@netsurai // he didn’t show up for training today. in his defense, he tried— he made it as far as his coffee table before the fever brought him back down. he’s just laying there now, a blanket dragged from the couch half-heartedly over his shoulders. guess this is how he dies. how embarrassing.
did you ever see a robin weep / when leaves begin to die?
Kakashi would never tell his cute little genin this, but he usually checks in on them at the arranged meeting times, just to make sure they're all there, on time, before he moves on to doing something else. Sometimes that's staring at the memorial stone, zoning out. Sometimes it's clearing detritus from the rotating cast of grave stones of his father, of Obito, or Shisui, or Kushina, or... Rin, he visits, but her mother keeps her grave immaculate and even laying down flowers feels intrusive. Sometimes he just goes grocery shopping, if he didn't feel like doing it after training the day before.
When they are late, he likes to make them pull extra training, though he never tells them why.
Sasuke isn't there on his second check-in, which makes him over an hour late. Sakura's mouth is pulled into a worried little frown, and even Naruto has a little wrinkle between his brows when he stomps his feet and waves his arms around and rants about how 'the bastard' (a moniker that earns him a slap to the back of his head from their little kunoichi, though it hardly slows him down) is picking up Kakashi's bad habits.
That simply won't do. No student of Kakashi's is going to get in the habit of being this late to morning training. Everyone would think he's slacking, and that simply won't do.
He knows where all his students live; Sakura with her adorable, saintly parents, and Sasuke and Naruto in the genin barracks, with all the rundown decor and creaky stairs and mysterious water stains. On account of the mysterious water stains and the creaky stairs, Kakashi likes to enter the boys' apartments through the windows, whose crumbling sills present an interesting challenge when trying to stick to them with chakra. There are no signs of life within the apartment, other than the cracked window to air out the faint stench of sickness, and Sasuke's static little ball of chakra, crackling erratically from somewhere in the dark living room.
He slides the window open further, steps inside, and sighs softly when the boy doesn't so much as twitch. He closes the window-- there's a dusting of frost on the grass, or at least there was before the sun started to come up, and the way Sasuke's breathing sounds in the sudden quiet of the apartment makes Kakashi think maybe the cold wasn't so good for his breathing-- and steps closer, bending down to peer at Sasuke's barely exposed cheek and part of his forehead. He can feel the warmth radiating off of him from here, and it makes him sigh softly.
He weighs nothing, it's easy enough to arrange his limbs and pick him up once he gives up on sleepily shoving Kakashi's cold hands away. His adorable little genin (singular) is dropped back into his bed, and then manhandled until he's back under the blankets. The back of his hand against Sasuke's forehead suggests he might have an infamous Uchiha Fever. A sigh, as if Kakashi is terribly burdened, and then he leaves him with a cool, damp rag laid over his throat.
Kakashi decides he'll get some grocery shopping done, then, once he peruses all of the kid's cabinets and discovers Sasuke doesn't have any fever reducers or soup stock. Miso, some bone broth, little bite-sized bits of wood ear mushroom and some tea with licorice and marshmallow root and ginger. He's sure it will taste like shit, but he'll be shocked if Sasuke is even awake enough to protest when he tries to pour it down his throat later.
He returns with the bags of groceries, now an hour and a half late for training with Sakura and Naruto. Sasuke hasn't moved from the bed except to kick the blankets off his legs and roll onto his side, bunching them up around his torso. He's snoring a little, in the way sick kids sometimes do. Kakashi tosses the ingredients together for the soup, boils water for the tea, and then absently picks around in his head for a jutsu, something to make the air a little more humid in the apartment.
He fusses over Sasuke, swapping out the drying cloth for a new one, and freezes when the boy mutters a quiet, "Mom, I'm okay, I promise." Kakashi doesn't reply, he ducks back into the kitchen.
When he leaves, he has succeeded in making Sasuke suck down a mug of foul-tasting tea, a bowl of soup, and an anti-inflammatory. There's a note on his nightstand next to a glass of water and a couple more pills. It reads, in Kakashi's distinctly cramped handwriting:
Last dose: 0915. Next dose: 1215
Soup in refrigerator, stay hydrated. Don't come to training until Monday. I will check in on you soon.
