Family bonding. Part 1.

[kickinyourteeth]

Who? Kakashi and Rin.
Where? Rin's office at the school, Rin's apartment.
When? Basically immediately after this piece of ridiculousness.
What? Kakashi and Rin antagonize each other and relive their youth, only to have their age catch up with them.
Warnings? Mild language and nudity. Seriously.



Somewhere in the part of her mind not clouded with a red-tinged haze, Rin sort of had to be a little amazed at Kakashi's ability to send her into a murderous rage in under four sentences. There were certain things in life that you absolutely did not talk about ever, like your intermarrying cousins or that time your parents left you in a gas station or something, and then there were things that deserved slow, torturous death for even alluding to, let alone overtly stating.

Like childhood nicknames that were not only misnomers but grossly inaccurate and misleading misnomers.

Which was what had her currently pacing back and forth across the floor of her office, stretching out her muscles by pulling first one arm, then other across her chest while casting death glares at the thick wood of the door as if she had both x-ray and laser vision with which to anticipate his approach and then singe his hair off. She felt a sudden affinity for those poor tigers at the zoo that spent the entire day pacing up and down the same stretch of beaten-down grass. She was pretty sure she understood their reasoning now. They weren't bored. They were planning.

Some distant part of her brain seemed to latch on to the fact that her current line of thought was doing nothing to nullify the implications of the Nickname Which Would Not Be Mentioned Ever, and the thought only made her mad enough to made a sort of growling noise in the back of her throat like some sort of feral animal.

A very small feral animal. But feral none the less. She was probably rabid, too. That would serve him right.

Kakashi cast quick glances down the dance studio halls as he moved silently across the wood planking towards Rin's currently sealed office. Spotting no witnesses, he crouched down so his silhouette wouldn't be seen through the frosted glass panel halfway up the heavy wood that was currently the only thing separating him from Wild Cat Rin. He couldn't help the tug at the corner of his lips as he listened to her clearly agitated pacing. His inner monologue was providing him with further proof that he was far too interested in the documentaries on the Discovery Channel. This particular Wild Cat is native to the far west and evolved as a hybrid breed after European cats that had been brought across the continent as pets escaped to make their lives in the Wild. It's far from its home territory, from which we can deduce a certain level of continued agitation. This however, if her lair and so she maintains home ground advantage.

Shaggy, partially bleached, partially naturally white hair batted at his forehead as Kakashi shook the train of thought away. Now was not the time to make light of the real danger that was Rin gone feral. Which would be why he was crouched far below the area she'd be expecting to be available for her claws. Slowly he reached up and twisted the door knob before pushing the door inwards suddenly, throwing it open while he was still safely crouched against the wall.

Rin buried the fingers of one hand in her tangle of dark curls. Now that the initial buzz of righteous fury was starting to wane she was beginning to doubt the morality of scratching Kakashi’s face off. On the one hand, he had broken the Sacred Code of Not Being a Sucky Best Friend and mentioned That Nickname Which Would Not Be Mentioned Ever. This was high treason for many reasons, one of which being that it was directly tied to this particular state of mind. There was some logic in that. She was using her College Graduate Reasoning Skills and considering the situation. Because on the other hand maybe Kakashi had forgotten how much she utterly despised it. Maybe he was off somewhere feeling really bad about himself and writing her a heartfelt apology.

And maybe he was also braiding pink ribbons in his hair and prancing through a field of flowers. She tossed both possibilities.

She was, however, giving serious consideration to maybe possibly seeing reason and allowing the idiot to buy back her affection with sugar. A candied apple might just be recompense enough to -

The booming WHAM! sound of the heavy door smashing into the wall had her jumping about four feet in the air and shrieking at the top of her lungs.

“What the - “ she began before her reptilian brain kicked in and sent her sprinting towards the doorway at high speed to catch the bastard before he did - whatever it was the bastard was going to do.

Kakashi smiled smugly to himself as he heard Rin's exclamation and subsequent rush. He took advantage of her momentum, and with perfect timing (that could only be the product of his years and years of beat counting), he turned away from the wall and into the doorway, standing and stepping forward as he did so. His shoulder connected squarely with Rin's mid-drift and his upwards and inwards movement counteracted her sprint and slung her over his broader shoulder much like a sac of potatoes. His hands landed heavily on the backs of her thighs the steady her as he strolled lazily into the room and kicked the door shut behind him.

She had increased her speed as she was about to round the corner so he’d have that much fewer seconds to get away from her. Which she was convinced would have been a brilliant plan if he had been trying to get away from her. All she got was a split-second view of pale hair that clearly stated that something in her scheme had gone horribly, horribly wrong and then the breath left her lungs in a whoosh as what she could only assume was Kakashi’s stupid, gangly body smashed into the general area of her stomach.

She was momentarily stunned and winded, more out of sheer shock than any physical pain, and then she was in the air and the blood was rushing to her head and that absolute jerk had pulled the potato sac manoeuvre on her! The woefully familiar view of Kakashi’s back sent a wave of panicked deja vu through her, as it was generally what she saw immediately before being tossed fully clothed in someone’s pool, and the knowledge sent her scrabbling into furious action.

“Put me down! Kakashi, I’m not even kidding, you put me down right now!” Her voice probably would’ve been a lot more convincing if it hadn’t been pitched high enough to irritate bats and small dogs. So to emphasize her point she twisted her torso crazily to grab a handful of scruffy hair and yank. Hard.

"Ow!" Kakashi exclaimed involuntarily, smile pulling into as snarl as Rin's short nails scraped across his scalp and her fingers tangled in his hair. One large hand left her leg and caught her wrists, yanking her hands away from him as he rolled his shoulder. Her weight rolled with his bones and he continued tugging on her arms and Rin was suddenly no longer slung over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes, but over both like some piece of large game being carried home by a Neanderthal (mentally he made note to start balancing his time between the Discovery Channel and MTV). Effectively immobilized with her limbs caught between his two hands (drummer's hands no less, with a near unbreakable grip), Kakashi allowed himself to smirk again.

"Sure, I'll put you down," he replied amiably, "as soon as you say the magic words."

