hard, or too far.
At night, you take turns with watch, same as always.
But you’ve stopped asking.
He’s always awake when you stir, already sitting upright, one knee drawn up beneath his arm, eye glinting faintly in the gloom. Not tense. Not entirely relaxed. As if the weight of something just beyond his reach keeps him on the edge of rest, hovering where dreams can’t quite find him.
You wonder how little he sleeps.
If he sleeps at all.
Sometimes you think you hear him muttering under his breath in the darkest hours, voice low, the syllables blurred by wind and distance. Not words. Just fragments. Like prayers. Or apologies. Or names.
But you don’t ask.
There are things better left alone.
Especially here, in this stillness.
Because whatever this quiet thing is between you—whatever this near-peace is that has settled over the long road and the empty sky—you’re afraid to name it. Afraid to mark it with sound.
So instead, you walk.
Through rustling fields of last year’s wheat, bleached pale gold by frost. Through forest groves where the snow has receded and crocuses bloom along the roots in defiance of cold. Through places that seem to remember what they once were, even if no one else does.
And each step carries you farther.
Not just from where you came.
But from the people you were, too.
The third day, you start training again.
The morning is heavy with mist and birdsong, the trail damp beneath your boots as you hike steadily uphill, weaving away from the road and deeper into the forest’s quiet interior. You search for higher ground, some place open and unburdened, where the trees part just enough to let the light in.
You find it past a curtain of ivy-covered rock and a slope of moss-draped stone—an overgrown glade tucked into the mountainside, ringed by birch and cedar. The canopy thins above, spilling gold shafts of sunlight through budding branches. The warmth touches your skin like breath. It smells of thawed earth and old bark, of water and green things trying to wake.
There’s no road here. No chakra signatures beyond your own. Just wind. Silence. Distance.
You unfasten your cloak and let it fall across a patch of dry ground, then step forward into the clearing and feel the first flutter of nerves roll beneath your ribs.
Your boots scuff across leaf-littered soil. You plant your feet shoulder-width apart, adjust your balance, roll your shoulders.
And then you try to remember what calm used to feel like.
The first hand seal is familiar, but it doesn’t settle you.
The second is harder—your fingers twitch. You bite the inside of your cheek.
Chakra gathers sluggishly at your fingertips. Uneven. Wrong in a way that’s hard to name, like a familiar tool with all its edges reversed. The internal channels feel swollen, tight, buzzing with that strange distortion again—like a wire wrapped too tightly around your bones. Not pain. Just wrongness.
Still fractured. Still too fragile.
You breathe through it.
And then—
“Your stance is tight.”
The voice behind you doesn’t startle. It settles.
Measured. Cool. Low enough to be mistaken for thought.
You don’t turn. Don’t move. Just tilt your head slightly, eyes half-lidded.
“I know,” you say.
You always know when he’s watching now.
It presses along your spine, a subtle weight that’s become more familiar than your own pulse. Not oppressive—just present. Like gravity.
You turn slowly.
He’s leaned against a narrow cedar trunk at the edge of the glade, arms crossed loosely over his chest, the shadow of the tree casting soft lines across his flak vest. His mask is still up, his hitai-ate angled to reveal the slow rotation of the Sharingan—steady, soundless, blood-bright in the dappled light.
He’s not blinking.
You look away first.
“Trying to rebuild something that doesn’t want to be rebuilt,” you murmur, more to yourself than to him.
There’s a quiet rustle of cloth as he shifts, one foot lifting slightly off the bark behind him.
“No,” he says after a pause. “It wants to. It just doesn’t know what shape it’s allowed to take anymore.”
The words hit like a tuning fork struck inside your chest.
You glance at him again.
Still watching. Still unreadable.
You form the next seal anyway.
The chakra shivers at your command, wild and watery. It sways between your hands before you steady your breath and force it to settle. It takes more effort than it should. Your arms shake slightly. A bead of sweat slips down your temple.
And all the while, his Sharingan tracks every motion. Every slip and correction. Every deviation from your old self, etched now into his vision for later dissection.
You hate how exposed it makes you feel.
But you also know—it’s the closest thing to trust you’ve exchanged in days.
You brace, seal again.
This time, the energy holds.
Not perfectly. Not smoothly. But it stabilizes. For a moment, it steadies into something like control—brief, but real.
Your hands tremble with the effort. But you don’t let it show.
And then you exhale. Release the chakra. Let it drain away before it burns.
Behind you, Kakashi’s voice folds into the glade like a breeze brushing through tall grass.
“Better.”
You don’t thank him.
He doesn’t expect it.
Instead, you wipe your palms on your trousers, heart still hammering beneath your ribs, and turn toward the sound of wind threading through the canopy.
His Sharingan is still spinning.
But it’s not as sharp now.
And when he finally closes it, you can almost pretend he isn’t still memorizing every fracture in your shape.
Almost.
That night, the trees thin and the sound of rushing water begins to thread through the stillness like breath.
You follow it instinctively, feet muffled against the moss-soft forest floor. The path curves downward and opens into a clearing where the moonlight spills like milk, soft and luminous. There—beyond a curtain of ferns and twisted roots—a river waits.
It cuts a winding silver path through the woodland, wide and slow and dark as polished obsidian in its depths, yet glittering along the surface where starlight catches. Mist rises from its skin like smoke, curling low over the banks where moss clings thick to smooth stones. Everything glows faintly under the moon’s pale watch—ghost-white, hushed, and untouched.
You pause on the edge of the bank. No words pass between you.
You don’t need them.
Kakashi lingers just behind, close enough that you sense the faint warmth of his presence, but still distant—turned away, facing the opposite direction. A quiet sentinel. Neither of you looks at the other.
You kneel.
