Chapter Text
Rin is fifteen years old when her best friend dies.
Obito has always been the bright spot in her life; ambitious, determined, stubborn.
Self-sacrificing.
So, as the world is falling apart around them and she turns to see Obito take a hit meant for Kakashi, she can't say she's surprised.
She falls to her knees anyway, hands lighting up with the pale green of medical chakra. Rin has always been a prodigy in her field, one of the hospital's best even at thirteen – she had to have been, to be put on a team with an Uchiha, a once-in-a-generation genius, and the Yellow Flash – but as she pumps her chakra into her dying friends body, she knows that no one can save him now.
She tries anyway.
Rin has always been nothing if not determined. It's perhaps the only thing she has in common with her boys.
But determination can only get you so far.
So as they run back to Konoha, a new eye in Kakashi's face and Rin's chakra running dangerously low, while Rin is sad, yes, sadder than she's ever been, she's not surprised. Somewhere, deep inside her, she always knew that this was going to happen. She always knew that Obito was going to die for someone else.
She just didn't expect it to be quite so soon.
They meet up with Minato-sensei, who takes one look at them before his face goes blank. His chakra lashes out wildly for one, breath-stopping moment before he locks it down tight, and it goes ice cold.
“Let's go back to Konoha,” Minato-sensei says. But he's not Minato-sensei in that moment.
He's Konoha's Yellow Flash, the man with a flee on sight warning marked on his bingo book page.
Rin grabs Kakashi's hand and breaks into a sprint, keeping a few paces behind Minato. Kakashi flinches but he doesn't let go.
Not for a long, long time.
--
As soon as they get back to Konoha, Kakashi is pulled into the hospital to make sure that Rin transplanted Obito's (OBITO--) eye correctly. She gets the lacerations covering her body patched up in an overcrowded waiting room, and Minato-sensei is called to report to the Hokage.
The Uchiha arrive half an hour later.
Kakashi is shoved into a conference room as soon as it's clear that he's not going to die (immediately). Minato-sensei goes in with him. Rin isn't privy to the details, but she can guess; they want Obito's eye back.
She isn't sure that they won't get it.
Rin waits in the waiting room of the Hokage building all day, waiting for her remaining teammates. She stares at the wall listlessly, dried tear tracks tearing burrows into her cheeks.
Her respect for Obito's family dies with his soul when they emerge thirty six hours later. But even if Kakashi is shaking and his gaze is unfocused, there's still two eyes in his head.
He's still alive.
--
The aftermath of Obito's death is hard.
He had been the thing binding team 7 together, with his endless smiles and cheer. He and Kakashi may have fought a lot, but Rin could never say that they hated each other. It was quite the opposite, in fact.
Minato-sensei begins his training to take over as Hokage. Kakashi runs towards every opportunity to kill himself; intense training, and high-stakes missions.
And Rin?
Well, she's always been more similar to Kakashi than either of them has ever liked to admit. She continues her shifts at the hospital and takes missions in between; sometimes, on rare occasions, her and Kakashi are assigned the same missions. It's the only time she sees him outside of mandatory “team 7 time” that only Minato-sensei really puts effort into.
Until it's not.
She doesn't exactly know where it starts. Perhaps when one of the older chunin – Jun-san – drags them both out for drinks with the rest of the squad after one of those rare missions they both get assigned to. Kakashi tries to bail but Rin's gotten a lot faster and something compels her to grab him, so she does. And ignores the betrayed look he gives her afterwards.
The bar is crowded but they get a table in the back. There's five of them and they squeeze in around the round, polished oak table.
Rin has never had alcohol before. Neither has Kakashi. They order the same thing and Rin checks their drinks for poison. When she takes a sip of her drink, Kakashi does too. It's a show of trust that she doesn't appreciate until much later.
They both end up drinking up way too much. Rin doesn't flush her system like she otherwise would because she likes the way her head is empty. She drags them both to her small apartment that she doesn't really use these days and holds Kakashi's hair back when he vomits into her toilet. He does the same for her.
They stumble into bed and Rin grabs an extra blanket and pillow for him. They end up squished together on her tiny single bed that is not nearly big enough for a fifteen-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy, but they make it work. They both fall asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillow.
