[FIC] Introductions - Pakkun POV

[wafflelate]

Title: Introductions
Summary: Their contract was made with the Hatake clan generations ago; it's inevitable that Hatake Kakashi will have a pack.
Notes: Based on this comic about Gai meeting Pakkun by shittilydrawing
Crossposted on wafflelate

All of Hatake Sakumo’s dogs had been white, most of them big and fluffy. Sakumo — who’d died before Pakkun was even old enough to speak — had had one specialized tracker, three combat-specialized dogs, and one dog that could do either but was also suited for carrying messages over long distances.

The humans had called him White Fang, and when Pakkun was a pup those white dogs had lolled in the grasses of home and talked about how strong their human was, how fierce, how loyal. Thrilling stories, like myth and legend, and none of them had ever, ever wanted to talk about how Hatake Sakumo died.

“Kakashi’s my summoner now, so I have to know,” Pakkun had eventually argued, hardly realizing at the time that he was even more of a child than Kakashi, unblooded and idealistic. He had not been deterred by offers to play, by friendly roughhousing, by the oft-stated promise that knowledge would come with time. “Some things can’t wait,” he’d told Sakumo’s pack.

Junshiro, the youngest and biggest and most playful of Sakumo’s five dogs, had been the one to break. The one to tell him: Hatake Sakumo had died easily and early and alone. Hatake Sakumo had not died as he should have, either old and loved or with his blood singing and the pack braying as they met his enemies by his side—

In the end Hatake Sakumo had been his own enemy, the only enemy the pack couldn’t fight.

“If you want to keep your Hatake,” Junshiro tells him, “then you’ll have to find people to help protect him from himself. We were too content to have Sakumo to ourselves.”

This initially sounds easy, but subsequent real world experience with his summoner reveals it to be nearly impossible. Hell, the kid doesn’t even want to get to know Pakkun at all; he just gives instructions and intel and sets Pakkun on a scent trail. Then, when Pakkun has sniffed out who- or whatever it is he’s nosing around for, Kakashi dismisses him without a word. The meet again and again and again. Pakkun to learns more than he really wanted to know about Konoha regulations and absolutely nothing about his summoner.

Still stinging from the realization that Hatake Sakumo hadn’t really been the hero he’d always been made out to be, Pakkun might have simply broken his contract with Kakashi, except...

First, breaking his contract with Kakashi would mean breaking the Dog contract with the Hatake entirely, since Kakashi is the last of the once-numerous Hatake summoners.

Second... Pakkun gets mad.

It’s one thing to have a snotty kid as your summoner. Kids grow up, and even snotty ones can be reasoned with or bullied, so that would have smooth itself out. But they were supposed to be pack. That was the deal with summoners.

Not an exchange of power and services, not a business relationship, not meaningless or utilitarian. A summoner was supposed to be someone to train with, to fight with, to run with. Family.

“I’m not looking for kibbles or belly rubs, but what, you’re just going to dismiss me without a word again?” Pakkun asks Kakashi after another hunt which, like all the others before it, started with a litany of instructions and concluded with a long period of being ignored while Kakashi sorts out whether or not there will be more tracking required.

Kakashi looks up from the bag he’s searching. His eyes slide between Pakkun and the unconscious, restrained criminal that Pakkun just spent several hours tracking down. “We’ve completed our task. What else is there to say?”

“How about ‘thanks’, if that’s not too much of a mouthful for you?” Pakkun snaps back.

“Rule Thirty-Six, a shinobi does not seek gratitude or accolades,” Kakashi says, dully, the tone of something learned by route. “A shinobi does his duty from the shadows.”

“Hey, genius, I’m not a ninja. I’m your summons.” Pakkun clambers to his feet, too agitated to stay laying down even though he’s still tired from the hunt. “I have paws and fur and I’m adorable and I don’t care about your stupid human rules.”

They stare at each other for a moment. Kakashi’s eyes are wide over the top edge of his facemask. He looks like he’s never considered that rules might not apply to dogs.