The moss yields beneath your knees, cool and damp. The river’s edge laps gently at the earth with a rhythmic, whispering hush. You dip your hands into the water, and it bites cold—clear to the bone—but the sharpness is grounding. It snaps the fog from your limbs, steadies the place inside you that still feels out of sync.
You roll back your sleeves and begin to scrub. Dirt flakes from your arms in silent streaks. Your fingers ache in the cold, but you keep going, dragging wet palms across your neck, the back of your shoulders, the inside of your wrists. Each motion is methodical. Cleansing. As though trying to wash off more than just the day.
Behind you, Kakashi doesn’t move.
But his stillness says more than presence ever could.
He’s watching the trees. The shadows. The stars.
And—unspoken, unacknowledged—you.
His chakra remains sharp but calm, like a blade at rest.
You don’t speak. You don’t have to.
The trust in it is quieter than any truce, but far more real.
When you’re done, you rise slowly, water dripping from your fingertips, sleeves heavy with damp. You wring them out absently as you step past him, close enough that your cloak brushes his side. You don’t glance at him. Don’t look back.
But your eyes catch, just once, on the silhouette of his form—outlined in pale moonlight as he lowers himself to the riverbank.
You catch the quiet shift of his shoulders, the roll of his sleeves. The glint of silver hair catching moonlight like frost.
Then you turn away.
Your back to him. His to you.
You settle on a low rock farther upstream, close enough to feel the pulse of his chakra but far enough to grant space. You rest your arms over your knees and keep your eyes on the dark water.
The river continues its quiet hymn between you. The woods hold their breath. The stars keep their distance.
The silence stretches. Long. Gentle. Unspoken.
And though neither of you says it, you know—if something were to emerge from the brush, if a threat were to rise from the river’s depths, you would move in tandem. You would protect him, and he you.
Not because of orders. Not because of duty.
But because, somewhere in this strange and silent world, you are still the only constants the other has.
The following day, the storm begins long before the first drop falls.
You smell it in the air—ozone and loam, sharp and wet, like the crack of a blade through moss. It threads through the wind, coiling low along the forest floor, riding in the hush that settles just before everything breaks. The canopy above stirs restlessly, a dry rustle of leaves that seems too loud in the sudden absence of birdsong.
Even the insects quiet.
The sky begins to bruise. Once-soft daylight fades into uneasy hues—dove grey smearing into dusk-violet, then curdling into something darker at the edges. You tilt your head, squint up through the shifting boughs.
The clouds are coming fast.
You and Kakashi both feel it in your bones before it’s even visible—chakra reacting to pressure, muscles tensing with instinct. Storms like this aren’t just weather. Not in this world. Not out here. They feel sentient. Like something watching from the treeline, waiting to unravel your steps.
Kakashi doesn’t say a word.
Just moves.
He veers west with no warning, cutting through low brush and uphill terrain, silent but purposeful. You follow without asking. He moves like a hound with scent in his nose, body taut, shoulders square. The forest thickens, then thins again—trees giving way to rock, the scent of lichen and wet stone filling your lungs.
Then you see it.
A ravine, narrow and choked with scrub, dipping away from the path. And nestled in its curve—half-hidden by vines and the skeleton of a collapsed tree—is a cave. Shallow, low, dark. Barely enough room for two bodies and a fire.
You duck inside first.
It’s colder than expected, the air dense with the scent of wet granite and old ash. You shake out your cloak, water already soaking the hem. The stone beneath your boots is slick, sloping toward the rear, but dry enough near the entrance to sit. Barely.
Kakashi follows a breath later, crouching low to clear the ceiling. He doesn’t speak. Just steps inside and scans the space out of habit. You feel the sharp, assessing flicker of his chakra—taut, edged, still charged from the open air.
The rain starts in whispers.
A scatter of drops tapping at the leaves like fingers. Then a murmur. Then a shivering wash of noise as the clouds break and the forest drowns.
It falls in torrents.
Thick and relentless, drumming the canopy, hammering the stone above your heads. The trees sway under it. The wind cuts sideways. Thunder cracks open the sky in a delayed, aching growl.
You don’t light a fire.
You sit with your boots off, legs drawn up, arms wrapped loosely around your knees. Your back rests against the cool cave wall. It’s damp and solid, grounding in a way that makes your pulse slow without meaning to. You stare out at the curtain of rain, at the way it catches what little light remains, silvering it into mist.
Lightning flickers again—far off, pale and silent.
For a long time, neither of you speaks.
You can hear him breathing, just over your left shoulder. Not strained, not tired—just quiet. Contained. As though every part of him is folded in tight, locked in some private calculation. His weight shifts only slightly, enough for you to feel the cold brush of his shoulder against your own before he eases back.
The storm wraps around the cave like a second skin.
Every gust of wind seems to breathe against the stone. Every gust of thunder rolls through your ribs like a heartbeat. You watch the world wash away in streaks of rain, and wonder how long you’ll have before it starts to flood the floor.
Still, it’s safe here. Safe enough.
Even if the tension in Kakashi hasn’t eased. Even if he hasn’t said a word since finding the shelter. Even if his chakra feels—wrong. Or maybe not wrong. Just different.
He hasn’t told you what’s been on his mind.
Nothing about the way he’s been watching the tree line like something will peel out of it wearing your face.
You doubt he ever will.
And knowing him, you doubt you’ll ever ask.
Because you know what it’s like to hold something too heavy in your chest. To sit in silence with your own ghosts pressed tight to your ribs.
And still—
Even with the silence, even with the ache of what’s unspoken—
You don’t feel alone.
Not anymore.
Not in the way that used to hollow you out.
There’s a presence now. Steady. Fractured, but real. His. Yours. Bound by the quiet between the rain.
And you let it hold.
Just for a little while.