Salvation (Kakashi x OC) (Standalone)

12

Written: 3/9/23
Word Count: 2,421

"You can go in," I waved Kakashi away, sitting down on my front stoop. I kicked my legs out in front of me, staring up at the darkening sky and trying to absorb all of the information I'd just learned about witches.

Hours of questions and answers had passed, and yet...I still couldn't really believe it.

The Mayhop Witches were a biker gang.

I mean, who the heck expected something like that?

As soon as Sam had started telling us about the things she couldn't stand about her people, I'd realized the only "knowledge" I had of witches were British TV shows and some random books here and there. All of those covens were very quiet, very hushed up, with powers that combined a love for nature to help cure ailments and exorcize possessions. Looking to the ancestors and all that.

"They're a pack of rabid dogs," Sam warned, "so let me ask around. I'm the heir, so they have to put up with me, even when they don't want to. It's going to take time because they're busy ruling the Underverse."

"Underverse?" I'd parroted.

In Sam's sparse living room, Kakashi and I both took up the one recliner. Me in the seat, Kakashi hovering on an arm. Kirishima sat on the ground, his red eyes pinging back and forth between me and Sam as the interrogation continued.

It had been hard enough to get Sam to talk about her people at all—certainly harder than when she'd confessed to being a witch, thinking me one, too.

Now Sam just sat against her small couch—or was it a loveseat?—with a dazed expression as she shared perhaps too many details about her coven.

"It's beneath our regular businesses, hiding under it all. They deal in illegal products and parts trading—you know, for witch stuff."

"Ah," I'd said, trying to keep the horror out of my tone as the notion of this gang of biker witches controlling a criminal organization beneath the surface of my city sank in.

"You alright?" Instead of going inside, Kakashi sat down on the stoop beside me. We stared across the pavement, watching a few of the neighborhood children dash about with a soccer ball, zipping over and onto the pavement, then zinging back to the small patch of grass between the building and the road.

It was dusk, but the ball had reflector tape on the rougher edges where it had been torn from overuse. Several ages gathered to play whenever this ball made an appearance. Though it was loud, I never minded because they were all such good kids. No gang affiliations—at least, not any that they brought home with them.

A gaggle of parents sat in creaky lawn chairs to watch the smaller ones, beer cans clutched in hand as they murmured amongst themselves. Their cigarettes glowed in the deepening dark, just mere pinpricks of that burning orange light.

"It's just...a lot to take in," I said, resting my forehead flat against my legs, wrapping my arms around my shins. Eyeing him from the side, my voice turned teasing as I continued, "But, hey, this is good news, right? One of those badass biker witches can apparently bring the two of you home."

"Mm..."

"I'm glad," I said, pushing past the sudden thickness in my throat. I stretched back a bit, watching the ball's whirling reflector tape as it was kicked back and forth between two of the older boys on the block. I'd seen them so often, yet I didn't even know their names. So I came up with my own.

The guy with the curly hair was Grapes because when he'd been a little younger, he'd had more than two shirts with nothing but a string of grapes on its center. For like, the first twenty times I'd seen him come around, he'd only worn those grape shirts.