#who doesn't love puppies? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ikemenomegas · 2 years ago

Note

Kakashi, Young

Kakashi is quietly panicking on many levels, springing over rooftops, scanning them and the ground below.

Konoha was a big village.

Pakkun was a very, very, small dog.

He'd known that going into the exercise, but Pakkun insisted. An unwilling part of him grudgingly admitted that he was probably owed some of the stubbornness.

It was still a stupid decision to let a seven pound pug try and run on the rooftops.

"It's not like you could have known," Rin pointed out, as though she had read his mind.

She loved the puppies and while he had initially been resistant to it, he was glad to have her around now.

"Bisuke was about the same size when he started training with you, and Pakkun is already faster. I'm sure he's fine."

"If he was fine, he would have already found us," Kakashi replied.

Rin fell silent.

He felt a little bad, but Pakkun had never failed a tracking exercise before. The only thing he could figure was that adding a restriction to rooftop travel alone had resulted in some kind of incident.

"We should split up --"

"No," Rin interrupted. "What if he's still looking for us? Splitting the scents won't help."

She was right, and he sighed.

-- Across the village --

"Are you sure it's this way?"

You'd always suspected part of the reasons the village shinobi stayed on the roofs wasn't just to keep out of the way of civilians.

Confined to the ground yourself and with a little passenger in tow, it was very clear that the two of you were getting lost.

"I'm sure," growled the little pug. "Put me down. I'll find the boss on my own."

You looked skeptically at the bandage you'd wrapped around his back leg and then quickly away when he twisted his ears back.

You looked up into the sky, maybe this "boss" would find you two before you found them. In the mean time, the pug was cute. So cute. Too cute. Especially when he wrinkled his wrinkly little nose and growled at you like that.

"No way," you say, turning in the direction the little pug is still facing. "That leg needs to be treated. Are you sure you don't want me to take you too the hospital instead? Or maybe the Inuzuka compound?"

The puppy's little whine almost breaks your heart. You really wish that you could get up on the roofs too, but walking around with your crutches hoisted over your shoulder so you can carry him is really about all you can do right now.

"Left," he says sulkily, as you trail down yet another narrow street.

"At least put me over your shoulder," he grumbles finally, when your right leg shakes again, protesting the weight placed on it too early.

You pause, admittedly tired, but putting the dog on your shoulder seems a bit unstable.

You put him gently down on top of a barrel and shrug out of your jacket. It's a bit of maneuvering to make it into a serviceable sling but you do actually try to pay attention in the academy's survival classes so it doesn't take that long.

The dog seems much more comfortable in it while you click down the street at a slightly more even keel.

"By the way, what's your name?"

The dog is silent for so long you look down at him. He's swinging his head to-and-fro to catch whatever scent he has you tracking.

"What's yours?" he asks, gruff.

When you give it, he tells you to turn left again.

"I'm Pakkun," he says finally.

"It's nice to meet you, Pakkun."

He just humphs and tells you to turn right.

"Are you sure you're ok--"

The dog, Pakkun you remind yourself, glares at you.

"-kay with the sling?" you quickly tried to cover.

Pakkun grumbled and then told you to pause. "It's fine," he said. "You're in the academy, right? We need to go west."

You dared to stick a hand in the sling to pat Pakkun's back. "That's probably easier than trying to navigate the alleys. Just let me know if you loose the trail."

Pakkun tensed under your hand so you withdrew. Ninken weren't like normal dogs and this dog wasn't like a normal ninken.

"Maybe if we get to a more open area your boss will be able to see us better?"

"Just keep walking," he muttered so you did, making your slow way west. It took you a moment to figure out that the little thump at the edge of your ribs was probably what you'd feel getting hit by a little wagging tail.

Pakkun was right. It was easier to simply head in the right direction without having to decide which exact path was right.

It also so happened that you could head west and south a bit and end up passing the hospital, which is probably where you would look if you ever lost a teeny tiny ninken after he'd tumbled off a roof.

A cold nose touched the tip of your finger as you neared the end of a wood area.

"Wait."

The rest of Pakkun's adorable head followed, his soft puppy fur brushing your wrist.

