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The rap to his window came in an all too familiar pattern -two short, a drum of fingers, and a knock to the windowsill. Kito looked up from the medical scrolls strewn about his desk and reached for his medical pouch. With a flick of carefully controlled chakra, he disengaged the wards around the window.
The ANBU slid through with half his normal poise. The blood soaking through the side of his grey flak jacket impeded his mobility. “Hound-san, I’m glad you returned home safe.” He pulled on a pair of disposable blue gloves, hands glowing green around the latex. “Please take a seat.” He motioned to his desk chair.
Mismatched eyes slid down his pyjama-clad form from beneath the porcelain mask, still hard and battle-ready. Kito smiled soft and reassuring, as he did every time an ANBU came through his bedroom window. Nothing about the small gesture should put a killer, still on battle-high, at ease, but it did and for that, the medic-nin was ever thankful. As he hoped, Hound’s shoulders relaxed the slightest fraction. He nodded and lowered himself into the wooden chair.
“I’m going to examine the compromised area, Hound-san.” With skilled hands, Kito pressed lightly over the pooling blood. The heavy material was saturated and hardening, which meant it most likely congealed to the wound. “I need to cut this open.” The green chakra around his left hand sharpened and slid through the flak jacket like butter. A small chakra tendril slipped beneath the material to soften it enough for Kito to pull from the wound.
The ANBU tensed against the pain, but remained silent and still. Kito’s heart ached heavily in his chest. You are always the perfect soldier. A jagged gouge, deep enough to show bone, lay beneath the flak jacket and spandex, black undershirt. Hound-san became too well acquainted with a serrated blade on his last mission. “I need to sew the muscles back together. This is deep enough you will need stitches even with my medical ninjutsu.” Kito worked almost exclusively with ANBU and onini butai since making tokubetsu jounin at fifteen. Blatant honesty when discussing injuries with such elite clientele garnered him respect. No shinobi in that line of work wanted kind platitudes.
Hound nodded once, hands gripping the chair edges to brace himself. “I’m stitching the tendons together now.” He pressed his hand directly into the gaping, bloody wound. The visible part of Hound’s jaw clenched. “This is going to hurt, Hound-san.” The green healing chakra flared and pressed down, pushing through the raw flesh to manipulate the ragged edges back together.
Kito worked with a skilled, steady hand. ANBU and Onini butai came to him at all hours of the day over the years but only Hound remained from the very beginning. They’d both grown from those awkward, grieving teenagers into skilled professionals of their perspective fields. Both ended the day with blood on their hands and the dead weighing on their minds, just in different ways. Common ground grew from shared experiences. Come day or night, Hound always knocked on his window.
With the muscles stitched back together, he worked on reattaching blood vessels and nerve endings. The skin healed thin and weak, jagged and red along the point of entry. With the medical-ninjutsu completed, Kito’s green healing chakra took on a violet tint. He ran his hand along the fragile, new flesh, numbing it with light pricks of chakra. The medic-nin threaded a sterilized needle and neatly stitched the jagged wound to reinforce the delicate epidermis.
He fixed his work with a personalized bandage seal. The swirling black pattern etched atop the white adhesive derived from Uzushiogakure’s famed fuinjutsu. His mother had been one of the many refugees that sought asylum in Konohagakure. She passed a few secrets onto him before her untimely death during the Kyuubi’s rampage. Kito’s seal enhanced medical skills were what ultimately got him the tokubetsu jounin promotion so young. “All done.” He pulled one glove off, folded the other neatly into the first and tossed it into the garbage can by his desk. “Please remove your mask. I will check for head trauma next.”
There was but a moment of hesitation before the ANBU reached up and slid the porcelain mask from his face. Mismatched eyes stared too calmly (almost detached) at Kito, his facial mask fixed firmly in place over his mouth and nose. Kito’s lips curved into a fond, but strained smile. “Was your mission a success, Hound-san?”
His eyes crinkled lightly from a forced smile that didn’t reach his grey irises. “Of course.”
"Thank -you for your hard work." Kito brought two fingers about a foot from Hound's face. "Please follow with your eyes only."
