Burn Me Alive

Kakashi languidly rolled up to the gate fifteen minutes late. Guy seemed to materialize next to him, jostling him out of his thoughts. He raises a brow at Guy, “You’re… late?”

Guy grins, “Most observant, rival!” Kakashi makes a sound of annoyance at the sarcastic comment disguised as a compliment. “I know how late you usually are,” he boasts, sparkling.

“I’m not usually late, Guy.”

“What would you call it, then?”

“I would call it the ability to see when I’m leaving due to the fact that you were at my house.”

Guy tsks, “That has nothing to do with my ability to know what time you show up to things!”

“Maybe I just don’t abide by time in the same neurotic way that you and Minato-sensei seem-.” He cuts himself off, seeing a yellow head of hair up ahead, waiting at the eastern gate.  

“Neurotic, Kashi, really?” Minato mutters, an amused expression on his face.

Kakashi’s face reddens, “Oh, good morning, Minato-sensei.”

His eyes narrow, looking at his student in a way that makes Kakashi desperately want to fidget. “What are you doing here?”

“You missed dinner.” The most awkward dinner of Minato’s life. From the perspective of Hokage, he appreciated Maito Guy’s contributions to the village. As a sensei, his friendship with Kakashi was a bright spot to see. It was good to see his student have someone, since his other close friends were gone… However, Kakashi often acted as a silent buffer when Minato and Kushina spent time together with the duo.

Guy could be exuberant, and that, mixed with Kushina’s own extroverted nature, could make for a wild night of conversation that went to ridiculous places. It sometimes brought Minato back to Uchiha Obito’s antics, and with that, he felt a pang of hurt that he still hadn’t worked through. Guy would bring that reminder of Obito’s absence so strongly that he would seek solace in conversation with Kakashi, therefore, last night’s dinner was full of lively conversation. Minato had tried to keep up and participate, but even his own extroversion fell short between the flaming youth that seemed to be burning last night.

Kakashi affirms the statement that Minato made, nodding and making a humming sound. He diverts his gaze to the right, and Minato steps to his left, maintaining eye contact with his avoidant student. “Kushina was disappointed.” So was I.

“I’m sorry, Hokage-sama-“

“Okay, let’s not get so formal-“

“I was busy,” Kakashi answers.

“Please don’t skip out next time,” Minato says, voice soft and pleading. Kakashi sniffs, shifting from foot to foot.

“We better get going,” Guy interjects.

The Yellow Flash rolls with the subject change and starts reiterating his gratitude to Kakashi and Guy in taking this mission. Kakashi and Guy both wave off the grateful platitudes in the same way, swatting the air in tandem. “It’s the mission, sensei,” Kakashi answers. He was both annoyed and relieved that he had come by to see them. Minato-sensei doesn’t hate me for missing dinner. Still doesn’t see the waste I am as a student.

Minato smiles at him and Guy, “Come back in one piece!” Guy affirms the sentiment loudly. Kakashi nods. The Yellow Flash squeezes the duo’s shoulders briefly and waves at them from the gate.

The two take off at a quick pace, hoping to get to the outskirts of the Mist village in two days and one night. Guy speaks to Kakashi about a wide variety of subjects, keeping the topics light. Kakashi does his best to stay tuned in and participate, however, his number one intent was to be so hyperaware of the area. Kakashi summons Pakkun and tells him to keep his senses on alert. He did not want to be surprised by any enemy nin.

They sit around the campfire at night, meals in their hands. “I told you that this spot would be the best,” Guy tells him triumphantly.

“It lacks some defensive qualities that the cave would have been bettered suited towards.” Kakashi had located a cave with Pakkun’s help that he wanted to set up camp at, appreciating its defensive position. Guy was unimpressed with the cave’s qualities.

“It also smells bad and could have spiders in there,” Guy mutters.

“It would also serve as a bad echo chamber for your snoring,” Kakashi agrees

“I do not snore, Kakashi!”

“Oh? It must have been my imagination when I could hear the floor practically vibrating last night.”

 Guy makes a loud shout of disagreement, huffing and stammering. Kakashi’s eye squints, his mouth tightening up until he breaks, laughter bubbling out. Guy could only hold his grumpy face for a couple of seconds longer before he gives a huge grin at Kakashi. He chuckles, rubbing the back of his neck and shaking his head. “I’m happy we’re on a mission together, rival!” Kakashi nods in agreement. Despite his anxiety about keeping his comrade safe from harm, he was enjoying himself.

“So, if you remember me snoring, you must remember asking me to take one of the extra rooms in the house,” Guy says after their laughter subsided. Guy had wrestled with bringing up Kakashi’s request, and he let the words tumble out before he could overthink about it.

Kakashi looks startled, “Maa, I don’t exactly recall-“

“Let me remind you, rival! Your house is much too big to be living by yourself!”

