Armed Ant's Entry: Up In Smoke (Part One)

[kakasaku_anon]

It started with a bang.

Kakashi paused in his brisk walk, frowning severely. Had that come from…?

He squinted down the grimy road, his eye locking on a particular brick building. Haphazardly nailed planks of wood blocked one of the windows, and between their cracks he could see…

Smoke.

Shit.

He broke into a run, his boots clacking loudly on the cobblestone street. Boarded up shops and derelict buildings blurred past him in the smoggy haze as he ran. He rounded a sharp corner into a shadowy alleyway, hopping over a rolling garbage can to avoid tripping.

A brittle black fire escape clung to the dark brick wall. Kakashi grabbed hold of the rail and ran up the tinny steps. A yowling cat serenaded his ascent. He did not stop until he had reached the top, at which point he sent a little burst of chakra to his hands to pull himself up to the roof.

A blustering wind bit at his exposed skin; he adjusted his tattered black scarf to shield more of his face before dropping to his knees. Again he sent chakra to his fingers, this time to manipulate the lock on the trapdoor. It shifted into place with a mechanical click that was swallowed by the howling gale. Kakashi prized up the metal plate; a flood of light fell onto his figure, drawing him into the apartment as he lowered himself down.

He landed with an oomph on the wooden floorboards, which groaned in welcome.

His eye watered. Smoke was everywhere, obscuring his view of the apartment. Somewhere he could hear a mechanical whizzing noise. He tried to squint through the smoke, but there was no sign of the pink-haired culprit.

“Sakura?” he called hoarsely. He could feel a hideous cough rattling in his chest. It erupted forcefully, forcing him to hack unpleasantly into the unraveling threads of his scarf. “Sakura?”

A low moan answered him; feverishly he fell onto all fours and crawled towards the source. Even at this low altitude the smoke still filtered through his scarf and into his lungs. A light was on but the smoke only played with it, distorting everything into a fuzzy screen of gray and yellow. He felt around like a blind man, groping at anything that crossed his path until he felt something soft.

“Sakura…” He padded around until he found her shoulder, bringing her up into a sitting position against the wall behind them. The smoke was starting to dissipate.

His gloved hand found her face, stroking her cheeks. They were filthy. “Sakura! Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

She said nothing. Idiot, he thought angrily. He had told her never to work on the machine alone, hadn’t he?

But then a cough sputtered miraculously from her mouth, and she curled forward, screwing her eyes shut against the smoke. “Ka-kakashi?” she coughed.

“Yes,” he said. The smoke had mostly faded, as nothing was actually on fire. Now he could see that Sakura’s face was covered in soot, and her pink hair was standing on end. If he hadn’t been so worried, he would have been tempted to laugh.

She let out a final, shuddering cough before cracking open an eye to meet his. Sheepish aquamarine met exasperated charcoal. “Sorry,” she said, wincing as if expecting a blow. “I was just…”

“Tinkering,” Kakashi finished grimly. It was the usual excuse. He cupped her chin in his hand; the soot rubbed onto his naked fingertips. “Didn’t I tell you not to…?”

“I know, I know.” She looked very put-out. Kakashi squeezed her chin, pushing her lips against each other comically. Her cheeks bulged out as she glared. He toggled back and forth until she rolled her eyes and pulled away.

She began to rise, offering a hand to pull him up as well. A flurry of dust accompanied them into standing position. Kakashi watched Sakura’s pitiful attempt to brush herself off before taking it upon himself to do it for her.

She stared thoughtfully at the dingy brick wall as he brushed off her backside. “Weird coincidence that you got here just now,” she mused. “Kinda spooky.”

“It wasn’t a coincidence,” he told her, smoothing his hands down her sides with the pretense of brushing away more soot. “I could hear the bang from two blocks away.”

