our mouth is glorious (Naruto, Hatake Kakashi/Mitarashi Anko)

[eoa]

Title: our mouth is glorious
Fandom: Naruto
Pairing/Characters: Hatake Kakashi/Mitarashi Anko
Rating: T
Content Notes: None.
Prompt: 2nd, Hatake Kakashi & Mitarashi Anko, fragile smile.

Disliked, hurt and volatile, Anko was placed into ANBU after Orochimaru’s defection.

It was a smart choice – the Sandaime wanted to keep an eye on her, but knew better than to pull her off the active roster for he knew better than to allow a shinobi to go bored and stir-crazy. With what kind of information about Orochimaru’s research surfaced after his defection, she couldn’t be kept in Research and Development either, and while that hurt (she may have been taught by the man, but she wasn’t him), Anko took it in stride.

Or at least, she thought she did. But when the Commander presented her the mask that would be hers – Snake, the blood-red kanji on its inner side said – she didn’t tamp down her wave of killing intent quickly enough.

“Adding insult to injury?” she snarled at the man, holding the offending item.

“It wasn’t my choice,” the Commander huffed, hands raised up placatingly. After a moment of silence, he finished what he was saying before, “You’ll meet your assigned partner tomorrow at nine sharp, training field forty-one. For now, you won’t be placed on a team, but that may change in the future.”

Anko nodded, half-satistied; she would’ve preferred being solo, but she wouldn’t reject what she was handed by the hand that fed her. Dismissed with naught a gesture, she left, though she wandered the Headquarters for sometime more; she still had to get her uniform fitted.

 

* * *

 

She came just a minute late, but her partner still made her eat dirt over it. Still, when he offered her a hand to get up from the ground, catching the breath he’d knocked out of her, Anko took it.

She couldn’t help a comment, though. “How hypocritical of you, Hatake.”

“Who’s that?” the bastard tilted his head in question. Like this, with his Hound mask on, she couldn’t read his expression at all. “Doesn’t matter,” he shrugged, “What matters, though, is your abhorrent taijutsu.”

“It works!” Anko refutted, pouting under her mask.

“True enough, but it won’t when you dislocate a limb with that careless form,” Hatake—Hound, she reminded herself, said. “We’ll work on it,” he added, more of a threat than a promise. “The sooner you’re getting better, the sooner I’ll get you off my back.”

“Fair enough,” Anko agreed, though she didn’t need such training – thanks to her body modifications (only some of which were a courtesy of Orochimaru), dislocating a limb was near-impossible. But standards were standards, she supposed; the thought didn’t linger long for she noticed how Hound’s hands locked up and smirked under her mask. “But I’m not the only one lacking in some area. You seriously didn’t notice I poisoned you until now?”

“Anti...dote,” he hissed at her through his soon-to-be useless voice chords as he toppled over.

Anko caught him, of course, and administered the antidote easily enough, but she couldn’t help mocking her superior all the while. “Tst-tst, how careless of you, taichou,” said she, as saccharine as an artificial sweetener. As she returned the vial of antidote to her kit, and sealed all of it behind, she added, “This’ll still take a while, you know.”

In seven painful minutes – not for Anko, though; she wasn’t the one who slowly regained control of her limbs with all the static buzzing that meant – Hound got up, slowly, carefully; testing the waters. That was when Anko broke the silence that reigned between them until then.

“You know, I could’ve looked under your mask, like that,” she clicked her fingers and his own, dark eye dilated in anger at the realisation, “if I wanted to. More so, I could’ve done so many worse things than that.”

“But you didn’t,” he responded, hollow; he knew what she would say to that.

She played along the script. “An enemy-nin would.”

 

* * *

 

They fell into a comfortable routine after that; barring the weekends, they trained for anywhere between one to four hours every day and went on three to four missions weekly. Their assignments were rather simple and straightforward; neither of their skillets were much specialised, so they were mostly sent on assassination, track-and-pursue or reconnaissance missions with the occasional short-term infiltration or exfiltration.

In fact, Anko was rather surprised (and wary) at how smoothly everything was going for her. Of course, just when she brushed aside her wariness after a month and half of such peaceful existence, telling herself that she would only call something down on herself with it, that was when things went downhill.

It was supposed to be routine, as easy as breathing; sneak in, kill someone close enough in body build to the person they were exfiltrating, use their body as a replacement for their comrade, burn down the place and the body, get out. This wasn’t their first time, nor their second, but they would learn that third time isn’t necessarily lucky.