The satisfaction Rin felt at forcing an exclamation of pain out of Kakashi was both short-lived and probably unhealthy. But then he did something really weird with his shoulders and at first she though he was actually going to put her down. Then she thought he was just going to drop her on her head and leave her unconscious body for the cleaning staff to find. And then the full extend of his evil came to light when she sort of - rolled, like a sausage or something - across his shoulders and he grabbed her with his freakishly ginormous hands (she used to think they were cute, like oversized puppy paws - now she saw that a bear might have been a more accurate analogy, or a caveman with oven mitts).

She wrenched her arms as best she could given the fact that she was slung across Kakashi’s broad shoulder like a dead gazelle, but her eyes went wide when she realized that she seriously could not move and Kakashi seriously could not be allowed to live.

So she did what any wild animal did when pinned in place and facing almost certain doom - she went into her death throes. She immediately started squirming violently using every ounce of her dancer’s flexibility to try to escape, accompanied by a constant mantra of “Getoffgetoffgetoffgetoffgetoffgetoffgetoff!”

And then he opened his big stupid mouth and said that. “In your dreams!” she shouted, seething. “Put me down now or I am biting your ear!”

Kakashi tightened his hold like a vice as Rin struggled, rolling his eyes as she yelled. She was strong, but he was stronger and had the advantage. Nevertheless, who was he to deny such a polite request? Especially when it came accompanied by such threats of bodily harm. "Down?" he queried, "If you insist..."

His shoulders shrugged again and Rin was suddenly dropped. Well, mostly. He let her freefall for a second before catching her knees and swinging her back around his body and into a bridal style hold. Internally he noted that if this musician thing didn't work out for him, maybe he'd go into competition swing dancing. "You know, most cultures would place 'ear biting' as foreplay," he teased dead-pan as he looked down at the familiarly flustered and angry brunette with what he knew to be his most infuriatingly enigmatic stare.

Rin yelped loudly as the support of Kakashi’s body suddenly disappeared and the floor of her office suddenly rushed up to meet her. She barely had time to panic, blood rushing in her ears, and she was probably going to break something, but that didn’t seem right because Kakashi would never actually let her smash her face into the ground. He wouldn’t, she was sure he wouldn’t - mostly sure - at least eighty percent, which left a twenty percent chance of a grisly death with face woefully similar to the pug puppy’s -

And then she was being swung through the air with disturbing ease (damn her tiny body) and then suddenly she was settled in a strong pair of lean arms and blinking owlishly. Wait, what just happened? She was trying to mentally calculate the angles and trajectory that were involved in the sheer physical feat of tossing her around like a rag doll, but his words made her jerk her head up to stare at him with gape-mouthed horror because Rin was still kind of twelve years old.

To her absolute misery, he was staring at her with that bizarre, unblinking intensity that had a documented equally powerful effect on teenage girls and hardened bikers who attempted to pick fights in bars (i.e. it made them nervous and generally forced them to run away and obsess about it all day, if for completely different reasons). She opened and shut her mouth repeatedly, like a fish tossed onto dry land and choking slowly on all that damnable oxygen, blushing a furious shade of crimson right down to her toes. Squeezing her eyes shut, she groaned and resumed wriggling. "Stop, stop with the face! I didn't mean it like that! Stop!"

When his grip refused to loosen even a bit (she hated drummers), she changed tactics. And directions. Using his shoulder as a brace, she half-crawled up his torso to wrap one arm around his neck in an attempt to get in him a headlock and, hopefully, crawl over him and run like hell.

Rin was really just too easy. And Kakashi was made of stone, which is why he was able to keep his face completely in check even though he was internally doubling over with laughter. He could scarcely believe that Rin was still such a mess of awkward and embarrassed whenever he broke out The Stare, but then again, the fact that it still worked was oddly comforting and warmly nostalgic. For a moment, Kakashi almost got caught up in some of those warm and fuzzy feelings like brotherly affection, and then she started crawling on him and even Kakashi has a breaking point.

His laughter was more of a sudden and short snort followed by a quick exhale, but his face was practically transformed as his usually grim lips slid into a comfortable (but rarely shared) half smile that brightened his expression considerably. "Oh yeah," he began sarcastically as he tightened his hold on Rin's legs and wrapped his other arm around her waist in an effort to pry her off his neck "this is real tame and civil behaviour." He really couldn't believe that she didn't think her nickname was even remotely accurate. Maybe he'd start calling her Feral Monkey.

“Shut up!” Rin shouted eloquently as she attempted to pry herself out of his death grip. Now that his face was out of her line of vision, she could focus more clearly on her goal - although whether that goal was ELIMINATE or RETREAT would be determined by how successful she was in freeing herself. His arm wrapping around her torso only made her tighten her grip, anaconda style, and she resolutely ignored the logic tickling her brain that maybe there was a connection between The Nickname That Would Never Be Mentioned Ever and her current behaviour and history of uncharacteristic binges of anger and physicality.

"You were the one who taught me how to do half this stuff anyway," she growled, clawing at his shoulder with her free hand like a cat (another animal parallel, oh God), trying to gain purchase and leverage. The strange part about the whole thing, she thought, was how even though Kakashi just talking to her in the wrong tone of voice could send her scurrying into mortified retreat, for some reason they could paw at each other like they were still in middle school and it barely even registered in her mind as 'slightly outlying on the bell curve of normal behaviour.' It wasn't weird, but it should have been. His grip on her leg twisted painfully, breaking her train of thought. "I'm gonna have really suspicious bruises to explain, you jerk," she snarled.

"Thanks for making me regret it," Kakashi mumbled sarcastically as he twisted his neck to keep Rin from getting a good grip, in reply to her reference to the 'self-defence' course he'd decided to put her through after a particularly rough run in with a gang of girls when they were in high school. The moves he'd spent hours helping her perfect had never ceased in coming back to haunt him. Again he tugged at her waist, loosening her grip around his neck. The sharp rake of her nails across the skin exposed by his currently bunched sleeveless t-shirt let him know that she'd lost her purchase there as well. Mentally he cursed the scratches, those were going to sting later and his damn students were sure to notice the twinge and comment. Now he had Sasuke's censure and Kiba and Anko's suggestive comments to look forward to. And Rin had the gall to complain about bruises?