She let out an indignant yelp as his hand wandered too far south, slapping it away and turning to face him. “Really?” she asked apologetically. “I’m sorry…”

“It’s not important.” He strode past her to the table in the middle of the room. Atop it sat a peculiar device. To an outsider it would have seemed like a random heap of metal and cogs, but the seemingly arbitrary construction was actually being painstakingly perfected. Precarious joints were strengthened by chakra bonds, but it was a temperamental machine, and Sakura seemed to have pushed it too far. Smoke was still trickling feebly from a bronze pipe that jutted out at a forty-five degree angle.

Sakura came up behind him to slip the coat from his shoulders. Beneath he wore a white button-down shirt, black pants and suspenders that drew smart stripes along his torso and back. He leaned forward, his clothed knuckles tightening as he gripped the edge of the table. The black scarf was pooled around his neck.

“What exactly did you do to it?” he asked her as she hung up his coat. His voice was more bemused than angry, but she still hung her head as she joined him at the table.

“I was trying to meddle with the frequency again.”

She looked up at him, but he didn’t return her glance; he was gazing intently at a pair of jammed gears. He pointed at the offending part. “Is that where you were…?”

“Yeah.” She dropped her elbows dejectedly to the table, resting her chin in her palms. “I really screwed it up, huh?”

He shrugged. “Nothing I can’t fix,” he said. Then he paused and turned to her with a crinkling of the eye. “Er, that is to say… nothing we can’t fix.”

She looked away with a snort.

Frowning, he put a comforting arm on her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” he said bracingly. “I’m serious. This is only a minor setback. But… what exactly did you do?” He wasn’t trying to be mean, but nothing had ever exploded.

With a huff, she pointed at the jammed gears. “I was feeding chakra into them,” she explained reluctantly. She spoke with the tone of someone constantly on the verge of slapping a disclaimer in the middle of her sentence. “I was doing it just how you showed me - and you did say that I can do that better than you because of my chakra control - but I guess I got a little too… enthusiastic.”

He nodded in understanding. That was easy to do; he himself was guilty of getting a little too excited when things were going well. It took time to condition himself to the expectation of failure.

“Okay,” he said quietly, and he kissed her sooty pink head.

A gas lamp sputtered unhappily beside him, casting his features into shadowy relief. His silhouette mimicked him haughtily on the brick wall, fastidiously carving out his strong features. The light flickered uncertainly over his work; he had to use his crimson eye to see properly.

Kakashi bent over the table, his hands flying as he fiddled with the machine. He would never admit it to Sakura, but she had jammed it well. Two important cogs were wedged against each other in a grinding impasse; it looked like he might have to resort to brute force to separate them.

He dabbed at the jammed gears with an oil-soaked cloth, hoping to coax them apart diplomatically. His efforts seemed futile, though. The niche was too tight to force in the clumsy cloth.

Irritably he sighed. He leaned back in the chair, forcing his shoulders back out of their hunch with a series of cracks. What a frustrating business. He let the Sharingan fall shut in a hope for some reprieve from his pounding headache.

A door creaked open and the floorboards whined with footsteps. He didn’t bother to look around; he knew it was Sakura.

She stopped behind his chair, her hands falling lightly to his shoulders. Her thumbs eased his collar out of the way, giving her access to his bare neck. He let out a small hiss as she pressed down into the knots there.

“It’s late,” she whispered for no reason save the darkness. “You should come to bed.”

There was guilt in her voice, but despite his frustration with what she had done to the machine, he could not bring himself to blame her for it. It wasn’t the first mistake either of them had made, especially not when it came to this rotten machine.

But not rotten, he had to remind himself. This ugly pile of scrap metal was their only hope.

He closed his other eye as she massaged his neck. A mechanical hum underscored the otherwise thick silence. All of the windows were boarded up in their tiny hole of an apartment, isolating them in their own pocket of rebellion.

Sakura pressed her lips to his silver hair in a gentle kiss. Her fingers continued to work at his neck and shoulders as she kissed him again, trailing a line of kisses down to the ticklish shell of his ear.

“Mm,” he mumbled incoherently, half annoyed and half pleased. “I’m working, you know.”