Kidnapping, erm dognapping, wasn't exactly a crime in the ninja world as long as you didn't get caught and the dog was willing, right? If you told Pakkun how adorable he was maybe he'd let you dognap him just once a month... you and your teammate stole things from one another all the time. It was good training in tracking.

Light as air, a boy with grey hair and a mask landed in front of you, hands in his pockets.

Your eyes widened in surprise and you leaned back a bit on your crutches, stabilizing Pakkun with a hand on his very soft chest when he nearly leaned out of the sling.

The boy glanced at you with a dark, unreadable eyes before looking back down at the dog.

"Hey boss," the pug said, half sheepish, half grumble, but you could feel his curly little tail again.

A second later, a girl with short brown hair landed behind the boy.

"Pakkun!" she exclaimed, "what a relief."

He grunted. "This," he looked up at you, half lidded eyes still skeptical as he said your name, "found me."

This?

The girl came forward, which seemed weird since the dog clearly belonged with the boy, but she was also more patient as you rearranged the crutches and lifted the sling over your head.

"I found him limping, so I bound the leg, but I think he needs a healer."

Pakkun glared at you and you shrugged sheepishly. Just because ninja were trained to hide injuries in the field didn't mean you should hide them among allies.

"Pakkun! You should have gone directly here. What's with the trail we picked up behind the west side scrap iron shop?" The girl scolded, already unwrapping your jacket, her hands burning green.

You blinked in surprise, "You're a healer?"

"Mhm," she said, immediately distracted. You looked up at the boy to see him standing in a way that seemed a guarding position and then stepped back to look at the scene properly.

Both of them had their hitae-ate, so they'd probably seen battle already.

Pakkun had his leg extended as the girl moved her hand around it. Even though you wouldn't exactly be able to fight like you were used to with your leg the way it was, or really needed to in the village, you sharpened your awareness too, paying attention to what was going on around you instead of with her healing, even though you would have preferred to watch.

Out of the corner of your eye, you saw the boy glance at you and one shoulder sag back into a more relaxed position.

"Okay," the girl stood up, wiping sweat from her brow. She picked Pakkun up with one arm and offered him to the boy, who finally took back the dog with what seemed an intentional lack of expression, and then gave back your jacket.

"Thank you for finding him," she said. "We were getting really worried."

The boy turned his body away in a way you were sure was meant to convey that he was both done with this conversation and had not been worried, but his fingers were already buried in Pakkun's short fur, checking over the girl's work.

"Ka-"

A boy with orange goggles and spiky black hair all but fell from the tree behind you.

You tumbled back, wincing from the noise, although the girl seemed unperturbed.

"Where were you," she immediately changed tack to launch into the familiar chiding tones of someone who had said this exact same thing before. "We already found Pakkun."

The new boy rubbed the back of his head, "I think I followed that weird trail through the alleyways. You know they took three lefts?"

You barely covered a cough of laughter but the ninken's sharp ears, and apparently the grey haired kid's too, picked it up enough for Pakkun to send you another twist-eared look. The boy, you thought, might be similarly embarrassed, although he stood so stiffly he was doing a decent job of hiding it.

The dark haired boy and the girl were standing shoulder to shoulder, the way old friends often did. She glanced once at the other boy and then seemed to somehow resign herself.

"Anyways, thank you," she said with a kind smile. "See you around sometime."

And then they were turning away, bantering back and forth in a familiar rhythm as they took to the trees and were gone.

"I'm want to go through a few of the boxes today, is that okay?"

Kakashi clearly didn't want to leave your still-new home and you didn't want him to go, but he had some sort of clan meeting to go to. And Tsunade had been on your ass about making him.

Unfortunately, this was the kind of thing he couldn't be late for.

He sagged further into his flak jacket collar, which for someone so tall shouldn't make him appear cute but it did.

"It's fine," he murmured, looking around at the scattered boxes of stuff you'd dragged from his home when he'd made it clear that he wanted to start doing something about the mess of his clan's records. He really had let it pile up over the years. "Are you sure you don't mind?"

You grinned, showing just a little too much teeth, "I keep hoping to find some more pictures of you as a kid. I want to have evidence so you'll believe me when I say how adorable you are."

He looked down at the ground and sighed. "Well good luck. There weren't many of those to begin with."

