She returns to a stray cat sitting on doorstep.

"Kakashi," she drawls, stopping at the edge of her door. She wants nothing more than to bury herself in duvet covers. Feelings, while a nice alternative at times, is something she has no energy for.

He offers her a small weary smiles before rising and leaning into her, head burying into the crook of her neck and two hands coming up to grip her shoulders.

They are sixteen and it is the first time she looks at him without being reminded of Obito.

It's also in that moment she realizes that he, too, has changed. Where he would've ran away from these emotions, he has chosen to tackle them. However, Ling doesn't know how to feel because she is the one he comes to.

From then on he is a constant. In her apartment, in her mind and in her heart.

+

Ling returns from her first official mission with blood on her hands and a fear of blue lotuses. The moment she opens her door, shivering and tired, Kakashi is there.

The sting in her eyes worsens and she crumples into his arms with a sob. Kakashi freezes for a moment, before he softens and adapts to her like a cocoon. "Oh, Ling," he murmurs, voice soft against her temple as he herds her to her room. "What happened?"

She doesn't say anything, she refuses to say anything. Because she feels more sorrow for the woman who was the enemy than the man she was to protect. But she protects the man anyway because the world is messed up like this and she, too, has never known anything else.

Ling hates herself that night.

She cries through the night and Kakashi is with her for the entirety of it, helpless except for a few murmured assurances each time she wakes up with tears staining her eyes and laboured breathing from nightmares. He shouldn't ask, Kakashi doesn't want to ask, but he needs to because if not for his sake then for hers— Because he's learned, that bottling things up is never the good way to go. But shinobi don't pry. They understand the phrase "I don't want to talk about it" intimately.

Yet. She has never asked him and she probably never will ask him when there are times where he comes to her the same— After missions, before missions, after nightmares and by then Ling had accepted him enough that she'd allow him beside her as she read a novel, sometimes out loud for him as they shared a cup of tea. But Kakashi's has never seen her like this. Because Kakashi had always been the misunderstood, emotionally-constipated genius while Rin and Ling had always been perfectly sane and independent individuals who didn't just stop feeling and get as far away from it as fast as they could because feelings and emotions were too complicated.

Ling wakes up the morning after with swollen eyes and pale cheeks, there's a heavy, grey fleece blanket — the one she'd given Kakashi last year — draped over her. "I hate fish," she drawled at the sight of the plate of fish in front of her.

"I hate cleaning up dead bodies," Kakashi returns cheerfully with a pair of chopsticks. "And going to hospitals with sick people. And organizing funerals. And being cried on by Minato-sensei." He smiles and picks off a piece of the fish. "Say ah, Ling~"

She refuses to open her mouth, so he rolls her eyes and peels open her mouth and forces the food down her throat. She doesn't spit any of it out and falls asleep on Kakashi's lap.

Ling's back to normal the next morning, but she doesn't say anything even if she remembers everything.

They began sharing a bed. It's not as if anything ever happens, it's stupid to be so dependent on another person, because what if they leave— No, Ling doesn't think about that.

+

ANBU takes her to the Hokage Library. It takes her to higher sections and each time she enters she comes back out more worn.

It hurts to think that she's protecting people like that. It hurts to know she'll continue to doing it. But with every mission, with every horrible thing she's seen, she stops being phased and eventually even the nightmares leave.

+

"Happy living another year!" Kakashi says with false cheer.

Ling slams a book into his face. "Congratulations on getting a position in the hospital, Rin!" she says as she tries — in vain — to shove Kakashi's through a window.

"Children," Kushina snaps. "Don't fight."

She huffs and stomps out of the room while a giggling Rin laughs and follows her. Kakashi follows a moment, shuffling through the door after them, and it isn't a moment later until another enraged shriek echoes off the wall and Kakashi tries to calm her down.

The team had come to an unanimous decision years before to host all five of its members' birthdays on the same day. However, looking back at it, it probably wasn't the best of its ideas the years after her fifteenth birthday, as Ling began requesting Kakashi's head as her birthday present and was always disappointed when it wasn't.

Kakashi, insufferable as ever, always gave her an Icha-Icha book as consolation. Which she always cheerfully burned and returned the ashes to Kakashi the following year. Rin, on the other hand, ever the sane one deigned to giving Kakashi brochures about not damaging his weapons and offering Ling free classes to anger management courses at the hospital.

She'd also introduce to her activities that were said to be 'soothing' and 'relaxing' such as crocheting and flower arranging. Ling liked flowers enough that she sometimes helped out at the Yamanaka's flower store during her breaks. And Kakashi, ever so grateful at the chance to get under her skin, always joined her.

"My," Kakashi pointed out once. "That looks an awful lot like your face."

Golden eyes narrow and she glares. "Come here and I'll rip you a new one."

Kakashi unfazed continue to pull leaves off the stem of an unsuspecting rose. "So violent, Ling-chan."

"You fu—"

+

Ling is seventeen when she realizes that she's probably never going to make Jonin.

She's easygoing at the mission desk and she's fine with doing a few extra hours of overtime because she enjoys nosing into people's lives, which endears herself to several jounin who gossip worse than old ladies or who're just plain paranoid ( namely, literally any high-ranking jounin in the village who don't want to deal with paperwork but thinks it's okay to give it to her just because she's a student of the Yellow Flash. That totally shouldn't be how things work, but Ling finds she is unaffected by the sloppiness, finds herself unresponsive to a lot of things nowadays. )

She's A-ranked. She can do S-ranked missions. She can survive them. But she has no drive.

During that year, she realizes that all along, she's been using Obito as an excuse for not advancing, for refusing to move on. Forgiveness is hard, but she knows, deep down, Obito would want her to forgive his best friend. And she knows, finally, that it is the right thing to do.

So she does, knowing that it's more for herself than it is for him, or even Obito.

+

Rin has a sudden brush with death. Ling spends her days and her night with Rin, by her bedside, and Kakashi is there too, so is sensei and Kushina. But Ling finds herself distant and unable to communicate with the other girl.

Ling is glad that Rin survived. The crevice in her heart opens and opens, the crack widens: she's read somewhere that the alcoholics with depression are better off than the battle-worn shinobi, as they express their emotions freely while them, instead, keep the welting storm in until it's too much to hold and rips them apart.

Rin makes it. There was never any doubt she would. But she's alive and strong and smiling. That in itself seems to lift a sudden monumental weight off of Minato-sens— Yondaime's shoulders. He smiles more. He laughs more, and so does the Kushina beside him, the bulge of her stomach growing bigger and bigger by day. Rin is there more often, too, a piece of the puzzle that can't be missed. Her cheer helps replace Ling's once loudmouth, hysterical laughter and her abilities as a medic-nin give Kushina and Minato comfort when she reassures them again and again that the baby is fine. And most of all, she seems to understand the pain and loss of Kakashi and Obito more than Ling ever could.