Kakashi wakes up first the next morning. He leaves her blanket neatly folded on her threadbare couch, breakfast, and a glass of water and two panadol on her bedside table. His side of the bed is still warm.
Rin heals her migraine, puts the blanket and pillow in her cupboard, downs the water, and inhales the food. It's not half-bad.
She throws two bento together and tracks him down to give him the lunch as a thank you. He's already left on another mission, so after her shift she cleans his apartment and throws away any old or mouldy food. He comes back the next day to ten pre-made meals in his fridge and an abundance of fruits and vegetables in his fridge's draws.
She finds a stack of high quality paper on her desk two days later. Rin never told him that she had taken an interest in fuinjutsu.
She impulsively buys a new bed that afternoon.
--
They fall into something that could be called a routine.
Kakashi shows up at her shoe-box-sized apartment every Wednesday at six on the dot. Sometimes he's dizzy from painkillers or wild-eyed with someone else's blood painting his vest, but he hasn't missed a day. They cook up something easy in her tiny kitchen then squeeze themselves onto her couch because her place is too small for a table. She has a bathroom and the other room is a mix between a kitchen, a bedroom, and a lounge. There's a sliding closet by the front door.
Rin wonders why she doesn't buy a bigger place. She certainly has the funds for it – even during war time, being a medic pays well. She supposes it's compensation for all the overtime and extensive trauma one tends to accumulate when they watch comrades – friends – die beneath their palms every day.
“Why don't you buy a bigger place?” Kakashi asks one Wednesday. They're stuffed together on her couch eating ramen because neither of them had the energy to cook. He's been quiet all evening and there was a distant look in his eye (only one—) when he showed up at her door, but when he turns to ask her he's focused and present in a way he hasn't been in about three weeks.
“I don't know,” Rin shrugs, “The only thing I really like about it is the couch.” Threadbare and pink as it is. At least it’s comfortable.
Kakashi is quiet for a short moment, a slight flatness to his brow that means he's contemplating something. Unnoticeable if you haven't spent every Wednesday with him for six months, and every day for six years before that.
“Too hard?” he asks. It's not condescending or pitiful—there’s a sympathetic note in his voice.
Rin swallows a piece of egg. “I guess. But I could always just use shadow clones. I don't know what's stopping me.”
Kakashi grabs the mayonnaise and pours a disgusting amount into his bowl, using his chopsticks to swirl the noodles around so that they are saturated in the yucky white sauce.
Being around Kakashi has permanently put her off mayonnaise. She keeps a full bottle in the fridge anyway.
“Having an easy solution doesn't always make it easier,” Kakashi says.
“Maybe.”
Rin puts a square of pork in her mouth. Kakashi slurps up a noodle. She contemplates breaking his chopsticks and throwing his mayo out the window. She knows that she never will.
“This place is going to smell like mayo forever,” Rin laments.
Kakashi hides a smile behind his chopsticks.
--
The next week Kakashi tumbles through her window on the verge of a panic attack. He knocks over the two plants on her window sill and they go tumbling into her sink. She jumps up from her spot on her bed and tugs him through the window.
He stumbles against a wall and hits his hip on the corner of her way-too-sharp kitchen counter. Rin tries to manoeuvre him over to her pink couch but he flinches back and almost puts a knife from the drawer that she left open through her head. She grabs the knife from his flailing grip and puts him to sleep with a tap of healing jutsu.
He slumps to the ground and bangs his head against her fridge. Rin hauls him over to her bed and runs her chakra through him to make sure he didn't get a concussion. She doesn't find a concussion but she does find three cracked ribs, multiple lacerations, and a fractured tibia. Oh, and his patella is dislocated, because of course it is.
Rin sighs, more used to this than she really should be, and gets to work.
--
She starts apartment hunting two days later.
--
“It's nice,” Kurenai smiles, her slim fingers ghosting over the dark red brick of her new living room wall. “Homey.”
Rin hums. “You think so?”
“I do.” Kurenai claps her hands together lightly, her smile brightening. “We should have a house warming party.”
Rin's nose screws up. “Do we have to?”
