Characters: Shizune, Kakashi
Summary: Attending to a man affected by Tsukuyomi was never something she was prepared for.
Pairings: KakaShiz
Author's Note: Dark, but dark is what I live for. With dark stuff I get to explore people.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

The new Hokage leaves in a sweep of drama and a gust of wind of belligerent confidence, pale gold hair catching the sunshine through the windows as she leaves. The very moment Tsunade is gone, Shizune is in.

Her sweeps and winds are different. She slides into the room like a sentient shadow, black linen rustling and plucking at her ankles like her yukata has a life of its own. Kakashi observes with mismatched eyes the nonexistent flash of white teeth from a toothless smile, her thin mouth a seam that never breaks. Shizune, Kakashi realizes, has mastered the art of smiling without really smiling.

He wonders when she learned to be false of her own will.

"Hello, Hatake-san." He would smile back, as falsely as her but he's just pulled his mask on and his jaw doesn't quite feel seamed on again just yet. "I'm not sure if you remember me."

"Of course I do."

She really is not very different from the nine-year-old girl Kakashi knew twelve years past. Still pale and pretty, desperately polite but awkward around people, as if she isn't quite sure how to behave. Wanting badly to fit in but never managing to. But she's different, too. All the soft lines have vanished from her narrow face; there's a gravity and a grimness hiding behind the friendliness in dark pools of sight.

Of course, not even a sentient memory of his childhood is the same as before.

"But I don't recall—" Kakashi's black eye fixes pale skin and the spinning one does not see at all; neither see the whole woman, just aspects of her appearance, light on ebony black hair, glimmer of lavender silk at the small waist "—you ever being so formal."

This, Shizune can plainly see, is an invitation to dispense with formality and slip back to childhood, if only for one facet of the whole picture.

"Alright, Kakashi." Her smile grows slightly and it's the first real thing he's seen all day. The light flashes off of a senbon entangled in her narrow obi and Kakashi is brought back to red light gleaming off of dull metal and water dripping onto the ground—no, no, that's not right, it's his blood, trickling down and off of the blade until it falls down Itachi's arm and into the water, lost, revived, stolen, recovered, erased…

Kakashi restrains a shudder as he groans and sits on the edge of the bed, searching with his eyes around the room—too white, too stark, too sterile, too familiar—for his shoes. "So, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?"

She starts without preamble. Kakashi remembers her as talkative but now even though Shizune seems to stay that way all superfluous words have been cut out of her sentences, primly with the sort of scissors that don't clip at corners. "Tsunade-sama has done all that she can for you physically; as she has a great deal to attend to I am to oversee your recovery from here on."

Tsunade hasn't told her.

Tsunade hasn't told her, because Tsunade doesn't know.

If Shizune really wants to see him "recover", she's about to step into the sort of world she was spared thanks to being too young for the last war that came down like a giant scythe to reap the earth. Kakashi eyes her and wonders if she, pale, talkative-quiet girl-woman, delicate with twitching fingers and masks of smiles, has the fortitude for that.

-0-

Shizune is struck hard by the sight of Kakashi for the first time in over ten years.

Tall and lean, no longer the little boy but a rangy, rawboned man, lanky and a little gaunt, two eyes, both uncovered which she suspects-know is a rare occurrence set far back in the hard-as-corundum sculpture he calls a face.

She wonders if she's been called here because Kakashi needs a psychological counselor, and not just a medic with green chakra and empty promises of life after this.

She sighs, counts numbers in her head and makes up her mind. If Kakashi needs a counselor, then he will have one; she knows how to be flexible. She knows how to crack her bones and rearrange them into unrecognizable shapes.

With the bone shape of a firm and unwavering medic, Shizune proceeds to arrange an appointment, and tells Kakashi in the sort of tone—vivid, sharp-as-senbon and ladled thick with threats—a schoolteacher takes with an unreliable young student that he'd best not be late or absent.