Kakashi choked on his bite of dinner. “I drank too much, Guy, I was just saying nonsense,” he finds an excuse.

“Not to mention you absolutely need help making it seem less like a depressed person lives there!” Guy continues as if Kakashi hadn’t said a word.

Kakashi scowls at him and mutters something dark that Guy continues to ignore. “Worry not! I have already accepted the offer. After all, my garden is now at your home!”

Kakashi tsks, stirring his food around with his fork. “Really, you don’t have to, Guy, I was under the influence of sake, and I would hate to inconvenience you.” Everyone that gets too close to me dies.

“You don’t have to push us all away, Kakashi,” he answers, the firelight making embers light in his pupils.

“I’m doing my best,” he answers.

“And like a good friend, I’m pushing your forward! It is training, rival! Having a roommate will make you more sociable!”

“I am plenty sociable!”

Guy laughs, “Sure you are, but I think you could stand to melt that frozen exterior a bit more.”

Kakashi shakes his head. Why does he even bother? Guy is going to do what Guy is going to do. “Do as you wish, Guy.” The blue beast of Konoha laughs.

“Anyway, it’s not inconvenience! My apartment is much too cramped anyway,” Guy continues speaking, glaring at Kakashi. “So, it’s decided! I will move into your family house when we get back!”

Kakashi scratches at the edge of his mask, looking left and right. “You probably shouldn’t get rid of your apartment just yet.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, you…” Kakashi finds himself at a loss for words on how to answer. He might get tired of being my friend.

Guy gets a serious look on his face and Kakashi tenses up. Something else must have occurred to his friend, Kakashi recognizes the look on Guy’s face as his ‘I have something to say, but I don’t want to piss you off’ look.

Guy looks down at his food and back up at his friend, at war with himself if he should say anything. Guy isn’t the only person in their friendship who has been learning how to read Kakashi. Sure, with Guy there can be less work because his face is visible and speaks quite a bit more than Kakashi. There are aspects to Guy that are below the surface and that Guy keeps under wraps. They were ninjas, after all, secrets came with the territory.

Kakashi waited and waited. The silence was uncomfortable for him, surprisingly. Quiet Guy is an unusual Guy. He shifts his legs around, this way and that. Guy was picking at his food. Weird. “Just spit it out, Guy, ” he snaps, not unkindly. Guy’s head whips up to attention and he gives a nervous chuckle.

“Sorry, Kakashi-o, I was just-“

“Hurry up now,” Kakashi urges. He’s feeling uneasy.

“I never knew the Sanbi was inside of Rin, Kakashi.” It was the closest he ever came to asking about what happened. Kakashi went still, eyes lowering to the crackling fire. He knew it would happen at some point, but he didn’t think some point would be right now. So many years have passed, since Rin.

Guy had never doubted Kakashi. When peers and members of the village used the moniker Friend-Killer Kakashi, Guy would argue against them and even fight for his friend’s honor. Every single time. Guy never pressed the issue itself with Kakashi. The only words Guy had for Kakashi regarding Rin were, “I’m sorry for your loss, Kakashi. I know that what happened was not your fault, because I know how much you care for your comrades. That’s good enough for me.”

Kakashi looks up at Guy, and then back at the fire. “She asked me to… before we got back to the village. She was used by the enemy as a bomb. Sanbi inside. I told her… I told her we would find another way. She disagreed, obviously,” He clenches and unclenches his hand, the one that Rin had been killed with. The feeling of going through Nohara Rin’s guts and viscera would never leave him, the blood and the death of his friend was forever sealed in Kakashi’s memory. Despite his efforts to stop thinking about it, guilt kept it front and center in his dreams and often in his waking mind.

Guy doesn’t respond. What could he say in response to something so heinous. “Rin protected the village,” he said quietly.

“I don’t know if it was worth it,” Kakashi almost whispers the traitorous thought out loud, but it was just his grief he would be giving a mouthpiece to. The food he had was sitting hard in his stomach and he sets down the bowl. He decides to say instead, “She did.”

Kakashi gets up and settles into his bedroll, finished with that conversation. Guy insists on taking the first watch. Kakashi lets him, shutting his eyes and trying to let sleep carry his mind away. All he sees is Rin, Obito, and sensei. Fractured memories playing on a loop in his mind’s eye.

The morning is quieter as the companions fall into a comfortable silence, packing up their makeshift camp. The seriousness of the mission takes over as the duo crosses the border from the land of fire and get over to the Land of the Mist. Kakashi’s focus on the mission has him channeling his persona from ANBU called Hound.

He needs focus and efficiency if he was going to succeed in this mission. The marshy wetlands in the land of mist made the sunlight dapple on the landscape change. Kakashi had Guy stay outside of smaller villages and use disguises to go inside different buildings, asking innocent questions to try and find leads about where Sanbi could be hidden. The duo took turns at each village, combing through each place to locate any sign of strange behavior or whispers about the Sanbi.