Carefully, so he had time to pull away, you wrapped your arms around him. He didn't return the embrace but he did nuzzle against the scent gland under your jaw and seemed brighter when he straightened up.

"Well I'm off. Have... fun."

There was no intentionally audible sound of his stepping away so you figured he had probably used a shunshin. He had been understandably territorial after the move, taking circuitous routes to get here and back and concealing himself more than usual until the new space had finally started to smell of the two of you again.

You moved toward a promising looking box, Guruko padding through the maze behind you.

It wasn't Kakashi's fault really. A lot of the village's smaller clan records had been made into an absolute chaos when the Kyubi had attacked and fairly interval attempts on the village infrastructure hadn't really slowed down from there. The fact that Kakashi had mostly kept things from his old house packed away in boxes had likely been what kept it from being literally tangled into a hopeless mess.

The box you chose had worn edges, more than some of the others, and you sat down cross legged to slowly sort through the documents.

In a corner, about halfway down, was another smaller box. It was also half-squashed given that it wasn't all the way full, but all that padding had kept the treasure inside near pristine.

You purred to the empty room with delight when your mate's face, younger than even in his genin photo, appeared at the top of the stack.

There were a lot of shinobi in the village and there was a lot of your mate that you would never know because for a long time you hadn't known him. In that way you envied Asuma and Kurenai. Theirs was the kind of romance you'd dreamed of as a kid. They knew everything about one another because they'd lived so much of it.

Kakashi told you things, if you asked, but he was used to keeping his silence, pushing the past as far into the dark as possible, and you didn't often know what to ask about. He preferred to talk about you, but you adored him and wanted to reciprocate that interest.

It made you proud how far he'd come since you first started sharing glances across the room, back when you were the new person being pulled into the orbit of people Kakashi associated with over dango and stories of stupid choices made during promotion tests.

At least one of the photos was obviously an academy school photo, plane background and your mate in an incredibly nerdy little scarf.

A lot of the other photos were later, and equally cutely, of the pack as puppies.

Some of them had clearly been captured by an inexpert hand, the picture blurred with laughter as Kakashi tried not to trip on a very excited young Shiba, and a cute girl, Rin you knew, carefully wrapping Uhei's paw while Pakkun watched.

You frowned at the photo, something tickling the back of your memories.

A few more pictures gave you that same feeling, including a picture of Kakashi and Pakkun alone, looking comically similar with their half-lidded expressions and awkward postures, clearly being forced to try and pose.

You knew Pakkun now of course and it was obviously him, but something about that picture seemed awfully familiar.

Guruko wagged his tail when he asked you to find one of him and you couldn't refuse so together you dug through the box. There were even the dogs' first collars in a sturdier wooden box under a few old papers that looked like academy assignments.

You were still in it, Guruko rolling around and telling you stories about training as pups, when Kakashi came back home.

Kakashi smiled fondly when both you and Guruko immediately rolled upright and went to him.

"Look what I found," you tugged his sleeve in excitement and pulled him to the couch and coffee table where you had carefully place the pictures. "I'm so glad these survived. Look at how little the ninken were. Look at you," you pointed to another slightly shaky picture that showed Bull and Uhei "playing" a game of tug of war where Bull had to do very little to win while Kakashi was clearly laughing in the background.

You didn't miss the slightly sad scent that began to cling to your mate or the way his fingers shook when you handed him the photo.

You leaned shoulder to shoulder and went quiet while he sifted through the pictures. Stored in the box as they had been, they didn't look nearly as old as they clearly were.

"Obito took these," he finally said, softly.

You should have guessed you suppose. There were far fewer pictures with the dark haired boy in it, and of those most were selfie like and cut off part of the person he was with or his own brightly smiling face.

They were youthful photos of a much different time.

You pressed a kiss to the back of your mate's hand and tried to hold onto some of the weight that settled all too easily on his shoulders.

You pressed gently on the scent gland at his wrist when he'd hit the vague edge of the limit you'd sort of agreed on for guilty pining, in the event you found some new memory of his he'd never shared before. You let a whine build in your chest, just enough to let him know you were getting worried, and he slumped over on you, pressing you into the couch with his whole weight.

It was a funny little thing he did that you weren't sure if he had learned from Bull or Bull from him. Usually it meant he was redirecting his stress into literally using his body to protect yours.