It will be a long time later before Shizune knows to be disturbed by how quickly Kakashi acquiesces.

-0-

"You were put under a genjutsu."

Shizune despises stating obvious truths, but it is as a good a prompt as she knows, and she only wants answers out of Kakashi, not essays.

"Yes."

Her lip curls slightly before she restrains the impulse, feeling Ton-ton, who always predicts her mistress's disquiet, rub soothingly at her ankle to calm her. She reaches down absently to stroke the pig's head before returning to Kakashi. While she doesn't want essays, she'd like something a little more elaborated-on than a monosyllabic answer.

Their setting is an unused room in the hospital, the set-up of two chairs slightly apart from the bed with its starched sheets practically stinking of bleach and disinfectant. After a whole lifetime on the road and in makeshift clinics and roadside hospitals, Shizune despises the orderly soullessness of hidden village hospitals, just a little bit. There was more heart in a roadside hospital with crumpled sheets and orderlies who actually looked their patients in the eye than there will ever be in this place.

Kakashi won't meet her gaze, seems deliberately to look away. Now, he's focusing with mock-fascination on a bright flash of gold, a sunbeam on the window and Shizune understands for the first time the impulse that makes Tsunade snap her fingers in people's faces to get their attention.

"Could you be more specific, Kakashi?" Shizune holds the clipboard on her lap that reads exactly what happened to him. Her eyes flick across characters before returning to burn his face. She lives out unconnected words. Uchiha Itachi… genjutsu… catatonic state… recovery in question…

Already writing him off to be a lost cause, but Shizune knows she will never let anyone become a lost cause when they sit right in front of her and she is so intimate with their humanity.

She's never given up before. She doesn't know how.

"I don't see that there's a need to be, Shizune." Kakashi's voice rings hollow, the one visible eye gleaming with polite sarcasm—she didn't know the two words could go together in the same sentence. "When you have the report sitting on your lap."

Shizune prides herself on her gift of eidetic memory and is glad for it, knowing just from this behavior that if she were taking notes—there is no pen grasped, poised and ready in clever hands with long, spindle-fingers—or holding a cassette recorder behind her back he would leave.

She holds it to the light and rattles off the facts like a messenger reading a casualty list after a long battle. "Yes, I do. It says here that you were, in the course of battle with Uchiha Itachi placed under a specialized genjutsu named Tsukuyomi." The word's foreign on her tongue, almost ugly; Kakashi stiffens at it and eyes her like she's about to draw senbon from her sleeves and throw. "But this…" Shizune waves the clipboard for emphasis before letting it fall back to her lap "…tells me nothing. I need to hear it from you before anything can be done."

Kakashi merely repeats the same thing over and again, that he was put under a genjutsu by missing nin Uchiha Itachi, and Shizune restrains a leonine growl of frustration.

Ton-ton grows distressed and nudges her way out of the room to take refuge with Tsunade.

-0-

Kakashi tosses and turns in bed during the night, the moon with its mapped surfaces wreathed in cloud peering in mistily through the window open for sticky summer heat. His dreams form battle lines of misery and pain relived, over and over again.

He can still hear Shizune reiterating facts they both already know, speaking the missing nin's name with far more equanimity than she ought to. This, none of this disturbs her and she's not the gentle little girl who loved to make daisy chains. Good. He doesn't need another little girl to deal with, another innocent little girl like Sakura who tries to understand with the earnestness of someone who's never really suffered—except that's not really right, since Shizune has suffered in her life, suffered plenty and more, reaped a far more bitter harvest than anything she ever sowed; suffering's stamped into her skin the way guilt is into his. Kakashi doesn't need a child like Naruto who doesn't understand and doesn't try to—which is why Naruto will never be able to change anything, because he doesn't bother to try to understand the things he wants to demolish.

Briefly, Kakashi remembers that Sasuke has been subjected to Tsukuyomi in the past as well and wonders if he ever has nights like this, then knows without doubt that he still does. Has Sasuke ever been treated for this? It would be interesting to know, but Kakashi suspects that he hasn't.

