.

People are far more likely to

lie to you than your gut.

From the second she walks through the massive gates of Yomitan, Hiwa knows that the mission is going to go wonky.

She gets through the border fine. A blonde wig, green contacts, and her usual prosthetics allow her to feasibly claim to be a Wind Country native. She completes it with a veil, bright red and gold draped robe, and sturdy but fashionable traveling sandals. Perfect to sell her as a traveling singer from a comfortable background in Wind Country, snaking her way through the Elemental Nations on the generosity of others and some money from her parents. The border guards scrutinize her a bit, has her perform for them, and pulls out some of the reference letters she always keeps prepped for this cover, checks her bag thoroughly, and sends her on through once they are satisfied.

It takes longer than she would have liked and leaves her to travel most of the way to Yomitan in the dark, using her enhanced sight to lead her through. But she gets there, the gates open for her with the break of dawn.

And twelve hours later as the sun drops and she watches the gates close for the evening from her spot on the street, performing for spare ryo, she thinks she'll be back out them first thing in the morning because her entire day has been one filled with short answers, furtive glances, and unease. The people of Konoha might not have known there was a war on its way, but the people of Yomitan sure do, and they've given her nothing but a bad feeling in her gut.

Guards shoo her away when she lingers too close to the warehouses with kunai and senbon and body armor spilling out of their seams. The folks selling crops by the dozen snap at her when, later that afternoon, she asks too many questions about the burst of business as of late. And when Hiwa inquires with a local seamstress about having some clothes made for her ninja cousin, and wow, there sure is a long waitlist, has she been doing additional special orders lately? Well. Hiwa's never been kicked out of a store so fast in her life.

The people are busy. The entire village is alight with activity, and at any given time, there's a dozen or so Kusa nin patrolling the place.

The mission statement wanted her to get numbers and stats, as specific as she could get, but there's no way she's going to be able to get that information without blowing her cover wide open, and that's a death sentence. It would be, as Jiraiya put it, 'stupid shit'.

So after she's sung her way through a few hours, she takes what ryo she has in her hat and heads off to the village's bookstore.

She grabs something stupid and smutty for Kakashi, one of the more promising female-led books for Genma, and then a few random books for herself. Might as well get something out of the mission. And while her issues with Genma are nowhere near dealt with, she remembers how interested he had been in all the unique authors she had on her shelf and has a book for him in her basket before she's even thought twice about it.

The books cost her what money she busked and a bit extra, but once she's gotten them bagged up she heads off to her hotel room, intent on getting some sleep for the night.

.

.

Kakashi's back at the memorial stone when Jiraiya's agent hands him the mission scroll. He takes it with a nod, and the agent retreats into the shadows.

He has his pack ready at the door of his apartment, already. All he has to do is grab it and go.

Kakashi raises his hand to the stone.

His fingers ghost over Minato's name, the grooves and sharp edges as familiar to him as the back of his hand. And then his hand trails downwards to another familiar name, one he's been tracing for the last couple of years, now.

Inuzuka Noboru.

He knows the other names on there that matter to her, Hamada Hiro and Ogawa Shinji.

At the thought of them, his gaze strays to Rin's and Obito's.

Then he thinks of the one ghost that haunts Hiwa whose name isn't on the stone: Tanji Hitomi. Hiwa said she never knew what happened—come the end of the war, her sensei had dropped off the face of the earth.

Kakashi's never told her that Tanji Hitomi is now Hino Hitomi, a farmer's wife in some backwater Fire Country village. As far as any of her new neighbors are concerned, Hitomi was a traveling dancer who settled down after falling in love with her current husband. None of them will ever know the blood on her hands or the skeletons that fill her closet.

It's the best-case scenario that any retired Konoha ninja can hope for when their retirement is forced due to their questionable ability to function in the field. Honorable? Hardly. But it's safe and easy.

Sometimes (more times than he'll ever dare admit to himself, much less say aloud) Kakashi wonders if Hiwa even remembers that night properly. If she remembers pouring her heart out to him while blackout drunk, narrating her life story, not in a blubbering mess of snot and sake-fueled sobs like he'd expect, but in a soft, clinical tone, like being drunk gave her enough distance to tell her life story as if sharing a folk tale with him.

He never forgot.