Pakkun looks away from him, knowing that if he looks longer he’ll start feeling bad that Kakashi doesn’t have anyone to teach him important rules like this and sniffs contemptuously. Old enough to be running after criminals is old enough to do research, surely, so Pakkun advises him: “We have a contract older than your village system. Maybe read up on that instead of chewing on your list of irrelevant rules.”

And then he desummons himself and spends the next several weeks complaining to anyone who will listen, except for Sakumo’s pack.

The weight of the expectation is too great — admitting he can’t even get along with Kakashi feels like admitting he’s failed. Feels like admitting they should give someone else his job, which Pakkun knows already isn’t an option. Kakashi is a terrible packmate, being summoned is awful and nothing is the way Pakkun thought it would be, but that doesn’t mean Pakkun can just give up, and quit, and leave Kakashi alone.

Ūhei makes the best sounding board, anxious and reassuring all at once. It’s awful, he agrees, awful. But the summoner, their only summoner, he’ll come around, surely.

When Kakashi summons him again, Pakkun responds without delay. They are not, to Pakkun’s surprise, in any of the following places Pakkun has commonly been summoned: the side of a road, the middle of a road, several stories up a Hashirama tree, the site of a robbery, the village gates, a training field, a busy city, or otherwise in fact outside at all.

Kakashi has summoned him inside, onto something soft.

Pakkun looks down, suspiciously, at the squishy ground he’s standing on. It’s a blanket with a shuriken pattern. He’s on a bed. Pakkun looks up at Kakashi even more suspiciously.

As expected, Kakashi holds out his hand. As unexpected, it definitely has food on it, instead of an item to scent for the hunt.

“I got them from the Inuzuka,” Kakashi says.

“Uhuh,” Pakkun says. “So does that mean you’re done pulling me out and putting me away like a kunai?”

Kakashi’s back straightens, his whole body becomes stiff. He’s on the bed, too, his legs folding under him. He’s still got one of his masked shirts on, but most of his gear his missing. In the reflection of the window behind him, Pakkun can see that he’s barefoot. Pakkun has never seen his summoner in any state besides combat-ready.

The hand not holding out the dog treat goes from laying flat on his thigh to clenched in a fight fist. “Yes,” Kakashi says, stiffly. “I didn’t mean to treat you like a weapon. And I now am familiar with the specific terms of our contract. Minato-sensei says—”

“Who?” Pakkun interjects. “That blond teacher of yours?”

“...Yes. I’ll introduce you later. He says all summons have their own rules, so I have to learn yours.”

“Smart man,” Pakkun observes. And then he eats the dog treat which, hey, is delicious. “Apology accepted. Rule one: I want more of whatever the heck that was.”

Kakashi looks at him doubtfully. “That doesn’t sound like a real rule, Pakkun.”

“Rule two: all rules I make up are real rules, not matter what you think.”

“Pakkun.”

“Okay, okay, we’ll work on it, brat.” Pakkun hops off the bed, and looks between Kakashi and the door. “C’mon, you promised me an introduction and I want it now. I’ve never been introduced before.”

Namikaze Minato is doing sealwork with a brush in each hand when they walk into his office. He glance up, sees Kakashi, and sets one brush down to wave. The other keeps going. “Hello, Kakashi-kun! Give me a moment to finish this up and then we can go train. Sorry I’m running late.”

His tone is cheerful and friendly. Pakkun instantly decides that he likes him.

“Ah, no, sensei,” Kakashi says, sounding a little embarrassed. “I’m here to introduce you to Pakkun.”

“Oh? A friend?” Minato asks, his tone teasing. His eyes still don’t lift from the seal he’s writing, but he holds out his free hand, as if to shake. “Will you be training with us?”

Pakkun looks up and up at the hand being held out for him to shake and then eyes Kakashi. Without even being asked, Kakashi scoops Pakkun up and holds him out at just the right height for a good paw shake.

“I hope so,” Pakkun says. He lets Minato bounce his paw up and down in a gentle handshake.

