A Thousand Birds at Dusk

On the twenty-sixth day, Sasuke put his hand through a cliff, and Kakashi caught him before he hit the ground. The boy was out before his knees went. That was the thing about the Chidori nobody wrote in the scrolls, because Kakashi had never written the scrolls: it didn't tire you so much as switch you off. One moment there was a sound like a thousand birds screaming in a cage, white-blue light crawling up Sasuke's forearm, the smell of scorched stone; the next there was a hole in the canyon wall the width of a man's chest and a thirteen-year-old dropping like a cut kite. Kakashi had been waiting for it. He'd counted. Twice was the limit for someone Sasuke's size, with Sasuke's chakra. Three was a hole in a cliff and a boy face-down in the dust, if nobody was standing close enough. He was standing close enough. He'd been standing close enough for twenty-six days. He lowered Sasuke onto the warm rock and checked the arm first. The skin from fingertips to elbow was pink and tight, like a mild burn, and there was a faint tremor in the muscles that would be cramping by morning. Nothing torn. He checked the pulse at the throat, which was fast and fine, and the eyes, which were rolled back and fine, and then he sat down beside his student in the long shadow of the canyon and let himself breathe out. The sun was going. Up here, a full day's walk from Konoha, the rock turned the colour of embers in the evening, red and orange and a violet that crept up from the bottom of the gorge. Kakashi had chosen this place because nobody came here and because there was a great deal of stone to break. He had not chosen it for the sunsets. He hadn't remembered, until the first evening, that he'd seen sunsets like this before, a long time ago, from a different canyon, with a different boy lying beside him. Sasuke woke up the way he did everything, suddenly and angrily. His eyes snapped open, red for half a second with two tomoe spinning before they faded back to black. He tried to sit up and his right arm folded under him. "Don't," Kakashi said. "I can go again." "You can't, actually. That's what the lying-down part means." "Gaara won't wait for me to rest." Sasuke got his left elbow under himself and pushed up until he was sitting, white-faced, breathing through his teeth. "I need to be able to do it three times. Four." "You need to be able to do it once," Kakashi said, "at the right moment. Anyone can make lightning. The trick is putting it somewhere useful." Sasuke glared at him. Kakashi had been glared at by Kage, by S-rank missing-nin, by a sixteen-year-old Guy in a bowl cut challenging him to a race up the Hokage monument on his hands. None of them had the particular force of Uchiha Sasuke, aged thirteen, sitting in the dirt with one arm hanging useless and the absolute conviction that he was being held back. Kakashi took a ration bar out of his pouch, broke it in two, and held out half. "I'm not hungry." "I didn't ask." A long pause. Sasuke took it. They ate in silence while the gorge went dark from the bottom up. Somewhere below, water moved over stone. A hawk circled the last lit ledge, then gave up and dropped out of the light. Kakashi watched Sasuke's hand shake as he lifted the bar to his mouth, and he thought, not for the first time that month, that he was very possibly making a mistake. The Chidori was his. Not the clan's, not the village's. He'd made it at twelve out of rage and speed and a Sharingan he didn't have yet, back when he'd still believed that if you were fast enough nobody you cared about would ever be in the wrong place. He'd been wrong about that. The jutsu didn't care. It had gone through the thing it was aimed at, every time, and once, on a night he didn't let himself remember on purpose, it had gone through Rin. And now he was teaching it to a boy who had told him, on the very first day of Team Seven, that his dream was to kill a certain man. "Why are you looking at me like that," Sasuke said. "Like what?" "Like Naruto when he's about to say something stupid." Kakashi laughed, which surprised both of them. "That's harsh." "It's accurate." Sasuke turned the wrapper over in his good hand. Then, without looking up: "You think I'm going to use it on him." The gorge was very quiet. Kakashi did not have to ask who him was. He had walked through the Uchiha district once, afterwards, past doorways he hadn't let himself look into. He had known the boy who did it, a little. They had worn animal masks in the same unit once, and Itachi