Boy, did he want to. That feeling it gave him? A split second where he let himself think that this girl was the first person he'd ever met who got it, who knew the crushing ache of having your life swept out from under you by grief the same way a running river grinds away at the mountainside until it creates a gorge? Not what he needed in his life.

The only positive was that it got him into an Icha Icha book. The only one of Jiraiya's books that Kakashi outright refused to purchase or read when an early copy was sent to him.

So like with everything else in his life, Kakashi bottled that night up and threw it into the back of his mind, only to be pulled out when it could be useful.

He thinks somebody might have smashed the bottle, though, because it's been leaking out into his thoughts again.

(His fault.

She's on the ground, covered in blood that might very well have been her own because he failed to check in with her. If he'd done it earlier, this wouldn't have happened.

It's his fault.

With as light a hand as he can, he wipes the blood off her face.

Another teammate almost dead at his feet.

He bottles it up, admonishes Genma for feeling exactly what he does like the hypocrite he's always known he is, and carries her back to her bed, refusing to let her out of his arms for a second.

He keeps an eye on her once they're back, makes sure she's alright.

He's there so much he starts to keep his own stash of tea in the cupboards hidden with the rest of the tea he knows Hiwa won't ever rifle through. It's creepy and he knows that, but what nobody else knows won't bother them.

He tells himself that if he leaves it to rot, it can't do him any harm.

He doesn't care. He can't.

Why care about something he'll never be able to have? And, frankly, something that he doesn't want?

Because he doesn't want a relationship. The last thing he needs is one more corpse in the parade that marches in his shadow, and he'd be a lousy partner.

Nobody else deserves to be dragged into the festival of carnage that lives in his head and makes up his past, least of all somebody who's seen enough of it on their own, who is so good, so kind, so everything that he's never been and never will be.

How somebody so similar to him can be so different is beyond him. How somebody whose gruesome backstory is bloodied the same was as his—dead parents and teammates, stolen by war and ravaged by the Kyuubi when fate decided it hadn't taken enough yet—can smile, laugh, and joke, all without coming off as a facsimile of a human being. How she can have nothing left to give, anymore, and finds a way to do it anyways.

So, he steps back. He plays go-between with Genma and Hiwa. At least that way, he's getting some entertainment out of things, and maybe he'll get to see her happy at the end of it because unlike him, she deserves it. And if he doesn't, he can pat himself on the back for having done his good deed of the day and get a show in the process.

That's all.

He's a coward, through and through, and he's fine with that.

He might be willing to step up for the sake of the village, but in his everyday life, it's better to be a coward in safety than a brave soul on the frontlines.)

He'll have to fix that.

Once he's slaughtered the whole of Kusa's scrabbled together border guard and gotten Hiwa back into the village, he will. He'll watch Hiwa and Genma get together, like all the good books end with, and he'll find a new jar for himself.

That morning when Hiwa wakes up, already decided on getting out of dodge before this can blow up in her face, she has a complicated decision to make.

Because she's in a complicated situation.

With the cover she used to get through the border, it'll look suspicious if she tries to cross back over this early. No musician stays in one country for two days and then leaves again. They might move villages if money's bad. But they wouldn't just jump ship to that extreme. Which knocks out that option.

And she doesn't plan on trying to sneak through their guard, either. That's yet another idea to throw into the 'stupid shit' pile.

Her best bet is going to be sneaking through Grass Country's border with Rain Country and then looping back around to pick up Rei on her way to Konoha. That's the safest option. Grass Country and Rain Country are on civil terms, so she doubts there's going to be much going on there—she won't try and go through the official paths because this cover doesn't have the paperwork to support that, but she should be able to get through the defenses and crawl her way southeast to Rain Country's border with Fire Country.

The issue comes in getting out of Yomitan itself—rather, which option is going to yield the safer result.

She can go out the same way she came in: the main gate. She can use the previously mentioned excuse that she's not making any money, and decided to move on. But if she's ruffled feathers like she thinks she has, they'll have her flagged and be watching for her and the second she tries to leave they can pounce on her. Kusa nin guard the gates, even if civilians are the ones who man the booths. She wouldn't stand a chance.

That said, her other option is to hop the gates and hope she can avoid the perimeter guards. This gives her a chance to get a head start. If they suspect her and have been keeping an eye for her, the second they realize she disappeared without a trace their suspicions will be confirmed. And if they're keeping a really close eye on her, they'll have somebody trailing her, and then she'll be dead in the water the second they see her take her first steps up the wall.

