𝐁𝐋𝐄𝐄𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐎𝐔𝐓, kakaobi.

03 | girls, girls, girls

CHAPTER III.

( girls, girls, girls. )

"How did you know?"

The question isn't made with malice. It isn't made with the intention to invalidate Kakashi, which she appreciates, but it's also—private. Uncomfortably close to letting her feelings loose. To opening up. 

And even if—even if this is Kushina-nee-san, it's not something she wants to talk about. She isn't ashamed, or anything like that, but she's also eight years old, and she just knows. Knows that she isn't a boy, that she's never been, that it feels wrong when people mistake her for one. 

Knows that she's been bleeding since she was four years old, and that she's never figured out how to make it stop.

Kushina's known she's a girl for about two weeks, now, and this is just her being curious. Kushina is a lot of things—scary, terrifying, irremediably herself—but she's not someone who would hurt her comrades on purpose. Of that, Kakashi is quite sure. 

(No one's cleaned her wounds as gently as Kushina, for all that the redhead makes a show of being angry about it. No one's scolded her for them before, either, and it's stupid because she's a shinobi—she's going to get hurt. But. But it makes her feel warm, and happy, and it makes her want to smile so wide it hurts her cheeks, and she wants to hate it but she can't.)

(Minato and Kushina are two names etched in her heart and she wishes she could rip them out and don't care anymore because—because father, that's why—but it makes her so, so happy that she can't.)

"I was—bleeding," she tries to explain, because she doesn't owe it to anyone but Kushina-nee-san is hers the same way Minato-sensei is, and she wants to. "And so was another girl. And—I thought, I bleed like her. And it clicked. That—I wasn't..." a boy, she doesn't say, letting the words linger. 

Kushina hums, and Kakashi flinches when a hand passes through her hair. 

"Would you like it if I called you Kashi-chan instead?"

It shouldn't—it shouldn't make her veins feel like ice. It's just—a question. Just a nickname. Just a more feminine way to say her name. Her heart shouldn't feel like seizing. Like stopping. But. But. 

("Come on, Kashi-chan, don't leave your old man waiting!")

It's not fair. She doesn't—she hates him. She shouldn't—choking and tearing up shouldn't be her first responses to that. He doesn't have the right—

"Yeah," and it comes out as a choked up word, one she can't make herself go pass her throat, but it escapes through her teeth anyways. 

She's frozen up, but Kushina-nee-san's hands are steady in her scalp and—she—doesn't—fuck. 

Why do I have to love you?, she despairs. 

(Why do you have to love me?)

Hate is easier than love. Kakashi's hated her father for long enough to know. But Kushina-nee-san's love is warm and blazing and home, just like Minato-sensei's, overwhelmingly vast, and it rips Kakashi from the insides and forces her to love them back. 

"Just—when we're alone," she clarifies. Because she's still the Son of the White Fang to Konoha and she'll probably always be. She doesn't care, because she doesn't care about what civilians have to say about her, or—or about her father. 

She doesn't. 

"Okay," Kushina accepts it, just as easily as she'd done when Minato first told her Kakashi's ready to tell you something, and the child in front of her had followed with I'm a girl, fake nonchalance in her stance. 

(Kushina'd felt her heart melt.)

("Good-ttebane," she'd answered. "Men are all pansies, anyways.")

From then on, Kakashi finds that Kushina-nee-san is just as bad as her father was. 

She buys her skirts. 

("A girl should have at least one in her wardrobe, and that's final-ttebane.")

(Kakashi can't say she understands why when all she wears is either her training gear, her mission uniform, or—or her father's old comfy clothes to sleep, but she's not going to go against Kushina-nee-san anytime soon, so. Skirts in her wardrobe.)

Kakashi doesn't dislike skirts in particular. Some of them are cute, some others are not. That's fine, but she doesn't have time for them. She's a shinobi, she's got to train. 

Skirts and dresses feel open in a way pants and old shirts don't, and it leaves her feeling vulnerable. 

She's not—she's not ready for that. 

She's not sure she ever will.

(Kushina-nee-san insists, at the beginning, that she can wear shorts under them. That it's not like she has to flaunt her underwear for everyone to see. That she can hide knives in there, better than with pants, that everyone underestimates those wearing skirts.)

(But Kakashi hides her gender from the world, doesn't let it hurt when others mistake her for a guy. Kakashi's not a kunoichi and she didn't take those useless classes at the Academy because of it, and she's—grateful. That beyond being a weapon for her village, there's something of hers that Konoha doesn't own.)

(She doesn't say any of that. She won't. She can't.)

But skirts are not what makes a girl, pink walls and dresses and dolls are not what makes a girl. Kakashi's been a girl all her life without them. 

So she doesn't wear the skirts Kushina-nee-san buys her, just like she never wanted her walls pink when her father suggested it, just like she's never wanted to play with dolls. 

She bleeds, instead: all broken bones and muscle pains and exhaustion, a body just like any other. Because despite their differences shinobi and kunoichi bleed all the same, and Kakashi is, and will always be, bloody from head to toes.

(Kushina'd said, a sad, almost bitter smile on her face: "You won't have it any easier than a kunoichi, but you won't have it worse, either. Being a girl means people think your violence will always be lesser than that of a man. That's why, when it comes to it, women are more resilient." She'd looked at her in the eyes, serious and protective. "You'll know it, too, one day." 

"What?" she'd asked. 

And Kushina had grinned, wide and feral, a whirlpool contained in her veins. "What we are made of.")