He is three and a half hours late to training, and takes Sakura and Naruto both to task for not taking initiative while he was busy with very important matters-- he doesn't elaborate, or explain where Sasuke is.
The Father, The Son, and the Unholy Ghost: Luke likes Din. Din likes Luke. Din is less crazy about Luke's insane, evil father who keeps trying to kill him from beyond the grave.
In Din’s defense, he’s never been much of a drinker.
So when Luke sets a bottle of cheap liquor on the hotel suite counter, looks up at him through this thick blonde lashes, and asks, “Ever done a handle pull?” with that sneaky grin, Din is already half-way to drunk.
The liquor just hastens the inevitable.
The last thing he remembers is Luke laughing too hard at something terrifying he’d said — No matter what Din tells him, Luke never seems to get squeamish, and that’s something Din likes about him: he knows there’s more blood on Din’s hands than skin, yet he still lays those long fingers over worn gloves with an ease that reminds Din that, actually, Luke’s body count is much, much higher than his own — and then he remembers Luke floating their glasses in the air with one hand, his other hand running up his arm to the broken seal around his neck, warm knuckles brushing against exposed brown skin. Din had swallowed, torn between acknowledging the touch and ignoring it in case he was misreading the situation. He’d chosen the latter. He nodded his helmed head toward the glasses.
“Cool Jedi trick,” he’d said, like an idiot.
And Luke, bright, terrifying, ridiculous, gorgeous Luke, had fixed him with a look like molten silver and tipped his chin back toward the bedroom door behind them.
“Thanks. Wanna see a cooler one?”
A more suave man would have had a line ready to reel him in, but seeing as hearing those words nearly killed him, Din’s just glad he could fumble out a quiet “Y-yes please,” before Luke changed his mind.
When he wakes up, he feels like he’s run over by a transport, and then seven more after that. In the dark, Din rolls over with a groan and immediately regrets it: his breath is sour and overwhelming inside the helmet, which is backwards. He lifts a hand to right it when something tightens around his naked waist.
He’s desperately trying to remember where his blaster is when the something shifts and strokes hot up his bare stomach, and Din freezes.
Slowly, carefully, quietly, Din works his helmet right way forward, and looks down.
An arm. An arm is wrapped around him.
Luke Skywalker’s arm.
He is in bed with Luke kriffing Skywalker.
For the first time in his life, Din wants to throw up and grin at the same time.
Din relaxes, slowly, pressing back into unfamiliar pillows and turning to look down at the messy blonde mop poking out of the sea of blankets. As if by instinct, Luke turns sleepily toward him and shoves his face against Din’s chest with a warm, unintelligible murmur.
Din dares to settle beside him and stroke a golden lock. The curtains are drawn shut, but he wishes he could steal over to pull them open a sliver, if only to watch a strip of light set it aglow. He smiles a secret smile down at him, ignoring the way his heart shudders to life in his chest like a vintage cruiser raring for one last race.
What he cannot ignore, however, is the furious blue glare hovering over Luke’s sleeping sun-kissed shoulder.
“YOU.”
To his credit, Din does not jump or curse, despite the disorienting hangover. He instead snatches the small vibrodagger sheathed between the mattress and the headboard and jams it into the figure’s jugular —
It passes right through, no more than an impotent suggestion.
“If you’d had this sense of self preservation last night, you wouldn’t be here,” the figure snarls and presses forward, pushing through Luke’s sleeping face to fix Din with a bloodcurdling sneer. "At least you've more vim than the last one." The last one? Din ignores the way his heart sinks and slashes at its head this time. The vibrodagger passes through once more. The figure snickers. “Oh, please. It would take more than that to kill me if I weren’t already dead."
