#maiika

With the Yakuza’s strict rules and expectations, there also came rewards.  One of those rewards was offered to them after every job, in the form of soft skin at late hours beneath the neon lights of Tokyo.  In his days spent as a runaway teen, if anyone would’ve asked Kakashi if he’d bed a whore someday, he never would have said yes.  On his first opportunity, he’d actually passed it up.  

But after Obito returned one night from Jiraiya’s, drunk, loud, and bragging, Kakashi couldn’t tolerate the annoyance any longer.  He had more pressing issues on his mind, like growing his business on the streets and matching Minato-oyabun’s fearsome reputation.  He thought he’d shut Obito up and be done with it.  No big deal.  

That was when he’d met Rin.

He couldn’t deny even that first time how pretty she was.  She’d looked about the same age as him, no more than twenty.  She’d worn her caramel brown hair piled on her head and arranged in spikes that resembled a messy bedhead, the straight lines of it drawing Kakashi’s gaze to her eyes rimmed with dark liner and heavy purple shadow.  Her lips were pouty and pink and when she smiled - well, Kakashi had to remind himself that this angelic-looking girl was being pimped to him by Jiraiya-sama.

She’d held that smile as she said pretty words, took him by the hand, drew him to her bed, and did things to him that made Kakashi forget the innocence in her smile.  

And then it was done.  Kakashi could turn his attention to his business on the streets - and he’d done that for a good while.  Obito continued to see Rin.  She was his favorite thing; she’d become his addiction.  So it wasn't surprising that he’d been angry when finally admitting to Kakashi that she’d been asking about him.   He’d claimed he wasn’t jealous, but Kakashi knew no better explanation for Obito’s behavior.  Kakashi had gone to see Rin the night of that argument, more to spite Obito than anything else.

That night with her was different than the first.  She liked him.  Rin talked through the afterglow, catching Kakashi while he was still lethargic and spent, explaining her lifestyle to him more than she needed to.  Kakashi understood that Rin, like most girls here, had no more choice in her fate than Kakashi had wanted to live on the streets.  He’d left her that night without saying much, but the impact of her words had taken their time to seep through his protective layers of defenses.  In less than a week, he’d sought her again.  He didn’t even tell Obito where he was going.

It became a regular thing.

Kakashi didn’t like the distraction, but the more he resisted the urge to see Rin, the more he thought about her.  He loved her smile.  He loved her touch.  He loved hearing what she had to say.  And eventually, in spite of how stupid he knew it was to let it happen...he loved her.

Rin didn’t stop seeing Obito, nor any of her other tricks.  Kakashi didn’t attempt to hide from her the blood on his hands, either.  They accepted each other as they were, so much so, that Rin even once made an offhand suggestion that she’d like Kakashi and Obito to pay her a visit together.   To say even suggesting such a thing would be frowned upon by the Yakuza would have been an understatement.  So they never spoke of it again, in spite of the wayward thoughts Rin had planted in Kakashi’s mind, in much the same way Rin was always nuzzling her way beneath his skin.

Kakashi, being a young genius who’d thought he knew better than everyone else, had developed other would-be-frowned-upon ideas.  

After receiving his first tattoo as a gift from Minato-oyabun for another job well-done (a kunai down the line of his right forearm), and seeing Obito falling behind on his collections, he’d wondered about making changes in their lives.  He’d thought (foolishly) they might have stood a chance at a different kind of life - a life with Rin somewhere outside Tokyo.  Rin wasn’t as convinced, but he’d worked on her until she’d consented to leaving Jiraiya’s (under the condition they had to take Obito from this life as well).  She knew as well as Kakashi did - the Yakuza life was as unfitting for Obito as prostitution was for Rin.  

Proposing the plan to Obito had been easy.  Obito said he’d already been planning to tell Kakashi it was time for them to get out, away from the dangers this life posed.  Although...he would’ve probably agreed to anything if it involved a future with Rin.  Kakashi went to the whore house to tell Rin they had accepted her conditions.  He went to spend one last night there with her, coming in as Obito was on his way out her door.

The three of them, somehow, hadn’t been the only ones to know of their plans to leave Tokyo.

The slamming of Rin’s door behind Kakashi’s back had immediately been punctuated by much louder, much more insistent thumps in the night.  At the sounds of the explosions and subsequent commotion, Kakashi had met Rin’s widening eyes before turning to reach for the door.  He’d run out into the hall with Rin on his heels, past the squealing whore crouched on the ground, past the young receptionist folded over the front counter with blood dripping between his vacant eyes.  

The front room, purple with silk and thick with perfume as always, had been splattered with red.  A gunman stood in the middle of it, a porcelain mask concealing his face.  Obito had been crumpled at his feet with a crimson pool soaking the beige carpet around him.  The gunman’s hidden eyes had turned on Kakashi, gleaming eerily behind the dark holes of his mask.

“No!” Rin had cried before making the worst decision she could have possibly made.

As the gunshot had blasted, making Kakashi’s ears ring and sucking all other sounds of mayhem out of the room, Rin’s back had pressed against him.  She’d lurched forward and then back again, clutching her chest.  

Clutching the bullet meant for Kakashi.

Kakashi had caught her in his arms, screaming her name as he fell to his knees.

The gunman’s footsteps were masked by both the ringing in Kakashi’s ears and his focus on Rin’s face. Approach was evidenced only by the vibrations in the floor.  The look in Rin’s dilated, shimmering eyes and the movement of her lips as she’d whispered his name for the last time still haunts Kakashi to this day.

She’d bled out in his arms.  

He can still remember the warmth of it.  

Kakashi doesn’t recall exactly how it happened, but the next thing he remembers is the gun in his hand and the gunman moaning on the floor.

He remembers what he’d done to him after.  He doesn’t regret it.  The bastard deserved every ounce of pain he’d received - and still, it falls horrifically short of the torment Kakashi continues to suffer to this day.

He lost his best friend that day.

But even worse, he lost the love of his life.  

He sincerely believes Rin Nohara, an amazing optimist in spite of being a pro, who’d never made it past the age of twenty, was the only woman he would ever love.  It had been young, it had been green, but to Kakashi then, that love had been everything.  The only other person who could understand his feelings for her died along with her that fateful day.

Without Obito pestering him and needling him in those years before Minato-oyabun stepped into their lives, Kakashi doesn’t think he ever would’ve had the drive he needed to survive on the streets or to be invited into the Sarutobi Clan.  In the years after joining the Yakuza, Kakashi regrets failing to see just how much Obito still needed him.  If it wasn’t for Kakashi’s oversights, he and Rin might still be alive.

It was years later when Kakashi discovered the true culprit behind their deaths.  The gunman had been hired by Danzo-sama, Yakuza brother to the father-figure of their clan, Sarutobi Hiruzen.  He’d secretly arranged the hit after listening in on one of Obito’s drunken nights of running his mouth.  Only after Kakashi had left Jiraiya’s with his life intact had Danzo given up any further pursuit of his assassination, deeming Kakashi’s losses enough punishment for his intended betrayal, and his continued existence a useful tool to the family.

He’s proven useful, indeed.

Knowing what he knows now, thinking back on Rin, Obito, and what they could have had together, he’d rather he hadn’t.