[Fic] Hush Little Baby
Hush Little Baby: Kakashi searches for a memory he doesn’t have.
Category: One-shot
Status: Complete
Rating: R for language and violent sensuality
Notes: Non-linear writing ahead. Entire story takes place pre-series.
***
Come on, we all know I’m not Kishimoto, don’t we?
With a flick of two fingers they land on the forest floor, silent as ghosts. No heavy footfalls of men found here.
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” his taichou told him once, steady and calm as shivers racked Kakashi’s body. They started at the base of his neck and shot down his spine, scarcely seconds apart. The hand in his hair gripped tighter, keeping his head less than an inch above the water. Kakashi remembers his breath, gasping, heaving, rippling the surface of the water and spreading out like the numbness that threatened to consume him all the way down to his bare toes. He remembers seeing his reflection in the ripples, contorting mismatched eyes and fuck fuck fuck he couldn’t remember if this was something new or something he’d dreamed up. “Something we all must know.”
Kakashi moved his lips, couldn’t feel them, and gasped as his head plunged beneath the water. Liquid filled his mouth and nose before he gathered enough wits to close them, but by then it was too late to be a remedy. He choked as water rushed down his throat, choked on the cold that burned and thrashed his legs because his head was in a vice of flesh and bones. They hit the bucket that gave him splinters where his chest dug into the rim. The sound reverberated, muffled, like the voice of his taichou somewhere behind him - echoing, lingering, dull and fading.
He swallows hard on a dry throat, and braces a gloved hand against an oak the circumference of his entire apartment. The glove stops the tree from giving him splinters.
Tiger raises a hand to his ear, index finger extended and slowing revolving once, twice, three times. His name is Tiger because his mask is painted that way, because his real name does not exist. The team knows him by red stripes and black whispers on porcelain, and knows what his twirling finger means. Is there anyone close by?”
Kakashi clacks his middle and index finger against his thumb, strikes to the left. No one he answers, letting the group breathe a little easier. No one means no one at all, that the pursuit has ceased. No alone means no one for the moment, so let’s make this quick, boys.
He has a sort of love-hate relationship with this code, the precise hand signs that aren’t precise at all. Nothing is simple, he knows that, and it kills him as often as it saves him. If deception is the only thing he knows he can depend on, that’s tragic. But at the same time [and this is the part that kills him, ironically enough], it’s still dependence, and he needs that.
They all need that.
To his left, Hawk grunts, depositing his burden on the forest floor as gently as possible. Gentility is the respect for a dying man [or a dead man, since it’s been miles since his pulse was checked], one of the last afforded. “Fuck,” he exhales, rotating his stiff shoulders. Muscles creak, bones pop. He may have thrown something out of place. “Just…fuck.” He throws a glance at Kakashi that no one in the clearing can see, pauses for a few seconds of contemplation, then scowls. “Stop that smirking, you bastard.”
Under the dog mask, Kakashi’s grim grin widens.
Hawk snorts in return.
Seemingly ignorant of them both, Tiger squats down next to their prone companion, fingers against the pulse in his neck. “He’s still alive,” he says blandly. Kakashi figures his expression is just as bland under the stripes. Just as bland as the day in the river. “Barely.”
“Barely, huh?” Hawk drops into a crouch, laying a hand directly over the gaping hole in Bear’s chest. He’s still bleeding, wet and slick under Hawk’s fingers. Chakra pulses gently, probing the damage. “Looks like a ninety-seven, being optimistic.” He wipes blood on his chest armor. A little more won’t make a difference. Bear’s already bled down his entire backside. “Don’t think he’s conscious.”
“I can’t believe he’s still alive at all,” Kakashi interjects, aware of how callous he sounds. It’s not like Bear can hear him, knocking on death’s door and all. He’d laugh anyway. “We were dripping a trail of blood.”
“Hard to believe they stopped chasing us.” Tiger keeps his hand on the pulse point, only his head turning to face Kakashi. “With the blood and all.”