had been polite and quiet and frighteningly good, and one night he had killed every Uchiha in Konoha except the one now sitting in the dirt beside Kakashi, eating half a ration bar. "I think," Kakashi said slowly, "you're going to use it on whatever's in front of you. That's what it's for. It goes straight through." "Then what's the problem." "The problem is what's in front of you." Sasuke didn't answer. Kakashi hadn't expected him to. He leaned back on his hands and looked up, where the first stars were coming out over the rim of the canyon, small and sharp. "I had a teammate once," he said. He hadn't meant to. It came out anyway, the way the Chidori did, a gathering of something you'd been holding too long. "He was loud. He was late to everything. He cried all the time; it drove me crazy. He wanted to be Hokage." "Like Naruto," Sasuke said, very quietly. "Like Naruto. I thought he was the weakest person I'd ever met. I thought rules were the only thing that kept shinobi alive, and he broke every one of them, and I hated him for it." Kakashi touched the edge of his forehead protector, where it sat slanted over his left eye. "Then he died, and he gave me this, and I spent the next thirteen years being late to everything." Sasuke was looking at him now. Properly looking, the way he looked at an opponent's hands, trying to read what came next. "That's his eye," Sasuke said. "The Sharingan. You're not an Uchiha. I always wondered." "His name was Obito." Kakashi hadn't said it out loud in a long time. It sat strange in his mouth, too big. "Uchiha Obito. He would have hated you, by the way. You're exactly the kind of kid he couldn't stand. Talented, stuck-up, good hair." Something twitched at the corner of Sasuke's mouth, in the place a smile might go one day, if somebody gave it room. Sasuke didn't really do those yet. "Why are you telling me this?" Because I'm afraid of you, Kakashi thought. Because I look at you and see myself at thirteen, and I know exactly what that boy would have done with a jutsu that goes straight through anything. Because your brother was the most gifted shinobi I ever served beside, and if you chase him you'll chase him off a cliff, and I won't always be standing close enough to catch you. "Because you asked why I was looking at you like that," he said instead. Sasuke frowned. He was still frowning when Kakashi got up, dusted off his trousers, and crouched with his back to him. "Get on." "I can walk." "You can't stand. It's not the same thing. Get on, or I'll carry you like a sack of rice, and I'll tell Naruto." There was a long, outraged silence. Then a weight against his back, light, much too light, one arm hooked over his shoulder and the burnt one hanging loose. Kakashi stood and settled him. Sasuke's breath was warm through his vest. He smelt of ozone and dust and the cheap soap from the inn in the valley where they'd been sleeping, and for a dizzy second Kakashi was thirteen again, on a different night, in a different forest, holding a different weight that had already stopped breathing. He kept walking. Sasuke was breathing. That was the difference. He made himself count the breaths, the way he'd counted the Chidori. They were halfway down the ledge path to the stream when Sasuke spoke again, his voice muffled against Kakashi's shoulder. "The finals. Three days." "Mm." "You'll be late." "Probably." "Don't be too late." A pause, and then, in a voice so low Kakashi almost didn't catch it: "I want you to see it." Kakashi didn't answer straight away. Below them the stream had found the last of the light and was holding it, a thin silver line through the dark. He thought about the stadium, the crowd, the sand-boy with dead eyes who had crushed Lee's arm and leg in the prelims, and barely moved to do it. He thought about Sasuke's hand going through a cliff. He thought about a boy who cried too much, telling him that people who abandon their friends are worse than trash, and how long it had taken him to understand. "I'll be there," he said. "Just remember what it's for." Sasuke didn't ask what he meant. Maybe he was too tired. Maybe, Kakashi hoped, he'd keep the question somewhere and take it out later, when it mattered. By the time they reached the stream he was asleep, his breath slow and even against Kakashi's neck, his good hand fisted in the back of his sensei's vest as if, even unconscious, he was afraid of being put down. Kakashi didn't put him down. He stood at the water's edge for a long time, under the stars, holding the weight.