Din retracts the blade for Luke’s safety, but keeps it in his hand, braced for attack. Blinking through sleep and confusion, Din tries to understand what he’s seeing. A man. A handsome man with knives for cheeks and sour gold eyes and a strange, breathy voice, not unlike someone speaking through an outdated rebreather. Shiny slivers of fractured durasteel and shattered black armor circle his head like a crown of ruin. Long brown hair waves to tanned shoulders fissured through with cracks of throbbing red and orange and yellow, and where hair and skin meet, the follicles burst into sickly flame. His hands are wicked black metal curdled with smoke, and they grasp desperately for Din’s throat, but they, too, pass through. The man clicks his tongue like he expected this, but is annoyed by it nonetheless.
Din wraps his arm around Luke’s back and pulls him toward him protectively. The man’s eyes immediately drop to the hand on Luke’s back and for a moment Din swears he sees them glow. “What are you?”
“Your worst nightmare,” the apparition sneers. With a crack Din feels in his bones, the shade grows, looming impossibly large in the small room, “I am Luke’s father. You will know me as… DARTH VADER.”
His voice whips through the room, an unholy heat radiating from his furious form.
A pregnant silence settles into the room.
The figure pauses, as if expecting something.
After a moment, Din realizes he’s waiting for a reaction.
Din looks down at Luke — still asleep in his arms, somehow, and something about that makes Din's heart squeeze — and then back up at hell’s most flamboyant reject.
“Sorry,” Din clips, wondering idly if ghosts can burn people to death, and if so, how badly that would hurt, “Darth who?”
@netsurai ᴀsᴋᴇᴅ: sasuke's grip flexes on the hilt of his sword, drawn but not quite brandished. this is a new level of STUPID, even for him-- and he knows that bar is low. he should withdraw. wait for some backup, someone more senior. but by then... by then, the demon could be gone, and he'd be a coward and just as lead-lacking as he was before he came to this town. not options he's willing to concede to easily, so: " i'm looking for a demon that calls itself ITACHI. if you can give me information, this doesn't need to get ugly. " // unprompted
This child is a fool.
Palm rests open upon Kyokokukamusari’s pommel, each of twenty-four eyes visible along the handle and guard shift with a hollow squelch, trained upon the Slayer that dare raise his Nichirin Blade. The boy is no older than sixteen and weak. Upper Moon One can see the hesitation in his blood flow, a tremble of muscle in his forearms, nervous system raising his temperature for sweat to bead upon his forehead.
Fear.
The boy will not attack.
❝Ugly..?❞ Kokushibo speaks at last, a single breath exhaling slowly from ancient lungs. Fingers flex upon the katana at his side only just. A warning. Attack, and your neck will no longer know your shoulders.
— But, interest is piqued only for a moment. Itachi...
❝I am curious... of what you think... you can do to ḿ̴̡̱̙͉̞̞̋̑̈͗͝e̶̛͔͙̖͖̼͖̽͛.❞
“ you’re really not dead, hm. ” the old man and kurotsuchi hadn’t been lying. here is SASUKE UCHIHA and deidara knows he isn’t dead because he’s changed. deidara expects rage to ignite inside his chest at the unexpected sight — here is the man who had rendered his magnus opus meaningless — but these past few years spent dead but undying must’ve dulled his hatred, because all deidara feels is HOLLOW. “ —how? ” / @netsurai
this is a joke right. HAKU! they are the romantic of the two of them. they're also the disciplinarian. haku is judge, jury, and executioner of the two of them, but in a loving way. sasuke has zero boundaries, so haku has to mete them out appropriately.
Who initiates the handholding?
haku. they also instigated the kisses.
Who worries more for the other?
haku. sasuke's mental stability is uh, questionable. also sasuke gets into some bullshit that makes haku beat his ass, and then talk to him about why he needs to stop doing stupid ass shit.
Who is more likely to ask for help?
haku. sasuke doesn't ask for things. he just suffers in silence or chooses not to do anything about whatever he's going through.
Who is the one always losing the keys?
sasuke. disassociation brain tingz.
Who leaves little love notes for the other?
haku. they're thoughtful, romantic, and watching sasuke's mental health spirals like a goddamn hawk. they find that leaving notes and physical reminders of care seem to help a little.