Kakashi meets whatever gaze Tiger sets upon his with his usual aplomb: cool and undisturbed, confident enough, for the moment, that ANBU’s baby can’t see the flicker of unease he feels watching slim fingers tap tap against Bear’s bloody throat. “We crossed a border. They don’t want trouble with Amekagure.” He shouldn’t have to defend himself. Not against him, not against anyone, because he’s the leader and he’s done this before, all of it. He will, though, because he is the leader and he has a face, petty and vacant as it may be, to save from the boy challenging him on bent knees.
He’s a difficult one, Kakashi’s newest team member. Difficult in ways he understands because he comes from the same ilk. It’s quiet, the way they’re losing their minds [and does it really count as losing it if it keeps him going. The parts he’s already lost say no], quiet and long-suffering. That’s the way they get to this point: by seeing things. Seeing too much.
Kakashi figures at some point that the gods-Sandaime, Hitari-san, all the utter bastards with long, sharp needles at the hospital-will judge him too fucked up to go on anymore. Until then, he’ll keep going, consciously pushing his father, his mother, Obito, and Minato-sensei to the back of his mind where they whisper and shift about like the summer grasses he lost his virginity in and wondering when enough will be enough for them. The psychiatrist wanted him out years ago, but here he is, still on the roster, staring down at the thirteen-year-old who doesn’t bother to challenge his elders on equal ground, hating the rasping sound in his head; they are the ones who brought him here.
Something brought Tiger here. No files say anything out of the ordinary, but then, they tell anybody's story they way the the survivors remember it. The doctors will write down that you were addicted to sedatives, or spent three weeks on mental a reprieve but they say nothing about why. No one will tell you why, officially. It’s the stories you have to rely on.
Hawk’s story, he knows. It’s not good etiquette to talk about the details [unless drunk off your rocker. Everything is excusable with alcohol, including having sex with your best friend for the fourth time.] once the story has been told, but once is enough any way. There’s only so many times a man wants to talk about the things his father did to make him better. There’s only so many times, Hawk said to him one night after they almost lost Falcon, nursing a dizzy spell from a poison that he kept in his mouth a few extra moments where he didn’t care, that he can stop himself from spitting the venom lacquered silver into his father's eye. Father knows best, he said with a laugh. Grim sound that it was. Father knows best.
Kakashi laughed along with him. Laughed until they collapsed in on themselves.
Bear told his story on his first death bed. Kakashi can’t repeat the story from start to finish. That’s not the way he heard it. Pain fucked with his speech, confusing memory and mumbling words. All he knows is that there’s a little girl somewhere, and a jade necklace around his neck, clinking against the dog tags. 1159-4657-3, scratched by the jewel of empires.
He has good manners; he won’t ask again.
But Tiger. Tiger behind the red and black mask pressing his fingers against a living pulse has yet to tell his story. It’s contradictory, the phenomenon that occurs in clans like his. The village knows their names and gossips as a necessary fashion, but no one can tell you anything beyond speculation. Whispers, market chatter, children’s games, drunken arguments. The talk mothers and fathers have after their children have gone to bed about secrets as ancient as the clan itself and as new as the bleeding slash across his shoulder. If not for all the talk, they might as well not exist.
It’s all very hush hush.
Hawk slumps to the ground, happy to take the pressure off of his feet. “We need to figure out what to do with him,” he gestures toward the prone figure in a quick jerk. To any ordinary eye, he’s not breathing, the rise and fall of his chest so subtle. “We’re not being followed, so we could take him back with us.” He shrugs. “See what the medics can do for him.”
“Dead weight,” Tiger slips in ahead of him smoothly. Kakashi doesn’t know what irks him more; not being quick enough or agreeing with him. “He’s most likely comatose and unable to be revived at this point. Our best option is to burn the body.”
Hawk frowns under the mask. Kakashi can’t see it, but he knows its there. He shares the sentiment. “That’s a little extreme at this point. On the off-chance that someone is still looking for us, smoke would give away our position.”
“Wolf-san has assured us that we’re not being followed.” Tiger rises from his crouch, joints sliding gracefully back into place. Kakashi can’t figure out how it happened that among the four of them, the youngest came away with little more than a scratch on his elbow and no sign of wear on his mask. “You don’t suppose he could be lying.” The way he phrases it isn’t even a grasp at a question, and if Kakashi weren’t so relieved to have those fingers away from Bear’s neck, he’d reassume the defensive. “Or mistaken.”