Immediately Kakashi's hand dropped away, letting her legs drop suddenly while she still didn't have any kind of a solid grip on him. The arm around her waist saved her from dropping completely (it even kept her feet suspended a few inches from the floor thanks to their significant height difference), but not until after he'd given her a scare. "Exactly who is looking at your thighs closely enough that you'd need to explain bruises to them?" Kakashi's tone was heavy with suspicion, with faint threads of possessive undertones that only ever came out when the idea of he and Obito needing to share Rin with other men was presented. As far as he knew, Rin was single, without any prospects on the horizon. That's how he liked things between their platonic trio; it meant that Obito still had a shot with her and that they didn't have to worry about letting some unknown into their network. He hated new people, especially ones that had impure thoughts about the closest thing Kakashi had to a younger sister.

She was loosing her grip. That was probably true in more than one sense, but right now that meant the very real possibility that she might just fall off of Kakashi and flat onto the floor if she didn’t manage to get a good grip on him and get out of his grip on her. She hadn’t realized, however, how much she had been relying on Kakashi’s arms to support her until suddenly he let her go - That jackass! He let her go! - and she gave a small shriek because it was going to be graceless and stupid and painful, but then his arm reaffirmed its hold on her mid-section. (Of course he hadn’t let her fall.)

She found herself suspended above the ground, her face more or less level with Kakashi’s, and her feet more or less level with his kneecaps. The really annoying thing about being under five four, she thought bitterly, was that the rest of the world seemed to take it as a genetic thumbs-up to manhandle you. She scrabbled to wrap her arms around his neck or shoulders or chest or something because even though he had a really solid hold on her, it wasn’t a particularly comfortable hold, as well as a hold that threatened in no uncertain terms that she could totally survive a fall from this height.

She balked at the question, flushing again, more out of anger than embarrassment now, though. It wasn’t the question itself (completely rude though it was), it was the implications of the question. Kakashi was, once again, attempting to assert himself as an authority in her personal life. And, okay, maybe he sort of was, but not in that area, thankyouverymuch. She had a twinge of flashback to some autumn day some year of high school and the realization that Kakashi had been scaring off the boys who kept trying to ask her to some dance and her fury that he (and she was still certain Obito had been in on it, the traitor) was trying to sabotage her whole life. If she had been in a more typical and coherent state of mind, she might have found it almost a little endearing, that weird combination of protectiveness and possessiveness that reminded her of some sort of guard dog, but unfortunately for both of them she was neither at the moment. "None of your business!" she snapped, and kicked at his knee with one of her dangling feet.

There was one of those moments, those moments so thick with tension that it pressed down on his lungs like the ocean after he'd been knocked off his surfboard. One of those weird moments that Kakashi normally associated with the second of confusion in which he would try to figure out which direction he needed to swim in to find the sky, and whether he had gulped enough air in that split second before hitting the water to last him as he tested his options.

The weight against his lungs wasn't the ocean this time, though he supposed Rin had a certain salty element to her as well. She scrambled again, wrapping around him like an octopus and then she was angry again, her sharp deep breaths shoving her ribcage into his.

It was a moment of disconnection and realization. A split second acknowledging the fact that if anyone happened to wander into the room just then, they'd see a very different situation from the truth. And Kakashi supposed that had Rin been any other woman, the theoretical interloper might have been correct in their immediate assumption. But with Rin...it almost made him sad for a second, when he realized that he really didn't feel anything even though she was practically glued to him.

And then she yelled at him and kicked him in the shin and Kakashi remembered exactly why he didn't feel anything. His face shifted from his former intensity to a quick snarl of pain. He shifted his feet and trapped her free-hanging legs between his, immobilizing them and protecting his poor shins from her further abuse. "I'll take that to mean there's nothing worth mentioning," he replied dryly, voice a little sharper than it probably would have been if his ears weren't still ringing from her indignant exclamations and his shin still smarting.

Rin had managed to sort of wrap her arms around his chest, with one hand groping at his ribcage and the other hooked over the ledge of his shoulder. While the arrangement was effective in that it kept her from being dependent on Kakashi’s grip on her for support, it did nothing in enabling her to escape or gain the upper hand. In fact, it was pretty much the polar opposite of both those goals and she chose to blame Kakashi for it, because at this point in her life she was just sort of used to things being his fault. Or at least, she was used to thinking they were.

Her eyes narrowed to feline slits as his unfairly long and muscular legs trapped hers in place and she dug her nails into where her hands were gripping at his skin - although not as hard as she could have, seeing as how they were both effectively stuck now, since he couldn’t very well hop to victory.

She sighed into his shirt in frustration pressing her face into the side of his chest to block out the world while she tried to reason a way out of this. She could let go, tug her legs free, fall, and then either take out his kneecaps for real or run to Obito’s office claim safe-haven. The chances of either of those plans succeeding seemed less and less likely, though, as the second ticked away, and she groaned. How did she manage to get herself into these situations? She was thirty years old now, officially, which she was sure was officially too old to still be having and losing wrestling matches with Kakashi Hatake.

She started reciting times tables to calm herself down. 1 times 1 is 1. 2 times 2 is 4. 3 times 3 is 9. 4 times 4 is 16 -

“Oh right, because you’re such an expert on my sex life,” she snapped, using her bitten claws in earnest now. She stopped moving abruptly, eyes wide, blood rushing to her face where it was pressed against his ribcage. Love life, she’s meant to say love life. Oh no. Maybe he wouldn’t notice? Maybe they were the same thing in his mind and he’d gloss right over with his Kakashi Logic? She bit down hard on her bottom and resumed trying to free her legs with new vigour. 5 times 5 is 25. 6 times 6 is 36. 7 times 7 is 49…

Kakashi may not be anyone' first choice for an eye witness, but there was absolutely nothing wrong with his hearing, despite his many years of raucous drumming and plastering his ears to speakers. He most definitely had not missed Rin's slip up, and in fact found comfort in it. Her phrasing spelled out how utterly inactive her romantic life was at the moment more than anything else she possibly could have said, though her defensiveness did present solid backup evidence. Angry and almost vulgar Rin meant 'frustratingly single', it was shy and coy Rin that he needed to be wary about. Which is why he chose not to call attention to her slip, that and the fact that she was presenting him with a multitude of teasing targets on top of that one. Targets that would be far more entertaining to aim for, such as the way she was wriggling quite desperately against him.

"The way you’re moving is a pretty clear invitation to become one," he replied, tone fully composed to his standard deadpan once more.

