[Naruto] Seeking Rin -- Chapter 13

[skylar_inari]

Title: Seeking Rin
Chapter: 13 - Nocturne
Author: Killaurey
Rating: T
Word Count: 4497
Summary: When Sakura, newly in a relationship with Kakashi, finds out about Rin, she makes a choice that's hard on them both. Even worse, there's a mysterious illness cropping up in Konoha that even Tsunade can't heal. And what does Ino have to do with it? Kakashi x Rin, KakaSaku.
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it. Part 13 of ? Unbeta’d.



Kakashi wakes up disoriented and alone.

He stares up at the white ceiling, painfully sterile looking and slowly expands his awareness to get a better idea of what's in the rest of the room. It turns out to be just him; there is no one else around.

That sends alarms all through his body and he realizes, for the first time in what feels like forever, there's no rage throbbing behind his thoughts. Just him. It's like breathing air after being submerged in water long enough to drown.

The rest of the room is just as white, just as clean. The bed he's on is one that would be found in any lab. The sheets are scratchy and starched. There's very little else in the room. A drain in the floor--and the floor is very slightly sloped towards it, which he finds ominous. He tilts his head back, looking for... yes, there's a line of sprinklers hidden in the ceiling. Now that he's looking for them, he can spot the tell-tale holes.

Nothing is on the walls. There's not even a cabinet or a pushcart in the room. Anyone who entered would have to bring everything they needed with them.

Chakra dampeners stick to him like ooze. Invisible and intangible but he feels them, muffling his abilities and leaving him much diminished in terms of offensive and defensive capabilities. Not harmless, no, but weakened.

His weapons are gone. He's been left with a mask, his hitae-ite, and a drafty hospital gown.

Kakashi appreciates the first two and worries about the last.

If he's in the hospital, it's in no room that he's ever heard breathed of before.

"What did I drown from?" he asks, testing the sound.

The noise doesn't echo. The room itself is silenced and muffled. Kakashi stretches carefully, working out stiff muscles, and wonders why he's in a room where no one will hear him scream.

He can't remember what happened to place him here. There had been a mission in a swamp and then... and then...

Something about Rin. Something about Sakura…

That's all he remembers.

Kakashi gets up, ties the hospital gown a bit tighter around him (not that it does anything to do so, but it makes him feel a little better) and approaches the door. He feels like he's blind without being able to use his chakra.

The door opens at his touch.

He backs away until he's flush with the bed again and waits.

And waits.

When Kakashi finally decides that nothing is going to enter, he approaches the door again. He listens, hard as he can, for sounds.

Nothing.

He scents the air, his nose not nearly as sensitive as an Inuzuka's but far more sensitive than an ordinary person's, and gets back nothing but the clean, harsh scents of industrial strength disinfectant and bleach.

Lots of bleach.

Maybe, he thinks wryly, that's why everything is white. Saves on repair costs.

The hallway is just as bland and featureless as his room had been. Kakashi leaves the door open as he ventures slowly down the hall. There's a few doors, spaced evenly apart, on both sides of the hallways.

No windows in them and when he tries a few of them, he finds that they're all locked.

Except for his.

He tries all of the doors again, still moving silently though that seems increasingly ridiculous to do when there's no one around except for him. It feels like a tomb.

Kakashi hopes it doesn't become his.

What happened to bring him here? He strains his mind, looking for answers that his memory doesn't want to give up.

"That way," Rin says lightly. "Left, then right."

He spins around, falling into a taijutsu stance, and then just stares. Rin stands there, her brown hair neat and tidy, her smile gentle, and she looks real. Not insubstantial or ghostly or anything like that.

Real.

She also looks to be about ten years old.

So she can't be real. He knows that, his mind babbles, it's not possible.

"I'm as real as you are," she says, which reassures him not at all. "Come on, let's get going."

Kakashi lets her reach and take his hand, falling out of a battle ready stance and looking down at her. Had she always been so small? He supposes so but in his memories, she looms so much larger. She's younger now than when she'd died.

That should just be another warning sign that this isn't real.

Her hand in his is warm and solid.

"It's all right," she says. "I could be leading you somewhere dangerous but I'm not."

He clears his throat, feeling it clogged with something terribly close to tears and hating that. Kakashi's grip on the small hand tightens.

Rin doesn't protest, even though he knows it must hurt her. After a moment, he forces his grip to loosen. She's not going anywhere.