Hawk opens his mouth to say something that will put Tiger back in his place, but Kakashi breaks in with a hand-signed code. Enough, he commands in the antithesis of a shout. Quiet voices are so much louder than stuttering bravado. They respect it entirely, instantly. No one is burning anyone, he signs quickly- clack one, strike left, rabbit ears twitch, circle one two- and efficiently, indefinitely more comfortable in this mode of nuance. He kneels [the reversal of the situation strikes irony into him, and he’s not playing that game, he’s not], unsnapping a compartment in his utility pouch as he goes down. No one is following them [he’s not wrong, he’s not lying, no no no] no one is expecting them anytime soon in Konoha. They have time, almost unsettlingly so. Time enough that Kakashi can ease the needle out of its compartment.
If Tiger frowns under his mask, Kakashi can’t tell. He only hopes, with every shred of faith he has left, that something passes over those sharp-edged features. Something more than impassive.
He hopes, faithlessly, that behind the mask his lips are parted.
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” Kakashi told him once, waist-deep in rushing river water. Chakra anchored his feet to the muddy bottom, holding him in sway with the current. Around a slender neck he kept his hands encircled, thumbs artfully arranged over the windpipe. It was a delicate procedure, that kind of strangulation. His hands had to be clasped tight enough to hold the boy in place, but loose enough that he didn’t cut off the passage to the lungs. Water wouldn’t tunnel down his throat if he blocked the way. “Something we all must know.”
There was no need to plunge him beneath the surface. A slow slip would do, easing the body in front of him down centimeter by centimeter. The waterline began just below the nipples stiffly peaked under the thin white shirt climbing steadily up the adolescent body with adult ambition. Kakashi marked descent by them- newly-formed biceps, wispy hairs, brittle collar bone. He could snap that collar bone, if he wanted, and no one would say a word. All part of the process, his taichou said of his cracked ribs. Things happen.
He shifted the angle of his thumbs underwater, grasping for control. There was an art was in knowing where and when to press, where and when to release. His thumb inadvertently caressed the jugular. The winter-cold river vibrated in his spinal cord.
The boy’s charcoal dust eyes, dark and pale at the same time, stared up into his as he descended. That’s why he chose to do it this way. Rumors, rumors, rumors in the unenlightened, legends, legends, legends in the scrolls Minato-sensei cajoled out of their grasps so that Kakashi could make use of thievery.
Secrets under the surface.
Kakashi holds him there by momentum, counting the seconds by the breaths he isn’t taking. One for memorial, two for the burial. Three for ceremony. Four for a disappearing act. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten for him and her and her and him and all of them. Eleven for the one he’s waiting for.
At twelve he’s burning for him. It’s a constant thirteenfourteenfifteensixteenseventeen hum of regret and it aches like rain in his bones.
Eighteen, nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two and there went the struggle, an ineffectual kick in the current. Then another. Another. Thrashing. Thin hands gripped his wrist, squeezing and pulling and forgetting how small they were.
Drowning did that.
Just before the boy went limp in his grasp, Kakashi let go of his throat. One hand placed on his shoulder, the other on the back of his neck, he lifted, separating the pup from the bitch. Let him choke on water and sputter. Let him choke on air and breathe. That’s how it’s done. That’s how Kakashi did it, watching keenly as the boy recovered his wits enough to find his eyes again, and waiting, waiting for something to be different.
His eyes were black when he opened them again. Kakashi was mildly surprised. He hadn’t expected to see the commas, but he hadn’t ruled out the possibility of a defense mechanism. He thought he’d read that somewhere. Just like he’d read his last porno: straight-forward and ordinary in prose.
They were ordinary eyes. Frightening. Exhilarating.
Kakashi didn’t let his breath skip when those black eyes looked up at him from beneath eyelashes even darker. He didn’t place hands where they didn’t belong. All he did was slide both hands back to their choke hold around the boy’s neck, where he found purchase. It was slippery and tenuous and all he could do was stay as still as stagnation as wet palms dragged up his arms, chilly and slick.