Rin’s jaw dropped as the proper young lady inside her recoiled in horror, even as the crazed animal part of her bared its fangs in warning. It was the fact that it was Kakashi who’d said it that was making her furious rather than simply embarrassed enough to crawl into a hole and die. Because he knew that she knew he would not even be remotely interested in becoming one, even if she had been offering. Which she wasn’t. Which he knew. Which meant he was just messing with her, which meant she was officially mad at him again.

Releasing one hand’s grip on his shoulder, she reached up and smacked it hard against the back of his head. “You are such a - whoa!” she yelped. Giving up her purchase on Kakashi’s shoulder had coincided almost perfectly with one of her legs coming loose, quite accidentally, and the sudden leverage had managed to break Kakashi’s grasp on her waist. She dropped, fingers tangling desperately in his shirt as she went, and fell onto the ground with a loud thump, her left elbow and the back of her head smashing painfully into the scuffed floor.

“Ow,” she groaned, eyes squeezed shut, one foot still trapped between Kakashi’s knees, her whole body pulsating with newly forming bruises. 8 times 8 is…something that hurt a lot. God, this was stupid.

He should have expected the smack; of course Rin was going to hit him for a comment like that. He had expected it to come after she was on stable ground though, not compromise her precarious hold. That was why he'd been surprised, surprised enough to flinch (and it was surprise, it hadn't really hurt much at all), but more importantly, surprised enough that his grip slipped. Suddenly Rin was falling and the free hand that snapped around her forearm wasn't enough to catch her, especially when she grabbed on to his shirt and pulled her down with him. There was the sound of tearing cotton followed by a serious of crunches and bangs as heavy, fleshy bits landed heavily on wood paneling, followed by the all too human groans of pain.

It was all Kakashi could do to keep from smashing down right on top of his significantly smaller friend, especially when her legs tangled with his and limited his mobility. The hand that had been around her waist crashed palm first into the floor above Rin's shoulder, taking all of his weight before slipping and forcing him to land awkwardly on his forearm. Kakashi flinched mightily as pain shot up through his bones and joints all the way to his shoulder, but he kept from crying out, already shoving his own pain and injury to the back of his mind as he focused on Rin, who'd taken the brunt of the fall.

He stabilized himself on his forearm, satisfied that he wasn't crushing Rin and glanced down, eyebrows knit tightly together in concern. "Are you ok?"

Rin’s brown eyes had started to open just as Kakashi’s suddenly massive and towering frame had started to topple down on top of her. She’d let out a tiny squeak of fear because he was going to crush her, break her into lots of tiny pieces and then his weight was going to compact those pieces into dust and then bits of her were going to float all over the campus grounds and she’d always wanted her ashes to be spread over the ocean and while the Atlantic was an ocean the Pacific was what she’d had in mind and hey, she wasn’t dead!

The sound of Kakashi crash-landing onto the floor had made her whole body jerk, the harsh smacking, crunching sound focused right next to her ear. She had been wincing, face screwed up in the anticipation of pain and maiming and her bones being smashed like eggshells, but his voice - concerned and urgent, and therefore really scary - made her brave enough to crack open her eyes.

She blinked his face back into focus, her vision still blurred and soft-focused from her head connecting with the floor. He had the unguarded, tight-jawed look that she had only ever seen a handful of times, and that meant he was not just concerned but outright worried, which was…bad.

She opened her mouth to speak, to say that, well, she could feel her pulse in the back of her head and her elbow was doing this weird throbbing thing and her bad knee was just really ugly from being tangled in his legs, but what came out was “I broke your shirt…”

Her eyes had followed the line of his body that was looming over hers, and she’d been surprised to find her fingers still wrapped in what were now the scraps where the middle of his t-shirt had been. That was so typical of her, she thought with a dizzy sort of frustration, she’d been falling and she was so desperate to save herself that she’d grabbed at Kakashi and not expected to do any damage in the process. She never seemed to remember how easily these things tore. Typical.

She slowly unhooked her fingers, letting the tattered fabric fall away, then looked back up at him, eyes going in and out of focus. “I’m sorry.”

Kakashi blinked at Rin's seemingly random reply then looked down, following her gaze to where her hand was tangled in the rag that had been a shirt when he'd walked into the room. He exhaled sharply, more a sigh of exasperation as he rolled his eyes back to Rin's face, still frowning in concern and the unfocused look on her face. "I was falling apart anyway," he informed her shortly, dismissing the shirt without a second thought. "Don't worry about it," he added a little shortly as Rin continued to stare at the scraps of cotton.

Frown deepening, he grabbed her chin (gently) with the hand that wasn't supporting his weight and forced her to look up at him so he could check her for early signs of concussion. "Are. You. Ok?" he ground out the question again, enunciating carefully to make sure she was keeping up.

Rin’s eyes took a second to catch up the movement of her head when large, calloused fingers scraped against her skin briefly. She blinked several more times, considering the question.

“…Yeah. I. Um. Yes. My head hurts,” she added, since it was true. She was slowly coming back into her senses a little more, and she started flexing her fingers and toes experimentally. Yeah, they were all in working order. Arms? Her left elbow was twinging uncomfortably, but it didn’t feel like she’d done it any serious damage. Legs? She flexed one, then the other and -

“Oh shit, my knee,” she gasped, immediately bringing her hand up to slap it over her mouth, although she wasn’t entirely sure it was because she regretted the outburst or because, yeah, she was twelve and not supposed to use foul language, young lady. “Please don’t fall on it,” she pleaded, her voice sounding odd in her own ears, a weird sort of combination of dazed and frustrated. Her small fingers overlapped Kakashi's slightly on her face, and she glanced up at him with wary eyes, back in stray animal mode.

Shit. Kakashi hated it when adult life (like injuries) rushed in and ruined his rare moments of childish fun. He shouldn't have started this in the first place, now Rin was seriously hurt and it was his damn fault. And she was scared he was going to make it worse. Fuck. Carefully, Kakashi untangled his legs from Rin's and propped up his feet to take his weight, like he was doing a one handed push-up. Once he was satisfied that he could move without jarring her knee again, he moved over to her uninjured side and sat up into a crouch so he could properly survey the damage.

He was relatively confident that Rin's head would be ok; she was a bit dazed and would probably have a lump, but nothing serious. Her knee however was already visibly swelling. Kakashi bit down on the inside of his cheek in his self-anger and forced himself to focus on being useful. "Here, let me help you sit up," voice low as if her were thinking out loud more than talking to anyone in particular, Kakashi slid one hand gently behind the base of Rin's skull and the other under her far arm and started to lift her slowly, watching for any further signs of pain or more serious injury. "Do you have any ice here?"