The first bad omen was that the place they would be exfiltrating Konoha’s agent from was Kiri, of all places. Both of them disliked the place, though for different reasons, but they just made a wordless agreement to finish the mission as soon as possible.

Anko, carrying Hound slumped over her shoulder, hoped that the mission wouldn’t finish them. She wasn’t sure what substance the shinobi chasing them poisoned him with, but she was pretty sure she knew and had just the thing Hound needed to survive until she got anywhere close to a medic-nin.

The sea was treacherous enough to run on when they entered Kiri, and it’s currents didn’t slow down since; Anko realised that their pursuers were gaining ground on them and soon would be upon them and cursed – loudly and with feeling. She changed track towards a nearby island; she wouldn’t give her enemy the benefit of fighting on their element. She dropped Hound’s body behind her next to a cliff by the shore and turned around just in time to deflect the hail of senbon one of the five Kiri-nin sent towards them.

She took care not to allow any of the senbon to scratch her; that was how Hound ended up how he was, after all. She vaguely heard him retching behind her and winced in sympathy.

“You aren’t the only ones who can use poison, you know,” Anko stalled as the shinobi stalked closer to the two of them. She attempted to look her worst – like she was already beaten and simply making a last stand; she huffed and puffed and made a show of reaching to her almost empty weapons pouch on her thigh.

The wind was in her favour. She needed to move, now.

She directed five senbon at the shinobi’s vital parts. Only one found its mark, but that didn’t matter; all the senbon were was a mere distraction.

As she threw the senbon, her other hand found the wax-packet of ground wolfsbane in her pocket and carefully opened it up. The wind did all the work for her; the deadly dust fell on the shinobi before her sooner than they could’ve realised what she’d done. Anko watched as their bodies convulsed, their hearts calling quits on them.

She threw the wax-packet aside and focused on Hound. She didn’t know how much atropine she ought to administer, but she supposed that half the lethal dose would be a good start. If he survived until they made it to mainland, she would give him a second such dose.

Anko sighed. She came to like the man, despite all his faults.

“Don’t die on me,” she told his worsening form as she administered her injection of a bullshitted antidote to an even shittier nerve agent.

 

* * *

 

It was a miracle he would live, the med-nin said, and Anko couldn’t help but agree. When she came to Konoha, she brought someone closer to a corpse than a person on her back.

She was shooed away after that, to let the med-nin do her work in peace, and given a perfunctory once-over before being discharged. As far as injuries went, she had none; some scratches and bruises and a minor case of chakra exhaustion, but that was about it. Really, even despite the fact that the person they were supposed to be exfiltrating turned out to be already dead and replaced by a Kiri-nin waiting to ambush his supposed comrades, Anko would’ve called it a success hadn’t Hound been poisoned.

Discharged, Anko went home to her apartment. She showered, ate and went to sleep; the mission report could wait.

The next day, she decided to visit Hatake in the hospital. For both his, hers and the medic-nin’s sake, she hoped he hadn’t yet wormed his way out of that place.

On the way to the hospital, she stopped by the Yamanaka’s flower shop (and since when did she care enough to be bringing the bastard flowers?). Anko made chit-chat with Inoichi manning the counter – a rare sight, and when she at last asked for what she wanted, he raised an eyebrow. “Deadly nightshade? Why, if I may ask?”

“A teammate got poisoned and atropine was the antidote, so I thought it fitting,” Anko shrugged. “What, is it bad luck to bring it as a hospital bouquet?”

Inoichi laughed. “Not necessarily, it’s just... untraditional, I guess.” With a gesture, he excused himself and went to back of the flower shop. As he brought a few snapped stems of nighthade and arranged it into a bouquet together with some lilies, he commented, “I heard you’re working with Hatake.” When Anko didn’t respond to this – after all, he hadn’t asked her anything, Inoichi asked her outright, “Is this for him?”

Anko hummed, and responded with a question of her own. “Why the lilies? I hadn’t asked for those.”

A spark of mischief burned in Inoichi’s eyes as he answered, “They fit together and bring visual interest.”

“Sure, sure,” Anko muttered as money and bouquet exchanged owners, “I can see that you’re plotting some miscommunication with the flowers, but you’re lucky that I woke up on the right side of the bed today and am above such things. Bye.”

The receptionist at the hospital told her Hatake’s room number with the spirit-raising words, “He should be there if he hasn’t yet escaped.” Anko still thanked her.

