Tianlong has always been a little strange, was even before she settled. She's the part of Kakashi that he pushes down and tries to hide, forces out of mind, and it puts them at odds.

Kakashi's never met anyone else who managed to set themselves at odds with their dæmon, but he's always been special like that.

She settles late—far later than Kakashi feels she should. No one ever has a concrete answer as to when or why dæmons settle, though most tend to think it has something to do with growing up and leaving childhood behind. But if that's the case, Kakashi can't understand why Tianlong doesn't settle when he's six years old, staring down at the body of his father in a pool of blood.

Surely, surely, after than he's left every bit of childishness and childlike behavior far behind him.

But instead, Tianlong keeps shifting, even though she favors the shape of a long, lean dragon over any other. She rarely deigns to perch anywhere on Kakashi, the way most dæmons do, and instead hovers in the air, circling and drifting like a piece of silk caught in the wind. Her scales shimmer a deep pearl-grey, warm and cool in the same moment, and the jewel on her chest glows like the full moon. People exclaim over her, speak in hushed whispers as they pass, because she's beautiful.

She's beautiful, and Kakashi has no idea why.

(Kakashi is thirteen when she shifts for the final time, grey-brown wolf to silver dragon, with Obito dead before him. The rocks close in with rumble that shakes Kakashi right down to his bones, and Tianlong screams, whirling up from four-legged form in a twisting death-dance, her cry rattling the stones. Something inside Kakashi screams with her, even as a blur of fiery color slams into his chest and he clutches at silken-soft feathers for the very first time. Fūraimatsu keens, high and hurt and desolate, and Kakashi wants to cry but can't.

He still doesn't understand, not the way he should, but—

There is no going back from this. There is no recovery, and no return to what they used to be.

Kakashi is used to grief, to pain. But somehow he still thinks that nothing has ever ached more than this final, definitive shift.)