His dream-memories-recollections-tortures are all the same.

Seventy-two hours in Tsukuyomi, three days ripped and created from a mere second in time.

He is hanging on a cross, crucified the way they used to do to followers of the religion from the West—kill them the way their Savior died. His lungs scream for air as they compress, his arms start to snap under the weight of his own body. Kakashi's wrists, nailed to the wood feel like they are going to splinter and let his hands separate.

Itachi's sword grinds away, cutting open flesh again and again, sparing no detail, sparing no inch of skin. Carved open like a chicken over a family table.

Again, and again.

Itachi continues to come to him every night, even though Itachi himself most likely no longer even thinks of him.

And he starts to come in the daytime, too, a ringing voice echoing on the edge of his thoughts, a sword tip just barely tickling into his flesh.

-0-

"You have nightmares."

It's a statement of fact, not a question, but Shizune's eyes are still startled pools of disquiet. She curses herself for not realizing before that Kakashi could have nightmares. Of course he has nightmares, she snaps at herself. Who wouldn't in such a situation? Why didn't you notice it before?

Kakashi shrugs. "I have memories, Shizune. I think you'll find that there's little difference between the two."

She stares at him.

-0-

The late afternoon spills liquid gold through the windows of the medical archive in the hospital and Shizune's pale, smooth brow furrows in frustration, frustrated at herself and suddenly at everything around her. For the first time, it's gotten so bad that Ton-ton actively avoids her and seeks out Tsunade's company instead.

Curse the prideful secrecy of the Uchiha clan that makes knowledge of their clan's genjutsus so limited.

A talkative orderly sits perched on the edge of the table as Shizune thumbs her way exasperatedly through dusty tomes that she would normally treat with much deference than this. Tsukuyomi Tsukuyomi Tsukuyomi, so her maddened mantra reads. Why is there no more information on the dreaded genjutsu than a few footnotes in research texts?

The orderly, in the meantime, chats endlessly and without meaning, her bland babbled words going directly over Shizune's head; the apprentice of Tsunade hears the words but doesn't really ever register them. All pretense of politeness is forgotten.

The brown-haired woman talks about how Kakashi is notorious for his legendary aversion of the hospital, and how impressed she is that Shizune manages to get Kakashi to come to the hospital at all.

She is just getting to the eyebrow-raised, coy statement that Kakashi must really trust her—"trust" is said in the sort of way that is more likely to be contained in paper notes passed over classroom desks in secrecy—when Shizune tips her head up and screams,

"Damn it, doesn't anyone have any more information on Tsukuyomi?"

-0-

She hesitates before looking Kakashi dead in the one discernible eye. They're not sitting in the vacant room of the hospital; they are instead standing in the deserted atrium of the hospital, in the mid-afternoon as they're leaving. He left without a word and Shizune, without really knowing why, felt compelled to chase after him until he realized that there was a silent shadow of a kunoichi behind him. Her concern rears its head in her like a beast and for one second Shizune sees the danger of falling into the whirlpool that's become Kakashi's life.

He looks at her, strangely mild, but almost pitying too, and Shizune struggles to force down a bristle when she sees it. She never wants pity, especially not from him.

She stares up into his skin, his hair but never really at him, and whispers,

"Tell me what happened."

This takes him aback, showing real surprise on his face for the first time since Shizune has known him again. But Kakashi skips only a single beat and is back to the same old tune within an instant, the tune Shizune has prayed she won't hear again.

"No."

She bites her thin mouth, the thin mouth that will never be full thanks to years of false, stretched smiling. Tsunade has always hated people who don't smile, so Shizune learned to smile even when she didn't feel like it—which with a drunkard for a mistress is quite often—and as a result the muscles in her mouth don't work quite as well as they should anymore.