Tiger exhaled under his mask, sighing his ascent and dropping back down to his knees across from Kakashi, the soon to be corpse between them. Silently, he holds out his hand for the suicide needle, a concentrated dose of thiopental. Hawk scoots forward on his bruised knees, shaking his head in warning. Tiger, facing forward, doesn’t see the display of distrust. But he knows it’s there, just like Kakashi knows that a challenge is still there. Belatedly, he thinks that he’s an idiot for holding his breath in the first place, but he’s a genius of self-preservation. He stopped before it caught up with him. Before any one could call him on it.
Coolly, aiming for the detachment he needs right now, Kakashi offers his flattened palm across the body. He isn’t shaking. Not from cold, not from anything. Tiger turns his hand over and picks up the needle between three fingers that drag over his life lines, soft but for the newly formed calluses that weren’t there when he traced the interruption of his scar from cheek to eyelid.
His fingers aren’t cold. But they linger, just the same, and Kakashi’s lungs drop to the floor, just the same. Because he can’t tell for sure, but he knows Tiger is looking straight at him. He feels the flat, disinterested, half-way there look in his eyes that he fixes him with when he’s being submerged into asphyxiation, gasping for air, or lingering around his Sharingan.
They’re small hands. Apt for maneuvering a slim needle into a slim vein.
He makes, like always, fast work of it. Locating the vein takes no more than a few seconds, puncturing even less. As he presses down on the needle, sending the barbiturate into Bear’s already non-responsive system, Hawk brings his hand to rest on his shoulder, rubs it gently as he hopes, along with Kakashi, that he’s not feeling anything. And he’s humming. There’s time for it, so he hums. An old song, a lullaby turned dirge that Kakashi imagines his mother used to sing to him.
Hawk hums deep in his throat and Kakashi makes syllables without sound, mouthing the words that they both know.
Hush little baby, don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird
The tune is steady and slower than Kakashi hums it to himself in the winter, when the cold bites and his memories won’t leave him alone. He hums it fast like a chant, then, half-praying that he can appease them. And it works sometimes.
It’s a funny feeling, his breath curling back and caressing his own face the way it is. He wants to laugh. Collapse in on himself again.
And if that mocking bird don’t sing,
Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring
Tiger knows the words. He has to. Mothers, they sing to their children in the cradle before they can ever protest, decide they’re too good for that. He knows the words and refuses to sing, the selfish slip of a man that he is. Still a boy, he should understand; there are no mothers here. There’s no one else to say goodbye.
And if that diamond rings turns brass
Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass
And if that looking glass gets broke,
Mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat
Kakashi whispers the words now, feeling distinctly that it’s not enough somehow. Shouting them won’t be enough, so he doesn’t try. He keeps whispering, his words trapped by porcelain. And he hears it, even if they don’t.
And if that billy goat won’t pull,
Mama’s gonna buy you a cart and bull
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” Kakashi’s taichou told him once. “Something we all must know.” Chest wet and heaving, Kakashi blinked water out of his eyes, the gray walls of the dungeon obscured by his bangs. His taichou yanked hard on his scalp, drawing him back into a dry embrace of skin that scratched against new scars. Breath was hot on his neck, burning back against the chill in his skin. Hands fluttered cruelly over his cracked ribs, pressing in just that right way to cause him pain. Provoking more than staccato in-out in-out. “We live by it.” Lips brushed against the shell of his ear, startling him into stillness. “Silence.” Lips became teeth and bit, sending his canines into his bottom lip just as one hand pulled his hair and the other crushed his side. Kakashi swallowed his screams, remembering that someone had fucked him like that before anyway. “It’s by silence that we live.”
Liquid down his throat, bent over the tub. Choking, choking, and whispering, whispering why aren’t you singing, you little fuck? Why won’t you sing at your best friend’s funeral?
And if that cart and bull turn over,
Mama’s gonna buy you a dog named Rover
Kakashi closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to see this anymore. He doesn’t want another funeral, another burial he has to carry around with him. He closes his eyes and Tiger is gone, blissfully gone, Hawk’s humming a static ring in his ears. Drowning out.
And if that dog named Rover won’t bark,
Mama’s gonna buy you a horse and cart
No eyes, no hands, no bleeding, no dog tags, no sweat, no breath, no little boys among men. No memory. It’s silence. They live by it.
But he still knows what comes next.