They had almost gone through the entirety of the smaller villages when they finally caught the scent of something. A couple of people they eavesdropped on talked about an abandoned shrine due east of this smaller village.

They made haste in going towards the shrine’s described area and located the outline of the structure not too far in front of them. “Two Mist shinobi, eight o’ clock,” Guy’s voice said at a whisper. Kakashi slides his headband up and utilizes Sharingan to narrow in on the two. They were flanking the structure.  

Below where the ninja was stationed was a dilapidated shrine, one that was shielded by a water-based jutsu. “I’m going to need to take a closer look,” he whispers.

“Do you think they haven’t chosen a jinchuriki, if it is at this shrine?”

“Entirely possible.”

“How does the enemy look?”

“Watchful. We’ll have to get by carefully. I should go on my own.”

“I can be subtle.”

“I know. If something goes wrong, I’ll need you as backup. It will be easier to move as one instead of both of us. Especially if there are trip wires. I can see them with sharingan.”

Guy frowns, but he agrees, “Fine.”

That’s all Kakashi needs. He disappears from Guy’s side and the man feels his absence immediately. “I’ll be watching over you, rival,” he murmurs.

Kakashi suppresses his own chakra and goes deeper into the greenery. He gets low and sneaks through the mist, running over a stream to cut closer to the two. He would have to take them out without them knowing. Using the sharingan and catching them in a genjustsu would be easiest. It would entirely remove their existence from the ninja’s minds. He has a sleeping smoke bomb in his pouch as a backup plan, just in case.

He swivels around, confirming that there were only two ninjas. Their chakra signatures seem okay, nothing too extreme, most likely water-based nature in each of them. That’s the norm for the Village of Mist shinobi.

Kakashi slowly makes his way towards the shrine from the back, both ninjas flanking the building from a distance. He steps over a few trip wires and goes down on his stomach to crawl to the front of the building, using a camouflage to blend in with the grass and mist on the ground.

He was almost on the stairs; the work to get there was excruciatingly slow. Kakashi’s muscles were taut like a bowstring as he brought up his hands and cast a genjutsu over the area. He swivels his head left and right and sees the ninja slump forward.

Kakashi rises to his feet and steps toward the door, looking over it with the sharingan. He puts his hand on the door, and he leaps back at the last second as the door slams open. A large ninja steps through the doorway. He calls out two names and then glares at Kakashi. “What the hell? Hey!”

“Fuck,” Kakashi mutters, as the enemy ninja pulls out a sword and swipes at Kakashi. His chakra must have been entirely concealed by the shrine. He throws the smoke bomb laced with sleep drought at the ground, leaping further back to be outside of the smoke. He watches the smoke unfurl from his vantage point in a tree and glances at his left at his friend.

Guy settles in next to him, and they wait for a couple of precious moments. The smoke seems to dissipate a bit slower, harder to distinguish with the mist. He checks the fallen ninja to see if he happens to be the jinchuriki. No such luck.

Kakashi pushes his way through the shrine doorway first sharingan looking around for any signs of any chakra signatures that might be in there. Seemingly nothing inside of there, he turns around in a circle. The small shrine was more like a shack, it smelled mildewy, and the wood was damaged by the moisture content in the air. Kakashi feels his eye strain as he begins to doubt that anything of importance was in here, when his eye catches a hidden compartment in one of the walls. He punches the compartment, hands grasping frantically around for the scroll and pulling it out of the wall in one fluid motion. “Located,” he whispers, Guy staring at the scroll as Kakashi turned his hand over and revealed a kanji that said, “Sanbi.”

The Sanbi. Minato had told them that stealing the Sanbi could tilt the scales too much if the jinchuriki was taken. Each village having their own jinchuriki balanced the scales between villages… However, Minato had mentioned his theory within the context that the Sanbi had a jinchuriki. Kakashi realized they were in uncharted territory and that he would have to make an executive decision.

They hadn’t expected the Sanbi to be sealed in a scroll. He exhales through his nose. Kakashi considered destroying the scroll right here and now. If the Sanbi hadn’t been put inside Rin in the first place, she wouldn’t have had to die. “…kashi? Kakashi!” Guy hissed from just outside the shrine.

“Is it in there?”

He exhales, “Yes, it is. In a scroll.”

“Someone is coming. Must be a four-man cell.” Kakashi shoves the scroll in his pouch, the decision made for him.

“We need to leave, but first we have to take care of him,” Kakashi leans down over the man he thrust into unconsciousness and opens his eyelid. He forces himself to look directly into his unconscious, lolling eyes and puts a genjutsu on him, hiding the identity of which village they came from. Kakashi slips off his headband, hiding the Konoha emblem. Guy follows suit, twisting his Konoha emblem around so it’s not visible.. They needed to be subtle. No signs of who they are to be seen.

“Let’s go.”