Who can’t sleep unless the other is there?
they're both fine, i think? maybe sasuke has some sleep trouble.
Who is more likely to propose to the other?
i can't remember what we discussed, but i think it's sasuke who challenges haku to the marriage match.
Who introduced the other to their family first?
[stares in ge.nocide] technically sasuke does because team seven? team seven.
Who is more likely to play with the other’s hair?
haku. i think sasuke has trouble with haku's hair because it reminds him of itachi.
Who makes sure the other has meals/stays hydrated?
haku. sasuke lives like a depressed dying barnacle.
Who is more likely to stand up to anyone for the other?
haku. sasuke wasn't paying attention.
Who is the most likely to prepare a surprise for the other?
haku. they gotta throw toys into sasuke's enclosure for enrichment.
Who makes the other pinky promise not to do certain things?
sasuke. it's one of those traumatized child remnants that haku finds sad but sweet and happily indulges in. sasuke treats them reasonably seriously, so haku can't go against a pinky promise. ever.
Who puts a blanket over the other when they fall asleep on the couch?
sasuke. he doesn't need blankets because he runs uchiha-hot ( dragon inheritance, baby! ) haku needs warmth to process food/for certain physiological processes because of their whole, you know, yuki blood thing, so not staying warm at night can actually be a big problem. sasuke is avoiding problems.
richard siken. “three proofs”. when you paint an evil thing / do you invoke it / or take away its power?
Sai likes to walk home from training with the team each day.
He starts taking the street after a few weeks of simply running the rooftops back to his sparse apartment. The long roads home hold more life than any he’s ever seen-- residential districts, brightly colored homes with laughing children chattering on their way home from school, old women hanging laundry out to dry, young lovers whispering to one another with ducked heads as they scurry home in the hot, mid-afternoon light. Sai likes to watch all of this, as if it might give him some great insight into the minds of people. He likes to watch all of this like he might learn something important from them.
On the way home, there is an old man. He sits in a wheelchair in an open doorway at the top of a set of narrow stairs and he frowns down at Sai the first few weeks he watches him pass. For lack of anything better to do, Sai always gives his plastic smile and waves, undaunted by the lack of friendly response in return. Walking past his door and his frown with a smile and a wave swiftly becomes a tradition, one that is broken after twelve days when The Old Man lifts a hand back and calls out, “Young man.”
His voice is reedy, thin and his fingers gnarled like twigs but they do not shake in the warm summer air. The words stop Sai in his tracks and he turns to fully face the man, head tilted curiously. “Hello,” he greets politely, “My name is Sai.”
“I don’t care, kid,” The Old Man replies, beckoning him closer. Sai climbs the steps without thought as The Old Man continues, “I need your help.” He wheels himself back and Sai follows him inside-- the home is well-lit, full of pictures of smiling children and grandchildren, neat and lively in a way Sai didn’t expect. He is not sure what he expected to see instead, but he has little time to dwell on the minor curiosity. “I live with my daughters and their husbands,” The Old Man rasps, “and they never leave me enough damn water. I can’t reach the glasses or the sink in this, but the husbands loathe me and they never leave me enough damn water!”
Sai hums quietly in response and wanders into the kitchen, carefully picking through the cabinets until he finds the one with the glasses, and he gets The Old Man a cup of cool tap water while he waits in the doorway, tapping his bony fingers against the armrest of the chair. Sai is quiet, and the man looks at him suspiciously while he finishes off the water greedily, and holds the glass out for more. Sai obliges him.
That day, he leaves without saying another word, and The Old Man only grumbles a reluctant ‘thank you’ as he wanders out the front door-- Sai just hums in response.
Every day for the next few weeks The Old Man beckons him inside of his unexpectedly cheery home and asks him for a glass of water, and Sai silently obliges because really, he has nothing better to do. It’s a few minutes of his time spent on a mindless, simple task. Sometimes The Old Man is silent outside of his gruff demands, and sometimes The Old Man tells him about his family-- the successful daughters, the sons-in-law who hate him, the grandchildren who go to tutoring after school that are going to be doctors and lawyers and other such things just like their mothers. He tells Sai he is alone all day and the sons in law don’t leave him enough water to drink because they hate him and wish him ill, and Sai almost fondly thinks The Old Man reminds him a little bit of Lord Danzo.