“Excellent!” Minato cheers, and triumphantly puts some kind of finishing mark on his sealwork. “And can I just say, you’ve got a really soft... paw?”

Minato looks down at his hand, still holding Pakkun’s paw. Then he looks at Pakkun.

Pakkun flops his other paw at Minato in an approximation of a wave. “Thanks,” he says. “That’s the best compliment I’ve ever gotten from a human.”

Kakashi scoffs.  “It’s the only compliment you’ve ever gotten from a human.”

“Who’s fault is that?” Pakkun asks grumpily, although his heart’s not really in it. It’s nice to hear that his paws are soft and all, but ego stroking definitely isn’t required by their contract.

“It’s great to meet you,” Minato interrupts. “And I wanted to apologize to you. I taught Kakashi how to summon, and it was irresponsible of me not to be on the lookout for differences between your scroll and the Toad Scroll.”

“Not your fault Kakashi’s a jerk, but apology accepted,” Pakkun says. “Let’s get to that training. And maybe more snacks.”

Minato laughs all the way to the training field, first about “Tsume’s advice” working just as well on summoned dogs as on ninken, and then through several embarrassing stories about Kakashi’s ninja career thus far. In the training field, Pakkun watches Minato teach Kakashi a few things, and then he and Kakashi try and track Minato through the wooded training field to varying degrees of success.

The months go on and on. As Pakkun and Kakashi improve their tracking and teamwork, they also begin to find the edges of what their two-person (or three, if you count Minato — but Pakkun doesn’t understand enough about human social structure yet to say if he should) and Pakkun begins the long, long process of talking Kakashi into expanding the pack.

Again and again they come across situations that Pakkun can stumble along through but isn’t quite qualified for.

“We need a dedicated scent tracker,” he might say. Or, “I can run that message over to Minato, sure, but you’ve seen how tiny my legs are, right?”

They don’t let just anyone be the primary summons for the contract, so Pakkun’s hearing is better than Kakashi’s, his eyesight is nothing to sneeze at, and he’s good at scent-tracking, but still. A full, dedicated hunt needs more than just him and Kakashi. It needs specialists.

As Kakashi gets pulled deeper and deeper into the war, it becomes an easier sell. More pack means more eyes to watch Kakashi’s back.

“What about the chakra requirements?” Kakashi asks when Pakkun is pressing a third pack member on him. It’s not an unreasonable request. Kakashi is still kind of a squirt and it doesn’t look like his chakra reserves will end up monstrous.

Pakkun knows that Kakashi doesn’t like to think of his father, and therefore doesn’t like to think of his clan, but he asked. So: “You’re gonna grow up nice and strong and we’ve got good reserves from all the Hatake who’ve come before you. We’ll subsidize the cost.”

“Fine,” Kakashi says, but Pakkun can hear the relief in his capitulation. “This one isn’t white, either, right?”

“No white dogs,” Pakkun promises, although that requirement had made Junshiro and the rest of Sakumo’s pack gnash their teeth and complain to Pakkun for a six weeks straight.

They’re all too old to be main summons, now, of course, but most of them have had kids. They’d had hope, before.

So: Bisuke and Bull and Urushi, and then Ūhei and Shiba and Akino and Guruko. Pakkun thinks Ūhei, who’s all nerves and tight-coiled energy, will be a hard sell, but he’s not. Kakashi just looks between Ūhei and Pakkun and shrugs. “Okay,” he says. “If Pakkun thinks we need you, then we need you.”

The years bring on more humans, too — chūnin and jōnin whose faces and names Pakkun doesn’t pay much attention to because he can tell they mean nothing to Kakashi. The occasional clueless civilian, who Pakkun would just as soon avoid altogether. Uchiha Obito and Nohara Rin, Kakashi’s assigned teammates, who Pakkun finds himself skirting around awkwardly.

It feels like Obito and Rin should be pack, at least in the way Minato is almost-but-not-quite, but the team just doesn’t fit together right. Kakashi is too rough on Obito, and Rin and Obito make their own kind of pack, a closed group — not that Kakashi puts any effort into getting to know them, but even if he did Pakkun’s not sure it would really work. The girl is too infatuated with how distant Kakashi is and the boy is too focused on Kakashi as an object in his path.