Her hand found the top button of his shirt, slipping it out of its slit with expert speed and then snaking down his chest. He groaned appreciatively in spite of himself, sighing heavily as he let his head fall back against her chest.

She pulled her head away from his to look down at him. His mismatched eyes crossed as he looked up at her mischievously.

“Sakura?” he asked, sounding like a little boy anticipating his treat.

A pink eyebrow arched in response. He took it as encouragement and continued, “It’s a pity that we couldn’t take Icha Icha with us, you know.”

She pursed her lips. He was smiling, but it still wasn’t nice to be reminded of the things they’d left behind. “Not really,” she said, her hands resuming their massage. “It deserved to burn.”

She expected him to pout, but his grin only widened.

“You used to like them,” he insisted. “Don’t you remember when we would act out page ninety-”

“No,” she lied stubbornly. Of course she remembered - pages ninety to ninety-four had been particularly creative - but she preferred not to indulge him.

“That’s a pity,” he hummed, still looking up at her, eyes crossed from the awkward angle. He winked at her with the Sharingan. “I can refresh your memory, though…”

“Well…” She worked absently at the next button down, loosening it to let his shirt part farther down his chest. “That depends.”

He waited with bated breath.

“Are we talking about Icha Icha Paradise or Icha Icha Tactics?”

Kakashi pretended to scoff. “Paradise, of course,” he said. “Page ninety-two of Tactics just has some boring political intrigue. Page ninety-two of Paradise, on the other hand, has the…”

“I remember,” she said wryly. “But I’m not sure I want to go that far in such a dingy place as this… it’s so icky.”

He laughed, and her fingers traced the vibrations along his chest.

“The bed’s not so bad,” he said fairly. She shook her head at him, saying nothing. After a thoughtful silence, he added, “But if you would rather not, we can take a more conservative approach, say… page thirty-four?”

“I don’t know, we’re pretty tired…”

“At least give me a page eleven of Violence.”

She sighed. “Fine,” she conceded. “But! My condition is that you have to stop requesting triple digits, period. We just can’t risk doing those sorts of things in public places.”

“I know, I know,” he said. He was well aware of her policy on anything past page one hundred. “Besides, there was only one time I really tried a page one-twelve.”

Chuckling, she patted him on the shoulders. “Come on,” she said, stepping away from the chair so he could pull out. “Page eleven of Paradise it is.”

He followed her gladly to the bedroom. The machine sat alone on the table, where the lamplight danced across its tarnished pieces.

Snow pirouetted loftily in the swaying breeze, landing on outstretched tongues as wet pinpricks. That is, landing seemingly on every tongue but Sakura’s.

“Urgh!” she seethed, retracting her tongue into the warmth of her mouth. “I’m terrible at catching snowflakes.”

“That’s the terrible thing about snowflakes,” Kakashi ruminated, scratching idly at his face. He tugged up his scarf to sit snugly on the bridge of his nose. “They come to everyone but you.”

He turned his gaze to the streets below them. From on top of their brick building they could see stretches of winding stone roads, cobbled together from mismatched bricks that stuck out in places. The cities of Iron Country were full of roads like these. It was a very different country from the more traditional Fire; to fit in, Kakashi and Sakura had had to purchase the most bizarre clothes. (Sakura would never stop teasing him about the top hat that never fit over his hair.)

Sakura cast an absent glance towards the empty streets. As usual, there was nothing of interest there: only smog and brick. Instead she turned back to Kakashi, an odd mix of excitement and anxiety in her eyes. “Shall we practice, then?” she proposed.

He nodded gruffly and raised his hands. The fingertips of his gloves had long since worn away; they reminded Sakura of the gloves he used to wear in Konoha, but these didn’t have the robust metal protectors of old. They were simply woven of thin black cloth.

“Rat,” he said hoarsely, and in unison he and Sakura covered their index and middle fingers with the other hand. “Ox.” This time two fingers in the middle came down over the others. “Tiger.” Fingers met in a steeple.

Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Ram, Monkey, Bird, Dog, Boar. As Kakashi named each hand seal they formed it, running through the seals in a practiced rhythm. No chakra was channeled to give the seals power; they were merely performing the routine. It had started out as something to do when they were bored with surveillance duty. Then they thought that perhaps they should do it regularly so that they wouldn’t forget.

Not that they could ever, ever forget.

After they had cycled through the signs, Sakura yawned into her mitten. Two pink baubles dangled from the wrist. “So boring,” she complained.

Kakashi said nothing. He was staring intently at a fixed point on the street below; she surmised that he was probably mulling over how to fix her stupid mistake with that stupid machine.

She had really been trying to help yesterday, she reflected glumly. She had thought that perhaps, with her superb chakra control, she could perfect the frequency they had been trying for months to accomplish… And then their months of hiding out would have come to something, and they could leave this horrible limbo and…

Her lip trembled. Sometimes it just felt so damn hopeless.

“Sakura,” he said suddenly, an edge to her voice she hadn’t heard in months. “Do you see that down there?”

“Hm?” She peered over the edge, squinting down at the street below. It was difficult to see through the smog of the nearby factories.

“There.” Kakashi dared to point at the spot on the road.

She followed his finger, staring unseeingly for a few moments before her mouth rounded in a gasp.

There was only one person she knew with the gall to bare his abs in winter.

“But…” She turned to Kakashi, her rosy face stricken with disbelief. “It can’t be…”

“He’s got his chakra signature,” Kakashi said. His excitement was poorly masked. “His chakra was always strange, since he used ink…”

Emotion leapt in Sakura’s heart. She felt giddy. After endless months, even years of waiting, for them to finally see a familiar person…

Before Kakashi could stop her, she impulsively sent chakra surging to her feet and launched herself off the building. The only man in the street paused in his walk to see the bundled up woman careening through the air to land squarely in front of him.

A cloud of powdered snow flurried up at her feet. The man in front of her stepped back cautiously; he wore a balaclava that swathed his face in anonymity, but his identity was still unmistakable.

He was raising his arms to make a jutsu, but before he could act Sakura tore her hat from her head and threw it to the ground, letting her pink hair fall out unhindered.

“Sai,” she said softly. “It’s Sakura.”

He froze. A long minute of silence passed, padded by the falling snow. Finally, he lowered his arms. “Sa…kura?”

She attacked him in a fierce hug. He stumbled backwards a little; Sakura squeezed him tightly, rocking back and forth in her excitement.

Sai patted her awkwardly on the back. “You know I am not good with hugs…”

She kissed the thick cloth covering his cheek. “I can’t believe it’s you,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut and grinning against his shoulder.

There was a soft thud as Kakashi landed on the street behind her, walking up to the embracing pair. Leaning to one side with a hand in his pocket, he watched them with a bemused smile. Sakura refused to relinquish Sai, whose black eyes stared out helplessly at Kakashi through the holes in his balaclava.

“Wow,” Sai wheezed. His voice was strained from the prolonged hug. “Not only are you uglier than I remembered, but I can’t breathe so you must be even fatter.”

Suddenly Sai had fallen hard onto the street, Sakura was brandishing her mittened fist above him, and Kakashi was laughing. He crossed over and lent Sai a hand, clapping him on the back once he had gotten to his feet. “Long time no see,” he said in a low voice.

Sai nodded, looking at Sakura with bewilderment in his black eyes. “I was not expecting this,” he said with his usual bald honesty. Sakura lowered her fist and smiled fondly at him.

“Come on,” she beckoned. “Let’s go somewhere warmer.”

Instead of going through the roof, the three of them walked together to the front of the apartment building. Kakashi wrenched open the thick metal door, holding it open as Sakura and Sai retreated into the dark hall. It shut with a loud thud, leaving them in a muffled, wooden hall.

“This way,” Sakura directed, and she led the way up the stairs. They were steep and wooden, creaking with every step of their dripping boots. Sakura kept glancing over her shoulder as if to check that Sai were really there.