She needs more information.

Despite waking up with an itch to get out immediately, Hiwa goes for a walk around the village. She gets herself some breakfast. Coffee and a Kusa-poptart. A Kusatart. A sweet thing that she can't really enjoy because she's too focused on being alert enough to watch for a tail without seeming like it.

And she doesn't hear, see, or smell anything funny. There aren't any eyes following her beyond what can be expected.

Wall hop it is, then.

She's grateful that her cover outfit happens to be as free-flowing as it is—she'll have no problem climbing in it, running in it, and if need be, fighting in it. Hopefully, she won't need to. But she will be doing the other two, that much is sure.

Hiwa heads back to her hotel room in as much of a rush as she can without looking out of place and collects her stuff. Given that the window faces another building and not the street, Hiwa takes the risk and goes out the window rather than loop back out through the main lobby with her traveling bag.

Ideally, the staff won't notice a thing. Not for four or five hours when they come in to clean her room. Or even better, the next day.

Getting out this way is easy. She opens the window, walks a couple of steps down the wall, then drops down the rest of the way. Not a soul witnesses it. So, she hefts her bag and makes off towards the nearest section of the village walls.

The mission might not have gone how she wanted but she got books out of it and confirmation of what Jiraiya suspected, at least. And now she'll be back in Konoha by the tenth if she moves fast. She just has to hope that everything else goes according to plan.

.

.

As Kakashi suspected, he finds Rei pacing on Konoha's side of the border like a trapped animal.

He and his pack track her down without any trouble. She meets them partway and tackles Kakashi the second he's within distance, licking his face and sticking her nose in the pocket of his vest where he keeps his treats. He indulges her for a couple of minutes, rubbing her head and letting her pin him to the dirt as the rest of his pack hangs back.

But they're on a tight schedule.

He sits up and nudges her away from him, and Rei complies easily. Her tongue lolls out of her mouth as she sits back, watching him.

Kakashi rests his hand on her head and says, "We're going to extract Hiwa."

And those words are all it takes for Rei to shift from an oversized house dog to likely three-hundred some odd pound wolf with a jaw powerful enough to snap bones like a child might a twig.

She rises to her full height. She takes a couple of steps back, raises her head, and howls into the otherwise silent afternoon air.

When she's done, she falls into step with his pack, separate from their hierarchy but deferent to Kakashi all the same. He can see it in her eyes—the sharp, feral determination. Hiwa has her qualms about killing. Rei, however, doesn't share them. Especially not when it comes to keeping her partner safe.

"Alright. Let's get started."

.

.

Things do not go according to plan.

Hiwa realizes this in the same second she realizes that at least a couple of the perimeter guards must be sensors, or something, when they immediately break from their vigil to follow her as she cuts her path northwest, up and around the path she'd projected they'd take based on their previous trajectories.

She knows how to hide her trail—she can dampen her scent, use a light enough touch as she tree hops not to disrupt the bark on landing, all the tricks of the trade. But she's never been able to pull in her chakra to help disguise her signature.

Making a split-second decision, Hiwa stops on the next tree she hops too, crouched on the branch. She adds more chakra to her ears than was already there and closes her eyes. Amidst the ambient sounds of the forest, the whistle of wind through branches and chitter of squirrels scurrying around the dirt, a chirp of birds here and the gentle grunt of a deer there, she hears it.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Feet against branches, about three kilometers back. Two sets of it. But when she listens more, she hears a softer echo to them and quells the string of curses that threatens to spill out. It was harder to hear on the move, with her own footfalls interfering and half her focus on not losing her balance, but now that she's stopped there's more—another two people, by the sounds of it, five or six kilometers off and gaining.

Hiwa pushes off her spot with vigor, putting on a burst of speed to make up for the ten or so seconds wasted.

From the rapid pace of their feet hitting the branches, and based on general guesstimations of ninja speed, she thinks they're moving at forty kilometers an hour, if not faster. She kicks up her pace. Fighting might not be her strong suit, but she's still an Inuzuka—speed and stamina are two things she has in spades.

All she has to do is hope that they can't keep up or lose interest before she tires, or she's going to be in for the world's deadliest game of hide-and-seek.

A/N: Me? Updating late at night because I forgot to do it earlier? Never. Also, since a few people have asked: the tag is for an OT3, not a love triangle :)