"Where are we going then?" he asks.

This has to be a trap. There's no way it can be anything else. Kakashi considers killing this ghost of his past who seems dreadfully and entirely real and discards the idea for now.

For now, he promises himself. He'll revisit the idea if necessary--later.

"Left then right," Rin says, smiling innocently as they walk down the hall, past the doors that Kakashi's has already tried to open to no avail. They stop outside of one more door.

"I've tried this door," he tells her, nostalgia turning his voice gentle. "It's locked."

"Not for me," she says confidently, which doesn't comfort him at all. Rin, rather than trying the doorknob, places the palm of her hand flat on the middle of the door.

Kakashi memorizes the spot she touches.

The door clicks open.

"How much danger am I in?" Kakashi asks, staring at the door and making no move to go through it.

He has no faith that Rin will tell him the truth but any answer will give him something to go on. He needs more information.

"I can't tell you what you want to know," Rin replies, looking down. "You're going to have to talk to another me."

Kakashi's frown deepens. "There's only one you, Rin."

Even though it's become apparent that that is dreadfully, terribly, untrue. Rin died.

He's holding a different Rin's hand.

Her eyes are very brown and serious as she looks up at him. "There was never just one of me," Rin says. "Let's go. We're keeping me waiting."

"This isn't possible," Kakashi tells her as she leads him through the door and into another white, many-doored hallway.

When he's out of here, he swears that he's going to paint the walls of his apartment. White is too… empty.

Fear sticks in the back of his throat like the taste of sour apples and old vinegar.

"It's okay," Rin says. "I'm not the danger."

"You're dead," he says gently. "Your presence is a danger I don't understand."

One that upsets and unsettles him and Kakashi is left wondering if that's maybe the point. "How many of you are there?"

Rin tilts her head slightly. "I don't know."

She doesn't sound bothered by that. Which is all right. Kakashi is bothered enough for the both of them even though the emotion, like everything else, feels at one remove.

He almost misses the rag--

"Don't," she says, interrupting his thought. "Don't miss it. That wasn't you."

Rin has never been able to read minds.

"It felt real," he says, rather than point out what she was doing. Instead he was filing that information away, analyzing it, and coming up frustratingly blank with a real answer to anything.

"That's why it's so insidious," Rin says. "It's not gone. If you think about it, it will come back."

"Where did it go?"

"We put it in remission," she tells him. "Temporary. Just so I and myself can talk to you."

They stop outside the last door on the right.

"Are you through here?" he asks, the sentence sounding awkward on his lips.

She looks at him. "I don't know."

Rin is the one who is leading him here, who will tell him where to go, even though Kakashi hates the fact that he's not in control but isn't that exactly what this whole situation is?

A reason to strip him of his control. An exercise in how to do it.

"Are you coming with me?" he asks, loathe to let go of her hand despite knowing all the reasons he should. There's no good reason to want this Rin to stay around.

She's not real.

But she feels real and looks real and sounds real and that's almost good enough for him. Almost.

"For a little while longer," she says, nodding and then leads him through the door. It requires another press of an invisible panel in the wall, in the same location, and then they're through.

The next hallway is white, painfully so, just like the rest of the place. The largest difference is the lights. They're harsher on the eyes. It makes the place even more unsettling and alien.

Luckily, they're not in the hallway for long. Rin gently tugs him towards a door with a window in it--the first he's seen since coming here. There is steel wire in the window, a precaution against it breaking.

Behind the door is nothing more exciting than a stairwell.

Kakashi is more relieved than he wants to admit to himself when they enter it--the stairwell is gray, with black non-slip strips at the edge of each step. The railings are a muted yellow. The presence of colour is reassuring.

"Rin," he says. "What do you mean you put it into remission? What is the rage?"

She takes a couple of steps more, heading downwards and ignoring the door on the next floor and Kakashi follows her, before she answers. "It's a type of… parasite," Rin says slowly. "It's a mistake that should have been contained a long time ago."

"I don't understand," he says.

"I'm sorry," she says. "It's my fault."

"It's not. You're dead."

And even if she hadn't been, Kakashi doesn't see how he could blame her for everything that's happened. What hand could she have in this?

"I am," Rin agrees. "And I'm not. I don't get to rest for a while yet."