Rin kept her eyes shut tight while Kakashi went about disentangling them. Oh God, if he slipped or is his arm gave out or if she moved wrong it was going to hurt so bad. But she felt rather than saw him push himself away, aware of his absence in the lack of body heat she hadn’t noticed up until that point. She kept her eyes squeezed shut, though, out of some childhood logic that if she couldn’t see it, it couldn’t hurt her. So far, her knee had other ideas, and it throbbing dully in protest.

She jerked at the sound of Kakashi’s quiet voice, and again when a hand brushed against her hair, but the nausea from the sudden movement quickly made her forgot to be afraid of him. She pressed her lips tight together, wincing as she straightened, until she was fully upright and the hand fell away.

She looked up at Kakashi where he was crouched by her side and looking angry and brooding. She shrank in on herself at the displeasure that was rolling off him in waves. Why did she always have to ruin it and make him mad at her? Wasn’t being all broken and pathetic punishment enough?

“Over there,” she answered, pointing with her good arm over to the corner of her office where she kept a small refrigerator with a large bag of ice in case something like this happened to a student (it wasn’t supposed to happen to her). “There are some plastic bags on top of the fridge,” she added weakly. She bent her knee experimentally, trying to get a feel for the damage. There was an ominous-sounding crunch, and she let out a low hiss she hoped he couldn’t hear.

"Stop trying to move it," Kakashi commanded sharply in a tight voice as he stood and moved over to the fridge Rin had indicated. The large ice bag was mostly full, for which he was grateful, and he quickly made two smaller ice packs for her head and her arm. He was crouched beside her again in barely a blink and tugging at the remnants of his shirt. He knew from experience that ice directly on a sore area hurt more than it helped, so instead of packing the large plastic bag around Rin's knee immediately, he wrapped it in the cotton first.

Kakashi was silent and as gentle as he could bring his hands to be as he carefully settled the ice pack around the injured knee, settling the bulk of the weight on the floor so that it supported itself and didn't add too much pressure on the swelling. He then handed her one of the two small bags for her elbow and carefully cradled the other against the back of her head.

Rin barely bit back a retort of “You are not the boss of me!” and settled for glaring petulantly at the ugly swell of her joint below where the line of her leggings cut off. She bent it once more while his back was turned, just a little bit, mostly because she got spiteful and petty when she hurt all over and felt this embarrassed. She only succeeded in making it hurt more. There was probably a lesson to be learned in that.

Starting slightly when Kakashi just materialized next to her again (maybe his old working pseudonym wasn’t so far-fetched…?), she eyed his large hands warily as they went for her knee, ready to smack them away if she decided they presented a threat. But they moved slowly and gently and that was unnerving her more than anything else. Kakashi had always taken care of her, in one way or another, but she wasn’t used to him being gentle with her, taking this much care. It was usually Obito who put her back together when she fell apart because Obito was the one who understood pesky things like feelings and verbal communication. And while Kakashi had always been willing to beat someone up for her, he’d never really done this. Or at least he hadn’t for a very long time, not since she’d gotten old enough to know she should be able to do it for herself.

Quiet animal noises worked their way out of the back of her throat at each movement - the brush of cotton against skin, the barest jostle of her bruised knee, Kakashi with no shirt on?, the slow, sweet cool that spread over at the carefully placed ice.

“I feel stupid,” she mumbled and she adjusted her grip on the bag at her elbow, trying to keep as still as possible so she wouldn’t bump his hand where it was holding the ice in place against her head.

"It's my fault." The words slid from his tongue like sandpaper, admitting to a guilt he almost always kept to himself, immediately to contradict her. While it was hard for him to share, Kakashi was never one to let others take responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Rin's knee had gotten wrenched because he'd trapped it; it had gotten wrenched because he'd dropped her. He was the only one who was to blame for it. He knew she had a chronic injury, and he knew it was easily aggravated. The bottom line was that he knew better, and now Rin was hurt because he'd ignored his common sense and had gotten swept up in the chance to pretend he was a kid again.

Once those three words had pulled from his throat, Kakashi turned his concerned frown (which was steadily becoming a self-hating scowl) towards the far wall. Rin's pained face always twisted his insides in ways that were better left unacknowledged. The ice was freezing his hand, and without his shirt to help keep in some of his normally excessive body heat, goosebumps were starting to crawl down his arm. Nevertheless, his hand remained perfectly steady. He should probably go find Obito, or at least call his office through the school's internal network that was attached to the phone on one of Rin's table. He'd always been significantly more skilled at making Rin feel better.

Rin frowned, an expression that on her tended to look less intimidating and more wounded. “Stop it,” she ordered, her quiet, still shaking voice sounding less than authoritative. “You always do that. Just stop.” She inhaled sharply before shifting her weight and resettling herself in a slightly more upright position. “It’s not anyone’s fault, Kakashi, it just - happened.” Her eyes fell on the pale skin of his exposed chest, noting with an absent sort of acknowledgment the tan line that cut across his stomach, clearly defined, but fading fast. Had they really been away from home that long? Well, of course she had, she’d spent the better part of ten years running away from the only place she’d ever wanted to be, and maybe she was just a little jealous of that - that Kakashi had had an extra decade with California that she would never get back because she’d been too scared of…everything. How had Obito managed to live here so long?

Obito. She wished he was here now. He could always pull Kakashi out of these moods.

Her eyes tiredly followed the line of his torso up to his arm, and noted with clinical disconnect the visibly chilled skin there. She carefully let her bruised elbow rest against her side, the ice pack flopping wetly against the ground, then lifted up her good arm to rub her hand up and down his cold forearm distractedly. “Well, I suppose, originally, it’s that guy’s fault for dropping me during that recital. But it wouldn’t have gotten all torn up if it weren’t for that time when we were surfing, and there’s really not a whole lot of point in the blaming the ocean. Actually,” she mused numbly “that sounds like something from one of your poems.” She was rambling. Babbling, really, trying to keep Kakashi’s mind off that dark place she could see him sinking into, and her own mind off the stabbing throb of her knee that was slowly soaking upwards to her thigh and hip. She considered asking him to go and quick grab her some opiates to knock her unconscious until she was forty, but she was fairly certain that it wouldn’t go over well. She settled for leaning her head against his arm and going back to her times tables. 9 times 9 is...80-something. But 10 times 10? Still definitely 100. Rin loved multiples of 10.