And if that horse and cart fall down,
You’ll still be the sweetest little baby in town.
Fin
Category: One-shot
Status: Complete
Rating: R for language and violent sensuality
Notes: Non-linear writing ahead. Entire story takes place pre-series.
***
Come on, we all know I’m not Kishimoto, don’t we?
With a flick of two fingers they land on the forest floor, silent as ghosts. No heavy footfalls of men found here.
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” his taichou told him once, steady and calm as shivers racked Kakashi’s body. They started at the base of his neck and shot down his spine, scarcely seconds apart. The hand in his hair gripped tighter, keeping his head less than an inch above the water. Kakashi remembers his breath, gasping, heaving, rippling the surface of the water and spreading out like the numbness that threatened to consume him all the way down to his bare toes. He remembers seeing his reflection in the ripples, contorting mismatched eyes and fuck fuck fuck he couldn’t remember if this was something new or something he’d dreamed up. “Something we all must know.”
Kakashi moved his lips, couldn’t feel them, and gasped as his head plunged beneath the water. Liquid filled his mouth and nose before he gathered enough wits to close them, but by then it was too late to be a remedy. He choked as water rushed down his throat, choked on the cold that burned and thrashed his legs because his head was in a vice of flesh and bones. They hit the bucket that gave him splinters where his chest dug into the rim. The sound reverberated, muffled, like the voice of his taichou somewhere behind him - echoing, lingering, dull and fading.
He swallows hard on a dry throat, and braces a gloved hand against an oak the circumference of his entire apartment. The glove stops the tree from giving him splinters.
Tiger raises a hand to his ear, index finger extended and slowing revolving once, twice, three times. His name is Tiger because his mask is painted that way, because his real name does not exist. The team knows him by red stripes and black whispers on porcelain, and knows what his twirling finger means. Is there anyone close by?”
Kakashi clacks his middle and index finger against his thumb, strikes to the left. No one he answers, letting the group breathe a little easier. No one means no one at all, that the pursuit has ceased. No alone means no one for the moment, so let’s make this quick, boys.
He has a sort of love-hate relationship with this code, the precise hand signs that aren’t precise at all. Nothing is simple, he knows that, and it kills him as often as it saves him. If deception is the only thing he knows he can depend on, that’s tragic. But at the same time [and this is the part that kills him, ironically enough], it’s still dependence, and he needs that.
They all need that.
To his left, Hawk grunts, depositing his burden on the forest floor as gently as possible. Gentility is the respect for a dying man [or a dead man, since it’s been miles since his pulse was checked], one of the last afforded. “Fuck,” he exhales, rotating his stiff shoulders. Muscles creak, bones pop. He may have thrown something out of place. “Just…fuck.” He throws a glance at Kakashi that no one in the clearing can see, pauses for a few seconds of contemplation, then scowls. “Stop that smirking, you bastard.”
Under the dog mask, Kakashi’s grim grin widens.
Hawk snorts in return.
Seemingly ignorant of them both, Tiger squats down next to their prone companion, fingers against the pulse in his neck. “He’s still alive,” he says blandly. Kakashi figures his expression is just as bland under the stripes. Just as bland as the day in the river. “Barely.”
“Barely, huh?” Hawk drops into a crouch, laying a hand directly over the gaping hole in Bear’s chest. He’s still bleeding, wet and slick under Hawk’s fingers. Chakra pulses gently, probing the damage. “Looks like a ninety-seven, being optimistic.” He wipes blood on his chest armor. A little more won’t make a difference. Bear’s already bled down his entire backside. “Don’t think he’s conscious.”
“I can’t believe he’s still alive at all,” Kakashi interjects, aware of how callous he sounds. It’s not like Bear can hear him, knocking on death’s door and all. He’d laugh anyway. “We were dripping a trail of blood.”
“Hard to believe they stopped chasing us.” Tiger keeps his hand on the pulse point, only his head turning to face Kakashi. “With the blood and all.”
Kakashi meets whatever gaze Tiger sets upon his with his usual aplomb: cool and undisturbed, confident enough, for the moment, that ANBU’s baby can’t see the flicker of unease he feels watching slim fingers tap tap against Bear’s bloody throat. “We crossed a border. They don’t want trouble with Amekagure.” He shouldn’t have to defend himself. Not against him, not against anyone, because he’s the leader and he’s done this before, all of it. He will, though, because he is the leader and he has a face, petty and vacant as it may be, to save from the boy challenging him on bent knees.