The more time he spends with team seven, the less fond the comparison seems-- he tries not to think too hard on it.
After helping and listening to The Old Man rattle off whatever comes to mind for nearly two weeks, The Old Man tells him of The Neighbor’s Dog. The Neighbor’s Dog, he claims, barks relentlessly all day when The Old Man is alone, drives him up a wall.
“Well,” Sai responds mildly, “perhaps your neighbors leave her alone all day as well. Perhaps she is as lonely as you.”
The Old Man scoffs. “I am not lonely,” he grumbles, gnarled hands curled tightly around the half-filled glass resting in his lap. “I am not lonely,” he insists again, louder this time, and he continues, “I want you to kill the dog, please.”
Sai’s expression does not flicker because he feels nothing, but he has to admit to himself that he doesn’t see much sense in the request. “You want me to kill the dog,” he responds flatly, crossing his arms when The Old Man nods at him with wide eyes. “Won’t your neighbors be upset if their dog dies?”
Shaking his head hard enough to nearly spill his water, The Old Man stares up at him with wide eyes. “No, no,” he insists, pointing a jagged finger at the wall to indicate which neighbor it is. “They leave her out all day and night! But she only barks when I am alone and she is alone. She barks and barks and barks, rain or shine. If you love a creature you do not leave it out at all hours in all weather, no? You care for it. She is just a thing to them.”
Sai does not want to kill the dog.
He tilts his head and gives The Old Man a vague answer about seeing if he could talk to the neighbors, ask them to chain her elsewhere or perhaps bring her inside, and The Old Man reluctantly agrees that perhaps this is the less contentious solution. Sai then tells him he will be going on an assignment and won’t be in the village for the next few weeks, but he will see The Old Man when he returns. He slips out of the open front door before he can hear the grumbled response.
The Neighbor’s Dog is standing in the next yard behind the slatted fence at the very end of her chain, staring at The Old Man’s house when Sai emerges, just like she always is when he comes by. He has never thought it strange. When he approaches the fence and leans his arms against the warm metal and peers down at her, she turns her gaze slowly from the house to him, and it strikes Sai as ... uncanny, somehow. It strikes Sai that before now, he has never seen her move at all.
“Hello,” he greets blithely, defaulting to something familiar in an attempt to settle the strange feeling shifting within him. The Neighbor’s Dog drops her head and her tail and takes four steps back until she is settled on the neighbors’ front porch. “Oh, you don’t have to be afraid,” Sai says, hopping easily over the fence and landing in a crouch in the grass. “I just want to know why you bark all the time-- I will not hurt you.”
The Neighbor’s Dog creeps forward when he holds out a hand for her to sniff, her steps silent in the grass beneath her paws. She’s cautious, but she doesn’t growl or bare her teeth when he settles his palm atop her head and strokes her ears. They’re silk-soft against his two bare fingers, enough so that he almost wants to take his glove off and repeat the motion. They lock eyes when he draws his hand away.
Suddenly, he knows.
It’s like his skull has been cracked open and his brain has been half scooped out and replaced with something else and then his head was shaken until the original matter is indistinguishable from the new. Though he’s dizzy with it, he doesn’t reel or flinch back from her because such an instinct was trained out of him long ago. He doesn’t know exactly what he knows but he knows this: something is Wrong. The Old Man is in danger, and the golden-eyed mutt next door knows the truth.
“Oh,” he says. “I... What should I do?”
He isn’t sure there’s a protocol for reporting a danger to an old man just because a dog told you it existed. She isn’t even a ninken, she’s... Well, not normal. But she doesn’t talk. She doesn’t respond to his question, either, just slinks back to the front door and lays down on the porch with a long, canine sigh. Sai sits for a moment and he tries to pick apart the feeling but he can’t parse anything from it and it makes him nauseous so he takes the feeling and he puts it in a box and shelves it. “Okay,” he says, resolving to deal with this when he gets back from his mission, “okay.”