Kakashi forced his face into stoic blankness, forcing his guilt back into the far left corner of his brain where it was devoured by the creature that had been gluttonously living there for the past twenty years of his life. It rumbled and stole another inch from his 'reasonable' mind. Rin was right, now was not the time to deal with that piece of himself, he could wallow in it later to his satisfaction.

Her hand was soft against his arm, as was her wild hair. Unconsciously, his face softened a fraction as the hand holding the ice pack against Rin gave her a bit of a nudge, tucking her up against his shoulder. "Black water or blue, you can never tell her moods. Consistent in salt." His voice was low, more like he was talking to himself than answering to any of her statements. His fingers lightly counted off the syllables against the ice bag.

Rin shot a questioning look at Kakashi and he pulled her a little closer, her temple leaning against the muscle of his shoulder that felt comfortingly solid beside her, but he was too busy staring a hole in the wall to notice. Kakashi had openly expressed his hatred of touching and hugging and hair-tussling, etc. whenever she attempted any such thing, so this sudden bout of (for him) cuddliness was distinctly out of character. It was probably for her benefit rather than his, then, she figured. This was a testament to how guilty he was feeling. She sighed in silent frustration, but settled into his warmth all the same.

She grinned in spite of herself as he pulled a haiku out of the air, large fingers tapping faintly against the back of her head, and turned her face into his chest. “You are such a dork,” she laughed, and brushed the knuckles of her undamaged hand against his opposite arm in a pantomime of a friendly punch she didn’t have the energy to deliver.

Kakashi let out a sharp exhale that was usually as close as he came to an actual laugh. "This from the girl who does multiplication tables in her head," he commented dryly. Seeing as this was such a long standing habit of Rin's, it surprised him that she still let her lips move around the numbers where she thought of them. "It's 81, by the way."

“Six thousand, five hundred sixty-one,” she mumbled as her eyes slowly drifted closed, exhaustion hitting her like a brick wall. “81 times 81. Wait what? What are we talking about? And I am not a dork,” she added as an afterthought. She winced at the sound of her own voice, too loud and too shrill for the headache she was just becoming aware of. On the one hand, if her head hurt so much she couldn’t hear herself multiply, she didn’t think about the agony that was her bad leg. On the other hand, her head hurt so much she could not hear herself multiply. Girls with very limited skill sets couldn’t afford to lose any of them.

"We're talking about 9 times 9 and how it equals 81." There was a sigh in his voice, of exasperation or a deeper kind of weariness, Kakashi couldn't tell and liked it that way. He could hear the exhaustion in Rin's voice, the clue he needed to decipher that the light, feather-like brush against his pectoral had been her eyelashes closing over her eyes. He considered letting her be, letting her rest while her body got to work on repairing her damaged tissue. Considered that she was resting against him and the weird twisting his gut went through when he realized it. Finally he decided that it wasn't a pleasant wrenching, and when it started crawling up his torso and soaking into his jaw, he decided he couldn't just grit his teeth and let her be.

"We were also talking about how your ability to instantly multiply 81 by 81 is clearly the coolest and hippest thing to ever come out of the west coast," voice utterly dry, Kakashi fell back on his tested and true method of sliding burrs under Rin's saddle. Teasing about math.

Contrary to popular belief, Rin could, in fact, recognize sarcasm when she heard it, but there was a particular tone people used when they felt like nursing their own lack of logic and reasoning skills by attempting to belittle the great field of mathematics. That same elusive tone was positively dripping from Kakashi’s lips and onto her ears like really irritating rain. She straightened from where she’d been slumped against Kakashi’s chest (because that wasn’t weird enough as it was), to glare defensively.

“I know what 9 times 9 is,” she snapped indignantly. “And for your information,” she went on, consciousness coming back almost as quickly as it had started to wane as her proverbial hackles rose, “Some of the most important technological advances of the twentieth century are being made by math geeks. Have you heard of computers? Apple? Macintosh? Any of this ringing any bells?”

She pushed herself back slightly to get a better view of him so as to properly scowl and jarred herself in the process. She growled in the back of her throat and slapped her discarded ice pack back onto her elbow, the plastic wet with perspiration and only adding to her overall state of displeasure. “And we’ll see how ‘cool and hip’ you think it is when you have to do your taxes come April.”

On the outside, Kakashi looked like the poster boy for quiet scepticism (lips ever so faintly pursed and skewed, good eyebrow twitched lightly upwards on his forehead), on the inside he was half laughing (Rin was just so damn defensive) and sighing with relief. Once again, they were in territory he'd long started recognizing as 'safe'. "Ah April," he replied wistfully as he leaned back to recline on his hand (a motion that was immediately retracted once his palm snarled at him, apparently he'd landed worse that he'd though earlier) "that's the month I've always got to hang out by your place with a baseball bat."

Rin narrowed her eyes irritably and started testing out her joints again. “That’s why I liked being a pitcher,” she muttered, bending her sore elbow back and forth, slowly, the pain dulling and throbbing faintly rather than the momentary needles of pain she’d had earlier. “Less equipment.”

She ran her tongue over her lips nervously and carefully bent her worthless knee. Okay, that had been a bad idea. “Or was that supposed to be some sort of euphemism?” She looked up at him with quizzical eyebrows. She was always half-certain that she and Kakashi were having two entirely separate conversations whenever they spoke.

It took Kakashi a second, a second in which his face sunk into his rarely shared 'what the fuck are you talking about?' look. Sometimes, often times, Kakashi was sure that he and Rin were having two entirely separate conversations, as this moment exemplified. "It was a joke," he replied dryly, "following the joke about math being attractive," he really could not believe she hadn't followed this "a play on the expression 'beating boys away with sticks.'"

He really needed to call Obito. Obito would have gotten it, and Obito would have laughed. And Obito would be able to convince Rin to stop moving her knee. "Stop moving your knee," he repeated out loud, more because he had to at least try; "I'm calling Obito." Decision made, Kakashi carefully helped Rin settle on her own support again before smoothly rising to his feet and walking over to the telephone.

