| [Dec. 27th, 2013|06:29 am] |
"Show me," he said, resigned. He pushed himself up to his knees and braced his forearms on the rim of the tub. Goose-pimples prickled his shoulders in the sudden absence of heat.
Kakashi dumped one of the scrubbing buckets over his head, pushed the sodden but newly clean hair back from his face, and turned, opening his Sharingan eye. It spun slowly, black on crimson. He tucked a stray lock of hair behind his ear, freeing his hands, and shaped four quick seals. Undoubtedly he could see his chakra spinning out into the genjutsu net; Minato sensed only the cool warning touch Kakashi'd thoughtfully built in before the bathroom vanished, and he was standing in a rainy forest at twilight.
Events unfolded dizzyingly fast from Kakashi's point of view: fuzzy first with memory, then snapshot-sharp when he opened the Sharingan to record and memorize. The team split to follow tracks through the forest, met again just before a blindingly fast attack; Minato rode on Kakashi's shoulder as they drove a handful of lightning through a demon's thorax. Then they were skimming along again, skipping over tracking and conversational interludes; they slowed down for an eerie creep through mountain tunnels to find first corpses and then grossly distended survivors, lingered over the gut-wrenching necessity of killing these villagers too far gone to save. Then another fight in the dark corridors, Shiranui attacked and abducted, Kakashi tracking down more survivors and rescuing those who still had a chance, giving the mercy-blade to those who didn't.
They dropped inside the mountain together, landed tumbling on something hard and moving, and Minato saw through Kakashi's eyes the way the demon-queen's chakra fountained out like a blood-lake, impossible, inexorable. The brief flurry of a fight in the dark, severing the demon's stinger, cracking her armor, scream-bluffing her into flight, rescuing his paralyzed lieutenant. And then another dizzying skip to a mountainside opening up under rain-grey skies, a river of rot spilling away from the shell of the demon-queen's immense corpse, the tiny huddle of teammates far below.
The genjutsu broke. Kakashi settled into the bath beside Minato with the faintest ripple of blood-warm water. His hair was scrubbed cleanly grey, and while he'd stripped out of his trunks he'd replaced the mask with a washcloth draped over his face. He tipped his head back against the edge of the bath, and sighed.
"You look ridiculous," Minato said, before he'd quite caught his breath.
Kakashi's grey eye cracked open; the Sharingan was closed again now, hidden behind a wet fall of hair. "I'm in good company."
Panting and sweat-sheened in a bath probably wasn't Minato's best look, but he shrugged that off. He settled down again at the opposite end of the tub, facing Kakashi; the tub was big enough they didn't have to touch, so long as they kept their feet tucked in. "That—wasn't what I'd planned for your first mission. You did well. You all did." |
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