She didn’t bother knocking when she entered his room. He seemed to be asleep but she was more-or-less sure he pretended to be so she would leave him alone.

“If you’re not feeling like socialising, fair enough,” Anko said in place of a greeting as she filled the empty vase at the man’s bedside with water and placed the bouquet there. “Still, some gratitude would be appreciated. I sort of saved your life there, y’know? More because of a lucky guess than anything,” a lie: she knew what to do in case of such a nerve agent because she experienced it herself as one of Orochimaru’s many lessons; “but the result’s the same, isn’t it? Though you’ll probably spit on it when you leave this place before they’ll even be contemplating your discharge. Why do you hate it so much, anyhow?”

Anko didn’t recognise herself when she stayed next to Hatake, talking to him for some half an hour more about nothing at all – her conversation with Inoichi at the flower shop, the mission report she had yet to write, how terrible he looked when she brought him to Konoha...

When Anko at last left, half-convinced the man was actually asleep, she didn’t notice the smile playing at his lips because of the surgical mask the nurses gave him.

 

* * *

 

Anko didn’t think that her words about not running away from the hospital as soon as he could walk would work on Hatake, but it seemed like they did; they resumed their normal schedule only after he has been discharged from the hospital, a week after that disastrous mission. This also corresponded with Anko’s full recovery from her chakra exhaustion, which left her easily tired and staying in during that week.

Her greatest success was going to the grocery shop and making enough stir-fry to last her the entire week. By the end of the week, she was so sick of it that only force of will got her through the last plate – her breakfast before she headed out to meet Hatake for training.

(And no, she still hadn’t filed their mission report.)

Her partner greeted her with a simple, “Thanks, I guess. For saving my life.”

His simultaneous sincerity and lack thereof caught Anko unprepared, but she didn’t comment on it. She also had days when she thought she oughtn’t be alive. “Nothing big,” she shrugged, “Just teammates being teammates.”

They left it at that and agreed to spar (taijutsu and genjutsu only, no poisons) after their warm-up.

Anko was surprised and worried at how Hound’s aim had worsened; still, a spar was a spar, and she took advantage of that fact by applying a rather simple touch-relayed genjutsu when she countered his elbow aiming for her armpit. It was basically the opposite of the Hell-Viewing Technique, showing the affected what their subconscious desired the most in that moment.

Even more unexpected and worrying was how long it took Hound to break the technique. Anko didn’t even need his raised hand to know their spar was finished. Just as she was about to apologise (what was she even thinking, using that technique on someone so throughoutly traumatised?), Hound raised his head up and stared at her, not seeing her, for a moment, before clearing his throat and saying, “I think I need some target practice more than anything else currently. Feel free to—”

Anko rolled her eyes. “I’m staying. I could do with some evasion practise as much as anything else. I haven’t moved further than the bathroom in an entire week, anything’s better than that.”

Nothing notable happened during their training after that until the end. Hound was stretching out his back while Anko carefully picked some of the poison ivy growing on the the trunk of one of the training ground’s trees, her hands coated in a protective layer of chakra. She put the plant in a plastic bag and sealed that behind, planning to make a tincture out of it.

She wanted to ask Hound why he was still there – typically, he would be long gone – but she told herself it was none of her business. Maybe he was meeting someone here after their training. Anko was moving to leave and get herself some take-out when she was interrupted by Hound’s words.

It took her a moment to process what he said. “You are inviting me for lunch at a restaurant of my choice?” she asked, deadpan. She couldn’t have heard right; Hatake was synonymous with stinginess.

He nodded and Anko stared. At last, she grinned mischievously under her mask, “I think I know just the place...”

 

* * *

 

The place turned out to be a bar, not a restaurant, but Anko argued that since they served food as well, it counted. Hatake would cover the meal and after Anko ordered a round of shots for them as well, it was decided that she would pay for the alcohol.

Anko ended up leaving a small fortune there all the while Kakashi – yes, they got to a first-name relationship somewhere between round four and eight – laughed his ass off at her dismayed expression at the sum. By the time they stumbled out of the establishment it was evening. As Anko loudly considered if going home was worth it – the nightclubs would soon be opening in no time at all, after all – Hatake said he had a better idea.

A drunken and stumbling shunshin to his place later, the two familiarised themselves with the other’s body. An admittedly unlikely pair, one that never came out as such, yet they saw each other even for years to come.