#unsealed scrolls

Yamato glanced up from his lunch to see Kakashi hauling a dense looking box of papers and folders onto the already-crowded Hokage desk.

“Taking on additional responsibility, I see,” Yamato said mildly, leaning back against the window behind him to get a better angle of the boxes sides, see if there’s a label. “How bold of you, Hokage-Sama.”

“There’s nothing which aids procrastination better than additional, unrelated work,” Kakashi said, dispensing his ill-gotten wisdom with two smiling, inky-black eyes. Yamato smiled back crookedly, and put his lunch to the side, finally rising to join Kakashi in whatever this new distraction was.

The box had dense chipboard sides and top, and hints of discoloration from unhindered mildew around the corners, and by the lip of the lid. There was a label on the lid’s front, but it was rusted so thoroughly that the paper had been eaten and stained so thorughly that it was unreadable. When he touched the sides, it was colder than the room they were in.

“Sai found it,” Kakashi said, as Yamato lifted the lid.

Ah. This was from Root, then. The dismantling of Danzō’s organization demanded a lot of cleanup, a lot of compiling and collection of Danzō’s libraries and resources and re-allocation of them into Konoha’s information, library, and data collections. If Kakashi was bringing this one straight here, rather than letting the experts notate, collect, label, and distribute this information, it must have been something he wanted privilege over—something too sensitive to immediately be shifted into Konoha’s resources.

Taking a guess, Yamato slid his hand among the side of the papers, feeling for the slick, cardstock texture of a photograph among the typewritten papers.

“Well, would you look at that,” Yamato said, as he felt Kakashi’s keen gaze slip from him to the image in his hand. It was of a sallow, gaunt creature that had never seen the sun, with long brown hair, wetted and slicked by preservative biofluids so that it was nearly black, legs that must have been trembling at the time of the photo which stuck out like twigs from beneath a thin, rough-textured cotton medical gown. The eyes that stared out at him though, were familiar, curious.

“It seems like they’ve finally declassified my baby photos,” Yamato said, and he tried to keep his voice light and humorous, but he tripped over a lump in his throat.

Yamato could feel Kakashi’s eyes leave the photo, and return to him, and so he turned, and pressed the photo into Kakashi’s hands before stepping back to his seat on the window, and lifting up his lunch again.

“We could burn them,” Kakashi suggested.

“That sounds like a bad idea,” Yamato replied through a wry smile. “Thanks for the offer though, always good to know you’re willing to destroy state secrets for a friend.”

“If being the hokage means I can’t even destroy my personal guard’s formerly classified medical documents anymore, then I don’t even know why I left Jōnin,” Kakashi replied, though he started picking through the box again.

Yamato resumed eating, finding himself colder and hungrier than he had been even minutes ago.

“What do you want done with it, Tenzō?” Kakashi eventually asked.

“I don’t particularly care. It can enter Konoha’s forbidden documents division, I suppose. There’s probably important details about how I was created in there, they might be of use for Konoha down the line, I suppose. Perhaps the next time, the experiments can be done consensually, and with less casualties, and perhaps without the more dehumanizing elements of all that.”

“Grim,” Kakashi commented.

“Pragmatic,” Yamato countered. He was fairly sure that there would be a next time—even if Orochimaru somehow miraculously died, even if he was somehow stopped, there would be someone else. There would be, once again, a demand for an otherwise extinct Kekei-genkai.

“I know how easy that section is to break into. I don’t know. Do you really want it in there? Even Sakura and Naruto could probably get in, if they tried, and you know how bad they are at stealth missions.”

“And whose fault is that, Hokage-sama?”

Kakashi gave him a sour look, probably about his continued use of the honorific. Yamato knew he was getting to Kakashi a little bit. “Yours. Don’t you still train new Anbu recruits? They’re not up to par.”

Yamato bowed deeply without leaving his seat, so that his nose brushed his knees, holding his meal aside with one hand. “My most sincere apologies, Hokage-Sama, I w—”

“Piss off,” Kakashi snapped. “You know you’re pretty much the only person in this village who still calls me that?”

Yamato sat back up, very pleased with himself.

Kakashi sighed, and looked back down at the box, and Yamato watched as he did, one of his hands leaving the white, voluminous robes to pick through a couple files at random, and then shuffle them back in.

“You were very young,” Kakashi said softly, looking at another document, which seemed (by a paperclip at the top) to have another photo attached.

“Most children are young,” Yamato noted, after another bite. “You probably were too, I imagine.”

“I suppose I was.”

“You’ll likely find mostly medical files and Kinoto and Danzō’s notes on my progress. I don’t think there’s much else to be recorded in there.”

“You don’t want to see any of that,” Kakashi guessed.

“I know what it will say, I lived it. As for the stuff that I don’t know, I’m happy not knowing.”

Kakashi tapped the edge of the box. “Does me looking at these bother you?” He asked.

Yamato looked out the window, where the afternoon sun was lowering but hot and bright and golden. Did it bother him? He didn’t think so.

“I understand why it’s interesting—but I’m not in that box. Whatever we would find in that box isn’t me. You know? Whatever you want to do with it, I don’t really care.”

Kakashi nodded, and put the paper in his hands back into the box, then placed the lid back where it had been.