As they marched up the stairs, Kakashi glanced out the grubby windows that passed them by. Thick smog hung in the air of the city, but few people were out as it was some national holiday. He could just make out the narrow smokestacks cutting through the gloomy sky. This country of iron and smoke was so different from his home.

They finally reached the top floor. Kakashi stepped to the forefront of their trio, reaching a hand into the interior of his coat to fish the key from a concealed pocket. His hands trembled as he turned it in the lock.

Sakura ushered Sai into the apartment and went immediately to the sink, turning the hot water knob at full blast. “I can’t believe you were walking out in the snow with your stomach exposed like that,” she said, grabbing a cloth to hold under the water once it warmed up. Her tone was scolding, but she was beaming.

Sai, however, paid her no mind. His attention was immediately drawn to the table that took up most of the space… or rather, the machine on top of it.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing unnecessarily at the contraption.

Kakashi and Sakura exchanged looks. Then Kakashi cleared his throat and said, “Well, it’s a pretty long story… You might want to sit down.”

Sai obliged, pulling up the chair at the table itself. He pulled the balaclava from his face, rumpling his jet-black hair. He didn’t seem to mind, though, focusing intently on Kakashi.

The Copy Ninja leaned back against a cluttered countertop, eyeing the machine thoughtfully. “It’s a communication device,” he said. “It’s very experimental, though, so we haven’t been able to manage much communication yet.”

Sai turned to appraise the machine curiously. “Communication?”

“Yes.” He glanced over at Sakura, who was holding the washcloth beneath the faucet. The water was beginning to steam. “Ideally, it’s meant to send out a chakra signal specifically to Konoha shinobi. Every shinobi has their unique signature, as you know, but their genetics play a role in it… So broadly speaking, there are certain patterns in the signature that are regionally specific. In theory, all Konoha ninja will have somewhat similar chakra.”

Sakura crossed the room quickly, handing the hot washcloth to Sai. “For your stomach,” she explained. He took the cloth and held it to his abdominals; the water dripped down his white skin.

“So what does this machine do?” Sai asked as Sakura settled herself on the floor.

Kakashi sighed. “Well, the idea is that we can attune this machine to that particular Konoha frequency of chakra and send a… message to everyone with it. Nothing like words, but more of…” He scratched his neck self-consciously. “It’s difficult to explain, but if we got the machine to work, what we would do is send a certain frequency of chakra through it that would reach anyone who had those patterns in their chakra- and we would send the frequency of that particular Konoha pattern.”

Sai swished the wet cloth around on his belly. “What would happen when people receive this… communication?” he asked.

Kakashi laughed shakily. “Well, seeing as it’s never worked yet, we don’t know for sure,” he admitted. His ears were red from a combination of the cold and anxiety. “But we think that we’d be able to make it clear just by sending this ‘message’ that there are still other Konoha refugees out there… That there are people who haven’t given up.”

Sai nodded thoughtfully. Sakura was quiet on the floor, her eyes boring sightlessly into the wooden boards. “I see… But how did you find out about this chakra pattern and communication?”

Kakashi gave his scarred eyelid a rueful tap. “When things were… looking bad, I memorized as many of the secret scrolls as I could. Rifling through the knowledge I memorized revealed this little gem… But this is ancient jutsu we’re talking about. We have no idea how well it could work, or if it could even work… The closest we’ve got is sending each other flashes of our own chakra signatures.”

“It definitely works when we do that,” Sakura chimed in. “Like when Kakashi has it attuned to his chakra frequency, and he sends it out to my frequency, I get a flash of… just him.” She could not find a more eloquent way to put it.

Sai nodded in solemn comprehension. Quietly, he said, “I wish that I could say that the time I have spent on the run has been so fruitful. I have never encountered any Konoha refugees coming up with something as concrete at this…”

Kakashi smiled sadly at their metal heap of hope. “It’s the best we’ve got,” he said, and he sounded like he was a hundred years old.

This Way To Up In Smoke Part Two