Rin blinked a few times. “Oh. I knew that.” She didn’t, actually. She had never been very good with this sort of thing. “Since when did you use baseball bats? As I remember, you would just imagine things and then punch nice boys in the nose.” She had been on the Math Team after all, not really the prime venue to cruise for chicks in California.

She glared at him again and opened her mouth to order him to stop telling her what to do when he one-up-ed her. “Don’t call Obito!” She crawled, crab-like, after Kakashi, grabbing hold of the hem of his pants and tugging, eyes huge and pleading. "Please? He'll make that Obito face and then he'll follow me around and try to cover me in bubble wrap and it's fine so you really don't have to." She gave him her most pathetic face that had been able to soften up even her monstrous, Russian ballet teacher on occasion and silently prayed to whatever deity that would have her that just this once he would listen to her.

Phone receiver already pressed to his ear, dial tone out of harmonic sync with that high pitched whining he'd been hearing since his kit had been set up next to a blown speaker in 1978, Kakashi stared bug-eyed (almost, well, kind of, sort of, maybe? not really) in shock at Rin in her desperate supplications. He was confused. This was Obito, not her overly strict an paranoid mother who thought (rather ironically) that he, Kakashi, was some kind of corrupting influence on her and wanted to cloister her away until she was safely married off and therefore out of the clutches of punk rock and it's representatives (he and Obito). From her reaction, had he not been exactly sure of what he'd said, he might have second guessed it.

He stared at her for a long, hard moment, trying to ignore the phone's pulsations and how the waistband of his jeans was slipping fractionally down his hipbone under the weight of Rin's grip. This was ridiculous. "You are not fine," he stated stoically, reaching out to the dial pad with the hand that wasn't holding the phone.

“I am totally fine!” she cried in protest, and - realizing that continuing to pull on Kakashi’s pants would probably end exactly the way logic dictated it would end - released her hold on him, and twisted her torso around to get a grip at the edge of her desk. ’I’m calling Obito’ was having roughly the same effect on her as ’I’m calling your mother, young lady’ did when she managed to get herself suspended from the cheerleading squad again, and she was not looking to relive that experience. It was just that Obito would worry and would refuse to leave her alone until he had personally driven her to the ER or something equally ridiculous and unnecessary and it would be weird. And things were weird enough without her going around and making him pull out chunks of his already hopeless hair on her account.

“Look,” she said, hauling herself up using only the muscles if her arms (which were screaming at her in loud, audible voices), “See?” she elaborated through slightly clenched teeth, hip braced against the desk to keep the weight off her right leg. “Totally fine.”

Oh God, ow.

Kakashi's jaw set in budding frustration. "I thought we'd long established that I'm not nearly as stupid as I look," he stated, clipping the words a little sharply as he gave Rin what was generally a rather withering stare. After a long second in which the dial tone gave up and went silent, Kakashi let the threat of dialling hang in the air. Finally, he relinquished and set the receiver back in the cradle.

"What do you want me to do, then?" He didn't bother humouring her blatant defensive lies, but he respected that if she was that determined...he could compromise. He wouldn't call Obito, but he'd be damned if he didn't do anything. That quiver that was starting to feel more and more like serious worry and concern twisted awkward and uncomfortable in the snake pit of his stomach.

Rin let out a less than subtle sigh of relief at the audible click of the phone resettling itself in safe inactivity, and pushed herself up onto the edge of her desk, her knee practically groaning. And now that she was settled, she realized that she would probably have to think of an answer to his question, an exercise that generally ended with wry humour at her expense.

“Um,” she began eloquently, and fidgeted with the ice pack on her knee gingerly. Well, she had an answer, in a general sense, but Kakashi was still way more of a hippie than she ever had been and he was probably going to make his Disapproving Kakashi Face at her. She scrunched up her nose slightly in anticipation, then asked tentatively, “There’s a bottle of Vicodin in the top right hand drawer of my desk? Could you…grab that…for me? Please?” She didn’t feel any particular urge to explain the doctor’s visits and chronic, gnawing pain that had led her to this current prescription. It made her not hurt, which was all she really cared about right now, her jaw beginning to ache from her clenched teeth.

She tucked a chunk of hair behind her ears and ducked her head.

Something cracked loudly in the back of his head; Kakashi suspected it to be one of his teeth from how tightly he was suddenly grinding them together. Vicodin. Fucking vicodin. Fucking addictive vicodin. Anger, impulsive, violent and irrational flared up from his gut, searing the inner walls of his rib cage and setting his stomach to boil. How could she have-- What the hell was Rin doing with that kind of a prescription?

His mismatched eyes burned into Rin as she hid from him, utterly galled that she had kept something this serious from not just him, but from Obito (Obito would have told him, Kakashi was sure of this) and now couldn't even face him with it in the open. Kakashi could have sworn he heard another crack, his ribs snapping like fire-dried twigs as he forced in a breath and forced down his immediate but useless reaction. Methodically, the storm that was equal parts betrayal and fear was neatly folded, boxed, labelled and stored away. Another breath, a creaking.

He looked down. He stepped back. He opened the drawer and looked for that tell-tale plastic orange bottle with its pop-off white top. There was a slight clacking noise that sounded impossibly loud in the now impossibly quiet room as he set the rattling bottle on the desk beside Rin's hip. He straightened. He sank into the chair behind the desk. The chair spun and he faced the window, one booted foot braced up against the sill, his back to the woman who, at that exact second, could have been anyone but was definitely no one. He needed to not think in terms of individuals for a moment.

The window was frosted over from the cold and there was dry, hard snow crusted on everything outside of it. The sky was that strange slate grey of eastern winter, perpetually coated with a fine layer of snow bearing clouds. There were crows circling the parking lot, black spots in his failing sight, like he'd spent too many seconds staring at a sun that didn't seem to exist in this city. This weather was utterly foreign to him, but he was coming to like it. It suited him, he decided as he took another breath, smooth and quiet this time. Cold.

When he was honest with himself, as this moment was forcing him to be, Kakashi was forced to admit that he was a walking can of worms when it came to secrets. While it was common knowledge that he was private by nature, he often doubted even his closest friends realized the full extent of his inner festering pit. He had no moral high ground. He had never had moral high ground with anyone but especially with Rin, so this was familiar territory. He could find comfort in that, solidity.