"Then don't come to me," she murmurs. This is the hardest thing Shizune has ever had to say—to anyone, but she knows it must be said. "Because if you won't tell me what happened, then I have no way to help you anymore."

The lost look that swims over the surface of the sea of Kakashi's half-covered face, a ship lost in the sea disturbed by storm, cuts into her skin, without telling why.

-0-

Shizune jumps and gasps when she hears that dull voice out of silence, the senbon hidden in tiny places throughout scratching her skin—she's thankful that she's so thoroughly dosed with the poisons they're coated in that she is no longer affected when they draw blood.

She has just finished attending to another patient, a young man with a cold and the hospital room is silent and golden in the afternoon as she wipes down the surfaces of the counters with antiseptic. The light shoots through the windows, dust particles dancing in the sunbeams for her own amusement, to keep her occupied throughout the dull days.

"It's getting worse."

Kakashi's single black eye stares at her with grim intensity as he says this, voice suffused with meaning, and Shizune stares at him, white-lipped.

They can both hear what she's not saying.

What do you want me to do about it?

Kakashi only stares at her for another moment, sharp and intense, before he's gone in a gust of wind.

Shizune breathes again, lungs expanding, and realizes for the first time that she didn't breathe the whole time he was there.

-0-

Kakashi writhes in bed the way a snake would if it was cast into a lit fireplace. And he feels like he's on fire. All over, on fire. Like there's ants biting him. Sheets that have wound around him—really making him feel like a snake, with just a long tail and no legs—are thrown off with angry violence, trying to find some coolness, waiting in vain for a breeze to come through the window flung open. His apartment is rancid with the damp smell of stale-and-fresh sweat.

But it's not ants. It's the cruel tickle of a sword point and shuriken, the phantom memory that won't quit, the remembrance that loves to giggle as he suffers, even weeks after the actual event has passed.

This is Tsukuyomi's true power, to never, ever leave.

No wonder those afflicted with it always seem to go mad in the end.

The sticky summer heat doesn't make it any better. Kakashi's already banged on the air conditioner unit but it won't spring into life, hasn't in the past three days, and the heat is absolutely violent.

Maybe it's just the insomnia that accompanies memory-nightmare-chimeras that drive the victims of Tsukuyomi stark raving mad.

Then, one of the shadows stretching out fingers from the living room takes on form and Kakashi is met with the rustle of ebony linen and the swish of coal black hair, as Shizune kneels beside the bed.

If it is a waking dream, Kakashi doesn't care. The tomoes of the Sharingan spin wildly as he takes in the sort of pale, pinched desperation that makes her face seem almost serpentine, all the contours bled out in the darkness to black and white bas-relief.

"No more nightmares," Shizune whispers, pale hand reaching out to soothingly wipe the sweat away from his brow, and the hypnosis of her quiet voice is so absolute that Kakashi sleeps the whole night, without stirring.

-0-

Almost disinterestedly, Shizune wonders if she should feel guilty. The thought has just now occurred to her over coffee—coffee this morning instead of tea; it's stronger—as she fills out paperwork emptily, regrets the sort of bland monotony her life has fallen into, and wonders too if taking on Kakashi's case was really just some sort of cry for help on her part. For the sake of her already diminishing sanity, she hopes it was not.

The only reason Shizune thinks she should feel guilty is because, technically Kakashi is still her patient. Only in name, only in official terms that mean nothing since he doesn't come to her anymore. But Tsunade still listens to her rattle off hollow details of Hatake Kakashi's recovery—all absent lies, since she hasn't seen him outside of that apartment in nearly a week.

He's her patient, and there should be some level of propriety to be maintained.

There's a danger in getting too close, a real danger, and not just from the ethical quagmire it will throw her into.

Shizune's pen pauses over paper, leaving a huge ink blot as black as jet.

It takes her only a moment to come to the revelation that she doesn't really care, and that it's less ethical to let Kakashi suffer alone than it is to abuse doctor-patient privileges.

-0-

The second time she comes, Kakashi doesn't let her go.