He digests this response slowly and then, because as far as he's aware, they're on no deadline, he takes a seat on the stairs. Rin goes down another four to stand on the next landing and then turns to look at him. No surprise shows on her face at his actions.

Kakashi wonders how complete their, whoever they are, information on him is. It's disturbing to contemplate but he does it anyway.

"None of this makes sense," he says, forcibly keeping the irritation out of his voice. He'll save it for someone more deserving than this ghost of a dead girl. "I got... infected?"

She nods.

"All right," he says. "Then Sakura..." Kakashi trails off as the memories come back in fractured detail. "She left me," he says, dismay squeezing his chest tight. "Because... because..."

"Of me," Rin says.

"You're dead," Kakashi insists. "She wouldn't leave for that."

"Not usually," Rin tells him. "You and she might have still had a talk about it and had to work a few things out but... Sakura's mind was being influenced."

In a way, Kakashi finds that worse of an idea than him having been infected with... something. Something angry.

For that matter, he's getting plenty angry himself at Rin's revelations and he breathes deeply to control it. He doesn't want to get angry. He doesn't want the rage to come back, not really, not if it means waking up disoriented and confused in a white lab room. Not if it means another trip like this with another Rin.

He wishes Rin had just stayed dead.

Things had be easier then.

It's a horrible, horrible thought and he hates himself for it. He's thought before that he'd give anything to have his team back but--not like this.

"It's all right," she says. "I'm not the teammate you used to know."

"You're not not her though," he accuses.

She doesn't answer him and Kakashi knows he's right.

"Why was Sakura's mind being influenced?" he asks, instead of continuing that train of thought. "Was it the rage in me changing her?"

Rin tilts her head slightly. "No," she says. "Though it's connected."

He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees, resisting the urge to bury his face in his hands. Instead, he looks at her levelly. "How is it connected?"

"In order to fix the mistake I made, the conditions need to be replicated," Rin says. "All of this is part of that."

"How much further does this replication go?" Kakashi asks flatly. "What mistake did you make? What's going to happen to those of us caught up in the replication?"

"I'm sorry," Rin says softly. "I'm so, so sorry." She clasps her hands behind her back and regards him. "I can't answer your questions."

"Can't?" he asks. "Or won't."

"Can't," she replies. "I am an imperfect copy of Rin. I do not have the full data. That is not my purpose."

Kakashi stands and gives slow, deliberate thought to killing the girl again.

He still can't do it.

"What's your purpose?" Though he thinks that he already knows.

She holds out one hand to him. "To lead you to a more complete copy."

Walking down the few steps, Kakashi takes the hand despite every part of him shrieking about how that's a horrible idea. He knows that.

But it's Rin.

Somehow, despite everything, that's the difference that makes him move.

He loves Rin. Differently, he realizes now, than he loves Sakura.

But it's love anyway.

"Lead on," he says. "And tell me, if there's a more complete copy, does that mean there's no such thing as a complete one yet?"

Rin's expression is solemn. "That's right," she says. "That's the most complicated part of the replication. It's almost perfect but almost isn't good enough. We've tried that before and failed."

Kakashi tries to think of how they could have failed. Of anything in the last few decades that would have indicated something like this was going on. But that's the problem with ninja... there's always going to be secrets.

"This time," she tells him, "we're going to get it right. But it's going to hurt, so I'm sorry."

"Is everyone sorry?"

Not that sorry would change anything but it's an interesting lapse.

"No," Rin says. "They're stronger than I am. This is for the best."

"It hurts," Kakashi says. "What's going to happen to me if your replication fails?"

Rin avoids his gaze and tugs him down another flight of stairs. "I'm sorry," she says. "I cannot answer that."

"You won't," he corrects gently. "It's all right, I know from that answer what you can't say."

He'll die.

Kakashi looks down at his free hand and balls it into a fist. "What's going to happen next?" he asks.

"You'll talk to the next link," she says. "The closer copy."

"And then what?"

"I don't know."

Rin opens the door leading out into another floor of the lab and Kakashi wonders how many floors there are to this place. How big is it and how had it been hidden for so long?

Then he snorts, amused by his own folly. There's no doubt bigger secrets hidden in and around the village. No one person can know everything, though many of them try, and this lab would have held no interest to him.

Until now it does.

"How much further?" he asks quietly. There's no need to whisper, so he doesn't, but the harsh whiteness of the area forbids him from speaking loudly-- though maybe that's all in his mind. Entirely possible.