He’s a difficult one, Kakashi’s newest team member. Difficult in ways he understands because he comes from the same ilk. It’s quiet, the way they’re losing their minds [and does it really count as losing it if it keeps him going. The parts he’s already lost say no], quiet and long-suffering. That’s the way they get to this point: by seeing things. Seeing too much.
Kakashi figures at some point that the gods-Sandaime, Hitari-san, all the utter bastards with long, sharp needles at the hospital-will judge him too fucked up to go on anymore. Until then, he’ll keep going, consciously pushing his father, his mother, Obito, and Minato-sensei to the back of his mind where they whisper and shift about like the summer grasses he lost his virginity in and wondering when enough will be enough for them. The psychiatrist wanted him out years ago, but here he is, still on the roster, staring down at the thirteen-year-old who doesn’t bother to challenge his elders on equal ground, hating the rasping sound in his head; they are the ones who brought him here.
Something brought Tiger here. No files say anything out of the ordinary, but then, they tell anybody's story they way the the survivors remember it. The doctors will write down that you were addicted to sedatives, or spent three weeks on mental a reprieve but they say nothing about why. No one will tell you why, officially. It’s the stories you have to rely on.
Hawk’s story, he knows. It’s not good etiquette to talk about the details [unless drunk off your rocker. Everything is excusable with alcohol, including having sex with your best friend for the fourth time.] once the story has been told, but once is enough any way. There’s only so many times a man wants to talk about the things his father did to make him better. There’s only so many times, Hawk said to him one night after they almost lost Falcon, nursing a dizzy spell from a poison that he kept in his mouth a few extra moments where he didn’t care, that he can stop himself from spitting the venom lacquered silver into his father's eye. Father knows best, he said with a laugh. Grim sound that it was. Father knows best.
Kakashi laughed along with him. Laughed until they collapsed in on themselves.
Bear told his story on his first death bed. Kakashi can’t repeat the story from start to finish. That’s not the way he heard it. Pain fucked with his speech, confusing memory and mumbling words. All he knows is that there’s a little girl somewhere, and a jade necklace around his neck, clinking against the dog tags. 1159-4657-3, scratched by the jewel of empires.
He has good manners; he won’t ask again.
But Tiger. Tiger behind the red and black mask pressing his fingers against a living pulse has yet to tell his story. It’s contradictory, the phenomenon that occurs in clans like his. The village knows their names and gossips as a necessary fashion, but no one can tell you anything beyond speculation. Whispers, market chatter, children’s games, drunken arguments. The talk mothers and fathers have after their children have gone to bed about secrets as ancient as the clan itself and as new as the bleeding slash across his shoulder. If not for all the talk, they might as well not exist.
It’s all very hush hush.
Hawk slumps to the ground, happy to take the pressure off of his feet. “We need to figure out what to do with him,” he gestures toward the prone figure in a quick jerk. To any ordinary eye, he’s not breathing, the rise and fall of his chest so subtle. “We’re not being followed, so we could take him back with us.” He shrugs. “See what the medics can do for him.”
“Dead weight,” Tiger slips in ahead of him smoothly. Kakashi doesn’t know what irks him more; not being quick enough or agreeing with him. “He’s most likely comatose and unable to be revived at this point. Our best option is to burn the body.”
Hawk frowns under the mask. Kakashi can’t see it, but he knows its there. He shares the sentiment. “That’s a little extreme at this point. On the off-chance that someone is still looking for us, smoke would give away our position.”
“Wolf-san has assured us that we’re not being followed.” Tiger rises from his crouch, joints sliding gracefully back into place. Kakashi can’t figure out how it happened that among the four of them, the youngest came away with little more than a scratch on his elbow and no sign of wear on his mask. “You don’t suppose he could be lying.” The way he phrases it isn’t even a grasp at a question, and if Kakashi weren’t so relieved to have those fingers away from Bear’s neck, he’d reassume the defensive. “Or mistaken.”