For now, you allowed it. You didn't like the implication of value there, but you also knew it soothed your mate in an important way. And he did let you gently tug him so he was more just laying on top of you and he could feel the rumbling purr you were making.

You rubbed circles into his back while he opened his one sharingan and perused the photos again.

When he got to the one that had stopped you before, you finally spoke, keeping your words to a low murmur.

"There's something weirdly familiar about that one, like I've seen it before."

You allowed yourself a little snicker when Kakashi held it up and that expression, which he still made but in a slightly less petulant way that still mirrored Pakkun's more committed sulks, came back into full view.

Your mate's mask had slipped as he sometimes rubbed his face against the juncture of your neck and shoulder and you could feel the tired quirk of his smile against your skin, the way he huffed a faint laugh.

He even gifted you with a little purr when you tugged your fingers through his thick, soft hair.

"He does still make that face."

You snorted and felt like the sun had lit up your chest when Kakashi chuckled.

Kakashi would have happily fallen into a doze like this, but neither of you were in the particular habit of napping, unfortunately. There were dogs to feed and yourself to feed, clothing to unpack, bedding to air out.

He swiped the photos off the table and back into their box, to be stowed away for now, but a few days later he gifted you the one of him and Pakkun in a new protective frame.

The others ninken of course saw it and slowly, gently, demanded that Kakashi find some of them too, claiming that the captain couldn't be the only one with a photo around the house.

Pakkun gave you a weird look when he caught sight of your staring at the photo one day, grinning to yourself and pushing away again that feeling like you were missing some detail in looking at it.

It hit you a week or so later when you were alone again, trying not to fret about your mate being out on what should be a relatively safe information retrieval mission. Others were busy and he'd wanted to go out for a while, so he'd gone and left Pakkun with you.

This reassured you he didn't think the mission would be that tough, but it also had the downside of having the little pug's judgemental little face watching you find things to do to distract yourself after your own work was already done for the day.

"What?" you finally asked him, after trying and failing to read a book. "You've been staring at me for days. Is there something I should know?"

"Do you really not remember?" Pakkun asked, skeptical and gruff.

You frowned and looked where he did, at the shelf where the photo was leaning.

"I--"

"I never forget a scent," Pakkun said somewhat haughtily.

You had all but memorized the picture yourself by now. Pakkun's wrinkled baby face. "No way."

One of his adorable little eyebrows raised.

You looked back at the photo.

"It was his decision start courting you-"

You amusedly decided not to bring up the reality which was less like courting and more like the local tomcat adopting you via a series of birds brought to your door.

"-so we didn't say anything, but I told them all you remembered."

"I've met you before!"

Pakkun's adorable little tail was starting to wag.

"But I don't remember where."

He slumped into a sulk.

"Sorry," you said, patting his head in apology and going into the kitchen to get him some ham.

"Hmph." He followed you anyways, toenails clicking on the wooden floor.

"It was a long time ago though. Maybe it'll come back to me."

He leapt onto the counter and grumbled some kind of vague agreement, taking the meat delicately from your fingers.

You leaned against the counter while he ate, looking around the apartment. Kakashi's discomfort was shared. Your mate could be away for days or weeks at a time when things were busy or something bad came to the mission desk.

Having a space you owned, that wouldn't be subject to change every few years, somewhere for him to come back to, had seemed like the right call.

It was the right call, you reminded yourself firmly. Both of you needed some kind of stability, if only to help Kakashi start to unravel years and years of avoiding a majority of physical and emotional attachments.

But the time it was taking to really make the apartment feel like home could be frustrating. You missed having Kakashi's scent just being around as a consequence of his frequent presence.

"Don't worry too much," Pakkun said, gnawing on the little bone in the center of the ham. "The Boss will be back before you know it."

Boss. Hmm.

You shook your head, "I suppose finally putting together some of the cabinets will make it easier to put things away. Want to learn how to use a hammer?"

Pakkun licked his lips and looked up at you. His steps were so light you almost couldn't feel them when he sprang up to drape on your shoulder.

"You know dogs don't have thumbs right?"

"That hasn't stopped you before."

Pakkun just huffed ham-scented breath into your face as you went into the bedroom.