She can't remember the last time she hung out with more than three people that weren't her co-workers. And that was at a coffee place two months ago with Kurenai, Asuma and Genma that lasted less than an hour because she had an emergency surgery.
She knows that she used to be a lot more social. That version of herself feels so far away now.
Kurenai raises an eyebrow. “Of course we have to.” She starts listing people off with her fingers. “We'll invite Gai, Ebisu, Genma, Aoba, Raidou, Asuma... Do you think Kakashi will come?”
Kurenai is too good of a shinobi to let her emotions slip past her mild mask (especially if she's being groomed for the unit that Rin suspects she is), but she can feel the hope in her chakra. She's a bit surprised. Everyone, bar Gai, seems to have given up on him a long time ago.
Rin schools her expression into something vaguely thoughtful, even though she knows the answer will be a hard no. “Maybe.”
Kurenai nods and doesn't push the issue any further. “Are there any other people you want to invite? Co-workers?” She perches herself on the edge of Rin's ratty pink couch, barely sparing it a glance of distaste. She's proud. The first dozen or so times Kurenai saw it, she was subjected to a impassioned lecture on the importance of having proper furniture and colour theory.
Apparently bright fuchsia didn't go with the pale green (chipped, leaking, damaged) wallpaper of Rin's old place. She was more surprised that Kurenai was so zealous about couches.
To each their own, she supposes.
“Not particularly,” Rin shrugs.
She can feel Kurenai's disapproving frown from across the room.
“Rin,” she starts to say, then stops. Purses her lips. Visibly gives up.
Kurenai sighs. “When do you want to have it?”
“Whenever everyone is free.” Which is something that happens maybe once every few months, to the dismay of probably everyone aside from Kakashi. And Rin, sometimes.
She's missed Kurenai, though.
Rin walks over to sit down on her garish couch and leans her head against the chunin's side. Kurenai huffs and starts combing her red-painted fingers through Rin's hair, the motion easy and familiar. It settles something deep in her chest that only really relaxes when she's around her.
“Let me take care of it,” Kurenai says, her voice sharp and flinty. Let me take care of you.
“Okay.”
--
“What do you think?”
Rin feels Kakashi's chakra move and twist as he scrutinizes her apartment, no doubt taking note of every entry, exit, and potential weapon. She hasn't looked up from her book, and it's the first thing she's said since he climbed in through her kitchen window two minutes and fourty-three seconds ago.
“It's...” Rin looks up and watches Kakashi's brows furrow, “...Good.”
Rin smiles. “Yeah. It's good. Not big but not claustrophobic, and close to the hospital. Mio from the ICU heard I was looking for a place and recommended me to her uncle—the owner of this place.”
Kakashi's face tightens. Rin smothers a laugh. The staff at the hospital don't exactly like him because of how many times he's tried to escape and the feelings are very much mutual.
He doesn't say anything more, and she doesn't expect him to. “What do you want for dinner? I was thinking okonomiyaki... or I have the ingredients for a stir fry?”
Kakashi settles down on his side of the couch. “Stir fry sounds good.”
“Coming right up.”
Rin gets started on making the sauce while Kakashi sauté’s the chicken. She's always been a good cook—her mum taught her from a young age. Kakashi's the opposite. She's almost sure that he's been relying on takeout and frozen meals since his father died, what with how he would (subtly) melt whenever Minato-sensei gave them something homemade. He's gotten a lot better since this whole thing started.
They end up huddled together on the couch, which for them means at least fifteen centimetres of space between them with their feet brushing. It's the most amount of contact both of them will allow that isn't violent or filled with the steady rush of medical chakra (cause he's, she's, dying, dying, running out of time).
Rin cuts the thought of quickly. It's a skill that you have to learn when you have a patient bleeding out on the table in front of you. There's no time for hesitation or indecision. It's made her blunt.
“I'm hosting a housewarming party,” she says, “Want to come?”
Kakashi squints at her. “I'm guessing Kurenai is planning it?”
Rin smiles helplessly. “Yeah. She is.”
Kakashi puts a spoonful of stir-fry in his mouth. He chews slowly. Swallows. “Maybe.”
It's the answer she gave Kurenai.
And it's not a no.