Rin was allowed to hide anything and everything from him, even herself. He'd been doing that very same to her for years, so it was only fair. Kakashi was the first to admit that most assumptions and aspersions made on his character were probably true, but hypocrisy was not a sin he would allow to claim him. So his face settled into its equally familiar, comfortable and solid, stoic blankness, lips stretching a grim line across his sharp jaw bone in such a way that he could be wearing a full face mask for all it revealed.

He was not allowed to question her. Steadily, familiar guilt and futility seeped into the vast space his anger had left behind as he stared out at the birds in the snow. It settled like liquid lead, so heavy in his gut that it pinned him to the chair, like the raven's shadow had pinned the narrator's soul to ground in that one piece by Poe. He'd always liked that image, which he supposed was lucky given that it had been haunting him since he was eight. Kakashi was pretty sure that poem had taken place in a winter like this, too.

She felt sick. She had expected him to react badly, but she hadn’t been prepared for this, for the way he could make his face just like a wall and how suddenly she was all alone in the room. The small bottle of off-white pills sat innocuously by her side, equal parts mocking and tempting and punishing, and she had the bizarre though that maybe this was how prostitutes felt when they got paid, this stomach-churning mix of shame and need, this sudden urge to hide herself away.

A small gust of cold air seeped in from the ill-fitting window frame, chilling her all along her back and neck, and she couldn’t help the thought that it might as well have come from Kakashi rather than the winter landscape outside. This place was so cold, she couldn’t stand it, and she mused stupidly that maybe it was just New York that was to blame for all this. She shivered almost violently, tremors running up and down her spine, and she hugged herself tightly in an oddly telling gesture.

Eyes closed, jaw tight, her fingers reached for the small prescription bottle and fumbled with it blindly, tipping it over with a soft tap that sounded like breaking glass for the way it seemed to fill the room and bounce off the empty space between them. She grabbed it angrily and wrenched the top off with the ease of someone who’d become well acquainted with painkillers in the last five years, and the noise was deafening. One small pill rolled into her palm and she brought it to her lips, but had to stop. Her fingers fisted around the Vicodin and pressed against her mouth where her teeth were digging into her lip hard enough to bruise. Sometime in the last few seconds, her throat had closed off, thick and sore and - she was not going to fucking cry.

The hurt she felt began to morph resentfully, and her guilt started to feel a lot more like anger. Who the hell was he to react like this, to make her feel like this? She hadn’t done anything wrong. However many years ago, she’d been in pain and she’d gone to the doctor because aspirin just wasn’t working anymore. And she’d learned words like “steady deterioration” and “grating cartilage” and the painkillers she’d had hadn’t been enough. Repeat that once a year every year and you ended up here: hurting, with sickeningly strong drugs that you wouldn’t even let yourself take for fear of ending up like…someone else.

She dry-swallowed the pill, ignoring the way it caught in her throat, then shoved herself to her feet (too quickly, an awful grating sound), and made for the door.

“I’m going home.” Her voice betrayed her, cracked loudly. “I’ll give you a call later or something.”

The chair creaked as he shifted, heavy foot dropping from the window sill so he could stand. When Kakashi turned and looked at her, everything was back in its proper place and the only thing managing to rise to the surface of his face was his genuine concern. "I'll drive you," he stated rather than offered, there was no way in hell he was letting Rin drive home while she was in pain and on the verge of getting her senses broadsided by painkillers. "I just need to get my coat."

Rin turned around to stare at him, her “…the hell?” expression plastered across her face. Weren’t they going to not talk for a week now? Wasn’t that how this usually worked? She’d feel bad and he wouldn’t care and Obito would be confused and then they’d pretend like it never happened and all would be right with the world. It was a solid routine they’d stuck with for years.

“I don’t remember asking you to,” she replied, her voice more confused than waspish. Why was Kakashi so weird?

Kakashi's mismatched eyes settled heavily on Rin's, face with all the expression of granite. "I don't remember asking your approval," he replied dryly through his unwavering stare before rounding the desk. He picked up the now discarded ice packs and threw them back in the small freezer before grabbing Rin's coat off a hook on the wall and holding it out to her. "I need your keys."

Rin snatched her coat out of Kakashi’s grip a little more roughly then was strictly necessary and pulled it on. “I don’t need you to drive me anywhere,” she snapped back, fishing her keys out of her coat pocket and limping towards the door. She had no idea if Kakashi was just being an ass to drive home the fact that she was helpless and pathetic right now - thanks, but no thanks, she’d gotten that particular message loud and clear. Jerk.

Kakashi caught Rin's wrist in the blink of an eye, halting her progress towards the door. He shot her his best 'please don't fight with me right now' before gently prying open her fingers and taking the keys from her. Under normal circumstances, he would have let her keep them and even drive until she realized that it was a really bad idea (he remaining very attentive in the passenger seat, ready to take control of the wheel at the first sign of trouble) but at that particular moment...he was pretty convinced that Rin would leave without him if he gave her the chance. So while it definitely continued to shove him down pegs on her favourite persons list, it was necessary.

"Wait here," he instructed blandly as he pocketed the keys and moved towards the door, "I'll just get my coat and then help you to the car."

Rin was tired. She was tired and she was hurt in lots of different ways and now she was just plain irritated. Kakashi had just yanked her keys out of her hand, thus securing her only means of getting home now that her bike was stored in the basement of her apartment and her only means of actually getting inside her home once she got there. She could, in theory, walk or catch a bus or taxi or something, but a) the thought of walking further than her car actually made her want to cry, b) the New York public transportation system made exactly zero sense to her, and c) taxi drivers seemed to hate her just on principle and had taken up yelling at her a variety of languages every time they nearly ran her over while crossing the street. Kakashi had, in essence, just rendered her absolutely helpless and she was - not - happy.

“Kakashi, get back here!” she ordered, fingers reaching for where his t-shirt would have been if it hadn't already been scrapped and sacrificed to the cause, and, finding no purchase on his skin, sort of hooked awkwardly at the waistband of his pants. There were lots and lots of obvious flaws in this tactic (for starters, she was practically groping him - Jesus), but her flustered state was refusing to let her think clearly. “Give me back my keys,” she demanded, and reached her around to try and snatch them out of his hand while she still had the element of (sort of) surprise. “And stop telling me what to do,” she added as an afterthought, glaring petulantly.