How much has been all in his mind? Kakashi toys with the idea that this is all a hallucination or a dream and that he's still in that bed in the room he'd woken up in.

"Not much further now," Rin tells him, seeming to not notice his preoccupation with his thoughts.

Naruto was involved, somehow, wasn't he? He was… there…

Kakashi strains his memories, struggling to connect the pieces and succeeding in only giving himself a headache as Rin leads him down another hall and then another. All of them are white and featureless except for the rows and rows of identical doors.

He wonders what's behind all of them.

"Why are my memories so fragmented?" he asks.

She tilts her head up to look at him. "Remission is hard on the mind," Rin explains. "Because the rage was so tangled in your thoughts, when we sent the rage away, your memories went with it."

Kakashi turns that over in his head. He's not a medic-nin but that seems to make sense enough for it to be plausible. "So I shouldn't try to find those memories then?"

Is the fact that some of them have come trickling back a bad sign?

Rin shakes her head. "Some memories will come back," she says, and he knows that his expression must have given away the unsaid question--despite his mask.

But then, Rin had known him for a long time.

This isn't Rin, he reminds himself sharply. Rin's dead.

"But trying to find them?" he asks again.

"Probably not the best idea," she says agreeably. "It will all make sense soon in any case."

Kakashi highly doubts that and allows his silence speak for him on that matter.

Rin just smiles, a little sadly, and releases his hand. He takes a few steps more, towards the next door, before realizing that she's not coming with him. He turns to look at her. "What's wrong?"

"I can't go any further," Rin says, clasping her hands in front of her. "You'll have to open the door on your own. You know how."

He does. That's... that's not the point though.

"Why can't you come?" he asks, feeling unaccountably lonely at the idea of leaving behind a copy--a ghost?--of a girl who'd died such a long time ago.

"It's my time to leave," she says simply. "I've done the job assigned to me. There will be other Rins."

He takes a step towards her and she sucks a breath in. "Don't," Rin says. "Just go through the door."

Kakashi just looks at her.

"I wish that you would listen to me," Rin says.

Then she crumples, eyes going empty and body going limp.

Kakashi catches her before she hits the floor.

She's dead.

Kakashi stares down at the wide-open eyes that hold no life, at the way her mouth gapes slightly, almost like she's sleeping. Her hair is in disarray, which seems wrong since Rin had always kept it neat.

Rin's dead. His heart pounds and he reminds himself that he'd already known that, he had, and this had just been a trap someone had made.

It still hurts to see her like this.

He retraces his steps through the lab until he comes across an empty room with a bed in it--the twin to the room he'd woken up in--and lays her on it. He pulls the sheet up over her, covering her face, and bows his head briefly.

Then he turns, leaves the room, shuts the door behind him and nods when he hears the locks engage.

Then, because she'd wanted him to, Kakashi goes back to the room where she'd died and places his hand on the invisible pressure square in the middle of the door.

The door opens silently.

Kakashi stands there for a moment and then walks inside. The door shuts automatically behind him and that would bother him more except for the fact that he suspects that the only way out of this place is to move forward, not back.

Unlike the rooms and halls he's walked through, this hallway isn't white. The floor is pale blue tile and the walls are painted cream. There are doors along each wall. None of them have windows. As a contrast, it's startling.

He'd be confused about where to go but there's no need to wonder.

Another Rin, this one even younger, maybe four or five, with her hair in pigtails, like she'd confided to him once that she'd had while in the Academy, sits outside the far left door. In her hands is a doll.

Kakashi pauses for a moment when he realizes the doll is a tiny replication of Minato-sensei.

Walking up to her, Kakashi kneels down to her level. "Hello Rin," he says.

She looks up and smiles at him. She's missing one of her front teeth and hasn't been given her tattoos yet. This isn't a Rin that he's ever known. Kakashi knows that when her task is over, she's going to die.

He hates that. Hates that someone has done this to a girl already long dead.

And a tiny, desperate part of him is glad for these moments with her. Stolen, bizarre moments he shouldn't have ever been given. They're a gift and they make him angry and sad and glad in about equal measure.

She doesn't speak.

"Where do I go next?" Kakashi asks softly.

Perhaps that is why they used Rin. He could yell at Obito or Minato-sensei. Not at Rin. Not even when he knows it's a trap.