Shizune is kneeling by the bed and stands to go when a strong, callused hand snaps up and grasps her wrist almost ruthlessly, but really desperately, painfully. Kakashi, of course, is by this time convincingly feigning sleep, so the only thing Shizune can assume is that his hand has suddenly started to move of its own accord.

For a few moments she grapples, but Kakashi's grip is strong as iron, inflexible.

She settles to the tightly woven carpeting, and prepares herself for a long night, knowing that while Kakashi may sleep, she probably won't.

In the morning, when the sun cracks the windows Kakashi wakes up and sees a dark head a fraction of an inch from his own, bowed over the edge of the bed.

Shizune wakes up a heartbeat after him. With tired eyes, she looks towards his hand and whispers, "Could you please let go now?"

His grip has half cut off circulation to her wrist, skin starting to go mottled blue without fresh blood. Kakashi can feel a flush rise under his mask, and his hand flies away from her skin.

Shizune stands, rubbing her hand with brow furrowed and lip bitten. "You shouldn't wear your face mask when you're sleeping. It will impede breathing," she murmurs, sounding almost absently annoyed, and that's the last thing she says before she leaves.

Through the front door, casually, absently, without any pretense of shame or nervousness.

-0-

One night Shizune wakes up on her futon to hear a rapping on her window like knocking on the confines of her mind. For a moment she thinks she's having a nightmare the way Kakashi does, until she remembers that she's awake, and pushes the thin linen sheet away from her flesh.

Kakashi's outlined by the moon, full like a pregnant woman's belly at the final trimester now, as he perches precariously on her narrow, fifth-story windowsill, no doubt irritated to find that she keeps the window locked. Silently, without words, she reaches over with thin, deft hands and unlatches the window so he can slide in like a little cat.

He barely spares a glance at her as he climbs into her tiny apartment, but somehow that glance sees everything. Shizune's standing in her knee-length kimono slip, shivering in her air-conditioned—Kakashi praises whatever merciful deity allowed her air conditioning to work—apartment. The ivory silk clings, low-cut, clings to skin and small breasts barely formed. Long, loose limbs have delicate bones and pale arms are latticed with scars—battle scars—like bone ladders. She still possesses, in a way, a warped version of the proportions of a child, but she's not the talkative child she used to be, but a creature of silences now.

Automatically, she seems to know why she's here. Shizune shakes her head and sighs, walking to close and lock the window again. "Take off your shoes—and the mask; you'll breathe better if you do."

Kakashi is silent as he acquiesces; he has no idea what to say.

Eyes dark in the night as jet peer over him. "Come on." Her voice is heavy and almost sad. She gestures to the futon. "Come get some sleep."

It's a little tight on the futon, but they find a way to be comfortable. A long, thin arm stretches across his chest to tuck under the opposite shoulder; dark hair tickles his skin. A small, long-fingered hand wraps into Kakashi's own, the fingernails chipped, so brittle and so soft that they would bend if he pressed into them. The familiarity comes as if it was always there.

Sometime between midnight and three a.m., Kakashi murmurs something, not caring if Shizune is awake.

"Do you ever have nightmares?"

Shizune is awake and her eyes fly open at this. Yes, she has nightmares. Nightmares scented in sake and smoke and paper money. Nightmares of the first and only seduction mission she ever took, rape in all but name that still compels her to take showers at odd times of the night from time to time, scrubbing her skin until it's raw and threatening to bleed. Things untold, never told, that hang over her still.

And realizes that she's the same as him, in a way.

"Yes, I do."

Kakashi vividly remembers crucifixion. There's no visible sign of trauma left on his body but he still has the memory of dying, over and over again, of the wounds, and keeps trying to trace for scars he knows aren't there.

He still has nightmares. He still hears Itachi's voice, feels the tickle of a sword point against his ribs when he's awake.

But he can count heartbeats in Shizune's fingers, a link to the reality of the waking world. And that is his anchor.