And Kakashi still doesn’t want anything touching him. People, bonds, contact poison... it’s all the same to him. The pack is a much-needed exception, and any time Pakkun is away from Kakashi’s side he wonders if it will be enough.

Junshiro tries to reassure him, but Tatsuya — another of Sakumo’s pack — says, “Maybe you’re not enough. There’s probably no way to tell until it’s too late.”

“But I have to be enough,” Pakkun argues. “He’s my summoner. He doesn’t even have anyone else.”

Tatsuya says, “It feels like that, yes. But Sakumo...”

She trails off. Pakkun doesn’t want to look at her drooping ears, her defeated posture.

Kakashi isn’t Sakumo.

Kakashi won’t leave them on purpose.

He and the pack are summoned and summoned and summoned. Pakkun has told Kakashi over and over again that he’s not fit for combat, and Kakashi has respected that, but when orders say to go into combat zones, Kakashi goes. And where Kakashi goes, Pakkun follows, until he’s ripped a man’s throat out as easy as breathing because someone needs to watch Kakashi’s back.

In one such fight they’re separated from Minato and Rin and Obito, although they’re not fighting alone. A Konoha ninja swells his hands up large enough to literally brush enemy ninja off their feet and into various unforgiving surfaces and pointy objects, and he must be a jōnin because he’s got kids Kakashi’s age with him.

The pack is good at incorporating new Konoha ninja into their formations; it happens seamlessly. It’s only afterwards that Pakkun realizes he and the rest of the pack might be a curiosity to their new, temporary teammates. The one in legwarmers and spandex eyes the vest Kakashi made for Pakkun and says, “Kakashi, I did not know you had summons!”

“Who says they’re mine?”

“I do!” The boy has a blinding grin. He brandishes a thumbs-up at Pakkun and the rest of the pack. “I’m Maito Gai, Kakashi’s eternal rival!”

Pakkun gives Kakashi a long, long look but Kakashi doesn’t seem to want to do the introductions — typical — so they fall on Pakkun. He lists the other dogs by name and then says, “...and I’m Pakkun. I have very soft paws.”

He holds one of said paws out to shake, and to his surprise Gai shunshins from standing about a meter away to kneeling in front of him. Gai shakes Pakkun’s paw as seriously as if they were two civilian men agreeing on a business deal.

“Hello,” Gai says, “it’s an honor to meet you.” Gai’s hands are calloused. Not like Kakashi’s, which mostly get used for ninjutsu, but rougher. A taijutsu specialist’s hands, not that Pakkun hadn’t already guessed that from seeing him fight. But it’s different to feel it, especially contrasted with the gentle, deliberate way he shakes Pakkun’s paw.

"...Sure," Pakkun says. When he had imagined human packmates for Kakashi, he hadn't imagined this.

Kakashi says, “You have no way of knowing they’re even my summons.”

“I would recognize your stitchwork anywhere,” Gai asserts, already moving towards the rest of the pack. “You beat me soundly at our embroidery contest!”

“You promised never to mention that,” Kakashi shoots back flatly.

The boy ignores Kakashi and begins to greet the other dogs with just as much delight and gravitas as he’d greeted Pakkun. He seems to regard it as an important occasion. Possibly Gai just really likes dogs, but Pakkun doesn’t think so. He wanders over to Kakashi and they both watch Gai greet the pack.

Pakkun says, “He’s weird but I like him.”

Kakashi watches Gai for another minute or two silently. When Gai has greeted all of the dogs and moved on to loudly proclaiming his admiration of all of the dogs’ finest qualities, Kakashi mutters a soft, “Yeah,” so low that only Pakkun can hear it.

For the first time, Pakkun thinks they’re going to be okay.

Comments

[pepperdoken]

I love Pakkun and the other dogs in this

[wafflelate]

Thank you Pepper!!