Hawk opens his mouth to say something that will put Tiger back in his place, but Kakashi breaks in with a hand-signed code. Enough, he commands in the antithesis of a shout. Quiet voices are so much louder than stuttering bravado. They respect it entirely, instantly. No one is burning anyone, he signs quickly- clack one, strike left, rabbit ears twitch, circle one two- and efficiently, indefinitely more comfortable in this mode of nuance. He kneels [the reversal of the situation strikes irony into him, and he’s not playing that game, he’s not], unsnapping a compartment in his utility pouch as he goes down. No one is following them [he’s not wrong, he’s not lying, no no no] no one is expecting them anytime soon in Konoha. They have time, almost unsettlingly so. Time enough that Kakashi can ease the needle out of its compartment.
If Tiger frowns under his mask, Kakashi can’t tell. He only hopes, with every shred of faith he has left, that something passes over those sharp-edged features. Something more than impassive.
He hopes, faithlessly, that behind the mask his lips are parted.
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” Kakashi told him once, waist-deep in rushing river water. Chakra anchored his feet to the muddy bottom, holding him in sway with the current. Around a slender neck he kept his hands encircled, thumbs artfully arranged over the windpipe. It was a delicate procedure, that kind of strangulation. His hands had to be clasped tight enough to hold the boy in place, but loose enough that he didn’t cut off the passage to the lungs. Water wouldn’t tunnel down his throat if he blocked the way. “Something we all must know.”
There was no need to plunge him beneath the surface. A slow slip would do, easing the body in front of him down centimeter by centimeter. The waterline began just below the nipples stiffly peaked under the thin white shirt climbing steadily up the adolescent body with adult ambition. Kakashi marked descent by them- newly-formed biceps, wispy hairs, brittle collar bone. He could snap that collar bone, if he wanted, and no one would say a word. All part of the process, his taichou said of his cracked ribs. Things happen.
He shifted the angle of his thumbs underwater, grasping for control. There was an art was in knowing where and when to press, where and when to release. His thumb inadvertently caressed the jugular. The winter-cold river vibrated in his spinal cord.
The boy’s charcoal dust eyes, dark and pale at the same time, stared up into his as he descended. That’s why he chose to do it this way. Rumors, rumors, rumors in the unenlightened, legends, legends, legends in the scrolls Minato-sensei cajoled out of their grasps so that Kakashi could make use of thievery.
Secrets under the surface.
Kakashi holds him there by momentum, counting the seconds by the breaths he isn’t taking. One for memorial, two for the burial. Three for ceremony. Four for a disappearing act. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten for him and her and her and him and all of them. Eleven for the one he’s waiting for.
At twelve he’s burning for him. It’s a constant thirteenfourteenfifteensixteenseventeen hum of regret and it aches like rain in his bones.
Eighteen, nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two and there went the struggle, an ineffectual kick in the current. Then another. Another. Thrashing. Thin hands gripped his wrist, squeezing and pulling and forgetting how small they were.
Drowning did that.
Just before the boy went limp in his grasp, Kakashi let go of his throat. One hand placed on his shoulder, the other on the back of his neck, he lifted, separating the pup from the bitch. Let him choke on water and sputter. Let him choke on air and breathe. That’s how it’s done. That’s how Kakashi did it, watching keenly as the boy recovered his wits enough to find his eyes again, and waiting, waiting for something to be different.
His eyes were black when he opened them again. Kakashi was mildly surprised. He hadn’t expected to see the commas, but he hadn’t ruled out the possibility of a defense mechanism. He thought he’d read that somewhere. Just like he’d read his last porno: straight-forward and ordinary in prose.
They were ordinary eyes. Frightening. Exhilarating.
Kakashi didn’t let his breath skip when those black eyes looked up at him from beneath eyelashes even darker. He didn’t place hands where they didn’t belong. All he did was slide both hands back to their choke hold around the boy’s neck, where he found purchase. It was slippery and tenuous and all he could do was stay as still as stagnation as wet palms dragged up his arms, chilly and slick.
