It was amazing how, no matter how fearful, no matter how heartsick, no matter how grieved, the human body remembered how to sleep after three straight days of battle. Kakashi woke up in his bloodstained clothes, halfway to his bed, and realized that a whole twenty-four hours had passed.

There was something he had to do. He would have done it earlier, had meant to, in fact, but the fox . . . there hadn't been time.

He drug himself up and out the door.

The streets were dark and littered with debris, scarcely lit by a chilly pre-dawn glow. Kakashi tugged his Anbu mask on and shivered as the cold licked at his bare shoulders. There was destruction everywhere, in the shattered homes, the hastily pitched tents, the occasional glimpses of young, frightened eyes.

What do those children think? he wondered. A dark-haired boy stood in the ruined Umino home and wept, alone. What will they think?

Would they hate the fox-child? Or just the fox? And what, indeed, about the Fourth's son? When he learned, one day, about what had happened and why, what would he . . . .

Perhaps it was better that he didn't know.

The Third was on his balcony, looking down at the broken village. He seemed to be swimming in grief -- he never would have expected to appoint the Fourth only to watch him die a short time later.

Kakashi passed a crib and paused to look at the yellow-haired infant. He tossed and turned unhappily, round cheeks flushed. With his eyes closed so tightly he looked like a fox, and the slash marks on his cheeks -- whiskers -- added to the illusion. You are, Kakashi thought pitilessly, doomed to a life of unhappiness.

The Third left the railing and joined him at Naruto's cradle. "He has nightmares," Kakashi observed, voice harsh and flat with exhaustion.

"Is there any one of us who doesn't?"

Kakashi nodded slowly, and tugged the mask from his face. Sarutobi looked surprised, and then stunned as Kakashi handed it to him

"I quit," he said. He glanced at the baby as he went to the door, thinking that maybe, maybe he ought to --

No.

"I think you know why," he added.

The Third was silent. As Kakashi shut the door behind him, the Fourth's son began to wail, dreaming fitfully of foxes and death.

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