Sai goes home and he packs and, predictably, he almost dies multiple times on that assignment, like he always does with team seven. All manner of things crawl about in his feverish dreams and they whisper things he cannot hear or understand, like he’s under water or perhaps they are, and when he sits around the fire at night and Sakura’s hands rest warm and glowing green on his shoulder he starts to ask her what he should to about The Old Man and The Neighbor’s Dog, but there are bags under her eyes and his tongue doesn’t want to cooperate with him long enough to explain, so he just goes to bed.
And when he gets back to the village, he goes to see The Old Man in the middle of the afternoon at the usual time despite the fact that he is not training with team seven that day. The Old Man is sitting at the door like he always is, but his skin is pale and waxy and there are deep bags under his eyes and his hands tremble like leaves in the wind. Sai stands on the top step and stares for a long time before The Old Man speaks.
“She’s dead,” he starts. Sai’s gaze turns to the empty yard, and then back to him. He wheels himself further into the house, and Sai follows. Gets him a glass of water. Stands in the doorway of his kitchen and wonders if the man ever goes outside. After an eternity The Old Man continues, “she started barking more often after you left-- when everyone was here, when the neighbors were home. Her barks... sounded like speech, to me, so familiar they were. Is that crazy?”
“The human mind can find patterns in almost anything,” Sai replies automatically, instead of asking what the dog told him. “Whether there is a pattern to find or not. We seek them out because we find them comforting.” The Old Man’s shoulders slump and he nods weakly, turning to look at the photos on the wall with a troubled expression. Sai opens his mouth and blurts, “I think you might be in danger--”
“I am tired,” The Old Man interrupts him abruptly. “I am old and I am tired, young man. Why don’t you go home?”
Sai pauses, tilts his head, and then nods in acquiescence. He turns and slips out the door, closing it softly behind himself, and he stands in front of the neighbor’s house staring at the grass in their yard with his arms on the bars of the fence. He stands there until the sun starts to set and the air cools and the neighbors come home, and when he sees them he smiles politely and he greets, “Hello.” It rings hollow, but even though the man and the woman exchange glances he continues. “I was wondering-- Well, I usually see a dog here? What happened to her?”
The pair exchanges a glance, and the woman sighs sadly: “She got rabies or something... started getting all crazy and aggressive, wouldn’t stop barking and growling, all the time. We had to put her down.” Sai nods once, curtly, and bids them an insincere goodnight. He goes home.
The Old Man is dead within the week, he hears. Accidentally wheeled himself down the steep stairs outside of his front door he never left the confines of and crushed himself under his chair. A tragic accident. Sai stands in front of the house exactly once on the way back from the training ground and he peers in the windows like he might learn something, but there’s nothing to see at all. There is no movement inside-- the people are still gone from it during the day, and there is no one to beckon him inside and ask him for water. Sai doesn’t know what to... do. Who to tell, or how to tell it.
So he goes home, and he doesn’t take the long way back from the training grounds anymore.
“ i didn’t need you to understand, i just wanted you to support me. ”
misc sentence startersaccepting / @netsurai
and he did. he did. in his own way, in the only way he knew how — god, he tried. but it’s just typical of Kakashi to not be good enough for anyone, isn’t it?
he put lightning in Sasuke’s hand in place of the words neither of them could say. he ran the boy to the ground in hopes that it would remind him of the reasons he must always get back up, in hopes that he could - even if only for a moment - forget about a greater pain.
( and perhaps Kakashi was too clouded by their superficial similarities to realise that they are nothing alike. Sasuke is wrath and fire and love with no place to go. Kakashi is empty empty empty. Sasuke didn’t need a distraction, he needed a direction — but how was a lost man supposed to guide another? )
“i tried,” he says, knows it sounds terribly weak and lacking. “how was i supposed to support someone i cared about as he descended into darkness?”