Tiger exhaled under his mask, sighing his ascent and dropping back down to his knees across from Kakashi, the soon to be corpse between them. Silently, he holds out his hand for the suicide needle, a concentrated dose of thiopental. Hawk scoots forward on his bruised knees, shaking his head in warning. Tiger, facing forward, doesn’t see the display of distrust. But he knows it’s there, just like Kakashi knows that a challenge is still there. Belatedly, he thinks that he’s an idiot for holding his breath in the first place, but he’s a genius of self-preservation. He stopped before it caught up with him. Before any one could call him on it.
Coolly, aiming for the detachment he needs right now, Kakashi offers his flattened palm across the body. He isn’t shaking. Not from cold, not from anything. Tiger turns his hand over and picks up the needle between three fingers that drag over his life lines, soft but for the newly formed calluses that weren’t there when he traced the interruption of his scar from cheek to eyelid.
His fingers aren’t cold. But they linger, just the same, and Kakashi’s lungs drop to the floor, just the same. Because he can’t tell for sure, but he knows Tiger is looking straight at him. He feels the flat, disinterested, half-way there look in his eyes that he fixes him with when he’s being submerged into asphyxiation, gasping for air, or lingering around his Sharingan.
They’re small hands. Apt for maneuvering a slim needle into a slim vein.
He makes, like always, fast work of it. Locating the vein takes no more than a few seconds, puncturing even less. As he presses down on the needle, sending the barbiturate into Bear’s already non-responsive system, Hawk brings his hand to rest on his shoulder, rubs it gently as he hopes, along with Kakashi, that he’s not feeling anything. And he’s humming. There’s time for it, so he hums. An old song, a lullaby turned dirge that Kakashi imagines his mother used to sing to him.
Hawk hums deep in his throat and Kakashi makes syllables without sound, mouthing the words that they both know.
Hush little baby, don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird
The tune is steady and slower than Kakashi hums it to himself in the winter, when the cold bites and his memories won’t leave him alone. He hums it fast like a chant, then, half-praying that he can appease them. And it works sometimes.
It’s a funny feeling, his breath curling back and caressing his own face the way it is. He wants to laugh. Collapse in on himself again.
And if that mocking bird don’t sing,
Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring
Tiger knows the words. He has to. Mothers, they sing to their children in the cradle before they can ever protest, decide they’re too good for that. He knows the words and refuses to sing, the selfish slip of a man that he is. Still a boy, he should understand; there are no mothers here. There’s no one else to say goodbye.
And if that diamond rings turns brass
Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass
And if that looking glass gets broke,
Mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat
Kakashi whispers the words now, feeling distinctly that it’s not enough somehow. Shouting them won’t be enough, so he doesn’t try. He keeps whispering, his words trapped by porcelain. And he hears it, even if they don’t.
And if that billy goat won’t pull,
Mama’s gonna buy you a cart and bull
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” Kakashi’s taichou told him once. “Something we all must know.” Chest wet and heaving, Kakashi blinked water out of his eyes, the gray walls of the dungeon obscured by his bangs. His taichou yanked hard on his scalp, drawing him back into a dry embrace of skin that scratched against new scars. Breath was hot on his neck, burning back against the chill in his skin. Hands fluttered cruelly over his cracked ribs, pressing in just that right way to cause him pain. Provoking more than staccato in-out in-out. “We live by it.” Lips brushed against the shell of his ear, startling him into stillness. “Silence.” Lips became teeth and bit, sending his canines into his bottom lip just as one hand pulled his hair and the other crushed his side. Kakashi swallowed his screams, remembering that someone had fucked him like that before anyway. “It’s by silence that we live.”
Liquid down his throat, bent over the tub. Choking, choking, and whispering, whispering why aren’t you singing, you little fuck? Why won’t you sing at your best friend’s funeral?
And if that cart and bull turn over,
Mama’s gonna buy you a dog named Rover
Kakashi closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to see this anymore. He doesn’t want another funeral, another burial he has to carry around with him. He closes his eyes and Tiger is gone, blissfully gone, Hawk’s humming a static ring in his ears. Drowning out.
And if that dog named Rover won’t bark,
Mama’s gonna buy you a horse and cart
No eyes, no hands, no bleeding, no dog tags, no sweat, no breath, no little boys among men. No memory. It’s silence. They live by it.
But he still knows what comes next.
And if that horse and cart fall down,
You’ll still be the sweetest little baby in town.
Fin