This isn't the closer copy. It can't be.

Tiny Rin gets to her feet, clutching her doll to her chest, and points over his shoulder.

Kakashi looks.

There's a door there, just like all the other doors. He turns back to Rin to find her watching him with unfocused eyes. Between that and the silence, Kakashi wonders what's wrong with her. "Hey," he says, "did you want to come with me?"

It would be strange for him to leave her behind-especially when he knows what's likely to happen to her. She's a trap and he knows that. He would also rather she die with him around than die alone and forgotten in a lab that no one visits.

Rin lifts her arms up in the universal gesture for 'pick me up!' and Kakashi complies. "No stabbing me," he says, though he can see that she's not armed with anything except the doll. She's left the doll on the ground though and Kakashi debates with himself for a moment before scooping it up and offering it to her.

It's just a toy.

She takes it gravely and hugs it to her chest as he settles her on one hip, cursing himself for an idiot because he knows if he's attacked now, he's more vulnerable.

But Rin is smiling as she rests her head against his shoulder.

Somehow that makes up for a lot, even though it shouldn't.

"Still no words?" he murmurs.

Rin looks at him and shakes her head.

"Because you can't?" he asks. "Or because you won't?"

She just looks at him solemnly and he wonders if the question is beyond her understanding. He wishes he knew more about the Rin copies.

He wishes he hadn't ever found out about them. How many Rins are there?

"Well," he says with a sigh, "we'll keep going for now."

What else did he have to lose?

Kakashi banished that thought from his mind as soon as it formed-there was always something else to lose.

"It can't be much further now, right?" he asks tiny Rin. "Your… big sister said we were close."

She hadn't said exactly that.

Tiny Rin points insistently at the door.

Pressing his hand to the panel, Kakashi opens it and steps through. Another hallway, though this one is also in the pale blue and cream rather than white.

Does this mean he's getting closer to people?

He follows Rin's directions, conveyed through pointing, through two more rooms and one more hallway.

The last door, at the far end of it, has Naruto leaning against the wall beside it.

"Good work, Rin," Naruto says, looking up as Kakashi approaches.

Tiny Rin reaches for Naruto, who plucks her out of Kakashi's hold easily.

"What's going on?" Kakashi asks, furious and fighting it-he can't let rage win; he trusts Rin that much-but it's hard, so hard, to throttle the betrayal.

Naruto presses a kiss to the top of Rin's head as the little girl smiles, closes her eyes, and stops breathing. She goes limp against Naruto.

Another Rin gone.

"Come on," Naruto says, opening the door. "You need to talk to Rin. Not her copies."

"Through there?"

Naruto's eyes look haunted. "Yeah."

"I don't trust you."

"I know." Naruto sighs. "I don't blame you and I'm not going to argue with you. It's your choice to go in there or not. Make up your mind soon."

Then he's gone, through the door, and Kakashi is left alone, with not even a copy of Rin to keep him company.

There's not much of a choice. He wants-no, needs-to know what's going on. Even if the smarter option would be to run the hell away and try to escape.

The pressure panel opens the door soundlessly.

There's a small hall behind the door broken by three steps going up and then another door. The floor in here is red, a sharp and abrupt contrast to the blues and whites even though the walls are still cream.

He takes each stair slowly, expecting something to go wrong, and nothing happens by the time he pushes the panel on the next door.

The door behind him closes and locks even as the door in front of him opens. Like they're connected and only one can be open at any one time.

The next room looks like any room that could be found in the long-term care wards of Konoha's hospital.

Ino, wearing an oxygen mask and hooked up to more wires and machines than he's ever seen anyone be connected to lays in the bed. She looks frail-no, wasted. Like something has been eating her from the inside out. Her eyes are closed.

Naruto has taken the chair by her bedside. Tiny Rin has been set on the floor, leaning against the wall, with her doll in her lap. A macabre replication of the scene he'd found her in. Kakashi's stomach clenches.

There's no one else in the room.

"You said Rin was waiting for me?" he says.

Naruto looks at him for a long moment and then turns his gaze back to Ino. "She is."

Hello, Kakashi.

It's Ino's power that allows the words to echo in his head.

The voice is Rin's.

"No," Kakashi says, like that will change anything. "No. No."

"This is Rin," Naruto says quite seriously, his eyes never leaving Ino's face. His fingers curl around one of her slender hands.

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