Those mismatched irises shifted with his fingers, up and down, side to side, diagonal right and then left. "I will run a diagnostic jutsu on your brain activity now. Please prepare for the external stimulation to your cognitive functions." Kito's hands glowed celadon as he leaned over the ANBU. Each movement was slow and deliberate when working with a patient still coming down from a post-mission adrenaline rush. Instincts always ran high around the elite. That’s what kept them alive, but any sudden movement could end with a kunai in his throat.
Chakra-gloved fingers skittered through silver hair and curved around the back of Hound’s skull. The pale green chakra quivered at the tenketsu in his fingertips, sharp and probing against his patient’s head. Kito gave Hound a moment of adjustment to the medical intrusion (past trauma often caused transference correlations to a Yamanaka mind probe). “I’m starting now, Hound-san.”
His finely-controlled chakra buzzed beneath Hound’s skull, monitoring and assessing his brainwaves. Kito concentrated his efforts on the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex, the areas most associated with a stress response. He made a mental note of the slight cortisol decrease and the erratic fluctuation of his synaptic connections. Both were common occurrences after exposure to traumatic events. Hound was more likely to feel fatigued as a result. Kito wasn’t privy to the details of his friend’s missions, but that wasn’t necessary for him to tell which assignments were most trying for the ANBU.
Over the last seven years of friendship, Kito became intimately familiar with the composition of Hound’s mind. A medic could draw many inferences on one’s lived experiences based solely on brain development. From the age of fifteen to the present at twenty-two, he healed codenamed Hound - an ANBU no older than he was. For those long years, Kito made a mental map of his patient’s developing brain, how the trauma and stressors physically affected his cognitive growth and the long-term consequences that entailed.
The most notable differentiation from a neurotypical patient was the reduced volume of Hound’s hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. This hindered not only his emotional processing and regulation but his long-term memory as well. The underdeveloped hippocampus reduced his ability to balance cortisol levels after traumatic events. The low levels Hound often exhibited affected energy levels, and socialization through hindering the ability to both relate to others and recognize normative social cues.
Kito also found notable changes to his friend’s amygdala reactivity, or well overreactivity, to traumatic stimuli. The slightest brush of diagnostic chakra lit the area up like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. An overactive amygdala triggered heightened emotional responses - such as extreme fear, aggression or anger- and made it difficult to determine how threatening a trigger truly was. The slow maturation of an adolescent's brain left them more receptive to anxiety and increased the difficulty of calming the mind. For the majority of their relationship, Kakashi had been just that.
A juvenile.
Kito bore a first-hand perspective of the difficulties Hound presented in empathizing with others and forming lasting bonds. The trusting rapport they shared took years of careful building to solidify. Even now, it teetered like a fragile house of cards. Kito was acutely aware one breach of trust would shatter their friendship like the fragile construct it truly was. He knew the complex duality of strength and weakness Hound’s limited bonds entailed. Besides himself, Gai and Tenzo were the closest to his friend. Can any of us claim we truly know him?
Kito’s goal wasn’t so much knowing him as keeping him healthy and relatively sane. No one in their chosen profession escaped at least some form of mental scarring, even those who didn’t see frontline battles.
The green glow deliquesced from his hands as they came to rest amongst that mess of silver hair. “Everything seems in order, Hound-san.” Kito’s fingers flexed and pressed into a light massage. He worked down the ANBU’s neck, slowly easing the tension from his nape and shoulders.
Hound hung his head with a soft groan, temple pressed to the medic’s collarbone. A few hair strands tickled his chin. Kito’s lips brushed the exposed skin just above the ANBU’s ear. “Please stay the night.” His breath tickled warm across Hound’s too pale flesh. “I miss you.”
When those mismatched eyes lifted to meet his gaze, warm and familiar, Kito allowed his professional mask to slip. The ANBU codenamed Hound had mitigated to allow Kakashi Hatake into his arms. Kito’s lips brushed across his friend’s forehead, lingering with a longing he barely indulged in. “Please stay the night with me.” The plea repeated, playing off his lips in a softened, pliant tone.
Long moments passed between them in pregnant silence. Then slowly, Kakashi’s arms encircled his ribs and the sharingan slid closed. His head tilted a bit, open eye crinkling into a teasing sort of smile. “Mah, I thought you’d never ask, Kito-chan.”
The medic-nin chuckled and peppered light kisses along the scar bisecting his right eye. “Welcome home, Kakashi-san.”
